In the Waiting Room: “Praise Music Sonogram” at DiverseWorks

Julia Barbosa Landois is a Houston-based artist and performer who recently earned a 2025 Artist Award from the BIPOC Arts Network & Fund Art. She has shown extensively nationally and across Texas, and her work is currently featured in the traveling exhibition Xican-a.o.x. Body.

We recently sat down to talk about her live performance, Praise Music Sonogram, at DiverseWorks, which combines spoken word, projected video, and live music to tell a story of motherhood, miscarriage, and abortion access across national and state borders. Barbosa Landois performs the piece accompanied by a live musician in the round with a minimal set design at one of MATCH’s black box theaters.

Gabriel Martinez (GM): Tell me about the title of your performance — why is it called Praise Music Sonogram? 

Julia Barbosa Landois (JBL): Over the course of this reproductive health saga that I experienced, I returned to Texas from Germany and had to get a pelvic ultrasound. One technician played Christian praise music during the ultrasound, which was quite awkward. So much of the humor of the piece is about the absurd awkwardness of a lot of those experiences, so I knew that had to be the title. 

GM: I found the script to be very funny — the song choices and the waiting room music. I was laughing out loud right from the start. 

JBL: These experiences are filled with absurdly awkward moments that I think make for a lot of humor. A big part of my style is taking something that is super heavy and finding those moments of levity and strategic pressure release for the audience.

Praise Music Sonogram is an autobiographical story that is told in a nonlinear way, in two parts: one part in Germany and one part in the U.S. It’s primarily a monologue with some music and a little bit of singing. There are also video projections of found and original footage. Some of it is projected onto the back wall, and some of it is projected onto a hospital curtain, which hangs from the ceiling and acts as a second screen that can be pulled out and retracted. The images that are projected are different sizes and also different distances from the audience. 

I had one video that was playing continuously behind me, and that was the split screen of Cecil B DeMille’s Ten Commandments from 1956 and a cell phone video of this electronic, turning kiosk sign in Berlin advertising Russian sexual massage on one side and vasectomies on the other side, which was at the time very pertinent because it was on the way to a reproductive health clinic. This was just one of the contrasts of being in a place with a different culture around gender and reproductive health. I have never seen a public advertisement for vasectomies in the U.S. I have seen tons of billboards for breast augmentation — all kinds of things for modifying women’s bodies for the sexual pleasure of others. But not vasectomies. 

GM: It’s truly foreign for an American and specifically for a Texan. You staged an earlier version of this performance at Lawndale Art Center for Nameless Sound, but the events that inspired it happened several years before that. So, this was on your mind for a while before it started to manifest as a piece.

JBL: Making any piece usually takes me a while. But especially with this very personal content, it was literally affecting my physical health and my ability to make art and take care of myself and my family. I was getting back on my feet with that. A lot of artists make work about the experiences in their lives in one way or another — however far removed or abstracted that might be. But, for this one in particular, I really needed to sit with it for a long time. When the new Supreme Court justices, Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett, came on, I knew that some big changes were coming and it felt like the right time to tell the story.

I also felt like I had enough distance from it that I could tell the story. At the time, I was doing a ton of writing. I go through these periods of doing a whole lot of journal writing. I went back and combed through all of that material to try to process and figure out what was most important and what the best way was to tell it, and I came up with a shortened version of the script. It was very simple for Nameless Sound. 

GM: The original version was you performing solo with the videos; None of the accoutrement, none of the props. For the DiverseWorks iteration at MATCH, you expanded the script: you added props, a stage set, and a live musician. Plus, an additional projection. 

JBL: Right. There’s a couch, a chair that I carry around many times, and then a desk that serves as a doctor’s office intake desk but also doubles as an exam table. I get up and sing on top of it, too.

GM: At one point in the piece, you sing a portion of “Oh, Comely” by Neutral Milk Hotel. Why that song? 

JBL: I love to put music in my performances. Not just because I love to sing, but because so many memories of experiences are associated with the music that I heard while they were happening or that I heard while I was processing my feelings about that experience. Performance can communicate an experience in a way that you can’t communicate in any other way. Music has that power for me, and I always want to honor that. I like being able to recontextualize all the songs and lyrics. I remember there being something about sex and ovaries and those kinds of things in the lyrics of “Oh, Comely.” When I look back and listen to it, the lyrics are shockingly fitting. I use a little excerpt of that. I love Jeff Mangum’s singing. It’s raw and emotive, but not in a cheesy way — in a really genuine way.

GM: It’s one of the showstoppers of Praise Music Sonogram. That moment where you break out in song, and you’re standing on the desk, spotlit. I remember thinking, “Oh, man, she’s really belting it out.” You’ve sung in other performances. Has singing always been a part of your work? Did you sing or play in bands as a kid? 

JBL: My singing career started in the Catholic Church, in the children’s choir. I did theater when I was a kid, too. And then, in my mid-teens, other stuff happened in my life, and I went into this shell. I didn’t perform again until I was 31. I didn’t sing or do theater or anything like that in front of an audience. I started doing performance art before that, but not singing. 

GM: When you say theater, what do you mean? Did you perform in a troupe?

JBL: Yeah, as a kid. 

GM: Plays, musicals? 

JBL: Both. I wrote the praise song from the performance, by the way. “Jesus, My King.”

GM: What?! 

JBL: Yeah. 

GM: If you ever get sick of the art world, you’ve got a future in church music. 

JBL: I was not just jamming around with a tambourine.

GM: So do you play piano or guitar?

JBL: I wish I could play a musical instrument! I can pick out melodies on a piano by ear, but that’s it. I came up with the melody and lyrics for “Jesus, My King” just by singing through it and Dru (Andrew Martinez) filled out the chords and those things.

GM: There’s an important section that appears twice in the performance, where you’re in the waiting room, and as you’re sitting there Andrew goes into a samba-style strum pattern. This is a smart choice because Samba was always the early example of elevator music. 

JBL: It was that relationship to samba being turned into elevator music, or muzak, but also, it’s the kind of music where there’s an expectation that it’s going to resolve or go into another part of the song, and then it just never resolves. We wanted you to be part of it, where just when you think you can breathe easy, it repeats. That’s what it’s like being in the waiting room for something.

GM: It kind of takes you out of a normal experience of time. 

JBL: Yeah. The clarinet muzak version of “She Works Hard for the Money” is the last waiting room music in the piece. That song was chosen because this particular healthcare center had this staid, co-opted, capitalist-feminist kind of vibe. Everything was pink and had rhinestones stuck to it. They had signs on the wall that said, “You Go, Girl!” I didn’t say it in the piece, but they also gave me a flower at the end.

GM: This is the clinic in Texas, of course? 

JBL: Yeah.

GM: I found the script to be very funny — some of the song choices and even the waiting room music. I was laughing out loud right from the start. There is a tension in the ground you cover throughout the performance — the comical and the serious. I think one of the most intense moments in the piece for me was when you pulled a small piece of paper out of a box that you were carrying and read what was on it.

JBL: When visitors came into the lobby before they went into the theater, there was a box on the table with these slips that said, “I had an abortion because…” And space to write something. I wanted to be able to incorporate stories from the audience so that it wasn’t just my story — to really personalize it and give people the chance to see what it felt like. They could remain anonymous, but could hear their story being vocalized, whether it ever had been or not. There are four times during the piece when I grab the box, read something out of it, and hand it to an audience member.

There’s audience interaction during the piece. Sometimes it’s just me kind of breaking the fourth wall and including the audience as if they’re in the waiting room with me, or asking them a question, or asking one person a question. The box is also part of that because the contributed reasons are in there. There are points during the piece where I will stop the spoken word, read a slip from the box, and hand it to someone in the audience. I don’t know who the slips come from — they’re chosen at random. The stories were different every night because there are so many different kinds of stories. 

GM: The audience interactions provide some pretty intense moments. They’re real, and they’re up close. There’s always a tension when a performer approaches you as an audience member. It was an effective component of the whole piece. 

Another addition to this piece is that you worked with Candice D’Meza as a director. 

JBL: Candice helped me figure out how to move through the space and bring the script to life in a more theatrical kind of way. We worked with Edgar Guajardo, who was the technical director. He did all the lights and the video projections and stuff. And then Andrew, of course, was the live musician, and I got a voice actor to do the voiceover narration. 

GM: The piece starts and ends with the voiceover. The actor you hired (Abraham Zeus Zapata) is very professional sounding — he completely pulls it off. 

JBL: At the beginning of the piece, I mention that I can’t get my TV audio descriptions to turn off. That is the actual inspiration that I had for putting the narrator into the piece. Because during this time, I was watching everything with the audio descriptions. The audio descriptions are there as an accessibility measure for someone who’s vision impaired. I began noticing what was being described and what was not being described and was thinking about how those choices are made. Who decides what is the most important, what gets described first versus later? And thinking about the narrator as a device either in a movie or in literature. It’s this authoritative, godlike kind of voice, but it also always has its own bias and point of view.

Sometimes that’s really obvious, and sometimes it’s not. There’s a reason why it would be either way. I wanted to think about how I would tell my own story versus how that type of narrator might tell my story, and what things they would leave out or emphasize that I might disagree with. I wanted to know if I could create some kind of conflict between those two voices.

The accessibility narrator voice is meant to sound as neutral as possible. But no narrator is neutral. Especially when it comes to stories about women’s bodies or women’s health in the U.S. — these stories are often being told by male legislators. Who gets to tell a particular story and who is considered a reliable witness of their own experience — particularly for any kind of marginalized group, the dominant group will be like, “Well, I’ve never experienced that. So I don’t know if that’s really true.” When do you get to be believed as the person who’s the authority on your own story? That’s why the narrator became so important. 

Toward the very end of the piece, I talk about this memory of my grandmother. Putting her old love letters through a shredder because she wanted all of that to remain intimate and private. I’m reading these reasons, but then by the end, I’m realizing that nobody owes anyone else their reasons. People sharing their experiences is powerful because those who are not in their shoes have the chance to empathize. It’s powerful for people who have had that experience to not feel alone and to feel like they’re in a community with others who are telling their stories. On the other hand, nobody should have to bare their soul in order to receive a basic right to bodily autonomy. You can share the story as a really empowered thing, but you can also withhold your story because you don’t want it to be extracted for the wrong reasons. 

GM: So there are three levels here: you have the disembodied voice of the narrator giving one version, a second story in the form of your scripted monologue, and then testimonials bearing witness to the audience’s stories that are not scripted. Off stage, in the real world, there are invasive techniques of wresting autonomy from women — period tracking apps, geolocation, and other ways where your life is no longer your story to tell. Corporations are extracting those stories through data mining — sort of an information-based extraction colonialism. 

The story starts in Berlin and ends up in Texas. You were in Germany for a residency? 

JBL: Yes. It was the first residency I had participated in since having children. I made the insane decision to go across the ocean to do that with a five-year-old and an 18-month-old. It was one of the hardest times I’ve ever had, but also a really amazing time, too. 

GM: While you were in Germany, you found out you were pregnant. 

JBL: There was a very different attitude towards healthcare there. Then you come back to Texas, and it’s rhinestones and pink and praise music while you’re getting a very awkwardly intimate exam. I didn’t get to continue the care that I needed because the residency ended, so we came home. I was having all this excess bleeding, but I couldn’t get any care for it. It was many, many weeks before I could see a doctor. By that time, I had to have surgery. It became this much bigger ordeal. 

The health care system is so different in terms of costs, in terms of accessibility, in terms of being in a very secular country and environment, and then coming back to Texas where everything is so saturated with religion — they’re playing Christian music while you’re getting a pelvic exam. There are crosses everywhere. It’s just very different. I didn’t feel like I could be open in the way that I could in Germany. I grew up with very strict Mexican Catholics and evangelical Christians, so that was like all of my life experiences filtered through those lenses. 

That’s why there’s often a lot of religious imagery in my work, because it’s just a permanent part of my…

GM: Trauma? Another component of Praise Music Sonogram is the research that you did around fake clinics throughout Texas that are misleading patients. Can you talk about that?

JBL: There’s a website that compiles a directory of fake clinics to help people discern where they can get real healthcare and where they can’t. It’s one of the resources in a zine that we gave out during the performance. There are currently sixteen of them in Houston. They present themselves as healthcare centers: you go and get a pregnancy test, and then they give you lots of anti-abortion literature and a lecture. There are also very spiritually manipulative practices where, for example, you need something like free diapers, and they’re like, “Okay, you can be part of our free diaper program if you sign up and come to these Bible study classes,” and you have to sit through the whole class, and then at the end they give you the free diapers. 

GM: This isn’t the last stop for Praise Music Sonogram. It will travel next to Links Hall in Chicago and then to UTEP in El Paso. Are you going to research fake clinics in those areas?

JBL: Yeah, they’re everywhere. I mean, they’re certainly not just in Texas. That’s a connection that goes to all of the places. The Chicago Abortion Fund serves many Texans who have to travel all the way to Chicago to get that healthcare. I met someone who worked there who was from Texas and was really happy to be able to serve women who were part of her community. It’s so far away, right? It’s surprising that that connection would be there, but it is.

 

Praise Music Sonogram is on view at DiverseWorks February 6 – 8, 2025.