JENNIFER VANILLA'S CASTLE IN THE SKY INTERVIEW

The sexless humanoid alien Jennifer Vanilla has been entangled with the NYC-based earthling artist Becca Kauffman for a few years now, and they have granted Interlocutor Magazine an exclusive and extensive look into the mysteries of their complex inner workings in this wide-ranging interview.

It has been written that Jennifer Vanilla is “a container, a portal, a joy delivery system, a self-help regimen, a social mirror, a Times Square celebrity, a shark-toothed advertiser, a kicky talk show host and an ebullient mascot. Kauffman inhabited Jennifer and transformed through Jennifer, and vice versa. This conversation in fantasy has taken shape as their debut full-length album, Castle in the Sky,” now out on Sinderlyn Records.

The album is a collaboration with co-writer/co-producer Brian Abelson, who also participates in this interview as a special guest!

Interview by Tyler Nesler

How do you view live-action role play (LARP) and avatar work as a particularly unique approach for creating new social and relationship spaces?

Fashioning Jennifer Vanilla conceptually as a LARP has been a way for me to frame my approach to performance as something different from “acting.” In a live action role play, the character you play gives you an alibi, a license to move, react, interact, and make decisions through a persona other than your own. It can be freeing, empowering, even divine. For me it can also feel very vulnerable and emotionally exhausting—terrifying—because Jennifer Vanilla is definitely a dimension of myself, and performing, no matter how I try to wrap myself up in the protective safety of an alter ego, is very exposing.

I’ve called Jennifer Vanilla a LARP for years, but if you want to be technical about it, it really isn’t a LARP. As I learned from speaking with the artist and larpwright Susan Ploetz, a LARP involves prior agreement to, and then participation of, everyone in the room in a shared conceit. I’m working on making that happen at my shows. I’ve always wanted them to be an invitation into a temporary new realm. I’m interested in facilitating the dissolution of the performer-spectator dynamic as much as is consensually possible at any given performance. I don’t want it to be about me, I want it to be about us.

Your Jennifer Vanilla persona has this infectious disarming impact on audiences – what elements of the character do you think are essential to creating such an inclusive, joyful atmosphere?

I’m happy to hear that’s been your experience. During a show, I like to talk to the audience, acknowledge their presence and the fact that we’re all in a room—let’s be real. We have such a mutually beneficial relationship, the audience and I, a performer. I don’t want to ignore them, I want to honor them, and let everybody know that they’re contributing to this one singular experience. Lots of times performing as Jennifer feels like performing under the influence. At its most liberatory, it is delightful and intoxicating. It’s like I am possessed with self-possession, and I think that temporary state can be kind of contagious. It’s possible to get a contact high from the neuron mirroring, maybe.

What seems most powerful about Jennifer Vanilla to me is that in their primary form there aren’t many overt elements of irony or flippancy in the performances. While Jennifer Vanilla was evolving, were you ever tempted to tilt this character towards more satirical or darker comedic places?

It’s funny you say that, because to me there is a definite touch of evil embedded in this project. It’s always been there, though it wasn’t my conscious intention. I started to notice these power grabs coming out of Jennifer as I was portraying her/it, some mildly despotic tendencies.

I started to question some of my earlier inclinations around the character, the desire for attention and control that was seeping out and that I, through this persona, was apparently seeking. And then lots of things shifted. I wrote the lyrics for the song “Humility’s Disease”, which cracked the positivity-drenched veneer of that earlier Jennifer and let out some steam that had built up from all the posturing. To me it feels more honest and authentic now, playing less of a mirage and more of a multidimensional, openly and relatably flawed individual. I strive to be a better sharer.

You've written that Jennifer Vanilla partially evolved from a series of home music videos. These are compelling because they show experimentations with elements of gender roles/identity/fluidity and an absurdist playfulness that are now all a part of the Jennifer experience.

Could you talk about the creative impulses that prompted you to make these videos and how they ultimately contributed to the birth of the Jennifer persona?

When I look at those videos now, I see how I was working through the dilemmas that come with being a performer, with the added layer of being woman-identified (at the time). You know, the social mirror, that ping ponging of perception: being perceived, receiving that perception, and reinterpreting yourself in response to the receipt of that perception. As a performer, you’re kind of trapped in that dynamic because your work requires being watched and witnessed in order to be actualized.

I was very influenced by 1970s and 80s feminist video and performance art, addressing the camera as a stand in for and commentary on the male gaze. It was an early act of what I later learned is called sousveillance: returning the gaze of the surveillor, looking back at it as a statement of resistance or a reclaiming of power. That back and forth of seeing and being seen, seeing and being seen, definitely embedded itself into the way Jennifer Vanilla originally made sense of herself, and how she proved and shaped her existence to herself and everyone else in the room.

I was also working out this problem of femininity, an obligation I felt encumbered by to deliver a certain kind of heterosexual appeal, and the burden of failure as I missed the mark. Many of these videos were an attempt to expose that effort, that unseen labor of being feminine, and portray the state of falling short. When Jennifer Vanilla was born, I decided she would possess the outward appearance of a successfully appealing woman, but be literally impenetrable, which is to say, have no holes.

Music and dance are core foundational aspects of the Jennifer Vanilla experience, to an extent that they seem to be used as elements for transcendence or survival.

For example, two Jennifer pieces complement each other thematically: “Space Time Motion” and “Body Music.” (“Space is accidental bodies/Bodies are movin' through time/Time has no consequence” from “Space Time Motion” and “Motion is an arc between two deaths/Complete immobility and complete collapse/When gravity has defeated the body’s power of resistance” from “Body Music”).

Are you commenting on movement within space/time as a powerful way to transcend limitations/inhibitions?

Yeah, I feel personally drawn to forms of moving meditation/meditative movement. Freeform dancing is kind of spiritual like that. The times I connect my limbs and my hips and my head and my face to rhythm and make shapes in space, my whole being takes on new forms, or my spirit transcends form entirely. Dancing is an emotional, physical, psychological interpretation device. It’s a glimpse into what is possible. And also I get to pretend I’m going to be discovered and put into one of Janet Jackson’s music videos (ok that’s a fantasy of mine from when I was 14).

From a performance art perspective, who are some of your major influences for Jennifer Vanilla? I see many similarities in what Laurie Anderson has done with her music and performance acts — are there any other performers you'd like to mention as inspirations for this project?

Some influences that I return to: Lynn Hershman Leeson, Jenny Hval, Will Powers, Ann Magnuson, Nina Hagen, Roisin Murphy, Mickey Mouse, my friend Teeny Lieberson who makes music as Lou Tides and puts on a rich, precise, choreographed live show, my friend Sophia Cleary, a comedian who talks about a lot of the things I’m too much of a coward to talk about.

Could you talk about the unique costuming and choreography in the video for the song "Body Music"? How closely did you work with choreographer Sharleen Chidiac to develop the overall feel and look of the video's performances? Did she bring anything unexpected to the project?

Also, that oversized BODY MUSIC shirt — David Byrne jumped right to my mind with Jennifer's jerky body motions, and the shirt is reminiscent of his giant suit from Stop Making Sense. Was his work on your mind when you were putting this together? Or who are some other influences on the piece?

Sharleen came up with the choreo for the dance studio scenes independently and taught it to us all on the day of the shoot. She’s such a talented artist and I think she picked up on the sensibility of the song and translated it to movement really well. The rest of the movement in the video is pure improvisation.

It’s funny that David Byrne is so frequently the go-to reference for oversized clothing. While his artistic choices have definitely left an imprint on me, for this video I was thinking about other things: Klaus Nomi’s signature Dadaist tuxedo, Carol Burnett’s curtain dress, and just the general control you can have over your form when you supersize your clothing.

I’m curiously drawn to packaged Halloween costumes, especially the ones that are giant wearable versions of inanimate objects, like a milk carton or movie popcorn or a traffic cone. Humanizing non-human forms has a natural comedy to it. Those boxy, foam costumes were the reference point for the enormous “Body Music” shirt, fabricated by Anne Symons (who makes clothing under the name Care Instructions).

I’m also a big fan of the New York-based fashion label Vaquera, whose collections have played a lot with proportion—scaling garments up, like a severely oversized sweater with sleeves so long they drag down the runway, and scaling things down, like a tiny violin case that functions as a purse so small it barely fits a cell phone. I think there’s an innate humor to that warping of scale because it calls attention to the absurdity of the body and corrupts the exact thing we expect clothing to do: fit. If it’s ridiculously ill-fitting, it creates a problem for the body to solve: how do I move in this garment? It takes on a prop-like role, and then you have something to play with as a performer. And it announces itself as a costume, which points to the inevitable performativity of getting dressed and existing in the first place.

I associate oversized clothing with clownish attempts at power, too. It extends and expands the body further into space, which creates this silhouette of authority. I’m interested in clothing that announces itself, clothing that is its own performance. An ensemble that can be loud without making a sound. It’s the introvert’s hello.

Your new album Castle in the Sky is the culmination of three years of working the songs out with live audiences and tweaking them based on audience vibes, in close collaboration with co-writer/co-producer Brian Abelson.

Throughout this period of experimentation, did you both have any set plans of eventually turning all of this into a full album, or was there no “grand plan” and did it ultimately come together organically?

JV: On that note, now’s a good time to bring Brian into this interview.

Brian: While the album came together in bits and pieces over a long period of time, we always conceived of it as a cohesive narrative rather than a collection of songs. Early on in the process, Becca and I were really into the idea of world-building as applied to sound and wanted to try and build a sonic universe that Jennifer Vanilla might reside in. You'll notice that many tracks share vocal refrains, sound effects, and other elements which serve to tie them together.

JV: Like Brian said, we were working to develop a kind of language or thematic texture—a soundtrack—to the Jennifer Vanilla experience. It was an exercise in figuring out how the expression, attitude, and personality of the persona and the live performance could translate into sound, and Brian’s technical fluency and creative drive made that possible. After probably a couple hundred hours, we accumulated an album’s worth of material, and here we are.

A unique production aspect of Castle in the Sky is that live performers recorded for it (including Teeny Lieberson [Lou Tides, TEEN, Here We Go Magic] on guitar, Boshra Al Saa-di [TEEN, Saadi] on bass, and Thesan Polyanna on saxophone), but then Brian kept the production in an electronic space by using the recordings as samples on the tracks.

How do you think this approach serves the album's overall sonic aesthetic while also best fitting its themes and tones?

Brian: One of the main themes of the album is identity crisis—who am I? Is the face I present to the world the real me or just a performance? During the creation of this album, Becca and I were occupied with these questions both in our personal lives and as artists. Becca was just in the process of finishing up over a decade with Ava Luna and I was trying to branch out from working strictly on dance music.

So, when we initially came together, we had some trouble landing on a sonic aesthetic as we were both in a state of flux. While we initially gravitated towards sample-based electronic productions as that's what we were into at the time, the Black Lives Matter movement helped us understand the problem of uncritically reproducing or sampling queer black music as white artists.

Bringing in live performers (and recording our own live performances) was a way to push against this historical pattern of cultural appropriation and help us carve out a sound and style of our own, drawing not only on our experiences in dance music but also Becca's long history recording and performing with bands. Ultimately, we felt this approach was not only a more respectful way to pay homage to the many artists we drew inspiration from, but also a more honest reflection of our artistic identities.

Castle in the Sky is available now.

Don’t miss the record release party at Trans-Pecos on August 24

Look for updates on Jennifer’s Instagram

Read our 2018 interview conducted directly with the entity known as Jennifer Vanilla

Photos by Luca Venter

Check out all of our other coverage of innovative musicians and bands

Tyler Nesler is a New York City-based freelance writer and the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of INTERLOCUTOR Magazine.