Critical Correspondence

Cunningham and Legacy: Addys Gonzalez, Jen Rosenblit and Niall Jones in conversation

Dancer Addys Gonzalez invited choreographers Jen Rosenblit and Niall Noel Jones to his small apartment in Prospect Lefferts Garden. He wanted to have them over for dinner, an endless loop of a conversation about mostly anything but focusing back and forth on Merce Cunningham and Legacy. An interview with the artists in the field now, that have yet to imagine a future and hardly have begun constructing a past. The dinner lasted seven hours, five bottles of Provence Rosé, Armagnac and countless cigarettes. The light outside changed, the music kept constant, and the laughter escaped in and out of open windows.

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Addys Gonzalez: The concept of legacy has always alluded to a monolith that exists after the person is no longer here. It doesn’t even have to allude to their work, since their work can no longer exist, but this sort of curation of what they are and what they hope to be remembered as. I wonder if every time you hear the word legacy is that what you think of, the after effect of the work? Or do you actually think of the work the person has accumulated?

Jen Rosenblit: I think of the person.

Niall Noel Jones: I think of the person, but I also think of the representation of what this person has become. Although I have never known Merce [Cunningham], I still know of Merce and I know of his work. I have an idea of what this person is through the work that I have seen, and the technique made after this person. When I hear of the word legacy I think of the word legend. That is sort of something that relies on history and historical basis and understanding. Also it gets passed from bodies to bodies like telephone and gets altered, swept away in other directions.

Addys: In relationship to Merce and his contemporaries – Are we living in a time where dance is no longer something everyone is out to codify?

Jen: There are some that are.

Niall: We were just talking about  RoseAnne [Spradlin]. There are desires to take these virgining institutions of new ideas about dance and organizing around the community. I think those are ways of codifying; almost codifying a community, wrapping it around a singular idea, or a singular motive. I think it’s still an act of codification. I don’t know to what that operates towards because I am really interested in dance not appearing as something particular because I think it ultimately excludes. I don’t think dance should necessarily bring in people, but it shouldn’t necessarily make people think that it has nothing to do with them – Even the people that are already inside it.

Addys: I am afraid of the word legacy. Even though it emerges through an artist’s career, I don’t like to think of dance as a drawn out accumulation of experiences surrounding one artist. I would really like to watch dance as it begins and ends, see ideas that begin and end, and have a visceral conclusion to my experience. My interaction with the artist ends after the show, whereas my relationship with the work continues. Legacy places equal value on the work and the artist.

Jen: I think there is something in that idea of legacy that ultimately suggests the person, the star. Not that I know that much about Merce, but what I gather is the second he died there was a frenzy around his legacy.

Addys: As I understand it, in 2000 he separated his name from his work and he started the Merce Cunningham Foundation. Its as if he was renting his work from his foundation for the last decade.

Jen: Well how much does that separate his name?

Addys: I think it’s a symbolic gesture of “these people are going to take care of my work,” but I am still creating work as an artist and not being the kind of person that needs to decide what is going to happen to my work.

Niall: He was still making work?

Jen: Yeah I guess I would really like to talk about what that means. I would even ask if Bill T. Jones is still making work.

Addys: True.

Jen: Once you have all this help about making work, taking the time to separate your name form the legacy of your work, that’s a business venture. I don’t think that’s a pure artistic visual venture. I don’t think we would have seen anything different coming form his work.

Addys: To me it says, “I will separate this whole talk about me dying and where my work is going, from the logistics of choreographing and creating.” It might be a symbolic gesture because you are so mired in that world, but he did separate the dual bodies of art and artist from his person.

Jen: But he has a legacy plan.

Niall: Beyond these people existing as packages, I would be also interested in how his decisions and how Merce, his environment, his working patterns, would have probably been systematized in this way. Maybe Merce was no longer making his dances in the way we understand a person making the work that they make. He has these people surrounding him that impart a whole difference of power and authority over his image and over the demand of Merce, because they know. When we think of legacy, how parts of these people get passed into other people, who then think they have a claim. Who is his –

Addys:  – Robert Swinston.

Niall: I guess he was his rehearsal director. Who knows what that probably meant for Merce and Robert during the later years of Merce’s life. Maybe he was acting directorially and making executive decisions. When you think of legacy and things that are going to be left behind, and remnants that you have to package and compartmentalize – that’s what a foundation does.

Addys: You can’t hold him accountable for being a successful person, for leaving work that needs to be managed when he dies.

Jen: I think we can all agree that no one was interested in his work after a certain time.

Addys: I would disagree.

Jen: Really? You were into his later work?

Addys: I never familiarized myself with his later work. His older work is where I have the most invested. But there are definitely some people not in this room that were very interested in his later career.

Jen: In terms of interest in the artistic value of his current work?

Addys: Well, I wouldn’t consider him a contemporary artist.

Jen: That’s the thing, once you establish legacy you are already placing yourself in a historical context.

Addys: How do you grow old in this field without becoming…something? Even Tere [O’Connor]: As downtown as he is, he is becoming an institution. He has made certain decisions to invest in the future. I guess how do you establish what comes after you die if you don’t take certain steps now?

Jen: As a young person, I don’t have a pull yet to think about that. Establishing legacy? I haven’t even established a now. I have yet to establish a method that would enable legacy. I want to be very bitchy and say that I would never have my work live outside of me after I am dead. But I would just say that I am young enough and naive enough to know that my work does not have a clear enough method where I can even think of appearing in someone else’s work that is already established. That is already recreating, that is already resuggesting, that is already defining that it already has its own method, already has its own context, that already can rewrite a situation.

Addys: I think Merce’s work lends itself to a utopian legacy. His work has no context to begin with. The world for Merce hasn’t changed, his dances are not a reaction to the body. When I first started taking classes there they offered me to be part of a small recreation and in some weak moment I said yes. I was playing this game with myself then about saying yes to everything everyone was going to ask me to do for one week. I was studying the technique for a year and at the beginning of the rehearsal process they gave me a videotape from the 1970s. “You are this man and just follow him throughout the whole dance and then you will be fitted in. Okay? Great.” “And then we will have two rehearsals where we are going to space you to make sure you are going there and going there.” I memorized the video, which was hysterical because inverse images really work my brain. We had the rehearsal. Nobody ever came up to me and said “You know this part is something more like…” or “This part should invoke or feel…”. Merce’s work, for me, is already constructed to last forever because it doesn’t matter who does it. The actual body just has to be here, the body has to be there. Of course, there is a high artistry in the deployment of his technique, but the ephemeral body is not his focus.

Jen: If we want to go historical in relation to legacy, he was defining a new way. I don’t know if it’s my claim to define a new way and I don’t know if it was during his time, but as myself looking at it now, he defined something. That is something that is really hard for me, that makes me a bit uncomfortable to talk about legacy, because yes I would want to say I don’t want to be a part of legacy, but when I watch Beyonce, or watch some star, I can recall how important it is and how referential it is and can be. I don’t want to think that my work wouldn’t be referential or important, but I wouldn’t say that it is a goal in terms of making. I do think there is a difference between Merce and someone like Tere. Merce was in a time where you could define something new; Tere is one of the more amazing people in my head space of what is defined as new, but historically I don’t think he is. I think Tere still filters on the verge of contemporary in that “I am not looking for newness.” I am looking for radical internal nature. Real commitment instead of new.

Niall: A renegotiation of those things that are being reemployed. I think dance references itself all the time. It would be impossible to not be connected to this formation of what it is legacy. Legacy is also based on this lingo of law. Something that is followed or abided by in thinking of dance historicized, or dance technique and systems of teaching. Cunningham is that. It’s built into these systems of how dance is taught in the nation and the world. In some way, we are all connected to that. We are all somehow in that. We’re in the Cunningham legacy. It’s strange to already exist in that. That is where we operate, or revolt. We decide to acknowledge and in some people an honoring, those that have been there. I always think how it would have been to make dance during the 50s – so exciting.

Jen: You find yourself in new terrains?

Addys: Really new. Your body’s new. Literally. We can’t even revolt too much.

But I remember when you [Jen] first started making work there was so much talk about you following a certain legacy of the unconventional body.

Jen: Yeah it wasn’t new. It was part of the historical study.

Addys: Even in thinking of your work Niall. I don’t remember the name of the work but there’s that Diana Ross song: [singing] “Just remember the day I set you free”. When I saw it, I almost called you without even knowing you because I had rehearsed that scene as a child, when she says that phrase, how gorgeous would it be to walk slowly and just slow down time, and then you totally did it. You started turning very slowly. It got me thinking of the legacy of the queer male body and the feminine body. There was a lack of campiness in your use of queerness and masculinity. It was more homegrown, real. And when she says that line and you and your dancer were on stage, the song exploded, and it is all about this woman. I wonder if you feel like you are following a certain Ishmael [Houston Jones] / Bill T. Jones trajectory?

Jen: – And your last name is Jones.

Niall: Yes my last name is Jones. Oh my god. I don’t know. I have been thinking a lot about that lately, especially with the new political shifting in New York City dance with these mergers and happenings. I think there is a sort of connection to gayness and queerness and of colored-ness that makes us connected in these ways and that’s fine. And I am all about observing that. But I think there are other things, these generational shifts, economic shifts, and like Bill T. [that I have a lot of problems with], that he doesn’t include those who do not have economic groundings. Especially for that interview that he had in the Movement Research Performance Journal. He said that the problem with artists now is that they do not know how to bridge into middleclass-ness.

Addys: He said that in the interview?

Niall: It’s kind of horrendous actually. To assume and to state that that is probably the biggest problem shows a severe gap in his understanding what it is currently like to be a practioner, a practicing artist in New York City right now. I don’t know if I necessarily have a legacy of theirs that I am really trying to hold up. At least not with my own body.

[Laughing]

Because it’s sort of similar to Merce. Bill is already doing that himself.

Addys: You can’t establish legacy without leaving your work. There was a lot of talk about being black and gay during the talk back of Jen’s Studio Series [at Dance Theater Workshop].

Jen: It was my fault. I invited three people to come in and talk and moderate because I wanted to avoid the questions about “process” and I wanted to talk about theory a bit more. I wanted to go a bit more outside the intimate details of the making of the work. Which I would have been more than willing to talk about. But we always get laden with questions of “how many times a week did you guys meet? Are you and Addys best friends?” I am all about those questions, but I wanted to lead with the idea of work.

It was my fault this talk didn’t go so well. I invited Will Rawls, Deyvon Emory and Walter Dundervill. I wanted self-identified men to talk about my work as a self-identified female. Very feminine in my own body, but already very obliterated idea of what gender is. I wanted these men to talk about my work. In my naivety, what happened was that there was a lot of talk about Addys’s maleness and blackness compared to the other white female performers.

Addys: Legacy is bequeathed to somebody else. You are a receiver, an interpreter. It was the first time I was actually called to a specific tradition of queerness and blackness. I told them that I was actually Dominican and that the concept of people of color has no political bearing on me. I wasn’t raised in this country nor raised in America’s unique relationship to color. I don’t necessarily seek camaraderie with anyone here based on color. Where I grew up everyone was a Domininican farmer, so we didn’t have to differentiate between each other because we were all basically the same. That is why Americans are so beautiful to me. They have such a huge concern of where they are and where they come from. I think it’s stunning. The scary part in the concept of legacy is just because I look like you doesn’t mean that I am politically in your world. I am very different from a Black American in Bed-Stuy. Will and David Thompson were kind of saying how can you not think of yourself as a black man when you are on stage.

. . .

Niall: It’s involuntarily linking you to something you did not link yourself too. How we identify and how we self-identify and the practice of that, sometimes it gets out of our hands, and others do it for us. In my dance history, recent dance history, how I can now be considered connected to Ishmael, who is somehow also historically connected to Bill T. Jones, this perspective of gay blackness and modern and postmodern dance. I am now connected to that because I appear in these people’s work. I have been working with them in this context and now I am inextricably bound to that person, to that thinking. I don’t really know what to do with that, I don’t know where that places me, because it’s sort of in the agreement you are making and also not making. I did connect myself in that way now I am sort of a part of this thing. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. It creates something for me to destruct or agree to.

Jen: I am more scared of, rather than knowing why, I don’t want to do it. It’s more of a fear.

Addys: A fear that it’s out of your hands?

Jen: It’s more a fear of that connection being unknown. Instead of me knowing exactly what it is and what I can do with it. It’s more like I don’t even know my own work, so I don’t know what that connection will do to me. How can I know the connection to someone else’s?

Niall: I also have to assume that, especially with the people in this room, that when we are not making or performing work with the idea of working to some sort of legacy. Maybe I would imagine the same thing for Graham, Paul Taylor, this historicized dance. And Merce as well. They weren’t thinking of haunted spaces to continue throughout time.

Addys: That’s where I think there is something tender about him starting a foundation apart from his company. I am really going to take this out of me completely, whether it’s practical or whether it can be accomplished at the level that he was working in. I am going to take this element out of my work and take this question of me dying and my prosperity, of me dying and my work dying. There is something precious and innocent about that.

Jen: Although I feel like it has nothing to do with making work.

Addys: I think he would agree. I wrote this quote down:

[dramatic reading]
“I understand that my pieces, whatever they’re worth, can easily enough be forgotten not only for what they were, but because as time continues, something else is happening which changes, which will push dance in different directions.”

Jen: Niall, didn’t you know Merce is here?

Niall: Merce is here. We are drinking him.

Addys: It’s almost as if he’s saying that his work is already gone. My work is already forgotten, because dance is perpetually changing. And now what I am trying to keep is the actual effort required to make these dances and what I do. He is saying remember the hard work I did to codify my movement, but my dances are not the most important things in that. My dances are over.

Jen: For him, it was a certain education. Which is different. I don’t feel like I am functioning at that level.

Addys: You are a contemporary artist. Your ideas don’t necessarily have to last your lifetime.

Jen: And they are not very much separate from the work.

Addys: At one point he was dealing with what he wanted to upkeep. I just don’t think there was a lot of personal research with him in terms of movement and aesthetic. Once you take that out, that he began incorporating ipods, visual arts. Now he is more “How else can I do what I do different?”

Jen: He did his research at one point.

Addys: Especially in the time we reached him, he had already settled a lot of questions he set out to do with his work. He’s so cutie pie. I have always had a secret crush on him.

Niall: On Merce? I didn’t know you loved Merce so much. What do you love about him?

Addys: The movement is extraordinary. I will always think of it as bold as not have a context in dance in a way of actually not having one.

Jen: To move? Or to make movement?

Addys: I can only speak to move. That’s the thing also, as a dancer I am willing to let go of you, the choreographer, easier than you are willing to let go of yourself. I think that’s a huge difference.

Jen: I definitely think of the difference between them. I dance in my work and I think about the difference to move and to make. I wouldn’t want to say that I do every second of my life. There are times when there is that question. At the Movement Research Gala moving and dancing there it was glorious. I was just dancing to the music. There is a little bit of a different brain space that I am sometimes in. Hence why it feels so freeing. I don’t think every second in the process of making dance is void of the dance. It’s a very complicated practice. I don’t think you [Addys] are completely devoid of that. I think you are suggesting that you are not into the making.

Addys: I think I am void of the legacy of making. Dancers don’t have much of a legacy rather a following.

Jen: I would just say that there is something different about the people in those early Merce videos that I saw and love, than you dancing in my work.

Addys: What is that difference?

Jen: I don’t think we’ve gotten there yet. There is a bit more expectation for you. They were beautiful and important in his process and stunning in their capacity. There is still something of a continuation in our relationship and you as a dancer, which I expect and will challenge you to challenge for me. I think that probably their personal relationships that did challenge each other but he was the beloved choreographer. At an earlier age he knew something, and I don’t think I know anything. I don’t think I am beloved and I don’t think you think me beloved.

That’s where legacy comes in. It’s something to do, what people hold you up as. Legacy is what you hold yourself as, and what you want to be a legacy of. And then there is what other people help you get to be. I just don’t know many people that hold me in the highest regards.

Niall: Dance culture was so different. There were fewer makers.

Niall: Back then it was more ubiquitous of dancers really following specific people. Because they wanted some knowledge or some understanding stemming from Merce Cunningham, from Alwin Nikolais… Who wanted to join their company, but there was a choreographer following. Merce had disciples.

Addys: And they were still teaching at the studio.

Niall: And there are still people that follow choreographers. Like Miguel Gutierrez.

Jen: Or even if you want to go a bit to the outskirts contemporary midtown uptown kind of way, Sidra Bell. We don’t actually, in this downtowny way, have the equivalent to Sidra Bell, who I love and wish she was my best friend to tell her to come dance the way I dance, because she will be better than me and it would be amazing. But I feel like she is that midtown uptown choreographer that has a following. People want, I want, to dance like her. I don’t like her aesthetic. It’s not contemporary or appropriate. But her following is massive and it’s because it’s part of a trajectory, part of that Gaga, balletic fucked up technique that you can just push so far. People are into that. I am! I just can’t do it.

Niall: It’s a kind of dance that still is radical even though it happened five years ago.

Jen: Exactly. When I watch it, it still feels radical to me, but I understand that it’s in a tradition that is so wrought with technique. Sometimes I wish I was wrought with technique, and then when I ripped my calf, I go back to knowing that I am not. I would say that Sidra Bell is the next Merce Cunningham in terms of that.

Addys: Somehow during the Movement Research Gala one of you approached me, I don’t know which one, and told me that the other one said that this will never happen for us.

Jen: I told you Niall told me. You said that during Trisha Brown’s performance.

Addys: What did you mean by that?

Niall: I did say that. Gosh what does that mean? I know where we were when I said it. Was Carla [Peterson] speaking at that point? No?

Jen: We were watching the video.

Niall: We were watching the video with Trisha. I think I said something like, “I can’t wait for us to be older,” and you said, “This will never happen to us.” Then I ran over and told Addys. It was sort of the magnitude of it. The size of the celebration around dance. That in it’s own way that it was an abreaction of history. A history that has sort of being long embedded in New York City. Not that that excludes me, I feel totally connected to Trisha Brown in many ways, but imagining this sort of tribute happening to those I know, of my current generation, I can’t fathom. I just don’t know if our generation is geared to honor and celebrate in that way.

Jen: I don’t think we have a clear starting point. But from my understanding of the generations before me is that there was a starting point: this is in rebellion against this, this is starting from this. I have no idea where I am starting from.

Addys: You [Jen] started in Maine jazz dance. And I started in reading books. We already started with such different information form the beginning. Previous generations started from the same base of frustration.

Jen: When we were children we were not up in our rooms thinking we are going to go far. We were thinking only as expansive as our world lent us and in my world that was lyrical jazz dance. Until we did not come into the same room we did not see any expansion. The starting point is a good thing about legacy. If you know where you start you might know where you end up.

Jen: Which is why for me it’s fucked up because I will do this until I can’t do it anymore. But I think that’s what every one of us think.

Niall: Probably not. I have seen so many dancers in college that fall by the waist side and remove themselves from the many unknown possibilities of dance just because it appears to be something marginal. Not financially beneficial and there is no monetary incentive so they just say maybe dance is not for me anymore, I can do it but I can also do fashion merchandising. I have seen people that think that they are going to be dancing forever and then creating this reality that says no dance isn’t real. Which I find myself quickly coming to terms with. Acknowledging that I don’t need to enjoy and care about dance in order for it to be profitable. The profit comes in other ways.

Jen: Like how?

Niall: It’s sort of comes in the struggle of it all. The trying to make it happen, the trying to rehearse, the trying to attempt to afford this lifestyle that doesn’t seem grandiose. That isn’t over the top far fetched.

Jen: You mean you didn’t feel fabulous when you got to the gala and were drinking red wine out of plastic cups?

Niall: I would if I was drinking it out of a Poland spring bottle. With the Gala, I think it’s sort of when history gets laid alongside the present.

. . .

Addys: Have both of you, in presenting your own work, have had to step up as a named body for the work to move forward?

Niall: What do you mean?

Addys: Is it important that your name be ever present as the entity that is concrete? For someone like Tere, his name can reach certain aspects that his work can’t. I wonder if it’s a conscious effort of choreographers to make their names that concrete object that can be recognized and comodified?

Jen: With Tere, his work does not reach people, his teachings does. If we would have used a different name like Miguel [Gutierrez] or John Jasperse, it would be different. I think Tere, and the reason why I would always follow his legacy, is because he has established this teaching. This educator… I would say that in the community he is a part of the legacy, but apart because he is unique enough in how he has spread the information. He is a different teacher and a different kind of maker. He is as complex as  RoseAnne [Spradlin] is. It’s just that we hold the man to expectations because he is so large in our minds.

Niall: But then how can we view legacy when this person is still with us? It’s interesting when speaking of legacy of one that is deceased and one who is still present, and living in the same city and making work. And we see them at the same shows that we are in. How does this person’s work and practice is then embodied in a person that is sitting in front of us?

Addys: Especially since we are living in the age of the choreographer and for me, I kind think of dancer versus choreographer. Where the work and choreographer can be indistinguishable.

Niall: I don’t know. I think there are some really incredible performers

Addys: Oh yes.

Jen: Names, Names!

Niall, Addys: Michelle Boule!

Niall: Because of her presence that Miguel has been able to sort of establish his own legacy.

Addys: But what is the legacy, for herself, that Michelle Boule leaves behind? Whereas Miguel can establish certain things that can outlast him, what can she establish in terms of her own personal legacy? Do dancers leave nothing to hold on to?

J: That is not true. YOU hold on to the choreographer. What I hear you saying is that YOU place more value in the choreographer.

Addys: Woo, intense.

Jen: Because I think honestly I know you hold a lot of value in Michelle Boule’s work.

Addys: Oh yeah!

Jen: As a choreographer I hold a lot of value in dancers and I keep questioning what more can I do for the performer because they obviously are the ones that float the work. I have an idea of what the work is, but that is the complicated thing about legacy. It does not exist in ideas, it exists in product. It’s product based. Michelle Boule is the product. She is the one that has worked over and over and over again and produced this thing that is then something I can stand up and clap for.

Addys and Niall: [clap clap clap]

Jen: The choreographer, I am like a think tank. Though I value think tanks, I don’t think think tanks produce what people can respond to. The think tank is like a book. It can only function for people who wan tot go to the library and read, it does not function for anyone else who can absurd in different ways.

Niall: But then how does that discourse gets disseminated? How do you create this idea or space where thinking and choreographer/performer dichotomy can be critiqued?

Jen: Well that’s why I can’t separate myself from my own work. It’s research.

Niall: I can’t either. In me choreographing and directing the work and existing in it that way, and then having people who simply perform the work, I try to build more of a space where it is me dancing as a hegemonic presence in this world of being followed. I refer to my other performers as collaborators. I think about them as that contextually and creatively in the work, because I think of their bodies as a necessary presence that informs me in multiple ways. If they weren’t there, then this work couldn’t be that.

Jen: We have actually talked about the word collaborator before and I don’t even think we are done talking about it. I just feel it’s fucked up that there isn’t a given starting point of collaboration as understood. I can’t in the program write Addys is my collaborator.

Addys: And I wouldn’t feel right being called that.

Jen: Because it feels so fucked up to say that. That is the base; it’s the starting point. It doesn’t exist without the collaboration. Right before you got here, Addys and I were talking about how I can’t even fathom entering into a new process with people that aren’t at a similar level as Addys. The idea of collaboration is that I call you whenever I want to call you, in whatever manner I want to call you. And I have to tell you this idea right now. The idea of professionalism gets further and further away from that in the moment. Right now I have to tell you this idea or this image I just saw. It’s very present. It’s very right now and sometimes it doesn’t get exercised on stage.

Niall: In my studio series I used the work collaborator in my press release. Something along the lines of “Niall Jones collaborates with Courtney Cook and Leslie Cuyjet.” Burr [Johnson] asked if that was really the case. Did they collaborate with me? Did they help make this work? And I said Yes. They did. I think if you are trying to think of Choreographer, or collaboration being a dismissal of choreographic power, then I am not interested in that conversation. People want to know if you did this.

Jen: Who answers the emails?

Niall: Who scheduled the rehearsals?

Jen: Addys and I actually address the same thing. Tere called me out on it, on why I am running away from the idea of choreographer. I am not running away from nothing. I want major bows. Since we were in our first year of college, we’ve been talking about a film being made about me. I am not trying to disregard my heyday as a star.

Niall: Which you are!

Addys: Hahahaha

Jen: That is a difference. The ego thing is different than the making. It filters in an out. There is this me that wants to be acknowledged as a beautiful amazing sexy talented person. Then there’s the thing that I do, that I work through with Addys, and I see what works and I see where I am needed. And for a long time we have been fleshing out what collaboration means, and collaboration for us is not that I am inviting him to the studio an asking him to make up 16 counts.

Addys: And I am not interested in making 16 counts.

Jen: And I am not interested in his 16 counts. I am interested in my 16 counts.

Niall: I have never asked the dancers to make that. But I do honor the fact that your body is here and that you are willing to offer yourself in a generous way. People like Michelle Boule are imagining the honor and tribute that they deserve will dissolve…Maybe this is a way to reengage that, that performers really do matter.

Jen: We will never forget Michelle.

Niall: I dream of Michelle. And it doesn’t all have to do with Miguel Gutierrez…

What I wanted to say before is that there is that demand. Maybe it’s an urbanizing or New York centric where legacy follows celebrity. That it demands this celebrity recognition of who did what and who contributed in what ways. That I get honored, that I get remembered. That I am this space, I am this voice, this haunted memory of what is important

Addys: And that is my ultimate question with legacy. For me, I want to approach the work as legacy, not the person.

Jen: I want to say that so clearly. Addys and I argued at my house the other night and I wanted to say that it is all about the work. But I want to be honest. I really want to be the bigger person and say my work exists without me. Honesty is the best policy when you are making and I don’t think my work exists without me right now.

Addys: I don’t think it has to exist without you in order for it to be about the work. You don’t have to separate from your work in order to highlight it.  RoseAnne [Spradlin] for me, she is one of my biggest dance crushes. But I have never seen her actually move. The way I view her, as part of her work, is a very collaboration between her and the work. Her performances don’t last attempt to entrench themselves in time. They blow up, and hit your face and you get splatter, and you walk away and say great. She doesn’t have for me a whole secret effort in promoting herself as much as she does her work.

. . .

Addys: I have had these conflicting feelings towards you [Jen] during the last year. As an audience member, which is the position I usually place myself in even in work that I am involved in, I have seen your dances moving forward and forward. And I think our generation has the ability to define what it means to move forward. We all can’t be like Merce, but I do think it’s valid for something of your work and visions to outlast your physical body without having to make you into a static artist. How can we exist without becoming a celebrity, without becoming a foundation?

Jen: I know we have been talking a lot about RoseAnne. But I died multiple ways watching her work. I died as an audience member. I died as someone who dances, who practices dance. The physicality of what was going on. But I would just say over 80 percent of what made me die was the artist who makes work. I feel like RoseAnne is creating a legacy but it is not in a fucked up way, in a way that is existing while she is alive, it’s not in a way that it’s existing in her work. It’s more in the people that are seeing her work and once her last audience member dies, her legacy is over.

Niall: And that’s okay!

Jen: Her legacy is in us and then it’s going to be gone. I think there is something valid about people who chose to stick around and people who chose to make a life in dance. Dance is a lifestyle. Addys and I had a roommate once and she would chose dance over lifestyle. She would chose dancing over eating. And for us, it was like “What?” We chose lifestyle to fit in terms of dance. I think that has always been our main thing. That is legacy. That’s why certain artists I wish I would care more for.

Niall: Names, names.

Jen: Meredith Monk. I don’t know much about her to care, but I think the reason why her legacy exists for some people is because it has been a New York life.

RoseAnne, and knowing RoseAnne, she is very alive, but I would say in terms of what I want legacy to be, she is establishing a legacy. She is here; she lives. Nowhere where I am going to live anytime soon, but I do walk by it every day. She offers health care and wellness to people, myself included. I see her, I know her, I’ve talked to her. There is a legacy that is involved in commitment to making dance fit into lifestyle. The reason why I can make funny jokes about Merce is because I know nothing about him. And because by the time you [Addys] were studying Merce, in my mind he was dead.

Niall: That is why people are so into Deborah Hay. She has somehow created this trajectory where she can somehow allow her lifestyle and her dance practice to coalescence into one body. Which I think we are all trying to do…

But in thinking about legacy, it is really hard to not think of memory. We just remember people that we know. People that have left indelible marks in our minds. You two don’t know my grandmother but I know my grandmother. I know when she dies I will remember this woman for the rest of my life. That is what makes that person, the ghost of that person, so profoundly impactful. I hold that. Missing RoseAnne’s show and knowing that I missed that show is still going to have an impact on me. I know that that person is still around and doing it. The hope that maybe one day I will have a visual reference with what I feel is there. Legacy extracts the present. It valorizes the past and then hopes for a future.

Jen: That’s my major concern in glamorizing present artists. If I was Merce’s close friend I would have told him “You are still alive. You are very much alive.” Now I understand what you [Addys] are saying about RoseAnne in relation to Tere. She does not make a conscious effort to make a legacy. I do see Tere, I do see Miguel making an effort towards legacy. Their work inevitably moves towards that.

. . .

That’s the kindred feeling I have about RoseAnne. She has chosen to stick around. I think there is this excitement around my work because I have decided to make it exciting. I think in seven years there might not be much excitement around my work. My connection to RoseAnne is that I see in her a lifetime of work and not necessarily exciting all the time. But the woman has chosen to stick to her research. I have seen her work over the span of six years and I see a research method that she has stuck too that sometimes has not been popular. And now we are deciding that it’s popular and I love that it is. It’s relevance. It has been relevant since as long as she decided to do it.

That’s why I have been fearful to say she has a legacy because I don’t want her to be cheapened. I know she has always been successful, but now people have decided for her when she is and when she isn’t. Our friend Shane [Powers] says dance is a visual culture. There is a part of visual culture where people decide what is a trend. We are in a trend right now that the artist gets to decide, which I am loving, but I know that it will fade. I know that another trend will come in and there is a fearfulness about that trend, because I know that I won’t be on top of that trend. Legacy isn’t an ever-present state. Legacy is only apparent when trend is apparent.

Addys: It goes back to what you were saying Niall about your grandmother. I first started approaching this interview with a celebration of living legacies.  A legacy that is alive, that is constantly in the people that are present. I will always appreciate dance for the people that see it, not necessarily the people that can talk about it, who can teach it. I am such an audience member lover. The audience has the only people that hold that legacy. I am really at ease accepting that five people saw it versus 500 people. It only takes one person.

Jen: I think we make work and dance work in those terms. I think a lot of us do.

. . .

Niall: There is something so non human about this idea of legacy. Dance as a visual culture references visual images. You see these replay images of things you have seen or passed down through verbal methods, through textbooks, that then are canonized and become no longer about this flesh and blood. It always becomes some other thing. To imagine to sit in a room with Tere O’Connor or Bill T Jones, gosh I am only naming men, but Judy Hussie-Taylor. To be in a room with these incredible people and know in the back of my mind that I am in a room with something special. It’s like you said, legacy is static, and I don’t think these breathing bodies are fixed. They are much active and I am watching that.

Jen: Can you name an unfixed legacy?

Niall: Non dance related, Malcom X has a clear legacy but his legacy is completely unfixed. I have recently been reading a lot of black activist readings. His legacy has been spread across multiple communities that want to portray him in one particular way: as a madman, a feminist, intellectual, non-gay friendly, and then being gay. He was a gay hustler for a long time. He actually has a legacy that is completely unfixed, very equivocal, with multiple meanings.

Jen: I think a lot of people are functioning in that unfixed state…

Niall: Legacy gets subscribed to via profit, across economical landscapes. Merce and Bill T. have these foundations built up that are not solely built around the time of work they’ve created, but also around a nest egg. They have financial influence.

Jen: They can float organizations.

Niall: How a certain kind of capitalist legacy demands money to be involved. Maybe I have some sort of an ounce of legacy somewhere, but it’s not situated through money. There also, that dance can survive without a central choreographic figure. I fetishsize death all the time, or of me dying so every time I have a show, like my Studio Series, I am like “Oh fuck, maybe I will be hit by a bus today. But the dance is made. And it exists.”

Jen: My mom saw the dolls I made for FACADE. I loved that she so clearly knew that it was me and Addys, that she visually understood what I was doing. She kept asking why are you saying death about you, you are very much alive, living life and my explanation was so simple: I needed to kill that name of Bottomheavy. I made it up when I was graduating college, it mean’t something important to me then. It doesn’t reflect what I need now. It doesn’t reflect me and Addys, it reflects this thing outside of us that I don’t need. She is confused by it but she at least asked the question.

Actually it speaks about legacy. I think I am business savvy enough to kill what I think is relevant to make noise. It is making some noise, because some crazy person is following the Bottomheavies and they know what it is called and then it’s gone. Not completely gone, it’s very much that nothing has changed but naming is very much a part of legacy. The only reason why we can talk about people like Tere, Merce, Bill T. and RoseAnne is because they are at an age where they are able to name things. The anxiety that comes to me is that I don’t think I can name things yet. I want to name things desperately but I don’t think I can yet.

Niall: And whatever these things are, other people are able to name it for them. We see it enough, we know it, we study it. To that crazy person of yours that is following Bottomheavies, legacy only takes one person.

Addys: Is that something you are both conscious of in terms of legacy? Legacy in terms of self-documentation? I remember Jen two years ago you wanted to start self-documenting yourself.

Jen: Oh my god, yes. Lily [Gold] was just talking about that. Which I didn’t follow through. I went through this thing two years ago, during our Fresh Tracks, I wanted to document: I wanted pictures, I wanted videos, I wanted interviews. I wanted to collect materials. Lily came into rehearsal one day with me and Addys and started taking some pictures. Nothing ever happened beyond that. I did have a feeling of legacy as being something that someone decided to document.

Addys: Merce I think is one of the few dance artists that has made his legacy not something that he records, but has made other artists record it for him. His collaboration with costumes, music, and sets. Documentation of his work is also done from an exterior perspective. This has allowed him to become a legacy of visual artists with his drawings, musicians with his collaborations with John Cage, and dancers. He has touched upon mediums that all circle around dance.

Jen: I will say that he was in the right time. The first time I tried collaborating was with my friend Jules [Gimbrone] who I am much closer to now. Our first collaboration was really hard because she felt that I was getting more press or more attention for my contribution to the show. I think it can be so much more complicated now. I think the artist is more complicated now. Artists are more expansive…

Niall: But you would still categorize the work you do as dance?

Jen: 100 percent.

Addys: Do you Niall?

Niall: I find it important that dance is remarked as dance. There has been such a desire to remove this imagined stigma about what that is. I think that it’s also why people are interested in your [Jen] work because you are doing dance and you are also reclaiming that as a possible artistic title. People are really interested in that. If we are talking about legacy we are also operating post Ann Liv Young. There were people that were operating via dance but no longer wanting to consolidate their work or their theories in relationship to dance. Dance has no visibility. Has no marketability. In our downtown culture of dance, those things don’t catapult you to a sea of greatness. There has been a lot of distancing. I feel like we are in this area that we want to say we do dance. We call it dance.

Jen: When I was teaching at Hollins University, there was this one girl who everyone would have fallen in love with her, she was really bad ass. In my mind, her performance was following a trajectory of Ann Liv Young, and I mentioned that during the talk back. The students began barking at me, saying that her work is so much more. I was in love with the girl; she was my epitome of southern charm. They said that her work is nothing like Ann Liv Young’s. It’s not as brass, it’s softer, more lamentable. I was in shocked to see how the generation a few years younger than me was also so much more sensitive to that world.

The really beautiful thing about dance is this affection towards intergenerational. I see some choreographers in the audience and I realize they are old. I know that one day I will be old amidst a crown of not old people. I will be that lame person that stuck around. And that’s beautiful.