“The audience will find us in this little outdoor space that is at 901 Trinity Street,” says Jenny Larson-Quiñones, describing the experience of participating in Unlived Lives. “It's behind the First Baptist Church of Austin in what we call the backyard. And you'll find us in a little outside makeshift living room. And you'll join us and you will maybe play some games, accept some challenges, and through these sort of games and challenges, you will be given a menu which you can choose an item from. And then that item will be either performed with you, taught to you, performed for you. Each of these menu items relates to this idea about a life that we have never lived, a life we've wanted to live, a life we have lived, but that maybe the other artists in the group haven't – a life we've lived that maybe none of the audience has, and we want to share it with them.”
If Unlived Lives seems a little unwieldy to describe succinctly, that’s possibly because it’s not exactly a show in the traditional sense, with an audience watching and performers performing. It’s more of an interactive experience, and each performance will be one-of-a-kind.
“Yeah, we're hanging out in the living room and we're gonna share experiences and ideas and songs and some dancing,” says khattieQ, Larson-Quiñones’ spouse and artistic partner. “It's a come and go as you wish, three hour performance, so every audience is gonna get a different experience.”
This version of Unlived Lives isn’t the first; it’s an update of a concept that began a little over a decade ago. “Myself and the collaborator, Ida Daniel, met in – I don't know if it was 2012 or 2013 – but we were moms in our thirties who were still doing art, making art,” Larson-Quiñones says. “And a lot of other parents we found to be kind of stepping out of creating when they became a parent. And for us it was really important. And we also looked at our own parents, our own mothers in particular, and saw that they didn't necessarily pursue their life with passion and purpose. And when their kids grew up, they seemed a little unmoored and like they didn't know what to do. And in lots of ways, I feel like they had lives that they didn't get to live, that maybe they fantasized about but they never saw out. And both [Daniel and I] were like, you know what, I don't want to be like that. And… I'm gonna show my kid that you can have a family and you can keep having a life of passion and purpose and all these things. So this idea of unlived lives, the life you never lived, that's where it kind of came from.”
There were a few other iterations of Unlived Lives over the years, with khattieQ joining the creative team in 2017. This version continues the exploration of lives left unlived, and also touches on some of the ways the lives of the artists themselves have changed in the past decade.
“The questions have changed because we're all 10 years older,” Larson-Quiñones says. “How have we changed? And[we’re] sort of sharing that with each other, sharing new artistic vocabularies with each other as well because Ida went to choreography school to be a choreographer and I started writing and started writing a lot of plays and jokes.”
“And I was a drummer and a guitar player and now I'm an actor,” khattieQ adds. “I had an injury in one of my hands, so I can't really play that much anymore. The grip, the dexterity in my hand is lost, so my life is totally different too.”
“We did live a lot of lives in those 10 years and that's kind of what we wanted to bring up,” Larson-Quiñones says. “I also came out of the closet and married khattie in that time frame. In 2015 when we were doing our first collaboration, I was dating a man. And so that was a big change. We changed locations, we changed professions, we changed relationships. Although Ida is still with her partner [Todor Stoyanov]. Our children are so much older now. They were both very young and now they are both young adults. And we've both moved different places. In 2017, khattie and I moved to Canada for a while, and I think it was in 2016 that… Ida and Todor moved to Germany. So we also both left our home countries to experience these other places and one of the reasons was rooted in fear of politics in our home countries. Now they're living in Germany and we are here, but we are still experiencing this rise in nationalism and authoritarianism. So, these questions are circling around like what does it mean to live a good life? What is friendship? What is an enemy? How do we make assumptions on friendships and enemies based on lines around nationalism and things like that?”
jkjk is happy to get the word out about Unlived Lives, but they’re also hoping some folks will be in the area and stumble upon the experience. “We are performing in, I like to say, SXSW’s back pocket, because we will be just at 9th and Trinity, and we'll have signage,” Larson-Quiñones explains. “We'll be outside. If you're just walking by and you see this outdoor area that looks like a couch, where people are like lounging around, eating, maybe singing karaoke, maybe watching weird things on a television screen – that's us. Come on in and you can. It's come and go as you please. So there's no like you have to be here at a certain time or stay so long. You just can drop in, drop out.”
