Premiere: Zhe Zhe, "Semper Fidelity"

Newly fueled by a Kickstarter campaign, the show is in its second season and gloriously spiraling into new depths of absurdity as Mona and Jean claw their way to the top, blithely unaware of the evil plot lurking in the background.

office is pleased to premiere episode 4, entitled “Semper Fidelity,” and as part of the release, we asked the show’s co-creator, writer, producer, and co-star Leah Hennessey about the show, its influences, and where she hopes it will go next.

Can you start by telling me a bit about how the show was born and how you feel it’s developed since your first episode?

Ruby (McCollister, who plays Mona), Emily (Allan, who plays Chewie), and I had been in a theater group together, and we wanted to make a show that was draggy and vulgar and fun and trashy and easy. We enlisted our friend E.J. (O’Hara) to direct the show, thinking that, as an artist and not a film person, he would make it look cool and not slow us down with film production standards. I guess we didn’t really consider what a precise and ambitious artist he was, and the “easy” part of making Zhe Zhe pretty much stopped with the first episode. Every time we come up with something we want to do on the show I feel like it’s beyond our abilities. The musical episode (Season 1 Episode 6) nearly broke up the band, but somehow we always pull it off.

We used to be really militant about being alienating, using our grab bag of Brechtian tools to ensure that no one ever empathized with the characters, but we’ve kind of let that go. Culture has changed so radically since 2013 and we no longer think escapist, emotionally manipulative, cathartic, narrative fiction is the Big Bad. Now the world is more Zhe Zhe than we are. Post-Trump it's hard to have faith in absurdity as a tool of mental liberation.

You’re obviously influenced by an enormous range of music when writing the episodes. What aspects of the music world are you reacting to and picking up on in Zhe Zhe, both in general and in this episode specifically?

I was always obsessed with relationships in bands. I love how the fabricated intimacy of pop groups seems inseparable from the devastatingly real stories of love and loss. Band stories are their own category of romance. We also love feminine or queer takes on the band story: Josie and the Pussycats, The Mighty Boosh, and Hedwig.

We're also heavily influenced by the ethos of Ze Records (even going so far as to calling our de facto record company Zhe Records). We love music that exists on the fringe of novelty song and soundtrack, and music that’s written for comedy. Especially when it's cool.

I love when parody songs transcend the reference, like the Chris Morris parody of Pulp on Brass Eye, "Blouse", (which in some ways does Pulp better than Pulp). There’s a freedom in making “funny music” that’s still thrilling and daring to me in a way that feels, for lack of a better word, punk. Some of the music I'm most inspired by right now feels new because of how it navigates irony, like Chicken, or Zhe Zhe stars Young God and Toasty.

I always wanted to be in a band. I also wanted to make music. It took me a while (and a few bands) to realize that those were separate desires. Zhe Zhe is not only the story of a band, it also is the band in my life. The five/six of us are the Behind the Music: Fleetwood Mac I was looking for, and sometimes we even make music together.

What is your own musical background like?  

Zhe Zhe has been an exorcism for all of us; all the demons we started with have been vanquished or accepted. I think I’ve been able to let go of my band fetish and now I can actually start focusing on my own music. Recently as a songwriter I’ve been trying to bridge the gap between the highly developed camp part of my brain the more vulnerable part that can communicate strong feelings. I think great songwriters don't have that gap. I've been listening to a lot of Lucinda Williams, Momus and Cardi B.

Zhe Zhe is also chock-full of references (both subtle and non-subtle) to shows and movies spanning from the ‘20s to the present. How do you find ways to work these into a sort of collage that’s both surreal but also drawing very potently from our concrete reality?

A lot of our primary inspirations and references are pretty old and/or esoteric but we’re using these quotes and images to talk about contemporary issues and feelings. We love Derek Jarman and Ken Russell and John Waters but we’re not trying to make a show that feels like it’s from the 1970s, we want it to be on the bleeding edge. It’s not important that people get all or any of the references on the show, we’re just using them like colors.

I remember as a kid watching The Simpsons, I loved the feeling that there was a parody at work which I didn’t understand, like in the episode where Homer goes to The Island from “The Prisoner.” I had never seen “The Prisoner” and I didn’t feel like I was expected to get the reference, but there was an eerie and clever aura that I found exciting. I love the Simpsons episode when Homer goes to the 3D world because it had that same feeling. Maybe that was a reference I still don’t get.

It’s impossible for me to write about life without writing about culture. Pop culture is the religion of Zhe Zhe, it makes meaning and purpose out of chaos and nausea.

Zhe Zhe Season Two Episode 4 Semper Fidelity

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I have to ask about the show’s costumes. Who comes up with them? How do you find them? What factors might go into the outfits for a given scene?

Arabella Aldrich is our official costume designer. She also plays bisected silent film legend Patty Frome in “Back From the Dead” and Jean’s mysterious one night stand in “Five High School Paintings.” She comes up with and crafts most of the more elaborate gowns and sculptural pieces, and she styles a lot of the more casual outfits from her own magnificent wardrobe. Sometimes we want the costumes to be exact references to films, (like some of Jean’s “High Fidelity” looks in this episode) but sometimes we just want them to be ridiculous and disruptive (like Mona’s fur coat and cowboy hat look in the hospital). In the first season Ruby made a lot of the costumes, but now she pretty much only makes clothes for her clothing line, Sofia Paris (which will show its next collection this September).

You guys started a Kickstarter to raise money for season 2. Which aspects of the show did most of the money go towards? What do you feel are the biggest differences between this season and the first?

We purchased a few basic things like microphones and hard drives but I think we’ve spent most of the budget on cabs and wigs. We didn’t raise enough money to pay anyone for anything, so we still rely on the endless kindness of our friends.

Do you have any aspirations to get the show onto a different platform, or do you like the format of the web series? What do you feel are the pros and cons of producing it this way?

We started making Zhe Zhe in 2013, when the internet still felt like a place to be freaky. We naively thought we could use YouTube like public access TV in the 80s or something and that we could make a show about our community and our community would be able to watch it. We didn’t realize that without corporate support the algorithms would bury us. People always ask us whether we’re trying to get “picked up” and the answer is that we aren’t actively pursuing any platforms, but we would be willing to listen to a great offer!

We’re such a small operation. If we had money/support we wouldn’t have to do every tiny detail of the production ourselves, which would free us up to make more episodes more quickly. That would be fun, but it might not be as special. I would like more people to watch Zhe Zhe and I no longer think YouTube is the right place for people to see it. I like showing episodes at galleries, or theaters, and on intelligently curated websites like office.

Tell me a bit about this episode. So far this season, we’ve mostly seen a number of episodes that can essentially stand on their own while also dropping little hints of this developing conspiracy plot. This time, we’ve got Jean opening a record store and Mona going to college. What went into the writing process for this one in particular, and how does it fit within the grander scheme of the season?

This is, definitely, all part of a bigger conspiracy. This episode is something of a stand-alone but it also features some elements of the unfolding conspiracy (some more explicit than others). I don’t remember who came up with the idea of Mona going to college, it wasn’t me, but I know I always wanted to do at least one High Fidelity scene. When I wrote the episode I didn’t really think much about what connected the two plots, other than liberal arts college being as much of a financial sinkhole as opening a record store, but when I started acting out the John Cusack parts I had some disturbing revelations. I think this episode is our own kind of exploration of “toxic masculinity.” When I was a tween I completely idolized Rob Gordon/Rob Flemming and even though I thought he was “an asshole” I still loved him and wanted to be him/date him. Rewatching the movie and inhabiting that character I finally understood what a miserable butt monkey Rob is, and I can’t believe that I dated him/was him.

And finally: any hints for the rest of Season 2? Or plans for a potential Season 3?

The next episode is very much a Now For Something Completely Different. All I can say is that Chewie fans are going to be very happy. By the end of the season (there will be six episodes in total), many of the questions about the aliens, about the death of Pat Phone, about who’s pulling the strings….will be answered. We will not David Lynch our fans.

Also in September Emily Allan and I will be debuting a play we wrote called "SLASH" at MX Gallery. It's not our Zhe Zhe characters but it deals with a lot of the same themes. There's a lot of cosplaying homoerotic pairings of bandmates so I guess what I said earlier about being over my band relationship fetish is a lie.

Culture

The Club Is Coming to the Stage

We enter and make our way to what is approximately front left of the DJ booth, where we’re accustomed to dancing at clubs in New York. “So is this a techno club or a dance performance?” yells an uncertain participant in my boyfriend’s ear. He laughs, bouncing along to Ben UFO, and yells back, “It’s both!” The club has long been a hot topic in European contemporary dance but it is only now making its way into New York performance venues, largely through transatlantic tours. R.O.S.E. follows recent examples like Michele Rizzo’s HIGHER xtn. at MoMA PS1 (May 2024), (LA)HORDE’s Room with a View at NYU Skirball (October 2023), and Gisèle Vienne’s Crowd at BAM (October 2022).

Do these performances compromise the club’s spirit — a space idealized for its anonymity, dark lighting, and thundering music? The notion of the club as a utopian escape is admittedly just that — an ideal — because of how its intense conditions can create barriers to entry. Still, the club remains sacred for many, a place to forge connections and embrace an alternative state of being. Looking at how performances transfer this spirit to new settings reveals what aspects of the club are essential and those that aren’t.

Sharon Eyal, R.O.S.E. 2024. Photography by Stephanie Berger, courtesy of Park Avenue Armory.

Eyal’s dancers make their entrance. The lighting shifts from roving blue to yellow spotlights as Ben UFO’s tracks transition to more melodic beats. Clad in deconstructed lace Dior lingerie with dark red tears painted on their faces, the dancers move cautiously in a tightly maintained pack, slicing paths through the horde with hoof-like steps and jerky leg extensions. After around ten minutes of this controlled choreography, the dancers vanish as the lighting shifts back to blue and Ben UFO picks up his dubby beats. The club, as we knew it, resumes. This cycle of tightly executed movements and free-flowing club-goers repeats several times, each time emboldening the dancers to plunge further into the crowd.

Clubbing in a building once built for the U.S. Army National Guard on Manhattan’s Upper East Side turns out to be surprisingly successful — at least for the audience. What starts as an awkward, scattered group searching for their non existent seats gradually gels into an engaged, bouncing crowd that erupts in cheers each time the dancers enter and exit. Performance patrons who might never step foot in a club find themselves swept up in its potential for communion, moving in unison with fellow ticket holders. But it isn’t until the very end of R.O.S.E. that the dancers finally break free from Eyal’s choreography and join the fired-up audience in a brief moment of improvisatory movement with the music. By keeping her dancers at arm’s length, Eyal seems more interested in the club as a backdrop for her signature movement style than wholly as a space with meaningful stories to be told.

Michele Rizzo, HIGHER xtn. 2024. Photography by Cameron Kelly courtesy of MoMA PS1.

Back in May, I attended Wire Festival, a multiday electronic music event at Knockdown Center that had no shortage of organically united dancefloors. It attracted a crowd of seasoned ravers who were eager to celebrate the start of spring as they danced alongside DJs who played well into the daylight. I left Wire in an afternoon daze to see Michele Rizzo’s HIGHER xtn. at MoMA PS1. My sleepless euphoria only deepened as the performance unfolded, starting with a lone dancer who looked plucked out of the festival.

The dancer, dressed in sneakers, baggy jeans, and a tight tank top, shuffled slowly into the gallery, perfectly in sync with the looping bars of an understated electronic melody. Soon, other dancers, clad in the same staple rave uniform, joined him — each having traveled from Europe for the U.S. museum debut of HIGHER xtn., which premiered at the Stedelijk in Amsterdam in 2018 and quickly became a fixture at kunsthalles and festivals across the continent. As the score’s tempo climbed, the choreography locked into a 16-count sequence, which the dancers executed with precise synchrony. They remained intensely focused, never making eye contact with each other, as they sought release in the endless repetition of synthesized beats. Once the dancers reached their limit, they stopped the sequence and exited the gallery, one by one.

HIGHER xtn. used the focused daylight of the gallery to highlight the meditative release found in the repetitive movements that dominate dark dancefloors. The performance’s restraint brought more consistency and intentionality than Eyal’s all-encompassing club construction in R.O.S.E. Yet both performances offer enticing entry points into club culture for those who may not frequent raves. Rizzo’s ecstatic, hypnotic repetitions reveal how the club can mirror other meditative practices, while Eyal’s interpolation of performance and clubbing helped hesitant audience members blossom by the end. Still, both works overlook one of the most underappreciated aspects of clubbing — its potential for individual expression. HIGHER xtn.’s pristine uniformity especially risks promoting the outdated techno trope that there’s a “right” way to dance to electronic music.

Maybe this shortcoming is, in fact, a benefit. For habitual ravers jaded by one too many sunrise sets, it’s a reminder to return to the club with more intention. If you pause and peer through the darkness, you’ll see hundreds of people moving to the same beat, each with their own subtle variations. This collective choreography is a ready-made spectacle that doesn’t need validation in a theater or museum. And when the music shifts slightly, you can watch the ripple effect sweep through the crowd while feeling the new beat in your body. Maybe this small bit of magic is best left on the dance floor.

Culture

Real Slick, Jack: Psyche Organic Arrives in New York

Shop Psyche Organic at Happier Grocery and Dimes. Coming soon to @citarellagourmetmarket @unionmarket @gourmetgarage @deciccos @fairwaymarket plus many more.

Culture

Porsche SCOPES Brings Art, Music, and Design to Toronto

The festival was a full immersion into Toronto’s dynamic creative energy. Day one set the tone with DJ collective Living Room, followed by an experimental performance by Claire Rousay that captivated the crowd. Jewelry designer Steff Eleoff unveiled her Porsche Taycan 4S art car installation—a bold fusion of automotive and wearable art inspired by her Sedona ring—while OVO Sound’s Naomi Sharon and DVSN wrapped up the night with powerful, genre-defying performances.

We witnessed SCOPES Toronto bridging underground and mainstream with day two’s lineup. DJ Korea Town Acid’s set paved the way for Angelphroot and Dameer’s debut of BASSMATI, a track blending South Asian influences with bass-driven sounds. Chippy Nonstop’s return to Toronto and Richie Hawtin’s extended set were milestones of the evening, proving that the city’s underground scene has a global resonance.

The final day featured standout performances from local pianist Harrison, Indigenous artist Tia Wood, and hip-hop visionary Sean Leon, who elevated his set with a live choir. Moonshine Collective’s film and musical performance explored themes of African utopia, showcasing art’s power to bridge culture and technology. Rising Toronto star SadBoi, who paused her tour to perform at SCOPES, further underscored the festival’s commitment to nurturing local talent.

Throughout the weekend, we experienced installations from artists like Mitsu Mitsu and culinary creations from Bar Mordecai, capturing the multifaceted creativity Porsche SCOPES brought to Toronto. This milestone 10th edition, open to all, allowed Toronto’s vibrant arts scene to thrive, underscoring SCOPES’ mission to celebrate local talent while connecting it to a global audience.

office had the chance to connect with rising star SadBoi ahead of the event. In our conversation, she shared insights into her creative journey and reflected on what performing and growing up in Toronto means to her and her work.

How are you, and where are you at right now? You told me you were traveling.

Um, I’m good, I’m feeling really good right now. I’m traveling back to Salt Lake City. I had a show yesterday in Seattle. I’m on tour right now with Coco and Claire.

How is touring life treating you? Do you like it?

I love being on the road. To be honest, I feel like I don’t know—like I’ve had good experiences and bad ones—but this time it’s really fun, especially with the people I’m surrounded by. It’s also the longest tour I’ve been on; I have about four more weeks to go. I’m trying not to think about how many days I have left.

Do you feel homesick?

Yes, because when I start thinking about how many days are left, I start to miss my dogs. I’ve just been trying to stay in the moment—I don’t even know what day of the week it is, to be honest with you.

Oh, sweet! What are your dogs’ names?

Jillian and Winston. I know, they’re crazy names.

You’ll be performing at SCOPES in Toronto, which is where you grew up. Do you feel like the crowd is different when you perform in Toronto compared to other cities?

Yes, I mean, Toronto just feels different because it’s home. Every time I come back to perform, something in my career has changed. The last time I performed in Toronto, people just wanted to have a good time, and I’m excited to perform back home again to see everyone’s reactions. I know it’s going to be different from the last time. It’s exciting to see your own growth. Toronto is a tough crowd, though. If we’re with you, we’re really with you.

So, they’re super picky? You have to gain their respect, or what is it?

I think Toronto people are in their own world, but when something really connects with them, they’ll lose themselves in the moment. But it takes something to bring them out of that. Toronto crowds are tough because even if they like you, they won’t show it outright until they’re really vibing with you.

It’s like a vibe check, right?

Exactly. They’ll enjoy your performance, but it’s hard to explain. When people visit Toronto, they often say, “Oh, you guys are so nice,” and I’m like, “I don’t think we’re that nice, we’re just polite.” Like, you can walk down the street, and no one will say anything, but it’s just our mannerisms.

You mentioned Toronto can have a moody energy, especially at night, and that the underground night scene there really inspires you. Can you talk more about what makes Toronto's nightlife so influential for you?

Absolutely, Toronto has this unique energy that comes alive at night. Similar to New York, there are the popular clubs everyone knows, but you need to find your niche—the people who know where the real parties are. I remember going to raves in high school yards, sneaking in because I wasn’t old enough. Events like Baby, Jerk!, and Yes Yes Y’all were pivotal, exposing me to DJs blending dancehall with EDM—something I hadn’t seen before. Toronto nightlife is moody and intense, but when everyone’s out, it’s like the whole city is alive.