Vie Boheme (she/her). Photo courtesy to Buck Holzemer.
VIE BOHEME
CEDAR COMMISSIONS SPOTLIGHT INTERVIEWS
Over the next few weeks we’re featuring the six artists of the 2021-2022 Cedar Commissions (taking place Friday, February 18th, and Saturday, February 19th at The Cedar) in a series of interviews on our site. The Cedar Commissions is a flagship program for emerging Minnesotan composers and musicians made possible with a grant from the Jerome Foundation.
In the second and now third year of the COVID-19 pandemic where shifts in daily life have been ever-present, these artists have been riding the waves. They’ve been composing, exploring new ideas, and assembling teams of musicians to bring their work to fruition in a mix of virtual and in-person work sessions. Over the two nights of the Eleventh Annual Cedar Commissions, audience members will witness performances about uncovering hidden truths of one's ancestors, uniting African music traditions across drawn lines, illuminating the Third Culture Kid experience, pushing oneself to the ultimate limit, the relational process of self discovery, honoring the disrespected beauty of our planet, and so much more.
Our fifth spotlight interview is with Vie Boheme (she/her). Vie is a vocalist, poet, producer, dancer, yoga instructor, and more as a multimedia artist. Her new work for the 2021-2022 Cedar Commissions The Edge supportively encourages the listener and viewer to reflect upon being at ones ‘wits’ end,’ and assess what lessons they can learn from reaching that point. Vie spoke with Marketing and Communications Manager Shasa Sartin about approaching edges within herself, being connected to ones body, and the importance of crafting stability and familiarity for an audience.
“So if I can put people in a visceral state of being concerned — ‘cause sometimes people are concerned for my safety when they watch me — they’re on their edge. So putting you in a state of concern and trust at the same time, where you’re worried, but you trust that I can do this.
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Shasa Sartin (she/her): Your project for the Cedar Commissions is titled The Edge, and in your blurb describing your performance you shared that you practice being at your own personal edge through your two performance signatures. Are you often drawn to pushing yourself to your limits?
Vie Boheme (she/her): Yeah, I would say that being a dancer, specifically [that] being the apple of my eye for a long time as a kid and in the early part of my creative career — I went to college for dance, I focused on dance all the way through — that is a constant practice of pushing yourself to a new edge and discovering what more you're capable of, and doing the work to find what that is. So I would say that is part of where that comes from. And I would say the other part of where that comes from is my experience growing up in church in Detroit as a kid. There's something distinctly signature about the African-American experience in an unfortunate way, in the US. But also spiritually speaking, I think a really strong practice is the durational, physical practice of expressing vocally and physically, cyclically, to really get the body and the mind to a space to be able to be available for the spirit. And so I think the combination of my dance experience, but also growing up in church and watching the spirit move are two places where I've found spiritual and physical edges.
Shasa: So then maybe the concept of being at the edge is not only relevant right now in these past few years living through the COVID-19 pandemic, but it's a life-long type of experience.
Vie: Yeah, I would say that, yes. And I would say that I'm always on some type of edge within my own self and in my own art making and all this. I've kind of always been that way. But in 2020, I found that the world around me was also now on that similar edge. Everybody was at the edge of their wits and at the edge of their patience, at the edge of their friendships, edges of their relationships, romantically, their marriages, their relationships with their kids, everybody was at the edge of patience. Edge of everything.
I'm always self-studying and figuring out how to evolve. I say that I have a perpetual Phoenix paradigm. I'm always like dying and evolving and re-birthing again! It's very dramatic of a life I've lived in a self-evolving way. So I found that I looked to my left and my right, and we were all kind of in that deep, intense space together.
Photo by Bill Cameron.
Shasa: You mentioned that dance was the apple of your eye growing up, and from your website I see that you're also a yoga instructor. Can you talk about the relationship between your music and your physical art forms? (Not to suggest that music isn't physical.) Could you speak to the way that they intersect?
Vie: So yoga, I would say, was my gateway to myself. For lack of a better way of saying it, it was my gateway to my body and my gateway to my mind and my spirit. I feel like the breath practice is what gave me the capacity to function at my edge. It's funny 'cause as I'm writing this music, I've also been able to get old journals from 10 years ago, and sometimes when you have enough distance away from a thing and you really can say hindsight is 20/20. You can see very clearly where you were and what was going on in your mind. Which is why I love journaling because I have literal snapshots of what my mind was like and how it operated. And I'm very far from that now. But I was always very, very critical mentally, I micro-manage my own thoughts. And so I am still in my head a lot today, but not in a critical way, I'm just always in deep layers of thought, comfortably. I just live in that mental space.
Whereas before, I was very anxious, I probably could have taken meds, honestly, for the type of anxiety that I was always experiencing. So when I got to really diving into my yoga practice, it gave me the capacity to manage what was going on in my mind and what was going on in my body. And being able to create a synergy, which allowed these crazy ideas I had about what I could do on stage. It's like I could see myself doing it, but I was too frantic and anxious to actually do it. So my yoga practice gave me the capacity to manage myself in order to continue to grow creatively.
Vie performing amongst a crowd. Photo by Amy Jeanchaiyaphum.
Shasa: You shared that in your performance you'll be balancing on one leg in high heels and singing while you're standing on your head. What made you want to choreograph these things for this performance?
Vie: Well, it's funny because they're things I was already doing to an extent. Balancing on one leg is something I do all the time, I've done that for years. But the context with which I was doing it was always... it wasn't the primary focus. It was just something else that was happening. So I wanted to really dial it in so that it's a more cohesive experience and expression where that movement is facilitating what I'm saying about balance or what I'm saying about love. That the physical is really, sensibly, giving a more visual representation or a visceral experience for my audience. There's a very intentional reason why I'm pushed to that far edge, and that's what it is for me.
It also comes from a piece I did a couple of years ago that was more theatrical where I was singing while standing on my head in high heels, and I was singing about my heart being broken, and I would fall, and get back up and do it again. And then fall. So there's almost this performance art aspect of the durational nature of it. What does it do for an audience member to continue to watch something like, "if you're gonna do all that, you might as well be flawless, how dare you fall?" And so for me as a Black woman, that's a really interesting idea to me. That we are super human in some ways to people emotionally. Yes, my heart is broken, but I'm still gonna sing while standing upside down and be backwards in high heels and dancing my legs around. For me, it is a meditation on, and a confrontation of those things. And so a lot of times my performances can live in a lot of places. They can live in theater, in a black box, on a proscenium, in a music venue, in an art gallery, or a museum. And that's fun, but it was creating, over time, a certain disjointed nature to some of my expressions. And so being on stage with a full band with raging energy and being in charge of the band and dancing, I'm really great at that, but it's really hard to really ... quiet. To be specific and say certain things.
And not just for me, I also am trying to keep my audience in mind because something I've learned over the years, [is that] it's hard for people to pay attention to more than one thing at a time. That's not even a fancy realization that's just like, people can only focus on so many things at a time. But I really wanna focus more on helping to educate my audience to be ready to process more than one thing at a time, because I think there's lessons in that ability to pay attention to more than one thing at a time. How can that really change the way we're interacting with each other? I'm always really fascinated with dichotomies and oppositions co-existing. So if I can put people in a visceral state of being concerned — 'cause sometimes people are concerned for my safety when they watch me — they're on their edge. So putting you in a state of concern and trust at the same time, where you're worried, but you trust that I can do this. There's so many reasons why, but having a chance to really create music, not with a full band this time and really write music that supports these signatures that I do, so that I can have more potent experiences with people.
Photo by Bill Cameron.
Shasa: Do you have any collaborators for this project?
Vie: Yeah, so I'm writing music with MMYYKK, who is a dear friend and colleague I've known for years now. He is a producer and filmmaker, and he also hails from a group called ZuluZuluu. We've been working together in different ways over the years, and so we finally have a chance to make music. I wanted to make music that's electro-soul in style. So something that has a capacity for a deep pulse. There's beats, but I want something that has more of an undertone, an understatement, a consistency that can be trusted and relied on. And then there are other things that can happen on top.
We've worked together a lot. We did a lot of yoga meditation work last year and during the pandemic, so we already kinda have a synergy with that.
Shasa: What else we can expect sonically from The Edge?
Vie: I don't know how to describe it. Some of his samples give me some nostalgia, so like drama, nostalgia, over really smooth, pulsing [beats]. The drums and the baseline... that is what I listen to and listen for before anything else, most of the time. And when I've been performing, and I wanna take risks melodically or rhythmically with melody and make variations, or when I wanna do things like that, the audience struggles to follow me. That's a hard thing for people. They like consistency, they like predictability, they feel comfortable with it. Now, that doesn't mean that I'm never gonna make things that are not easy to follow, it just means that I have to work with people to bring [them] where I want them to go. So I feel like if I wanna do all this crazy stuff, I have to provide something of a bed for my audience to settle into and be comfortable with and trust and rely on while they're having an experience that they can't, maybe, process.
That's been a common thing for me sometimes. People have a really hard time. It doesn't mean they don't enjoy it, but it's just a lot to process at one time. And it doesn't mean people aren't capable, but there's things I wanna help them with in order to allow them the space to process. So I feel that electro-soul music is a good way to do that. It's gonna give something that they can continue to nod their head with while they're observing whatever it is.
Photo by Bill Cameron.
Shasa: That was great. Now I'm thinking of one of my favorite 2021 albums called By The Time I Get To Phoenix by Injury Reserve. They're a rap group and some people have begun to describe them as "post-rap" because this album was quite discordant. It was well received in a lot of ways, but one major critique from their listeners was that it was hard for them to connect with it, at least initially. And for the same reasons you're bringing up being that there's not much to grab on to because it kind of throws you all over the place.
Vie: I was having a conversation with a colleague about that, about improvisation in dance, and why certain types of dance may or may not catch on as quick as others, and it's a fine line. And it depends on what you wanna do. So everybody has their different values of what they value, what they don't value. In my personal opinion, in order to have an audience come along with you, that is the power of the melody. The power of it is something that people can remember. And when you remove that sense of reliability it doesn't mean people can't enjoy it, but in terms of coming back to it ... what are they holding on to?
And the same thing for movement. Watching someone improvise, it could feel like a run-on sentence. It doesn't mean it's not beautiful, but I can't tell you what they said. It could be the most beautiful improvisation in the world — and there are artists who specialize in this type of work, there's no value system to it for me — but the practicality of a mind that isn't trained for movement to be able to track what you're doing and follow the conversation you're having with your body, that's just been a challenging thing, to me, for people [to do]. People also separate themselves from their body so much, in such a way that they really look at dancers as something outside of themselves. Like, "oh wow, y'all do that over there, y'all are athletes," but dance is different. 'Cause people look at athletes and definitely feel like they're superhuman in some ways, but they feel more related to them because then they may not be able to play basketball to the same degree as LeBron James, but they can play basketball. And they know they can play basketball, and they can relate to the body experience in a certain way.
[In] American culture how we interact with movement and dance and connect to other people [has changed so drastically]. It really happened with disco. When we hit the disco era, and we stopped hearing a live human beings play instruments, that did something to our culture when there wasn't that human aspect to the sounds we were hearing. That changed things. And it also changed our experience with dance. We stopped facing each other, we started having these individual experiences and we didn't see anyone else. We stopped dancing heart-to-heart, we don't even slow dance anymore. So all of these small things have changed significantly how we relate to sound and music.
I'm trying to find a middle ground for myself of like, "okay, let me give y'all something, because I wanna do this thing over here." It feels like I'm in a space of negotiation in order to express myself and increase capacity for my audience to stay in relationship with me. It's not like I wanna please people, but I want them to be able to connect with me, so that's also what's driving me to create in this way right now.
Vie performing on stage. Photo by Amy Jeanchaiyaphum.
Shasa: Do you have any final comments?
Vie: I guess what I'm gonna share in February is just a look into what I've been working on. I don't know if I truly believe in final projects anymore, like I used to. It's alive. The art is alive. And it's gonna change after an audience is present. So if people have an experience: tell me about it. Let me know, let's get into that feedback. I challenge the Twin Cities audience with that, too, because I'm an East Coaster, so people gon' say it. But it's always like pulling teeth in the Twin Cities. So I want to say, if you feel something, if you have an experience, let me know. Whether it's good or bad. I do not want only good feedback. Tell me what confused you, tell me what didn't make sense, tell me what you needed more information on. That's all really helpful, useful information.
Catch Vie Boheme’s performance of The Edge premiering live at The Cedar on Saturday, February 19th as part of the Eleventh Annual Cedar Commissions. Buy tickets here.