There are one-person shows, and then there’s Jodie Landau’s Performance of Self. Fusing memoir, concert, and cabaret, Landau, a Grammy Award-nominated composer, vocalist, and percussionist backed by a seven-piece band, is set to perform the West Coast premiere of his solo show at REDCAT, May 29–30. Featuring Landau’s original chamber rock compositions, the 75-minute work, which was commissioned by Beth Morrison Projects and was seen in an earlier iteration at Brooklyn’s National Sawdust venue in 2024, explores themes of love, sex, gender, and family.
“Beth Morrison had a lovely open invitation, [asking] what I would like to make,” explained 34-year-old Landau, who is also a member of new music ensembles Wild Up and Roomful of Teeth. “And we weren’t sure if it would be some narrative opera or what. But I ended up saying, ‘Here’s the music I’ve been working on, and here’s what I’m experiencing in my life.’”
Indeed, Landau pointed out that he’d been working on the piece since his mid-20s, “when I was just beginning to date and be out in the world in a different way, [and was] feeling like a queer person existing within the straight dating world. It sparked from there.”
And those sparks have been numerous: While the opus was set to premiere in 2020, it was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic. This telling, then, is directed by Diana Wyenn.
“My family is a big part, so the shows had a bit of a rewrite and a life update, as two years ago my father [film producer Jon Landau, of Titanic and the Avatar series] passed away,” Landau said. “In the last version, I was grieving the loss of my grandmother [film and television producer Edie Landau], and now things look different.”
The musician said that deciding what parts of his lived experience belonged onstage and what needed to remain private was a thought-provoking process of choosing stories from his life over the last decade.
He said he exists “within a few different worlds. As a performer, stylistically, there's a variety of music from big rock songs to more jazz ballads to cabaret numbers to then the much more introverted, electronic world with vocoded vocals.
“Going in between all those styles musically, helps me to traverse different aspects of my personality, from the big, boisterous, loud, and unapologetic, to the mildly inhibited and introspective,” Landau added. In addition to his own pieces, he also performs works by and with, among others, Ellen Reid, Nico Muhly, and Marc Lowenstein.
As for his ethereally sounding voice — which might best be described as an instrument of transformation — Landau pointed out that during the show he’s able to run the gamut, all the while stretching different aspects of it. “Maybe you can't quite tell either what gender I am or [that] this sounds high and angelic, but then [there are] big, loud, and belty, talk-sing-y moments where I’m whipping through stories as I’m singing.
“And with my body, I get to move around a lot and dance like the theater kid I grew up as,” he continued. “It's a moment where I flex the other aspects of my performance.”
Landau admitted that the process of the piece — one in which he breaks the fourth wall — has also changed his understanding of who he is: “I'm both very much the same and completely different, both because the world at large is very different, and my internal world is very different; both with the relationships that I've experienced in the last several years, as well as the loss that I've experienced. I think it's a combination of time [moving] on, where my priorities have changed.”
Ultimately, though, Landau said he hopes that by sharing his story in an open, vulnerable way, it will “allow peoples’ faces to reflect their own lives, their own excitement, their own limitations,” he said. “I'm talking about myself in a way that we can all reflect [on] and think about the larger picture in our individual selves and in larger discussions of gender and sexuality within our society. At the end of the day, we just need to say, ‘Screw it,’ and just go with the flow and be ourselves.”
