Meet the Glamorous Creative Duo Princess

The two artists in Princess Collaborative performing on a stage. They stand holding stringed instruments facing an audience on the left and right sides of the stage lit with a light blue light. Behind them a large projection of a music video featuring the artists is playing. The video features a magenta hue.

“Once society embraces the full gradient of Identity, the richer, healthier, and more beautiful the world will be.” – Princess

Princess is a genre-defying arts duo featuring Alexis Gideon (he/they) and Michael O’Neill (he/him). They create textural, lush, humorous, and colorful time-based art. Alexis and Michael combine modes of creative production by blending music, costumery, and video operas. This approach reminds me of expansive/fluid expressions of queerness because both often create beauty and complexity through imaginative re-contextualization.

Each artist has a robust practice outside of their shared project, Princess. Alexis is a composer and visual artist who creates innovative animated live video operas. Michael is a musician with extensive collaborative projects and approaches to creative practice. One of Michael’s other collaborations, MEN, explores the radical potential of dance music. This theme of radical potential compliments Alexis’ ongoing exploration of transcendence and healing.

Could you each speak to your creative inspirations and influences?

Michael: When I was 9, I started dancing at a school run by Broadway dancers in New Jersey. One of the instructors was the Rum Tum Tugger in CATS—we got to go backstage! It was very early-90s_jazz dance was everything. Once Kurt Cobain came onto the scene, I put away my jazz, tap, and ballet shoes (for the time being) and started playing alternative guitar. A few years later, in high school, I developed a passion for the Grateful Dead and other improvisational psychedelic music. The 90’s was an incredible time for music–you could be into all these things at once.

Alexis: One morning when I was 10, I woke up and knew I wanted to start learning the guitar. The next time we visited my grandparents we grabbed my mom’s old nylon string acoustic from when she was in college. It was that day I wrote my first song. Little did I know that this was the beginning of an ever-expanding process of reaching out towards the divine through a meditative interdisciplinary artistic practice. In terms of influences, they span era, language, medium and aesthetic, from the literature of Octavia Butler and Jorges Luis Borges to the art of Louise Bourgeois, William Kentridge and Kerry James Marshall, to the music of Karl Heinz Stockhausen, OutKast, David Byrne and Meredith Monk, to the films of Andrei Tarkovsky and Mika Rottenberg.

How does Princess fit into the context of your greater creative practice?

Alexis: It’s funny. Princess really has its own voice. Even when I am working on something without Michael for Princess, it still comes out with the tone and spirit of Princess, which has a bit more of a playful humor and audacity compared to my solo practice. It is really liberating to have the project have its own character—something that channels through you.

Michael: Princess is where I get to explore being an artist and not just a musician. The music is the backbone of what we do, but it’s always conceptual. The work we are creating is centered around a theme, and through video art, animation, and live performance we get to create work that can be experienced, seen and not just listened to.

What art or music-making processes are you most drawn to in this phase of your practice? Can you describe a bit of your work outside of Princess for us?

Michael: My process often begins with the live experience. Outside of Princess, I am currently in a band called CRICKETS (with JD Samson and Roddy Bottum). We started the band by getting together in a room and making sounds, seeing what we came up with and then forming songs out of them. You know you’re onto something when it feels good in your body, and you have to keep coming back to it, almost obsessed. That’s when I know I’m onto something.

Alexis: I have been working on a largely improvisational daily music and visual meditation practice currently. It involves looping different instruments at different lengths based on the Fibonacci Sequence so that the different instruments are constantly changing in their relationship to one another; generating an infinitely changing piece of music. I trigger video loops of painting animations to go with it. I think of the loops as reaching for an expression of infinity and related to quantum theory.

The two artists in Princess Collaborative performing on a stage. They stand on the left and right sides of the stage. Behind them a large projection of a music video featuring the artists is playing. — *Andy Warhol Museum, Sound Series: Princess. Photograph by Sean Carroll. Image courtesy of the artist*

Princess is a deeply genre-defying project. While I see you have some vinyl out, music available to stream, and video operas, your work is also exhibited in art museums. Can you describe how you conceive of the structure of what Princess is, how you aim to disseminate it, why it exists, and who it is for?

Michael: Yes, genre-defying was always the basis of who we are and what we do; thank you for seeing us! Going back to that first question about influences, we grew up in a time where you could be so many things at once. Being genre-defying is a death nail in the music industry because commercial success relies on marketability to the masses. The art world is more open to our concept, plus it allows us to present our work in an interdisciplinary way. Queerness is part of who we are, so we see our artistic output as an extension of that identity. Princess is for anyone who wants to be anything.

Alexis: We have always thought of genre-bending and interdisciplinary approaches as a very queer ethos beyond polarities. We want to embrace the fluidity between different genres and disciplines as a way of thinking about embracing all the differences in the world. All are welcome.

How do you view your work with Princess within the cultural context of our country at large right now?

Michael: The country at large seems to be in deep trouble. Again, going back to the 90s, for us, it felt like the world was entering a new era of celebrating cultural diversity, but somehow there was a conservative backlash that seems to be taking over. It feels very Back to the Future 2 (1989) where Biff (who’s character in that movie was based on Donald Trump) gets a hold of the almanac, and as a result Hill Valley becomes a dystopia. We have to get the almanac back! At the same time, I think that if we zoom in and focus more locally and to our immediate communities, we can preserve some of our wellness. We are going to get through this and Princess will continue to stand up!

a video still of a side view of creative duo, Princess, facing one another and kissing. They are in front of an edited background featuring magenta and soft green recording equipment. — *Image Still from “Out There” by Princess. Image courtesy of the artists.*

Let’s transition into the process of building a work for Princess. Take us behind the scenes. What is your process for developing new work?

Alexis: Very often, the idea for the next piece will spring from something in the last piece. In our piece Out There (2019), the song “Phone Zone” (all about our unhealthy relationships with our phones), was the jumping off point for @1minworld (One Minute World)(2020). In @1minworld, the song “TROUBLING” (all about how political discourse has become so fragmented and isolating) became the jumping off point for the project we are currently working on entitled Bubbles. We usually start with the music. A narrative generally evolves out of the music. We refine the narrative and then start working on the visual/video element.

What would you want to say to a reader who is feeling fatigued by or afraid because of oppression related to embodying queerness?

Princess: Hang in there! As queers, we exist beyond definition, so don’t let anyone else define you. Preserve your own sanctity and safety. Find community; stand together. Remember Stonewall. Focus on what is good in this world and use that power.

You don’t owe anyone anything. Whatever you need to do to feel safe and seen is valid (as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else). Practicing joy and community is an active form of resistance!

Is there a new Princess project in the works or any other upcoming projects either of you are working on that you could give us a sneak peek on? How can we keep an eye out for this?

Princess: Yes! We are working on a new piece entitled Bubbles.

Bubbles is a theatrical production that uses dance and music within an immersive video installation. The action on stage follows the protagonist as she dances through a video projection environment. The entire narrative of Bubbles is told through songs performed live by Princess with the protagonist (portrayed by dancer/musician Mira Cook) singing, acting and dancing through the space. The movement will be choreographed by dancer/choreographer/filmmaker Robin Cantrell.

Bubbles is a sci-fi narrative where people are living in actual bubbles that resemble smartphone screens. Human interaction is impeded as people float through space in their opaque bubbles, tuning in only to other like-minded bubbles on their bubble screens. The story follows a woman that has escaped her bubble and is forced out into the uncharted world below, exposed and vulnerable for the first time.

Bubbles investigates the internal and social fragmentation that personal technology encourages and normalizes. Identity politics in an already-fragmented world can become painfully reductive, furthering isolation and inflaming stereotypes. Using lessons from intersectional approaches, Bubbles aims to honor the various things that might describe us by showing how they don’t define us.