Interview date:  October 30, 2010

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Laurie Van Wieren: Let’s talk about the piece you just did in France, Mammal. How did that project become what it was?

Otto Ramstad: I got an email from Yorgos Loukos, the director of the Lyon Opera Ballet, just randomly out of the blue. I thought it was spam, because when does that happen? The email said, “This is Yorgos Loukos. I’m the director of the Lyon Opera Ballet. I want to know if you want to make a piece with the Lyon Opera Ballet. The performance dates are June 14 – 20.”

Olive Bieringa: Wow… and this was a year and half ahead of time?

Otto: Yeah. Before the rehearsals were going to start. I looked up the webpage to see if [he] was really the director, and he was. He was on a panel for the Rolex Protégé Award, and I was nominated for that. I applied. I didn’t get it, but he saw our work sample. He put together an evening called Next Wave. It was me, Antony Hamilton [from Australia] and Jason Akira Somma from New York.

Laurie: How did you approach that? Did you look at videos of the ballet company?

Olive: We were all invited to Lyon to meet with the company, watch ballet class, look at the facilities, and sign a contract. Then, we said we needed to come back and audition dancers. We were very fortunate that when we were there, Ralph Lemon was there working on his piece with David Thompson. They gave us a lot of insight into the conditions of working with the company. We also got to watch the company perform Ralph’s new work as well as [Trisha Brown’s] Set and Reset, Beach Birds [by Merce Cunningham], and a Jerome Bel piece. It was like step-by-step getting to know what we were in for, in a way.

Otto: We also talked to Tere O’Connor, who had done a piece there, and John Jasperse [via] an email exchange. We were getting people’s advice of what it’s like to work in that [ballet company] structure, because our work always comes out of the dancers. We come with our scores, structures, and ideas and then the choreography comes out of the dancers interacting with it.

We also got advice from a friend [who was in] the original Twyla Tharp company. She sets Twyla’s work all around and she gave us a lot of advice as to how to fight for all your time, which is very necessary. We made extra production meetings go over the schedule, just because we originally thought that we had six weeks, but really we had 18 days within six weeks.

Lyon Opera Ballet

Laurie: When you went in there the first time, how was that? What did you have to give them to start?

Otto: We looked at our previous works, [specifically] the Holiday House trilogy. We took a lot of effective scores out of that piece and out of a solo that I did Hello, Nervous System.

Olive: …also out of the solo practice of Go.

Otto: We looked at our work and we took out scores that we developed and were still interested in, that still have potential. We brought those to those dancers, and choreography came out of that. Some of the structures stayed the same, and some new things were created. In retrospect, it was good because we knew how to direct and guide [those scores], especially when starting out with completely new people you don’t know at all.

Olive: When you’re working material that’s unknown and you’re working with unknown dancers and an unknown rehearsal context, it was just too much to take on in a short [period] of time. It was good for us to come in with material that we could embody in an instant and demonstrate. These dancers are incredible, but they’ve never performed improvisation in a show. We were interested in looking at [improvisation] as a possibility.

Laurie: What kind of score did you bring them?

Olive: Most of the improvisational scores were duets.

Otto: One of them was a score that we call “Active Passive.” In that score, one person is active and one person is passive. The passive person can either be in a still position, stiff, holding their shape, or loose, holding no effort at all. We described that as, “You’re either freshly dead, or you’ve been dead for a while.”

Laurie: This is from Holiday House, right?

Olive: Right. We also worked on this in Half Life to some extent.

Otto: The active person can move and do anything that they want. Part of their job is to create a context around the duet. They should cycle through different contexts and use the [passive] person’s body to get something they want. It could be compulsively needing touch or it could be showing that they’re above [the other person]. It could be representational but also physiological.

Olive: You’re building an image using that still person to layer yourself in the position.

Lyon Opera Ballet

Laurie: You’re also prodding them to jar their imagination.

Otto: Yes. Your imagination is very important, especially for the active person. Then the roles can switch at any time. A lot of times, if the passive person becomes the active person, it’s surprising for the active person, who has to become passive. You can only inhabit one role at a time, so the shift is a big part of the improvisation… generating the imagination inside of the image and then the shift of someone just cutting that.

Laurie: So then they take that and they develop it some more? They’re inside their imagination and their body and then what? You shape it or…

Otto: It can go several ways. We thought that maybe we’ll set choreography out of that, but actually we did it two different ways.

Olive: We did set one version and we had one improvised version in the show. It seems that it’s working when it comes out of the right partnership. Then there’s a magic in it in terms of how different people are approaching the score.

Otto: One [version] ended up being the two women that do it in the opening of the show. Maïté [Cebrian Abad] and Eneka [Bordato Riaño]. They had a chemistry that you just kept on wanting to watch. Maïté had been in the company the longest, and she’s the oldest dancer in the company. Eneka had been in the company for only a few years and she had her 25th birthday in the middle of the show. They both have really different strategies, and I don’t think either of them had performed improvisation on stage, so that was really exciting. In every show, [Maïté] changed strategies. She kept some things that worked, but kept on cycling through.

When you work with those dancers, their training and professionalism is just to take the information and not ask any questions or give feedback. That was an interesting way to try to direct improvisation because they would hold on to what they had from us for a long time and then keep working on it and change it. Because of the structure, it took us a while to realize we have to directly say, “When I ask ‘How was that for you?,’ I actually want to know.” Each individual had their own strategy within [the score], and I don’t know if they were telling each other [what that strategy was].

Laurie: Was that important to you though? That you know [the strategy]?

Olive: What was great was that it was revealed to us later in the process, but whatever it was they were doing was working. Eneka’s English is not so great, and it was revealed to us later that she had chosen just to work on one thing the whole time. It totally made sense when I saw it, but at the time we were so in the construction of the work, and what they were doing was working, so we just let it be.

Otto: Maïté has a child, so we rehearsed our six hours of the day, and then she just went home like you do. It’s a job.

Olive: She’s not hanging out and socializing, talking, and processing.

Laurie: Who in that piece… there’s someone who dances in the lobby or entryway?

Olive: That’s Eneka. In her solo, she’s working with tone and being in the social environment of the pre-show audience. The audience has just come out of seeing another piece. They’re waiting to get into the theater. She comes through them, and everybody just thinks she part of the audience, but then she’s working subtly and not-so-subtly [to change] the muscular tone in her body which then is transforming the social space. People are really responding empathetically, kinesthetically, moving towards or away from her. They either want to get close to see what’s going on or they’re like, “Woah. This is too close for me.” She’s setting up a visceral experience of the physicality. Once we enter the theater, and she enters the stage space, we continue to resonate with her because it’s been set up so intimately with us.

Mammal, a commission for the Lyon Opera Ballet from Olive Bieringa on Vimeo

Otto: Then, she interacts with the cast the way she interacted with the audience. Our hope was just that they have a different kind of access to empathy, having experienced something and then seeing it. [This section of the piece] was driving at one of our root concerns about working with a ballet company. They’re totally elite athletes and elite craftspeople in terms of dance, their training, and the life that they’ve had… just being a dancer your whole life, never having another job, being in a totally supported system of France, which is great and at the same time it makes a context where you can be seen as an object in a way.

Olive: Like the “other,” the special, the ballerina, you know…

Laurie: The artiste.

Otto: The valorization of the “other” in ballet is a very big thing. People want to see just how far and how different the extreme technique is from them. Part of our thought was that to be different is not that hard. [Laurie and Olive laugh.] We have [Eneka] walking around the audience, and if she just changes the tone of her shoulders quickly instead of slowly, then [she is] like the other. It’s like if you’re in the street and you see someone who is going a lot slower or faster or if they’re homeless… it’s so small, the tipping point between me and the “other.”

Olive: We were also looking at this question of culture, wildness, and civilization. I think that also comes into play with the title and having the rabbit on stage. There’s also a dog that appears in the video. There’s this play between social bodies and animal/human bodies and this idea of wild versus civilized. For me, it relates to this idea of the trained ballerina being at the height of this hierarchy and playing with that whole range of what is possible in their bodies.

Laurie: Just to get back to [Eneka’s] entrance again, she was an athlete in that. It was very intricate and disturbing in a way. I was very aware of the dancers standing next to her and [how they were] getting out of her way or getting embarrassed. The detail of her dancing was very elite in a way. It was very specific to her but highly skilled, which reminds me of ballet, but it’s a different code of course. It was a fascinating thing when she entered the theater and then she just stopped and put herself into this pose on the stage, next to the rabbit. That was a really beautiful way to just let people enter.

Otto: Just to clarify, when we’re talking about a rabbit. It’s a dead rabbit on the front edge of the stage.

Laurie: Did you eat the rabbits?

Olive: We couldn’t because we used them for multiple nights. We ended up using two and we had a burial ceremony for them down by the river. In France, everyone’s eating rabbit so it’s easy to access.

Otto: I was thinking about what [Laurie was] saying about the detail of [Eneka’s] movement and the skill of it. I’m thinking about this in our current work and always. We’re interested in trying to not display known dance vocabulary. To try to, as a puzzle, not use representation of dance. A byproduct [of this method] is that there is a level of complexity that you can get going through physiology rather than the language that you know. I think that’s interesting that when you saw [Eneka’s solo], you read the complexity of it and related it to the really technical complexity of dancing, but it’s different.

In our current piece, Symptom, we’ve been on a back-and-forth about setting things or not setting things. Because I’m so interested in discovering the complexity, going into the different sensations of it, and because I’m not super skilled at setting certain things, I’m realizing that there’s less and less time I need [to set choreography]. I could be happy with getting close enough to an approach that is generating what I want versus setting.

Laurie: How does that relate to when you’re working with other people and you’re trying to get them to do your work?

Olive: I think that’s a question of how far you can go with them based on how much time you have. There’s a certain kind of work that we create. If I wanted to create a big site-specific piece with 50 people, I may want to set material and have big unison choreography, but it’s not our interest in our work right now. We’re much more interested in these kind of intimate and complex states or physical realities. It’s the developmental way that you bring people into the complexity of the score. Right now [in Symptom], we’re working with Emmett [Ramstad], Otto’s twin sibling. He’s a visual artist, so it’s different, but the same time it’s totally the same as working with a ballet dancer.

Photo by Sean Smuda.

Laurie: Because Emmett isn’t trained in your vocabulary?

Olive: Right. We have to bring people in one step at a time and layer information as we’re defining what we see as being the potential of something. You can’t just dump something on someone and expect them [to know] it. How do you bring them in piece-by-piece? Maybe that sounds very obvious. There’s something about the approach to movement [in] Body Mind Centering work that allows us to figure out what somebody needs in terms of physical activity, mind focus, senses, and imagination. [We use Body Mind Centering] to get them to this complexity that we’re interested in. Of course, sometimes it doesn’t work, and we go back and figure out what’s missing.

Laurie: How do you know when it’s right?

Otto: For me, that’s kinesthetic. You’re working with empathy and kinesthesia and you’re getting intrigued or engaged. [Something works if it] is answering a lot of questions or it’s confusing in a positive way. Confusing and exciting… that’s what we call it.

Olive: There’s an agreement too.

Otto: Well, there’s two of us, so there’s a back-and-forth.

Olive: There’s a conversation about “Are we there yet?”

Laurie: What about the audience? How do you want the audience to be engaged in their imagination?

Otto: I guess there are lots of different responses. I like it, personally, at a show when I can ride the edge of understanding. I’m looking at it and I’m engaged in it, but I don’t know what’s happening… I sort of [know] and I sort of don’t. That’s the experience I want to share.

Laurie: How did you begin Symptom?

Otto: Two or three years ago, we were writing a funding application and we had that possibility to apply for the piece we were working on and then apply for work-in-progress for the next piece. We just said we wanted to do a work-in-progress, and they said, “You need to send more information.” So I invented it in a day. I had the title, Symptom. I thought this about how you know you have a body, looking at it from different perspectives—from language, medicine, and somatics.

Olive: …and how these three different perspectives give you an understanding that you know you’re in a body.

Otto: For instance, when someone says, “He has a lot of gall.” It relates to your gall bladder, and that’s a language thing. We don’t consciously think about it, but that’s one of the ways we know we have a body.

We started working on [Symptom] in a residency in Hamburg a year ago. We started working on that piece with another dancer, Elizabeth Ward. Emmett came to the second half of the residency, and we started working on the same piece with him. The communication between us, being siblings, was a huge part of the piece. So it still has some concerns about how it is to have a body and some of the vestigial interest from what the piece was. It now contains our relationship, the way we communicate, the way we look (we look really similar), and what that does. It also became about the interaction between performance and visual art. What is the dialogue between those [forms]? What is Emmett’s physical practice as a visual artist and can that come into dance?

Laurie: How do you work with him as far as getting him to move and dance?

Olive: Emmett grew up doing creative movement as a kid. When they were kids, he studied with Suzanne River who was a Body Mind Centering teacher and a children’s dancer teacher. I can say to Emmett, “Move from your blood.” And he can just do it. Because he doesn’t have a dance vocabulary on top of that, it comes from a very fresh place. There’s something lovely about that, when you’re watching someone who can really engage in something on an imaginative level and just be present with it. That’s been a starting point for us in terms of the work. There’s also been very simple gaming structures we’ve created. There’s been a lot of Emmett drawing or sculpting imaginary materials in the piece, as well as many references to other artists… kind of stolen materials.

SYMPTOM from Olive Bieringa on Vimeo.

Otto: There’s another interesting thing about when you work with someone who can move but hasn’t done a lot of dance as an adult. What do you keep of their “non-dancer”? When I look at Emmett move, I’m engaged because some of it’s really new to do and new to do it in front of people. There’s some vulnerability and total freshness. There are a few technical things that we would try to help him out with like coordinating the upper body and the lower body. There are a few things that you want to help out with physiologically and technically to make it easier.

Olive: But then at what point do you start to lose the originality of how he moves? If he hangs over, does he crook his neck to look at the horizon? A dancer would release the back of their neck unless it was part of the choreography. This brings us into seeing between Otto and Emmett; their similarities and differences. There are these physiological similarities but then there are these socializations that have happened that have led [them] to move differently or make certain choices.

Laurie: What’s different about Symptom, though, is Olive: You’re sitting outside. Are you more of the director?

Olive: Well, we’re co-directing the piece, but yes, in that I’m sitting outside and constructing the order of the day.

Otto: It also plays to some differences in our collaboration. A lot of times, I generate the scores and structures.

Olive: And I’m the structural person who makes the order and makes sense of things.

Otto: We both do both [roles], but there’s a tendency towards that.

Laurie: This is going to be performed soon.

Olive: It’s premiering in Minneapolis November 11 at Intermedia Arts and then in New York at P.S. 122 during COIL Festival and [the Association of Performing Arts Presenters Conference] January 5-12.

Laurie: Thank you!

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Note:  Kyli Kleven was a 6th US-based participant in this year’s DanceWEB scholarship program. As this interview came about in an impromptu manner, we were unable to find her on time to sit and talk with us. We regret her absence. (Perhaps for the reunion conversation?)

Alejandra Martorell: Sarah, you were saying this is the end, and this is the end of the 25th Impusltanz Festival in Vienna. Can say your name and a little bit of what you’ve been doing here?

Sarah: My name is Sarah Beth Percival. I’m from the states and I just spent the past two years in Brussels at PARTS. I took mostly coaching projects, which last a whole week and are 6 hrs./day—we would speak a lot and then try things. It’s very different from spending most of the day at Arsenal (the center of the festival, where as many as 12 simultaneous classes are in process each day), and going from class to class. The group becomes more solidified. I was taking coaching projects and seeing performances almost everyday and socializing with many people from the festival everyday.

Milka Djordjevich: To give the readers a context for what the DanceWEB program is: many people from around the world apply to participate in the program. It’s a five-week program that takes place over the whole Impulstanz Festival. The Festival is only four weeks and if you take part of DanceWEB, you have some extra time to interact with other people who are part of the program. We have 66 DanceWEBbers from 30-something different countries. We are brought together as a group that was selected by DD Dorvillier and Trajal Harrell, the DanceWEB coaches. The main format of the program is that we are all taking classes and workshops and seeing performances together, which in my mind served as a structure from which we can then start dialoguing and talking about our ideas. It gives a basis from which to connect since we’re all coming from different backgrounds.

Otto Ramstad: I did DanceWEB in 2005 with David Zambrano. We did a lot more dancing and performing. We performed three-to-five-minutes improvised solos every day—not for everyone, but for one or more members of the DanceWEB. This year I’m what they call the frog, which is a term from the university system in the U.S. It’s the people who live in the dorm, and help you figure things out. Here it’s more telling people where to bike and consulting people on what workshops they should take, performances they should go to, and do they really think they can do 8 hrs./day for a month of classes. There has been a big difference in regards to the group, and it’s not just what the proposition is from the coaches. When I did it, it was less choreographers and more dancers.

Sarah: Do you think that was an agreed upon criteria? Do you think DD and Trajal set out to get more creators?

Otto: Yes. That’s what they told me. They got more people who are making, more thinkers.

Milka: When we were first meeting everyone, it was sort of surprising that everyone was very similar to my own situation—people who are very interested in researching and making their own work. Not necessarily to be a choreographer, but to have some sort of creative process, and also a lot of people who do like to perform, and also a lot of people who like to create discourse and dialogue.

Nohemí: My name is Nohemí Montzerrat Contreras, and I’m a DanceWEBber from Mexico. Currently I’m living in New York making my work and working with artist from US and Mexico as a performer and researcher.

Will: I’m Will Rawls. I live in New York City. I’m originally from Boston and I’m a DanceWEBber. I do a lot of performing in my own work and in the work of other people since I’ve been in New York. I’m also very interested in research and developing that a lot here, and in the few months before coming here.

Alejandra: Part of the dialogue structured—there are these talks and the coaching projects. Is a lot of the dialogue the result of you being together in a dorm and happening among you because of all these common activities?

Milka: I think the biggest thing that actually started the dialogue was that DD and Trajal proposed this idea of creating public service projects as a jumping off point. We split into groups of five or six, and as a group we had to propose a public service project that we would actually do. It could be not dance-related. I felt like a lot of European artists assumed that public service was provided by the government, which from the U.S.’s perspective, I think of it more as a communal thing—an activist thing that comes more from privatized organizations or from people coming together. Once we had this thing to work from, if we’re taking classes and workshops together, or eating breakfast together, or doing all these different things, is all on going all the time.

Sarah: Trajal also organized a parallel [process] with the critical endeavor group, who are judging and electing one of the young choreographers in the 8 Tension series for an award. We started discussions about who DanceWEB would choose to get this award.

Will: I think that because there is such a diverse group of people with common interests, there’s a real potential when we’re speaking about things that are not working and working for us, of trying to find out how to make things that are working more sustainable. I think it promises a lot of advances in creating several models of developing work and taking this social aspect and pushing a little bit further. Creating work not only in terms of gigs for ourselves, but also in terms of practices that we’ve all been engaging over the past four weeks, which is conversation, which is email and blogging and video, and trying to figure out how to use these various technologies to make dance a stronger forum.

Alejandra: Do you individually feel like there is a contrast between the discussions and opinions that you’re forming processes as DanceWEBbers, and the performances you’re seeing?

Photo: Otto Ramstad, Thumbnail photo: Otto Ramstad

Otto: There are two common questions when talking to someone in DanceWEB: what are you doing this week, and did you see so and so last night? I think the discussions are pretty different than most of the shows because Impulstanz almost never premieres work. It seems they really program a festival for the general Viennese public. Most of the festival—the DanceWEB, the teachers—don’t pay full ticket prices. When we see Ultima Vez or Jan Fabre, and all these uber choreographers of Europe, frankly a lot of it is really crap.

Sarah: I think watching these performances every day forces you to figure out what you like and then it informs what you think and how you talk to people.

Will: I think a lot of what DD and Trajal are thinking about is this idea of proposing your present situation as potential content or form for your art. I think when you’re seeing all these shows and you’re taking bits and pieces of the shows and bringing them back with you, and thinking about them and figuring what works and what doesn’t work, then that can feed the proposal of today. I’ve been in workshops where there’s this title and this workshop description, and they’ve been about absolutely nothing related to what was written and what I read four months ago. What is this idea of a dance life that’s created somewhere else and that I imagine that I’m moving towards? I feel that this festival has helped people be so much more in the present with what is right now my dance life. And DanceWEB constitutes that immediate dance community and these performances are feeding that and helping it grow. I think my focus and my emphasis has been really about re-proposing the present moment at this festival, over and over, and figuring out how my practice is exhausted for the day or is really growing.

Nohemí: For me the performances are connected to our discussions as they affect this social sphere created in this festival. They are a starting point for discussion that touches personal understanding in every performance, and oneself in a 24/7 negotiation within this social frame. The lack of time to digest or locate yourself in a performance produces tension, and suddenly you have to give an answer as soon as you walk out of the theater. It’s like this interview, we haven’t finished a process yet we want to answer your questions, so what can you say from this constant changes and adaptations, your present.

Milka: In terms of looking back at all the performances, it’s really interesting to see the ones that really still resonate with me, whether or not I enjoyed them or I didn’t. The ones that really upset me, that I really had problems with, I feel maybe I got more out of those than the ones I liked because it really made clear to me what my concerns are as an artist and what I’m interested in seeing. Often times people see performances and they’re like ‘don’t see it, it was so bad’. One thing that came up for me was well, we all have different opinions and that’s something we learnt very quickly in this festival. And the other thing was that if someone really hated it, I actually want to see it more. I want to see why, what’s happening? I feel like I’m a generous viewer, I like to separate my own personal aesthetic and opinion and try to appreciate work, but maybe something about the intensity of this festival, I feel like I’ve been more vocally opinionated about certain things than I have ever been before.

Alejandra: That makes me think about what you were saying Will, about the now. Because it doesn’t mean you might not like it if you see it two months from now, but right now, you’re so full, so alive that you can sharply say yes/no.

Will: Yes, and we have all these feelings about being in motion and this idea of your personal theory of dance in motion, but then also when you’re reacting to these things, it’s like you’re putting a stake in the ground, at every moment, and pulling it up again as well and moving forward.

Alejandra: The body that I’ve been picking up from all of you is a moving body, a geographically activated, social body. Often the word practice comes up, but here practice seems to be more what Sara was talking about, the level of intensity. It makes me think, even 20 years ago, the body was a very different thing.

Will: I think the definition of choreography and dance keeps expanding. Trajal keeps talking about how we’re in this really conceptual moment in dance, and I feel that it goes hand in hand with the idea of the expansion of the information highway into this enormous global network and locating ourselves in that. The body has expanded to take on those questions and those wires that have been connected. I feel that without that global network, dance practice was much more local. There was a New York scene that was focused on particular practices and concerns, and I feel that locality is really shifting. Even though we are still developing relations to New York City or to our lives in New York.

Milka: I think most everyone applied to participate in the program as a way of being mobile, as a way to get out of their local environment and create a network beyond their immediate community. I don’t know if it’s because we dancers are more social beings, and we do move. I wonder if there’s something about expanding what it is to be a body or how you relate to other bodies. With globalization and the expansion of the Internet and information, of course communities are going to expand and grow and cross borders. Another thing that is interesting to me is how being a dance artist in Europe is like: ‘oh, I’m from Poland but I live in Paris and work in Amsterdam’. The sense of identity that we had before, of ‘you’re from this country so this is how you’re like’, is totally being broken down. It’s been interesting to see how identity shifts based on where you are in the present moment, versus where you’re from or where you’re going to.

Alejandra: Do you think that there’s a relationship between how the mobility of whole communities, the mobility of professional dancers moving around, relates to the diminishing amount of actual movement on stage? Is there a correlation? I wonder if the wide lens is on and the movement of one, two, three bodies on the stage is just not at the center of attention.

Will: I don’t know if it’s an anxiety or just a pulsating energy from being exposed to so much information. That when you step into the studio, which is a place that is sort of cut off from that information, you’re asking yourself questions about what you brought in with you and what are you leaving behind. Like that in itself is such a complicated separation process. I think a lot of the work is leaving some of those really active bodies behind in order to leave room for some of these other associations, which an informed choreographer knows his audience will make. So there is like a tablet for that information to be projected into the dance, although it’s interesting because I think a lot of the work that I haven’t liked has been work where there isn’t movement but there’s also no room for me to get inside the piece. It’s so hermetically sealed that it has shut down on itself, almost like a safety or defense mechanism.

Nohemí: There is within our group this urge for movement, but it’s not as easy as ‘you want to move’. There are so many questions you get perpleja (perplexed). The DanceWEBers are really into critical thinking and all of a sudden they say I want to move, but then there’s a silence. So there’s something, I don’t want to say changing, but there’s something pressuring in between these two tensions, this social movement and lack of movement on stage. I think within those tensions, there’s something that might be produced—when, how, you can’t say that.

Sarah: I find somehow even when we travel really far, we still belong to certain class or group. We’re mostly funded by subsidies or fellowships—most people I know except for maybe the U.S. people. (Laughs.) Yeah, maybe you’re in a different game. But the idea of bringing public service within the frame of DanceWEB was a big question. How are we serving the public when we are still in this bubble of this environment? Did anything that we did actually reach a broader public? Not to be pessimistic about it but just to bring the question up. Not that my work has so much to do with socio-political topics, but it’s something that I’m aware of in my own life and talking to people. I think about the Superamas performances. It stressed the issue of the incapability of contemporary dance in Europe to effectively raise issues of politics outside of our context. And it does it in a somewhat cynical way, but it does it very strongly. It forces the issue of how to be socially and politically aware beyond our network.

Will: We’re always talking about how dance is so insular and self-reflexive, and therefore it’s not effective in the outside world. But we’re also going through this process of being really mobile and having our lives be in so many other places, and learning about lives of dancers that are happening in so many other places, and the social body. So, we are that broader public that is taking this work further and not just in the dance context. I think that it’s really hard; it’s still a problem of choreography and how it’s affecting a broader public. But I definitely think I’m part of a broader public through which I can work these concepts and develop these concepts.

Photo: Otto Ramstad

Alejandra: Since it’s almost the end of the festival, what is poking at you every day when you wake up? What’s on your mind at that first level of milking this experience?

Will: I’m trying to reserve judgment until after the festival. I think that the way DanceWEB has worked is that all the experiences are running together. I literally go from one conversation to a show to a conversation to a party, and there’s really a commonality in all of that, which is about researching movement and researching people and ideas. I’m very interested in what happens next, and how to put things to use. I think the mobility of choreographers and performers in Europe, of being able to travel from place to place, and move within very different contexts with more ease than there is to go from NY to Europe or anywhere else, is very interesting. I would love to find that kind of mobility either in my own, back home in NY, or access it in Europe and beyond Europe as well.

Milka: I’m realizing that for me the most pleasure I’ve been getting from the experience has been hanging out with everyone, more than the classes, workshops or performances. It highlights the fact of why I’m a dance artist—because there is a heavy social element to it, because I move with other people. That’s something that I’ve been stimulated by. I feel like I barely know people, but I’m so enriched and happy, like I love everyone. Another theme for me has been the politics of what this large, heavily funded festival produces. In some ways, it’s made me feel very proud to be working where I work, and living where I live. Whatever sort of insecurities I’ve had about living in New York City or what I do, they’re gone.

Alejandra: The internationalism has reaffirmed your sense of specificity and locality.

Milka: Yeah. Not to say that I think it’s better. I don’t mean that at all. But I like that my locality gives me a reference point from which to interact with other localities. And then, when I go to other localities, it stimulates that, which has been fantastic.

Sarah: I kind of have the same feeling as Milka—this very positive experience of being immersed in a huge group of people who are very amiable and have similar interests. I’m thinking about how I would like to continue to be just as active in my practice and with other people who are in the same field and doing the same things. My task for myself is, when I leave—wherever I end up—how to remain at this level of stimulation. I would like to find out the things that I can take away from it—connections to people, communication, the dialogue that started—to carry on somehow.

Alejandra: Y tú Nohemí?

Nohemí: For me, my locality is New York and Mexico, specifically Puebla and Monterrey. So it makes me think what is it means to bring this information with me along and what roles do I play going back and forth. And after Impulstanz experience, what are we going to do after this? We had a meeting and we were talking about not being nostalgic about this within years, but what can we do to make these kinds of connections a way of supporting each other and continue understanding our development as artists and researchers. What can we do to have it not be just an event and a good time—meeting each other, taking classes and everything that involves being here—but to really support each other and engage outside the bubble of Impulstanz and DanceWEB. I think that’s a challenge for all of us.

Alejandra: Any last thoughts?

All: You should do an interview like five months from now.

Alejandra: That would be lovely. We can do an email interview.

All: We’ll all be in New York.

Alejandra: Then I guess we can meet.

Photo: Otto Ramstad

Listen to this interview

Holiday House #1 interview by Justin Jones

Thumbnail photo: Sean Smuda

Justin Jones: Hi, this is Justin Jones sitting down with Olive Bieringa and Otto Ramstad of the Body Cartography Project and we’re here talking about Holiday House #2, which is taking place in their home in Minneapolis. It’s a reworking of Holiday House—a piece in the theater and also based on a film of the same name. The first question I wanted to ask you today is about your choice to re-present Holiday House. Why you chose to re-do the piece and what the process of re-mounting Holiday House was like?

Olive: In the summer of 2005 we shot the film, it would have been probably in late August, and we did it in over a week or 10 days, approximately. That has sort of evolved itself into a 13-minute film. The following summer we developed the live theater piece for the Momentum Series that took place in July. That was a 45 min. version in 2006…

Otto: …commissioned by the Walker Art Center and the Southern Theater.

Olive: …and then this year, almost14 months later, the hour and 10 min., site-specific version of Holiday House which incorporates the film and material from the Southern (Theater). In a way it’s like the material from the film informed the live work, then the live work and the film both informed this new site version—material has been gathered from both places as well as new material.

Otto: When we made the proposition for doing the Southern show, a lot of it was about re-contextualization—of taking work that we’d done site-specifically and the process of making site specific work, of making film work—and directly overlaying that on making something in the theater and seeing how the process would inform the theater work, specifically addressing the Southern Theater as a theater, but also just ‘theater’ as a template.

Olive: By bringing people into the house, the house is already generating so much of the context, in terms of the scenography, the dramaturgical concerns, in a way that there’s more room for dancing somehow within that formula. I think that there’s something about really bringing the audience into having a very direct kinesthetic experience—the opening of the piece is like bodies moving past them, banging into them—really having them walk and move through the house and have these different sensory experiences in different parts of the house. And then bringing them out into the alley and actually letting them sit down towards the end of the piece for the first time and letting them sit and be this more, I don’t want to say passive audience, but definitely more like a theatrical audience situation than in the rest of the show. They then get to go into this other state having had this very physical and sensorial experience. It’s something about the intimacy and bringing the material two feet away or in direct contact with the audience that’s very exciting.

Otto: Well and that part, when we transition from in the house to in the alley, it’s like in the house it’s really the feeling of watching people in a house, and then I think that when we move out of the house, back into the alley and people sit down, it’s like making a theater out of an alley. So there’s like a different kind of transparency or mutability of the different spaces that you can play with.

Olive: It also goes from smaller spaces to a bigger space, and in the same way the content or the activity goes from more literal activity and mundane activity to more, not abstract, but definitely less literal and less everyday. It gets more extraordinary in terms of the arc or the movement material.

J.J.: That seems to relate to the title of the piece and to what I’ve read and what I’ve heard you say about a perceptual shift that you go through, as I understand it, and that I’ve experienced when I’m on vacation—the way that activities become framed in different a different way, and that perceptual shift that you have when you’re on holiday with friends. I wanted to ask you about how, having worked on this piece in so many iterations and for such a long time, has you’re understanding of that title [Holiday House] and that subject matter changed and how has that shifted for you as you’ve worked on this [version of the piece].

Otto: Well, we have an opportunity in this piece, more than in the theater and the film, because we have many spaces with different permeability of division between them. You know, sound, visual, different temperature, haptic spaces that we can really specify the experience of the audience to a far greater degree. So we have that fundamental ability to be in different spaces with our specific materials that are inherent to them that we can accentuate and, we have that as a basis. Then a lot of the play in this piece was about how different senses work together, and how you’re imagination works with the different senses. If you hear someone in the basement for a while and then you see a video image of them later in the piece, then you start to build up a schema of like, “Okay I think that that’s there,” and then when you get there you have a relationship across time like “I thought it was like this but really this is bigger, okay, and it has this temperature, and we saw this one person down there but now we realize there’s two people.” And then when you go from the first floor to the basement, you realize that the whole house is wired up with different cameras and so you… I think some people had talked about, some of the people we work with, the guides—they said that when they got down there [the basement], they became more implicated because they realized that maybe they were being filmed the whole first half of the piece. And then they were watching everyone else in the different places.

Olive: The reality of working on the show was totally not the reality of the premise. Because the time span has been so short that our house has not been a holiday house. It’s been more like a slave labor camp. The initial film was more like a holiday and this was really compressed. I do think of that premise and I do think about, when you are on holiday, not just the quality of the time that you spend with each other and how, because there’s no schedule, people eat at weird times, or they all end up congregating in the kitchen at two o’clock in the morning, you know, those sorts of things.

But I also think about this idea of time travel too, that somehow when you’re on holiday you have this time for stuff to come up. And stuff comes up, in terms of memory. And you really have time to open your senses to things in a different way, and you have time to be nostalgic about things or time to have memories of other holidays. There’s this layering that happens which doesn’t happen everyday when you’re manically dealing with your everyday life, administrating yourself and you’re rushing from one place to another—you’re trying to stay present with stuff. But there’s this spaciousness that I’m really interested in, in terms of the time traveling piece and in terms of the layering of history somehow that I think about when I think of that title, because in a way that title’s kind of tongue-in-cheek in a humorous, weird fifties…thing.

J.J.: I’m glad that you mentioned time travel because I kept thinking about the piece that happened a year ago in the theater as I was watching the piece last night. It was just so delightful to be able to do that. You don’t have that experience often to think back over a year of time in relationship to a performance work. So I was having that experience of traveling back in time to this other piece—having the fantasy that when I watched the piece a year ago, that the piece I saw last night was happening at the same time, and then also the way that the sounds of the performers, the sound of Karen Sherman’s leg, mic-ed, happening inside, and that being projected outside the house and looping over time and then existing in time. The house just seemed laden with and heavy with its own short-term memory.

I wanted to ask you guys about how you’re thinking about time travel in this work and how maybe that relates to the text we hear at the beginning of the show about space and time and the nature of space and time and the big bang and black holes.

Otto: I’ll just start with the science lectures done by Bryce Beverlin II. I think it relates to the whole agency of the house also and the perceptual experience of space and all of this. What we wanted to accomplish with those lectures is give people information to be able to have a perceptual and tangible physical experience of physics that they can put their body into it. Like when Bryce talks about escape velocity and how fast you need to go to escape the gravity of the earth, which is 7 miles per second. We just wanted to see if we could get people into that process of seeing the stars, having a miles-per-hour relationship to gravity, seeing one star as a multiple of them, and that once you get information about physics and phenomena, then you’re perception changes and then maybe you could have a physical relationship to it.

Olive: And to add something, especially to that first section, I think that there was also this idea of how could we do “Google Earth” on a physical level without using any technology.

J.J.: Low budg[-et]

Olive: Yeah, to give people the context that the house is in the universe, the house is in the world, and physical principals are operating in order for this house to be here and this lawn to be here and for you to be standing here and for you to be able to move around and for each of these activities or events to be able to happen. These are the principals that we need in order to make this work. It’s like the view from up in outer space and then here you are.

Otto: It relates also to Body Mind Centering in particular because we see things all around us, but also in our body, we have many different sensations, and in the process of studying B.M.C. over years and years, you start to put names and titles or markers to experiences and sensations that you’ve had your whole life. Like feelings of pain you have in a knee and then you know what nerve it is, or feelings you have of pressure in your organs and then you know what organ they are. There are many different experiences of phenomena that happen that we don’t name and then once we do, our perception has changed. I guess that I’m hoping the same thing happens with the house, that as you hear different things before you see them, and you see things and then you hear something different than what you’re seeing, like you were talking about, the delay, and about how you hear a sound that hits on the table and then you see it and then thirty seconds later you hear it again and it has a delay. And the way we have it set up is that you hear the live sound unprocessed amplified sound and then processed amplified sound like all together to add layers of experience on top of it. I hope by adding it you get to really notice what the original source was more. The more layers, you’re perceptually paring down to the primary experience of the material like, “table” and this is what it could be. It’s like a perceptual game the whole trilogy.

And then that relates to the whole “holiday” thing—is taking your perceptions to a new place and then noticing what materials… what they do, what their affect is after you’ve shifted your perception. All of the iterations of the piece were about the inheritance of the family you grew up with. The psychology you inherit and the physicality that you inherit over time, and how it manifests in your dancing, and how you use it consciously and unconsciously. Particularly in the section of “wandering off” [a section of the piece where the group repeatedly groups together and then splits away into smaller numbers]: how you deal socially with groups of people is inherited from your family and then what you do when you remove your self socially off on your own—how you express that. I also experienced that as you become an adult, especially in the United States where you have this nuclear family obsession, you really kind of go away from original family. And then you’re out and there’s this idea that you’ve left your family. But I think that you really are just creating a larger family. You’re creating connections with other people. And then in the dance world I think that becomes even more of a factor because you have collaborations that go over years. You spend a lot of time together in an empty room where you just have your body and your personality and—you’re just in an empty room, you’re not typing on something or painting on something—it’s just us there.

Politically, also, the whole gay marriage—not debate but disaster—the whole legal imposition onto family. I wanted to highlight that this model of making these family units like we have in dance is similar to the gay, lesbian, trans. community. You make the family that you want because you’re not allowed a place, legally, to have that. It’s terrible and at the same time you make something out of it that’s amazing because you get to generate…

Olive: …your own form, your own structure.

Otto: Yeah.

J.J.: In many ways I feel like the cast is the main subject matter, especially relating to what you’re talking about—this idea of intentional family. But also I’m curious about how, in your process, you work with them as people who have their own critical voice, who are such brilliant choreographers in their own right.

Olive: Often, when we’re working with live performance and video layering together—video material that has been improvised and then Otto and I have edited, or in this case, I’ve edited it down to a very distilled thing, we go back in and dance on top of it, and that material gets set. There’s choreographic offerings from everybody. Once the material gets set, that’s a decision. I mean, that’s pretty traditional process in that way. But I think in terms of the structured improvisational stuff, that’s really based on who people are as movers, and what each of those people brings both on a choreographic level but also, almost, it’s not character, but on a character level. In some ways, who they are as a body and as a physical presence and as a person, because this piece is so much about the ‘people-ness’ of these people. There isn’t the artifice of a person on top of who they are, but there’s something that’s being drawn out of who each of them are, who each of these people are as performers, and we’re exploring this idea of people being people rather than just being dancers. And that’s been incredibly important to all of our work in the last few years, but in particular to this piece.

Otto: It’s very challenging to work with all choreographers instead of people that mainly interpret, but I almost want to say that I always want to work with just other choreographers because I also want to learn about, not just my work by doing my work, but by having it analyzed and challenged and taken apart and questioned by other people that make their own work. And then in that process I also learn about their work because I know: oh, Kristin [Van Loon] is saying this because I’ve seen her work, she’s saying this because that’s her aesthetic, what she likes about that. And so I know where she’s coming from. I don’t have to take everything as a challenge of my work. It’s coming from their work and what they want.

Olive: What they like stylistically.

J.J.: And just to be clear the cast is…

Olive: The composer is Tim Glen, and then Bryce Beverlin II is performer and sound-maker. And the dancers are Karen Sherman, Morgan Thorson, Kristin Van Loon, Otto Ramstad and myself, Olive Beiringa.

I would like to come back to the Haunted House/Neighborhood Danger/ the history of the neighborhood, and what’s happening in the neighborhood right now, and sort of the darkness aspect a little bit.

J.J.: That’s certainly something that came through in the performance. I mean from the beginning of the show there’s this signal, the sound of a Theremin, which made me think of a haunted house. And then, being led by a docent, and being taken through all these spaces, especially being taken down to a dark basement. There is something about, not the subject matter at all but the, like you said, the agency of the house working in a way that made me think of a haunted house. I think it’s not really like a haunted house, it’s something like taking a tour of a house that people say that there’s ghosts in. Rather than going somewhere where it’s set up to scare you, its just a place that’s maybe an old house that had things other than humans living in it, and by things other than humans, maybe it’s the experiences of the house living inside of the house over time.

There are moments when I was thinking about what it must be like to be in a house after someone’s died in the house. I mean there are all these things that happen in the house, death and sex and birth. And I was thinking about all these things that happen in homes, and then I was thinking about how those things actually don’t happen in homes anymore. Or about the way that those things have shifted from in-the-house activities to out-of-the-house activities, you know, people dying in hospice centers and not in their homes, or people giving birth not in their homes, but in the hospital. And how that has shifted our perception of home and our experience of what a house is. It’s not a hospital, it’s not a deathbed; it’s a cleaner environment where you…sleep.

Otto: And then there’s the whole thing about the tenement museum in New York. You go there and they give this speech about the people that used to live there and this and that. And I thought those are all designed art experiences, and are those the only designed art experiences that we go into a house context to see? Usually it’s at a museum, or a theater, or a hospital, or a hospice center. We’re talking about life processes put in institutions, versus being in houses. And that’s pretty interesting that the ones that we have—that we actually visit a house in culture, have to do with supernatural and death and historical time—things that become more profound because of their context. That they wouldn’t work if taken out of context. I mean, they would but they would just be conceptual and you can’t embody them unless you’re in the context. There’s a connection between those things you were talking about, about life processes and houses and then experiences of public coming into houses, and institution versus house, and how those interact.

J.J.: And the transition that some houses make from being ‘house’ to institution. That seems to be something that’s also happening, a tension between domestic environment and some kind of institution, although it’s a small one, it does become a kind of institution. You know, people call and make reservations on your phone and there’s a formalism about how I’m allowed to interact with your house by the docent. The docent’s telling me where to go when. It’s not just a free experience, there’s still a kind of enforced behavior on the audience even though the perceptual experience is opened.

Olive: I also think, you know, I didn’t grow up in Minneapolis; I grew up in New Zealand. So, for me this geographical landscape is still new in some ways: to have a wooden house next to another wooden house next to another wooden house. If I look out my kitchen, I see into my neighbor’s kitchen. If I look out my living room, I can see into my other neighbor’s kitchen. So, I have these people right next to me. I grew up in a context that was hilly, it wasn’t flat and it wasn’t squares. It was, you know, you had your house and you couldn’t see anything (maybe you could see a house up the hillside or something) because there are trees everywhere. It’s just different, it’s a different context. And that was in the city, it wasn’t in the countryside, but it’s more spacious, and we didn’t have alleys. So for me the whole thing with the backyard and the alley… and then Otto has this incredible vegetable garden out the back that, you know, we have this season in Minnesota which is like this four month or maybe five month growing season where it becomes tropical. So you go from having nothing to having this complete transformation of the vegetation in this very short space of time. So there’s something very magical about that—we’re just coming to the end of that arc right now. We’re transitioning into everything going back down into the earth in the next month or next six weeks or so.

So there’s this whole other kind of private world—it’s a public space, but it’s kind of like, you don’t share your yard necessarily with your neighbors; you share this back alley-trash-building kind of space. And there’s really a darkness for me out there. And this neighborhood in particular, right now there’s quite a lot of violence happening. There’s a lot of gang violence happening and some random shootings. For example, a cyclist was killed two blocks from here last week.

J.J.: That was two blocks from here?

Olive: Yeah, it was two blocks from here.

Otto: Elliott and 37th.

Olive: He was a friend of a friend and he was riding his bike and someone threw something at him, a blunt object. And we were rehearsing the other night and at the end of rehearsal there was a shooting one block away and the whole street was closed off. And then also we were rehearsing and someone ran into a house on the corner and threw a brick or a big object at the window and then the police showed up. So there’s a lot of police activity and violence that’s going on. And so to be rehearsing in the midst of that creates some level of anxiety but of course it informs and has informed the work from the outset also. I think we talked about that in the first interview a little bit, this element of danger or accident, or the possibility of accidents.

J.J.: I remember Otto saying “Safety Second”

Olive: “Safety Second,” exactly… Also this quality of a murder mystery that never really happens. There’s the big knives in the piece and the death scene at the end of the video, and these things that are there that are made reference to but it’s never fully played out. It’s like the shadow. There’s a very strong shadowing in the whole piece and I think that also the quality and the agency of the house and this kind of haunted sense of the house with the walls talking is part of that darkness in a way. That I feel has been very present in the process.

Otto: But also the literal darkness, that the piece happens at night. And we’re using lights to highlight and specify certain areas, and the magic of light. And when you turn lights on and you feel like, wow, just the thrill of electricity that you can still experience even though we’ve lived our whole lives…

Olive: But you’re lighting up a place you don’t normally light up.

Otto: Then there’s also the converse of it, the dark space. The mystery of what you don’t know, what you can’t see. Because the brightness of something makes the darkness somewhere else on the other side. And then there’s a creativity in that as well. That there are spaces that you don’t know and you can’t see. That plays into the senses too. You might be able to hear things, but because you can’t see them, it changes the way you hear them. Like when you’re in the basement and there’s a sound installation, or when there’s twelve different sound sources that are hidden in the rafters and underneath things and then, because it’s relatively dark and you can’t see all of them, it adds another layer of mystery as to what you can see and can’t see. There’s a darkness about human experience and violence, but then there’s also just literal darkness that we’re working with in the piece.

J.J.: Well Otto and Olive, I’ve had such a great time talking to you today and I really appreciate you taking time out to talk with us for the very first cross-country Critical Correspondence.

Olive: Fantastic.

J.J.: Yes, it’s really excellent and best of luck with the rest of the run.

We take the opportunity of Lisa Nelson’s upcoming Tuning Scores workshop to publish a public interview with her conducted by Nita Little during the Side Step Festival of 2005 in Finland. Lisa’s own remarks on Tuning Scores is also published.

The fifth international Side Step Festival was held in January 22-30, 2005 at the Cable Factory in Helsinki. In their own words: The biannual Side Step Festival is a topical and active contemporary dance festival. The theme for 2005 is Dance, Perception and Bodily Thinking. Side Step Festival 2005 offers alternative views based on bodily knowledge and movement understanding, and questions the usual ways of performing and perceiving. The festival focuses on the question of how reality is revealed through bodily perception and how it is transmitted in the performing arts.

We are thankful to Otto Ramstad, who was a participant in the workshop, recorded and transcribed the interview, and offered it to us. Also, to Lisa who agreed to its publication, and gave her valuable time and skill to fine tune it, and to Nita Little for making it happen in the first place.

Lisa Nelson: It’s very useful for this talk that Nita and I haven’t seen each other for a long time and actually have been developing what we’ve been developing from a common base in some ways. The common base was a college in the countryside in New England [Bennington College, VT]. My first years there (’66-’68), I was studying traditional techniques, and by the time Nita reached there, a couple of years later, there had been a shift. I will try to say what the shift was.

A dancer named Judith Dunn arrived at this college in 1969 when I was on leave. She was working with improvisation with a black musician named Bill Dixon. She came from a group working in New York City in the early ’60s. She was tangential perhaps to this group-the Judson Dance Theater. At that point, many of the group were former or current Merce Cunningham company members and they were studying composition with a composer named Robert Dunn, who at that time was married to Judith. These dancers, in their exploration of composition, started to dismantle some of the conventions and the expectations that were laid out over a long period of time in the modern dance arena, and it was a very lively time. I was a child in the early sixties, and was studying traditional dance uptown at Juilliard in New York City-Graham and ballet. What’s interesting to me is that I had heard of these wild happenings happening downtown, but I never saw them. Bill Dixon was a jazz-based musician.

Lisa: At the time he emphatically called his music “Black music,” [but] in any case, he was an improvisational artist. For me, this was the first formal implication that improvisational dance work stood next to choreographed work. This was very nice because I had been making improvised dances for years before entering formal training. Judith’s proposition at that time was somewhat like the Cunningham/Cage proposition where the dance and the music worked independently of one another. The musicians worked in the room, and there were anywhere from five to ten of them, very, very incredibly high energy sound that created an envelope of sound within which the dancers worked independently.

I don’t know how the doors got opened for you, Nita, but it didn’t seem like a big deal. Improvisation and fixed choreography were existing side by side, these working methods and these forms. But over time it’s gotten marginalized and kind of either/or. Is that not true in Finland? I’m just curious because maybe I can pass through this comment. Do both kinds of work exist in equal value?

Audience: No.

Lisa: So maybe the conditions here are the same as the rest of the western world. I’m locating this around 1969-70. I had an interest in music so I worked with musicians a lot and that was a very natural interaction. I found that the language we used to talk about what we were doing was musical language. We didn’t talk much about the details of the dance experience. We talked about interaction in terms of harmony, or line/melody, or unison, or cannon, energy, tonal quality. In my next foray, in 1970-72, I worked with a theater-based improvisation dance company called Daniel Nagrin’s Workgroup that transposed the work of Joseph Chaikin’s Open Theater to dance. You might be familiar with Chaikin. They were doing explorations with non-text sound communication-without text or with transforming the delivery of text. It wasn’t “physical theater,” whatever that means, but it had to do with encounters, how human beings encounter each other. In the Workgroup, the way we assessed what we did used more of a psychological language.

And then shortly after that, I met Steve Paxton, and he had been developing Contact Improvisation with some people from Bennington, including Nita. Contact Improvisation was very radical to me, because it was the first dance improvisation proposition that was talking about the body. In a way, it related to technique-the technique of the body, the way the body organizes itself. All the other work I had been doing while making improvised dances had borrowed from other disciplines, other languages. Contact combined for me an idea about training the body-which I had a big question about from my own traditional training-while giving the dancer something to apply it to and a way for the body to learn.

Shortly after that I quit dancing and I entered a new zone-video-where my work became more oriented toward how we look at dance. One of the aspects is working with the senses and in particular the organ of vision because dance is more or less taken in with the eyes. It’s also taken in with the ears. I was very interested in vision as a set of instructions that come from a physical experience and the effect of that physicality on how I see things. So, not just how I see dance but how I look at the world. This has been a passionate interest for these many years, and I’m still stuck there.

Nita: You’re interested in the doors of perception, but what you’re looking at has more to do with making action in the space, or changing the space, or changing yourself to perceive more or differently.

Lisa: I’m interested in dance behavior. And I’m very interested in what people would probably think of as incidental movements. I’m most attracted to movements that don’t seem to be important. I’m very interested in how the organism relates to the environment. And I see that very clearly when I’m looking at dancers on stages. I’m not talking about fidgeting nervousness. I’m talking about how we carve out something from what we look at to simplify what is before us. We choose, we shape, we reshape each other in our seeing of each other and that seems very efficient both for surviving and for getting very, very distracted from having an original experience or seeing something new. I am interested in the movement of attention.

I’ll watch a dance performer, and I don’t care much what they’re doing, whether they’re doing ballet, or someone else’s language. I love to see something moving in people and some dancers can do that no matter what they’re presenting and others don’t do that as successfully. Or maybe they’re not interested in it; they’re more interested in design, or telling a story, or being looked at. So, observing is what we all do. In terms of presenting a performance on stage, whenever I feel like I have something organized enough that might resonate with this underlying behavior, I feel like presenting it. Though I don’t know if you’ll see it.

Nita: The key word is organized. Can you talk about that? What does that mean to you?

Lisa: Composition or organization. I think that organization for me comes from the inside. It’s like I create filters in my own seeing. I organize through my own seeing. I observe things and try to find what’s predictable about their nature. And if I find something that’s predictable in a way that I’m interested in, then I can look for a way to frame it so it can be seen by other people. And frames can be many things-they can be sound frames or visual frames, etc.

Nita: Can you give me an example of something that is predictable?

Lisa: Yeah, okay, it may be hard to imagine. For a while I worked with a score that I had made relating my breathing to the activity in my visual apparatus. I made a frame of sound that placed an idea of breathing in the space-sounds that had a certain organization that was recognizable, like laughing or pigs breathing. Somewhere along the line most people have heard a pig breathing, so even though it’s an odd combination of rhythms, it has an associational image. It also affects your own breathing when you listen to it. I tried to start this dance very small so that people could tune into small events without a big distraction around them. What was predictable about it was if I worked with it for a certain length of time something extruded, it got bigger, it manifested more and more into space. Actually that was a decision I had to make, so I had to intend to push it out into space over a twenty-minute period of time.

Nita: Push it out into space?

Lisa: I mean it’s not just me going through a personal process. I have to make it visible to others. Much of this is artifice. I’m very interested in the artifice. We’re full of artifice, but there’s an animal in here and it’s busy surviving. Culturally I’ve learned…for example, I would like to talk to you like this [Lisa begins to gesticulate more wildly and use extreme facial expressions, opening and closing her eyes and stretching her mouth]. This would be much better for me. I could articulate much more clearly; I could think more clearly. It just doesn’t work culturally. There is a level of composure that I think of as artifice. I’ve learned it from everybody; we all teach each other what it is. So, I relate that to theater and to composing myself to be seen. I don’t want to get in the way of you seeing something. I can use it, rather than say ‘that’s artificial, I don’t want to go there’-it’s a very positive thing. Perception is interesting; perception is organization. The way the senses operate is fabulous for a dancer because we have access to it as movement. We can observe it in ourselves; we can observe it in other people. It’s been a very cheap education. I don’t have to pay to study. There are wonderful books; there are people to observe constantly, animals to observe. And this is kind of socio-economical. Where do you go to learn what you’re hungry to learn?

Nita: So, you end up teaching what it is you’re interested in seeing. What is the relationship between that and developing material that you’re interested in performing?

Lisa: A lot of my performance work has had to do with creating inhibitions. For example, for a long period of doing performance work where the movement kind of streamed endlessly-you know move, move, move, endless, endless, lots of movement, I didn’t want to do that or see that any more. But it was a habit. So I had to find out what was underneath all of that moving around and I started looking at what is stillness. I mean this is just so obvious. To do this, I started looking at one image at a time, not just stillness, but one image at a time. And I tried to construct a dance where whatever was the first action, that was it.-That was the whole dance-end. And this is too hard to describe but anyway… Wherever the first organization came from, as soon as it started to extrapolate, or transform, or become something else, or go on to the next thing, end. That was the beginning: seeing what a single image is.

Nita: And that’s a movement image, or a visual image or a sound image? What were your parameters?

Lisa: Well in the body, all of the images, everything is a…

Nita: A kinesthetic image…

Lisa: Yeah, well, no. It’s a synaesthetic image. It’s made of all those things, the kinesthetic, the visual, the auditory, touch, etc.

Nita: Sometimes you speak of an image as a singular modality or a single perceptual form, and now you’re speaking of an image as synthesis.

Lisa: I’m going to call it an action image-how about that-because I’m really talking about moving. I’ve never called it that before, but I think that might work. And an action doesn’t necessarily have to be a movement either. We recognize action in watching each other’s attention. When I became mobilized to make an action, I didn’t know what the action was going to be, but when I recognized it as organization, it was an action, and I would either repeat it, if it was repeatable, or if it was a singular image that couldn’t repeat, it just happened once.

Nita: This weekend you will be performing a new dance with Steve (Paxton), and that’s another collaborative process, in which I’m sure that some aspect of your end of the collaboration will be informed by all of this that you’ve been speaking of.

Lisa: I’m going to describe a dance that Steve and I made in ’78, called PA RT that we performed for 28 years, until last year. It had a structure. I don’t call it a score because it simply delineates entrances and exits. The structure was solo-duet-solo-duet. There was no other directed material, other than a recorded opera by Robert Ashley (Private Parts) that provided an environment in which the dance occurred, and we had costumes that tried to stay the same for the 28 years. It was the only dance I’ve made where my personal score was dancing. Within that score there was a period when I utilized another inner score I call “reading out loud.” In the dancing, I was reading the space, myself contained in the space. In a way I would be making visible what was touching me in the space. But basically my score in PA RT was dancing. I never really wanted to dance in front of people. Even making dances when I was very young, I never thought that was worthwhile. I thought dancing was more private. Choreography was a creative opportunity.

Nita: Do you have any questions for Lisa?

Photo: Raymond Mallentjer, Thumbnail photo: Gil Grossi

Question: What is your relationship to time? I’m interested because you talked a lot about space.

Lisa: Well, they are inextricable. Time also is measured in the body through all the different senses. Probably I’m much more interested in time than I was long ago. When I talk about the space, I talk about how my body reads and takes instructions from the space. Much of the time, we’re reacting to the architecture and human beings. We’re reacting, we’re not really responding. We don’t have time to respond for one thing. But time-how long does it take for an image to organize in the body? I think the eyes are the fastest sense to name things. We can name something the second we look at it. But we don’t often take the time to actually look at something. The longer you look at movement, the richer it gets. But culturally, there’s a rejection of taking the time it takes to look. We want to keep getting change, food, change, food.

Question: (Otto Ramstad) You briefly touched on this in the workshop, but I was sort of interested to hear more. You were talking about how a lot of what people call improvisation you call dancing. I think maybe one of the reasons the improvisation word is loaded is because the definition is assumed.

Lisa: The implication for me is that you’re making something when you’re improvising. I notice that people are dancing freely and calling it improvisation. I was very sad that the word “dancing” left the whole arena. Nobody talked about dancing once they were talking about improvisation. So it felt like there was no longer a place for dancing as an unmediated flow of the body moving or, even sitting still you could be dancing. Improvising implies to me there are limitations, there’s something to solve. Improvise a picnic, improvise a table-there’s some need, there’s some objective, to make something. There’s a level of mind involved-an application of mind-involved in improvising. Mind in the sense of filter or a way of making choices-a way of limiting the number of choices, so that something happens as a result of that. Those are useful differentiations on a spectrum-many choices you could make or fewer choices you could make. Or choices you could make with your skin, and choices with your eyes, or choices you could make from different systems of the body.

It’s said that people don’t want to produce improvisational work because it’s not predictable, dependable. I think it’s very dependable. I mean you may not like the results. That’s much clearer. Say ‘I don’t like the results’. Or ‘I’m not interested when things are organized in this way’. But you can’t put improvisation in one container.. Maybe when people say choreography everybody thinks of people doing something in a line in unison. But that’s not what I think of when I think of fixed choreography. I see no image-it could be so many things. Same with improvisational work, it could be so many things. It tends to not be, that’s part of the problem. People imitate what they see. Also because there’s not a lot of exposure, people don’t get to see a lot. Seeing helps you get new ideas, or have an opinion, or take some inspiration, or get some anti-inspiration. But without exposure to lots of examples, there’s not a lot of growth in the field-everybody appears to be doing the same things over and over. I think it’s a pity. I feel that if there had been more exposure over the last thirty years, there would be a much more critical way of looking at the work. Critical, meaning you would get more from it-see a lot more in it, there would be more layers.

Question: I’m very much interested in improvisation and I love to talk about it. But what I hear a lot, I don’t know if it’s a semantic or linguistic issue, but improvisation has become loaded with some other meanings, which we don’t have to get attached to. And therefore I rather use choreography, dancing, instant composition, and a number of other alternative words to describe more or less the same thing that me or you are doing. So what comes to mind is that can we reclaim that word. Is there a way, through exposure maybe, through putting it out there in a way that’s closer to what we do?

Lisa: I remember years ago when I asked a black musician friend about the term improvisation. He said “it’ll never be acceptable because it’s associated with black music and black culture”. We were talking about the U.S. Even though it’s highly valued, there’s still something in the culture that says, ‘oh, that’s just playing around.’ If somebody says ‘what were you doing?’ I would never say, ‘well, I was improvising.’ I’d say, ‘I was working on dot, dot, dot.’ I wouldn’t use the term to say what I was doing because it’s too vague. Although I couldn’t deny that I was improvising.

Nita: It’s very political on some level.

Lisa: Yes, it’s interesting to be in a field that the very idea of the method that you’re using is political.

Nita: It sounds similar to the undervaluing of our own living that is going on, the undervalue of our own intention-all the work you’re doing. It is bringing value to and awareness to our seeing, our perceptions.

Lisa: Well, I hope also it brings value to action. I’m interested in action more than the perceiving part.

Question: So, do you think it’s possible to compose improvisationaly?

Lisa: I think that I’m improvising choreographically because that’s the tradition my work evolves from and I can sense and talk about my choices in the terms of western choreography. But I’ve added more to the idea of choreography besides appointments in space and time. I think it’s more inner dimensional, multi-dimensional-making inner action visible.

Shall we?

photo: Scott Smith