Interview date: September 30, 2010

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John Jasperse: The first work of yours I saw was 100% Polyester, which actually I saw on video. I would describe it as a little bit like a dance without a body. Maybe this is the most overt example I can think of, but still I feel like there always has been a consistent interest in the immaterial, or in the absent or erased body, in your work. I’m wondering if you think that this is an accurate statement, and if so, could you talk a little bit about why it’s interesting to you, and how you see it in your work? Or if it’s not, is there some other way in which you could say, “Well, no, it’s not that, it’s this other thing?”

Christian Rizzo: What is funny for me about 100% Polyester is that when I did it first, in fact, it was a costume that I made for someone, but finally this person didn’t want to wear it. So I had this costume and I said, “Perhaps I want to make this costume dance by itself.” So, of course, the absence was really clear. But I didn’t really understand it like that at first. I think it was more after that I considered that [absence]; finally, it was kind of manifesto. What we are working on, it’s not specific to the dresses—for example, in 100% Polyester—or the space, but it’s all the parts between. It’s what I sometimes call the negative space or the empty space. The emphasis is always on this thing.

John: So it’s almost like one of those things where . . . you read this revisionist theory about the concerns, but in some way the concerns are actually there naturally from circumstance. And they [the concerns] are intuitively understood in the doing, more than, “I’m setting out to make a piece that’s about the absent body.”

Christian: I never work with a concept first. When I start to work it’s because I need to be at work. It’s my first desire. I wake up, and I say, “Now I have to create a form.” Because I’m more formal than conceptual. I have more the vision of the form, and after I’m working, that’s when I start to understand why I chose this form.

John: Just to clarify, when you say “a form,” are you speaking about the visual environment, or is the form something innately about the structure of the work, or is it the person?

Christian: When I say, “form,” I think it’s more like a filter through which I look at the world. I am looking at the world and I say, “Well, now I have to create new glasses to look at the world.”

John: In the past you’ve talked about your choreographic work as “writing bodies in space—”

Christian: —and in time, of course!

John: And in time. We’ll get to that. So in French you talk about écriture chorégraphique, or choreographic writing, and you talk about the choreographer as an auteur, or author. There’s all of this language that’s embedded in French nomenclature that relates choreographic artistic process to writing practice, but it seems like what you’re talking about is something more specific than that cultural perspective that’s embedded in the language. I’m wondering if you could elaborate a little bit on that.

Christian: I couldn’t write a book, so I know that the only thing I can do is to write in space. I’m very attached to this idea that each piece is like the next tome in my diary. I’m not very attached to the dance as material. For example, if I were really a writer, a book writer, I would choose the vocabulary, but I would not invent words. I’m going to use words that already exist and make combinations of these words to find my own taste of writing. And I think that the dance is a little bit like that. I’m going to use the dancer, and I’m just here to grab some movement that the dancer invented. Perhaps this project with Julie is a little bit different, but usually I let the dancer find the dance, the movement, and then after, when I have this material, I really start my work, which is to . . . I would say to tordre—

John: To twist.

Christian: Yeah, to twist the thing, to cut it, to edit. I think sometimes I am like an editor to the thing. Sometimes I relate my work to people who take a documentary, and they start to edit the thing . . .

John: They collage, and they edit with found material.

Christian: I sometimes feel like that. But at the same time I’m creating a lot of my own images. So it’s between my own unconscious or instinctive things and what the dancer is giving me—the material. And then how do I bring them together to create a harmonic thing or a friction? And how do I build a space? It’s always the space between the things . . . the space between two bodies, the space between the performance and the audience, which is, for me, very important.

John: It sounds like you’re talking about spaces in-between that aren’t just physical spaces, but that are also ideological spaces.

Christian: Of course. And there’s always this kind of fluidity . . . The flux between the things: That’s, for me, what is important.

John: So before we get into too many other things, I wanted to talk about the piece at The Kitchen, b.c. janvier 1545, fontainebleau. So the title refers to Benvenuto Cellini and “the Nymph of Fontainebleau.” I just want to interject here that I’ve always found “Perseus and the Head of Medusa” to be really sexy, so that’s my preferred Cellini sculpture. (laughter) But anyway, that’s a pretty Eurocentric art history reference, so probably not a lot of Americans are even going to have this reference—

Christian: Even the French.

John: There comes this question about reference—the importance or lack thereof of the legibility of that reference.

Christian: So first, the title. It’s not about Benvenuto Cellini, really. It’s this moment: It’s January, in Fontainebleau, with Benvenuto Cellini. Because this day, in January, in Fontainebleau.

I found it [the history] in this book, which I was reading, about what in German they call the Wunderkammer, or, in French, le cabinet de curiosités, which I’m very interested in. So when the museum appeared, we started to organize the things by theme. Before the museum, we had these Wunderkammer, where it was more someone who decided to put in the same room all of the things he wanted to have, and also the knowledge about the world—so it could be some scientific things, some poetical things—and he just organized them to help him to look at the world.

So in this book, I read that Benvenuto Cellini had to deliver two sculptures to Francois I. But he didn’t—he just brought one this day. And he decided to light it with candles around, he asked a musician to play around, and finally he started to move the sculpture.

John: He was an installation artist! (laughter)

Christian: He did a hybrid performance! So I said, “Wow. I’m gonna put this title just for that.” Because in this period, which is in the sixteenth century in Fontainebleau—

John: —during the Renaissance—

Christian: Yes. There is one hybrid performance already. Like, some interdisciplinarity. I’m fed-up that [when we talk about art history] we start with Black Mountain, with Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, blah blah blah, during the 50s. I’m a little bit like that (gesturing) . . .  How do you say . . . ?

John: Up to here?

Christian: Up to here that in the dance field, and also in the visual art field, all the people are talking about history, references, “rereading the modern.” And I say, “OK, if we are talking about history . . . History in art doesn’t start in the 50s.” Because it’s started to be like, “Oh, what is the winner reference?” So it [the title] was for me a little bit of a joke, in a way, about that.

John: In talking about reference . . . There was a moment when the serious artist was supposed to respond to high art, and then there was this moment when the serious artist was supposed to reject that and embrace the inclusion of low art. That window of what-is-the-right-thing-to-be-concerned-about is moving around, which brings me to this question about fashion and style, freshness, and what is contemporary. And neither you nor I is twenty years old, so both of us have begun a process of moving away from “freshness,” if we want to talk about that.

Christian: For me, now, this idea of “contemporary” is connected with the juncture of what’s happening around me and things that are totally archaic. So there is no reference about this time or that time [alone]; it’s the complexity of the time.

All photos: Marc Domage

John: I wanted to talk a little bit about Julie, who is performing—or is the collaborator—in b.c. janvier 1545, fontainebleau. I wanted to talk a little bit about her training as a classical ballet dancer, which is a training that you don’t have, and the way in which that is present or not in the work. Classical ballet, being something that’s so hard to learn, often imprints itself on your personhood in a way that is quite profound. And it reshapes your entire relationship to embodiment. I’m wondering about working with a classical dancer but not making a classical ballet.

Christian: For me, I don’t know about this “classical training.” When I’m working with a dancer, I take the movement they are producing, so I don’t have any archaic movement. When I’m looking at a ballet dancer or at one of my best friends who is in almost all of my pieces who is a drawer, not a dancer, I look at all the movements and—like what I was saying about words—I look at how I am going to combine them. For me it’s someone who came with his own history, the body history. And in a way I like that. What I love about Julie is . . . It’s so deep in her. She’s had so many different trainings. It’s also why I wanted to work with her. I met her at the Lyon Opera Ballet. When I was looking at her, I was almost looking just at her. I didn’t see the others because I had this feeling that each time she was doing something, it was right. In time, in space. I mean, she was sitting, and I would just look because I had the feeling that everything was connected. I’m always talking about intelligence when I talk about Julie because I can see it: When she’s moving the shoulder, I can see all the space around it moving. Because she’s so deep in the work she’s doing. Every day she has yoga and then ballet training, and I’m totally fascinated by this. I think I love all the people who are doing something and go deeper in [that] something. It could be cooking, it could be building houses, it could be a hairdresser. I mean, when people are involved and they don’t stop on the technique: They try to use this technique to push it a little bit more and the more they push it, the more they are opening something . . .

John: My last question is about André Lepecki, who is a Portuguese dance and performance theorist, and his ideas about the ontology of dance . . . He talks about the way in which there have been what he sees as false assumptions about dance’s essential nature, assumptions about a signature or privileged domain of dance which relates to movement. My understanding is that he thinks it [dance’s essential nature] has more to do with the problematic relationship of the body existing in time. So then you have this discussion over in the popular journalism world, where people like Dominique Frétard have come up with this word “non-danse” to talk about it. I get a little bit frustrated with that vocabulary because I feel like it just reflects a lack of any other way to congeal these various researches into one thing that we can call an artistic movement of this time. I wanted to ask about whether you feel there’s a cohesion of artists and if you feel like the kinds of language that I’m citing are representative of the central locus of that community. And if you do feel a part of something and it’s not centered around the body existing in time, do you have any idea what it is centered around?

Christian: I think that perhaps for me I’m not following so much the theoretical things.

John: Because you’re not interested in it, or—

Christian: Yeah. I’m not interested in it. I think I believe more in poetry and literature. I don’t read anything [theoretical]. I used to a lot, and then one day I took everything and I put it in my library. And it stays here, and I feel better. (laughter) Because I started to have too many questions that I almost started to lose my intuition of working. I love to fight, too, with my own questions . . . I remember that I was reading a lot of things because, in a way, I wanted to have some answer. And finally I have more and more questions!

(laughter)

Like what we were talking about with beauty [earlier]. There’s something so intimate in a way that I can’t even explain. And I like that I can’t explain it. But it’s funny because I’m going to have a book of my works [coming out] in one month, and when they asked me about the title, I just said, “Something Is Going On.” (laughter) That’s it. Because I knew Andre (Lepecki) a lot because I was living in Portugal for four or five years, and I mean . . . I love this theoretical thing, but in a way, it’s a specific job.

John: And it’s not the artist’s job.

Christian: No, it’s absolutely not my job. And I like when sometimes people say something and I say, “Oh! I have found a way (a commonality, an understanding),” but I’m not very involved in it. It’s not that I don’t have any ideas about it. Like, for example, this idea of “non-danse,” I have my own ideas about that. I remember when the journalists wrote in ’76 that some bands were performing as “punk people.” Nobody said then, “I’m punk.” It’s the people 10 years after who decided to be. So perhaps we can just have t-shirts that say, like, “Non-Danse.”

(laughter)

John: Yeah, but I mean, it gets back to our question about fashion because something can’t be “in fashion” unless you give it a name, or at least a grouping.

Christian: I always have this question: Am I a part of a certain group? Do I need to be in this certain group? Did someone sort of put me in this certain group that almost I don’t even know that I am in it? And for me it’s also connected with the power. So even if I am a critic, I’m not going to talk about what I call “célibataire experience, célibataire projects.” Single projects. We cannot deal with the market with that.

John: Yes, we’re stuck in a power structure that is absolutely about grouping into hierarchy … even in the political structure of artistic discourse.

Christian: Yeah, like some years ago I started to get a little bit angry because we started to have so many colloques . . . symposiums. And I say, “It’s very interesting, but I would prefer so much that we could show works of artists.” We have more symposiums than creation.

John: Yeah, a lot more discussion about art than the creation of actual art.

Christian: Yeah, and I know that for it’s important for some people, and also for me, it’s important. We can spend hours and days to talk about everything, but if you cannot face the reality of dance . . . I remember, especially in France, you can be invited by a theater to be in a symposium that would never invite you to show your work. I’m fed-up with that. I like that discourse as a real practice. I could stay with you here all day long to talk about everything. I love that. I love that. But, in a way, there has to be a balance.

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Jmy Leary: So I wanted to have a nice intro. Shortly after I moved to New York, straight out of college from California, I saw your work at The Joyce’s Altogether Different Festival (2001): Waving to You from Here and another work I can’t quite remember, maybe it was Excessories?

John Jasperse: That was Scrawl and Waving to You From Here. It was the same year that we did Execessories. It was six months apart from that one. We did Execessories and Fort Blossom at the Kitchen. Scrawl wasn’t the best piece I ever made. There were strips of paper in the back and rolls of dance floor that got flipped over. They were beige and then they were red.

Jmy: Scrawl was not memorable to me, but I was really impressed by Waving to You from Here. I had been looking for work like that in California, which I never found. I knew that it was out there somewhere. I had been in New York eight months. I liked all of the dancers in it. They were great performers and I hadn’t seen performers like that. They were technical but strange, compelling but weird. Also the set–the ceiling comes down. I saw all the things that I wanted to see again in reverse. The wooden bleachers. I don’t remember the sound.

Above: 1993 review of Jasperse' "Waving to You From Here", Thumbnail photo: Jmy Leary

John: James Lo made the sound. The palette of materials for that had a lot to do with suburban sounds, sounds you would hear in a suburban environment. A lot of them were recognizable before being rendered abstract in the composition. It gave it a location.

Jmy: And the newspapers in the beginning. It was nice to see something that was very intelligent and also entertaining, that had many different tones in the movement and performance. The dance was also very much in relation to the space, the ceiling coming down, dealing with objects in a way that was not just like props, but actually impacting the dance. The dancers were reacting in almost an everyday quality to the set. So that is my nice intro. Then everything changed after that piece, right? Or after Giant Empty?

photo: Maria Anguera de Sojo

John: It changed before that. Execessories was really the piece that, if you are speaking of career stuff, really changed things for me more dramatically than with any other piece.

Jmy: Because that was a successful piece?

John: It was a successful piece. I won two international competitions with that. It corresponded to the Zeitgeist of that time. We started touring internationally. I don’t think I would have the same career right now if I hadn’t done that piece at that time. But in other ways, it set up certain kinds of expectations. In many ways Waving was the antithesis of all of the expectations that Execessories had set up. I knew that there was the expectation that the next piece would be more sexy, more in-your-face, more body-sex-naked-blah blah blah. Waving wasn’t any of that. Waving was formal and structural.

Jmy: There was a distance to that piece.

John: Many of the people that were really excited about Execessories were slightly disillusioned with Waving. The people that were excited about it because it was like tits and dicks and sex, followed by a piece that had none of that. I also felt like that was why I chose to do that, because I didn’t want to be inside of this one box so to speak.

Jmy: What box is that for you?

John: I felt this pressure to do a certain kind of thing, to be a radical bad boy, “enfant terrible” or whatever. That wasn’t the place that started the investigation that became Execessories, so I didn’t feel like I identified with that. It was just something shoved on me.

Jmy: Why was it shoved on you at that time? Did you want it?

John: Because I happened to be doing that and then there is a desire for that. I realized that the tits and dicks section from Execessories is a cultural critique, yet many of the people who are excited about this are getting off on it purely as the thing that it is trying to critique without actually experiencing it as critique. That was frustrating and confusing for me. Am I actually further replicating the phenomena that I am interested in having a discussion about and questioning? By doing it, am I further solidifying this thing that I think is a problematic manner of feeling?

Jmy: Okay, here is a pre-made question: Do you believe that in a lifetime of making art, you are making the same work over and over again? You mentioned in an interview in Chicago, a larger trajectory, making work in relation to a last project’s microfailures. What is your larger trajectory and can you give specific examples of your microfailures?

John: I don’t think that each piece is the same piece. The dance world is very interesting to me. The visual art world is set up in a certain way to encourage an artist to establish a certain field of investigation and then to not necessarily change that, traditionally. A lot of that has to do with marketing. We were having a conversation earlier about people encouraging you to define your style of investigation and don’t change that, because it will become a thing that will sell.

Jmy: Because people recognize what they are seeing and feeling, and are comfortable in the familiar.

John: They recognized it and they know, oh, that is a John Jasperse piece or that is a duhduhduh piece. That functions in visual art in part because there is an object that people can buy, that can appreciate in value. Consistency assists all of that to move forward. In dance, you have a performance. More in dance, you have a tradition of the artist having to reinvent themselves and any kind of repetition is viewed as more of a negative rather than a positive thing. There is the expectation of artists having to completely reinvent themselves.

Jmy: While staying somewhat true to themselves?

John: That is where it is tricky. I feel like I have internalized a lot of that value system. It verges on self-loathing, this desire to erase who you were to try and become this other thing. I am interested in going somewhere that I have not already been. There is no security, there is no substantial financial remuneration. Fame is the most ridiculous concept to be consumed with in this field because even when you become “famous,” you are still totally obscure. It seems oxymoronic. One of the things that we have that is quite strong is that sense of being free. We are not burdened by these things that constrain us because my work is never going to have commercial value. Because of that, I am not constrained by trying to preserve the value of the product in a commercial field. Because the product never had any value in that regard anyway. So to me, that is a liberty and freedom to try things that I don’t know how to do.

Jmy: Like what?

photo: Maria Anguera de Sojo

John: Just Two Dancers is a perfect example. Up until that point, I had made work for a frontal audience. It was not so much about proscenium and the separation of the proscenium frame, but it nonetheless was ‘people sit over here and we watch a thing that happens over there.’ There was a one directional thing happening. So much of what I knew how to do was about designing architecture in space knowing that everybody, yes, has a slightly different perspective on it from where they are viewing but everyone more or less is seeing an event-object from a particular viewpoint. I created Just Two Dancers, where not only are they sitting in completely different orientations, but I am giving them an individual mirror to compose their own architectural vision of this thing. I am completely out of control. I have taken the one thing I know how to do and not only obliterated the capacity to control it, but I have given over this enormous power in that regard to each individual audience member. I was forced to approach making a performance in a different kind of way. How am I going to define it using a different set of tools because if I try to define it with those tools, it will fail because I can’t define it for the people who are experiencing it. That is a painful process of tying my hands behind my back and pushing myself off of the diving board.

Jmy: I think you like to tie your hands behind your back, didn’t you do that to yourself in Excessories?

John: I complain about it and I experience pain and extreme discomfort and yet I keep doing it.

Jmy: Is your larger trajectory more in terms of a structural relation to dance-making?

John: I am trying to pull the form somewhere it has not already been. I am also aware that the ways I have gone about doing that, to certain populations, seem extremely conservative in that I am making evening-length shows largely for established performance venues and moving them around from one place to another, touring, using the infrastructure of a not-for-profit corporation.

Jmy: So are you like Obama in that you prefer to move down the mainline?

John: I don’t know if I am like Obama. I didn’t set out and say, I’m going to build a non-profit corporation and I’m going to become a dance company. Some of those things just happened. Quickly, I realized that the interesting work is not happening in those structures. It is happening largely in the context of independent choreographers or independent artists working with people. Historically, I am defacto moving into a historical position. Some of that has to do with age and some of it has to do with the aging of the aesthetic questions that formed the foundation of my early work.

Jmy: What is your larger trajectory?

John: The larger trajectory has to do with wanting to experience some kind of discovery. Because of the burden and the wealth of history, personal history – as that increases, the discovery narrows, where that field is going to go. I don’t have the same mobility that I had when I was twenty. I’m not talking about my body.

Jmy: You have baggage.

John: I have all this work that got created. There is a struggle to balance that. I could easily walk away from it all and say that I am not going to do anything like that again. I will only make performative actions that happen in men’s rooms and bus stations. It could happen, but there are good reasons to not throw all of it away. I have to have a sense of clarity about it. I don’t have that. I continue to be interested in many things within my investigation. Why run away from that? I think it gets back to a question of fashion. Some of my investigation is old-fashioned. It will become more and more old-fashioned as time goes on. That is not a good reason to abandon it.

Jmy: What are you interested in right now?

John: Some of that is defined by what I am not interested in. There is an overwhelming importance of personal identity in our world and people feeling like they need to be witnessed and heard.

Jmy: Like ego?

John: Ego. The whole obsession with reality television and other similar phenomenon all stem from people wanting to be witnessed and not being erased by the social culture. There is so much that pushes to erase the individual. It seems natural that the artist would be engaged in trying to retain a sense of individuality into a cultural space. Frankly, I am more and more disturbed by this. I am not the child having the temper tantrum because I am not being paid attention to. I become more interested in a space where the question is moved away from that into a broader notion of what is out there in the world.

Jmy: Is it a space away from attention?

John: Work that is about identity, fashion, fame, all of these phenomenon. The focus seems to go back to the artist. I am more interested in work where the artist is working to create a space that exists independent of them. It is not about the erasure of the artist, but the artist has an identity construct that is sufficiently stable that they don’t need their entire body of work to support them.

Jmy: Is it an artist that doesn’t have an individual identity?

John: Maybe, but I don’t think that is what I am talking about. I started to get interested in this notion of aesthetics: aesthetic experience starting where logical language breakdowns, where language hits against a wall and where there is something that it can’t go beyond. The thing that emerges on the other side of it is art.

Jmy: What do you mean by logical language?

John: So many people try to understand art. Art is fundamentally about an expression that can’t be understood in those square and Cartesian terms. Poetry exists when the limits of the language are traversed by using language. Nonetheless, the subject of what is going on is beyond.

Jmy: Joseph Campbell wrote about the dark forest of original experience, that place of not knowing, unfamiliar. He taught at Sarah Lawrence.

John: I didn’t study with him when he was there. Confusion is a deep component of that. Confusion, not as striving or struggling towards resolving that confusion, but existing within the dark forest of not knowing. There is a relationship back to the divine. I know that sounds a bit creepy. Once you start talking about the sacred and art together, you get into some dangerous territory because of the associations that people have.

Jmy: There has been a lot of talk about the sacred and art-making. There is a blog on the Guggenheim website about that with different artists, professors, historians, many different arguments. The thing that comes up in that blog is beauty. What is beauty? What is the value of beauty? People seem fine to disagree about religion on this blog, it’s notions of beauty that rile.

John: One thing emerges when there is enough space for the ego to be slightly removed from the equation. When the ego is present, it is difficult for the other phenomena to occur. I am someone who has dealt with issues of depression for years. That is stamped all over my work. I recognize that as a human being, I will always be dealing with those issues and problems. I don’t think it will ever escape me. It is like having diabetes. I may always have diabetes but that doesn’t mean my life has to be governed by that. What is important is that I manage that issue. I would like to make a work where that was not a part of it. I have tried at times to do with that. With Madison, I was trying to ask: Can we make a work where there is a vibrant discussion about how people co-exist in the space that is not about describing a relationship of power? How can we describe social interaction in a way that is beyond that? Fort Blossom didn’t feel like a sad piece, but many of the other ones it creeps in to.

photo: Alex Escalante

Jmy: You are making it. You can’t be distanced from it even if you try. What is your relationship to objects in relation to humans with personalities? How do you work with other people involved in a project?

John: Objects have come in as things. Nikolais dealt with objects like geometries or Dada used them – the cube, the line, the plane. There is a desire to bring in things but the choices of things were to stripped those things of any kind of associative value. I am much more interested in bringing in things with baggage, with association. A book is a book. It is not a cube or rectangular volume. The first layer of working with objects is their association. They are also there as things to relate to and interact with. They don’t respond in a way that a human does. There is a discourse between the animate and the inanimate.

Jmy: Throughout your work, you always have objects, never just humans.

John: I am interested in the ways in which the objects resemble or stand in for or don’t resemble human beings

Jmy: In your new piece (Truth, Revised Histories, Wishful Thinking and Flat Out Lies), you have fewer objects.

photo: Cameron Wittig courtesy of the Walker Art Center ©2010

John: Very few props. The balls and doilies, but those are more of a costume than anything else. First, there was a discussion about lace. We got into black and white. Lace became interesting because it is related to filigree and the Baroque. Anything that was about adding flourish to movement, that would give it value. So nuance moves the thing up on the value scale; lack of nuance pushes it down. That was related to beautiful and ugly and how we constitute those things. This then related to value systems that associate Baroque to bling. Different kinds of cultures going back to the same thing and it seemed to me, isn’t what we care about what’s real? There is an interrelationship between what we care about and truth and lie and how we constitute that. So that brought us to lace. Lace was also for me related to it being not solid, you can see through it. It’s white or its black, but it is simultaneously the voids in the white and the black. With the doilies, we got to thinking about camouflage. Then we were thinking about burkas as human camouflage, the erasure of the human being. I saw this amazing photograph, it was a guy taking a family portrait. There were ten women all in burkas and he is taking a tourist photo of them. The irony that: he is making a document of this people who have been made invisible by the garment that they are wearing. Hussein Chalayan was doing all of this stuff that was very much burka-esque in terms of these hats with sunglasses on them that totally covered the face. There is a representation of the eyes but they cannot see. That threads through his work a lot in terms of fashion, the incorporation of the burka. The doilies had this Christian veil reference. At the same time, it felt like Leigh Bowery style-ized club thing, which at the same time reminded me of Fat Albert. There were a lot of different associations that all fused into one thing, and I felt they were quite beautiful.

Jmy: They were beautiful with the draping. So, your relationship to humans with personalities…?

John: I like people. Honestly, as much as I am a person who is socially dysfunctional and anti-social, one of the things that has always attracted me to dance making is that it is a fundamentally social art-making process. You have to deal with other people, unless you are going to sit and make solos, which I can’t think of anything that would be more tortuous.

Jmy: MAK and I talk about that. She will sit down and make a drawing or be at her studio all day with herself and what she is doing and how it is so different from being in rehearsal with a bunch of people. It is such a different thing. It is a socially functioning (or non) art-making process.

John: I studied classical piano. The thing that I hated as a kid was those hours and hours of practicing by myself. I wouldn’t even do it because I hated it so much. For me, the real things that push to the other side, where I make a discovery, ninety percent of the time they come from a space of social interaction where I am engaged with someone else. Whatever it is that my very full, constantly thinking brain can be pushed slightly for a brief moment out of the way so that I can get to something beyond it. What I can’t escape in a room by myself is my brain. The complexity of all that thought process invades and there is nothing to avert my attention from that. In many ways, at a basic and cynical level, I would say that that is one of the big things that draws me to dance. It is that process of working with people. Sometimes it can be really challenging, trying to figure out what I am supposed to be for them. Recently, I have been trying to allow people to be unhappy in the process. Not that I am trying to create a system or situation that would make anyone unhappy…

Jmy: What is it about letting people be unhappy in the process? You don’t worry about them so much?

John: So much of the time, I feel like I want to fix it and really uncomfortable in making a choice that makes someone else unhappy. In the end, so much of the time, you can’t fix it anyway.

Jmy: Did you grow up in the Midwest?

John: No, east coast, suburban Washington DC, in Maryland. I deeply believe in respecting the people and not abusing them. That is very important to me in my process. Accepting that this decision might be a little uncomfortable but this is what the work needs. To just say that this is what needs to happen in the lightest, most generous touch way, but also deciding what we need to do. It helps people because so much of the time, I say, what do you think? At some point, they say, “what do you think?” That is what they really need. Once it is inside of that, they know that is what John thinks and that is what we are doing. How do I as a dancer fit into that scheme of things? John is defining, so I can have a way of responding to it.

Jmy: It can be challenging as a dancer to do what you think the choreographer wants you to do, but then the choreographer is not telling you what they want you to do. That is problematic.

John: There is a weird dynamic where I feel I want it to be this utopian democracy and realizing that some of what is required is leadership.

Jmy: Almost a belief system.

John: I have to be comfortable with people disagreeing with me and saying that is great that you disagree but that is not what we are doing right now. You would like Fort Blossom. It is a beautiful piece, if I must say so myself.

photo: Maria Anguera de Sojo

Jmy: I like beauty. There is a problem at times with beauty in the dance community, wanting the anti-aesthetic. But I don’t think there is anything wrong with striving for beauty, whatever that may be. How do you make movement these days? What are you interested in about the body? What do you put on stage? What is the meaning of what you put on stage especially in relation to gender and gender-specific costuming?

John: The movement invention has been deeply drilled. I try and make movement that is like other things. I have an idea of what it is going to be like. In this work, when we were thinking about how movement aesthetics would project value systems, about what is beautiful and what is not, I was thinking about Bill Forsythe’s work of a certain era.

Jmy: Which era?

John: Late 80s, early 90s. The first half (of Truth), all the neo-classical stuff. We looked at these different pieces where there is a really hyper extended and everything is really ex-ex-extreme. For instance, I am trying to do that. I have a hard time because I try and make things up. I want to access this kind of thing, then I try and make something up. It looks like me. My body has its own logic and whatnot, and those things get imprinted into the movement. In this piece, I began a residency at Jacob’s Pillow and I was in the car driving up. I had been thinking about this, not talking to anyone, but thinking that we really needed to deal with film because people are so conscious of the history of film. Here is this thing that is ultimately fake, but it is more a part of our real, shared…

Jmy: It is a representation. Film is not always fake.

John: Not always, but much of it is about the creation of something even if it is naturalistic. In a certain era, there is a lot of stuff that is fabricated. I wanted to deal with that. It is experience that is not real in the first place that is supposed to be naturalistic, but is hyper-natural. It is just projected light, and yet it imprints our cultural consciousness. We have this shared experience of this thing that didn’t happen to any of us but is nonetheless imprinting us. It was very different when there was no visual media.

Jmy: There was always visual media – statues…

John: But not in the same way. They were not disseminated in the same kind of way. Every person on the planet has a relationship to an image of Madonna.

Jmy: Genis Khan, Cleopatra…

John: No one knew what Cleopatra looked like.

Jmy: She certainly projected her image. People thought she was beautiful. They had an idea of what she looked like. Cleopatra was the beauty of the land because there were busts of her all over the place, which are representations. I do agree that film is unique. It is a young art form and there is a relationship of film to dance, because there is this movement. I don’t know anyone who has ever figured out how to marry the two in a very harmonious relationship though, both forms borrow from each other.

John: In this piece when I started to do that, we pulled stuff directly, quotations from movement that I would never have been able to make up. I would not have been nearly as successful at capturing something.

Jmy: So you copied something?

John: We learned material, then we learned certain kinds of gestural things that then became rhythmic things that were then translated into other things. We started from source material that was other than my own body, on purpose. I wanted to avoid the artifacts of my own body logic being imprinted all over the piece. In this instance, I don’t care about that. In the last ten minutes of the piece, it was really about letting my own body logic to be imprinted all over the material. All of those moves I made with the exception of some movement that had evolved by moving onto the other dancers’ body.

Jmy: What was your interest in film again? Maybe you already told me–I can’t remember.

John: The quintessential discussion of what is real and fake. In the process of thinking about those things in relation to cultural production, it felt like film was at the center of all of those questions. When I focused on this particular style of film, the kind no one makes anymore, where it is like a play that is filmed.

photo: Cameron Wittig courtesy of the Walker Art Center ©2010

Jmy: You are talking about Who is Afraid of Virgina Woolf? I asked MAK about the film because I have never seen it and she said it completely changed how films were made. As the viewer, you didn’t have to leave the room. All of a sudden you could make this very dramatic film that was only about the relationships between characters, much like a play.

John: That film is very much like a play–the style of how it is done, with the exception of the scene in the bar that is not in the original play that he inserts.

Jmy: You can frame things in a way that you can’t do in theater. Film allows details and close-ups.

John: You only get that one perspective. Someone can move downstage or upstage but the scaling of what you can do is so limited in comparison to film.

Jmy: In the second half of Truth, you were playing with timing of movement of live bodies.

John: We used to rehearse that fake fight with a Julio Iglesias song, which has one of these slow motion fight scenes in the ring. Then we looked at Chinese music videos with slow motion Kung-Fu. All of this intense action that is rendered more aestheticized and visceral because it is in slow motion.

Jmy: So that is what you put on stage. Let’s move to gender and gender specific costuming in Truth.

John: Keith Hennessey wrote his dissertation. He wanted to consult with me because he felt I was an artist that had been invested in an asexual construction. My aesthetic identity as based on an asexuality, which I thought was a strange and funny way of putting it. There is a certain generation of a postmodernism that was attractive to me because I seemed to skirt around the issues of sexuality.

Jmy: What are you referring to?

John: A certain generation of release work.

Jmy: Like the pajama pants era? Like Stephen Petronio or David Dorfman?

John: It is a certain generation of Trisha’s work. I would not have thought that I was connected to that in the terms that Keith used. That was his language, not mine. I feel like it is an ascetic, monastic aesthetics, a pretension that was more pure. No one would have used that language or thought in those terms, but I think these ideas are behind it. All of these gender identities are just constructs.

Jmy: How are you thinking about it in terms of this piece?

John: I am interested in the constructs, examining them as constructions.

Jmy: So you are representing the constructions? Where is the critical commentary in that?

John: Excellent question. I am not sure I know what the answer is. I think the commentary comes in when you inflate it and when you pull the plug and how that moves back and forth. I don’t think they stay totally static. The women have push-up bras on in the second half and white dresses. They have these bras on for a reason. Are you just reaffirming the thing? When we have the pony song, are we doing the white snake video?

Jmy: I wonder about that with this piece. I do think that there is commentary that you are making that is behind everything. But, the picture that I was left with was more of a representation.

John: That is true. You have that first opening thing, then the bling thing, but you are also on a runaway that looks like your grandmother’s fabric print. Could that be not more black music with what I consider to be white dancing?

Jmy: The person to the left of me made that comment. During the naked part, the person to the right of me couldn’t watch it. A twenty something guy couldn’t look at the stage. I didn’t ask him. I was confused by this piece. I have been confused watching dance lately. I don’t know how much of it is personal and how much of it is what I am seeing. I was confused by the representations in relation to critical commentary and by how the actual movement fits into the dance piece. You don’t have a history sheet of where the movement is coming from. Audiences in general don’t have a history with modern dance. They may not have seen Forsythe.

John: Some people do. That is a longer conversation. There is a demographic of the audience who are going to listen to Rick Ross and layer pony and perceive the passage of time. They are going to see Pony as old school rap from the early ‘90s and Rick Ross as 2007. For a while, we rehearsed it with Baroque music. The whole construct of what to do with that material did not come from me. The aesthetics of it are different, but the construction of the music is similar. He uses cannon in a similar way. The sound is fancified in a similar way to the constructions in this hyper-white Baroque. The relationship between African-American music, bling, and Baroque seemed this thin. The decorative element is cancerous in terms of its proliferation. Rocco has form, but the decorative form is like an overgrown garden with a hidden structure underneath. Sparkle and fog were about the same thing, adding all of this frill around a basic construction. The style of the frill is radically different, but it is still frilly. They are two different ways of adding froth.

Jmy: Playing with function and decoration.

John: That is how I got to the ascetic aesthetics and that being more real. Is it more real for people to do a walking pattern in flat jeans and a tee shirt? It is just constructing another thing that is no more real or artificial. I was interested in not being afraid of the gendered constructions. Sexuality and the construction of desire and how gender fits into that seemed to be central to all of these questions.

Jmy: You are playing with representations, which are embedded in the image.

John: I am not answering the question now because I am not answering the question in the show either.

Jmy: You don’t like to answer the questions specifically. Sometimes you do.

John: This is a big question for me about the show, putting these things out there. Joe Levassuer (Lighting Designer) absolutely hates the doily section of the show, what we call quiet time. Other people thought it was exquisite. This individual can invest in that thing but not this and vice versa with someone else.

Jmy: You are interested in those crossovers.

John: There was a moment in rehearsal before we left for touring when I remember not being able to tell whether this is ironic. That was fascinating to me and I liked that.

Jmy: I did wonder about that, the irony, where it was located, if it was there.

John: It made me really uncomfortable because I realized I made a strip number in a direct and uncomplicated way. When it is happening, it becomes more the thing it is without resisting it. It felt less protected.

Jmy: You also do like being in an uncomfortable place with your hands tied around your back.

John: Yeah. I find it fascinating. Maybe I am wrong.

Jmy: As you are getting older and your dancers are getting younger, your role in your work increasingly reminds me of the wizard in The Wizard of Oz. I have something to read about the wizard: “Every time the wizard appears in a different form. Once as a giant head, once as a beautiful fairy, once as a ball of fire, and once as a horrible monster. Eventually it is revealed that Oz is actually none of these things but actually a kind, ordinary man from Omaha, Nebraska who has been using a lot of elaborate magic tricks and props to make himself seem great and powerful. Working as a magician for the circus, he wrote Oz on the side of his hot air balloon for promotional purposes. One day, his balloon sailed into the land of Oz and he found himself worshiped as a great sorcerer. As Oz had no leadership at the time, he became supreme ruler of the kingdom and did his best to sustain the myth.” I was thinking about this in relationship to institutions and the trappings of having baggage.

John: As I go on making stuff, I keep thinking about how I want to understand what it is that I am trying to do. That is the broad sense of why do I want cultural exchange. Why do I go in front of people, show them this thing, they pay money, then they leave. What is that? The boundary between the artist and the politician is not so wide as one might think. Are we just selling a bill of goods just like a politician does? We are trying to convince people that this is beautiful just like Obama is trying to say this is the right thing to do. Is this a good thing to be doing? I think it is, although it’s complicated. You can go wrong pretty easily. I understand my role in relation to the piece, but I also know that I am performing my own erasure. Why do I want to perform my own erasure? This is tricky, just as a person, a human being. I am interested in the vulnerability of failure as a potential source of material and not just about power or greatness. There is some level of an ego construct that must be in function that believes that what I have to say is sufficiently important that entire structures should be put in place and maintained so I can continue to do this silly thing called making dances. It doesn’t feed anyone. Nobody can live in a house that was built. It is important to keep asking those kind of questions. When you talk about the conflict of the artist creating this inflated world and the wizard, it gets to this question about the ego in performance and its relationship to trying to undermine the ego construct. Someone came the other day and said, I am not interested in watching you act like a buffoon. The question is not so much am I a buffoon, but are we all, at least periodically.

Jmy: We will end there.

photo: Sylvio Dittrich©2009

Here’s another verbal exchange from Sidewinder, this time between Bay Area-based Ray Chung and New York City-based John Jasperse. Sidewinder was the name of Movement Research’s most recent Fall Festival, curated with the assistance of Jennifer Monson and Zeena Parkins. During it, some in-town artists sat with the out-of-town artists to talk about each others work. The conversations were loosely framed around the theme of improvisation. This conversation is about 45 minutes long, and covers topics like the relevance of an audience being in the known about a performance being improvisational, Contact Improvisation as a tool and whether there is a generational stamp on that technique, and the relevance of place and cultural context in the current lives of dance and dance improvisation in different areas of the U.S., Europe and other places. Enjoy.

The Center for Performance Research (CPR) is 4000 square foot arts facility in Greenpoint Brooklyn, co-founded by Jonah Bokaer/Chez Bushwick, Inc. and John Jasperse/Thin Man Dance, Inc. CPR strives to address the critical need for space designated towards artist research and development in contemporary dance, performance and related forms. Recently Sarah Maxfield, who has worked on capital projects for Lincoln Center and Danspace Project, spoke with Jasperse about the development of CPR and its planned programming.

Sarah Maxfield: What led you to create CPR?

John Jasperse: I had a studio in a loft in Bushwick that I moved into in 1991. I kept that loft for 14 years, and various projects happened, people rehearsed there, it was an incredible resource for my work and for many other people. It became clear to me how important that resource had been and how it allowed me to basically experiment with different kinds of ideas about space and architecture and design in a way that would have been completely impossible had I been rehearsing by the hour. It was a kind of space that doesn’t really exist in New York anymore. So when I lost it, I began the process of exploring what it might be to buy something. From the beginning I was committed not only to how this could serve my own needs as an artist, but how I might be able to create some kind of context of permanence. [Having experienced] the classic oxymoronic thing where the artist gets displaced by the change that they’ve actually brought, I felt that I needed a sense of permanence and actual ownership.

The developer of 361 Manhattan Ave sent a proposal to a lot of different organizations. That began the discussion, and I pursued that relationship with the developer for about a year before it became clear that it wasn’t really tenable as a project solely of Thin Man Dance. I began to look for potential partners, and we brought on Chez Bushwick.

The biggest thing about it is the sense that if something isn’t done the working artist is just going to be forced out of New York City, particularly in forms like performance and dance where there is a need for space and time. Those two things cost money that has now become prohibitive for many people. It’s so challenging to find the space to actually develop the work. If we don’t find a way of supporting that in this community, that’s ultimately going to change the fabric of art-making happening here.

Sarah: Even performance venues that are mostly focused on presented product are talking about this need. It’s prevalent – the need for research and development. There’s a general clamor that the quality of the work is suffering from too much focus on product.

John: I’m actually interested in a way of thinking about how to bring other people into process. I’m not just saying as artists – I’m talking about a community. I think there is a lot of confusion and lack of literacy in the public [about contemporary dance and performance]. One of the things we’re trying to figure out now with CPR is how to use that – how to make the situation actually a win-win.

Sarah: I understand that you are conducting a study focused on community involvement. Can you talk more about that?

John: It’s important to make [CPR] a space for research and development and make community outreach that is symbiotic with the central mission, not in competition with it. This is complex because CPR is in Williamsburg, and Williamsburg is a socially and ethnically complicated neighborhood. There are really long-standing communities that in some cases view the artist as the displacer of those communities. It’s a complicated thing, especially that we’re in a condominium. We’re very committed to creating a feeling that we’re not trying to ignore the complexity of those issues. We’re trying to bring that complexity in.

Sarah: Do you have a sense yet of how you might do that, or is it just a desire at this point?

John: That’s complicated because it’s a long-term process. One of the things that has to be unfortunately really clear on the front end is money. We’re in a very tight situation. We [are strategizing] what we can do on the front end so that we don’t have this fantastic program and in six months the thing is dead. We’re going to avoid that, and one of the ways to avoid that is to be really focused on how we’re going to make this project stable in its first two years of operation. A lot of people who are going to work [at CPR] are going to have to rent the space. We would like eventually to move more into a curatorial process, but we need to get through this first stage.

Sarah: In this first phase of two years or so, are you planning to curate the rentals, or will it just be a case of booking whoever comes along with the cash?

John: I think it’s a little bit of both because obviously we’re seeking out people who have the resources, but who also fit. There may be lots of people who we’d love to do something with that we can’t right now. It doesn’t mean we’re not thinking about them, and it doesn’t mean also that those people wouldn’t be rehearsing there on an hourly basis. It’s difficult to say definitively how it’s all going to pan out that this point.

Sarah: I want to go back to what you said before about the importance of owning the space so as not to be constantly displaced. On your website you describe CPR as a “dynamic new model for sustainable arts infrastructure.” Is that related to the ownership concept, or is there more to that?

John: There’s a huge history of artists getting together and making do with the situation at hand; there’s a lot we can learn from that. I think one of the things that we’re excited about are environmental initiatives. The building itself is seeking LEED certification. It’s the first mixed-use building of its size in Brooklyn to [do that.] I think when we’re talking about environmental responsibility and trying to combine that with economic sustainability, that’s slightly different than other models out there.

Sarah: Can you talk a little more about working with a developer? It seems that artists are being approached by developers seeming to offer a fantastic gift of space, but with significant strings attached, though that era may be over in light of the recent economic downturn. In any case, what was your experience on this project?

John: A friend of mine once said that a good deal is a deal where everybody thinks it’s a good deal. Here’s an example of a commercial developer trying to make some money for investors and also trying to address some larger need and identifying a product that has an appeal to a certain market. We become part of the product, and I’m ok about that. But, we’ve experienced frustrations, and I fought really hard to get the best version of this space. There are some battles that I’ve won, and there are some that I’ve lost. Even in the moments where there has been a lot of conflict, there has been nonetheless a feeling for me that the developer has been really behind the project and wants to see it succeed. That’s really exceptional because it’s not an easy thing to maintain and has become increasingly difficult, given that the market this project started out with is not the market that we’re in now. [The developer’s] capacity to make money has diminished dramatically. That puts him in a very challenging position to continue to maintain the commitment and support.

Sarah: While working with the developer to realize the space, what were your priorities? What was achieved, and what had to be let go?

John: We got the ceiling as high as we could; that was a big uphill battle. It’s not perfect, but I also was not interested in a space with a dramatically beautiful high ceiling that would require an enormous amount of money to heat. So we were trying to balance those things. We asked ourselves, “How do you make a space that is ultimately very good in terms of working conditions, but where you’re making some choices that make it possible to actually run the space?”

Sarah: I’m curious to hear more about the choices you made related to flexibility.

John: Well flexibility has to do with cost and labor. I mean, you can move everything around, but how much does it cost to really do that? The lighting is a perfect example. We [have a bid in] for the first fully-LED facility in the country. Now, LED does some great things – it uses less than a quarter of the electricity of a conventional setup, which is a big plus for operating costs. It’s a very specific kind of light. It has enormous capacity in terms of color; it doesn’t have any expendables, so you don’t have to use gels, and you don’t have lights that burn out. It’s a soft light; you can’t get a really sharp light. So, me, being somebody who spends an enormous amount of energy thinking about light, I went through all of this trepidation of getting this thing. It will always be really great, but it’s going to be in a way, specific.

So, there are certain things like that where I feel like we tried to enable things without getting too grandiose and having this fabulous thing that nobody could ever afford to use. [We’ve installed] bleachers; they’re not the most comfortable seating in the world, but they’re super-light. Maybe this isn’t the perfect thing, but for somebody experimenting who wants to move the audience, two people could [move the audience seating] in four minutes. That’s what I think is really key: trying to set it up in a way that it becomes like a laboratory.

Sarah: To what extent do you plan to use that laboratory for your own development, and to what extent is the space available to other artists?

John: Included in the whole business plan is a commitment to 600 hours of activity for us, and we pay to use those 600 hours. So it guarantees income for CPR at a certain level, but it also guarantees to us a space that we can work in. Otherwise, I don’t think it would be possible to put in as much energy as we have. That still leaves over 4,000 hours of activity for others. I think it’s really exciting that organizations are trying to figure out ways to use resources that are there. That’s why I’m doing CPR. Some people think it’s a little bit crazy to be putting that much energy in, and it is just the beginning. The last four years have been huge. I feel like I care about my work quite a lot, and I feel like I’ve made some really exciting and interesting work, and I’m excited about what I’m working on right now. But I also feel like the world’s a big place, and I feel like I’m interested in a kind of role that’s bigger than that and seeing how I can be a part of something that isn’t just about meeting my own needs.

Do I want to become a producer or a curator or a programmer? Absolutley not. I’ve no interest in that whatsoever. But hopefully, putting forth this thing can create possibilities. And even when I decide I don’t want to do this anymore, there’ll be something left. For some people, the hourly rehearsal model really works fine. If they’re not working with any kind of objects, if they’re really only working in movement, it’s not such an onerous model. It’s the people that begin to think about how they are dealing with space and design and objects even in the simplest way that it can drive you to insanity. You’re just schlepping shit all day. If there’s anything I can do to create the slightest bit of a resource to buffer that, it changes the way people think. I think people don’t think about [working with objects], not because they don’t want to, but because they can’t. In my touring, people are like, “Oh, well New York work has no sophistication in relationship to scenography or production.” I’m not interested in glitz, but I do feel like there is some truth in that people don’t really have time to think about it. That has to do with the process in which people are forced to work, or the circumstances.

Without the artistic community engaged in [CPR], it’s just a big empty box. What I think is interesting about this project is also that it’s asking for engagement. It’s going to rely on the community to enliven its content. It’s going to rely on the community to continue to support it in an economic time that is not going to look so easy. I think together it can be something really exciting. Our responsibility as directors of this organization is to continue to make sure that [CPR] is responsive to the needs of that community. I’m interested in that sense of how the space becomes something that’s really useful to people in that community, so that they can take it somewhere. You have to put effort into engagement. We all do.

Sarah: There’s an opportunity in that.

John: A strange one. Not your typical notion of an opportunity, but nonetheless an opportunity – for all of us to somehow begin to think beyond our own myopia and ask, “What is it that I can do that’s going to help the whole of which I am a part?”