LEILA HEKMAT: THE ARTIST'S MASKS

In Leila Hekmat's performance, the way each and every individual character looks is built up in the details. And if her art, which is made up of eccentric and amazing costumes, wigs and accessories – which she designs and makes by hand so that they fit each of the actors on the scene perfectly – is highly visual and arouses in us feelings of wonder and desire, intrigue and engagement that fashion shows have for some time now not been able to do – it is also true that Leila Hekmat always treats each character like a portrait, turning each guise into a seductive pretext, one that exalts their appeal and at the same time brings out their essence. Thus, between comedy and tragedy uncomfortable truths emerge about the person and about society. The existential malaise, the vulnerability, the fragilities, and the frustrations, the role plays and convenient identities that hide behind our precise ways of appearing. Masks, indeed, like at the theater. And it is especially about that human theater that Leila Hekmat speaks, sophisticated curator of the psyche that she is, delving into the real or presumed states of being, into the diseases of the spirit that are induced, latent, or explicit, exploring them with the help of the script. In her performances there is speaking, dancing, singing, in tenor or soprano, but also in whispers, squeals, and falsetto voices.   And all of this is concerted and foreseen in a script signed by the artist, a textual articulation that takes shape starting from a visual moodboard of inspirations, just like in fashion design.

Leila Hekmat's activity has officially been documented since 2015. And with the exclusion of a few trips for exhibitions or residencies between Paris, Glasgow, Tbilisi, and Hong Kong, Leila Hekmat has always chosen to produce and present her most important works in Berlin. To name just a few: “Pedicula” in 2017, “CROCOPAZZO!” in 2020, “Il Matrimonio di Immacolata” in 2021, and, lastly, “Female Remedy” in 2022, still today the most ambitious and complex work in the artist's time. Given permission to use the spaces of the Haus am Waldsee for four months, a historical building just outside of Berlin that has been hosting events, exhibitions, and art performances for over seventy-five years, she turned it into a sanatorium for the occasion, occupied solely by female staff and patients. Being a woman is indeed the illness that does not require treatment, that is substantially incurable, and that all the women who are hospitalized there, both religious figures and nurses, suffer from. And by way of the language of hysteria that they share, they manifest all their strength – enterprising, provocative, and impertinent. Transforming the sanatorium into a place in which to indulge in idiosyncrasies, desires, and delirium, the stage of a comical, exhilarating, and at times grotesque mise-en-scène. 

Leila Hekmat is an artist of multifaceted talent, whom I have been observing and admiring, and who has piqued my curiosity for some time now. In the space of a phone call I would have liked to learn everything or as much as possible. And so I tried to move from her origins to today. Proceeding in a rather linear way in the time that was much too short of our meeting-conversation on Face Time. In her studio in Berlin, about to become a mother for the first time, she nonetheless patiently introduced to me the present and the past, geographical movements and first professional experiences, projects realized and dreams still in a drawer somewhere. In short, just enough for me and for you to get an idea.

LH : My parents are Iranian and they moved to the United States in 1979, after the Revolution. My brother and I were born in Los Angeles, where I lived until I was 17, after which I moved to New York. There I studied photography at the Parsons School and at the Milton Avery School of Arts at Bard College. When I finished my studies I had to support myself, so I got right down to work. I chose to take on different types of jobs in the fashion sector, because they offered me the best opportunities to earn money.

I was a production assistant for fashion shows, I did shop displays… but I was also willing to accept more modest jobs, as long as they paid enough. I collaborated with many artists, stylists, fashion designers…So I could afford college and everything else. I eventually went to live with friends in the Lower East Side. Some of them managed a store and I worked there one day a week. We were all artists, and we worked on the displays. At a certain point one of the managers asked me to design a collection, and for a while I earned good money producing outfits for a Japanese group. I had no training in that field... Everything I made was by hand. After 12 years of living like that I quit everything and moved here to Berlin.  

MC: From that time to the present, I would say that as an artist you have produced and presented many performances, but almost exclusively in Germany. What was the basis for your decision?

LH: First of all, I have to say that things started rather late for me. I conceived my first works when I was already 35, and here, in this community, in this context, I had all that I needed. Producing and showing works in New York would have been easier at the time, I even had a studio there, but no one ever saw what I was doing. Actually, I had to start doing other things to be able to pay for the studio and to be able to work there.

When I moved to Berlin being able to do things suddenly seemed easier. I don't know why I have done everything here, I think it just happened.

MC: I also need to congratulate you because every one of your projects implies a great deal of work in terms of imagination and production. Everything is conceived and made by you, the costumes and even the wigs are handmade… and it's all so fabulous!  

On the one hand, you've been able to use your experience in fashion, but on the other, you render that experience functional to a totalizing design, breathing life into characters who are perfectly defined by a look that outlines their personalities and that makes them the eloquent interpreters of your performances. What do you like about the live exhibition? The dressing up, the chance to take on different roles and personalities, the coming to terms directly with the public? You are gentle, kind, even shy in life, but you are not at all so on stage. Your performances are always very eccentric and powerful, provocative and destabilizing, engaging and demanding both in form and in content.

Tell me everything about your most recent "colossal" project, “Female Remedy,” a performance that is extended in space and time. We begin from your point of view today, and then we go back in time...

LH: “Female Remedy” required a great deal of work in a very short amount of time, but I am pleased with the results. I would say the performance includes all of the ingredients that I have always thought should be combined in my work. I love making costumes, which allow us to communicate a great deal of things... Moreover, in this case it's about psychiatry in the context of a hospital... In the past the characters in my performances expressed human conditions, the way they saw themselves, feelings of fragility, vulnerability... But in “Female Remedy” I was able to express my interest in psychiatry, the mind, verbal and non-verbal behavior, how women are considered in a context such as this one. The idea was to imagine a place where a disease does not require a cure. And I worked a great deal on the humor, because comedy always thrives alongside tragedy inside a hospital. And in “Female Remedy” the dividing line between what is tragic and what is sad and what is very amusing and dark becomes extremely subtle.

MC: Have you ever thought of recording your performances? I don't believe there is a film or video version of them. And if such versions really do not as yet exist, do you think it might be possible to consider transferring them to film or to digital form, so that the public can relate to your work, approach it and delve deeper into it even in places that are different and distant in time? Do you still have the costumes you conceived for your work over the years? If so, where and how? Do you create an archive for them? Do you keep them in storage, or do you like to have them around, close at hand?

LH: I keep all my costumes in the studio. After “CROCOPAZZO!” I thought it would be necessary to make a film of my performances so they could continue to exist. A form of documentation would make no sense, if no one sees it then I don't think it would be of any value. I would like to find a language that transforms the performance into a film. I would like it to somehow maintain the quality of a play, albeit in a different key. Generally the theater costumes aren't made with the same crazy details and materials that I use in my work, just as the appearance of all the characters never seems to be as accurate… This extreme attention to detail cannot be documented. That is why I began filming my performances. The first of these was “CROCOPAZZO!” I then continued with “Il Matrimonio di Immacolata,” but I still haven't finished the job.  

MC: How is what you do conceived? Do you start from the visual or from the writing?

LH: It generally starts from a collection of photographs and from a word, "hospital," for instance, Then I start thinking about the context, about what it can contain. At that point I conceive the costumes that I imagine in that frame. The research broadens, I take every direction possible, and everything takes on crazy dimensions. I don't just collect images, but texts, dialogues of all kinds, books and films, and ideas for my characters. Then I create a sort of outline of the story: what is the plot, how does it begin and end, which characters does it involve...

MC: Do you have some favorite films, or favorite directors, characters, periods described in cinema that you like more than others, that have fueled and inspired your personal research?

LH: Of course! Among the ones I love the most are Milos Forman and Peter Greenaway…Federico Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Roman Polanski…I have many favorite films and new ones are always being added.

MC: And what about your sense of the comical? You always know how to turn the serious into the facetious. And comedy is certainly not an easy text either to create or, even less so, to stage. Do you like to write when the moment arrives?

LH: (Laughing) That's the hardest part!  So then I call my mother to say I have writer's block and she says: “Oh Leila, you say that every time…”. But each work seems to take more time than the one before, I'd say that the text itself doesn't come out easily. There's loads of work behind it, research, reflections, pressure, and anxiety. It's very hard to write about amusing and comical things.

MC: Now I'd like to go back in time. Exclusively as concerns your activity as an artist and performer, where did you first begin? And how did you choose to proceed starting from that moment or that project?

LH: First I made a video of me watching a game show on YouTube. I had found one with Salvator Dalì among the guests. And in my game show I also tried to recreate that same Surrealist atmosphere. That was the first time I emerged from the confines of photography. I invited other people and I worked with them to make the costumes. I would say that the idea of having a group took shape from that project.

I love theater, perhaps because I come from Los Angeles, and I really like films, shows, television... And when the New Theater of Berlin offered to present one of my pieces in 2015 I naturally chose a dance piece. I still wasn't writing, but I was really interested in  Bob Fosse, I wanted to interpret this famous choreographer and I did so together with seven other performers, making all the costumes by myself. The day of the auditions a dancer showed up, while all the others were artists who were not particularly familiar with dance.  So I asked her to create a choreography for me seeing that I didn't know anything about it either. She laughed and replied "Let's do it then!" I showed her the images, the images and the steps I loved the most about Martha Graham, Bob Fosse, and other choreographers. 

MC: Wow! Remind me of the title and tell me how it ended.

LH: I called it “Mercury in Retrograde.” It was a lot of fun, all of it home-grown.

The next project instead came out of my first draft for a text and it's called “The French Mistake.” I think I worked on it in a very interesting way. I did the casting and the audition, which meant that lots of young people came to my studio. After deciding with whom I wanted to work I looked at their Facebook pages to see how they used the network. For some of them it was like a diary with lots of personal considerations. I extracted tons of material, all the parts where they talked about themselves, and I used it in the script. Even the music was composed based on some of their texts: a text by a performer who had talked about a visit to a museum became a song.

I made fifteen costumes for four performers used on the stage as paintings.

MC: I see that “The French Mistake” is dated to 2016. Then came “Pedicula,” which inaugurated your collaboration with the Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi. Which you both wrote and directed. I remember it was spectacular, visually incredible, with amazing costumes.

LH: It was a difficult performance, a very dark one, about many terrible things, for instance all the things I know about myself... And I wanted it to be more baroque, crazier, sort of like a melodrama. This is why I wanted to work with three opera singers.

My best friend is a dressmaker who works in New York. We've known each other for twenty years and she comes to Berlin to help me whenever I have a big project. We love sitting around sewing together, I think something up and the two of us imagine how to create it. And working together over the years we've become more and more laborious, we use fabrics that are more and more amazing, more and more padding, more and more embroidery, just like in real couture. This also happened with the costumes for “Pedicula.” I also had an excellent assistant helping me, Elsa, who studied at a fashion school as well.

MC: What about “The Organ Grinder’s Canto," the 2018 performance that you exceptionally presented in Hong Kong at Duddell’s, a prestigious Chinese restaurant?  

LH: I wrote it at a very dark time in my life, I was getting a divorce, and I was terribly sad... I think that in that restaurant it was good, sad, but also funny that no one liked the  performance…no one understood the language, not because it wasn't in English, but because I had chosen some complicated poetic constructions.

MC: What are the people you bring to the stage like, where do they come from, how were they trained? You seem to have chosen freely, with no fixed rules...

LH: I work with a performer who is also my partner, I met him in 2015. I choose based on castings and auditions. I also work with artists, but in general these are people chosen at random, friends, people off the street, or people I see and contact on Instagram. With the exception of three opera singers in “Pedicula,” they are hardly ever professionals. More often than not they're ordinary people.

MC: How long does it take you to teach them? And which do you believe was your best collaboration?

LH: I think that still today the best cast was the one in “CROCOPAZZO!”: ten people in all, of which only two came from theater. But it was the group's chemistry that was special. There was a guy who was 19. who I'd only heard sing. I thought it would be interesting to invite him, I assigned him one of the most important roles, and he really blew me away.

In “Female Remedy” as well I only worked with male and female friends, six performers who came to terms with extremely complex material, long monologues, very intense and moving personal stories. It wasn't easy for them, also because in addition to having to memorize their lines, they had to speak English and many of them didn't know the language.  They were forced to quote and say things that they often didn't even know the meaning of. Doing that and doing it well was really incredible.

MC: I also think that the roles never depend on the gender of the people playing the roles Today you might say your approach is fluid...

LH: Yes, I do so in a very conscious and unconscious way, but I'm not interested in political statements.

MC: I know you're expecting now. I'd like to come to Berlin soon so I can meet you.

LH: I waited a long time to have a baby. And in the past I made many costumes with a pregnant belly, because I thought it was a strange and abstract concept. Someone even went to far as to say that since I had always seen myself as a child who would never grow up, I would become a woman who would never have children. I found it strange to experience this change so pleasantly!

MC: What are you working on? What do you have in mind?

LH: I have a project I've been wanting to do for three years. It's called “The Gloriette” and it's about a department store that's sinking in Venice. I would like it to be mounted right in Venice with all the departments and the products, one that sells shoes, another bras, flowers, magazines... The water rises but the sales personnel continues to do its work...