Performing Oneself or Someone Else: An Interview Between Linda Mary Montano and Nicolás Dumit Estévez 

NIcolás: Linda, after attending your performance Mask On/Mask Off, at the Gershwin Hotel in Manhattan I was wondering if we should invite the reader to wear a wig, to tease their hair or to do their hair in a different style before engaging in this piece?

Linda: Great idea. Now everyone put on your extensions!!!!!!!!!!!

Nicolás: For nearly a lifetime you have been performing so many characters. Can you tell us where they come from?

Linda: I was a "silent selective mute" as a child. That term I made up....but I remember staying in silence forever. My family was very quiet and silent, My Italian grandparents didn’t talk much because they didn’t know English or didn’t like America maybe? Not sure. And my other grandparents who did speak English were quiet also. So I watched everything very closely and when TV first came to the house and people were talking, I learned how to talk from all of those characters I imagine. Señor Wences... very difficult, very easy. Remember? And then there was the church where I spent hours in silence, very happily, dreaming of how to become a saint.

Nicolás: Can you give us some suggestions for allowing hidden aspects of our personas to come to the surface and to take on a physical shape? By this I mean to become a tangible character that can be explored privately or publicly?

Linda: Everybody does this already. We play around with friends and talk differently, fooling around, using accents and personas with them. I would say, the next time you get in a tough spot, have one of your personas work it out for you. Also see who is in your unconscious, lurking there, and give that persona a voice and task.

Nicolás: Why Masks? Mask on and off? Are you implying that we wear masks in our day to day?

Linda: We are always performing and sometimes a persona will take over and confront or stay too long inside us and the idea of seeing this dance as a mask dance is helpful to me. No mask is a bad mask. Each mask is take-on and take-offable. On our death bed, there is only a death mask.

This Q&A was first published with the Queens Museum and the New New Yorkers Program as part of Life as Material For Art and Vice Versa , 2009