Response to Trajal Harrell’s Judson Church Is Ringing in Harlem (Made-to-Measure)/Twenty Looks or Paris Is Burning at the Judson Church (M2M)

October 11-13, 2012 at Danspace Project

Photo of Ondrej Vidlar, Thibault Lac, and Rob Fordeyn by Miana Jun

 

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Response to DD Dorvillier’s Danza Permanente

September 26-30, 2012 at The Kitchen

Photo of Walter Dundervill, Fabian Barba, Nuno Bizarro, and Naiara Mendioroz by Paula Court

 

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Response to RoseAnne Spradlin’s beginning of something

September 26-29, 2012 at New York Live Arts

Photo: Ian Douglas Performers pictured: Rebecca Serrell Cyr (foreground); Natalie Green (background)

Untitled (after Carolee Schneemann)

 

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Response to Brian Rogers’s Hot Box

September 13-15 and 17-22, 2012 at The Chocolate Factory

Photo of Madeline Best by Paula Court

Response to Clarinda Mac Low’s 40 Dancers do 40 Dances for the Dancers

September 13-15, 2012 at Danspace Project

Photo of Simone Forti by Ian Douglas

Christine Shan Shan Hou is a poet, artist, and critic living in Brooklyn, NY. Publications include Accumulations (Publication Studio, 2010) and C O N C R E T E  S O U N D (Norte Maar, 2011), a collaborative artist’s book with Audra Wolowiec. Additional poems appear, or are forthcoming, inWeekday, EOAGH, Parallelograms, Bone Bouquet, and A Science. Awards include The Flow Chart Foundation/The Academy for American Poets and the Zora Neale Hurston Scholarship. In 2011, she completed a residency at Mount Tremper Arts in partnership with The Brooklyn Rail. She is currently the Managing and Program Director for iLAND (Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art Nature and Dance), and writes on performance for The Brooklyn Rail, The Performance Club, Hyperallergic Weekend, and Idiom.

This series presents brief conversations with the current Winter MELT comp teachers: Susan Rethorst, Jennifer Monson and RoseAnne Spradlin. As active makers and seasoned teachers of composition, these artists are invited to articulate their current approach to making and teaching, their observations and the problems and questions that are leading their particular investigations.

Two words: “F*** You” over and over and over again. Okay, so this was actually in the tail end of 2005 – NOVA by RoseAnne Spradlin. A looping cascade of performers traverse a wooden plank, at the end of which an aggressive “F*** You” is directed out towards a singular point in space, just above the audience horizon. Oh, to be the lucky audience member sitting at the end of the “F*** You” line, I can only imagine. So this was totally awesome, but it became even more awesome in the passage of time since seeing that show. How many times have I felt like that, careening through a chaotic landscape and only adding to the endless assault with my own personal “F*** You” energy. What is the utility of this aggro-tendency and why do we chose to manufacture hatred?

Thumbnail photo by Valerie B. Barnes

Alejandra Martorell: I thought I would just invite you to talk about whatever aspect of the work you want to talk about: whether it’s conceptual, or process-oriented, or personal, or wherever you are at right now.

RoseAnne Spradlin: Well, let’s see. What were some of those words you just said? “Conceptual, process, personal…” I don’t think I am very much of a conceptualist in terms of how I go about my work. I am probably much more of a process-oriented person, and definitely personal. I have a personal approach to my work, I think. I mean, who doesn’t, really? So, I’m not sure what that means except for that if it doesn’t have something kind of personal infused in it, then I haven’t really done what I’ve wanted to do, or what I find most satisfying. You know, sometimes it does turn out that it kind of lacks that somehow, and that’s very mysterious to me how that happens, how it does happen and how it doesn’t happen.

So, not being very “conceptual” I feel like is always the difficulty that I run up against, in terms of being able to talk about my work, being able to sell my work, being able to…you know…get grants. Even working on this show for DTW, we had this big sit-down the other day where it was like, ‘Is it going to be a white floor or a black floor?’ And I was like, ‘You know, it could be white, it could be black…’ [laughs] And the DTW people were like, ‘Don’t you even know if you want a white floor or a black floor?’ [laughs again], and I was like, ‘You know? Not really, because once I see it, I’ll know what is right for the piece, and it could probably work either way. Some things will be brought out by the white floor, and some things will be brought out by the black floor.

Alejandra: Do you think that there is an appreciation of what right now is considered to be “cool” that implies a more global view of work, so that there’s a multiplicity of elements and a theatrical idea of what stage performance/dance is at this point in history?

RoseAnne: I think that must be an expectation. There’s a lot of emphasis on the kind of art-direction-side of work right now, and the kind of questions that that might bring out. I’m not not interested in that, but I just feel like in a space like DTW, there are such limits anyway in terms of how you can really approach the space, I feel like I’ve accepted it for this project. I’m not trying to change the space really.

Alejandra: Does it also have to do with resources? Like the ability to think in that scale? Where every detail is taken care of?

RoseAnne: Probably. I do think it has to do with that, too, but I think also it has to do with something about my work, and me. I am very much a person who tries to make it work. Whatever the circumstances are, I try and make it work. So I feel like I can make it work on a black floor, I can make it work on a white floor. I think it will work either way. I’m not trying to make a black statement or a white statement [laughs]. And I’m not by myself on this: the real hang-up was with Glen [Fogel], who is making the video element—he really wanted a black floor, and then Joe [Levasseur], the lighting designer, who was much more interested in lighting something that was on white. So, I was holding the middle space and trying to get everybody to wait until we see more of the elements in the space, so that we can actually see what it is.

I think I work that way as an artist: I really work by seeing what it is, and not so much thinking about it ahead of time. To me, that way of working is pretty boring. I know it must be exciting for some people, but to just think up a project, and then the whole thing is about…

Alejandra: …making it.

RoseAnne: Making it. And that doesn’t appeal to me, somehow. I think that a lot of people think that is the way artists work. Some people must work that way, but I think that in reality, I doubt many people really work that way. Even people whose work seems like it’s that way, probably they don’t really work that way. You know what I mean?

Alejandra: Yes.

RoseAnne: How can you know what you are making before you’ve made it? To me, what you are going to make then, is something that has basically been done, either by you or by somebody else. Because otherwise, you wouldn’t even be able to imagine it, right? [laughs]

Alejandra: When I saw the rehearsal the other day, I had this moment of goose-bumps, because I realized this is the space—and also the time—where this incredible tension between process and finalizing occurs. And I could feel it, and it’s really exciting from the outside! [laughs] It’s really hard when you are in it, but it was voyeuristically pleasurable to witness that spark of moment, that tension, though I could also think, this sucks! This is so difficult!

RoseAnne: Yeah! I guess I’ve been feeling that because on this project, I have more collaborators than I ever had before. I feel like I’m the one who keeps wanting to say, ‘Can we stay in the process of it? Can we stay in the process of it a little longer?’ You know? Even with the dancers, I feel like I get in this fight with them like, ‘Don’t spend your time trying to figure out where that’s going to go on the stage, because we might change it!’ [laughs] And then all that is going to be wasted. It’s like: just try to do it…and even one of the dancers kept asking me on Sunday, ‘What are we doing next? What are we doing next?’ And I was like, ‘AHHHHH! Would you stop it?! What do you mean, ‘what are we doing next?!’ Because I don’t know! If I knew, I would tell you, but this is just unfolding right here in front of your eyes! That’s hard for me.

Alejandra: That’s an amazing capability on your part: to embrace staying in the moment, and look at the work, and keep listening to it to see what is going on. Because I feel like that’s the hardest thing, especially when the time approaches…

RoseAnne: Yeah.

Alejandra: How do you do that? Is that something that you’ve grown to embrace, that you’ve taught yourself? Or is it kind of a natural instinct, or interest you have?

RoseAnne: I think it is how I work naturally, and I think what has grown over time is just my confidence to say that I know this is the way I work. And not have to always feel like I’m doing something wrong because I’m not meeting somebody’s expectation. Now I can just come in, a little bit more so, and say, ‘I’m really somebody who is working in the process and I’ll be working on the piece up until the end. And I have this, and this, and this, and I don’t know how they are going together—yet.’ So I feel a little bit more confident about saying that is how I work and that somehow I know it will come together. I guess that is something you get over time, because you go through so many times where you don’t know how it is going to come together, and then you find it does. Or it does and it doesn’t, or it always comes together and then sometimes it’s more successful than other times.

But, I think that interest must come a lot from my experience of studying with Bonnie [Bainbridge Cohen], and that approach to looking at the mind and movement. Bonnie always says that the brain is the last to know. If you are really in a new experience, the brain is the last to know. And if the brain is the first to know, then it means you’re doing something you’ve already done before. That the primary, first order experience doesn’t come from the brain, really. She says it comes from the cells. That sounds very esoteric for people, like, ‘Cells? What? What does that mean?’ But I know that can translate somewhat into the creative process, and it’s just that thing that people talk about, like ‘being in the process,’ or maintaining that space of being undecided. I think that that is what it is.

Alejandra: That’s fascinating. Can you just talk a little bit more about your process as a creator in relationship to your process as a student and teacher of Body-Mind Centering? Also, how does not being in the work affect that process of being in the moment, in the process, in the body? I don’t know how much you work out what you are working on in the piece on your own body before you invite dancers, etc.

RoseAnne: Yeah, it has changed over time. Maybe I’ll talk about the second part of the question first and then go back, because I think it’s a really big issue for me right now: not dancing in my own work, and not really making the movement up myself so much. I do make it up in a certain way, but in a certain way I only make it up in the very, very beginning. I quickly give it over to the dancers and then try to continue to work on it through their bodies. It can be a lot of pushing and pulling, and sometimes misunderstandings. I know that can be very frustrating or irritating for the dancers for somebody to be saying, ‘Ok, I want you to improvise with this,’ and then to also have veto power over it [laughs], like, ‘Ehhh…No…Not that, not that. That wasn’t the direction I was thinking about.’ [laughs] It’s a very odd thing to be trying to sit in both of those positions at once. But I don’t know how else to do it, really.

In this piece, I feel like I’ve been struggling to try to find vocabulary that’s interesting to me. When I made up my own dances for my own body, it’s so totally different. Because I don’t think that things that I made up ever really looked like any sort of technical approach—they didn’t really look like “modern dance,” they didn’t really look like “post-modern dance” either, or they didn’t really look like this or that; they were just some sort of weird amalgam. Now I feel that with other people, I have to be a lot more conscious with what I allow in, and what I consciously try not to allow in terms of stylistic and movement choices, and certain default choices. Like all of those choices that people take for granted, and I do, too.

So I’ve been really, really searching for vocabulary, and a lot of it does still come from me physically, somehow. I know that my way of accessing it is different. The more time that I have, the more time that I am willing to spend helping the dancers access it in a way that I might. But when there’s not a lot of time I can’t help them that much. That kind of process takes a lot of time. To get people to wipe the slate clean and just go to their body and start from nothing and find whatever it is you are looking for and bring it into external movement. That can take a really long time. Somehow in this process, I haven’t felt like I’ve had the time to do that as much as I would have liked.

Alejandra: Is it different with the people that have worked with you for many years—like Tasha and Walter?

RoseAnne: Yeah, I think so.

Alejandra: Do they have more common ground with you?

RoseAnne: Yeah…and they certainly know a little bit more about my likes and dislikes, you know? As a mover and dancer, Tasha is the closest to me. Not that I ever moved like she moves—she has so much more technical facility than I ever had as a dancer—but her way of approaching dance as self-expression—I feel very at home with that. That way of approaching it makes sense to me. She, to me, is always very natural in a certain way, even when she is being dramatic, it is somehow kind of natural to me. The other dancers I’ve worked with, they’d often take several different strategies to get something going that works for me, and works for them. Ultimately, it has to work for them, or else it would just be a disaster![laughs]

Alejandra: Right. When I was at the rehearsal, I was thinking about the very strange and conflicting relationship between choreographer and dancer. I think it came up for me because the way that I see your work, it seems like it is sprouting from this very intense, very personal place, so there is that strange dynamic between whose personal? You know? The person who is making it or the person who is onstage? That became very palpable for me.

RoseAnne: In this dance, it’s been really interesting to me that what was once the first layer—the outer layer, the choreography, what I thought was going to be the dance—has largely been cut away, and at some point I just decided to try to bring in this underneath layer that had more to do with the dancers. I started asking them, ‘Well, what’s your attitude about this little part of the piece—like when you come onstage there, what do you think you are doing? What does it feel like to you? Do you like it? Do you not like it? And how would you do it different? What does it have to do with that other person over there?’ So we started bringing in this other layer, and eventually that layer took over, so that’s mostly what’s there now.

Alejandra: That’s very interesting…

RoseAnne: And I would like to even be able to do that more. I don’t know how much more I’ll be able to do in a month, but I just thought that ultimately it’s a lot more interesting for a lot of us to work that way. But it still takes a lot to pull it out of people. I think a lot of people…I mean, of course, you are a dancer, you have a million things going on in your life, you go to rehearsal and somebody’s trying to drag something out of you from the inside! [laughs] And you’re not sure if that’s your material, their material, or are you going to share that material? It’s confrontational, sometimes, and it can be kind of uncomfortable, and there are boundary issues.

Alejandra: It makes sense that if you understand your work as being very personal, you are bringing that very notion about the work to the making of it and bring it to the final product.

RoseAnne: Right, right. And whenever you try that thing that artists do, like where you try to take something and make it bigger, you make it more, compound it, or enlarge it, take it to an edge, or whatever you call it—the more you do that, the more uncomfortable it can get, in a way, for choreographer and the dancer.

We were talking about…you didn’t see any of the video, did you?

Alejandra: No.

RoseAnne: Because one of the things that Glen did—the person who is working on the video—he started out by doing these “screen tests” of the dancers, taking off on the Andy Warhol screen tests, where they just sit in a totally dark space with the camera on them for a while. We started off like that, and then he interviewed them—right now we don’t think we’re actually using any of the verbal stuff, but we’re using their faces, and I think that the piece is starting out with one minute of each person’s face just huge—covering the whole back wall. They’re moving, but minimally, just blinking their eyes, or whatever…

That wasn’t how I started the dance, but that came in fairly early in the process, where we started doing some of that recording; we’d gone on this residency for a week to Pennsylvania, so there was a lot of time to sit around, and talk…I was comparing it somewhat to sex, you know? In that, do you want to be with somebody who is going to lead you into new territory, or not? Do you want to just be like, ‘This is what I do, and I don’t do anything else!’ [both laugh] You know? And I think that some people are in that category of ‘this is what I do, and I really don’t want to do anything else! And stop it!’—they don’t really want you to come in, and that’s really hard to work with for a choreographer.

In a certain way, if you are making work like I make, you need your people to be somewhat…um…what’s the right word? Available? And willing—willing to go into that unknown, uncharted territory. And when they start resisting, you can’t do anything. That’s the way I feel, and that’s sort of what has happened during this process with different people at different times, there’s been a lot of resistance that has come up. And I can’t do anything with that! If you resist me, I’m stymied, it shuts the door, I can’t do anything with that unless I just want to struggle with you, and actually, I don’t have the energy to come into rehearsal and struggle with people—or the interest. Like, I’m not that interested in doing that, you know?

I don’t know why in this process more than others this has come up, but I think it’s partly the subject matter…partly the people…partly just the point in time in terms of me and my work and the length of time I’ve been working with certain people, and adding in new people and the chemistry. It might be a little bit of growing pains, because I think I’ve been asking people to give more and be a little more responsive to the whole enterprise, more than I ever used to. Which is something I think you just do if you are trying to keep it going. I mean, you can’t do the whole hundred percent of it yourself—it is just impossible to do that. You need other people to own a little bit of it. But anyway.

I think there is a lot of blurriness around the expectations and rewards, and that sort of thing. In this process, I had two people who were in the piece who didn’t stay in it: the first was Chase [Granoff], who got injured. That was a really big blow to me, to lose him, because I felt really good about working with Chase. And figuring out what his injury was, and what it was going to require, that took a really long time—it took about a month—to figure out, ‘Ok, he’s out of here, and he’s not going to be back.’

Then I had another person who took Chase’s part and who only stayed two or three weeks, and then quit! And I’ve never had that happen before! [laughs] And I really wasn’t prepared for that. So now I have Cédric [Andrieux ] in that part, and he’s great, but new—new to my process.

Alejandra: You mentioned subject matter; I’m curious to hear what is your subject matter—a simple question—in the piece. Is it very concrete?

RoseAnne: No—it’s not concrete. And that’s probably another reason that it’s been a little bit difficult. Because I think that what we’re working with has been kind of elusive, for both me and the dancers. I had this idea, which was kind of a hold over from my last piece, where I was exploring something about getting rid of things. As opposed to, lots of times—especially in this culture—we think, ‘I need more of this, I need more of that, we need more as a country, as a dance community…more this…more that.’ So I was kind of looking at the opposite of that. It was something that I was feeling in my life, actually. I need to cut away—I can’t carry this baggage anymore! [laughs] That’s how I was feeling, like I need to lighten my load, I need to get rid of all of this stuff I was carrying around with me. I was thinking psychologically and physically, so that’s a weird thing to try and bring into a dance. How do you do that?

But eventually it kind of worked its way into being, I think. Ok, so it was about cutting away, and then it became about breaking down. Breaking something that’s very formed down into its most basic matter so that it’s no longer formed, it’s no longer structured, it’s no longer even a “form,” and you just take it back to material. So that’s kind of heady, actually.

Alejandra: But descriptive of what I saw.

RoseAnne: Yeah, ok, good! So we went through a long process where we just tried to do that with movement—like in some really obvious ways with movement phrases: break them into tiny little pieces, or take something that was holding and let it break, that sort of thing. And then eventually it meandered into being a bit more about the relationships, too. Because it seemed like that’s what was happening in the process of making this piece: it just felt like the relationships were breaking down, and changing form, and refusing to solidify from one day to the next. It just felt like everything was constantly shifting. So, I think, as I try to push the piece a little bit, I try to figure out how that is reflected in people-to-people relationships a little bit more.

So that’s kind of the subject matter.

Alejandra: It’s really fascinating to me how seeing a rehearsal, because if I had to describe what I saw—

RoseAnne: What would you say?

Alejandra: Well, I wrote down, “partialization”—is that a word? I had a sensation of the theater as being this huge empty space, and a sense of the space being a protagonist in a way, and of people letting go of sequence, and just coming into the space to take on a little part of it, and do what felt like a remnant of something, a very partial aspect of a whole.

RoseAnne: Mmm hmm…

Alejandra: It’s funny, when you said that you tried doing these very literal things with movement… It’s fascinating to me what “concept” and “obviousness” are, because there’s this way in which things come to be that is very evocative, and eloquent and yet, in a way, it came from the very literal—’let’s do the most obvious exercise.’ That phenomenon baffles me. That’s what I saw, but I saw it in such a mysterious way.

RoseAnne: Well, one thing I felt like I got a handle on right away in the process—and I also said this to all the collaborators—was that I wanted to try to make it a visceral experience. Not something necessarily that people would be able to follow linearly, like ‘that happened, and then that happened, and then that happened’—you know? People wouldn’t walk away from the piece like that, but hopefully they would walk away having had an experience maybe more like you’d have with music: you can’t necessarily pin words on it, but you know that you went somewhere. So that’s what I think we are trying to create—this sense of having a visceral-level experience that kind of shakes you. We are trying to do something that will be somewhat unsettling—and not for the sake of being unsettling, but to feel like the ground is shifting under your feet, or something like that.

So a lot of the wiggling that they do—a lot of that has been cut out. There used to be these long, long sequences of just all this movement that had to be done with the wiggle. I don’t know how well it’s working now, but I know that when it was longer, I would start to feel really unsettled! And I would kind of sit there, and start wiggling in my chair—of course I am very synced up with them empathetically, but…anyway…

So I hope that that happens by the end: that people feel like that they had an experience. [laughs]

Alejandra: Another thing that I thought about while I was watching it—and I wonder how much of it is your work, and how much of it is particular to this piece, or the dancers—was something about openness and rawness. I’m thinking of Paige’s movement when she’s doing that lunge and also the lifts where the whole body gets spiraled and exposed and open. And also there’s those things with the hands that remind me of the conversation that Miguel and Neil had where Miguel was talking about Neil’s gesture with his hands. I was noticing hands are very prominent.

RoseAnne: Yeah.

Alejandra: And I think that is part of your work.

RoseAnne: Yeah, and I think it always has been.

Alejandra: And now I’m wondering if that had to do with that rawness that I was feeling, especially in the women. So in a way, that’s like “signature RoseAnne.” Is there language for that? Do you have an explanation or understanding of what that is?

RoseAnne: You know, I don’t talk about it to them, they just do it. It just comes out—I don’t know how it comes out, but it just comes out. But, I will say that in Bonnie’s work, she says that the parasympathetic autonomic nerves express through the hands and feet, and what they express is engagement and personal intent. I think that is really part of what that is: that rawness comes from that visceral intent…and because you use the hands to reach out and take hold of things and to express like that, I think then when you abstract that into movement, it still has that feel in a way: you are reaching out to get something, or…I don’t know…that’s all I can come up with!

Alejandra: Do you think the thing about resisting you that you were talking about before gives that section some sort of tone—sometimes a struggle between the person moving and the group’s movement?

RoseAnne: Yeah, that’s right. There is that layer.

Alejandra: Is that also a signature of your work?

RoseAnne: Yeah.

Alejandra: That you don’t erase any part of the personhood. It’s always the dancer as full-bodied person…multidimensional being. Not like the dancer performing something that was put on them. It’s just a big difference.

RoseAnne: That’s definitely something that I am interested in; that’s what I want to see. I want to see them being individuals.

Alejandra: You talked about collaborating more in this project.

RoseAnne: Yeah, because I also have Chris Peck making the music. I’ve used live music before—and I’ve commissioned several composers before—but usually, I’ve sort of commissioned something that has already almost been created, and is not totally from scratch. And this feels just more from a totally beginning place. Also, I think that with a piece like this, what the sound is can color it so much. I think that we’re on the same page now, but for a while, Chris and I were really trying to communicate, but not always successfully communicating about what we were thinking. Or at least, I don’t think I was communicating to him somehow what I wanted, but that’s partly because of what I said: I didn’t really have the full form of what I wanted. It’s kind of hard to communicate about something when you know don’t know what it is! I feel for him! I think it’s turning out ok now…

And then the video—I’ve done some pieces with video in them before, but I always did it myself, so this is the first time I’ve ever had anybody else.

Alejandra: And he started from a blank slate? Listening to you?

RoseAnne: Yeah. And what he’s doing has a lot of me in it. For one thing, he decided to record a recreation—we recreated this scene from my last piece, where somebody cuts the clothes off of somebody else, and they are wearing many, many layers of clothes, so it takes a really long time—so Glen recreated that in the black space at DTW. But he did this really brilliant thing with it, which was he had these two different strobe lights on it, so he videoed it totally in the black with these strobe lights. And it was Tasha who cut all these clothes off of Walter—basically, in the dark, with just these strobe lights and these enormous scissors, so it has almost like this horror movie kind of feeling to it. You can hear the “Sh-wooh, sh-woosh” of the scissors cutting, cutting, cutting, and sometimes she rips the fabric, and you can hear this ripping sound…and he videoed it really up close, so a lot of it is pretty abstract.

That image came from my previous piece, but he did something else with it that made it his piece, and it’s interesting, because it looks a lot like his work. But I think Glen and I—our aesthetic, and the way we are as people—we kind of had this immediate connection like, ‘Oh! I get it! I get you.’ So that’s been good….that’s been really good.

And then even though I’ve worked with Paige before, I hadn’t worked with her in a long time, so she’s come back into it after a long time away. And Cedric is totally new to me—and I’ve never worked with anybody who has been in a company like the Cunningham Company before, so…at first, I was so fascinated by…it was like, ‘Oh, gosh…they really do that so well!’ Because a lot of times, my work is so slow—and especially in the past, my dances would progress so slowly and if anybody moved anywhere it was always walking, and it was always slow walking—and then I just saw that Cedric was able to dart around, and it looked very natural, and I was like, ‘How do you get to that?’ And he was like, ‘Oh, you know, Merce is a very impatient person when he works with us! He just likes us to move.’

So that was interesting—having that influence come in, and I got interested in having the piece move more quickly from one thing to the next thing. That’s been a new little experiment.

And what did you think about all of the partnering? Because the partnering is something I feel a little funny about: everyone kind of doesn’t like partnering in a way, because of all of its associations with mainstream dance…

Alejandra: Really?

RoseAnne: Like males-lifting-females, kind of thing. I’ve tried to break that up some, but we’ve struggled to get the men to be lifted, but they’re just not easy to lift! They’re hard! Even to have one guy lift another guy is hard! I finally came around and said, ‘Ok, we’ve figured it out! This is why women get lifted! They’re smaller!’ [laughs] You can actually get them up in the air without having a backache after, or pulling your neck out of place.

Alejandra: The idea of male/female was in my head, because I was thinking about what I said about the woman being different in the piece than the men; being—I don’t know how to say it. There is something about their bodies that’s more open, literally, maybe.

RoseAnne: Yeah.

Alejandra: And the quality of the openness is very particular. It’s a kind of… not tearing, but in that realm of open. So I was reading that gender thing, but that was then offset by the idea of “partial.” When these crazy lifts happen out of nowhere. There is no buildup towards them, but they are a peak. So that is interesting, and it’s an interesting thing, structurally, that all of a sudden this is happening, but you didn’t see how it got to be there!

RoseAnne: What you’re saying about the women, I know that body place, and that’s probably what just comes naturally for me. The men—I’m really interested in men right now, as creatures. I don’t know who they are! I don’t get them, really. [both laugh]

I’m interested—I want to know more how they function. It’s partly because at this point in my life, I kind of totally failed at the relationship thing: I was married for a while, and then I had one major relationship after that, and neither of them lasted. I don’t really get guys, I don’t know how their minds work, and I don’t know what they feel! [laughs] Like I know what the women feel—or maybe I’m wrong, but at least I think I know what they feel.

Alejandra: That’s tricky, because…well, what I’m about to say—not what you just said, but what I’m about to say—can be so un-P.C., but I have to say that watching that rehearsal, a similar thing happened to me: I had a level of absorption with Paige and Tasha that was very, very different than with Walter and Cedric. With Walter, there’s that section in the middle where he goes into the floor—he’s just like a scribble that doesn’t stop, and I was fascinated by it, but my fascinations are different with each one.

RoseAnne: Uh, huh.

Alejandra: There’s a different kind of admiration, and I think it’s colored by the admiration of…I don’t know…to me, watching Walter, I felt like, ‘That is beautiful,’ and watching Paige and Tasha, it’s more like, ‘that’s a place. That’s a way of being.’ And I think that what that says is I know more of that world, because I can see more three-dimensionally in it, whereas the other one is like, ‘Oh…wow…that’s very pretty…’ You know? Not in a bad way, but…

RoseAnne: It’s so interesting! What is it that is analogous for the men? What kind of place can they be in? I don’t know what it is! I feel like I haven’t yet been able to create it for them.

Alejandra: It’s really exciting to hear that you intend to keep on working, that that’s your mindset right now.

RoseAnne: There’s such a conversation now—which is good, which is totally good—about what is happening, about what do we need, about what has happened, did the scene fall apart, or not. Sometimes I read the Dance Insider when it comes across my computer. I read something today where he [Paul Ben-Itzak] began railing again at the Joyce—and BAM—that you should lead your audience instead of pandering to your audience, you should lead your audience to the new work. And I totally agree with that: that is what presenters and producers can do and should do. They should take the risk.

On the other hand, I do feel like I lived through the days, here in the downtown scene, where it was more about personalities—like, who is an interesting artist?—meaning, who is an interesting personality? Almost a kind of celebrity-cult type of thing. And I think David White kind of created that somewhat, and maybe Mark Russell did, too, although they both also had really good points of view. I think they strengthened the community in other ways, but that personality cult is actually really bad for artists, because it’s so momentary—that’s the thing! You can’t be the personality for very long! The whole thing is about moving on, from one personality to the next personality to the next personality, just like the celebrities on T.V. or the movies. You’re not that hot that long—you know? That totally goes against what it’s like to be an artist. To have a lifetime as an artist, you have to keep working. It’s not about being an appealing personality, really, it’s about your work.

Alejandra: Or about arriving at a success…

RoseAnne: Yeah. So I think that that’s a trend that I am wary of when it raises its head. I’m hoping that that one doesn’t come back right away. Where you have to somehow look like you’re an interesting personality in order for people to like your work. That also starts operating a lot when people don’t actually know what they are looking at, so they don’t know how to judge the work and they judge the person instead. I hope we don’t go back to that. I feel like we did that—we saw what that did.

Alejandra: I don’t know if this has anything to do with what you are saying, but it makes me think of the whole Gia [Kourlas] statement about New York not being the hub of dance anymore. And not about what Gia said—because I don’t remember what she actually said—but about what people interpreted it as. The line that was out in the street, was ‘there’s not good work out there right now.’ I feel there is a lot of good, mature, work now. Maybe there is a “cutting edge, young, sudden-stardom” phenomenon going on alongside a group of people who mature in their work, and that work is just more mature than any sudden stardom can be. But there might be a preference in the culture for that sudden-stardom quality.

RoseAnne: Well, I think that is always there, and I think it’s pretty much built on—what do they say?—on clay feet, or something like that. People look for a little savior, and they are always hoping that…

Alejandra: So, it’s kind of produced partly by the artists themselves, and partly by the producers, presenters and press?

RoseAnne: I mean, it’s just human nature. It’s just like wanting the new relationship because you think that this one is going to be different from the last one! [both laugh] You know?

Alejandra: Yeah…

RoseAnne: And then, they say, they are all the same one, actually.

I think that the scene feels fresher to me right now—with more potential. Not to say that everything new is good—or young is good—but at least it’s sort of whatever that weird fear was that was operating, it seems like it’s dissipated.

Alejandra: Thank you for talking with us.

RoseAnne: Thank you.

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Thumbnail photo: Tamar Lamm

This interview occurred on the phone with Yasmeen in Israel, therefore, “here” refers to Israel and “the city” refers to New York.

RoseAnne Spradlin: So, Yasmeen, it’s nice to talk to you. It’s been a while since I’ve seen you.

Yasmeen Godder: Yeah, it has been a while since I was last in New York, too.

RoseAnne: How long has it been?

Yasmeen: Last time I was there presenting something was at the Whitney. I think it was spring of 2004 at the Whitney at Altria.

RoseAnne:Right, right.

Yasmeen: It’s so nice to come back. I miss it.

RoseAnne:I know a lot of people who read the website will know you, but some people may not. There seem to be new people in the scene all the time. Do you mind giving a brief framework of your bio?

Yasmeen: I was born in Israel, and I moved to New York with my parents when I was eleven. Basically I grew up in New York City, and then after finishing the High School for the Performing Arts, I went back to Israel. Then, after two years of living there, I went back to New York to study at Tisch School of the Arts at NYU, and at that time I was starting to make work. During my last year at NYU, I started presenting work outside of school at different spaces, in Brooklyn at what was called the Gowanus Arts Exchange at the time, and at different venues. Then I presented my work at DTW a few times and at the Mulberry Street Theater. And then I moved back to Israel in 1997, I think, and I was going back and forth presenting work in New York, doing different things like Dancing in the Streets, and then going back to Israel. Then slowly, with time, I found myself more based in Israel—making work here, working with dancers from Israel, and committing to being here. That’s how things have developed, in a very brief, quick way of describing it.

RoseAnne: So, that sounds like the process of finally locating in Israel was gradual.

Yasmeen: Definitely. It was hard. I really enjoyed making work in New York, and I developed myself as a choreographer there, so it was very difficult to give that up and decide to commit to being here only. I still feel like I’m part, even though I’m not actively part of the scene there, I feel like I often am very connected to that. I’m glad to bring my work to New York. It’s different than presenting work elsewhere because it is bringing it back home, in a way. I’m always interested in that dialogue that arises between my work in Israel and in New York, and having these two different perspectives on it. It’s almost like two sides of myself looking at the work or experiencing it differently.

RoseAnne:Do you find that the audience response is different?

Yasmeen: Yeah, definitely. I felt it particularly with a work like I Feel Funny Today, which I brought in 2001 to DTW. There was a very different response in New York to Israel, and that was interesting. Different doesn’t necessarily mean black-and-white-different. It was just that the perceptions and the nuances of the work were taken in differently, and also the way people experience or talk about what they experience [is different]. There’s a way of talking about dance that is different here and in the city.

RoseAnne:I’m sorry, I think I missed that particular show, but could you just give a little example of what you’re talking about? How the response was different?

Yasmeen: Yeah. I often feel that the responses I’ve gotten here are very emotional, very direct emotion, whereas in New York, the dialogue tends to be more analytical. Still the aspect of emotion is there, it’s present in the conversation and it is part of the experience, but there are other layers of dialogue that come in. Also, this whole concept of “feedbacking” and giving information or viewing… I even think this whole system of The Field that I also went through of “What do you see?” has become a part of this way of seeing work, and talking about it, and having tools to deal with what you see. I feel like there’s less of that here.

RoseAnne:I guess that’s good and bad.

Yasmeen: Yeah, yeah. I don’t know. I guess I enjoy both, because I can relate to both, both ways of talking or experiencing work. I don’t know if the experiencing of it is different, but the talking about it, and also the perspective, the cultural nuances of things. I brought Hall to the Kitchen in… I don’t remember, I think it was 2003. And some of the scenes of the work, some of the underneath scenes were about this sense of security or illusionary world falling apart or tearing apart inside of these individuals that were in the work, and it related at the time to something that I was experiencing with my generation here in Israel. Those aspects of the work really came out for people who were seeing the work in Tel Aviv, whereas I felt in New York, it was not seen through those eyes, and that was interesting to me. Of course it relates to certain hints that you have in a work to culture, to other familiar ideas or signs that you have. In that work there was a song in which the lyrics were very much related—not directly—but to this sensation in Hebrew, and I imagine that that also impacted the way people experienced it. I enjoy these two lenses because I often feel like that’s what I’m dealing with in the work. I often have this double perspective on things that I do and different cultural impacts, or different experiences that are influenced by the cultures that I lived in that define the kind of associations that make up my work.

RoseAnne:In your piece that you’re going to show here next month—Strawberry Cream and Gunpowder, is that right?

Yasmeen: Yes, well, the full name is actually Yasmeen Godder and the Bloody Bench Players Present Strawberry Cream and Gunpowder.

RoseAnne:Ok. Is that piece also something about your generation, do you feel?

Yasmeen: I don’t know, maybe, it could be. I feel like I’m not sure if I could say that it’s about my generation, however I can say that it’s about a place that I’ve come to as a person and as an individual that I felt like I needed to touch or experience. Perhaps it resonates in a bigger way at this time and to people of my age, but as much as the subject of the work is a big subject of this time, for me it was a very personal piece, very much about how I was dealing with the images that surrounded me in daily life about the war here.

RoseAnne:Why don’t I just interject for the people who are reading or listening something about this piece that you’re showing: You’ve said that you began the piece by looking at photographs of war or photographs of suffering. Is that…?

Yasmeen: Yeah, photographs, which I felt were iconographic photographs of this period of the conflict here in Israel. What I mean by iconographic is that, with time, I felt that there were certain photos that kept on repeating themselves. There was a way of expressing this war through these photos, and so I felt like I wanted to bring those into the studio and deal with them, not only in my life of passing by a newspaper stand or watching television, but also questioning how I deal with them in my own bubble, my own art-bubble.

RoseAnne:I think the reason I asked that question—does the piece say something about your generation—is because when I watched the piece a couple of times on DVD I was trying to trace what happens to these people in this piece. How do they get to the end? What do they go through? And even, kind of the moral voice of the piece, how does it develop and where does it go? I found that very interesting.

Yasmeen: Yeah, it’s interesting what you’re saying. It’s almost like the studio became a laboratory to bring these images into our bodies, first from a very exterior place, but ultimately the work was about how we, the people in the work, the dancers, experience these photos. In that way it is related to your question about a generation because perhaps this is a generation, you know, a group of people from the generation going through this process, and within the process seeing what that does, or how that affects us as people. As I mentioned before, because I saw this as a very personal process, it has been interesting to me over the past few years, performing it quite a lot, hearing how it resonates in a bigger way, that it has this sense of a generation that is dealing with something that they cannot deal with, or how that impacts… How that violence enters into their lives or into their own perceptions of themselves. How these questions of being victims and aggressors enter into their psyche? And it’s true, that is what the work is about.

RoseAnne:And being witnesses. I mean, you’re right there, in Israel, but because you’re using not the real-life images necessarily, but the photographs, in a certain sense it’s the same for anybody anywhere in the world…

Yasmeen: Right, exactly.

RoseAnne:…in that we’re all witnessing constantly. I think a lot has been written about the use of photographs in terms of how they penetrate our psyche. What can photographs do? What do they ultimately do? What response do they draw forth, if any? Is it the response we expect or not?

Yasmeen: That’s exactly what I was searching through the body. I wanted to have the answers come by embodying these images before having an opinion about them or knowing what I think about them, which is very difficult of course, because you already… As it is, these images were very heavy and difficult and full of information, and each one of us had a difficult time with how we even dealt with touching this because it’s almost holy; it’s almost touching this certain reality, or this certain moment of a person’s life just by… posing in it. It was already so intense, so overwhelming that the witnessing went through another layer.

RoseAnne:When you say you wanted to approach it through the body, can you say at all what it came to for you and your dancers?

Yasmeen: As I said, in the beginning I pushed the dancers to just be the thing that they saw without trying to add on to it anything that they think about it, and then slowly with time that gesture, that mask, that physical stance or state started penetrating into them, and part of the process brought out, on one hand, the understanding that we all carry these bigger-than-life things. I mean, some of these images were really difficult to perceive at first, but then with time, we did all these exercises to try to see how to make this thing alive, how to make it live inside of you, sometimes very mechanically, by the way, not necessarily psychologically or through the intellect. That brought out this place where people’s understanding of that moment was so deep and so profound that that was really strong. On the other hand, another side of it was touching it from a very superficial place, and very much staying attached to this plastic expression. And at times your own inability to deal with the resonances of this image was part of the process, was part of the way of dealing with it. So, I think the work touches upon all these different levels of witnessing the place in which you are rejecting it, laughing at it, critiquing it inside of you, to the point that you are completely identifying with it and on to the point of not being able to handle it. It’s hard to talk about it in words because part of the reason that I wanted to do it was because my feeling was that there was always a lot of conversation about it, but the conversation really never touched upon some of the complexity of the experience that I had in viewing these images. I wanted to challenge this “normal,” or already-known way of dealing with it, this everyday-way of handling it. I wanted to say, to myself at least, to stop thinking about it like this, and to try to reach this experience, to enter it from a different place.

RoseAnne:How successful was that for you? Did you feel like you did have that different experience?

Yasmeen: Yeah. In doing the work, yes. In doing the work, I do feel like… It took a long time, because when we premiered it, it was still difficult for us, and I think also for the audience. It took time because the process itself needed more time. We needed to get over certain things in our heads about it.

RoseAnne:Like what?

Yasmeen: Like the kind of questions that were really big in the process, at some point, to allow them to just be present. I think because of the subject of the work and because of the questions which the work proposed, I kept on changing it for about 6 months of performances. It was completely… I think the video you saw is from the first performances.

RoseAnne:Oh, really?

Yasmeen: Yeah. You’ll come to see it in July at Lincoln Center. It’s not completely different, of course, but it’s gone through some changes, and I think really part of the reason that it was so difficult for me to commit to one structure was because it was so complex and because what you’re asking me is a question that I question myself all the time: Did I manage to do what I wanted to do? I don’t’ know. To have a dialogue about it in a different way with myself, with other people? Yes, definitely. To touch something that was scary to me? Yes, because that was part of it. It was really to touch something that was not easy. It wasn’t easy to bring it into the studio. It wasn’t easy to talk about it, you know. It wasn’t easy also for the dancers, for the performers, they also had a difficult time.

RoseAnne:You know, one thing I wasn’t totally sure about when I watched it, because I wasn’t sure if I might be missing some cues or something, but in terms of who the people are, would you say that their identity is not meant to be clear in terms of one side of a conflict or another side? They can be…?

Yasmeen: Yes and no. There are hints, I think.

RoseAnne:There are hints, ok.

Yasmeen: There are hints. That was one of the interesting questions that came out in the process, how do we identify our side? What are the methods with which we point to a picture and say, “This is me; this is not me.”

RoseAnne:Right, right.

Yasmeen: Whom do you identify with? That was one of the issues, and it is meant to be a question that’s there in the work. I think there are hints at moments, but ultimately really it isn’t about identifying. It also seems that the performers are a character, that each one has a character, but in reality…

RoseAnne:And they stay that same thing throughout the piece?

Yasmeen: Exactly. To many people that’s what it seems like. In fact, when we did the work each person worked with about three images, and it could be a man, a little girl, and a soldier, let’s say. It could be different images, because ultimately I didn’t necessarily want them to portray a character. At times it was more important for me that their experience was to go into an image, or to be an image. But, of course, because we have one body, and that body carries… It’s an interesting thing how narrative happens without you wanting it, and I find that really interesting because I didn’t want narrative here and it did happen. There is a narrative in it, but that’s ok because I think there’s something about you as a person that can embody a few different people, but somehow in the wholeness of you, on stage, you carry these three personalities. I’m contradicting myself because I wasn’t dealing with personalities, but more so three images of a person, or three experiences of three different people.

RoseAnne:Well, and if photographs have any impact on us, which I think they do, there is that process of empathy. You enter into the person that you’re looking at in the photograph, maybe, and it can be anybody. It can be a child, or an old person, or a soldier, the victim or the victimizer.

Yasmeen: Exactly. In the work those roles became—the roles of being a victim and a victimizer—that became really the essence of the process, taking on those roles.

RoseAnne: And did they switch? Did a certain person switch roles? It seems like they did, as best I remember.

Yasmeen: Yes, they do. I think it’s more about this place of how as a victim, you become an aggressor or a victimizer, and how as a victimizer, you become a victim. It’s around those grey zones that the work touched upon.

RoseAnne:Your performers are really incredible. They’re so great. Can you just say a little bit about who they are?

Yasmeen: Yeah. The cast that you saw in the video has also changed.

RoseAnne:It has. Because I was just looking at the photograph that’s in the Lincoln Center brochure, and I was asking myself, “Are these different people or not?”

Yasmeen: It happens a lot. I’ve been running this work for two years now, and it took eight months to make, so it’s been since… in November 2004 I premiered it, so it’s been a while since it first went up. The people that I work with… some of the dancers have been working with me for a long time, like Iris Erez. She and I have been working together for like seven years. Others, this was their first project with me, and they basically come from different backgrounds. A few of them were in the Batsheva Dance Company like Arkadi Zaides, who is from the original cast, and now we have Jeremy Bernheim and Inbar Nemirovsky, and also Eran Shanny. So, a bunch of them have worked with Ohad Naharin and others, like Maya Weinberg, have worked with me for the past four or five years. Different backgrounds.

RoseAnne:Do they have backgrounds as actors as well as dancers, or not?

Yasmeen: No, but my way of working often incorporates… I also kind of train the performers with whom I work, and it incorporates a lot of theater work, which my partner Itzik Giuli is very much involved in. In this process in particular, I don’t know whether to say if it was about dance or about theater because it was really about searching in your body, your soul, your psyche, for something.

RoseAnne:I just asked that question because they really seemed to resonate emotionally with what they’re doing. Often you don’t get that right off the bat with people who are mostly trained in dance. You know what I mean?

Yasmeen: Yes, I do. I totally know what you mean.

RoseAnne:They’re just not always paying attention to… And also just the name, “The Bloody Bench Players.” Is that your ongoing company, or is that just for that project?

Yasmeen: No, just for this project. It was part of this acknowledgement that we are “bench players,” we’re sitting on the side. We’re not actively the players in this thing, but we are players. We come and show this thing, we represent this thing, we present it… not represent it, but present it. So it has this kind of twist inside the name.

RoseAnne:Yeah, that’s good.

Yasmeen: It’s interesting. Maybe I’ll use this name again for my next project. Perhaps it will still be right to say this, that we are the “Bloody Bench Players.” But no, it’s not my company name; it’s part of the name of the work.

RoseAnne:I think that’s interesting because in a way, that acknowledges a big piece about making a work like that, when you’re really taking on somebody else’s experience in a way, and trying to inhabit it yourself.

Yasmeen: Exactly. In the name, I wanted to acknowledge it. I also wanted to say that we are players; we are presenting something here. Ultimately the work is about us. It’s about how we deal with it.

RoseAnne:I noticed, and I totally understand that you could say this, you say in one of your press pieces that you’re not a political artist. I think any other artist would understand you saying that, and yet, what is the purpose of this particular piece? It seems like it could have a political purpose in one way.

Yasmeen: I’m a political person. I have political views, and I think they are relevant in the work; they are present there in some ways. I can’t completely detach, but that’s where I always go back to this thing that it is a personal work because the subject could be a political subject. It’s also the way people see it. We’ve just performed it in Japan, and the audiences had very different views about what this piece was about. Many of them saw this victim/victimizer issue. Some of the people did not connect it to the conflict here in the Middle East, and some saw it more about relationships between people. I guess when I say I’m not a political artist, I don’t necessarily want to disregard the political aspects of my work because I guess they are there. Also, with my previous work Two Playful Pink, which I’ve also performed a lot over the past four years, people often say, “Wow, it has a very strong agenda. It’s very feminist, and very… Are you a political activist in this field?” Really, it was more about a place that I was in, and something that was a mix between my emotion and intellect and the people that I was working with and how that impacted what came out. So, that’s how I can answer that.

RoseAnne:Can I ask you one more question that’s in that political realm, and then we can get off that? I notice that there are three Israeli companies performing this summer at Lincoln Center Festival, and I don’t know if that’s intended to be a mini festival-within-a-festival particularly looking at Israeli dance, or not. Do you know?

Yasmeen: I don’t’ know. I have no idea.

RoseAnne:On the other hand, I wondered if it was some sort of unspoken show of support, as well. Has there been… Is there some stuff going on around the world with people on that political level with artists from Israel? Have you encountered any kind of…?

Yasmeen: No, well, what I’ve encountered is there have been like celebrations around… about ten years ago, when it was a 50th anniversary for Israeli independence… There is sometimes an interest around doing something around the Middle East, or having work from different places in the Middle East, and seeing the different voices that come out of this. I’ve been involved in a few of those festivals. I guess there is an interest because of the conflict, but I don’t know how that relates to Lincoln Center. It is amazing that three companies from Israel are being presented this year… very different work. I don’t know what to think of it.

RoseAnne:Well, I had just read about some little flap, and I don’t know if it’s something that one person is making a big deal out of, but there was something about this magazine, Dance Europe, refusing to cover some Israeli company…

Yasmeen: Yeah, I read about that.

RoseAnne:…unless they gave a statement saying that they were against the occupation of disputed territories in the Middle East. Is that important to you right now, or is that just a minor, expected type of flap?

Yasmeen: It’s expected because I feel like it’s been… it’s there; it’s present. As an Israeli, it’s always a question, it’s always… Because the presence on television, because of the presence internationally because of the conflict here, there’s always this question. And it’s present, it’s in the air, and it takes on different modes of expression, whether it’s a rejection or a support. Sometimes I have… it is a part of my identity. Sometimes it could be difficult because it’s always in relation to a place, the politics, the situation. On the other hand, that’s the reality, and it’s a very difficult time, and of course it’s going to be there as an issue. It’s something that has been a part of my life.

RoseAnne:I think the anti-American sentiment is more subtle right now, but certainly it’s there as well in Europe. Sometimes it’s almost easier to deal with it when it is really overt, or to respond to it. I don’t know if you can deal with it, but to respond to it.

Yasmeen: You know, it could be difficult at times when… In this work, for example, I’m dealing more directly with the issue, but with some of my other work, which is not necessarily dealing with it, it’s been interesting how I’ve presented it and have had questions about the conflict in relation to what I did. So I think it’s kind of a reference that people have in relationship to being from Israel. It’s maybe the first thing that jumps up in the mind of someone who hears of someone being from Israel. I can’t say that it’s always easy. I don’t always feel like that is what I would like to talk about or describe or explore, but on the other hand I can understand that that’s what comes up from this kind of coverage that comes out about being here.

RoseAnne:Well, it does seem like your point of view about making work, and probably just the person you are, you do seem to be interested in the kind of feeling-level of the body. What are your other interests in dance? I read in your bio that you’re teaching Release Work. Is that still true?

Yasmeen: Yeah, it’s true. Do you mean what are my other interests in dance in my work?

RoseAnne:Yeah, in your work.

Yasmeen: I think that I’m always searching for this tension between really intense structure or strong structure, and where does the performer live within it, or how does the performer deal with it. Those two points are the points that I’m most interested to challenge. Can I create a structure that is, on one hand, very complex and strong and, on the other hand, allows for the performer to kind of re-experience? I think on that same note, I’m always also going in between movement exploration and questions of how that resonates, or how that impacts a performer. Oftentimes my process was from the inside out. I would start from a place to explore some kind of a state or a memory or different things that exist inside of us and allow that to take the process. In Strawberry Cream and Gunpowder it was really the opposite. I started from an outside place: let’s be that. Then you search inside how to relate to this exterior place. I think that’s kind of where I’m always searching to challenge how I present some of the thoughts to the people that I work with and to myself, and within that, to always search for something that holds it from a bigger view, from structure, from rhythm, from space. My process is very different each time.

RoseAnne:Each time you make a new piece?

Yasmeen: Yeah. I try to ask myself new questions. I try to make myself do things that I’m not used to, or things that I’m scared of or that I don’t feel comfortable in.

RoseAnne:What are you working on now?

Yasmeen: I’m working on a new project, which I will premiere in Berlin in November, and it’s a quartet, and I’m performing in it. That’s about what I can say about it at this point. It’s hard to say because I’m right in the depths of the process, but that’s what I’ve been working on. It has a lot of different layers, but because of where it is in the process, I prefer to keep it inside of myself, rather than try to define it.

RoseAnne:Are you going back and forth in your work now between being in it and not being in it?

Yasmeen: Yeah. Even in Strawberry Cream now I’m performing. I replaced one of the dancers. In this work, I really wanted to be on the inside. In the process, I missed being on the inside of it. It’s hard to know because both places are interesting, but I think that I’ve been really connected to the place of performing, and doing some of the experiments or the processes on my own body and person. Yeah, I’m going back and forth. That would be the way to describe it. It hasn’t been consistent.

RoseAnne:What’s it like living in Israel now, in terms of support for dance? Is it very good?

Yasmeen: It’s all relative, as you know. In relationship to what it was like in New York, right now it’s much better for me. I get supported on a yearly basis from the government here. Basically the funding here is mostly through either the city or the government, and there is no private funding, almost none. That’s how artists work here. They are supported either yearly or per project, or they get funding from a festival for a new creation.

RoseAnne:Is it difficult to qualify for that?

Yasmeen: It takes time. It is competitive. It’s difficult, and it takes time, but it is possible. What I like about the process here is that it’s very much about presenting your work. Also, the committees which decide upon the funding see the work, rather than what I experienced in New York at many different times, which was about writing about the work. The process here is usually not about writing about the work. It’s about showing it and then either getting support for continuation of it or not. And then the long-term funding is more about you showing activity. What’s difficult about it for me right now is showing activity in Israel because I do present my work here maybe once a month, when I’m in Israel, but when I’m away, and I have been on tour a lot, I haven’t been able to. Also, not so much outside of Tel Aviv. That’s difficult. It’s difficult to tour the work here, outside of Tel Aviv, not because there are no theaters, but rather because of what the theater directors choose to present.

RoseAnne:Oh, I see. I’m interested in the more long-term support than one can qualify for there. What’s the process of renewal for that? Is it something you have to apply for every single year?

Yasmeen: Yes, every year. However if you are living up to the criteria that are presented, you are automatically moved on to the next year. You don’t have to apply each year and then wait to see if you get the support, if you live up to the criteria, which means, four times a year you need to present your budget and you need to have a certain amount of activity and a certain amount of income from your own shows. You can’t completely depend on the funding. You have to show that the ticket sales are bringing in some of the funding. It works on percentages and whether you present your work outside of the center area of Israel, that’s also very important. For example, for an artist that is being presented all over the country, they have more credit for getting more funding, but it’s very complex. Right now the Ministry of Culture is working on redefining the criteria, and it’s been this complex dialogue about how to define how much to give to the artists, how to define a big company and a small company and a medium-sized company? And that’s been kind of a difficult dialogue at this point, but at least it’s there, at least it’s a dialogue. So that’s how it works here. It’s not always so perfect and easy. Sometimes you’re expecting the budget, and you don’t get it until the summer because the ministry of culture didn’t get their own budget. So, it’s not so easy, but ultimately it works.

RoseAnne:It’s interesting the point you make about here, in New York, getting grants is so dependent on writing about your work. That’s a whole other conversation I guess, but I have really felt myself that in a subtle way it changes the kind of work that people make because certain things you can write about more easily than others.

Yasmeen: Right, and what you know about what you’re going to do…

RoseAnne:Yes, exactly.

Yasmeen: …a year and a half before you start, or not even, maybe even earlier, but I think that’s another part of it.

RoseAnne:I know. It makes it more difficult for people who like to start their process from an open, knowing-nothing-about-it place. I’ve found that hard myself. You eventually figure out ways to do it.

Yasmeen: I guess when I was in New York and I was trying to do it, I was starting to understand the process of it. I didn’t get to the point that I was really depending completely on that and continuing to do that. But here, what has been good for my experience is the fact that I have been able to tour in Europe quite a lot, and that makes me able to, in the past few years, have longer-term relationships with dancers that I work with and have a more consistent structure to offer, rather than once in a while have a show and hope everyone is available.

RoseAnne:Yeah, there are so many aspects to what it takes to keep it going. You have to be able to give something for the dancers; otherwise they’re not going to be around. Yasmeen, is there anything else you’d like to say that I didn’t ask you about?

Yasmeen: Maybe I could say two words about the music of this show. It was created by Avi Belleli who is the lead singer of a band from here that’s called The Tractor’s Revenge, and he’s created quite a lot for dance. He’s worked also with Ohad Naharin and did different projects with interesting theater people and musicians. And that was also a challenging process for me to work with him because in the work, he’s performing the music live on stage. And the process of finding, also, what kind of sound or what role does the music have in these images, if at all. How to work with textures? How to work with sound that was… ‘Cause it always has such a heavy impact on the way that you view what you see, and I think that that was part of what made this piece also strong for me was this sound aspect, that was really a struggle… On one hand, not to give up the idea of using sound, on the other hand, to allow something to color this experience on stage.

RoseAnne:Will he be performing live here?

Yasmeen: Yes.

RoseAnne:Oh, great. Well, I really look forward to seeing you and your company here.

Yasmeen: Oh, good. I’m looking forward to it.

RoseAnne:I think it will be a great success.

Yasmeen: I hope so. I hope so. So, thanks.

RoseAnne:Thank you so much.

Yasmeen: I hope to see your work some time. Let me know if you’re presenting something while I’m in New York.

RoseAnne:Not this summer, but in November I’ll be doing something at DTW. That’s the next thing.

Yasmeen: Are you working with Tasha?

RoseAnne:Yes, actually. She’s still working with me.

Yasmeen: She’s great.

RoseAnne:Yeah, she’s great, isn’t she?

Yasmeen: She’s really wonderful, yeah.

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Thumbnail photo: Courtesy of Andrew Dawson

Andrew Dawson: Is it sunny?

RoseAnne Spradlin: It’s raining here.

Andrew: It is here as well, so that’s ok.

RoseAnne: Can you just give some brief biographical information?

Andrew: I’ve been performing and working in theater for 25 years – something like that. I originally trained as a dancer, and then in mime, and then in theater. I’ve always worked independently of other companies. I had my own company for a while, and we produced various shows that went into London’s West End and toured the world. One being The Three Musketeers, which was a mad adventure, and another show based on the TV series Thunderbirds, which was very popular in England, Australia and Japan – particularly Japan. I’m always working in a physical theater world, in a way, not a less text-based world, producing and directing little bits and pieces and different sorts of work, and finally arriving at Absence and Presence.

RoseAnne: And you’re performing later this month, April in New York. Is that the first time you’ve performed here?

Andrew: It will be the first time I’ve performed in New York. Yes, at P.S. 122, it opens on April 27th.

RoseAnne: Did you study here too?

Andrew: I did in 1983; I was at the Cunningham school.

RoseAnne: I thought I saw a little Cunningham in your piece.

Andrew: Yes, yes, I do a little homage to Cunningham. That’s my venture back into that. It’s fantastic to actually perform the piece in NY because part of the show has letters from my father that were written to me while I was in New York.

RoseAnne: Ah, ok.

Andrew: The audience receives as a program an envelope, which has a New York address on it, which is not because I’m in New York. It’s because these were always the letters that meant the most to me.

RoseAnne: And that was where you lived? It’s an actual address?

Andrew: Yeah, it is an actual address. I actually really was there.

RoseAnne: I wanted to ask you a little bit about the context of creating this particular work. How many pieces have you made that are in this same vein.

Andrew: This is the first time in a way. The very first show I made in the early 80s was a one-man-show of short pieces, and this is the first full length one-man-show I’ve made since. So, in a way, it’s taken more than twenty years to come back to performing solo again. This has come at a very critical point in my career really. It’s a big step to venture into a piece that is more performance art in many ways than the more theatrical… A lot of the work I made before, the West End shows and other things, were inspired by things that already existed: Thunderbirds being one. And I directed and wrote a stage version of Wallace and Gromit, which of course is now very popular. So they were based on things. And this story about my father, this personal story had always been needling away in the back of my mind. So, in a way, it was a big step to risk it.

RoseAnne: Was there any certain thing that triggered your decision to make this piece when you did?

Andrew: Yeah, it’s interesting. My father died in 1985, so it’s been a long time. He died and lay undiscovered for ten days, and it was always that time that he was undiscovered that fascinated me… that time. And over the years, I’ve had various little, half-attempts to create it as a little film project, or something. I’d start it, and then it would be put back in a drawer and wouldn’t quite see the light of day. And then I decided to apply to my local funding body here in London, the London Arts Board, to see if they’d give me a grant to make a piece. In a way, the whole writing of the application… I think this happens to a lot of artists… The process of writing the application is already an enormous creative effort, and you put the application in, and you go, “I feel much better for that.” And then of course they turn around and say, “Oh, yeah, we really like it, and here’s the money.” “Oh no, now I’ve actually got to make the thing I’ve talked about.” There’s that realization that somebody else thought it was a good idea as well. When you’re dealing with a personal subject, you never know how interesting that is to everybody else, until you start.

RoseAnne: How long did it take you to make it, once you got the grant?

Andrew: I spent a year making it. My wife was very clever in saying that I didn’t need a rehearsal space for this piece, that I needed a studio to work in, so I rented a studio near where I live in North London, and spent a year in there fiddling and filming. I painted one end black so that it was like a little TV studio. I learned to tap dance, and I made this sculpture, this chicken-wire sculpture of my father.

RoseAnne: Oh, you did that yourself?

Andrew: I made that. Everything is made. All the video stuff I made. I had collaborators who came in and out, who helped me through various parts of the process, but most of the time I… And because it was my space, I could leave things. I could walk away from it for a week and come back to it. And live through the piece slowly carving, literally carving the shell out in a way. Rather than writing and rehearsing it, which is what one might normally do.

RoseAnne: So you lived in it for that year.

Andrew: I lived in it… yeah, yeah.

RoseAnne: I watched it twice, but of course the DVD on the TV is not like seeing it live.

Andrew: No.

RoseAnne: But, I really look forward to seeing it when you’re here. I’m going to ask you a few questions, and if there’s something that you feel, “I don’t really have anything to say about that,” you can just keep going.

Andrew: (laughing) Ok, sure.

RoseAnne: I read the reviews that were on your website, and people write about it very nicely too, but many reviewers mentioned this theme of a parent and child, or a father and a son not understanding each other. Do you feel that we need to be understood by our parents… as artists particularly?

Andrew: I think I was very much part of a generation where, certainly as a young artist, my parents were in another world. I have two children of my own now, and my son is 13, my daughter is 6, and we are of such a different generation. We shop in the same shops. I buy a nice bag and he steals it and uses it for his school bag, and I say, “That’s my bag; you’ve stolen it!” That never would have happened with my father. We were very separate. We share so many things today…”those shoes, can I borrow them?” So, in a way… whether that’s good or not, I don’t know. Only his generation and the next generation will say, “God, we shared too much with our parents.” You know what I mean? We don’t know how that will pan out. I think I was very much of a generation that had awkward communications with our parents. My parents were very… My mother had died 5 years before. She was very interested in theater and film. We had a very loving relationship, but my father was always very strained because he died when I was in my 20s. It would be interesting if I could talk to him now… whether we’d have a different relationship. In a way it was hard to access him, and I think during my travels, and during my time in New York, I would receive these letters from him, and he was a very lonely, depressed man. He had medication for depression, and so on. I never realized or appreciated the love that he had for me and for my brothers. So, in a way we felt we were in very, very separate worlds. It’s only now, in making the piece, I realized the kind of relationship he was trying to have with me, that I didn’t realize was happening. When you’re in your 20s your busy doing your thing, doing your life. You don’t want to worry about that old bloke back at home. You’re in a very different space.

RoseAnne: Did you feel like you came to understand him better as you made the work?

Andrew: Yeah, very much. And that was a surprise because I made the work thinking I was making it about the ten days that he was… that he lay undiscovered… that being the starting point. But actually, in the end, I made a piece about the absence of a relationship, and the lack of presence that we had together. I think that’s where the reviews and the people that talk to me relate to the show, because they share in that expression of their relationship with their parents.

RoseAnne: And yet, I got this feeling watching it that, on the somatic level… just the body feeling… I felt like you had some memory of, say, his touch, or something. There’s the time when the two people take hands. It’s the father taking the hand of the child.

Andrew: Yes.

RoseAnne: It seemed to me that you could almost remember what that felt like.

Andrew: Yeah. Well, and some of that is remembering that with him, and some of that is reliving it with my own children. I remember holding… very conscious of taking their hand, and more so having made the piece. I’m really conscious of it now. My memory of his is vague and faint. It’s elusive, that memory, so you try to recall that in some ways. What is very strong in my memory of him is his posture, and how he would walk. I can feel that very close. It’s almost like I have it in my bones.

RoseAnne: Yes, I’m sure you do.

Andrew: Maybe we all do in some way, if we can recall it in some form.

RoseAnne: You know one critic mentioned this feeling of guilt in the piece, and I thought that was pretty interesting. Do you feel like that is the shadow of the work, in a way?

Andrew: What, that I have guilt?

RoseAnne: Yeah, I mean, do you know which review I’m talking about? There’s one where it says, “Oh, this work feels guilty.”

Andrew: Yeah.

RoseAnne: I thought that was kind of a strong statement for that reviewer to make, but interesting and intriguing.

Andrew: Yes, I think often that those reviews come from their feelings. I think often, more than any other piece I’ve made, I’ve read reviews about the piece where you can actually feel the reviewer – and you feel people commenting on their own lives, but through commenting on mine. Because I don’t really have guilt.

RoseAnne: So that’s not something…

Andrew: It’s not something I carry now. I certainly, at the time… you know, it’s a very weird thing to realize your father’s been dead for ten days, and where were you. There’s all that kind of guilt involved with that. But, in a way, I’ve long reconciled that. I think it’s interesting that people comment about those things, because they’re busy thinking that, but in a way, I think it’s really interesting that the piece creates… brings those echoes of other people’s lives out in their writing.

RoseAnne: I guess because you’re dealing with something so universal too.

Andrew: Absolutely, that was one of the things. One of my aims was to make something in a universal way. In the application, one of the phrases I used was that I wanted to look for the ultimate universal gesture of loss. That was one of my aims.

RoseAnne: Did you find it?

Andrew: I think I did. I think I found it for me. I think it’s in different places for different people, of course. Everyone comes from their own perspective. For me, it’s when I lose the ring and swim after the ring.

RoseAnne: I was going to ask you about that. Was that a recounting of something that really happened?

Andrew: It is. When my mother died 5 years before. I had her wedding ring, and I went swimming in the sea when I was 21 or something, so she’d only died a couple years before, and I lost it in the sea.

RoseAnne: And you never found it?

Andrew: I never found it. I sat on the beach for hours and hours because to me she was still with me when I had the ring, and then I finally lost her completely. And I hadn’t realized that I still had a bit of her with me, even though it was in the form of this ring. Then I thought, well, shall I try and tell that whole story in the piece? And then I thought, well, it’s actually quite nice and true, that it stays as a metaphor for loss. Ultimately, you swim and you swim and you swim, and you never find it. It’s gone, and then you have to move on.

RoseAnne: Yeah, that was beautiful, and I think watching it on TV, I couldn’t quite tell what happened. I couldn’t quite tell if you found it, or didn’t find it…

Andrew: Well, you don’t quite see probably in one hand you become a very miniature swimmer, and then a big swimmer, and a miniature swimmer, and eventually you get down and there’s… the ring lands on the book, and then it just carries on, and it’s not found.

RoseAnne: What about the image of the moth? How did you come up with that, and at what stage? Was that something you came across early?

Andrew: No, quite late on actually, quite late on. I was always trying to find ways of beginning the piece, and I was playing with this image of the lamp on the TV a lot. My father had died and was found on the bed in his pajamas with the bedclothes off the bed, and the bedside light on. So the lamp comes from the idea of the bedside light. And the fact that you have a light and a moth. I was always intrigued about the things that would be still going on in the house. Like, you would hear the fridge go on, and the phone would ring, and grass would grow. One of the other images was that a moth would fly around, and you had this movement of a moth flying around the light. Moths are also associated with death.

RoseAnne: Well definitely I felt that and also maybe the life force itself, the last flickering or the last movement of that force.

Andrew: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely, that that would flicker – no one else would witness it – and then that would die as well – and it wasn’t witnessed. It’s a kind of private event.

RoseAnne: What about… did you think that much about how you use the light and dark in the piece as you were making it, or did you just kind of work intuitively or…

Andrew: Very intuitively. I’ve always lit my own pieces, and in the little studio I had some little lights I played with a lot. So when I filmed all the stuff on the TV, that it’s changing from like night to day, kind of thing, the blue to white and the dark… I’d always had this image that this white… like an installation: kind of white walls and white floor. And to play very subtly with light; direct light and lines and…

RoseAnne: And again I was watching it on TV. Sometimes the way the light would come on suddenly, it also had this feeling a little bit of being a shock you know. Also then the darkness would kind of set up this meditative feeling.

Andrew: Yes

RoseAnne: This quiet reflection that somebody maybe is being very still in order to wait for some thought or feeling to come, you know, and then suddenly the light will come on and it’s like oh! It’s such a shock.

Andrew: It’s like a door opens.

RoseAnne: Yes, exactly.

Andrew: The light pulls into a room, suddenly the room is alive again, is activated.

RoseAnne: That way it seemed to me like the piece really had something to say about how we record and recall our experience. I thought that was very beautiful because that’s something that, I don’t know, like who would start out to make a piece about that, you know.

Andrew: Quite, yes.

RoseAnne: And yet somehow it comes in there very strongly.

Andrew: Yeah. I think if I’d set out to do that I may not have done it. I mean, that’s where the piece is lucid like that because you set off on one journey and then little by little it became another one. And I think one thing I’m really glad of and one I’m very conscious of and think about the work, new works and things, is having time to let them just stay properly because I think in that process you start to get rid of the… You start to hone it down a bit and tune in your intuition a bit more, about what really works and what doesn’t, and about rhythm and things.

RoseAnne: How many times have you performed it now, do you think?

Andrew: About 60.

RoseAnne:Oh, aha. And does it feel different now than it did in the beginning?

Andrew: It gets harder to do.

RoseAnne: Does it? In what way?

Andrew: Emotionally it’s easier, because it’s familiar so I don’t have to go on the journey in that sense because you become the performer. You have to do that in a way. But it becomes harder to me because I want to be more and more precise. So, when I walk slowly toward the chair, you know, I want to do it exactly right. You don’t want anything to be out of place. So, in a way, it becomes more of a challenge to do it more and more precisely. But I really enjoy that.

RoseAnne: But so, emotionally, now you feel like you’ve kind of…

Andrew: In a way, yeah. Because if I went on that emotional journey with my father every single time I did it, I’d be a wreck I think. But, I mean, that’s not to say I don’t go on that journey with it, I go on it in a very specific way, I suppose. I go as the performer. There are moments when I really meet him and sometimes that catches me out in different performances. “Oh, god, he’s here.” Sometimes I feel his presence very strongly. Sometimes I feel my mother’s presence very strongly and I suppose that’s the natural life of performance: you never know quite what’s going to happen even though you’re trying to be really precise and it runs to the DVD, to time, you know, it runs a random second longer or shorter. So, it’s amazing how much you can move within that constraint.

RoseAnne: I noticed in reading on your website that you have studied the Feldenkrais work.

Andrew:Indeed, yes. I did my four-years training, 1990-94.

RoseAnne: I know it’s kind of a, there’s probably not an obvious answer to it, but how does that work come into the way you create your pieces, do you think?

Andrew: I’ve been thinking about this a lot really, because I haven’t been, since I’ve been concentrating on performing, I haven’t been thinking about teaching so much—the Feldenkrais method. But I’m busy with it in the making of the work, and the way I think about work, what is beautiful about the way that Feldenkrais looked at movement and looked at the body and looked at the skeleton and used different view points. You might look at something from the external to the internal first, or from the internal to the external, or create a constraint and using a constraint would create a liberation in another part of movement. I could give you a bad example, but if you fix one leg maybe you realize how much the other leg can move you know. By having something fixed you realize the liberation somewhere else. So, those sorts of strategies that he created in looking at movement and I look at in terms of making work. Often you use his kind of thinking behind what Feldenkrais was busy with.

RoseAnne: Can you give me an example of that, I mean you did with the leg, but ….

Andrew: In the piece?

RoseAnne: Yeah.

Andrew: Um, let me think. Well I suppose there’s an interesting moment when I sit still for… Well, there are two things. One is walking; a slow walk to the chair. In terms of Feldenkrais, using a lot of awareness through movement as I have to be aware of what I’m doing in order to walk very smoothly and very easily. So, I am very conscious of the way my balance works, and how one shoulder relates to one foot, and the other foot to the other shoulder. And I’m busy in the process of my whole self being part of the movement, so it’s not just about walking in slow motion. I’ve become very aware of my whole system in that moment. Other things, in terms of what I was saying before, about the constraints and liberation. I suppose there’s some ways, like when I sit still. I sit still for over a minute and there’s just my face breathing on the screen and in a way I find that stillness is a liberation for your mind and for the audience because I think it’s a moment where you stop. You can think about the way you realize you’re actually in the theater for a minute, ‘cause you’re waiting for something to happen. So, in that [stillness] you actually…. Maybe you hear the traffic outside or you’re aware of your own breath. It shifts your audience’s awareness all the time and then, you bring them back again.

RoseAnne: Yeah, you do do that, you do that very well. It works.

Andrew: Good (laughs). So, I think it’s playing with attention, which is a lot of what Feldenkrais’s work is about: shifts of attention. It’s interesting to talk. My daughter rode her bicycle for the first time today without little stabilizers. And in the last couple of days it’s amazing how I used the method (Feldenkrais) instinctively to know what she’s going to do, so that she learns faster, you know. Because you know that if you…as you’re running along with her, if I hold her jacket if you hold her bag, then she’s not sitting on the seat properly, but if I hold the seat then she really feels the way she’s really sitting on it and then of course, you gently let go and she doesn’t know you’ve let go. And then she’s riding and she says, “look, look” and I said, “but I’m not holding you anymore.” (Laughs) Then she learns very fast… Ah! It’s very hard to explain.

RoseAnne: No, I get what you’re saying.

Andrew: You get what I’m saying?

RoseAnne: Well, I think maybe because I’ve studied some somatic-type work. There’s something about facilitating the other person’s nervous system…

Andrew: Yeah, exactly, exactly.

RoseAnne: …so they think they’re doing it, and the moment you let them go, they are doing it.

Andrew: and they are doing it and they know they’re doing it. And when you’re six it’s just wonderful because they don’t have anything else in the way; they’re not intellectual about it. They just do. And if only the rest of us could do that that easily. (Laughs) That’d be fantastic.

RoseAnne: Yeah.

Andrew: ‘Cause we’ve spent all our time thinking; it gets in the way.

RoseAnne: As a mover, have you always had that kind of lightness and fluidity that you have now? Even before you studied (Feldenkrais)?

Andrew: Yeah, yeah. It gets me into trouble ‘cause they say: “oh, you’re not making enough contact with the ground.” (Laughs) I can’t do that, I’m good at being up. But, yeah, I always was very light and always very fluid. It’s always been my trademark, I suppose, in that sense.

RoseAnne: Is there anything else about the piece that you’d like to say that I didn’t ask you about?

Andrew: Um, I suppose what I really like about the piece is that often people think that it’s a sad story, that it’s going to be quite a struggle to watch. What I really like about the piece is that actually it’s quite uplifting. And that people feel very positive, some people feel very moved. But it’s quite a positive experience; it’s not grim in any way because it’s dealing with death. And sometimes it’s hard, until people see it, to realize that.

RoseAnne: It’s good that you said that because that’s true in watching it, it’s not at all grim.

Andrew: No. And we’re dealing with real stuff.

RoseAnne: Yeah, I was just going to say I was reading…somebody had just given me this article about meditation and you know this writer was making the point that whatever is happening, if you experience it fully, then that’s all you have to do, really. So, there’s something about…it’s not sad, it’s just what happened and you’re living in it.

Andrew: Yeah. Well that’s a very good, a very good thing to say. Can you experience it fully? How many things can we do that’s always a battle to be present.

RoseAnne: Are you able to support yourself as an artist?

Andrew: Yeah, just about.

RoseAnne: Switching the subject around a little bit…

Andrew: It’s, well actually, God, you know. Five years later I have a house in North London, which is no mean feat. My wife does work as well, she works in production for corporate companies like Motorola or people like that. But she works; she freelances, so it’s always precarious. Most of the time one of us has always been here for the children. So, I go on tour, she’s here, and then if she has a bit of work, I’m here. So, we juggle it. I work as a hand model (laughs).

RoseAnne: Oh, you do?

Andrew: I do, I actually make TV commercials as a hand model. How bizarre is that?

RoseAnne: That was one of my questions that I didn’t quite get to, that something about hands, you know like hands are so important in the piece.

Andrew: And I made a piece, I’m going to do one performance of, I think, at P.S.122 on Wednesday, the first Wednesday. I can’t think what date that is… [Wednesday, May 3rd, immediately following the regular performance] of a piece I’ve done many times called “Space Panorama”. It’s a half an hour piece and I recreate the entire Apollo 11 moon mission on a table with my hands.

RoseAnne: (laughter)

Andrew: To Shostakovich’s tenth symphony (laughs), which is bizarre but is very good fun. And in 2000, I performed it for an astronaut reunion in Houston so I performed it for Buzz Aldrin and all these bunch of astronauts and they really liked this.

RoseAnne: I was going to say, did they love it?

Andrew: They absolutely loved it; they’d never seen anything quite like it.

RoseAnne: That’s great.

Andrew: So, it is a homage to the moon landing. It’s all me and hands at the table. But I will give one performance of that.

RoseAnne: Okay, that’s good to know.

Andrew: A little extra. ‘Cause hands have always been important and then someone said, “oh, you have nice hands, you should model them.” And… “really, can you do that sort of thing?” And I now have an agent called “Hired Hands” and they call me and they say can you do a job for McDonalds, and I go off and make commercials with hands in them. It happens from time to time. They’re nice when they happen. Like all these things like voiceovers and things, you can do three in one month and then nothing for six months. But they’re fun when they happen.

RoseAnne: The three you do help pay the bills.

Andrew: They help, no absolutely.

RoseAnne:I have at least one more question for you…

Andrew: This thing about the piece was, or two things, one is the music, Joby Talbot. He wrote the music for “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” and he’s particularly wonderful composer. One piece in it, the piano piece, is actually called “Absence and Presence” and he now performs it when he plays that he also runs a movie, which I made of the handwriting. The piece has another life when he plays, that’s always nice.

RoseAnne: Did you tell him what you wanted? Or did he come and see you?

Andrew: He’d had a similar experience in that his father had died some time quite recently and so we had a meeting of minds about loss, and then he just fed me bits of work. Some of it was previously written some of it in development. There’s one—the big orchestra section—I could never have commissioned an orchestra to have recorded a piece like that, but there’s something he just did. And then he said I think I’m going to write this piece specifically for the show, and we discussed that. And then he wrote it and then I ended up choreographing to it. It’s sort of become a two way street, really.

RoseAnne: One thought I had when I watched it, was that the music a little bit took it out of a lot of work that I see around here, that would fall into the category of performance art, because the music seemed to take it into a larger scope. It’s kind of ambitious or dramatic even.

Andrew: Well, I love the way music, like in films, I kind of…

RoseAnne: Definitely very film-like.

Andrew: I tend to use it like that. I can create to music. I run a lot. I’m running in the London marathon in two weeks time. I fly to New York the day after having run the marathon for the first time. Oh my god, oh my god. But I listen to, now with iPods and things, you can listen to music all the time. I run and dream out stuff whilst I’m running. And I never used to do that. How fantastic!

RoseAnne: It is fantastic.

Andrew: Yeah, ‘cause you never had an iPod before, too. And I never ran before. The two things are rather wonderful.

RoseAnne: Running is something that you’ve taken up later?

Andrew: Only in the last four years.

RoseAnne: Really. Does that go okay with your body? You don’t suffer too much from it?

Andrew: When you study enough Feldenkrais you don’t need to suffer (laughs)

RoseAnne: Okay, very good. (laughs)

Andrew: It might hurt but your muscles still hurt, it doesn’t save you from that. But it does save you from injury and it does mean you run smoother and easier, and use your whole body to run.

RoseAnne: Interesting. I guess there’s a question I had for you. I wanted to ask you what kind of work do you like when you go to see, first of all, dance. Are you that interested in seeing dance work?

Andrew: Yeah. In Edinburgh I saw lots of work. Usually when I’m home here, I tend, with having a family and so on, I tend to go out less really. But, in terms of dance, I like Sasha Waltz very much and Pina Bausch. Cunningham, I’ve come back to bizarrely. I loved it at the beginning because I did it, and then I hated it because it was too abstract and too weird and I just couldn’t access it. And now I’ve come back to the beauty of line and form and shape in a way which excites me to come back ‘cause then I think maybe I could make more things like that. They’re less story-led, so that’s interesting. I mean, the Wooster Group, I’ve always been a big fan of, and SITI: the Saratoga Institute.

RoseAnne: Anne Bogart’s company?

Andrew: Anne Bogart, yeah, yeah. Do you call them SITI, do you call them that?

RoseAnne: I think she does use that name here.

Andrew: Yeah, I just saw on the website. I saw that piece “Bob” which I thought was very nice, very nice. That was quite influential in the fact that seeing how much one person could hold the stage so well. And I thought, god you know, sometimes you need to see things like that so you know you can do that.

RoseAnne: That’s right.

Andrew: Spaulding Grey was a big influence early on. Because of how simple you could be in the theater. I thought that was magic. Lepage, Robert Lepage’s “The Dragon’s Trilogy” certainly, Peter Brook. Those sorts of…I mean…dance, I’ve been very frustrated seeing dance. And very excited at other times. I go through extremes.

RoseAnne: Just say a little bit about what frustrates you?

Andrew: Oh, I suppose because more often than not, dance is about the dancers and not about the dance, and they’re so busy with themselves and this lovely video image that’s created or whatever in the background or… And then I go but I’m asleep. I’m not activated by it. And when it works really well, or a rhythm really works, or when it works, when it transposes itself off the body and into the space between us, that’s what I try and aim to do, to have it live in this space in front of the performer and in front of the audience so it creates a third thing.

RoseAnne: Have you ever tried to teach somebody how to do that?

Andrew: Yes. (laughs)

RoseAnne: How do you get somebody to do that? There may not be a short answer to that.

Andrew: No, yeah, ‘cause I think I’m still busy trying to figure it out. I worked with a company, the Fabrik, in Potsdam (Germany) a lot. They’re wonderful performers and we made a piece called “Pandora 88” where these two performers, Wolfgang Hoffman and Sven Till spend all their time in a box. And it was very interesting making that transition out of the box, even though they were staying in the box. So, they would create this third space. It’s a kind of stage, I think, for the performer that you have to get to. So, I’m exploring it really. That’s for myself to find out what it means for me, and I’m sure these things can be translated into one form or another. It’s finding strategies to bring it out. I’ll let you know… (both laugh) I’ll figure it out.

RoseAnne: Well, I guess that’s about it, unless there’s something else you would like to say.

Andrew: There was one other thing, yes. One of the reasons it has so little dialogue in the piece or why I’m interested in the visual particularly in “Absence and Presence”. In those moments of extreme emotion, we’re often at a loss for words. People say they’re at a loss for words. So, I thought it would interest me to go to that place, where you don’t have to say it. We just are, in that state. So it goes beyond words.

RoseAnne: I think that works really well in your piece. You did that. You accomplished it.

Andrew: Good (laughs), and most of all from the video….

RoseAnne: Have you started working on your next thing yet? Your next creation?

Andrew: Well, I’m messing around with a few things. At the moment I have a small grant from the Welcome Trust here, which is monies that puts science and art together. And I have a little grant for a piece called “The Process of Betrayal.” I’m working with a neurologist called Jonathon Cole and a filmmaker and an Alexander teacher and dancer and we’re interviewing on camera and talking to people who have an extreme movement impairment of some kind. So we’ve talked to a man with a motor-neuron disease who can’t move form the neck downwards, and a woman with MS, and a woman who’s a tetraplegic who broke her neck at C6, at the base of the neck. And we’re not quite sure how the piece is going to manifest itself, I mean, I think it’ll be a short film to start with ‘cause it’s all been filmed. Somewhere in this, in the heart of the stillness we’ll talk about movement. In the extreme lack of movement we’ll talk about how much we really move. So, some things are peering out, but how it’s going to, whether it’s going to be… It might be an installation, it might be a theater piece, I’m not sure. We’re sort of in the middle of that at the moment.

RoseAnne: That sounds very interesting.

Andrew: There’s an extraordinary man, Michael, whose dying of a motor-neuron… I mean, you don’t survive. And he used to play the cello and he talks eloquently about the way he played the cello. And he can’t move anything and it’s very profound, you know.

RoseAnne: Because you mentioned the grant that you got to make “Absence and Presence,” if you don’t want to answer this, I totally understand but, just because finances are such a big issue here in NYC, I thought maybe… how much money did you get to make that piece?

Andrew: To make “Absence and Presence”?

RoseAnne: Yeah. Like how much did it take to support this yearlong process?

Andrew: I had… the grant was 24,000 pounds, so that’s about $50,000.

RoseAnne: Wow. Okay, good (laughs).

Andrew: I don’t know whether you should print that or not, I think maybe you should know that.

RoseAnne: Would it be okay for me to print that?

Andrew: Well, I don’t see…put it down and let me think about it.

RoseAnne: Okay. I’d like to print it for dance funders here to see that because we usually get grants that are like $7,000. $10,000 is a big deal. You know, $20,000 would be the biggest anybody would ever get and you might get that one time in your life. I mean I’m talking about the people in the kind of downtown community. The Mark Morris’s or whoever, get a lot more, but…

Andrew: Well, it’s always a battle here, and whether I’ll get that again. I mean, it always depends on your application at the time. I mean, generally our funding here is pretty good.

RoseAnne: It takes money to make work. It definitely does.

Andrew: And, god, that money doesn’t go very far. I mean you never have… the moment you start to print, publicity and then you get collaborators in and you start filming something and you rent a space and you get a…all that’s gone. It doesn’t… ‘cause space isn’t cheap here. Everything is expensive. You always struggle within the parameter you’re in, don’t you.

RoseAnne: Yes, we’ll transcribe it and we’ll run it by you before we put it up on the website.

Andrew: Yeah, ‘cause that would be a good thing to think about, whether that…I’m sure that you could go to the London Arts Board and find out how much people fund, I mean it’s not a secret, know what I mean. Put it in, and then it depends how it sounds in terms of the way you put it down. We can think about that.

RoseAnne: Okay, and after you get here, if either of us feels the need we could do a few more questions if we want to add to….

Andrew: Yeah, lets. Also, when you’ve seen it in the flesh, as it were.

RoseAnne: And you run for two weeks…

Andrew: I run for two weeks, and then I stay on in New York for another two weeks because I’m working with a company called “Rainpan 43.” They did “All wear Bowlers.”

RoseAnne:I don’t know that company.

Andrew: They’re two guys and they’re called Trey (Lyford) and Geoff (Sobelle) and they were a big hit in the Edinburgh Festival last year. One lives in New York and one lives in Philadelphia. And Geoff in Philadelphia, he’s worked with the most famous company in Philadelphia whose name escapes me…anyway, it’ll come back to me. They’re working on a new show so I’m going to start work on a show with them.

RoseAnne: Great.

Andrew: That will happen in Philadelphia in September. So, I am around.

RoseAnne: Then we’ll touch base.

Andrew: What are you rehearsing at the moment? Because you were rehearsing yesterday.

RoseAnne: A piece that my own group performed in December, and then next week, I think on the 18th, we have a one day gig in New Jersey. We’re just rehearsing that.

Andrew: Do you have your own company?

RoseAnne: Well, so to speak, it’s hard to call it a company. I do about a show a year usually, and some of the people, a couple of the people, I mean this is just four people that I’m working with now but several of them I’ve worked with for a while, six or seven years.

Andrew: Great. And do you manage to survive?

RoseAnne: Um, It’s tough. I actually went back to school to study acupuncture and I’m practicing acupuncture now and trying to support myself doing that along with making dance work, choreography, but it’s a little touch and go.

Andrew: And it’s hard for your brain to flip it, because I often thought about teaching Feldenkrais all the time and it’s very hard to be, “now I’m going to be that person and now I’m this person.”

RoseAnne: It is hard. It is very hard.

Andrew: There are not enough hours in the day.

RoseAnne: I’m not sure I really recommend it, but on the other hand I feel like in a way it may be the new paradigm for artists in NYC, because you can’t really not work anymore. When I first came here in the 1980’s people didn’t work that much and people tried not to have real jobs. Now, you kind of have to have a real job because you can’t support yourself otherwise. So, everything’s changed and I feel like, well, we just have to be flexible and keep trying to adapt to what the situation is. And, at least I feel like everything I’m doing is about movement in some way. Because the bodywork and acupuncture is all about that too.

Andrew: Yes, and one informs the other.

RoseAnne: Yes, they really do.

Andrew: Yeah, yeah, yeah, and you develop a much deeper understanding, it’s very nice.

RoseAnne: And I was excited to see that you’d studied Feldenkrais, because I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of this work Body-Mind Centering (BMC)?

Andrew: I have, yes.

RoseAnne: That’s the kind of work that I studied for many years. And people have always asked me, how does that influence your work? There’s not an easy answer because in a way it’s just like the food you eat, it goes in you and it becomes a part of you and…

Andrew: It’s hard to say when you’re not using it and when you are using it.

RoseAnne: But, I’m interested in the somatic practices because I think they really do deepen the work, they deepen the performance, they deepen the choreography and it’s something that I hope to see more of.

Andrew: And you really see it when you see performers that have that understanding.

RoseAnne: Yeah, you really do.

Andrew: And it doesn’t matter whether they’re doing classical acting, they’re inhibitors in some way. It makes a big difference.

RoseAnne: So, thank you Andrew.

Andrew: Pleasure.

RoseAnne: And it’ll be fun to meet once you’re here.

Andrew: You can stick needles in me and then I can make you roll around on the floor. (both laugh heartily)

RoseAnne: Sounds good.

Andrew: Sounds like a trade. (laughs)

RoseAnne: And you know how to get me by email if you need to get in touch and then I don’t know how long it will take to get it transcribed, hopefully just a few days of so. I’ll get back in touch with you.

Andrew: Brilliant, okay. No problem, if you need to call again, just call or email or whatever because I’m around this week. Mainly running, training.

RoseAnne: Well, good luck with that (laughs). I wish I could do that.

Andrew: It’s kind of a thing to do, mad…must be mad, but there you are.

RoseAnne: Alright, so you can just hang up and then I have to go through a little process…. this conference call. Alright, talk to you soon, okay. Bye.

Andrew: Speak to you soon, Bye.