Pushing Up Daisies
Performance at Open Studios, Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten Amsterdam, The Netherlands
May 2025
A pamphlet I found on the street poses the question:Do you worry about the fear of death?The question is grammatically specific. The question is not "do you worry about death", but rather:does the fear of death worry you?
This performance departs from considering the fear of death as a symptom of Western society, where medicalization, social stigma, secularization, censorship of genocide, and self-optimization abstract one of the few experiences all living bodies share, with the privilege of time or distance, or through violent interruption.
In the corner of a room that is lit with theater lights that fade in and out and move, a quilted wooden stage waits for live intervention. In a sequence of four vignettes, a two-sided puppet serves as a messenger from a threshold between life and death, where they sit in perpetuity.
- -Lili Huston-Herterich
As a performance, Pushing Up Daisies is 40-minutes in total, and comprises of four 10-minute chapters:
- American Yoga, where a two-sided puppet has a crisis about broadcast death and their own mortality in a CorePower yoga class, while their other side tries to shut them up.
Towering People, where a puppet describes a dream of two interwoven funerals of public figures.
Death Bed, where a puppet explains the conditions in which they would like to die.
You Are A Stain, where a two-sided puppet sings a song with their puppeteer.
In the context of a weekend exhibition, the performances interrupted the exhibition twice daily.
