"Unmetered time": An interview with artist and educator Conni McKenzie
Conni McKenzie. Photo by Ella Richie DeMaria.
For multi-disciplinary artist and educator Conni McKenzie, the Mojave Desert inspires feelings of community and helped her process climate anxiety through reconnecting to nature. This spring, Conni brought her immersive experiences to local elementary students and adults alike through partnership with Mojave Desert Land Trust, and performed her piece “Borrowed” through BoxoPROJECTS at Black Rock Nature Center in Joshua Tree National Park.
In honor of BIPOC Mental Health Month, we spoke with Conni about dance, the importance of community, and the concept of ‘unmetered time’.
MDLT: What was your first experience or a foundational early memory with movement or dance?
Conni McKenzie: I started dancing at 3. That's when my mom put me in classes, because I was really shy. At home I would often do my own dances to music, and she thought it would be a great way for me to get out of my shell. I proceeded to hang on to her leg for the first two classes. Eventually I came out a little bit more and just totally fell in love with the activity. I was put in other activities too as a kid, but dance was always the one that stuck. It's always been very helpful for expressing myself. I'm a lot more comfortable with words now, but this was a lot harder when I was younger, to really talk to people and get to know people through conversation. I was always very shy. I didn't have a lot of friends. I would go to dance class and then be able to be myself a little bit more, probably because there wasn't that much talking involved.
“Borrowed,” performed at Black Rock Nature Center, Joshua Tree National Park. Photo courtesy Conni McKenzie.
MDLT: What inspired “Borrowed”?
CM: While we were on this art tour, we visited Andrea Zittel's “Planar Pavilions”, an outdoor installation piece, and the Noah Purifoy Outdoor Desert Art Museum. These brought up the sense in me of this pattern of mass wastefulness and overconsumption that we in industrialized societies have, and it's in our culture. It's in the way that we operate. It's in the values that a lot of us carry. It brought up this idea of like, we're making all these duplicates of things that don't need to exist.
One of the things that my roommates and I crack up with is like, I'm the borrowing queen. I love to use something that’s somebody else’s, not because I can't buy it, but because I literally don't want another item circulating. While it's nice to have everything curated and just for yourself, it generates quite a lot of wastefulness. Over time, it became this idea; when we behave in this way where everything's just a duplicate of one another, and there's, like, 50 million copies of it, we're really borrowing from the planet when we do that because we only really need a certain amount of unique items to live. And if we “borrowed” more from each other or shared things more collectively, it would reduce a lot of waste.
So it started as my way of processing overconsumption. More and more, we're starting to see the impacts of climate change on the desert. “Borrowed” became this concept of what happens when, through unsustainable patterns of over-consumption, we borrow from nature. And what's going to happen when we've borrowed too much?
Conni immerses the audience in Joshua Tree National Park through a guided experience. Photo courtesy Conni McKenzie.
MDLT: Your piece at Joshua Tree National Park received a lot of emotional responses. How do you feel that performance went and how did it feel to receive those kinds of responses?
CM: I didn't expect that people would be that moved by it, and it was very uplifting for me to see people that moved by it. Having that emotional resonance echo throughout the whole audience was really wonderful. After you go through an experience like that, and your mind’s somewhere otherworldly and your thinking’s inspiring, being surrounded by people that are with you on that can be very powerful because it highlights the fact that we're all part of this shared human experience. You're not alone in how you're feeling when you're going through this experience. We're less different than we think. We may have different ways of approaching how we feel, and how we want to take care of our communities, but at the core, we’re very similar as humans.
The hope with the project overall is to inspire specific communities. With climate change, it is really up to the closeness of our community and the fabric of the people immediately surrounding us that will allow us to survive climate change. I am really starting to believe in that a lot more: the importance of having strong community foundations for not only happiness, but our own survival. I think trying to take care of the whole planet is too much to chew off, but we can take care of our own neighborhood. We can take care of our own space, our own acreage, our own mileage.
Conni conducts a post-show Q&A. Photo courtesy Conni McKenzie.
MDLT: What is it about the desert in particular that inspires you?
CM: I'll start from the beginning, which is it's beautiful. When you're in a beautiful place, just having the time to really spend there, to actually, really just be in that place. It’s special.
The openness of the desert can go two different ways. I'll start with the dark; it can be a void. It could feel like everything is far apart, open, spread out, and dark. And then the other way is like, open possibility. You can see for 50 miles standing from a lot of different places, and that's cool. I love the surround-sunsets. I love looking around and seeing everything all around me. It's really interesting.
And being in the desert, I also learned a lot about community, at least in Joshua Tree. Something that was really interesting to me was the community fabrics that were already there before I even showed up. And that was special because they try to do that in San Francisco, but it's a lot harder, because there's that city mentality that I am sometimes even a part of. The focus that folks have with spending time with each other in the desert is very special, and that's something that I feel like I even learned from while in residence.
And the desert climate is really interesting, the extremes of it. I grew up in a place with seasons, so I particularly like the changes in the weather because they signify some form of change in general, which is very synonymous with how humans are. Humans are not stagnant creatures. We change and adapt over time. And similarly, that desert landscape changes sometimes a little brutally over time, and sometimes over a very short amount of time. It brings out this spirit of curiosity and possibility in me. It's a space that invites a lot of creativity with the boundlessness when you're looking around. Even looking around right now in San Francisco, all I see are buildings. I see where my limits are. There's a feeling of limitlessness while you are in the desert.
Embodied Wellness Workshop at Mojave Desert Land Trust HQ. Photo by Ella Richie DeMaria.
MDLT: I really enjoyed our Embodied Wellness Workshop at our headquarters and wanted to ask you about how those practices have helped you or others you've worked with, and why you brought them to share with us?
CM: The workshop that we did -- it's very interesting because, you know, we had this partnership going on for months where we were creating a workshop with kids that they could better explore plant life and desert life, which I think is definitely the first step for leaning on nature for your own mental health, you know? You first have to understand a little bit about it, and then have some form of relationship with it, which for a lot of people tends to happen in their youth. So, when it came to the adult workshops, I think what was interesting is we had some of the activities that we transferred over, with a focus on mental health. Besides being a dancer, I also enjoy meditating. I like yoga. I like hot girl walking. It's my favorite way to get myself moving, and just being out.
MDLT: I wanted to ask about the beautiful phrase you have of ‘unmetered time.’ Could you elaborate on that for us?
Conni: I love unmetered time, and it's hilarious because my life almost never works that way. Unmetered time, essentially, is an experience when you're not worried about what time it is or what's happening and why. It's more about allowing yourself to seep into the present versus being concerned about deadlines and certain things getting accomplished. It's inherently anti-capitalist because capitalism loves a strict schedule. It's a way of clearing your head because you're no longer operating in an accomplishment/productivity mode. You're more in just in an existing, letting time go either way mode. It is a luxury that I love to have when I'm not working. To be in a space where you're not thinking about time, and just knowing that your time is being taken care of by somebody else, is a luxury that many of us can only have once in a while at best. But it's also just so good for us, because before the structure of life that we now understand, time did not work like this. People would stop working when it got hot out. They would go to bed when it got dark out. It was less about the metering and bucketing of experiences into certain brackets and more just about moving with time as nature shifts and as things shift.
“Borrowed,” Black Rock Nature Center, Joshua Tree National Park. Photo courtesy Conni McKenzie.
MDLT: What was one of your big takeaways from your recent desert experience?
CM: I'm capable of a lot more than I realize.
And I just so enjoyed our collaboration. It was the first time that I got to really work that way and I think it was important for me to do so. Having an organization that had the values and the ideas who let me do my thing and create something was huge for me.