About

Our Secret Little Ritual
Cool Water
East of Flumdiddle
The Password
Bacchanalian Revels
Jukebox

After an engagement the previous year, the gallery and performance space Diverse Works invited the group of New York performers not yet known as Watchface to Houston, Texas, in January of 1985. The gallery’s director, Michael Peranteau, had arranged for Iris Rose’s Of Little Women to be performed at Houston’s prestigious Alley Theater for one night, so he helped the group make good use of their time in Texas by also asking them to present an evening of shorter works at the gallery. On their first visit, they had shared excerpts of 1984: The Future Repeats Itself plus the first complete performance of Negotiations. The second visit’s bill featured Iris Rose’s recent solo work, the opera Camden, plus two brand new pieces: Chazz Dean and James Siena’s Boys Will Be Men, their first collaboration, and the first of four collaborations between Kim X Knowlton and Maggie Siena, Our Secret Little Ritual.

Kim and Maggie had both performed in Iris’ House of Jahnke in 1983 and Of Little Women
the following year. After these experiences, they were ready to take on the creation of a
performance of their own. The trip to Texas was the perfect opportunity.

During the conception of the show, Maggie was a History major at New York University. She
was particularly passionate about ancient history, and one specific fascination was the
Eleusinian Mysteries of ancient Greece. These were annual initiation ceremonies for the cult
of Demeter and Persephone based at Eleusis outside of Athens. Eleusinian Mysteries depiction
The Mysteries represented the myth of the abduction of Persephone from her mother
Demeter by Hades, the god of the underworld, in a cycle of three phases: the descent, the
search, and the ascent. reunion of Demeter and Persephone depiction Of all the Mysteries
celebrated, these were held to be of the greatest importance and were kept secret. Initiates
were sworn to secrecy on pain of death as to the details of the rituals, but those who
participated in the Mysteries were said to be forever changed for the better.

The cycle of the Eleusinian Mysteries became the structure and the inspiration for the
performance. With the ancient ceremonies predominantly still unknown, Kim and Maggie
made up their own rites. There was no way of guessing what the ancient sacraments might
have been, so they could neither recreate nor modernize them. They used ideas such as
journey, reunion, quest, and catharsis to create their rituals, which reflected the descent,
search, and ascent of the original cycle. Despite its foundation in serious historical research,
however, an essential ingredient of the piece was humor. Both women wanted the show to
have an additional – and obvious – layer of wit and comedy.

The performance was primarily movement-oriented with little text. The actions were
performed as tasks, as opposed to set and specific routines, appearing more spontaneous
and random. Clips from found music were used as accompaniment. The music reflected
the concepts that inspired the rituals but also had a comedic bent, such as the 1949
recording by Sons of the Pioneers, “Cool Water.” The lyrics to the old cowboy hymn
described a journey through a barren wasteland where the constant pursuit for cool, clear
water is thwarted by mirage in the day and pools of stars at night. This corny country western
classic played during the first section, which acted as a purification rite in preparation for the
Mysteries. Maggie stepped into a partially filled child’s wading pool; cupping water from the
pool in her hands, she slowly poured it down the back of her neck, savoring the feeling. She
took a second scoop of water and downed a voracious drink. Kim joined Maggie in the
pool; they repeated the actions together in unison several times, duplicating the ritualized
movements exactly.

The third section, The Password, contained the only set dialogue, with references to their
purification rite.

Maggie:
I took off the robe.

Kim:
I went into the kiddie pool.

Maggie:
I did the walk.

Kim:
I put on the colors.

Both:
I accept the consequences.

During the recitation of these lines, the women ceremoniously smeared cream cheese onto
one another’s faces. They proceeded to make their version of kykeon, a peasant drink from
early Greece made mainly of water, barley, and other naturally occuring substances. It is
beleived that in the case of the Eleusianian Mysteries, kykeon was used in the ritual’s climax
to break a sacred fast and also may have contained pyschoactive compounds. Kim and
Maggie’s version was made with sliced fruit and a blender. They poured the liquid into four
paper cups, fed it to each other, and then each fed a randomly-selected audience
member. The empty cups were smashed and simultaneously thrown over their shoulders
onto the stage behind them.

After falling backwards into the wading pool at the end of the prior section, the very brief
final montage had the lights come up on the women, still lying in the pool, as they both lit
cigarettes and let out a quiet sigh of release.

This first collaboration, Our Secret Little Ritual, was as much a social experiment as an
investigation and utilization of the performance concepts and techniques they were
exposed to in House of Janhke and Of Little Women. During the creation and rehearsal
process, the two women were also taking acting classes from the same instructor and were
roommates. Maggie recalls the experience as “two crazy girls being wild together.”

Following the premier in Texas, the only other performance of Our Secret Little Ritual was as
part of an assemblage of Watchface works at Jeffrey Neale Gallery in New York City two
years later. It was the final piece in the collection of works titled A Watchface Sampler.
Jeffrey Neale Gallery card
Jeffrey Neale Gallery program