In Conversation with Jenn Kidwell on WE COME TO COLLECT: A FLIRTATION, WITH CAPITALISM

There are theatre-makers who politely critique capitalism, and then there’s Jenn Kidwell — kicking the whole thing over in heels and daring us to laugh while it burns.

In we come to collect: a flirtation, with capitalism, Jenn and collaborator and ASL artist Brandon Kazen-Maddox drag audiences headfirst into the glittering pigsty of global capitalism through a riotous collision of comedy, cabaret, performance art, and political provocation. Beneath the glow of a crooked chandelier, the pair skewer myths of American economic power and hold our ideas of value, labour, race, shame, and desire up to a warped gilded mirror — all while shimmying wildly between the cosmic and the absurd.

Leopard-printed, fiercely intelligent, and unapologetically filthy, the show refuses easy answers or neat moral lessons. Instead, it revels in contradiction: glamour and decay, rage and joy, chaos and catharsis. Kidwell’s work has long challenged audiences to rethink the systems shaping our lives, but here that reckoning comes wrapped in performance-art spectacle, razor-sharp comedy, and the ecstatic possibility of collective release.

Jenn’s poignant, performer-driven theater work addresses the complexities of race and notions of American history with sharp intelligence and wry humor. Invested in probing challenging social and historical truths, Kidwell says her work is “concerned with discomfort and/or confusion around normative practices and systems.” With Scott Sheppard, she premiered and performed in Underground Railroad Game, lauded by The Philadelphia Inquirer as a “brilliant theatrical commentary on contemporary race relations.” A graduate of Pig Iron Theatre Company’s School for Advanced Performance Training, Kidwell created and appeared in the company’s Center-funded project, I Promised Myself to Live Faster, and The Wilma Theater’s production of Antigone. For the 2014 Whitney Biennial, she performed in Joe Scanlan’s provocative piece Dick’s Last Stand as the artist Donelle Woolford. She is co-artistic director of the theater company Lightning Rod Special and co-founder of the Brooklyn-based performance space JACK. She holds a BA in English and comparative literature from Columbia University.

The title promises provocation – what does “flirtation” with capitalism mean in the context of this work?

Jenn: I wish this question came up more often because it’s significant to me, thanks for posing it. The piece itself is a flirtation, it wants to reel its audience in. The writing and performance is meant to beckon, enchant and engage. We perform flirtatiously. There’s consensual touch, preening, winking and even a marriage proposal. I was recently reflecting with a choreographer friend on how seduction is an essential part of work for us both, and shows up all over our respective pieces. Given desire is the motor of capitalism, seduction is made explicit in this particular piece. And while it’s a critique of, the piece is also flirting with capitalism. If the first half is an indictment of “work, ” the second half of the piece is a long-form hustle. The piece engages with and deploys a little capitalistic enterprise in real time — with varying results — in order to perform its inherent failure. But, with charm and delight.

You’re both performing and directing this piece. How does wearing both hats shape the work?

Jenn: Performing/co-directing/writing, in fact. However, the process manages to be quite collaborative, I hope. I studied theater in a Le Coq-based program in which we made our own work collaboratively every week, so, I’m used to this way of doing things. Hopefully, this collaborative approach offers the process and the piece the benefit of lots of perspectives, so while as the initiator I’m hosting this party, but the whole team is making the party fun.

What drew you to performance as the form for exploring these ideas about capitalism?

Jenn: I thought I wanted to make a piece about the pipeline from U.S. enslavement to the criminal injustice system, but while I was doing all that research, capitalism emerged as the seed and nexus of the critique because I found myself ruminating about no one  — slaveowners and prison guards included — can be free within this system. As the U.S. colonial project was asserting itself, there was a brief moment when the disenfranchised and property-less folks came together and organized. There were Indigenous communities, people of African descent — who at that time weren’t necessarily all enslaved —, women, indentured servants and other poor white men and they scared the shit out of the rich, propertied white men who wanted the colony to work for them. The propertied entities not only quashed the rebellion, they also codified laws to bolster the heteronormative white supremacist social order with which we continue to contend today. For me, that moment was the tinder for this capitalist conflagration, and I started to ask myself, “what is it about capitalism that makes us fall for its okey-doke?”

How much of yourself – your own relationship to capital, consumption, survival – is in this work?

Jenn: A WHOLE HELL OF A LOT. This shit is personal as hell. My mother is quoted extensively throughout, I share a couple of my own dreams and it’s performed into and before a giant mirror. Sigh. I don’t know how to leave my damned self out of it. What does the space or staging ask of audiences? Are they implicated, complicit, or something else? The space invites the audience to engage with things I find pleasurable: soft seating for reclining, a giant surface to admire oneself and others, a giant surface in which to make funny faces, silly wigs, sumptuous secondhand furnishings, sexy lighting … it’s meant to seduce the audience into liking being implicated and complicit. Like, I kno we’re literally making you look at yourselves in real time, but here are some fun and/or beautiful images (the giant mirror is also a projection surface), and some… mardi gras beads.

You’re bringing this work to Australia – how does it feel presenting a piece about capitalism in a different economic and cultural context?

Jenn: I’m/we’re curious about how the meaning will shift in a different context! I see evidence of what capital can do in Melbourne, while I acknowledge how intensely it has brought us in the U.S. to our knees, how it is the origin story of our colonial project. So, I’m eager to see how — or if — it works here. Thanks for having us.

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we come to collect; a flirtation with capitalism plays at The Showroom, Arts Centre Melbourne as part of RISING festival.

For tickets and more information, visit the RISING website.