space to be for a while

(Part 1)

alexa dexa with danilo machado 

This interview between poet danilo machado and sound witch alexa dexa took place on Zoom on June 23rd, 2024. The conversation, on the occasion of alexa dexa's recent online bathtub opera soak [1] explores their practice of reimagining opera as live online participatory performance rituals that center transformative community care. It has been edited for length and clarity.

danilo: Hi! Love your background — lit candles and everything!

alexa: Hi! Yes, of course! I love your baby blue hankie.

d: Oh yes, I was thinking about the splish splash when I put it on. 

a: That's it! 

d: I mean, did we just do the interview?

a: I feel like we did, right?

d: Wow, okay — great. Send. Publish. 

a: We said everything that needs to be said, if we're being totally honest. 

d: Totally. How's your . . . what day is it?

a: I could not tell you — I just don't understand time as a concept anymore. I used to be really with it with the clocks. We were friends and now I'm like — calendar?

d: I hardly know her! By which I mean I know her too much and also not at all.

a: We used to be besties and then we fell off real hard.

d: She can be a bad friend.

a: A real bad friend. Very unforgiving. Real pushy. How are you doing? 

d: I got back from some travels and am trying to readjust. 

a: Oh, how lovely! Did you have a good time? 

d: I did! I stayed on a houseboat in Baltimore! 

a: I mean, does it get any better than a houseboat? Did you sleep in it?

d: Oh yeah.

a:  Wow, you were one with the water! 

d: Yes — splish splash! Anywho, I was thinking we’d just keep this Loosey Goosey today. 

a: I love it. Loosey Goosey is really the lifestyle to attain. It’s the dream. 

d: Truly. Okay — here we go. How did this project begin for you?

a: I was in one of my flares. Sore. I’m like, the muscles are not together. The hands are like, we don’t want to be part of the body anymore. Can we secede? Can we just disintegrate? But I guess sometimes I think disintegration would be better because then they would dissolve and surely would hurt less. Instead, they do the opposite, getting tight and twisted up. 

d: Compressed. 

a: Yeah. So, I had been — as one is want to do — just soaking in the tub, laden with Epsom salts. I’m in the bath definitely once a day, sometimes twice a day — for hours; for a good long time, you know. I feel the most ease in that warm space — I love being in the bathtub. It’s sometimes the only time of day where I could feel like a human. On earth.

While I was in there, I was thinking a lot about ways of bringing my own personal ritual practice into performance, and being able to share that with community. Why do the soak alone when you can soak together?

d: Exactly.

a: I know I'm not the only one out here with aches and pains that need to be alleviated by getting into a soaking tub. For me — especially shielding from COVID and already having that isolation — being in that even more isolated space of the tub is where I'm feeling okay. I really wanted to share that feeling and have it be a space to be together from afar, soaking and entering into that ease through ritual.

And so I started writing this incantation; writing this libretto through brain fog and pain haze. I was writing out the messages that were surfacing for me, the things that I wanted to remember, the things that felt like they needed to be acknowledged, to be shared, to be released and then to re-emerge out of this shimmering space. 

I was also thinking a lot about the idea of going to a bathhouse, or a public pool, or the beach — where you’re in the water with others. I really wanted to experience these communal soaking spaces online where, even though we're not physically in the same location, we're really all soaking in the water together.

d: Yeah, and how even if the water is not the same water it feels connected because it's the same substance.

a: Exactly. Like, you look up at the moon, and you're like, okay, well, we might not be looking from the same location, but the moon is the same. The moon is still out there doing what the moon does. It's like water. For the most part, we all have access to it in some way, shape, or form, even just being alive and having it make up our bodies. Water is inside, water is outside. Water is water. I really like that as a point of connectivity.

d: It’s water all the way down. All the way up? Relatedly, I’m interested in your tech and your process. What is captured wet and what is captured dry? Did you have a waterproof notebook? 

a: Oh yes, I do — thank you so much for asking. 

d: Amazing. 

a: So when I'm writing the incantation, we're really in the tub: we got the candles lit, the Epsom salts dissolving, the water warm. The pencil can go under the water no problem, even the eraser will work. The underwater notepad floats next to me and when I have an idea I just sort of scribble it away and decipher it afterwards.

d: So good. This opera is brought to you by waterproof notebooks.

a: Truly phenomenal to just be able to write down things underwater. We love it! We do! 

d: You should really reach out to whatever brand notebook you use. They would love that.

a: I probably should reach out to them. I thought about it, I don't know . . . 

d: Do it. You should become an underwater waterproof notebook influencer.

a: I'm gonna. I'm ready to espouse the joys of having underwater notebooks and microphones. How wonderful is it to make sound underwater and then to experience underwater sound? I love singing underwater. My left vocal fold is weaker than my right one, which means it's always more tense because it doesn’t want to close all the way. But when I'm singing underwater, there’s zero tension. It's bliss. 

I'm not singing underwater for this one — I have in the past, and it just feels like it should feel like. It's like, oh, this is what it should feel like to be in a body . . . Look at how it can feel to be in the body as opposed to being in a body that's like ouch. It is possible to not be in pain, to not have brain fog take over everything — it's possible for there to be room for something else. We're very much calling that in with this opera — it’s the whole spell.

d: Yeah. Conjuring for yourself and for others, sort of elemental. It conjures the most basic; the womb, even.

a: Right. 

d: Were you looking at other examples of this kind of space?

a: Yeah, I found stuff like bathhouse.online when I was looking up to see if there were any other online bathhouses. And when I found that one, I was like, Oh, I love this imaginary nonexistent project. Like, existing but like not, you know. 

d: This reminds me of a play I saw a few months ago by my friend Jesús [I. Valles] called Bathhouse.pptx at The Flea. 

a: That sounds fabulous! You really had me at PowerPoint. Did they have one?

d: Oh yeah. It was incredible. It engaged with some of the history of bathhouses and “cleanliness” from this very queer, very migrant, very timewarped lens.

a: I don't know how you couldn't be excited about a PowerPoint. I mean, it would only be better if it involved many bathtubs in the theater. Can you imagine just like clawfoot tub after clawfoot tub? That's the dream, right?

d: Truly! Something that stuck with me is that by engaging with history, the play was able to push against so much erasure and assert these connections between marginalized communities. The play and your opera also reclaims a space that is sometimes co-opted by vapid self-care™. You picture a white woman with a glass of wine. 

a: Yes! Oh my god, yeah. In my research, I was interested in seeing historic bathing rituals. And that history is nothing like a white woman with a glass of wine. That's not the history. That's not the lineage. This is not that.

d:  It also makes me think about what it means to bring the intimacies of private or dim spaces into public without de-fanging them, without having them lose their sensuality or mystery.

a: Yeah, that's been an interesting thing. My feeling for soak is that if it's a bathtub, however people wanna show up to it is fine. Maybe folks potentially showing up without clothing makes some people uncomfortable, but I don’t have a problem with that. I'm not trying to police anybody on how they wanna show up as long as no one is harassing anybody. Everyone should come to the bathtub with what is accessible for them. I'm not trying to sanitize the bathtub. I want you to show up however you want to show up, and for me that's as a whole entire human mess. If that's how you want to show up, cool — that's the whole point. We're here to do that together. The point of the piece is that it's not just you're showing up to watch me, we're showing up and we're doing it together. The point is that we're not alone and that we're sharing the space. I think that it's important. And maybe there is access friction. Maybe that makes some people uncomfortable and that's valid as well, but also you can choose what to look at on Zoom or you can just not look at it.

d: Exactly. 

a: It is interesting to see the ways the work rubs up against organizational structure and social etiquette. And in other countries, or at certain beaches, everyone is showing up naked. I'm like, please just show up to be in the bathtub. I'm not mad. I'm happy. I'm happy you're here. That's all.

d: Yeah, for sure. And how some of the roots of those fears are anti-sex, anti-nudity — and perhaps discomfort with the fact that disabled people are naked sometimes. 

a: What do you mean? That's very scandalous! I mean, what did you think was going to happen? Did you think no one was going to be in the bath? I just don't feel aligned with those fears. 

d: Yeah, a fear of people asserting space that has always been theirs.

a: Right, right. That agency just feels really important to me. 

d: Indeed.

d: How do you see this project in relation to your past and future work? 

a: On the sound side, there's been a real shift in the work I've been making. There had been a good ten years where I was doing more toychestral electronic pop. These were short, four or five minute pieces that were very rhythmically together, where everything sort of had its groove. For this shift into creating operas, a few things happened: for one, I have so many toy instruments I love and I wanted to be able to use all of them. I wanted to introduce more fluid sound structures that allowed for chance happenings, so that it wasn't always like an intentional process. There was an opportunity for a sound to sort of circle back: to be in space, be processed, and then come back into the sound plane. 

I'm creating a lot of structures behind the scenes to contain these sounds and give them directions, then they pop in and combine in ways that I could not have planned. I’m just building these electronic containers that record sound randomly and then randomly play that back — maybe 30% slower or with a ton of reverb and extra delays. It builds this space that sort of feels like a little cocoon. 

The sounds aren't rhythmic in a super intentionally structured way. Well, everything is rhythmic — everything has time, you know, the time that it takes to enter and to be in these communications. It doesn't matter when you come in or when you come out of the sound making — all of it is great. All of the movements make it feel like little conversations happen, and then build upon each other. I really love that element of letting go of that control and seeing what surfaces when you open up the space and allow things to come through. 

I think that's also a shift as I've moved more towards doing ritual work and virtual readings with oracle cards that I've created, which double as graphic musical scores. In my personal practice and in my personal life, I’m thinking about the things that are happening that you're not gonna pick up on unless you're open to them. I think this is probably true in human to human communication as well — or human/animal, whatever. If you're not open to receiving a message, you're not gonna get it; if you don't want to be in conversation with someone, that conversation isn't going to happen. And so I think a lot about having these conversations through just opening it up with anything and everything. 

I’m seeing how that comes into play in the work and letting that be part of the process. Yes, I'm orchestrating things — I'm creating these structures and containers, but I'm also saying this is a conversation. It's a conversation with the instruments, with technology, with the earth. It's a conversation with me, and it’s also a conversation with the audience because with soak, there's me in my bathtub soaking and it's the sounds of my bath in real time. It's also the sounds of my bath that I've recorded playing back. It’s the sounds of toy instruments glacially time shifted. But it's also the sounds of everyone who is in their own waters. Maybe it's your bathtub, maybe it's a shower, maybe it's your bed and you're just imagining water. Any form of water. 

For me, the sounds of everyone soaking is part of the conversation — that's part of the opera.  For the first half of the opera the sounds from the audience won't be shared, but I think that even if we're not all experiencing everyone else’s sounds, to me just knowing there's someone else on the other end of that connection who is soaking is meaningful. Their soak sounds are happening and that's not like oh, let me make sure my headphones are like canceling out all the noise. I don't want only the sounds of my soaking to influence the sound of this opera. The interplay of all of us soaking is all part of the sound world, even an imaginary one. I think that's so fascinating. I love knowing that there's another dimension to what the sounds are and that someone might be humming or doing you know their little splish splashes — who knows. All of those sounds are the sounds of the opera.

Then there's like a second half where I open up the space for people to be able to make whatever sounds they want. All of it is very fluid — which is fitting. I think there's been a real shift in the way that I want to and that I hold space for people who are participating or attending to be able to include the sounds that they're making as part of the work that's taking place — to let that be another way that chance is entering into the space, but also an understanding of the ways that we’re interdependent. Of all of the ways that we are here, we're here together. We are alive together (or dead, even — ghosts could come around too) and I just want to be in community so much. I really want for us to be able to have these spaces where we can have that opportunity to engage in ways that we're not always allowed to. 

d: I love that and I love thinking about what it means to engage with the long form — to think about these wide containers as opposed to narrow or compressed ones; the slowing down of time and the durational. Like, how is the long soak in conversation with chronic illness, chronic pain, a long pandemic, long lineages, long occupations, a long genocide . . .

a: Right. 

d: What sort of strategies allow us to be for the long term? One of the things I keep noticing is how so many of us are continuing to gravitate towards the collaborative —  towards the participatory, towards the ritual, toward the conversational —  as a counter to isolation and individuality. A counter to capitalism and the way its demands are so narrow and mostly violent. 

a: Everything that you're saying times one thousand. Like, what does it really mean to be slow in a society that wants you to push through to do more, to produce capital for the state every minute of your life, to feed algorithms, to feed artificial intelligence, just so that they steal your time and your data and your lived experience. What does it actually mean to say, I'm just gonna be laying here. I'm gonna be laying here with you. I know we're still meeting through these technologies that are part of those systems, but we're not doing anything — this is an undoing. 

d: Exactly. 

a: We don't have to perform for anybody.

d: And on top of that, we’re not going anywhere.

I was thinking a lot about this during my residency this Spring with New York City Poets Afloat, which was on a barge in Red Hook [Brooklyn]. The barge is a museum and performance space, but doesn’t move and hasn't moved for many years. It just sways and there's something very particular to that kind of motion — really slow and rhythmic and unattached from a traditional destination. It's not interested in arrival because it's arrived, it's where it's going to be. 

a: Right. Right. You're already. 

Endnote

[1] soak is an accessibility-centered, virtual, and immersive electroacoustic toy opera by a sick + mad + disabled non-binary babe soaking in a bathtub co-created with and for sick + mad + disabled folx in bathtubs/shower chairs/showers/wash basins/sponge baths/kiddie pools/sitz baths/foot baths/areas of cozy and enveloping rest and ease/in, with, or near any body of water big or very small (an ocean, lake, river, creek/rain, snow, steam, or ice/a glass of water/our own bodies), real or imagined (because who is the arbiter of what is real anyway?).

soak is a crip ritual for nourishing our sick + mad + disabled bodyminds, for sinking into ease and effortlessness, for soaking until the ache dissipates into lull.

a small journey in a small space where the expanse is within you, the story is yours. a bath journey that moves beyond cure to ask what would feel healing for you, for right now?

the premiere of soak was presented by crip house and Experiments in Opera and took place live online over zoom. there were 3 free performances over the summer of 2024. for tender invitations to future soaks, join alexa dexa’s crip ritual invite list.

About

alexa dexa is a sick + mad + disabled toychestral electroacoustic composer-performer, technologist, and crip xXgrandmacoreXx songspell crafting + casting sound witch reimagining opera as interactive remote-access rituals that activate transformative community care, interdependence, and disabled joy. Using sound as a source for shaping change, they dream and manifest aleatoric, indeterminate, and improvisatory works for our resonant bodies and crip ecologies, an ever-expanding toychestra to rival a playpen, and live and pre-programmed electronics. Envisioning online performances as living art forms with all the magic and potential of in-person performances, and even more, alexa dexa values generating collaborative accessible experiences that nurture strong community bonds. The originator of divinatory oracle cards that double as graphic sound scores, alexa dexa’s rituals + readings with their self-published oracle//composition decks offer portals for dreaming our most glorious dreams into existence as we shape + reshape our own nonlinear paths. Their crip ritual operas have been supported by The New England Foundation for the Arts, New Music USA, Mid Atlantic Arts, Creatives Rebuild New York, The New York State Council on the Arts, and OPERA America. Pre-pandemic, alexa dexa spent 4-6 months out of the year for 8 years touring the world with their toy piano. Their 14 previous self-booked tours have taken them throughout North America, Europe, Oceania, and Asia.

Instagram: @xxalexadexaxx | Facebook: @AlexaDexaMusic | Twitter: @Alexa_Dexa | YouTube: @AlexaDexa

danilo machado is a poet, curator, and Leo living on occupied land, interested in language’s potential for revealing tenderness, erasure, and relationships to power. A 2020-2021 Poetry Project Emerge-Surface-Be Fellow and 2024 NYC Poets Afloat Fellow, their writing has been featured in Hyperallergic, Art in America, Art Papers, Poem-A-Day, The Recluse, GenderFail, among others. They are the author of the collection This is your receipt and is not a ticket for travel (Faint Line Press, 2023) and the chaplets wavy in its heat, to be elsewhere, and suggestion as more profound or more interesting than the thing itself (or, july) (Ghost City Press Summer Series, 2022/2023/2024). Recent curatorial projects include to hold a we (BRIC, 2024), Any place I hang my hat is home (Bullet Space, 2024), and Eligible/Illegible (PS 122, 2023). They are the author of the Post Post Post newsletter on Substack and, with Em Marie Kohl, co-organizes exquisites, a queer reading, workshop, and anthology series. danilo currently serves on the Board of Directors for No, Dear Magazine and co-organizes The Long Poem Support Group with Ry Cook. danilo has performed at venues including National Sawdust, Poetry Project, Lincoln Center, Bowery Poetry Club and, as DJ Queer Shoulders, danilo has DJ’d as a part of programs and fundraisers with The Shed, ART PAPERS, CultureHub, Crown Heights Mutual Aid, and Connecticut UndocuFund. They are working to show up with care for their communities and believe in a free Palestine. 

Across social media platforms as: @queershoulders