Shared experiences of awe. Brian Lobel
Brian Lobel is a force of nature. His art, his work - Brian, himself - connects us to each other. The personal becomes a shared experience, one meaningful step after another. Always with care, joy, love and awe.
Today (5 October) marks the release of the interactive site “24 Italian Songs and Arias (and Voices)”. This project is part of Brian’s digital artist residency with the University Musical Society (University of Michigan). Check it out - listen, read, take part!
N.B. This interview took place on 15 November 2020.
Who are you?
I’m Brian. I am… It’s a great question. This is going to be the long one kids! My name is Brian. I’ve always considered myself American summer camp counsellor turned UK and European based performance artist. I really like that trajectory for myself and they also relate to each other.
I have been working as a performer for the last seventeen years. Other identities that are relevant to me in the world of ‘who am I’ - I am a leftist Jew, which is very relevant at the moment in the UK. I am an educator. I’m someone who’s both annoyed about politics in the UK and the US - a starting point for being annoyed about politics beyond those two countries, where things are much, much worse but they happen to be less outside of my voting ability to change.
As someone who’s nervous that I talk too much, I’m a Come Dine With Me winner! I would say I’m a good friend. Being an artist, I define myself as a performer, not an artist, because an artist is what other people call you, much like a friend is what other people call you. It’s obnoxious to call yourself an artist. They are definitions that others have to bestow on you. It always felt so uncomfortable.
I think what the image of an artist is - it didn’t naturally include the people that I’m most moved by. It felt like it had a relationship to capitalism and market that I’ve never quite seen in my own work. I don’t know. There’s something about artists that live intentionally. This might be it.
An artist is someone that engages with life somewhat intentionally and framing things as purposeful acts that they wish to share with the world. I think the intentionality seems obnoxious to claim just for yourself. It almost has to be witnessed and appreciated, has to be seen by others in order to be a good enough intention, that will then make it a meaningful addition to the world.
An artist is someone who creates with intention. The intention is essential to the doing, but - the intention cannot be self-evaluated. It’s not enough if I say, “I wish to live this life incredibly intentionally or do this act intentionally.” It has to be shared by other people who see the intention as rigorous and thoughtful.
That’s the reason why I have a hard time calling myself an artist. If other people want to call me that, then that would be okay. It’s not validation in a selfish way, it’s validation in accountability.
Why do you do what you do?
A few years ago, I got a Fellowship at Wellcome, which gave me four sessions with a very high end coach. I said to her that I’m not a person who does executive coaching. (That was the cult that was started in my hometown, NXIVM, where they made the HBO documentary.) I said, “Gina, what I need is a plan that will give me hypothesis and action, intention and accountability, action and reaction and future planning.” I said that I really needed to work with her on a plan. She said that I was thirty-five. For all intents and purposes, it seemed that I was doing okay so far. So much so, that someone else was paying for me to get coached.
She said that maybe what I needed was not a plan but more comfort knowing that I wasn’t a person who would work from a plan. It gave me this huge appreciation of that conversation because it cracked open to me that I have always, kind of, moved forward, without a grand plan. I never really had gigantic goals.
It’s really interesting because I’ve had some real moments of power in my career. (Not that I was in a lot of power but power played with me). I had a show at the National Theatre and everyone treated me like someone who really had their life goal of being at the National Theatre so I should shut up but I was like - it was never my goal to have a show at the National Theatre. It’s amazing and a humbling honour to be there but it was never a tick, tick, tick of things to do. Therefore, I feel fine here. I had a gig at the Sydney Opera House, I had a gig at Harvard Medical School. After a few of those, you’re like - they’re not different.
I have always done what I wanted to do. I’ve always created the work I’ve wanted to make or the teaching I’ve wanted to teach. I’ve always been someone who gigs. I love gigs. I come from a capitalist art economy. I was in the States, where there’s no arts funding, so you go from one thing to the next and keep the creative wheels moving because they need to do that to survive and to live. Thank God I have a big nose because I’ve always followed it and tried to engage with who I was meeting and the context we were changing and the things that are important in life.
The best projects I’ve done have come from a real, personal desire to change something in my own life and that desire in my own life, feels common enough or rather in common enough with enough people for it to be relevant.
I did my first show about cancer. I just needed to make my cancer story not just my cancer story. I needed to share it. The basic intention was that I needed to get everyone into a room for sixty minutes to tell them my story because then I didn’t have to repeat it over and over again. Thankfully, my need to do that is similar to a lot of other people’s needs to do that. So I’m carrying a lot of other people with me.
The reason that 24 Italian Songs and Arias was started, was because I needed my mother to hate my performances less. Therefore, I needed to put her into the show. I needed the show to be about failure because my bad relationship with my mother about my work was making me think that my work and my relationship with her was a failure. I had to do the Math. I had to do something about failure. That was the arc. The core, always, was to do something in my own life that I need and hope that that engages with enough metaphors, that it becomes relevant with an audience.
For me, I try to be useful, more so than productive. I’ve never been an artist who needs to put out a show every year. The seasons never dictated to me when I did things. Maybe, if I were more successful in different ways, I would do that because people would want a show from me every year. So it’s not that other people are plotting, I’ve just never felt that pressure. I’ve always tried to do something useful to me and then the world around it reveals itself.
Has the pandemic made any difference to opening that door in creation?
I have a lot of sympathy and empathy for people who are working very hard to get the arts world back open. In March and April 2020, Bryony Kimmings and I ran a big fundraiser to try and cover people who had lost wages. The pandemic has made me want to take care of people in very literal ways. It’s different from the metaphoric ‘taking care of’. When we do 24 Italian Songs, I think it brings comfort to audiences who have lived those lives, for whom those metaphors are important and that music is gorgeous. It does something to help their lives, it helps an audience in some way.
But that’s not literal enough for me right now. I’ve needed much more to see artistic intervention, artistic protest, theatres being repurposed for BLM protests. That’s what we need to be doing right now. I can’t imagine that this is the time that someone would want to write a romantic comedy that Netflix might pick up. It doesn’t mean that the creative juices can’t flow and that people can’t be moved by stories.
For me personally, the pandemic has changed what I need or want to put out or engage with, for art. I’m cautious about saying this but I’ve really watched no art. None. Maybe I’ve watched A Streetcar Named Desire and the videos that you place online. That English National Opera series of shorts in June/July 2020. I watch the content that my friends put on because that’s supportive, not of the art world but my friends!
The usefulness of art has really changed. What is missing is the art museum and the theatre space for us to express citizenship, practising being in a room together, listening to someone’s story quietly, having a shared experience of awe. That could be in a church, smelling incense or being in a Chekhov play. That’s the importance of art.
The thing I’ve missed about art is the half hour before and the hour or two following. I don’t need the art world to show me stories I don’t know. I have a pretty amazing, diverse group of people around me. I do need to see people and the conversations that are happening about representation of black voices and relaxed performance venues where people can make any kind of noise they want in a classical music space, which hasn’t happened yet. These are civic conversations that have to happen and they’re really important.
Sometimes artists can communicate about the problems in the world of art as if they were the only space that was practising citizenship. That’s when I get annoyed with artists. But there is real power when a theatre puts in unisex bathrooms. It does change the world. That’s really exciting.
I think the conversation about funding for the arts is only won when we have good arguments for it. I think we can win the argument when we can demonstrate the value that it adds. It’s annoying that the country doesn’t value the business case for the arts in the UK and the US. It’s disrespectful.
There are huge uses for people coming together. The use of theatre is shared experiences of awe. It’s the reason why I love 24 Italian Songs. It has just awe after awe after awe. What I love about it, is that I’m not the person that causes them at all but I am someone that facilitates awe.
It’s beautiful to me because the role in the show is for me not to be awe inspiring. Everything I do is kind of mediocre and that’s lovely to me. I know how to hold a room and I also know how to hold a room with vulnerability and a little bit of self-deprecation. Suddenly there’s a kid who sings and they’re nice but then there’s Gwen who awes. Then it’s Naomi who awes. Then in the end, when we get you to do a longer solo piece with Allyson, there’s awe there. Then there’s a choir of people and that’s awe inspiring as well.
It’s not just the super successful professional that can awe, it can be the person that left professional singing many years ago, it can be the person held back in their solo piano playing...the voices of all these people together is awe inspiring. I think that’s the usefulness of art and that’s what we’re really missing and that’s what we haven’t gotten around to yet.
In the other solo that I have, it’s about telling a very personal story. Maybe two minutes before the end, finding a metaphor for someone to think about that themselves and then to engage with the awe of that. This isn't self-deprecating, I’m not like a performance prodigy. I’m not going to do a monologue better than anyone, I won't have better timing than anyone. If I can get people to think of little ol’ me, then two minutes before the end, ask them to think about themselves and then they see the awe themselves - that feels really exciting to me.
I do a show where the audience touches my genitals. It’s a cabaret act and starts with five people medically appreciating my genitals and writing a description. It’s an eight-minute piece. I talk about how people thought of my body after I had testicular cancer and the surgery. And the reason why it's an amazing show (and I’ll say it without apologising for it) - I wrote it in the interval of an Akram Khan dance piece. It came out word for word and then I performed it about four hundred times. I’ve never stopped performing it. It’s really about how I felt when I was twenty years old. Only in the last minute do I ask people to close their eyes and imagine themselves, their body, how it felt and how it felt to be touched.
The reason it’s a good show is because people will never care about my cancer, I don’t care about them caring about my cancer. They have their own problems, their own families, their own things. But when I say,” This was how I reflected on myself twenty years ago, how does it feel and reflect on you on your body, in a really physical way?” That allows people to have a sense of awe with themselves. I do like an ending where people feel something, deeply. That is important to me. I don’t like the thoughtful, cerebral, theoretical endings.
My first boyfriend, who died in 2010, was the most magnificent human being ever. He was incredibly intelligent. After he died, I revisited all our emails and made a project out of them and recut them all, letter for letter and made them into a thing. He said,” Maybe closure is a garish, American trait but maybe I’m a garish American.” I loved that idea, to have this emotional cohesiveness. For me, the artwork lives in that awe moment, instead of, ”Oh yes, that is clever.”
I don’t want it to be clever, I want people to feel it in their gut. They can only feel it in their gut when they care about themselves. I could tell a million stories about my dead grandparents...but no one cares about my dead grandparents. They have too many other things to worry about. But if I can use a story about dead grandparents to make them think about their dead grandparents and their relationships to generations and ancestors, then that would be a story worth telling.
Does your work then give people permission to feel, to be in receipt of that awe?
It’s in the stories of the ordinary that we can really engage in that. Everything has tried to be really small in what it does. If you start with, ”Look at what Brian did..”, it’s totally easy to get involved in it. It’s not a world far away, a huge trauma. I’m very lucky not to have the material to make work about war and trauma in different ways. If you start with really small things and ask people to take one meaningful step and make it easy for them to do so, that’s better than throwing a million things at them and making them unable to take one step, even if those million things are really beautiful.
At the end of my show Purge (about Facebook – who’s your friend or not), I ask people, at the end of the show, to do me a quick favour. Before they switch on their phones, to hold their phones in their hands and to take one deep breath before turning it back on. You don’t have to do anything or change your relationship with your phone or cut your credit cards up. It’s just to take a breath before reentering the space. Maybe you’ll see it with a slightly more oxygenated view.
For me, it’s about enabling people to take one step. Because my work is about that one step, it feels better to maybe work at a food bank and help people and get things moving, so that the world around me feels more stabilised.
How has the journey of your art engaged your voice – artistically, personally and politically?
I really punctuate my journey with the teachers that I’ve had along the way - who I’m with, who I’m learning from, whether that be Holly, Lois, Katherine or either of you. The journey changes as I meet people and grow alongside them. I think I’ve become bolder. I’ve always had the same energy since I was at high school. I’ve had an optimistic outlook. I’ve been more friendly than I’ve been bitchy. I’ve been more lighthearted and approachable than sombre.
I think I’ve become more pointed, more clear because the more I engage with my teachers who are clear, clearly spoken, it’s easier. I’m less apologetic. I think I’ve found a voice that is stronger. I think it’s been strengthening but I would say that it is strong now. It doesn’t always mean that I’m right and I can be wrong. It doesn’t mean that I’m arrogant but this is what makes sense to me. This is how it’s going to work.
When you’re starting in your artistic career you are always trying to please other people. You do need other people to help you along the way, curators that like you, directors that trust you. I do a lot of applications for things, for academic and artistic things. If something’s too hard, you’re not going to get it. The reason why is, the older I am, the more confident I am, the clearer I am, I know what is for me and what is not.
My father was a food broker and he said to me,” Brian, you don’t need to convince someone to like ketchup. There are enough people in the world who like ketchup, who want ketchup and we’ll make enough money selling ketchup to them. You just have to get the ketchup people the ketchup they want. You don’t have to worry about other people.”
In some ways, I’ve learnt that not everyone is going to like this work. I wanted a piano player in 24 Italian Songs because I really wanted to enter that space of classical music. I don’t really care. People are going to like or not like it. I’m stronger because I know that it’s good. I know it contributes to the world.
A lot of my friends are much more political than me and sometimes I think that if they thought my work was bullshit, they would tell me. I’ve got strong people around me, they would tell me. They appreciate its contribution in its own way. I don’t care if someone doesn’t engage in it. They won’t need to. There’ll be enough people for me to engage with. That’s always been important to me in relationships and social media presence. I’ve never gone after viral video making and the like. I don’t wish to engage with people I’m not accountable to.
Who are you?
Who am I? I’m someone who worries, I’m a worrier. I feel even less secure in the answer than I did at the beginning. Who am I? I’m Brian. It’s more like - you know it when you see it, you know? I cook, I make art, I like teaching people. I like helping other people out with applications and making them feel more infrastructurally supported. I feel like I’m a good uncle. I’m a relatively okay volunteer. If some people want to call that an artist, then they can do that. If someone wants to call that a curator, then so be it. I feel like I have a strong sense of self but I don’t feel that I have a strong sense of self semantics. For some people, a strong sense of semantics is important to them, whereas it’s a little less important to me as all those self categorisations are more flexible to the audiences they’re engaging with. I am still a happy person.