Critical Correspondence

John Jasperse in conversation with Jmy Leary

Truth, Revised Histories, Wishful Thinking and Flat Out Lies

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jmy: Because that was a successful piece?

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

Jmy: There was a distance to that piece.

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

Jmy: What box is that for you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jmy: While staying somewhat true to themselves?

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

Jmy: Like what?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jmy: What is your larger trajectory?

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

Jmy: You have baggage.

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

Jmy: What are you interested in right now?

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

Jmy: Like ego?

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

Jmy: Is it a space away from attention?

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

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

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

Jmy: What do you mean by logical language?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jmy: Did you grow up in the Midwest?

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

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

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

Jmy: Almost a belief system.

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

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

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

Jmy: Which era?

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

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

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

Jmy: There was always visual media – statues…

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

Jmy: Genis Khan, Cleopatra…

John: No one knew what Cleopatra looked like.

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

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

Jmy: So you copied something?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jmy: What are you referring to?

John: A certain generation of release work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jmy: Playing with function and decoration.

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

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

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

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

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

Jmy: You are interested in those crossovers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jmy: We will end there.