Critical Correspondence

Sam Kim in conversation with Milka Djordjevich

Darling

Thumbnail photo: Ryan McNamara

Milka Djordjevich: You have a show coming up at PS 122 and I know you’ve been working on some material for a while—since dumb dumb bunny, which you did at the Kitchen in 2007.

Sam Kim: October 2007. You were in it.

Milka: What have you been up to since then in terms of process?

Sam: I’ve been working on a new piece, Darling, which is what I’m doing at PS 122. I showed the first iteration in June 2008, which looking back, the piece has changed wildly. During the middle of the process I was away in California for two months. The first, I spent at an ashram getting my yoga teacher certification and, bizarrely—I don’t know exactly how to do the math on this, but—helped clear some stuff away psychically to make room for some new stuff to emerge.

Milka: What was the stuff that was cleared away? And what was the new stuff that emerged?

Sam: I had a really skeletal framework for the ‘aboutness’ of the piece. I had been thinking about the massive potential of the body to morph in a time-based way – everything from aging to the trauma of injury and the possibility of rapid recovery. I was also thinking of David Cronenberg and his films. I’ve always loved the way he treats the body in his films, you know, bodies morph in these really disgusting ways—the body can become a weapon. I think hands have become weapons in his work and heads explode. So really graphic, gross stuff, but essentially really funny, because it’s so grotesque and extreme.

So, it kind of started there, thinking about the potential of the body in that sort of gross-disgusting way and ramming it up against the formality and highly-controlled, physical nature of dance. As time went on I started looking at the whole spectrum of horror film, a genre I’ve been attracted to for a long time. I ended up landing on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre as a touchstone and inspiration for Darling. I think it’s essentially a black comedy because the family dysfunction in that movie is just so insane and funny. It’s so far out that you can’t take any of it seriously, but it’s still very affecting and violent and funny. I like how it’s known as a horror film, but truly functions as a black comedy. That transgressive sort of layering and subverting of genre is definitely something that I’ve always been attracted to.  Texas Chainsaw Massacre is loosely based on Ed Gein’s story.

Milka: I don’t know about that.

Sam: Really? Ed Gein was an infamous serial killer from Wisconsin. He also inspired the killer in The Silence of The Lambs.

Milka: Oh, Okay.

Sam: In essence, his story was he grew up in a really religious, oppressive environment and wasn’t allowed to be who he was. As a result, that oppressed energy transmuted and it went really, really bad.

Milka: There is this extreme use of the body or extreme reconfiguration of the body in this sort of gore. In film it’s fake and we know it’s fake, but yet there is often this visceral reaction to the gore of it. Yet in film there are all of these special effects. I wonder about using this as inspiration in live performance. I think you use blood right at some point? Or am I spoiling it?

Sam: Let’s just say there’s fluid involved. You’re right. There’s no guarantee that those same smoke and mirrors are going to work in a live format. I would say the horror comes more from suggestion and timing. This is where the architecture of the BAX theater really came into play for me (where I showed work-in-progress showings of Darling) because I flipped the space and I used this narrow little door that goes into the tech booth. BAX just had certain nooks and crannies that were useful. Just seeing fingertips emerge out of nowhere can be incredibly disconcerting. My mission is not to throw on all the gore—that could be something and maybe that’ll be the next piece—but I think the real horror is the stuff that happens in everyday life – the psychological violence that can occur between members of a nuclear family unit. Nobody ever really knows what happens behind closed doors. Being able to reveal that in an honest way, abetted by black humor, is central to this work.

Milka: The use of space is often times the thing in film that is actually really suspenseful in that sort of way, the manipulation of it.

Sam: Traveling down hallways that are lit in a particular way. Doors that are slightly ajar. So horrifying.

Milka: You’re going to do this as PS 122 and I definitely think the space is very different, but in some ways PS 122 is a little creepier to me. There is a sort of unknown territory in that space.

Sam: First of all, PS 122 is bonkers. I don’t understand the architecture of the whole space and I’ve had shows there in the past and have spent considerable time there. I still don’t know where anybody’s office is. I was just in there recently and they’re like, “The marketing people are in the treehouse,” I’m like “What?” They are tucked away in this loft—you have to climb this makeshift ladder. It’s got a certain disorienting quality overall. Their tech booth area is very, very strange, there’s a lot of texture, there’s an open catwalk between two main tech booth areas. There’s just a lot of surface area going on. It’s not completely flat. Some of the areas are paned others aren’t. So, yeah, it makes for a lot of potential play.

Milka: Also, the difference between the white and the black. There is a little more of a vast unknown with the black color of the space.

Sam: It’s actually a huge shift in color palette. At BAX, Darling was pretty light and pastel, in the end, a sort of blue-gray palette. In a way I resisted that PS would be a full- on black box, but that can be managed.

Milka: I don’t know if you feel this way, but when it comes to black boxes I simultaneously love them and hate them. The thing I hate about them is that it feels like every other space in some way. There’s this neutrality that’s actually not neutral at all.

Sam: How do people come to accept that as a neutral standard? Why not taupe? Why not beige?

Milka: It’s the same thing with visual art in a way, the white box. It kind of makes sense because it’s the light thing about displaying artwork. You were talking about how two months wasn’t necessarily enough time since the last piece to sort of process. I’ve been thinking a lot about this. I definitely sense this in myself, this odd, not pressure, but idea that you need to make a completely new, different work or art.

Sam: A reactionary response.

Milka: Yeah, reactionary response. And in visual art, and even in – not to compare choreography to television – but this idea of episodes…

Sam: Love it!

Milka: If you think of a miniseries, episodes, or sequels, prequels…

Sam: Ongoing saga…

Milka: In visual art they have these studies: study no. 1, study no. 2 and there are certain artists that make the same goddamn thing and they’ve been doing it for 50 years. I don’t know I’m just putting it out there…

Sam: It’s because of what’s native to dance. The fact that dance is a live form and such a felt experience, it makes sense to me that you would really want to go to the other extreme for the next experience. Because your whole being is so involved. I think dance lends itself to wanting to destroy it, kill it and move onto the next thing. Dance is constantly dying as it’s being experienced – there’s no opportunity for a rewind. But I like that. I have to say I do think that there is continuity between dumb dumb bunny and Darling.  Darling is more forthright about examining primal relationships, the family relationship, and how that engenders certain perversions and how that manifests on some larger sociological level, too. dumb dumb bunny was looking at that on a larger scale with a bigger cast. In Darling, there’s a more tightly contained framework with fewer bodies, but I think my questions are still essentially the same. Where do the perversions come from? Can we go back even further? Can we go back to that originating moment when psyches rip? These questions are ongoing for me and when I look back at my body of work, I see that that same concern has always been there.

Milka: This idea of the family unit, are the performers assuming specific roles—of an archetype, of a certain family unit? Or is it more like the idea of a family unit?

Sam: There’s more fluid interplay with who’s the oppressor, victim, or whatever, the gay uncle. In The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Leatherface has an amazing scene where he has this ugly-ass wig on, a curly brown-haired wig, and applies make-up to his second, victim-made ‘leatherface’. This ritual is so important to him. He’s got to do his butchering later on and that’s like a job requirement, but for the time being he’s found solace, he’s finding his inner and outer beauty. Killers, even really slow-witted ones, need some personal time. I’m attempting to find a similar, expansive range within the idea of a fixed ‘role.’

Milka: I’m wondering how not only the content of the films may inspire or influence your work, but how the medium itself, how it’s experienced either formally through editing techniques or sense of time or how film gets composed, if that ever affects or not what you make, since it is this sort of two-dimensional medium versus a three-dimensional medium.

Sam: It’s all editing. I don’t have any direct experience making films, but I’m intrinsically interested in the medium, very, very interested in it. I do feel like I borrow certain cues from the form, but I don’t consciously imbibe any kind of formal information as to how to set up a mise en scene or how I want to frame this or that, so much as I feel like there’s something in me that feels an affinity for what film does. Although I will say this, though again, this has nothing to do with film technique. Film has this tradition—I can think of so many films across so many genres where film uses ‘dance’ to express the ineffable, what cannot be expressed through the medium of language in a naturalistic way. Like Napoleon Dynamite. What would that movie be without the quintessential solo dance number to express his true self? Or even Bring it On?  Kirsten Dunst has this amazing – she’s listening to this mix tape from the boy that she is majorly crushing on and it sounds so dumb, but I’m so convinced watching her dance to it. What she does energetically to come to that emotional peak with her dancing, jumping on the bed, it’s really, REALLY effective. So I am deliberately attempting to use dance in big quotes, within my dance, in lesser quotes, to mimic what the ‘Dance Number’ does in film.

Milka: It’s interesting this dance in quotations and the dance because sometimes I look at dance and I think about how odd it is in some ways. That we somehow have this assumption that people moving in this way is completely normal to a certain extent. That’s the beauty of it too, you know, choreographer’s can create worlds and the idea to highlight or creating another sub dance is interesting.

Sam: Exactly, the essential weirdness of it. It is totally abnormal. Dance is completely, completely abnormal. Why would anyone do that and then create a premise as such where people come and sit in a black box to watch these people do an abnormal dance? There is something wrong with that, which is awesome.

Milka: Sometimes it’s even subtle things like, when my boyfriend sees dancers bow, he says, “They’re bowing like dancers, why can’t they bow like people?”

Sam: Right on.

Milka: You mentioned to me earlier that you have a special guest.

Sam: I do have a special guest. And Milka that was a great segue.

Milka: Thanks.

Sam: You’re welcome. Since I am playing with this idea of dance in quotes within a dance, I have this mini-section within Darling which I refer to as “Personal Dance Hour.” (There may be a few of them). When I would try to choreograph the big one I would always think of Stanley Love, who for me was a really big figure at a certain time. I’ve been aware that he’s resurfacing and rather than me try to channel Stanley, it dawned on me I could just get Stanley. Huge profound leap. That was the reason behind hiring Stanley to guest choreograph. It’s literally not going to be me. It’s gotta be such a huge systemic really bonkers break from the rest of the piece that I just needed somebody completely other. Not me.

Milka: That’s so great. It’s like cameo choreography. I think that’s brilliant.

Sam: It’s feeling good to me. It feels refreshing. It helps cut the preciousness.

Milka: Yeah, definitely…You know, dance is such a communal form compared to a lot of other forms because, in some ways, you need the bodies in order to really make. It’s always really collaborative, but yet it’s sometimes hard to let go of ownership. The idea of letting go of some of the ownership and let someone else in is really empowering in some ways.

Sam: I feel like it’s one of those big, sexy topics, ownership and collaboration. I’ve never been one to kid myself about having a full-on collaboration. In making dances, I never really see it as a collaboration. In practice, yes, but in fundamental vision, no. Having guest choreography suits me well because of the premise I created—that it has to be such a complete break that it cannot come from me, from my body or my mind. So I’d like to make that distinction between guest choreographer and collaboration.