Too Much of a Woman

Too Much of a Woman is a solo performance for my own voice, live electronics, amplified objects, fixed video and movement, developed at CNMAT, UC Berkeley, and premiered at The Lab, San Francisco, in 2022. It is notated in a hybrid score of my own devising — an Embodied Vocal Notation System that tracks voice, electronics, objects and movement on parallel lines — and lasts fourteen to sixteen minutes in five sections: Emergence · Naming · Escalation · Saturation · Dissolution.

It delves into the complexities of gender identity and self-perception through the fusion of voice, amplified objects and image. A sung line — I was there, you were here, we were waiting for each other — enters a looper and accumulates; spoken fragments break it apart; it returns, looped and then live, under a spectral freeze as the body intensifies; and the fourth section arrives at the sentence the whole piece has been circling, delivered once, as a scream, then laughter: Here I am, too much of a woman — I was too much for everyone — too fat, too tall, too smart, just too much — but I do apologise. I do exist. A singing bowl and candles sit on the table; the video is a deep red field with bird silhouettes and a ghost of the performer’s own face. In the last section the layers peel away one by one and she walks to a protest banner — a pankart — which is blank, and holds it, and freezes.

It is a visceral performance that challenges the norms it quotes and explores the fluidity of personal identity, creating an intimate experience for the audience. A new version was presented at the eviMus Festival in Saarbrücken on 1 November 2025.