Why do we make art? What can the performing arts teach us about how to engage in dialogues to overcome conflict and division? Our guests today are actress Catherine Curtin and artistic director Kate Mueth.
Curtin is known for her roles on Stranger Things, Homeland, and Insecure. She played correctional officer Wanda Bell in Orange Is the New Black, and for this role she was a joint winner of two Screen Actors Guild Awards for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series.
Mueth is the Founder and Artistic Director of the award-winning dance theater company The Neo-Political Cowgirls that seeks to deepen and challenge the ways in which audiences experience stories and awaken their human connection. Based in East Hampton, New York they have performed to audiences in America and Europe.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
You have both collaborated together on projects for Neo-Political Cowgirls and you're both very political as actors. How did you come to be so political at the same time as pursuing your art?
KATE MUETH
I don't know why we would really want to tell stories without being connected to the meaning.
And I think that's especially for women, but I do think for human beings, that is how we can work as hard and be able to get up the next morning and keep going. Because we are working through the meaning, and it feeds us as we're like making sense of it all, trying to make sense of it, and for being in community and communion, if I dare say that, as an ex-Catholic too.
Like sharing as a witness what it is to be human and what it means, and through this work, tell our story. So yeah, I feel like it's a bit of a crushing experience, as an industry goes. And I often feel like I'm way flung out to the side in the process of how I do the work versus how the industry wants it done, expects it done, and how the money is made and having it done. And there's an unhappy marriage between art and commerce right now. We've changed as a society, and the internet and AI have changed the world. But I kind of don't care because I get one life that I'm aware of, and I just want to do it in a way that feels good and the art feels true for me.
CATHERINE CURTIN
I grew up in New York City. And when I was like 13, I'd sneak downtown on the subway and I'd go see shows at like La MaMa and Wooster Group and all of these sort of heavy-hitting, really alternative theaters. And theater was, for me, my first love. And I feel like in some ways, we've lost touch with that because we exist in a world that has become so fast moving. And I'm not sure that's a gain, a bonus, but there always has to be a check-in, and I find working with Kate, I've always felt that I never had to fear that my process was taking a long time.
There was never a sense of like, what have you got? Show it right now. Do it, show it, show it! What have you got? Okay. Oh, you haven't got it. It's like there's a sense of, with Kate, it's like you're being wrapped in this enormous teddy bear of artistic freedom and care. Because I do do enough TV and film. Sometimes the bigger the budget, you know, sometimes... (gestures as though to say 'the quality doesn't always increase'). So, I'm always glad to just relax in the creative process, and I'm always very grateful for that. I think it's why I do so much indie film because it's really fun.
...The depth of the pain that so many people who are walking the strike right now feel. It's the depth of the pain of the unhappy marriage between art and commerce. It is the depth of the pain of how we've changed as a society and how the internet and AI in the computer world, it has given us so much, but [we lose something in the process].
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Your work has resonated widely with some of the really important issues and stories of our time. Women's rights, incarceration, social justice. You mentioned that meaning is very important for art, not just to be entertaining but to have meaning.
MUETH
The best art is political, and it gets us in conversation. And we should be able to sit and hold different opinions and listen to each other and wonder about solutions.
I want everyone to thrive, wherever they're calling is. These are things that fundamentally, to me, make life thrive and be meaningful. And when my neighbor thrives, I'm more likely to thrive. So let us be in communication. And women holding the power of the pen, because enough with this bullshit, patriarchal brokenness and war. Like the fact I look at Putin's war, I look at Ukraine, I look at what America does, I look at this violence and I go: this just makes no sense to me. It looks like a petulant little child kicking each other's sandcastles over. Stupid little men.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
My grandmother just died, and so I'm thinking about what passes away and what remains. That's what a good performance does. We're beautifully flawed. I think that's the advantage that we have over AI. We don't know everything. AI seems to know everything except the very basics of life.
CURTIN
Death is the imperfection of life. Because life is just a fleeting thing for everyone, for all of us. And so there's no way that a black box AI can know death. So AI can never, in that sense, know life, because every day you walk, you think. Like I was just on my way to do the zoom with you guys, and I just went to grab my bracelet, which was sitting next to my grandmother's picture. And I loved my grandmother. So AI doesn't touch us because we exist on a level of such mortal frailty and mortal cruelty, and mortal love, and hate, and jealousy, and insecurity and freedom and joy and wackiness, and being in the moment that there's no way that when one of my neurotic fellow conspiracy theory New Yorker friends says to me that AI is the end of the world! I'm like, it's just not possible because the world is not that permanent for any of us. This is an impermanent destination that we're on.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
You mentioned some of your different role and issues, the incarceration of women. And of course we know Catherine's work from Stranger Things, Orange is a New Black, Homeland, Insecure... I thought that Orange is the New Black was so illuminating because there are so many of these voices and experiences, and I'm afraid to say I never thought that much about the plight of incarcerated women. We often think of the men, but not the women and the families affected by incarceration and the whole prison industrial complex. The way we treat so many of our citizens is devastating, and to hear about the experiences of women more so since that reverberates and is felt all the way down the line to their families.
CURTIN
Women's Prison Association is a fabulous organization that everybody should be aware of. And they do things in the fall like Pack your Book Bag and things like that. So there's a lot of different ways to get involved with them, and they're really wonderful. And the WPA started in like the 1860s in New York because what was happening to a lot of women is - they've kept their books from that time of the people that they helped and the stories that they helped, so this within the books of the WPA archives. What was happening were these women were coming over as immigrants, and maybe their husbands were already here, but their husbands, maybe they got a new family or maybe they just kind of disappeared, checked out for whatever reason. Quite often the husband, it's documented, would sell the children from that woman coming over to the industrial complex - real factory child labor stuff. And the woman was forced to become a prostitute, which I actually think should be legalized, but obviously, at that time it was not. And so the WPA had a lot of women who were immigrants who were prostitutes. And what they sought to do was to help these women not go to prison, get their children back, and get jobs. And that is still what they are doing because the problem with the prison system is that once you're in it, once you have a record, it's very hard, even when you get out to get that record expunged. So the whole effort is to say to a judge, if this woman, who has three strikes or whatever the law is that is funneling her through the system, passes through our program (I think it's a six-month program) and it's difficult, then she won't go to prison. We will endeavor to get her a job, get her an apartment, and get her kids back. And that's the goal. And that has been the goal of the Women's Prison Association and also women coming out of prison. The goal is to get them back into the system of getting a job, getting an apartment, getting their kids back. So the Women's Prison Association, it's a fabulous organization. It's one organization that everybody could support that is really on the right side of making society a stronger, better place.
MUETH
In America, incarcerated people are not seen by us. We act as if we know that oh, they've been tried, they deserve to be in there. And some do. Some are victims themselves. Many of them are women. I just did a month of grand jury duty a month or so ago. And that's where we go and sit with 22 other people and decide, from witnesses, if this case has enough proof for the person to be arraigned, and go to trial.
And something that I came away with was it feels like most people who got themselves in that situation were, most of the time, stupid and greedy. Or they were in abject poverty. All of the hopelessness, right?
They have had nothing but violence in their life. How we can continue to make it a practice and a policy to punish these people and then put them away, punish them some more in our brutal for-profit prison system and expect them to come out and want to be different. Or even have the capacity to be different. It's obscenely naive and ignorant on behalf of our society. And you know, a "Christian nation" bullshit. We're not a Christian nation when you allow this to happen without an ounce of compassion or forethought about how we're going to take care of these people and help them to come to thriving when they get released, as is their right.
CURTIN
We used to edit film on a flatbed. And every time you would take a scissors and make a cut and if you made the wrong cut you had to put the pieces back together and it wasn't a simple little thing.
I believe Angels and Insects was the last film edited on a flatbed. Anybody who looks at that film sees the difference in the edit because when you choose to do something really thoughtfully and carefully as opposed to like, you know, I could put that scene there and I could put that scene here and what we've done today is we've made everything so fast and so easy that I think there's something to the creative process about it being a little bit more of an exploration than it is wham bam, it's done.
Let's go have lunch. And I think there is something to the creative process where it's allowed to develop. It's called process because it is a process.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
You’re both so outspoken and have found your political voices, which is so important, because if we don’t speak up for ourselves, others like lobbyists will fill gap and speak up - and not on our behalf.
CURTIN
It's so important, like when Number 45 went into office, and he emptied out all of the documentation in the EPA. He was like, empty all those files, get rid of all that research, get rid of all those researchers. I think that clearly, even now, the Trumpers are like, oh, the environment. It was a global warming. You know, we had a global warming problem. Well, we knew that a long time ago. And so one hopes that maybe that is one of the places that AI can improve the human condition. Maybe AI, the statistical data, and the non-emotional data will convince people when there's a problem and take the emotion out of the issue. Because I think that that's one of the reasons why issues don't move forward sometimes is that the emotional impact is too hot. And so maybe just getting it into statistics or getting it into data, or getting it into numbers where people can't really deny the truth of one plus one does equal two, you know?
MUETH
The vibration of a beating heart, of a human voice, of the blood pumping in our bodies is so much grander and embracing and full of story than artificial intelligence could ever be, or any technology.
We forget when we're in the woods the hum of nature, it is so distinct and unique. And even when we try to replicate it, we cannot replicate it in truth. And this is the thing, we are so full of hubris and so incurious that we just keep moving past our natural connection to the planet and that's a shame.
And that's where I think we inherently miss out by all of us just getting swept up in this technology and forgetting to pay attention to this place we call home.
