Critical Correspondence

Daria Faïn in conversation with Marya Wethers

Daria Faïn is an acclaimed New York choreographer originally from Antibes, France. Critical Correspondence paired her with Marya Wethers to discuss her latest piece, Working with Stockhausen’s Stimmung (1968), which premieres at Danspace Project September 30, 2010. Marya is active in the New York dance community as a dancer, thinker, and dance administrator. She commissioned Daria to create the solo Target: Furnace, which Marya performed at Dance New Amsterdam in February 2010.

Interview date:  September 21, 2010

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Marya Wethers: Daria, it’s nice to be here with you and have the chance to talk to you more about your work. To start, I’d like to ask if there are any ongoing questions that you continue to address in your work over the span of your career. Also, what do you find is changing?

Daria Faïn: I truly believe that the core of my work is about movement and the understanding of movement. [The work itself] can take different forms—pure movement, installation, writing—but at the core of my work is the question of what is movement.

In order for me to make a piece or a project, I have to look at where the movement is going to come from. It can come from a conceptual idea that I have (most likely this is how it works). And then I have to understand where this movement comes from. And for that I use the practice that I’ve developed, which is based on information that has come from my work with disabled people, with chigung, with the Five Element theory in taoist practice, with architecture. This information comes from different sources and has become a practice. This practice is in constant evolution, as I evolve in my understanding of what movement is and what the body is.

Each project is also based on an external question. When I was very young, for example, a question arose in relation to how the physical space around me was influencing my movement. So I started to study architecture and landscaping for a few years. Each project brings a new question, an external question that is then studied and researched and brings a new element of understanding to my practice.

That’s the movement between the internal process and the external process, which is just one thing. It’s just a flow between one and the other.

Marya: Like a feedback loop.

Daria: Exactly. That’s exactly what it is.

Marya: In terms of the Stimmung piece that you’ll be performing at Danspace, what interested you about the score or the composer, Stockhausen? What drew you to that music?

Daria: I discovered that music when I was researching language, specifically the phonemes, which are the smallest unit of sound in language. I was googling “phonemes,” and I saw that piece, Stockhausen’s Stimmung. I actually saw that piece performed when I was in my teens, and I loved it so much. I started to listen to it, and it was very interesting in relationship to my work with Robert [Kocik] on the Phoneme Choir. I was not planning to dance to the music at all.

I talked with Peter Sciscioli, who is a dancer who works with me and with Meredith Monk. I asked him if he knew that piece, and he said, “Well, actually I am performing that piece.” I had a gig at the 92nd Street Y, and I asked [Peter’s vocal ensemble] the Magic Names if they want to perform with me. And we performed it. It was an accident, to make a solo with that music. A total accident. Trajal Harrell saw the piece and curated it. It was a surprise. I was not planning to make a piece out of this originally. I was engrossed with a much larger project.

Looking at Stimmung made me look at Stockhausen more. He was a composer who had always fascinated me. As I worked on Stimming, I was searching for a good reason to do the piece. I investigated Stockhausen’s work, and was completely enlightened [by his relationship to his artistic lineage]. He is a classical contemporary composer in lineage with Schoenberg and other very traditional music, but his belief in that tradition was completely eccentric and very unique. For example, his way of bringing technology and innovation into this lineage. His beliefs that are so absolute—he really believes he comes from Sirius, the star. His understanding of energy. His absolute commitment to do his work the way he wants. His refusal of pressure from institutional organizations. His battle all his life to remain close to his core interests. His way of being esoteric and mesoteric at the same time, without any compromise in either direction. This is something that I feel very close to.

Marýa: Can you say more about that? What is it that you feel connected to about Stockhausen’s approach and philosophy?

Daria: He would say that art is a means to transform people, to enlarge their awareness as individuals within the universe. This is the only reason why he does his work.

[This belief led him to] study vibration and what it does to your body in a very scientific way. He was one of the first electronic musicians of the last century, and he really studied acoustics and sound engineering for the purpose of enlarging the awareness of what people are, as vibratory beings. Ideally, he liked to have the concert hall for at least a week before a show in order to create the perfect environment for people to receive his work.

He was highly aware of what is invisible, of the things that are not obvious to us but that define the way we are. He wanted to transform those things. He was very scientific about his work, about the laws of how to channel attention, to channel focus, to channel listening.

Marýa: I see a lot of parallels in what you describe in your own work, specifically in the group work that I’ve seen with using bodies to define space and energy. Also, in [your approach to] set design, installation, and architecture.

Daria: Just one more thing about Stockhausen: All his concerns that are internal, mesoteric, are also very clearly political and economic statements. That clarity was very interesting for me. It’s very easy for people to categorize those things as mystic in order not to see their implications in economics and politics and sociology. That has such clarity in his work, and I hope in mine too.

Marýa: I’m curious to hear about the choice to return to the solo form. Your last few works have been group pieces.

Daria: I was always a soloist, I never performed in a company, so I was defined from the start as a solo dancer. I made myself a soloist, because in France there were very few dancers who were interested to work with me. Not that they were not interested, but I was so engrossed with my research that it was also very hard for me to reach out. I started as a solo dancer and I didn’t dance much with other people, certainly not with one choreographer. I was first choreographed by another choreographer when I was 40, and it was Pooh Kaye. That was the only time I was really choreographed by someone else in my entire life. The solo form is a recurrent thing in my life since the beginning. My last solo was Germ, in 2005 at the Chocolate Factory.

I didn’t plan on doing a solo now, but this accident with Peter and Stimmung just happened. That accident forced me to look at where I am right now in terms of movement. And let me tell you, when I first started to work on this, I felt almost like a dinosaur. Not in terms of feeling old, but a dinosaur in the sense that I didn’t find a lot of subtlety in my movement at all. I worked very intensely in order to understand what I was doing. Why are you going to be on stage dancing solo, if you don’t know what the fuck you’re doing? I had to find a good reason. The music helps because it’s gorgeous, gorgeous music. I’m surrounded by incredible singers who are singing this magical thing, but then, you know, I have to find a good reason to be on stage. I had to work to figure it out.

Marýa: I’d be very curious to hear what was involved in that process, answering that question. Did you find a reason?

Daria: I love to dance! With the solo, it really comes down to that. I’m at the point where I don’t really need to justify what I do. As I said, at the core of my work is movement, and the life force that there is in movement. When I say “life force”, I don’t want it to sound like a new-age thing. Life force is a serious thing: You die, and you live. And you transform. And even when you die, you keep transforming. It’s not that you die and things stop. You die, and you keep transforming. Movement is a form of transformation. It’s the reality of our existence. Existence in a much larger frame than, “I am Daria Faïn.” The life force is about the life that we are a part of. When I dance, that’s what I want to tap into. Like a little girl that wants to dance, you know?

With this solo, I am liberated of the why. You know me—conceptually, I have to work very hard. But with this piece, I don’t. It’s about not obstructing the simplicity of wanting to dance. And it’s very difficult, because . . . it’s larger than the self, it’s larger than my name, Daria Faïn. It’s about being a vector of that life force. It’s about how to not abstract that, not to want to put more stuff on it. This is what the work is about.

Marýa: Beautiful. This relates to my next question. Many people know that something deep and transformative is happening when they watch your work, but some don’t know quite how to access it or how to enter into what you’re creating. I’m curious to hear if you think about accessibility and creating entry points when you’re making work. If you do think about it, how do you do that? And if you don’t, why not?

Daria: That’s a simple question and a complex question at the same time. I’m in a very difficult position in relation to this question now, as opposed to when I was younger. When I was younger, I was very, very engrossed with research. It hurt me, if people didn’t understand my work, but at the bottom of it, I didn’t really care. I had so many questions, and these questions were more important to me than anything else. I had to define those questions and the answers, if there were any, to these questions. I couldn’t help doing it the way I had to. I cared, I was hurt if people didn’t get it—I want to communicate with people—but I had to do what I had to do.

As a performer, I always had a form of charisma. People liked me as a performer. They didn’t know why, but they liked me as a performer. The question was more when I was doing group work. I had to transmit my work to the performers in a way that enabled them transmit it to an audience. Amy Cox was the first dancer in New York that could really get me. She was really able to transmit that work. Even though it was not completely clear for everybody, it started a process that kept growing, since 2001, for people to be able to get my work a little bit more and more and more and more.

Now I’m much more free, because I’m more interested in the question of what a production is. I’m very liberated by this research. With the Phoneme Choir, I can make an incredibly bold statement of transition, because I know it’s going to work without compromising what I want to say. I know what’s structurally necessary to the piece to bring people to the next step. I have all those stones and gold and rubbish, and I understand how they are working together. Now it’s more about how to give it to other people. I am very interested in that as a research now.

Marýa: Can you talk about what’s next for you?

Daria: Almost a year ago, I started a dialogue with Robert Kocik. He gave me a book called The Many-Headed Hydra, which is based on the history of the Commons and what it means in our society. It traces English history, how the Commons [land] was taken from the people, and they could no longer make a living from the earth. They became vagabonds and pirates and thieves. The whole structure of the society changed. There were police and criminals. At the same time, trading began with North America. The colonies and the slave trade were created. This was the foundation of our capitalist society.

[Robert and I] also discussed that the last century’s production model—you know, the company model—was not going to work anymore. The [dance] community became so insular and isolated, and that made me look at my position as an artist in my society. I wanted to learn how to change it.

The project of the Commons is an attempt to look at what in our society we have in common, what is the role of an artist, and how we can affect society in a larger way. It’s a many-headed project, which involves an on-going think tank discussion and people, whether they are into research into the environment or politics or the economy or art or poetry or dance. The Commons also created the idea of the Phoneme Choir and also reflects on architecture.

I will be very engrossed for the next three years on that project, trying to figure out what it is, and the implication of what funding is, and the implication of how we work with each other and how we sustain each other as individuals making a project together. All these questions will be part of the project.

We hope that it will create another format. My goal is to bring another format of what a production can be. It’s the most challenging project I’ve ever done. This is my new research, to learn how to think about these things. It’s not easy.

Marýa: It’s very complex and multi-dimensional.

Daria: And it will require a lot of people. It’s about addressing those questions with a bunch of people. It’s not valuable if it’s just my own thinking, mine and Robert’s. That’s not what we want.

The Commons Choir is modeled on the chorus in Greek tragedy. We will draw on all the research, and hopefully there will be many arms of the same project that will be independently led by different people and connected through a thinking process that will happen at the same time. I don’t know what form it will be, maybe it will be like a festival, I have no idea right now, but I will be very very engrossed in that in the coming years.

Marýa: One of the many things that I love about this concept is its non-propriety essentiality. It’s not an idea, my idea that I make this idea on these bodies. It has potential reverberation, generating outwards. I like that.

Daria: It’s amazing, the Commons’ [Phoneme] Choir. I’ve never experienced anything like that before. Because I am not doing anything. I have a script, and I have very little time to set it. I am not selecting the performers; anybody can participate. I am a vector of that moment at that time. It’s the essence of how I want to work. I just have to make sure that everyone has a place, and I listen to what everybody is seeing, and I just make it possible. It’s more like creating a possibility. It’s about all these people, all this energy, all these things, and trying to make sense out of it together. It’s very beautiful. Very unique. And the amazing thing is that everybody is very present in that thing. It’s a real experience for everybody.

Marýa: And also an experience for the audience. I was very moved. I have one last question: What is your dream project?

Daria: I like this question, because in that question is the core of everything I do. If I could, I would do a project in the center of the earth and another one orbiting the earth. And they will happen at the same time, and I don’t know how they will be visible. That’s what I would like to do. I’m fascinated by the aspect of human time that is absolutely primal and visceral and completely ethereal. I always want to bring these things together. If I could, that would be my dream project.