Earlier this month, Anohni released the remarkable album HOPELESSNESS. Its danceable electronic sound is something of a departure from the soulful chamber pop that made Anohni—formerly known as Antony Hegarty—an inimitable figure in indie music, but the idea of creative reinvention is not exactly foreign to her. Anohni was, first and foremost, a performance artist; it was only after getting a grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts for her plays that Anohni was able to finance the first Antony and the Johnsons album.
After years immersed in the world of transgressive experimental theater, Anohni emerged with the idea that the most meaningful performance is of reality itself. In truth, however, she has acted upon this wisdom since her youth. As an undergrad in California, Anohni would gather friends and write what she called“transvestite musicals,” which were both extremely absurd and a means of becoming her true self. Theater as a medium allowed Anohni to explore various genders and characters in a manner that would perhaps not be acceptable in public at the time. She has identified as transgender since her youth, but in late 2015, Anohni made her previously private name public for the release of HOPELESSNESS. The resulting record is a startling depiction of apocalyptic truths and harsh realities.
In anticipation of Anohni’s upcoming live debut of HOPELESSNESS (at New York’s Park Avenue Armory as part of the Red Bull Music Academy Festival), as well as a series of international stagings of the album, we examined her performance history, starting with her avant-garde theater days.
Blacklips and the Formation of Antony and the Johnsons (1990-1997)
In which Anohni explores experimental excess, and the seeds of a musical career are planted
In 1990, after two years at University of California-Santa Cruz, Anohni transferred to New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she attended the Experimental Theatre Wing. Anohni quickly began to absorb the history within queer New York—the continuing AIDS-related traumas, the activists, even the nightlife kings and queens. In 1992, she and Johanna Constantine formed the Blacklips Performance Cult, an avant-garde musical theater troupe that expanded to include many characters of the downtown NYC arts scene. It's amusing to imagine the now noble and stoic Anohni as Fiona Blue, engaging in a more hardcore take on John Waters' gross-out theatricality, often covering both audience and cast in buckets of blood. But when Anohni would perform a number, that voice would emerge from the chaos, transfixing the audience in the same way it does today.
After Blacklips ended, Anohni formed a new performance group called the Johnsons to stage her plays, rather than collectively devised work. In 1997, the works The Birth of Anne Frank/The Ascension of Marsha P. Johnson—the latter in honor of the transgender activist who serves as the Johnsons' namesake—earned Anohni a New York Foundation for the Arts grant. Anohni used the award money to make Antony and the Johnsons’ self-titled 1998 debut, later telling NYFA, “As soon as I got that money, I knew I had to invest it in music because I felt that the only future I would have would be in music because there wasn’t the resources to support experimental theater of the nature that I was doing.” That same year, Antony and the Johnsons formally performed for the first time at the Kitchen, one of New York's longest-running nonprofit performances spaces and thus a hotbed for experimental art.
As a result of these years spent in garishness, Anohni's early music is markedly more reflective and emotionally explorative. Much of the experimental theater Blacklips performed came from thoughts of the apocalypse, and the literal death of the underground and its heroes. By the time Antony and the Johnsons took off as a musical project, Anohni was becoming inspired by the broad themes of truth, hope, and natural beauty.
TURNING and I Am a Bird Now (2004-2006, 2014)
In which Anohni becomes critically acclaimed and turns to face the world
Antony and the Johnsons first presented TURNING, their collaboration with video artist Charles Atlas, at the 2004 Whitney Biennial. Set to the music that would eventually become the Johnsons’ second album, 2005's I Am a Bird Now, 13 women took turns standing on a rotating pedestal while projections of their individual portraits filled the stage.
I Am a Bird Now was awarded the Mercury Prize in 2005, making Anohni the first American-based artist to win the honor. The accolade allowed her to bring TURNING to Europe in 2006, where she hoped to“see if the experience translated, if it could mirror a similar community in those places or if the people there could spread it by themselves." During the tour, Anohni began interviewing the performers about the experience, their own histories, and their identities as cis or trans women. In 2014, these conversations were paired with concert footage and turned into a documentary that is downright piercing in its vulnerability. Anohni’s music has always felt like a microphone for those who exist beyond the norm, but TURNING was the first time Anohni allows these voices to truly have a platform.
For Anohni, the initial TURNING performances marked a point at which she began to draw more energy from the surrounding world, as well as the metaphysical. “TURNING was a turning point in that way for me because it was the first time I was visually embodying other people’s experiences in the songs,” she told The Quietus. “I used to imagine that I was like a piece of glass and that people would see through me and see the experience or the story as a narrative of the woman behind me, on screen."
"Swanlights" Concert (2009-2012)
In which Anohni literally shimmers like a jewel at the heart of darkness
In 2009, Antony and the Johnsons performed their third album, The Crying Light, at the Manchester International Festival. After seeing the Manchester concert, MoMA chief curator at large Klaus Biesenbach commissioned an expansion of the piece. The result was January 2012’s “Swanlights,” a one-night-only* show at Radio City Music Hall that included songs from all four Antony and the Johnsons albums (including the 2010 record of the same name); was arranged by Nico Muhly, Rob Moose, and Maxim Moston; and performed by a 60-piece orchestra.
The concert was intended to be a "meditation on light, nature, and femininity” and as such, the stage was transformed into a pulsing crystal cave installation. “The idea for the piece was to imagine a quartz crystal. We retrieve it from the center of a pitch-black mountain, and yet it has luminosity,” Anohni told T Magazine, "That is the inspiration for the concert in a way, to suggest light and its relationship to darkness.” “Swanlights” light designer Chris Levine and set designer Carl Robertshaw encased the stage with geometric quartz, layered screens and projections atop each other, and to boot, engulfed the production in rotating lasers. Anohni sang within the cave, like a beacon of light amid overwhelming chaos.
(*Though billed as a one-night event, “Swanlights" would go on to be performed at London’s Royal Opera House in 2013 and at Madrid’s Teatro Real in 2014.)
The Life and Death of Marina Abramović (2011-2013)
In which Anohni pairs returns with the godmother of performance art for a surreal opera
After first meeting in 2007 at a cookout hosted by Björk and Matthew Barney, Marina Abramović served as a mentor of sorts to Anohni; in fact, the legendary performance artist inspired the atypical staging of “Swanlights." In 2011, the two collaborated on The Life and Death of Marina Abramović, a “quasi-opera” abstraction of Abramović’s biography that premiered at the Manchester International Festival. Anohni composed the show's music and performed alongside Abramović and Willem Dafoe. One of the songs she wrote for the piece, “Cut the World,” became the title track of her 2012 live album.
Future Feminism (2012-2014)
In which Anohni becomes her most political self yet
Cut the World featured the seven-and-a-half-minute spoken-word track “Future Feminism,” which explores the intersection of environmentalism and feminism. The lyrics read like a manifesto of sorts: “It might sound far-fetched, but if you look at your own beliefs, just imagine how quickly you accepted the idea that the ocean is rising and the ecology of our world is collapsing. We can actually imagine that more readily than we can imagine a switch from patriarchal to matriarchal systems of governance—a subtle shift in the way our society works."
Two years later, Anohni, performer Kembra Pfahler, Bianca Casady and Sierra Casady (of CocoRosie), and Constantine presentedFuture Feminism at New York gallery the Hole. The group developed the exhibition and performance series after three years of conversation regarding their respective views of feminism. They devised the 13 Tenets of Feminism, which were then carved into rose quartz circles that hung upon the gallery’s walls.
Future Feminism continues to permeate Anohni’s contemporary work in its unification of feminism and environmentalism, or as Tenet I puts it, “The subjugation of women and the earth is one and the same.” This much is clear from the exquisite political rage that fuels HOPELESSNESS.