“Duplicity” is performance art exploring how life often places us in dual roles, or in positions to consider our own lives in precarious ways.

In this piece, I was specifically considering what it means to be both a mother and a daughter simultaneously, and how motherhood forces me to balance caring for my own children with reconciling bits of my own childhood. Am I becoming more like myself or more like my mother? How will my actions affect my own daughter as she grows into her own identity? Am I repeating missteps or taking new ones? What values will be etched upon my daughter’s character as they were upon my own?

The performance elements were individually created one piece at a time via sound and video recordings and finally layered together to create a compilation that could safely be shared during a time of pandemic. The work was intended to manifest for video.

I composed the music for the piece, and I played both the piano and clarinet. These instruments are significant as they are common to myself, my mother, and my daughter. I choreographed and performed the dance, I operated the camera, and edited the elements together. In the spirit of “Duplicity” the work was both playful and somber, childlike and mature.

I am represented both as self and other. I am objectively looking both at myself and at my shadows. Who am I? Where am I from? Where am I going? How does my own image evolve over time with each passing revolution? What is it about change that is both alluringly beautiful and strangely unsettling?