Brandi Divine
interviewed by True
x
On sobriety, prophecy, performance, prayer, poetry, hypnotherapy, & more...
Who am I? I don’t think I’m here to be easily explained. I think I’m here to disturb people awake. I’m someone who’s spent enough time in the dark to stop being impressed by performance. I care about what’s holy, what’s broken, what still trembles underneath the surface. My work comes from that place. Not to decorate the world, but to reveal it.I stand for beauty with teeth. Tenderness that doesn’t apologize for itself. Truth that ruins sleep. And if I have any calling, it’s this: to be a kind of prophet through my work not predicting the future, but dragging what’s been hidden into the light. Making people feel something real enough to change them.
What are you doing right now?
Rolling a cigarette. Norwegian shag.
And where are we?
Noelia’s stoop. Can I get a time check?
It’s like 2:30. What are you doing after this?
Buying a vintage dress, dinner at Balthazar that I don’t pay for, then I’m going to Alan Vega’s birthday party.
Incredible.
Well first I’m going to sell poems outside of the party so that I can get the money to get let in to his birthday party
This is how you make money, generally? Selling poems?
No. I just kind of do what it takes.
Why sell poems?
Well I actually just started doing it this month to challenge myself to go on the streets because I’m usually in venues, and I didn’t want to wait around for a “job” and I’m really broke right now and I wanna leave for my artist residency and to visit family so… Gotta do what it takes.
Yeah. It’s sort of a time-honored tradition. If you have an asset to sell you should sell it, y’know?
I have a lot of assets to sell I just wake up and pick one.
How would you define your artistic practice?
Embodiment
Through what medium?
Depends on my mood, depends on the weather. Um. Today I’m feeling like a poet.
[Seeing someone across the street] I went to college with this guy. Yo, Adam!
ADAM: Brandi!
BRANDI: I’m in the middle of an interview right now.
How’s it going?
ADAM: Oh shit, sorry
No, you’re good.
BRANDI: True runs Ethics Magazine
ADAM: Cool. How’s the interview going? It’s not live, is it?
No, don’t worry. I’ll edit this part out, I promise.
ADAM: Well I’m a big Brandi supporter and...
Actually this is great actually, let’s get a second opinion. Tell me what you know about Brandi, how you know each other, how you find her work. Tell us how you really feel.
ADAM: We met in school at UNCSA, like 2018, which is a long time now I’m realizing.
BRANDI: Almost ten years.
ADAM: A singular artist… Uh… Patti Smith part two, I’d say.
BRANDI: Someone recently that’s directing me in my next film said I’m somewhere in between Audrey Hepburn and Sid Vicious.
ADAM: That too. Cool.
BRANDI: How would you describe what I do?
ADAM: I mean this in the best way possible, I don’t know if I could describe what you do.
BRANDI: OK good, good, good.
ADAM: But you’re always doing it.
BRANDI: Exactly what you should say.
ADAM: Well, I gotta run.
Good to meet you.
BRANDI: That was great. There’s some things that are indescribable.
Yeah. OK so you’re doing a performance at Food tomorrow? Tell me a little bit about it.
It’s called A Waltz With Time and B. Divine. It’s an immersive experience where I play a timeless waitress for four hours.
In what way are you timeless?
You’ll just have to fuck around and find out. Most of my shows are like that, I don’t like spoilers. Magicians don’t reveal their secrets.
What was your last performance before this?
What was my last performance? Oh, I performed in Tompkins with a band called Broom. And they were playing their music that sounds like whale sounds and I took out the newspaper and I was like “PEOPLE DON’T READ THE NEWS ANYMORE” and then I just kinda opened it and made up shit that was in the newspaper like off the dome. It was a Father’s Day performance so I kept saying “Daddy I love you”
[A doordash delivery guy steps over us]
DOORDASH DELIVERY GUY: Sorry
You’re good, you’re good.
BRANDI: Should we move? Should we go somewhere?
I like the stoop. I love how it creates all these moments of interaction. Or just being a problem. And neither of us live here.
Story of my life.
So when you’re putting together a performance how much of it comes to you in the moment and how much is sort of pre-ordained?
So just like any of the forms the work takes, I do a lot of research and private rehearsals and I spend a lot of time—so like making a film or performance, I’ll start with a Spotify playlist of the tone, I’ll write diary entries through the character, do a lot of research on references, so that when it comes to the stage it just pours out of me naturally, it’s like I’m giving birth instead of, like, putting my baby inside a box. Because I look at each project like a baby, I actually become much like a mother wolf, I become fiercely protective, even with collaborators around my baby. I don’t like belligerent babysitters, so it’s more about giving birth than it is, like… Like you don’t work on building a baby like a machine inside of you, you just take care of it, and nurture it, and take the right vitamins so that it can grow and be healthy.
So it’s about taking the time in the gestation phase, and then—
And then it all comes out and floods. But tomorrow actually I’m trying something new, I’m gonna have my hypnotherapist meet me fifteen minutes before my performance to put me in a trance for it.
So you’re gonna be in a trance for the whole four hour performance?
Yep.
How long have you been doing hypnotherapy?
For the past month and a half.
Has it been beneficial to you?
It’s been hella beneficial. I started doing it as research because I wanna… I want my shows to feel like you’re on drugs or hypnotized, so it started as research but then I’ve gotten so much personal benefit out of it that I started just doing it. I’m gonna start teaching acting classes again in July, where the hypnotherapist will come in for a couple classes as a guest teacher to do self-hypnosis for actors.
So sick. So when you’re doing this performance you’re creating an altered state for you and the audience. Kind of a leading question but what’s your relationship to altered states?
Well, Sunday I’m thirty days sober.
Congratulations
Thank you. At first when I was using, it was like: “Oh this is research, and when I have a kid I won’t be able to do it anymore,” but then the research went on for years. Too long, I think. But not too long because I’m just in the perfect place right now. But I’ve lived, I would do drugs as research because, y’know, I have a brother on Skid Row and a lot of family members that have the disease of addiction. I think that there’s a purpose to it. I believe in art therapy, I’m a private art therapist for kids and I believe that the power of art can be like a drug if you let it. And especially with technology, like, everybody says I’m Patti Smith part two but I believe I was born in the right generation, because I get to use all these tools and magic and technology to make my work way more visceral, while also having one foot on the ground in the past, paying homage and respect to artists like Patti, and Sid Vicious and Audrey Hepburn that came before me, and bringing the spirits to the present day with the tools that I have makes me feel very blessed and aligned with the timeline that I was dropped into.
I love that. I was actually gonna ask what you’re doing to bring your work into this generation?
I mean a lot of artists are against tech, but you have to find ways to use it as a tool authentically and that’s a skill on its own. I’m embracing change, I’m embracing the future. Like, what happened when it was photography and then video came around, did they want to just stay in photoland forever or did they want to evolve? And of course evolution is a sensitive steering ship and you have to be careful that it’s going in the right direction. But most of all I believe in keeping pure intentions.
I think to be successful you need three things: Gratitude, hard work, and delusion.
So real. Gratitude is huge. What do you think makes you different from other artists working now?
I’m a prophet. I’m a self-proclaimed prophet, I guess. But also I had this experience in Washington Square Park where, during the Hare Krishna festival these Hare Krishnas came up with cigarettes to get a poem and I was like sure and I wrote a poem for them and they come back and they’re like “This isn’t a poem, you’re an oracle, you should go to Tompkins, the Hare Krishnas blessed the land and you’ll do very well there,” and I listened and I went to Tompkins and I made $1500 in three days. So maybe they’re onto something.
That’s beautiful. Would you describe yourself as a spiritual person?
I don’t believe in God, I know Him very well.
Do you generate these prophecies on demand or do you have to wait for them to come to you?
I’m a vessel. And sobriety—That’s been the beautiful thing about it is the channel’s so much clearer. The shit is out of the tunnel. It’s pure communication. I’m always writing and my mantra’s always use me use me use me move me move me move me. God is my favorite muse, He’s the best writer, the way that He alchemizes comedy to romance to horror and my jaw drops at the totality. That’s what my goal is as an artist, to alchemize all genres of life into my work because I don’t think that stories should be told in a linear theme, it should be everything, all encapsulating. My biggest muse is God on the streets, God in other people. I tend to look at everything besides the form of art I’m working on, so you know, if I’m making a film I’m not watching other films, if I’m making a performance, I’m not going to other poetry readings. I’m more inspired by the mom in Florida that’s working an overnight shift so that her kids can have clothes for school, you know, that’s what inspires me. Life. Living life is like the cheat code to an abundant body of work, really soaking it in and digesting it through the work instead of trying to contrive what people want you to make. That shit’s forced and not natural.
Yeah. Totally. And speaking as an addict myself I feel like it’s easy when you’re using to think it helps you be a channel.
It’s a scam. It makes you feel like that but man the biggest drug of all is sobriety. It’s a trip. But it’s manifested in experience, it’s something you can touch. And yet there’s never a comedown you just get higher, and higher, and higher.
Yeah.
And it’s beautiful, it’s like, you feel that high, and then it’s manifested into a work that you’ve attracted or a person you’ve attracted, and it’s like physical. Not a feeling you lay in bed and listen to the birds chirp and want to kill yourself after.
Totally. You believe in manifestation?
I do if hard work and gratitude are on the other side of it, yeah.
When you’re writing, or when you’re performing, do you think that there’s a perfect set of conditions for strengthening your connection to the beyond, to whatever you’re channeling?
No. I actually don’t ever know what I write. I don’t remember anything. That’s why I write over myself, that’s why my font is layered. It’s like I’m in dialogue with my subconscious. Like, where is this going?
There’s this great Hélène Cixous quote, where she’s talking about Lispector and she says something like that [Lispector] “lets her hand write, puts herself into an intense relationship of listening.” She refers to it as transcription or transmission rather than a writing.
You know that’s actually–the first time I moved to New York, I did a photoshoot when I was like nineteen, and the photographer read one of my journals I had on me and handed me Clarice Lispector. That’s the first time my writing got compared to someone and it was her.
She’s just the greatest.
Melancholic lullaby from the gods.
What are some things that help you achieve this state of receiving, though? Like what’s your ideal setup?
A diner in Jersey that has a bunch of old people in it, and I have a newspaper and no music and a coffee, and I flip over the placemat to write poems on the back based on what random words I hear in passing or see in the paper and then I’ll add onto that. That’s like my ultimate.
Favorite diner?
A place called VIP in Journal Square, in Jersey. I was taking acting classes with Michael Imperioli at one time, because I used to get overstimulated by the city and I’d flee to Jersey and I told Michael that I was writing in that diner and he was like you know that’s where my character in the Sopranos relapsed.
Awesome. Do you still get overstimulated by the city?
Sometimes. Like I said, I’m about to go on an artist’s residency.
What do you think it is about New York right now—I mean, I feel like a lot of people are sort of uniquely disillusioned about the function of artists and the so-called scene, especially here and even moreso downtown. What do you think your function is within it?
I want to burn “The Scene” down
Yeah. I feel very similarly… Do you think that there’s any use in it, though?
Comfort, for people to feel like they belong somewhere. Discomfort of being an individual.
And you consider yourself more of an individual, outside of all that?
Sheep need a herd. Wolves eat them.
And you’re the wolf?
Yeah. I mean I’m a sheep at times too, or a ghost. Can I hit your vape? Also what time is it? I have to go in like five minutes.
Sure. I want to ask you more about your films. Actually just before this we were exchanging links to our films and I realized I had totally seen one of yours like four years ago before I even knew you, on nobudge, and I didn’t even realize it was you. I totally forgot about it but I remember really loving it.
Yeah, Pair of Dice. I made it in response to my diagnosis with early on-set dementia.
Still from Pair of Dice (2023)
Affecting, yeah. What was the last film you made?
Last night. I put myself into a trance and I filmed it for an hour and I’m gonna edit it together into a film for my thirty days. Because it ends with a prayer of surrender and salvation.
Are you typically working in this autobiographical, documentary way?
Docu-fiction. I’m usually the only fictional character and everyone else is real. But last night it was the most raw version of myself which is alone in my room.
Do you ever feel like you’re performing the character of Brandi Divine, like you’ve built up a version of yourself that you’re comfortable playing in?
I perform more off the camera. I have to so I can be more digestible.
What helps you reach a flow state?
Coffee, cigarettes, prayer. Mostly prayer.
When you pray, how do you, like—Maybe this is personal so I guess you don’t have to answer it on the record—
I can be personal. I can do anything.
Like do you sit down with a Dear God or is it more of a conversation?
I open my jaw, I feel my throat with the air in it, I breathe Him in, I breathe out, and I start talking.
In terms of movement-based performance—Because I think the first performance of yours I saw was the thing with the radio and the mask, and you were wearing this maybe robe and you had the thing, but you were holding the mask and I think I said this afterwards that you reminded me of a music box, or like an automaton, the way you were moving and the light was just hitting you and like I saw that moving through you. Well I was basically captivated by a quality and I was wondering how movement gets incorporated into your practice, how you consider it, both in the moment and before?
Yeah. Well that one was interesting because the mask broke, that wasn’t planned. I wasn’t supposed to be holding it but I guess that brought something out in me. Like I said earlier one of my mantras is move me move me move me. I get possessed. I completely black out, I don’t remember, it’s another state of unintentional self-hypnosis. I’m not even the one—I just listen to my body. And I follow what it says.
Do you have any practices outside of performance that help strengthen this mode, this connection to the body?
Dancing in the club, dancing in my room. Ecstatic dance in general.
What’s your favorite music to dance to right now?
Suicide. Alan Vega’s birthday party tonight imma go crazy.
There’s like hella flies out here
Oh shit. What time is it? I have to go.