Critical Correspondence

Donna Uchizono in conversation with Ralph Lemon

longing two

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Ralph Lemon: Hi Donna. It’s been a while. What are you doing?

Donna Uchizono: I’m making this work right now that is a dual location piece and we are in the heat of it. The original idea has transformed so much, but I’ve been thinking about this for a very long time, a couple of years now. I was in the process of trying to adopt this young girl in Nepal and I had to take classes about birth place versus destination. And how even though you are born in a specific place or environment, when you move to another place you have to recreate an identity of who you are. And in one of these classes that I took, I was talking to someone and I said, “You know it’s funny because as artists we do that all the time.” There are some people who are born into artistic families, but many of the artists that I know are not really born into this way of life. This creation of an identity doesn’t seem so odd to me. Also, originally we had this studio on Fourth Street that was very narrow and long, and kind of rough. When we rehearse there the dancers are right up against you. I liked the view because it was so close, but then it’s strange how you get in The Kitchen – and none of us really have space like The Kitchen. I’m choreographing in these really small studios and I’m up against it. I couldn’t have any distance. So I originally I wanted to do the first half at this little narrow long studio and then see how the piece gets transformed when it gets to The Kitchen.

And so when the small studio pulled out I approached the Baryshnikov Arts Center [BAC] and they had a pretty tight schedule, but I told them the dates and they actually had that available. It changed a lot because BAC is not this grungy long narrow studio, but I still wanted to keep this idea of a narrow space. The paper set actually came from a couple of ideas. I wanted the audience to be close, but every time I’m in a place where dancers are close, I’m always pulling myself in because I’m trying to give the dancers space. I found with this piece of paper there, I’m allowed to relax. I feel like there’s a border and it doesn’t feel invasive when the dancers come into my space. There’s something very protective of the audience with this paper. Also the original idea was of something to be revealed later on in the second space.

Another idea was that one end of the BAC space is considered a “virtual The Kitchen” space, relating back to how we make dances in one space that then get transformed by the performance space itself. I look at this end of the BAC [indicates left hand] as virtual space so every time someone exits the BAC space, they’re at The Kitchen virtually. The lights are set up so that you might hear what’s going on in the “virtual The Kitchen” end but you can’t see it. At BAC the audience is sitting on the two opposite sides of the paper looking up at the dancers. And so I had this idea that then when the audience actually gets to The Kitchen, it’s no longer virtual, which is the power of dance: that it’s physically “live,” non-mediated, not virtual. They are actually now sitting in what would have been the BAC performing area, within the two paper sides looking at The Kitchen space directly, but now looking down into the bowels and seeing the “bass” of the piece, the bottom. But the perspective is switched, you are now seeing it from one end rather than the sides as in a traditional proscenium.

I wanted the first part to be cinematic like an old film and asked Joe [Levasseur, Lighting Designer] to design the lights so that everyone would have no color. At first he was excited about that idea but eventually he said the only way to do that is to use amber light and we didn’t want to copy Olafur Eliasson’s show at MOMA so he decided to use fluorescent lights. With both Joe and Ronnie [Gensler, Set Designer], I talked to them about ideas of things getting wrinkled and used and curved. So the set and lights are straight at BAC and become curved at The Kitchen.

Ralph: Before you go forward, can I go backwards and ask, have you reconciled how you lost the original, more emphatic relationship to the small space where the idea came from? Now you’re beginning the work in kind of a fake space, BAC, which is not the space where the idea originated. So the original idea is already not what it was. It’s interesting to have this idea of an original space, whatever that might mean, and then have it evolve to this other iteration. So now it’s an other thing and an other other thing. I like using this language with my own process so I’ll ask you: Is the piece already a failure?

Donna: On some level. But then something else comes into play.

Ralph: And then really interesting information comes from that, and maybe you can’t know about it until it’s performed.

Donna: This may drive some people that I work with really crazy, but the way I’m interested in making work in the last couple of years is that I have this idea that I just dive off from. I like to use those as points of departures, rather than things that I stick to. And then I start to play, but I’m always waiting for this time when something else enters that’s not of me. It’s not always the collaborators, (sometimes it is the collaborators) but it’s something that feels much larger than me. It feels larger than my brain. I’m waiting to tap into something that is beyond that defined conceptual idea, and sometimes that happens sooner rather than later. Then I hook onto whatever that is and that drives me forward. In this work it hasn’t happened quite yet and that’s ok, that’s just the nature of it.

So when the other studio let go, I thought that must mean something else will come out of it. At some level I have a lot of trust and at the same time I have a lot of distrust and panic. I think on a personal level I’m scared and worried but on a spiritual level…

Ralph: You have to be fine.

Donna: I am what I am. So those two things are always fighting each other.

I think that the most confusing part of this piece was that in the middle of February, I had a nervous breakdown because I found out that the adoption [I had applied for and worked on for seven years] was not going to happen. I felt like my child had passed away and it was so abstract that no one could tangibly relate to that. So I broke down. And Hristoula [Harakas, performer] has been with me through that. There were a couple of rehearsals where we didn’t rehearse. I just sobbed, she held me and I sobbed. And from that point, it’s been very difficult for me to make the piece. Because I just wondered, why am I doing this? So I think that has affected the process a lot.

I didn’t want to make a piece about this at all because, to me, it seemed to trivialize my experience. I didn’t want to make art about it – that thought just made me mad. So now, something else is happening and I’m not sure what it is: a lot of conflict of ideas and a sense of being lost, a sense of not having an anchor, the odyssey.

Ralph: What about accepting the reality of that kind of life trauma? That’s your life and you’re making art and you can’t really separate it. I mean you can maybe separate it, some kind of useful denial that you can conceptualize on paper, right? But the body is going to mourn. In fact the reality is, at best, the aesthetizication of your mourning, or recovery, or whatever phase you’re in. The piece is that more than anything else, no matter what it looks like. You’re sobbing but do you feel like you can be in a place to acknowledge that? It’s not about dual location, not really or maybe not anymore. It’s now more substantial, maybe.

Donna: Well I don’t know if it’s more substantial, but on some deeper spiritual level I have to let go of the original driving force. Because I’m still in shock and mourning I can only see what happens because I’m still in a really detached place emotionally to things. There’s something that kind of breaks in your brain and it has been difficult for me to define what is important to me. And that has always been the guiding point from which I’ve been able to make dances. Because I always knew what was important to me, or what interests me…

I’m in shock and I’m grieving and I just feel like I’m going day by day and seeing what arrives. I’m in an unhinged place.

Ralph: Still, in that unhinged place you have set up some kind of rigor because it’s not a solo so you’re working with bodies, an idea, and spaces, and publicity and a gala and blah, blah, blah. And all of that takes some kind of container, some kind of structure to support your detachment. And what does that feel like? How would you describe that?

Donna: First of all, I haven’t performed in ten years, so that’s huge for me. And choreographing while I’m in it has been something I haven’t done in a really long time and I’m really out of practice. I don’t know how to do it anymore. A lot really fell on the shoulders of Hristoula Harakas, who I’m doing the duet with, because it’s been hard for me to do it from the inside and not sit and look out. And I’m in grief. I have some interest that is so buried beneath all of this sense of being lost. I know it’s there and sometimes it comes out..

Ralph: It’s clear why you’re here, because it’s obviously your work or going into the studio is kind of like oxygen, especially when you’re in a place of immense sadness about something. Just to be in that space to let whatever happens happen is really clear to me and profoundly important. When you’re asking others to join that process that have a very different relationship to your experience, it’s much more difficult. How do you hold it together? How are you holding this piece together?

Donna: I don’t know if I am. That’s the funny thing. I feel like I’m holding the piece together by just showing up. But I don’t know if it’s enough.

Ralph: What’s interesting is it’s enough for you. It makes sense to me, it’s enough to just show up but then there’s this other responsibility that becomes very complex.

Donna: Yeah, I think that I’m changing the way I make dances and that’s confusing. There’s something else coming out and I’m not sure what that is. I feel less structured in some ways and I don’t know if it’s because I’m just rebounding from something that has completely taken the rug out. I’ve been working on this adoption for seven years and it was holding me together through some other things. When that broke I think my whole identity of everything just broke. I thought my child would be with me this year. So yeah, I’m just trying to show up. It’s not like I show up and just sit there, I do try to have ideas. But trying to have an idea is really not the point of choreographing for me. Having an idea is great but if you don’t you just work at something whether it’s good or not.

Ralph: Why don’t you, even at this late point, think about what would be a heroic process, practice or dance? Maybe it would be really heroic to stop? Like right now, stop and not do it. Is there an argument for or against that in your mind? Why keep going, other than the superficial responsibility of you having a date in two theaters?

Donna: Because I think that despite all of this stuff that the piece wants to be performed. It is at a place where the piece has a voice of its own on some level. …I always talk about these moments where I’m trying to wait for something to come in, that’s where I feel like I start to have a dialogue with the piece itself. And I feel like the dance is at a place where it already has its own say and voice, that it’s really not mine anymore and it’s not really mine to make that decision that it doesn’t get performed or doesn’t get finished. It’s gonna call for it, and so I’m doing the best I can to honor whatever that is. And yes of course I have a date, I have all these dancers, it’s our 20th anniversary and all of those things, but I always feel like the dance takes on a life of its own and it wants to be revealed with all of its imperfections.

Ralph: It sounds heroic.

Donna: It doesn’t feel heroic. I really don’t want to romanticize what we do. Personally I think it is a pretty noble thing, but on a larger picture, it’s hard for me to hear heroics in the same breath of what I do.

Ralph: Well, I think there’s an element of that that keeps one going in a particular genre that gives so little back of what it gives you back. I’m fond of sharing what Viola Farber said to me many years ago about this thing that we do and how impossible it is and we do it anyway and how beautiful that is. At a certain point it seems to me that one needs to romanticize it, otherwise you have to stop.

Donna: Originally I wanted to name the piece “On the Fumes Of” because I keep saying that all of us make dance on the fumes of the resources and money that exists. Sometimes people go, “What did you think of a dance?” and I say, “I don’t know. I really like to judge a work within the larger context of an artist’s historical arc. I don’t even have an opinion anymore, just the fact that people made it is kind of a miracle.”

Ralph: What attracts us all to this way of leading a life and making work? Maybe it’s more to do with something Meredith Monk shared with me recently, it was a quote from Daniel Nagrin: That dancers are the “cockroaches of the art world.” We can’t be exterminated, we’re just gonna keep coming back. It’s just the way it is. Maybe it’s that mundane, I’m not sure. But there is something about the moving body that, I don’t want to use the word pure, but is kind of profound.

Donna: I think what’s profound about it, especially in our digital media world, is that dance is so basic. It’s just a live body with a live person watching a live body and that kind of communication is not something that you can do so quickly. It takes time, it takes a commitment to either be in the piece or to see the piece. I think there’s some basic human need for live interaction and the vulnerability of that interaction. And we don’t get that kind of vulnerable communication with other forms of communication – email, text, phone.

Ralph: That directness is also messy because you’re talking about a discursive mind/body. We’re full of messy emotions and a messy cellular and molecular system. It’s like a whole little wild universe, a compositional ecology that is also just the body. So everything and nothing can be be done at the same time, if one finds that right balance.

I’d like to ask a question about your being onstage again after ten years and your relationship with Hristoula. From what I saw today, I was struck by the generational difference and I’m not talking about the older/younger body, but just a generational body politic of ideas. How much has changed in you since you began showing your work? And now how are you showing work with a body that represents a different kind of work?

Donna: Oh gosh Ralph!

Ralph: It’s not an easy question.

Donna: Hristoula was the one who put the idea in my head to possibly perform. And I’m finding in this process that there were reasons why I didn’t want to perform anymore and they’re becoming clear to me again. This will be it.

Ralph: Why?

Donna: It’s interesting because as a performer, in the past, I always felt like I could perform. I mean I wasn’t a dead fish onstage, I had a presence and all of that… I’m not personally interested in what I can do as a performer. I don’t want anyone watching me, and that’s been really confusing. But yet I don’t want to shrink back because that’s not the solution. I know that I should say I’m really happy to perform but I’m not. I completely love watching other people perform, I’m just not interested in it for myself. In the moment I can get into it, but …

Ralph: But you’re performing in this piece, so what specifically is that exchange? For you and for us watching it? Or is it about the confusion?

Donna: I think it definitely addresses that I’m an older performer who is not interested in doing anything that I did ten years ago, and that there’s this tension in the relationship with Hristoula onstage because what she can do with her body is…I mean it’s just crazy hard, and her ability is mind-blowing to me and I can watch her forever. I really like what she’s doing, but I’m not making myself do any of that because it would just be silly and stupid. But I don’t want to make her not do it either because that would be silly and stupid. So there’s this real difference between some of the material we do. I do these little movements that is about the beauty of the disintegration of things. And that I have physically disintegrated but also out of this disintegration there is something that comes up, which is experience and history. I had some problems with my feet and the doctor said, “Oh yeah you have a lot of mileage on your feet and there’s no way to tune them up.” I think that you can see the mileage and that there’s something interesting in that.

Ralph: What do you see in Hristoula’s body?

Donna: What I love about Hristoula is that she has incredible rigor for detail and nuance… She’s at this peak period, she can technically do anything. But she doesn’t care about that, she cares about how she’s doing it and the why and the quality of that. So she can pull off these physically impossible things, but she also has history and experience behind that. And right now I pretty much have the history. I’m not trying to do any technical feats.

Ralph: It makes me think of generational experiences with dying or decay. And specifically this idea of rigor, which is what one needs to have when making any kind of work. And how within the older body, there still has to be that rigor. It softens, but stays rigorous. How much do you pull away, or come close? How tight do you manage an experience, how much time do you spend looking at it, thinking about it? How hard it is to hold on to a particular idea? How does one emphasize the importance of something?

Donna: It’s interesting because rigor now for me includes how to let go, how to let things happen, how to give things more space. And how not to have a very tight, concrete structure or idea, maybe a couple of ideas exist simultaneously that compositionally don’t work. Allowing myself that takes a lot of rigor because everything in my thirties and forties was about trying to stay with the concept and structure and I’ve been fighting that because I don’t want to do that anymore. It’s not that I don’t have an interest in concept and structure, you may start there but I think there’s something beyond that.

Ralph: So it’s like the rigor of being out of control, which is terrifying because it potentially means you’re not making anything. Which I think is really heroic.

(laughing)

Donna: I don’t know, but I know for me that I don’t think I’m going to perform again after this. That part of the rigor I can’t handle anymore. Just to stay in the performance body and to stay in the performance mind takes a lot of rigor. I’ve been trying to keep in a physical shape to be able to do this and I don’t want to keep that kind of rigor in my life. It wasn’t like I didn’t go to the gym and take yoga before, but that I have to go to stay in shape not for me, but for this performance… I don’t know if I’m interested in that kind of rigor anymore. It’s a lot. I’m also not so interested in how I can control a piece by the way I perform it but more interested in the choreography of it.

Ralph: It sounds very challenging because as an artist that started focusing on the rigor of the body, and then removing that rigor and maintaining the rigor of some kind of form, experiment, research…It’s a challenge in work that is so much about the body.

Donna: I love watching the work of younger choreographers and seeing where they’re going and it’s a completely different direction and interest than mine. It’s exciting to see and I worry for them. It’s harder then it was when I started. I was directing this new media and performing arts grad program at LIU [Long Island University] and I loved it because I felt like I was able to give back to younger artists in a way that was very fulfilling for me.

Ralph: It seems to me there is something organically reasonable that a part of the evolution of the older dancer body is about mentoring.

Donna: Are you in your next piece Ralph?

Ralph: Yeah.

Donna: And how do you feel about that?

Ralph: I’m in it the way I need to be in it and it feels really clear how I’m in it, but I’m absolutely not moving. I’m not moving my body like I’m asking the performers I’m working with to move their bodies, not at all. And I make it really clear to them that they’re being surrogates for how I’m feeling emotionally. And we’re both kind of ok with that. You know that’s on the table. There’s a certain element of making art that’s about manipulation, kind at best, but manipulating material. And I think the bodies we work with become materials. I think that needs to be understood. Kindness is a very important part of my politic, but it is also about the material body. Everybody has to be ok with that.

Donna: Why are you in the performance?

Ralph: Well this particular piece for me is very personal. So I’m in it because I feel it’s important for an audience to see my face. Even though I’m not thrashing and screaming and crying, which is what the work’s about. But it’s important that I put my body on the line in a way that represents those things and it feels right. I’m not confused about it.

Donna: That’s great. I am.

(laughing)

Ralph: I think we should leave on that. It’s beautiful.