Ralph Lemon – Critical Correspondence http://old.movementresearch.org/criticalcorrespondence/blog Critical Correspondence is an artist-driven project of Movement Research that aims to activate, develop and increase the visibility of critical discourse on dance and movement-based performance work. Fri, 17 Jun 2016 18:53:46 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.5.29 University Project http://old.movementresearch.org/criticalcorrespondence/blog/?p=3&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=lorem-ipsum-dolar http://old.movementresearch.org/criticalcorrespondence/blog/?p=3#comments Fri, 04 Dec 2015 03:42:42 +0000 http://www.movementresearch.org/criticalcorrespondence/blog/?p=3 The University Project is an initiative of Critical Correspondence that aims to shed light on the shifting relationship between academia and working artists. More and more Universities are interested in bringing working artists on to their faculty, and many Universities now offer low-residency MFA programs to assist working artists in obtaining higher degrees. What are the ideas and who are the people behind this change in institutional thinking? In an effort to understand the issues and challenges underpinning these new models we are conducting various interviews with educators, administrators and teaching artists across the country over the course of the next few months. We are also printing some background articles from various publications that provide a framework for our discussion.

The University Project is the first in a series of ‘research projects” in which we will accrue and amass various materials and approaches to a broad and relevant topic. Please feel free to participate and comment to keep the conversation alive.

From Guest Editor, Maura Donohue:

I remember sitting in the audience—a student about to graduate from Smith College—listening to Donald Byrd and fellow Tufts University grad, composer Mio Morales, explaining that his work, titled “Drastic Cuts,” was referencing the reduction of funding for the arts he saw happening in America.[4] Soon after my entrance into the community as part of the spring ‘95 Fresh Tracks program at DTW, I watched Ralph Lemon disband his company. I was told that things looked bleak. But, like many young artists coming in with nothing, I had nothing to lose. It didn’t seem like bad odds. I’d hit the fringes and thrive, avoid the pitfalls of the 80s and champion thrift and ingenuity. Flash forward ten years: I’m doing a residency in Hong Kong with two children in tow.[5] Their father has to carry them (the four-month old strapped to the front and the two-year old packed on the back) to the Academy of Performing Arts so that I can nurse in between classes and rehearsals. Great anecdotes, exhausting times—I knew I could no longer parse projects and pennies together with my experimental theater husband while trying to feed two kids.

I ran for academia. It’s a familiar story. We get older; the romantic notions of the starving artist diminish.  We seek stability and a way to stay in the field we love.[6] I went back for the MFA, managed to get full-time, tenure-track work here in NYC. For me, it all feels—to borrow a Hebrew word—Bashert, destiny revealed. I see my path ahead built through seemingly unrelated efforts from the years behind. Apparently academia is a good place for over achieving rebellious nerds.[7] As it turns out, it can be a really good place for many artists. You know—the working artist, the practicing professional, the independent artist, the people whose work we like to be in and to see around town—those capital “A” Artists. It’s also a pretty good place for well-known ex-dancers of the well-known “big dance companies”. And, it’s a good place for many more artists who work hard to educate on the campus and still manage to make work in the other real world that exists beyond NYC.[8]

It’s nice to get paid. It’s nice to get paid regularly, with benefits, and to have access to studios and computers and video cameras and maybe sometimes a theater and technical support.[9] It can be very not-nice if one is dealing with unsupportive administration, cantankerous peers, ignorant masses of know-it-all-but-seen-nothing undergraduates, having to go to work at a regular time, sitting in meetings, scrambling for money and justifying why the arts matter. But let’s face it: we need college. What’s our history without Bennington College in the 1930s with Martha, Hanya, Doris and Charles—without Martha, no Merce; without Cunningham, no Cage; without Cage, no Robert Ellis Dunn; without Dunn, no Judson Church; no Judson Church, no Grand Union. Without all of that, where would we be? Still twirling exotic fabrics and shiny tassels in the name of art?

The field is changing, the country is changing, the world is changing dramatically. Perhaps now it’s easier to be a poor artist, after the glamour of high finance has worn thin. Maybe it’s worse. If our presenting organizations don’t weather this crisis, how many important works and artists will we lose?[10] Or maybe the next seminal works need the new landscape in order for the field to grow. New York City teaches a kind of social Darwinism with fierce intent. There is attrition and contraction all around. Artists working in the service or temp industry feel it, artists working at arts organizations feel it, artists trying to make art feel it. But, when I speak to the heads of these college programs and to some of the highly respected artists now imbedded in academia, I hear overwhelming optimism. Everyone has plans: many are rethinking their curriculums, their hiring, their expectations and alliances. As an entire generation of founding faculty retire, a new guard is chipping away at the staunch mountain of academia. There is an abundance of hope in the following interviews with many ideas of how to serve students, artists, and the field, many plans for keeping pace and creating systems with mutually beneficial returns.

I’m very grateful for a couple heated, fleeting debates during DTW Artist Committee meetings. They sparked my desire to continue moving the conversation further. For me, it’s all about the conversation, which is why I’m also so deeply grateful that Critical Correspondence embarked on The University Project and let me jump in and bang at the threshold spaces of art world/school world and real world/campus world. Borders are being crossed, categories cracked—it’s no longer an either/or option. Every conversation I’ve had for this project so far has taught me a multitude about the generosity of spirit, ingenuity of planning, and wealth of possibility that lives inside the pairings of academia and art-makers.

There aren’t any formulas or easy answers, but my hope is that college and university departments can read these interviews and develop an arsenal of information that they can return to their Chairs, Deans, Provosts and Presidents to show how other schools make it work. I hope this project offers the same thing for artists. That those entering academic situations will arrive armed with more information about what is possible for them, or that those pondering the MFA can think about where they will be best served. I hope too that artistic and academic institutions can find something in here to help them build stronger alliances in a challenging landscape. But, most of all, I hope that we are adding more voices to the conversation already in progress.

Thank you to everyone who has (and who will) take the time to talk.

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Infiltrating the MoMA Atrium Part 2: Ralph Lemon in conversation with Marissa Perel on “Some sweet day” http://old.movementresearch.org/criticalcorrespondence/blog/?p=6325&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=infiltrating-the-moma-atrium-part-2-ralph-lemon-in-conversation-with-marissa-perel-on-some-sweet-day http://old.movementresearch.org/criticalcorrespondence/blog/?p=6325#comments Fri, 07 Dec 2012 17:37:47 +0000 http://www.movementresearch.org/criticalcorrespondence/blog/?p=6325 Interview Date: November 21, 2012 at the artist’s studio in the Park Avenue Armory

Download a PDF of this conversation

Artist, choreographer, writer, conceptualist, Ralph Lemon, further discusses his artistic and curatorial concepts in relationship to race, and the work of Deborah Hay and Sarah Michelson for Some sweet day in MoMA’s Marron Atrium, October 15- Nov 4 2012 in conversation with Marissa Perel. Read Part 1 of this interview on the Art21 blog.

 

 

 

 

Marissa Perel: Tell me more about the role race played in your curatorial concept. How was it communicated to the artists in Some sweet day as a prompt?

 

Ralph Lemon: I feel like I can claim the idea of race as something that I’ve embodied, and racism as something I’ve embodied, but also something I can work with as a material in all my art practices, and that feels like a gift. With Some sweet day, it felt like something I could share, whether the artists involved were interested in that or not didn’t matter because it’s part of the air we breathe. So the Easter egg was revealed, not that anyone has actually found it, and maybe in the way I set it up with the artists involved, it’s not findable, not really, surely not as some utopist collective find.

 

Marissa: This Easter egg analogy for the role of race in your curation is interesting. It calls attention to the dimension of racialization in the art world. Whenever there is a show in which race is considered, the writing has to literally be on the wall, spoon-fed, so to speak, to the viewer. But formal concepts rarely need to be spelled out, they are aesthetically apparent. This makes me question whether your decision not to spell it out was deceptive or actually a conceptual point. Why does that need to be highlighted above other ideas or issues?

 

Steve Paxton. Satisfyin Lover. Performed at the Whitney Museum, April 20, 1971. Performers Jeffrey Lew, Al Loving, Richard Nonas, Nancy Green. Photograph by Peter Moore © Estate of Peter Moore / VAGA, NYC (promotional image on MoMA website)

 

Ralph: It’s a charged issue, and it can easily become the focal point. If I had publicized it, then all of the work would have just been seen through that lens. Steve Paxton was primarily interested in projecting his Weight of Sensation project on the ceiling of the Atrium, but if you look at the promotional image I chose for the series, it’s got the black artist Al Loving in the center of Paxton’s Satisfyin’ Lover, from 1970, so I was very deliberate, if evasive. It’s a problem with the lexicon of race in our culture. Either Obama is black or he’s not. Politically he can’t talk about his blackness. He is black, but he can’t be black. And I feel like it’s also how I live a part of my life, particularly as an artist. It’s there, and it’s not there, and it’s there. So, that’s how I considered it in organizing Some sweet day.

 

Marissa: When you say, ‘it’s there and then it’s not there and then it’s there,’ are you saying that it’s part of your awareness, and then it’s gone, and then it returns, or are you saying that about how the outside world perceives your work?

 

David Hammons, Untitled, 1992. Copper, wire, hair, stone, fabric, and thread, height 60 in. (152.4 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. whitney.org

 

Ralph: It’s like a river, it flows, and it’s ever-present, but there are times when certain things surface or fall away, but it’s always there. Sometimes it floods. For me as an artist, there is a certain privilege to being in this flow that there wasn’t 50 or 60 years ago, certainly. I think about the difference between a David Hammons and a Bruce Nauman. These are both iconic and important artists, but looking at the differences in how they’re culturally represented by the white visual art world is so extreme. No one really, I think, has articulated that commonality and division, so they also flow within this river.

 

Bruce Nauman, Fifteen Pairs of Hands, 1996, white bronze with painted steel base, edition Artist Proof, 15 parts each: approx. 52 x 12 x 12 inches, Collection The Glenstone Foundation, Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York. artsobserver.com

 

It’s hard at this point in time to codify things racially and it’s getting harder as time goes on. It feels like a privilege, but then there’s also a responsibility to history, to the people that struggled and died and suffered incalculable horrors to be citizens of the United States. There are still outrageously violent racist elements that exist, but I speak as someone who has had more privilege than not.

 

What is black music? It wasn’t until Deborah Hay presented her work that I confessed to it as the third prompt, besides the first prompt of engaging the Atrium and the second prompt of the pairing.

 

Deborah Hay. No Time To Fly. 2010. Copyright Rino Pizzi

 

The work was all it seemed and nothing of what it seemed. For me, I saw two organisms navigating a space, different evolving spaces within a space, an ecology of bodies, and the audience as a third instant organism and a different space, I didn’t see race, not so much. I suppose I made a choice that a binary gaze would be too limiting. That there was potentially more to see.

 

Not to discard the problems that the piece brought up about race, they are important problems. It’s just a reflection of how we are in this country, in this world and for this conversation, how we were at MoMA. The first afternoon of her performance, I was the only black person in the roving audience looking at the work. No one talks about that, no one knew or cared to see that. What’s more important? What’s happening inside or what’s happening outside? If these questions can be brought up – yes, on the façade, they should anger and outrage, and then we get to the more interesting thinking, if we’re lucky. Have we not learned anything from the Wooster Group and their brilliantly wrong and seminal racial experiments; Route 1 & 9, or Emperor Jones?

 

Kate Valk in the production of the Wooster Group’s “The Emperor Jones” latimesblogs.latimes.com

 

Marissa: Many of the performers in Hay’s group were extremely fraught throughout the process.

 

Ralph: But they stayed with it as professionals. And Deborah was sincere, even as she was obfuscating, but that obfuscation was very direct.

 

Marissa: What do you mean?

 

Ralph: I’m not defending her. Like I said, her obfuscation was very direct.

 

Marissa: I wonder if this is really about understanding the artist’s context within her/his body of work. Michelson’s placement of the guards is classic as per her process, which I see as a unique form of institutional critique. Through implicating the employees’ participation with the dance, she makes the hierarchical structure of the museum visible. Because Hay wasn’t direct, it seems like the performers had to interpret potential meanings for the work themselves, which doesn’t read easily to the audience. Theses artists have become known for their respective processes, but when they’re put to the task of addressing race, it gets tricky.

 

Ralph: The artists weren’t put to the task of addressing race. They were addressing the Atrium space primarily, that challenge, on their terms, and in the process they may have stumbled upon my presence, or maybe not. In a recent e-mail Deborah sent to me she said, “My work has been and continues to be about how we see, not what we are looking at, and that includes the same challenge for audience and performer.” Add the element of race to that ungraspable thing, and it makes it even more fraught because when you’re only looking at black and white, what else is there? But there was a lot more there. Her genius is in revealing what she’s not revealing. The façade happened to be the most apparent reality. Deborah Hay’s piece was seemingly and shockingly explicit, like racial pornography to some viewers. But Sarah Michelson working with the black guards, why is that perhaps more brilliant, racially harmless and or less obvious?

 

Clifford Owens, ‘Anthology (Kara Walker),’ C-print. 16 x 24 inches. galleristny.com

 

Marissa: It brings to mind the whole scandal about the score by Kara Walker for Clifford Owens in his show Anthology. Walker hadn’t intended for him to actually perform it, and when she saw him do it, she interrupted the performance. It was a spectacle, but at the same time, the artist was giving himself permission to experience an eroticism that is publicly censored, and the audience was participating in it. Where else could he have explored that, but at an arts institution? I had a lot of problems with it, but I also felt that it was an important moment. In comparing it to the notoriety of Deborah Hay’s piece, I actually didn’t think it was the most transgressive work in Owens’ exhibition, even though it got all the attention.

 

Sarah Michelson. Devotion, Study #1. With Nicole Mannarino. Photo by Paula Court

 

Ralph: In Sarah’s work, Devotion Study #3, the seven black guards were holding the space for a young, white woman. Protecting her world. To me, that was epically rich, elegantly outrageous and fraught from an American point of view because the black male in American culture is historically characterized as “monstrous.” Part of the genesis of racism in this country has to do with the idea of white men protecting the white female from the black slave monster. In the surround of this, Sarah was composing another dazzling architectonic dance about nothing but dancing and the space it inhabits.

 

Marissa: Was part of your role acting as liaison between the artists and curators?

 

Ralph: I didn’t need to do that because Kathy, Jenny [Schlenzka], Sabine [Breitwieser] and the other co-organizers were all supportive of the choices I had made of the particular artists involved, and the choices the artists made for their work. I did feel like I had to be immediately and unconditionally supportive of the artists throughout the process. It was important that everyone got what they wanted, at least what they needed. Of course, there was the instability of watching the work in the space, of watching the audience’s reactions, and what that brought up for me. It’s a very complex space in the heart of MoMA. Its size, scale, whiteness. It’s a public art space, for a price, and also a space that seems to break down a hierarchy in the museum. It’s a kind of ante-space that is both hybrid and full of potential.

*thumbnail image of Ralph Lemon by Dan Merlo

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Ralph Lemon in conversation with Donna Uchizono http://old.movementresearch.org/criticalcorrespondence/blog/?p=2300&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=ralph-lemon-in-conversation-with-donna-uchizono Tue, 19 Oct 2010 12:57:54 +0000 http://www.movementresearch.org/criticalcorrespondence/blog/?p=2300 Choreographers Ralph Lemon and Donna Uchizono discuss Ralph’s work How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere?, which recently had its New York premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.  CC has excerpted their discussion in four sections: Authorship; Nobility; Mentorship; and Grace, Generosity, and Love.

Interview date: September 30, 2010

Download this interview as PDF

 

Authorship

Ralph: In this work, I’ve been exploring the idea of authorship. [How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere?] has evolved in a way where it’s almost a collective, a faux collective. After Come Home, Charley Patton, I pulled more and more away from wanting to own what it was I thought I was making.

The last three minutes of Come Home, Charley Patton was an anti-dance that I didn’t want anything to do with, compositionally. I asked the dancers to throw themselves around wildly for as long as they could. It was fraught, because they needed my input, but ultimately they made it themselves. Part of this new work is the continuation of that so it’s gone from three minutes to twenty minutes. They’re still making it with my tricky input, my continuing and personal revolt against the accomplishment of many years of building a craft. I mostly feel like it’s not my dance.

There are five parts to this work, and there’s a different, questionable ownership to each part. It’s a little passive aggressive, and I’m happy that these questions of ownerships are happening, but I don’t feel like I wrote down on a piece of paper, “I want a more democratic way of working.” There is a part of me that would love to just have work appear alchemically, appear via some other kind of energetic exchange.

Donna: But then does it get billed as “Ralph Lemon?” There is that hidden responsibility dancers have to contribute a lot of material, structure, concept, and ideas. That’s a lot of responsibility that doesn’t get recognized. Within the community, people recognize that. But on a larger level, who gets the review, who gets the grant, who gets the support, who gets the next gig . . . that kind of recognition stops at a certain level. It’s a tricky place.

Ralph: I don’t really desire a collective. Although, I imagine something like what I have now continuing and being really interesting. This particular situation feels indeterminate and enlightened. Yes, it’s being supported because of my name, but inside of it, it has a holistic ecology [that depends on] every single collaborator. I try to be very clear about that.

This work would not have gotten supported if it were a pure collective. It’s bothersome, but it’s also the reality. I live with that. I think we’re all pleased with what the situation is. The external stuff—where the money comes from, what the title is, etc.—that’s not so interesting. It’s just the work we’re concerned with, and in the work there is no fraught, overwhelming hierarchy.


Nobility

Donna: The word “nobility” comes up in a lot of our conversations, that there’s something noble about the act of making dances and performing dances. How do you react to that idea?

Ralph: There are words that scratch the surface or are right at the edge of that portal, but it’s not quite [the word “noble”]. There’s something really beautiful about the work part. I don’t know about you but for me, it was there in the beginning and then it got a little confused in the middle. The long middle part where it became about support and dance company versus not a dance company, reviews, touring, a good work and a bad work.

The whole time I was just working. It’s just about the work. It’s just about getting up and having that work and having that work. There’s something very beautiful about that. That’s life.

And then there’s the placement of dance-making in our society—there’s so clearly no real payback other than the thing itself. I’m never confused about that. I don’t think I was ever confused about that part. You only get out of it what you put into it. Maybe I do romanticize the lovely impermanence of it. It’s there and it’s gone. At best, it’s just about cycling the gift of it. I guess that’s noble.

Donna: You’re talking about the courage it takes to continue to do this. It’s a practice. It almost feels like you have to have the courage to recommit to it everyday. It’s not the sort of thing that when you make something, you have some financial gain or presenters running after you saying, “I’m going to support you.” It’s this thing that you keep doing because you have to.

I’m just wondering if some people might look at you and say, “It’s easy for Ralph to say that because he has support.” A younger generation is coming up into one of the most difficult economic times that we’ve known. They’re still doing it and creating their own models. How does that [idea of courage] relate to [younger artists who don’t have support]?

Ralph: Support is relative.  The few or many thousand dollars I get to make a work is more about the gift I’m getting from the people who care about the work and less about the dollars.  But compared to the larger world success order we live in, I’m in the margins. But yeah, I am supported. I have incredible people managing this research. To me, I’m supported by a handful of friends. It’s more about that exchange. That seems valuable and real. The other, it’s hard to articulate with any real meaning, because it’s so illusive and unpredictable. I don’t know what’s going to happen next year. And really, after I finish a work it’s like . . .

Donna: You don’t know.

Ralph: I don’t know. There’s no certainty. In that sense, I’m like everybody else.

Donna: Right.

Ralph: Maybe this is where I’m not like everybody else. I don’t really think about those things. I think about how can I be better at what I’m doing right now? Just within myself. Better at how I’m living, at what I’m doing, and at sharing [what I’m doing].

 


Mentorship

Donna: We spoke once about a conversation you had with a presenter about looking at work by younger choreographers. It’s interesting to see how this next generation and the generation after that creates its own craft or its own way to look at the work.

Ralph: I think that’s always been, right? Each generation is setting up their own criteria for how the work is perceived or how it should be perceived. How a particular generation empowers themselves as artists and as a community and dictates how the work needs to be or could be looked at.

Right now, the power is in the hands of the few funders and presenters out there. Some of them are really wonderful and working very hard, and some of them are rather lazy in how they think about moving the art form forward. So that’s that. That’s just nature. That’s the way it works.

At the end of the day, it’s the responsibility of the artist. It’s about a kind of emphatic-ness. What it is they’re making and doing and how they’re sharing that work and then being patient. It’s going to take people time, if ever, to give in. It’s a nice problem for both the inside and the outside.

I try to do my part by exercising my own generational purview, because I don’t know how to look at a lot of the younger work as well as it can be looked at. I’m trying. I find it very exciting and vital, but there’s a lot of information there that goes over my head or past my aesthetic and emotional needs. I think it’s an absolute responsibility for presenters, unless . . .

Well, this gets into a very difficult argument and discussion about what dance is and how to hold it. Like the idea of the canon. The canon is great but that’s all it is. It’s not like everything else should be held up to that, to exist or be relevant. It is just the canon. It has a place, and this young work has a place and there shouldn’t be a hierarchy.

Now where good versus bad work comes into play, that’s maybe where it becomes more simple. But what is that? What’s good work? I think there’s a lot of work to do, at least from the point of view of perceiving and responding to what we see, if we need to do that. Those in power positions of supporting dance need to do that. I think our being responsible in trying to understand what a work is trying to communicate, why it exists, is something that is only going to make the art form better. At the moment I don’t think that’s being done. We’re all too busy managing the outside surfaces of our own perceptions. And there’s a lot of work that’s really interesting and that’s just going to fall away or pass, unfortunately.

Donna: I always think about this, too. As you come in to the “downtown scene”, you’re forging this path, you’re not sure what it is, you have a community that you’re apart of. All of a sudden, you look back and you’re like “Oh my gosh! I’m actually now at the other side of it.” I don’t even know how I got here. I was just so involved in what I was doing. I always felt like I was emerging. I never felt like I had emerged, because it was always about exploring and getting better and charting new territories, or at least territories that were new to me. What is, then, my relationship to the dance community? What is my part in this now? How do I relate? Do I relate on any level to what is happening? How does that effect my work? Do you have a sense of that? Does that come into play at all? Do I isolate myself too much, or am I involved enough, or does it matter?

Ralph: I admire people like Ishmael Houston Jones, because he’s such a great artist mentor. The way he’s fixed in a community and how present he is. I really admire that. You do that as well.

Donna: I like to.

Ralph: You’ve really been giving a lot back. I’ve been more selfish maybe, or more spacey. I’m kind of more . . . what’s the word? Oblivious.

Donna: I don’t think you’re oblivious at all.

Ralph: I get so taken by some of the questions I’m asking. I go into my rabbit hole a lot and I come out and it’s like four years later or six years later [laughs] and I’m like “Who are these new people? Oh, I should go see this first. Who are they?” And they’ve been around for ten years. You’re right, I’ve been at this for 35 years now, and it feels like I moved to New York yesterday.

Donna: I know.

Ralph: I feel like a baby. I still feel really naïve. I feel like I still don’t know what I’m doing. The work still feels very fragile and fresh. Of course, life keeps on coming at me too, distracting me wildly. I don’t feel settled, but I know generationally I’m at a place that’s really different from where I was 30+ years ago. My placement’s quite different from a lot of the really interesting young work I’m seeing right now. But there’s also a part of me that is obsessed and in love with a certain privacy that seems to be really important to how I work and think about work. It seems necessary. That said, I think a lot about the idea of being a mentor, generosity, and giving something back. But when I think about the giving back, I’m not sure what that is.

Donna: Right.

Ralph: I’ve been working at something accumulatively that never seems to have anything to hold onto.

Donna: But you do give back, Ralph. Your presence has always been there for many. You also advocate behind doors. I, too, always question what is my relationship to this community? Does my work even have value in terms of what I hope I’m trying to do? I’m always trying to chart a territory that I haven’t been in. How do I make work, and how does it relate on a larger context?

Ralph: Yeah and history is so relative, too. There’s short history, there’s long history. There’s a history we don’t know. There’s a history of us after we’re gone. Over the span of our lives in New York, we’ve seen a lot of really hot artists come and go, right? Famous for a couple years and then . . . right? It’s very clear to me. It’s like that part doesn’t really mean anything. So again, getting back to this idea of being present and how to stay as present as I can. That’s become really clear to me, and that’s the best I can do.

 

Omagbitse Omagbeni (left) and Darrell Jones, All photos: Antoine Tempé


Grace, Generosity, and Love

Donna: You said that you were in love with the questions you were asking. Can you verbalize what those questions are, or are they energetic?

Ralph: I just had this recorded talk with PhillIp [Bither] at The Walker. He asked if I was I embarrassed by using terms like “grace,” “generosity,” and “love?” These are words I’m using to describe this new work. He suspects we live in a time (and have for a while), when artists don’t touch those terms. I said, “Yeah, I’m proud [laughs] that I can throw them around so freely.” I believe very strongly that they are really good markers for me and how I’m thinking of myself as an artist and human being. They feel complete. After love, generosity, and grace, what else is there? If I can make work that tries to hold those things, that’s good work.

I’ve made work about all the other stuff—being abstract, being nebulous, being indeterminate, making work about nothing. I’ve been in love with all those things at different points in my career. Now, these [generosity, love, grace] are the things I’m really interested in, how a particular art can hold them. That’s where it gets fun, because there’s a certain important element in art making that’s about being transgressive. And of course there’s something inherently contradictory about how art needs to not love. Love, generosity, and grace also holds all of this contradiction. These words hold everything. That’s what I’m discovering. There’s really no contradiction. There’s no problem. I can have it all. So, I’m not embarrassed.

Donna: I wouldn’t be embarrassed by it. I always used to say that kindness is so underrated. It’s such a needed and necessary thing. When people are [kind], it seemingly goes unnoticed but it does something energetically to the people who are involved. It’s subtle.

Ralph: I think it’s how we allow ourselves to illuminate all that is there. This idea of rage, anger, cynicism in a lot of work is due to the fact that there’s such an element of struggle in what it is that we do. But those things are not what they are without their opposite. Rage and love coexist. Rage is rage because of love, and love is love because of rage.

Donna: Love is such a huge container and can actually contain hate and rage. When you boil all of that down and you get to the essence of rage, anger, or hate, there is that love underneath. It’s hard when you’re in the middle of that struggle. When I was younger [it was difficult] to understand that there was a container that contained it all. It didn’t mean that those other things didn’t exist or that they didn’t have a certain pain. It was not to diminish or denigrate the kind of pain that can go with some of those things. Love seems to contain that too, or at least cradle it.

Ralph: When we use terms like this, where we try to mark a certain layered, varied emotionality, we create stagnation. When you’re talking about that whole complex mind-body continuum, it’s not fixed like that. It’s so much richer than a thing. When we think we’re feeling one thing, we’re feeling many things. What might the practice of that be to really allow it to open up and let that help us make work?

Donna: . . . which you do pretty brilliantly. [That] seems like it’s been your practice as a person, too. It doesn’t seem very different from the person I know who’s been practicing being a human being in integrity as much as possible in all moments. Also being very generous with the flaws we find in ourselves in that pursuit or practice. That has always been my experience with you as a person. [You are] someone who has a lot of compassion for the condition of being human and the flawed beauty of it. I see how that also informs the way you make work.

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Donna Uchizono in conversation with Ralph Lemon http://old.movementresearch.org/criticalcorrespondence/blog/?p=1526&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=donna-uchizono-in-conversation-with-ralph-lemon Wed, 04 Aug 2010 01:39:06 +0000 http://www.movementresearch.org/criticalcorrespondence/blog/?p=1526 longing two

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Ralph Lemon: Hi Donna. It’s been a while. What are you doing?

Donna Uchizono: I’m making this work right now that is a dual location piece and we are in the heat of it. The original idea has transformed so much, but I’ve been thinking about this for a very long time, a couple of years now. I was in the process of trying to adopt this young girl in Nepal and I had to take classes about birth place versus destination. And how even though you are born in a specific place or environment, when you move to another place you have to recreate an identity of who you are. And in one of these classes that I took, I was talking to someone and I said, “You know it’s funny because as artists we do that all the time.” There are some people who are born into artistic families, but many of the artists that I know are not really born into this way of life. This creation of an identity doesn’t seem so odd to me. Also, originally we had this studio on Fourth Street that was very narrow and long, and kind of rough. When we rehearse there the dancers are right up against you. I liked the view because it was so close, but then it’s strange how you get in The Kitchen – and none of us really have space like The Kitchen. I’m choreographing in these really small studios and I’m up against it. I couldn’t have any distance. So I originally I wanted to do the first half at this little narrow long studio and then see how the piece gets transformed when it gets to The Kitchen.

And so when the small studio pulled out I approached the Baryshnikov Arts Center [BAC] and they had a pretty tight schedule, but I told them the dates and they actually had that available. It changed a lot because BAC is not this grungy long narrow studio, but I still wanted to keep this idea of a narrow space. The paper set actually came from a couple of ideas. I wanted the audience to be close, but every time I’m in a place where dancers are close, I’m always pulling myself in because I’m trying to give the dancers space. I found with this piece of paper there, I’m allowed to relax. I feel like there’s a border and it doesn’t feel invasive when the dancers come into my space. There’s something very protective of the audience with this paper. Also the original idea was of something to be revealed later on in the second space.

Another idea was that one end of the BAC space is considered a “virtual The Kitchen” space, relating back to how we make dances in one space that then get transformed by the performance space itself. I look at this end of the BAC [indicates left hand] as virtual space so every time someone exits the BAC space, they’re at The Kitchen virtually. The lights are set up so that you might hear what’s going on in the “virtual The Kitchen” end but you can’t see it. At BAC the audience is sitting on the two opposite sides of the paper looking up at the dancers. And so I had this idea that then when the audience actually gets to The Kitchen, it’s no longer virtual, which is the power of dance: that it’s physically “live,” non-mediated, not virtual. They are actually now sitting in what would have been the BAC performing area, within the two paper sides looking at The Kitchen space directly, but now looking down into the bowels and seeing the “bass” of the piece, the bottom. But the perspective is switched, you are now seeing it from one end rather than the sides as in a traditional proscenium.

I wanted the first part to be cinematic like an old film and asked Joe [Levasseur, Lighting Designer] to design the lights so that everyone would have no color. At first he was excited about that idea but eventually he said the only way to do that is to use amber light and we didn’t want to copy Olafur Eliasson’s show at MOMA so he decided to use fluorescent lights. With both Joe and Ronnie [Gensler, Set Designer], I talked to them about ideas of things getting wrinkled and used and curved. So the set and lights are straight at BAC and become curved at The Kitchen.

Ralph: Before you go forward, can I go backwards and ask, have you reconciled how you lost the original, more emphatic relationship to the small space where the idea came from? Now you’re beginning the work in kind of a fake space, BAC, which is not the space where the idea originated. So the original idea is already not what it was. It’s interesting to have this idea of an original space, whatever that might mean, and then have it evolve to this other iteration. So now it’s an other thing and an other other thing. I like using this language with my own process so I’ll ask you: Is the piece already a failure?

Donna: On some level. But then something else comes into play.

Ralph: And then really interesting information comes from that, and maybe you can’t know about it until it’s performed.

All photos: Sarah Sterner

Donna: This may drive some people that I work with really crazy, but the way I’m interested in making work in the last couple of years is that I have this idea that I just dive off from. I like to use those as points of departures, rather than things that I stick to. And then I start to play, but I’m always waiting for this time when something else enters that’s not of me. It’s not always the collaborators, (sometimes it is the collaborators) but it’s something that feels much larger than me. It feels larger than my brain. I’m waiting to tap into something that is beyond that defined conceptual idea, and sometimes that happens sooner rather than later. Then I hook onto whatever that is and that drives me forward. In this work it hasn’t happened quite yet and that’s ok, that’s just the nature of it.

So when the other studio let go, I thought that must mean something else will come out of it. At some level I have a lot of trust and at the same time I have a lot of distrust and panic. I think on a personal level I’m scared and worried but on a spiritual level…

Ralph: You have to be fine.

Donna: I am what I am. So those two things are always fighting each other.

I think that the most confusing part of this piece was that in the middle of February, I had a nervous breakdown because I found out that the adoption [I had applied for and worked on for seven years] was not going to happen. I felt like my child had passed away and it was so abstract that no one could tangibly relate to that. So I broke down. And Hristoula [Harakas, performer] has been with me through that. There were a couple of rehearsals where we didn’t rehearse. I just sobbed, she held me and I sobbed. And from that point, it’s been very difficult for me to make the piece. Because I just wondered, why am I doing this? So I think that has affected the process a lot.

I didn’t want to make a piece about this at all because, to me, it seemed to trivialize my experience. I didn’t want to make art about it – that thought just made me mad. So now, something else is happening and I’m not sure what it is: a lot of conflict of ideas and a sense of being lost, a sense of not having an anchor, the odyssey.

Ralph: What about accepting the reality of that kind of life trauma? That’s your life and you’re making art and you can’t really separate it. I mean you can maybe separate it, some kind of useful denial that you can conceptualize on paper, right? But the body is going to mourn. In fact the reality is, at best, the aesthetizication of your mourning, or recovery, or whatever phase you’re in. The piece is that more than anything else, no matter what it looks like. You’re sobbing but do you feel like you can be in a place to acknowledge that? It’s not about dual location, not really or maybe not anymore. It’s now more substantial, maybe.

Donna: Well I don’t know if it’s more substantial, but on some deeper spiritual level I have to let go of the original driving force. Because I’m still in shock and mourning I can only see what happens because I’m still in a really detached place emotionally to things. There’s something that kind of breaks in your brain and it has been difficult for me to define what is important to me. And that has always been the guiding point from which I’ve been able to make dances. Because I always knew what was important to me, or what interests me…

I’m in shock and I’m grieving and I just feel like I’m going day by day and seeing what arrives. I’m in an unhinged place.

Ralph: Still, in that unhinged place you have set up some kind of rigor because it’s not a solo so you’re working with bodies, an idea, and spaces, and publicity and a gala and blah, blah, blah. And all of that takes some kind of container, some kind of structure to support your detachment. And what does that feel like? How would you describe that?

Donna: First of all, I haven’t performed in ten years, so that’s huge for me. And choreographing while I’m in it has been something I haven’t done in a really long time and I’m really out of practice. I don’t know how to do it anymore. A lot really fell on the shoulders of Hristoula Harakas, who I’m doing the duet with, because it’s been hard for me to do it from the inside and not sit and look out. And I’m in grief. I have some interest that is so buried beneath all of this sense of being lost. I know it’s there and sometimes it comes out..

Ralph: It’s clear why you’re here, because it’s obviously your work or going into the studio is kind of like oxygen, especially when you’re in a place of immense sadness about something. Just to be in that space to let whatever happens happen is really clear to me and profoundly important. When you’re asking others to join that process that have a very different relationship to your experience, it’s much more difficult. How do you hold it together? How are you holding this piece together?

Donna: I don’t know if I am. That’s the funny thing. I feel like I’m holding the piece together by just showing up. But I don’t know if it’s enough.

Ralph: What’s interesting is it’s enough for you. It makes sense to me, it’s enough to just show up but then there’s this other responsibility that becomes very complex.

Donna: Yeah, I think that I’m changing the way I make dances and that’s confusing. There’s something else coming out and I’m not sure what that is. I feel less structured in some ways and I don’t know if it’s because I’m just rebounding from something that has completely taken the rug out. I’ve been working on this adoption for seven years and it was holding me together through some other things. When that broke I think my whole identity of everything just broke. I thought my child would be with me this year. So yeah, I’m just trying to show up. It’s not like I show up and just sit there, I do try to have ideas. But trying to have an idea is really not the point of choreographing for me. Having an idea is great but if you don’t you just work at something whether it’s good or not.

Ralph: Why don’t you, even at this late point, think about what would be a heroic process, practice or dance? Maybe it would be really heroic to stop? Like right now, stop and not do it. Is there an argument for or against that in your mind? Why keep going, other than the superficial responsibility of you having a date in two theaters?

Donna: Because I think that despite all of this stuff that the piece wants to be performed. It is at a place where the piece has a voice of its own on some level. …I always talk about these moments where I’m trying to wait for something to come in, that’s where I feel like I start to have a dialogue with the piece itself. And I feel like the dance is at a place where it already has its own say and voice, that it’s really not mine anymore and it’s not really mine to make that decision that it doesn’t get performed or doesn’t get finished. It’s gonna call for it, and so I’m doing the best I can to honor whatever that is. And yes of course I have a date, I have all these dancers, it’s our 20th anniversary and all of those things, but I always feel like the dance takes on a life of its own and it wants to be revealed with all of its imperfections.

Ralph: It sounds heroic.

Donna: It doesn’t feel heroic. I really don’t want to romanticize what we do. Personally I think it is a pretty noble thing, but on a larger picture, it’s hard for me to hear heroics in the same breath of what I do.

Ralph: Well, I think there’s an element of that that keeps one going in a particular genre that gives so little back of what it gives you back. I’m fond of sharing what Viola Farber said to me many years ago about this thing that we do and how impossible it is and we do it anyway and how beautiful that is. At a certain point it seems to me that one needs to romanticize it, otherwise you have to stop.

Donna: Originally I wanted to name the piece “On the Fumes Of” because I keep saying that all of us make dance on the fumes of the resources and money that exists. Sometimes people go, “What did you think of a dance?” and I say, “I don’t know. I really like to judge a work within the larger context of an artist’s historical arc. I don’t even have an opinion anymore, just the fact that people made it is kind of a miracle.”

Ralph: What attracts us all to this way of leading a life and making work? Maybe it’s more to do with something Meredith Monk shared with me recently, it was a quote from Daniel Nagrin: That dancers are the “cockroaches of the art world.” We can’t be exterminated, we’re just gonna keep coming back. It’s just the way it is. Maybe it’s that mundane, I’m not sure. But there is something about the moving body that, I don’t want to use the word pure, but is kind of profound.

Donna: I think what’s profound about it, especially in our digital media world, is that dance is so basic. It’s just a live body with a live person watching a live body and that kind of communication is not something that you can do so quickly. It takes time, it takes a commitment to either be in the piece or to see the piece. I think there’s some basic human need for live interaction and the vulnerability of that interaction. And we don’t get that kind of vulnerable communication with other forms of communication – email, text, phone.

Ralph: That directness is also messy because you’re talking about a discursive mind/body. We’re full of messy emotions and a messy cellular and molecular system. It’s like a whole little wild universe, a compositional ecology that is also just the body. So everything and nothing can be be done at the same time, if one finds that right balance.

I’d like to ask a question about your being onstage again after ten years and your relationship with Hristoula. From what I saw today, I was struck by the generational difference and I’m not talking about the older/younger body, but just a generational body politic of ideas. How much has changed in you since you began showing your work? And now how are you showing work with a body that represents a different kind of work?

Donna: Oh gosh Ralph!

Ralph: It’s not an easy question.

Donna: Hristoula was the one who put the idea in my head to possibly perform. And I’m finding in this process that there were reasons why I didn’t want to perform anymore and they’re becoming clear to me again. This will be it.

Ralph: Why?

Donna: It’s interesting because as a performer, in the past, I always felt like I could perform. I mean I wasn’t a dead fish onstage, I had a presence and all of that… I’m not personally interested in what I can do as a performer. I don’t want anyone watching me, and that’s been really confusing. But yet I don’t want to shrink back because that’s not the solution. I know that I should say I’m really happy to perform but I’m not. I completely love watching other people perform, I’m just not interested in it for myself. In the moment I can get into it, but …

Ralph: But you’re performing in this piece, so what specifically is that exchange? For you and for us watching it? Or is it about the confusion?

Donna: I think it definitely addresses that I’m an older performer who is not interested in doing anything that I did ten years ago, and that there’s this tension in the relationship with Hristoula onstage because what she can do with her body is…I mean it’s just crazy hard, and her ability is mind-blowing to me and I can watch her forever. I really like what she’s doing, but I’m not making myself do any of that because it would just be silly and stupid. But I don’t want to make her not do it either because that would be silly and stupid. So there’s this real difference between some of the material we do. I do these little movements that is about the beauty of the disintegration of things. And that I have physically disintegrated but also out of this disintegration there is something that comes up, which is experience and history. I had some problems with my feet and the doctor said, “Oh yeah you have a lot of mileage on your feet and there’s no way to tune them up.” I think that you can see the mileage and that there’s something interesting in that.

Ralph: What do you see in Hristoula’s body?

Donna: What I love about Hristoula is that she has incredible rigor for detail and nuance… She’s at this peak period, she can technically do anything. But she doesn’t care about that, she cares about how she’s doing it and the why and the quality of that. So she can pull off these physically impossible things, but she also has history and experience behind that. And right now I pretty much have the history. I’m not trying to do any technical feats.

Ralph: It makes me think of generational experiences with dying or decay. And specifically this idea of rigor, which is what one needs to have when making any kind of work. And how within the older body, there still has to be that rigor. It softens, but stays rigorous. How much do you pull away, or come close? How tight do you manage an experience, how much time do you spend looking at it, thinking about it? How hard it is to hold on to a particular idea? How does one emphasize the importance of something?

Donna: It’s interesting because rigor now for me includes how to let go, how to let things happen, how to give things more space. And how not to have a very tight, concrete structure or idea, maybe a couple of ideas exist simultaneously that compositionally don’t work. Allowing myself that takes a lot of rigor because everything in my thirties and forties was about trying to stay with the concept and structure and I’ve been fighting that because I don’t want to do that anymore. It’s not that I don’t have an interest in concept and structure, you may start there but I think there’s something beyond that.

Ralph: So it’s like the rigor of being out of control, which is terrifying because it potentially means you’re not making anything. Which I think is really heroic.

(laughing)

Donna: I don’t know, but I know for me that I don’t think I’m going to perform again after this. That part of the rigor I can’t handle anymore. Just to stay in the performance body and to stay in the performance mind takes a lot of rigor. I’ve been trying to keep in a physical shape to be able to do this and I don’t want to keep that kind of rigor in my life. It wasn’t like I didn’t go to the gym and take yoga before, but that I have to go to stay in shape not for me, but for this performance… I don’t know if I’m interested in that kind of rigor anymore. It’s a lot. I’m also not so interested in how I can control a piece by the way I perform it but more interested in the choreography of it.

Ralph: It sounds very challenging because as an artist that started focusing on the rigor of the body, and then removing that rigor and maintaining the rigor of some kind of form, experiment, research…It’s a challenge in work that is so much about the body.

Donna: I love watching the work of younger choreographers and seeing where they’re going and it’s a completely different direction and interest than mine. It’s exciting to see and I worry for them. It’s harder then it was when I started. I was directing this new media and performing arts grad program at LIU [Long Island University] and I loved it because I felt like I was able to give back to younger artists in a way that was very fulfilling for me.

Ralph: It seems to me there is something organically reasonable that a part of the evolution of the older dancer body is about mentoring.

Donna: Are you in your next piece Ralph?

Ralph: Yeah.

Donna: And how do you feel about that?

Ralph: I’m in it the way I need to be in it and it feels really clear how I’m in it, but I’m absolutely not moving. I’m not moving my body like I’m asking the performers I’m working with to move their bodies, not at all. And I make it really clear to them that they’re being surrogates for how I’m feeling emotionally. And we’re both kind of ok with that. You know that’s on the table. There’s a certain element of making art that’s about manipulation, kind at best, but manipulating material. And I think the bodies we work with become materials. I think that needs to be understood. Kindness is a very important part of my politic, but it is also about the material body. Everybody has to be ok with that.

Donna: Why are you in the performance?

Ralph: Well this particular piece for me is very personal. So I’m in it because I feel it’s important for an audience to see my face. Even though I’m not thrashing and screaming and crying, which is what the work’s about. But it’s important that I put my body on the line in a way that represents those things and it feels right. I’m not confused about it.

Donna: That’s great. I am.

(laughing)

Ralph: I think we should leave on that. It’s beautiful.

All photos: Sarah Sterner

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