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[0:00] Leah Walsh: Hi, and welcome to The Compass, the podcast documenting the struggles of life as an artist. I'm Leah Walsh. Hi, everyone. My guest today is Catherine Mueller. She is an actor, director, teacher, community maker. I took a workshop with her last summer that I spoke about on the podcast at the time, but I was blown away with the space that she held for mother artists in that workshop, and we'll talk a lot more about those during the podcast. We also talk a lot about her clown work and realized that we didn't define what that means since I had some similar training in my grad school experiences. So the clown referenced here is both theatrical form and aesthetic, a distant cousin to the American circus clown and more closely related to other physical forms, such as bouffant, commedia dell'arte, and mask.

Catherine has studied clown and applied it as actor, director, and educator for the last 20 plus years, studying with Jane Nichols, Gregor Pestlowski, and Philippe Goulier, among others. Hopefully, I pronounced those correctly. Most notably, she studied under Chris Bayes, currently the head of physical acting at Yale School of Drama, with whom she also apprenticed and whose clown pedagogy she teaches. She established the Institute for Collaboration and Play in 2014 as an action thinking tank for performers and humans interested in play-based creative practice, and she founded the MAMAS, Mother Artists Making Art, in 2020 to foreground the value and visibility of mother artists. You can find more information on those at their websites, which I'll put in the show notes, www.ifcap.org or www.motherartismakingart.com. She is a force, and I'm so happy to have her on the podcast. I hope you enjoy the 184th episode of The Compass.

[1:53] Leah Walsh: What do you do to try to keep from going to the dark side as an artist? And wrapped up in that is what does the dark side mean to you when you hear that? What do you think of?

[1:58] Catherine Mueller: I think of despair. I think of despair like, oh, it's so hard and no one cares at all. I was thinking about this question and knowing that you had posed it to other guests, guests, people on your podcast, and guest makes it sound like this is Ellen DeGeneres, here we go. And I was thinking about something that one of my advisors said to me in graduate school. I went to an unusual graduate school program, which we can talk about at some other time if it's relevant. But for my second semester in grad school, I had a playwright as an advisor, a lovely playwright who's based out of Minneapolis. And she told me I was really struggling. I was really at a point of transition in my career. And I'd had a physical theater company for like, I don't know, seven years.

And we had disbanded because it was unsustainable for us to continue to make work as we were, which takes a lot of time and takes a kind of, because we were making work through the lens of clown. It takes a kind of specialized performer in a way to step into that room if they don't know how to operate in those modalities with that aesthetic. And many of our friends or colleagues, compatriots, and their love of that work were also really starting to pop, especially the guys. They were really starting to pop as actors. So it was really hard to get everyone in the room and work for little or no pay, a passion project, all of that. After a certain point in your life, you get tired of passion projects being only the things.

And so I was in graduate school and the theater company had ended and all my artistic collaborators had sort of disappeared in one swoop. And I'd lived in New York for quite some time by then. And I don't know what it was by then, like 15 years or something. And I was like, I think I need to go away and have a yard or something and health insurance, which I did have through SAG, but inconsistently. So anyway, I ended up at this amazing progressive graduate program. And my advisor said, as I was having this crushed, like my soul was crushed, and I presented this work in progress that I'd been working on myself at Dixon Place. And it was called Mary Poppins, a show about Mary Poppins, where I pretended to be all the parts of the Mary Poppins Disney movie myself at once as an idiot virtuosic.

And I used like all my childhood stuffed animals and they all had labels and they were all basically cats and they were like Mr. and Mrs. Banks and Uncle Albert and all the people of the world of Mary Poppins. And I had a flip chart and I had a running list about why Mary Poppins was important and all the important lessons that we learned from Mary Poppins, which children aren't watching now. I interviewed other parents. I wasn't a parent then, but I interviewed parents and no one was showing Mary Poppins to their children. I was like, and so it was this whole giant effort. It was like two huge suitcases full of props. And it was ridiculous and like exhausting and still to some degree incomplete when I showed it at Dixon Place.

And I, but I had this whole amazing journey to creating this work through the lens of clown, but without the red nose, obviously, but through the lens of an idiot, an idiot, virtuoso, and who has a terrible idea and decides to put it on stage in front of people. And that was my terrible idea. Like all the parts of the Disney Mary Poppins and my cat puppets. And so anyway, Kira, I had this crisis after that show where someone I'd been working with, like as a kind of, I'm not even sure how to define his role because he began as a former student who was like an assistant. Like, I just want to be around the work. How can I help you? And he evolved into kind of like a semi co-performer. Like he sat on stage and did all the live Foley.

And so it was like a solo, she was billing it as a, she meaning me, was billing it as a solo show with two people because she was so inept at even making a solo show. Anyway, he had initiated this conversation with me after that presentation about how, what I was trying to create was really essentially

[6:43] Catherine Mueller: Solipsistic and no one was going to want to see a show about just me having a good time on stage. Right. There was a whole section about Mary Poppins plays super password. Like it was full of derivatives and he was like, there's no narrative. There's no, you know, the things that we are taught as undergraduates, if you will, to look for in theater, none of that structural Aristotelian shit was in there. It was just like one silly thing after the next that culminated in this like revelation when she puts the cat puppets to sleep because her cat has died. And so she sings, you know, stay awake to the cat. I mean, and then everybody in the audience got a paper kite. It was really lovely. People cried like, but he was like, this isn't theater.

And I remember thinking, if you don't think this is theater, then you shouldn't be a part of this with me. And I get that. And that's your prerogative. Go, go make what you want to make. I'm now going to have to start over again. And I was just kind of crushed. And I just, I was like, I think Akira, her name was Kira, the playwright advisor. And I was like, I think I have to give up on theater and write like personal essays about, I don't fucking know, like just some stuff. And she went like, and give up. And she said, the theater doesn't take care of its own. And that made such sense to me. I was like, no, it doesn't. It kind of takes us for granted. You hear about the intense community that exists at the Broadway level.

And I believe that that exists. And those folks are contracted to be in those shows for long periods of time. And they have babies and they get married and they have, there's a, there's a structure. I feel like in that model, that production model. But if you're an itinerant person making strange non-narrative theater in small places, very clear that my show is not going to be in Midtown, unless it's an accident. And it's at like, Shoshama, like it's not going to be in Midtown anywhere. There isn't that it's really itinerant. It's really here to there, to there, to there. And I also had a side hustle, which wasn't even a hustle. It was like a side thing of being in television commercials. I found this niche where I was a funny white lady and that was my bread and butter for a long time.

I never made bazillions of dollars, but I made enough to have insurance and to not have to have a day job doing something else. And I consider that a huge success. And that allowed me to have my strange physical theater company for the seven years that I ran it with a partner, Justine Williams, also a wonderful clown and now a mother artist as well. We met in a Chris Bay's workshops, another story, but in any case, we met in a Chris Bay's workshops, another story. But anyway, Kira was like the theater doesn't take care of its own. And I thought you're so right. It doesn't like I could disappear tomorrow. And it's not like Kristin Chenoweth. If she disappeared tomorrow, people would really notice.

But I was like, who is going to notice? Like we watched companies fold that we really liked. We watched that because when we came into the city, the model was still that you had to turn your fledgling theater company into a 501 C3. So we were a 501 C3 and those are hard to maintain. They have a specific tax. You have to have what you have to really, you have to follow certain rules with your board and with how things are navigated understandably so that your donors can receive a tax deduction. It's a part of the transaction, right? And that's why you have that status. And we'd had a fiscal sponsor at first, and it was more complicated because the fiscal sponsor always took a little percentage of the monies that we would receive, which was how they then get paid to be your fiscal sponsor and make sure you're doing everything legally.

And it was a whole big, long thing. And so we watched these other companies fold and I was like, yeah, we could disappear. And I don't think anyone's going to cry. Isn't that strange when you have something that you put yourself into and to have that feeling? I mean, it's a strange thing about theater in general, that it is like a live, a live thing that dissolves into the air after you're done with it. But that's the fact that we're all still human and part of a community and it still has that feeling that, yes, if I went away. Yes. And I had just experienced like an intense grief of even though running the glass contraption was quite difficult and challenging in many ways, it was also what Justine and I had both prioritized as being artistically fulfilling.

And in that choice that we made, we also were consciously stepping away from some of the more commercial pursuits that our colleagues were still involved in. Even though I did TV commercials, it's not the same as like going away to Minnesota for three months to do a show. Right. And so those would take a day or two. Right. And so, so Kira was like, you're at a little bit of a crossroads. And she's like, I challenge you to find some way to be creative that isn't reliant upon having, I was so, I'd spent so long in the ensemble devising model of making work that I was, even though I just made this stupid solo show about Mary Poppins, I still made it with at least two other people in the room at all times.

And so, because you can't make a clown based thing without an audience, you have to constantly be like, is this funny? Did you think it's funny? Is it funny three times in a row? Or is it only funny once? Is it only 20 times in a row? Are there other ways to, I mean, she had a phone call with Oprah in that show. She had all kinds of like stupid antics that I still think are funny, but, and she was terribly inappropriate. Like she, she, she crossed lines in terms of her political correctness, correctness, like all the time. It was a lot of fun to do. My British accent is terribly inconsistent, but it didn't matter because she's not a good performer. Right. So Kira was like, you need to find things that you like to do. And this was my second semester of graduate school.

[13:08] Catherine Mueller: I was an MFA in interdisciplinary arts. So it was a program that recognized that there are groups of us that are multi-hyphenate artists, and we don't fit other places. And it was not appropriate for me at that stage in my life to go get an MFA in acting. I already wanted to be teaching the people I was acting alongside. I wanted to be teaching them clown. I wanted to pull them aside and be like, listen, this is the form that's going to help you the most. And at this school, this person teaches it.

[13:40] Leah Walsh: So what school did you go to? You got to just tell us now.

[13:43] Catherine Mueller: Oh, I from undergrad, I went to Hofstra University on Long Island. And then my graduate degree is from Goddard College, which is in Vermont. It's a college. It's a low residency MFA designed because Goddard has a history of activism. The Bread and Puppet Theater was in residence there for like decades. And they also have a history of educating people that nobody else wanted to educate, like unwed mothers and people of color, which is for Vermont, but God bless. Like they were like, our doors are open. We're creating different models for education here so that you can come into an academic setting and we will embrace you with your learning differences or your life differences. And we still say you deserve to get to be educated in a way that partners with your life.

So my graduate program was filled with extraordinary practitioners who for whatever reason, ages like 28 to like fucking, there was a dude in the seventies, were people who were blending form and were deeply interested in the impact their art would have in the world. And so if you're drawn to those questions, a traditional MFA in playwriting or directing or acting, or even like piano performance or sculpting or whatever, it's not going to be asking you those questions. It's going to ask you, it's going to work with you to be the most incredible practitioner that program can produce you. And that's a worthwhile pursuit for some people that really makes a lot of sense. And it wouldn't make sense for me.

And I had always in looking back, been asking these larger questions about the theater and its purpose and why does it matter? And what is it doing in the world? And it's not to say that people who matriculate through more traditional MFA programs aren't also asking those questions. What I'm saying is that their programs of study are not centralizing those questions alongside their programs of study. So you can get out of Juilliard, which is an amazing training program, as you well know, and no one could ask you that question. There are people who come out of Juilliard who do have secret generative desires, and that's something that they don't have the skills or the musculature to engage with. And yet you can put any accent in front of them, any time period of a piece, and they know exactly what to do. Which is the thing that I would have to go look it up in the library.

[16:22] Leah Walsh: So what did you do when she told you that, that you had to find something that you could do on your own?

[16:28] Catherine Mueller: I wandered around and cried. And then towards the end of that second semester, I was approached by a colleague of mine in the program who was probably a decade older than me, maybe a little bit more, had a background as a visual artist, a photographer. And he was working in what he called performance photography. And I'm like, what is this? I've never heard of this. I don't understand what this is. And he asked me if I would collaborate with him. And I was like, sure, whatever. And so we applied to a residency, which actually was started by a Juilliard graduate. I don't think it exists anymore. It was called Makehouse. And this guy, he was a lovely guy. Oh, Mark Junik. Mark. But his clown name was, I don't know what his real clown name was, but he wanted his clown to be named Sparklehorse.

And he campaigned for the name Sparklehorse forever. And Chris Bays, who teaches clown at Juilliard, was like, no, you can't have that name. So, but I always think of him as Sparklehorse. Anyway, Sparklehorse had this like residency thing that he was doing at this house in New Jersey. And John and I applied and we were accepted and we went for this weekend and it was our first collaboration. And I came to the table with like 85,000 surprise ideas, but some of them were very specific. And even though he and I had very different backgrounds and artistic lives and personal lives until that point, there was a lot of overlap in terms of how we were exploring identity. But I was exploring identity through the lens of the mask, right?

Having worked with the clown's red nose and worked with comedian masks. And I was going through a phase where I was obsessed with different kinds of beard wigs and putting them on and being different people, which fit right in with his exploration of gender and what can you wear or not wear and who are you and blah, blah, blah. So we did a whole series of me wearing all these stupid beards and mustaches. And every time I would put one on, I was like, I think I'm this person. Oh, I think I'm this one. And he's like, what is this? And we just thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. And that was the beginning of the most rewarding artistic collaboration I've ever had. It lasted about five years. Also, it lasted past graduate school.

And he still does. He lives in Silver Spring, Maryland with his husband. And we found a way to collaborate across form and across geographical distance. And we developed a whole kind of approach to interdisciplinary collaboration that began with a collaboration for one other person, like a dialogue that we found was easily adaptable to a classroom setting or a collaborative generative setting that was interested in exploring. And then I also learned that John, unbeknownst to me when our collaboration began, actually at that point had probably 20 something years of experience working alongside Liz Lerman in her critical response process. He came into our collaboration with this deeply grounded sense of values from working in critical response that come from a place of looking at work in development as through a series of questions that are based in curiosity and wondering versus the way we are trained to look at art, which is one like of wrongness.

Like, what's wrong about this piece of art? What don't I like about it? What would I fix about it? Like, we are a little bit trained to come and look at art through that lens. And it's really unhelpful to the generative or the presenting artist when you're in a room and everyone in there is like, well, I would change that. I don't understand that. Like, why would you ever show your art ever again? So John stepping into an unfamiliar collaboration with me because of my performance background and my clown background, because of his way of looking at art. And also there's a spaciousness in how an idiot or a clown may also look at art. And just some things that were innate in me prior to discovering clown as a form that we found this way of holding space for each other and challenging each other artistically.

And it didn't mean that we abandoned the practices that we had prior, but we expanded them. So we expanded our own artistic language and it was so exciting. So I actually eventually put myself in front of the camera. I started in performance photography, I started manipulating tiny objects in front of the camera, and which was a kind of object animation, right? Like, like stop motion. A little, I did a little stop. That shit is hard. A little stop motion, like, and we found that we both were curious about the power of tiny things and clown for me, which was the sort of the lens through which I applied to this graduate program was that I was very clear I wanted to deconstruct clown and reconstruct it in my own, with my own language, if you will.

That by that point, I'd studied the form for about 15 years and I'd studied with Chris Bays for a long time. He was a collaborator, a mentor, a teacher, and then I apprenticed under him. And I was at that point, one of six, I think, people who had his blessing to teach his pedagogy in the world, which is a big deal. It meant that after a decade of study with him and a bunch of people before him, that I had enough understanding, innate understanding of this form and its value that I could then pass it on to other folks through his pedagogy. But I also knew that Chris Bays was at that point not really interested in cultivating a legacy of like Jacques Lecoq, like a legacy of teachers. And when the glass contraption folded, I was like, I just have to do it myself.

And so it opened up in a period of where I was even more anchored in what clown is and could be. I found I was applying it to, to surprisingly to myself, to all these other seemingly non-performative forms of art making. And that was super satisfying. And that experience gave me a further, like I was further rooted in my own understanding of what clown was and could be, as I said. And then also that I actually did have a visual aesthetic that you don't think of when you're an actor because you're constantly told what to wear and you don't get a lot of say. And you're working really hard to mold yourself into the vision that the director has or the collective vision, right? Which is part of your service being at service.

And you want to do really good at that and you want to get hired again. And so you don't stop and think like what you would do with the set for Julius Caesar, right? There's no one stopping to ask you. And I realized that I had always been thinking what I would do with the set of Julius Caesar, if I was in Julius Caesar. When I was in my twenties, probably like mid to late twenties, I played Emilia in Othello. And I remember my older brother who was a pianist who lived in the city at the time saying to me, you're a director. And I was like, shut the fuck up. I was like, no, I am not. I don't know what you're thinking about. I was like, playing Emilia is like the best thing ever. I love it. I'm crying.

I'm dying. It's fabulous. Listen to the text. Look at me go. And he was like, no, you're a director. And I said, why are you saying that? And he said, because you are always thinking about the totality of the theatrical event. And I was like, oh, you're right about that. And then, but then I kept that a secret and I didn't tell anyone until, I don't know, probably 10 years after that conversation where I was like applying to the director's lab of Chicago. And I recall that conversation. I was like, I am, I am a director, but I'm not a director in the way that you, that I had always thought of them as people with binders and like walking, telling you where to stand and go on this line. It had nothing to do with that.

It was coming out of this, these decades of working in these strange and unusual forms that are highly generative and very celebratory of the uniqueness of a particular performer and somewhat non-narrative and experiential. And it was coming out of that. And I was like, oh, this is, I really want to steer ships that are headed towards this. And I remember being on a city bus and running into another alumni from your school who was, who probably graduated from your school in like, I don't know, in the 99-ish or so around that time.

[26:15] Catherine Mueller: And she was working a lot and she ran into me on a bus and we knew each other because of a workshop that I taught with Chris, blah, blah. And she was auditioning for a big, big movie with Will Smith and this and that. But she was like, what do I do with these sides? And she had all this anxiety. And here she is on the bus with me and I was like, here's what you do. I was like, forget the job. I was like, you read this and you have the best fucking time of your life doing this drunk lady, whatever the character was. I was like, or this like floozy. I was like, have a great fucking time. It's like, that's what you do. I was like, I already know that you would be great at this job. And it's really a matter of like, do they want you to do this job?

I don't know. And you don't know either. So your job in this moment is to go be extraordinary and stop worrying about what they, and I was like, have the best fucking time of your life. And she looked at me like, oh yeah. She was like, thank you so much. And I was like, you're so welcome. I believe in you. Go forward. She got off the bus and I actually felt this sense of relief that that hustle wasn't so primary to my life anymore. I was like, oh, I feel so relieved. Now this woman is on like a lot of television shows and she's just having a throt. She's thriving and it's so well-deserved and she's an amazing human and performer. And, and I'm like, yeah, but I remember that day on that bus being like, whoa, I, five years ago, if I'd run into her, I would have been super jealous that she auditioned that I didn't have, even though I wouldn't have even wanted me for that type, but I still would have been jealous.

And instead I was just like, go, go have a great fucking time that you have the skills, you have the gifts. Like at this point, we all know that. So it's really like, can you just have a great time in that moment in front of, right? And so I feel like you're able to do that for yourself when you do find yourself in those, those positions, again, those kinds of addition situations. I gave myself that grace. A lot of the time before I became a parent in the last, in that last section of my career, and then I've been a parent for five years now, and I found another kind of disappearance happened when I became a parent and it was even more radical in a way because I had an infant that I was responsible for.

And it's not like I could just drop the infant off and go to Beth Melski casting for 20 minutes here and there. Like that was not something that I could do. My body was different and my understanding of myself and who I was had been radically altered in a way that I also didn't anticipate. And so I have had very few auditions since becoming a parent. And instead I find I'm having a lot of really intense conversations with people who may be parents or not trying to explain what it's like to be a new mother. I can't speak for dads. And I think they have a different kind of sense of their own role and responsibility, especially in parenting an infant. So it's not to say, and I've held the babies of other people at commercial auditions.

I've been doing that for a decade. Like we all just would rally. If someone came in with her kids and she had to go into the room, we would rally and we would keep the children quiet. We would do like, I didn't know these women, but it was just what we did, right? We took care of who was there to take care of. So it wasn't like I didn't even think that was part of it. I couldn't even imagine getting my kid to Beth Milski casting in the first place. Right. Even get there and hand him to someone. Yeah. I really want to talk all about the mamas and the pamas, but can you tell us a little bit first about deciding to become a parent as an artist and like what that journey has been for you?

[30:35] Catherine Mueller: Sure. We've already seen as evidenced by what I've shared so far that I was not on a traditional path towards being a Broadway star. I came to the city with that in mind, but that started to change. And I took my first clown class when I was 26 and it was impactful right away. I was like, whoa, there's something going on here. And it, it gave me language, not just like language of how to talk about it, but experiential language for how to hold space for my strengths as a performer that no other form had done prior as a six foot tall white lady with giant blue eyes and a sort of big nose and dimples. I didn't fit into a lot of boxes. I was really funny and I was, could be very vulnerable and cry for you, like ding dong doodly, but I could do more in the glass menagerie because I was taller than everybody.

And so finding this world where my body fit and my timing fit and my receptivity fit was so satisfying. So I was already like not following a traditional path, even though it was very gratifying to my parents that I was in television commercials. I feel like that was really, and it was great. I had the best agent in the planet and it was great. So by the time I was having that crisis right after the glass contraption closed and I'd finished my apprenticeship and all my, all my artistic collaborators disappeared and I'm in this strange graduate program. I was already like, how can I get out? Like, how can I, where else can I go? Or can I adopt a small person? Which came from my theater company spending a summer in South Africa.

We did a two month residency in South Africa. And one of those months we spent at the Topsy Center for Children Living with HIV and AIDS. And we taught clown and created a clown show with them. And we lived there for a month. And Justine had said, by the time we all leave this place, there's each one of us is going to have a child that we want to adopt. And I was like, you're crazy. No, we're not. There were six of us and we all recognized like all the complicated, like racial, like all the like implications of being white people from America coming to a country and saying, I really want that Zulu child to come live with me. And the arrogance of that. And at the same time, there was a child for each of us that spoke to us somewhere in our hearts and had the world of parenting or caregiving open up in a way that for most of us, except for Justine, because she'd already thought about it, was totally new.

And so having that experience myself, I was like, what the fuck is this? And I did not expect that kind of thing to open up in me. I didn't expect adoption to be a conversation I would be thinking about. And so I came back from that and I had a conversation with my financial planner and I was like, how can we set me up to be able to do this someday? As a freelance actor with nothing, living in a law firm and in Astoria, I was like, how can we transition? And so there were other conversations that were running alongside the conversation when the theater company disappeared. Right. And so I was working my way towards trying to find a job in academia, teaching clowns so that I could have a house so that I could adopt a child.

And then I happened to meet the man that I married and now I'm divorced from, but I met him when I was in graduate school. And I thought also that becoming a parent as a person who just crossed into her forties, that I knew a lot of stuff. And then I would be like, I wasn't a 25 year old. Like I was like, I got, I got some life knowledge. I got not about parenting per se, but I got some, a lot of my friends are parents now. Like, it's not like I was the first one out of the gate. I was the last one out of the gate. So I was like, I was like, I can do this. My agent's fabulously supportive, like an amazing human. She has in her office, my commercial agent, she has her like a wall in her office picture covers with pictures of her clients, babies and pets, opportunity, parent, celebrator.

And so I, there was no hesitancy for me when he showed up as a potential life partner with the same desire, I was like, let's get it on. I was like, let's do it. Like, like, let's go. And so I had, I didn't have because I thought he would be my partner for life. And there was a certain kind of life that he presented that we would have together. I thought I would be somehow exempt from some of the challenges that I knew other artists' parents faced, especially to artists' households. Right. But I was not. They have showed up in their own way for me. And they were very hard to sit with. And there were some very old gendered ways of thinking that he was carrying from his culture and his experience that I don't think he was quite in touch with.

And I wasn't prepared for how different my body felt as a physical theatre practitioner, a person who I, at that point, I had something that I had invented called the Institute for Collaboration and Play. And I was running a plaboratory, which was a monthly lab for any creative person to come and play. Like, we need places to exercise our play muscles. It's like, you need to keep exercising those muscles of spontaneity and curiosity and imagination because that's what's going to let you be free enough to go into your audition for Will Smith and be like, fuck this, I'm just going to have a good time. Right. And let that lead. And so, and that's when you're most, you're at your most captivating, I think, as a performing artist is when your skills and your imagination are traveling.

Like, so I can't tell what's driving. When I watch Mark Rylance play on stage, I know that man is wicked skilled. Like, forget it. That opening thing in Jerusalem where he goes into a handstand and dunks his face into the floor. Come on. Wicked skilled. And yet, I don't see his skill. I see his imagination. And it's a little bit dangerous, but never like someone's going to get hurt, but it's a little dangerous. Like, I'm not sure how far he's going to lean. Is he going to lean? How far is he going to lean? And so, right. So I lost my train of thought. We were talking about your decision to become a parent just because I don't want all our time to get away from us. Can we talk a little bit about what The Mamas is and you starting it and where that came from, from your own experience?

[38:01] Catherine Mueller: I wrote an essay when I was pregnant and it was called Three Things How to Talk to a Pregnant Person. And because I was so tired of people feeling the license to touch my body and comment on my body. And I was a tall person, right? And I was carrying a large baby. And the people would say, are you sure it's not twins? And I would be like, I mean, do you think another baby's hiding in the ultrasound? Like that nobody noticed? And I'm eight months pregnant. Like the audacity to say, right. We don't go up to other bodies and say, did you have two slices of pizza for lunch? Like we don't do that with other people, but we feel it's okay to do with pregnant people. So I was super pissed, wrote this essay.

And then somehow in my like late night, what the fucking for my art mother artist identity, when my son was like six ish months old. And I was like, I don't understand. And I kept delaying my return to leading workshops in part because was not something that my home life could support. And so I just kept pushing back. I kept calling Carol, my agent and saying, I just need six more months. And she was like, whatever you need, you take it. She's still saying that to me. So I found Rachel Spencer Hewitt, who founded PAO, the Parent Artist Advocacy League. And I'm not even sure how I found her. If someone pointed

[39:52] Catherine Mueller: Kind person. Her daughter is like three months-ish younger than my son. Anyways, so then a conversation started with Rachel. And I knew that I was craving this kind of like transparent, supportive dialogue with other mothers and mother artists. I was like, what the F? No one talked about this part. No one talked about that part. No one talked about the fact that I'm just as capable of teaching clown, but now no one is calling me. Like they weren't calling me that much before. But now what you've just decided that I'm home lactating and I can't do it. And I'm telling you, I can do it. But I also felt like, can I do it? Because I can't leave my child, right? I didn't have the structures of support for me to go teach a workshop that didn't exist in my life.

It looked like it did from the outside, perhaps because of where we lived and how we lived, or how we seemed to live. It's really more accurately. And I didn't have it. And so, um, that questioning too, is interesting that like, can I do it? Yes. Because, you know, there's things that we haven't done since we became a mother. And there is that wondering of like, yes, will it be different? I knew a mom who was a director and she went back to work when her first child was six weeks old. And I couldn't have imagined doing that at all. But it was what she needed to do and what she did. And she took her child with her into all the rooms and nursed him. And he was just there. And her spouse was wicked supportive and helped make that happen for her.

And like, I was like, awesome. That is not my story. And I don't even know if I want that to be my story, because I waited a really long time to be a parent. And I had this friend who I was looking at the actor center has that wonderful teacher training program every summer for people who teach actors and been eyeing it for a long time. And I started eyeing it that summer because somebody in particular was on the faculty. And, and I remember, and this was, my son was probably like six, eight months. And I said to a friend of mine, I really want to do this. And he'd done it and had a fabulous experience. And, and I said, but I don't think I could be in a room from nine to four or whatever for two full weeks.

I was like, I'm still nursing. Like, how would I do that? And he said to me, you know, you really wanted to be a mother. So just let be, be a mother. Let yourself have that. And I didn't know. And I so appreciated him saying that to me and I didn't apply. And I was like, I'm just going to be a mother, but there was something in that that felt liberating and also terrifying because when you matriculate as a freelance artist, you are always being evaluated on what you're working on and what's next. Exactly. There's two things. It's not even just, what are you doing right now? It's what are you doing next? So you are constantly hustling to get the thing that's next and the thing that's next after that.

And the thing that's next after that, and that takes, that's so tiring. And I had already moved away from so many ways that that is damaging to a person in terms of how I was constructing my life. And I still carried it with me to some degree in terms of, is it okay for me to just walk every day in Washington square park? I knew that there were things that I wanted to accomplish. I still have these big ideas about transforming how we train actors at the undergraduate level and introducing conversations about generative content and like how to think about yourself spaciously and with a holistic encompassing approach. Like that's not a conversation a 19 year old cannot have. I've had it with them as my students, right?

They're craving it. And so I have all these goals and ambitions for how to create space for artists to be in dialogue with each other. And like dialogue, dialogue, but also creative dialogue, interdisciplinary, like bust the form out dialogue. And so I really was like, what the fuck? And then when my son was 18 ish months old, I got the idea for the mamas. We'd moved to Brooklyn by then. And I was like, there was a mother that I knew who was a designer who lived somewhere else in Williamsburg. And I was just kind of stalking her a little. And I was like, okay, if I can just get her into a room, I think I'll be okay. If I can sit in a room with her, I think I'll be okay. And so I contacted Rachel and my son was like in the stroller and I was talking to her on the phone.

I was like, this is my idea. And I literally wrote shit down on a piece of paper, like on top of the stroller handle walking on Bedford or whatever. And then my life took some life, like hard life turns with some pregnancy losses that segued right into a really contentious and prolonged divorce that took two years. So it took, there was no stability in my life in terms of for me to say to Rachel, I can start this thing now. And I won't, I can show up for what I say. And so it took me moving out of that house and the divorce getting finalized for me to finally say to Rachel, I think I can do it now. And I've been thinking about it for so long and there's a pandemic now. So we can't meet in person anymore, which was the original idea.

I was like, I think I can do this now and do it virtually. And two of my former students that I taught when they were seniors in college were both pregnant. And I was like, and I really want to be able to do this for them while they are pregnant. I was like, they're really wonderful women and performers and I don't want them to feel alone. I can't help them. Like they'll still feel alone. One is partnered, one is not. I was like, they live in different, one lives in New Jersey, one lives in DC. I was like, I don't care if it's just them. I was like, I want to be able to start having these conversations to hold space for these really complicated questions that are asked in, I learned a phrase, whisper societies, conversations that only happen over here in people who know.

And I think motherhood, birthing, the process of birthing is a whisper society. Sexual harassment is a whisper society, right? It only happens like, and I think for mothers who are brave enough to recognize that these questions are at play in their lives, deserve a space. There are mothers who are ignoring the question. I think every mother is asking these questions, but there are some of us who have more facility with hard questions of identity and purpose. It's not to say that a banker doesn't have those questions or a dentist. I believe that they are also extraordinary mothers and people and doing what they need to do. And hopefully what they love to do in life. I think artists traverse in complicated questions.

It's like our language. And then our art is how we choose to investigate answers to those questions. Whether I'm investigating the sculpture or production of Hamlet or my TV sitcom about my crazy childhood in Chinatown. I'm trying to find answers to some really big questions. And those questions are way down deep. Do I matter? Does my story matter? Who gets to tell my story? Do I belong? What does it mean to be a this, this, and a this together? What happened to my mother? Is it going to happen to me? Can I stop it from happening to other people? These are really deep, deep, deep questions. What have you been experiencing yourself since starting these groups and holding this space for people?

It's really humbling and gratifying. I feel the need. So, I mean, it's all happening in a virtual space right now. And I feel the need so viscerally through my computer when a mom logs on and she has a seven week old baby and she's like, I don't fucking know what, I don't know what just happened to me. And it's clear that she loves her baby, but she's like, I don't know what just happened to me. And we introduce ourselves and hands down half of the people introducing themselves will say something like, I used to be a playwright, but I don't know what I am now. And there's this dismissal of self. There's this way that motherhood somehow disappears our body of work or disappears our, our sense of our creative aspirations or our creative muscles.

And I so firmly want to assert that in fact, no, that's not what's happening, that your muscles are being flexed probably in ways that they've never been flexed before. And with a rigor that they've never had to be flexed before, because you're dealing with somebody who's upset at bedtime, or you're dealing with somebody who doesn't want to eat the blank that you put in front of them. So you got to go to the fridge and come up with something else, or you got to make the thing that's in front of this child really exciting. That they'll feed it. Right. And so you, your stakes are really high and your creativity and how you look at the world is to me directly informing the choices that you're making as a parent.

And so why can't we, um, celebrate that convergence rather than, um, like with the, the divergence, that's all the messaging that happens in the world out there. One or the other mother or limiting. Yeah. Like fuck that shit. Mother artists have been around since mothers have been around and art has been around. So why, why are we pretending like they're not? Because it's so much easier because the world really would collapse if the uncompensated wages, not wages, if the labor of mothers, which is uncompensated, um, disappeared. It's the, it's the unpaid labor of mothers that makes the world go. And so if we were to take that out, right, so everyone else is benefiting from our labor and it's a labor of love, you say, and yes, it is.

And it is also labor and weak. Like, so there's, there's a lot of ferocity in me towards dismantling and exposing these incredibly narrow conversations that many of us carry in ourselves and we're grappling with them ourselves. Um, and that's what, I'm just so grateful that I was able to be a part of it. One of your sessions, just because I, I feel like as a parent, I've been so isolated, especially obviously with the pandemic that I, I can only have them with myself. Like I'm just not being in the spaces with other moms. We're all busy doing our own thing. Um, we lost the village. That's another thing that I'm to restore is we lost a village mentality. We lost an idea that I have your back, you have mine.

Let me give you some sugar and I'll take your kid for an hour. Like we lost, we lost, and our children have lost that as well. They've lost that sense that I, they can run up and down the street or the hallway or wherever they are living and that they know who's behind the doors. Right. And they know where the secret, where the keys are hidden. And if there's an emergency, they go to Mrs. Tinker across the street or whatever it is. We've lost a lot of that. And it's, it's so apparent when you are, when the, when the pandemic happened and, and everybody was stuck at home and all of a sudden the labor of mothers, in addition to all the other things was right in front of everybody. And, um, the moms were turning to their partners and saying, well, now you are going to do three hours of coloring so I can go do the thing that I would normally have done when my, when our child was in school. And the other person is like, what do you mean? And a lot of times they're like, uh, and it, it's, I, I just, the

[52:29] Catherine Mueller: I use the sentence that the MAMAs and the PAMAs exists, and the MAMAs is mother artists making art and the PAMAs is pregnant artists making art, just so people know what it stands for, as leading a movement to foreground the value and visibility of mother artists. And it's like whatever comes from the MAMAs and the PAMAs, whatever I write or do or conversations I have or workshops or whatever I'm facilitating is for that. It's in service of that idea. And this last, like two weekends ago, I had the honor of being in the gathering intensive for the 2022 cohort for people who are pursuing certification in the critical response process. That thing that a decade ago, John introduced in our collaboration that was so meaningful.

And then I started to use as a facilitator and an educator all the time. And I applied with mother artists as my underserved community. And there was a young woman in the cohort. There's only 10 of us, right? Everybody is a super badass. And this gal comes up to me and she was like, you know what? And I said, what? And she said, every time we talk about different groups in society, with all sorts of different identifiers, she said, mother is never a group. And I said, no, we are invisible. We're in all those groups, but we're not our own group. And it's not to say that we should be our own group like nothing else. But I was like, but no one is recognizing that when a mother is in all those groups, she's also contending with all these other things that come with being a mother.

And we should be paying attention to that. We should be working towards a matriarch-centric feminist society. You know, your favorite phrases. And I'm ferociously committed to that. It's very idealistic, but it's like one conversation at a time. And sometimes the first conversation is sitting with that mom, who's the mom who takes the chalk out to the sidewalk when all the kids are on the sidewalk and they have nothing to do and they're getting cranky. She takes the chalk out and she's known as the chalk mom on their block or whatever. And I'm talking to this mom and I'm like, how does your artistry connect to your parenting? And she's like, well, you know, let me think about that. And I'm like, why do you need to think about it?

You're a designer and you took the chalk out to the sidewalk. It's like, to me, it's like second, it's so second nature for us to be the artists we are that we're not even seeing how the art, the artistry that is innate to us is at play in our parenthood because it's dismissed and it does us a disservice. It does our children a disservice. It keeps us small and everyone else benefits. And I'm tired of that.

[55:42] Leah Walsh: I feel like we could talk all day, but I'm going to ask you the couple of little questions that I usually ask at the end, just cause we're coming to the end of our time here. But if you do find yourself kind of going to that dark place of despair, are there any tangible things that you reach for again and again that can help you come out of it? Like a book you reread or music you listen to or something like that?

[55:58] Catherine Mueller: Right now I sing to my child at bedtime and I reach into my mind and find songs from musicals that I listened to as a child. I don't know all the words to them. So if I don't know the word, I just say the word banana. And I've come to really treasure this, this bedtime practice to the point where now there's like seven songs happening versus there used to be just one. I think that it's rare that I have the opportunity to discuss clown or what it means to me in any sort of in-depth way with persons. And so that is always invigorating to me. It's another thing about which I will evangelize in perpetuity. It's, it's and so finding a form or a resource or connecting to another parent. I learned Liz Lerman, who was in the workshop with us last two weekends ago, at the end of it came up to me and said, I see you.

And she said, dialogue is your refuge. And I had never thought about that before, but that's actually the most healing thing for me that yes, there are pieces of art, books and things that I could return to again and be like, yes, that's so cool. Yes. But actually for me, this, the privilege of talking to you for an hour and feeling that you and I are in alignment with the things that we value or the things that we're interested in, in this conversation, and it's worth having this conversation. That to me is restorative. And I believe that art is inherently dialogic. Art making is dialogic. And this quest to be in conversation with others, meaningful conversation isn't new. It was a component of me as a child.

And Liz just gave me this framework, like two weekends ago, and I was like, it is my refuge. That is my life. That's in the t-shirt. So I would say that that is what it is. And so creating the MAMAs and the PAMAs gives me that structure for dialogue. Now I have a different role in those conversations. It's, it's, I'm holding the space, right? So I'm facilitating, but I'm also receiving and I'm deep in the inquiry with the cohort of mothers and pregnant people that are gathered. I believe so strongly in the healing capacities of dialogue that it almost could be problematic in some places, probably has been. But I'd say that that is the thing. And the songs that I sing my son, reminding my, oh, I do know all the words to that from a freaking My Fair Lady or whatever it is.

I know all that words from the music, man. It's, it's weirdly restored. And then we'll bring out some, like, I'll bring out some Joni Mitchell and I'll get halfway through. And I'm like, this is not appropriate for a bedtime, but I'm already in it.

[59:23] Leah Walsh: Is there any piece of art that you've taken in recently that you want to recommend of any form?

[59:30] Catherine Mueller: Formally, I can't think of the last time I sat in a theater and watched things or went to a museum and, or had an experience in that kind of, because moving out here and the pandemic, it's a different world out here. I live outside the city now and in a little house and I'm clawing my way back in a sense to those direct and visceral experiences. But I will say that this is not art, but I'm rereading Rage Becomes Her by Soraya Chamali. And I would say that any person who claims to care about women or female identifying folks in any way should read this book. And I said the same thing when I read it the first time, when it was first published, and I'm reading it again now to sort of bolster my relationship to some of her concepts.

But I say it's a very, it can be triggering and difficult, but it's also insanely validating. When she talks, she truly breaks down the caregiving tax that is given to women, whether they're mothers or not. The challenges women face in terms of how we are viewed as less than in the world and how that structurally plays out and experientially plays out the fact that bathrooms are designed as if men and women have equal bathroom needs. Like there's all kinds of stuff in the world that is saying to us, your needs don't matter. And she's just putting it all there. And in a way that's accessible as opposed to some books that feel really like they're written in a way where I get bored reading them, even though I'm really interested in one.

This is not the case. I have to request it from the library. It's one of my most favorite or preferred books that really encapsulate the challenges that women face. And I would say that, and then I would say Bisa Butler. Did we talk about Bisa Butler in your MAMAs? I don't remember if we did. Bisa Butler is this fucking badass quilting artist. Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes, we did. I just saw that she quilted a Questlove Oscar. And I was like, I fucking love this one. Carrie Mae Weems, I fucking love that woman. I mean, Carrie Mae Weems is just like, there's something else going on with her. I have a list on the MAMAs website, which is www.motherartistsmakingart.com. There's a list of resources that is ever growing.

[1:02:31] Leah Walsh: Do you have any sessions that are starting soon?

[1:02:41] Catherine Mueller: We just started one for the PAMAs. And I'm not sure when the next ones will be because it seems that moms don't sign up for things that are for them. They sign their children up for things. And if they have like, you know, a couple hundred dollars extra, which who has that, but they spend it on their children, right, or something that the family needs. But I also have once a month, there's a free mom's coffee, a virtual mom's coffee, the first Friday morning of every month. And any mom can show up to that and any mom can be there. And that's literally just like, what do you want to talk about with some moms? The MAMAs itself, like the six week gathering is really a deep investigation into the mother artist identity.

And we talk about the work of other mother artists and your own responses to their work that you investigate creatively. So that's like a different kind of experience. And there are other ideas I have for what the MAMAs could become and could hold for us inside that duality, which isn't even the right word inside that smush up that is mother artist.

[1:03:51] Leah Walsh: Well, I hope everyone checks it out. It was so wonderful when I did it last summer. I'm so grateful to know you.

[1:03:57] Catherine Mueller: Yeah, I so appreciate this time. When you live alone with a five-year-old, there's not a lot of space to have conversations that fly in all these different directions. And thank you so much for providing space for this conversation, for letting me interrupt you and have and celebrating mother artists. And I'm really grateful.

[1:04:31] Leah Walsh: Thank you for listening to the Compass Podcast. If you find these conversations valuable to your life as an artist and would like to support the ongoing production of the Compass, please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com slash the Compass Podcast. Pledges start at as little as $1 a month and anything you can give would be greatly appreciated. Also, if you have a moment, please review and follow in iTunes. Every little bit helps other listeners to find the podcast. I'd like to thank the following people for their generosity. The Compass cover art is by Kim Miller, music by Brendan Spieth, audio assistance from Monic Choksi, and a special thanks to Frankie J. Alvarez. See you next time.