Jonathan Burrows’s Keynote Address for the Postdance Conference in  Stockholm, Sweden

Curated by André Lepecki for MDT and Cullberg Ballet, Stockholm, October 14th 2015

Download a PDF of Burrows’s Keynote Address
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Good morning and welcome.

André Lepecki suggested to me that this Postdance Conference

was an opportunity to find time and space

(and he underlined time and space)

to reflect on the developments and forces that have shaped choreographic imagination

from the 1960s up to today,

and when I saw the underlining of time and space

I felt the terrible weight of the choreographic

and the task ahead of us.

How do we talk about this recent history of dance?

How might we recognise the present?

Or imagine what might happen next?

What do you want to hear?

What could I possibly say?

History is a straight line but my body disagrees,

there’s stuff in my motor memory still thinks it’s 1978

and my body isn’t good with dates,

or aesthetic arguments,

or what’s in or out of fashion.

I’m trying to work out how to approach this

without academic certainty

and at the same time without nostalgia,

but I need the thought of the academy to keep me steady because my body can’t be trusted,

and nostalgia comes and goes

as always.

This talk is pretty much subjective for want of a clear picture,

and to see what my body might think about history, in relation to future, if I risked to ask it.

And it turns out I have a lot of steps in me going way back

and some of them are in fashion and some of them are very suspect,

but my body is remarkably unprejudiced against these patterns

and throws them up old against new with a steely logic that I try not to trust.

And it turns out the nostalgia gets swallowed up in movement

and everything seems equal when you dance.

It’s a hard-hearted art form when it comes down to it,

and you think of the time it takes to figure anything out

and the speed it takes to date itself shortly after,

and then thinking how far ahead that dated stuff will sit in your muscles,

and you’re on your death bed and your legs are still thinking about sub-Cunningham dance routines.

Judson for my generation

was contact and release techniques,

the women’s movement and improvisation

and back then nobody talked much about Trio A.

To watch Trio A you had to wait in line at the New York Public Library

and be passed a U-matic videotape through a hole in the wall,

which you watched with headphones on

in front of a TV set in a crowded public room.

It was so exotic.

Meanwhile a lot of what passed into our bodies came through a kind of osmosis

that flowed from dancer to dancer,

and everything seemed possible and unburdened by historical proof.

I went to the Dartington Festival in England in 1980 or 1981

(as I said before, my body’s not so good with dates)

and I ended up by accident in a recreation Steve Paxton made of Satisfyin Lover

and it never occurred to any of us we were walking through an icon,

it was just something we shared in a workshop festival,

and he liked the ones who laughed

because embarrassed laughter seemed a more straightforward response

and afterwards there was a disco.

And when Ramsay Burt showed me his collection of Judson films

I said ‘But this looks more modern than postmodern’ and I thought of Merce Cunningham,

and I wondered about the moment after Judson

when all that soft intelligence emerged in the 70s which we thought was Judson but wasn’t quite,

though we based our idea of Judson on it,

mainly because it was the same people

ten years after and into something richer and stranger,

which looked and felt postmodern and somehow fed everything,

and is in danger now of being eclipsed by the juggernaut of iconic, archival Judson in grainy black and white.

And I can understand that a younger person might think Trio A was always visible, up there on YouTube,

but at the time we had to take Sally Banes’ word for it.

And it seems like she and others called Judson post-modern partly because it came ‘after modern dance’,

and on the other hand the expression got caught up with the actual philosophical term

which confused things for years,

and afterwards anything vaguely pedestrian got called postmodern,

and then to confuse things more we eventually started to read postmodernism

and it was easy to think then that what we were doing had always been actually postmodern

and maybe it was.

I’ve no idea really, I can’t remember what I thought I was doing or watching

or what anyone else thought they were doing.

I heard there was a reunion at Judson a while back

and Simone Forti said the problem was that nobody had ever rejected Judson,

and I have to say in some ways it does look weirdly like Judson is still the future,

and it’s hard to work out what the consequences of that might be.

In the 80s Judson was just the recent past that had opened a gate

and the future hadn’t yet been pinned to any kind of historical past perfect moment.

Because our bodymind doesn’t work like that,

it’s a more anarchic thing really and won’t be held down by hierarchies of knowledge.

We’re more like the movement equivalent of those TV programmes about people who hoard junk

and mostly we don’t want the mess tidied,

and even if we did there’s no disentangling Trisha Brown from a Michael Jackson video,

because our motor memory sorts according to movement similarities,

which is a curse and a blessing and the source of our work.

And Ramsay Burt talks about ‘the disinterested mode of performance’

which he says is the dominant mode,

and I know what he means and what it feels like,

and I got to noticing recently when I use it and when I don’t

and I use it mostly when I feel I should be more contemporary.

As in ‘contemporary dance’,

which has been contemporary for the last 50 years,

which makes it slightly hard for us to locate the present,

let alone the past,

or the opportunities ahead.

And at the same time my performing-self recalls other ways to engage

and suggests them to me with quiet resolution,

and as an act of resistance,

against the idea that the contemporary could be so easily represented

by a particular kind of walk,

or a pair of plimpsolls.

Because all the time dance is busy

stripping away and then reclaiming the messiness of everything the body might throw up and indulge,

in which battleground the queer, the folk, the pop, the trash, the burlesque, the black, the kitsch, the street and the vaudeville

are constant casualties and occasionally triumphant victors,

and long may they also thrive

regardless of that construct called the contemporary,

because the future contains all of it.

Or as Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker said to an early group of P.A.R.T.S. students,

‘Why would you want less?’

This is subjective,

this is a mess,

because that’s how the last 50 years felt on a cellular level,

which is our great strength and a blessing,

however hard it might be to figure out what’s really going on.

Robert Cohan, dancer with Martha Graham and founder of London’s first modern dance company,

came to watch a rehearsal of his old dancers and as he left he turned to me and said,

‘Jonathan, this is a room full of people who still think dance has meaning’,

and I looked and he was right and I wasn’t quite sure what to make of all that.

And the possibility that dance might have meaning still hovers,

at cellular level,

or at least one might say that many of us experience an occasional moment of guilty expression,

that rises like a ghost and must be contextualised.

And the location of the meaning has shifted

from the body to the theatre to the spectator

but it feels the same when you feel it

which is why most of us like to dance.

I went to Boris Charmatz’ Museé de la Danse at Tate Modern

and I thought ‘These are my people’,

and I thought ‘I don’t care where they do this but a gallery is as good as any other place so long as they keep on doing it’,

and it made me wonder what it was they were doing and whether it was old or new,

and it seemed to defy exact placement and I thought maybe that is what we’re doing,

to somehow keep occupying these spaces that can’t be easily identified but live in the body

and can be activated anywhere,

and as much as we worry that we should be more popular,

nevertheless we enjoy this place of privileged deviancy that pulls people in,

and has nothing to do with history but is about defiant and intelligent becoming.

And I don’t believe in ‘in the moment’

but I’d hate to see the cult of archiving sit down like an elephant on our pragmatic forgetfulness.

And I’d hate to see the machine of Facebook

make us stupidly forgetful,

so we can only tolerate what happens in a day

and must throw everything else immediately away,

including ourselves,

and our friends,

and the work that we love,

and need.

So I started writing a list of all the dance artists still alive

and still making work,

whose work I love,

and need,

and it got longer and longer and I kept writing

and I was going to read it out to you,

and I was going to end the list with the ones I missed

saying you, and you, and you, and you,

and you, and you, and you.

And some of them were making work 50 years ago

but they don’t feel like history,

not at a a cellular level.

The problem is we keep staring at the past 50 years

to try and reassure ourselves what we’re doing is new,

and we forget we have this thing called a body

which hasn’t changed much in the last 150,000 years,

which is a pretty special place from which to resist all this,

And anyway the cult of the new drives uncontrolled consumerism

which is one thing we should and can be resisting.

And everything is new at the point of performance if you want it to be.

We keep staring at the past 50 years to reassure ourselves what we’re doing is new

but as the artist Grayson Perry said about painting,

since there is no new you end up searching for a nuance,

a tiny variation you can make your own,

and most of the nuances are already taken.

50 years ago there weren’t many of us and we all knew everyone

but there are thousands of us now

and we’re all searching for a nuance,

and the market loves a niche product

but it all feels a bit unsustainable.

And it’s up to us not to bow to this destructive machine

driven by networks of producers

at the mercy of a marketised cultural scene,

but rather to cherish what we pass through and what passes through us

and to create our own agenda for the next 50 years,

which honours the history in our bodies

and leaves room for the mess that emerges

and the humanity,

reinvented with each generation

and looking nothing like the past.

This is the start of the Postdance Conference,

which is a special challenge thrown out that gets to the heart of the matter,

meaning at the end of this 50 years we find ourselves a little unsure whether we want to dance at all anymore.

Which doesn’t mean we don’t like to dance,

just that we’re not sure quite where to go with it.

And we’ve invented the term ‘post choreographic field’,

and we’re all camped out there under the stars

while we work out what it means,

which is tricky.

And Hans-Thies Lehmann and Helene Varopoulou wrote a fantasy letter to Brecht

for Tom Plischke and Kattrin Defeurt’s ‘New Epic Theatre’ event,

and the letter said we should resist the ‘temptations of the neo-Baroque’,

and I thought ah, but this baroque describes exactly that ornamentation which is fundamental to dancing,

and contains all our rhythmic detail felt intensely at cellular level

that opens worlds and worlds and changes everything.

And I thought how do we refuse this Sun King thing

so rightly critiqued here,

and how do we assert and reclaim again that radical and necessary joy we feel

when we juggle our synapses in a play of detail that circumnavigates all concrete meaning

and yet makes the most sense?

Because as Deborah Hay pointed out

to dance is always a political act.

And here in Stockholm 14 years ago,

Mårten Spånberg’s Panacea Festival

seemed like the birth of something new we now call conceptual,

which was a thinking mess

and only afterwards became history,

which mess we might seize and celebrate

and not call conceptual

or post-post conceptual,

but rather some kind of a new way to deal with how we see and what we see and what matters,

whether dancing or not,

for which the term dramaturgy is somewhat inadequate and professorial,

and which shift of perception is the real revolution.

That we got smart to re-contextualise all the mess the body overwhelms us with,

and overwhelms the audience with,

and so stepped lightly aside from the usual heavy handed attempts to solve this art form called dancing

that most of us would rather get up and do.

And meanwhile the university dance departments proliferated

alongside the spread of choreographic studies,

which are a curse and a blessing,

and universities profit from the courses and poke at them to become more billable

and to turn out the employable

which is an ongoing battle,

and as I said before things got more crowded,

but a lot of us have also found shelter there,

and time and space

and a culture to sustain us,

and the boundaries are getting more fluid

and the old fence is falling.

And the passing of Pina Bausch has left us the question

what might tanztheater be in the 21st century?

And the passing of Merce Cunningham has left us the question

what chance for abstract dance in the 21st century?

And the Atlantic Ocean stayed where it was

and people made work either side of it

and remained somewhat sceptical of each other

and a little nervous around questions of origination.

And hip hop turned virtuosity into a political act

and crossed all the continents

and found its way slowly into our collective motor memory.

And rave culture set the world alight with dancing

and the media and the politicians thought it was to do with drugs

but it was a folk dance gone global.

And women artists have continued the fight to be visible

and black artists have continued the fight to be visible

and disabled artists have continued the fight to be visible

and older artists have continued the fight to try and stay visible.

And artists with so-called disability

have shown us exactly how limited our idea of ability is.

And as Jérôme Bel says,

YouTube has become our first library,

which changes everything but we don’t really know how yet.

And the future is virtual and also not virtual.

And we fight to survive

the death of the author

and the rise of the curator

and her friend the spectator

hiding at the back

to avoid becoming a somewhat reluctant participator,

and the outside eye paid by the producer,

and the onward march of marketing and markets

and that asset stripping exercise called a funding application.

And all the economic consequences we must also discuss,

and digest,

and conquer.

And a younger generation has arrived out of all this

and invented their own means of distribution,

collectively, below the market, beyond consensus,

socially active,

intelligent with institutions,

refusing the iconic

and post-nothing at all but only present,

because they had to.

All of which has not gone unnoticed by art galleries

who’ve made beautiful virtue of those qualities in our art form we’ve always been ashamed of,

like the flimsy, forgettable nothingness of it all,

which is nice so long as we resist them telling us their spaces are the best

and then marginalising half of what we do

(because why would you want less?).

Or lending us Biennale models

that can marginalise people after a five year career

and we all lose out

to the old hyper-capitalist chasing of the new.

Because history goes sideways in the body

and overlaps itself

and more or less ignores fashion

or the official timeline.

And as I said before, all this is 150,000 years old at a conservative estimate

so there’s no real rush.

This is a ramble in the woods

with a guide who can’t see the wood for the trees,

and every tree is always almost somewhere

which is the best place to be.

We’re always almost somewhere and the best pieces never quite arrive

leaving us thinking ahead to what might happen next.

Leaving us thinking ahead to what might happen next

and never more than in a 4 hour performance,

or a 24 hour performance

(because why would you want less?),

or a 24 minute performance.

And we’re always almost somewhere slowly

and the best pieces never quite arrive

but remain imminent,

which is where I’ll leave you,

just here,

beautifully critical but passing through,

here today and gone tomorrow.

Thank you.

With grateful thanks to Ramsay Burt, Katye Coe, Mette Edvardson, Sue MacLaine and Chrysa Parkinson for help and advice on the subtleties of it all.

© Jonathan Burrows 2015

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Biography:

Jonathan Burrows danced with the Royal Ballet for 13 years before leaving to pursue his own choreography. His main focus now is an ongoing body of work with the composer Matteo Fargion. The two men are co-produced by Kaaitheater Brussels, PACT Zollverein Essen, Sadler’s Wells Theatre London and BIT Teatergarasjen Bergen, and are currently in-house artists at the Nightingale Brighton. Other high profile commissions include work for for Sylvie Guillem, Forsythe’s Ballett Frankfurt and the National Theatre, London. Burrows has been an Associate Artist at Kunstencentrum Vooruit in Gent, Belgium, London’s South Bank Centre and Kaaitheater Brussels. He is a visiting member of faculty at P.A.R.T.S Brussels and has also been Guest Professor at universities in Berlin, Gent, Giessen, Hamburg and London. ‘A Choreographer’s Handbook’ has sold over 8,000 copies since its publication in 2010, and is available from Routledge Publishing.

—Will Rawls

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Lawrence Kumpf interviews NYC-based choreographer Moriah Evans about her recent premiere of Social Dance 1-8: Index at Issue Project Room. Evans reflects on the deeply intertwined nature of form, rhythm, architecture and choreographic structure in her practice—and she acknowledges the possibility for the unexpected to emerge, a way for dance to break through the choreographic system. The social agreement of dance, the affective exchange with others, plays out against the ever present forces of organization that structure social life.

Engaging the often muted voice of the dancer, Milka Djordjevich embarks on an experimental process with collaborator, composer Chris Peck, which invites herself and a trio of dancers, including Kyli Kleven and Jessica Cook, to integrate vocalization, song, and harmony within a tightly woven fabric of choreographic gesture and movement. Djordjevich discusses the visible difficulty of the process within its exposition with choreographer Heather Kravas, noting the productive tensions of the act, en masse, that highlights not a virtuosic or successful performance but an underlying effort of attention, effort, and possible failure.

– Biba Bell

As part of Critical Correspondence’s Of Note Elsewhere contingent, this conversation and all quotations were first published by Showbox LA. http://showboxla.org/2014/09/13/heather-kravas-and-milka-djordjevich-on-mass/

“And then the element of the voice is added, which is a way of not being the voiceless dancer, being less anonymous, but somehow still anonymous as we are singing and dancing together; being together as an ensemble and a group. Chris was thinking about vocal equivalents, like a barbershop quartet or the Andrews sisters or girl groups, etc. And in addition there’s this other subtext in the title MASS. It’s not necessarily about religion or church, but there’s liturgical dance where singing and dancing match, that kind of Mickey Mousing; and how experimental dances happen a lot in churches in New York. So that churchy, liturgical thing also incorporates musically into chanting, early music harmonies. It’s a lot of different things at the same time.”

“A lot of MASS is about the three of us really being a unit, three parts of a whole. The beginning is less about the singing, but configuring our bodies, isolating body parts, perceiving them differently, the otherness of our bodies together, the material of the body, and how that material and the isolation of body parts turns in to dance. And how that’s what dance is about.”

Djordjevich and Peck present the culmination of this sonic, embodied laboratory, MASS, at The Kitchen April 30 – May 2nd.

Take a look at Milka’s 2011 interview with Jonathan Burrows, also discussing these questions of music, dance and mistakes. http://www.movementresearch.org/criticalcorrespondence/blog/?p=3989

– Randy Martin, A Precarious Dance, a Derivative Sociality

The dance community suffered a significant loss with the passing of Randy Martin on January 28, 2015. Randy was a brilliant thinker, a passionate dancer and activist, and an admired mentor and teacher to many. His writings about dance, including Critical Moves: Dance Studies in Theory and Politics, provide a unique call to recognize the power that dance has to both reflect and enact new possibilities in the world.

The following text is a transcribed portion of Randy Martin speaking on his concept of “the social kinesthetic” at the Movement Research Studies Project, Performing the Changing City: Public Space, Transformative Events and Creative Action in New York, which took place at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics on March 19, 2013.

The program also included panelists luciana achugar, Jenny Romaine and Niegel Smith.

The event was convened by Abigail Levine and Paloma McGregor.

Link to video of Randy’s talk HERE

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Niegel Smith, Jenny Romaine, Randy Martin, luciana achugar. Video still: Hemispheric Institute

Introduction to a Social Kinesthetic

When I was a younger child than I am now, I remember growing up with these publics. There was public school, and there were public parks, and there was public transportation, and I went to this thing called the public university, and I came out and I actually didn’t have debt. So, obviously, there were dinosaurs roaming around, and cockroaches—a strange unfamiliar world. And I wound up here, teaching public art to freshmen who likely will be in debt. That’s something that happens at the Tisch School. The students come in and there’s this sense that their own personal and private investments in their artistic craft will not be sufficient in a world that’s often hostile to the arts. They’re going to have to learn to get a public voice and become public intellectuals on behalf of the arts.

So, that is to say that I’m stitched in to this line of publics. I just want to pause and worry what that line might be because it seems that there’s no doubt that from so many perspectives the public that we once knew has gone missing. It is like the sand castle; every time the wave goes up there seems to be a little less of it. I think in some ways, we’re at a kind of crossroads or a crucible where we could ask, Do we want that public back? And certainly, as Abby [Levine] was suggesting, when we think about what that public was it was not all it has cracked up to be—it was full of exclusions. If we’re talking about the Greek version of the public, you had to be a male, a property owner. And it wasn’t the 1%, it was the 5 %, but things haven’t moved that much. If we’re talking about Victorian public and private, obviously there were all kinds of issues of what was valued and what was not.

Randy Martin. Video still: Hemispheric Institute

I think it’s important to appreciate that the Western conception of art enters right into that divide, the gendered idea of the private realm as issuing the aesthetic, as issuing this virginal domain where value is going to be pure and restitutive. This is part of a troubled legacy that artists continue to live through in the form of not giving comparable wages for comparable work. So, there’s a lot to worry about with this public. But when we think about the other aspect of a strategy, of a politics around reclaiming “the public,” we also have to worry about what happens to that divide between public and private. If we’re valuing a form of public art and if we’re talking about New York City, the history of that public art is the history of state representations of what the people should follow, heroes on horses, of organizational forms, like non-profits, in which public coffers get evacuated through tax exemption and artists are invited to think of themselves as corporations. The very language that we’ve had to think about the public has been itself something of a Trojan horse where what’s inside the horse is not simply the private or the market or that truth, but a difficulty in sustaining and supporting that very notion of what the public might be. That boundary between the private and the public is itself part of the problem. Because it sorts out what can be valued, what we should unify around, and those claims to unity have this troubled history where some particular type of person or place or position was meant to stand in for everyone and that’s part of the freighting of the public. What else might we look towards if we’re noticing that there’s an expansion in our midst? The relationship between the public and the private continues to have all kind of tactical value; there are all kinds of worth and capacity there. But maybe that particular framework or naming what it is we want more of is going to put us in the paradoxical situation of gaining us less.

It seems to me that one alternative to that partition of public and private would be to consider “the social” as a term that is not necessarily based on that particular cut between what gets to appear and what’s rendered invisible. And it’s striking to me that many of the most interesting interventions in politics and the arts have straddled some version of public and private. Certainly, Zucotti Park would have been unimaginable if it wasn’t in that liminal condition of being a formerly public-private entity that couldn’t be exactly shut down at midnight and had a charter with the city. But that perverse relationship of using government and public authority to vest particular capacities in private entities is more or less the extending formula that we have for meeting what are now called public goods.

We should even remember that that notion of public good started off amongst economists coming out of the 1930s and the idea that gave birth to something that’s now called neoliberalism. That public goods were things that did not lend themselves to the market because many people could use them at the same time without using them up. They were non-rival. It was difficult to keep somebody away form their use and there weren’t additional costs involved the more people that used them. So, those were known as the condition of being non-rival and non-excludable. But that pristine state of the public good into which knowledge and art were supposed to fall, that was very much the basis in 1965 for a Rockefeller Brothers report that justified the need for public funding of the arts in the form of the National Endowment for the Arts. That became precisely the basis for extending markets, intellectual property, the capture of that which previously didn’t have a price, that didn’t have a value—the privatization of education, the transference of education, which was seen as something that was important for civic and national purposes, into something that was an investment to add value to an individual’s earning power. When we visit the terminology that we have, whether it’s economic, organizational, cultural, aesthetic, that divide becomes a problem. When we look at the ways in which artists and activists have begun to re-craft space in the city we see that in many ways it is precisely in the crevices in which something else is being emitted, in what would have been a boundary or a barricade between the public and the private.

Randy Martin. Video still: Hemispheric Institute

I think it’s interesting to consider if this is auguring not a turn to the past, to try and get back our public that we’ve lost back, and with it having to negotiate who the “we” was, and what that past was, and what the point of reference was. If we’re talking about orienting ourselves to the future, which was part of the framing of the panel, then I want to also inquire what’s happened to the future? The future once was also safely locked away from the past and the present, and if anything we’ve seen that now the future’s come crashing upon us. We’re asked to live out all of these different risk-management strategies. Whether it’s in terms of preemptive wars on terror, strategies to try and trade carbon or pollution credits, or strategies for trading on the stock market. I think if we think about what has taken over the city in the last forty years it’s very much been the financial sector whose mantra is to make the future actionable in the present. That’s what derivatives are meant to do. Derivatives are incredible phenomena where some small aspect or attribute of some underlying value, like the interest rates on a mortgage or the likelihood of default on a mortgage or currency exchange, get traded in order to anticipate risks. And the total value of those derivative contracts is about a quadrillion and a half dollars, which is about fifteen times what the world’s gross domestic product is. Now we can stop and say, Uh oh, something unreal, something epiphenomenal, something ethereal, something immoral—because it is immaterial—has taken over our lives. But we might want to pause and say, But wait a second, isn’t that exactly how people talk about art? Something that is ethereal, epiphenomenal, something that isn’t grounded in the material? Certainly those are not people who do art—who labor tirelessly without wages—who think that the effort stops when the performance is over and it becomes ephemeral and ethereal and disappears—when in fact you just continue working.

Part of what’s at stake in this future coming at us is, What does it mean to take the practices of risk that are so familiar in the arts and to introduce a different kind of currency? If the future is upon us. If we can make small interventions. If the logic of a derivative is what’s called arbitrage. If you look at the small differences in a space that seems to be closing and you move right into that space. Now that reminds me of contact improvisation, but it also reminds me of skateboarding and other kinds of movement practices moving through and etching out certain kinds of openings and closures in the city. We might say that this is, indeed, a kind of mapping of a different way of valuing risk that acts on what could be and begins to announce what I would term a “social kinesthetic,” a sensibility for how it is that we move together, that we’re oriented towards movement that we could say is a way of reclaiming and reinvesting in a different principle, a lateral, distributed, but also difficult-to-concretize principle of people moving together but not as one.

“At the time of Coda I was beginning to negotiate my work’s positioning in both visual art and dance economies. Floors and walls with black and white patinas, respectively, were useful visual synecdoches for “black box” and “white cube”—themselves synecdoches for not only the theatrical space and the exhibition space, but for dance and visual art as fields and economies. Working with white wall as a material, something important to my current work, was the next step in this progression.

Laris Cohen reflects more broadly on the phenomenon of dance’s incorporation into the visual art landscape and the experience of practicing at the meeting point of these two sites:

“The art world’s incorporation of dance is moving very quickly; the terms have even shifted since Coda in early 2012. I have not participated in the one-way migration “from the theater into the museum”; I was starting to make work when this process was already—albeit newly—under way, and my practice was never situated solely in one site or the other. I benefit from this renewed interest in dance and visual art performance, but I’m not wild about some of the institutional modifications to the “white cube” made in an effort to accommodate dance. Accommodation is the wrong strategy.

Like many visual artists, Laris Cohen is using dance as one of many materials within his work. However, again, his approach is distinct. It is common for visual artists to insert dance into a framework that has been conceptualized independently of an active dance practice, asking the dancer be the guide to the use of movement within the work. Laris Cohen usually creates work using his own body, even understanding the making of the work itself as performance. Referencing ballet, he speak of using the form “because it is a language I can speak.” The resource of a physical language and treatment of performance as creative process moves dance into and through visual art spaces in ways that Laris Cohen ties to various dance histories. All the while, however, he rejects a positioning of his work “between” spaces, between dance and visual art, reaching instead for the less stable “transitions of among, within, and elsewhere.”

–Abigail Levine

 As part of Critical Correspondence’s ongoing Dance and the Museum project, we point you to an interview of Yve Laris Cohen by Jenny Jaskey for Mousse Magazine. http://moussemagazine.it/articolo.mm?id=1085.

All quotations above from “Among, Within and Elsewhere” by Jenny Jaskey.

Photo by Karl Rabe, courtesy of the artist. Yve Laris Cohen, opening, from “Landing Field: Vito Acconci and Yve Laris Cohen” at Hessel Museum of Art, Centre for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, 2013.

French choreographer Boris Charmatz is presenting three different programs this fall at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City under the umbrella title: Three Collective Gestures(October 18-November 3). In many ways, he is taking on the whole contemporary issue of the relation of dance to the museum. In his first offering, 20 Dancers for the XX Century, Charmatz has curated twenty dancers, each one presenting a solo or solos by twentieth-century choreographers. Some of the works are well known and some are relatively unknown. The solos were announced for between noon and 5pm, during which time one could find them in numerous locations in the museum, popping up unexpectedly and serially throughout MoMA’s five floors and garden. This format has its charms: there are architectural cut-out effects in MoMA thanks to which one suddenly spies a space two floors down, particularly interesting to look at when the cut-out frames a dancing body. But, then, dance constitutes a sort of light diversion in the process of navigating the museum, which, in the case of MoMA, is a bustling public space. The format also proved to be chaotic and frustrating of any attempt to learn what one was seeing.

And, the conditions of performance in this setting have to be challenging for the dancers: the floors are hard and in many cases the public streams past the dancer to a nearby staircase. The Atrium, on the other hand, is sufficiently large to constitute an area the dancer can exploit to his or her advantage, but the problem of the unforgiving floor remains here as well. I was most moved, however, by seeing Gus Solomons performing his solo in homage to John Cage in the garden next to a Giacometti sculpture. It made me think that the dialogue between dance and visual art was an important aspect of twentieth-century dance. (A recent exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris pointed to this connection). The historical connection of dance to the visual was also brought home by MoMA’s recent show “The Invention of Abstraction” in which dance – albeit not live dance – was prominently featured.

What this production highlighted is what Ralph Lemon — in discussion with Simone Forti, and Boris Charmatz moderated by Associate Curator (Department of Media and Performance Art) Ana Janevski, (October 25, 2013) – referred to as the dancer in the museum as visitor: “The dancers were visitors,” Lemon said of his own experience of performing in the Atrium, “visitors with agency, but visitors”. “Dance,” continued Lemon, “will always be on the outside. It doesn’t really belong there.”

Musée de la danse. 20 Dancers for the XX Century at The Museum of Modern Art, October 2013. Part of Musée de la danse: Three Collective Gestures (October 18 to November 03, 2013). Dancer: Gus Solomons. Photograph © 2013 The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo by Julieta Cervantes

Here, it should be mentioned that Boris Charmatz’s base in Rennes, France, is called “Musée de la Danse” (Dance Museum). So, there is already with Charmatz a conception of museality that has been transmuted into the reality of dancing. In the discussion Charmatz characterized his appearances at the Museum of Modern Art as an opportunity to place one museum within the other. The idea with respect to 20 Dancers for the XX Century is that dancers enact fleeting interventions in which the collections of MoMA are rivaled by the idea of a museum of dance, one in which the dancer him or herself is not only the “work of art”, but also the explicatory label and/or catalogue: in short, in which the dancer is at once artwork, pop-up materialization of choreography, and a living archive able to inform about it. This all happens within a museum that is operating in an entirely different way. The museum within the museum is not an easy fit. The museum of dance that sits uneasily within the halls of the MoMA is multiple: each dancer him or herself, according to Charmatz, constitutes an autonomous museum. As the program puts it:

Each performer presents his or her own museum, where the body is the ultimate space for the dance museum. Hence there is neither a stage nor a demarcation of performance space.

This sounds better on paper than it looks in practice. But, the idea is that the dance museum is virtual. Charmatz states: “the force of a museum of dance lies especially in the fact that it does not yet exist.” If dance appears as a virtual museum within a non-virtual museum then the transitoriness of dance is being emphatically emphasized. In that same manifesto, Charmatz wrote: “We are at a time in history where a museum in no way excludes precarious movements or nomadic, ephemeral, instantaneous movements.” His is a museum within a museum in the sense of a body in a building, a living and breathing human being among artifacts, energy amidst what could be experienced as the inertia of a material culture of the object. What does it mean to say this moment in history does not exclude precarious movements in the museum? Installation and video have been part of museum exhibition and collection for some time now. The dancer’s body may have an archival dimension – but is this enough since a museum is so much more than an archive and in many senses not an archive – but how does the dancer generate on that basis a space of exhibition adequate to their expressive capacity? This is one of the questions that this event raised but did not answer. But, perhaps to raise it is enough.

Musée de la danse. 20 Dancers for the XX Century at The Museum of Modern Art, October 2013. Part of Musée de la danse: Three Collective Gestures (October 18 to November 03, 2013). Dancer: Meg Stuart. Photograph © 2013 The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo by Julieta Cervantes

I still wonder about how the idea of a museum of dance such as Charmatz conceives it can be manifested in the context of an institution such as MoMA where the artwork has been so carefully and expertly staged in galleries. How can dance as visitor compete with visual art in its home if dance does not occupy a space adequate for its own contemplation? The museum within the museum inevitably suggests a comparison – an agon – in the encounter of two forms of art, the visual and the performative.

At times I had the sensation the dancer was challenging the museum as a static space by the intrepid intervention of the moving body – daring, beautiful, theatrical, dynamic, funny — at the museum’s margins and in its very transitional public spaces between galleries or at the base of stairways and escalators. The dancers often took on their marginal status and played it to the hilt. But, this challenge is not of the essence of the desired encounter: the sensation of inferiority at being an artwork as visitor — a turning inside out of the relation between living beings and exhibited objects – leads to certain hubris whereby the living, breathing, animate dancer implicitly expresses a superiority to art that does not move but hangs in stasis while, nonetheless, that “static” art maintains its monetary value and cultural capital. Museums producing dance should take on the responsibility to produce dance visuallywith the same care they bestow upon visual art. The playing field might thereby be somewhat leveled.

Even though the Musée de la danse in Rennes is not a conventional museum — it has no gallery space — but a place for dancer training and choreographic experimentation it is related to the museum inasmuch as it is also a site for learning and invention. This speaks to a concept of the museum as a space of learning and invention. If Charmatz has chosen to place the word museum next to the word dance it is perhaps because the idea of the self-educating dancer is one that encompasses the dancer’s appropriation of dance history. That history in the twentieth century is one that is deeply engaged with visual art. Thus, for several possible reasons the museum for Charmatz is the appropriate figure of, or term for, such a project. As Yvonne Rainer remarked at the discussion a museum is a conservative institution. However, when the dancer appropriates his or her own history, reserving the right to express, formalize, and articulate it in/as a performance then I believe one may refer to a museum as a performative idea.

All in all, there is – and has been for some time — a tendency in contemporary French dance to put more power in the hands – and bodies – of dancers by wresting control of the pedagogical and historiographic project of institutionalized dance training. A sense of the contemporary dancer as autodidact emerges from recent debates in the French world of contemporary dance. Charmatz’s idea of the museum within the body and the body as a performative mini-museum derives to some degree from this autodidactic project, one that he has described and theorized in the context of an earlier initiative – Bocal (Jar) – in his book Je suis une école. Expérimentation, Art, Pédagogie [I am a school: Experimentation, Art, Pedagogy] (Paris: Les Prairies Ordinaires, 2009). French institutional power over the training of dancers is at issue in the very idea of the dance museum.

The transformative potential of the museum for dance in Charmatz’s view, as I understand it, resides paradoxically in its very educational and specifically autodidactic potential – hence the audience is also meant to learn — although that potential has been transferred from educational institutions such as conservatories or museums to the dancer him or herself.

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Mark Franko is Professor of Dance, Coordinator of Graduate Programs at Temple University (Philadelphia) and Professor of Visual and Performance Studies at Middlesex. His publications include Martha Graham in Love and War: the Life in the Work, Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body, Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics, The Work of Dance: Labor, Movement and Identity in the 1930s and Excursion for Miracles: Paul Sanasardo, Donya Feuer and Studio for Dance (1955-1964). He is editor of Dance Research Journal, and founding editor of the Oxford Studies in Dance Theory book series. He edited Ritual and Event: Interdisciplinary Perspectives and co-edited Acting on the Past: Historical Performance Across the Disciplines. Recipient of the 2011 Outstanding Scholarly Research in Dance from the Congress on Research in Dance, Franko’s research has been supported by the National Endowment fort he Humanities, the Getty Center for Research into the Arts and Humanities. The American Council of Learned Stocieties, and the American Philosophical Society and the National Endowment fort he Arts. He has taught at Columbia University, Princeton University, Purdue University, and at the University of California Santa Cruz (emeritus); he was Valeska Gert Visiting Professor of Dance and Performance at the Institut für Theaterwissenschaf,t Freie Universität Berlin, and Visiting Professor at Bard College, Paris 8, Université de Nice, and the Catholic University of Leuven. His work has been translated into French, Italian, German, and Slovenian.

Critical Correspondence is pleased to share with you an excerpt of a conversation from Kinebago, a magazine created to foster the documentation and contemplation of dance and movement-based practices in New England. Here, improvisor/dance maker/teacher Chris Aiken talks with Kinebago founder Sara Smith about what he describes as “ecological practice” and how it transforms his perceptual, aesthetic, and relational capacities as a performer.

 Download a PDF of this conversation

Kinebago/Sara Smith: We were talking last time about choices in movement. In my movement practice…I’m not a contact improvisor…but when I’m in the studio improvising, a lot of what I’m interested in is this interruption of automatic patterns. And I’m dancing with the space, with the architecture. But that gets a lot more complicated in contact, when you’re also responsible for somebody else, for that person’s well-being…

Chris Aiken: And your own well-being!

Utopia Parkway dance concert at Smith College
Chris Aiken and Angie Hauser
©2012 Jon Crispin

Kinebago: Right!

Chris: So, with contact being as demanding as it is, in terms of dealing with weight, with disorientation, with another person…it can cause people to develop very habitual ways of responding to that. And it’s difficult to keep it fresh. To get to a place where you’re able to keep that improvisation alive, and not just rely on familiar ways of doing contact…it’s difficult. But I’m disappointed when people describe me as a contact artist, because I don’t think of myself as a contact artist. I think of myself as an improvisor who makes dances, who has a high-level of skill in contact from years of experience, but I’m never setting out to use contact as the means for expressing my aesthetic sensibility. That’s not to deny that contact IS part of my aesthetic sensibility, but it isn’t front and center.

I often think that what I have to offer the world of contact, is a link to what I call the perceptual roots of contact, which come from Steve [Paxton], and Nancy [Stark Smith]. Steve created this form, and as he was creating it—I’m sure he was already interested in perception—but the practice of contact very quickly became an amazing laboratory for observing yourself. Observing the moments when you have gaps of consciousness, when the speed of the dancing is so fast that your reflexes kick in, and you leave your body for a second and then come back. And you’re like “Ooh, wow! My body just took over!” And it’s exciting—your body just took care of you! But Steve was also interested in if you could you stay conscious in those moments.

Kinebago: I heard him talk last year at Smith [College], and he was talking about noticing when your eyes want to close, and how that cuts off the visual feedback you get, and you might want to work on not automatically closing your eyes. It was a fascinating talk.

Chris: Yeah. So, contact both provided an avenue for observing yourself in high-stress situations, how adrenaline affects you, and how to inhibit certain reflexes in order to access other states, or other movement possibilities, such as pulling your head down when you start to fall, instead of extending out into space. Like, an Akido roll gives you the chance to jump into space as you’re falling towards your head, to turn your body into a wheel so you roll. Once you develop those skills, your body stays open as you’re falling, rather than contracting. So, being able to observe those reflexes, and have a relationship to them, and retrain them, so to speak…but also to realize that your perceptual frame, or your foundation, doesn’t have to be fixed. Each of us has a singular, perceptual vantage point from which we live. It’s particular to each person.And in that construction and sensibility, certain senses are highlighted and accentuated, or are suppressed and not activated, or not developed. Most of us are not aware of this—we’re just living. But with contact, by ramping up, or elevating, the amount of sensory information I was getting through my skin—my haptic sense—I realized that I was changing.

Utopia Parkway dance concert at Smith College
Chris Aiken and Angie Hauser
©2012 Jon Crispin

Contact gives you…a capacity to perceive your back-space, to perceive surface and depth that’s not available to your eyes. But if I touch you, it gives me a huge insight into how you’re organized structurally. So much information is available through your haptic sense—through pressure, texture, temperature. It’s like a laboratory. Once you develop that sense, you realize, “Wow, I can develop any of my senses!” And I can reorganize that perceptual frame, or foundation, from which I view the world. And for me that was huge.

Kinebago: It IS huge!

Chris: Yeah. It not only changed who I was as a person, but it also changed how I thought about art. I believe that many people have this idea that great art comes from artists who have blinding insight. Like the myth of Mozart is that he just got these compositions that came to him, and he would just write them down.

Kinebago: Inspirational flashes.

Chris: Yeah. And if you look at his life, that wasn’t true. He had a lot of training, and he was able to improvise and work on his compositions, so when he did write them down, he had gone through a process, just like anybody else.

Kinebago: Right.

Chris: So for me, the creative process is this intimate relationship between perception and what I think of as imagination. It’s your interaction with your materials—whatever they might be—and your imagination. You get an idea, and you try something and you see what happens, and you get another idea. It this process of experimenting, and then observing, returning, changing, adapting, and trying new things. Well, the means by which you make that process happen is your senses. If your senses are not skilled, you don’t know what to look at. And often, people who want to be artists, they get an idea, and they’re just going after that idea, and not going through all the changes that the process is suggesting. And from my perspective, the artists who are most successful, are able to…with each decision, a whole new set of decisions reveal themselves. And to see this is rooted in your perceptual skill.

And to me, this is linked to being ecologically tuned to one’s environment. It isn’t simply that you listen more, though that’s a good start. It isn’t just that you turn yourself into a massive membrane and vibrate with the universe, and then you’ll know what to do and be ecologically tuned. Some of what is important in terms of making decisions about how to live, or how to make art, are things you can’t see, or can’t sense in the moment. I guess I think that one of the values of science is that it helps you see what you can’t sense without the right tools.

Photo of Chris Aiken and Angie Hauser by Jim Coleman

Kinebago: And science also tells us that there are things we can’t perceive that are still true.

Chris: Exactly. Or are only perceptible through technology.

Kinebago: Or in an even more abstract way, sometimes we know they’re true because we understand mathematics, and mathematical principles are based on things we learn from the universe.

Chris: Right. And I think that that’s very much connected to art. There are all kinds of things that influence how I make art that are not immediate. It’s not simply my ability to sense what’s happening at this moment, but it’s my cultivation of an aesthetic, based on what I would think of as aesthetic research. Which is not only looking at art, but also dialoguing with others about art. And also dialoguing with artists and others about ideas, or concepts…I think it’s important to think about your foundational beliefs—what are the words you say to yourself regularly: what are the words you use to describe the world you live in? I think many of us communicate to ourselves through words, or images.

Kinebago: Most of us.

Chris: Right, most of us. And if those images and words are not regularly re-examined, then they just drive you, without you being conscious of it. So, part of an ecological practice is to look beyond what’s there, and towards “what will I look like if I hold these beliefs for ten years, or for the rest of my life?” So some of what I think of as the profound changes that have happened to me as an artist, are based on values that I re-examined, and words that I changed, in relationship to art or performance. When I say “words,” I mean beliefs.

I think I said this last time we talked, but I often ask myself and others, “Why are you performing? Why are you asking people to come see you?” And I think the answer isn’t the same all the time. I try to keep myself connected to that question. I want it to be a question that I continually reconsider. I don’t want to just assume that the reasons I have for doing it are the right ones. Like for example, I think that sometimes performers think they’re sharing, but they’re really showing. “Offering” is different from showing. My interest in art making is to create a space where we can have a shared experience that’s co-created. I need the audience to share in their attention, and they need me to create the space, and to be the initiator of that experience. But it would not be what it is without them.

Utopia Parkway dance concert at Smith College
Chris Aiken and Angie Hauser
©2012 Jon Crispin

Kinebago: What are some of the things that you do to get at this?

Chris: One of them is that I look at the idea of “hiding” on stage. One of the ways that people hide, is showing off—they pull-out their best moves.

Kinebago: Is this something that you dealt with in your own performing?

Chris: Yeah. When I was younger, I felt like if I didn’t show people what I could do, then they wouldn’t know. I felt obligated to display my skill, so they would a) feel that they got their money’s worth, and b) that they wouldn’t doubt that I had those skills.

Kinebago: Right, so they would feel that you were worth their money and time.

Chris: Right. That I’d done my homework. But as I matured as an artist, that just faded away. I know that I’ve done the work. I don’t take it for granted, but that’s not my main consideration anymore.

Kinebago: What considerations took the place of that way of thinking?

Chris: It’s creating an experience where the audience feels me being conscious of them, not in a way of trying to please them, but in creating avenues for them to share in an experience. So, sometimes it’s looking at the audience, sometimes it’s allowing them to see me, like not habitually looking above the audience, or away. Acknowledging that they’re there. They’re not off to the side, they’re not above or below me, they’re right there. So, really including them in my visual field. And also, if I’m not looking at them, I’m still listening to them, I’m tuning into my back when they’re behind me. So, I’m considering what their reality is. I’m not privileging it over my own, but not privileging my own over them. It’s just saying that in order for this to work, we have to work together.

Utopia Parkway dance concert at Smith College
Chris Aiken and Angie Hauser
©2012 Jon Crispin

Kinebago: It’s a kind of contact improvisation.

Chris: Exactly. And noticing… there are really no recipes. But if I let [the audience] know early on that I’m with them, and I want them to be with me, and I see them, I’m welcoming them, then I can dive deep into my experience. I don’t have to do it all the time, but enough so they know I’m with them. And I know it’s working, because audiences consistently say that they can feel it in a way that’s genuine. And to me, that’s just as important as the performer recognizing the room that they’re in. Every space is different and has its own possibilities. And some performers are able to connect with the space around them, and others seem to be doing the same performance no matter what the space is. And to me that’s non-ecological. In a way, every performance is site-specific.

Kinebago: Right!

Chris: It’s audience-specific, it’s space-specific, and it’s socio-politically specific, based on what happened that day in politics, or in the town. Or with the weather. One of the most amazing experiences I ever had was performing in Miami. In the middle of the performance—it was a solo—it started raining, and I could hear the rain on the roof of the theater, and the thunder, and the wind. And [the audience] could too, and we just…it was a very special moment. It was just thrilling to feel like this was a singular moment, and we were all sharing it. And I felt very connected to a much bigger cosmos. And to bring it back to the practical, I don’t think that’s just an aesthetic; it’s a lived practice.

Kinebago: Right, it’s an ethos.

Chris: Yeah, it’s an ethos that you don’t develop overnight; you can’t just turn it on for a performance. It has to be grounded in your everyday experience. At least that’s my opinion. When people ask me “how do you rehearse to improvise?” or, “how do you practice?” In a way, I’m always practicing. There’s the development of the aesthetic sensibility, that’s rooted in years of making and performing, but then there’s also instincts that are…when you’re in the midst of a performance, you cannot be analyzing all your choices—it’s way too slow! So you have to have done your homework in order to have those instincts to have those choices available to you.

Kinebago: That’s what practice is for.

Chris: Yeah. And practice gets rooted in your nervous system. And that takes years.

Kinebago: Right. And you do research on those physical systems too.

Chris: The science has affirmed this—the way you live, your posture, your relationships, your environment, it’s all recorded in your body and your mind. And the functional structure of your being is evolving. It evolves slowly. The structure becomes the function, which becomes the structure, which becomes the function…they’re inseparable. But the architecture of your experience evolves very slowly. Like, I think that if I do work for ten years, then my structure will change. If I work for ten weeks, it’ll change, but not nearly so much.

Kinebago: And most dancers—no matter what form they work in—have experienced this. Over years, thinking about their turn-out, or their alignment.

Chris: Right. And this isn’t rocket science. Every dancer knows that training is important, and that you are the product of your training. But in dance education there’s often not as much emphasis on imagistic, and aesthetic, and conceptual training. That’s more thought training, or cognitive training. Those become memes, things that change your body. But they don’t do this right away. Embedded in every dance form are all kinds of ideas that are often not even really examined. They just get passed on, and the dancer evolves into that kind of dancer. Training involves a lot of images, and language, and culture, and history—much of it is passed down orally, or by watching your teacher. But I didn’t want to be a passive participant in that process. Because I’m a teacher, I feel responsible to look at what I’m doing with my words and my actions that is creating openings and opportunities for people to learn and grow, and what I’m doing that’s closing those avenues off without even realizing it.

And I think I told you before…and it’s a constant re-learning…but years ago I finally understood the need to examine privilege, and gender. But that is just a microcosm for power. And as a teacher, how do you stay tuned in to who’s on the outside, without becoming so overly sensitive that you’re always care-taking? But recognizing that you can create openings, and people can come in if they feel safe enough, but making sure you’re not pushing them away without realizing it. And you can’t do that if you’re not thinking about words, if you’re not thinking about tone. So when I’m thinking about the “ecology of dance,” that‘s just as important as sensing gravity.

Steve talked about how Robert Ellis Dunn created a freefall from “cultural gravity.” Have you heard him say that? That his classes—for a period of time—they were free from the weight of culture.

And that’s what I try to do as a teacher—acknowledge the world as it is, and create a space where we can experiment a bit, a little bit, not massively…I think if you create an environment that’s too radical it can blow people’s circuits. I think I’m being subtly subversive. I mean, I’m teaching contact improvisation at Smith College! It’s pretty wild that I’ve actually made a career teaching contact improvisation in a liberal arts setting. That’s pretty phenomenal!

Kinebago: So when you teach these workshops that are specifically framed as an “eco-poetic approach” to improvisation, what is the focus? Is it different from what you do in your regular classroom?

Chris: It’s connecting the natural sciences with the poetic imagination. I’m not a scientist, but I certainly study science. And I study the body. At the very base level, I start with perceptual systems, and how they function to co-create the world that you live in. I talk about gravity as a constant. To ignore gravity is to ignore one of the pillars of what it is to be a human being.

Photo of Chris Aiken by Chris Randle

Kinebago: And what it is to be on this planet…

Chris: Right, exactly! We wouldn’t be on this planet, we’d be out in space! And when I talk about developing the poetic imagination, I sort of try to humbly present the world of art, of making things. I ask, “what does it mean to have an aesthetic sensibility?” And I share my research as an example of what it means to have an aesthetic practice. That’s what I’m teaching. I’m teaching a practice of tuning your ecological sensibility in conjunction with your poetic sensibility. Because the world is neither one nor the other—they’re completely intertwined. In other words, meaning doesn’t come from science. Meaning comes from the interaction of my wishes and my experiences in relationship to what is actually tangible and real. In the sense that I have a body, and there are objects in the world. And there’s gravity, and plants, and animals, and the “real world.” It’s the interaction with the environment and my imagination. Because for me, I know that the world I’m experiencing is particular to me, and I know that your world is particular to you. Now, there are things that we share. But what helps me both remain hopeful for humanity, and for myself, is when we can share glimpses into each others’ worlds, and both see the congruencies, and the differences.

So, I might not live in a world where the color pink, say, is important, but I might meet somebody who, their world is completely inspired by pink. Or like somebody who’s really into wine—it’s not my thing—but maybe for them, the complexity of wine is what makes them get up in the morning! Like someone who has a vineyard…I love talking to someone whose vantage point is very different from mine. I’m reminded again and again that I only have a very small experience of the world. And I think I said this to you the other day, I just had this experience with Jane Stangl, the Dean of the First-Year class [at Smith College] who made me conscious that my ideas about gender were more fixed than I thought they were. It’s easy to have value judgments about things that are based on murky assumptions. And once you have a little bit of clarity, or somebody puts a frame around something, you see things in a new way. And art does that.

So, ecology is all about relationships. It’s about dialogues that are going on across time. Someone who has ecological skills is able to tune into many, many different levels of experience that are interwoven. I mean, most people who have any sense of science grasp that everything is interconnected. That seemed completely intuitive to me as a young person. And any religion that didn’t start with that as a base, I couldn’t buy into. So, separation of mind and body, separation of human beings from animals, or human beings from nature—I couldn’t go there! It seemed completely non-intuitive. And non-scientific. One thing that science has taught me over and over and over is that everything is connected. And lastly, just to go back to John Dewey, in Art As Experience, he talks about the aesthetic object as the representation of the artist’s relationship to their world. And so when we’re celebrating that art, we are celebrating interconnectedness, between that person and the world they lived in, as represented in that work of art. And not just the world, but it’s their relationship to those materials. So, when you’re watching me dance, you’re watching my relationship to my body, and to the world, and to my own ideas. So yeah, it’s about things connecting. That’s what ecology is for me. When you have ecological skills, you understand relationships.

Utopia Parkway dance concert at Smith College
Chris Aiken
©2012 Jon Crispin

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Kinebago/Sara Smith: It was really interesting to watch everyone in class today trying to do the material from that piece.

Heidi Henderson: It’s really hard.

Kinebago: Yeah!

Heidi: It doesn’t look hard.

Kinebago: It’s really hard!

Heidi: I say that’s my special skill: to make really hard movement that looks easy to do. I would be a lot better off making easy movement that looks hard to do.

Molly Lieber and Karl Rogers in Pine. Photo by Brit Lilienthal.

Kinebago: Well you know, I spent this morning talking to my parents, my mother especially—who came to the show—about your piece, trying to explain the difficulty and the virtuosity of what you were doing.

Heidi: She was sitting right in front! I figured it out afterward.

Kinebago: Yeah, they were sitting right in front. And they were like, “That woman who did the solo, she wasn’t a very good dancer.” And so I said, I guess I can understand why you might think that… I was trying to explain, from the dancer’s perspective, how what you’d done was very technical and virtuosic, though they couldn’t necessarily see that because the performance is so understated. And then watching dancers grappling with the material and figuring it out in class this morning… I mean, they know that it’s difficult, but to watch them imitate what they think you’re doing, and then slowly figure out what you’re actually doing, and the technical needs of that if they’re going to do it well.

Heidi: It’s funny. I feel also that it seems less difficult than it is, especially if you’re an intermediate dancer, and you don’t really see what you’re not getting about it yet. Or, I know that in my body I’m doing it exactly the same way every time, to the inch! But, it looks sloppy. But to me, that’s what technique is, doing something exactly the same, no matter what it is.

Kinebago: That’s interesting. Not having seen your work before…do you feel like what you teach in your class is preparing people in the technique that you use?

Heidi: Yes, but it took me years to figure out what it is that I do, and then how to teach it. So it was definitely backwards. I would take a phrase and then break it down and see what is the weight that I’m using for this particular movement and then what metaphor or class-based idea can I apply to prep people for that moment? Now I trust it more. I used to literally have moments from the choreography in the class exercises—although nothing really feels like an exercise, because you have to move the whole time. That’s not my idea—lots of people do it. But I used to kind of snatch moments and find ways to dialogue about them and put them in, and now I trust that the class, if I teach my class well, is going to prepare people to do the work, even if the exact steps aren’t in there. And it’s an easier way to teach, frankly. I used to try to focus so much on the structure.  Donna Uchizono is a genius at doing that…you would go to her class and by the end of her class exercises you would know the phrase, even though you didn’t know you knew the phrase—it was incredible!

Kinebago: When you just mentioned use of metaphor in teaching…one of the things that definitely popped out to me when you were teaching this morning was your use of metaphor to help people understand what you are doing.

Heidi: Yeah, for years I tried to avoid the metaphor thing, because I don’t…my dances don’t feel like they’re about something, other than the movement. Even though I recognize that they are for other people. I don’t think of story or meaning while I’m moving, I’m thinking about pure physicality. But in teaching, I couldn’t come up with enough language about physicality to get people to understand what I was doing.

Heidi Henderson in Pine. Photo by Michael Hoy.

Kinebago: So it’s an afterthought.

Heidi: The imagery is an afterthought. Like, I’ve made the movement, and here’s a way I can reframe what I’m doing so that you might understand it better.

Kinebago: So when you say things like “I’m holding the moon,” when you made it you weren’t holding the moon…

Heidi: Nope, no moon.

Kinebago: But now there’s a moon.

Heidi: Yeah. I can’t… I’m not a literal person.  Although it’s funny… at night before bed I read bad science fiction, or fantasy books. I listen to thrillers while I’m driving in the car. I love the idea of plot! But I can’t make dances that way.

Kinebago: Why do you think that is?

Heidi: Well mainly, because I don’t believe the movement means that… like, I’m thinking of a dance I have seen where it’s sort of swoopy movement, but then someone is using a speech as sound, and suddenly the piece is ABOUT that.

Kinebago: Right, like I’m making a dance about say, Democracy, and it goes pas de bourrée, pas de bourrée, chassé, jetté.

Heidi Henderson in We wait. Photo by Nikki Carrera.

Heidi: Yes, that! I don’t believe in that. So then I have to find a way of moving that feels like something… and I don’t know what the something is and I don’t need to label it. But like, for this piece, I was making movement, and all of a sudden the movement just felt really sad. So I was like, maybe I can make more “sad movement.” What does “sad movement” feel like? But there was never a reason to feel sad, until I got plopped in this piece, with a duet, hugging.

Kinebago: So this is part of a larger piece.

Heidi: Yeah, there’s a duet. Karl [Rogers] and Molly [Lieber] are downstage, hugging, the whole time I’m doing this. This is part of a trio.

Kinebago: So when you’re making more “sad movement,” how do you go about doing that? Do you put yourself in a state of sadness? Or…

Heidi: No, I’m moving around until the movement feels sad, and I don’t know why.

Kinebago: So you just say, “that one—that movement was sad. That one stays!”

Heidi: Yes.

Kinebago: So did you weed things out that stopped feeling sad?

Heidi: Tons. I mean, I’m a slow maker. I work very sequentially when I’m on a phrase. But I edit out a million… Like Karl Rogers and me, we have this piece that we want to install in a space from 9-5 for a week. We’ve done it in smaller chunks in a few different places. And within that score, we each have 10 minutes to work on a solo. And in that 10 minutes he’ll have come up with 4 minutes of material and then in the next hour he’ll cut out about half of it. In my 10 minutes, I’ll have come up with 20 seconds that I will keep. I used to write papers like that in college. This was before computers. I would have probably 8 versions of an opening paragraph and then I would edit and copy it by hand on to the good paper and then go on to the next paragraph. There’s something… I’m just really picky, like I can’t just go on if something’s not working. There might be a lot of phrase making, before I figure out, “Oh, I’m working on sad material.” Like, I think there was quite a long phrase, and then I was like, “Well, that was nothin’.” If I learned to videotape myself, then I might have a lot of nothings left over that I could make into a piece another time.

Heidi Henderson in Imagine Us in Silver. Photo by Nikki Carrera.

Kinebago: A nothing piece.

Heidi: Yeah, that’s good! A nothing piece!

Kinebago: So, what I love about your performance is how open it is. It has this great combination of openness and specificity of movement together. So it feels both external and internal. Vulnerable and emotional, but still geometric and anatomical.

Heidi: Yeah, and part of it is that difficulty. The movement is difficult enough to do that I can never count on it being easy. So in performance, I have to pay attention in a pretty extreme way. So the movement is built to be open, but it’s so hard to do that the care that I have to take to dance it demands that other presence.

Kinebago: Right. And I think that the care you’re taking with the movement reads as emotional too.

Heidi: Yeah. And it’s probably the hardest thing I’ve ever made myself do on stage—the beginning solo, the first six minutes of the piece. I’m doing this very slow, carved solo. But it’s so hard to do that I’m very internal, because I will fall over. I’m standing on one leg for a very long time, and it feels extreme, but if you go to an extreme place slowly… like, if you whack your leg up, that’s extreme because your leg is high, but if you’re trying to do that same thing slowly, you have to stay on the other leg so carefully. And it starts out being 25 seconds maybe, but then I open this place up and add another 25 seconds in there, so things repeat, but they don’t repeat in an organized way for the people watching. Things come back. And material appears in what Karl and Molly are doing too. And I do five minutes of that slow, curving stiff to “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

Kinebago: So, at what point in your process does music come in? Because the music in the solo you present in this show is very present.

Heidi: Well, it depends. I have a piece called “We Wait,” that’s 20 minutes long and in silence. And then, well, this is what’s on the docket for the concert we’re going to do in May. I have a duet that I do with Molly to David Bowie’s “Life on Mars,” and we use it three times in a row, but very differently each time. And I got a talking to about it actually, from with David [Dorfman, who directs the Dance Department at Connecticut College]. He was like, “maybe you want to alter the music the second time?” And I was like, “No, that’s not the plan.” Exactly the same song, every time.

Kinebago: And why is that the plan?

Heidi: Well, structurally, I’m very rigid. When I come up with a structural idea… I mean, my joy is in finding a really stupid structural idea that can’t possibly work, and then trying to make it work. Like using the same music three times, but not repeating anything. At one point we blink through the music for a whole verse. And there’s a really slow motion section, and a really wild flying, sort of dance-y section like I taught today. And I love really pure minimalism—like I love Donald Judd’s work. But I’m such a mess of a person emotionally, and I also want the joy of a dance-y dance. But my aesthetic is a really minimalist, mathematical structural one.

Kinebago: But there can be a lot of humor and emotion in minimalism too. Like Sol Lewitt is hilarious, right?

Molly Lieber and Karl Rogers in Pine. Photo by Brit Lilienthal.

Heidi: Yeah! And the Bowie piece is funny. And I print the lyrics in the program and ask people to sing along. So by the third time most people are singing, hopefully loudly. And we sing along too, we have a lip syncing section. And we have on spray-painted silver outfits. So we look really bad, but we think we look really good, I mean, we’re in silver!

Kinebago: Awesome.

Heidi: So I think I had made the big dance-y phrase for the David Bowie piece without music, and then I had started this little slow thing that sort of fell into the dance-y dance and I got really intrigued with the slow thing, and then somewhere in the middle of that I found the David Bowie to go with the slow thing. And that was just so compelling that I had to keep doing it for the whole song. And then it was like, well, what do you do after David Bowie? More David Bowie! We tried other songs, but we just got really hooked on the idea of using it again.

Kinebago: That’s great. And then it also feels like you’re presenting a direct translation of your process in the performance. You went through this thing where you thought, well, David Bowie seems right, so what’s after David Bowie? David Bowie. So then you just present it like that: after David Bowie is more David Bowie. Here it is.

Heidi: Yeah, it’s very obvious! I don’t like magic.

Molly and Heidi in Imagine Us in Silver. Photo by Brit Lilienthal.