Critical Correspondence

Benn Rasmussen in conversation with Tess Dworman

Tess Dworman talks to Benn Rasmussen about The Adventure, a discussion group that was organized by Trajal Harrell in conjunction with Trajal’s curation of Danspace Project’s PLATFORM 2010: certain difficulties, certain joy.

Interview Date: November 20, 2010

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Tess Dworman:  What did you actually do as an Adventurer?  And where did the idea of The Adventure come from?

Benn Rasmussen:  The Adventure was something in 2006 that Trajal Harrell participated in as part of ImPulsTanz. It was the brainchild of Mårten Spångberg who led the group.  There were 10 choreographers in the group and they met for four weeks from 10am to 10pm Monday through Saturday.

After Trajal’s experiences in the original Adventure, he wanted to do this type of group, this type of discussion, and this level of engagement alongside the performances he curated for the platform at Danspace Project.

Because the shows on the platform were developing a certain kind of culture, he also wanted to have this discussion group to go alongside that culture and to use the shows as content for discussion.  So he modeled this group from the original Adventure.  There was an application process, and he selected 16 of us.  From mid-September until the end of October, we met every Monday for an Adventure discussion that was about eight or nine hours each day.  We went to all the shows that were on the platform, and every Saturday we had a three-hour public discussion preceded by a two-hour discussion with invited guests.  We also went to other shows as well, that were elective shows that Trajal had suggested.  This developed a shared experience.

Tess:  …and you always had to see the shows on the same night.

Benn:  Yes, we tried to.  So this developed a certain reference point that we could all talk from.  Trajal also assigned readings by art historians and performance theorists and critics and dramaturges that  specifically looked at the pieces and the ideas that were influential or researched by the different artists.  So it was this discussion-based examination-analysis-questioning process.

Tess:  I went to a couple of the public discussions and really enjoyed them.  We were talking earlier about how this experience was a lot like grad school… like a really awesome version of grad school condensed into six weeks.   I know a lot of the people who went through it felt it was a big time commitment.

Benn: [The time commitment] is the important thing about the Adventure that I’m not certain other discussions can offer.  A post-show discussion is a really specific relationship between the moderator and the choreographers, performers, and the audience.  It’s also very limited.  It’s often 20 minutes, maybe 15.

I would say [the time commitment] is the most beautiful thing about [the Adventure].  We went in knowing we had to commit to this amount of time.  Something very beautiful evolved between the beginning and the end because of this.

The public Saturday discussions also brought together certain people from many generations in the dance community that maybe wouldn’t have had this conversation.  It was particularly fruitful the day when we talked about the euro versus the dollar and the differences in American and European dance.

Tess: Yeah, I was there for that one!

Benn: I think for all of us that were in the room that are of a younger generation but scattered between maybe a ten-year spectrum, hearing all of that history and lived experience was super helpful.

Tess:  Post-show discussions are often really brief.  After you’ve seen a dance, it’s always hard to put thoughts together, and the discussion can sometimes help patch up what you saw.  I don’t think the Adventure was there to patch things up.  The idea was to get a lot of concerns out in the open.  At the first discussion, Trajal said, “It’s the elephant in the room, people!”  He really wanted us to put it all out there.   Sometimes it would get really tense, and you come away from it thinking, “What did we just do?  What just happened?”  Which is sort of what you do when you’re making a dance.  It was process-based talking.

Benn:  I think what was produced was knowledge.  What was produced was a way to exist within group dynamic whether this was in the private discussions on Monday or the discussions on Saturday or what we enacted in our slot on the platform.  What is produced is conversation.  We weren’t always interested in answers or solidifying concepts, but more so the process or the questioning or dialogue.  All of these actions [were] the Adventure; the way in which the organism of this circle can open or fold in on itself, depending on who’s in the room.  There’s a tremendous amount of flexibility in this discussion.  At the same time, there is something that’s constantly being maintained, investigated, and supported so that there is something that unifies the room.  That rare space was really special for a lot of us.

Tess:  We should talk about the fact that it was a selected group and there were private discussions.  People had different ideas about the exclusivity of it.

Benn:  We were all aware that it was a chosen group, and one day Trajal made it very clear that it was a privilege to be there.  So, we accept that with responsibility.  There were many times in the Adventure that it was this small group to launch discussion.  A lot can happen in a smaller group and I felt it was important to come back to the small group to establish the pathway through the discussions again and again.

At the same time, there were opportunities throughout the Adventure for more people to choose to come and engage.  I don’t think any one of us wanted to limit anyone’s engagement with it but offer multiple points of entry into the discussions.  Even from the 17 of us, when we break away for lunch there would be smaller groups of four or five, and some of us would discuss then.

For whatever reason, those of us participating and a lot of people looking at us from the outside saw an identity in that.  One of the largest discussions we had was in authorship and how do we author this performance we’re enacting?  How are we seen as a group? How are we seen as individuals?  Does the group have an identity?  Is the adventure the 17 of us or is it this concept of Adventuring? People certainly felt and looked at the group as a group, but Trajal was really explicit in saying that the Adventure is a continuation of this process of developing an intellectual community around a time and a place.

I think what’s important is that the information is shared.  Trajal’s intentions, Judy’s intentions, all of our intentions, they’re various but they do come from the similar root of making this available.  The importance in this was not necessarily conflict, but dialogue and people’s permission to engage in that dialogue.  It’s not about attaining some kind of agreement in the room.  The agreement was to come back and talk.

Tess:  Something that was brought up in one of the conversations was that it feels like we are in a transitional moment in terms of the work that’s being made.  We’re never not in that sort of moment, but it does feel like we’re moving into something else with the work and how the work gets produced.  What does it feel like we’re moving into, to you?

Benn: This discussion about “what is next” was a large part of the day when Tere O’Connor was the guest.  I think what is important to note is that there isn’t one “what-is-next” or one “artistic movement”.  There’s so much going on that it’s hard to pinpoint one set of ideas.  To do that, would actually be a detriment to the development that’s happening right now.

Over the course of our adventure, we met for a long time, but it was also not enough time.  We’ve talked about this—how the Adventure didn’t start until it ended.  It takes so much time for a group of people to build a collaborative group dynamic.  As Adventurers, we didn’t have a movement practice.  We were never in an investigative process to produce a work or a piece.  The difficulty that we ran into was having a slot in the platform to perform.  We didn’t set out to do that.  We set out to lend transparency to ideas that hadn’t been discussed.  These conversations have always been circulating, but I think our discussions brought a lot of clarity to these ideas.  Maybe a lot of us are creating work and talking from a point of assumption or myth or problematizing these issues.  Maybe it gave me the opportunity to move from my worries or concerns of these topics.

There’s a lot of important work that has happened in New York but there’s also been a lot of muck and a lot of grey areas.  I had this experience after listening to Emmanuelle Huynh where I was like, “Oh I didn’t know that that was a grey area for me.”  But now I knew that A.) It became a grey area and B.) It was no longer grey because she filled it in because I was now able to build my relationship to that information.  Now, as a 29 year old in New York, I know a lot more and I feel more capable to make the work I’m going to make and to make it in the context I want to make it in and how to talk about it.

Tess: That is a really nice thing that these guests came in to blow up the perspective a little bit and take it outside of New York.

Benn: Maybe this comes from the conversation of “Is New York the center of dance in the world?”  I’m pretty sure it’s a center but it’s not the center.  With that kind of viewpoint, in the way a city or community has this sort of closed feedback loop on itself.  When it’s missing information, it’s continually fueling the same recycling of information without new things coming in to disrupt that or infiltrate that.  Maybe, this is what started the Adventure.

I think looking for some “collective movement” to jump into, is the wrong process. This, making movements, is a function of history.  But as a practicing artists we need to keep making the work.  We don’t need to spend our time positioning a group that’s more prominent than another.

Tess:  Right.  You don’t really know what’s going on until it’s over… well not over but passed.

Benn:  In a creative process, there’s a lot of unknowing.  You can’t know until you’ve gone through the process of unknowing.  So it’s hard to call something what it is when you’re in the unknowing process.   Also, if you say what’s “next”, then you’re censoring what’s happening right now.

Tess:  The whole feel of [these discussions] was kind of worrisome.  It felt very anxious to me.  Maybe anxious is the wrong word, but there was this small expectation that we need to solve something by getting it out in the open.  I know this isn’t the point—to fix it—but it had that feeling.

Benn:  I do think for the New York dance scene (whatever that means) in the last five years, it has been hard and there has been a struggle.  But as individuals, we need to continue to work and contribute to this struggle to evolve and find ways in which we can survive.  It’s false if people think they’re going to get out of the struggle, because then all you do is institutionalize yourself and then maybe your relevancy is questionable.  I don’t want to say that it’s always going to be hard.  I think you can find ease.  This life as an artist, there is a commitment and responsibility to it.  If you want to stay in it, you have to take on that responsibility.

Tess: Maybe that’s the kind of energy I was reading into.  Not anxious, but this responsibility to maintain what we have and work to continually evolve.  It’s a caring thing as opposed to a problematic thing.

Benn:  Caring and being responsible and contributing can come from a place where difficulty [also resides].  Conflict in dialogue can be part of that.  That’s what I observed in Trajal.  He created a space where important discussions can occur and we can actually move into this space where disagreement happens and that space can produce valuable knowledge.  There is a danger if it gets too derailed along one person’s agenda.

Tess:  …or the idea that we are going to come to a solution.

Benn:  Yeah.  And I want to say this one last thing that maybe is a quagmire that I’m opening up:  I think there’s this thing that we do as a young generation…

Tess: All young generations or just ours?

Benn: All young generations.  This thing where we complain and we think it was easier for those before us, I think that romanticizes a different time.

Tess: Oh, everybody does that!  When you become the old folk and you’re looking back on the young kids thinking, “When I was your age…”

Benn: Ha! Yes.  This kind of hardship we think as unique to us.  I don’t think it is.  Maybe the specifics of how we engage the difficulty are different.  Privileging our time as singular or unique is totally the wrong way to go.  People are unique and singular, certainly, but this experience of like, “Oh, it’s so hard!”  That will waste your time.  To engage that whole complaining process, maybe that’s useful for some people.  But it’s not useful for me.