Critical Correspondence

Movement Research Spring Festival 2010 Hardcorps curators in conversation with Levi Gonzalez

Artist curators Walter Dundervill, Melanie Maar, Aki Sasamoto and AL Steiner speak with choreographer Levi Gonzalez about curating last year’s Movement Research Spring Festival Hardcorps.

Interview date: June 22, 2010

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Levi Gonzalez:  I wanted to start talking about how the concept came into being for Hardcorps.

AL Steiner: Well, we liked each other immediately which was really helpful and we didn’t know each other so I think that was really good.

Melanie Maar: I don’t know if we talked about concept but even in the first meeting we started to throw out all these words, remember? And then we kept throwing out words and after 10 minutes we were making a list of words. You wrote it down (indicating Aki). From the first moment you were the keeper of the list.

AL: It was processed through Aki’s brain. Rigor was important. And some other things came up.

Aki Sasamoto: I think at the beginning we already talked about what dance is, and performance art is… the difference. Because I think we were a mixture of choreographers and artists. So we were trying to figure out other words that connect us and that’s where rigor came out.

Melanie: And central, de-central came pretty quick. And open and not mushy.

Levi: Not mushy?

AL: Yeah, not mushy was a huge thing that we had to deal with so eventually if you take that and you get to hardcorps it does make sense.

(laughter)

Walter Dundervill: It’s the affirmative of not mushy. We were trying to come up with the statement. Some things would be suggested by ideas that we were throwing out and some ideas would start to get shaped by the words that were thrown out. So it was going back and forth. Like title coming before content or content coming before title.

AL: We were trying to frame what we wanted it to be and the language was helping us, but I think it wasn’t until our fourth meeting at Abrons [Arts Center] where we were suddenly struck by the idea of something being hardcore.

Aki: It came that day. That word was not there until the day we actually decided.

AL: Like so many things that happened in the scheduling of the festival. And that’s also a way of thinking about how we dealt with the festival itself in a larger sense. We were talking a lot about nostalgia and the idea that the process of making is so current and so active but there’s also this idea that some thing has already been there. How do you inject rigor into new ideas, and how do you formulate some sort of discipline within the scope of this freedom of art-making or dance-making?

Melanie: Discipline was another word. Practice and discipline. To be diverse but skilled within that diversity. When hardcore popped up it seemed like it was all these things. From the beginning it wasn’t about being smart but really connecting it back to experience and communal things. We were talking about us, not just me the artist but something that is more us-like.

AL: Groupthink.

Melanie: It became a groupthink, like a strong feeling towards connecting with experience and skill and the different mediums, but not making value on the mediums. Not being afraid to mix it but also still staying strong about each single one.

Levi: That seemed really clear to me. I think I had an epiphany at one point when I finally sat down with the schedule. I was really struck by the lack of a hierarchy between social events and panel discussions and performance events. I remember being really taken that a brain dissection could be part of a Movement Research Festival and visual art events and all of that.

AL: I think we were all really engaged with each other’s practice, which became inspiring. As much as it is inspiring to ask people to be in a festival like this, something that’s very experimental and open we were also very taken by wanting to make things that we all wanted to do with each other. We had a lot of scheduling issues where we couldn’t all be at everything but the desire was that every single thing would be something that all of us would want to do. Which is a really hard weird thing to accomplish but we felt in the end the schedule really reflected that. There wasn’t anything that I didn’t want to see.

Aki: I also think that there is a moment when four people meet and don’t know each other, that’s a good state because you can be interested. And that’s very different than going to a very packaged thing that is “interesting” already. The festival is about pointing these people to many things, and we as curators have to have the not mushy thing, so that you can bring everybody into an interested state.

Melanie: That connects to not just the friend or the community or downtown or whatever. It stays within a Movement Research community but because we had such intersecting and diverse subjects it did branch out, and maybe not by the mass, but by the individuals. I saw a lot of people that I never saw, especially for the performance events or the science event or at Jimmy’s. At the beginning I had this idea that we were going to make it diverse because we come from such different backgrounds and can we make a Movement Research Festival that goes out of the circles we know. It was just an idea but then the reality of it is that it is such a specific community but the breaching happened more with certain strands and people. The other idea is utopian. It’s not Performa, you know what I mean? It doesn’t have the budget. It’s a totally different scenario.

Levi: It’s like concentric circles instead of a discipline. You can’t make the community of Movement Research disappear but there can still be some kind of stretching and expansion.

AL: We were really focused for the first couple of meetings on the spaces, and so Jimmy’s for instance was great because we said, “Well, why don’t we hang out at a bar as part of the festival? What’s stopping us from doing that?” And so we used the bar. And then what location is Movement Research used to and what is it not used to and how do we define what that is? So its like familiar spaces then mixed in with other possibilities. And a juxtaposition also within the spaces: CPR with a dissection workshop, I mean, that’s fairly unusual. So when Melanie suggested that, where should we do that? Not at a medical center. Let’s do it at CPR which then has a funny connection because its called CPR. (laughter)

Melanie: I didn’t think of that until that day when the professor came in and she was like, “its so interesting we were dissecting a brain at CPR. The brain is dead already!” (laughter) It was such a perfect moment [another night] at CPR when Heather Castles was standing, she had this scaffolding and she was the last performer of the night, and the scaffolding was in the exact place that the brain table where all the brains were spread out and dissected were and she was standing there and she was at the edge of her physical capability. Shaking and being such a body, a live body.

AL: And so the juxtapositions weren’t even always in the same time, but they were constantly happening. I think we created an energy. Being interested is a really specific energy rather than things being interesting (general agreement). And so there’s an engagement that we tried to point to. And sometimes it worked and sometimes it was problematic because we had cancellations and all this on the opening. The opening night being cancelled was crazy but then we were like, “well, what does that mean?”

Melanie: And it was very ironic that Bailout Theater bailed out.

Aki: And [the event] was called “Artists and Food Are Present.”

AL: And the thing that they kicked us out for was a fasting workshop for three days.

Levi: Wow. (laughter) It was meant to be.

Aki: When you start to look at a festival as one piece then those things become interesting. And I enjoyed doing a curation where I get to see that picture, where we expanded the community to bigger things. It’s like there’s a line formed and the festival is really about pointing, drawing those lines. Okay, it could follow this way or this way and hopefully the people who came to multiple things went to different places, you know?

Levi: I always think about geography as a big deal in a festival. I was thinking it’s specific to New York but I don’t know if that’s true. Like Impulstanz… It’s pretty centralized, isn’t it?

Melanie: Within the city it’s not all that centralized because the place where the workshops are happening you have to take a bike, and then there are the theaters and then there’s also the bar situation.

Levi: Maybe what seems centralized is that there’s a committed group of people that are present for the festival and that’s their primary focus.

Walter: And the majority of classes seem to take place in one place. So there’s a place where everybody congregates at Impulstanz in the daytime. And we talked about that in the beginning. We had this idea of centralized/decentralized. We did have an idea that we wanted to try to centralize the festival and make the venues relatively close to one another and then we just realized it’s almost impossible in New York because you’re dependent on whose available and where the venues are who are donating space. So then it got decentralized but the Jimmy’s bar idea became our locus for congregating and coming together at the end of each evening. So the centralization concept got shifted a bit from what we originally thought. But its true if you go to Tanz im August in Berlin it feels like you’re going all over the place. And most New York things you feel like you’re going all over the place.

AL: We also talked about focusing on a day being a day. It wasn’t about giving a lot of options that one had to sort through. It was about creating an agenda and where that agenda would fit. And if you were interested in it, there would be overlapping things throughout the schedule as well, so that there was an ability to connect the lines, to connect the events or workshops or classes. But it wasn’t required and you would still have an experience that was very substantial. We talked about other festivals in the city where you are constantly almost hysterical because there’s something you want to see here but there’s also something you want to see there. Are you going to feel excited about seeing everything? We weren’t really interested in that type of excitement. We were interested in the focus. In the end Façade/Fasad became this space in Red Hook where you were there for five or six or seven hours. It started around five and it ended at three in the morning. And it was amazing. Some of us were there for all of it. So it was about that placement of energy, not so much the variety.

Melanie: And the Façade was a real metaphor for this commitment. If you were interested, you have to go and travel and you have to stay there. Not like “oh in another two minutes I’m going to go to this party and then we’re going to this.” And I think a lot of people came in rolling their eyes because it was such a trek but then once they were in it was really rewarding. There was something happening.

Walter: It was one of the best parties that I’ve been to in a long time.

AL: And that was really the centralization of all our energy. That was the place where we did many, many things.

Levi: So much festival programming is about the name of each specific artist. And it really didn’t feel like these events were organized around an artist. There were artists involved but they were coming into another kind of frame. It wasn’t just that Joan Jonas is talking. It was that artists and choreographers and curators are talking about the intersection of these places. Again it creates this level of interest vs. interesting. That’s a really interesting distinction.

AL: We had a very egalitarian view probably because we were very sensitive individually about that. When we wrote the descriptions we were cracking up about a lot of them because we all have a good, overlapping humor that helped a lot. We got tired and ornery but we never disagreed essentially on the description. Or that it was an artist and a choreographer not that it was Joan Jonas and the professor and…

Walter: Marian, Skipper and Gilligan. (laughter)

AL: And I think the writing it out. “Something to Drink About”. Writing those out was really fun.

Walter: It’s amazing how helpful that was because on one hand you have this assignment that you’re coming up with these statements and themes and headings.

AL: You’re trying to point out what’s important in some way or another.

Walter: And they created these little structures we could then curate according to the themes that we devised for each evening.

Melanie: In the beginning we were still trying a little bit to have certain artists perform. But over time the idea of presenting an artist got lost, because we realized that there’s no money and the person from Sweden or Norway isn’t going to make it here for the budget that we have.

Walter: One of those Scandinavian countries.

AL: And are we supposed to invite the star from blah blah blah?

Melanie: It became more about these structures that we filled with…

AL: Content.

Melanie: First of all that’s an illusion that we can. Performa can because they have a structure for presenting but it would weaken the Movement Research Festival to try so hard to present when that’s not what the supporting structure is. And we found that a strength rather than, “Oh shit we don’t have money and they’re not going to come.” It also spread out the aesthetic factor. It wasn’t so much about presenting this certain aesthetic, but presenting structures and forms where people can perform, talk, workshop. It’s not about defining a certain way of doing it and that’s something very specific to a Movement Research Festival. We could bring in a scientific thing, and performance art, and Jimmy’s. It made it not about defining what dance is now. That was really flowering for the mind. I really enjoyed that and realized it more in the aftermath.

Levi: I was curious about the framework that gets set up and then shifted as you’re negotiating the practical issues. You talked about how that affected the centralization/decentralization idea. That there are concrete issues that come up that start to shape the festival as much as the abstract or intentional ideas.

Walter: That’s true in everything. It’s a choice. You can either push against the things that come up that you didn’t expect or you can go with them. But how far do you go with them? You’re constantly negotiating the obstacles as they come up. Is that obstacle just going to take us too far off of where we’ve started from or can we kind of veer off over here and redirect ourselves? I think there was a lot of that balancing and negotiating.

AL: And a lot of organic reaction to the practical. We worked a lot of our issues into the Jimmy’s talks.

Levi: Good format.

Melanie: Alcohol helps.

AL: Yea, instead of passing out Aderol we just went to Jimmy’s. (laughter)

Walter: Oh right, passing out was one of the possible titles of the festival. (laughter)

Aki: If something meaningful happened it was always not planned. The panel [Multiple Personalities – Talking Choreography and Performance Art] was a good example. I think that was the best panel I attended for awhile. One thing was that we could reach out to those people because of that interested state. They were isolated. They were representing that field or that title, choreographer or artist, so they didn’t feel like they are a star of that field, first of all. They are already vulnerable in a way. Surprisingly famous people agreed to do it because they are interested. And then we didn’t really have structure to give them. We were discussing and couldn’t reach a conclusion.

AL: And we added the moderator [Carla Peterson] last because we thought the structure is going to have to be basically someone who can manage onstage. But the excitement was, we just asked each of these artists and they all said yes. And we thought, “Oh, they want to talk to each other.” This is not us. We helped facilitate that, but they’re interested.

Aki: So we didn’t really tell them what to talk about. And in the end that really sprung them into interacting on the spot. And in a performative way because there is an actual tension involved in getting to know somebody and that made the talk richer. Other panels I’ve been to, the panelists already know what they’re going to talk about and the audience already knows what they are going to talk about. So you go and you’ve already constructed a smart question to ask and try to time when to ask that question. It was not that kind of panel. It was more honest. And Jimmy’s was like that, but with the help of alcohol. It was about getting to that space where you’re not re-performing what you’re knowledge is. It was about actually encountering somebody’s opinion on the spot.

Walter: That’s such a great point. That’s very true.

AL: And we realized artists and choreographers haven’t really spoken to each other.

Aki: So it was really about somehow curating half-assed so that you can really be hardcore on the day. (laughter)

AL: Well it’s called Movement Research. I was really obsessed with the research part. Every time somebody would do something I would turn to someone and say, “see, it’s research.” Because I don’t know what just happened. (laughter) We were not presenting success, we were presenting as much in-depth coverage of the unknown as we could possibly plan.

Levi: Are there other events that resonated with you either individually or as a group?

AL: Oh so much. There was Governor’s Island. And there was Judson and Abrons.

Melanie: And the workshops were really great. People were interested in taking workshops again. Not that we have to make workshops in the festival. We could’ve dropped the workshops but it just fit into the ideas we had already talked about. Then in curating it’s about what I as an artist am interested in now. We are not curators or organizers in our daily life. We’re artists. So we are connected to other artists. I felt like there was this smooth thing between all four of us very individually, what we are thinking about and then how it’s connecting to what’s around us. When I look at the schedule I feel like it’s distinctly each of us but also fitting together in a larger way.

AL: There was just a lot of overlap and a lot of participation from the people in the festival.

Melanie: That’s a huge difference to some of the other festivals. You feel like you are also a part of it and you are making it happen too as audience. That’s very special about the Movement Research Festival.

AL: And the things I couldn’t be at I got texts about what was happening. We had a blog also. There were so many aspects to it that we put together and a lot of it fell in at the last minute.

Walter: I think that’s also part of it. We know, especially in a festival in New York City that’s going on at the same time as other performances that not everybody is going to make it to everything and most people will only make it to one thing. And so you want to have each event be something that somebody is going to get something out of. So there was a sense of focus for each of the events that might draw particular people.

Levi: Not mushy.

Walter: Not mushy.

AL: I feel like we’re artists, but the curatorial process is actually intrinsically a part of being an artist in some weird way. So this felt like a natural extension of many things we’ve done, or that I’ve done that have been called curation. Then there’s some things that happened during this process that I actually never had done. I would say one of the things was us meeting constantly and just talking. Usually I’m so dogmatic about what I’m doing and I’m only usually collaborating with people that I’m making something with. So this was really different. We also included lots of our physical presence.

Levi: Any other reflections so far? It’s been like, what, two weeks?

Melanie: Something that came up in the talks was sustained attention and it ties into the idea of interest. To have a moment of sustained attention whether its in performance or the workshops or the talks such an amazing thing to commit to and to have a practice of because things are happening all the time and we’re all over the place, chasing one performance and the next. I realized that there were so many moments in the festival that created an environment where attention is sustained for a moment because you are interested. And that’s a pretty empowering thing. I thought that was really special and about the practice of the body.

Aki: It takes time.

AL: It was completely unreasonable and inspiring so it was really rewarding. And it was really empowering. Now we’re all living in a commune together. (laughter)