Interview Date: November 17, 2011

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Milka Djordjevich: How and why did you started making work and what that process was like?

Laura Arrington: I wanted to make work in school and was making work in school. I went to New York and stopped making work and kind of stopped dancing all together. I moved out here [San Francisco] with a former partner and fell back into it because it’s a lot easier here than in other places, and I just kept doing it.

Milka Djordjevich: When you started making work again, what were some of the ideas or motivations about wanting to make work? And what kind of work? Did it have any relationship to what you had done in school?

Laura Arrington: I was thinking about that a lot. Why making things has been my thing all my life. All of the times I have reinvested in making it, it’s been quite simple and as silly as it sounds, just about imagination or a playfulness or something. I came out to California and started doing it again just because everything wasn’t as conditional as it was in New York. There are a lot of resources and an ease to making things here. I got really into it again.

Milka Djordjevich: You said, “the ease to making work here.” Can you talk about what that ease is? And I’m curious about how a certain environment, or even the city itself, conditions and frames how someone makes work? Even if it’s just the logistical day-to-day things.

Laura Arrington: When I first got out here, it was really different. The Garage was where I started making things and there wasn’t the amount of interest in making shows there as there is now. So, space was readily available. And there was no pressure because there was no audience. It was just literally: you get the key, you show up, you work on some shit, and maybe twenty people are there, at most, and then you’re done. So that felt like the perfect kind of conditions for me. And things have since changed a little bit. There’s a little more identity around the performance community and maybe it’s not as relaxed as it was when I first got here. But, that’s what was really nice about making work because I started to meet people who were making work under the same conditions, like Phillip Huang and Jesse Hewit. That sense of us being able to relax into it is something that is really different.

Photo by Robbie Sweeny

Milka Djordjevich: Or having the space for failure?

Laura Arrington: Yeah. It just didn’t matter. It was really just me and I didn’t know anybody. I knew one friend of mine who had moved out to the Bay from New York as well, then a girl I went to college with and a girl I just met in a dance class. There was no pressure on any of it. You know, the Bay doesn’t have the same identity as other places, especially New York. There’s not that pressure of you’re never going to “make it” or whatever that means.

Milka Djordjevich: Well, what does that mean anywhere [laughs]?

Laura Arrington: Totally. But I think people think that.

Milka Djordjevich: Yeah, I’m surprised that there are people who feel that. But, ultimately, when you try to describe those who “make it” to people outside of whatever small community these people work in, are they really making it? We’re not really working in the same commercial models.

Laura Arrington: I think that’s the thing. Even with that filter, I didn’t have to engage with that at all when I came out here. It almost felt like being a little kid again and putting on shows for your friends. That’s what’s really interesting too. You can capitalize on that. Like, the Home Theater Festival out here has now become this whole other thing, but started off as absolutely that. Just play around in your bedroom and make a show. That’s become the identity of the festival and it’s capitalizing on that approach and turning that into an aesthetic and an artistic statement.

Milka Djordjevich: It’s basically acknowledging what people already do and making it a valid thing as opposed to acting like it’s some how less valid because it isn’t part of an institution or doesn’t have the same sort of production values. That’s how people are working anyways and the facade of production value is totally nonexistent. In working that way, I am assuming that things have shifted for you now? You have shown your work more, probably have been given more support and have worked with some institutions?

Laura Arrington: Yeah. Right before the biggest show I’ve ever done – in terms of all of the sort of administrative work – the conditions for making work really, really shifted. I still feel really connected to the original impetus for making stuff. But, it does always shift things and it does change the way that things have to happen. Even the mediation that happens in the process. Right now, I got grant support for the show, but it’s not as mediated as other shows – I have a lot of freedom. But, I have worked with institutions and felt like, “That’s something different.” Specifically, what happened with SQUART and also a Counterpulse residency I had. So, I feel like right now I am just trying to wrestle with why I am actually making work, what I am making it for, and what is my relationship to releasing it, letting it be seen. I don’t feel like I know any of that right now. But, I think those are the questions you have to start asking yourself as I’ve started to have more people involved, more interest and large-scale shows. But, also realizing how detrimental that can be to getting work done.

SQUART’s a really great example because it was one of those things that was just an idea and we did it and I kept doing it. It was all of the circumstances around it that kept changing, but SQUART stayed the same.

Milka Djordjevich: Can you describe SQUART?

Laura Arrington: SQUART is Spontaneous Queer Art. It’s a show I started a year and a half ago that happens a couple times a year. Usually, a group of about forty artists show up and in a compressed period of time make something. It’s usually about two hours but we have done one in a twenty-four hour period of time. It’s literally the same container: It’s a bunch of strangers, a couple requirements, a small amount of time, and then a show. It was really interesting watching SQUART shift from place to place and seeing how different each place that SQUART existed in, how it was received, even noticing that sense of mediation. It started off at The Garage, and it went to the Lab, and SoMA Arts, and it went to Headlands. At the Garage, nobody gave a shit about it. But then at Headlands, it was this amazing experience with all these incredible people who were involved, but there was a lot of justification that had to happen: why should this exist? What are you doing this for? And, so even those filters, having to deal with those questions, and even having those conversations, I thought, “Oh, this is really different.” It also shifted the way you think about things. Like if you’re constantly having to justify the existence of something or explain why it matters or what’s relevant about it. Or, convince someone to show up to it. It’s kind of impactful in terms of how you do things.

Milka Djordjevich: It also seems with SQUART, there’s probably this element of the ownership being of the community and people have a hand in its existence and what it is. And as it happens, as people have witnessed it, as people have expectations and as people are doing it, more becomes invested which then, probably, complicates it because them emerge differing opinions about what it is.

But I wonder then, in relationship to making work, I know you said that you still have many questions about the expectations of making work in this community. But do you find yourself starting a work and thinking about the ideas that are going to be a part of it? And how to make choices with who you’ve worked with and stuff? Is there this element of the voice of the community? Or certain people that start to guide you? Or do you fight against your community? Because, I have been thinking a lot about this – both making work in New York and starting to make work here. I am starting to really embrace the fact that when I make work that is going to be shown in New York, even though I am trying to think more broadly about it, I still know where it’s going to happen, who the people are, who are, more or less, going to come to it. And, I come here, and realize, oh, it’s a different situation. And, then I am starting to re-question what it is that I do.

Photo courtesy of Laura Arrington

Laura Arrington: Yeah, it’s that thing about how things are received and how even the circumstances around how they’re made, impacts the work. I am definitely thinking about that a lot, especially if I am thinking about coming to New York. I think that’s one of the things that’s interesting about San Francisco. It’s a small community and it is a community where there is a premium placed on collectives and the community here. That can take you in a lot of different directions. For me, right now, I am really trying to move away from that. I do recognize how the smallness of the community can really impact what you’re making. So, realizing on some level there is a group of people that I know will be there and they may not like it, but they’ll be there and they’ll be supportive. But that doesn’t seem like enough for my investment in making the work. So I think that’s the thing: trying to figure out what are these barometers or compasses that I use to figure out how to make choices and really trying to connect whatever the internal ones are. And that sounds really selfish and really silly but, trying to figure out why I am actually interested in everything that I am doing and, if I actually am interested in what I’m doing. Because, I think, again, habit is real and ritual is real and it can become sort of stayed and repetitive really easily.

At this specific moment, I am really trying to reinvest in my own interest and that feels really important. Especially since what I have done in the time I’ve been here has been about community and has been about creating a sense. I am not interested in community as this, “let’s get together and like each other,” like art serving community. I am interested in community serving art. SQUART was about getting people together and getting them working,  but it’s also about what happens to an idea if it gets passed around a bunch. I am not just by myself working in the studio, or doing a show, but just trying to create relationships and dialogue and actual investment in the health of the community as art makers, as opposed to people. I feel like I’ve swung a little far in that direction and I am just trying to focus, focus, focus in personal investment. Does that make sense?

Milka Djordjevich: I think there has probably been so much focus on community that community art gets a bad rap for all of this. If the emphasis is on community acceptance or tolerance, it’s like, “Oh, we love anything! Everything’s great!” Versus communities doing art like you’re saying, I think really emphasizes ideas and ideas that come from individuals and how they work as a group. Then how does that perpetuate a shift or independent thinking in art making and what not. I think that’s a big point.

I thought maybe you could talk a little bit about the piece you are making now and, maybe, where it started and how it’s changed?

Laura Arrington: Yeah, it’s gone through a lot of different changes and this is, again, I think the reason I am in this place where I am curious about personal investment: I get a little bit too eager to do too much too quickly. I was coming right off my Counterpulse show and Jesse Hewit and I were planning our next move – Jesse Hewit, who’s a person who I collaborate with, more with producing evenings than making work together – I just had an eagerness to do the next thing. I was writing all of these grants for this piece Fox Den which was the third section of this triptych of work that I was making. It started with this piece, Fingerbird, the second piece was called Hot Wings, and this third installment was going to be Fox Den. And then I just really skewed all of my language. I just skewed everything to what I thought would be a grantable project, or a fundable project, or that would work: “It’s a trio of pieces, all dealing with this one issue, and it’s all about femininity…” You know, really organized really palpable and really consumable, in terms of an idea for a project. So I started working on it. I was doing a residency at this place, Headlands Center for the Arts, in Marin for two months. I started working on it right away. I was just realizing that, even my writing about my work like that and thinking of the piece as this organized, really simple, projecty project, was just totally in the way of me doing anything that I was interested in. I felt like I was so committed to how I was talking about the work and how I was writing about the work. So, I made all of this material and hated all of it. I just really felt disconnected from it, so I scrapped all of it and started again. Then everything in my personal life got a little shaky and again I scrapped everything. This actual piece is not done. It’s going up in three weeks. It’s totally not done, I don’t know what it is. There are themes and ideas that I am working with but, it’s not–

Milka Djordjevich: –It’s not like a package.

Laura Arrington: Totally. It’s all kind of being revealed to me. Which is actually the way I like to work. I find it really frustrating that you have to know what your project is before you do it. It’s not something that’s even close to being a thing yet. I am wrestling with it right now, but at least I am really interested and at least it feels really alive and keeps me up and all that stuff. More than anything we’ve dealt a lot with difficulty in the process. Doing something and being like “No,” doing something, “No,” doing something and throwing it out. Looking a lot at difficulty and how pushing happens and limitation. So, we’re working a lot with movements of the body, movements of the mind, image, the constructs of how we show work even.

And it’s called Wag, it refers to a movement of a dog’s tail. That’s the one thing that’s been really true about all of this: my dog has been a main inspiration for the piece. Even just trying to figure out what the indicators are in terms of that relationship, I am feeling out that behavior and how interesting it is to me. Even just the action of his tail always wagging. It sounds really simple, obviously. So, it’s almost like an unsure piece in that it’s very personal and it’s not cerebrally constructed. If you read the grant language for the piece it wouldn’t actually make any sense for what it is now [laughs]. I’ve just been thinking a lot about it again, that sense of the relationship between the system and how the system gets enacted, or how structure gets enacted. I think it’s also active in the piece. The idea of how to make the work and the way you operate within that structure. It’s also the desire to create structure, to create static realities. That at some point you meet the moment where the structure no longer supports the thing anymore and the structure sort of falls apart.

Milka Djordjevich: That’s interesting. You have the grant language and the regular language, and you have this theme and you actually make the work, and shit happens and it doesn’t happen. However the struggle between individual interests and what actually manifests, what actually happens in rehearsal, that’s probably what this is now, but it probably keeps happening in a way. It’s not like the process of making work is always so simple and so. Part of art making is playing the game of having to deal with those things and then negotiating what you reveal to the outside about what the process actually is.

Laura Arrington: Well, I think maybe that’s part of it. It’s just me being a really young artist. It’s obvious that it’s understood that you do “this” a certain way. But I think maybe this is my moment of being like, “Oh, that’s not real.” Then it begs the question about this system of how we make work. Why are we doing that? Why don’t we just accept that that’s the structure? What does that do to reality? If there’s this massive rolf between what the work is, how it’s marketed, how it’s presented. Then what are we doing? Are we just saying, “Oh, I don’t trust people to be able to receive something.” And why? Why are we all complacent, you know?

Photo courtesy of Laura Arrington

Milka Djordjevich: It’s funny because I think whenever I write marketing language, it’s always a huge struggle. No matter how many times I’ve done it or what the work is. I always read other people’s marketing language to get a sense of how people have decided to write about their work and how it is framed by the expectation of people’s work, and I reflect back on having seen the work or not and seeing how the language worked. On one level, I ultimately read marketing language and more or less have no fucking idea what the piece is going to look like. I think there are some people who are maybe more clear and if their body of work is more familiar, people can kind of get that sense. And on another level, I watch the work and I generally forget about the marking language once I see it. Maybe that’s because I am an artist myself and whatever.

But on another level, aside from marketing language: What is the expectation of an audience having either seen your work before, or performance work in general? What is the struggle of trying to make a new work knowing that people have expectations of what your past work was, in this community or in performance in general? How to negotiate trying to do something new or different that is your interest and may challenge that? And how to emancipate the audience from their expectation and to engage in it?

Laura Arrington: Yeah, I think it’s a huge problem. I don’t know what the answer would be. The thing is, you want to have integrity, right? And you want to live in a way you feel good about. We were talking before about how much making work affects life, how we think about ourselves and how if we are always making these concessions for things, there’s going to be a result. There is so much disconnect in the information we give audiences in terms of advertising, marketing, and all that stuff is just about insecurity and this lack of trust.  I don’t know, I don’t have anything interesting to say about it…

Milka Djordjevich: Yeah, I’ve been writing a lot of stuff about my work and what my values are and I suddenly realized, I am not interested in educating an audience because they’re missing something when it comes to performance work. For me, it’s important to acknowledge that, no, they already have the necessary information and they are going to be different from the person sitting next to them. That information is just as valid as having a lot of information or having none at all. I think that it’s important for that moment in time, that experience in time to stand on its own. It’s tricky because it’s such a small community in general, when it comes to more experimental performance work, and it tends to attract the same sort of people. So then that’s the frame to contextualize in a certain way. It’s really hard to practice what you preach because, ultimately, it is a specific audience and it’s not like you want to make work for, I don’t know, Hollywood or whatever.

Laura Arrington: But, I do feel like I would just to be able to accept that and not have so many conditions on things. I think that’s the thing: the conditional. It just creates, again, a sense of insecurity and a sense of anxiety around what the work could or couldn’t be. And, that’s basically what this whole piece I’ve been working on is about.

Jesse Hewit in conversation with Milka Djordjevich

Choreographer and CC Editor, Milka Djordjevich, sits down with San Francisco-based artist and performer, Jesse Hewit, before his upcoming performance, Freedom, as a part of a shared evening with fellow Bay Area choreographer, Laura Arrington. Their shared evening, The Dog Show, takes place at Z Space in San Francisco, December 8-11, 2011. They discuss Hewit’s creative process, dance making insecurities, and the many meanings collaboration takes in artistic development.

Interview Date: November 18, 2011

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Milka Djordjevich: What are you working on now and how is it potentially different from what you’ve done before?

Jesse Hewit: That’s funny because that is everything I am working on: I’m working on something that is different than what I’ve done before. It almost feels like anything of that nature, I almost don’t know how to talk about it. So that is something to be considered. So I was talking to the folks that I work with and I do a lot, these days, of sitting in front of them and negotiating how much to talk and explain. We’ve had tiffs over me being withholding with my reasons or my dramaturgy or my thinking or whatever. So I am trying to be more expressive and explanative with them lately. So, I’ll have these things where we’ll all sit down and I’ll be like, “Ok guys, I am going to talk for like 7 minutes, if that’s okay.”

So we did this thing about six or seven months ago that Margaret Jenkins does in San Francisco called Chime [a mentorship program for professional choreographers]. And Ralph Lemon is the Chime Across Borders mentor for this year. He was in town preliminarily before the mentorship started. And he was having a conversation with Margaret that was public. He met with Margaret – and Margaret is so interesting, right? She is seventy and she has built a dynasty of everything that is dance in the Bay Area.  Anyway, she is sitting at this table with Ralph, they have their glasses of wine and their microphones. It’s so amazing! And she’s really formal with him. She looks amazing. She is so beautiful, you know? She is asking him all these questions about his journey and his development as an artist, and the way things are changing as he grows older. His relationships to funders and grantees and all these things that come with being an artist. And Ralph. He doesn’t give a fuck! You know?! He’s also very antiestablishment, he’s a very radical kid in a lot of ways. And there’s one point where she was asking Ralph a question about production, how things have changed over the years in terms of producing and mounting work. And he’s in a place right now. He’s in full resentment of this cultural expectation to show work. It was funny, I remember I was watching this. Walking into this room, I was obsessed with Ralph. I adore his work, it’s inspiring for me. I didn’t even know him yet at this time. Anyway, Margaret’s like, “What’s your favorite way to work?” and he’s like, “In my head. I never want to have to show people. It’s so painful, it’s so violent to have to show people my work.” And I was just like, “BAH! You fucking pretentious rich bitch. I hate you!” I was actually very disappointed. I was really disheartened by him. It was funny because I kind of came full circle. I walked away with it with the appreciation that Ralph is fully himself and he is a person of conflict. That he is a developing artist just like anyone else. And I felt really at peace with that, but I definitely felt that condescension and eye roll around this idea, that we shouldn’t have to show our work. It’s so violent for our sense of self. I didn’t give it that much thought and still love Ralph’s work. Then Chime came along and I worked in the studio with him. And I really developed a relationship with that man, that was probably mostly felt by me, not as much by him [laughs]. He taught me a lot about risk; he taught me a lot about working with people I don’t understand and who don’t understand me; he taught me a lot about entering a room or a space with politics, paradynamics, human beings, objects, colors, textures; and making a work, basically. Making work in an interesting way. So, I was like, “You know, really feeling Ralph.”

Anyway, fast forward. I am making this piece right now, Freedom, and we’ve been working since March. It’s just been this continual barrage of questions and inquiries and weird little pockets getting opened up inside of me. Like narrative pockets of, “Oh, this thing happened in this story, this image happened when I was 12, or when I was 18,” and now it’s forcing its way into the work. What do I do with it, you know? What it’s been is this incredible series of starts and stops, and hundreds and hundreds of hours of having show-stoppingly brilliant ideas in my head, either produced by me or produced by one of the dancers I am working with. And just being so overwhelmed by all of it. I can’t take it and be like, “Oh now I am going to put this in the show in this place and build transitions around it.” And I am not trying to be precious, in that it’s all so beautiful and I don’t know what to do. It’s the process of the research, finding things out, constantly being wrong and constantly having things that I think are interesting and actually only lead to more questions. Then engaging in feedback with people about what I’ve shown them, which only lead to more questions. That’s just so much more interesting than the idea of deciding what’s worth putting up in Z Space next month. I have just been fighting tooth and nail every time I go in the studio to be like, “Today’s the day I make the piece! Today’s the day I realize and decide!” You know? And I had to beat it out of myself and I think I have. But I am at this place where all of a sudden, Ralph Lemon is resonating in my brain with this: I don’t want to have to produce bullshit and I feel it. I really feel it.

…I am really excited about the stuff we’ve done. I am really comfortable situating myself in a place where I can say to people, “This is what we’ve been looking at for the past year. I am proud about the choices we are going to put up next month.” I am really invested and always surprised by my performers. I am giving them choices, I say choices like the scores of the piece, I am giving them tons of room to change and fluctuate every night. I want to embed lots of opportunities for freedom for the performers inside of them, essential to a piece that deals with what we’re dealing with…I’ve been thinking and working in the studio for about a year now, about the concept of a freedom and how it relates to dominant narratives of monsters, villains, evil as created by the collective Americana psyche slash the media. And we’ve done a lot of work that I think is really, really interesting and we are going to show that. We are actually going to show about 1% of it [laughs].

Photo courtesy of Jesse Hewit

Milka: I wanted to ask about this issue that I think everyone making a performance work or any other work deals with: what happens in the process and how does that exist in the performance? I wonder about your approach. You mentioned you are trying to give the performers freedom and space, so maybe that’s a way to deal with some of the process in the performance in a way. I’ve been really interested in this because, well there are a few things: I really relate to this idea of how much you reveal to the performers. I’ve dealt with this a lot in different ways, and at a certain point I stopped working with performers because I realized that I needed to figure some shit out. I do think that sometimes there is something that happens when you try to articulate through language to performers. It somehow distills and in a way doesn’t give the full impact of what it is that you’re interested in. I find that there is a skill or method involved in how to communicate the creation to performers. And then if you try to communicate through language in a specific way, each performer probably has their own individual way of interpreting that. And it may not be the right way for them to engage in what’s happening…

Jesse: Which is a shitload of stuff to consider and a shitload of extra work.

Milka: Yeah, yeah.

Jesse: Which I can totally understand why you stopped working with performers. I’ve made group pieces for the past three years with, you know, five or six people. And I am ready to not. That sociological interaction of dealing with people is very interesting. Absolutely. But every piece I’ve made has spiraled down into that essentially, because we are all strong people, we have strong personalities and strong intellect and the idea of creating space for performers to be free, some people don’t want that. You can totally hire or collaborate with or whatever, the most wild, intelligent, capable dancer, and they just might not want what you’re asking them to have.

Milka: Exactly, totally that. I think that what ends up happening at a certain point is, instead of viewing the work, you go in your apartment or whatever and you’re thinking over and over and over again about the rehearsal. Then, you come to rehearsal and you’re like, “Ah these people! They’re here!”

Jesse: Oh my God! Exactly!

Milka: And so after working on my own and also making a point to work more collaboratively in these duet form collaborations where we produce really different work than I had done prior to that. I then did desire to work with a group of people again, but figuring out a way to negotiate all these issues. So I decided to work with people with really strong personalities who were my friends and who are really interesting. But I think what ended up happening is that I made a series of assumptions when I was working with them that they wanted the same things I wanted, and not all of them did. I suddenly was so disappointed, like, “These are my friends! They should want what I want!” [laughs] And they didn’t. It was really difficult because I felt like I was put in a place where I was offering something and I was put in a place where I get these blank stares back, like, “Wait…what is this? What are we doing?”

Jesse: Yeah, it’s heartbreaking.

Milka: It’s heartbreaking. And then I get super insecure: “Do I know how to make work? What’s wrong with me?”

Jesse: It’s a really funny experience to talk to someone and they’re describing an experience and how else do I say this any more crudely? I’ve had the same experience! The progression of events: this is how I am going to explain it, explain it to the performer, the person who you know is just a ball of fire and brilliance goes, “Ugh…” And you decide you have to quit your life [laughs]. Why does that mean that, which then means that?

Milka: It’s horrible too because in working with people again, I have to be honest: I am the author. I am doing all this administrative work, I am doing all of this thinking, constructing and  stuff. And I collaborate intensely with who I am working with, but for me to say we work equally in collaboration, there’s a power dynamic, you know what I mean? That also gets difficult too. I suddenly have this guilt as if I am not pleasing them. But at the same time, I feel like they should meet me in the middle.

Jesse: Oh my God. “Save it for your boyfriend,” you know what I mean? I am always like, “How do I have five intimate relationships right now?”

Milka: Then in relation to that, maybe it’s just me projecting or assuming, but do you find that one of the issues in figuring out what to put in the piece is about the fixed nature of its existence and it almost becoming more like an object or like a fixed thing? And then in relationship to that, does this also relate to how you are approaching how the performers perform the work and what they are doing?

Photo courtesy of Jesse Hewit

Jesse: Yeah, sure. I think if the performers have an understanding that this is “it,” they perform it in a certain way. But if the performers have an understanding that this is version 372 and there will be 665 versions, they will perform it in a different way. I also think it’s totally different every project. The really decisive thing I realized about this project is we just don’t have time. It’s just not over. It’ll maybe be over in five years. So that’s the first time that’s happened to me, where I’ve been at a point where, technically speaking, in order to mount a show for December 8th, I need to decide what the show is in some regard. And I truly have no impulse to do that. That’s never actually happened before. I’ve always been really excited about the cobbling points. And I just don’t care about it right now. So the way I am thinking about it with this project, first of all, is getting super humble with myself about the fact that every week I am super turned on by something different and it’s just not going to stop. It’s going to keep on happening until the day we put the fucking thing up. And so talking to myself with that language like: “This week I am really, really excited about this.” Or, “Today I am really excited about this.” Or, “As opposed to this morning, tonight I am really excited about this.” I think what that yields is that there are certain things that we are landing on and there’s one thing in this piece that has stuck since day one and that we’ve been doing forever and ever and ever. And then there’s one other thing that’s been there since day five. And everything else has been trickling in. And of course there is one massive section of the piece that’s probably a quarter of the entire evening that we will show in December, but we totally haven’t it made. So it’s sort of a weird fit of fancy in a way. But that seems to me to be the only way to interact honestly with the material.

Milka: There’s no answer to this, but how do we let ourselves do what we need to do for the performance? Ok, let me back up. I’ll frame it a different way. How much of what you’re doing and the issues that come up have to do with the expectation of what people think they need to see?

Jesse: Too much. Way too much. I mean, you know we all have different personalities and different psychologies under our skin. I have a tremendous amount of struggle with needing to be praised and liked. It’s a personality trait. I don’t know what it is, but it’s there. So that manifests itself as a very specific challenge for me when it comes time to working to do what the piece needs, as opposed to working to make the thing that’s going to impress. Right? I know it. I am conscious of it, so this is good. But it is still something I have to fight against. And that’s actually where I got swallowed a couple weeks ago. I think that’s pretty much the thing that is pushing me down. I’ve had an overwhelming year: dealt with a lot of fucking work, I’ve worked for other people, I’ve traveled, I met some of my heroes, I worked with some of my heroes. There’s definitely a flutter inside of me right now, of expectation and possibility and also monstrous insecurity. Because I am seeing what I want to be, what I don’t want to be, what I want to make, what I don’t want to make. And how do you describe how something just takes hold of you? You know? Why? Why all of a sudden you look back and you realize for four months you’ve had part of your brain shut off and all you can think about it how horrible it will be if people don’t like your work. I am astonished. It’s actually very incredible, literally. I am incredulous at how much I gave myself over to that and for how long. And God bless my instincts because I woke up one day after a lot of tears and frustration and was like, “So guess what, you can’t do that.” That’s my therapy moment.

Photo courtesy of Jesse Hewit

Milka: They’re a few things: I think what’s hard about making art, particularly something about performance, is that there is so much of yourself involved and yourself attached to what it is. I feel like when I talk to artists at any stage of their career, it’s so hard to separate the work from self. Particularly, I think in American culture where we have to have our day jobs and all this stuff, somehow art is other than work. It’s this expression of self, who we are, and what we want to be. It’s less about “will people like the work or not,” and “will people like me or not?” I struggled with that a lot when I was doing these collaborations, where I am co-signing equally with one other person. And it’s difficult on both ends because the big issue that came up was this element of trust and trusting each other to do what we’re doing together. I think in making work, you sometimes don’t trust yourself. So, if you’re already doubting yourself and your ideas and you have another person who’s doing it also, and you’re working together, it’s amplified. For me it made work that ended up being a lot more separate from myself because I had to intersect with someone else. I somehow was able to realize, this is my work, but it’s also this thing. And at the same time, because of that detachment with it, made me even more anxious about how people would receive it because it’s even more separate from self. The people don’t know that and then they are going to think it’s me. I negotiate that and understanding ultimately not everyone’s going to like your work no matter what. Who can we say sits there and says everybody loves their work? That’s just impossible. I think this element is difficult to do, but I think if you stay honest and true with what you’re doing, there is this element that people can see just as much as you thinking it’s going to be good or not.

I don’t even know you that well, but I feel like during that process a few weeks ago at the showing, I was really aware of your insecurity about whether or not people would like it. But, what I saw in the work was really strong and really great, but then I really read that from you. So suddenly it’s like I am reading what you’re feeling about, versus what I am actually seeing.

Jesse: Oh God, I hate that I did that [laughs]!

Milka: The thing is, we all do it. I do this too. I did this piece with this composer, Chris Peck, and it was a really different sort of performance where we were making work for each other, performing for each other, making work together. We had the premiere and we were both really nervous about it. And it was the night they were reviewing it in the New York Times. I was so nervous. All of my close friends were there, and important people, and all this stuff. In the review the only negative thing was “they seem to be nervous.” And I was like, “Oh my God.” It’s crazy how that became a thing that I had no idea [about].

Photo courtesy of Jesse Hewit

Jesse: It’s so funny too because it’s really just what day they catch you on. We’ve all been a ball of anxiety at different points. I mean I was a hot ass mess on the 26th of October when I showed you all that stuff and if we did it again tonight, I’d probably enjoy the shit out of that stuff and we’d go out for drinks afterwards.

Milka: I also think it’s interesting, not in relationship to makers or performers in the work, but how an audience can be different night to night. It’s really interesting and how it affects it. Or like what happened earlier today with the weather.

Jesse: I was thinking about that today. I think honestly, the weather and the seasons matter. When we do the piece at Z Space, it’s this big, big, big space that can be really cold if you don’t do certain things. And if we set the work really far upstage and don’t use much warm light, and everyone’s really cold and we make a piece about love, does it work? Obviously, you take space into account, but I was really thinking about how I want to be cozy right now. And how if everyone who comes to my show really wants to be cozy, is my show going to make them feel cozy? And if it doesn’t, are they not going to like it because it didn’t make them feel cozy? I went into a funny place with my brain. But this idea that everyone just comes with different sensorial, and personal, and random things to lay on top of your work or not.

Milka: That makes me think about how it’s easy when making work to not think about the experience of the audience. For instance if I am entering the door to knock or whatever, and how important that is. I don’t ever think about that because it’s such a codified thing: it’s a theater! It’s a black box! You know the theater, there’s a way they do things. And it somehow compartmentalizes performances in that way.

In relation to that, I wanted to ask about the visual element of the work. It is so sensorial and I know you’ve described the set to me, but I am curious about that.

Jesse: For a long time, I wanted to do the grass thing. Yeah, Pina Bausch. And initially I thought the whole piece was raised and it was actually on a really big platform that was high up and you couldn’t really see all of it. But then I became less interested in that because it’s a really specific technicality to be working in and I wanted to do more a visceral, frontal type of performance. Z Space is big and it allows for a lot of square footage on the floor. This piece originally started by thinking about relationships between dogs and humans and the way that watching creative play and impulsive dogs is really antagonizing for people because of our relationship to impulse, which is really complicated. Not so much with dogs. I thought about yards and wanted a yard back then. But then when the piece became more about people, the grass thing continued to work. I don’t know why yet. And maybe it won’t. For me it’s a yard. A place where people run and jump and play. A place where the ground rubs off on you. I don’t want necessarily to say the performers are portraying children, because they are not in my opinion, but it is a kind of childlike freedom to the way they are doing certain things. Also I feel like grass is an archetypically familiar or suggestive of a very particular codified, American backyard: Mom and Pop, safe, enclosed, play space, which has a particular set of rules with it. A lot about this piece is about breaking the rules we did in space. You know, de-terrotorializing a space you have particular assumptions about. So another layer on top of that is a lot of things we are doing is very complicated stuff around the monster terrorist, or displays of sluttery in public and things like this. But, they are happening in the physical context of their backyard. Backyard, almost like a soccer field. A little bit like a prison yard, which brings in the lighting concept.

We took booms, a bunch of traditional instruments and a bunch of nontraditional instruments, like florescent pods with florescent bulbs in them, and created these clustered structures with all these different kinds of light. They are freestanding, almost like robots, and they are standing on the outside of the perimeter, all facing in on the green. They are a little bit interrogative in terms of how they shed light. They are also a little bit enclosing and then they are interesting also, because they are on the head eye level of the performers, so they create light in a way that is immediate. Everything that manifests from your face in terms of emotions and stories, whether it’s lit or not, it’s happening right in front of the performers’ faces. So the performer gets to interact immediately with tropes of light or darkness. It’s happening right there. It’s not like it’s environmental or atmospheric. It’s actually just light or not light. I like that element of it. And beyond that, I think whatever tones or narratives pop up as a result of those two elements of design, so be it. We’ll see.

Also, in terms of costumes we had an interesting time. We had a really interesting, ongoing conversation with the costume designer about it. And once again, like I said, I am fucking loving the process. It’s so great. We started with the concept of talking about human drag. The designer first put us in panty hose that were pulled up a little strangely with magenta paint, highlighting our mucus membranes, or our soft spots. But then it felt too surreal and conceptual for me because the actual content of the piece is really difficult. I wanted things to be pedestrian in terms of clothing. The costume designer had been talking to the performers about who they would be if they could just do a different life. So, someone would be like: “Oh, I want to be a builder,” “I want to be something with the Earth,” “I want to be a gazelle,” “I want to be a wrestler.” We’ll basically combined all these things and the person I am working with is a really great garment builder. So, they’re taking all these bits of the performers and creating these original garments that are not specifically elusive to any one of those things. Actually, it’s just an original garment that is just elusive enough for the performer for their knowledge, that they can interact with the costume and interact with the costume that allows them a certain sense of freedom and imaginativeness in the performance. The viewer is not going to see it as like, “Oh, clearly Loren wanted to be half stripper half stay-at-home mom,” you know what I mean? So that’s exciting. It comes out looking sort of like high fashion. But they are very personalized and intentional garments for each performer, so I am really enjoying that. It’s funny that we started in a place that was really conceptual and wild and weird, and we ended up more on this, make clothes to fit the secret dreams of the person without making it costumey. So that’s been fun. We are working with really blocky primary colors and patterns for that because we don’t want the clothes to be what’s happening. We want them to just be worn and interacted with by the performer. In terms of visual stuff, it’s a bunch of people being who they really wanna be, sort of. Sometimes coming with some difficulty on a big sheet of sod, with eye level florescent lights in their face [laughs].

Photo courtesy of Jesse Hewit

Milka: I also wanted to ask you, this is a question that I wanted to ask Laura Arrington but we ran out of time. She was describing the two of you as collaborators, not creatively, but in the way you collaborate in modes of production, like collaborating producing this evening together. This is interesting. What is it like to create a work with another artist who you relate to and want to share the production side of things? And also can you talk about the concept of the title of the evening?

Jesse: I think initially when we started doing this – because we’ve been doing this for years now – it was just going on impulse, like a personal affinity moment, you know? I feel really proud that we didn’t ever lay down a lot of garbage about why we produce together because I think there does need to be some magic in this world, you know what I mean? The fact that we never explained why, feels really good now, especially because we have given ourself a shit ton of room to figure out why. And just recently we’ve had some really good talks about why. I don’t know what Laura told you, but I’ll tell you where I am landing with it: Laura and I produce together because we get tremendous discursive benefits from putting our work up next to each other. We have a lot of similar agitation about the larger artist economy that we exist in: as young people, as queers, as Americans. As you know, it’s not like we are making money and getting famous, so you might as well be around people that are going to really massage your guts the way you get massaged. And Laura and I are both pretty effusive and pretty crazy and we really want to continue to push alternative ways of considering social structures and social codes. That manifests itself in us doing an evening around performative femininity or an evening around domesticity and freedom, or things like this. But really for us, it’s just this, as trite as it may sound, this very, very deep lifelong agitation with people. I am not going to nail it down, but I will say something about how we are dissatisfied with the way meaning is made; pervasive strategies of meaning making. We want to encourage people to think differently, think closely, think creatively about what they’re seeing. And our aesthetics are sometimes similar, sometimes not at all. Our roles and our ways of executing projects and our desires for what we want them to be are sometimes similar, sometimes not at all. I don’t know man. We get together and we complain and we get excited and we freak out and we cry and we criticize each other and we fight but it’s all about really wanting to continue making work. So, if you know someone like that and they are kind of at a similar place to you, in terms of how you identify within your career and whether that’s important to you or not, and you have really, really, really hot generative conversations, whether the work looks good next to each other or not, I don’t fucking care. Whether the themes of the pieces are speaking to each other, I don’t really care. It’s more like we are occupying a headspace around what it means to make work and be who we are and we share that. That’s where we understand each other. That’s who we should be interacting with. Maybe if I was thinking more capitalistically or intelligently, you know making work with people who make you look good and make you look smart. But we’re not really doing that. We are just sticking with each other because the conversation is real, it’s dynamic, it’s messy, and we don’t want that to change. We like that about each other. It sounds really romantic. And maybe it is and maybe it’ll blow up in our face. But I’m rolling with it.

Milka: Well, I think just from that relationship it’s like you guys make each other look good. You know what I mean? It’s not that that’s the goal, but you probably look more good next to each other because of that, than if you actually strategically planned to do that.

Jesse: I am really curious to see where it’s going to go. We’ve reached the point, where there’s no hidden agenda, it’s not like we can’t afford to do an evening on our own. We’ve both done other things on our own. But it’s almost the moment to decide what this means and I think it’s coming up pretty soon. I don’t mean get really static about what it means, but figure something out. Because I am also wondering, do we collaborate on something? We applied to collaborate on something that may be happening next year but we’d need a lot of money to do it because it’d be really expensive. And if it happens it’s going to be really interesting to see what happens with the collaboration. We’ve already really, really torn each other down to the point where we didn’t trust each other and stopped speaking for months at a time. We’ve already gone through that shit. I think we’re going to be okay [laughs]!

Milka: It doesn’t mean it’s going to be easier. But you’ve already gone through the first major hurdles.

Jesse: It’s so funny because we’re friends again now, but back when we were friends we had bought plane tickets to go to Berlin together. And then some things happened and some months passed and we were not friends. So when we boarded the plane together we hadn’t spoken in quite a few months, and it was such an experience [laughs]! It was great! And everything turned out good. We gave each other a shit ton of space, so it was good.

Laura Arrington in conversation with Milka Djordjevich

Kinebago: So Danny, you were saying before that you’re taking a sort of sabbatical from making. Is this something official, or something that you just fell into?

Daniel McCusker: Well, it was intentional, if that makes it “official.” I’ve been in New England close to 25 years, shocking!

Kinebago: There should be a cake!

Daniel: And there aren’t a lot of opportunities here, but yet somehow I’ve been incredibly active for the whole time. And for the past few years I’ve been getting into trying to make some performing opportunities for other people, which I remain committed to doing. But I really felt like I needed a year. I needed to pause for awhile and really think about what’s not satisfying and how to change it. Just for myself. And I’m not anywhere, there’s nothing to announce, but one of the things that I’m interested in is doing more of this presenting activity. And I’m investigating different ways to do it and maybe initiating some partnerships. So I’m spending time on that this year. And I’m in the studio less than I would normally be, but still I’m in the studio 5 or 6 days a week. And it’s a little bizarre because I’m making material to do nothing with, but that’s fine. There just came a point for me where I felt like I was just doing the same thing. Not in terms of my work, but the situation that conditions my work [here in Boston] is the same, so it’s hard to make what you do look different if all the elements around you are the same. So I’ve been really thinking about this—what do I embrace, and what do I try to do that’s new? So that’s what I’m in the midst of. I mean Ana might feel the same thing is true in New York…

Ana Isabel Keilson: Yeah, I do. Well, it’s different because at least here there is the promise of some kind of institutional support, whether or not it actually exists, where that doesn’t seem to be as true in Boston. But…I’ve been frustrated for any number of the same reasons things that most people are frustrated with about the New York dance community. And I think that part of my solution to that is finding alternative places and ways to go about showing my work and engaging with different communities. But it does seem that outside of New York, that dance in New England is so different, and there isn’t as much out there as there should be. And you can only self-produce so much before that gets exhausting.

Daniel: Presenting is part of my creative life…I’m fashioning programs that I feel like support the kinds of work that I’m interested in seeing and doing.

Kinebago: How long have you been doing that?

Daniel: Well, I’ve been doing it officially for like four years, but since I started being in the higher education mode…I taught at Holy Cross and then I taught here…so in small ways I’ve been doing it in both campuses, bringing people who are local—broadly defined “local” — have New England connections to both of those places. I’ve been teaching in higher education for 15 years. And when I lived in Maine we had a presenting series at Ram Island, and it got to be smaller over the years, but once it got to be smaller we actually started to produce things that were more in line with the kind of work that we were making. So, you know, that was pretty long…25 years.

Ana Isabel Keilson presented the work “Fanny and Alexander and Fanny and Alexander” (2010) at the ThisThat showcase, curated by Daniel McCusker. Photo: Mike Hoy

Kinebago: And also, having been part of one of the shows that you curated here, I feel like one of the things that you are fashioning is community. And I felt for instance that at the “ThisThat” show I was part of I met and connected with other choreographers—actually including Ana—who I wouldn’t have necessarily seen otherwise. And in the sort of backstage studio environment we got to know each other in a different kind of way.

Daniel: Right. I never even thought about the backstage studio environment, that’s so funny. But yeah, I think it’s community.… I mean the thing that’s interesting is it’s kind of my community.

Kinebago: Right. But I think in that way…I mean, one of the things I like about seeing you as someone who builds community, is that it seems to come from this place of you being interested in the art that you’re seeing, and then you invite those people whose art you’re interested in [to come] together and then that creates it…. Like, you don’t come from this angle of, “I really want to create community” and then let’s see what happens. In this model, the art may be of varying levels, or it might be something interesting to you or not. But actually you come from this place of like, “Let’s see if we can put together something that is artistically sound,” and that this also can create community.

Ana: I was going to say, I feel like that’s something I’ve also inherited from you, or learned from you. In a lot of the projects that I’ve been doing or trying to do or seeking out…you know, with ‘the zine’ or “CLASSCLASSCLASS,” or thinking, who are other interesting artists whose work I want to see more of together, that my work can also kind of be a part of. Rather than being like, “well, let’s just make community and then see what happens.”

Daniel: “Let’s have a potluck, and then let’s see what happens after that.”

Ana: Right. I think there’s a lot of false pretense about what “community” is, especially in the art world, and especially in the dance world, so…. I think this is something that I’ve learned from you… Like, if it’s not interesting, it’s only going to get you so far. The experience of watching, or the experience of learning from something…it doesn’t have to be something that you like aesthetically, but it still has to be interesting and engaging. And how do you facilitate performance and exchange in a way that’s meaningful, that sort of gains momentum and doesn’t just sort of disappear into the ether?

Sara Smith presented the work “Of Empty Dressers” at the ThisThat showcase curated by Daniel McCusker. Photo: Sara Smith

Daniel: I also think that’s partly driven by outside forces. You know, it’s a way to get funding. I mean it’s something that I’m always fascinated by: we’re bringing in Choreographer X to lead a community building experience in a community that they’re not part of, that they’re not going to stay in. And you know, maybe something will get left behind, maybe it will…a seed will be sown. I think that’s the idea always behind it, but there’s something about it that’s also sort of preposterous. I mean, you know, the choreographer is there—it’s a job, it’s a gig, it’s an opportunity.…There’s two ways in which you can get funding: one is to do educational programs and the other is to build community. God forbid you should fund an artist because you want them to make a dance. You know, because they might fail.

Kinebago: Right.

Ana: I don’t know if this has changed over time, but what you were saying about Alfredo Corvino saying you know, people are going to learn when they’re ready to learn. I think, and maybe this is sort of wandering into sort of like a social critique or something, but it feels like a lot of people in society kind of need to be hand held…led into learning. And there’s not the idea that you can watch something, you can see a Trisha Brown concert, even if you’ve never seen dance before and you’ve never seen anything like it before, and learn a lot from it. Even if it’s not some kind of workshop with members of the Trisha Brown company who are doing some kind of community-based learning lab. That actually just seeing dance and being an audience member or being a performer or you know, seeing good art, is an educating experience in and of itself. And somehow our sense of that seems like it’s gotten lost in the sort of funding for education as like all the funding for the arts…

Kinebago: Yeah, I mean I think there’s something about this good impulse—the original idea that you should try to make arts more accessible to people who don’t have ways in, can sometimes get corrupted into this thing where the only valuable way to get people to approach art is by breaking it down for them before they can just approach it on their own first.

Daniel: Yeah, I think the original impulse is good, but I also think that how it’s played out often betrays any trust in the value of the artwork on its own. And it also betrays any belief in the idea that people can rise to the occasion. And there’s something about that…I mean, I’ve always been interested in the idea…let’s give people more credit. Let’s give them credit for being smart, having curiosity, whatever words you want to use there. But I feel like there’s not any trust in that actually, and on an institutional level there’s a lot of distrust of that.

Daniel McCusker’s “regrets only” (2010). Photo: John Kramer

Ana: So much of seeing dance is also making a choice as a viewer about what you’re seeing and how you’re seeing it, and I think that the more you see then you’re able to kind of, as a receiver, put those things together too. So when you present a palette of dances, I think we’re also able to kind of receive them in that way. But that doesn’t happen unless you experience it, unless you actually get an opportunity to see these dances…again, it’s not a structure that necessarily has to be given to you.

Daniel: Right.

Kinebago: And also I think, Danny, in some of the shows you do you bring in visual artists…and you present them like a dance. Like, okay so now in this slot on the program we’re going to watch a projection of an art piece.

Daniel: Right.

Kinebago: And I do think for viewers that that is a different model of allowing them to sort of reframe how they’re looking at dance without holding their hand, but because people are more used to looking at visual images…

Daniel: Oh alright…

Kinebago: They look at television, they look at movies, they go to museums more than they go to dance performances for sure. And then to see art in that context, I think it makes the art feel more like performance, and it makes the performance feel more like art. [In the ThisThat show] I felt like those pieces really framed the dance performance for audience members, that they could see that.

A still from the video “Beauty Life” by Rick Fox. Image Courtesy of Rick Fox

Daniel: That’s interesting. I mean, of course I’m choosing those things because I feel like they have resonance with the dance pieces. The first time I saw the Rick Fox video it was a dance to me. It was so much like a dance the way there would be a big image and then suddenly it would zoom in on a little detail. I mean to me that’s choreography. So to me it was just so obviously related that I didn’t even think about it really.

Kinebago: But I also think it made it obvious to audience members who might have seen his work in isolation and thought, “Oh, that’s animation,” and seen a dance and thought, “that’s a dance.” But in this show, it was animation as a dance and dance as animation and art.

Daniel: Well, that’s interesting. I mean I love dance, but I also feel like dance is informed by lots of things. We’re not just you know…where it’s not just informed by “we’re in the studio doing steps.” If we’re making dances, we’re also reading books, we’re listening to music, we’re seeing people walk down the street. It’s all informing us. And I feel like it’s all part of the same process. This is a little digression, but you asked me this question about how long have I been doing some presenting activity, and I was like, “Well…blah, blah,” and I explained all that. But you know one of the things that I didn’t say which is somehow related to this conversation is you know, I’ve never been [only] a presenter, a dance company, a teacher, a…there’s a wider range of activity. It’s not just about one thing, or at least it’s not for me. I think it’s a wider range of activity for all of us.

Daniel McCusker’s “Horizon” (2010) Photo: Michael Hoy

Interview Date: November 17, 2010

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Tess Dworman: Let’s start out by getting an idea of what you’re doing right now for work, creative work and combinations thereof.

Rachel Damon: What’s really amazing about the balance of my life right now is that it’s pretty much 50/50; half creative work and half work for other people. The work I do for other people is creative as well. [It’s] production work but there’s definitely a collaborative element. Synapse [Art Collective] is my creative home and I’m working on two major projects.

One is called Factor Ricochet and that’s an exploration of the embodiment of gender. It’s evolving into a dance theater work. Right now I’m in a research process with quite a few different people from different places on the gender spectrum. I’m working with a movement coach who is using her dance movement therapy knowledge to guide and facilitate. So, that’s taking up a lot of my brain space. I’m planning to premiere that in Chicago in the Fall of 2011 and I’m doing excerpts here and there because I really appreciate work-in-progress feedback, especially on a topic that is really charged and different for everyone.

Tess: And you’re still working at Links Hall now, right?

Rachel: I’m the production and stage manager at Links now. I just work on Links Hall productions. I also work for a company called eighth blackbird. They’re a contemporary music ensemble and I’m their production and stage manager and lighting director. Those are my job jobs: to prepare and travel with eighth blackbird and to prepare and manage the Links Hall shows.

Tess: Cool! So it’s all performance-centered.

Rachel: Yeah, it’s great. Day in and day out I’m planning, seeing, producing, or managing performances.

Tess: How long have you been in Chicago?

Rachel: I moved here in 2002, so just over eight years.

Tess: …and you’ve been in the dance scene since then?

Rachel: Yeah. I moved here [Chicago] to transfer to Columbia College and I was a Theater major in production but I minored in Dance. I joined Breakbone Dance Co. in 2003.

Tess: I’m wondering what your experience has been since you moved there and how it’s changed over time. I know you do a lot for the dance community. You do all of this production work and then you also perform and make work. I’m curious about what you give to the community and what it gives back to you.

Rachel: I feel like I have the life I have because I started working at Links Hall. Asimina Chremos hired me when I was still an undergrad. Just working there in the technical aspect introduced me to so many dance artists. If Asimina hadn’t sat me down and said, “Here’s what I want. I want you to draw an outline of where the wrenches should hang and fix the curtain.” I wouldn’t have this life. So I thank her and my lucky stars.

Links is such a heart for the Chicago dance community, especially for contemporary dance and the younger dance makers. I started meeting people that way, and then we would go do shows together at other venues. My relationship with Links Hall is at the core of how the dance community is for me.

But how it’s changed over time… I started out in a 80-85% production capacity. Since, then I’ve been working to balance that with my creative work and I’d love to continue to shift the balance even more towards dance and performance making. But I’d love to continue doing production as well. [whispers] And there’s no money in being a dancer. [Both laugh]

Tess: Have you noticed how the Chicago dance audience has changed since you’ve lived there?

Rachel: I can’t speak like I’ve been there from the beginning but just in the time that I’ve been engaged with Chicago dance, it’s pretty clear that there are generations. Maybe that’s true universally. I definitely felt as an undergrad at Columbia that I was watching people like Carrie Hanson [Artistic Director of The Seldoms] form her company and her aesthetic while I was taking her technique class. Being in a piece of hers as a student and now watching her work, knowing that she’s touring internationally, it lays out a trajectory for me. Whether or not she set herself up as a mentor to me specifically, just watching the ways the generation ahead of me are forming their work and work life defines that group of people for me.

Photo: Ward Thompson

As an emerging person in this community, I am also starting to see the recent grab of the Chicago programs or people who are very recently doing the residency programs that we have. I’m watching work that is obviously a generation or two apart from Carrie Hanson and Julia Rhoads [Artistic Director of Lucky Plush Productions]. The work in the generation ahead of me, well this is obvious, but there’s a maturity to it. Often times I’m really engrossed in the investment of the performers on stage because it’s clear that those dance makers are spending time talking about how much of that performer’s self is brought on to the stage.

In the younger and new folks, I see so much energy and freshness that is really inspiring. I watch them and go “Yeah, I can’t do that anymore.”

There’s quite a definition of style between graduates of different programs in the area. Columbia style against people from [University of Illinois]…really different. Clearly, each program has their own goals and aesthetics. The more dance I watch, in Chicago, the more I can say “Oh look, it’s a Northwestern dancer next to a UIUC dancer on stage.” Or “This choreographer is clearly a Columbia choreographer.”

I’m making a dance right now where there’s one dancer from Northern [Illinois University] and one from [University of Illinois] and it’s really interesting to watch them do the “same” movement that’s entirely different because of their stylistic backgrounds. Even in rehearsal, it’s really clear [which of the dancers] went through programs where [they learned] you don’t talk in a rehearsal. Then, there are ones who talk all the time and there’s this interchange.

Tess: As a somewhat new transplant myself, I’ve been thinking about how the place where I live gets into my creative work. I don’t have a way to describe how that’s happened so far, but I’m curious if you experience that too. How does your habitat make its way into your work?

Rachel: The biggest thing I would say is the pace of life here. I’ve only been to New York a couple of times but it feels vibratory to me when I’m there. It almost puts me at a low-level anxiety.

The pace of life here settles in my body. I can go downtown and that bustle is there. But really, in Chicago, I don’t have to go downtown. I don’t have to leave my six block radius. It’s really neighborhoody and that’s so kind and supportive. In a way, it makes me feel like I’m not in a huge city. I have a town within a city. I think that has a large affect on how I structure my life and therefore how much time I’m spending in the studio or how many weeks or months I determine a rehearsal process should be. Our turn-over time is a little dictated by the pace of Chicago life.

Additionally, I think the way I make dances is really affected by the athleticism of Midwesterners who grew up doing sports year-round or grew up on farms and were doing chores in the morning before school. There’s a sturdiness to the people that I work with in body and in spirit that definitely affects the dances and how we make them.

Tess: I’m more sensitive to seasons here, for some reason. I mean the actual seasons and then the dance seasons of performing. You really notice when there’s stuff going on and then when there’s nothing going on. Are the people you work with ready to go all year? What’s that seasonal change in energy like for you?

Rachel: This is where production life effects my creative life because I work on a cycle of seasons rather than the calendar year. For pretty much everybody, seasons start in September and goes through May. Nobody’s working in August and nobody wants to go outside in January. Maybe it’s effected by the school year (which is harvest-influenced anyway). The hibernation period that begins after Thanksgiving, and we don’t really emerge until February, is really awesome. It’s dark and cold for 16 hours of the day! At that point, are you really going to get yourself to ballet and then the studio? We do our shows in April, May, September, and October. There seems to be a tacit agreement. In the winter, you’re less productive. You’re supposed to hibernate.

Photo: Ward Thompson

Interview:  4.26.10

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I moved to Los Angeles from New York City for no real reason. This interview is the first in a series of interviews of interesting people, programs, events, and work in the Los Angeles area. I first saw The Wooden Floor at REDCAT, one of the few experimental dance (as well as other types of performance) venues here and was blown away by the performances of these young people and the type of work they were doing (pieces by Nami Yamamoto, Mark Haim and Melanie Rí­os Glaser). Growing up a bunhead, encouraged to fit into the narrow, restrictive and submissive stereotype of ballet, these students of dance, the work they are exposed to and the people they are encouraged to be (themselves) was refreshing, inspiring and unusual. For one month while the regular rehearsal assistant was on a residency, I assisted Melanie in working on her piece “True or False: I was Born in the Nederlands” for 48 young people of The Wooden Floor. I totally love these kids, they are amazing, and this program allows for hope in not just their world but mine. I have never known such a successful program where I feel the true potential of success, not just a justification of your lack of consciousness and caring in a money-driven world.  —Jmy Leary, October 2009

The Wooden Floor’s 1989 edition of DanceFree Weeks, a free dance program designed to boost confidence and teach respect through high-energy, introductory dance training. Photo: Courtesy of The Wooden Floor

Jmy Leary: You became the Artistic Director of The Wooden Floor in 2005. In 2008, you became the Executive and Artistic Director. Why?

Melanie Rí­os Glaser: Beth Burns, our founder, had put together an Executive and Artistic Director team who reported to the Board way before she retired. When she stepped down, there was a transition period that can be called “creative disruption.” Eventually we consolidated the positions and I stepped into the role because it seemed appropriate. I hired a General Manager/Chief Financial Officer to complete the structure and we went back to having a single leadership structure. The buck stops with me. I have a lot more work and responsibility that is not artistically related. Now I’m trying to bring back the artist.

Jmy: How did you get involved with The Wooden Floor?

Melanie: I met Beth Burns at Jacob’s Pillow in 1997, where we were roommates. She liked my work and, a few years later, she asked me to be the first outside choreographer to work with the youth at The Wooden Floor.

Jmy: I read a bit about the work that Beth made on the kids, working with Mayan culture. She had the kids do drawings which would be part of the set and the costumes. Or another piece, Unearthing, the kids talk about their personal stories and histories.

Melanie: One of Beth’s unique talents is that she has an eye for the whole theater – sets, lights, and costumes. Her work is theatrical. Because she came from an Anglo background, she felt the need to make sure she respected the youths’ culture and heritage in the work. I think there was some surprise when I began to make work here. I am a Guatemalan, and my work did not necessarily reflect that. My argument was that as a Hispanic female, I wanted to have a right to contribute to a contemporary art movement without having to bring in ethnicity or, folklore inspired dance. (For one I am not Mayan and have no such dance tradition in my background.)

I had been working in France, and found that there was an expectation that artists from Latin America or Africa bring some sort of “fusion” of traditional dance in a contemporary framework.

The work was accepted regardless of its depth of inquiry only because it was acknowledged that these cultures had been through hell and therefore could make any kind of art they wanted to. You were expected to make art that fit their idea of what art from your country should look like. I’ve heard it called the Frida Kahlo Syndrome.

Jmy: What did your work look like?

Melanie: In those days it could be labeled “very abstract.” It did not have any conscious references to culture albeit there must have been subtle ones. It was more generally about humanity and the kids doing things they had not done before. It was about physical risk taking. Beth went on to produce this very abstract piece. She gave me a piece of hers done with Mariachi music and Mariachi skirts to re-choreograph my way. We influenced each other.

The Wooden Floor’s Annual Concert, called Child of Grace, held at Memorial Hall Auditorium May 17-18, 1990. Photo: Courtesy of The Wooden Floor

Jmy: There seems to be some parallels with her original pieces, in getting the kids to not pretend, not strive to be anything other than who they are and to research their histories. Beth taught the kids ballet, which was her primary vocabulary, is that correct?

Melanie: She didn’t choreograph within the ballet language, and she didn’t want to. She was attracted to choreographers outside of ballet and wanted herself to expand.

Images from a scrapbook in The Wooden Floor’s archive depicting early classes in church basement. Photo: Courtesy of The Wooden Floor

Images from a scrapbook in The Wooden Floor’s archive depicting early classes in church basement. Photo: Courtesy of The Wooden Floor

Jmy: The kids are in ballet classes but the choreography is all over the place and filled with different references. What do you teach the kids now?

Melanie: The curriculum is based on ballet, modern, improvisation, and somatic studies. We are still playing with the somatics curriculum and how to fit it in. We have outgrown our space. What makes us unique is our striving to pair the kids with interesting artists that are contributing to shaping the genre of contemporary dance today. The kids are here long term, so that by the time that they graduate they will have been involved with this collaborative art making process for years. They know that they are not “pretending” to make art, they are doing the real deal in collaboration with these fabulous artists like Sally Silvers, Nami Yamamoto, Susan Rethorst, and Mark Haim to name a few.

Jmy: You can see how experienced the older kids are in making pieces and being creative whereas in other schools of dance, you get the director’s vision and the kids are submissive to that. The older kids feel like professional dancers. They are able to articulate to the younger kids how to approach movement, space, behavior.

Melanie: Here they learn things that kids learn in college dance programs. They may not be as strong in ballet, but they come out with other dance and life skills.

Jmy: What is the somatic work that they do?

Los Angelitos – Mark Haim, Performed at REDCAT, January 2010 (REDCAT – Roy and Edna Disney/Cal Arts Theatre). Photo: Omar Galvez

Melanie: We have two somatics teachers. Lisa Pettigrew’s approach is based on the work of Anna Halprin. Mary Herzog’s background is in contact improv and child psychology. She has made it her life’s work to mix improvisation with an awareness of children’s issues.

Jmy: Can you talk about the kids that come into the program?

Newspaper clippings: Courtesy of The Wooden Floor

Melanie: The only requisite to entrance is that you are extremely low income and have a desire and some ease with movement. Most of them are Latino, first generation or not even. Most have Spanish speaking parents and are two grade levels behind in school. A typical family at The Wooden Floor is a household of five living on $29,978 a year in Orange County, which is not Kansas.

Jmy: In the piece you are making with the kids, these issues come up and you allow them to come out on stage.

Melanie: When you see our kids on stage, they look so composed, together and fulfilling their potential for how wonderful they will become. You could almost romanticize who they are and what their background is. I have done that. It is not that I don’t want to make them look good. I wanted to bring their everyday issues and struggles into the work. I want them to talk about the issues in their lives, some of the stereotypes that they face.

Flying with my Shooting Stars – Nami Yamamoto, Performed 2009 & 2010, Irvine Barclay Theatre. Photo: Kevin P. Casey

Jmy: The piece is and is not about identity. Some colleges emphasize this cultural identity that people are supposed to find and make pieces about. There is something that feels false about that to me. The piece you are making is about cultural identity but it doesn’t feel false. These are the issues that you seem to be exploring, how do you present something without exploiting it, how to not romanticize it. You are also teaching kids about activism, sit-ins, rebellion, ideas they have not grown up with.

Melanie: You were with me that day when we asked them what a sit-in was and none of them knew. I never really know what I am doing until I am done and then work speaks back to me. Latina women are one of the least empowered groups so one of the attempts was to get them to feel that they have power. I take it as a compliment that it doesn’t feel forced. It might be that we are looking for authenticity.

Jmy: I was struck by how the kids were asked to be themselves, while in most theater and dance programs, you are asked to be other, something you may not want to be and you don’t feel like you have a choice.

Melanie: The piece came from what they were saying, venting, and doing. This piece has had several incarnations. I created a piece in the summer that was more accessible, romantic, inspiring. I dismantled it and reassembled it for REDCAT. Then I disassembled it again and added more kids.

Jmy: Their authenticity feels timeless. There is something about the issues they are dealing with that feels classic and timeless – responsibility, sex, drugs, growing up.

Melanie: I remember you saying that these issues were what you dealt with growing up. The struggles are timeless.

Jmy: The developments, needs, and desires to be close to others, to understand others, to be understood are the same no matter where you are growing up.

Melanie: To have credibility and authority is a big one for them. We still strive for this as adults.

Jmy: It never ends. You also bring in other choreographers like Mark Haim, Nami Yamamoto, and Sean Curran.

Melanie: Mark is talented with this group.

Jmy: His movement is fantastic for the kids.

Melanie: I also brought Scott Wells. We also collaborated with the Cunningham Dance Company to create a showing called MinEvent with excerpts from Roaratorio. Bill Viola gave us a video work to use as part of the collaboration. The great artists and production team are not here for the pay. They believe in what we are doing. The philosophy is, why shouldn’t these kids work with the best? Sally Silvers is another choreographer I brought in. Three of the artists have said they don’t have such great production values anywhere else. The Founder valued excellence, excellence, excellence. These kids get shortchanged everywhere in their lives. We are not going to shortchange them here.

Jmy: You bring unique people to work with the kids. You are not bringing the people that everyone else thinks are amazing. You bring independent people.

Melanie: Cunningham, Streb, and Limon have been here in residence. I have to remind my audience that the people who they may have not heard of, who are not so rich and famous are doing interesting work. They also have to want to work with the kids and get wonderful art out of the process.

Jmy: These are people that should be more valued, but there is not often money or support for this kind of work. Would a program like The Wooden Floor even exist in Europe?

Melanie: I have worked in Europe. I haven’t done a lot of research to know if this exists or not. They have many more subsidies, but I don’t think the model of ten years immersion is common. I have never known of another place where it actually exists.

Jmy: I have noticed that kids at The Wooden Floor are appreciative of what they are getting and how much harder it is when you don’t have any special attention or an outlet or a place to go after school. Can you talk about the program that is coming up?

Melanie: We have performances at the Irvine Barclay Theater on the UC Irvine campus. John Heginbotham, who has danced with Mark Morris for over a decade is creating a new piece for over 100 dancers. They will be performing Clapping Music by Steve Reich. Susan Rethorst just started her residency this week and she will be working with the older students. I will restage True or False: I was born in the Nederlands, which is inspired on the way the kids talk, walk and are influenced by pop culture.

Jmy: All pieces seem to allow the kids to use their imagination. This is such an important skill and there is not a place for it within western education. There does not seem to be a place for it outside the education where kids used to be allowed to run free, talk to trees, and have their own world. This space makes them feel calm and safe. What they learn here is how to deal with the stress of their lives. The parents also talked about how the kids were open and excited about their dance classes.

Melanie: You are right about all the pieces being imaginative. You walk into a dance studio and you don’t have anything. In that space with nothing, you will do something. All you have is you, space, and other people. The Wooden Floor levels the playing field. You have to use your imagination here.

Jmy: You can do something you don’t have to explain, which is not valued in our culture. We may not have the language to describe certain feelings and actions. You may not know what they are. There is not always language to describe what happens in a dance piece. It is a secret, other world that the kids enjoy being a part of.

Melanie: We make it different than school.

Jmy: What do you believe in these days?

Melanie: I believe in the arts as the end all, be all. I don’t believe in organized religion. The arts are a pathway to access our inner life and our deeper selves. I have not been very interested in “music” in the last couple years, but I am interested in contemporary visual art, performance art. Matthew Barney’s melting, linoleum white substance, stuff. I believe I need a sabbatical. I feel very strongly about people having the time to clear the deck.  With clarity comes enthusiasm and optimism. As a leader, I am often asked to have a clear vision. People in this country love to plan, which is helpful if you want to get from A to B. My last piece before this one was called Living with Murky. It was about the ability to be in an ambivalent, ambiguous, less clear place and not strive for clarity all the time, letting things happen in a more haphazard way. I advocate for some messiness, mixed feelings. That search for clarity often ends up in simplistic forms of thinking. Maybe it is less efficient. We are all about being efficient in the United States.

Photo: Kevin P. Casey

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!

Interview date:  November 15, 2010

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Ursula Eagly: “Practice” is a word that’s used a lot in our field, and you have a long history with many different types of practice. Could you talk about your background and how you synthesized it in the process of making this particular piece?

David Hurwith: Everything we do trains us. Whatever we’re doing, including this phone call, is practice.

But intentional practice, especially towards artistic goals or personal evolutionary goals, [is something] I’ve been involved with consciously and unconsciously for a long time. For me, a profound practice has been working with the body, both as a dancer and as a healer and as a person trying to be healed.

I had a long involvement with the Alexander technique, profoundly with Eva Karczag and Barbara Kent. Then I got involved with Body-Mind Centering, and I did the training as a practitioner. And I’ve meditated in a much more off-hand way. And the Authentic Movement, which was started by Mary Starks Whitehouse and profoundly developed by Janet Adler, is a practice of learning how to move without some of the other goals [of other approaches to movement], and how to witness someone and support them. Each of those practices has a different, but related, set of goals. And also a different idea of what it is to be human. The other practice that I’ve done is improvising as a dancer and improvising in performance.

All those practices have marked me and changed me. They also point to something: If you’re going to perform improvisation, you have to have a faith that sometimes when your conscious mind doesn’t know what it’s doing, you’re manifesting something else. That shouldn’t lead to just doing anything; specificity of intention and really looking at what’s there are essential.

[I also work with] capturing what’s happening. When you perform choreography, you have developed a structure and you have a memory of [that structure]. You refer to the structure and you’re also trying to refer to the present moment. So you’re doing two things. In a different way, when you’re performing improvisation, you’re doing the same thing, but without the idea that the structure is finite enough to tell you what to do. So you’re asking yourself to look at what’s happening and what you know and [then to] present something . . . that was kind of dense, and I have to say it seems a little serious.

Ursula: It’s serious stuff!

David: Nietzsche wrote, “If the truth were a woman, she finds the philosophers to be clumsy suitors with their seriousness.” It’s a great quote for being intentional, but also humor captures something really important.

Melissa Guerrero and Kate Martel dance in front of a painting by Nick DeFriez and a cabin constructed by David Hurwith. Photo: Katherine Ewald.

Ursula: You’re working with dancers that don’t have the same background that you do. How did bring them into this work you’re doing with these different forms of practice?

David: Actually, I feel like some of the dancers who are much younger than I am have a lot of experience with this work in different ways. They’re working with their bodies and studying and teaching. Some of them are teaching Pilates and some are involved with Alexander Technique. I feel like they’re much on the same road, but in different places. At first, before each rehearsal, I would do a little session on the ankles, and I would introduce something I learned from Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, something I learned from Twyla Tharp, something I made up myself, and bring in the systems . . . Body Mind Centering has a marvelous vision of different systems. In the dance world, there’s beginning to be a focus on anatomy, and they’re starting with the bones. I think all the systems—the bones, the muscles, the fluids, and especially perception—are really important and begin to have their say. When I see people dance, I often see different minds of different parts of their body speaking. I love that.

But in answering your question, we would have these sessions where we would focus on a piece of anatomy that we would work on together, and I would present the material. We began a practice of soloing for each other and witnessing and supporting each other. That was an incredible, inspiring practice that has gone on for a year. I feel like it’s the ground of this work. It sounds simple: One person is dancing, the other people are looking. And then the people who are watching are offering something in support of what that person did. I think a lot of people do [a similar practice]. But doing it over and over with the same people, we expanded our own movement vocabularies and [our ideas about] how they might be used to related to the content of the piece.

At first, [our verbal responses to the solos] were like a conversation. I think conversation has a covert agenda to maintain the status quo, and I really wanted a focused use of language. Then, we sometimes said three words, or ten words, or named three incidents. We really focused our intention to be in support, in a different way than just being nice.

Of course, [watching these solos] is a subjective experience. How do you take a subjective experience and be supportive of another person? There’s a projection involved. It’s something you aspire to, but it’s almost rhetorical. It’s not something you want to do and you do it and it’s done. It’s ongoing. That’s what makes it a practice.

But beyond that, first we [offered responses] in support of the person. We were just saying things we liked: “You looked great doing this,” “I loved this moment when you did that.” Later, I asked that we [offer responses] in support of the person’s process. We had developed enough that you might even say something that didn’t make sense to you, or it could be construed as critical, but you were demanding of yourself that it be in support of their process. That’s a different goal.

One of the problems of doing this was that we would warm up and then we would watch solos, and there was a lot more sitting involved than moving. So then I asked us to feel the movement in our bodies, not just in our eyes and in heads, and respond to it more physically.

This practice of soloing and responding also affected other sections of the dance. We have a section called the family channel, which is based on watching a lot of sitcoms, and [our practice] changed the conversations they were having and the ritual they were presenting. It became more conversational and less “I want you to know I’m listening to you and I’m thinking about what you’re saying, and then I’m responding.” Because people do that in specific situations and they also, in a very important way, just converse.

Ursula: Having developed this practice, how did you move from practice towards presentation?

David: The initial idea I had about this dance was to present the surreal aspect of being a member of a family. So some of the things we did included sitting down at my dinner table and having what we imagined was a dinner conversation. But we did this in a programmatic way. We went in a certain order and repeated certain things. We took something mechanical and we saw what nuances were there.

And the other thing that we did was . . . well, for me as a director, many days I had an idea of what I wanted to do—or had no idea what I wanted to do—and in the solos I’d be inspired by something to then try a form that I thought would bring on a certain aspect of the way people relate to each other. But I think for the dancers it was that thing of working at something and then being able to harvest something from it. Not so that you can repeat it exactly—that’s not what I’m looking for—but so that you can have a relationship to what you just did and develop it.

Ursula: I’d like to hear more about your relationship to the dance and performance traditions in New York City and the contact improvisation and Body Mind Centering traditions in Western Massachusetts. What traditions are you drawing from? What traditions are you working against? How have you brought your own history with those traditions into this specific process?

David: Well, I named some of my influences . . . my interest as an artist is in the uses of imagination and embodiment and emotion. Not in their raw form, but not in their completely digested form either. My medium is taking something real and of the self and presenting it in a way that people can understand.

When I first was choreographing, I did something abstract or technical in the way of rhythm and steps and shape. I’m interested in those things to this day, they’re the basis of any dance vocabulary. I’ve also been really inspired by music. One of my biggest influences, Charles Mingus, had all of these compositions where there’d be this group choreography and then these fantastic solos . . . the mixture of the group having a clear say and these conversations, which were also practiced because they performed them every night. You can hear different versions of them. Indigenous jazz music is a huge influence and huge support and company when I’m in the studio.

When I started to dance, I think I came from a visual idea and a doing idea. I was making tasks and then imagining them being seen. After I had done Body Mind Centering, I thought about developing a palette of different qualities of moving from the body. I was sourcing and presenting something more internal and not so in my head, which has always been my goal.

Ursula: You’ve been rehearsing both in New York City and Western Massachusetts. How is the process of working in these two places?

David: I’ve put a lot of miles in my car!

First of all, I have to say that I tried to make a group that I supported a lot. And I find now that I’m getting towards the end of this piece, the group is supporting me, which has been like a dream for me.

In New York, you have three hours with the people, once a day if you’re lucky, and then you go off on your merry way or you have another rehearsal. Those rehearsals have been fun. And having them up here [in Massachusetts], they’re staying at the studio, and we’re eating meals together. We’re working in the set. Many of the dancers showed me things about the set that I created that I hadn’t imagined. I had two large drawings that are 40 feet wide and 12 feet high and then on a muslin drop a surrealist painting that evokes the living room for the family part that’s 30 feet by 16 feet. It’s been interesting to work on movement ideas in New York and then really go deeper with the set and the content here in Massachusetts. And also deal with the dynamics of living together. The dancers have given so much in making their lives work so that they can come up here. All dancers donate so much, have lifestyles where they can work on things.

The 30′ X 16′ drop painted by Nick DeFriez. Photo: David Hurwith.

Ursula: You once mentioned that this piece is the most developed work that you’ve made. What does that mean and how is it manifesting in the process and presentation of the work?

David: In a certain way, I indulged myself. Each artist needs to figure out how to indulge themselves and also how to be disciplined, each in their own way. One of the ways that I indulged myself in this piece was that I didn’t agree to a performance date until I felt like what we were working on was something that I feel confident about. This was very hard for the dancers; I lost some dancers. But the work got to develop, and also I got to sit with [the material], and it got to marinate for 18 months. That allowed me to have new ideas and come at the content again and again. That’s one way that this work is much more developed.

[Another way is in] my ability to build the set and work with other artists. I built a little cabin in my studio that we work with, using barn wood from the area around here, beautiful decayed barn wood. That was an homage to Edward Kienholz, an artist who I love. I really made an object that’s very beautiful. [This process] brings up my interest in different mediums and collaborating with different artists. [I’m also working with] Mike Vargas, the composer, and Nick DeFriez, the painter who painted both drops.

There’s not only an external politics. There’s a politics in how you engage the people you’re working with. I made a commitment to being supportive of the dancers, not just for what I could get from them, but in their lives.

And also I made a commitment [to integrating the design elements in the dance] . . . you work on a dance for however long and then you bring in lights and costume, and sometimes [in the past] I would come up with not the deepest or best solutions, because I just wanted it over with so I could go dance. And [in this process] I demanded and again got support from my dancers in figuring out what was really going to work and what made sense for this dance as far as those other elements.

Also, I have a practice that I haven’t mentioned yet, which is that I write everyday. There’s a little monologue that I wrote that I adapted for this piece. So this work really brings in a lot of my different interests.

And all these things make me really feel like this work is more complete.

Ursula: It sounds like a very broad process . . .

David: One of the things I know is that you can’t really exclude anything from the work. It will all be there.