Who knows where the time goes? Marianne Rendon, returning to Tivoli, New York
By Alison Green
Photography by Emily Winiker
Location courtesy of Hotel Tivoli
It’s a damp and rainy day in late October. The tree branches are spindly and bare; the gray sky is mottled with birdsong. The season is changing, as it always does. Marianne Rendon walks down the main road of the tiny Hudson Valley village that, a little over a decade ago, felt like the center of her world.
They say you can’t go home again, but there are some places you outgrow and some places that grow with you, claiming a corner of your internal landscape and imprinting on who you are by reminding you of who you were. For Rendon, a seasoned and successful actor who splits her time between Brooklyn and Los Angeles, this place is Tivoli.
“I love the Hudson Valley so much. When I do guided meditations that ask you to imagine a beautiful, idyllic place, it’s here that I think about,” she says dreamily. She speaks with the warm and easy intensity of someone to whom thoughtfulness comes naturally. You get the feeling that she has lived many lives, and is grateful for each one.
With a steady career in film (such as Mapplethorpe and Charlie Says) and television (such as Imposters and In the Dark) under her belt, and roles in four films slated to release this year, Rendón recently found herself on a an unintentional pilgrimage back to where it all began. Last summer, she shot a film in Tivoli, the quaint and artsy town she lived in during her formative years studying theater at nearby Bard College. Ironically, the film titled Summer Solstice follows two best friends from college as they reunite and attempt to reconcile their old friendship against their new and changing lives. I can’t even visit my old college campus without becoming a moony mess of nostalgia — returning to your collegiate stomping grounds for the first time in ten years to shoot a movie about college best friends feels almost too serendipitous and surreal to bear, like a reoccuring fever dream come to life.
“Oh my god, it was so emotional when I first came up here — it’s amazing what instantly came back to me,” she says. “Just the way the light falls in the trees. There’s this one clearing on 9G between Bard and Tivoli that opens up and you see the Catskills and there’s just something about it – I’ve never seen light like that anywhere else in my life.”
Seasons change, and people do too, but no matter how much we’ve grow and evolve and how many past selves we shed, there will always be things that transport us right back to the wide-eyed person we used to be: a house, a meal, a scent, a song, a soft bend of fading light. In Tivoli, Rendón saw her old self everywhere, and found it beautiful but bittersweet, that vivid double-edged sword of memory. “When I’m here I feel like I’m investigating who that person was, how far away I am from that person, and how moved I am by that person still. I had so much time to dream and romanticize. This place does that to you. There’s this beautiful walk between here and campus called Tivoli Bays. In college, I had an acid trip through there with my best friend – these are things that change you. There’s a memory on every corner here. I mean, it’s just one street, but there’s a lot to remember. I’m unraveling all that now.”
Rendón was raised in New Rochelle, NY (“City kids would never say I was a city kid because I took the Metro North. But I would go to punk shows at ABC No Rio on the LES. I was really into the hardcore scene in the early aughts.”) by parents who molded their lives around making and loving music. Her mother was a vocalist in composer and “icon of musical theater” Marvin Hamlicsh’s concert performances and her father was a sound engineer for live performances. Rendón grew up playing the piano and guitar and dancing, two creative outlets that she still practices to this day and feed into her film and theater work.
“When I’m here I feel like I’m investigating who that person was, how far away I am from that person, and how moved I am by that person still. I had so much time to dream and romanticize.”
“I’m so grateful my parents exposed me to all that stuff. When I’m dancing, I think so much about acting, and when I’m acting, I think so much about music. There’s a rhythm in language. And each shot has its own rhythm.” At Bard, she danced flamenco under experimental dance legend Aileen Passloff, played in an all female feminist country band, and grounded herself by playing music before every theater performance. “I’ve done that since a young age. Even my first plays, I would always play piano before going onstage because it was a kind of meditation. I always bring my guitar when I go on location.”
To this day, music looms large in her life and her work — though the music she makes now is purely for herself. “I need something that’s just mine. Something that is my soul. No one can buy it.” She tells me about an impressionistic film she shot in Costa Rica last year, with a script as sparse as a poem, and how her main way of preparing to embody her character was through a score she created for herself. And what score would bring her right back to her halcyon days in Tivoli ten years ago? “Who Knows Where the Time Goes by Fairport Convention. Or the entirety of Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks. Music is our greatest time machine.”
After college, she left idyllic, Hudson-hugging Tivoli and landed in New York City, where she got her MFA at Juliard and threw herself into her career, garnering praise for playing a handful of characters who embodied a certain intensity. I ask what draws her to a role: “Ideally, something I’ve never done before. The ideal for me is to have a new challenge. I love rigor, and I love a kind of muscularity in crafting something so I’m drawn to more psychologically intense circumstances because it’s just a kind of heightenedness. I also do a lot of comedy and that’s rigorous too, in that it’s incredibly technical.”
There is a seriousness to her tone when she speaks about her craft, that Julliard-trained razor focus that has kept her working steadily for the past eight years peeking through. But then she lights up as she begins talking about a creative dance project she is working on with a former classmate from Bard, choreographer Lisa Fagan. “I did a lot of her choreography pieces at Bard and we just did a piece we’re working on at Prelude Festival, which is a really great work-in-progress experimental dance and art festival. She has these scores that are somewhat improvisatory and you rely so much on your physical goofiness - I find it only works when you dive face first and don’t know what’s going to happen.”
“I need something that’s just mine. Something that is my soul. No one can buy it.”
There is a thread I pick up on as Rendón and I get deeper into the story of past and present selves, a thread that she herself seems to be unraveling as well. She is working on her health, letting go of the trajectory she expected her career to have, and prioritizing building community and making art with the people she loves. “I’m on a path right now of learning how to find the surrender in everything,” she explains. “Letting go of control, being more open to not knowing. Which is interesting because it’s such an essential part of acting. When acting is really alive is when you’re at your most unsure of what will happen next. But it’s hard for me to be in that place.”
As for what will happen next, it seems like she has some strong leads. She is recently engaged, and she’d like to be a mother. She wants to become a death doula. She wants to rest and regulate her nervous system. She is excited about her current theater project, which is starring in Sarah Gancher’s musical adaptation of Pushkin’s novel Eugene Onegin, which she describes as a bluegrass “beer chamber musical” they hope to perform at bars or around a campfire or upstate on a farm. Talking to Rendón, you feel like you’re witnessing someone on the precipice, or at the center of, an evolution of self, a creative restrucuring. It’s an telling time to be pulled back upstate to bucolic Tivoli, to remember the influence it had on the building blocks of her artistic life. Many of her classmates put down roots there after graduating; she runs into people every time she returns. Maybe someday she’ll buy a place up here. “I would treat the community really well,” she says, almost as if to herself. I believe her.
I ask her if there’s anything she would tell that younger self today, basically whispering the question because it feels too personal, too complicated. I’m not sure I would know how to answer. But she responds immediately with a laugh and her usual openness. “I can see myself just walking down the street with my horrible boots with eight holes in them. I would love to tell her that I’m doing the thing I always wanted to do. I feel like I have to learn from her at this moment because she was so free in her art. I didn’t have a ton of voices in my head back then. I just had a quality of courage and I would throw myself into things. She has a lot to teach me right now.”
Rendón is in town for a whirlwind twenty four hour roadtrip, visiting friends and waiting out the rain at the cozy Hotel Tivoli. Tonight, she has a reservation at Stissing House in nearby Pine Plains, a colonial tavern seving rustic seasonal fare by candlelight – she’s been dying to go. Eventually she’ll leave this place that holds so many of the memories that shaped her past self, and head back to Brooklyn, towards her present life and future self. After all, she and I agree that we carry all our past lives and loves inside us – they’re always there to remind us, to ground us, to teach us. Look no further than the last lines of the song that sums it all up for her: So come the storms of winter/and then the birds in spring again/I have no fear of time/For who knows how my love grows?/And who knows where the times goes?
