In February 2012, artist/writer/curator Marissa Perel spoke with dancer/choreographer Katy Pyle about the development of her dance form, “Ballez,” and the early stages of her piece, The Firebird. Here, they rejoin with members of the cast to discuss each performer’s background and experience of Ballez, alternative approaches to the idea of failure in queer performance, and motivations for the piece, which was presented at Danspace Project, May 16-18, 2013.

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Marissa Perel: I am talking to Katy Pyle about her show, The Firebird. We’re here with Jules Skloot, who plays the character of the Firebird, Cassie Mey, who plays the Sorceress, and 4 other members of the Ballez, who perform as princes in the piece. Katy, I interviewed you last year when you showed an excerpt of this piece at Dixon Place. What I remember most is your remark that this is the kind of ballet you wish you had seen growing up. Could you expand on that?

Katy Pyle: I wanted to see (and am now seeing through creating this) different kinds of bodies than the classical super small body that we’ve seen in ballet. In this work, I see people who have radically different gender embodiments than what we’ve seen in classical ballet, people who are different sizes partnering with each other. The female-assigned people partnering with each other in general is a big deal. I didn’t see any queer ballet at all and certainly not a story ballet. Maybe there was some contemporary dance that was “gay,” but I didn’t see women dancing together period. If I did it was in an experimental context, it wasn’t a classical story ballet, so thats something I wanted to see. I wanted to see people take the theatricality of these structures and the playfulness of them and put that forward at the front of the experience. I would always watch these ballets with amazing costumes, amazing lights, amazing dancers, but I felt they were just doing the technical elements. I was like, “You’re a fucking fairy, man! Why don’t you care?” It felt like a consideration of the way things are embodied was last on the list, and yet the potential for fantasy was so present in my mind — what I wanted to see, but was not there. It seemed almost disconnected from the performers intentions.

Photo of the princes by Hedia Maron

Marissa: To realize this, you’ve been teaching Ballez. You have a class that’s been part of the rehearsal process and you’ve been teaching it to dancers and non-dancers. I’ve actually never been to a class, but I’m curious about this issue of embodiment and how dancers who are technically trained but maybe not trained to embody their sexuality can do that in this dance, and then how people who aren’t trained as dancers can execute dance and embody their sexuality at the same time.

Jules Skloot: That’s a big question. In thinking about structuring the classes, we spent time talking about the importance of making it a welcoming place, and energetically prepared ourselves as teachers to welcome people.

Marissa: Were you seeking to create a different environment from a stern, judgmental technique class?

Jules: As you can imagine going into a more formal ballet setting, there are assumptions of what people know about the code of how to be in a dance class, and the code does not necessarily include eye contact, or smiling at each other and saying hello, and it certainly doesn’t include, “What is your name and your preferred gender pronoun?” That is something that we include in any Ballez class. I like that it’s built in so people coming to their very first class have the experience of being asked that question and understand it is a relevant question to the space, and for folks coming week after week to know their answer can change.

Marissa: So fluidity is a value in the class structure. You can change pronouns, and still be identified as you want to be and dance.

Jules: Right, that’s actually part of the class. We get to take these forms and play with them, experiment with them, and be fluid in ways that maybe we wouldn’t outside the class. We all hold onto parts of our identity for various reasons: for safety, for our well-being, for expressing who we are. It can be a really good experiment to jiggle up our sense of ourselves, how we wear ourselves and embody ourselves, even if it’s not something we want to do everyday or in public walking down the street. You can learn a lot from trying different things on.

Marissa: Is what it’s like for you to be part prince . . .

Katy: . . . part bird, part firebird, part tranimal? Jules is always fluidly shifting roles.

Marissa: Did you [Jules and Katy] collaborate on how Jules would embody the Firebird? How much of the character comes from your own process?

Jules: It was very much a collaboration; talking about the story and taking this vision of what a Ballez class and a Ballez company could be. As the story of The Firebird emerged, we thought about how the story would shift from the traditional Russian folk tale. Katy and I have been working together for a long time in a dance conext, so there’s a lot that we know about each other, and quite naturally parts of me got entwined with the character of the Firebird. Katy knows the places that might be harder for me to go to, which are vital for embodying the character of the Firebird. So, she’s been able to coach me into the places and physicalities that aren’t as natural to me, or that are even disturbing or scary and also exciting.

Photo of Katy Pyle by Alex Escalante

Marissa: Are those places that are scary and exciting gender places, a dance places, or a combination of these?

Jules: More a dance place, but the lines are really blurry around that. We’ve been talking a lot about the Firebird’s focus being very direct, almost pointing in a straight line. As a mover, I tend to spiral and swirl with an internal focus, so it’s been exciting and hard to learn how to shift my focus and take on this character.

Marissa: Does aggression play a role in your dancing?

Jules: Sure, there’s aggression. It’s more direct action and taking on an animal — the wildness of it. Maybe Cassie has something to say about that.

Cassie Mey: My background and much of my performance history is in the realm of abstraction and using technique in an embodied and present way, so coming into this process and having to take on the role of a character, I had to find the dominatrix within. She’s really powerful and magical. She embodies wisdom. She’s all-seeing and all-knowing, but she is immature emotionally or she doesn’t have an open heart in the way that she needs to experience. It’s her heart-wisdom that evolves through the piece. She’s very clear and focused and direct, but also cold and withholding, which creates this power dynamic.

Marissa: And she needs to be worshipped?

Cassie: She needs to be in the power position, but maybe not worshipped. We’ve talked about her relationship to the princes and the garden; they are consensually adding to this fantasy together. She’s creating the land around it, but it’s a consensual journey — the princes want to be taken care of in this realm, they want to have all the fruits of this experience as the sorceress gives it to them. They’re willingly residing in the garden as a polyamorous community that, as Katy puts it eats, shits, sleeps, and fucks together.

Katy: All within a classical ballet genre. That’s the fantasy to me of what that was.

Photo of Katy Pyle by Alex Escalante

Cassie: As a performer, it’s been interesting to express my sexuality in dance. Dance and sexuality have occupied separate realms my whole life and this is the first convergence of that. Being seen as queer in a dance realm is exhilarating and terrifying. It brings up a lot of emotions and helps me investigate my relationship to the queer community, to being out, and to exposing the way I feel sexual in the world. Exposing those fantasies for the world is exciting and empowering. The first time I saw Katy and Jules dance in Covers I freaked out; I had never seen anything so hot and moving and sad and funny all at the same time because I felt myself reflected for the first time in a piece, I felt that whole part of me.

Marissa: So now we can pass this around to the princes — briefly talk about what your background is, if you have dance training or not, and not only what the process has been like for you, but what you feel you bring to your role as a prince uniquely within the group?

Sam Greenleaf Miller: My performance background is varied — I danced a lot as a kid and grew up going to queer clubs, so I have that very much inside of me. I’m also a classically trained musician and toured as a musician for a number of years, so mostly my performance background is musical. In the last 5 years, I’ve collaborated with Vanessa Anspaugh and Geo Wyeth, who is a musician and performance artist. So, I’ve been moving away from standing onstage with a guitar and singing, to moving, which is very much a part of my life in another realm. It’s been exciting to start this process with Katy and to learn about my body in all sorts of new ways. I started taking Ballez class this winter and it was my first time doing any sort of ballet movement. It was intense because I’m 35 years old and I was a beginner at something again, which was a humbling and totally fun experience. I realized that I really like the form and it somehow suits me (at least Ballez, I don’t know about ballet). I felt like I could bring parts of my gender, sexuality, experience, and the way that I move in the world into the form and have the form help me refine it. I don’t totally know what I bring to my role. I think I bring a lot of exuberance, play, and care for my other princes and the company.

Lindsay Reuter: My background is a lot of dance training growing up, studying dance in college — all abstract in the same way that Cassie mentioned. I’ve never been asked to have a face when I was dancing, let alone that my face be genuine and reflect my body. For me, it’s really important to have a fluid gender identity where I can present whatever I want at any time, and there’s room for that in Ballez. Reinventing yourself all the time is celebrated and never questioned. I’ve been thinking about who I am as a prince in the piece, and there’s a quality of earnestness that’s really important to me. For example, just trying really hard (which I think is kind of how I am all the time). I’m the person who never gets sarcasm because I take people at face value; there’s this sweet childish, big eyes, big heart. [Laughter] If I titled my prince, I’d be The Prince of Wanting It, and that’s relationally important in the dance. I’m never a prince by myself; I’m always a prince with other people, and I really want to foster that.

Effie Bowen: I grew up doing theater and went to college for dance. It’s been rewarding having a dance process where I feel like I’m always right when I’m in it. I like pretending that I’m good at ballet, so I think I bring that. I started ballet really late and I can’t really finish a traditional ballet class. In Ballez I can pretend I’ve been doing ballet my whole life and I’m amazing at it. It affords me a confidence that I’ve never had. This is the container where I can put on something and escape into a fantasy that I wouldn’t normally go to. Regular ballet underscores how I’m failing at this thing I’m striving for, but in Ballez I already have it. In Ballez I’m Nijinsky.

Francis Weiss Rabkin: I am a writer, a poet and a playwright, and my relationship to performance has been as far from the stage as possible for most of my life. As a child, if I ever had to perform in a class play, I played inanimate objects. One time I played the hill on which the billy goats grazed. I’ve been dancing with Katy ever since the first work-in-progress showing at BAX, and that was my first time dancing in a stage context. I used to only dance at dance parties and at clubs, so I was interested to hear Cassie say that performance dance was never sexy to her. I’ve only experienced dance as sexy, as a space where I feel hot and there’s the fluidity. My most intense dance partners have been gay men; that queer fluidity of attraction between a female-assigned person and a cis-gendered gay men, feeling seen in that world. To bring only that experience to a performance setting is very strange because there is something very protected about queer dance parties; you’re communicating so much, but in a closed world. Bringing that energy to a mixed, critical audience through performance is a leap.

Photo of the princes by Christy Pessagno

What I am bringing to this experience is that I’m the “Prince of Going Through It Right Now.” Most of my life I’ve felt really disconnected from my body; as a child I thought I was literally invisible. In the time I’ve spent working on the Ballez, this relationship to visibility has become about being seen, being seen again, being seen some more, and being seen more accurately and more deeply, as well as emotionally experiencing the range of the excitement of being seen and the terror of it, holding those feelings for as long as I possibly can, and then going onstage with them. I bring a lot of language around emotion, and I’m willing to talk about the complications around emotions and share that in rehearsal and outside of rehearsal. I have the capacity to dwell in and be stable in hard feelings.

Marissa: I’d like us to talk about some hard feelings. I was was disturbed by how The Firebird was listed in the New Yorker. I felt that is was minimizing Katy’s conceptual artistry and her choreographic mastery both because of the amount of quotations around the nouns, and that last line, “recently divorced lesbian who goes into the woods to figure herself out.” There is something really matter-of-fact about the way this language. When is the practice of art making divorced from “figuring oneself out?” If this was a write-up for a male choreographer making a queer dance about his identity, I highly doubt that the New Yorker would describe the work as “figuring himself out.” I was surprised because of how I have seen the press  praise the concepts and narratives of certain choreographers, but this sounds slightly mocking or ironic.

Katy: I got a lot of great comments about the New Yorker write-up on my Facebook page. Our acting coach, Jibz Cameron had the best line, “Too bad your ‘ballet’ isn’t making ‘sense’ to the ‘writers.’ You’re too advanced creatively for their ‘brains.’” [Laughter]

Marissa: I noticed in your piece description, you mention “queer failure.” I’m wondering if this kind of mis-reading, or marginalization of your talent in the New Yorker speaks to that concept. I’ve been thinking about the term a lot, and what it might mean in the context of the Ballez. I learned of this term from Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure, but it seems to have pervaded many cultural contexts quite suddenly.

Katy: I am taking on these monolithic cultural structures and putting these really incredible, beautiful embodied humans inside of them to show how the structures fail to hold us. If you’re looking at this as a ballet and judging it from a classical set of terms, assumptions and value systems, then we are failing at every single fucking thing we do. We’re not doing any of it right. We try to do these things and we do them wrong. But, the ways we do them wrong are actually worth looking at and interesting to watch, and shows how the world is actually failing us.

Francis: I’m thinking about the ways in which the world can fail us, and can fail so many kinds of people — it fails even the most normative people. I think there are two painful things that happen for a lot of us in Ballez: pain from the way that growing up in the tradition of ballet has shaped one’s sense of self, and pain from being gender-nonconforming in a world that really wants you to be. And then, there are people who have both. I think about the ways in which I feel super lucky that I didn’t have ballet training as a child, I don’t have that pain at all because I haven’t fit in since being a little baby.

Marissa: Is that lucky? That doesn’t sound lucky, that sounds like a lack of permission that you felt.

Francis: Maybe, but I didn’t want to go to a class that told me I was fat or clumsy. No one saw me at all, so I didnt get that judgment, I just didn’t get seen.

Marissa: I identify a lot with that for myself. “If you can’t see me, I can make up who I am.”

Cassie: I definitely get prickly around the ‘queer failure’ banner. I understand what it’s trying to do, I think. I don’t feel like a failure, so that is hard to identify with. I feel more empowered. Reclaiming the word failure seems like an easy out and I think we’re worth more than that. As artists, we are very seriously making a piece about liberation and freedom. So no, we’re not failing! It’s almost a sassy retort to say, “Okay, you think we suck so we’re just going to fail harder,” but I think we’re beyond that irony.

Drawing by Jibz Camero

Sam: I want to say something different, not in defense of the word failure, but that we use it in response to success. I’ve been slamming up against the realization that I’m not following a path that leads to “success.” I’m not thinking about babies, marriage, and a career in these very stable ways and I’ve had to come up against my own internal sense of being a failure, taking that inside myself and actually loving it, loving the ways that I’m failing. Artists have failed society’s expectations for centuries, and we are good at it. It’s our job.

Marissa: Even normative heterosexual artists have been failing society’s expectations, but there’s more permission or choice about it. There isn’t the added layer of enforced otherness or alienation, as there is with the queer label.

Sam: Artists are total freaks and failures. No, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with me. No, I don’t think I’m failing, but I am a person of this culture, I am made of it, and those narratives are inside of me. Especially as I get older I am smack up against my peers, choosing not to do these things that would make me much more legible and more accepted. I am thinking of failure as a means of liberation.

Effie: I think the idea of failure is fine as long as it’s not an excuse to stop trying. We are not trying to fail but we can acknowledge the presence of failure without giving up.

Sam: It’s not our participation in the work that is dealing with failure, we are not as artists trying to fail.

Marissa: What about the function of irony and humor in the Ballez? It’s definitely a part of The Firebird.

Katy: I feel like I am often put into a category of being ironic and funny, and honestly, it’s serious to me. I am a different kind of human than a lot of other humans and I see the world differently. Whether that is from having five concussions [laughter], I don’t know what it came from. What makes the material I work with funny is that it’s so real, and that is actually what I want to see. I am an extreme person by the regular standard of the world, and people think it’s outright humor, but it is actually playfulness. I think playfulness is a huge value to me, and it’s important to show that on the stage, but it’s not fake. There’s nothing fake about it. The fantasies that I have are extreme, and that’s what I’m putting out there. People laugh because they’re uncomfortable, because they want it too, but they don’t want to say so. I think laughter is cracking open a space where we can all acknowledge that we want these things that are beyond what we are allowed to want. That’s the function of humor in general. I have several friends who are comedians. I see them performing their truth onstage and people laugh, and it’s heartbreaking to me because it’s sad, it’s intense, and it’s real for them. I think as performers and makers we put ourselves in a vulnerable position of really showing our truth, and people respond in all kinds of crazy ways. I’m not trying to keep people from laughing, and I want to create a container where you’re allowed to laugh, cry, cheer, shout, have a response. But irony functions as a cultural code to keep people safe by keeping the unfamiliar at a distance, and then emotionally reacting or not reacting from that distance.

Marissa: Right. It’s about what we can we understand now. For instance, does your personal truth align with the cultural values of the moment for it to be accepted? You don’t have any control over it and it’s a totally artificial way to look at art or at a person’s work, like, “It’s okay to talk about this now so I’ll talk about it.” Or, from the perspective of the reviewer or presenter… “It’s okay now, but it wasn’t five years ago, or maybe it will make more sense five years from now.” Do you see your creation of the Ballez as a new dance form? Do you intend to continue to teach Ballez or make more things with this group of people? Where do you see the future of this work?

Katy: This is something I absolutely want to continue, and I want to continue with these people. I think it’s powerful. People who are coming to class have had really profound experiences. There’s something we’ve stumbled upon that I want to keep doing. We’re supposed to be teaching classes this summer and I have a residency at Dixon Place next year to work on a new Ballez, Sleeping Beauty and the Beast. I feel like the thing that is hard is the money part of it, and the large-scale company model obviously doesn’t fit into the current economic structuring of dance, which I think is unfortunate because there’s a lot of power and potential that can come from a big group of people. There’s a greater diversity of ideas and responsibilities. This is a whole field of research there that is really powerful and important, but we have to figure out how to keep it alive!

Effie Bowen performs, choreographs, writes, runs, knits and puts bananas on things.

Cassie Mey is a dancer and archivist for the Dance Oral History Archive of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. She is proud to have helped Katy Pyle launch the Ballez Company and The Firebird! She is also currently working with Dean Moss; and has performed and collaborated with Molissa Fenley, Jillian Peña, and Geo Wyeth among others.

Sam Miller is a performing artist and astrological counselor living and working in New York City. Sam worked as a touring musician from 1999- 2007. Since, she has performed as a mover and musician in the works of Vanessa Anspaugh and Geo Wyeth and currently dances with Katy Pyle.

Marissa Perel is an artist, writer, and independent curator. She is currently the organizer of Lobby TALKS, an artist-driven discussion series, at New York Live Arts. She will be teaching Touching Into Text, a hybrid reading and movement class for classclassclass at Arts @ Renaissance May-June 2013. She writes the column, “Gimme Shelter: Performance Now” on the Art21 blog, contributes to Bomblog and P-Club, and is a former editor of Critical Correspondence.

Katy Pyle is a multimedia performance artist whose works explore fantasy, queer failure, and the lineage of performance. With the Ballez, she is working to upend the heteronormative conventions of ballet through a process of wholehearted embodiment; subjecting queer and othered bodies to a form that fails them, and playing all the while.

Lindsay Reuter is a dancer and dance-maker living in Brooklyn. In her dance practice, she is particularly interested in (dis)ability and works as a behavioral therapist for students on the Autistic spectrum. She is on the curatorial team that produces the President Street Performance Series and makes duets about queer love.

Jules Skloot is a brooklyn-based performer, teacher and liscenced bus driver who loves working with Katy Pyle.

Francis Weiss Rabkin is a writer and performance-maker.

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Interview Date: December 17, 2012

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“And lose the name of action” at Walker Art Center, Photo by Boru O’Brien O’Connell

Marissa Perel: How long was your process in making And lose the name of action?

Miguel Gutierrez: There are multiple answers to that question. In terms of actually rehearsing with people, we started working in April 2011, for September 2012 premier, but we would work in intensive chunks, three or four weeks at a time. Last fall, at the LMCC residency on Governor’s Island, we did work for six or seven weeks. So it was these different kinds of time periods throughout a year and a half. Then, leading up to that, there had been at least a year and a half of “research,” which involved interviewing people and reading.

Marissa: And the actual experience of your dad’s hospitalization.

Miguel: Right. That’s what I was writing about today. I wrote that in the time that I began to think about this show, my father got sick, and was in the hospital for four and a half months and recovered, and I was in and out of a pretty significant relationship, I lived in five different apartments. That really fucked me up when I wrote that down today! And I made two other pieces—actually I made three other pieces and did three other research projects with other artists.

I made I Say the Word with Jenny Holzer at the ICA, Boston, and Heavens What Have I Done, then I made You are gorgeous and I am coming and then I choreographed a piece for the Fondu Set in Australia. I did another research project with Luke George. I went to many, many countries to perform and teach.

After I wrote that down this morning, I thought, “No wonder I’m invested in incoherence!” Look at this! My life is insane. The only thing that has felt coherent throughout all that time is my relationship to my mind’s ideas, my subjective imagination. It would make perfect sense that this show is partly about a sense of un-tethered-ness, or perhaps a different, associative approach to tethering. Look at this crazy lifestyle!

My ideas for the piece were already underway while I was making Last Meadow. When Last Meadow premiered, Phillip Bither approached me to discuss commissioning the next piece. I’ve realized that most pieces are that, they’re someone asking you to do something [laughs]. You create some abstract deadline, and then it just goes. I’ve been thinking about that as a phenomenon of making art. There were so many different kinds of things that happened during the time frame of making that show.

“And lose the name of action” at MANCC, Photo by Chris Cameron

Marissa: When did you start studying Feldenkrais?

Miguel: I had already been going to Jimena Paz sporadically for Feldenkrais lessons, and then in the fall of 2010, in the midst of my dad’s illness, we were about to do a tour of Last Meadow in France, I had a really transformative experience with Jimena. I’ve had pretty serious back issues since my early thirties, and I had a lesson with her where I felt so mobile after; I was restored to my younger body. It was like I was given back my younger body while having all the self-awareness I have now as an older body.

I found that really compelling, and then when I went to France to do the tour of Last Meadow, I was afraid of the rigor of that tour, and I ended up looking at a lot of videos of Ruthy Alon, who had been an early student of Feldenkrais, and again I just kind of aped her, I just did what she was doing, because she looked amazing, and I got through the tour without being injured. I felt like something in me was changing, and I wanted to learn more about it.

So, I applied to the training program, and I got in. Then when my Dad got out of the rehabilitation center, we set him up with a Feldenkrais practitioner in Florida, and he immediately responded really well to it. I was really happy to see that there was this kind of approach to working with a person.

My father experienced aphasia. It’s not that he can’t speak, but some days he’s able to answer questions better than others, or commands better than others. So I liked watching him work with this practitioner who wasn’t really demanding anything of him, just working with where he is. I saw how favorably responded to it.

I thought, “This is pretty awesome! If this can do that for my Dad, then I want to work more on this with other people.” It’s been fascinating to walk into something—this keeps happening to me, in my thirties–I encounter things or artists or people who give language to something I’m either already doing or already interested in.

That happened to me with Deborah Hay. When I worked with her, I thought, “Oh my god, this is all stuff I’ve been getting at, but I didn’t have these words.” The ideology of Feldenkrais, of meeting someone where they are, feels pretty integral to who I am as a person, director and teacher—not trying to make someone into something else. In my friendships and artistic collaborations, I feel like I’m pretty in tune with that way of being and that way of thinking.

“And lose the name of action” at MANCC, Photo by Chris Cameron

Marissa: When you started working on And lose the name of action with all these things in mind, did you have a vision or an idea of what the piece would become?

Miguel: The one thing that has stayed closest to my original conception is the spatial design of the piece. I knew I wanted an “unusual” configuration with screens, the multiple surfaces for video projections. I wanted to create a deflection and disorientation from what is front and what is back. Aesthetically, I thought I was going to make something very different than what happened. I had been researching the brain, watching boring DVDs, reading books, and so much of that research was dry. I suspected that the piece would have a dryness to it, or a kind of rationalism to it, like a “powerpoint piece,” or the “lecture-demonstration–performance, ” where there’s an overhead projector, everyone’s wearing regular clothes, the house lights are on, and that’s it. What I did not expect to make was a big ole’ mutha-fuckin’ spectacle.

[laughs]

“And lose the name of action” at MANCC, Photo by Chris Cameron

Marissa: Were there segments in the work that were based on improvisation, or was there set choreography?

Miguel: There is some. Hilary [Clark] and I have little improvisational moments twice in the piece, both when I go over to her when she’s sitting in the chair and she gets up and we kind of talk, we talk and then we move and we talk, and then later, when we’re both screaming text and throwing each other around, that’s improvised, and then the section where we’re running around in the dark, that’s improvised, and it’s very short. I think there’s one other section that’s improvised by KJ [Holmes] and Luke [George].

The interesting thing for me was trying to find seamlessness between what is known and what is not known, or what is set and what is not set. I’ve been disappointed that there hasn’t been more writing on the actual movement aspect of the performance. I feel the movement is a really big achievement of the piece, and certainly inside the larger trajectory of my own work, because I was trying to capture something about the strangeness and surprise of improvisational movement, and the way in which value is dispersed in all these different directions. If I get up and say, “I’m going to create this action, this sequential analog of action,” I’d be using a choreographic method for conventional dance material. I feel like the choreography of this piece is a real success because the movement reflects the spatial values, the temporal values, and the dramaturgical values of improvisation, which was my vested interest in the making of this piece.

“And lose the name of action” at BAM, Photo by Bylan Douglas

Marissa: I think the reason why there’s some emphasis on the text is simply because of the text becoming a centerpiece at points. It’s also easier for people to attach value to language.

Miguel: Sure. Always.

Marissa: Some people enjoyed your use of language, and others found it totally problematic, but I haven’t heard anyone say that about the dance, or that it is a dance. I was definitely invested in the text, because I’m invested in it. But because of it, and the style of the costumes, there’s a way in which we could characterize what you’re doing as experimental theater. It’s curious to me that because you choose to use a script, or you have a song, suddenly the dance is called into question.

I don’t think your piece is about theater in a way that a person could interpret it to be about theater. The parts of just dancing were where I felt inside of the piece. I felt empathic responses to this idea of disintegration or devolution from the relationship between action and sense and action and language. It made me remember experiences of my own body making sense to me, and not making sense to me, and the feeling of something being lost to me in the process of trying to understand it. That’s a crazy thing to choreograph, or direct!

Miguel: That loss that you’re describing, or detachment—estrangement, even, from a body’s experience, is for me a huge conundrum working in a form where the space of the person doing it and the space of someone watching it will never be the same. All kinds of things are projected onto that experience because somehow that experience is often valued as a visual rendering. If you come from dance, your body is trained to cohere, and integrate information, and that comes with all the baggage of visual rendering.

Really, dance is an unfolding proposition. We are so concerned with our presentation of ourselves, but I am interested in an experience of dance that is away from that. This body is central to allowing me to go away. If I didn’t have this body, I wouldn’t be able to go away because I wouldn’t be there in the first place. When I think about all the different places I was in the course of making this piece, geographically or emotionally—despair, love, abandonment, fear, mortality, just so many crazy places I went to, in myself, in this body, I experienced these things, I went through these things, and somehow I’ve always wanted dance or performance to accept that multiplicity, and to propose it, or offer it, because I don’t have an investment in coherence, actually, or in believing that things arrive in integrated ways.

“And lose the name of action” at BAM, Photo by lan Douglas

Marissa: Maybe that’s a way to talk about the script, as well. I’m thinking about the number of times in the piece when people were uttering and you didn’t know what it was, when KJ and Luke were talking and you don’t know what they were saying, and both Hilary and Michelle [Boulé] have these moments of talking to themselves, or even moving like they’re schizophrenic, or as if they are doubled. It took me a long time not to be frustrated with that and to realize that I can just watch their mouths move.

Then, in the video, there is a lapse between when you’d see Paul [Duncan] speaking and when you’d hear his speech, which I loved. It’s a crisp, clear depiction of one’s consciousness being muted. The piece had many different modes of speech; singing, talking to yourself, silent soliloquies, dialogues, and that literal script, when the performers were holding those folders, and yelling “fuck you.” At that moment language takes over. What is your experience of that moment in the piece, and how is that relating to the other elements of the piece?

Miguel: Well I love that it’s like this weird rupture, “and now we’re talking and you can hear it.” You can understand it, but it’s also this obtuse argument, and it’s this bad acting thing—we’re trying to be good actors, but we’re not very good actors [laughs]—and we’re reading a script because none of us could memorize the whole thing, or anyway—Ishmael [Houston-Jones] probably couldn’t [laughs]. We’re just enjoying something about it. I’ll also just put forward that rarely do I ever experience anxiety about things being different from each other, inside a thing.

I guess it was my early training with Joe Goode, where so much of the compositional training with Joe was juxtaposing things right next to each other, and sort of living for the frisson between the two things, and then just stepping back and enjoying the way in which meaning exists in these relationships between events. That compositional training landed so deeply in me, it’s almost like I found my home in that idea and it’s something I’ve employed and deployed ever since.

The idea that all of a sudden you can just be dropped into this crazy little Grecian situation comedy is really satisfying. So I always really enjoy that part, because I get to just play off Ishmael, who is so funny and ridiculous and game for anything, always. It’s also this weird father-son thing for me, like when you go off to college and you come home and you’ve read all those great books, and your Dad says these boring old things and you’re like, “Ugh! You don’t know what all the new books are saying!” The kind of hateful way that young people can be, it taps into a lot of those archetypes for me.

“And lose the name of action” at BAM, Photo by Bylan Douglas

Marissa: There’s a way where it felt like an assault, when you were screaming, and that was the only time in the piece where it felt like there was an assault, like you were trying to test our ability to sit there, which, for you, is tame [laughs] compared to other things.

Miguel: That’s interesting. That’s nice. Yes—and it’s all words, doing that. It makes sense. Certainly in my Dad’s situation, words have been used in all sorts of fucked up ways, like his idiot physical therapist, or the words of that idiot doctor. Words become so powerful there, and it’s enraging, because you’re having this different physical experience and the person is like, “Clearly, this person is…” and you’re like, “How could they be saying that? I’m right here. I’m the person who knows what the fuck is going on.”

Marissa: There’s a lot of rage in that.

Miguel: There’s huge rage in the way language then becomes the de facto way of constructing meaning, or it’s the reliable way. It’s like fuck you, all I have to do is touch this person to know that they’re tired, or sick, or hungry. There are so many other ways of experiencing knowing.

I’m just getting flashes of memories of participating in public demonstrations, and of my mother, a Spanish speaker in a primarily English-speaking country. Throughout my Dad’s crisis, all of the medical professionals flat-out ignored her; “Here’s this woman who doesn’t speak English, let’s ignore her.” She was the person who knew better than anyone what was going on with my Dad, but her knowledge was not respected. She was incredibly frustrated and angry as a result of that. I’ve been so aware in my life of when people wanted to be heard and couldn’t be heard. Being bicultural you understand really early on that he who holds the language holds the power. Of course you’re going to want to fuck with language. You’re like, “what is this fucking tool?”

An e-mail exchange from Nov. 1 – Nov. 3 2012

Choreographer Daria Faïn and poet Robert Kocik spoke with CC Co-Editor Marissa Perel about their opera/Greek tragedy/choral poem “E-V-E-R-Y-O-N-E,” scheduled to open October 31, 2012 at New York Live Arts. Due to Hurricane Sandy, the production was canceled, but is now rescheduled for February 8-March 2 2013. In an e-mail, Robert explains why the hurricane is part of the process, describes his intended installation, “LOBBYING (acts of re-English),” and shares archival research.

Marissa: I am so sorry to read that your performance at New York Live Arts has been cancelled. What a wild turn of events since our interview! Would you like me to wait to publish our interview until the show is rescheduled?

Robert: The hurricane does not, did not, exist separately from the performance of E-V-E-R-Y-O-N-E. It’s part of the show. Our part is to see how so. Because this work comes out of nowhere (speaking for and from the libretto) it can neither be created nor destroyed, not even by a superstorm (can only be informed by). Above all, E-V-E-R-Y-O-N-E is a ‘spell’. An amulet. It’s an act of cosmogenesis-by-phones. The hurricane is just one small event in this work’s total waveform.

The performance has taken place in this way, as this part of the performance—as not having happened at NYLA and happening in every other way (like this letter to you). Our lead vocalist suggests that the work conjured the storm. Another performer noted that the time-elapse satellite photos of Sandy followed the formation of the ‘Belly Button’ section of the performance (see Daria’s diagrams).

As a choir we simply must learn from this experience and become more fully and carefully aware of the potency and scale and intimacy of our practices. We mean well (or we wouldn’t make a sound). Another way to look at it: as E-V-E-R-Y-O-N-E is one vast amulet (or one long algorithm working toward an all-inclusive well-being), who knows how much more destructive this storm would have been, or how less luminously jarring, had it hit without this safeguarding.

Which is to say, it would be perfectly in keeping to publish your article now, at this point in the performance. By the way, there is also the other show that didn’t happen as planned (as one of the strophes in E-V-E-R-Y-O-N-E states: “things are things that turn out otherwise”), i.e. the exhibition (called LOBBYING) (acts of re-English) that I was about to install in the lobby at NYLA to accompany the performance. Here are some images of this otherwise unmanifest commoning museum).

1. Detail of the kleroterion (the first democracy having realized beforehand that only selection of public official by chance would prevent further oligarchy, autocracy and plutocracy.)

2. The revolving shelving for the reading area that was to be set up (with the kleroterion in the background):

3. Titles of some of the texts filling the shelves:

Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle, Silvia Federici

Women and the Gift Economy, ed. Genevieve Vaughan

Caliban and the Witch—Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, Silvia Federici

The Natural Economic Order, Silvio Gesel

Sacred Economics, Charles Eisenstein

Women, Community and the Hormel Strike of 1985-86, Neala Schleuning

New Money for a New World, Bernard Lietaer

Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress, Lawrence Lessig

Social Credit, C.H. Douglas

Aladdin’s Lamp, Gorham Munson

The 99%, the Editors at Alternet

The Web of Debt, Ellen Hodgson Brown

People Money: The Promise of Regional Currencies, Margrit Kennedy

Energy Plan of Western Man, Joseph Beuys

Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord

Diary of a Radical Cancer Warrior: Fighting Cancer and Capitalism at the the Cellular Level, Fred Ho

The Almost Perfect State, Don Marquis

The Chiapas Rebellion: The Struggle for Land and Democracy, Neil Harvey

The Right to Useful Unemployment and Its Professional Enemies, Ivan Illich

The Looting of America, Les Leopold

The End of Money and the Future of Civilization, Thomas H. Greco, Jr.

Just Give Money to the Poor, Joseph Hanlon

Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare, Frances Fox Piven

So Rich, So Poor, Why It’s Hard to End Poverty in America, Peter Edelman

A People’s History of Poverty in America, Stephen Pimpare

Why Global Poverty—Think Again, Clifford Cobb & Philippe Diaz

The Theory of the Four Elements, Charles Fourier

Debt: The First 5,000 Years, David Graeber

The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, Peter Linebaugh & Marcus Rediker

Debt and Economic Renewal in the Ancient Near East, ed. Michael Hudson

Women and the Pamphlet Culture of Revolutionary England, 1640-1660, Marcus Nevitt

Worlds Apart: The Market And Theater In Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750, Jean-Christophe Agnew

Liberty Against the Law, Some Seventeenth Century Controversies, Christopher Hill

The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley, ed. Thomas Corns & David Loewenstein

The Pioneers of Land Reform: Thomas Spence, William Ogilvie, Thomas Paine, Unknown Author

Lawes Divine, Morall and Martiall, etc., William Strachey

The English Civil War: Papists, Gentlewomen, Soldiers, and Witchfinders in the Birth of Modern Britain, Diane Purkiss

Common Sense, Thomas Paine

The World Upside Down, Christopher Hill

The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth As Revealed in the Writings of Gerrard Winstanley, the Digger Mystic and Rationalist, Communist and Social Reformer, Lewis Henry Berens

The Magna Carta Manifesto, Peter Linebaugh

In the Shadow of the Oracle: Religion as Politics in a Suriname Maroon Society, H.U.E. Thoden van Velzen

Vac—The Concept of the Word In Selected Hindu Tantras, André Padoux

The Language Encounter in the Americas 1492-1800, Edward Gray & Norman Fiering

Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World, Nicholas Ostler

Dhvani: Nature and Culture of Sound, ed. S.C. Malik

The Conscious Ear, Alfred Tomatis

The Hidden Messages in Water, Masaru Emoto

Choreia: Pindar and Dance, William Mullen

Deep Listening, A Composer’s Sound Practice, Pauline Oliveros

God of the Word: Archetypes in the Consonants, Margaret Magnus

Healing with Form, Energy and Light, Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche

Spaces Speak, Are You Listening, Barry Blesser& Linda-Ruth Salter

Nātya Śāstra, Bharatamu

4. One of the graphic works

5. More graphics

6. A posting of the first English-written laws in the New World, (25 of 37 offenses prescribing the death penalty!) (and a footnote)

7. The Papal Bull that got the Age of Discovery: “claiming all that you see as your own” rolling

8. Of course the 4-hour day Commons Choir button (and it’s 19th century antecedent to helping end the 16-hour workday and child labor)

9. And finally, this call.

Thank you for your wonderful attention!

Luminously, Robert

Marissa: Thank you for the thorough response! Would you like me to post it as an interview?

Daria: I think that would be great. Thanks!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marissa: What do you mean?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*thumbnail image of Ralph Lemon by Dan Merlo

Interview Date: November 9, 2012 (in Adrienne’s big yellow truck with Gillian Walsh)

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Choreographer and performer, Adrienne Truscott, talked with CC co-editor, Marissa Perel while driving to help with Hurricane Sandy relief efforts in the Rockaways. They discussed Truscott’s LMCC residency at Governor’s Island, being alone in the studio, working with jornaleros, and the trials and travails of being a Wau Wau Sister. Truscott premiers …Too Freedom... at the Kitchen Dec 8-9 & Dec 12-15 2012. 

Marissa: So, it’s your birthday.

Adrienne: Yes. A year ago today I was at a mansion in Australia performing at a music festival. I was standing among a group of girls who looked like they woke up in a magical meadow after losing their virginity to unicorns.

Marissa: [laughter].

selected google image result from “indie boho headband” aka post-unicorn coitus. stylehive.com

Adrienne: You know, those girls at music festivals with the woven, Native American style headbands with their hair mussed up on purpose with full make up. The look is like the “Summer of Love.” So, that was a year ago, and today I am with 2 lovely ladies on my way to help out in the Rockaways.

Marissa: I can’t believe what’s happened at the Kitchen.

Hurricane Sandy’s damage to the Kitchen, Nov. 1, 2012. Photo by Sarah McSherry http://theperformanceclub.org/2012/11/apres-le-deluge/

Adrienne: 2 feet of oily water surged through the whole place. The newly built bathroom has been destroyed. The desk that is the bane of Neal Medlyn’s and Gillian Walsh’s existence has been swept away. One entire wall has been torn down, but everyone is working to re-build it fast. Of course it just so happens, guess who is supposed to have the next show there? Me. So, the date has had to be rescheduled. It’s funny because this is the second time that I haven’t been able to show.

Marissa: What is the other show that didn’t work out?

Adrienne: It was called Bermuda ($$) and it was supposed to happen at P.S. 122. It was a site-specific indoor-outdoor thing that had to be canceled.

Marissa: Has it ever been performed?

Adrienne: No, one of the sites for that piece literally disappeared and then the performers couldn’t reschedule to another date, so it evaporated. It was a close call, but I’m glad this new piece won’t be wiped away. Its been the same issue with scheduling, though. I travel so much with the Wau Wau Sisters that it’s hard to nail down time to rehearse with people, so the piece utilizes a lot of different people that have been available at the random times when I have, including whomever is working at the Kitchen during my run.

I had a one month Process Residency at Governor’s Island this Summer, and I started asking day laborers to come into the studio and work with me, instead of say landscaping or painting. So, they’d come in and dance with me in the studio.

Marissa: Will they be in the performance at the Kitchen?

Adrienne: Yes, they will.

Marissa: What is the process of working with them like?

Adrienne: I didn’t work daily with them – they know what they are being asked to do before they show up, on the day of the performance. They are paid the hourly wage or going rate they are paid by contractors. Likewise, other people who appear in the dance or work at The Kitchen are paid the hourly wage they normally make for their ‘day jobs’.

Marissa: How does that relate to the title of your show …Too Freedom…?

Adrienne: Well, I was at Governor’s Island doing this amazing residency in this beautiful studio, and I had never had a residency before. I thought, “I’ll make this piece this month before I go on tour.” But then none of my usual collaborators could come, and I was alone. No one would know if I went there or I didn’t. I’m not the kind of person who walks into a studio and says, ‘and now I will dance!’ It felt like I had too much freedom for it to be useful. Years ago, I had a Chinese acrobatics instructor and he would say, mostly of Sarah Michelson – we were all with LAVA at the time.

Marissa: When?

Adrienne: A century ago! No, more like 12-13 years ago. I would say that Sarah Michelson in her intellectual and psychological make-up is not a natural acrobat. I don’t know if she actually enjoyed doing, but it made us laugh a lot. The teacher didn’t speak English so well, but he had these phrases that he would deploy. He’d say ‘too freedom’  to Sarah. She and I then adopted it as our own when we felt we were indulging in or presented with too much freedom – or thought we beheld someone else having ‘too much freedom’ – it became our social and personal vernacular.

[laughter]

I kept hearing his voice in my head during the Summer residency. It was hard to be there by myself for hours and hours on end without constraints.

Marissa: That’s hard for me, too.

Adrienne: Is it hard for you, Gillian?

Gillian: Well, I dance by myself all the time, but not to make something.

Adrienne: Right, like, it just feels forced. I had to go into my Deborah Hay brain of just starting in some way, and then just keep going. I was making jokes to myself on my recent tour (with the Wau Wau’s) that I’m not spending enough time rehearsing this piece. Like, “Well, it can always be an improvised solo!” And now I feel like that is what I’m doing. It embodies the title most. I just work on it whenever I have free time where I’m touring, and that doesn’t depend on anyone.

“Knees and Trees” Photo by Adrienne Truscott

Marissa: Does that feel like it goes against your acrobatic training?

Adrienne: Well, I have a dance background where I learned improvisation and I used to do it. The older I got, the more I veered away from it. There’s not a lot of performed improvisation that I enjoy, but now I’m going for it.

Marissa: Where did you train?

Adrienne: I studied dance at Wesleyan University, where the focus was more on composition than technique. Then I  moved to New York to be in the kind of improvy-Judson scene. I got whisked away in the acrobatics, circusy world, and kept going with that. I worked with Sarah Michelson and David Neumann, and made my work on the side. Then I developed the Wau Wau sisters with Tanya Gagne 12 years ago.

Marissa: Would you characterize the Wau Wau Sisters as performance art? You talk and sing in your performances as well as performing trapeze and acrobatics.

Adrienne: Yes. I often describe our work as ‘circus-comedy-cabaret.’ That description makes me want to vomit, but it is the best for what we do. It’s a performance art piss-take on all those genres, which is rarely noticed here in NY, but has many nomadic homes abroad. I think New Yorkers take its showiness at face value, but there is always more beneath the surface.

[We pause to take in the destruction in the Rockaways, looking at a block of storefronts burned to the ground. We park on the street nearby and Gillian leads us to Occupy Sandy workers. For more, read my recent Art21 blog post on the experience].

En route back to Brooklyn:

Marissa: What’s one of the hardest venues you’ve ever performed at?

Adrienne: Well, Tanya and I have had an ongoing gig on a cruise for lesbians. It sounds like it would be all cute and empowering but it’s actually one of the most conservative audiences we have ever dealt with. For many of the women there, it’s the only place where they are “out,” there are many Southerners and Midwesterners on the cruise.  I totally it would be like Michfest, but nope! We’ve had audience members walk out of a show there because we did a parody on Catholic school girls. I was like, “If you’re that religious, what are you doing on this boat? It’s not like I’m going to tell the Pope on you!” On our recent trip to Australia we actually had a death threat.

Marissa: What? How is that possible?

Adrienne: It had never happened before. Some misogynist-religious-extremist was threatening to kill me and Tanya and our audience members if the show was allowed to proceed. We had a full-on security detail and armed officers in the theater every night. Metal detectors were at the doors.

Marissa: But why? Because of nudity? Use of religious symbols?

Image credit: streeteditors.com

Adrienne: The name of the show “The Last Supper,” and on the flier is an image of a fish, a bible, grapes, and us naked with the words covering our body parts. It was a target for an extremist. Meanwhile, if you ever want to get a posh hotel upgrade, and an escort, get yourself a death threat!

*thumbnail image credit: www.irishtheatremagazine

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Choreographer Daria Faïn and poet Robert Kocik spoke with CC Co-Editor Marissa Perel about their opera/Greek tragedy/choral poem “E-V-E-R-Y-O-N-E,” scheduled to open October 31, 2012 at New York Live Arts. Due to Hurricane Sandy, the production was cancelled, however in a series of posts exclusive to CC, Faïn and Kocik relate their process. In Part 2, the artists discuss working with a libretto, historical research, Chinese energetics, money as a shared resource, and levels of engagement with the work.

Marissa: Is there a process of transmuting the pain from the use of language as a system of power in order to be able to work on the phonemic level? How do you go from that awareness of oppression, and how that lives in the body, into a different level of awareness?

Robert: Your question is exactly the project of the choir. We move the language out of the place of power and into a vulnerability, admonishment. One of our characters is “the optative,” which is the voice of beginning, pleading, wishing things were otherwise. The optative voice doesn’t exist in the English language, though it does in others. We don’t have an emotional tone for that, or for resolution, or seeking resolution.

Daria: One of the reasons why I enjoy working in this mode is that I am a natural mediator. It’s very different than choreographing a dance piece. I am working from a libretto, and just activating the scores, creating clarity, making the scores come to life. It’s very liberating because it’s about observing the people, and creating ways for our awareness of one another to come into focus.

Marissa: You’re working from a libretto? Is this an opera?

Daria: Yes, it’s an opera.

Robert: It’s a musical.

Marissa: But it’s a tragedy.

Daria: It’s a Greek tragedy.

Robert: It’s a choral poem.

Daria: It all started when Robert gave me this book, The Many Headed Hydra, and I read this history of America as a tragedy. The book really crystallized my understanding of America because I’m not American, and I’ve never completely understood this culture. I thought, “we have to use this, and we have to make a tragedy in order to try to heal this history.” We already had the choir so it made perfect sense to use it for this concept.

Robert: Yes, to tell this story not with language, but through language.

Marissa: Which started in the perineum of J.P. Morgan (laughing).

Daria: Exactly. It started in the perineum! Well, it’s interesting because the kidneys rule the sexual organs in Chinese energetics, and they are also considered the “Ministry of Finance”. Each of the organs corresponds to a different governing body.  The heart is the Emperor, the lungs are the “Ministry of Justice,” the digestive organs are the “Ministry of Agriculture,” and the liver is the “Ministry of War,” extending outward from vision, saying, “I want this, I want that…”

Kidney energy begins in the perineum, is the “Ministry of Finance,” and is about the resource of water. When I performed “Begging” as part of the process of this piece, I was envisioning preparing the earth to receive water. Have you heard of the book, Blue Gold? It is all about the precious resource of water.

Robert: The commons was a shared means of subsistence for people, for their livelihood. It helped people survive. We are considering money as part of this shared resource. We’ve been working hard to raise money, Daria performed “Begging,” we raised money through U.S.A Artists, and have a benefit committee. This is not just to support the work practically, but to also call attention to money as a resource as part of this practice. We have a part of the performance that is about working with the fire element in the kidneys, which is all about money.

Marissa: It seems like your process for the performance and production of the piece is a total experience.

Robert: Yes, it is definitely meant to be full circle.

Marissa: I wonder what it is going to do to the audience? Is it meant to affect the audience on this very deep energetic level?

Robert: Well, we are just doing it. We have this material worked out that is for us to move through this deeper level, but we don’t expect it to affect everyone this way.

Marissa: E-V-E-R-Y-O-N-E is a fusion of your respective art forms – language and movement coming out of your healing practices and combining to create a kind of “energetic opera,” but you’re saying that the audience can appreciate it on the level of art without going deeper?

Daria: It took so much work to integrate all of these levels [of experience], and I’m always afraid it won’t be understood that way by the audience. People want to take things at face value, and are not necessarily open to listening on a deeper level. Or it’s interpreted in a superficial way for a snap judgment.

Marissa: That’s the American way.

Daria: Yes, it is. For us, it’s a tremendous opening to a new way of working, but I feel that normally when people see a certain set of references, certain things are assumed or misinterpreted, and the reality of what we are dealing with then gets over-generalized. If you have time and are open to seeing this on a deeper level, then it can have a deeper effect, but otherwise you might not share our perspective.

Robert: At the same time, I’m not an apologist for our work and for our practices. A line that comes up often in the piece is, “part of what is said is what can’t be said.” So, the unspoken is part of what language is. You can’t separate the two. The reason we know words can’t say everything is because of words. So, we’re in the tacit there. We’re coming into and out of the tacit in the unspoken and the unspeakable all the time. If I can say it, I’m also not saying it.

I like to describe what the practices are because that might be all that people have. They might not practice it themselves, so if they can hear me describing it wholly or well enough it might be what they need to understand. Whether your epiphany happens through words or movement or stillness or conundrum, it’s kind of all the same.

Marissa: That’s the interesting thing about what Daria is saying. You can see this piece and choose your own adventure depending upon which level you choose to engage with.

Robert: Yes, like Daria said, we don’t want to give people their experience.

Marissa: That alone is a revolutionary sentiment about performance, versus the way the word “production” is exactly meant to be a product.

Robert: For instance, we have sonic sequences to stimulate the endocrine system. Do they really do that? For me, when I put them together, they do. I put them together over a span of 3 weeks to figure out how to circulate peptides to make emotion have equal power in every part of your body. It’s the adventure of experimenting with it. Maybe this doesn’t work for some people, but it’s the radicality of this gesture that makes me invested. I’ve taken it this far, so if this isn’t what stimulates your endocrine system, then what does? I’m showing that sonic sequence can influence biochemical processes. If your process is different, that’s also real. Still, I’m interested in people really knowing that I’m dealing with this.

Marissa: Well, it is the fullest way to talk about it, as we have in this conversation. I know for Daria, being an explorer of energetic states and being a teacher of healing practices have always played such a fundamental role in your artistic process, but at the same time you have this dance training, you can choreograph. In your work, these methodologies commingle, or play against one another.

Daria: Traditional dance is meant to do both. It doesn’t keep them separated. They were looking to do something very specific to the audience, it is a science throughout the centuries, and it’s not by accident. I always feel like as contemporary artists we’re saying that we’re interested in affecting the audience, but I don’t know if we really are.

This year I saw a dance company from Bangalore at the Joyce, and I got out and asked, “What else can you do?” The level at which I was moved in my body and spirit – I was just completely elevated. I felt really humbled as an artist. The form they are working with is totally full. It reinvigorates my work with the choir because I want to invest my knowledge of all of these levels of experience into it, into the complex organism of the group.

Interview Date: October 24, 2012

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Choreographer Daria Faïn and poet Robert Kocik spoke with CC Co-Editor Marissa Perel about their opera/Greek tragedy/choral poem “E-V-E-R-Y-O-N-E,” scheduled to open October 31, 2012 at New York Live Arts. Due to Hurricane Sandy, the production was cancelled, however in a series of posts exclusive to CC, Faïn and Kocik relate their process. In Part 1, the artists discuss the formation of the Commons Choir, phonemes, prosody, and freeing language from systemic and institutional oppression.

Marissa: How was the Commons Choir conceived?

Daria: It happened in 2008. Robert and I made an installation in the vault of the J.P. Morgan building downtown, a dark room, the base of J.P. Morgan, which we called the “Perineum of Wall Street.”

Marissa: A deep, dark place! [laughter]

Daria: Robert and I did a lot of research on darkness, how it affects the body and how it affects language. We bridged a healing practice with a poetic practice in the dark. That’s where the choir began; we like to say that the choir was incepted in the perineum!

Robert built a beautiful installation that held 8 people at a time. So we had 8 people in the dark, making sounds, and we were just experimenting. It was there that we started to work with phonemes. We had a phrase that Robert found from Rudolf Steiner, that if all the phonemes of the universe could be sung together, we will create another universe. So we were all in the dark and making these sounds, and that was the beginning of the choir.

Photo by Daria Faïn

Robert: Speech sounds are part of a cosmogenesis. Our body formed around these sounds to say them. In English there are 40 to 45 sounds to our speech. In the J.P. Morgan building we started with a score, “all at once,” which was for everyone to make all of these sounds at once, which was like starting from the beginning of the cosmos. Then we had the “phonemic emanation,” where we reenacted the sequences of sounds that are the origin of speech, which ones came first, which ones after. It’s possible that this is the first time this kind of thing has been done in English. We also did a score called, “the garland of letters,” of specific phonemic sequences.

Photo by Daria Faïn

Marissa: What were the performers doing with their bodies while they were following the sound scores?

Daria: In the beginning it was very open and experimental. We didn’t have an agenda besides listening to what was happening in our bodies. Then Robert came up with a concept called “braids” stemming from his Vedic studies. We started to really feel what each of the phonemes were doing in the body, and what processes were occurring inside us.

We were interested in the research of Hans Jenny, and Cymatic theory. There was a system of passing sand over vibrating brass, and the grains would settle in very clear patterns. This was done with water and petroleum as well. Dissonant vibrations would disrupt the patterning. We realized that this was probably what was happening in the body as well, so we started applying some of the Cymatic theoretical components to the body.

Photo by Daria Faïn

Marissa: I remember in your Qi-Gong class, you showed an exercise for purifying water in a glass with our Qi. You showed pictures of different pollutants getting cleared away by Qi. Does this relate to Cymatics when applied to physical movement?

Daria: Yes, it is very connected. Frequency and vibration are everything that we are, do, and make. When you’re putting intention into that vibration, you are affecting your own cellular make-up, and you start consciously relating to the cellular make-up of others. We are literally creating ourselves through speech. We’ve tried applying empiric…how do you say it, “empyrique?”

Robert: Yes, “empirical.”

Daria: So we’ve tried applying empirical methods to prosody to understand all the possibilities for embodying these sounds.

Drawing by Daria Faïn

Robert: One of the rudimentary experiences we’re working with is how utterly susceptible we are to sound, to tone, to presence and intention. We literally form another when we meet. We configure each other. We didn’t want to call it “vibe.” I like “vibe,” but we settled on “prosody.” Prosody is composing with the material of which we’re made, but more importantly, the medium in which we relate to one another, this is prosody. It’s what we call “the prosodic body,” composing inter-relationship with sound, tone, gesture, and movement.

Marissa: So what does it mean to be making this performance with trained performers of one form or another? Do they need to step out of their training or area of expertise to step into this way of relating? What is the process of working with the group?

Daria: Something with this form is that the more you practice it, the better you get at it, but it’s also very immediate. The moment you start with it, you start to change and notice things. Some of the people we’re working with have been here since the inception, and others are completely new. It’s very different than the way you’d work on a traditional production.

I didn’t choose the performers. Sometimes I asked a performer to participate, but others I would have never met otherwise. Everyone has a very different background and understanding of the work; it’s a very eclectic group! We’ve been working with everyone’s unique way of understanding, and at the same time trying to reach a greater understanding that is beyond our individual perceptions.

Robert: A lot of these things are things we just do. They happen, and we aim to have them parallel these empirical approaches. When you’re able to tap into that level of awareness, you experience a healing awareness with these sounds. We’re working with a large group in production mode right now, but even this is oddly without a huge degree of pressure. We’re existing in a trust and atmosphere that we’ve been working with the whole time. The work should be beneficial; it has to be.

Marissa: How does the concept of the commons enter into the work? It’s political. So, there’s this organic, prosodic process and then another, perhaps allegorical purpose to the choir?

Robert: The premise of the choir is that our current ecological and economic inequities and crises are a direct result of the sonic and connotative qualities of Super-power English. So, it’s influencing the globe, and we’re at the epicenter of it as native speakers, especially being in New York.

Marissa: You’re taking the meaning of the language away from the Superstructure by bringing it down to a phonemic level.

Robert: Yes, and idiomatic, and “neo-creole,” reinvesting the language with qualities it never had. We did a careful study of the commons, and the history of privatization, of English as a carrier of oppression. Has English ever been a language of free people? Has this ever been the land of the free? The concept of the commons has been excluded from American conception of land. Virginia, for instance, was founded by the Virginia Company, which brought indentured workers over here to start making money for stockholders in London. The land was owned by the crown, then the company, then some of the workers who worked through their indentured terms bought land from the company. There was never a dialogue about ownership, or shared space. Territory was never open once the Europeans came. English has only ever been a commercial, mercenary, duplicitous language. America has broken every treaty it has ever made.

Interview date: September 21, 2012 (via Google Hangout)

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New York based performer, choreographer, writer and teacher, Jack Ferver spoke with CC Co-Editor,  Marissa Perel via Google Hangout about the process of making his new solo, Mon, Ma, Mes, which will be performed October 6 at Le Skyroom for FIAF’s Crossing The Line 2012. Ferver discusses returning to his alma mater, Interlochen as a guest artist, sculpting performance out of chaos, the art of the Q & A and the performance of persona.

Jack: I am back at Interlochen, my old school, where the seed for what I’m doing now really was planted. When I studied at Interlochen, you had to choose between being a theater or a dance major, so I decided to become a theater major, but take a lot of dance classes, and use the dance building at night to make my own work.

Marissa: How long has it been since you’ve been back there?

Jack: I came here a year ago to do a panel, which is why I got invited to make this work here. But before then, it had been ten years since I had been here. I’ve been here since August 31, and I haven’t been back here for so long since I went to school here. It’s like this constant mirror, where the birth of my superego happened. Plus, I’m working with teenagers, and they’re art teenagers, which is twice as intense.

Jack studied theater and dance at Interlochen from 16-18. Here, rehearsing “Mon, Ma, Mes”

When I was studying here, I was in the Bacchae, and the director knew that I had been studying Graham technique, so he said, ‘well, why don’t you choreograph your part?’ So, I’d learn the text by Euripides during the day, and then choreograph in the studio at night. It’s ultimately what I’ve ended up doing here with the students. I’ve taken three plays by Euripides; Medea, Elektra, and The Trojan Women, and I have done my own adaptation of Medea and Clytemnestra’s monologue.

Since it’s Interlochen’s 50th Anniversary, I wanted to use classics, and in the way that I do things, contemporize them. So, in the last scene of Medea, these three teenage lovers appear and have fights about heartbreak. In Elektra, there’s a youtube video of a girl who hates her mom, and misses her brother and her dad, while the death scene of Clytemenstra happens on the other side of it, and there’s a dance to Nikki Minaj’s Young Forever, while Clytmnestra is getting killed. The last piece, Trojan Women, has nothing classical in it. It has a girl hanging out with her friends, and they’re dancing around, and she gets a skype call from her brother in Afghanistan. She then sees him get killed, which is was a contentious incident that was reported to have actually happened to a woman’s husband this past May.

It’s been interesting working with these teenagers because I’ve been teaching them how to use their own lives, and improv, and Authentic Movement to build choreography, and creative writing to build text. So, I rehearse with them and then come home and write, then I rehearse for my show at FIAF, and then I rehearse with them again.

Marissa: How is rehearsing for your show at FIAF?

Jack: I wanted to explore persona, and the “Jack Ferver persona,” the concept of celebrity, and how people build that. So there’s a Q & A session, which I am creating for the performance.

Marissa: Is it with the audience?

Jack: Yes. Then, I am doing a dance.

Marissa: What is the dance?

Jack: Well, it’s a lot. I am processing just having re-performed my trio, I am trying to hear myself at the B-Out exhibition at Andrew Edlin Gallery this Summer. I made it 5 years ago when I was in a very different place in my life, and after having re-performed it, it just felt like self-abuse. I turned to Marc Swanson, whom I collaborated with for Two Alike this past year at the Kitchen. Two Alike was a difficult piece to perform but I felt a sense of efficacy and accomplishment with it. I am trying to hear myself is different, made on a younger body. So, I have been taking elements from it for my solo. I guess that’s where it begins. [Screams] In the tower of art I sit with Martha Graham over a ouija board!

Marissa: [Laughs hysterically]

“Me, Michelle,” Museum of Arts and Design as part of Performa 11.

Jack: This piece for FIAF is about loneliness and control, it’s an issue that is very present for me as an artist. The more you grow as an artist, the harder it gets. You get to see what doesn’t work much clearer and the line becomes thinner. When I made work earlier, it was ok to do things just because, intuitively, but now I am asking myself the questions of “Why?” “What am I trying to say?” “Why am I saying it?” This has come from teaching, and doing dramaturgy with students every day.

Marissa: Tell me more about this hardness. What are you getting out of this process versus the youthful feeling of being free and doing whatever you want?

Jack: Well, for starters, I’m alone. I am continuing to work on the Interlochen show for October 10th, but I am also working on a duet with Joshua Robin Levy for Prelude 2012 at CUNY the night before my show for FIAF.

Marissa: You are busy!

Jack: Yes, that’s how I like it! I think being at Interlochen right now while I am working on the solo is important because I have to look at how I started as a performer. It compelled me to do a lecture-performance at Crossing the Line, where I am going to talk about myself as an artist. I feel like it’s micro to macro dialogue.

[Google Hangout crashes and then restarts, and then Jack sings, “Witchcraft will make the Google Hangout happen!”]

Marissa: You were talking about the Q & A as a micro to macro dialogue.

Jack: I feel like the Q & A explodes what the audience wants from us, what the audience expects, what we want when the audience comes, what we expect. It’s like any relationship, which is part love and part abuse. There’s a duet going on between us and the audience that is part love and part abuse, there’s a duet among audience members and how they relate, and between the artist and himself, who he is and how he relates to himself when performing. In A Movie Star Needs A Movie, I made a Q & A at the end to push this sense of grandiosity.

Marissa: Is it grandiosity or self-reflexivity?

Jack: It’s drawn from a sense of narcissism, like how artists talk about their collaborators by referencing themselves.

Marissa: What do you mean?

Jack: It would be like if someone brought your name up to me in conversation and I said, “Oh, I know her, she is so brilliant. She had marvelous things to say about my work, and how I am breaking the zeitgeist.” So, it’s really not about you at all. I am dealing with the thrust of choreographic control, and how we wrestle with control, this obtuse narcissism and neurotic behavior.

It’s like the beginning of The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, “… a girl gets a scholarship here and a scholarship there, and ends up driving New York like her own private car, but I wasn’t driving anything, not even myself.” That is totally me. I got to Interlochen and to New York by scholarships and by a movie. But I wasn’t driving, I wasn’t in control. I rehearse every day, I meticulously script my material, but I still don’t know what it is. Chaos reigns.

I’m sculpting the performance, my dramaturge is looking at it, Marc is looking at it, but where is it coming from in me? What is it? The thrust of my work is psychology. Making work is a lot of analysis; why are you using that music? Why do I use cold lighting?

“Two Alike,” The Kitchen, May, 2012. Photo by Paula Court

I think I’ve said to you before that artists are the stomach of society and they are digesting the indigestible. It’s a lot of energy to channel and sculpt. I make art so that people won’t feel as lonely as I have felt. That is what I get out of seeing great work, too.

Marissa: How do you allow the chaos to occur to create material that you then sculpt? Where is the place of chaos in your process?

Jack: Chaos happens in the creating of the dance, the script and the performance. The Apollonian tactics for the Chthonic matter, thank you, Camille Paglia, are how you rehearse, cut and edit the original material. So the making of choreography is a meditation on what you are trying to say.

Marissa: Do you know what you’re saying yet?

Jack: When I walk into the rehearsal room I know what I want to say. This new dance is a meditation on loneliness and control. I film it, I look at it; just like Gia [Kourlas] said “just because it feels good it doesn’t mean that it looks good.” I try to write every day and figure out how to line the bullets up, so when you shoot the gun, you hit them between the eyes. So that’s how I metamorphose the chaos.

And then I talk to my collaborators, so I’m putting the chaos out there. In the duet with Josh, I am looking at the dramaturge- performer relationship like the therapist-client relationship, and how the dramaturge tries to get the performer to another place, which doesn’t always work.

Rehearsing “All of a Sudden,” Photo by Al Hall

Marissa: Do you need to get into an intense feeling of isolation to meditate on loneliness and control, or is that feeling always there and it’s a matter of focusing on it?

Jack: I like what you said in the second part of that question. I feel all the feelings, Marissa! All the time! So it’s a matter of tapping in. It leads into deeper questions like, “Why am an artist?” As Martha [Graham] said, “Ambition is not enough, necessity is everything.”

I need to do this. There are certain things that I have to explore as an artist. These compulsions lead me to both difficult and rich places, and they are not easy to separate. For instance, in going to back to my dance-making process, I was very oriented toward repetition in Two Alike because it was about finding a sense of safety in an unsafe childhood. My compulsions, personally and artistically, brought me to where I am today, but they also made me develop traits that made me into a monster.

Marissa: How?

Jack: Traits that I developed in my childhood to be safe, I don’t need as an adult. But I can’t get rid of them. It makes it very difficult to negotiate the world. So, I watched Opening Night. I watched it here, where I grew up, where I took dance every day. It seemed appropriate to think about what it means to be haunted by an inner child, or a super ego. Everyday I’d be rehearsing, going to dance class, theater class, then I’d read Blood Memory by Martha Graham, night after night. This thing about the solitary artist and that it’s self-imposed had a great effect on me, and it illuminates what it is to be back here.

In my childhood I was becoming so isolated, but I was also validated in my isolation by being an artist. This made it ok to cut off, in fact encouraged, to cut off friends and family. It took years to break apart, and it remains a cunning reality. I’ve been doing this since childhood, and the discipline at Interlochen. I’m happiest making art, it’s where I know what to do. I can struggle here.

Marissa: When I saw Two Alike, I interpreted it as a meditation on death.

Jack: How did you come to that?

Marissa: It was something about the eradication of self. When you put the blanket over your head, I saw it as you looking to eliminate the pain by eliminating yourself. But it sounds like for this new solo, you are being present with it, living in it.

Jack: Yeah, that is probably true. I feel it is at once trying to be present with it, and to step in and out of that performance skin.

“Two Alike,” The Kitchen, May, 2012. Photo by Paula Court

Interview Date: March 28, 2012

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Marissa: Your previous work has had a unique humor that I’ve always admired. In this piece, it felt like something was at stake, there wasn’t time for that, except for maybe the horse. What is your relationship to humor now?

Artist, Charlotte Cullinan in “Devotion, Study #1 – The American Dancer.” Image credit: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/02/arts/design/2012-whitney-biennial.html

Sarah: I just think I am funny [laughs]. I think that in most rehearsal processes for my work, though not in this one so much, there is a lot of laughing. I laugh a lot at how extreme I want it to be or how far we have to go. Somehow, that’s where it is. That’s where it lies. But, this show didn’t have any decorative element, really. Obviously, it had a lot of well conceded things about the way it looked, but it didn’t have anything to juxtapose, and I think sometimes that’s where the humor is: in some kind of juxtaposition. The horse and the text, could potentially be seen as humorous in this piece [at the Whitney], and, yet, I think what we did was painful and excruciating. It is also quite funny to do one step only and call it a dance.

Marissa: As opposed to creating a massive spectacle?

Sarah: Totally, yes, to actually deny all spectacle. I keep trying to deny all spectacle, but somehow it ends up still a spectacle.

Marissa: Nicole sweating through her costume with that teased hair and makeup is a spectacle. The text amplified it because she’s working so hard and Jay [Sussman] is reading Richard [Maxwell]’s text where he describes his sexual fantasies when he’s in the shower. Tell me more about how generated the text for this piece?

Dancer, Nicole Mannarino in “Devotion, Study #1 – The American Dancer” Image credit: http://artforum.com/inprint/id=30827

Sarah: I knew that the basic elements of the previous Devotion had to be present in some way. I knew right away that Richard had to write some more text for me. Our relationship has become very cued to that.

Marissa: Was that something where you both sat down and had this talk? Did you both script it?

Sarah: No. I didn’t script it. He has incredible instincts and he knows me. I did ask him for it to be on the subject on art making and devotion, and to replicate some kind of conversation between us, or the development of our relationship in some way. He did one version and I had some feedback about it. We had a couple of sessions together where we worked on it. I think by the end it was like, version five! In Devotion, I had this relationship with curators as part of the work and there was this very loose idea of retrospective. So, having a curator be part of this work in some way felt logical, or felt to have integrity. I liked the idea that I was reading the script, playing myself and Jay was playing Rich. There is a removal on both sides because Rich actually wrote me, and he wrote himself but Jay is reading his part.

Marissa: Did the Balanchine text, “superficial Europeans are accustomed to say that American artists have no ‘soul,’ etc.” have any intended irony behind it?

Sarah: Well, that is funny. There was a talk-back after [one of the performances], and a European man said, “Why would you write that? Europeans aren’t superficial!” He was really mad. I told him, “I didn’t say it, Balanchine said it,” he said, “You put it in!  I just don’t see it this way.” I said, “Yeah, that’s OK. I am just bringing those issues up. I am not saying Europeans are superficial. I am, in fact, European, possibly I am superficial, and I’m willing to go with that.”

[Laughter]

Marissa: I’m curious, on this issue of spectacle we’ve been discussing, how did the dancers warm up for the performance? Were they in public the whole time?

Dancers playing around in “the dressing room” at the Whitney. From left, James Tyson, Eleanor Hullihan and Maggie Cloud. Image credit: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/arts/dance/whitney-biennial-presents-michael-clark-and-sarah-michelson.html

Sarah: The gallery opens at 11 AM, and the show was at 4 PM. The curators, especially Elizabeth, were very concerned. I really didn’t get it at first what they had done. They had, at my request, basically allowed all this real estate to dance. Right away, there was this question of, “Well what’s going to happen in the space when the gallery’s open but the show isn’t happening?” Usually, we when we have a show at 8PM, everyone comes at 2PM to warm up. So, that’s how I decided that everyone would warm up for gallery hours. It was very much in the public gaze. Some days worked better than others. Sometimes, if the dancers were having a rough day, it was hard. There was no place to go. There was a green room that we thought was going to be locked, but it was an art installation, so it had to be open! There was nowhere to get dressed. Everyone was just getting naked. There was that dressing room and a little bit of space behind the risers. If it was really an emergency, or we had to cry we’d go there because there was no other private place to go. It was tough.

Marissa: I remember you mentioning how hard you had to fight to be able to bring water up there!

Sarah: Yeah, it was a big issue because water is not allowed in the galleries. It wasn’t that I had to fight to bring it in. Everybody understood that the dancers had to have water, but no one was able to make it automatically happen. Someone said, “OK, they’re dancers. Not only are they dancers, but they are going to be working really hard and we need water.” It’s required that we’re here from 11am to 6pm, so, we’re going to need water. There’s just no show if there’s no water. Right away, the curators and the Biennial coordinator really understood that. But, it was trying to get the museum to allow that to happen. It was a really difficult question. I think we were allowed like twenty bottles of water. In the end, we all just had our own water and snacks. It was all on the lowdown.

Preparation in public: Moriah Evans and Eleanor Hullihan, at table. Nicole Mannarino and James Tyson on floor. Image credit: http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/reviews/nathan/whitney-biennial-2012_detail.asp?picnum=10

Marissa: What do you think about that for the future, when you perform in visual art spaces, or in the museum again?

Sarah: In that scenario, where it was the Biennial, I totally understood that the gallery had to be open and inhabited. Everyone wanted to be there because everyone wanted to warm up and be getting ready for the show. So, there was no way to make up something else. But there wasn’t any possibility for privacy. Had it not been in the Biennial then that green room would’ve been an actual green room. It was interesting, really tough for the dancers, but it wasn’t a negative experience. I was sick for a lot of it. and I had my daughter, Prudence there. Obviously, she had to have food and drink.

Marissa: So, you brought your daughter to the Whitney?

Sarah: She goes everywhere with me pretty much, so she would come straight after school and be there until at least 5 PM.

Marissa: What is it like to be at this place in your career with a child and a life?

Sarah: It’s tough. It’s great. I feel really lucky. When I got pregnant and when she was born, I had it in my mind that I’d stop [dancing and choreographing]. When I think about it now, she was born November 21st, and I had a show at BAM on January 28^th, and then my piece, Dover Beach, was that June. So, I never stopped! She’s been really a part of that. Her closest friends are the dancers and the dancers are also the babysitters and all that stuff. It’s very beautiful. This line of work is not completely financially viable, so it can be hard part managing a family, to be honest.

Marissa: How do you manage your production costs with your personal need for support?

Sarah: Everything goes into to the work. It wasn’t just performance, it was the production of a an entire piece: designing and building the floor, installing the lights, cables, etc, paying the dancers, paying for rehearsal space. I needed to pay for many hours of babysitting for about six months, which was all for rehearsal. I realized that for most artists installing their work in the Biennial, we’re talking about an object, but I was charged with making a whole experience, a whole world really.

thumbnail image credit: http://www.artfagcity.com/2012/02/29/slideshow-the-cats-out-of-the-biennial-bag/whitneybiennial__80/

Interview Date: April 15, 2012

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Marissa Perel: I am sitting with Jillian Peña in Brooklyn to talk about her show, The Guiding Light, which opens at BAX [Brooklyn Arts Exchange] April 27th and runs until the 29th. I saw a version of this in November, but how long have you been working on it?

Jillian Peña: I started in the Summer, maybe August? It hasn’t been long enough. But, maybe after this show, I feel like this is one show in itself, in its entirety, but it’ll keep on developing to be a show at the Chocolate Factory in December. So, I feel like it’s almost like Part 1. I wish people would actually see both of them and remember this one in their distant memory, months ago. You know, I don’t want it to seem like a work-in-progress, and this other thing, and then the real thing. I want it be like a real thing, like a prelude or something.

Marissa: Who’s in the dance?

Jillian: Two of the same people you saw [in November], so, Cassie Mey, who’s so incredible, and Lea Fulton, amazing. And, then…[you saw] Anne Marie Gover, who is a student at UArts [University of the Arts] in Philadelphia, but now it’s Alexandra Albrecht, and she’s great.

a work-in-progress image from “The Guiding Light” at BAX

Marissa: I remember during the open studio show in November, the dance was in unison, but you had worked on it with each dancer individually and it was the first time they were together. Has this process continued? What is the tension between the individual and the group in The Guiding Light?

Jillian: I want everyone’s attitude be different but I love multiples in my work. It’s a focus on the self, multiplied. In my early dance work I was always trying to cast the people that danced almost exactly the same. So, I came to want the dancers to become part of the same body. This is not natural, and it’s not that they fought it, but they were like, “This is not going to work.” Their energy was just so vibrant and strong and against each other, rather than all together, but it’s not a battle!” I want them to do exactly the same, intricate movement but just completely differently. Have you heard about Laban’s Movement Choir?

Religious cult/ group exercise, Fleyhausen. http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/

He was working on movement choirs where the focus was on all these different bodies…they had to focus on the unity as a group, but they had to do all different movements. And, I feel like I am doing exactly the opposite. I am trying to have exact movements the same but you can see how differently each body does it. It’s coming from ballet. I was obsessed with Russian ballet when I was little, I wasn’t trained in Russian specifically, but the flick of the hands, how the fingers are held, and the carriage is so dramatic. It feels like you’re embodying this historical drama. I am just so obsessed with Russia. I studied Russian for four years. I don’t know if I learned anything [laughs]. So, I feel like I came at it from Russian ballet.

Marissa: There’s something in [Russian ballet] about drama and history and seriousness that’s really different from American ballet, that’s about turnout and showing like a showboat. I think you’re reading the ballet differently in Russian ballet.

Jillian: That’s true, but I am also obsessed with ballet in general right now. This doesn’t trace specifically to Russia. It’s about the sex in ballet. I had this great dance history professor in New Mexico. I think she probably wrote a book about this that I should read, but it was about how the pointed toe is supposed to reference orgasm, actually. All the extensions are about a physical climax.

Marissa: I learned that in sculpture.

Jillian: Oh really?

“Iris, messenger of the gods” by Arthur Rodin, Bronze, 93 cm (36 5/8 inches), 1891 http://hayhill.com/docs/rodin/r21.htm

Marissa: Yeah, Rodin’s, “Iris” is of a woman’s leg in the air with her toe pointed. There was a belief that the sign of climax for a woman is a foot cramp that makes the toes curl. So, this sculpture is of a woman holding the arch of her foot with her toes curled.

Jillian: Ballet is based on that arched foot, too, so it’s based in sex. The leotards used to be ankle-length tutus and they just kept getting shorter to sell tickets to the ballets. And, the tutu was just this crotch shot. I just love the inherent sex, the sexuality of ballet. No matter what, it’s just sexy.

Marissa: What are the dancers wearing for the show?

Jillian: I’ve been looking at religious, liturgical dance costumes, which are incredible. But, I also don’t want it to become about that, you know? I want to reference that but it just holds too much…

Marissa: I see a theme here about liturgy with the title, The Guiding Light, though that’s also the name of a soap opera…

Jillian: It is, and the music for the piece is from a soap opera. I do mean guiding light in more of a religious way. I’ve always been obsessed with religion and I did study at a Baptist ballet school.

Marissa: Growing up?

Jillian: Yes.

Marissa: What was that like?

Jillian: My family isn’t religious. My mom was agnostic. She was like, “Just hide when they all pray. Just hide.” It was weird. They would tell us that our bodies were vessels for Jesus, which is very sexy.

Marissa: Being a vessel is sexy.

Jillian: Yes, it’s like no wonder I became a stripper right after! I had liturgical dance and then went to the strip club. It feels really connected, too. You know? Sex. It’s everywhere. But, I was trained in this physical praising in ballet. We were really taught to praise our bodies.

Marissa: You just did a gesture of going up. Like you’re always looking up to this thing?

Jillian: I like the idea of the vessel, but when you really believe in something it’s like this emptying out in order for that to fill you, which is sexy. So, I am interested in that physicality. Religiosity in a physical sense. What that means. What that looks like.

“The Light” video still, Peña 2006

Marissa: I think there’s a correlation between this emptying out for the Divine, and the emptying out for [choreographic] form. Dancers are being filled by a form that is animating their bodies – the artistry is in how they are instrumentalizing the idea of the choreographer.

Jillian: Ugh, it’s so weird. Maybe that’s why I cannot dance for someone else!

Marissa: But that artistry is very specific and involves just as deep of a skill set as the directing part, right? The reason why I don’t do that is because for me, there seems to [be] something inherently violent about getting rid of something of yourself for that thing to come in, but then I am in awe of it at the same time. I am always curious about how people decide to make versus to dance for someone else.

Jillian: It’s funny because I loved working with Ann Liv [Young]. The boundaries were very clear, where she was in control and you were executing her ideas. There is something about just doing that, and doing it well. But looking back on it, I am also really wondering how much I enjoyed dancing. I’ve always loved barre. I loved the first half of class but I’ve always suspiciously had “injuries” that prevented me from finishing class. I don’t love just dancing, which is weird. I am just, now kind of owning that.

Marissa: Well that’s why dance in your work is so smart. It serves this bigger idea, commenting on culture, society, sexuality. It looks at a bigger picture of how what we are is manufactured by lots of cultural input.

Jillian: The dance doesn’t come to me through my body. It’s very visual. I have all these notes. I’ll just be sitting there and it’s like I choreograph in my mind and in my imagination.

Marissa: Your video work is very much imaginary. I haven’t seen your work in a few years, but I know you used video in Mothership. Is there video The Guiding Light?

Jillian: There is video. I can’t get away from it. There are two live feeds of the performance in this piece. I like how it multiplies them [the performers] exponentially because of its set up. It’s just like, “ding!” There are so many bodies in the space! I love video. It’s so much easier to make  than performance for me.

Marissa: Because…

Jillian: Because I can do it alone. I have control over it. You know the image and it doesn’t change.

Marissa: What is it like to go from having that intimacy with the process and that kind of control to managing time and space with other bodies as a choreographer?

Jillian: I don’t feel like I am completely good at it yet. I feel confused as to what to share with people and I feel so personal about making things. I am not always sure of how to share my intention. At the same time I feel really inspired by my dancers, and this piece wouldn’t exist with different people. I do like feeling inspire by other people, so it’s a step. Mothership was my last big performance, actually. I’ve done a lot of work since then but it’s been in the form of formal studies and readymade exercises. This is the first real performance in a long time.

Marissa: I want to go back to your use of “religiosity,” and probe at it a little bit in relationship to the soap opera theme.

“Go into the light/ don’t go into the light…” http://www.onepagewonder.com/poltergeist_movie.htm

Jillian: At first I was working with the movie, “Poltergeist” and how in the theme there’s a woman who says, “Go into the light. No, don’t go into the light.” I wanted the light to be a signifier, or an actual character. I love the title, The Guiding Light. I wanted the work to border on kitsch, but that pushed it too far into kitsch, so I had to take it back. But, I do love that idea, so I am just trying to imagine it. What does that phrase mean? I feel like it’s very common, like, “I see the light!” The light is some experience. What is that?

Marissa: I always have gone through really intense stuff about that as a healer because I end up encountering healers who have these really stereotypical beliefs about light and darkness. When we’re working, someone will be like, “You need to find the light” or “This needs to have light.”

Jillian: Totally.

Marissa: Or they say, “this is in the dark” and it’s like light = good, darkness = bad. I always laugh about that. I never talk to clients about what they’re going through in that way, and I also feel like that dichotomy comes from religion and it is a system being imposed on someone’s life.

Jillian: Yeah, it’s so ridiculous. That’s totally, exactly what I’m [going for].I feel like Guiding Light is a reference to fake impressions, [and] our plastic version of something higher or transcendent about God, death, and heaven.

Marissa: Or like “finding god.” The only way to be redeemed from committing a crime, or from becoming a drug addict as a celebrity is by “finding god.”

Jillian: Have you read Foucault’s Discipline and Punish?  love that book. I love how it talks about the way we just discipline our bodies into operating in the larger societal body, as if there is a way out of physical punishment through “finding the light…”

book cover http://web.ics.purdue.edu/

Marissa: Will you tell me more about this “flip” [in your work] where something is kitsch and is real at the same time?

Jillian: Yeah, I feel like my work always borders on that. It’s because there’s something in deep sincerity that can be seen as kitsch. When it tips over from one into the other. That’s the interesting thing about the whole self-help thing, or how you talk about New Age healers. How we’re talking about this thing that’s a joke to us, but it’s also sincere for a lot of people – that is kitsch. I’m not a believer, but I really want to [be]. That’s what this piece is trying to embody. I just really wish I believed in the light. Wouldn’t that feel so good, to go towards the light?

Marissa: When you’re saying that do you mean it in a religious way where God is this clear goal?

Jillian: Yeah, I kind of do. I really do wish that I believed in anything. Like, anything.

Marissa: So, that goes back to Foucault, then.

Jillian: It always goes back Foucault [laughs].

philosopher, Michel Foucault http://inthehallofmirrors.typepad.co.uk/

Marissa: I know! [laughs]. I feel scared talking about these things because these things are what cause war and this is real stuff that we are making fun of, and we sincerely are making fun of it because it’s ridiculous.

Jillian: But I sincerely want to be a part of it.

Marissa: Well what about the sci-fi bent of “Poltergeist,” and working with multiples? That’s different than an idea of a god, but it’s still working with something alien watching us, something “out there.”

Jillian: I feel like a lot of our lives are sci-fi now. Like the political situation, the pro-life movement, it seems sci-fi to me. It’s so ridiculous how bodies are being treated, it’s like a fantasy. It seems like some kind of futuristic terror.

Marissa: Like Ursula K. Le Guin was writing about reality, not sci-fi.

Jillian: I don’t think there’s that big of a difference between sci-fi and today.

Marissa: I remember a video piece that you screened at Dixon Place in 2006, where you were multiplied and you looked like an alien.

Jillian: Yes, Siamese Twins. I got in trouble for that because the politically correct term is “conjoined twins,” even though I was creating something virtual that was supposed to be a mythological creature.

Marissa: Ha, well is there a similar desire for twinning in this piece? Are you interested in the dancers being reflections of you?

Jillian: In this piece I don’t think the dancers are me, multiplied. They are different people. But, I do feel like I am comfortable using people with a similar background and body as mine because I can relate in terms of movement. It’s easier. It’s like a more direct translation. Does that make sense?

Marissa: Yes. They are models in a sense, but in this piece they are just referencing themselves.

The Tiller Girls http://www.tillergirls.com/

Jillian: I’m writing my [M. Phil] thesis [at Goldsmiths] on multiples in performance. I feel like it’s a bad word today in contemporary culture to think of unison and the homogeneous. It’s outdated or just not cool. I was looking for answers as to why I do it, basically. That led me to the Tiller Girls, who were the pre-Rockette-rockettes in England. There’s an essay by a German philosopher that said that superficial emblems, like the Tiller Girls, reveal things about culture more than its politics. It makes sense: by looking at art, by looking at TV, we can actually know more about a culture than whatever it says is going on. So, it’s a really good essay. That’s the chapter that I am writing now. John Tiller had troupes that would tour all over the world, and many troupes were made in their likeness, including the Hiller Girls, which was started by Rolf Hiller, and they would perform with guns for the Nazis.  All those groups were individually owned and operated, but were using the same formula. They said propaganda was best seen through entertainment than by directly saying what you believe in. Laban was aligned with Hitler. Did you know that?

Hiller Girls http://www.flickr.com/photos/25763479@N04/5413654403/

Marissa: No!

Jillian: Yes. I mean, there are books written about this, but Cassie Mey works in the Performing Arts Library and she said she saw a letter, or she heard a voice recording of Laban saying, “I am trying to get all of them out of my school” to Hitler.

Marissa: Whoa! I had no idea. It sounds like you’re working on some very important material. It’s funny to think about when we were younger, and you had first moved to New York. I remember you were so fascinated with Vanessa Beecroft, but who would’ve thought you’d end up writing a Master’s Thesis on multiples?

Jillian: I know. It’s crazy. It’s disgusting how much school I’ve been through at this point! Thank god I’m teaching and I’m going to be done.

Vanessa Beecroft, VB60, Shinsegae, Seoul, Korea, 2007 contemporary-art-blog.tumblr.com