R+D Artist Spotlight: Maya Gurantz

By Gina Young

Maya Gurantz’ Research + Development: For Parents/Guardians project, The Sunworshippers, uses dance and storytelling to explore the history of a forgotten Los Angeles-based cult that left an indelible—and to this day, almost entirely unexplored—mark on the 20th and 21st century. 

In her participatory lecture-demonstration, Maya (she/her) will tell the story of cult leader Rev. Dr. Otoman ZarAdusht Ha’nish, dance against a rear-projected backdrop of richly composited video, and lead the audience through Mazdaznan exercises. Along the way, she will reveal connections between new age culture, eugenics, and right wing conspiracy theories; call up the traumas enacted by male leaders; and both create and undermine the notion of group spiritual spaces.

With Research + Development: For Parents/Guardians, Maya will be supported with focused time to develop this new work from the ground up, and given specially-tailored support including a childcare stipend. Maya and I chatted about her project and her hopes for R+D on a hot Thursday in July.

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I’m really excited, reading about these R+D projects. They’re an incredible group.

It’s quite a dazzling cohort to get to be a part of!

How did you hear about R+D and what inspired you to apply?

I actually showed work at an earlier iteration of CASUAL, and have been really excited about the projects that LAPP has been supporting. I also think that, particularly for performance, structures that force you into showing work while you’re in process are very valuable.

Valuable and vulnerable, yes.

My work has always been deeply research-based, and the R+D structure is very aligned with how I make work.

You’ve been researching Mazdaznan for a long time. What first brought you to this figure, this subject matter?

I grew up as a first-generation immigrant kid in San Diego. I’m Jewish, but I come from many generations of socialist atheists–any kind of religious or spiritual practice was really foreign to me growing up. So I was always fascinated by the evidence of strange alternative spiritual practices that littered the landscape around me. When I returned to Southern California for graduate school, I read this description in City of Quartz by Mike Davis (RIP), about a sex-magick ritual staged by Jack Parsons, where he had naked pregnant people jump through hoops of fire. I was then four months pregnant, and was like–clearly I have to re-enact that!

Making that video sent me down a rabbit hole of these really early groups–what many people don’t understand is that 1960s cults and spiritual communities and groups, even Scientology–they’re all 4th generation! Alternative spiritual practice is baked into the very bones of early white settlement in California, from the late 19th century. I wrote about some of these early California spiritualist groups a few years ago for ACID-FREE.

Doing that research, I found this quotation about early California alternative spiritual groups:

No other city in the United States possesses so large a number of metaphysical charlatans in proportion to its population… Whole buildings are devoted to occult and outlandish orders—Mazdaznan clubs, yogi sects, homes of truth, cults of cosmic fluidists, astral planers, Emmanuel movers, Rosicrucians, and other boozy transcendentalists.

I was like—Mazdaznan clubs? What the hell are THOSE?

And I started to uncover the story of this cult, Mazdaznan, that was both wildly impactful, but also has disappeared entirely out of popular memory. It was run by a total con man, Otto Hanish, this insane picaresque character. So for 15 years, I’ve been collecting a giant archive of Mazdaznan publications, finding every time Hanish and his group showed up in the news from the 1890s through after his death in the 1940s. I’ve found really wide-ranging traces of his impact. And particularly after Trump, I feel like we are assessing the long-term impact of con men in our society.

Yes totally; this project feels so relevant to the Trump era and QAnon.

When all those documentaries came about about the NXIVM cult and its leader Keith Raniere (The Vow, Escaping NXIVM, etc.), I was like–Mazdaznan’s leader was Keith Raniere, a century ago! Point for point! Between that and what’s happening politically, it started feeling relevant and urgent now in a way that maybe it didn’t when I was first doing the research. 

I know the review panel for R+D was particularly drawn to that timeliness, that relevance. (For those who are curious about applying to R+D, one of the main review criteria is a project’s potential to contribute to an active dialogue within a network of contemporary practitioners in Los Angeles, leveraged in service to the ideas and issues of our time.) Do you have hopes for how Los Angeles audiences will connect this piece to our current political moment?

In addition to having this big impact on the Bauhaus Movement, and the popularization of vegetarianism, and proto-yogic breathing exercises–Mazdaznan also had an impact on the emergent radical right in California. I mean, I think that it’s unavoidable to connect this piece to the current political moment. Especially because things Mazdaznan popularized are also things that so many of us (dancers, theater makers, political progressives and leftist radicals) connect to–it’s not as easy as “this guy was a nut.” I mean, he was, but the seeds his movement planted are still very much with us, in visceral and intimate ways. Mazdaznan was a health and wellness cult. During COVID, the seven biggest purveyors of anti-vax information came from alternative health medicine peddlers. A lot of alternative health people (and a lot of the right wing, funnily) use language that comes from Eugenics, which was considered established science in the early 20th century, and which Mazdaznan promoted aggressively. So it’s with us–both in terms of what we believe in, and what we don’t believe in.

Didn’t a Mazdaznan follower create Montessori education? I think I remember your proposal mentioning that connection.

Yes, one of Hanish’s Mazdaznan followers introduced Montessori education to the United States. She then became a follower of another cult leader, Elizabeth Clare Prophet.

This is so interesting to me. I’m so fascinated by that place where the left wraps around so far that it converges with the right.

Absolutely! I keep finding that in the Mazdaznan research!

OK so process question: It sounds like The Sunworshippers is highly interdisciplinary, incorporating lecture, movement, film… how do you plan to explore all those elements in your R+D process?

There are different pieces of it: The UCSB Library has an incredible Special Collection on American Religions, which possesses the most complete set of Mazdaznan’s Magazine, from its first issues in 1901 until its final ones in the 1980s. So I am very excited to be supported in going to the archive. 

I will also be working with dancers on movement that comes out of Mazdaznan’s exercises, which are both strangely familiar but also a little weird; we’re also going to play with the movement language of spiritual “razzle dazzle”–performances of how spiritual leaders command and convince. 

For one of my recent research-based projects, The Plague Archives, which explored the human history of disease and epidemic, I did a lecture-performance on The Dancing Plagues, a time of contagious and compulsive group dancing in the Middle Ages. I talked about medieval dancing plagues, and explored how TikTok dances might be our contemporary version. It incorporated storytelling, interviews with experts, and also dance. Such a structure might be useful for this work, but we’ll see!

I’m very interested in this lecture-performance model you mention, and that segues into my next question. Can you speak to the interactive nature of the work? What does the lecture format / guided movement function as, for you? I would love to hear any of your thoughts on what draws you to the interactive form.

My first decade as an artist I spent directing devised experimental theater. When I make art, I’m super-sensitive to creating an experience where the viewer meets the work, even in my films and installations where I’m not physically present. I’m also a teacher and love being in the classroom. My podcast, The Sauce, is an ongoing conversation with my co-host. I feel most comfortable in the give-and-go of interactions of visceral sensory experience and learning.

Your proposed performance/lecture/guided movement experience will definitely involve the viewer in direct engagement with the work. It reminds me a little bit of the Sheila Callaghan play So Um Thank You that puts the audience through a yoga class during the course of it. Different style and subject matter, but likewise puts the audience in their bodies in such a way that the text hits very viscerally.

I’m a big believer in work that puts both the viewer (and the artist) in their body. Particularly in our current technological moment where so much is being stripped from the body. The body as a container for knowledge–even inchoate or chaotic or weird knowledge–is a theme I find myself returning to again and again, as I write about in this essay for CARLA, currently on the cover.

Love that. Okay lastly, I would love it if you could speak to the “For Parents/Guardians” aspect of this Research + Development experience. Is there something you need as a parent/guardian artist that this opportunity provides?

I read once in an interview–I think with novelist Junot Diaz but I’m not sure–that a big lack of diversity in MFA writing programs is a lack of writers with families. When I read that, it struck me like a bullet. I see it in art programs all the time. Because people who are parents and guardians have daily, relentless, intimate, visceral insight into so many elements of human existence that are out of our control–wouldn’t you think those are important life experiences to share in making art? But so often, it doesn’t happen. In fact, often artists are shamed for making work that reflects their experience as parents or guardians–it’s often devalued, particularly for women.

I was so moved that LAPP provides the For Parents/Guardians grant, acknowledges the chaos and particular needs of parents and guardians, and says, explicitly, that it values the experiences that we bring to our work. I am so honored to be recognized in that way.

That’s so nice to hear. It’s really important to LAPP’s mission that we reserve two of the R+D spots for parents & guardians each year.

The ongoing somatic experiment that is parenting obviously impacts my work. But also, the support allows me to just… get away to UC Santa Barbara and know that I’ll be able to get help with my kids!

ABOUT MAYA