a house with no walls: first floor

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a house with no walls: first floor *

a house with no walls: first floor is a project exploring the ways in which we exist internally and externally in the world. It’s a living archive of transgender and gender non-conforming people’s experiences, shared through movement, objects, and the deep intimacy of what it is to be seen as all you are. We will sit around the living room catching up with old and new friends, we will bump into each other in the kitchen as we find nourishment and fullness in each other’s company, and we will receive the gift of living with our hearts fully open; even if just for a moment. We’re glad you’re here with us to continue the fight for visibility, joy, and preservation of our humanity. Let us hold you for a night as you hold our stories. Let’s exchange all the silly ways in which we’re human. Come on in, the door’s open! 

*The first floor was performed June 6th-8th 2024 at the Boston Center for the Arts, as a part of the Boston Center for the Arts and Boston Dance Alliance’s “Boston Dancemakers Residency” for the 23/24 season. 

program note

Welcome home, and thank you for being here. I am beyond grateful, humble, and excited to share a house with no walls: first floor with all of you through the generosity of The Boston Center for the Arts and Boston Dance Alliance. 

Outside of the heartfelt and life bringing interviews I had the pleasure of conducting with local transgender/nonbinary people, this work is inspired by May Sarton’s “Journal of a Solitude” in which she details a year of her inner world as a queer woman living alone in rural New Hampshire in the 70’s. Her words have brought me comfort in isolating moments, put “a house with no walls” into words when I could not, and reminded me to always, always greet the neighborhood cats when they visit.

“March 1st. And now the great spring skies are here, the more dazzling because the snow is still three feet or more deep all around. But there is a lift in the air, in the spring notes of the jays and chickadees, in the stirring of sap in maples and in me. I feel hugely happy, in a state of bliss after a wonderful weekend with X that included a long windy walk by the sea. I got back yesterday as the sun was setting, pouring golder light on the snow and lighting up the white walls. For once I did not feel the pang of the empty house. It welcomed me, and after an hour (I had been watching for her) the wild cat came and I fed her. It set a seal on all I had been feeling, for there is no doubt that this shy, intense, starved creature has become an alter ego. I have identified with the perpetual hungerer after comfort, the outsider watching lighted windows… The mood is caught in a photo Mort Mace took of this house all lighted up one March evening. The effect is dazzling from the outside, just as my life seems dazzling to many people in its productivity, in what it communicates that is human and fulfilled, and hence fulfilling. But the truth is that whatever good effect my work may have comes, rather, from my own sense of isolation and vulnerability. The house is open in a way that no house where a family lives and interacts can be… I feel sometimes like a house with no walls.”

To preserve program space, please see my recommendation list below; this is in no way comprehensive but I do encourage all of my fellow context-hungry viewers to check out the artist’s work below. 

  • “Socialist Realism” by Trish Low (book)

  • Edna St. Vincent Millay (Queer poet from the 20’s)

  • “The Visitors” by Ragnar Kjartansson (Video and art installation; occasionally on view at the ICA)

  • “Nanette” by Hannah Gadsby (Comedy special, reality of ‘coming out’ in unsafe spaces)

  • “Tiny Boxes” and “Sweet Petunia” by Sweet Petunia (songs, local genius musicians) 

  • “Life in a Scotch Sitting Room, Vol. 2 (Episode 16)”; “Gravity Begins At Home”; and “Do You Ever Feel Lonely” by Ivor Cutler (songs)

  • “Meteor Shower” by Alison Sudol (song)

  • “Remembrance” by Yussef Kamaal (song)