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Irina Kruchinina

Interviewed by Thrasyvoulos Kalaitzidis in the LSU Quad, on February 23rd, 2021.

Irina Kruchinina, a performance artist with a Ph.D in Comparative Literature, who grew up in Russia, came to our appointment in the LSU Quad carrying two delicious Swedish cinnamon rolls called Kanelbullar. I ate both of them in less than a minute while Irina was saying how she can’t handle dough very well.

Thras: So, I think I have heard you complaining before about not being good at cooking and at other “domestic” activities like knitting and I remember you telling a story about a class for “women stuff” that you had at school which you didn’t like very much.

Irina: Yes, we basically had this horrible teacher. We were supposed to learn so many different things about home. We had a sewing section, a knitting section, embroidery–I actually enjoyed this one because it was meditative! I really like detail, so it was nice to work on something so small. But I gave up on it after I failed to complete a picture I was making with a violet-color thread. It was a picture of a rabbit and I was making it for my great-grandmother, but I don’t know what happened and part of the rabbit’s face ended up looking very asymmetrical. I don’t know what possibly went wrong, since everything is so visible in embroidery. I wasn’t able to undo it because it was one thread that connected all of the face and ear, so I never gave it to her as a birthday present–she died when I was eleven. But I still have this unfinished rabbit sitting on a shelve as a reminder that it’s not finished; it’s like a photographic image of an unfinished thread in my mind, after 20 years! So, we would do this class on Saturdays and one day the teacher had us boil macaroni, not any specific dish or anything fancy, just boil the macaroni. We started the process, put the pots on fire, and she told us we could leave for our French class and she would take care of it, she would switch it off. We came back after our French class and the macaroni had become like porridge; it was disgusting! And we got so sad! We had nothing to put on the table that we were preparing! Then we had to sew a skirt, a very simple skirt, it was not rocket science! But it made no sense to me. I blocked my mind and said, “I don’t know how to do those seams!”

Thras: You were simply not in the mood of doing this kind of stuff?

Irina: It just didn’t make any sense to me. You know last year I was experimenting with video poetry and I was using these very simple Windows editor, where there is barely anything you can do. So then, I tried Premiere for a video I was making for a class and I was overwhelmed, I found it very complicated. I said, “there’s no way I will learn how to do that”! I thought I would either end up feeling miserable or making really primitive movies! But when I started making this video-poem, it suddenly made sense what to do. All these means become part of the process and this kind of learning is not just a mechanical thing. It is like dance in a sense, a movement that you are doing while figuring out the connections. You are figuring out what you are doing by being in touch with the material. So, eventually, video editing mattered to me. I was interested in it and I started doing more fancy stuff, etc. With sewing I never reached that point. I was sitting through the class, not doing anything, pretending that I am doing something. I got back home and asked my grandmother to sew a skirt for me, just to check that box. I still have this skirt and I wear it even! It is interesting how I have all these residues of failures!

Thras: I am glad you mentioned that video because it taught me how to dry clothes at home! (laughs) Hanging hangers from the ceiling fans–that was inventive! But also, that “Performance Theory” class was where we got to know each other. In that class I realized that for many people the road to performance goes through text and literature. I had no idea about that because for me performance was part of visual arts. How did you end up working with performance? I guess it was not something that you were dreaming about when you were nine years old. I guess it appeared somewhere in the process.

Irina: This is a very funny question because performance was something I was dreaming about when I was nine, quite literally! (laughs) Actually at that time, I didn’t like to read, and I was reading by compulsion because I had this list of books that I constantly had to read, and I kept saying to my mom that I had read them. I only liked three books: an adaptation of Dante for children, the most beautiful adaptation of Shakespeare for children (which was so vivid that I probably liked it better than Shakespeare himself), and Notre-Dame de Paris, but not so much because of the book, but mostly because of the musical that was going on in Paris at that time. My mom had brought this black-and-white VHS that I watched. So, performance for me actually goes back to childhood. I was 11 or 12 and I told my mom that I want to be a director in theater. Without meaning to discourage me from dreaming, she told me that realistically it’s not possible; you either need to have connections or money.

Thras: She is a realist!

Irina: Somebody has to, right? So, I took this for granted, I didn’t question it, I didn’t get upset. Performance was just something that had come up organically because I liked telling stories. Since I was 4, my mom had me reciting lessons to her. We were going from home to school and I had to recite a history lesson. Going from school to the dance class I had to find synonyms. There was one word that I couldn’t remember, “Pasmournyj”, which means grey, muddy weather and I even remember the place where I remembered this word for the first time. But sometimes I would try to trick my mom and I would say to her “ok, I was telling you lessons for so long, now it’s my turn!” And I was telling her stories about some imaginative world that I had created. There were events happening there every single night! I would “fly” there during the night. I had a life in that world that was truer than anything else. So, we were walking, and I would tell what I did in that world, and about the room and the house that I had, and how I went to school there, and the street dogs who were cooking in my house. It was a land where I was really, truly living.

Thras: It sounds so great to have had so much communication with your mom.

Irina: I think that performance is a lot related to my mom, more than I could imagine. We even started talking more, since I started doing this. It’s like saying “I was doing lessons for twenty years, now it’s my turn to tell stories!”. When we would go to the sea, my mom would take me with her, and I was going around talking to adults, to children and I was always telling stories. I was naming myself and started talking.

Thras: You were naming yourself?

Irina: Yes, I would give myself a name.

Thras: Not your real name.

Irina: No!

Thras: What was that name?

Irina: It’s actually a name that I now hate, “Faina” but I liked it back then because of a pop music group; they were singing that song with that name “Faina, Faina, Faina!” So, people, adults, would come to my mom and tell her “Oh, we met your daughter, Faina, and she told us all these amazing things about this school! Where is this school?” My mother thought they were mistaken, but then I would run through and they were like “Wait, this is your daughter!”, “Yes, this is my daughter, but her name is not Faina and she is not doing all this stuff at school!”. Somehow, I was doing it very convincingly! When we were actually going to the seaside, in Crimea, which was a 24 hour journey with the train from Moscow, I would get other children with me and we would go to every little room in the train and we would either tell stories, or sing, or whatnot, and people would give us candy.

Thras: A child performer!

Irina: Yes, when I went to a hospital, which was a horrible place…

Thras: Because you couldn’t perform?

Irina: There is no such place! The treatment was bad. But I organized the children and some teachers that were there, and we created this fairyland where we were living and playing all day long. When my parents came to take me away, the nurses told them “Please don’t take her away, we are all living in this fairyland!” There was always the possibility for stories. Then I started reading more and reading put me a little bit in a dark place and I started being more secluded, not talking to people a lot, because it is a solitary activity. Then I wanted to be a writer, but I realized I cannot do it, so I said “ok, I will do philology!” But, of course, I didn’t know about performance as a study area.

Thras: What was your mother doing as a job?

Irina: Initially she was doing nuclear chemistry. She was at graduate school for that and she was working in the lab–that’s where she met my dad. But she had this controversial group of friends who would gather at her house, really interesting people: hardcore scientists who were discussing literature that was prohibited during the Soviet Union. She was a very rebellious spirit…

Thras: Sorry, a quick parenthesis, what kind of literature was banned during the Soviet Union?

Irina: Even Bulgakov was banned! Pasternak was banned, Solzhenitsyn was banned, all good literature that makes you think was banned until the 80s (the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991). People would give each other prints in secret. So, for me, literature still had this flair of something prohibited, something like the secret of truth that people hide like alchemists. My mother was always interested in literature and other cultural phenomena. She knows so much; she is a very thinking person.

Thras: And your father?

Irina: Originally, he is a helicopter engineer. But he worked a little bit as a physicist, and he always talks physics with me. But in the beginning of the 90s, when I was born and when the Soviet Union fell, all the good scientists, and teachers, translators, and artists, they all went to sell trousers in the market. They would buy them cheap from China and resale them in Russia. In that time everyone became a businessman in a sense. So, my mom focused on helping me with school to give me good foundations because she was very anxious that I was going to be stupid, she had this fear since I was a child. She had to do everything so that I am not dumb! We have this expression in Russian which means “overbending”. I was like “why am I doing this?”, that’s why I was telling her stories. There were so many other things that mattered, why did I have to come up with synonyms?

Thras: I don’t think that this synonyms thing was a bad idea.

Irina: Actually, it is not! And I think that this is the core of my investigation. My whole life is synonyms! Trying to find the subtle differences between similar things. Poetry is exactly in those hues. You have all the ways to say something but what you are actually saying remains a negative space. But still, I always hated them when I was a kid! I thought I didn’t have any friends, and I was just going from one school to another school reciting lessons in between! Of course, looking back at that period, I can see that I had friends. You know, I was also very flirtatious as a kid! I was probably more aware that I was a little woman than later in my life. All these flourishing love stories happened when I was nine! And, of course, they were totally platonic. But they included a lot of drama, emotion, and conversations.

Thras: I remember this very dramatic period of childhood. Everything was huge! I asked you about your parents because very often, when I am making art, or writing, I feel like I am replicating things that my parents do but in a different format. Have you ever felt the same?

Irina: The further I develop, the more I feel it. My father is an inventor. As a kid, he would find things in trash cans and make bombs and boats that would work. As a kid, he was even published in a journal for construction! With my father we make this joke about things we dream to invent. I don’t know the details of his projects, but I know the subject. He has become one of the main metaphors in my work.

Thras: Since I don’t have any inventors among my relatives, I am curious to know what the driving force of inventing is.

Irina: I think it’s a play. My father is really playful, in general. Inventing doesn’t mean you do anything new; if it is possible to make, there is a possibility there! You just have to see these possibilities and bring them up. It feels as if you are inventing but it is right there! The idea of wings is right there; any birds have wings. You just have to see it in a different way. So, when he does this, it is his time to think. Let’s say he has two objects in his hands. He sits, and questions how the details between these two things are connected, how can this connection be magnified? It is time to sit and think, contemplate. It does not originate in ambition. Of course, we joke with each other, like “when are you going to get a Nobel?”, etc.

Thras: This is so fascinating that he devotes a specific timeframe to thinking and “playing”. What is your routine? One of the things I admire in you is that you can do a hundred and fifty different things in a day while I can only do five. (laughs) What does your day look like? You wake up very early, right?

Irina: For some reason writing goes really well in the morning, probably because I’m not totally wake yet. I mean, I’m awaken; I drink coffee while I’m doing that!

Thras: Does coffee help?

Irina: At this point it is like a ritual. I don’t want to say I need it, but I am a little bit dependent on it. I need this cup to stand in front of me. And I need it hot, so I warm it in the microwave all the time!

Thras: You need the performance of the cup!

Irina: Yes! Is there anything to keep the coffee hot? (laughs) So, I start with this ten-lines project which is great because it feels like time to pray. I start my day with a prayer, anyway. I am trying to focus on fulfilling something as a human. Somehow thoughts, ideas, and visions come together while I am writing about them and they become plans. And that makes me a little bit upset, because there are so many plans to do. I do some writing about that. Then some schoolwork comes together–deadlines help to complete things–but then I have two or three hours in the day when this kind of depression kicks in when suddenly there are so many things to do. I have a whole list of things to do. Then, it’s 1 pm and it feels like I don’t have anything to do. It happens on a mental level. It is a point where nothing makes sense anymore. It is a bit annoying because it happens during the day. But I am glad to embrace this moment because you can actually be a bit still, you don’t need to contradict anything. Yesterday, I was talking with my mom, and this took a bit too long, but I also needed to prepare a lecture. It was about Plato’s Symposium, which I really like. I wanted to find time to talk to my students about Plato, but somehow, I was sitting and not working. So, I got up and started baking for my friend who had her birthday while re-listening the audiobook on Symposium. For me relatability is the driving force. I have certain things that I really want to say to somebody. I have a wish to connect, so by making something for this person, or in relation to this person, or by trying to explain this person, or by helping them find some good meaning, I suddenly find energy, time, and it is possible to do these millions of things.

Thras: You mentioned earlier that you start your day with a prayer. How spirituality fits in your day, or environment.

Irina: It’s not that it fits, I fit into it. Everything starts from it and everything aims to it. It is fascinating to see how much is given. I try to multiply it and make space for the works of love that I am not capable of, but somehow when I am part of this prayer, I am making it, too. That’s why I am not really afraid when I have these “no meaning” moments in the day, because eventually it’s not about making, it’s not about checking off projects. These are times for prayer, too. It is a gift to be able to think in this constructive way where things are coming together, and you need to figure out a way to take this gift and multiply it.

Thras: I really like the word “multiply”. I think it fits nicely in this conversation of spirituality.

Irina: Lately I was thinking about John the Baptist, who is saying that “I’m not anything, I’m just making the path”. It almost feels as if you are making these pipes, these connecting vessels for the words to connect but making is already in these words or is these words.

Thras: Thank you Irina, I really enjoyed this conversation!

Irina: It was so interesting to talk in the mode of an interview!