Experimental Performing Arts Duo Princess Bringing New Music Piece to MCA Denver

Queer performing arts duo Alexis Gideon and Michael O'Neill, aka Princess, have high expectations for the impact of their performance of an experimental music-video cycle at the Museum of Contemporary Art's Holiday Theater on Wednesday, June 28. "I want [the audience] to throw their phones off a bridge," O'Neill says.

O'Neill's first foray into performing was at age six, when he was studying jazz dance with Broadway performers including Anita Ehrler and Frank Mastrocola. He says that dance background is the formative influence for his undying loyalty to leotards, something he's honored even while performing in Princess.

Like O'Neill, Gideon fell in love with performance art early in his life. He began playing guitar at nine, then attended a performance art high school (although he says it wasn't as dramatic as High School Musical) and studied composition in college. 

After years spent developing a deep infatuation with performance and music, the artists first crossed paths in college. Despite attending different schools — Gideon was at Wesleyan University and O'Neill was at Hampshire College — the pair instantly clicked.

"[We] immediately started working on projects together, and they started mostly based in music, but they grew into these weird events, partially because we weren't in the same place," Gideon says. "We did a lot of improvised performances, not sounding improvised aesthetically, but using a lot of improvisational techniques." Together they created playful, fresh and enticing shows, including a performance with songs based on characters from Saved by the Bell.
In 2003, the two moved to Chicago and started Princess, but a mere three years later, life pulled them in separate directions. O'Neill moved to the East Coast, Gideon moved to the West Coast, and Princess went on an eleven-year hiatus.

During that time, Gideon dove into the visual art space, and O'Neill performed political, feminist dance music with a band ironically called Men. Now Princess embodies elements of both performers' journeys — they've drifted into a space that combines visual storytelling and music with deep social commentary. "We try to keep that happy medium between being challenging but also fun to experience," Gideon says.

The upcoming performance at MCA is an experimental pop-song extravaganza titled One Minute World. "We were actually in Amsterdam, performing a sneak peek of a part of 'Out There' in 2018 for the Transformer Festival," Gideon reflects. "Michael and I had a couple of days there, and we were hanging out, and there was an hour-long sci-fi feminist rock opera that demanded a lot from the audience. And we were lamenting people's attention spans and that people don't really listen to albums anymore and people hear music on Instagram."

So Gideon and O'Neill decided to create a cycle of videos adhering to the time limit of Instagram — fifteen songs, one song per minute, with an original video accompanying each. Gideon describes the project as a "meta critique on social media released for social media."

The tracks are danceable pop beats that jump from themes of surveillance capitalism to social media addiction. "Scrolling" is meant to "brainwash" the listener, creating the same sense of mindless repetition provided by scrolling sites like Instagram. "I literally just say the words, 'This is a photo, this is a photo, this is a video, this is an ad,'" O'Neill says.

Gideon lives in Pittsburgh and O'Neill is in New York, so composing the tracks for One Minute World was a back-and-forth process, with each adding musical elements as they went. "Generally the songs come out really differently. Sometimes it'll start with a drumbeat, or sometimes it'll start with a guitar part," Gideon says. "The only part that really stays consistent is the sending stuff back and forth, kind of hot-potatoing the tracks."

As for the videos, the duo says the creation process was very time-consuming. Gideon has a lot of experience in stop-motion animation, so the videos loop photos of the two doing things such as scrolling on a phone or swinging their hips in a funky, hypnotic dance. "I constructed a Lichtenstein-esque plastic world [that] we were in, just slowly putting that together over time," Gideon explains.

The songs and videos are meticulously synced to the 24th of a second. Princess performs the songs live while the videos play, and the two mediums create a holistic performance. "One of the challenges was making it interesting while making it quick, so one of the things [we] relied on was repetition," O'Neill says. "So that [repetition] sort of spoke to both the need to make something in a timely manner, but also the monotony regurgitation of social media, of seeing this again, seeing this again, seeing this again. So the videos themselves, you'll see repeated visuals."

There's also a second half to the thirty-minute performance — but Gideon and O'Neill won't reveal anything more than its meditative nature. "After the isolation and shutdown of the pandemic and the live performance being put on hold, it's really nice to share space with people and have an experience and a moment to slow down and be human together," Gideon says. "So I hope that's what happens when people come to the show."

See "One Minute World" on June 28 at 7 p.m. at MCA Denver at the Holiday Theater, 2644 West 32nd Avenue. Tickets are $5 for students and $25 for general admission.