I walk through a nondescript door at the Exploratorium and enter a small sea of people, all making final adjustments to their exquisite costumes and makeup. Each costume is exceptionally unique, but every one has a certain feel to it - and in their individuality proudly proclaim that they have come from the mind and incredible talents of Bad Unkl Sista. Inside this room is a strange and beautiful world, and if I let my mind wander for a minute I can clearly find myself in a dream where these characters are preparing to be introduced to a new book involving the whimsy of Dr. Seuss and oddness of Tim Burton’s animation, with not such a small measure of The Brothers Quay.

This is the world of Bad Unkl Sista, a beautiful dream that draws you in and lets you find other worlds inside of yourself, if you’re able to let go. Combining Butoh, site specific performance, incredible couture costumes and passion, you are taken away from the common world and placed into an immersive experience.

Anastazia Louise (that’s ahn-ah-STAZ-eee-uh, not anna- stayssh-ia) is the phenomenal talent that created Bad Unkl Sista as a vehicle for performance, visual art, costume and clothing design. She performs everywhere – from Burning Man to the Supper Club in San Francisco, and this piece was written just after I returned from an exquisite performance at The Exploratorium in San Francisco. I was supposed to crash at her place, but there was far too much swimming around in this noggin’ to simply sleep, and I knew that staying up again all night to write and trying to do an interview probably wouldn’t work for me I needed to write about what I had just seen, and hope that my exhaustion didn’t show through in my words…

I met Anastazia at the Supper Club where I had the joy of performing with her and her crew, but I must admit that before our first brief talk there I was somewhat intimidated by her – I had heard her name countless times, seen her performances when I could, yet she was something of an apparition. It is in this first talk (where I didn’t have anything to record what she said) that I found a person so far beyond what I could ever expected.
Here was a person who refuses to have her wings clipped in any way, and gives all she is in her creations – from performance to the clothes she designs and makes.

After a few calls, it was time for her show to begin. I got there just a little bit late as I was somewhat lost with all the wonderful toys in the Exploratorium, but when I arrived…

I just sat watching the flashing cursor on this computer for a few minutes before I realized that there was absolutely no way I could describe what the performers were wearing. Thank the gods for Nightshade, who captured it in photographs.

When I arrived to where her performance was, the sound of a solitary opera voice greeted me, and when I was close enough to see, I saw that it was one of Anastazia’s performers singing in something that was much more of an exquisite work of art than a costume. Her haunting voice set the scene as you looked to the left and saw mannequins dressed in some of Bad Unkl Sista’s creations, then looked to her right to see what seemed to be a person suspended by rigging to the ceiling, another two to the left & right of him, all covered in fabric. A set of eyes peering out of fabric in the front of the “stage” looked around in their disembodiment, adding to the realization that this was no ordinary performance.

Then, as the singer finished and a bizarre aural experience ensued, out from somewhere a woman entirely in red appeared, and in slow, intentional and somewhat disjointed movements made her way to a long piece of fabric that was hanging down. In this the wrapped herself, and in doing so pulled the fabric draped over the suspended person and the two below him. What followed was something I cannot truly explain and give justice to – slow Butoh movements, exquisite costumes, a performance that needs to be seen…

There was supposed to be an interview with Anastazia here, but I was far too exhausted to drive as it was supposed to happen in the last hours of creating this site – and I prefer not to do email interviews when at all possible, especially after hearing what she has to say…
I hope within the week (by May 7th) to include it. Keep checking back, and in the meantime, enjoy the images – and be grateful for them. I certainly don’t have the words to describe what I saw.

~ kSea flux

***Not all shots from this particular performance.

Interview with Bad Unkl Sista
By kSea flux

A few months ago I knew Anastazia only through photographs, performance, & a very brief meeting through a friend where little was exchanged except names. Still, I had that Style tab you see above this to fill with something, and so I contacted her and Anastazia invited me to join her at a venue in San Francisco where she frequently performs to get a taste of what she does, who she is. I jumped on it. (Any reason to dress up and wear what some people would consider a costume, I'll take...)

kSea: So at long last, here we are. I would like to focus on what you’re doing as what you call a ‘fabric sculptor,’ which I think is an ingenious way of putting it, for the creations I’ve seen, but you’re so much more than that. In every show I’ve seen, not only fashion shows (which I don’t see you too often in anymore, and you’ll explain why later), it’s pure performance, and that’s what you thrive on. Tell me about what made you get into designing, or sculpting, fabric.

BUS: Well, for me actually, let me say that I actually have never actually been in a fashion show. I have only provided a performance at the end of fashion shows. Just because they happen to happen on a runway does not mean that I do fashion shows. I do not do fashion shows, I do not do a ‘one model walking down the runway standing for a moment with a vapid style.’ [laughter] That is not what I do. What I do is provide for a moment a dreamscape in which you can release all of your ideas of what fashion may be, all your ideas of what you think style may be, or beauty or anything of that nature. For me, beauty is not some skinny model on the end of a runway in a pretty outfit. For me, beauty is what we can find inside ourselves, what we can find all around us, what we can find in our dreams. Our dreams, I think, is where the true beauty lies. Now, the way I got started in fashion, if you must call it that – actually, I never started in fashion. [laughs]

kSea: Let’s not call it – I prefer not to call it that. Just the word itself creates too many preconceived ideas in the mind of an empty world where nothing matters but appearance…

BUS: Right.

kSea: Let’s use the word ‘creation’ from now on out – or try to.

BUS: Right. I’ve never actually been involved in fashion yet. [laughs] It just happens that that’s where my things end up. For me, I started creating different pieces when I was part of Carpet Bag Brigade, which is an acrobatic stilt-walking troupe. We created a 45-minute stilt-walking opus and we were going to perform it within two weeks, and we didn’t have any costumes. We were in the middle of the desert in Arizona and you can’t just go to a store and buy red silk stilt pants, and the director of our troupe, Jay Ruby, decided that we would all make our own stilt costumes. I was livid. [laughs] I was absolutely beside myself, pissed off that I had to make my own stilt costume because I didn’t know how to sew, and neither did anybody else. We had to make all of our own costumes. From that moment of making our own costumes, to a year and a half later where I was the main costume designer for the group, for Carpet Bag Brigade. I’ve been an artist since I was very small, since I was ten. My world just revolved around art. I grew up dancing. My mom is a dance teacher. We had a studio connected to our house. I’ve been performing since I was five. The performance and the art went hand-in-hand with me ever since I was tiny. Using material as another medium for doing artwork became a new interest. It became something that was very exciting, so I began sculpting costumes, sculpting anything that I could make. As you have noticed, I have an obsession with anything alien, Victorian, Japanese, or insect-like. So, this is the meager beginnings of where I come from.

kSea: In the pieces you create, what inspires you? Is it perhaps a mood for the show, or do you read people and find something that would fit them?

BUS: Mostly, what inspires me – well, it’s a few different things. I’m obsessed with head pieces, so I get inspired by what I’m going to put on the head. I used to create a whole costume, and then think, ‘Oh, now I can do the fun part! Let’s make a crazy headpiece.’ Now, I’ve started the opposite way and I create a crazy headpiece, and then create the costume to go with it. Now, within creating, I have an original – either a piece of trash or a piece of a strange article of clothing – just random things inspire me to make headpieces, to make costumes. I couple that with who I know would wear it, so I get inspired by the people that I am having in the show. I am lucky enough to have many amazing people that will let me put any number of painful things on their bodies [laughter] and perform in them! I always tell my performers, ‘The more painful your costume is, the more of a compliment it is to you, because I trust that you can carry it out, that you can act – really inhabit – that costume.’ So, for me, if I know who I’m going to have or if I have an idea of who’s going to be in that, then I design it around them with the strangeness that is coming up from me. It’s really a collaboration of the wonderful people that I surround myself with, and the strange garbage that I can find.

kSea: Right on. So you definitely consider who might be wearing this as you are creating your –

BUS: Oh, yes. I sometimes create an entire piece for someone that’s going to be wearing it even before I’ve asked them to do so. [laughs] Because I know they’ll wear it!

kSea: I just raised my hand, for those who can’t see this in print. [laughs] One of the things you mentioned very recently to me is that you are, first and foremost, a performer and really don’t want to be targeted or tagged as a designer.

BUS: Right.

kSea: Doing what you do and creating the phenomenal things you do – the clothes, the pieces, the wearable art – that must be an insane struggle and hopefully through anyone who reads this, you are, first and foremost, a performer. You create what you need to in order to accentuate the performances, but I would imagine that you too often get pegged as a ‘fashion designer’

BUS: Right. The places that I’ve been seen most lately are runways. That is quite difficult because I have many people call me to do runway shows, and then I have to explain to them that I don’t do runway shows. [laughs]

kSea: ‘But wait, you’re a fashion designer.’ ‘No, I’m not, I’m a performer.’

BUS: Right. That’s exactly the thing. I will come and bring my work to any avenue in which I feel that it can be seen, and there’s not too many places that you can show nineteen costumes, big costumes that are two feet in circumference and two feet over and above the head, all at one time. So if I have a space in which I am able to bring that many pieces forward without creating an entire event in and of myself, because that is a whole other bag of worms – I just want to show up with my nineteen performers and throw them out there and send people into another realm of imagination. It happens that those venues have been a way to do that. I’m actually trying to pull away from that. I’m going to have people hire us as a group performance, like we did Yuri’s Night in which we had an entire stage. It was not a runway. We also had 111 Minna, where we had an entire stage setting. For those things, we choreograph. We use as many as 19-25 costumes that are huge, over-the-top.

kSea: Also, very recently you did the Exploratorium which was pure performance, gorgeous costumes. It was nothing close to a fashion show, more like a surreal dreamscape.

BUS: Right. They actually contacted me because they wanted me to be a part of the fashion show. I said, ‘Absolutely not.’ [laughs] I said, ‘I would be happy to do an installation and perform on your opening night but I will absolutely not do a runway show because I am not a runway artist. I am not a runway designer. I am a performance artist, so if you’d like to work with me on that level…’ They were very excited. I actually have a 25-foot installation there right now that can be seen until September. Two days after the performance –

kSea: I’m sorry for interrupting, but tell me about your installation at the Exploratorium.

BUS: Yeah, well, that’s what I said. I said I would be happy to do an installation, so what we were going to do is create this huge installation that we would perform inside of and then it would be there for 6 months. The actual place in which they wanted to place the installation was a very slanted rooftop, so that didn’t really work with the choreography of the piece, so we did the piece in another part of the museum which I actually set up a huge installation for, then took it down two days later and placed it another part of the museum which is almost in the center of the museum.

kSea: I'll keep those pictures up. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but I have a very amateur review of what I saw that evening with pictures of it. Some of those will definitely be up but I’d also like to get more photographs of you performance without focusing on the amazing costumes you create.

BUS: The installation, though – You should check that out. It’s a 3-D installation. As you walk up to it, it’s different, and as you go around each side of the installation, it changes because I made an entire atmosphere, an entire other world within the installation. It’s totally three diminsional.

kSea: I really like other worlds. [laughs] This one’s working, but you know…

BUS: I just had an interview there for Yahoo. The Exploratorium called and had me come there in full costume. They put me inside my installation and had me dance inside my installation for a full interview that was going to be on Yahoo.

kSea: Wow, where on Yahoo?

BUS: I have no clue. [laughs]

kSea: So, basically go to Yahoo and search for ‘Bad Unkl Sista.’

BUS: I don’t know. I guess they’ll let me know when it shows up. [laughs] I just had a big spread on Threadbangers as well.

kSea: Threadbangers – I have never heard of that before.

BUS: Someone came all the way from New York, from the Threadbangers website to interview for ‘Second Skin.’ There’s a big interview there with Bad Unkl Sista as well.

kSea: Earlier this evening, before this mad recording device was turned on, you told me that you have absolutely no idea how to sew. You just throw things to the machine and see what comes out the other side.

BUS: That’s right.

kSea: I found that awesomely inspiring. That is, I think, one of the most rousing things I’ve ever heard because I don’t know how to sew and I’m an anal piece of shit, and because I don’t really know how to sew – I have a machine, and I’ve created a couple of things, but that struck a serious chord in me- I mean hell, this magazine was created with only a vision, but no knowledge of how to do it. I essentially threw it in the machine and this is what came out the other side… How do you create the amazing pieces you do, without – as you say – knowing how to sew?

BUS: Well, they teach you. The pieces teach you. They tell you what they want to be, so if you just keep shoving them through there [laughs] something’s going to come out. I call myself a ‘mistake media’ artist because it’s the best mistakes you never make. If you work mainly in mistakes, there aren’t any, so you just keep throwing it through and throwing it through and putting it on your body, seeing where it fits. Where does this fold go? Where does this little pouch go? If you try it on your body in so many different ways, you’re going to find one way that works and then you’re going to go with it. It’s like free-writing. When you start just writing off the top of your head, it eventually goes somewhere. If you start folding a piece of paper, it eventually goes into something. If you start free-drawing, after a while something shows up, a little creature. You can do the same things with sewing. If you keep throwing it through and throwing it through, something’s going to show up. You just have to have the patience to keep going. The thing is, the more you do it the more you’re going to understand that, ‘Oh, last time I threw it in this way, so it had this curve here.’ It starts to become a puzzle, become a meditation, become something ‘other.’ If you just let it speak to you, if you just release, then you can actually meditate on the fabric. You can release yourself from ‘it’s supposed to look this way.’

kSea: That touched me when we were talking before, because the largest problem I have is having an intention when I sit down at the sewing machine, or having an intention and not knowing how to create it. Therefore, I never sit down at the machine – out of fear, out of ‘okay, what if I destroy what I have?’ What you said, letting go and letting it happen by itself and learning from it, not trying to make it be what you want to be, is incredibly freeing.

BUS: One of the things, too, is – why don’t you just have the intention of ‘something will be created.’ Period. That’s it. Your intention is that once it gets out the other side of the machine, there will be something created. Then you can release yourself of what it is to be created. The thing is that it’s going to turn out better than what you had thought in the first place because you didn’t know how to create what you wanted to in the first place [laughter] so if you release that, then you’re totally free.

kSea: It takes its own shape and becomes what it was supposed to be in the first place.

BUS: Right, exactly. Some of my best pieces are things that I had no clue how it was going to end up. I just went with it. We don’t need to limit ourselves. We’ve been socialized that everything is supposed to be one way or another, but it’s not. [laughs] It’s just not, period. I don’t know what else to say about that.

kSea: One of the things when we walked last time at Supperclub, and I’m going to go back to your ‘fabric sculpting’ again, is – is that something you still want to do for people?

BUS: Well, my fabric sculpting actually is mainly my costuming, is mainly my costume work. I do a line of street wear. I do not do a fall line, a spring line. I don’t do any of that. I do things that speak to me. It’s very important for me to have a very, very versatile array of options that I can do with my things. There is not an article of clothing that you cannot wear in more than one way. Almost everything I make can be worn backwards, forwards, inside out and upside down, not to mention inside out backwards and upside down [kSea laughs] because everything must be something else, even a pair of pants. A pair of pants can be a hoodie, a pair of pants can be a scarf. A pair of pants you can put your arms through and make into a shrug. Everything that is on my rack can be worn as something else. Especially now, we need to be multi-versatile in everything to cut down on all of our stuff, all of the material goods that we accumulate. If we have one piece of clothing that can be worn in eight different ways – Hello? [laughs] I do street wear. It’s only available through my personal trunk shows. I sometimes will have them available elsewhere. I do them because I love them, but I don’t want it to be my main coin, my main financial back.

kSea: That is performance - but sometimes performance and the money you derive from it gets a little tough. Something you told me the last time we talked at Supperclub really made me struck the chords of my heart. The way you described what you create, the pieces you create, and why you create them. ‘Guarantee’ sounds like a very vapid word and very vague but there was something you said about the way the piece is the person and the way, if it tears, if it rips, when you repair it, you repair a part of that person. Can you describe that?

BUS: Right. The reason I work in fabric is because we are a society that is really concerned about the way we look and the way we feel in a piece of clothing. I feel that one of my main jobs on the planet is for human connection, so where else to go but to a fabric, to something that we wrap our bodies in? Something that feels like a hug. So, for me this is just fabric, it’s just fabric. I don’t really care about the fabric. What I care about the personal connection. I don’t produce my stuff in other places. I hand-make everything and when I have assistants come in to help me make my work, I always put their name on the tag and I say, ‘This design was made by Bad Unkl student so-and-so. If you like their design, please contact them.’ I hand-make everything for someone specific and then I put it on my rack, and wait for that specific person to find it. Once they find it, they know. They know this is their piece. They take it, and I guarantee it. For as long as they have the piece, I will repair it always. Even if they rip it to shreds, I will figure out a way to repair it because, like I said before, it doesn’t have anything to do with the fabric. When someone brings something back to be repaired, it’s some piece of themselves, some piece inside of themselves that needs a little nip or a tuck, like all of us do. We need someone to listen, we need someone to be there for us, so when I repair a piece of clothing, I’m not repairing that piece of clothing. I’m listening, I’m being there, and I’m repairing by taking a little nip or tuck in that psychic tear, that place that we all need to be heard. This is what I do it for. 

kSea: This is certainly a world far too full of indifference, and the things you create are able to erase that. They can’t ignore your creations, they can’t ignore your performance.

BUS: I don’t know if it erases more than – it might escalate a bit more, because I know that my pieces scare people. [laughs] Erase?

kSea: Okay, so startles them and they go home with a jarred mind.

BUS: Right.

kSea: And perhaps think about it, perhaps remember something from their childhood, perhaps dream a little bit more vividly.

BUS: [laughs] Perhaps.

kSea: Perhaps a little bit more darkly. Let’s say ‘perhaps’ a couple more times.

BUS: Perhaps.

kSea: then again, Perhaps not.

kSea: You’ve answered all the questions that I have. The last question I had was, ‘What, in your opinion, sets you apart from the rest of the clothes designers, or the fashion designers,’ but you nipped that in the bud by saying that you most certainly are not a fashion designer, you are a performer who creates fashion for your performances.

BUS: Right, but I don’t even create ‘fashion.’ I only create art, and the thing is that I don’t know the first thing about fashion. I don’t know. I don’t know names. I’m really sheltered. I haven’t had a TV for 17 years. I haven’t seen a sitcom for – I don’t know names. I don’t know. I don’t have a clue about fashion. I am only an artist that is making things you can put on your body.

kSea: I think, that being said, the word ‘fashion’ really needs to be expanded because it isn’t Donna Karen, it isn’t all the other big names. ‘Fashion’ is pure style, and it’s what you are. It’s gotten a really bad rap but it is – let’s just call it ‘style’ because style goes far beyond what you’re wearing and reaches down to your soul because it’s who you are.

BUS: Well, Bad Unkl Sista got a lot of style, but she don’t know nothin’ about fashion.

BUS: That’s a whole other interview.

kSea: Yeah, exactly. Where we don’t need to focus on your clothes, we could focus on your performance, we could focus on –

BUS: That’s a whole other can of worms there.

kSea: Oh, that’s what I want to dig up. I go fishing. The biggest nightmare for me is doing a mundane interview, but I guess that goes back to throwing it in the machine blindly – I have no idea what I’m doing, so if I’m lucky what comes out the other end is better than I could have imagined – like this.

BUS: Good.

kSea: I told you about this question, which I normally don’t. As we’re both yawning now and need to sleep… tell me a secret.

BUS: I think I told you the secret the whole time. I kept telling you over and over and over again, is that I am a secret successful ‘fashion designer’ that doesn’t know anything about fashion and don’t even know how to sew. [laughs]

kSea: But, back up. You aren’t a ‘fashion designer.’

BUS: Right, but that’s what people tell me.

kSea: You’re a performer.

BUS: That’s what people call me.

kSea: Alright, so that’s the secret? That you’re called a ‘fashion designer?’

BUS: [laughs] Right.

kSea: But you are paid, I should say, as a ‘fashion designer’ but you are so far beyond that and so much more. Let this be known. I’m going to put this in bold friggin’ letters: Anastasia, a.k.a., Bad Unkl Sister ummm - Sista, sorry.

BUS: No ‘r’ in ‘sista.’

kSea: is not a fashion designer. She is a performer who creates the most amazing fabric sculpture for her performances, and in the future you will find her again in these pages on a different page.

BUS: We haven’t even gone into the BUS Stop Gallery yet.

kSea: ‘BUS Stop Gallery?’ What the hell is that?

BUS: That’s what you’re sitting in, dude. This is an event space.

kSea: No, no oh, hell – no more recording. No more editing!

BUS: No, I mean, that’s a whole other – That’s what we have this space for, is to start doing events, to start doing fundraising events, to do free sewing classes, to be doing performance events where we’re collaborating with the art galleries over here and with Anon Salon.

kSea: Talk a little bit louder because this should go on there, too, if you want.

BUS: I think it’s a whole other thing because that would be ‘what’s going on in BUS Stop Gallery.’ We do once-a-month trunk shows. We’re going to be doing movie nights.

kSea: What are trunk shows?

BUS: Trunk shows are where I sell my work. It’s all local, all couture, all hand-made. We promote local designers that need a boost up. We’re also going to have healing nights where we have a bunch of healers come. You can pick and choose, find out about different healing modalities.

kSea: Be partially healed or wholly healed, or healed in parts of your body, your soul or spirit. Or wardrobe.

BUS: We’re also going to do performance fundraisers where we have invite-only performance night. You can have up to 70 people at $65 per head. We can come and have an intimate performance night.

kSea: Except, of course, for the media, because I don’t have any fucking money, for my head or anything else. Gods. I just called myself media. Fuck that - I'm a magazine sculptor - and then some.

BUS: Of course. There’s a gallery down the way, like I said. We’re going to do roaming performances where we start the performance there. We have a procession that processes all the way over to this gallery, then there’s street performances on the corners and on their processions. Then we have people hanging from the fire escape doing performances as they come in, people in the garage, in the stairwell coming up into here, having the final performance in here.

kSea: Talk to me about that. Let me know about that. Right now, that may or may not be included in the interview.

BUS: No, I don’t think you should include it. It’s its own thing.

kSea: I’m signing out. if I actually had a bedtime anymore this would be way past it. Big Top Magazine and kSea flux interviewing the most incredibly delightful Anastazia, a.k.a. Bad Unkl Sista - with no ‘r’.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~