Critical Correspondence

Isabel Lewis in conversation with Levi Gonzalez

Strange Action

Levi Gonzalez: I’m talking with Isabel Lewis who just came back to New York yesterday for her show at PS122. We were just talking about New York and what’s hard about it.

Isabel Lewis: What’s really hard about it. My distance from New York wasn’t so planned, but came in phases. As I was working with Ann Liv [Young], it was the touring that was taking me away and then Lewis Forever also started taking me away because my sisters are in Berlin. Then meeting Josep, my boyfriend, and we’ve started to collaborate… and slowly, I felt like I was actually burned out on New York. This is a pattern for me, I get burned out on something and I disappear… and it’s not so premeditated, but I realize it after the fact.

Levi: I had that feeling, I never heard you say, “I’m leaving.”

Isabel: I’m still very much in between and I’m not so settled there at all. And I also no longer have a home address here in New York, which is a very strange place to be. But what was important for me was that distance, and I guess specific to Berlin, the kind of quietness and solitude that you can have there. People talk about it as a lonely city. And even though I have a community there, I spend a lot of time alone and in silence. You can actually hear silence when you are in Berlin. Whereas here, there is just the constant, constant noise. You forget as you adapt to another situation, and in a way it was soothing and relaxing to me because it felt like home somehow, but I’d forgotten that when I go to the toilet, when I go to the bedroom, any space in the house here, it’s just constant sound. In Berlin that solitude, that silence was something that I really needed.

Levi:There’s such a curiosity here of like, “Should I be there?” Especially for artists who are struggling with survival here.

Isabel: It’s been a really personal journey—it could have been Berlin, it could have been anywhere. It was just this fact of needing to take some distance from everything and needing this space for reflection. I had contacts and connections and friends and family in Berlin, which landed me there. I don’t know really about the dance scene in Berlin. My time there was so clearly about this introspection after having consumed so much experience in my years here in New York. I really went for it here.

Levi: You did.

Isabel: I did so much. And I learned so much and it’s incredible, but never did I have time to really process. The thing that I can speak to is the fact Berlin is significantly cheaper than New York. The entire pace and the sense and value system of time and money is just different. It’s another sensibility completely. Here, there’s that constant pressure to go and to keep going, and it’s also something that cannot be compared—it’s invaluable, it can’t be matched. But Berlin wasn’t, for me, about making a bunch of connections or trying to get inside the scene. Here there’s a really clear and tight sense of community, which is beautiful, that I don’t think exists there.

Levi: It seems harder to locate.

Isabel: It’s hard to locate. You meet tons of unemployed artists, tons of unemployed dancers. And there’s an attitude of, well, I’m just going to keep training and keep doing my thing and keep trying to get a job and work at the café. So that’s very similar to here. And then there’s the people that try to create their own scene. In certain neighborhoods, like Kreuzberg and Neukölln, that’s happening more and more. And it’s feeling more and more like the energy that I felt in Brooklyn, with artist-organized stuff happening more and more. But I’ve been using my time there in a very specific way, like learning how to eat breakfast before turning on my laptop and writing emails.

Levi: You don’t learn that in New York!

Isabel: You really don’t! I never ate breakfast when I lived in New York. It was really a thing that I learned there, to have a proper really beautiful breakfast and then start working. Because if you email that person thirty minutes later or one hour later it is not going to make a difference. But then there’s the other vibe where people get to Berlin and they get lost in that sense of freedom. It’s beautiful to get lost and you need to get lost. I needed to get lost for a while, and now I’m trying to start making these connections. This last month in Berlin I performed the show once per week over the month. I showed it in this really raw space, a bar of some friends of mine. And someone there runs a space that’s part of this commune and he just said, “I really loved your show, whenever you need space let me know.” He had access to this big open room with no columns and windows, so I did the next showing there. As I start to show my work, it also starts to create connections and I feel like I’m starting to feel that sense of community more, but it’s something only just starting for me. But there are all these squats and communes and physical space that exist there that are not so hard to get a hold of.

Levi: Were you showing this work that you’re bringing to PS122?

Isabel: Yes. The show Strange Action; it was called Untitled Solo (Sweet Exorcist), but there were many iterations of it, the very, very first one being at AUNTS in November of 2007.

Levi: Wow, good memory.

Isabel: I remember it because it was directly after Halloween. I found this really amazing denim jacket in a second hand store, and I thought “that reminds me of Mr. T. I’m going to be Mr. T for Halloween.” And that started the whole Mr. T exploration. I had the gig at AUNTS. It was November, but I had no time to actually make anything because I was working with Ann Liv and working on Everyone with Miguel [Gutierrez], and we were touring and it was kind of constant. I was performing all the time and I hadn’t given myself any time to actually make anything, and yet I really wanted to make something that’s mine, after not having had that in a while. I was thinking and stressing out about it and I just decided at some point that whatever I do at AUNTS I’m going to frame it by this week that came prior to this date. Whatever happens to me in this week is what I’ll focus on and make something out of that.

So in that week, there was Halloween, in that week I had also watched Eyes Wide Shut by Stanley Kubrick for the third time, because I’m weirdly obsessed with that movie. So, for AUNTS that night I said, “I’m just going to arrive three hours early and I’m going to use these three hours to make the show and at the end of the three hours, I’ll open the door and the audience will come in and that will be the show.” So I got there, they gave me a space upstairs in the Event Center, one of these weird creepy rooms. I closed the door and made a sign, “At 11pm, you can come in.” I had my Halloween costume, I had my laptop, I had a cigarette, I had this robe and these scattered ideas. I was also thinking about the last AUNTS that I had performed in where I had done this weird repetitive head banging ritual thing. So with those things I made the show in those three hours, essentially.

I remember I didn’t understand what I had done and I felt really weird and vulnerable because of that. And yet there kept being these repercussions. People kept mentioning it and bringing it up. And then there was the “Young Americans” APAP [American Performing Arts Presenters Conference] showcase, which I was meant to be a part of. And again had no time to prepare anything. So I said, well, I’m going to do the weird thing that I did at AUNTS.

I remember that day I had to tech Everyone with Miguel downstairs and then run upstairs and do my APAP showing and then run back downstairs and do the APAP showing for Miguel.

Levi: Yeah, that sounds like APAP.

Isabel: So again, I had fifteen minutes, I showed the thing and I left. I just went for it, that’s what I had. I have to be real about it. That’s what I’ve had the chance to work on and that is what I’ve created. I remember getting ready right before we started the showing – I was in the studio reading this piece of paper in a corner and listening to this song on a laptop. And I remember Chase [Granoff] actually making some comment like “Oh, so this is how you warm up now?” because I think he probably expected me to be getting really warm to do some crazy physical thing. I do physical stuff in the show, but there was actually a makeshift scrapped together script written on a piece of paper. That was the first time I had ever done anything like that. So that’s what I was looking over and that’s what I was writing out—I’m going to talk about this and this and this.

Weeks later, I got an email from Vallejo [Gantner, Artistic Director of PS 122] mentioning, “I saw the showing, I really liked it, I’m really interested in this piece.” I wrote back to him and said, “thank you very much, but what I’m really working on right now is this new project with my family called ‘Lewis Forever.’” That’s when we did Freak the Room at PS 122 instead of doing the solo show. I was just so terrified; I put it on the back burner. And then Lewis Forever started and it’s been this full time thing…

Levi: Which continues right?

Isabel: Which continues and it was actually meant to be Lewis Forever that was programmed this summer, but it was too complicated and this space opened and I was like, “I don’t think we are going to be able to deliver this Lewis Forever show, but I still have the solo.” I hadn’t let it go. I wasn’t able to let it go… The impact of doing this thing that I really had no understanding of was so intense for me. I was still completely fixated on trying to understand what I had done. And so I had been slowly working on it all these years. So now I had this chance to really focus on just that and put Lewis Forever aside for a little bit. Since January I’ve been putting together this expanded version of the original solo in a very concentrated, focused way.

Levi: When I read about it, it sounds like it’s examining your relationship to performance in general.

Isabel: It’s absolutely about my relationship to performance. The way I think about it, the things that excite me about it, the things that bring me joy and bring me back to a sense of why I do this, why I choose to perform. It was this realization over the course of my small career that the thing that fascinates me in terms of content is really performance itself. I’m finally coming to understand that I’m just obsessed with this form and, it’s not specific to dance because it has more to do with this live act, this action, this experience of what it is to perform. Whatever it is that you are performing, whether it’s music, text, dance, or whatever. But the condition of performing, what that is, is really fascinating and bizarre and strange, and especially working with so many different choreographers and directors with really different approaches.

Levi: All relatively intense people too. So, that’s all part of the research?

Isabel: That’s definitely been a huge part of the research. It’s such a state, such a site for so many things to happen.

Levi: I feel like it’s a container or space where so much happens that I’ll never really be able to understand it all, or analyze it, or pick it apart. And that’s what’s exciting about it. That you create all of these conditions and structures, as many as you can possibly think of and maybe it’s about rehearsal, maybe it’s not, but then you enter into that space and it’s so beyond comprehension somehow. Energetically, intellectually…

Isabel: I love performing and I’m terrified of performing and I always hated the thought of making a solo. By nature, I have a very shy interior and at the same time I find something in this act of performing that’s so liberating and bizarre. It does have to do with the unattainability of really understanding it. I am so critical in the way that my brain works; I like to really understand things and pick things apart and analyze, and performance is always so fresh to me, every single time no matter what it is I’m performing. It was such an incredible experience for me to do so much performing and from so many different approaches to thinking about it.

This show has a lot to do with that fascination, which also is connected to this workshop that I made, the Communal EPIC Fiction workshop. The breakdown of it is: Communal Experience of Performing Instantly Created Fiction. I made it to teach at Hollins [University]. And then I got to teach it as a part of classclassclass. And I’ve continued: I taught it again at Hollins, I got to teach it at Universitet De Kunst in Berlin, with a visual artist from the Master’s program.

I developed this workshop to come up with a structure for people to create instantly and perform together instantly, as a kind of ensemble. The way of going about it was by exposing the traditional production elements of a performance. So you have these roles: lighting designer, cameraperson, scriptwriter, inhabitor or performer, but everybody’s a performer, performing in these ten-minute sets and then the roles would rotate. The whole workshop was focused on eliminating this hesitation. The choices are all being made instantly. We don’t use the language of improvisation, we don’t think of it in that way. It’s about creating the show right then. Creating this workshop re-inspired me. It was also my response to difficulties in collaborating with Lewis Forever, where all four people are all trying to make a determined number of choices together. I was trying to figure out how I can come up with a system of collaboration that doesn’t feel like a series of compromises, but where everyone has agency and where everybody feels the power to make a choice and to not have that hesitation and that back and forth, which can be interesting. But it’s also frustrating and it’s one in which we all struggle a lot.

Levi: The workshop sounds very liberating, as a practice.

Isabel: Yeah, I thought there has to be some other way that I can understand what it is to collaborate with many people. I had been feeling lost and frustrated about my role inside of performance. And with the workshop, I got excited again about it. I said, “What is it about doing this workshop and being with people and guiding this thing that feels so satisfying and so inspiring to me, and how can I bring that to my own process?” Because when I start making a work, I just feel sad and depressed and I hate myself. Can there be a way to find joy inside of my own private creation process? Does it always have to be torturous and painful?

Levi: I’d love to know what you figured out.

Isabel: It’s kind of unclear to me exactly, but for me it was this thing of live interaction and I decided that that’s going to be part of how I’m going to deal with the approach of performance in this show, literally talking with my audience. Not trying to create something that’s separate from them and they just watch, but something a bit more conversational.

Levi: There’s a way to make people cognizant of the fact that they are participating in a live event, that can be a lot more subtle than dragging them up onstage. Have you seen Dean Moss’s piece Kisaeng Becomes You?

Isabel: I didn’t see it. I was out of town.

Levi: It really was classically pulling someone up onstage, but somehow transforming them with this traditional Korean dress, and filming that. They’re mimicking someone. It’s this incredibly honest performance because they’re lost. They have no mastery of what they’re doing, they have no relationship to it, so they’re literally just translating on the spot. And there aren’t the layers of projected personality that can sometimes infiltrate performance. Of course, that’s not necessarily the only way to engage an audience.

Isabel: It has been so long since I’ve made something on my own, where I was making the final call on all things. I started paying attention to my own process and trying to figure out where I find joy in that. Another big work for me was the thesis I wrote in my senior year of college. It was about comic books and film theory and performance and time and literature and narrative and blah, blah, blah… I got to spend a year just working on this piece of writing. And the way I went about it was, I realized, a process of mine which I have been neglecting… Just reading a ton of stuff, pulling all kinds of sources, and connecting ideas that seem unrelated somehow, and finding new connections between them. And the whole year I was slowly collecting in a single document quotes, ideas—these scraps that just collected and collected and collected and became like a master list. And then I started to slowly connect and construct the structure of the entire work. It was this unorganized mess that I found structure through just spending time with it. I just discovered again that I really enjoy research in this academic way. It’s not so much about generating original content as much as seeing what exists, seeing which ideas are exciting to me or seem to stick in my mind for periods of time, and then the creative work being how I connect the ideas.

Levi: And in this case, how you inhabit them.

Isabel: Exactly. When I started working on the show again intensively, I was just on my computer in my flat in Berlin collecting scraps, this quote, that quote, this writer, that film, this artist, this poet. That process ended in a 12-page script. It was never intended to be used as a script to be memorized and delivered verbatim. But it was a kind of skeleton or a way to help organize my brain so that I could access this information live and transmit it and communicate it in an embodied state. I didn’t spend too much time worrying about “is this dance or not dance?” “what’s my relationship to dance?” Although there was a good while where I was really confused by that.

Levi: It seems like that question isn’t necessarily particularly productive as a place to work from. I see more and more people letting go of that obligation or responsibility to fulfill some kind of genre requirement.

Isabel: I sometimes feel it’s a lot simpler than that and it breaks down to what you have access to, what you don’t. My work had to adapt to my conditions which were not ever being in one place long enough to set up any kind of regular studio practice. It’s me and my laptop and my notebook and that’s the working site and I’m just adapting to my situation.

Levi: You’re also being clear in what your interests are, I think. It’s very personal and subjective, looking at your own process and examining what works and what doesn’t work, and allowing that to direct you in terms of how you’re working and what you’re work is about.

Isabel: I definitely feel a new excitement for myself, and I feel a clearer framing of what this has all been about for me all along. Looking over past works like the Labor Union, which was really inspired by a sense of aesthetics that were happening during the labor movement and finding all of this movement vocabulary that felt generated from visual representations of the body during that time. I always felt somehow the final work never reflected the research and that can be fine, but I’m in a place where I do care about the research and I want to reveal that in someway. I want that to be a part of the live event and yet I never figured out quite how to do that or how it belonged. You do all this research and you think about all these ideas and then you create this aestheticized thing based on that, but it’s not transparent enough to reveal it. Other things are revealed in the mystery of live performance, and that’s cool too, but there was something unsatisfying for me. Even with The Live Performance by the Labor Union, where the goal was not to create any original content but to try to steal from everyone in our scene, I realized how closed and small that is. How would anybody not completely involved in the scene be able to decipher the thing that we made? I think there is something cool about making something that specific, but something is missing in the execution and it’s annoying to me. It keeps me sort of skeptical about my own abilities as an artist, or my own sense of who I am as an artist. I made something and it got a decent review, and people seemed to like it, but there was something about bringing that research closer to the live moment, sharing it in some way.

Levi: I can really relate to that. I’m not interested in making art that’s decorative, but somehow when it gets removed from the source or the inspiration in the real world, it starts to feel decorative—a treatment of a thing, but not a thing in and of itself.

Isabel: I was also having problems with that. In the piece I kind of address ideas of representation and these levels of distance that I think are possible to have and to create inside of a performance via a performer. I think of it as fiction and layers and levels of fiction. I talk about that a bit in the piece, and the impossibility of succeeding at representation or at least in what I’m trying to do. Like maybe with tons of money and an acting coach and plastic surgery you could. I’m just going ahead and dealing with the ever-present failure of representation, but still saying that I’m Mr. T or I’m Nicole Kidman. It’s not about landing that investigation in that. It’s just putting it out there: this is what it is, but then what worlds can we create here together. When am I Isabel? When am I performing Isabel? When am I Isabel performing Mr. T? It’s all about that performative near and far with the audience and with the actual and the fictional, all mixed up and blurred. Working with this concept of fiction, I was able to let go of some kind of authentic representation of myself. Being able to completely set that aside gives me this sense of relief and freedom and fun when I perform. I can actually have fun if I feel like I don’t somehow have to represent my authentic self. That’s not for me—trying to discover who authentic Isabel is onstage.

Levi: I think it just happens. Maybe it happens more clearly when you stop obsessing over it?

Isabel: I have a feeling that’s the case. That it’s this other route, but somehow I had to do this kind of mental gymnastics for myself in order to get there.

Levi: I’m excited to see the show.

Isabel: I’m excited to do the show. I’m very excited.