The Brooklyn Rail

This fall, Alexandra Neuman will be teaming up with co-directors Raychel Ceciro and Logan gabrielle Schulman for our third installment of The Collective Womb, a participatory cosmology performed on a mound of compost. Drawing from earth-based creation myths, the project explores abortion from an ecological lens, as part of the cycling of life, death, and rebirth. The work will be performed on Governors Island, with in-kind support from local climate organizations Earth Matter and Climate Imaginarium.

Preparing for the work, Neuman spoke with her spiritual mentor, the ambient music pioneer Laraaji, about upcoming projects, end-of-life care, and inter-dimensional travel.

Laraaji: Was The Collective Womb a performance in your initial inspiration? Or did you feel your way toward its current form?

Alexandra Neuman: I definitely felt my way in.

Laraaji: Guided by what?

Neuman: The idea arrived during an artist's residency in rural Finland. I was making a stop-motion animation out of dirt. So I had a camera facing the ground outside, and every day I let images arise from the ground spontaneously as I was shaping and reshaping the soil. And over time, that's how the myth emerged, which eventually turned into the script for the project.

Laraaji: The content that first came into your stop-motion camera, did it suggest anything related to femininity, womb, creation?

Neuman: The stop-motion revealed the earth merging itself with the erotic and creative energy of the womb. And that was around the time that Roe v. Wade had been overturned. So I started thinking about abortion as an exchange of energy between the womb and the earth.

Laraaji: The play has been presented three times so far, three audience accumulations. Now, if you did not present this play ever again and you left the earth plane, what would the earth plane be missing?

Neuman: Hmm, that's a beautiful question. I think the earth plane would be missing a new womb-oriented cosmology, an alternative to so many patriarchal portrayals of creation. It opens a way for people to approach reproductive justice from a totally other world, rather than with the intensity of how it's characterized politically and religiously in this moment.

Laraaji: Are you concerned about the audience's response or experience? Does it matter?

Neuman: Well New York audiences are mostly onboard with the underlying themes of the work. But it still provokes people with the bodily fluids. There's some menstrual blood, and some moon-milk. More generally, I hope audiences can touch into a feeling of a sensual spirituality, without keeping it at an arm’s length. Like they can actually worship the earth and feel like it’s honest. That would be an ideal experience that audiences could have.

Laraaji: Is this myth capable of being a motion-picture, would that be a little too much for this?

Neuman: I used to be oriented towards video and film, but I’m evolving more towards live participatory art. Performance and ritual are my ways of answering to this moment of chaos and collapse. People are needing that physical togetherness, to co-create in a mythical space together and dream something new. I feel like that's present in your work too.

Laraaji: Yes, interactive, hands on. I'm curious about where you get your dirt for your performance. Do you just go and order it?

Neuman: For our first performance, it came from Randall’s Island Urban Farm. My friend Ciara works there and she forklifted three thousand pounds of dirt onto a U-Haul that my collaborator was driving. But for the next version of this play, we're performing at a composting site on Governors Island called Earth Matter. So we’ll have a fresh mound of compost as our stage.

Laraaji: With your art form, working with mud or clay, are you able to maintain a pace with it while you are managing this production? When I go on the road touring, some of my at-home activities don’t get attention.

Neuman: That’s something I've been grappling with. I think about it as yin energy, when I’m at home in my creative space and little whispers are happening. But I’ve made peace with the fact that I'm not always going to be in that mode. And I would say, I'm not in that mode right now because I've been working at a hospital.

Laraaji: That’s right, you're doing some hospice work?

Neuman: It's end-of-life chaplaincy.

Laraaji: That’s a pretty definitive title, end-of-life. Is that their actual fate? Is that the most scientific and realistic diagnosis?

Neuman: I think it's a clinical term that is almost a euphemism. But spiritually, I am aware that there's a greater mystery around death. I’ve had experiences with patients that make death seem like a portal rather than an end-of-life. I've heard you use the term transitioning before.

Laraaji: I think of transitioning and bliss. Transitioning as a way of softening any tendency towards stress and trauma. Change, a new transition of letting go and letting flow.

Neuman: I also picture a sense of freedom, because there's something dense about being embodied. So if our conscious awareness extends at least slightly into this transition, that it might be something playful, a lightness that opens.

Laraaji: I’m being invited to contemplate the idea of a fifth dimension, that there is or may be a fifth dimension to which we can evolve. My sense of a blissful transitioning to, as you say, greater freedom, greater lightness, and this incredible sense of having always been here, and there's no recollection of the third and fourth dimension, because we're in continuous present time.

Neuman: But maybe you can integrate those fifth-dimensional experiences back into the third and fourth dimensions?

Laraaji: I accept that, that one would operate as inter-dimensional. They're having a sense of this other realm, and they are a conduit or a medium that can transmit this energy into a digestible language.

Neuman: That's like your whole creative process, as a bliss mediator. Do you ever think about how your energy will still be transmitted through your music long after you’re physically here?

Laraaji: Yes, it’s a question very relevant to my recent thought of a piece that I channeled. When I listen to it, it sounds like a piece that has a life and intelligence all on its own, an intelligence that can lift one up, soothe someone by drawing them out of an over-embodiment consciousness.

Neuman: Is that something you've already released?

Laraaji: Yes, it's up now, it’s called Holom 1. As I listen to it, it feels like it's speaking and that it will be sharing an energy long after I'm moving forward somewhere else. I thought I'd be up in a rehabilitation center by now and I'd have access to this peaceful music, but the rehabilitation center is not happening. I'm too busy traveling. Other people listen to it, in yoga studios, doctors offices, bedside people giving birth to children.

Neuman: That’s great to know that it's truly medicinal.

Laraaji: It’s important as a practitioner to monitor my own breath. Is my breath flowing? Am I holding on? In the presence of someone at the end of life, do you feel it's important to guard your breath? To make sure that you don't over-empathize to the point of giving up your own fluid open breathing?

Neuman: I don't have too much fear about how I will be affected by what my patients are experiencing. To reach out and hold someone’s hand when they are suffering, it creates a moment of wholeness, it benefits everyone involved. I think that people doing healing work have a strong life-force, and they can share it with others.

Laraaji: Does this work invite you to consider your own eventual transition?

Neuman: Definitely, it reminds me to keep asking myself, what am I actually doing while I'm embodied on this earth right now? It helps me focus in that way. And seeing people care for their spouses that are passing, even younger people, it reminds me about our relationships, how precious and temporary they are.

Laraaji: Personal question: do you have any anxiety about being Jewish today? Is there a sense of obligation, guilt, pressure to take responsibility for anything?

Neuman: Judaism was not central to my identity as an artist, but now that my tradition is being twisted into a nationalistic agenda, and being used to justify genocide against Palestinians, this has called me to connect with my ancestors and ask about how to reclaim Judaism’s soul. I'm currently writing a performance called A Jewish Exorcism. So I do feel obligated to respond, and to respond in community with others. Thank you for asking.

Laraaji: You’re welcome. I feel honored that you trust that I have something to offer for this interview.

Neuman: Well, I feel honored that you accepted my invitation. Thanks for being willing and open, and thank you for continuing to share your presence with me in so many ways. I really appreciate it.