Critical Correspondence

David Hurwith in conversation with Ursula Eagly

Ursula Eagly talks on the phone with David Hurwith, a choreographer who works in New York City and Western Massachusetts. Hurwith’s new work, Gasp, I’m Home! premieres at Ritual & Research in Worthington, MA on December 2-5, 2010.  The work is created in collaboration with performers Maggie Bennett, Kate Martel, Rebecca Lubart, Leah Nelson, Melissa Guerrero, Yina Ng, and Ronja Verkasalo.

Interview date:  November 15, 2010

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Ursula Eagly: “Practice” is a word that’s used a lot in our field, and you have a long history with many different types of practice. Could you talk about your background and how you synthesized it in the process of making this particular piece?

David Hurwith: Everything we do trains us. Whatever we’re doing, including this phone call, is practice.

But intentional practice, especially towards artistic goals or personal evolutionary goals, [is something] I’ve been involved with consciously and unconsciously for a long time. For me, a profound practice has been working with the body, both as a dancer and as a healer and as a person trying to be healed.

I had a long involvement with the Alexander technique, profoundly with Eva Karczag and Barbara Kent. Then I got involved with Body-Mind Centering, and I did the training as a practitioner. And I’ve meditated in a much more off-hand way. And the Authentic Movement, which was started by Mary Starks Whitehouse and profoundly developed by Janet Adler, is a practice of learning how to move without some of the other goals [of other approaches to movement], and how to witness someone and support them. Each of those practices has a different, but related, set of goals. And also a different idea of what it is to be human. The other practice that I’ve done is improvising as a dancer and improvising in performance.

All those practices have marked me and changed me. They also point to something: If you’re going to perform improvisation, you have to have a faith that sometimes when your conscious mind doesn’t know what it’s doing, you’re manifesting something else. That shouldn’t lead to just doing anything; specificity of intention and really looking at what’s there are essential.

[I also work with] capturing what’s happening. When you perform choreography, you have developed a structure and you have a memory of [that structure]. You refer to the structure and you’re also trying to refer to the present moment. So you’re doing two things. In a different way, when you’re performing improvisation, you’re doing the same thing, but without the idea that the structure is finite enough to tell you what to do. So you’re asking yourself to look at what’s happening and what you know and [then to] present something . . . that was kind of dense, and I have to say it seems a little serious.

Ursula: It’s serious stuff!

David: Nietzsche wrote, “If the truth were a woman, she finds the philosophers to be clumsy suitors with their seriousness.” It’s a great quote for being intentional, but also humor captures something really important.

Ursula: You’re working with dancers that don’t have the same background that you do. How did bring them into this work you’re doing with these different forms of practice?

David: Actually, I feel like some of the dancers who are much younger than I am have a lot of experience with this work in different ways. They’re working with their bodies and studying and teaching. Some of them are teaching Pilates and some are involved with Alexander Technique. I feel like they’re much on the same road, but in different places. At first, before each rehearsal, I would do a little session on the ankles, and I would introduce something I learned from Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, something I learned from Twyla Tharp, something I made up myself, and bring in the systems . . . Body Mind Centering has a marvelous vision of different systems. In the dance world, there’s beginning to be a focus on anatomy, and they’re starting with the bones. I think all the systems—the bones, the muscles, the fluids, and especially perception—are really important and begin to have their say. When I see people dance, I often see different minds of different parts of their body speaking. I love that.

But in answering your question, we would have these sessions where we would focus on a piece of anatomy that we would work on together, and I would present the material. We began a practice of soloing for each other and witnessing and supporting each other. That was an incredible, inspiring practice that has gone on for a year. I feel like it’s the ground of this work. It sounds simple: One person is dancing, the other people are looking. And then the people who are watching are offering something in support of what that person did. I think a lot of people do [a similar practice]. But doing it over and over with the same people, we expanded our own movement vocabularies and [our ideas about] how they might be used to related to the content of the piece.

At first, [our verbal responses to the solos] were like a conversation. I think conversation has a covert agenda to maintain the status quo, and I really wanted a focused use of language. Then, we sometimes said three words, or ten words, or named three incidents. We really focused our intention to be in support, in a different way than just being nice.

Of course, [watching these solos] is a subjective experience. How do you take a subjective experience and be supportive of another person? There’s a projection involved. It’s something you aspire to, but it’s almost rhetorical. It’s not something you want to do and you do it and it’s done. It’s ongoing. That’s what makes it a practice.

But beyond that, first we [offered responses] in support of the person. We were just saying things we liked: “You looked great doing this,” “I loved this moment when you did that.” Later, I asked that we [offer responses] in support of the person’s process. We had developed enough that you might even say something that didn’t make sense to you, or it could be construed as critical, but you were demanding of yourself that it be in support of their process. That’s a different goal.

One of the problems of doing this was that we would warm up and then we would watch solos, and there was a lot more sitting involved than moving. So then I asked us to feel the movement in our bodies, not just in our eyes and in heads, and respond to it more physically.

This practice of soloing and responding also affected other sections of the dance. We have a section called the family channel, which is based on watching a lot of sitcoms, and [our practice] changed the conversations they were having and the ritual they were presenting. It became more conversational and less “I want you to know I’m listening to you and I’m thinking about what you’re saying, and then I’m responding.” Because people do that in specific situations and they also, in a very important way, just converse.

Ursula: Having developed this practice, how did you move from practice towards presentation?

David: The initial idea I had about this dance was to present the surreal aspect of being a member of a family. So some of the things we did included sitting down at my dinner table and having what we imagined was a dinner conversation. But we did this in a programmatic way. We went in a certain order and repeated certain things. We took something mechanical and we saw what nuances were there.

And the other thing that we did was . . . well, for me as a director, many days I had an idea of what I wanted to do—or had no idea what I wanted to do—and in the solos I’d be inspired by something to then try a form that I thought would bring on a certain aspect of the way people relate to each other. But I think for the dancers it was that thing of working at something and then being able to harvest something from it. Not so that you can repeat it exactly—that’s not what I’m looking for—but so that you can have a relationship to what you just did and develop it.

Ursula: I’d like to hear more about your relationship to the dance and performance traditions in New York City and the contact improvisation and Body Mind Centering traditions in Western Massachusetts. What traditions are you drawing from? What traditions are you working against? How have you brought your own history with those traditions into this specific process?

David: Well, I named some of my influences . . . my interest as an artist is in the uses of imagination and embodiment and emotion. Not in their raw form, but not in their completely digested form either. My medium is taking something real and of the self and presenting it in a way that people can understand.

When I first was choreographing, I did something abstract or technical in the way of rhythm and steps and shape. I’m interested in those things to this day, they’re the basis of any dance vocabulary. I’ve also been really inspired by music. One of my biggest influences, Charles Mingus, had all of these compositions where there’d be this group choreography and then these fantastic solos . . . the mixture of the group having a clear say and these conversations, which were also practiced because they performed them every night. You can hear different versions of them. Indigenous jazz music is a huge influence and huge support and company when I’m in the studio.

When I started to dance, I think I came from a visual idea and a doing idea. I was making tasks and then imagining them being seen. After I had done Body Mind Centering, I thought about developing a palette of different qualities of moving from the body. I was sourcing and presenting something more internal and not so in my head, which has always been my goal.

Ursula: You’ve been rehearsing both in New York City and Western Massachusetts. How is the process of working in these two places?

David: I’ve put a lot of miles in my car!

First of all, I have to say that I tried to make a group that I supported a lot. And I find now that I’m getting towards the end of this piece, the group is supporting me, which has been like a dream for me.

In New York, you have three hours with the people, once a day if you’re lucky, and then you go off on your merry way or you have another rehearsal. Those rehearsals have been fun. And having them up here [in Massachusetts], they’re staying at the studio, and we’re eating meals together. We’re working in the set. Many of the dancers showed me things about the set that I created that I hadn’t imagined. I had two large drawings that are 40 feet wide and 12 feet high and then on a muslin drop a surrealist painting that evokes the living room for the family part that’s 30 feet by 16 feet. It’s been interesting to work on movement ideas in New York and then really go deeper with the set and the content here in Massachusetts. And also deal with the dynamics of living together. The dancers have given so much in making their lives work so that they can come up here. All dancers donate so much, have lifestyles where they can work on things.

Ursula: You once mentioned that this piece is the most developed work that you’ve made. What does that mean and how is it manifesting in the process and presentation of the work?

David: In a certain way, I indulged myself. Each artist needs to figure out how to indulge themselves and also how to be disciplined, each in their own way. One of the ways that I indulged myself in this piece was that I didn’t agree to a performance date until I felt like what we were working on was something that I feel confident about. This was very hard for the dancers; I lost some dancers. But the work got to develop, and also I got to sit with [the material], and it got to marinate for 18 months. That allowed me to have new ideas and come at the content again and again. That’s one way that this work is much more developed.

[Another way is in] my ability to build the set and work with other artists. I built a little cabin in my studio that we work with, using barn wood from the area around here, beautiful decayed barn wood. That was an homage to Edward Kienholz, an artist who I love. I really made an object that’s very beautiful. [This process] brings up my interest in different mediums and collaborating with different artists. [I’m also working with] Mike Vargas, the composer, and Nick DeFriez, the painter who painted both drops.

There’s not only an external politics. There’s a politics in how you engage the people you’re working with. I made a commitment to being supportive of the dancers, not just for what I could get from them, but in their lives.

And also I made a commitment [to integrating the design elements in the dance] . . . you work on a dance for however long and then you bring in lights and costume, and sometimes [in the past] I would come up with not the deepest or best solutions, because I just wanted it over with so I could go dance. And [in this process] I demanded and again got support from my dancers in figuring out what was really going to work and what made sense for this dance as far as those other elements.

Also, I have a practice that I haven’t mentioned yet, which is that I write everyday. There’s a little monologue that I wrote that I adapted for this piece. So this work really brings in a lot of my different interests.

And all these things make me really feel like this work is more complete.

Ursula: It sounds like a very broad process . . .

David: One of the things I know is that you can’t really exclude anything from the work. It will all be there.