INTERVIEW WITH AYOKA CHENZIRA

IN THE RIVERS OF MERCY ANGST
SNOWFIRE

Series curator Kathy High conducted this telephone interview with Ayoka Chenzira in May, 1997.

Would you tell me how the idea for IN THE RIVERS OF MERCY ANGST came about? Because it's such a beautiful piece.

Well, thank you. I must say that I like this piece a lot. You tend to say that about your work after a while. You know, you kind of fall in love with it. But I have to say this piece is very special to me because I got an opportunity to do a lot of things that I'd been experimenting with in my head for a long time. And, you know, it's a short film. It's simple in some ways, complex in others, but it really is the coming together of an experimentation that I thought might work -- I wasn't really sure -- and I just played with it in my head for a long time.

For example, I have been wanting to have more control over both production and post-production, and I wanted to be able to get closer to the emotions, dreams, and imagery that exist in my head. I find this harder to do when there's a larger crew. And I wanted to get back to things that made me happy as a dancer, a painter, a photographer, and a musician. And although film encompasses so many other art forms, it's different. The process is so different. And I guess the major thing for me is that in those other art forms I mentioned, there's a lot more attention and opportunity for experimentation.

And improvisation?

Yes. And for the rehearsal. Because you're not put in a position where you necessarily have to put head and tail credits on your composition or your masterpiece, or your painting, until you're really, really ready. And there's not that financial clock ticking.

So I wanted to get back to the area where I felt like I could really play again. And in that, have fun, and feel like there weren't certain kinds of pressures, because you only had a certain amount of money, and therefore your shooting ratio could only be this, and you could only bring on these people . . . So I was thinking about how to continue to produce the kinds of things that I wanted to produce in a wonderful, fun, playful way. And so MERCY ANGST allowed me to do a lot of that. So now I'm planning other kinds of pieces with a similar approach.

That's really wonderful. You can feel the play in it.

Well, also I think that the team of people that I was working with was much more like theater and dance, in terms of certain kinds of collaborations. I enjoyed the process as much as the final product. And I can't say that about all the pieces that I've done.

And I think the timing is more like theater and dance. Things evolve over time in a way that's slower than we're used to, in these other choppy, choppy productions. But it works quite well in this tape because it's so rich visually -- each of the images, each moment . . . it's sort of like watching a painting evolve in front of you.

That's what someone said. I think it was the guy who runs the Toronto Festival. There's an African component, I think. He said that it's like watching a painting unfold. I think the other thing that was very helpful to me is that I got a chance to do a lot of things that I like to do. I like to shoot. I like to process my work. I like painting.

Can you talk a little bit about the story structure?

Yeah. I really like that territory that is, I guess, commonly known as magical realism. I like magical realism particularly if there is also some kind of political bent to it. The territory that I was interested in exploring with MERCY ANGST is a kind of madness on the one hand, but it's about post-war syndrome. It's almost like "post-Movement syndrome," which is a term that I heard. Sekou Sundiata is a poet, a very fine New York poet, and I heard him use that term, and I just love it because there are so many black people suffering from "post-Movement syndrome," in terms of the expectations of the '60s and '70s, and how we would proceed, or what would happen. The result was not satisfying.

There are all kinds of issues of betrayal. There's so much. And so the best way I can explain it is "post-Movement syndrome." A lot of people that I know or have seen suffer from this. Mercy Angst is a person who can't move forward. And to me moving forward is having the ability to dream, and then to actualize your dream. She can't do that because she's so locked in memory, and it's a kind of memory that's literally eating her alive, and that's the function of Kom, the Keeper of Memory. As we see in the story, when he's on his moon time, he's quite mischievous. Essentially, he stores his anger inside of her, and to free herself from that, she needs to be able to hook onto a dream, which is the function of the Dream Keeper. So I see it as this struggle between Memory and Dream.

Somewhere I decided that Memory and Dream were married, which is why there's that line, "He's my husband." There really is a partnership, and if either side goes out of kilter, you lose your balance. For me it was a way of addressing or responding to that area where I think a lot of black people in particular are much more comfortable in being fueled by the anger of memory. And sometimes I plug into talk radio, and it becomes so clear after a while. It's just too painful to listen, because you realize that there's a real comfort zone in the angst that one has found. Although you can be very articulate in some cases about that, there's almost like an unwillingness to step on the other side and say, "Okay. Well, now we know that. What are the new possibilities?" So that's what's underneath the piece, and I think the style of it is a way to begin to talk about it poetically.

I showed this piece to a really packed house at this very tiny school in Lycoming, Pennsylvania, which is where . . . do you remember when all those students were going to France and the plane crashed?

Yes.

It's that town.

It's the airport of that town. And the place was crammed. I think there were maybe four black people in the audience. There were close to 350 students and faculty. Afterwards, a woman came up to me and she said, "Is this piece about drug addiction?" And I said, "I hadn't really thought about it that way." She said, "Well, I'll tell you. I was a drug addict and I felt like I was possessed by somebody just like Kom, and I struggled so hard to free myself." And so that's the eyes that she used in looking at the piece, and it kind of worked. There's a potential for it to work in any situation where one feels possessed.

When you talked about putting this group of people together that you were working with, I wondered if you had worked with this particular group before, or how you came to know them?

Some of them, yes. Some of them, no. But the crew was really tiny. It's myself, my partner, Barbara [Chirinos]. It's two of my former students who I've done a lot of work with, and Thomas Osha Pinnock, who's a writer and who's also my husband, but we kind of don't put that out there necessarily that way. He's a writer. And my daughter, Haj. And so that was the crew.

Well, your daughter's in the piece in a really interesting way, because isn't that your voice over her image?

Yes, it is.

I did a double take with that. Because even if people don't know you, it's a little disconcerting. And in that sense, unsettling, in the same way that the rest of the tape works to sort of unsettle and then resettle.

The only person I had not worked with before was the woman who played Mercy. She is someone that my husband found in the subway. I think they were in the subway at West Fourth Street, and she was just kind of attracted to his energy and went up and started talking with him. And he knew the script. I had been looking for someone, but it had to be someone who was kind of willing to put themselves out there in particular kinds of ways, and she just talked and talked and talked. And so we were talking about finding a Mercy. He mentioned her to me and he mentioned her whole vibration. And I met with her and the woman really does speak in tongues. What was interesting is there was really very little explaining that I had to do, because it's somebody who kind of crosses in and out of reality -- or different kinds of realities -- and so she understood the character so easily. That's how we found her.

With my daughter, I wanted a storyteller. I didn't want it to be me, but I wanted the character that is telling the story to be also somewhat otherworldly. I tried to go for representation of that by pushing it into the kind of hard black and white and flipping the sound. I did it with her in synch, and it felt like it needed to be more askew in some way to connect with the rest of the piece. I think that sometimes it works, and maybe sometimes it doesn't. But when people see it, I think that they feel it more than they see it. So it feels like it's different.

Did you have any mishaps or occurrences while you were shooting, that changed the end production?

Yes. Originally, the piece was designed so that Mercy Angst was telling you her story. In other words, Mercy was the narrator of her own story. We had built this lovely hut house for her on my studio roof. It was really quite lovely. She was sitting down, and she was in her present incarnation, which is an apprentice to the Keeper of Dreams, and she was telling you how she arrived at this position. I had been, for a long time, working with people that didn't have a history of acting professionally, and wanted to continue to do so because I found that they were much more generous. I also had more options. So when I found her and I interviewed her and we talked a lot, it appeared that everything would be okay. But what I discovered was that she was not as comfortable with telling that part of the story as she was when she went into Mercy in her madness. The way she told the story took a lot of the magic out of it. So I restructured it.

It's also interesting how she has this character of being a photographer prior to any meetings with the Dream Keepers. When you were talking about this relationship of memory, and what happens to her, were you making a connection between her photography and memory?

Well, what I was thinking of was that it would be easy for someone who was more involved in non-verbal communication, someone who was used to seeing things and responding to what they've seen, but non-verbally, to be possessed. And also in giving her the camera, she also is being set up as a potential Keeper because that's what the camera helps to facilitate in terms of the Keeping of the Image.

That was great. All right. Let's move into SNOWFIRE . . .

SNOWFIRE. Do you know the background of it?

Is this why you chose to make it with the stills?

Well, I'm doing a lot of that, the still and the live image, in MERCY ANGST, also. I was a photographer for a long time and I miss it. I'm getting back to it and learning how to incorporate it more and more with live footage. But I said to them that I wanted to do it, but I only wanted to do it if I could do something that I hadn't done before, which was this incorporation of stills and live footage. And they said fine. So it was another opportunity to experiment with something that I had wanted to experiment with, but hadn't really gotten the opportunity.

Well, the stills function in a really interesting way to kind of collapse time. I mean, one still seems to speak about a greater moment than we would see in real time performed in front of us. They're really quite dense. Did you shoot the entire piece as stills?

Yes, I did. What I said to the actors was, We're shooting it the same way that you would shoot a dramatic narrative with live footage. It required that they move slower, so that it was almost -- again, I think it's coming out of my dance and still photography background -- so that the movements are choreographed. And the timing of the movements are very clearly worked out. And they could do everything that they would do if it were live action. They just had to do it as I told them to do it. So, I talked them through each frame.

Did you write the story? And was this a story that had been close to you somehow?

Yes, I did write it. The half-hour piece is based on the death of a friend -- one of my best friends. And, although this isn't quite his story -- his story is a little different in that, when he died, the family said that he had a heart attack. You know, there was something about [the idea that] it's better to have a heart attack -- it's just the choices that people come up with . . . Well, it's better to have cancer. Well, it's better to have a heart attack. I was so angry. Losing someone you love dearly and then, somehow, the closure wasn't there because the lie had been told. I understood it was not acceptable and didn't provide, I think, the real closure, because everybody basically knew what he died of.

And so the heart attack just, sort of, hangs there in the air, like: Ah, so there isn't this real closure. So I needed to do something to give myself some closure. And, what I did was I constructed a story, using a character that I thought would have the hardest time, and was a Caribbean man whose only son dies of AIDS. It's so against the immigrant dream in so many ways. The only thing I knew about this story when I started was I needed to be able to move this man from a place of total resistance to a place where he understood and felt the loss. In some ways, writing the story helped me to forgive the family that told the lie about one of my closest friends.

Did they get to see it?

No. They haven't seen it, and it's a kind of situation where, even if they did, they wouldn't get it. It would be like, "Oh, that's interesting."

They wouldn't connect it to their lives.

No, no.

I like the piece a lot. What I like is that, in the writing process, a lot of things come to you that you don't plan on, and you don't know the answers to, which makes writing interesting to me. For example, the father threw the son out of the house once he discovered that he was gay -- not even knowing that he had AIDS -- just that he was gay, he was gone. The mother has feelings about that, but continues to stay with the father.

So, in a very short time, there's the introduction of that complexity. There are these other powers working, because I really don't remember when I got to the point where the mother says, "What you're really angry about is that you didn't get to tell him how you felt." I think that once I understood that, I understood why she continued to stay with him. I get to learn something new when I create new pieces, and that that's very helpful and useful in life.

There's something about the pacing of it, too, that is incredibly compact. You were talking about the different emotions that come up, seeing what the mother is doing, and how she's involved with the father, and why she stays, but there's a lot that happens in an incredibly short amount of time. It feels very evenly paced, and I wonder if part of that is attributed to the use of stills? What do you think?

I think some of it is how the stills are used, and I think some of it is related to the color choices, and the kinds of lighting that are used, for example, in the bedroom scene. In the bedroom scene, I think, we just did three angles, and most of the shots are from two angles. There's a lot of color in the room but there's not a lot of light in the room. I think what you're feeling is that even though the mother's talking, it's also cut so that you feel the father too. Maybe the kind of density you're feeling is that you can feel the other person's presence, in addition to having to listen to what the mother is saying.

Again, did anything come up as you were shooting?

Well, there was some funny stuff when we were looking for actors. The actor who played the love interest of the son is someone who I had worked with in the film "Alma's Rainbow" very successfully, and I wanted to work with him again. And when we were interviewing, we did not have the adult Isaiah, the father's son, and so we asked this actor, Lee, what man are you in love with? And what man would you be willing to, like, kiss? Instantly, without batting an eye, he named this actor and we got him down there in 10 minutes. And to my knowledge, both of them are heterosexual.

Oh. That's a riot. I didn't know that.

And, the first time we did the kitchen scene where the father has to look and see them kiss, it was so funny, because they were hesitant on the kiss, so they just kept playing around with each other's faces and bodies, and what not. And I said, "Well, guys, I don't know if you realize it, but this is even more provocative than the kiss. The only problem is, we don't have enough time to have you all just play around, so you're going to have to get to it." And I said, "Lee, remember, this is the guy that you told me you would kiss." And so, it happened and it was just wonderful and, as I said, they're both heterosexual men.

Well, this is good. You have introduced a whole new element into their lives.

Maybe, but they were quite comfortable and quite willing.

They seemed to like it?

I think they liked the story very much. And then, you know, the other thing that was really difficult . . . the first time we shot the boat scene we had a bigger boat that was decorated in the most incredible way. It was slightly different -- I think richer in many ways, and the sun was on our side. Something snapped in the camera, but you couldn't hear it. You couldn't hear it and you couldn't see it. So we didn't know. And when we processed all of the slides, the top half was blank, and the bottom half had all this gorgeous color. And I said, "Oh no, we have to shoot this again." The sun wasn't with us on the second time. It was a harder shoot, but that first time, what I think also made it special and difficult was that one of the actors that I had hired to be part of the mourning and the procession on the beach, suddenly started crying, and, someone came to me and said, "You know, he's upset because he just lost his brother and he wants to talk with you." So, I went over to talk with him and he said, "I know that you're getting ready to do this scene, where the father's going to put his son's ashes in the water. My brother died of AIDS recently and I'm not handling it very well. I have his ashes in the car. Can we use his ashes?" And I said, "No. You're going to have to work this one out on your own in a different way." I didn't want to do that. But that was it. I decided not to because I didn't know the brother. I didn't know what I was walking into. But it was a hell of an experience.

Right. Well, I can see why these scenes seem so loaded now. It's always interesting to hear what happens behind . . .

Behind the set. But it was a wonderful shoot, because there's an area of Jones Beach that is not open to the public. And if you go to the Mayor's Office, that's where they assign you, and that's where they do photo shoots. The first boat we had was about three times bigger. The men had to walk the boat from the road because you can't take cars down there. It's totally off limits. It was truly quite a day. Black men carrying the boat. And it's kind of funny. It's like, "Oh, did you have to carry the slave ship, too?" It was an interesting time.