Noémie Solomon and Will Rawls discuss DANSE: an anthology, Solomon’s new compilation of writings on contemporary dance.  The anthology uniquely comprises recent scholarship from the last fifteen years and many of the essays are published in English for the first time. As the book weaves a thread among French contemporary dance practitioners and thinkers, it also branches into the work of Europe- and U.S.-based artists and theorists, producing a dynamic portrait of transcontinental currents in contemporary dance and choreography.  The anthology was generated to accompany DANSE, a French-American Festival of Performance and Ideas, taking place in New York City, May 1-18, 2014.

Interview Date: April 28, 2014

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Will Rawls: I am here talking with Noémie Solomon about a number of things in relation to her work as a scholar and thinker and writer of performance, specifically dance, if that’s a fair.

Noémie Solomon: Yes I think so.

Will: And we’re going to be talking about the anthology that you put together for the DANSE festival, as well as some of your future projects. But first, welcome to New York.

Noémie: Thank you!

Will: What are you working on this week in relation to the DANSE festival? What are your responsibilities?

Noémie: The DANSE festival was initiated by the French Cultural Services here in NYC. They’ve invited a string of theater directors across the city to look at and program some contemporary dance artists and companies based in France. And so that gives rise to a different kind of festival: there’s not a single curator who decided on the overall program. Rather than having someone or a structure imposing a choice from the outside, this way of doing produces a grounded, very diverse, sort of rhizomatic program. Each director, I assume, made a decision according to their taste, their preferences perhaps, but also in relation to their specific audience. In this context, Sophie Claudel and Nicole Birmann-Bloom from the French cultural services approached me to take part in the festival in a particular way, or, to take care of what they called an accompagnement critique to the festival – a kind of critical, or editorial accompaniment. And I think about it in terms of a vector, a transversal line that cuts across the events of the festival, or that sometimes follows it, at a distance, running beside it. And the task unfolds across different sites and phases: the anthology constituted a first step.

Will: Beautiful book: DANSE: an anthology, I have it right here.

Noémie: So basically, one of the tasks of this anthology was to provide a singular map or a survey (however incomplete and partial these endeavors are doomed to be) of different theories around contemporary dance that have been elaborated, let’s say, in the last 10-15 years. At stake in this project was to put in relation or in dialogue discourses and authors from the French context i.e. texts that have been written in French but are not translated or often accessed within an English-language field of dance studies.

Will: In reading the book, one really understands the general pervasiveness of French thinking around experiments in dance, specifically in the late 90s and through to the present, which were very influential to me as I moved to New York and became a choreographer. This book sort of cuts open the apple in some way and looks at the various slices. And you mention in the introduction that “anthology” has this root of a “collection of flowers.” How did you come to select the texts?

Noémie: I like the apple metaphor! Yes and I realize I haven’t been able to reread the introduction since I wrote it. [Laughs]

Will: [Laughs]

Noémie: Yes there is something kind of scary, stiffening perhaps, about the project of an anthology, and it was important to remind myself of its etymology: a collection of flowers, a way of organizing the living and the moving. So thinking about the anthology not as a volume of definitive texts, of dead and still bodies, but rather in close relation to practice: to movement and dance. So yes, the relation between movement and discourse is very important here, mapping how certain contemporary dance practices have experimented with the production of discourses since the early 90s. And this trade between theory and movement must also be followed across different cultural contexts. Thinking for instance about how French critical theory has been used and read a lot here in the States.

Will: It’s everywhere.

Noémie: It’s everywhere right. And it is so interesting to me to see what is overwhelmingly used, read, discussed, and conversely, how there is resistance in translating some specific texts, authors, subjects, especially when it comes to more let’s say, experimental or obscure practices.

Will: It’s interesting to think about Gilles Deleuze as someone whose writing has been a reference point for a lot of people who work in experimental ways around dance. And he’s someone who was writing primarily in the 70s and a lot of his major texts were being published about 30 years ago. I can’t remember actually when exactly he died but…

Noémie: I think it’s 1994 or ‘95.

Will: Yeah, ’95, but that only now there is this profound echo and a sort of institutionalization of his work–not in the sense of a foreclosure of his ideas–but precisely because his ideas leave a kind of open-ended or open concept about the body in relation to dance, which is, you know, a very open question.

Noémie: Yes, and I guess Deleuze for instance has been read, used, and re-encountered at different moments in different artistic frameworks, and in the dance field certainly his thought has been circulating for at least fifteen years or so, giving rise to manifold movements. So yes, this kind of trade between theory and practice, and also between history and practice, is something that artists have been engaged with, and that I think is worth looking at. In the 90s, for instance, through the work of the Quatuor Knust in particular, a certain American postmodern dance made a very important appearance on the French choreographic stage. And this experimentation with history, through the study of the dance score, was very important to the formation of a contemporary dance scene in France and Europe. The Quatuor Knust was a collective of dancers–Christophe Wavelet, Dominique Brun, Anne Collod and Simon Hecquet–who came together in the 90s when studying Laban Notation in Paris. They set up a series of significant projects around the re-creation of pieces they deemed emblematic of dance modernity, including a redoing of Yvonne Rainer’s Continuous Project – Altered Daily and Steve Paxton’s Satisfying Lover. They invited a bunch of dancers and choreographers to join them in the experiment, including Alain Buffard, Emmanuelle Huynh, Jennifer Lacey, Xavier Le Roy, and Boris Charmatz at times. This bringing together of different actors around questions of history, memory, and text was instrumental for the dance field in France and beyond. It provided material in relation to the very specific history of dance there, while opening it up to other traditions, histories, influences. Because you know France’s relation to modern dance is very different from let’s say the U.S. or Germany–and without going in too much detail–I think there’s this very important moment in 1981 when the socialists come to power and create these structures to develop and promote contemporary dance across the territory, the Centres Chorégraphiques Nationaux… Here I am… and I want to say, I’m not French. [Laughs]

Will: We have to specify that Noémie’s is not French.

Noémie: There it is. And my knowledge about French culture is somewhat diffracted, coming from Québec. But perhaps this also gives me a necessary distance. Even though I lived in France for some years.

Will: But we’re all convinced at certain times to pretend that we know a lot about French culture. [Laughs]

Noémie: Exactly.

Will: Which is maybe part of what New York is trying out – a platform for understanding of the effects of French dance on our thinking. You know–

Noémie: Yes the effects on our thinking and on our practice… So the establishment of these Centres Chorégraphiques Nationaux was a pivotal moment for dance in France. It enabled the creation of what has been labeled the danse d’auteur… It gave the means to a series of choreographers to develop singular dance vocabularies and styles…

Will: …through having these houses of culture all over France that produced a network in which the modes of production were highly elevated.

Noémie: Yes, houses of culture, and they provided a kind of base, an institutional ground really, for the flourishing of a certain contemporary dance. Which gave rise to a lot of “dance”: through big companies, particular forms of training, given aesthetics.

Will: You sort of mention this in the introduction of DANSE where these practices happening in the 90s in France were very much a critique of the system that has been comfortably in place for a while and that there was a reach to an outside system of thought by reviving a lineage, let’s say, a transcontinental lineage.

I also want to talk about Beatriz Preciado. You mention her in your introduction that she had this productive contraband between theory and practice.

Noémie: Yes, Beatriz has been a very important mentor. I met her while studying in the dance department at Paris VIII. She was teaching “Discourses on the body” and also “Gender, body, performance” which was really unique in the French academic context at that time. I encountered a way of approaching theory and discourse in a new, very dynamic way, in close relation to the making of bodies and experimental practices. Something there felt very meaningful to me, and in a sense, I feel it is through her scholarship that I ended up coming to the States to study. Beatriz is from Spain, but studied with Jacques Derrida at the New School and did her PhD at Princeton. When I first started to study with her I think in 2002, I had barely heard of Judith Butler. I mean, Gender Trouble was only translated in 2005, I think. Fifteen years after its original publication? Which is kind of interesting, given that so much of it addresses French feminism or Derrida’s thought, right?

Will: And so was she working with these Butler texts?

Noémie: Yes. Well really she was drawing an experimental genealogy, cutting across numerous authors, but bringing gender and queer theory into this French academic context, which was wild! Actually her latest book was just translated into English this fall, Testo Junkie.

Will: Testo Junkie?

Noémie: Yes Testo Junkie, as in addicted to testosterone. She engaged in a writing experiment around the history of gender by following a line of what she might call experimental philosophy, or practical philosophy, in which philosophers not only talk about ideas in an abstract way, but actually use their own body as a platform for experimentation. Think for instance of Sigmund Freud and cocaine; or Henri Michaud and mescaline.

Will: Timothy Leary and LSD.

Noémie: Yes and so on.

Will: And was this specifically in relation to theories of queerness she was working on? Or theories of performance?

Noémie: Yes, experimenting with drugs as a means to reflect on and invent modalities of gender production–through and as a series of performances.

Will: So for her, as a scholar, this relation between the body as a platform and the brain as a platform–these were very closely related, intertwining concepts like this “contraband between the body and theory.”

Noémie: So yes, this “productive contraband” between movement and theory, between different, alternative aesthetic practices and critical theory is something she invites us to follow. It is a way perhaps to look at unexpected encounters, messy relations. In a sense it is a call to draw experimental genealogies, to reassess and reinvent the different histories that compose us in the present. And again, this is very important for some choreographic practices that are addressed in the anthology. How some artists at some point have to engage with critical theory, writing, thinking. Staging a dancing body that is always already “linguistic” as Merleau-Ponty would say.

Will: It’s not necessarily that dance is operating alongside theory but rather that theories are developing as an implementation of what dance produces; that dance itself produces knowledge; it has a cognitive aspect.

Noémie: Yes, dance produces a kind of knowledge. For me it’s really important not just to try to impose or assign a knowledge to the dancing body but to see how dance itself changes the ways in which we think about knowledge and what it can do.

Will: Still working with your introduction here if that’s good for you. You also refer to the late José Muñoz. Was he someone that you had worked with or studied with?

Noémie: Yes I did, while doing my PhD in Performance Studies here at NYU. José has also been a vital figure for so many people.

Will: You refer to his idea of the ‘burden of liveness’, in that, in thinking about the present we might actually foreclose the future or that we might foreclose futurity for minority practices or identities that could be expressed through dance. And then Bojana Kunst also talks about the “autonomous dancing body”, a body somehow isolated in the moment of dancing. How can we subvert its isolated expressiveness, by not overly emphasizing its “being in the moment” but by thinking that, in that dancing moment, it reveals histories and maybe futures?

Noémie: Yes, and of course José [Muñoz] is writing in Disidentifications in reaction to the ontology of performance, defined by Peggy Phelan as that which disappears while it is being performed. José reminds us of the political implications of locking up the experience of performance in the present, especially when it comes to certain minoritarian practices. How can we reach out to histories to invent other possibilities? How can we think of experimental dance practices as they create very spacious presents somehow, in which gestures are filled with past moments and are also stepping into futures?

Will: In the anthology the essays are wonderful because although they do collect around certain concepts and certain approaches there is also a wonderful alterity of approaches in talking about dance and choreography.

Noémie: That’s nice to hear. Questions of alterity and diversity are certainly very meaningful to me in such a project. Reading Susan Sontag recently, her journals and also the Rolling Stone interview, I was fascinated to see all those lists of books and texts she creates, or how she says then when having insomnia she dreams of creating anthologies: who to put in relation to whom, what text should be next to this one… and I think this is wonderful… creating those strange, unexpected assemblages over and over again… a weird curating of words, bodies, movements.

Will: Maybe this anthology is a performance that could open up other possible anthologies. This sort of anthology is a pretty rare thing too, in that there are very few anthologies specifically of this period of writing and thinking.

Noémie: It definitely deals with pretty recent texts. The oldest one is actually Chantal Pontbriand’s “Expanded Dance.” And I think it is a key one, first perhaps because it addresses Québécois dance, which is an important site to think about in relation to this exchange between French and American cultures. And also because it constitutes an early utterance of “expanded dance,” a decade before the notion of expanded choreography found its way back on the European contemporary dance scene. But yes, perhaps anthologies do make sense after all, to experiment with bringing things together. And I guess when you organize things, bodies, words in different ways it produces a different kind of knowledge.

One key stake was really to bring some French texts that hadn’t been translated into English, to use this opportunity and platform for translating some crucial essays. And so I decided not to include some texts that I thought were important but maybe available elsewhere. And if the plan goes well, the anthology will be published in French next year so the opposite is also true: the English texts are for the most part not available in French.

Will: Ralph Lemon. And [André] Lepecki is writing in English.

Noémie: Also, it was important to find voices and texts that were speaking about or with dance practices. Perhaps a matter of finding something embodied, visceral, corporeal about the writing.

Will: As you read through and consider the work of people that are writing on dance and for you as a writer also, how do you–when you see dance, what is your experience as a writer when you try and recount that experience in relation to this idea of practice? How do you read dances that you relate to through the practices that are represented?

Noémie: Yes, that’s an impossible question.

Will: I know.

Noémie: But it’s a wonderful question.  You know, I guess for me there’s something about dance making and dance writing that can be thought of not as opposites but in close relation.  Maybe there are ways in which movement and text are holding each other, folding onto each other, and that might be another key point in the book. Dancers repeatedly engage in writing practices, thinking and embodying ideas, putting them into practice and into motion. And that’s something dance writers that I really admire also do, right? They have a way to write about dance that is close to the gesture itself. And I don’t think we need to yet again reiterate this dichotomy between practice and theory, gesture and writing. Quite the opposite: finding bridges perhaps, creating more “productive contrabands.”

Will: Do you have a dance background?

Noémie: Yes I do.

Will: And do you still work in dance or perform as a dancer or rehearse or do you have a practice?

Noémie: Not so much these days really. For different reasons, I had to let go of dancing at a certain time. But also there are different ways of dancing for which we at times may need daily dance techniques, then also different forms of thinking and writing that help us articulate our own practice in relation to a broad set of things, histories, bodies.

Will: It’s this kind of analogous thinking that comes into dealing with dance as a subject matter. I’m a proponent of the reality that dance produces ambiguity and that it’s one of the things it does the best. And that the expanded field of dance – how can choreography be a book or a car or a traffic jam or a protest? These are all ways of producing analogous thinking in order to come closer to contextualizing this thing, which, at its center, produces ambiguity. Recently, at a Performa event titled, Who Can Write On Performance?, Claire Bishop was talking about how when she began to write about dance that she could talk about context and certain aspects of historicity but that when it came to a vocabulary about the dance itself, you know, that’s where she felt herself, if I can put words in her mouth, at a loss for what to say. So, is dance that is always moving the only kind of dance that escapes language? Or, could the dancing that Jérôme Bel produces when, according to Claire Bishop, he “de-skills” dance to the point where it becomes a speech act–could that also be a dancing body that is ambiguous?

Noémie: I love that. I think the question of ambiguity is quite resonant when it comes to the dancing body. I remember many years ago, as I was just about to move to the States, having a short discussion with Peggy Phelan after a dance performance who said to me, “Oh I know nothing about dance. I don’t speak the language.” I remember being struck by this statement, well first because Peggy had written quite a bit and beautifully about dance. And also because I was then myself wrestling with English language, figuring out what Performance Studies was about–what was that resistance about? It is as if you don’t have the experience of having danced for ten or fifteen years, there’s nothing you can say about it–you don’t hold the knowledge. Whereas, I absolutely agree with the idea of ambiguity. Perhaps what dance teaches us is nothing but ambiguity.

So we may say, yes there is a vocabulary, and certainly codes, conventions, histories, but the vocabulary is shifting too, it’s ambiguous, it’s not just in there. And I think it’s fascinating. And I think it’s also why dance has so much potential in universities, in these institutions that basically are designated as cultural producers of knowledge…

Will: …and clarity

Noémie: Yes clarity! Institutions that produce knowledge around clear thresholds of visibility and legibility.

If you’re not dancing, then the way of producing knowledge is through work analysis. For instance, at PARIS VIII University, through the work of Hubert Godard, the movement analysis classes were very important. Basically that was where knowledge would emerge from the experience of closely watching moving bodies. Godard can just, like, riff, just looking at two people standing up from a bench and then seeing micro-things and connecting that to psychoanalysis, critical theory, philosophy et cetera, et cetera. Now he’s working in the medical context looking at what he calls missing gestures. Like what happens when you have a part of your body that doesn’t engage fully, and your kinesthetic sphere, and trying to solve that problem. So he’s doing therapy mostly.

Will: I feel, as a dancer, that talking about the movement itself, wherever on the spectrum that movement lies, whether it’s sort of “not moving” or really active dancing is so important.  Bodies are not only signs or symbols.  Even if you’re looking at or thinking about visual arts practice, and installation, where you can layer and manipulate the body with signs, images, citations et cetera, there are always compelling, slippery qualities of movement that exist in those manipulations.

Noémie: Yeah I agree with that. I strongly believe that seeing dance broadens our experience of dance. Of course it goes without saying. John Martin was writing about that in the 30s. He says this amazing thing about internal mimicry – like I always imagine this little stick figure doing the movement internally. You see Martha Graham dancing there and you kind of do it internally. [Laughs].

Will: And where is that stick figure located? Is it in your gut as you just gestured? Is it in your brain, or is it all over you?

Noémie: Where is it? And how, according to his writing, does it shape this national body, the American subject? It reminds us of how dance is a powerful medium as well. Louis XIV in the 17^th century knew it. And when they created the first art academy it was actually dance, before music, painting. It was recognized that dance is like the military arts, very important in the forming of this national, homogenic, political body.

Will: 5, 6, 7, 8, and now you are a soldier. It’s the obedience that…

Noémie: …you internalize.

Will: And I know there will be another book in relation to this festival.

Noémie: Yes, the second volume will also be published with Les Presses du Reel, part of this New York series, and it will be called DANSE: a catalogue. It will also be a collection of essays, but this time it will include new texts, which I find very exciting. If the idea of the anthology was to collect things that already existed in the world, outlining the state of a field somehow, however partial and incomplete, this publication will be a mixture of some texts that will document and extend the work of the festival that is starting this week [May 1-18, 2014] and some new texts that will explore different themes and issues in the field of contemporary dance.

Will: In reading through DANSE [:an anthology] many of the choreographers and initiators of these discourses and praxes are not necessarily the same choreographers that are presenting work in DANSE, the festival. Well, there’s Claudia Triozzi, Alain Buffard… but what are these newer artists up to? When I think about Francois Chaignaud and Cecilia Bengolea, they’re working through a sort of minorization, a marking of the body with radical kinetics, and theatricality, and voguing and twerking. And when I think about Miguel Gutierrez, who is not in this festival, there’s this elevation of “me”, the specific me, dancing and giving myself to this form. This is very different from Nom donné par l’auteur [by Jérôme Bel], which is a kind of object-oriented ontology–a performance in which objects carry an expressive value comparable to that of a human body.

Noémie: Yes, and perhaps also already moving toward an ethics of things, as André Lepecki’s text in the anthology suggests: de-objectification and depersonalization in favors of circulations of affects, speeds, intensities. But yes, in a sense we started by saying that the anthology is dealing with texts that are pretty recent and yet we already feel that–although I wouldn’t say it’s dated, there are definitely some newer practices troubling this. Perhaps importantly responding or extending what we may call “a conceptual choreography”; bringing in different corporeal erotics, visceral matters, and often inserting singular histories and bodies. So yes, I am hoping the writing in the catalogue will reflect this as well.

I just saw again in Montréal this weekend Rachid Ouramdane’s piece, Far [Loin], which is not a new piece, but I think a crucial one still. It is quite moving, personal, and yet also impersonal in a way; blurring fiction and life. He’s dealing with heavy material: his father was tortured by the French army during the Algerian occupation, and also worked for the same army during the Indochine War. So he’s unweaving these familial and historical threads, folding the colonial and political onto the personal and dancing body in a very affective way. To me these practices are still vital and necessary in the dance field, in France and elsewhere. And of course, we could see Boris Charmatz’s Dancing Museum along those lines: he mentions in his manifesto that one of the things that prompted this idea of creating a dance museum is hearing on the radio that there are something like 180 museums of the sabot in France–wooden clog–but no museum of slavery. No museum of slavery, and no museum of dance. Without equating the history of slavery and colonialism to that of dance, Charmatz proposes that there is something important at stake in how we refuse, collectively, to look at the histories and the meanings assigned to and created by dancing bodies. And of course, for Charmatz, the museum in Rennes has to remain empty. He is experimenting with this constant movement of getting rid of things, dance as the “getting rid of” histories, techniques, this unraveling – deskilling, perhaps, as Claire Bishop may say. And of course it matters that dancers are doing this unraveling. Many very important practices, what they did, and are still doing, is deskilling, unraveling or unworking certain mechanisms, vocabularies, histories, conventions of dance but by operating at the threshold of what dance is. The “threshold”–meaning its interface with the world, with other practices. And to me it says so much about dance and how it can affect our lives.

Will: I think about this with Alain Buffard’s piece [Baron Samedi]: having an international cast, primarily composed of black performers who are dealing with questions of transformation, brings up the politics of authoring your own experience in relationship to French, African and U.S. histories, as well as in relationship to French contemporary dance in Buffard’s context. There are certain examples of people working now with this radical kinetics that is not apologetic about itself moving is coming back into focus.

Noémie: Yes. Radical kinetics as they unleash multiple physicalities and desires and histories. Lately I have been researching Québécois dance history and it’s been so interesting to find these bodies and practices and tremors I wouldn’t have expected to find. In the case of Québéc, strong and at times necessary nationalist politics have tended to harmonize a somewhat diverse ethnic and cultural ground. And of course when it comes to dance there’s this tension because history is a dynamic thing and when you look at the dancing gesture, well if it’s held as being so ephemeral, then it seems to barely exist in history, or, you see the need to foreground it and imagine that it always stays the same. But how can we move, write, and think with barely perceptible and yet always-morphing dancing bodies, as they speak to and queer history in the present?

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Noémie Solomon is editor of DANSE: an anthology which was published in February 2014 at Les Presses du réel. She works as a writer, teacher, dramaturge, and curator in the field of contemporary dance, and is a Mellon postdoctoral fellow in the Faculty of Arts at McGill University, Montréal. She collaborated on a series of dramaturgical and curatorial initiatives in the dance field internationally, including: Dance on Time with iDANS (Istanbul, 2009); the retrospective Move: Choreographing You at the Hayward Gallery (London, 2010); Self-Methodologies at Tanzquartier (Vienna, 2011); the Photomusée de la danse (Festival d’Avignon, 2011); and Solos and Solitudes at Danspace Project (New York, 2012-13). 

Will Rawls is a choreographer, performer and writer based in New York City. His projects have appeared at Dance Theater Workshop, The Chocolate Factory, Danspace Project, Dixon Place, The Brooklyn Museum, The Emily Harvey Foundation, Tanzquartier Wien (Vienna), Mount Tremper Arts and Williams College, a.o. Since 2006, Rawls has collaborated with Kennis Hawkins as the performance duo, Dance Gang, working parasitically in public spaces and galleries.  As a performer and interpreter Rawls has worked with Marina Abramovic, Jérôme Bel, Brian Brooks, Alain Buffard, Maria Hassabi, Noemie LaFrance, Nicholas Leichter, Neal Medlyn, David Neumann, Tino Sehgal, Shen Wei Dance Arts, and Katie Workum. Since 2010, Rawls has been a guest artist at Bard College, Barnard College, Princeton University, Williams College and a student mentor for Colorado College’s Department of Theatre and Dance.  Current publication projects: Obedience, a memoir for a choreographic object (Triple Canopy) and Leap of Fake, an essay on dance and doubt (Tanzquartier Wien (Vienna)).  He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Art History from Williams College, was a 2008 danceWEB scholar, a 2013 MacDowell Colony Fellow and is a 2014 LMCC Process Space residency recipient.

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Alain Buffard: It works?

Jennifer Monson: I tested it.

Alain: The first interview… I made it with a very famous French writer, and it was chaos. A blessing, I mean to have this… huge interview at this place, and it took maybe 2 hours… an hour and a half or something, and I get home and try to listen, and there’s nothing on the tape. So, I call him… “I’m very sorry.” I was so stressed… that was my first interview, and I said, “Could you please just record 1/2 an hour to replace everything?” He said, “ok.”

Jennifer: When did you make this piece?

Alain: First meeting with all of the European choreographers was in 2003 for the Montpellier festival, that we opened the ball of the big huge strike… the artist strike there. So, we were the first company to decide to be on strike. All the festival and all the theaters from June to Christmas time, canceled everything.

Jennifer: Wow!

Alain: So, it was kind of a tricky thing because we rehearsed maybe one day. I was nervous because all were famous people and some of them didn’t know each other, or even speak each other, so we made it one day, and then we just talked and talked about, “are we going to do this strike or not?” And we did; and that’s it. So, after this we did… I was pretty happy with that… it was in a festival in Dijon in France, and I presented the 3 versions: Good Boy the solo, Good for… the quartet, and Mauvais Genre, the group work, and audience could get tickets for a free performance in different little spaces, and we had only two days to do Mauvais Genre.

Jennifer: And was it the same cast as the ones that went on strike?

Alain: Most of them were the same, but we had only one day, so it was very quick and fast. I always remember for the opening night we were still trying to find the end of it, and I tried out everything and nothing really worked. The audience was just behind the door, waiting for us. We’ll do this, and I remember the director of the Festival d’Automne in Paris came for the opening, and I was so ashamed because I knew it wasn’t so good for the end. So I told him, “I’m very sorry, but I’m still working on it.”

Jennifer: So your own process, you hadn’t conceptualized the whole piece when you taught it to them.

Alain: Well first, I’d like to talk the solo work, Good Boy… you haven’t seen it. I made this solo work in ‘98. It was just after my first meeting with Anna Halprin, and so the question was very simple, “What can I do with my body, which has not been trained for years and years?” Because I quit dance during 6 years.

Jennifer: Can I ask why you quit dancing?

Alain: Well, I was just fed up with doing movement with no reason for it, and when I asked the choreographers I worked with, I didn’t have any kind of response to it, so… And there’s also a kind of delay of how I reacted to my HIV status, and something was wrong… It’s a funny disease, because I’ve never been really sick. You have your count of T cells (your sad songs), boo hoo you’re doing bad. (laughs) Why? I feel so okay. It was very psychological… it’s a kind of wrong thing inside your body, and I just couldn’t make it… I think at that time I had this silly idea of dancing, even if you are doing ugly things… there’s something in regards to grace, or something, that was very pure, and very… yes, like a kid. And so, I couldn’t manage the issue.

Jennifer: How did you find Anna Halprin?

Alain: First it was through Yvonne Rainer. I met her in ‘96. At that time it was during my long lack of dancing time. I was a manager for dance, theater, and music companies, and I was also an assistant in a contemporary arts gallery in Paris. So, at that time, I was managing a small group called Quatuor Knust and they work with Labanotation, so they did very historical pieces from the early modern choreographers like Doris Humphrey. And, we decided to work on Continuous Project – altered daily, from Yvonne. She made this piece in the 70s. We had kind of material from notation, from film and mainly from her book, Works. It was also for the Montpellier Festival, and we worked with her for two weeks, and it was… All the questions I had asked of those French choreographers… that piece from the 70s… everything was just given to me, so obvious. And she’s so witty, so clever, so gentle, and so I really love her. I knew at the time that she had been training with Anna and I had never heard of this name before. Nothing was available in France to try to pick some information. So I found that she did very important work in the 50s and 60s, and at that time she was running a workshop for life with cancer and AIDS, and I said, “Oh, I have to know much more about it, and about her and her work.” So, I decided to go to San Francisco. I applied for a grant, and I got it. Just before that I went to a huge workshop in Germany, for 150 people or something like this, in a gymnasium. And among all those people, we had connecting eyes or something, I don’t know what. I saw her solo during the second day of the workshop dedicated to her grandfather…

Jennifer: I saw that.

Alain: So you know she wears…

Jennifer: his pajamas.

Alain: His pajamas and these huge boots. She was 75 at that time, and she’s doing this kind of Russian dance, really physical, and I said, “Wow, what’s that girl?” So I decided to go to San Francisco, and I stayed there for three months. I first did this sea ranch retreat, and it was very great for me because usually they just ask for colleagues and students, and it never works really, so they said, “Ok, go, you’re nice.” That was my first trip to California, and all those people I didn’t know… with my poor English… During three weeks, just out from the cities, from all the social habits. We improvised a lot on the beach and in the forest, and I’ll always remember… we just have to collect some material, whatever, the seaweed… I remember that I was working with a huge seaweed, and from time to time she came to me and said, “Hmm, that’s very nice. Very pretty.” And I knew it was just fake and very French way to do it. Ok, I realized that I really didn’t know how to get into her work, and the first week it was, “Oh, I should go back to France, I just don’t understand what she’s doing.” Finally at the very end, we started with auto-portrait, and the first day we finished with another one… it could also be a group piece if you want to… and it came time for performance in the woods, and I don’t know what I did, but I have this fear of what people will think, or a kind of judgment, so I did kind of a wild thing… screaming and I don’t know. I stayed at her place to do a workshop in hospitals with AIDS people and cancer people, and all the labels you can imagine, and when I came back to France, I said “Ok, I should do something… I don’t know what.” And I didn’t expect to present it in public… just for me to work in the studio. And just before that I saw Yvonne a second time and I asked her, “Would you make a solo for me?” And do you know what she answered? “Well, I think you better go to a studio and find your own material.” Thanks, that’s just right. I’m very grateful for that.

At that time in France the political and aesthetic context was a very weird thing. It was a response of Still/Here, you know that piece by Bill T. Jones. I was so pissed off when I saw this piece. I mean, two screens of the workshops he made with the people in very different ways of surviving, and then you saw these beautiful, healthy bodies doing arabesques or whatever, and I was so angry when I get out of this theater. I said, “I should do something about AIDS here in France.” Never did before, in France. So, I just decided to present this work to a few friends around me, and all of them went out crying, so I thought, “Hmm, there must be something there.” I don’t know exactly what. I would never perform like this now. I mean, I put everything, my whole life up on stage. Now I’ve got quite distant.

But the idea of the very beginning… it’s actually the very end of what happened. All the layers of underpants, and just to make the movements of the dance impossible. And how to get out of this situation, it was like a metaphor. And so I tried and it didn’t work because I couldn’t breathe anymore. So I said, “Ok, now I want to go to that point; let’s try something else.” Mainly all of the solo was made with only one movement, just do it three times… this stretch with my elbow. The idea was to make this solo without the things that you usually would use for performance: lights, costumes, music. Well, the music was kind of in-between, but just to say that body is really enough to tell a story, whatever the story is.

Jennifer: Is Good Boy very different from Mauvais Genre?

Alain: Well, it’s exactly the same material.

Jennifer: But you just had more people do it?

Alain: Yes, I had some people, but the climax is totally different. Good Boy is so dramatic, it’s kind of a tragedy, and it’s very dark. That was the thing with both the quartet version and the version with both women and men… ok, you can get material, like an arabesque, and you can do it a very different way, so I mean the skeleton is more or less the same, and the material as well, except the floor section.

Jennifer: There’s something very compelling about seeing all of these different people do it. For me, most of the people in the performance here in New York are very good friends of mine, so I have this very intimate relationship, especially the very first time that I saw it, watching their bodies and seeing their personal choices within this very rich context of the piece. I felt like the phrasing and the simplicity of the events that were happening, and the way they built towards each other was very powerful. And it’s interesting to hear that it comes from this very personal place, but then there’s something about seeing it opened up. I found that I was able to resonate with images in both a very intimate and a sort of larger way. How was it to work with the New York cast versus the French cast? Have you done it in other countries besides France?

Alain: Yeah, last November in Brazil, and last summer in Vienna, Austria, and Germany. Each time it was totally different. Here, it’s too soon to tell exactly what I felt, but I would say it was more up. I really feel… I don’t’ know what the difference is, but even in the very, very beginning, the way people walk… I didn’t really see it well, except during the rehearsal, but there’s a slight difference how to get into a space. Matthieu [Doze] and I, we are the only French here, and we are used to do this piece, and Matthieu is my assistant on Good Boy, so he’s done Good Boy I don’t know how many times. Very, not relaxed, but just walking into a space. I can see some of the New Yorkers having this attitude to be really prepared before you get in the space, and you have to fight. Do you see what I mean? Because even if Paris is worse and worse and very stressful now, we don’t have to fight so much to be an artist. Maybe I’m totally wrong, but this is my very personal understanding of this. Even for this Good Boy part with the boxes and high heels… It’s always very difficult. We start facing each other, the male and female group, and it’s kind of a catwalk, you have to be a little bit bitchy. And I know even in France, the word “bitchy,” the wide range of meaning… I know it is not a good word because it could be really bitchy for some of us, and the others are more behind…

Always in the process of my work, if you don’t really find the right word, it doesn’t work. I remember my second piece, we were doing with Matthieu, and he got these pantyhose with little balls of polystyrene to make him very fat. At the very beginning he came up and there was just a touch on the belly… and I didn’t find the right words. I don’t know in English what the word is. He was doing exactly the same movements, but we could really see—the other dancers and I—a total difference. It was so amazing: just the power of the words. And always in my process, again, we’re speaking a lot during the process. And I know this is really important for me. It’s the beginning of sharing. This idea of Mauvais Genre was to get out of my own story; to share, and to give to the others. And now we are more or less 60 people who have already performed this piece. So, big family, and I hope it will still grow a lot.

Jennifer: When I think about when I came to NY in the 80s and moved through the AIDS epidemic here, and a lot of the people who were also performing with you here in NY. All of us were very, very involved in Act Up, and it really shifted our relationship to art-making. And it’s really compelling for me to see it come back as a theme and as material. And this relationship to the body. And both its interiority and exteriority in some way. The improvised section, when there’s the 4 different places that they’re going, and you can see people dealing very much with the external surface of their body, but then at the same time, I felt like, because I’m so familiar with these people, I can also feel their internal relationships to the piece as a whole happening. Could you talk about this? it seems clearly related to what moved you to make this piece, but how did you make it?

Alain: Because you saw the first and the last performance, there was a real journey. The last performance, I remember the 4 spaces and 4 activities was very simple, concerning the skin and the inside-out. So we have rubbing, slapping, breathing, and this whatever with the back of the neck. And with the breathing, I remember it was very smooth and light breathing on the skin of someone, all along the body. And for me, it’s very important to give a place of this non-event, which is very important as well.

I remember during a rehearsal, it was quite complicated to ask them don’t do so much. Even from the very beginning, just to stand and face the audience, which is my favorite moment. And it’s so strong to see all those different bodies. And you can really get inside body and soul. And the way they put on the underpants… “Be more simple.” For some of them, it was so complicated to just do this. It’s not daily… you don’t put your underpants on in the morning like this, I’m sure, but we’re on stage, we’re not in the locker room with some jokes around. So, for me it was very compelling, because even though I’ve not been trained in New York, I came here a few times in the 80s. I studied with [Alwin] Nikolais and Viola Farber and Yvonne and Anna, and so I can say I’m an American dancer in a way… Well, my training at least. And I’ve been so involved in the history of Judson. I mean that’s the main… I don’t know how to say this in English… “knot” in my way of thinking about dancing. And so to come back here… And Yvonne saw the performance, and she liked it. I was so moved by that.

Jennifer: I also felt very welcomed in to a sort of ritual, and the sound of the piece was very beautiful, when they start walking around the whole space. What I know of Anna Halprin’s work is that it does have a ritual aspect to it, and it has healed many people. Was that also on your mind as you were making it, or creating?

Alain: It was also to say, I don’t need music to make music with my body, which is really important, especially in the improvised part. And the thought is certainly the most important of any kind of movement that you are doing. And that’s the way we linked all together and that’s the moment where we start to build a group from here. And I think that’s very clear with the walking. I love the walking.

Jennifer: And the boxes falling… clearing the boxes.

Alain: Yes, each movement. I talk about this stretch with the elbow… it was so strong. I remember the first time I did it, people… it was in kind of a garage with a big echo and b-kow! And then stop. And then do two times again. I think I just could do this for 30 seconds, it could be a real performance. So I said, “Oh, yeah, I can really do something with body sounds.” It’s a very fun part as well. This section in Mauvais Genre really shifts from the solo. I really love it.

Jennifer: I was curious about the end: your choice of New York, New York.

Alain: That’s from the very beginning, the New York, New York version with the car horns, screaming from Good Boy… Good Boy is so dark, I just wanted to make this, not hilarious, but… I’ve got these tons and tons of underpants around me… and the image, because the light is coming from behind me… It’s kind of a diaper, kind of tutu of Alain doing this kind of classical thing. New York, New York is for me a tribute, first, to musicals, I think, because I like them. I always remember when I was a teenager I saw Cabaret, and it was so important for me, this movie. And then, it’s also about the story about trying to be on stage in New York and it’s so difficult. And it’s exactly the same for dancers. Well, I didn’t choose what happened, but it was very special here to do this. That was a question in 2003; should I keep or not New York, New York? There’s only one version, the German, where we didn’t sing the song, but I invited a very famous singer [Georgette Dee]. She’s a he-to-she singer, and she didn’t want to sing that song, so I said, “Ok, I just need a song that all Germans know. So we sang a kind of kids’ song about a story of a young girl who really liked to dress, and each different chorus is like “my green skirt,” “my blue skirt,” etc. Georgette changed all the words and was talking from her point of view about the lovers, and the lovers could be a sailor or a priest or whatever. So it was kind of a tricky thing, because everyone knew the melody and couldn’t recognize the words. It was so funny. She was wearing saris of different colors; it was great.

Jennifer: Have you ever done it [the piece] with transgendered bodies?

Alain: Not really, no. I’ve been… I don’t know transgendered bodies [who are] real dancer/performers. And even though this performance is very simple, you need to be trained in a way, be aware of your body, so I didn’t ask. I know one in Holland… in The Netherlands… but she wasn’t available at that time, so…

Jennifer: Tell me more about the differences of doing the piece, say in Brazil or Austria.

Alain: Well, in Brazil it was very different. We were 5 of the original cast and 10 Brazilians. Most of them were very, very young, coming from the “favelas.” It’s this word for very, very poor. It’s not even a house where you’re living… in a cupboard or I don’t know. And those people saw them. It was the first time they performed. They had come just out of school. We didn’t have any money, so I just paid them for the bus ticket, which is nothing really… 45 cents or 25. I can’t remember, and I bought some food for the break. I knew that they would never use the money for the bus ticket. They would just walk the kilometers from the suburbs to where we were performing.

I just love Brazil, everything is so different. You live almost naked all the time, so you get used to the bodies, and it’s so warm. You can be sure that people are gazing at you, they just do it. In France, especially in Paris, when you are taking the Metro, everybody stares like this [demonstration]. To look at someone, it would be interpreted as an aggression, which is not a mistake here. For example, I didn’t ask for classical stance, I just wanted to make a well-known and recognized kind of dance… it could be jazz or samba or whatever. You can’t imagine what happened; it was great. One of the girls did this kind of… it wasn’t samba, it was… subculture samba… I don’t know. It was very specific to that part of Brazil, and it was great… very, very different.

Jennifer: So they were doing samba, and you were doing kind of…

Alain: I’m always doing the same every time. The fourth section, I never teach my own movement because it’s just not possible… I mean, due to the length of… it just doesn’t work. It was more wide, the improvisation part. I don’t know if it’s wider, but very unexpected things happened.

Jennifer: Did they know it was an AIDS piece? Were any of them HIV-positive?

Alain: That was the second time I went there, so I presented Mauvais Genre in two different situations. It was different things. The situation there with AIDS is worse than here. Nobody goes to the doctor because they don’t have money. AIDS is a huge national problem, and at the same time Brazil is only country who’s making generic (prescriptions). There’s a real program for that, but we can’t imagine how poor they are. It’s just like Africa. And at the same time you have very rich people who instead of taking their car, they take helicopters. You have millions of helicopters in the San Paulo sky. And everything is like this there. It’s a huge country.

Jennifer: I love seeing the older bodies. As I get older, maybe I just appreciate different kinds of bodies more and more.

Alain: So do I.

Jennifer: And what’s your next project?

Alain: Oh, don’t ask. I’ve got a project that. I don’t know if I should cancel and pick another project, or find someone else for the cast. This German singer, Georgette—I used one of her songs in my last project. The last piece was pretty new in my work, more narrative… theatrical… so, I wish to continue more in that way. I try to be inspired by The Bitter Tears of Petra Van Kant, of Fassbinder, but I don’t want to use the text or anything, just the context. Georgette is a man that’s kind of a woman on stage, a very famous Dutch actress with kind of a very strong character, and then Vera Mantero, so a trio of women looking at gender issues and love, kind of lesbian, but really lesbian due to Georgette. And I want to make very camp things, but I can’t do it, so maybe the next one… I want 2-3 different things for inspiration, which is the very glam Hollywood cinema, like Sunset Boulevard and things like this…. more political like [Fassbinder], and doing a musical tragedy with that. So, a lot of songs and music, which I never did before… maximum there’s 2-3 tracks of music in each project. When I arrived in New York, I received an email from Georgette, and she said, “Well, I hate…” because I’ve changed my mind about six times now because I first had this idea of [Fassbinder]… “I just hate this movie. Well, I’m a gay man; I’m a woman of the stage. I’m an alien for a straight man and woman, for gay people… I’m nowhere.” I said, “I know that’s why I want to make material for a performer that you don’t know.” She said, “I mean Vera and Lillian are also very good singers, and I’m sure if you ask one of them to sing Be my husband, for example… just nothing the whole idea, and that’s what I want to do… just using very well-known standards from jazz… even classical, because Georgette is able to… the last piece I used a Schubert piece instead of the piano, she’s playing the electric guitar, and it’s just, “Whoa, I never… I love Schubert, but I never heard this.” So, a real large scale of possibilities of music with all these three performers. She didn’t answer me from my last mail, so I don’t know. I’m not waiting. I have to decide because it’s starting to be very late for production.

Jennifer: Well, I hope it happens. It sounds fantastic.