Sometimes you can only cry, sometimes you can only scream: In conversation with Diane Mahín
Mila Narjollet
Writer Mila Narjollet sits down with Diane Mahín for an in-depth conversation on the genesis of her performance GRUNT, her enduring relationship with music, the volatile intersection of violence and sound, and how it can generate new realities for what or who is ‘other’. In times of heavily publicised, live-streamed violence, what does wildness mean? Who is allowed to explore it as an annex, a dormant beast within oneself, and who is it imposed upon? This article is part of Writing Wildness, an editorial collection of reflections and insights emerging from the 2025 edition of FIBER Festival. Writing Wildness gathers a constellation of voices reflecting on art, sound, and technology, tracing the many ways creative practices can open new pathways through which to sense and imagine the world.
What does wildness mean in times of heavily mediatised, live-streamed violence? Who is allowed to explore it as an annex, a dormant beast within oneself, and who is it imposed upon? Mila Narjollet invited Diane Mahín to discuss the birth of her performance GRUNT, her love for music, what can come about at the intersection of violence and sound and how it can generate new realities for what or who is ‘other’.
Mila Narjollet: Hi Diane, thank you so much for meeting with me. I have a lot of questions for you. Can you begin by just telling me about how you developed GRUNT? What was the urgency there?
Diane Mahín: The urgency to make something becomes clear to me as I look at the material. I always start from a sound, and I want to come close to that sound so I start digging in it. As these things unlock for me, I start to understand why I’m so drawn to it. I kind of stumbled upon the vocal technique of growling, firstly. I was studying, at the time, a master in opera, and my classmates really liked singing together, and I didn’t really enjoy singing together. We had to make a piece for which you could make your own character. So then I thought, how do I get out of singing together? And I had already heard this technique a lot; my brother listened to metal growing up so I knew what it was. I thought, if I can growl, I don’t have to sing. That’s how I got to growling.
And then a metal teacher came to teach me and I fell in love with the vocal technique, something unlocked in me. In my gender expression; I really loved how I was supposed to make very violent and low sounds that normatively might be labeled as masculine I loved that I could produce that.
Growing up, I was always expected to be a ‘lady’, and I’m really not a lady. This sound really unlocked the complete opposite of a lady, whatever that means. So there I really fell in love with the sound. The growling allowed me to be this kind of monster, and at the same time, it felt extremely feminine. This sound, it’s like a volcano, it felt really connected to the earth. And it just felt really good to do.
But I also really like listening to violent music. Not only limited to metal, which I started listening more to while studying the vocal technique. What I like about a violent sound is that it doesn’t lie. Your violent voice cannot lie to you; a growl really expresses some kind of learned violence or trauma that you cannot hide. And expressing it, cleanses you from it somehow. That’s what I really liked about it, this dissociation that happens when a voice tries to say something, but it cannot do anything but produce violence. A beautiful violence to me.
MN: Do you feel like a composer in this way?
DM: In some pieces I feel like a composer. I also work, for example, with crying sounds. There I feel more like a composer. For GRUNT, I don’t really. I work with a score for this performance, which allows me to embody this dissociation between trying to communicate and trying to connect, but only being able to produce a sound that people don’t understand, the violent sound.
MN: I was wondering what place language has in this piece. Is it something that is a driving force, or is it something that’s a parasite?
DM: That’s a good question. Language plays a huge role in my work. Everything I say in this performance has a sentence in my mind – the text is already written, and I perform the text by producing sounds. I use gestures and you can see in my eyes that I’m trying to tell you something, and that is the text, it is the language that we know. My body is speaking in the language that we know. But I want this dissociation between what we know and what is coming across. I want to show that this person cannot, is unable. It is about the failure of language. That you might try to say one thing, but because of a violent past and because of the violent world, all you can do is express.
MN: And what about intelligence? Does our understanding of intelligence and intelligibility play in your mind when you write your scores?
DM: Yes. What I think is happening in this performance also is that it starts from a dissociation between trying to communicate something and not being able to. But I do think that throughout the piece, slowly, the audience starts speaking my language. People get used to things really quickly.
In the beginning, it’s really weird, it’s kind of alienating, that the body is disconnected. And you try to understand, she seems like she’s telling a story, but she can only kind of scream at you. And then at one point as a performer I’m becoming more comfortable in this new language that we made. Because why do you need these words, really, to get your point across?
Throughout the piece we create a new intelligence with the audience to understand a story through more bodily means or more sensory means. So called language is not needed for that. And at one point in the performance the sound cuts away, and then you just have the body left. I really like stripping away elements and seeing how the material is still intelligible.
MN: Is humour a way for you to create this communal understanding?
DM: Yes, for sure. I find humour extremely, extremely important. GRUNT is a very dark piece. It’s really sad to see her want to say something so urgently but not being able to. It’s also a sound that feels in distress, ridden with violence. Performance is a place where I aestheticise darkness and violence. And to me, everyday life is something very dark. I try to put that on a stage so we look at it together. But I need to have something to relate to it, to make it safe to look at. I think humour is a tool to do that. So if you feel like you’re allowed to laugh together with other people, I think it’s easier to relate to this darkness. I mean some things are not humourous. You cannot find humour in it. But there is humour in what I’m doing with GRUNT. It’s sometimes hard to make the audience understand that they can laugh. But I work with humour by digging in the sound and in the darkness. I don’t do it the other way around. I don’t paste humour on it. It becomes humourous at one point when you’ve been listening to this person for so long and you start to think ‘What the fuck is she saying?’ You create points of relief. And the person that performs, the woman, the growler herself laughs, of course.
MN: I was really struck by these moments of play with tension and relief. When you crossed your leg, or when you ruffled your hair into a mane that covered the face. These moments of playing with that line between the human and the non human.
DM: You want to be able to relate to the unhuman thing, right? If it’s completely unrelatable there’s just no entry points; I think you can also make something relatable by exposing it over a long period of time, by making the inner logic so logical in that world that you accept it. But I do like playing indeed. The crossing of the leg was a moment of remembering that I’m in a room with people, and they’re trying to listen, and I just had this whole rant. But maybe I should start over and be civil about it. The ‘lady-like’ parts come back. I think: ‘Oh yeah, my legs are spread. How did I learn? How did I learn to be human again? What was I taught in everyday life?’ I use it to make a kind of recap there. That’s an important moment for me.
MN: Is it important for you to associate yourself with non-human things? Do you see this character or yourself being associated with something that is animal, in quotation marks, something that is wild, and why is that important for you in order to tap into this violence and trauma that you were talking about?
DM: The voice, this growl, for me, symbolises something beyond logic, something instinctual and something violent, and something that cannot lie, something that is indifferent. To me, that is nature and wilderness. Whatever made this thing that way, will express it that way. Nature is not going to have a filter, it won’t be expressing itself a certain way, like we do. We translate. I feel really angry, but I should compose myself. I think that something animal or something natural doesn’t have this filter. In that way it’s very important to look at something non-human. The growl in this piece is a beyond-human voice or actually, I think it’s a pre-human voice. It’s pre-verbal, pre-taught.
MN: I really like the word you used: indifferent. I think that suits very well; it doesn’t give into narratives we might have about the nature/culture divide where nature is all giving and all encompassing, that it is bountiful and infinite in its ability to give to us. I think this indifference is very important and beautiful to bring forward.
DM: Yeah, I think nature doesn’t give a shit about us. This growl if you let it go, it might kill something or it might be beautiful, it doesn’t really care. I like putting that in a human. I really like putting learned social behaviour together with this more instinctive voice that’s also uncontrollable. There is definitely something about control there for me.
MN: How do you tap into the uncontrollable?
DM: Through sound always. It’s really a sonic quality to me, this uncontrollable thing. But in order to show it, or to look at it as something uncontrollable, I have to put it together with something I control. I have this score of texts, and I use gestures that we know and I sit on a chair. It’s a story really. I propose this uncontrollable sound, which actually only symbolises the uncontrollable because it’s extremely controlled, it’s a whole technique. And by putting it together with the score I understand what is controllable and what is uncontrollable. And how they relate to each other.
MN: And where does your relationship with sound come from? Where does your obsession come from?
DM: My obsession with sound mostly comes from how it speaks to the body directly, but also how you can play with that. I’m mostly obsessed with body sounds – sounds coming from the body. I work a lot with socialisation, learned behavior and the everyday, so I am very interested in playing with sounds that come from the body directly, which are often something that you cannot control. And often what is interesting for me is to take the sound away from the body, or to dissociate it from its context.
Sound is great because you have a pre-verbal opinion about it, a pre-learned opinion. Everyone knows! Anyone who can hear knows exactly what they feel about a sound, even though they cannot put it into words. To me it is related very much with instinct, which doesn’t marry well with text or logic and I like things that don’t marry well with text or logic, because that’s where the danger is. The importance for me is to relate something logical or cognitive with something bodily, like sound.
MN: It’s true, isn’t it? It’s one of the first senses for many of us. Even in the belly one of the first things you can sense if you are able to is sound.
DM: Yes! I also made a piece with gut sounds, and that’s exactly what you hear in the belly. I guess that’s what you hear for nine months.
MN: I noticed that this is a sort of motif in your practice. GRUNT and other performances of yours seem like a glimpse into the inside of the body from the outside. Can you tell me more about this inversion or this playing rather?
DM: Like I said, the first time I worked with body sounds was for GUT. The reason why I wanted to explore gut sounds was because I wanted to turn a body inside out. Later the performance became about something else, about this logic-not logic paradigm, but the first intention was to turn the body inside out. I wanted to sink in my own body somehow, because I think there’s a really interesting tension inside a body between basically death and the fear of death but also the calmness of entropy.
That’s why I wanted to bring the inside of the body out, because I thought: ‘how does this then live in conversation with learned social behaviour?’ The guthuman we call him, is drinking, or trying to dance, or trying to talk. To me, those everyday things which become so redundant, become really interesting when they are confronted with something that is so real and that’s coming out the inside of your body.
MN: It’s beautiful, I think it’s very cyclical imagery that you’re drawing up here. The gut is where you eat, but also where you are eaten. It’s the topos of where that happens at the same time.
DM: Exactly. GUT is quite old, I made it a while ago, so I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and I do see, indeed, the motif of bringing something uncontrollable out, like growling and like crying.
MN: Right, and these sounds are also a shameful thing. It’s the reminder that you have a body and that it doesn’t always listen to you.
DM: Exactly, it doesn’t really care about you. If you think about screaming or growling or using your voice like that, it is also something you shouldn’t do in public. Crying is, of course, in this culture, in the Netherlands, very taboo. You shouldn’t cry so loud, you know? I like bringing out those sounds that we like to hide, I like giving them the lead role.
MN: If you think about it, there’s really no space for screaming ever. Specifically here, I have found that in the Netherlands, there’s not so much space to be in public, it’s always already seen as an infraction to be and to occupy public space. So I think there’s quite an urgency and something very powerful in bringing the inside, the inner, the body, to an audience. I was really so curious about when you kind of burrowed into the audience at the end of the piece. Could you talk more about that, what kind of relation did you intend to build with that?
DM: At one point the growler loses her voice, and all that is left is the memory of her trying to get her point across somehow. I guess I wanted to share this feeling you get when you swallow something in for so long and it eventually comes out way more violently. So I chose to go into the audience to hurl it all out. And she’s kind of crawling over the floor, she becomes more like an animal. When she’s not allowed to be, she becomes more other. I don’t like participatory theatre or participatory art, but I do want the audience to feel like I’m one of them and that we’re in the same world. So I throw up growls, and they become way more violent because they’re amplified.
What I like about that scene, is also that suddenly the embarrassment comes in for me. I go into the audience, I crawl into the audience, I’m suddenly among you, and I puke growls into your world. And it’s very loud and very violent, I become more of an invasion. And when it’s done and I look at what I’ve done, when I look at you I realise that ‘oh I shouldn’t have behaved that way.’ It’s similar to the crossing of the legs, but it’s a bit more extreme. To get that feeling I have to be in the audience. Before that, when I’m still talking to the audience, when I’m still being respectful of the boundaries, it’s like we’re getting to know each other. But then the climax comes, I swallowed in the growls for so long that I just need somewhere to puke.And I don’t care if it’s amongst people at that moment. Until I become aware of it, what I have done. That is kind of the line of that character.
MN: Now that you say embarrassment, I’m curious how shame or guilt nourish your creation process or the development of your pieces.
DM: I do always go for things that can be considered very shameful, or that people are ashamed of, but I don’t really manipulate it in the creation process. The sound that I use is something that’s considered as something you shouldn’t do, but when I use it in the creation process, I take it as a given. This is not my language, I just scream. Or, this is my language, I use gut sounds. In the creation process I try to be that character for whom it’s completely normal to scream. This is something she does every day, all the time. This is how she talks. I’m already past it somehow, the shame. I think shame comes in more in the dramaturgical choices. But guilt, not so much – it does not have this same role in what I do.
MN: You mentioned othering, which I also immediately thought of while watching your piece. Is there any part of that character that is also trying to communicate to other growlers or other grunters? And who might they be?
DM: That’s a really good question. I don’t know if I know that yet. My characters are always very lonely, even if I make a group piece, like the one with the criers, they’re alone. So loneliness is a very important part of my work. Just as important as this being something other.
And until now, I think these characters mostly try to speak to the other, to the audience. I don’t think these characters that I make – like this growler are very happy with where she is. The growler is reaching out to another world, but because loneliness is really important for me, it’s important that they’re isolated characters. They don’t really communicate with other growlers.
But it’s a question I have for myself. I would not know what happens if there was another growler there, another one of that world. It almost feels like the characters I make are kind of like outcasts of their own society and they’re the ones trying to reach out to the other side. This question does linger though – where are the others? I don’t know where they are yet. I don’t know if they’re there. I know they’re there because I always think of the performances I make as little societies. So they come from a society of growlers, they live in a growling world. But I don’t know where they are. I don’t know where the others are.
MN: Is it important for you to have this kind of background? Because you also mentioned this logic that you build. Is it very important for you to have a whole world and a set of constructions behind the characters?
DM: Yeah, for me, it’s very important to have a lot of rules and instructions that the audience doesn’t know about. They don’t need to know, but it has to be crystal clear for the character what kind of world she comes from and how you behave there.
I don’t work much with scenography, but in the performativity, in how I move and how I behave there are many rules which come from a kind of fictional society. Always.
MN: It’s very interesting that you have all of this operating in the background. Have you ever thought about sharing that in any way, or do you think that would be almost a betrayal to the performance?
DM: I think I would, I do share it, like I did in the talk for GUT, for example, but I do it for people who are interested, it’s often other artists that are interested in how such a creation process goes.
I haven’t so far put that in the audience’s world but I can imagine it. I think the costume is already kind of a step towards sharing more about that world. Until now, I haven’t worked with scenographers, I can imagine I would, but it also really needs to come from the performative material. I really enjoy letting something speak a world into existence, that you perceive as a whole world because there are so many rules. We want to know so many things but I find it important that sometimes you understand something with your body. You can feel something coming from a specific world, even if it’s not explained to you exactly. Otherwise we go more into the logical realm again.
MN: I was also really curious about the collaborations with your brother. Because you were talking a lot about loneliness, I wonder what happens then in collaboration. Is it a whole different methodology?
DM: My brother and I are very similar. What comes out of us is also very similar. And funny enough, the characters that me and my brother make are also alone. They’re together in the same world, and they’re not the same person, but they don’t really see each other. And sometimes we even think maybe they are an extension of each other. So in some pieces, we do feel like they are just manifestations of the same thing.
MN: That’s really interesting. Do you associate this loneliness at all with wildness? I would like to bring it back to the theme of the festival, wildness.
DM: I do associate it with that, because this loneliness also comes from this really existential feeling of how fucking absurd everything is. And how it’s not supposed to be like this, this is not good for us. Whatever we did here, this is not good, it doesn’t feel good. And I think that has to do with wildness, because you feel it on the inside. We’re not supposed to act this way, be this way. And I’m not saying we’re supposed to be super violent and scream all the time and tear our clothes apart. But I do think the reason why things can feel so absurd is because we have this inner wildness, this part that doesn’t have a place. It’s actually really alienating. I think the world is super alienating.
MN: If you feel like an alien, what world would you like to inhabit? What would you envision for yourself as a character?
DM: I will only answer a small part of that, because, of course, the world I would like to see… There is so much to say.
But the main thing in my work is that there’s no patterns to follow, there’s no set rules to follow, you are not told to do the same thing over and over, there is no authority you have to listen to, you don’t do things just because it was done like that in the past. So you have to really figure out every moment for yourself. Should I still walk standing up? Isn’t it better if I walk sideways? You don’t take things for granted or as a given.
MN: So inviting wildness in the performance can create space for maybe not improvisation, but spontaneity?
DM: It creates space to be woken up to the idea that this is really weird what we’ve done here. To reconsider a little bit how you want to live and to be reminded that everything we do is actually made up.
MN: So the idea is trying to highlight the logics that have constructed the way we do things and make the audience face that?
DM: Yes, make them face that we constructed all this, and it’s not going well, you know.
MN: Yes, and performance is so linked to that. I mean, performance philosophy is all about how things have both been constructed, and how they keep getting repeated over and over again, and how that creates its own internal and circular logic.
DM: Yeah, exactly. You can make entirely your own logic in a performance. These people made this world, so that means we can make our world as well. Through performance.
MN: To round off, I would love to hear more about the crying performance.
DM: It’s called large space in the back of the mouth, and it’s a composition of crying, vocalised crying. In my mother’s country, in Iran, there are professional criers at weddings, at funerals, and they come and cry so that you can release your crying. They fake cry, so that you can cry, so that you can get rid of your emotions. Crying was a huge, like, a huge part of growing up in an Iranian household. It’s really something I grew up with, but I didn’t really see much in Dutch society, and then I started to get more and more interested in crying sounds.
I was making this piece during the same time that Israel intensified the genocide in Palestine. Palestine has made me confront how we are all entangled in the same systems of destruction, and how our responsibility is shared. It became more clear to me how I wanted to work with crying and grief. I think in order to be a good human, or in order to truly relate to other humans, you have to relate to your own grief and your own position in this really fucked up machine instead of pitying other people. Therefore, I wanted to start from the sonic aspect of crying and dissociate these crying sounds from the performers in this piece. It’s not about their personal story. The audience hears a sound and it makes them relate to their own grief , and that will hopefully activate people into taking responsibility in their own position of this killing machine that our world is.
MN: Was there a kind of evolution for you from the grief to the anger with GRUNT?
I don’t know. I don’t think I did it consciously. But I do become more and more angry. I oscillate a lot in this time between anger and grief. With crying you just have to let out the grief, it’s a state beyond control, your whole body is out of control. And I think it’s an expression of grief. But between the cries I get really angry. I mean, I’ve been angry for years. Sometimes you can only cry, sometimes you can only scream, and sometimes you have to use your words and your emails and your calls.
MN: There’s also something to be said about the difference between being able to tap into a wildness within yourself and a wildness being imposed on you.
DM: I think so too, for sure. There is so much dehumanisation right now on many different levels and it’s used as a tool to justify killing. Just this week I saw clips of Iranian women being described as uneducated and subservient in the context of the bombings by Israel1. Wildness, as a narrative, can be used in this way, against someone or something. Through performance I have the privilege of choosing to visit wildness, to embody it as something that is simultaneously outside of myself and very much informed by my lived experience as a woman. In GRUNT I know the story that I’m telling because it’s the story of an angry woman. She’s angry, and that’s it, we’re not listening to her words. It’s just an angry thing. In that way, I think the dehumanisation is also happening in the audience, because you don’t know what she’s saying. You can only see that she’s angry. And this is so often the role that a woman gets pushed in – when she’s angry she’s a hysterical woman.2
So yes, it’s a huge privilege to be able to visit this wildness instead of being cast aside as a wild thing.
MN: Yes. That made me quite emotional when you said, I know the story that I’m telling. It’s a powerful sentence. And I think it speaks to this embodiment that you have going through your whole practice – things known in the body.
DM: Exactly, yeah. I cannot always put it to words yet, as a maker, but also as the audience. Sometimes it’s just something that you know. And only later on do you understand why that was something and where you want to go with that thing.
MN: Yeah, beautiful. Thank you so much.
Mila Narjollet is an artist, writer, and researcher based between The Hague and Amsterdam. Their academic and creative research explores the extractive relations between lands, bodies and species which are imposed by globalisation and neocolonialism. They attempt to trace the dynamics which underlie the current planetary heart failure and to challenge the imaginaries and narratives which exacerbate it.
This interview was recorded on June 20, 2025.
Author’s note: Wildness being imposed on someone / through performance being able to or having the choice to tap into a wildness that is buried within but that it does come from a lived experience of being a woman.