MoMA’s latest venture in curating dance—three weeks of performance conceived by Boris Charmatz and titled Musée de la danse: Three Collective Gestures—offered an opportunity to keep thinking about these questions. In 2009, Charmatz was appointed Director of the Centre chorégraphique national de Rennes et de Bretagne in Northwestern France, one of several state-funded choreographic centers in the country. But in an effort to distance dance from notions of choreography, centrality, and nationhood, Charmatz renamed the choreographic center Musée de la danse. In a recent conversation at MoMA, Charmatz explained that after several years of institutional critique in the arts, he wanted to experiment with institution building.¹ What might a museum of dance become? Keeping this an open question, Charmatz has transformed the choreographic center from a place where choreographers would retreat to make works into a public space for viewing and making and thinking about dance. With a great deal of optimism and energy, he has challenged outmoded understandings of museums as static houses for dead art. “We are at a time in history,” he wrote in his Manifesto for a Dancing Museum, “where a museum can modify BOTH preconceived ideas about museums AND one’s ideas about dance…”²

So it was with great excitement that I attended the opening day of 20 Dancers for the XX Century, the first event of the three-week series at MoMA. My initial enthusiasm, however, quickly turned into frustration as I navigated the noisy chaos of the museum on a Friday afternoon. Without a map to guide me (none were provided), I kept stumbling haphazardly upon important dancers and dances. I found Trajal Harrell, but only just as he finished performing a version of Jérôme Bel’s Shirtology (1997). I heard that Shelley Senter was somewhere performing works by Trisha Brown, but I never found out where she was dancing. I also heard that Meg Stuart had performed an arresting solo earlier in the afternoon. As I walked through MoMA’s many galleries, I kept hearing applause, indicating that another unknown performance was finishing up elsewhere in the museum.

Dancers, choreographers, and presenters already work incredibly hard to make and perform dances. In New York, this entails incessant labor, interwoven with complicated lifestyle choices. Why gather such a diverse and accomplished group of dancers within MoMA, only to withhold information about where and when and what they would be performing? According to Charmatz, 20 Dancers for the XX Century constitutes a living archive: “In dance, we don’t have museums usually because it’s in our bodies that we store things. So, we thought, Okay, the main museum is the body of the dancer. Could they just invade MoMA?”³ Aiming to create a dialogue between museums, Charmatz gave the dancers a great deal of authority. He let them choose spontaneously what they would perform, and to decide for themselves where they would go and how they would interact with their audience.

One might then consider 20 Dancers in relation to the “archival turn” that has taken place in critical theory and arts practice since the early nineties, which has challenged traditional understandings of archives as official institutions dedicated to the preservation of documents.⁴ Theoreticians have underscored the extent to which power plays out in archival projects, and they have urged us to consider what is absent from archives rather than just what is present. They have asked us to think of archives as sites for complex processes of remembering as well as imagining future possibilities, both of which are bound with the production of social knowledge. Recognizing that rich information about the past often eludes written texts and static objects, we also have been asked to think about archives of feeling and affect.⁵ Charmatz is not alone in describing the body as a particular kind of archive.⁶

Viewing 20 Dancers in relation to the proliferation of archival theory in recent years, one could argue that 20 Dancers resists rigid, linear presentations of history that limit how a dance might exist as it moves through time and space. It allows the viewer to be surprised by juxtapositions between works. One might see a sequence of technical exercises developed by Ted Shawn, and then just happen to see Leiomy Maldonado voguing in a nearby gallery. In between, one might glimpse a sculpture by Sol LeWitt or a painting by Gerhard Richter. Perhaps one could also say that emphasizing the importance of dancers rather than merely fetishizing choreographers liberates the work. In future years, any given dance might do far more than the choreographer imagined. Watching Ashley Chen perform solos from Merce Cunningham’s Biped or Rainforest as part of 20 Dancers, for example, invites one to consider the various ways in which dances continue to live even after the death of the work’s creator, or after the time of a dance’s “official” performance.

This theoretical consideration of 20 Dancers matters a great deal. But it doesn’t change the fact that it was difficult to locate or attend to the actual dancing at MoMA. So, I returned on Sunday with a different viewing strategy. Rather than purposefully walking through galleries in search of work, I sat for two hours in the atrium. Resigning myself to the fact that I would not see all 20 dancers, and that I would probably never know all that was danced that day, I witnessed an interesting juxtaposition of styles, approaches to performance, technical histories, affects, and ideas about preservation. Christopher Roman entered the atrium, just as Meg Stuart was wrapping up her solo. Roman, who has been a principal dancer and collaborator with the Frankfurt Ballet and the Forsythe Company for the past 12 years, introduced himself and explained that he would be improvising based on thematic material from Enemy in the Figure (1989), The Room as it Was (2002), You Made Me a Monster (2005), and Decreation (2003). When an audience member asked how his improvisations were structured, Roman demonstrated the themes choreographed by William Forsythe. Then he set out to alter them, seeming to account for the architecture of the room, points and lines within his own kinesphere, and even engaging playfully with a toddler who stumbled repeatedly through the atrium. At various points during Roman’s improvisations, Richard Move could be seen, performing as Martha Graham in the contemporary gallery to the right of the atrium. After Roman concluded his improvisations, Trajal Harrell performed Bel’s Shirtology while Michael Jackson’s Bad reverberated from elsewhere in the museum. Following Harrell, Ashley Chen performed works by Cunningham, Phillippe Decouflé, and John Scott. Chen then handed the atrium over to yet another dancer who performed in the Cunningham Company much earlier in its history, Valda Setterfield. She elected to perform The Matter, a dance scored by her husband, David Gordon, in the seventies.

As the title 20 Dancers for the XX Century suggests, it was a performance that invited a consideration of dancers and the complex accumulation of memories, knowledge, and techniques that they house. Still, if one is really going to think about these dancers as a museum within a museum, and if one is going to consider 20 Dancers as a work that frames dancing and posits bodies as archives, then yet another set of questions emerges, with relevance beyond any particular choices that Charmatz has made. The precariousness of dance—both at the level of physical practice and in terms of its lowly position in the broader economy—has been offered in recent conversations as one reason why dance has captured the art world’s attention during the past decade. In other words, dance seems uniquely able to reflect this period of global economic crisis, when life seems frightfully precarious. Perhaps it even has something to teach us. But it is ethically fraught – complex, at the very least, and worthy of consideration – to invite dancers into high-art spaces in order to perform, again and again, their precarious positions. With this, three details from 20 Dancers stand out: Charmatz, with hands cupped to mouth, shouting in a futile attempt to be heard above MoMA’s roar that he would be performing Isadora Duncan’s Revolutionary Study from 1922; Valda Setterfield, 79 years old, who wore a sweater around her torso, explaining that because of the cold temperature in the atrium she would need to engage in some Qi Gong practices in order to “wake up” her body; and Ashley Chen, after dancing a solo from Cunningham’s Biped on the atrium’s slate floor, quietly acknowledging that he had “thrown his neck out a bit.” These moments might be relegated to incidental choreographies were they not so poignant and undeniably familiar.

¹“An Evening with Boris Charmatz, Simone Forti, and Ralph Lemon,” Monday, October 21, 2013, 7pm.  Theater 2 (The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2), MoMA, New York.

² Boris Charmatz, “Manifesto for a Dancing Museum,” 2009. http://www.moma.org/pdfs/docs/calendar/manifesto_dancing_museum.pdf

³ “Boris Charmatz’s Museum on the Move,” Interview Magazine, October 2013.
http://www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/boris-charmatz-musee-de-la-danse#_

⁴ For further reading see: Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, Zone Books, 2002; Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: a Freudian Impression, University of Chicago Press, 1982; Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, Vintage, Reprint edition, 1982; Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History, Rutgers University Press, 2002; Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, Duke University Press, 2003; Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History, ed Antoinette Burton, Duke University Press, 2006; Archives, Documentation and Institutions of Social Memory: Essays from the Sawyer Seminar, eds. Francis X. Blouin Jr. and William G. Rosenberg, The University of Michigan Press, 2006; The Archive (Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art), ed. Charles Merewether, MIT Press, 2006.

⁵ See Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Desire, Duke University Press, 2003.

⁶ See André Lepecki, “The Body as Archive: Will to Re-Enact and the Afterlives of Dances,” Dance Research Journal, Winter 2010. Also: Jennifer Monson’s Live Dancing Archive. http://www.livedancingarchive.org/providence/pawtucket/index.php

Danielle Goldman is Assistant Professor of Dance at The New School and a professional dancer in New York City, where she recently has danced for DD Dorvillier and Beth Gill.

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Interview date: October 14, 2010

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Jen Rosenblit: I’m here with Jean Butler, talking about Jean’s experience as an artist/performer leading up to the New York City premiere of DAY, choreographed by Tere O’Connor. Jean, just to give a little background information, please talk about your training in terms of how you understand the body. How you came to dancing and where are you at now?

Jean Butler: I’m going to be 40 next March, and I started dancing when I was three. My mom put me in ballet and tap, which I did not like very much. My mom is Irish, and she eventually found an Irish Dancing class. She thought it would be a great way to keep her culture in our family. There was something immediate about Irish dancing that I loved, probably in the informality compared to the ballet class. I think it had a lot to do with the teacher, Donny Golden, who I still consider my teacher today.

Irish dancing is a cultural art form that exists within a competitive world. It’s related to ballet in the way it’s taught. It’s a formal technique. It’s codified. There’s a correct way of doing things, and there’s an incorrect way of doing things. As a result of the competitive aspect of Irish dancing, there’s less consideration for process.

There are three defining features of Irish technique. One is verticality. It’s posture, i.e. there’s no movement from the waist-up. Your arms are at your side. Your spine is not locked, but it’s straight. You turnout the feet but there’s no turnout at the hip. There’s no plie. Another aspect is musicality or timing that has to do with dancing directly on the music, to the music. The third aspect in Irish dancing is rhythm, which would be an interpretation of music but again, on and with the music. There are also two types of Irish dancing. There’s soft-shoe and then there’s tap or hard-shoe.

As a child you learn by repetition, and you learn toward an end-goal, as in perfecting a particular movement in a particular way. For me, the idea of how to get there was always missing. You just go and hope you pick it up. I also think being taught in that way, perpetuates a disconnect between the mind and the body, to a certain extent. Your legs are just going and going and going and you just hope that it turns out okay. I remember being very young and trying to figure out how to jump higher. I was about 12 years old and it was a very simple jump. Your two legs are together and you just vertically jump straight up into the air. As you leave ground, you point your feet and your knees should lock. I did this for hours on end and I kept trying to get higher. I remember getting tired and I started taking breaks in between the big jumps and doing a little jump so that it was a little jump and then a big jump and then a little jump and then a big jump. I realized from doing that that I was releasing down into the floor in preparation to spring up into the air. That was a really critical moment for me, because I had to engage in what I was doing with my mind and my body and figure this hole out – this hole in technique and how it was taught.

From then on, I started engaging with the dance as problem solving. For instance, if I wanted to do something that I saw an older dancer do, I had to take it apart and start thinking, “Where is my weight when my leg goes here? Where is my spine in relation to my knee in relation to my ankle?” Although I wouldn’t have had that vocabulary to talk about it then, [that’s what] I was investigating. I was investigating it because I was really interested in it. That inquiry, that questioning, that examination bring a level of presence to the dance. It’s a layer. It’s not something I was just taught and then simply regurgitated. This is something that’s been deconstructed to figure out how to make it better. I had to figure out how I was engaging with this. I was really lucky because my teacher, Donny Golden, recognized that interest and really pushed me towards it.

And I really enjoyed the work aspect of it. Things like style, interpretation and individuality . . . they’re layers that come after the mastery of principles of basic technique.

Jen: How did DAY come to fruition? What was the first thought in your head about approaching Tere [O’Connor]? Did you approach him?

Jean: My only training, really, is in Irish dancing. I did a Masters in contemporary dance performance years later. I started exploring a different physicality. I did this because I wanted to evolve as a dancer and a performer. I still had a real interest in continuing to dance and I had to figure out how to do this.

I moved to New York and was really interested in the downtown dance scene. I had a few friends who had introduced me to different choreographers and their work. Out of all the pieces that I saw, the one that resonated most with me was Tere O’Connor’s Rammed Earth at the Chocolate Factory. There was something mesmerizing about the performance that I couldn’t fully articulate then. I forgot I was watching dance. There’s something in that that really attracted me. It wasn’t derivative of anything I had seen. There was an inherent theatricality to it, there was poetry to it, there was a cinematic overtone. There were so many other things than just “dance.” I started getting really interested in Tere’s work. I would go to his talks and I did one of his MELT choreography workshops, which I found enlightening. He is very different from the world I come from in that he said “I am not a master at this. I’m not interested in authoring or owning this. I’m interested in this as a continued practice and exploration.” That [sentiment] resonated with me.

In the meantime, I was doing my own work, mostly funded through Ireland. A commission came up for my next piece from the Abbey Theatre [National Theater of Ireland]. I knew immediately that I didn’t want to create this piece. Somehow, I knew what I needed to do was envelop myself in somebody else’s process to pull things out of me that I wasn’t aware of or that I wasn’t able to do. Immediately, I thought of Tere. I never in a million years expected him to say “yes.” But he did. That’s how the whole piece started.

I think he realized where I was coming from was almost a similar place to where he was in terms of inquiry. I was very clear that I didn’t want to become something that resembles a contemporary dancer. That’s not my evolution. My evolution is to explore the possibilities I might have as a dance artist.

Jen: What has it been like stepping into the work of someone who has such a honed language? How did this affect the time spans when he wasn’t part of the rehearsal process?

Jean: I didn’t know what to expect. I had never been involved in somebody else’s process to this extent. For some reason, again, I had to rely on some instinct of not judging myself, not judging the piece, not judging Tere. It was like somebody was creating a script for me to learn and do and continue to deepen and interpret. [In terms of] the movement material, I think it’s very similar to how he works with his company. There are certain pieces that he sets absolutely and he will teach verbatim. Then, there are certain pieces where I will respond to what he’s doing and he’ll pull out things that spark and he’ll reintroduce them in a new way. There are moments of improvisation. The movement material is very organic. It was also, at times, very difficult because I had to learn different ways of moving. One of the main ways had to do with the spine.

Another thing that we talked about was fully embodying the movement. This was a notion I understood maybe theoretically, but not physically. I wasn’t able to inhabit that in the beginning. I began to realize when I was using my whole self and when I wasn’t. That’s a big departure for me, to understand that. I see that in performers that I’m attracted to and now I understand more fully how that works. That doesn’t mean I’m successful at all times, but I understand more what’s involved.

Jen: You’ve mentioned to me previously that the piece pretty much eats you alive. Maybe you used different words. Could you talk more about being inside the work and the experience you’ve had in relationship to all of these things you’ve just mentioned?

Jean: It’s a brand new experience for me to be working on so many different levels simultaneously. I’ve had to learn to move in an entirely different way that is an extension of me, not imposed on me. I’ve also had to remember phrases, timings, and non-sequential episodic situations that are unnatural to my thinking. On top of that, there’s a whole personal narrative within the score of the piece that is fluid, that changes. It’s incredibly complex for me.

The experience of performing that piece and what it does to one’s nervous system was very unexpected. There’s not a moment when you can’t believe fully in the awkwardness of what you may be feeling. The minute you do that, you’re outside of it in a way that’s not relevant.

The piece eating me from the inside out also relates to the way I view the work. I sometimes think of a Jackson Pollock painting where the visceral action of the painting is as evident as the totality of the painting. Tere’s work, for me, is almost all subtext. There’s no text, it’s just the subtext.

I had to constantly locate exactly where I was at each moment, and [each of those moments] throughout the several times I’ve performed them, are completely different. [It depends] on how I am, how the audience is, or what just happened previously. I am putting myself into this car, and I know where it’s going to go, but I don’t know what’s going to happen along the way and when I get there. That’s total engagement. So, in the middle of all this, I feel like the piece is on top of me and around me. I’m swimming in it and I’m struggling in it and I’m breathing in it and there’s mud thrown at me in it. It’s pretty psychological for me.

Jen: You mentioned earlier to me that you were going to be teaching in and around some of the thoughts, concepts, and ideas that have come up through this work and possibly other work you’ve done. Can you pinpoint any of those at this time? What is some language that you find yourself negotiating even when you’re not on stage in front of people? What are the parameters that have to be there for you to be a performer now?

Jean: Tere’s piece requires an absolute commitment to every single breathing moment you’re on stage. [There needs to be a] commitment to the actual vocabulary and a commitment to the fluidity of state that happens in performance. Sometimes I feel like a little girl, sometimes I feel like I’m not human, sometimes I feel like I’m just a fixture of choreography. It’s the complexity of that experience that is absolutely engrossing and engaging to dance.

I think about the full possibilities of the transformative powers of performance. That really interests me. Who am I when I do this? What memory do I have of the performance, if any? What has occurred? It’s almost like my Hamlet. It feels that intense.

Photo: Michael O'Connor, Thumbnail photo: Cuan Hanley

Jen: What was it like to premiere DAY in Dublin, where you’re known as one kind of performer? How did that feed into your desires, anticipations, or worries?

Jean: It’s a tricky thing when I perform in Ireland. I’m part of the national landscape of dance because of my relationship to Irish Dancing. At the same time, the contemporary dance world has witnessed a certain departure [from that tradition], but not an exiting. It was more just like “She wants to explore something else, but she’s not denying her past in any way.”

I did a solo show in Ireland that was very much a portrait of where I was at the time, where I had been, and what might come in the future. I feel that the Irish audiences were intrigued by where I was going and what I was doing, but I didn’t feel any sense of validation. I felt skepticism.

When I came back [with DAY], I didn’t have a sense of what people would expect. I didn’t really worry about it that much. After the piece, the reviewers were heralding my arrival into the contemporary dance scene, which was kind of amusing. I felt authenticated by them in some way because of that. But it was about them, not me. I think this also had to do with the combination of me and Tere’s work. For them to enter into Tere’s work through me was a very interesting thing. For me to enter into the contemporary dance world (from their perspective) through Tere’s work was an interesting thing.

I also think Ireland is thinking “Well, what is she going to do next?” I have no idea what’s next. That will hit me when it hits me. It was a very personal choice to put myself out there in this way.

Jen: Do you have certain anticipations or hopes for the upcoming New York premiere at Danspace Project?

Jean: My ultimate dream was to do this piece in New York. I like to think I am somehow a small part of a community, and I have a lot of very good supportive friends who understand what I’m doing. I have a lot of other people who maybe know me but haven’t seen me dance anything relevant to what I’m about right now. For me, it’s important in terms of an introduction. But I wouldn’t be naïve enough to think that my background won’t be omnipresent [in viewers’ perception of the piece]. All I can do is hope that they view the piece not just from that perspective and that they view the piece as what it is: a dancer dancing Tere O’Connor’s work.

Jen: We have ideas in our head that in order to work with an established choreographer, you have to build a long history of a relationship with them. You don’t ask them, they invite you. The childlike nature of how this came about, this inquiry of “I’m interested in this information. Will you show it to me?” is amazing.

I’d also be interested in hearing you talk about Heather Olsen [who acted as rehearsal director for DAY] and the other dancers in Tere’s company. Matthew Rogers [a performer in Tere O’Connor’s company] said at your first showing at the Joyce Soho that there was just so much integrity in the work. Whether it’s beneficial for you to be aware of your load, it’s there. [Tere] has a honed voice, and he has specific people he works with consistently. We’re used to seeing that. We’re used to taking the work in a certain way. There’s a just a brilliance in your performance that took a lot of work. You probably don’t even realize how much work . . . maybe you do. [laughs]

Jean: No, I don’t. I don’t really see the affect of it. I realize the nature of it, and I talked a lot about commitment and being interested. I also think I had nothing to lose. Jodi Melnick was the one who said “You can ask. He can say yes or he can say no, but you’ve got to ask.” It does seem ridiculously simple. I’m sure Tere’s decision to say yes was not simple. Maybe he was just curious. Maybe he was interested in working with somebody he hasn’t worked with or that wasn’t part of his world. I had only seen one of his dance pieces. He had never seen me dance.

Heather was a big part of this process as were Michael O’Connor, the lighting designer, James Baker [composer], and Sylvia Grieser, the costume designer. It doesn’t feel like a solo. There are five people with me on stage as I’m doing this. That is a huge amount of support . . . even though it’s my ass out there if I mess up! There is an enormous amount of work that everybody has put into this and I feel very grateful for that. I’ve danced alone a lot, and I’ve never experienced this camaraderie.

The piece was made in two parts of the year, because Tere teaches in Champaign-Urbana [Illinois]. We finished it in December 2009, and then Heather and I went into the studio on and off for three months. She literally combed through the material with me and reiterated things that Tere had been talking about and reintroduced new angles. It’s too simplistic to say Tere wrote a short story and Heather came in and helped me punctuate it. There was something about her experience and actually doing the movement with me as we combed through it and her suggestions about certain things. Useful things like imagining the floor is foam or a trampoline or a rock or . . . Images that I could work with that give certain things a different tone. She really helped me understand from a dancer’s perspective. She was invaluable to the process.

My whole dance background has been to please or impress, to a certain extent. None of those things matter in this type of work. I had to constantly re-check my relationship with what I was doing to make sure this isn’t about the pleasing. This is about entering in the deepest possible way. That was pretty heavy stuff.

There’s a whole part of me that’s tried to stay practical about the piece. That’s been some weird strength. This is like learning a different language and speaking it through a translator in a different country. This is something you have to completely immerse yourself in and don’t question in a judgmental way. If anything, I feel it has a conviction about it that reads. It’s important to me, because I want to continue to dance, so it’s nice to know those things.

A series of short video interviews, Notes on Prisma tries to sketch the experience of the Prisma Forum in Mexico at the end of June and beginning of July 2009 for those who were not there (which includes me). Immediately having access only to participating artists who are in New York, I’m learning about the event as I go from one conversation to another. Different artists, invited in different capacities and engaged in different ways talk about what they did, what impact the experience has had on them and what they think Prisma adds to the current practices of production and distribution of work, as well as the discourse and modes of collaboration that were been explored.

minimum background information:
Prisma Forum, coordinated by Monserrat Payró and Horacio Lecona, launched a sophisticated website/initiative calling for an encounter to take part in Mexico this past summer. Participants would come together for two consecutive weeks, first in Oaxaca then in Mexico City, to share their work and explore diverse modes of collaboration, exchange and discursive forms. Global in scope, Prisma was also experimenting with democratic politics in opening the Forum to anyone through online proposals.

Previous Prisma interviews: Nohemí Montzerrat Contreras, Jennifer Monson, Thollem Mcdonas, DD Dorvillier, Moriah Evans and Martín Lanz Landázuri.

As this past Fall’s MR Festival – Sidewinder – developed, with performances, talks, workshops and Chinese checkers games, some in-town artists sat to with the out-of-town artists to talk about each others work. The conversations were loosely framed around the theme of improvisation. The first of this series of conversations finds Tere O’Connor talking to Mat Voorter and Thomas Hauert. Voorter and Hauert performed during the first weekend of the Festival at Danspace Project (December 4-6, 2008). They did a duet and were also part of the creation and performance of improvisational scores based on Chinese checkers games with Steve Paxton. O’Connor speaks of his own work vis a vis the often posed as dual relationship between improvisation and set work, setting a framework for discussion with terms like rigidity and freedom, intuition and objectivity, editing, and ‘a way of living’. The interview is about 29 minutes long. Enjoy.

I usually go about creating performance material with the aim of making an audience think, but I have come to realize that, as an audience member, I am most affected by dance that makes me feel something first. In these best instances, I have a feeling that I can’t quite identify or won’t quite leave me, and I then turn to thought to untangle it or figure out how the choreographer and dancers conspired to leave me in this state. Tere O’Connor’s Baby left me with a doozie of a feeling–something between schizophrenia, giddiness, and a strange and subtle high. I saw this piece nearly a year ago, and I remember clearly that feeling overtaking me as the stage went to black and the dancers took their curtain call. It left my friends and I giggling nervously as we walked down the street. We weren’t yet able to talk about why we were laughing. We simply began calling out images we couldn’t stop seeing in our minds. As I reflected on this mess of feeling and imagery, I came to its most confounding and appealing source. O’Connor seemed to have no regard for narrative in any sense that I had been trained to absorb it. He set off associations, built and undermined stories and relationships, and bypassed social and intellectual protections on the way to emotional and sensorial reactors. I had spent an hour in a world that was not fixed to any of the logic that so irritatingly and comfortingly anchors most of our lives and interactions. The final and most startling result of this experience was that I was nearly convinced that the world I was about to walk back into was not the one that I had left–ordered, navigable, filled with conventions and rules–but the one that I had lived through in the theater–disorienting, upsetting, laughable, teetering on the edge of implosion. I remember this performance a year later because, although I walked back outside and found everything as I had left it, I eventually realized that, if I stepped back a bit, the world that feels so manageable is actually quite akin to the one that O’Connor conjured. It is simply a well-practiced narrowing of awareness that keeps me from being as disoriented by the world’s chaos as I was in O’Connor’s theater.

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Thumbnail photo by Paula Court, ©2005

Tere O’Connor: Okay, I’m sitting here with Molissa Fenley, and I want to interview you on this occasion because you say you are doing your work—can you say where you are doing your work at?

Molissa Fenley: At the DUMBO White Wave Festival, the first week in November, on an evening with other choreographers, and I’m performing two pieces.

Tere: I’m going to go right into some of the things. I go see a lot of work—I think you do, too—and I see that one of the things that is, maybe mistakenly, being called ‘contemporary’ is to not move anymore. I’m still interested in any kind of range of no movement or a lot of movement. I think all of that can be part of contemporary content. I think you are doing that. You know, I’ve seen your work since I was really young—and we’re not that much older than each other, but you started working before I did, so I always looked up to what you were doing.

I’d like to talk about a couple of aspects of it, and just kind of let you freely talk. I talked to you about it in the studio the other day, about the gestures thing, and how they are so—I call it ‘runic’—or how they are…

Molissa: …almost like an alphabet.

Tere: Like an alphabet! But an unreadable one, one that doesn’t want me to read it. So there’s both the ‘plastic arts’ of it that I’m looking at—it’s visual—and the internal thing that’s going on in you as a contemporary person. You know? And sometimes, in the earlier days, dressed in really cutting edge fashion items, these blendings of contemporary and something really primitive. I’ve always been really interested in that. I see it as a long continuum in your work, and I would like you to talk about what you think about that—anything from any points of view.

Molissa: Okay. Well, I think runic is a really good word for it, because in a sense, there’s a kind of feeling of magic that’s involved in that gesturing. The gesturing evolved really early on in my career, probably my last year of college when I was at Mills, where I became really interested in an Egyptian hieroglyphic-type of profile work—an archaic type of style that then, as I started working on it, became morphed into the three-dimensionality of the torqueing of the torso, which became a trademark, being in a position and then torqueing and spinning out of it really fast. The body and the arms would often be initiating that force, I started codifying that more and more as time went on.

Another thing about it was having grown up in Nigeria, West Africa, and having not come to the United States until I started college—so I was sixteen. I lived here until I was six, but then my real formative years were in a third world country. When I think back to my childhood, or when I just close my eyes and think about the imagination of that period in time in my life, often very alone—we lived sort of out and away from other people, so I was always by myself in the afternoons after school—and remember sort of having this kind of language that I devised for myself and my dog…

Tere: (laughs) That’s great!

Molissa: It was this sign language thing with my dog. In a funny way, that’s sort of been incorporated in as well, as a knowledge that the upper body is so informed, and so communicative. Then, seeing so much of Yoruban dance as a young child, the upper body is just, like, you know, gesturing all the time and rhythmic, and often in counterpoint to what the lower body is doing. The lower body is often transporting the body through space, and the upper body is doing all this akimbo sort of stuff, that then is a language as well.

Tere: So, it’s a layering of these things.

Molissa: It’s a layering of that, and then, as I said, codifying it even further as I went into my career here. I was very interested in Balinese dance, Indian dance, mudra. I was never interested in the idea of learning specifically what those mudras signified, because I thought that was really not right—you just can’t take from a culture…

Tere: No.

Molissa: Right? And you see people do that.

Tere: Yes, they do, and that’s a really interesting subject matter.

Molissa: But seeing what was going on with the hands—particularly because in Western dance you don’t really have the hands as being almost, you know, like a fan, or this very extreme curve that can place…

Tere: Like the Javanese dance.

Molissa: Right. And that’s so expressive that, I just fell in love with that. And that became part of the language as well. So, all of these things are part of it. And then as with the making of each dance, I tried to dig deeper into what that language is, and finding things that are specific for a specific dance. For instance, that piece you saw the other day …

Tere: Can you say what that was called?

Molissa: Oh, yeah, sorry. That piece is called Dreaming Awake.

Tere: And it was to a Philip Glass score.

Molissa: Yeah, a Philip Glass score that has two lives to it—it can be done as a solo or as a trio performed with two of my dancers, Ashley Brunning and Cassie Mey. So, in the making of it, I made sure that the language that is chosen for that piece is very endemic to it and not from anything else. The expression of the language within that dance gets started and evolved and goes to some kind of—not necessarily fruition—but some kind of other…

Tere: Other place, yeah.

Molissa: Yeah, that gets explored and dealt with.

Tere: I can really relate to what you’re saying, and I think it’s good for an audience to see because I could think of an audience member saying, ‘well, it looks similar to the other dances.’ But I know something about being in a really micro-place, and finding the enormity of choices within that place, you know? Because I do think you have maybe a style, but I don’t think it’s a place of stopping for you; I think it’s a place… it’s generative for you.

Molissa: Yes, it’s very true. It’s a place I always cull from, a place like a reservoir that is present and I can always go in there and dig something out. And when I do, I try to propel it into this new form, into another form. And often that involves either a timing issue or a spatial issue. I’m really interested in how dance is situated in space. When I was working as a soloist for so many years, that was really the whole premise—this individual in space—and what does that say about our culture, what does that say about dance itself or the individual. It’s taking a stand, taking a position.

Tere: Do you think you were trying to… Where there inferences being made, or was it completely just a projection-field for you—when you were in that place, from your point of view?

Molissa: From my point of view, it was really about taking a stand of some sort, depending on where a work would be performed. Like in Japan, for instance, there was a time when a woman by herself onstage was unheard of. Whereas in India, a woman alone onstage is like, well, yes, why would you ever want anyone else onstage with you?

Tere: Yes! Exactly. right, right. That’s really interesting.

Molissa: And then in Nigeria, a person would not stand out alone, a person would always be a part of a group. That collective space is always very present. So, to work as a soloist all that time was really a deepening of an emotional expression of a person standing alone. But emptied—I mean, I think it was never just me, Molissa Fenley, standing there. It was me as some kind of iconographic representation of a solo human being. And I think I was really quite androgynous at that point in my life, and I was really interested in that. It was like, this wasn’t necessarily a man, this wasn’t necessarily a woman, this was a person at large, within the space. I learned a lot from that whole period.

Tere: Yeah, I think it’s basically an extrapolation of a basic root metaphor of dance—the human figure is used to be projected upon. I mean, you can’t necessarily be as specific as you can in a narrative realm, so the human figure becomes this kind of adhesive for all of the suggestions that it makes coming from the minds of the viewer. I feel like that was very evocative in those solo works.

Molissa: And then also, when you think of ancient art, it’s the sculpture that really exists overtime. I’ve been very interested in ancient sculpture. Sometimes, in periods of my life, I would just go to the museums and take those stands—particularly the Asian sculpture, the top body is going this way, and the hips are going one way and the legs are going another way, and it’s like the body is a river, a flowing object, and to me that’s a tie-in. Cycladic art I absolutely adore—these really iconic, graphic positions of the arms, particularly, or of the body just being one entity.

Tere: Can you tell me what that brings you, when you go there and relate to them? Because the other day I was talking to you about the relationship of what I saw as ‘runic’ with the temporal setting that you set up, which comes from a kind of twentieth-century knowledge, certainly—and relative to a lot of twentieth-century music—but also this idea of continuum.

Molissa: Yes.

Tere: Maybe a post-minimalist look at time. How do those relate? I don’t know if you know the answer to that—I think it’s something you are working on. Because if something is…if you are standing still…when you stand still, is it electrifying? Does it generate forward movement through time somehow for you? Or, what do you think about that?

Molissa: Do you remember a work called Bardo?

Tere: I do! About the forty-nine days after the death…

Molissa: Bardo had a lot of stillness in it, and yet within that stillness there was the sense that this metabolic body is continuing, and our sense of watching is continuing. It’s taking that stillness of the body, and the stillness of the person watching, and maybe together you go somewhere.

I think that stillness allows for an entrance that maybe doesn’t happen through the continuum of dancing. In my early work, when the dancing was constantly going, that was really my interest in that period, particularly with group work—that there would always be this feeling that space was being emptied and filled constantly; that there’s this ongoing-ness of… An area of the space would be taken by one dancer, that dancer would leave, it would be alluded to by someone else, in an inverse relationship to what the other person had just done—maybe an arc is described and then another dancer performs its inverse or performs it smaller or larger or in the air or on the floor.

Tere: I want to go back to the other thing, but just now you’re talking about that time in those early works, like Hemispheres, etc. I always felt it was a problem—or a stopping point—that people looked at it and equated it with sport, athleticism or aerobics.

Molissa: That’s horrible! (laughs)

Tere: It’s so much more interesting than that, and I always thought that was a block…for the work.

Molissa: Well, you know, the politics of criticism—that’s a whole other issue.

Tere: Yes, and marketing. But I think that’s something people glommed onto, and I think it’s good if it can get your work out there, but I thought, ‘you’re missing a whole layer of this!’

Molissa: Yeah. I remember it was like, ‘oh, you could be the Jane Fonda of dance.’ There are so many issues to talk about with that. I would have people tell me that I made them feel embarrassed about their own body. I had trained myself to a point where doing a dance like Hemispheres was absolutely a piece of cake. Remember the three of us—Silvia (Martins), Scottie (Mirviss), and me?

Tere: Of course!

Molissa: The three of us danced the work all night long, and then it was like, ‘okay, now what?!’ We were absolutely women of steel!!

Tere: But that was secondary to the subject matter of it, basically.

Molissa: Absolutely! Because if you train your body to a point where that kind of physical work is effortless, it’s a physical relationship to your mind. It’s all about concentration; it’s all about discipline and how to filter your mind into zeroing in on the body. So it was really metaphysical.

Tere: You’re relocating continuum through this.

Molissa: Absolutely. A few people would get it.

Tere: I got it! I was so into it, you know?

Molissa: Yeah. And when we did Hemispheres again at the Kitchen just recently, to reenter that, twenty-five years later…

Tere: Oh my god!

Molissa: …or whatever it was, you know, in my fifties.

Tere: That’s intense. You went to it from a mind exercise, so it didn’t necessarily have to be…

Molissa: I mean, yeah, you have to get to it physically, but you get there through your mind, whereas when you’re younger, you just sort of forge ahead, and you have this amazing musculature that can deal with it! And now, to do that kind of work, later in years—like right now I’m reconstructing State of Darkness—I’m going to be setting it on Pacific Northwest Ballet.

Tere: You’re not going to…

Molissa: Well, I could! That’s what is amazing!

Tere: State of Darkness is Molissa’s version of The Rite of Spring, which she danced topless—it was beautiful. I saw it in Florence, if you remember.

Molissa: That was the absolute premiere of the piece—and Enzo got so mad!

Tere: He got mad?

Molissa: Yeah, remember? He and…um…Enzo and Guy—what was his name? Bartolucci?

Tere: Oh, Giuseppe Bartolucci.

Molissa: Yeah, had a huge fight with you about it, because they both hated it and you loved it.

Tere: Oh! Right! I remember that! Well, you know, in Italy, that’s not called a fight— that’s called a debate.

Molissa: Well, I mean, it was great—it was really super fun. But anyway, I’m doing that again, and for the PNB. I asked Peter Boal, who is the director over there, ‘Are you going to have the women not wear shirts?’ And he said, ‘No, because then it’d just be called the “topless ballet.”’ It’s just interesting that the first thing you said was that the piece was done topless. To me—and this is another aspect about having grown up in Nigeria, where, you know, we just never wore shirts—it was not a big deal. You often would see a woman’s breasts, and it was never… anything.

Tere: No, I didn’t mean to characterize it; I’m just bringing some anecdotal information to it.

Molissa: Yeah, I know, but it is a thing that becomes an endemic thing. It’s, you know, ‘oh, that ballet.’

Tere: But let’s get back to where we were. I’m interested in the relationship of runic thing or something plastic—I call it— and solid, to continuum or what I was saying as this post-minimalist thing. We’ve talked about it as being from the molecular body, or the moving internal body, but I think it posits something about the relationship to objects around you in the world. For people, that’s really important. To say something about that object that is moving past me, or I’m moving around it and sensation changes—the whole language of dance that I think is really present in your use of the plastic versus the trajectory of time passing.

Molissa: I think that might also have to do with the spatial concepts that we’re talking about: that the body is moving around objects that are invisible, or set up sculptural designs on the stage that are then… that the body sort of moves through these structural forms to continue.

Tere: It’s a relationship I look at in many peoples’ work, and I say, ‘are they adept at this, or not?’ And ‘are they even aware of it?’ I think it’s a good thing to talk about because—going back to the politics of criticism—I think a lot of criticism is based only on the visual and on stopped imagery, as opposed to the fact that those images are in a temporal setting. They’re moving by you in relativity to each other. So, the ways that we do that are the whole language here. It’s a really interesting thing to investigate, and I think you are one of the people investigating it by taking dance, and really committing to it as a valid form of research.

Molissa: Yeah.

Tere: So each piece you do is examining that thing, you know? It is difficult to talk about, but I think that something like… I forget what piece it was—it was a while back, and you did it at the Joyce, and there were these attachments to your body…

Molissa: 331 Steps.

Tere: …and I thought there was an attempt there to visualize something that was going on spatially—like rays that are going on. And sometimes I feel like there’s a circularity, a spinning three-dimensionality to what you are trying to do there, and that that generates a time-sense, also.

Molissa: That piece had to do with being attached to the back wall by a long piece of cloth while trying to maneuver your steps. The idea was that you would get caught up with other people’s attachments and you’d have to move around, underneath or above them. But I think this temporal thing is really interesting and the vocabulary changes according to the speed a lot. You’re talking about how a lot of dance isn’t really dance anymore, that there are images that are made, and image against another image’s place; whereas the transitional moments are really almost not even adhered to—or thought of—as being important. I think my work rarely gets to a moment where you say, okay, ‘that’s a second,’ or ‘stop!’

Tere: Something that’s readable.

Molissa: I use stillness, but in a very different way. The continuum thing means that all the movement necessarily has an equal value, or equal validity to it, so that you’re not making pictures; you’re making motion that of course is made up of pictures, but is just continuing over time. That, I think, puts your mind into a different place as you watch dance. You have a reading of time passing over a period of time, rather than, um, more like a dramatic effect of something being placed. The effect, I think, is cumulative…

Tere: I agree.

Molissa: …of the temporal work. As time passes, the experience of being there, present, watching—the experience of dancing it at that kind of level of commitment— that’s where it goes someplace else.

Tere: Right.

Molissa: And I think that’s kind of transformative. I think that’s a kind of magic thing that goes back to the runic concept.

Tere: It’s also a desire you have to re-organize time.

Molissa: to something that is outside of our normal realm. Because to me that’s what the theater should be: you go in and you are already outside of your normal realm. For things that take place over real time, you have a half an hour or something—you have this real-time situation—though within that, you have time-travel, you have past, present, future. Time varies according to how deeply one is dancing and how deeply one is watching. It’s an even match, and it has to be. I think in a way, audiences are not trained to do that anymore.

Tere: Unfortunately.

Molissa: I think that is a very sad thing. I mean, you know how we were saying the other day how the piece teaches you how to watch it while you watch it?

Tere: Yeah, if you can let go to that.

Molissa: If you can let go to that, yeah. And I think that that’s true mainly of many art forms. You go to a sculpture show by John Chamberlain, for instance, and there are all these hedges of cars stacked together, and you see that as a visual entity, as an iconographic thing. Yet it’s in the making of it and in the understanding of its components and what it means—and you know a little bit about the person who made it, you know? It all becomes a full experience. Or you can come in and say, ‘oh it’s a bunch of cars.’ So it has to do with engaging—how deeply does an audience want to engage? And I think they do! I think that if you give people something that is engaging, I think they are usually happy to be engaged.

Tere: I think so, too.

Molissa: I think people love to read, people love poetry, film. I think our culture likes to think that they don’t, because it’s more marketable to be quick —let’s be quick…

Tere: Also, the kind of criteria for product—which is an element that is stopped and doesn’t move in time—is kind of hoisted onto this temporal setting. Even at the image-level, people look for a product: what’s that one thing that is capturable, something that I can use to denote that experience.

Molissa: Right—logo.

Tere: Logo-setting, which becomes a temporal idea, because you are looking for a stopping point as you watch it. And if you’re offering to the world another temporal ideology, it’s going to have to be filtered through that, somehow.

I wish that a lot more people… I think that even people who are doing what they would call “outer-edge”—I can think of a range of different people—you always have to be aware of how is your time kneaded out, and what is the inference of the way you are using time. It has meaning, the way you are using time—the density of elements within that amount of time, and it’s inescapable. And I really would love for choreographers to redouble their attention to that, because there’s an issue of what people are coming to it with that’s different now from what it was like when we started, you know? I really see that change, but it can be so powerful.

I also wanted to talk to you about some of the endings you had, which I think are so lovely. You can say that you just stop in some of them, but they’re arrived at. I’m thinking of one where you just do a plié, and you finished in an attitude. Does that ring a bell to you?

Molissa: Um, yes, it could have been… I came up in an attitude and that was the end?

Tere: Yeah, that’s the end. It’s just like, ‘dun, dun!’ But in a non “tah-dah” way.

Molissa: I think that’s the second part of Eureka.

Tere: Oh yeah, I remember that dance. I forget how Hemispheres ends, it ends in some kind of other way that makes you eat the continuum; it goes into your body somehow. And I remember thinking, ‘well this isn’t foxy—she’s not being sly,’ and it doesn’t have a “ta-dah factor,” and somehow it was like clipping the continuum. There was something about it that was really successful.

Molissa: Well, I think that it’s this idea that the continuum is happening before the dance begins and after it ends

Tere: You’re just bringing it into everything.

Molissa: Yeah, and you’re riding it that period of time, and when the wave is over, boom!—you’re gone.

Tere: And then people can select to go back to real time or go back to it, in a way.

Molissa: Right. It stops so that the idea can reverberate, I think. And it’s in that reverberation that you’re saying this artwork has happened. It has taken place over real time—you sat there and watched it, and now it’s over. And what is its resonance? Is it moving you to do something yourself? Are you a better person because you witnessed it? Are you a worse person because you witnessed it? Does it have any effect? I think that reverberation is what we really need for artists to be working with.

Tere: One of the things I’ve been thinking of doing is looking at all of the ways in my work that I could…what’s the word? take on the audience’s point of view as a role and invite it into the process of making things. The idea that people leave and are coming to terms with what you’ve made is how I want to make my endings, so that they are in the middle of boring into your neurology and it’s not finished—it continues. And you’re going to be the final editor in your memory. So, I don’t want to do anything, taking from the history of dramatic structure that would make it…

Molissa: …a finalization.

Tere: …the tyranny of drama, you know? Take that away and say ‘you and where you are in the world—where the world is—and you walk away from the theater, and forgetting is going to make this piece finished. I’m going to create a wind that collects the stuff of the world and brings it before you.’ And that’s what I am working on now, and I feel like that is something that is going on in you as you work. I actually think that dance—if people could be freed up to take it in—in a way, is a much easier art form than a lot of people think.

Molissa: Well, they are mystified by the whole deal!

Tere: Totally, I know.

Molissa: I think abstract dance is the most beautiful thing to watch, and to just experience.

Tere: To go through.

Molissa: Yeah. I just saw Merce’s show the other night…

Tere: Me too.

Molissa: …and the piece with the Rei Kawkubo costumes! It’s just really extraordinarily beautiful.

Tere: It’s glorious! And it really sculpts time. It’s really chopping up time for you in a way that is just so… glorious. And the music for that, too! God, it was extraordinary.

Molissa: David Behrman’s music.

Tere: Cunningham is really the place where I want to dress up in a nun’s outfit and say ‘I want to try and help you! I like this!’ Bring people to the light! It is an intense experience. Maybe there are just different types of people, but I think there are filters for people, and they don’t allow them to get to what is so mystical about it all, you know?

Molissa: Merce has a trajectory that is followed through each work. You know when it’s going to end because suddenly all fifteen people are back onstage. I mean, it almost always happens, and I find it so interesting and lovely, as a kind of nod-to-this-finalization onset at the end of the dance, but yet…

Tere: …but then the curtain goes down and the dance is still going on.

Molissa: And you know that it’s a moment in time being stopped. That’s just so great because, as I said, it’s a nod to this need that we seem to have for a beginning, middle and an end. That’s really brained into you from day one—that that is what you want.

Tere: It’s a Western cultural idea.

Molissa: Absolutely. That’s another really wonderful thing about performing in Japan, is that that is not the issue. Often the end is simply: another door opens and off you go someplace else. This thing of opening doors for people is a really important thing.

Tere: Yes, in any way that you can…

Molissa: In any way. I think that the vocabulary in my work helps—that if you see the work over a period of time, that vocabulary becomes something that is signature and a signifier. And that then, if you are seeing the work over a period of time, you get that, and then that takes you to another level, too.

Tere: In fact, with many artists—and visual artists—you see a body of their work to see one thing, so it really does something to your understanding of it.

Molissa: And that’s something that is really missing in our culture—this idea of going to see a body of work. I mean, I have some critics who saw my work in the early eighties and who have not come back. And it’s like ‘just think of your own life trajectory, what you did when you are twenty-five is not what you are doing when you are fifty’. But this idea of making art as a lifetime pursuit—that’s what we’re doing. And there are periods in one’s life, and there are things that are interesting when you are older that are not when you are younger.

Tere: There are all these transitions…

Molissa: Everyone is going through those transitions!

Tere: I actually wanted to ask you that, because you’ve had a pretty anomalous journey here. You had such an enormous, unprecedented visibility in your early, early career. I’ve been talking about this recently: there are very few artists who are still going at something, as opposed to creating something that has their name on it, and continuing to sell that thing. Like Merce, you, this woman Odile Duboc from France who I’ve just gotten turned onto—people that keep turning the corner and saying, ‘what else?’ But that’s what I’m interested in doing. What do you feel about that? I know it’s like that for everyone, but it’s been quite an anomaly, your experience, I’d say. I can’t think of anyone else that’s had this thing.

Molissa: Well, thirty years. 2007 will be my thirtieth year.

Tere: That’s a kind of continuum, how you’ve gone through it all.

Molissa: It’s gone through many, many different ups and downs, the whole gamut—from working with a company at first, to working as a soloist with visual artists for ten years, and then back to a company. When you think about it, you’re just living it, you’re in it, and time passes. I remember when I decided to drop my company and work as a soloist; it literally was a year of discomfort with how things were going. I’d had a company for a number of years, Scottie and Silvia both left, and other dancers replaced them. I had to teach them repertory, and I felt like I was treading water, and it was like, ‘let me out of here! I’m out!’ I got out of it, and then suddenly all of these other doors opened, and I made State of Darkness, etc. So that was a whole re-invention of my self. Then one day, after doing all of that, I started getting really lonely and thought that I should have a company again. And then I had that terrible accident, and as far as other people were concerned, that was the end of my career—they’re still waking up to the fact that I’m still dancing.

Tere: That’s a big issue.

Molissa: Anyway, I got lonely, and I got people again. And I love it!

Tere: It’s almost like a dance: it starts out with some people, and then lead with a solo, then you fall, and come back in! It’s like a really long dance.

Molissa: I feel about it that way. I feel that everything is interconnected, and one thing leads to another. Also, to look back on older work, like reconstructing Hemispheres—to embody it not just on someone else, but to make myself do it again. Oh man! I loved it! It was like being in someone else’s dance company. I had to relearn this stuff that I hadn’t done in years. And just relive that whole thing, and then here it is, years, years later, and I’m experiencing it with these other women that are half my age. I love that, because I’m dancing right in there with them!

Tere: Yeah, you are! That’s like an old kind of discussion, because the way you are—and some other people are—it’s not an issue that you’re older than they are, it doesn’t seem like a theme at all.

Molissa: No, it doesn’t seem like a theme to me at all. It just feels like it’s very natural. I feel ultimately that I dance my work the best. It’s that simple.

Tere: I actually think that’s one of the things I want to say to you, that sometimes people’s dancing is really crucial to their making, and sometimes I think that the fact that their dancing is crucial to their making is a problem. I don’t see that with you—you’re the motor for it.

Molissa: Even more when I wasn’t dancing. Like when I was laid up, I made pieces on Peggy Baker and Peter Boal, but I could still kind of get up and give them the idea. The idea of not doing it myself is not interesting to me. I like doing it.

Tere: That’s true. That is important in your work.

Molissa: I love doing it. I get anxious when I’m not involved. When I make a piece for a ballet company and I have to watch it instead of dance in it, well, that’s hard. Because I know that as an ensemble dancer, my being in the ensemble, it’s like it’s a feed. But I don’t feel like my dancers are constantly referring back to me as to how they should be doing it—it’s just that it’s a feed.

Tere: It’s an energy thing.

Molissa: Yeah, and I love that. And I get that from them, too.

Tere: And for the viewer it’s a point of reference. I also feel like you don’t make them try to do it like you.

Molissa: That’s right.

Tere: It’s a thing, and three people are doing it in three different ways, which I adore. I’m really committed to that in my own work, also. Everyone should do it completely different.

Molissa: I have a really wonderful rehearsal director, Judith Renlay, who comes in towards the end of a rehearsal period. She helps me pack it together, where the disparate things that are too disparate, you know… But also to find a way so that each dancer does it according to their personal translation, and I really like that. Everyone dances in terms of their own training, in terms of their own interests.

Tere: And also, that mirrors audience, too, because it’s a reinterpretation of something and anybody who sees your work is not going to know, because there are no signifiers, really, that are denoted in any dance, so everyone’s interpreting. And even in the room, the dancers are playing that role of audience. To let that slip seems really helpful for the audience members. It’s like, ‘oh, they are doing that, too.’ Not on a frontal level.

Molissa: On a subconscious level. I think that this idea that is open-ended—everyone has their own experience—and as you say, it’s clear that that is the issue, that it’s meant to be that way, because we don’t look the same.

Tere: It’s really beautiful in terms of an open ideology of ‘wow, this system is so finite— what you’re doing. It’s so specific and at the same time, it’s really open.’ And it really is a metaphor for language, too: the millions of different ways people can suddenly use language, using all the same structures and words within one language, but everyone is a variation. No one is the standard. And so it has that…

Molissa: It becomes conversational. It becomes a dialogue between the dancers as they dance, and consequently, a dialogue with the people who watch.

Tere: Just a couple of things. What do you feel now about teaching? You have an appointment at Mills College for half the year, and I’m interested because that’s starting to happen to me now. What is that like, to coexist in some of those things in your life?

Molissa: Well, I go one semester a year, which works because it’s a four-month period that’s really quite intensive. I live on campus, and I work with mainly the Masters graduating class, who are doing their thesis. I go to rehearsals in the evenings—it’s real hands-on. I really like that. I find that talking about choreographing, seeing people when they are younger, helping them find their own voice, helping them filter through what is interesting to them, what’s not, giving them a wide array of information… My big thing is visual art, I know a lot about twentieth century art. Many dancers have never even heard of Picasso, much less Malevich or Mondrian. I like to give a lot of information on Frank Gehry, and Frank Lloyd Wright—get the dancers outside of the dance thing! Because they’ll get that, they get that through their history, or they get it.

Tere: They get it, it’s not that big. (laughs)

Molissa: Well, yeah, that’s the problem: they’re too in that. They need to get a wider array of knowledge, so that’s what I do. And the music department there is fantastic. They have the contemporary wing in the music department—it just has amazing people coming through. It’s a great resource.

Tere: And how does it affect your making? Or does it?

Molissa: Well, when I’m there, I can’t make a thing!

Tere: Is it time or….

Molissa: I think it’s time. I can reconfigure things. I can take a dance that was maybe made for three and make it for twenty, and within that, have a very creative, wonderful time reconfiguring. But as far as actually making new language, I find that I’m just stymied, lost. I’m a real hermit when it comes to working. Even before my dancers come in to the studio, I do a lot of work alone, and always have. There at Mills I don’t have big blocks of time. I have some, but I find that I’ll be in there trying to make something, and I’m thinking, ‘oh, I have to grade that paper.’ Then also, in the University, you get so involved in these faculty meetings and it is endless! Watch out! You are just consumed. But, because of that, there’s this boiling pot: I come back and it’s like boom! I go into the studio and make three works back to back!

Tere: So you just have a back-up in your system and you spit ‘em out.

Molissa: It sort of works. Hopefully that’ll be the case for a couple of years, because I just signed a contract for three more years!

Tere: Sometimes I find that my teaching, because I make them ask continually widening questions, it’s really affected my work.

Molissa: It does make you ask questions of yourself, because they’re asking questions. Also, you think, ‘okay, if I were looking at Robert Ryman’s work right now…’ because we’re doing that in my class, and so I’m looking at it, too.

Tere: Right, exactly, you’re reconsidering it.

Molissa: This is part of the boiling thing I’m talking about: these things are starting—

Tere: You’re feeding yourself.

Molissa: Absolutely. It’s really interesting, because when I leave there, not only do I have this wonderful relief of making work again, but I also find that some corner has been turned. You were asking about how is this thing—the continuum—doing this for three years, and how to make new work. I think it’s getting involved with other people that is helpful to turn constantly new pages.

I just made a piece, Patterns and Expectations, with Fred Frith music, a wonderful composer. Joan Jeanrenaud, the cellist, commissioned him to make the score for her and William Winant, who is a wonderful percussionist. Not only are the cello and percussion going, but there are moments where suddenly she plays the cello with a chop-stick, or suddenly Willie tears up a newspaper or throws a ping pong ball, or something is dropped on the floor. I thought it would be interesting if the dancers echoed those actions too, it’s kind of Dada.

Tere: That’s really interesting: take someone else’s impulse, or something, and play with that.

Molissa: Exactly. And we’re having so much fun with it. That’s actually the piece we’re doing at the DUMBO festival.

Tere: That’s interesting to me, because sometimes I look at what Merce does—he’s just like, ‘I’m going to do my dance, and you can put whatever you want on it.’ Basically, it doesn’t matter, it’s unwreckable.

Molissa: And all of that information that he gets from the computer—the body moving through space, and the possibilities. It’s changed the vocabulary so much; it’s just opened it up.

That ipod thing was really funny. I liked the idea a lot, but… words, hearing a song…

Tere: Hearing words was really weird. And a regular, metered, quantized tempo was not what he’s getting in there. It’s a much more ragged musicality.

Molissa: But I mean, still, what an experiment.

Tere: Totally interesting, of course. The basic metaphor of everyone being by themselves in the audience—you’re having your own experience, and I’m just going to put spray paint on that and make you really notice that. It’s really your own experience and it’s communal. Of course he’s just endlessly new, you know?

Molissa: That’s really filmic too: you go to a film…and I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather watch a film with other people around in a movie theater than to watch it on DVD.

Tere: But not with a friend. I like to go by myself—in a group of people, definitely…

Molissa: …but among strangers, witnessing in a void. And there’s something really fascinating…

Tere: …really compelling.

Molissa: …about that. I think that’s why live performance is so great. To be there…

Tere: …with everybody…

Molissa: …and you’re just like this thing in a sea. It’s such a great, freeing thing. That’s the other thing about art: let’s free ourselves up.

Tere: That’s totally what it does, yeah. For myself and for you people who have been doing this for a long time, I notice that the way I look at everything has been totally altered because I spent so much time making work. The way I look at everything. I hope that can happen for audiences sometimes. I think it can to different people at different degrees.

Molissa: Right. When you’re making work, you’re inside your own head, and that head is either engaged in the cultural world, or it’s not engaged in the cultural world.

Tere: And/or it’s filtering it into its own cultural nature.

Molissa: Well, what I mean by that is that there’s this dialogue that goes on—you see it more in the visual arts—this idea of a dialogue that then artists feed into, sort of like a strain—maybe it’s installation art or whatever. Then you have somebody who is still painting over the edge; that person feels really isolated. But, meanwhile, that person is making explorations for herself/himself that’s within a dialogue of painting throughout the time, the culture. I think what happens with marketing is that everything gets narrowed down to where the dialogue is between the last five years and the next five years. That’s why it’s so interesting for me to look at people like Malevich or Mondrian or Agnes Martin,—that their dialogue takes place over a very wide, expansive period of time. That continuum—getting back to that term, which is such a good one—is what I want to get into. I want a dialogue with those people!

Tere: It’s so interesting to think about how I’m doing my work, and where I’m going in my work right now is less and less result oriented. It’s more about what am I doing in that room, or what are the inherent politics of my process. The product could keep getting just more and more what it is.

I’ve been seeing a lot of younger work, and there’s some unstated rules in a lot of it, which are: no dancing, don’t make a finite ending (because that’s bourgeois or something)—there’s a bunch of little things going on, which I’m sorry about because I want people to go on their own journey. I think contemporary art forms should open up and multiply and multiply and multiply the types of voices, because to me, the more it comes to a consensus, the more it is like our ugly friend’s religion. And government.

Molissa: It’s just all about a narrowing down of the mind so you don’t question it.

Tere: Yes, and I see it in a lot of younger work now, that it’s looking back in itself. It’s interesting, but there’s a bunch of givens that are almost requirements, and I hope that people will crack that a little.

Molissa: Is the anti-dance thing a rebellion against the period before them? Against Paul Taylor or something? I mean, what do you think that is?

Tere: I don’t really know. I think that some of it is an affect, perhaps an erroneous look at what is a “European” affect or… I don’t know exactly, but I think some of it is anti-establishment of some sort. People come at it from different ends. I think a lot of people are interested in performance art.

Molissa: When I was starting to choreograph, you wanted to go against Grand Union. You wanted to dance again! That was the thing: Johanna Boyce, and me and Charlie Moulton, and Bill T. Jones—we were all dancing.

Tere: Well, that’s the thing that I wish would become contemporary: that all of these forms that we’ve gone through—we’ve gone through Judson, the ‘80s, through Martha—that they all become part of a toolbox that can represent a different texture within one work. So you can go from something really conceptual to something representational to something commercial, and that becomes a reflection of a moment that’s really advanced, just in terms of time moving forward in history. Not as in post-modernism, either. It’s not referring to the source, it’s just assuming it.

Molissa: I think when people are young, though, it’s helpful to have mandates that get you going. Because I remember when I was young—and I’m sure there are still people that are angry at me about it—you know…

Tere: What?! I’m sure I’ve got people angry at me, too! (both laugh)

Molissa: But the point is when you are a young person, you’re sort of like on a mission.

Tere: You have to be the generating step.

Molissa: Yeah! And you have to be a little bit arrogant, because you have to settle yourself, you have to place yourself in this thing that you are a newcomer to. So you have to come in, head first

Tere: Yeah, show ‘em up!

Molissa: And everyone gets angry, you know? And then you find twenty-five years later, they’re still angry!

Tere: Well, I love a lot of this work. I’ve been watching it. And now there’s a bunch of reiterative elements, let’s say, in people’s work.

Molissa: Like it’s mannerist. That’s the problem. If it’s not on its own trajectory, it gets mannerist.

Tere: Definitely. And I mean, if the trajectory isn’t like ‘exit where you just were,’ basically lean forward, forward instead of going back. It’s a really huge discussion, but it’s something that I look at, and what I see now is like, ‘wow, I could do this, I could do this, I could do this.’ Going back to these role model things, I want to go to Merce’s every time and see him be in this other kind of examination again and again and again. Or I go to Pina, and I know what it is. She’s never going to get rid of characters and just do one kick in repetition. It’s not going to change, it’s called Pina, and it’s PINA.

So that’s the thing that I am looking for in my life right now, and there are very few role models for an older artist. If you are a visual artist, you would look at Matisse, who did paper-cuts at the end, and summed it all up!

Molissa: That’s why I think as a choreographer there is a really wide world to look at through Matisse. There aren’t necessarily role models in dance culture, because it’s still so relatively new.

Tere: That’s true. And I think it’s new—this phenomenon of people dancing time for a long time, and making for a long time, other than a couple of people. I think people are going into their fifties in a really different way than they used to. It will be interesting to see.

Molissa: Well, yeah, into their fifties and still dancing…I mean, Trisha is still dancing, which is great.

Tere: I know! Oh my god, I saw her and she looked like she was fourteen!

Molissa: Brilliant. And Merce danced until he was—even with a walker! It’s so great.

It’s really interesting to see—just talking about Merce again for a second. In that piece Crises from 1960, there are movements in there that were so particular to him, to what he does with men, because what he does with men is different from what he does with women, I think.

Tere: Yes.

Molissa: There’s this sort of balletic boxing thing that it was so interesting to see it early on—it’s like it gets down…

Tere: …it gets grody and down low and punchy, very interesting. (laughs)

Molissa: That’s something that I’ve seen in many of the works….

Tere: It was really interesting to see that piece, and to see that that’s where he came from. You can see both the seeds and the moment—the exit. You can see both the newness and what he was trying to get away from. Do you think there’s any other stuff you want to cover while we’re having this talk?

Molissa: Well, we were talking about the sort of Zen concept, and I think that’s a helpful thing to talk about, because I think that for a young person, it’s a very interesting thing to see. You and I have a very different…when we got here, it was not so expensive—I lived in a place for fifteen dollars a month! I rented a room from some guy.

Tere: I had a house on Vestry St. for a hundred dollars a month—a loft.

Molissa: I worked on Wall St. for a long time, I just punched in at 6 am, worked until two o’clock and then made dances the rest of the day.

Tere: With really cheap studios.

Molissa: Absolutely. And I know people are not able to do that now. So there is a really different life force that these kids have when they’re coming… And I think it’s helpful for them to see that you can make it. That this life of making art—you have to Zen-it!

Tere: You have to Zen-it out!

Molissa: You have to Zen-it.

Tere: What is interesting: the really, really positive side of a lot of this work is that the work is the result of the situations. You know, making work in your house or…

Molissa: Which is so interesting.

Tere: Totally. That’s the thing that is really free and open and new about it. These people are—that’s not rebellious, it’s just the situation. They’re not looking at the role model of ‘single artist/company’—that’s not even in their dreams! So it really unleashes up to this whole other thing that’s really interesting to watch.

Molissa: There are all these situations that have been happening before, and they can just cull from one to another. I mean, David Appel makes living room dances…

Tere: I know David Appel’s work!

Molissa: I just think they’re so interesting.

Tere: I wish we didn’t have this grant situation where every year you have to produce something. There could be more space for these other voices for people who work in smaller ways, or to see that whole range of things. Well, some people are doing that—in Brooklyn, there’s places to see that stuff.

Molissa: It’s interesting doing these group shows. I just did one at the Flea the other night, and someone said to me, ‘Oh, it’s so brave of you to go back to working in such an alternative space,’ because the other people in the evening were like, you know, thirteen years old! And I just said, ‘Well, you know, I don’t have a season this year—I’m working on a season for next year—but I just want to keep in the mix!’ It’s not an embarrassment to play in a small place—it’s actually really fun! I had a great time. And Richard Move was in the Dance Conversations at the Flea—he was the moderator at the end—and it was a hoot to talk to him again. It’s been a while. I think that work should get made, under any circumstances.

Tere: That’s a really great point.

Molissa: And just young kids have to know that! You just have to get out there and just everyday get something made, or think about it, or do your research, or whatever.

Tere: I’m amazed at how many exciting people there are out there, doing it, in these conditions. I’m shocked, really.

Molissa: And thank goodness for that! That they are making it!

Tere: Totally. There’s a whole thing going on of young work that is very impressive. It’s amazing. Well, I’m going to end this here, maybe we will have another conversation next year. But it was really nice talking to you.

Molissa: Well, I timed it—it was exactly an hour.

Tere: It’s like a T.V. show! (both laugh)

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Photo by Eric McNatt, Digital Production by Elizabeth McAlevey

Tere O’Connor: I’m so happy to talk to you Sarah. I didn’t plan this too much because I like to just be able to talk openly. One thing I would like to do is find some kind of—not clarity necessarily—but a way into what you’re doing choreographically because I, as you know, think it is very interesting. Other aspects get talked about. You know, other things about you get talked about, and I’d really like to talk about the inside of the work more because it is of great interest to me, and I wonder about it. The first thing I would ask you is (and just tell me if it’s too broad or something, because I could get a little more pointed): What is the degree of your imagination relative to the function of what you’re making? What is that like? I feel like your work is based in your intense ability to imagine things. At the same time, it looks at the world in a really pointed way, and I wonder about that. What is coming from an internal source, and how does that relate to the moment you’re living in? And what do those two things have to do with shaping your work?

Sarah Michelson: Well, it’s a very flattering question. When you were asking the question… This is funny, sorry, but I feel like you were asking me… This is just a funny thing to say. In that workshop of yours, a long time ago… I feel like you can ask me that question because whatever that was, you saw back then: that funny combination of me trying to organize something personal from the way that I would perform something or be a character or move, as well as structure something quite mathematically, in a weird way. I don’t remember what you said to me, but I remember having the sense of you watching. I remember being very impressed by you and nervous, but you watching. I feel like you saw something that is somehow in that question.

Tere: Well, yeah. One of the things that I talk about a lot, and I think that you do very naturally, is you take things very far. That’s a big part of what you’re doing. You say, “I see this, now I’m going to take it very, very far.” It’s choreographic. I have this term “choreographic,” which means something very specific to me, which means that it’s not about something explanatory or about something denotative, but it’s this journey that starts from something, and it has a response to the starting point that isn’t necessarily an explanation of it. That’s something that I think you do in such an incredible way. It’s very poetic, as operatic and as large as it is, sometimes I find it really poetic. It’s the imagination, and I did see that in you a long time ago. Then there’s this kind of formalism in there too. That is a beautiful contrast between the hyperbolic, exaggerated things you do, and the restriction of the formalism. What is that? What does that feel like to you?

Sarah: I don’t know what to say because you said a lot of stuff that was right. But, I definitely think… Okay, let me be simple. For example, when I’m working in rehearsal, it’s very, very, very rare that we improvise or that anybody else makes up any material. That material that is on the stage has usually—I’m going to say 85% of the time—come from my body. And, how it works in rehearsal, these days, and in the last few shows, is that people stand around me, and I do stuff. They copy it, and they do it over and over again until they remember it. Then I turn around, and I look at that. Those people are a varied group of people, and from looking at that varied group of people, I can get a wide picture of what I must have meant. The better I know the people, and the better I know the way they interpret things, the more I can be reductive about what the thing was. There is something very internal when I’m making up a movement.

Tere: And something intimate with those people, I think.

Sarah: Oh, yeah. Yeah, definitely. I rely absolutely on the impulses of the performers in the action of copying me. I think that Parker and I, now (especially in Dogs), have come to a place where the movement gets transferred from me to her, and to what the thing will be, really fast because of the way she understands me and because of her role as visual collaborator. She brings that role to her dancing in the studio. She is very exciting to work with in that way.

Tere: And, is that like talking to them, or is that like being observed?

Sarah: What is it like? You mean…?

Tere: I mean when you’re in that action in the studio, with the dancers, are you playing anything out? Are you hiding something from them? I have this premise about dance, not that it could “reinvent and talk about what language can’t say” (that kind of romanticized thing), but that it is its own language. I think more and more of what I do in my work comes out of my personality.

Sarah: I think it’s definitely control, in the way that the specificity of the thing that I’m trying to get at is ultimately… Regardless of my inspiration in terms of the sites, and by sites I mean theaters—I’m just going to say theaters. How I consider those is often an inspirational starting point, but then the work that we make together—me and that group of people—is very specific in terms of the way the movements come out of me and are developed into the material that then we’ll use. I think, if someone assumes too quickly that they know what it is, I might be like ‘It’s not that.’ But, in answer to the original question, it’s like being observed rather than having a conversation.

Tere: I think what’s interesting is that you make these enormous arenas out of the theater/site/whatever-you-want-to-call-it, to house these intimate things, and that’s so beautiful.

Sarah: Right, and I think very early on in my, if we’re going to call it a career…

Tere: Let’s call it a career.

Sarah: I was rejected by… I auditioned for a dance company in San Francisco. He rejected me, and I was so mad, and I realized that his movement would be so much better if I was in it, but he can’t… whatever.

Tere: No, your work would be better if you made it.

Sarah: Yeah. So, anyway, that was it. I guess I’m going to have to make the scenario for myself. I’m going to have to make the situation that I want the thing to be seen in, even before I make the thing. So, first I have to make the scenario that I’m going to make the thing to be seen in, and once that’s pretty complete, then I make the thing. That’s why I think, from what I’m told anyway, that there’s a complete experience.

Tere: A completeness to it.

Sarah: It’s not arbitrary. I’m not looking for a beautiful place and then making a dance in a beautiful place.

Tere: No, I feel like you react to the place, and something about it. The word “opera” comes up for me, because the size of it against… I guess because I know you, and that’s not fair, but I mean maybe who you are, or who one could think that you are, the size of it is a real reaction to that: to who you are and to how you’re bumping against the world. I can see how you grow some things. You see maybe one little thing in a space, and you just go dig at it, and you put fire and sun, and it becomes this thing, which moves me into another thing that I wanted to ask you about. What was that gorgeous thing you made up at the Kitchen, when it was a work-in-progress?

Sarah: Grivdon

Tere: Yeah, yeah. I was saying about that piece that there was this repetition thing, and I saw it in Group Experience also. This person saying, “I have to stick with this.” It’s really dramatic, and because it’s so dramatic, because it’s so personalized, because it’s coming from the person you are, it doesn’t refer to repetition in the history of dance. It’s its own thing. It objectifies repetition and turns it into a thing that is forced into the viewer’s head. I see the repetition come up again and again, and I keep thinking it’s very much a really key part of what you’re doing. I wonder what you think about that. The battement section in Shadowman going across…

Sarah: Totally. I’ve been trying to let it go. What it is, is a lot of what you said—‘here’s an idea.’ In Grivdon, it was the stepping, I think.

Tere: Oh, I loved that.

Sarah: Yeah, I loved that too. How do we fulfill that? When is it that we’ve experienced that?

Tere: You mean, when can you leave it?

Sarah: When can you leave it? And, in my case, I think, if I was making work in a vacuum, I think I would really still be doing that. I would be going on and on and on and on with repetition, but I feel—and it did show up again in Lyon… I don’t know if you saw that piece.

Tere: I didn’t see the piece yet.

Sarah: I’ve been trying in Daylight not to do it, but then, afterwards, this Lyon Opera Ballet thing came in, so that showed up.

Tere: Well, I mean, more and more, the most interesting thing to me about this form is that it’s temporal. It’s just a way of registering time passing, which is a very dramatic thing on Earth right now. Time passing is marked by a lot of war and a lot of awful things. So, it’s almost like saying, “I’m going to stop time.” That’s where I think there’s a drama in it, that it’s so persistent. You insist on it, and insist on it.

Sarah: It’s felt very powerful to me.

Tere: Well, Group Experience was the first one where everybody’s coming down front… It really questions for the viewer, “Is this a transition, or is this a thing? Am I there yet? Am I at whatever I’m trying to project on to this? Has it arrived yet? Is this it, or are we getting there?” I think that’s one of the basic questions that a choreographer who is seeing well is asking. How do people perceive time, and a sense of, “Are we there yet?” which is obviously a useless thing to think about because you’re not ever there. Something about that really comes up in these works for me.

Sarah: I definitely think that it has something to do with eternity, as corny as that sounds.

Tere: It doesn’t. That’s the place you’ve been working from.

Sarah: It’s at the root of everything as soon as I start to make it, and that shows up in different ways. I think the repetition thing is something for sure. Now that I’ve done it so much and my local work environment has shifted slightly since I started making work, it seems less relevant for me to keep doing that. I’m letting go of that, but there’s something in that for me, and I think there always will be. It’s very deep in me.

Tere: I’d just like to talk about other aspects. Tell me if I’m characterizing them incorrectly because there are other things about your work, and I’ll try to say them as someone who would see it for the first time. There’s a reference to dancing in it.

Sarah: Yeah. If I’m political, which I’m not, or I am not deliberately, but if I am in the way that we talked about, I definitely… With all the options that have been offered to me every time in terms of what people say, “Oh, you do this,” I would say, “I make dances. I’m a dance-maker.” I’m coming from that point of view. I defend that point of view. That point of view is very precious to me. If I make something that’s good, I want that kudos to be in this world that we belong to.

Tere: That’s hard to do. I mean, you don’t use the language verbatim necessarily, and it’s filled with all kinds of your sauce, but still it has references at the level of line and stuff. I think it’s to your credit that you wrest it from the history of dance and use it in this other context.

Sarah: That’s what I’m really trying to do at the moment, and I feel like I’m really trying to go very far with that. I feel like there is a lot of rejection of dance and of forms of dance, and I have questions about that. Why? I know that maybe there are taste and aesthetic issues, and where do they separate from that very interesting question that you brought up about conceptual art using movement that’s unconsidered inside the structure, then… Those questions of form and what form people use, and how the form is dated in time and forms that have…

Tere: Forms are in the air—they’re in the air.

Sarah: I really love David Dorfman, but no one’s making handstand dances anymore in the fashionable arena. But ten years ago, everybody was making handstand dances. What would it mean—I’m not making a handstand dance—if I was going to make a handstand dance? I don’t mean to be rude by calling it that. You have to protect me and help me out here. That seems an easier way to talk about it than ballet or Mark Morris.

Tere: It’s recognizable.

Sarah: It’s because that was a whole period of Doug Varone and David Dorfman and Lisa Race, and many others.

Tere: A certain kind of physicality.

Sarah: A certain kind of scenario of being upside-down that was really exciting, including to me. I tried really hard. I auditioned for David. I like that guy very, very, very much, and I was very excited by that, and those things. What does that mean ten years later? That’s a very interesting question, to me.

Tere: Yeah, it is.

Sarah: Someone was going to make a work, and say they made incredible work, or it would have been incredible if it wasn’t full of handstands. Or, it’s incredible because it’s full of handstands.

Tere: So is it just a perception?

Sarah: Yes, what is that? So, I’m interested in that. I saw a dance that I thought was incredible, that actually my very good friends hated.

Tere: Oh dear.

Sarah: Yeah. It was interesting. Because I didn’t know anyone else who’d seen it, apart from Gia. It brought up a lot of questions for me, because I found that they, my cute friends, were rejecting it on grounds of aesthetic and of form.

Tere: One can.

Sarah: Of course. That’s true. Good point, Tere. I accepted it wholly, in terms of structure.

Tere: The questions are there, those questions. I think the thing about what I was saying about you using technique is that there’s something going on that’s basically so personal. Personal isn’t the right word because it sounds like psychology, but personal in the other way. You’re seeing it detached from its history. You’re relating to it…

Sarah: Totally.

Tere: …within your own life, and so I don’t see it as reference. That’s really the difference. You could look at a language or what you were calling a handstand dance or a ballet dance and say, “That dance is a ballet dance,” or you could say, “That’s a dance that includes some ballet.” Or, you don’t even see the ballet, and it’s those degrees of where the structure subverts the visuals. I think that’s what’s happening to you. The content behind what you’re using reinvents the visual information. I think I see that with you a lot.

Sarah: I definitely think I’m working in that area.

Tere: The other thing I wanted to ask you about, because it was so interesting in the last piece at P.S. 122…

Sarah: Daylight.

Tere: …was the woman coming out at the end and dancing, and the woman was just this…

Sarah: I’m so glad you brought that up.

Tere: …real beautiful and simple and blatant and kind of painful coming to terms with theme and variation. This is my old trip: theme and variation. Why does anyone do theme and variation?

Sarah: I think I do theme and variation.

Tere: But the whole thing is like, “Oops, here’s the theme. I’m sorry. Are you leaving? Oh, here’s the theme. Here’s the dramatic information. It’s going to be delivered to you in a person who’s out of ilk, in a costume that is really different, who has not been introduced.” I am grappling with it, and I think it does with the audience—the theme is being presented out of the confines of the beginning and end of the piece.

Sarah: So simple, right?

Tere: Very simple. It suggests something like the viewer has to come up with the thematic material. It’s after the show. You are coming to terms with it after the show. You just bring that into visibility somehow.

Sarah: It’s great that you notice that because Phil Sandstrom thought she was doing completely different movements in his review.

Tere: That’s the root movement, isn’t it? It was the basic theme.

Sarah: Yeah. Yeah.

Tere: That’s clear. I just love it because, I don’t want to talk about myself, but I am grappling with theme and variation. I really don’t like it. I want to run from it. It’s like a nightmare.

Sarah: But, you do theme and variation, Tere. You do theme and variation…

Tere: Well, I do theme and variation, but I want to do just variation.

Sarah: …like a master.

Tere: I want to do just variation.

Sarah: I know, but you do theme and variation.

Tere: I want to do just variation.

Sarah: I’m sorry.

Tere: It’s not about whether I do or not. It’s an Incubus for me. I hate it.

Sarah: You’re masterful at it.

Tere: How did that come up for you? Making that decision?

Sarah: For her?

Tere: Yeah. What was the chronology of that, and how did the chronology of that discovery…

Sarah: I had these grand ideas about Herzog & de Meuron, and reinventing P.S. 122. Parker and I had just heard Herzog & de Meuron’s idea for an intimate theater for the Walker Arts Center. Using all of their concepts, and even their fabric, and making P.S. 122 into a Swiss stage—ha, ha, ha—and then, in that stage doing a modern dance. Then knowing who we are and that 90% of the people watching that dance will watch that dance knowing who we are: me and Parker and Greg and Mike doing that. It felt like there had to be someone making an effort. Not that we weren’t making an effort. We were making a huge effort.

Tere: Oh, definitely.

Sarah: But, there had to be something authentic. It was so authentic. Daylight to me is… I’m very proud of that dance, even though I think it was received very negatively. I really have this new adulthood where I feel very confident about things even when maybe people don’t like them. That’s very new for me.

Tere: Well, I think that…

Sarah: I know I’m trying something.

Tere: The thing is, out there in the world, a lot of people who suggest they would like you to try something, it doesn’t really work out when you do, so that’s something that you have to really…

Sarah: I know that, as far as I’m concerned, that was a little experiment, and when that theater was built inside the Walker Arts Center, and you saw how similar the actual thing was, like the stencils, all these things that we had mimicked, just from a PowerPoint presentation and some theory. It was very fucking exciting to be on the stage in the middle of that theater and then have 50 children dressed in stencil outfits.

Tere: It terms of extending the idea, the idea that that one girl… You could see her through the glass on someone else’s lawn. It’s the same as crossing the street at the Kitchen when you guys, you and Parker, came over. The theater expands outside of the theater. My idea expands outside of the theater. My idea is expansive. It is so poetic, and the poetics are made geographic almost.

Sarah: I think the formalism is the thing. I didn’t know this at the time, but I think I’m figuring it out now. I think that formalism is the thing that protects me from being thin on the ground with a fast idea. I think formalism is the thing that backs up my desire because I am so formal.

Tere: You mean supports it.

Sarah: Yeah, that’s what I mean, that it’s not dismissible quite as easily.

Tere: Oh, I see. I remember seeing the Rose Window when I was very young in a book—not really young, in college—but I just remember being like, “God, this is so… this is the beauty of repression.”

Sarah: I’m a repressed person.

Tere: Oh, please. I wouldn’t have had you over if you weren’t. It’s all about that. The word “press” is in the word “repress.” It’s like a stencil, or pressing something out through this formalism, and that’s what I think is a real tension in your work. It’s you through the cage of formalism. It’s really, really resonant. But, I just want to go back, if you don’t mind, to that question that I asked about—because we just went on a little journey right there, which was very enjoyable; my hair is mussed—but…

Sarah: Put your shirt back on. [Laughs.]

Tere: But, when did that idea come? It subverts theme and variation.

Sarah: Lindsay.

Tere: Yeah.

Sarah: Her name is Lindsay.

Tere: It doesn’t matter when it came, but I think it’s interesting for people to understand the chronology of dance doesn’t necessarily reflect the chronology of its inception.

Sarah: No, yeah. She was a player—that role, from the beginning.

Tere: Oh, from the beginning. Oh, that’s incredible.

Sarah: But I didn’t hire her till about halfway through.

Tere: But who she is isn’t necessarily that, but the structure of what’s going to happen there, was there. That’s really interesting.

Sarah: I have to make decisions that are going to give me faith. If I’m going to go all the way of making that dance in weird, floaty outfits, I need to know something’s been placed so that I can go all the way with that.

Tere: I see, so the structure is kind of like an anchor for you.

Sarah: Yeah.

Tere: I was really into that. That was really interesting to me. Now, I would like to talk to you also about a sense of fashion that’s in there. I said to you before that I’m an enormous fan of the pictures in the BAM promotional material. I’m not a fashion person.

Sarah: I’m not a fashion person.

Tere: Well, I mean.

Sarah: All right, readers…

Tere: Well, I don’t mean fashion person. What I want to ask you about it is why is it one of the symbols in your work, and I think that it is. I don’t have a judgment about it, I’m just wondering, what do you think about that?

Sarah: I think at first, when I first started making work, and I feel like I can talk to you about this frankly because I feel like really you were there. You came to Group Experience and you knew me, and I think it seemed radical at first. Fashion, as an element in a modern dance piece in P.S. 122, at that moment in relationship to the things that I love: Yvonne and DD and Jennifer and DanceNoise, seemed a step out on my own at that moment.

Tere: So, it got born that way, and what did it become?

Sarah: Then, well… it’s so hard that word, “Fashion.”

Tere: Well, let’s call it something else.

Sarah: I feel like I know what you mean, and at a certain point in my life, when I was working at Movement Research and editing the Journal, and I was so proud of that job and so dedicated to it and so upset that there were a million magazines that people would pick up before they would pick up the Movement Research Journal, I thought it was because it lacked glamour, and the things that people would pick up—I feel naive saying this now, but—had a certain kind of cache or glamour about the design. It seems sort of dumb to say this now because so much has changed in that short amount of time, actually, really in the last six years. There’s been a huge change in relationship to media and dance and magazine cultures, and all of that stuff, but if you can imagine another time… At that time, I just thought, “Couldn’t it just have something that would be… We’re doing such neat things.”

Tere: It brings attention.

Sarah: I was younger. It seems naive now, but I think that I felt I was driven somehow to stay really true to everything I’d learned from all of my collaborators and people I worked with at Movement Research and all those thoughts and ideas, but just get a little bit out of the bread and butter culture, somehow. Meaning that I don’t want necessarily to use string and cardboard every time, though I love string and cardboard. What happens if you have a limousine? Can you have a limousine and Dolce and Gabbana outfits? Can you do that, or can you not do that? I don’t know if you can do it or not do it, so I want to try that.

Tere: The fashion thing to me is interesting because I feel like when I read things about fashion, and I’m not a real intender, but it talks about, “This is like the ’80s, this is like the ’70s.” It’s all reference, and when you guys came out, particularly the women, but also the men, in Daylight, you come out, and we’re like, “What is that? What is that look?” It’s Cesaria Evora goes to Macy’s to have lunch with Lucille Ball and Edith Head, and it’s like, “Where am I?” But it’s the same way that you deal with signifiers in dance because there is no lexicon of anything. No symbol really means anything in dance, and I think that’s what you’re doing. You’re using fashion in a choreographic way. When you came out, I was like, “Okay, I am in a place of not knowing right now.” (Laughs.)

Sarah: That’s cute. I like it. Our outfits…

Tere: No, they’re gorgeous, but they’re unidentifiable. They make a comment on choreography. It’s its own system.

Sarah: There was so much in that. We had so many crazy outfits. We had these puffy coats.

Tere: Oh thank God you didn’t do those.

Sarah: Yeah, well, we did them in Daylight in Minneapolis on the roof, and we sang the pop song that became something in the extended Daylight, but I cut them all up in my house. I made these things. I was very affected by Dominique Mercy when he performed at the Bessies.

Tere: That guy from Pina’s company?

Sarah: Yeah, and his billowing shirt, and we had a section that was based on Dominique Mercy in that dance. I don’t know why. It was just funny, but we did.

Tere: Well, because it hit you somehow.

Sarah: Yeah. It seemed like we took ages to really arrive at it, even though the idea… This is really Parker and I. We kept wanting to go for it. It seemed like the men had to have billowing shirts—weird.

Tere: And weird pants.

Sarah: So are we in slips? What? We had to be like, “Whoa, okay.”

Tere: But I think there’s also an attempt to say, “This isn’t anything you know.”

Sarah: Well, I don’t think that it is anything you know because we barely always know. I only feel satisfied if, on some level, I don’t know.

Tere: I feel that. I think it’s a parallel to the choreography, and I want to just go into one other level of thinking about the choreography. Say that one of the elements is repetition. Can you talk a little bit about how you construct things? Because I think that really is telling with artists. You can just talk randomly. I don’t think that you need to be explanatory about it, but I know some things in retrospect about what I make that are kind of telling, and I’m wondering if you have any. Suddenly they’re all over on the side of the building, the side of the Kitchen. Then there’s the thing with Jennifer Lacey. Then you’re here. What do you think about that, about constructing and making structures with the elements?

Sarah: That’s very instinctive. That thing is always the thing that—even when we’re talking about it—burning me. Well, you have to go over there. No, over there, over there. It’s very base. It’s very instinctive, that thing.

Tere: That’s good to hear.

Sarah: It amounts to something in the end, and I just keep going, fiddling and fiddling until it amounts to something. But I think it’s probably some kind of physics or mathematical construct that arrives.

Tere: It’s a system, yeah.

Sarah: It’s always sadness. It’s always a feeling in the end. How do we get to the feeling?

Tere: Repression and sadness. (Laughs.)

Sarah: In the end, it’s always all these elements: What are we going to wear? What are we going to do? What’s the space? What are we going to make it look like? What’s the genre that I’m going to use? What’s the reference? What’s the comment? All of those questions are happening, and then after that’s all in the pot, how do you arrive at the feeling that those things all are?

Tere: I think maybe it’s because…

Sarah: It’s Love Boat, man.

Tere: It’s Love Boat (laughs). Maybe you don’t give any of them more importance than the other thing, because I think the experience that I have of your dances is, or that one could have with them is, that there’s something inevitable about them. There’s something going on that is…

Sarah: If you feel that, I feel like I’ve succeeded. That’s what it feels like to me.

Tere: I remember that I was so in love with, in Group Experience, the person who was knitting the thing. That’s not frivolous. That’s like the repetition. It’s soaked in the aesthetic somehow. It is a part of it. It’s temporal. It’s constantly being knitted and growing. It reminds me for example…

Sarah: Of yourself. (She points at the knitting basket.)

Tere: I knit badly. Splitting up Shadowman was basically two halves of one evening, but you have to suspend your mind for a two-week intermission. It has its seeds in the ever-growing crocheting there. There’s all these parallels from the visual information and the structural information in your work, that I feel point to you being an artist. It’s interesting to hear, and I think it’s interesting for our community to talk sometimes, about what’s just intuitive.

Sarah: I think there’s a level at which I’m pretty base in that way.

Tere: Or that’s heightened. I like to think of it as a heightened sense.

Sarah: Okay. That’s cool, and I really want to say, that those ideas, I really work on with Parker a lot, and she’s very similar to me in that way.

Tere: If you just focus on a moment of your work where there’s dancing happening, you’re thinking, “Oh my God, this dancing is just very fulfilling.” Do you think that, because I look at people’s work and find that their phrase material, if there is phrase material, or just even the way that they make one step go to the next, reflects the overall structure of their work.

Sarah: Totally.

Tere: Do you think it gets born out of dancing often? That structure?

Sarah: Mine?

Tere: Do you think that through dancing you’re trying larger structures—through making material the dance material?

Sarah: Yeah. The moves become iconic. Therefore that move exists and then it creates, it demands something of you in order to leave it.

Tere: And you can grow from that into larger ideas.

Sarah: Yeah.

Tere: Actually, one of the things that I really respect from you and would like to try and do… That you’re so secretive about your work is really great. I wish everyone would do that because having to explain your work beforehand is really a big problem in this form.

Sarah: I think so. A fucking blurb? I mean, whatever. I don’t mean to be critical about what works for people.

Tere: It’s just the system, and people are doing the best they can. It’s not about that. For me, I find it completely aggravating to write one, and you don’t, and I think that’s great.

Sarah: I pretty much say no whenever I can, and people are starting to be much more supportive of that. It was very, very hard at first, especially because I don’t…

Tere: It’s not a bratty thing.

Sarah: No, it’s me. I don’t have a website or a press kit or any of that. That’s not for me, and that’s fine for everyone who does it. Of course it’s fine. I’m totally supportive and would help anybody who wanted to do that stuff, but I do sometimes want to say to people who hear that they must have a press kit and they must have a website and they must have a this, that, and the other, I want to say… One time, I was really, really upset about something, and I called Guy Yarden. He met me for breakfast, and he listened to me go on. I dribbled on, I’m sure, about this, that, and the other, and he just said, “Do your work. Do not get distracted. Just do it.” He was not being nice with me. He was like, “Why are you wasting my time?” That’s Guy. “Do your work. Don’t be a baby. Just get on with it.” I really hear his voice saying that so many times, and sometimes I do think it’s important for people to know that you will be told that you need to have marketing materials, that you need to meet presenters, that you need to do all these things. But, if you keep making your work, and if your work becomes of interest to your immediate community, people find out.

Tere: Yeah, that’s true. That’s true. To go back to what I was asking you, and to finish the question, is there something about the BAM space or this experience, without you telling me anything about it, what’s the next step for you at the nuts and bolts choreographic level? What do you think you’re confronting now, if you know, because that always changes, I think.

Sarah: It does. I think that potentially the pressure or the expectation that “Sarah Michelson going to BAM” would be spectacle. So, I’m really handling what does that mean and potentially not arriving at spectacle. Also handling—this is the responsive thing—I am going to have a gig at BAM. And maybe I’m being too grandiose and special about it, but…

Tere: No, it’s scary.

Sarah: It’s, for someone who is me, from the downtown community going to BAM… First of all, let me just say that as far as I know, certainly Wally [Cardona] and John [Jasperse] who are the other two people from our community that I know of (there’s Susan Marshall, but I don’t know her) who have done shows at BAM, have premiered there work elsewhere before the show. So this, as far as I know, is a pretty rare situation where a person hasn’t premiered the work elsewhere and has a two-day load in.

Tere: Oh, God.

Sarah: Total. Two days total load-in.

Tere: You should load in during the piece.

Sarah: Hello! Right? In going to BAM and considering all those things—Who am I to this community? I don’t know, but obviously I got that gig and so, how can I be responsible about that, whatever that means. What comes up are the considerations of how would one approach that stage, and how would one approach that scenario, and how would one represent, and how would one figure out if that representation is actually diminutive, really? My concerns have become… Recently, inside our community, with the introduction of a lot of conceptual work and maybe less focus on actual dance and structure, I feel I want to approach that in a very formal way. So, I’m doing it on purpose. I’m just telling you now.

Tere: A bunch of things are coming together. I got it, I got it.

Sarah: But they’re printing this after the show, I know.

Tere: Unless I black-market it.

Sarah: Hey!

Tere: Sarah and I were talking earlier about being responsive and what that means, and are we?

Sarah: Sarah and I? (Laughs.)

Tere: Sarah Michelson. I’m talking to [other] people, not to you (laughs). So, I’m just saying that to the listener/reader. And that’s the thing that we were talking about: what is being responsive now? I think there’s something about trend, and I run for my life against that. I think it shapes my work. It shapes the look of my work. In Baby, there’s certain things that are just gross to me, but I keep them because they’re other, and that’s why I like them. I think that’s a way of being responsive, and I feel this tension between conceptual and movement, although I think it’s a really unfortunate thing because it feels very old to me. It’s almost like “figurative versus abstract”, which is a dead discussion. Do you think that it changes any kind of natural progression you would have or it’s part of that natural progression?

Sarah: I do, but then I have to imagine it’s like ecology.

Tere: It doesn’t matter, yeah.

Sarah: The thing fell off. I didn’t want it too. I really liked it, but it had to fall off. It definitely does. I feel like there are things that I started that are unfinished because their potential got picked up and done in a cheaper way. So, therefore, I can’t finish that thing. That’s when I have to go down another route.

Tere: But what is that? I’ve had those feelings, and I think a lot of my work has been shaped that way.

Sarah: I don’t know.

Tere: Why do we have to be so original? Is that…?

Sarah: We could talk about dumb stuff like meter and all that stuff, but I actually think that’s the very deepest argument of artists of all time.

Tere: Which?

Sarah: Exactly that—what does it mean when someone else who is close to you and in your community… when those things are all happening and you’re responsive, and you’re forced to go in a direction? I feel like that, in a weird way, when that’s happening, irritating as it might be, is just living in a vibrant art community.

Tere: Yeah, definitely. I think so too.

Sarah: And as Guy says…

Tere: Do your work. (Laughs.) Let me just think of other things I could ask you about. Let’s talk about something like the Jennifer Lacey idea, which I just thought was so great because, for some people, that’s some woman in a video, for other people, that’s Jennifer Lacey in a video.

Sarah: That was very exciting all over Europe, do you know what I mean? Some people knew her, and some people identify her with me.

Tere: Right because she just appeared and was born there, right. And then Superamas has their interview, which is really funny.

Sarah: Which, that was the funny thing, because they came up to me, and of course, I was a total cow. They were like, “Sarah, you must, must, must come to our show.” They’re so cute. They were like, “You must, must, must come to our show,” and I was like, “Oh, yeah, yeah,” and I didn’t go in Europe. Then, when I went in New York, I did feel like a total turd, because I was like, “Oh, that’s why they wanted me to come.” They said, “We have so much in common, you must come to our show,” and I was like, “Oh my gosh.” We were on the same touring circuit.

Tere: Well, you were both at SommerSzene in Salzburg.

Sarah: We were in Salzburg and Berlin, so people must have really been seeing Jennifer Lacey’s face all summer long in people’s work. That was hilarious to me when I realized that.

Tere: Well, what is something like that for you, something that’s really personal, and something that is going to be seen as personal, and also absolutely not? What do you feel about that? I think that’s really resonant.

Sarah: People have really criticized me for that and gave me flack because they said that that means that it’s all in-jokes, it’s all insider dance. It’s trendy insider dance.

Tere: I think that’s so sad because…

Sarah: They say that I’m making elitist work. I was like, “I can take it on the chin. Okay, fine, let’s say I am.”

Tere: I hate that word.

Sarah: Let’s say I’m making work for the contemporary dance elite.

Tere: All three of them.

Sarah: Yes, exactly. Let’s say that’s what I’m doing, fine. That photograph of Jennifer Lacey was taken during a special time. We were on tour with Group Experience, and we won this prize in Zurich. Jennifer Lacey met us in Zurich and she became the knitter for the Zurich shows.

Tere: Oh, she did?

Sarah: She was the knitter. We won the prize and then we also got the Joyce SoHo Residency on the same day, and it was Parker’s birthday. Y’all didn’t come for dinner because you had just flown in and you were too tired. You all had to stay in your hotel. Yeah, you did. You were apologetic. Janet called us.

Tere: I was being a Cancer.

Sarah: The next day we went to Baden-Baden and went to the baths, and Jennifer came, and we went on the Lichtentaler Allee and took photos in the flowers. So she was, in a weird way, part of getting to Shadowman, and it was Germany, and as you know, part two of Shadowman was inspired by Germany. The whole second part was German speaking by Mike and Paige.

Tere: Oh, which I loved.

Sarah: It felt like we brought the girl home.

Tere: It’s a specific choreographic thing, especially these…

Sarah: But, it also was for Miguel Gutierrez. It also was for Miguel Gutierrez. I knew that he was in the audience and that, when Jennifer Lacey’s’ face came on, he was going to be very excited. Why shouldn’t that mean something? Why can’t it be that? That just means that certain people who dedicated their lives to this form, sometimes get a special message, and how fucking great is that?

Tere: I also think it brings into focus how much people project onto dance works. Some of it is really personal, and some of it is really generic. For an artist to bring the personal and the generic into close proximity is in the nature of the form, and when people call things non sequitur, or, as you know, the famous “surrealism”, I think those are aspects of dance. They’re not what you’re working with. They’re already there in the form.

Sarah: Totally, of course.

Tere: And you’re just bringing them into evidence. I feel like that’s something that you’re doing that is of great interest to me. I really hope that it can be elucidated to the viewer that it’s not elitist. It’s just what they’re doing anyway. They’re looking at something saying, “That reminds me of my friend.”

Sarah: Totally.

Tere: Then they’re like, “What’s that?”—the next thing—and then they’re like, “Oh that’s like pizza.” Then they’re like, “Oh, what the heck is that?” It’s just that journey in and out of a sense of being able to identify things through personal codes, and I think you bring that in to the making.

Sarah: Well if you want to take the time when Jennifer Lacey’s face is flashing, Jennifer Howard, who shares her name, but who doesn’t even know Jennifer Lacey…

Tere: Is going on a wicked diagonal downstage.

Sarah: The only person who doesn’t know Jennifer Lacey is doing a dance with her.

Tere: She’s doing a wicked diagonal, I know. She’s like, “I am on this diagonal.”

Sarah: Totally. (Laughs.)

Tere: (Laughs.) Also bringing Henry [Baumgartner] into it. There’s all this…

Sarah: Henry. Now me and Henry are friends, do you know?

Tere: I know. I saw him the other day.

Sarah: That’s a shift. I always knew Henry, blah, blah, blah. I learned so much about that person. I know his girlfriend, or at least I speak to her on the phone. She is not a dance lover.

Tere: He’s there all the time. Well, I wish the elitist thing could go away. If there are four women in England who collect a certain kind of milk glass, you wouldn’t call them elitist, but for some reason that gets foisted on us.

Sarah: I think that gets foisted on me when… I’m scared to say, it doesn’t get foisted on you when you’re unsuccessful.

Tere: Perhaps not. That could be true.

Sarah: I think it’s when it feels like it’s successful in some way that you don’t relate to. I apologize. I am…

Tere: I feel like the world…

Sarah: I am a hybrid, and I am a snob maybe. I’m also very, very humble. I’m definitely one of the most snobby people and one of the most humble people I know all in one.

Tere: They often coexist.

Sarah: In one little parcel.

Tere: I think people are responding to your work, and I hope that it’s something about audience opening up to a wider understanding about what this form can be. If we go back to the new problem of conceptualism and dance-making as we see it, in a way that includes movement as part of its investigation. The thing that upsets me about some of the conceptualism is that it is so topical. It calls itself conceptualism, but it’s narrative to me. People who can look at dances that float meaning with a lack of meaning and intermingle those things, and that that can be successful, and in your hands it is, I’m happy about that. I think that’s a really good thing. Also, that my feeling about… I use this word “imagination.” It sounds so bogus, but it is key to dance-making, because there’s nothing there in that room. There’s nothing there. You are just creating the whole vision and its temporal motor.

Sarah: Definitely motor. I really like that: motor.

Tere: Yeah, you have to keep it going and it shifts the ways that it continues moving forward. I don’t know. I guess I kind of feel happy that there’s light being shed on you, because I feel like…

Sarah: Oh, that’s cute, Tere. Thanks.

Tere: I do think the success thing is an issue, because I wish that people could just see that this is a real great big poetic.

Sarah: But it is that funny thing. Why do I have a show at BAM? Why me? That’s what Erika [Kinetz] has tried to ask, I think in the New York Times, and I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t know. I don’t know why you don’t, Neil Greenberg doesn’t, Miguel doesn’t. I don’t know why. I am lucky? Unlucky?

Tere: That’s one level of importance. I feel like a real horizontal thing about it. I don’t think that BAM is any different than Dixon Place, really.

Sarah: No, I don’t either. The thing is…

Tere: Erika [Kinetz], when she said, “the scrum”—”getting out of the scrum of downtown dance.” What is going on?

Sarah: So disgusting. So disgusting, but yes, I am responding to… Okay, BAM’s different. I’ll tell you why: the way that it’s organized. You have rehearsal space. You call the people up, and you say, “Oh, let’s have a production meeting.” It’s different. It’s very supportive.

Tere: The thing about BAM in a really obvious way is that you are making very big work and it goes there. I think that makes a lot of sense. I want to talk about one other thing though, because I don’t know, is this going to be interesting to people or is it just that we’re having a nice talk? What about a sense of what’s going on in the world? Do you feel anything about that and how…

Sarah: (Laughs) Oh, Tere, Nothing.

Tere: Obviously. I was just asking the question. I just keep asking the question because I get so confused when some people do work that is called political, and I think, well, “I get those ideas. Why are they in the work?” Then other things like Juliette [Mapp’s] piece, where she’s just asking the question, and you really feel this sense of urgency in her question about it. I’m wondering if that’s in your work. How does it get filtered? I think it is. I think you’re crashing against what the time we’re in is like. But do you see how that’s filtered into the work or how it manifests itself somehow in there, or not?

Sarah: You know, I don’t. I feel like it is. I feel like I… It definitely is. I got to say, if it’s in my body, then it’s in there.

Tere: Yeah, that’s true.

Sarah: I can only trust that.

Tere: I trust that. I guess I just asked you because I think that whatever the word “contemporary” means, I feel like your work is very contemporary and I trust that. I think dance-making is a way of processing information that’s going on in a non-hierarchical kind of way: not saying this is more important than that, so I’m not going to make war frontal in my discussion, but it certainly is part of the engine. I feel like that’s going on in your work… This is my last question.

Sarah: Okay. Just like that.

Tere: Well, I mean, I could go on forever, because I am so full of shit, and I like to blab.

Sarah: Oh, my God. This is an hour long.

Tere: Well, we’ll go for two hours. I just did this piece in Lyon, and you did a piece there. You’re doing this piece at BAM. What do you think about big stages and dance? I find it sometimes really hard to see people.

Sarah: The dancers you mean?

Tere: Yes. I feel like sometimes it looks like pencils in an earthquake. That’s all it looks like.

Sarah: Yes. You have to know that before you do it.

Tere: But sometimes it feels like that’s the biggest message that there can be in it. I see some work at BAM, and I’m interested in the poetics of it, but I can’t feel it.

Sarah: Like what?

Tere: I think more in the olden days—things with Pina, and these huge cavernous spaces where I was like, “I can’t see that, so it kind of brings something generic to the work.” William Forsythe’s last piece, Kammer/Kammer…

Sarah: I didn’t see that. I was away.

Tere: Well, it’s very, very, very far away, even though the video screens do something about bringing it into close-up. Maybe he was trying to come to terms with that thing.

Sarah: Definitely it was, because the close-up…

Tere: Well, they’re not really what’s going on. It’s a framed version of what’s going on, but there’s something about that that bothers me. Even at New York City Ballet. I went this year, and I had seats in the back of the orchestra, and it was like “I could go to Central Park and watch people at that distance.” Is there an overall statement about putting the human figure in such a monolithic space, and can you get beyond that? Can you transcend that?

Sarah: I think you can. For me, just in those small things between Shadowman 1 and 2…

Tere: Yeah, big to little space…

Sarah: And, Daylight to Daylight in Minneapolis, I feel like…

Tere: Shrinking and growing things.

Sarah: Definitely, and in Lyon, the thing that I made with White Oak that you saw in the studio. It was successful in the studio. It was unsuccessful on stage, pretty much, I think. I learned a lot from that, on the proscenium. For a bunch of reasons, several reasons, really, but one of them was the proscenium. I did better in Lyon. I wasn’t on the proscenium, but it was a fucking huge place. It was so huge. Did you go there?

Tere: No, but I heard about it.

Sarah: Oh my God. It looked exactly like The Kitchen, but four or five times the size. I mean, it was huge. So, I did that thing, that probably I would do. I put the dancers really far away in one corner for like half an hour.

Tere: That’s cool. It’s just a big question for me when I see work, because I feel like there are all these accidental kind of ideas that come out if a person, if an author isn’t really on top of it, and one of them is…

Sarah: Perspective is a huge issue.

Tere: But also the message of placing a body in space, what it says. The space says, “Look, you can’t see me because I’m too far away.” To transcend that is difficult, I think. I think we, as a group of humans, we’ve come to terms with it and said, “That’s fine with us.”

Sarah: I’m very inexperienced with big stages, but…

Tere: But it has to be brought into consideration…

Sarah: I think that the one thing that I have going for me is that I naturally handle things in relationship to perspective. I’m always looking, as a looker, in terms of that. So, the idea of something being invisible because it’s very far away, but still being dance—I’m interested in that problem.

Tere: A lot of times what you seem to do is grow spaces outside of their size. Do you think in a big space you shrink the space?

Sarah: In this particular dance that will be at BAM, I think that I went in. I think I went in to the idea of that space as opposed to… I think yes, shrunk it, not literally.

Tere: I’m looking forward to seeing it. Do you have any questions for yourself?

Sarah: No.

Tere: Well, what other things do you think are interesting because, like I said to you before, it would be nice to do a class or something with people to look at a piece and talk about it because I can’t remember everything. I can remember a lot. I certainly can, but…

Sarah: You certainly can. I can’t even believe it.

Tere: To say to people, “What does it do to you when you see this next to this, or when this progresses to this?” You’ve taken my class, and something I talk about is the “thing-to-thingness”, this idea of “what comes after what?” In your work, I think that’s really gorgeous and important to the work, that you set up a system where I don’t know what’s coming next, but that’s not its point. That’s what’s happening because you’re immersed in a certain innate, forward-moving thing that you’re making, and it occurs and it goes on this journey.

Sarah: I hope so. Gosh that sounds good.

Tere: It does feel like that. I don’t think I would like it so much if it didn’t feel like that. There’s something about the shaping of it that is ineluctable. It has to happen that way, and it’s so well wrought, and it’s interesting to hear you say that it’s intuitive because I think intuition is so important to unleash on your work.

Sarah: If something feels wrong, all I know is it feels wrong, and it bugs me.

Tere: But, just the way that you talk about it that way, it gives me the freedom to not have to look for the reasons why it’s working.

Sarah: No, I’m kind of autistic in that way, I think.

Tere: I think that some choreographers are on that spectrum, and I don’t mean to be not respectful of that. We can stop here. I don’t know if we did a good job or not.

Sarah: I don’t know either.

Tere: It was nice to talk.

Sarah: It was nice to talk to you.

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Thumbnail photo: Courtesy of Yasuko Yokoshi

Tere O’Connor: I think I would go back to what I said in the elevator, about how forcefully selected what you’re doing is. And I would start by asking you to talk about the selection. I think that’s what artists do: they select from everything that there is on Earth to concentrate on.

Yasuko Yokoshi:I haven’t completely selected yet. That’s why I have people come in and watch.

Tere: You’ve selected to have a thematic place, with Kabuki.

Yasuko: Yes. I see what you mean. That selection. That’s actually more accidental, I must say. That’s why I find making work is always interesting. There is great effort and discipline and selection involved. And so much of it is also luck and accidents and mistakes and failing—that you have no control over, somehow. The reason for Kabuki was accidental. I went to Japan with my ex-boyfriend. He got a gig in Japan and the teaching job involved me accompanying him so he get used to life in Japan. So I decided to take sabbatical from New York City, artist life. When I decided [to go] I didn’t know what I was going to do in Japan. I didn’t want to take contemporary dance class. And I haven’t lived there for what, 24 years? A long time. So, a friend of mine said, well do you want to learn traditional Japanese dance. She is an actress and she takes lessons from this teacher. I said, yeah!

Tere:Then I would say though, about selection further, that even though it was an accident, you stepped on it. You didn’t go to the next thing.

Yasuko:But what I’m saying is that I didn’t go after it.

Tere: You didn’t decide it, yes. Here are some questions that I think about, things that go around in my mind: that it is Japanese and you’re Japanese—really obvious things. But also that it’s a historical moment. You selected a very fine gradation of the movement and a dynamic world of it. Because Kabuki can get much bigger than that too, right?

Yasuko:Huge, yeah!

Tere:So you’ve done all this selecting, and I found it really convincing to go into it. After a while, the structural and dynamic role of it is within this very small range, and like, okay, this is what there’s going to be, fall into this world… That’s what’s so forceful about it, is that it’s a very precise place that you’re in. So, those kinds of selections, that kind of stuff also, maybe…

Yasuko:Well, I must say, if I say Kabuki dance, it’s often mistaken. Because Kabuki is a spectacle, and it’s a popular art form. It matters volume, instead of quality. Quantity instead of quality. My teacher is particular in the aesthetics because she is a direct apprentice of this guy whose name is Kanjyuro Fujima. He made a lot of Kabuki dances which are still performed to this date. His biggest contribution to art form, performing art form, is this form called bare dance, Su-odori, like naked dance. He is a bit postmodern.

Tere:What does ‘naked dance’ mean?

Yasuko:In Kabuki, you put a lot of intense costume, make up, and exaggerated gestures and all that. And when choreographers make, they make the bones of the choreography. So he basically stripped all those decorative parts, and emphasized the purity of the form, and made an art out of it. That’s what she is taught from him. Her name is Masumi Seyama and she’s been studying since she was six years old. Her father was a prominent doctor and a benefactor of major Kabuki actors. He’s been taking care of all those major stars in the Showa era in Japan. So this Kabuki choreographer, Kanjyuro Fujima, was hired by one of these major Kabuki actors. That means my teacher’s father consequently became a benefactor of his. And this choreographer was incredibly talented. He is like “oh my god!” So, he [the doctor] decided to let half his children be adopted by this guy and his oldest daughter married him and my teacher took over the name Seyama which is a very important name, as heavy as Fujima a name is.

Tere:Does that [name] come down a Kabuki line?

Yasuko:Yes, it is a family name for Kabuki dance choreographer. She is given this very heavy name at age 14. Why she? Because her oldest brother was supposed to take after this name, but he died in WWII. And he left a will that said if I die, give it to Masumi. Now she is the head of the family and studied under Kanjyuro Fujima all her life, years and years… Anyway, where did I start all of this? The reason why I can do this—that she is giving me this repertoire, which is pretty much taboo and impossible to use in a different context… I am hacking the system.

Tere:Is it all appropriation?

Yasuko: It is. It’s almost like I’m using Swan Lake in my work.

Tere:That’s really interesting.

Yasuko:She‘s the head of the family; she’s the owner of the dance.

Tere:But she already comes out of someone who is kind of doing something different with the form.

Yasuko:It’s not different. Everybody has done the Su-odori dance. But Kanjyuro made an art out of it. He put such emphasis on it. He thought how beautiful this thing can be. So all his life he never danced in costume, he always danced in a hakama, and a black—not black necessarily—but very simple kimono, not the all “onna-gata” of female characters. I have a video of him performing as a female without all those decorative make up or costumes.

Tere:Those questions come up, of gender, and the use of gender in Kabuki. And then in contemporary culture and contemporary theater, there’s a lot of dialogue between those forms. How did you come to that decision?

Yasuko: Because I’ve been always into character study. That’s all I’ve done in my dancing career. I always switch genders. In my last piece, I wore this enormous penis, dark color penis.

Tere:That’s maybe a way that the works look so different. It’s because they come from character.

Yasuko:It’s different, but inside of me it’s almost the same place in a way because it’s a character study. One thing that is different [now] is the form comes first. You learn the dance and then you put the content later. Whereas, in my past work, when I create a character I start from zero and build up the character. I become that person, therefore I create the movement and text and gestures. So it’s a completely opposite direction. And that was fascinating. She tells me, the teacher: here is a geisha, she is nineteen, and she is going to meet her lover, and she does this, that, that. So I learn the movement first. I don’t know how this geisha is like. But while learning the dance, I become that geisha because I do the movement, so I articulate the outside first.

Tere: But, I also wondered while I was watching it if you are layering it with a contemporary person to you.

Yasuko: To me?

Tere:To you, or to the actors in the piece. I think of Wooster Group, and how they use sources and they layer different sources. And you can feel that in the actors. Sometimes they are editing what they are doing; they are present, and you can see. And sometimes they are immersed in it. And I wondered if there is anything like that going on. Where you feel like just by doing this thing I become it, or do I have to energize myself into the character. Or some kind of balance between those things.

Yasuko:Because it’s so detailed training, it’s mind-bogglingly detailed, incredibly, there’s no place to put my imagination in. I do exactly how I’m taught. And once I don’t do that, I feel it. And I’m way off. Because I haven’t trained with her for quite a while, I know I’m way off. And I’m not trained all my life. This is only my third year. So I’m a complete beginner. I can’t call my self traditional. Not even near. I’m some sort of faker. Because I’m a dancer and I’m trained, my body is trained, so I can pick faster than normal people. But the training is not in my system. So, when I do it, I try to do exactly how I’m taught. And I tell the dancers, don’t put imagination in it. Do as you are told. And my teacher tells you so.

Tere: But a lot of character comes out of that.

Yasuko:Because you try to be a vessel in a way. But you can’t help it either because the characters we created for the purpose of the piece. We improvised and created the characters. And then we imposed this vocabulary like a… mush. It’s a funny balance.

Tere: I’m wondering about, in the construction of the piece, you divorce it from its original source? The way that you put things together… It looks like the relationship is very choreographic, not very narrative to me. Is that the case? Is it like having little bits of film clips that you just chp, chp, chp?

Yasuko:You mean in the repertoire?

Tere:The way you put one thing next to the other, is not story-oriented, or is it?

Yasuko:It is because it comes from Raymond Carver short story, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. So there is a distinctive narrative I come from. And we developed the characters from that.

Tere: I forgot about that! That’s a really important part. You’ve told me that.

Yasuko: I’m a huge fan of Raymond Carver.

Tere: So there are these two layers though.

Yasuko:Y eah, yeah. The Raymond Carver story we read many, many times. We played the characters and developed them through improvisation. And created our Raymond Carver world with Japanese traditional dance in our bodies.

Tere: I see. Will people know that in the program?

Yasuko: I’m going to try to write a bit. It’s always a difficult choice for choreographers who go from abstract dance aesthetics. How much you want to explain or give information and background. But this particular piece, it might be useful.

Tere: It could be useful. Although I was really looking at it as though… I was looking at Ryutaro, and he starts to become “the man.” You can either see that in the specifics of a Raymond Carver story, or you could see it in the world—that man. And you start to say: “these are the different parts. You’re someone, she is someone. That other guy. ” It’s so beautiful when the men become the women, and how seamless that is, and how much it doesn’t matter. So, you could have a narrative, or not. That’s what I think is really exciting about it.

Yasuko:That’s what I’m trying to be most careful about, in terms of selection. Narrative, but I’m trying to make it as ambiguous as possible. The more complex the emotions are, the more successful I am. So people don’t go: “oh, this person does that, and that’s why this is happening.” They may do it anyway. But the more variety there is, the more interesting. I’m interested in choreographing drama, not necessarily narrative.

Tere: I’m going to ask a question that I think someone might ask, which is why do you want to be ambiguous?

Yasuko: Because Kanjyuro Fujima’s dance, I think the biggest attribute of his dance form is that magnificent ambiguity, is the source of the beauty. The more ambiguous it is, the better.

Tere: I can totally relate to it. Sometimes I hear what I say about my work, and I think why do I want to do that? So it’s interesting to ask an artist why is that what you’re going for.

Yasuko:I t’s so beautiful, because humans are so ambiguous. It’s complex, never this or that. It’s always in the margin of this gray area that is so fascinating, especially the human psychology. And dance is something where you don’t have to necessarily go with “cause and effect” that develops into narrative. Dance is a very interesting medium. You can play with narrative, but you can completely deconstruct it and people go with it because it’s dance.

Tere:And they read it on different levels. I was interested in watching this dance because one thing about watching it is you feel “oh! I’m learning something. I feel like I’m learning something by watching this.” What is it in the culture that makes things slowly, and there’s almost like a line up for some things. And there’s all these kind of knowledges in the body that I don’t necessarily know and they either… sometimes they look like I can see their source, and other times, it’s just a different way to navigate the moving through space, that might have ramifications in the culture at the level of architecture or nature. And I wonder somehow about that, and also about you being Japanese, and what does it mean to you? Does it matter for you that you’re Japanese making this?

Yasuko: I t’s a loaded question.

Tere: It’s not loaded. I just wonder, maybe it doesn’t.

Yasuko: Yes, definitely, of course. But, the twist is, the reason why I had access to this is because I live in the United States. I think my teacher originally thought of me as American artist. Because this is exclusive art form. If I lived in Japan, I couldn’t get into the school, no way. I just don’t have access to it. But because I’m in the States for so many years, I guess she sees me as American in some way.

Tere: You are validated somehow?

Yasuko: I guess it’s a distance thing so, she knows I’m Japanese, of course, but the distance made her excited, and when I danced, she was like, “oh, you’re so pure,” because I’ve never seen Kabuki dance at all until I met her. I know nothing about it. I actually used to put it down, despised it, because it’s all for men. So I went there with zero information, but my body is trained. She was so excited. “You are not tainted.” I can be neutral because that’s from my training.

Tere:And you’ve been away for a long time and you’ve gone through other trainings.

Yasuko:And in American training, you add Martha Graham, Cunningham, Trisha, you name it, whatever, but you always decode it in order to be in zero. You add this information but you try to have a range by being at zero, so you can be neutral. Because I’m trained in American system, that put a lot of attribute for me to get access to this Japanese traditional art form. So, yes, I’m Japanese and that’s why I chose it, but because I’m American-trained, I understand it and have access to it. It’s very complex in this kind of Japanese living abroad…

Tere:And how you found it, being an accident…

Yasuko:…and so removed from your own heritage. Because Japanese don’t teach traditionally in school at all. And Japanese culture itself is a combination of Western culture. The identity itself is a combination of America, Europe and Asia.

Tere: But Kabuki is pre-westernalization , its source, isn’t it?

Yasuko:Yeah, but I am a part of contemporary Japanese culture. The funny thing is that when I went there, the students were amazed that I pick up so fast. So they said something like: “oh, you can learn because you’re true Japanese. You’re true, true Japanese.”

Tere:Maybe because you don’t have too much respect, where they have too much respect for it.

Yasuko: And I say, it’s probably ‘cause I’m not true Japanese, that’s why I can. So I’m very interested, say, if I give this to non-Japanese, don’t know nothing about the culture, how they take this form. I’m very curious.

Tere:Another thing I wondered about was the dance language, the style of the language and its size, the size of the style. Did that do anything to how you constructed the piece? Did you use that information to edit the piece at all?

Yasuko: Size? What do you mean when you say size?

Tere: You know, everything is pretty minute. There’s never anything “Pah!(?)” There’s never anything really big.

Yasuko: Except the male dance.

Tere:T hat’s true. But sometimes I feel that the qualities that I’m working with are a kind of a virus and they infect me and I make decisions out of that. And I’m wondering if anything like that happens. Because today you said you cut a whole big thing. Was it based on something like the size of the dynamic world?

Yasuko: No, I don’t think. I think cutting the piece is not about that. Though I have to tell you traditional Japanese dance can be done in a very small area, in close proximity. When Geisha dances, it can be done on one tatami mat. That’s why dissecting the stage is such an important thing. So that influenced me to construct the work. But duration-wise. No. I wanted to have more like a water running image. But the problem was as soon as I put distinctive narrative-ish scenes in…

Tere: …it stops the flow…

Yasuko: It becomes an arc o f the piece, and people think that’s the whole reason the piece exists.

Tere: I think it’s not doing that, and that’s great about it.

Yasuko: But, on Wednesday version I think I had a problem. So that’s why I said, take it away, change the scenes, and try to subvert any concrete place that the audience settles on. So it’s always moving forwards. There’s something moving. You get involved, but you don’t know what the heck is going on. That’s what I like about it.

Tere: There is this one really complicated, beautiful moment, when you are sitting down with Ryutaro, and the other great guy [Kazu] and the woman [Hiromi] are doing that beautiful dance coming downstage. And it’s just so beautifully complicated to look through all that, and they are the continuum of it, they are like the bass note or something, somehow going through it. I don’t know, there’s something about that moment where everything comes together and you feel like you’re not going to do what you just said. You’re not going to make an apex happen. It does become connected to an ideology that maybe could be born of some other culture that is not American. So it starts to say something to you like “don’t wait for the big moment, Western people, it’s not coming.” And that has a metaphor in it. It becomes, you’re thinking, maybe that’s the reason she is working with this now. It’s this other political intuition. A different way of speaking.

Yasuko:I see. But I think I’m intrinsically like that.

Tere: Well, that penis… a huge black penis is not the same kind of thing, you know.

Yasuko:Yeah, but that piece is also kind of narrative and mushy at the same time. It was called Shuffle, you know. Yes, I wore a black penis, but…

Tere:I guess what I’m saying is, I think there is something intrinsically political in the process that people use. The process you use kind of reaches out and says something to the world. Almost more importantly than images. So this process of saying I’m not going to make anything emphatic, it would be a great way for politician to deal with things. It’s not just that and just that.

Yasuko: I see what you mean. That’s probably because living in the States as a foreigner for this long, and contemplating this completely different value system constantly, everyday, it forces me to come to a place where I can’t make any generalizations or judgments or value system, one better than the other. You are to learn to be so inclusive and embracing and forgiving and appreciative, as much as you can. Because you get pissed off all the time. And that struggle of being “other” in one culture. America is multicultural, already, but… That’s probably my, I don’t know, my philosophy of life almost. That’s reflected in my work maybe.

Tere: I would say so, definitely.

Yasuko: But that’s what you are too, to me. You being an artist, you know, gay, all these play mainstream and marginal. Constantly in flux. How much you have wide angle or perspective to take a look at what’s so fucked up.

Tere:From marginalization, yes definitely, I agree.

Yasuko: That why you tend to make work that is…

Tere: That shows, it’s reflective of…

Yasuko: Yes.

Tere: I’m going to try to think of some things that I think people might ask here. How did the other dancers, how was their experience with it? Was it difficult for them to come to it? They most have had different ways of coming to it.

Yasuko: Oh yeah, Jesus, we went through a lot of bumps. Each one in a different way. We fought, you know, push and pull. Because it deals with a power system that there’s authentic, real master, and we just had to believe in it. And in contemporary dance training, you question and you take information but you put value and you devalue at the same time. And that makes you unique. And here, I’m suddenly coming and saying hey guys, this way is supposed to be the best way, and I have to impose on them. And I’m not the owner but I’ve been told like that by somebody else. And in the rehearsal: “no, no, do this.” It’s such a…

Tere:You can always say they told me to say that.

Yasuko: That’s what I do. I say that’s how I’m told.

Tere: I can see that there’s this kind of authoritarian on the body, you must do it this way. You know when you get up, and you go into two and then one leg forward a little bit to come up and then the guy/woman does the same exact thing? It’s not a personal weight shift. It’s a cultural weight shift.

Yasuko: Yes, and you impose that cultural body onto yourself. Even though you are from that culture, you don’t practice it, at all, it’s from old times.

Tere: The culture is history, is not even Japan.

Yasuko: Yes, it’s a lot to be force onto their body and mind. And going through so many… months after months after months. They’ve been working with me for two years, some people three years. It’s a long time. And you had to learn the repertoire first, before making material. So the first year all I did was to transfer this repertoire I learned to their body as close as I could. That’s all we did. And I go back to Japan and get checked. Always my dance gets pretty bad if I don’t practice with my teacher watching me. In traditional Japanese dance, teacher that watches you determines everything. Who touches you is who you become. So you don’t change teachers from one person to another just because you don’t like her or him. The person who touches you first is imprinted in your body, and that’s what you are.

Tere:So then you’re playing that role with the dancers too.

Yasuko:But it’s imprinted by my master, so when I am off, I feel danger that I’m not articulating to my dancers, so I have to go back to Japan to be checked by my master, and then come back.

Tere:It’s really interesting. In a way it’s like not taking the responsibility for being the choreographer.

Yasuko: That’s right! Absolutely….

Tere: “Don’t get mad at me”

Yasuko: But then when I create the work it’s my work, what we when we is my piece, it’s reflective of who I am as a person. So I play this super-individualistic American role— which is uniqueness and freedom and expression matters—and all the form is Japanese—don’t do anything, but this.

Tere:I think maybe because I know you, but I think maybe for other people too, it will come up: this is a very contemporary artist, you, and she’s doing this thing and that gives a whole bunch of energy. I think during it, “is she going to switch into something that’s another part of it?” And then when it stays really verbatim… I think there’s this painter, what is this guy’s name, from the 80s, David Deutsch, I think. He does this egg tempura paintings on wood that are like replicas, I don’t even know the time period, but from another century. This way of using this pre-existing thing to filter some part of yourself through it. But to also have this doubleness, a two-sidedness to it. What do you feel about that kind of immersion? Did you immerse yourself in this for reasons of exiting, or blending, or finding, or any other thoughts? I’m not even suggesting anything. But to immerse yourself, that is intense.

Yasuko: It was a bit strange because I was convinced Raymond Carver and Kanjyuro Fuyima are same place in my mind, ‘cause aesthetically, same: understatedness, minimalist, essential, ambiguous, emotional, gender—man and woman, kind of thing. The same place but approaches are totally different. So only determination… It’s there, but how to go at it, it was almost impossible.

Tere:How to find the relationship?

Yasuko: Yeah, it was almost like, I’m doing something completely impossible.

Tere: I think this is something that is great for people to hear. That you felt, no matter how you explained it or not, that those two things existed in the same place in your mind. And that’s poetics. And certainly dance is the place where you can bring those things together. I don’t want to see a kabuki movie with language about the Raymond Carver story. I don’t want to see that. But here they can swim together in this other kind of world.

Yasuko:I don’t know how I made this piece even. That’s the funny thing. It just happened because it was so impossible.

Tere: It feels very made, you know.

Yasuko:It’s absolutely made. I’ve selected, every day, every week, every six months, I’m selecting. But the how I’m selecting, I only know I’m hoping this should be this way. Because I don’t know any model.

Tere: It’s just so intuitive. You are an artist, you are finding your… every piece you make you’re getting closer and closer. This moment where the two men are there, the part where he pushes that one guy’s body down. The first time they touch and do something. It was in a context that you’re thinking, “oh, in this tradition men play women,” but also this is kind of gay, but also, now I’m forgetting all of that, and I’m just getting into that movement that was beautiful, and all of my thoughts or references are gone and I have that gorgeous movement, and that keeps happening to me. So I go in these different planes of looking at it as a Westerner and being like “what’s Japan?” And then being like “what is it to use something [pre-existing] in the contemporary culture.” And then pure movement, at the level of pure movement, too.

Yasuko:This is something I should probably say. Conceptually I always had the idea that I could really gender blend, meaning that I can be a man. I tried and then realized, after some point, that it’s impossible, I can’t. That this is impossible, I am not able to play a man in this kind of form. Even though conceptually it works. It just doesn’t look right. Stuff like that, how to choose music. And many times I tried to change the movement even.

Tere:To not do it traditionally?

Yasuko: Right. Form stays the same, but I tried to change an order, where this section [goes], like that. Tried many, many ways. Oh my god, the experiments I did! It’s crazy. But it was impossible.

Tere: I’m still not understanding and I would like to know there more about. I mean, this isn’t in the state you learned it? You choreographed it, right? So that’s what I wonder about. How you decide this goes here, this here. I’m cutting that, I’m doing that. If you know. I really wonder about that in the mind of choreographers because, like I say, it’s really well considered. It doesn’t look accidental.

Yasuko: I would say not accident for the sake of accident. The material I made is ten times more than you saw. I threw away so much. So what stayed is essential, so that without this I cannot live, kind of thing. So then it is a matter of to construct it. It is like editing a movie. The solo you saw in the end, that used to come in the very early, at the top of the piece. Then the drinking of the four of us, that used to be second instead of the third. So everyday I’m juggling the order, and the piece flows in a very different way. But the essence stays the same. I want to see the most efficient, interesting way for me to see.

Tere: And to keep the water feeling, maybe.

Yasuko: Yes. I used to have more blackouts and awkward transitions. We worked hard on not to use blackouts, and really let the piece flow as much as possible, without any stops.

Tere: I wanted to ask you little things like, you know when they come out with the umbrellas and they do like a little shaking of the umbrella. Those are the places that I love all the ways I try to read it. Again, one movement, just as movement it’s so gorgeous, so little. I’m thinking there’s a meaning there. It’s a metaphor for how people misunderstand dance always, trying to find what it means. It plays on that line a little bit more violently almost, in this context, if you’re not from that culture.

Yasuko: Interesting. It’s true.

Tere: But in an abstraction, there’s so many beautiful things. What he does with that piece of material. When he goes here [demonstration of movement] and then turns it over. There’s no function to that. But it looks really important.

Yasuko:But those, you see, I didn’t make it. It was made by somebody else.

Tere: Right, but even that, when that comes and just placing it in this context. It’s like saying what if you took a Shakespeare play and cut it up and didn’t worry about the narrative, and you didn’t know that there was a fight going on but someone came out with a sword thing and only did this much of it [movement], and you don’t’ see that ever [movement]. It’s like that. Is this a junction or is this a fullness? So I think it’s really interesting on that level. How it invites you in to name things and then…

Yasuko: I see, that’s probably why, I suppose, I felt [it was] very important to do this piece in the United States. If I lived in Japan, I probably [would] not even think about. I’m probably not allow to show this piece in Japan.

Tere:You think so?

Yasuko: I can’t imagine. Imagine, it’s like George Balanchine’s whatever concerto by joe shmo.

Tere: I bet some people in Japan would be very interested to see it like that.

Yasuko: But in the traditional world code, it’s bad. I don’t know.

Tere: That’s interesting because in the Western context you don’t feel how illicit it is, what you’re doing.

Yasuko: Because I do it with full respect. It’s not abrasive [or intended] to destroy or anything like that. But the traditional art form is so exclusive. [It] cannot be touched by someone who doesn’t own it.

Tere: Sometimes I think about all the different ways that humans have used the fact that our spine is erect—in dance, in ballet—and what the spine can do, and I was starting to see some relationships with social codes from ballet to this. Almost at the level of what would be called epaulement, you know, the turning of the head. And how slightly different it is because the ballet one comes from the land of aristocracy, and this one comes from a different relationship, with geisha involved in it, this kind of, most of it is down below a little bit. I just think it’s interesting all the really small differences you can create with head on spine, both in abstraction and in social codes.

Yasuko: And then the shoulder blades. The reason why you think [of] spine is because this part has to be always down. So that when you play female, this is normal and then this [pulling shoulder blades in and down] makes a feminine tone.

Tere: Wow!

Yasuko:So when men [play women], they have to use their backs like crazy.

Tere:They did a good job.

Yasuko:They are great. They put so much effort and discipline.

Tere:And it was really so disciplined that they’re never [look like they are] playing a woman. You just don’t think about it.

Yasuko:Because that’s the biggest taboo in the aesthetic, this master tells you. She would say “don’t cheapen it” if you try to play female. And if you are woman, the person learning female dance you have to almost reduce as much as possible because you’re already a woman, so you have to do much less than men doing female. When it becomes sexy in a way, the sexual tone, ooh, she gets totally despised by it.

Tere: I could see that, because it doesn’t do that ever.

Yasuko:She is very strict about it. It’s true. I have to tell them also. Don’t make it cheap, meaning sexual. Everything is sexual innuendo, of course, but because of that you have to do as little as possible. It makes it more sensual because you don’t do it.

Tere:You know one thing that is beautiful about it, structurally, is that you do one thing where you sit down with the pillows—if you’re front and you’re facing this way. And then you do another thing over here, then another thing here. And then when you do that thing when you and he sit on a diagonal, somewhere in the body of the viewer they’re thinking, “oh they’ve got to do something up here.” Maybe in a really subtle way. So when you do that thing and you look up there, you’re so engaged with it because you are like, “that’s not really right.” There’s something about expectations that get set up there. Then it’s the one time where we have to read faces just from here [quarter profile]. It’s beautiful, it’s very sculptural, because you’ve set this up and you’ve trained us to get three dimensional somehow. It’s a really great moment.

Yasuko:That’s a rip from Yasujiro Ozu’s film.

Tere:Which one?

Yasuko: “Tokyo Story.” There’s a lot of rip from film scenes, a lot. Scenes like that, and juxtaposing things.

Tere:Is the tea party from a movie?

Yasuko: Which one is that?

Tere:The four people drinking…

Yasuko: That one is not; that’s totally original.

Tere: That’s beautiful. That’s another place where I keep thinking of the Western filter and you think, “well are they’re going to be double duets, or how are they going to…” but it doesn’t. It’s almost similar, but it’s not musicalized, and you start to separate out the coupleness of it somehow, but it starts out kind of with symmetry.

Yasuko:Yeah. They’re supposed to be drinking sake first of all, not tea, alcohol. I made it like this [demonstration] to communicate this way. But very few people notice these people are communicating. They think there’s somebody else out there.

Tere: I saw that. I could see that definitely, but mostly what I see is that it ultimately doesn’t matter.

Yasuko: No, it’s just two dynamics of two couples.

Tere: And you also feel this logic. There’s a logic behind it that you don’t care about identifying where it came from.

Yasuko: That section took me forever.

Tere:Yeah, that look like it had a lot of work behind it.

Yasuko:That was so hard. It was probably where I had the most difficult time. That was a big challenge. I had to constantly apologize because it is so small and so detailed, and I had to make them go over it, and over and over, and it’s not a dancy thing, and they get tired easy.

Tere: I think viewers will recognize the work that is in this. It’s just so compelling. I was wondering what do you think this is going to bring you to next. Because I always think that what I did before really affects what I do next. And I am wondering if you are thinking about that.

Yasuko:Well as a next thing I really want to teach repertoire as is—I don’t touch nothing, to… how do I say… brilliant American dancers.

Tere:You mean you want to continue with the Kabuki?

Yasuko:Just up until the next level. I really want to see [if] culture is transferable as much as technique. The reason why I chose these Japanese dancers—they are all contemporary dancers, of course—is because I thought it would be easier.

Tere:Because they were Japanese?

Yasuko:Yeah, but then in some sense it was harder because they have preconceived notions so they interpret their own way. Whereas if I work with non Japanese, they know nothing. So it might come up something interesting.

Tere:It’s definitely an interesting thing. But when the form was born, I’m sure people’s bodies were much more imprisoned in social ideas and this people, again, it’s contemporary people being forced into… like if you had to put on a samurai… When I was out at the National Museum I saw those crazy outfits they wear and it’s so restrictive. And the dance can be a restrictive clothing in a way. And their bodies are used to being free.

Yasuko: That’s true. Other than that, where I go on from here, my dream is when I reach and finish my menopause and I’m totally old woman like 60 or 70 years old, I want to do this very cute female dance. I’m not able to do right now because I’m too woman. So it’s uninteresting. I can do it but when I’m an old lady I want to dance that as a 15-year-old girl. Because I’m not a man, I cannot do kabuki. So not matter how much I try I’ll never attain what I want to. But at least I could get rid of “woman” by getting old, so that I have distance from my woman-ness. I want to know what’s it like to play this girl dance as an old woman. I’m very, very curious. But I want to practice for the next, what? 20 or 30 years.

Tere: So you feel that you’re going to stay in this world?

Yasuko:As a practitioner, but I would never be traditional artist; I will be always a contemporary artist.

Tere:But you feel like it’s going to be a flavor in the next thing you do.

Yasuko: I don’t think so. My next piece, I can’t talk about it, but it will be completely different.

Tere: You have to talk about it.

Yasuko:No, nothing to do with this piece probably. As a performer I will learn, and I’m sure this influences me a lot as a maker, but not necessarily go more into traditional. I probably get bored some time, I’m sure.

Tere:Are there other things you want to talk about or say about it, that would be interesting for people to hear? That is not guided by my questions.

Yasuko: I never know if the more information there is, the better it is, or… This piece is very particular because it has got so much background. When you apply for grants, you want money… And it’s perfect piece in many ways, but it’s very difficult in other ways because I always feel I’m lying.

Tere:And you can only talk about the Kabuki aspect of the dance?

Yasuko:Yes, or when I want to bring up the Raymond Carver, and [that] it’s a cultural exchange. Sometimes I’m like, “it has nothing to do with cultural exchange, it’s very personal.”

Tere: Totally personal. There’s a poetics in it.

Yasuko:But when I want to get certain grants I have to say, there’s certain language…

Tere:I think that we starting to talk like this is so important for that. Because everyone has a good heart; they want to give you money. But these limited ways of talking about it. When we just talked about a whole bunch of different directions and that is how complicated it is. It’s good to put this out in the world and say “this is how it is. Maybe you should just give me the money.”

[Laughs]

Tere:Because when I start a new work I don’t have any idea in my head. That’s my politics. I start from nothing. But you can’t write a grant like that way. So it becomes this other work.

Yasuko:I wanted to make a film. This was a film. I wanted to make a Raymond Carver story into dance in film before even learn traditional dance.

Tere:Aha!

Yasuko:And I wanted to shoot this film at this tiny house on an island my grandmother owns and nobody lives in anymore. It’s a beautiful house and it has these beautiful glass doors and you see the light changes and the change of the shadow moves through this glass door. So I wanted to shoot this What We Talk About When We Talk About Love in this house, make a dance film out of it. That was the very original idea.

Tere:You think that’s still in the video you’re talking about?

Yasuko: Yeah, the image is in there. I don’t know if after this, I go on to make a film, from this piece.

Tere:I think you should go live on that island. Sounds nice; see what happens there.

Yasuko:We went there, Ryutaro and I went there to shoot the video and stayed for four days. He bring great images out of this.

Tere:That’s where you shot the video?

Yasuko:Yes, on this island. So, you’ll see what I’m talking about. It is multimedia. The teacher didn’t want me to use video though.

Tere:Oh she didn’t? Just tell her “I didn’t.”

Yasuko:No. She knows. [segue]

Yasuko:I a lot owed to my teacher, because it’s a collaboration with the teacher. So when I go back, we talk, and she influences me quite a deal. Because when I’m here, in New York City, because I’m a contemporary artist, I tend to go wild.

Tere: Will she see this?

Yasuko:She saw a version. We went to Tokyo, the whole company went there, and she trained us.

Tere:Did you show her the construction that you made?

Yasuko:Yes, she looked at the piece. She really liked the work. She was very fascinated by it. She was most impressed because I really kept the repertoire as it is; I really didn’t touch it. She was a little bit afraid, I think. She thought I was going to deconstruct and fuck with it. She thought it was pretty brave because the tendency is for people to go and change it around.

Tere: I wonder if there’s something that she ever thought in her head, like I would like to change it a little bit, and then you do it. It would give her a sense of freedom to watch it.

Yasuko:She’s never seen anything like in this context ever.

Tere: when I was there I was thinking that the whole idea of an individual as an artist is already hard for them, for the dance people especially.

Yasuko:She really wanted me to preserve the vocabulary, the dance itself as close to her sense as possible. Composition may be o.k. [to change], but she’s really strict. So she was quite disappointed when we went there because the dancing was not up to her level. She give us very intense training.

Tere: It’s so beautiful how much she cares.

Yasuko:She sent one of her pupils, a real Kabuki actor. He took a time off from his Kabuki gig in Tokyo. Sent him to Florida and he stayed with us for three weeks. She paid the airfare. So he stayed with us.

Tere:He was like the police.

Yasuko:Yes, he was. And he watched every detailed.

Tere:Wow. That’s amazing. Was it helpful?

Yasuko:Oh yes, but it put a lot of pressure on us.

Tere:You go down there, [the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography] and it’s supposed to be the “research” center, and you’re like you have to do it like this.

Yasuko:Authority comes in so strongly. And then I become the authority. Until then I’m one of them, when we’re making material. But [when I] bring this kabuki actor, and also when the teacher is involved, I’m on this side. And I’m sure the dancers hated me.

Tere:The other thing that I’m thinking about is nostalgia and why people hold on. She sounds like she really does not want this tradition to be in any way forgotten. And I mean, I can think of that too with even buildings in New York that are going away, one after the other, and it’s sad and I can see how people can become like “no! no more change!”

Yasuko:But the funny thing is she chose me to carry on this tradition.

Tere:She must trust you.

Yasuko:But at the same time I think she really believes in spirit. Because I cannot do the way she dances. I haven’t studied with her long enough. She has pupils studying with her for 20-40 years. I think she’s very progressive.

Tere:I would say so because you’re really taken it to this other place. It’s interesting what you say about the spirit. You’re very serious as an artist, she probably senses that.

Yasuko:And she believes in what I believe in because a certain aesthetic that I’m going for is what she believes in. There we’re connected. But the actual preservation of the dance, I cannot be the carrier because I’m not trained. Thank you for asking all the questions. It’s always good to hear from another artist.

Tere:Anybody out there who is a presenter, bring this piece because it’s very compelling. It’s a really great piece.

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Thumbnail photo: Tere O’Connor

Alejandra Martorell: The basic question is: what are you working on with Baby?

Tere O’Connor: I should introduce it by saying that, in the last couple of pieces, I’ve been trying to go back to the beginnings. Which is, trying to find out some fundamental aspects of the form and then expand them to try to use them as process. For example, with Frozen Mommy, I was thinking about tangential thoughts, by which I mean thoughts that just sort of bounce from one thing to the next, and how if you take them out of the context of stream of consciousness, or absurdity, or surrealism, or non sequitur, they become this positive element of dance, of what dance really is. I wanted to really honor that and use that as my process, so that the structure of a dance evolves; it doesn’t get calculated into existence. And if I have a secret kind of theme and variation in the back of my head, or a secret narrative, I want to really keep detaching from those, and come up with an abstraction that is documenting the time I’m living in. It doesn’t explain it; it happens in tandem with it, and it’s brought into being from its energies. I don’t have to be logical, but once I find out what all the elements of a thing are, then I have to find its logical structure by letting it become itself.

Baby is about letting every next thing be born. I looked at the ways that I make phrases, and I tried to analyze—why do I put this thing after this other thing? And it’s always about breaking a sense of harmony for me. It’s not necessarily towards a rebellion. It’s an effort to say that the way that I’m standardized to think through language is painful and I have to do this also. Each thing is new. Each thing doesn’t explain the thing before it. And that is what I’m looking at with Baby. The other thing I’m trying to do with Baby—and it isn’t relative to the title—has to do with time passing. It’s another one of these elemental things in dance, it is almost banal. Time passing; that time is going on. What if I used that as a system?

When we were down in Florida, at the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, I said, alright, let’s take this literally. I’m not going to edit anything; I’m only going to move forward. And I’m going to keep everything. Everything that comes out, I’m going to keep and move forward, and each thing is going to bring the next thing. I started to arrive at this place where choreography could be a metaphor for something other than calculation, or fixing, or setting.

In this piece there’s this cowboy thing that comes out, you’ve probably seen it in the card, and that happened last year in January. It came out and I don’t really like it, but I decided to keep it. So instead of being a choreographer who says I’m going to pick the best things, I said “I’m going to keep everything and create a context for those things.” And that’s another way of looking at choreographing. So that even boring things or things that are kind of cheesy almost, anything can go into the mix. It’s my job to look at their relativity—how they relate to each other and what kind of structural building ends up being that I’m going to put on stage. The dance itself will be born out of the coexistence of all these things. Not my cutting them, but their being together. I rearrange them. That’s how it started out. And I have cut stuff and I have edited, of course. But that was my first thing. And it was an experience that ultimately really affected how I edited when I did. It brought me into a different qualitative thought place about editing that way. But I tried, and it was horrible. It was just horrible. Hillary and Matthew and Erin were down there in Florida with me, and in three days, they each had half an hour of material because we kept going. And it was like: “what am I looking at here?”

Then this other thing came into my mind that I also started to bring in. When a viewer is watching a dance, he/she is trying to remember it, they’re trying to make little hierarchies for themselves: “that’s good”, “I’m going to keep that.” Not in such an analytical way, but somewhere in their consciousness they’re holding onto things and creating a structure for themselves. So I wanted to bring that in, too. What if the dancers didn’t know the movement so well? I started dancing and they copied me. They would try to copy what I was doing. And sometimes I would just dance, and they would follow me and try to keep everything. And there was a lot of forgetting going on. The end result of a lot of the movement came out of that process. That was the way I was trying to bring in what an audience member goes through into the room and use it in there. As opposed to saying, we’re going to calculate all these things and now you’re going to look at it and now you have to go through that process. I wanted to see what it was like to have that in the room.

But also, for the dancers to have to fix it. Not to improvise it, do it different every day. But that, much in the way a viewer tries to remember things, or they have a desire to remember things, I was trying to set that situation up in the dancers’ mind/body. Then when we got back to it in June and everyone was there, it started to switch into other things, but still I created a lot of the movement that way.

Alejandra: As you accumulate material, is what you see accumulating giving you the character of what‘s happening, and that is informing what is going to come out of you next?

Tere: To some degree.

Alejandra: But you’re also trying not to formalize what it means, or an idea of what it is about, and just go again to whatever may be next.

Tere: Yes. Ultimately, it gives me a systemic kind of information to use to structure it. I’m trying to make choreography not to be about calculation. When you see this piece, you’re going to be like, what are you talking about, it’s so calculated! But it doesn’t really matter. It’s how I’m getting there that’s important.

I have this beautiful idea that a dance isn’t from you. It’s born of you but then it kind of stands next to you and you help it become itself. But it’s not you. It’s not necessarily even an expression of you. I am working with this idea that I really want to validate for myself and for a viewer, that choreography is a documentary form, a way of processing the information of the world. If I put a camera into the studio, you’ll see a room with people in it. If I were to write about what went on in the studio, I would have to explain it with words. If I used photographs… and so on. But a piece of choreography, what it can do is it can adhere to all these different aspects of what’s going on: feelings, shape, time, world events that are shaking in our bodies, personal events, five different personal events – and I want to keep switching the planes of legibility of that thing. Asking which one of those things am I taking information from now? But not to come to a tangible narrative. That’s why I’m trying to detach and let this be this other thing. Really, for me, I know spiritual sounds so big, but it is a spirituality. It’s like a way of saying this is the only way I can be here. It’s if I can take all these very different things and bring them into close proximity with each other. And let that bounce around and become something. So that if I knock everything over on this table, it would be that, and then, I’ll see that and it will give me an energy. As opposed to knocking it down with an order that I want to see. I call it itness. It’s like trying to find the itness of what is it, as oppose to I’m making it be this. That gets really big and scary also.

I feel like I’m at this point in my life where I just want to try it. I would love to have a big change in my work, but I know from experience, you can’t have a big change quickly, it takes a long time. But you can use big change in your process to change it a little bit, and I feel that’s what I’m doing right now.

Today I was just grappling with something, trying to expand a section and make it become like a big pillow of this moment, that’s bigger and more open, and I kept working it into something that is tightly woven, and it’s too complicated, and I couldn’t do what I wanted to do. And a lot of times that decision comes up in a process where I set up to do that, and this happened. And that is a really important thing to listen to. For me, in my process. That my mind said I wanted to do that, but what ended up is that I did this other thing. And I have to go with that and, again, that is part of the thing that I want to validate about choreography. How it kind of shows you that that is what happens in your life too. You go towards something. You never get what you think you’re going to have. That’s why I think travel is so disappointing. You’re going to go somewhere, you have an image of it in your head, of what it’s going to be like, the place you’re going to stay at, and you get there and it’s all different. And the way that you imagined it, you can’t ever remember that again. It’s gone. I think that’s a really important part of perception, part of being a human being, part of the loss that everyone around you is always experiencing all the time that we don’t take into account when we are with each other, and that choreography can get theatrical about somehow. I’m trying to bring all these items in, and use them to make from.

Alejandra: When you look at the piece now from the outside, what elements would you point out in the piece that are a direct result or show what you’re talking about?

Tere: I probably wouldn’t pick one thing. I would say three things in a row and how they change from each other. And how they look next to each other and how you go from one, to two and you feel something and then you go one, two and three, and you feel something else. This kind of forward movement of the thing. It’s like how I always look at a day. This morning I was all worried about something that was a really important thing, and I was really really worried about that. That seemed like maybe thematic. Now I’m not worried about that. I’m not even thinking about that. It’s just gone. And that’s how everything is, nothing stays as central. You just give it a central character for a moment of your day or of your week, and then it always goes away. But it never stays central. So this idea of importance that theater does to imagery, I wanted us to get away from. And that sense of loss also, that sense of thinking that something is really important and then it just becomes unimportant.

Also I’m dealing a lot with this feeling about memories that used to bring me to an emotional place. But then at a certain point they kind of loose their strength to do that. And I find that really sad. That I can’t use that memory to shift my mood. Something like putting the cowboy thing there, it really came chronologically one of the first things that I made here, but I don’t want to develop it. I want it to be there and be this thing that you move away from , this tangible thing that you can hold on to that just never comes back. That’s another thing about memory and choreography and the history of expectation in a viewer. Like “Oh, I like that! I would like more of that… or not.” I’m going to manipulate that as the director to say, I know how many people would like that, and I want them to really like that so that I can create a sense of loss in them when it doesn’t come back. So that becomes one way that you can see this from the point of view of the director. But I wouldn’t say there is one place you can see that. Mostly in the movement from section, to section, to section, is where you can see it, whatever you want to call a section. From a different perceptive place to another, which you’ll see clearly.

I know that some of my other dances start to work for me when they go to this place, and to this place, and then to this other drastically different place, and another different place, and another different place, and finally I get away from what the different places are, but keep the music of the change. Like when the dancers go to these places, and they go “oh, now we’re staying on this one longer, and I was expecting it to change and it’s still in my body, but it’s not going there now. Now I’m having to come to terms with a structural thing that is going on and the images I’m reading are less important. And that is really one of the things I’m trying to do with my work, is this idea of what is the importance of identifying things as single things?

Alejandra: Do you think that your process makes the performers feel that? What you were just describing sounded to me as coming from the perspective of the performers, but also from the perspective of the audience watching.

Tere: It’s definitely in the structure, the cutting of it. And the dancers, definitely. They really go through that, and they can go through that in different ways in different nights also. There is a lot of them in it, in that change. One of the reasons I want to get away from calculation—of calculating a good structure, according to some cannon that’s in our heads—is that no one is going to be seeing it the same way anyway. You talk to someone and say: “You know, the first part and the second part…” And that person is going to say: “I thought that was all one section.” No one sees that the same way. But they can see a sense of changeability there, and on to that, they can project their own systemic ideas. Because you’ve requested it from their imagination somehow. I don’t want to say it’s only this thing. And I also don’t want to be in a completely hippie immersion. I really want to be rigorous about this because, at the end of the piece, I want you to have gone through something pretty big.

I am making these works, and I think maybe they include so many extreme differences in them, because that really represents a structure of what it’s like to be here right now, to me. I think that if it were another time, I might be much more monothematic, or in a smaller dynamic gradation that would reflect a different time more. But I feel that it’s very jarred right now by the events of the world, and I think this is reflected in my structures in a big way. I don’t want it to be like anything goes. It’s really not like that for me. There’s a certain point, once the thing is detached from my body and I’m not in love with it, or precious about it, when I go: “oh I see, it’s got its own system, now I really have to help it get to be the best version of that system that it can be.” And that really seems different for every dance. And more and more, they seem really different.

I would say, for people who know my work, that I look at Winter Belly and I look at what I’m doing know, and they are so different. So, so, so different. But a journey from one to the next is really important for me. Even one piece to the next has the same information I was saying, about one move to the next. This kind of difference that happens and I think that could happen more and more for me. If I were able to free up and let that happen.

Alejandra: Do you ever struggle with similarity? When things are coming out and you are not editing them, do they ever start to seem the same to you?

Tere: Yeah, they do. Sometimes they all seem the same size and the same length, but that’s when you become a worker. I feel like a worker more than an artist now. At that point, I see this thing is showing me what it needs. I have to go help it. That part there is crying ‘open me up a little bit.’ And I’ve learned that the system of delivery, how it comes out of my body, is never the way it should remain. For me, I am a conveyor belt of stuff for the first two months, then that conveyor belt stops and I have to look at the stuff that is in the warehouse. And start to figure it out. Part of it is the delivery and part of it is the finalization of it. That is the real distinction. That is what I’m doing right now. I know that there’s a part of this piece, three quarters of the way into it, that to me looks like an almost Aristotelian, cathartic, melancholic moment. And it feels important to me to put that about a quarter of the way into the piece. It feels important to me to have that happen too early. I’m trying to bring that there because some little gnome there is telling me to do that. Now I’m the worker trying to say this needs to happen here.

I’m working now with words like declension and conjugation as opposed to theme and variation. To say you or you plural, is the same thing but it’s not. And those ideas from grammar are big in my mind. Sameness is different but in a smaller scale of difference. And I also like to call it and live through daily what I call sameness revisited. Which is like, I’ve sat here before. I’ve thought that. The sitting is the same, the day is different, the thought is different, but the thought and the sitting are closer than the day and the thought…

You know how you turn your head and a memory is unleashed. That’s a part of choreography. It’s happening to the audience in a lot of levels. That you do one thing—an action on stage—that is in a situation, and it does something to two or three people. Suddenly they are having that memory. I try to be open to that. When I repeat something, I do want it to be anchor. I don’t want it to be theme and variation. And sometimes it’s parenthetical to me. In Frozen Mommy there’s a big one where the dancers stand in a diagonal and they go ‘closer, closer,’—then there’s a huge parenthesis and then it comes back to that same place. And you really have forgotten about it by the time it comes back. And then you go, “oh right, we were there.” Like spacing out in a more formal way. Sometimes when that thing comes up, of something being similar, I have to get out the dynamic crayolas and darken right there, this thing, or do I cut that? And those are the two different kinds of things that happen when there’s something like that.

Alejandra: When you are talking about the different people in the audience going off to different places watching the piece, the way that you are incorporating or tapping into that experience is by having so many possible doors that keep opening in the piece? That you are trying to highlight and allow all those exits and entrances?

Tere: To a degree, plus I’m trying to make a viable structure underneath it that suddenly grabs you by the seat of your pants and takes you with it. So while you’re really trying to find all these ways in and identifying, something happens where I grab you by the feet and start pulling you down into the structural, subconscious mud.

Alejandra: How do you find what that is in the piece since you didn’t plan it ahead, it just became?

Tere: That’s the whole importance of it. That you can’t. You can only find it. That’s what I’ve learned. If you make it happen, it’s coming from something canonic, pre-existing and it will smell, people will smell it. As opposed to finding it. Each dance has its nature. I think this is something I’m just finding out. I’ve been working for twenty-five years, and I’m just getting a sense of this, in my body. In my mind I may have known it, but the sense of being patient and letting this thing arrive, and going: “oh , it’s here, it’s arrived. Now, I just have to open it up and help it.” This piece right now, I’m tumbling with it. This shift from three quarter to one quarter that I told you about, I’m starting to understand that it’s telling me that. That if I put it at three quarters, it’s going to be mundane. If I put it at one quarter, it’s going to be inviting and it will give the rest of the piece a tone. And it’s a way out of the cowboy thing, because it’s going to be an immersion for a moment, more than a moment.

I’m re-enamored of Cunningham now. I’ve always been. Sometimes maybe the body language is not what I’m interested in, but right now it doesn’t really matter what I’m interested in. Choreography can work well in a million different stylistic areas. I remember being at City Center at a young age, and feel like my feet were getting muddy, there’s something slipping off the stage and he’s taking me down. And I’m watching all this kind of complication, just like I do with the stuff of being in life. Got to eat, got to this or that. But underneath it, you are moving slowly into a kind of sadness, or away from one, or into a kind of practical head. The minutia of life and the big slide. And it’s the relationship of those two things that he really can do.

I was talking at Chez Bushwick the other night and I mentioned this idea that I’ve always had about spacing out in a dance. In an excellent dance, you space out and there’s a piece of kite string attached to your top shirt button and it’s back on stage. And you’re out there, but you’re still connected to the work. As opposed to when you’re just like, “this is not working.” That’s one of the best things choreography can do for me. When some body sets up this kind of kinetic structural arena that unleashes something in you. It’s a thrilling thing about dance that, unfortunately, it’s so hard to invite a lot of people into the joy of it because they are instead stuck on “what is it about?” And it’s about that experience, when you get out of the ‘nouning’ of things. The calling things names.

Alejandra: I’m curious about what you said about the conveyor belt and the warehouse. Why are you so convinced that the form that it comes out in is not it, it hasn’t arrived yet to its form?

Tere: I’m saying this about my work, first of all. I am talking about movement. I used to think movement was a very important thing. I think it was when I was younger because I had to find this difference thing, the juxtaposition of diverse things in real close proximity. And that had to be put into my body. But now dancing and making movement are a form of ruminating for me. I start by dancing, but then idea comes out of it. And that idea could be rendered in little theatrical things, or a song, or poems. There’s a fake language in Baby, a made-up language. It can go in all these other places. Dancing is one of the many layers of a dance for me. I look at other works and I think these people are confusing dancing with dance. And dancing is like the material, but you always have to cut from the material to make the whole shirt, or whatever. All of us in the city, or in Europe or wherever, we can make a lot of really cool moves. But I don’t trust that in myself. I feel like there’s something else that I’m getting to by dancing. Some of the product of the dancing remains. Some of it has to be cut. A lot of it actually.

Alejandra: When you do the first dancing part of the process, do you do it alone?

Tere: I don’t anymore. I use to. When I was young, I had a three months of alone time and I would fix everything. But now I dance right away with the dancers.

Alejandra: What do they do? They dance with you? They follow?

Tere: Sometimes they follow, sometimes I make it really specific. With these dancers, they are so amazing, sometimes I leave it very sketchy, and they take it a little further, and I see that and then I go a little further with that. It’s definitely a dialogue with them. I’m really aware, especially with these guys—Heather, Hillary, Erin, Christopher, Matthew—they way they move, where they move from, is all very different. So it’s very exciting to see what they average out to. And what they really subtly tell each other about a certain movement. What they tell me. There is a deep dialogue, that doesn’t ever have to be mentioned, but they affect me, I re-affect it, and there’s this folding thing that is always there. I think another thing that is understood with the dancers that I work with is, once I give you this thing, it is not stopped at all. You’re growing it at the level of memory, psychology, the way you are moving it, your phrasing. It’s in a stage of growing and then I get to the point when I’m directing them when we bring that more into our consciousness, and we say: “well, this section needs to be riddled with these ideologies, or maybe just for today, and we’ll detached from that later.” But the dancers are really involved with that.

This company is great. I feel it’s the first company where I feel like I’m the old guy and they are the young people but that is only factual, it doesn’t feel like that. I love them, we’re close. I am older, they’re younger, but we are also free with each other, we are friends and they’re experts. And they’ve chosen to be with me, they’re not saying “I will dance with anyone.” They are like, this is my aesthetic and I’m a full artist and I’m in this with this person. We have different jobs in it, but we are all moving towards this thing. It’s very fulfilling to be with them. I love watching them.

Alejandra: It all comes across watching them.

Tere: They really own it. They are committed to it. One of the things about the way I choreograph, the first thing I looked at when I started making dances, is this idea of what is the stuff of dance and how can you grow it into meaning and significance. And that was unison. In my first works, and still, unison is a very big part of what I’m doing. And it points to oppression. And I use it that way. As the standardization of human behavior. It’s about sixty percent of any person. What you’re grappling with. It’s a big coat of pain on everything that is happening. And that’s how it’s in there. What my dancers are dealing with is an enormous amount of convolution, willfully in my work. It’s really complicated what they have to go through, to growl through, in an evening. It really keeps them in this state of really being there. Plus, they’ve researched a whole bunch of avenues and different gradations of feeling that can go with any one of the moments. So there’s a real multiple sourcing they can do once they are dancing.

Alejandra: When you said that you start with the dancing and that some ideas come out and they might become a poem or a song, I would like you to talk a little bit about voicing and language and text.

Tere: Much in the same way as the viewer will encounter these portals that I’ve been talking about. There are for me also. And I go in and examine some of them. And sometimes when I go in there, there is something in there, and when I go in there with no judgment and I don’t say “I have to pick the best thing,” something just comes up. For example there is this moment about vegetarianism that is in Baby and it just came up and it feels ripe with something for me. It feel like it’s part of this dance. But I don’t pretend to know why that is there. But I feel like it needs to be there. That’s what I can tell you about certain things. Certain ideas that I go into, once I go deeper into them, I think that’s going to turn into a word, or music, or dancing, or stillness. It doesn’t always render itself in more dancing.

Sometimes I think that’s why it would be very interesting to do film. One time I made this piece called Nursing the Newborn Pig, and I thought it would be so great for three seconds for everyone to be completely filled with band aids, and then they would be gone. It would be so great to have film, but as an aspect of live dance, that you could just make things happen like that. Also with the making of the music, the way we work is that I go in there and I identify this thing and I think “I want the music to be like this section or distant from it.” Or, “I’m reminded of this sound. Let’s put that in there or see how it works.”

Every junction of a dance is a way in and I could choose various things and it is about a poetic sensibility that is telling me this seems like the right one. So a step or a word or music, they could all be brought into a choreographic lens filter.

Alejandra: It doesn’t seem like the pieces of text came to you already in verbal form. In other words, it wasn’t a conversation you heard, the vegetarianism thing for example.

Tere: Oh no! Nothing is ever… Everything is born in the room for me. A lot of it is intuition. But the longer I spent in the midst of one piece, the better the intuitions get. The more pointed they get, perhaps.

One thing it is, is patience. I just put something really gross in yesterday. And I’m not cutting it yet. I know it’s gross. It looks like bad regional theater. But that might be the right color for that moment. I might want people to get a little soured at that moment to then jettison them into the next moment. So, if I cut that out, that’s a color I’ve taken out that could be really useful in the context of the piece. And if you fully hate it you can always cut it out. But that kind of I love it-I hate it thing, I really want to move further and further away from that. And just see what happens. Although half way through this process I chickened out. Because down in Florida we made this stuff I was like “oh my god, somebody shoot me in the head. I can’t watch anymore this crap.” But my first impulse, I call it the Edward Scissors hands impulse, is to go like –cut, cut, cut—and make everything crystalline. It’s something that I have an affinity for and an ability with. But I don’t think it is the best part of my work. And I would like it to open out. This is the journey towards that.

Alejandra: When you said that, at the beginning, your body had to understand the juxtaposition of many different things, that it was something that had to get into your body. Does that mean that that came to you as a conceptual desire? An understanding of what you see life is like? And you wanted to put that into movement? Or did you go out and, whenever you moved, you switched from one thing to the next?

Tere: I knew that when I moved by myself, something was different than what I learned in university. And I couldn’t come to terms with those two things. I started to know I wanted to be a choreographer, so I then made the decision after a short time of dancing with two people, that I was not going to dance with anyone else, and I never did again. I had to unearth this thing. And I am so, so, so glad that I did that, now. I mean, to dance with someone famous is the way to your own fame, and I really think it is the reason why it took me a really long time to come into notice. And what I do is not standardized. But by unearthing that moving—I didn’t know that then, I know it now in retrospect—that’s what I was looking for. And it grows out of marginalization. It grows out of being gay. And the diverse ways you use language. One to guard yourself. One that includes a very fast dynamic that lets no one in. And another one that is an internalization of everything that you’re going through. And once you mix the three of those together, this other thing comes out that is just not the way language works. So you can’t speak that way. So it came out of my body, I think.

It’s not about the sadness of being gay. I mean, that’s hard. But it’s about, actually, the kind of gift of marginalization at a young age. So you see the façade of language, you see the structure of language, you see its various uses. And you see it externalized for others and internalized for yourself in poetics.

Alejandra: How is the part that is internalized?

Tere: Internalized for myself is that I had a secretive life, I had to speak to myself. “What am I going to do?” Because I didn’t even know you could call it gay. I grew up in a place that was not urban. I was like “What is this difference? What am I going to do?” And then I went into a lot of invention. I would spend time making poems up, or making up voices in my head. And it’s not all tragic. A lot of it was fun.

Repression will bring up invention in the right circumstances. And that’s what happened to me a lot. The kind of energy of having to really select your language, I think it’s why I have an affinity to language. Because I had to really become good at it. Because it was used in a very pointed way. If someone was about to find something out, I had to go one up from them. It was a really useful thing and once you get out of the sadness—the being gay is not an issue now, it was then; it was hard back in those days. But then the blessing of it is that – that you get these different layers of understanding language.

Alejandra: It seems that you were successful at perceiving how language was codified and limiting. And that you were able to come up with something else.

Tere: To invent with it.

Alejandra: And you did, both in movement and in actual language.

Tere: The structure, the system of those, came out through my body – with words gone, literally the grammar of it. I always talk about being parenthetical, and if you’re a person who is afraid of maybe being murdered because you’re gay, parenthesis are your friend.

The structures of my dances are very parenthetical. Or adjectives. How long you can string adjectives along before you actually get to the point. That is a structural idea. And then there’s disconnect in you, and that comes out in the structure of the dancing. It becomes fragmented because you are in two worlds: in the world out there, and in the world inside, figuring out what to do. And… I probably have a learning disorder. [Laugh]

But they didn’t know what they were then. I can see what the worth is of a pluralistic look at language. I don’t like to say this, but I think back and I think.. it’s Irish. I’m Irish, and there is something Irish about this. Recently there’s this thing between Ewan Mc… and this British…. John … somebody wrote that the British uses literature as a window into clarity and the Irish uses it as a stained glass that keeps multiplying and changing its colors. And it’s very kind of chauvinistic in a way, between these two countries, but I’m not really connected to that. I was listening to that and thinking that it might be genetic. Like Joyce. If you read him. How he fractured everything. The reason it had such force from him is because it came natural. It wasn’t calculated. There’s great intelligence behind it, but it was born out of a way of perceiving language. And it affected everything. It’s really interesting to think about language as relative to dance, structurally. It’s very interesting to me.

Alejandra: It could have to do with the political relationships, as what you said about being gay can also be applied to any marginalized position.

Tere: Everyone’s language has to be filtered through that kind of socialization. And the different kinds of hierarchies of your life are reflected in the way you use language and the way language is foisted upon you.

Alejandra: It makes me think of the word ‘wholeness’ the same way that when you talked about the conveyor belt made me think about the concept of ‘authentic’ movement. Of how these concepts, like wholeness or authentic, are so highly valued in the hierarchy. And it is assumed that if you reach them, you will be happy. It seems to me that you are talking from a very different place. One of observing that that is not the nature of anything.

Tere: And letting that become reflected in the process of making the thing.

Alejandra: It’s big, because they are really up there as principles of desirable values.

Tere: In no way do I think that we shouldn’t be paid a lot of money to be choreographers and dancers, but since I haven’t been and I’ve lived a life of really not having that much money, the kind of desires for things that a lot of people have, isn’t a part of me. And I’m not saying I’m special, it’s just so not available that you don’t research that desire. And something else moves into importance for you. Something else comes into focus as what you are floating on. And I’ve really seen that happening with me. Once I realized I couldn’t work in any commercial setting. I could, but I couldn’t stay there or sustain it. And the freedom of that. Now I feel like I can detach and let go of being a personae in front of my work with a name, and just see what is it like if I’m just its helper. It helps me to be in the room that way. I owe it to you/the dance. And that goes back to Baby for me. That the dance is like a baby; the thing itself I’ve given birth to. That metaphor isn’t great but. At the end, you got this big [baby sound] experience that equals whatever this baby is.

Alejandra: I think that the thing that moves into focus, a lot of it is observation.

Tere: I think that is really true. And I always try to remember to say this when I teach ”just notice what you’re doing.” And then call it ‘what you’re doing.” That is really the thing and that parallels what it’s like to be in a life. Instead of “I wish I was doing that…” “well, you’re not. You’re doing this. It’s this. What are the sensations that come out of that?” Which is the same thing as “I want to fix this dance.” Instead of seeing it. It’s a pretty cool thing, and I feel fortunate to have made it through whatever this crazy maze is, to keep working and to carve a space for myself to ask these questions. And keep going with it.

Alejandra: What is next?

Tere: I’m doing a dance with 15 people in it. I’m really excited about it. I don’t know anything about it process wise. It’s for the Lyon Opera Ballet. I’m going to do it in August and it’s going to open in September. It’s going to be in the Lyon Biennale de Danse, which is great.