Interview: Alex Grelle and Kasey Alfonso

Our next interview is with educator, choreographer, and real estate agent Kasey Alfonso and Chicago theatre-performance artist Alex Grelle. Kasey and Alex are some of the most talented creators in the city of Chicago and they also happen to be my friends. Alex premiered the latest volume of The Grelley Duvall Show in late May 2021. Kasey choreographed some moves for it and I danced and acted in the show.

I wanted to interview them together because they were collaborating during a pandemic. I struggled so much to find motivation and even inspiration to make anything, and the level of output from these two is so impressive. How does a performance artist who needs bodies in the room quickly adapt to the online platform, create work, and still feel fulfilled?

— Alyssa Gregory

Alyssa Gregory: So, the pandemic hit, we're in lockdown. What did you all do to survive creatively, but also mentally and emotionally?

Kasey Alfonso: I think and I feel this was also true for a lot of people, but I tried a lot of different things. I tried to take classes online, several different kinds of dance classes. I don't love taking dance that way, I realized. I also personally really like to cook, so I ended up cooking a lot and, and pushing a lot of creativity into that place. And that was also a hobby that's useful because you can turn your brain off a little bit and you're using your hands. You can sort of put your brain somewhere else and you can put music on and sort of be in another place.

I was also lucky because I teach at the Chicago Academy for the Arts. I teach at least once a week there. Obviously that went remote, but I was forced to do that still. You know, as much as I love teaching those kids — I love them — it was hard to come to a place where you had to come up with material, but they still require an education. They're high schoolers, there's no telling them I'm not going to make a dance for them because I'm sad. I can't, I just can't. So at least once a week I was forced to make something or at least put my body in a thing that hopefully my head would catch up with, you know?

Alex Grelle: I think it's been giving me a lot of time to think about the past, which is something I feel I haven’t really had that much time for it before since I was kind of just moving as fast as I possibly could.

Other things, Paul [Alex’s partner] and I just made a lottery of our movies. We have 412 movies from LaserDisc and VHS that we've thrifted.

Alyssa: Holy shit.

Alex: We put it in a pot and then when you draw that name, you watch that movie because we're just so sick of picking them. We recently watched a Hallmark Channel movie with Ellen Burstyn, that drug movie from the nineties, with Katie Holmes. It's so bad. Every movie in the mid, late nineties is just trying to be Pulp Fiction.

Oh, Heartburn, that's a really important movie to me. It's my favorite Meryl Streep and I wanted to share it with Paul. 

I also worked on the Grelle DuVall television special at the top of the pandemic. That really inspired me and fired me up to do another project that was supposed to be in December. Now you guys are working on it and it's going to be in May. So, it's a full year and it's a much bigger and bolder project. It's really intimidating.

Alyssa: I'm really interested in this question for the two of you, because I know you both are still doing output and how you manage that. I struggled with it personally. How did y'all stay creative? 

Kasey: For my students at the Academy, I vowed to them that we weren't going to do any sad dances. There's really no other way that I know how to address this feeling, this heaviness, that sadness, this uncertainty. I don't know how to address this other than to just put on a song with a heavy bass drum and dance.

Hard, hard dancing, hashtag hard dancing. That's all I could really muster up for them. So that was… I don't think I made anything though. That was just for me.

At the Academy they have majors, those are musical theater majors in high school. So they're, you know, training for this career that will or will not exist. I also have really complicated feelings about that because, yes, I'm sure theater will come back. I don't know in what capacity, I don't know how they're going to do it, but a part of me felt really complicated about nurturing this education towards a career that doesn't exist right now.

Of course I love teaching dance, I always loved teaching dance, but there was a part of me that wanted to be like, “Hey, get a business degree, just even if you don't use it, you could still do musical theater.” I have really complicated feelings about institutional conservatory training anyway, because that's the world that I came from.

Alyssa: I feel a similar responsibility. I had some similar conversations with students too and I kept saying, “Well, when we're not in a pandemic, this is how it goes.” I felt important for me to be really clear that this is what this is and this is what this is right now. I cannot give you any guarantee about what is going to happen. It's also weird when you have students that look to you for advice in that way and you have to throw your hands up and be like, “I don’t know.” 

Kasey: Yup, I don't know. And my boss at the Academy is incredible. He said you should tell the kids about, you know, what you're doing. I'm also a realtor and he's like, please tell the kids about your life doing that. Because they need to see that. Everybody has you have to do it. And sometimes this is your full-time career. And sometimes this is half of your career. Sometimes it's not a career at all, but it is something that you do. There are so many nuances to being a performer or choosing to perform that I do feel we have a responsibility as educators, you know, anyone that educates someone in a performance space to make that known. Because I feel it wasn't made known to me.

Alyssa: It wasn't made known to me either.

Alex: Yeah. I mean, it was definitely known for me in college. My professors were definitely vocal about, you're not gonna make money being a live performer. There's not even a 1% of live performers that are making it. Everybody on Broadway sells shoes during the day, you know. So I kind of just embraced that idea because I was born to be a Vaudevillian clown. 

Kasey: You really are.

Alyssa: I'm curious about how you both view and feel about community through the pandemic and what community will be like on the other side.  

Alex: We have a really good community of people that we work with that are completely talented and get their job done. And I can't be thankful enough, but in these projects that I'm working on, I'm really seeking relationships and collaborative efforts with these people that I've always wanted to dig deep with and cause I think they're really, really good. And that's the kind of, you know, the mission statement of Chicago to me. It's just, we've got to work together. We've got to showcase each other's work. We've got to trust each other.

Also the community I had before, way before the pandemic, I don't know about you guys, but I have connected with so many people in my past that helped me. Kindred spirits I have reconnected with. I mean, granted it's just over the phone, but it's just any sense of nostalgia or happiness from before, even if it's way before in my life, someone that helped me come into my sexuality, I liked to talk to, you know.

Kasey: I think with the one-on-one connections, like you're saying Alex, I'm way more likely now to pick up the phone. If I see somebody who I haven't talked to in a while is calling me, because I'm interested in what they have to say. I want that connection. I need that connection. And I feel, yeah, I need the updates. And I feel like if they put in the effort to call me — set aside time to call me — then I owe it to them to pick up.  

Alyssa: What's a lesson that the pandemic has taught you?  

Alex: I think it's definitely taught me patience. I feel like my fuse has been super short and I'm learning how to counteract to not blow up. My temper has been something that I've been working with my whole life. I'm trying my best to figure out how to make my fuse longer. And I think I'm making steps in the right direction, you know, I think that patience is a really hard thing right now because we're still waiting to get back to normalcy.

Kasey: Yep. I think that in the pandemic, probably what I learned the most about myself or something I'm working on is the power of focus and quality time. And what I mean by that is because of this sort of black hole that we were presented with in a weird way, it kind of shed a light on things in my life that maybe were not serving me before. I was made very aware that no, actually my time is quality. I have that. And the time that I choose to spend with people needs to be quality too.

I became very aware of the two-way street of relationships and that we — I'm not gonna say we — I only had capacity for relationships and communications that are fully reciprocal that I feel like both parties were getting something good out of. And it also helped me focus on what I want for the future, because all of this time was suddenly here. And so what else are you going to do? You have to just sort of zero in on the thing that you want, you know? So that's I think the lesson that I came away with.

Kasey Alfonso, originally from Los Angeles, is now a Chicago-based performer and choreographer. She has worked all over Chicago, including Lookingglass Theatre, Paramount Theatre, Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, The Court Theatre, American Theatre Company, and Chicago Children’s Theatre. As a choreographer, her work has been featured with The Inconvenience (The Fly Honey Show), Quest Theatre Ensemble (The Fantasticks), and Inappropriate Theatre Company. She also teaches Dance at the Chicago Academy for the Arts.

Alex Grelle is a queer Chicago based performer that creates heartfelt, comedic spectacles. Grelle's shows are carefully curated and showcase performances and artists that have impacted his life in an influential way.