Happy Halloween from CYM! We are back in Baltimore for the week and are very excited to share Hard Feelings with all those who didn't get to see it live. Both of our houses sold out and we even had to turn some folks away so for all those people and for all our friends not based in NY, here is the info on Hard Feelings: A Show About Grudges.

The show was divided into four sections: MAKE your grudge, HOLD your grudge, SHARE your grudge, and SHED your grudge. It was funny (we know because people laughed!) and also, we hope, thought-provoking. This show gets our award for #1 Best Props in a CYM Show with a handmade Grudge Bag filled with 165 Grudge Balls. As audience members walked into the space, they were handed a survey about their own grudges, which we later incorporated into the show:

Hard Feelings included scripted words, improvisation, movement, audience interaction, and singing. We got a lot of feedback after the show and one comment that came up many times is how rarely people had thought about grudges before seeing it. We are so grateful for any and all feedback we receive as it always informs our work moving forward. We are also very grateful to both our venues, The Tank in Manhattan and Triskelion Arts in Brooklyn, for being such great hosts. The video documentation from the Triskelion show (which includes an additional opening act by Kedian Keohan, Peter McNally, and Ian Edlund) is still in process but until then, here is a low fi video from an audience member in the first show that should give you some feel for it. The video includes opening sets from comedians Sarah Wilson and Kenny Hahn. Click here to watch.

On Monday we are off to Cucalorus in Wilmington, NC, where we will be doing some administrative regrouping, emceeing at the Cucalorus Film Festival, and making a punching bag of some sort! For slightly more regular updates, follow us on instagram @call.your.mom. And to sign off, here's two last photos by audience members of us making googly eyes at / being smushed by our sweet baby grudge.

Breaking news: Call Your Mom is in New York! We’ve started our year of traveling and we have to say, it’s going very well. We’ve had long talks, big meals, and cozy nights. We’ve also secured our second New York venue for Hard Feelings: A Show About Grudges. Our performances will be at The Tank (312 W 36th St, NY) at 7pm on October 22 and at Triskelion Arts (106 Calyer St, Brooklyn, NY) at 8:30pm on October 25! See show poster below. ​

Truce is now online, with both channels playing beside one another. This means that the viewer gets to experience both sides, all at once. Click here to watch Truce.

As Call Your Mom edited, we wondered what the repercussions of putting the two channels into one video were exactly. Some of our questions about our artistic choice are:  
- How does the work change if we are able to hear both internal rumblings at once, a feat impossible in reality? 
- Does its edit create further neutrality, or does one side seem more “right”? 
- If the audio is spaced so you can hear every word, does the piece become argumentative instead of contemplative? 
​- Do our biases inform the way we edit, privileging one type of emotional processing over another?
What can watching these two channels at once offer to the viewer? 

This week, Call Your Mom began our year-long experiment together developing Say You’re Sorry as full-time collaborators. We began this exciting new endeavor with gusto! Being full-time artists is no easy task, and although we’ve been planning, organizing, and fundraising for many months in preparation, there is still more to do to ensure we can share our work with the world and also have the funds to buy deodorant. 

We started off with the daunting task of organizing and taking inventory of all our files in Google Drive. We would highly recommend—not the task itself but the feeling of having already completed it. We have also been diving into administrative research; how to pay ourselves and our collaborators as a 501(c)(3), how to track our spending and fundraising, how to log our receipts and keep track of our hours. This week has been an energizing leap into our year together, finding a newfound enjoyment for fiscal planning and organizational stability. In addition to important administrative tasks, we have also been looking up synonyms and making titles, which is much more in our wheelhouse:

We’ve also been planning for our fall travel which will start in October! We are headed to New York to develop a show about grudges (see image above for excessive synonym examples). We are so excited to create an evening in collaboration with New York artists and performers where we can all laugh, cry, and get off on our grudges together. Feeling bright and excited for some big work!
​
Love, 
CYM

This weekend, our video installation Truce opens at One Charles Center (at the corner of Charles and Fayette) as part of the 2019 Janet & Walter Sondheim Semifinalist Exhibition. The installation consists of many individual components that we use to prod at the frustration, processing, and introspection inherent in coming to a truce.
The ingredients:

• A 2-channel screen dance with individual audio coming from headphones
• Immersive audio playing on speakers throughout the entire installation
• 3 astroturf squares on the floor
• 2 orange costumes on either side of the installation stretched taught toward and away from each other
• A 10ft x 10ft square made up of strips of orange fabric tied together coming out of the wall and landing on the floor about 8 feet from the corner

Each video is accompanied by a voiceover that reveals the internal perspective of one person in a conflict. In other words, it reveals only half of the story. Viewers experience one point of view and then the other. They hear the ways in which the two sides talk past each other, find points of agreement, disagree, and walk away.

​For example, a few lines from POV 1 include:
I don’t know how they justify what they did.
I’m not trying to say that there is a right thing to do, but isn’t there?
It's not personal.

Meanwhile, POV 2 is saying:
They can explain anything away.
I’m not trying to say that everything is relative, but isn’t it?
Everything is personal.

The ambient audio in the space is both tracks playing at once, literally speaking over each other. 

The show will be open Wednesday-Sunday, 12-6pm from now until August 18. Come stand on our astroturf and watch us move through conflict without finding resolution. After the installation closes, we will be posting the videos online.

On Sunday July 7th, our board member Joan Susie invited us to facilitate a workshop for her birthday. The workshop was a fundraiser for our current project, Say You’re Sorry. Many lovely people attended and donated to our project. After some mingling and snacks, we lead the attendees in a workshop around our Forgiveness Scale. 
The activity was similar to the performance experiment we conducted at FORCE in January 2019. Once again, we read a series of wrongs and had participants walk a quilted scale from "Easily Atoned" to "Unforgivable." We adjusted some of the content for our new audience based on what we observed in January. 

​The second iteration of the Forgiveness Scale generated some very interesting discussion. This time we added one or two “caveats” to each scenario, in order to clarify/complicate the scenario and give it context. We talked about intention vs. action and the importance of context when wrongdoings are committed. The most compelling part of facilitating this activity for a second time was that the same prompts with small changes often warranted vastly different responses.

One notable moment was a discussion about how people neglect/care for their kids and pets. This brought up how vulnerable it can be to ask for help caring for someone and how certain types of care are inadequate. Is it harder to forgive someone who hurts a loved one than it is to forgive someone who hurts you? This all came from the prompt “They lied about caring for your pet.” Almost everyone found this nearly unforgivable. 

The fundraiser had many cool moments. To name a few: 

• A comment about how our work verges into categories of mental health and  psychology
• Another conversation about stealing labeled lunches and food insecurity from a different perspective. This time someone lost their job over it! What role does the informer play in defining punishment? 
• A talk about forgiving people for yelling at your kid. Did the kid deserve it? 

We are so grateful our generous and enthusiastic participants and contributors. The conversations we had gave us much to think about. We are excited to continue pursuing responses to these big questions and developing thought-provoking content around those responses! ​​

Last week, Call Your Mom set out on a weekend retreat to film our newest screen dance, Truce, which is set to premiere at the Janet and Walter Sondheim Semifinalist Exhibition. The piece will show alongside the 17 other semifinalists for the Sondheim Prize at Artscape. 

Over the course of the retreat, we spent time choreographing, writing dialogue, and filming outdoors. We worked with videographer Nate Gregorio to gather shots, which we will edit into a 2-channel visual and auditory installation. The dialogue and accompanying visuals will mimic two people's internal dialogues in conflict. We want it to feel a bit one-sided, as though the participants aren’t truly listening to one another. We are interested in exploring how people and groups of people come to compromises in the face of complex conflict. The installation will invite viewers to sit and listen to the two audio channels through two separate sets of headphones, placed diagonally across from one another. The two speakers will have a few repeated lines between them, but most of the things they say will contradict the other. For example, one person says “They’re putting their feelings before a solution,” while the other says “They’re putting words in my mouth.” Or, “We both made mistakes. We did this together,” vs. “This isn’t bringing out the best in me.” ​

These statements are meant to highlight how difficult it can be to come to a consensus that accounts for all perspectives within a conflict. The show will be open July 18-August 17 (with a reception August 1, 5-9pm) at One Charles Center, located at 100 N. Charles St. We hope to see you there! ​

Call Your Mom's first forgiveness experiment took place in January 2019 at the studios of FORCE: Upsetting Rape Culture in Baltimore, MD. For the first part of the experiment, we performed public apologies by nameless public figures and had participants hold up YES/NO paddles based on whether a given apology warranted forgiveness. For the second part, we read a series of wrongs and had participants walk a quilted Forgivability Scale from "Easily Atoned" to "Unforgivable." Each participant was given 4 slips of fabric to write specific responses to any of the prompts and pin them on the scale.

Some responses to prompts on the Forgivability Scale: ​“I’ve done that + haven’t forgiven myself, but would forgive others” / "Too emotional to be ideological about it” / “Gaslighting!” / “Would take time + healing + an effort to love (after time)” 

After the two activities, the participants sat down with us to discuss the experience. Here are some notes we wrote down from the discussion:

• What does forgiveness mean? Accountability? Moving on?
• Identities affect everything so it’s hard to think of it in the abstract
• There’s so much grey but justice feels black/white
• Easier to forgive your own assailant than your friend’s assailant
• Forgivability props up the carceral state
• Anything is forgivable in theory but would I forgive is a different question
• Time aspect - how long has it been?
• Forgiveness is taught to women / queer folks as necessity
• Forgiveness as a process vs. as a finished whole
• “Understanding” vs. “Forgiveness”
• You can forgive an act without wanting to ever interact with the perpetrator again
• Accountability not included in these experiments
• Brings up questions about the anonymity of public space, crying in the subway
• Forgiveness can’t be passive
  
• Easier to place yourself in the middle of the pack
• Taking someone’s lunch out of the staff fridge → small acts of colonization
• Simple items can be more loaded because layers / identities brought in
• What if the next Forgiveness Scale is a room with 4 corners? Axes to walk versus one plane
• Could be good to throw in some less abstract ones, marked with identities (name whiteness, cisness)
• It’s good that there is no “neutral/no comment” box
• Next time we could have audience members read some of the prompts, encourage them to put whatever intention they want into it