Noura Murad is a multi-disciplinary artist, dedicated researcher and the artistic director of acclaimed Leish Troupe. She lives, creates and teaches in Damascus, Syria. Noura and I first met in 2009 at the Beirut International Platform On Dance (BIPOD). The first thing I remember is that she offered me some really targeted feedback on my solo work at Monnot Theater – and she has held my attention, my curiosity and my heart ever since. We met twice in 2010, in Damascus and Amsterdam, while each on tour. It was at the Julidans Festival that year that I attended Noura’s work and was introduced to her Identities Project.  These were watershed moments for me – my first communion with a fellow Syrian woman around the topics of art, aesthetics and cultural warfare.

Fast forward to this year.  Our dear cohort Adham Hafez, co-curator behind the New York Live Arts – Live Ideas 2016:  MENA Future alongside Tommy Kriegsmann, had the idea of a collaboration by proxy. He contacted Noura and set about a process that would bring her language and research into the lives of 5 dancers in New York City. Jen Rosenblit, Omagbitse Omagbemi, Miguel Angel Guzman, Ishmael Houston-Jones and I were the Proxy Girls. We took on the task in a one-night experiment that ultimately became a conversation about intimacy and perception. Noura attended that night via Skype, though technical hurdles prevented her from interacting live with the us or the audience.  This interview serves as a follow up to Proxy Girls; as an outlet for Noura to speak about this collaboration and to further the discussion about proximity and understanding.

– Leyya Mona Tawil

Proxy Girls was produced as part of Live Ideas: MENA/Future – Cultural Transformations in the Middle East North Africa Region in Association with Movement Research, MAPP International Productions and Critical Partner, Culturebot, on the 21^st of March, 2016.

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22 May 2016

Leyya Tawil: Let’s just get right into it. Proxy Girls. How did the whole event come to be? Was it an idea of yours, or Adham’s?

Noura Murad: In fact it was Adham’s idea. We were in connection for months and he told me about the (NYLA Live Ideas) festival and he said Okay, if you don’t mind, let’s try this experience. It was really strange for me, it was the first time to work with such a distance with the dancers. It was weird. [laughter]

Because all artists know that when you work with body you need this energy connection. You need to be near the people, you need to touch them, to see them, to hear their voices, to feel them really, to know what you can do with them. And it was not possible in this experience. But I was very excited because I appreciate how Adham sees his own role – to distribute contemporary artwork, especially in this time. We agree that we are not agreed at all with the modes of transferring or distributing, especially regarding Syrian artists abroad. It’s sad, in fact. I mean, using the name of war and everything… media. We think that as artists we need to have another way to explain what we are living now, about violence, about anything we want to talk about, you know?

L: Yes.

N: For me it was important to find somebody who thinks like this because there are a few people who see the image as we see it. Everybody, I believe, unfortunately, is using the circumstances, the terrible, terrible circumstances we are living in for art. For me it’s not acceptable. I cannot accept to be used by…whatever political or social or whatever…

L: Agreed.

N: I said to Adham, thank you very much because you are thinking like this, and yes I would love to try this project. I mean, explaining or trying to explain how we see the role of art in this time while we are living in war. It was important because I believe that voice is not heard until now. And we need to make it louder because everybody talks about death and destruction. But nobody talks about survival. It’s important to talk about that because all Syrian people who stay in Syria, they are survivors for five years, and they will stay being like this until the war will end. They need a voice to talk about them. So I thought that it’s an opportunity for me to do this because I believe it’s important and so I accepted. That’s all.

L: Yes. Before we go into what you saw that night, can you just say a little bit more about this idea of the message of survival? I’m hearing that your presence in Proxy Girls, your presence in the room and to get this project manifest, and your voice established outside of this sort of propaganda art…

N: Yeah.

L: …this is important and the message is, “I’m here, I’m surviving, let’s do something”? Like…”let’s dance”? What is the relationship of survival to your presence in this work?

N: I think, Leyya, that the role of art is not like that of media, and unfortunately there’s no boundary between arts and media nowadays. I mean when war started in Syria, all the artists outside, some of them inside, they started to use, if I can call it a ‘media perspective of things.’ You know?

L: Yep.

N: Through their arts… And I don’t believe that is the role of arts. Art is giving hope to people, even if in peace times, because even with peace we all have problems. I mean we live in a world which is very fast, very commercial. It takes everything from us and gives us less than we want, especially in spiritual things. I believe that art—not only dance, I am talking about all art – its main role is to push the people up and to give them hope, give them a way to continue with their bad circumstances. I had to stop working during these past five years because I couldn’t do this at that time. The circumstances weren’t really helpful, because it was the beginning and we were in a shock.

L: Sure.

N: And it wasn’t even possible for us to find any hope in that time, because it was the beginning of things. Now, after five years, and with all our survival experience, which I believe it’s the most important thing war gives us, the most important positive thing. Because we learn to understand life much more than before, to appreciate and to know the value of the moment we pass together, or with people we love, or we care about, or with our arts, art or our work, whatever. I couldn’t talk about hope if I have no way to find it myself.

L: Exactly.

N: I believe that this is our role. To turn all artists into activists—this is very much bothering me because last month I was in Lebanon, there’s a international dance festival in Lebanon and the label of the discussion was dance and activism, and I have a point about that because art is activism.

L: Essentially.

N: When you are talking about dancers in the Arab world you are talking about people who are fighting all their lives with their societies or their economical or political regimes. So why – because we have a war – we need to make all artists activists? It’s not our role. We are not activists. We are artists. Our role is to open up hope to people, to let them see light in the darkness, to let them believe that there’s something better come, to push them to start for themselves if they want to really to make a change. Unfortunately, nobody is doing this. Okay, yes, there are people who are doing this but we are a very small group in the middle of a sea of commercial media, artists who are trying to use the war to make their work. For me this is not possible to accept because I’m still living in my home, I’m losing my friends, I’m facing death every day. I cannot accept that somebody can use this to make something or a project or to make a point, because it’s not the time anymore. All of us made our point in 2011. We don’t need much more chances to do this.

L: Right.

N: Now we need a way to survival and I believe that’s the art, that’s the role of art in crisis or in wartimes.

L: That’s really clear. That’s beautiful. I could not agree more, honestly, in the separation of art’s role and activism. This is a really important point, actually… Oh great, we’re back. Can you hear me?

N: You can imagine how we wanted it, Adham and I, for Proxy Girls. Can you hear me Leyya?

L: Yes, we’re back. Well let’s go into Proxy before we get cut off again. So, tell me about that night for you, because, you know, we saw you through a laptop. As one of the performer/collaborators in it, I feel like we didn’t really get to… we had the written interaction with each other and with you, directed by you. Then the dancers came together and we had a really inspired conversation about proximity and about intimacy, and visibility. We had this conversation inspired by the prompts that you had emailed us. But we didn’t have that conversation with you, we had it with each other. But not with you. And that was very sad for me.

N: For me too, for me too.

L: Can you talk a little bit about the time, as we were preparing for the event, the performance, what were your ideas about it? How did you think it would go, and what was your experience of it in the moment?

N: First of all, when Thomas (Kriegsmann) and Adham sent me the whole idea of the festival and how they were thinking about the role of dance in societies and all these things, I was really, like, yeah! As I said before, since I started to work in 1999, my whole experience gave me a belief that when I become closer to myself, when I can explore intimacy and talk about it onstage, I can be much closer to the audience.

L: Yes. Absolutely.

Proxy Girls, photo: Kim Cullen

N: Since that time I started to work with this method to explore with the performers, their own stories, and their own intimacy. And I believe that after all these years we are able to really make this point because sometimes when you are working on a new project you feel like, Okay, maybe I’m the only one who feel like this, maybe I am the only one who will have this experience. Maybe the people or the audience cannot really understand or feel what I’m talking about. And suddenly when you present your work you know that everybody is feeling the same, even if they have other stories, other details. You know what I mean?

L: Yes.

N: Because finally, in the end of the day, we are talking about human beings, we are talking about people. We are the same. We have the same, if you want, dreams, even if it’s different. We have the same problems, even if it’s different. And with that, I decided that we (the Proxy Girls ensemble) will talk about intimacy, and I want them to talk about themselves.

L: Okay.

N: Let’s not do it as a meeting between somebody who lives in Damascus and someone who lives in the USA – no. Each of us has a lot to say about himself, about how is we are facing the world in these hard times, which I believe is all over the world. From that we started with the question: what is the image of you that is not you. How does your society accept you and how they create an image which is not at all what you are? What do you feel that you are… And I believe it’s about all of us, you know what I mean?

L: Yes, yes.

N: And Adham agreed. To be honest, I didn’t think that it would go like this. I really wanted to have a meeting with you on Skype at least one time before the presentation because I wanted to hear your opinion about it. I wanted to hear this discussion you did together without me…

L: I know, exactly.

N: But I think it was the problem of organizing the meeting. I didn’t really understand what the problem was. Of course we had the problem with connections because I don’t have electricity or an internet connection all the time. But at least I want to hear your voices. But Adham and I agreed about almost everything. How we can do this, or what we wanted to say from this experience. Or what we will expect. So, it was really helpful for me to have such a sensitive partner who was the real connection between me and you all in this. But, yeah, unfortunately we couldn’t do it as I wanted it to be. Because I wanted to meet you, I asked for a rehearsal before this performance. But it was, unfortunately, not possible. So we do it like we did it, together.

L: Right. Well, to tell you what actually did happen. We, the performers, got together in the theater and we did actually just start talking about our personal outlook because of your concept of ‘auto-portrait.’ We all began free-associating with our thoughts. It started with what we thought you meant, so we all had an interpretation of what you meant in the written directions. And then it unraveled into conversation about how we each place ourselves in the world or in the context of art making or in the context of presence and communication. I feel like it fed and it structured our choices in the improvisation. What happened in the act of performance actually held quite a bit of the content related to what we had been discussing earlier. It held the stories that came out in the conversation that we had about our own auto-portrait, the auto-portrait as seen from the inside and the outside. I know that at some point when we actually started dancing—wait, were you actually able to see the whole performance from your Skype perspective?

N: Yes. I believe that there are corners not visible, but I saw it and I think from what I saw I believe that, yes, I am agreeing with you. For me it was really personal, and it was important. That was the most important thing for me.

L: Mmm. Beautiful.

N: It was a really great tool to have such a group that has their own experience as performers because there were no clichés, no such dance movement as we know it, no copy pasting of something we all know, right? You know what I mean?

L: Sure.

N: That was really important…and the level of listening between all of you onstage in this short improvisation. I believe it was really good, because you tried to take the improvisation as high as you could. I know how hard it is, even if you are working together. I don’t know if you worked together before or not, but it was obvious that your focus was on hearing each other, which was also very important for me.

L: Well it’s interesting that most of us in the room had not met before—there were a few that had worked together before—but out the five of us, I think there were three people that knew each other well and then there were two of us that were outside. So the newness of it actually contributed quite a bit to that idea of how you are read from the outside. We were dancing together, and I was dancing, personally I had never worked with any of the other artists before. I was reading them, and listening to them, and also communicating and putting out my own information through my body and my actions. I think this contributed quite a bit to the language of the evening. We didn’t have a past story. We had only the present story to contend with. I think that really worked for this concept.

N: Yes, that was the concept—because you don’t know each other it’s up to your involvement and focused listening to each other. You get the goal without even knowing that you are getting the goal, and that’s why it was really great for me. I was there looking, watching you, and I was like, all the time, what amazing listening they are trying to create between them as a group, it was amazing for me. That was important because that is the topic. if you want to express yourself to the others, and tell them who you really are, you need to listen to them and to know who they are.  You know what I mean? That was very obvious for me in the performers. It was really great.

L: It was beautiful. The ironic thing is that even though I hadn’t met any of the Proxy dancers before that day – I knew you before. So I knew you, but they didn’t know you, they knew each other, but I didn’t know them. In a way, in the room – in the event-  I felt closest to you, in so many ways.

N: Yes, I know. I feel it.

L: Yeah.

N: Adham and I were talking about you all the time because we were discussing for example an idea for something. I was always telling Adhem, yes, Leyya, she knows my work, she knows me, she understands what I’m talking about. So even with the preparation of the performance it was obvious for us that you are the second connection line between me. In the performance it was obvious because I was listening to you all as much as you were to each other on the stage, and I felt that you are much more closer to me than them. Yeah. I know what you are talking about.

L: It was really tangible. I could feel you in the room. I liked our duet. I didn’t know if you could see me because at one point – I call it “our duet” in my head – at one point I was just kneeling in front of the laptop and making eye contact with you.

N: Yeah.

L: I felt like – I am in your room, facing you, making eye contact with you and holding space with you right now. And I didn’t really know what was happening behind me but I knew that you could probably see me and probably see whatever the other dancers were doing behind me and probably some audience members too. It was this very tangible moment. I got very homesick for Syria actually.

N: Yeah, I know.

L: I felt it. Because I felt like I was in your room. I felt like I could smell the air there in that moment.

N: Yeah.

L: Let’s see. What were the questions that you had – had you been part of the Q&A afterwards? [laughter] Had you been able to ask questions in the moment, can you recall if you had any questions or comments? What would you have asked the audience or what would you have asked the performers at the time?

N: In fact I was very interested by the audience’s questions, when you had your discussions, and I couldn’t really hear the whole discussion too because it was a really bad connection. I wanted to listen to you. I don’t know, I don’t have real questions. I thought that you would have questions.

L: Yes, yes, well we did.

N: Yeah. I believe it was a strange experience for all of us. And it was necessary for me to hear from you directly after the show—what you felt about it and how you deal with it onstage, or what you wanted to do and you couldn’t do or what you expect from me, or you know? I wanted to know the real-time reaction, which is now very, very far away.

L: I know. It’s true. Talk about proximity. [laughter] Even our memories go into a distant land. Well, let’s bring it back to today. What are you working on now?

N: I’m preparing for a performance titled Survival. It’s, in fact, our old group. It’s our experience of these five years with acclimation.

I don’t know if it will be a little bit or much more different from other work we did before. It’s a very different experience. There are members of this group who live outside Syria. And there are other ones who left Syria two years ago. All the performers are staying here, so we tried to exchange our experience with acclimation, to talk about it on a larger level. Not only talking about how we are dealing with war or death or danger now. We want to talk about all the people, how they survive in bad circumstances or in difficult times. We wrote a subtext together and now we are working on the scenography and I am working with musicians to find the things we want to do. And hopefully we will start rehearsing the first of August for two months. We will be presenting the work in Damascus in early October I believe.

L: Skype is starting to get a bit choppy, but can you answer one more question for me?

N: Of course.

L: Thank you. I love the concept of an Arab body language. Because I think it’s a really clear and simple way of stating I think what a lot of us in the Arab world and diaspora are trying to get at in terms of a language of what we’re doing. We’re not all saying the same thing and we’re not all doing it in the same way but there’s an unspoken connection or an un-narrated connection between you and me and Adham and these other artists in the diaspora and in the region—how we’re working, the perspective from the inside and from the outside, and how we’re always bouncing between. An “Arab body language” seems to nail it. That’s my interpretation of what you might mean by that. So could you talk a little bit more about what you mean by that?

N: Yeah. In fact, this work started in 2006 when we started with Identities Project, a long-term project. It’s artistic and practical research about the capacity or the specificity of our bodies. I believe in the Arab region, especially the Levant, we have the same special heritage in the meaning of music, dance, folkloric things, ritual, details, all these things. And the point of my research is to find that language for the audience to feel and understand. Dance is still something new, not really acceptable for our audiences. They always want to understand a story. Dance is not always telling stories. When we started with Identities Project we needed to make people feel, not think. We needed to push them to open up. So, my choice was to work on social religious rituals of the Levant, and all the movement systems of this ritual. By ritual I mean marriage, funeral, you know, all these things that started a very long time ago but that have changed with time, with people, with new generations, with new times…. So its not strange for our audience at all. They do it everyday in their everyday life. You know what I mean?

L: Yes.

N: For example, when you pray or when you get married or when you go to a funeral. We started with this, but the point was always to find it in ourselves, in our bodies. Find the reason, find the connection with the past and future and the present. Find the relationship with the space because it’s different than with others. It’s normal. The place you are living in gives you a different concept of rhythm, of time, of space, of colors, of smells, of everything. Unfortunately we did just two performances of the Identities Project, one in 2008 and the other in 2009 that you saw in Amsterdam. The third was supposed to be in 2011 when things started here and we had to wait until now. We are planning to do it next year if we could do the Survival performance. The main goal is to write a book about the system of our body, the concept of our body, which is in direct relationship with mind, and habits, and all Arab culture, religious, social, political, and economic, and artist heritage of Arab people or Arab artists or Arabness… you know what I mean.

L: Yes.

N: We just decided to take another five years to finish it because it’s very long and very hard work, especially on the level of research. It’s not always possible to go to the places to see the people, to be on the ground. It takes time, and it takes a lot of teamwork but I believe we need to finish it because it’s very important.

L: Yeah.

N: It will break the image of global dance in audience’s minds. We are not trying to, how can I say it…make the folklore modern? We are not trying to put alternative ways of moving on the table. No, we are just trying to find our own body identity. Which is a reflection of how we think and see the life. It’s reflections of our culture, of Arabic culture.

L: Super important right now because everyone has control over our narrative but us. This is why it’s vital that we articulate these ideas.

N: As you said in Amsterdam, it’s not only work with the performers or with the teamwork, it’s also the relationship with the audience that is important. I believe Arab people, in general, react more than they act.

L: Yeah?

N: Yeah, Leyya. Most of them. I don’t want to make a generalization, because I understand each of us is individual and has our own way of living and seeing life. But in general, yeah, we are people of reaction. We don’t act really. We don’t act enough. It’s a part of our identity that we want to move; we want to change. The two performances we did, yeah, we had actions from people. I was so happy, because we could take a few small steps toward this. Let us stop just reacting; we need to act.

L: Yes.

N: It’s so true.

L: Well, Noura, thank you so much for all of this articulation and all of this work that you are doing. Thank you for being so strong for everyone. Honestly.

N: Believe me – people, and this is a little bit strange, but I feel with my friends who left, who were forced to leave, and are living now far away from Syria, when I talk to them sometimes I am waiting to have positive energy and hope from them. But I feel instead that they need this from me.

L: Right?

N: It’s true, you are in the middle of the thing you don’t have but hope to catch in your hands and your legs and your teeth and all your body because is the only way to survive. And it’s a strange, I don’t know if it’s strange, but I believe it’s a choice. War forced us to see light in the darkness because it’s so dark. So, to be able to survive you need to believe that there is a light and you need to see it and you need to go for it and to push all the people around you to it. You need to change things in yourself. This is the hardest step because when you discover that the change starts from yourself. This is very long and hard trip.

L: True.

N: It’s the hardest you could choose, to work on yourself. To discover your weak points, your problems, your weakness, everything that doesn’t help you to survive or make connections with others and to be strong. Strength, it’s a result, it’s not the point. The point is to believe that there is a choice to change yourself, at least. Because the change we all want, I don’t believe I will see it. It will take a very long time.

L: I know…

N: I’m trying to say out loud, stop talking about Syrians as victims or as heroes. No. We are humans. We are living circumstances that make us have other choices, different choices, as all the people who experienced war in their lives, as all people who experienced bad times. All the things you pay in these wartimes: your friends, your happiness, everything you think that matters, that you didn’t notice before. That’s why I want to come back to work, and that’s why everybody has a right to talk about what’s happening here in his own way. But there is a part of it nobody is talking about and I want to open this door and make people see it because this is the only way to give hope for us and for them. Nobody is giving us hope, everybody is talking about us as like it will never end, and it’s a disaster. It is! It is a disaster! But if we think like this here, we can die in our homes. We need to believe that something good will come and we need to make it. We need to go forward and I want the world to know this because we are not the only ones. Syria is full of people like us and nobody knows about them. Nobody wants to believe that they exist. For that I wanted to talk about it and I accepted the Proxy Girls project just to make people believe that this exists. It’s not a dream. No, no, it’s a reality. That death is a reality. But life is inside of Syria, it also a reality. It’s a time to talk about it and show it to the world.

L: Wow. My god. Thank you.

Noura Murad was delegated to France on a practical course dedicated to physical theater and its teaching methods whereby she joined parallel courses of the techniques of dancing and movement design in 1998. Noura received a training course on cultural management by Culture Resource in 2010, Damascus. She worked as a co-teacher in the department of acting, and as a teacher of Body Expression at the Higher Institute of Dramatic arts until 2000 – 2003.

She established the Leish Troupe as the first physical theater troupe in Syria; and has been its Artistic Director it since 1999. The first performance of the troupe entitled ‘After All This Time’ won the best Scenography prize in the Cairo International Festival of Experimental Theater 2000. Since 2001, she has been supervising and organizing workshops in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Dubai- and has also participated in many conferences in the region and abroad. For two successive years, Noura was appointed as a member in the jury of the Philadelphia Festival for University Theater 2005-2006. In 2009 she co-organized the 1st Damascus Contemporary Dance Platform.

In 2013, Noura returned to the Higher Institute of Dramatic Arts as a teacher of Theatre Movement (Department of Acting) and Physical Theatre (Department of Dance). She was head of the Dance Department at the institute and was the dramatic supervisor of fourth-year students’ graduation projects in 2014 and 2015. Currently, she is teaching Contemporary Performing Arts (Theatrical Design Department). Noura has also played many roles in theater, television, radio and cinema.

Leyya Mona Tawil is an artist working with dance and music practices. She is the artistic director of DANCE ELIXIR and TAC: Temescal Arts Center. Tawil is a Syrian-Palestinian-American engaged in the world as such. Her performance scores have been presented in 16 countries, including ongoing collaborations in Berlin, Detroit, and St. Petersburg-Russia. She is known for location-based projects, the most prominent example being Destroy// – which is in its fourth year of touring. She has discussed her work with author Linda Weintraub for Movement Research’s Critical Correspondence and with Lizzie Simon for the Wall Street Journal and American Theater Magazine. Presentation highlights include New York Live Arts/Live Ideas (NYC), Dock11 (Berlin), MOCAD (Detroit), BIPOD9 (Beirut), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (SF), TransDance15 (Cairo), Museum of Nonconformist Art (St. Petersburg) and the Syrian National Opera House in Damascus. www.danceElixirLIVE.org

Cultivo una rosa blanca,
En julio como en enero,
Para el amigo sincero
Que me da su mano franca.
Y para el cruel que me arranca
El corazón con que vivo,
Cardo ni oruga cultivo:
Cultivo la rosa blanca.

  -Jose Marti

(I have a white rose to tend
In July as in January;
I give it to the true friend
Who offers his frank hand to me.
And for the cruel one whose blows
Break the heart by which I live,
Thistle nor thorn do I give:
For them, too, I have a white rose.)

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I reverberate in the motions of last week’s Movement Research Spring Festival, Hand Written Note(s), curated by the ever so thoughtful Aretha Aoki, Elliott Jenetopulos, Eleanor Smith and Tara Aisha Willis. The curatorial statement began with “thoughts scribbled in the margins, notes passed on the sly, the indominant culture hidden just below the surface” and we each unfolded what these words promised to our dance circle. My writing attempts to encapsulate my participation in the festival week as I looked to dance as an undercurrent of culture, a structure that moves, a sacred circle where bodies find freedom.

I was invited to show work on the third evening of the festival. The expectation to accent the program with my marginality did not present itself. I simply participated with the opportunity to gain access to studio space and be seen. I wasn’t stung with the label of other within the spaces the curators fostered and I thank them for making that space available to artists. We were with each other and not against the other at the festival events. In this nurturing each otherness, we traced lineages to our originators, finding commonality within our differences.

The curators composed something that’s unique to my New York dance community experience. They curated me in a bill with the illuminating Jumatatu Poe, a person of color and I thought “Wow! I’m in a dance show with another person of color,” but without a blatant people of color agenda, without a racialized platform designed for us to be seen within. In a world where people like me typically hold indominant roles, it’s very special to be invited into a space where my body is more or less “normalized” or even seen. Where the audience is invited to see me the way I’ve always seen myself, where I’m not asked to perform my othered self; where just being who I am is enough.

Jumatatu and I shared a studio retreat and residency in Northampton, MA two weeks before our show; a space and time to think and make work. Coincidentally, Northampton/the Pioneer Valley is where I formed the beginnings of my dance life as an undergraduate at Hampshire College (ten years ago). Northampton continues to be the place where I enjoy the visit but can’t linger for much longer than a short stay. I kept Juma in mind wondering what this might be like for him, as this was his first visit. I assumed his experience was similar to mine, very “city mouse” and different from urban life in Philly with a sustained dance proximity to New York. I thought about what he might have felt as a man of color in a New England town today, yes even still today, and what that meant. Perhaps it was a place where people were nice but it’s hard to know if we were actually welcome. Where everyone talks about something but they never start the conversation about you. A place where the people who look like me dominate the undercommon labor; they work from behind counters and kitchen doors and they buss the tables, mop floors, they work hard while others hardly work. These indominant individuals are the people “hidden just below the surface” too. These activities are obvious in a place like Northampton if you pay attention (I always had to) and though it’s been a place that has nourished me and has seen me grow, I know where its faults lie.

Jumatatu and I stayed at Jen Polins’ beautiful house, she runs The School for Contemporary Dance and Thought (SCDT) on the main street of the town. We were each granted 14 hours of studio access and we were so hard at work that we didn’t get to hang out with each other very much. We respected each other’s space because that kind of time is rare (at least for me) to come by. We worked diligently in our spacious studio, a pillarless dance hall built by Masons and once a space for only Masons. I was reminded again that there is labor in everything; labor in our respite from our bustling hometowns.

For our shared evening, Jumatatu presented his brilliant work, its light beamed directly into my center. He and dancer William Robinson performed with a pink hashtag (# also known as a pound sign) on their chest, I thought: #blacktwitter. They perform for an audience that generally (except for a few) doesn’t racially reflect who Juma and William are. He assures us he’s used to that and he’s accommodating of it. I can say I’m used to that too, festival curator Tara Aisha Willis writes:

“Juma has already reminded me that I’m one of a couple black folks in the room besides the two of them, let alone people of color, as per usual. But I rest easy knowing there are 15-20 of Juma’s black friends projected on the back wall of the stage, reacting to the piece. They each sit in their own little box in the video, too far away in the long room for me to make out their expressions. But of course, I’m not one of the people in the room who needs to check in with them, Juma reminds us. They are there in case the white folks aren’t sure when or whether to laugh during the piece. Familiar as it is to me to be one of a few in the room (if not the only one), the reminder triangulates me with the performers and the projected images, and I adore the feeling: each year I’m less and less capable of sustaining the suspension of disbelief required of me for smooth participation in some of my more lovingly colorblind, primarily white communities. I feel my attention turn inward and outward at once.”

Juma treads the line of humor and tragedy as he proposes to the Movement Research dance community to think about what we are actually enacting with this experience in this evening of togethering.

I zoom out and the scope is wide, the festival continues and there are events I’m unable to attend but I read about them on the Hand Written Note(s) website. Maura Donohue writes about a day she spent with Ni’Ja Whitson and mayfield brooks. The artists facilitated workshops that I’m so sorry to have missed. I’m grounded just reading Maura’s musings, simply learning that people are holding space together in this way. I should mention that I didn’t meet Ni’Ja or mayfield (who also made this) until this festival and I thank the curators for their expansive and inclusive reach that keeps the Movement Research community wide and in flux.

On Thursday evening the artists were invited to a dinner at festival curator, Eleanor’s house, a delicious homemade spread of tacos and desserts. I found myself scanning the room and I was excited (and a bit embarrassed) to realize I didn’t know two thirds of the people in the room; a major first for me as a member of the Movement Research community for ten years. I’m thankful to the curators who have brought us into each other’s timeline where I can see we’re happy to meet each other. A generous space to relish inside of and pause: my family is growing, so many of these people are underlings like me, my counterparts the “indominant culture hidden just below the surface,” an awesome tender space to be revealed. I speak with mayfield at the dinner, who shares about research on Whitney Houston’s bisexual lifestyle and about how this research currently enters mayfield’s work, I’m fascinated. Some people went to the Beyonce concert that week and confessed their marvel of big concerts, another populous mode of coming together, another brown person taking up a lot of space and we giggle. I should mention that the bike ride out to Eleanor’s house made the evening extra beautiful. The sun hung low and the trees, lush with leaves, threw spears of light onto the pavement. Deep into Brooklyn, the row houses were low, exposing sky, Bachata played from bodegas and back yards, people washed their cars, families chilled on their stoop; an evening to gather.

As the festival arrived to it’s beautiful ending, I looked back into the writings to see what else had happened during the week. I was taken by in the shadows of the american dream, by Jaime Shearn Coan. His is one of many voices with sentiments about what happened in Orlando and a first response on behalf of the festival. Jaime wrote about the Latinx community in Orlando, a space where  people “had also gathered together to celebrate each other, to move together in a space of their making” on Saturday night. There is a common practice between humans to come together to celebrate each other and the Movement Research community took part in dancing together on that night. What a beautiful life to allow us to come together and take action in this way, what a beautiful place dance is that it brings us to each other. I zoom out and imagine all the rooms of people dancing on that night, all the rooms of bodies taking up space, carving out dance circles from within a crowd, something that I’ve always thought to be inclusive and exclusive. It’s something that invites the eye to locate spectacle, the dance circle is sacred. To move your body and to have a life to do so has become a privilege; I am grateful to own it.

As a lesbian Latina, I’m not always accounted for but I’m always counted upon; courage is my inheritance when the lives of brown people are mourned again. I attended the vigil at Stonewall on Monday night and I was reminded of how invisible my people were. Not just my LGBTQ community but most of all, my brown skinned Latina/o and Latinx and Black community. I was raised on the dance floor, I was taught it was a good thing and believe it still. I was taught to dance for any occasion because it’s reverent to life, a space to be free when we’re not. At the vigil, I wanted music from the club to take to the streets and unite us all in dance, I wanted someone to give a speech in Spanish, not just the mayor (but good job I guess). I wanted The Battle Hymn of the Republic to stop taking up space for once because I yearned for a heart-felt Cumbia to play instead. I wished for a deep bass beat to pound inside my chest so that it could for just a moment beat louder than my tired heart. At least a Cumbia track would be something closer to home, to whom we came together for.

The dance circle is sacred, keep it moving, keep it free, celebrate, come together in dance and let’s not forget the history and courage of Latinx like her each day. Les mando mi mas sentido pésame a las familias y a los sobrevivientes de la masacre. Que lastima que vidas bellas, jóvenes, llenas de amor al prójimo y a la unión sin barreras hayan perdido a la batalla contra el odio. Bailemos todos que estamos de duelo! El baile inspira amor, alegría, unión y paz. No mas. El pueblo unido jamás será vencido. Presente.

– Abigail Levine, Editor at Large

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October 30, 2014

Janine Antoni: So, when I was going around offering my studio, I ran into Annie B. Parson at a performance. I didn’t know who she was but learned quickly she was a choreographer. I told her about laying a dance floor in my studio, and she was immediately curious. I naively asked her if she needed a space to rehearse. She called me the next day and said, I want to come over and work on some duet material.

Before her arrival, I made a Power Point on my work seen through the lens of the duet. I talked about the duet with ‘the other,’ the duet with my mother, and the duet with myself. After my presentation she turned to her dancers and said, ‘ok, shall we dance this?’ And I didn’t know what to think. But, of course, knowing Annie B. now, it’s exactly what she would do; she’s pulling her sources from everywhere.

Then Annie B. and I launched into a conversation about our husbands being artists while the dancers went off to create material from my slide lecture.  And then about fifteen minutes later, they had material drawn from everything I showed them. I went for a walk with my husband [the artist Paul Ramirez Jonas] afterwards, and I said, kind of facetiously, this should be my retrospective. I had seen twenty-five years of my work performed in five minutes of dance.

Abigail Levine: This was in what year?

JA: This was in 2010. And he said, ‘that’s a phenomenal idea.’ I said, ‘really?’ I was actually about to apply for the Guggenheim Fellowship and a Creative Capital Grant and this was the idea I had: to find five choreographers and ask them to choose a body of my work as a source from which to make a dance. I would call it a retrospective. It would replace the mid career survey show that is an idea that curators have been presenting to me. Frankly I’m completely terrified of looking backwards in that way. But a dance retrospective would be a way to move forward while looking back. I’d met Jill [Sigman] at a workshop I’d taught in London called Performance Matters. She’s serious, and she’s very interested in sculpture. And I said, let’s make a deal, I’ll teach you what I know about sculpture if you teach me about dance. And she said ok, and she started to do things with me that became a piece. But what she said to me was, I’d be happy to do this with you, if I can do it on you. I had no idea what she was talking about “on me.” Actually, I was really offended by the term.

AL: Welcome to being a dancer.

JA: I know. … I said you can do it with me. Or we can do it together, but what does this on thing mean? That misunderstanding basically generated the whole piece that we ended up doing together. It’s called Wedge. …The thing I should say is that rather than working directly with the content of my work, Jill did a lot of exercises to understand the feeling that I had while making the work. I wasn’t sure exactly what it had to do with the work itself, but that was part of my journey. I tried to remain open to the way she was working even though I didn’t really understand how she was making meaning. It was so different than how I was used to communicating through my work.

AL: Yes, explicit positioning of a work in relation to another is more present in visual art history than dance.

Janine Antoni. Living Set for Like Lazarus Did, performed by the Stephen Petronio Company (Performance documentation) 2013
Helicopter stretcher, polyurethane resin. Dimensions variable.

JA: Also, our relationship to language as makers, and thinking before acting—all of this is different which has been interesting. I think part of the incredible, prolific moment that I’m having has to do with, in fact, letting go of a lot of those preconceptions. Working in dance has allowed me to think in another way. And then there is my experience of improvisation; I feel like it’s not only changed my work, it’s changed my personality.

…So, when Jill said, I’m going to make a piece on you, I said, ok, and I’m going to make a piece on you! We had the pottery wheel next to the dance floor, and I was making the hip bone pots. The wheel is a moving surface, and the forms are made because of the way the material is shaped by the body as the wheel moves. So, why can’t I just apply that to Jill’s moving body? As she danced, I tried to use her body to make something. I did what I always do—I used the body as a tool for making.

I was on a crash course. Dance was slowly taking over my entire life. Jill Brienza invited me to a rehearsal of Stephen Petronio’s company. A week later he gave me a studio visit and asked me to make him a set for his upcoming performance, Like Lazarus Did.

I had been looking at these objects called milagros. In many Latin American countries, when you have an ailment, you go and buy these wax body parts, you take them to the church, and they are hung on the ceiling as a prayer for healing. The thing that struck me about Stephen’s work was how exuberant his choreography is. I would be taken away in the whirlwind of it all, and then I would leave the rehearsal with a simple gesture that kept haunting me. He has an extraordinary way of framing these provocative movements that seem to stick. Given the other work I was doing with somatic movement, I was really interested in how a gesture enters your body. For Like Lazarus Did, I decided to make Stephen a ‘living set’ of milagros.

AL: What was your process of working with Stephen and the dancers?

JA: I asked the dancers, of all the things you’re doing in the dance, can you give me a gesture that resonates with you emotionally? They took pictures of themselves with their phones doing the movement and sent them to me. I took those gestures, and I reenacted them in my body to make casts from them. I said to him, “the only thing I can offer here is stillness.” So I took myself and my objects off the stage. I wanted to be a counterpoint to the movement. I started to become interested in the stillness of the audience, how their stillness provides the space for this kind of intense movement. I love the idea of mirror cells and that the audience is moving inside in response to what they are seeing while their exterior remains still.

Janine Antoni. Living Set for Like Lazarus Did, performed by the Stephen Petronio Company (Performance documentation) 2013.
Helicopter stretcher, polyurethane resin. Dimensions variable

AL: Which is so hard sometimes.

JA: Yes, I agree. I just went to see Steve Paxton at DIA, and I have never had to hold onto my body so tightly. I felt my vertebrae just popping.

[Showing an image of Like Lazarus Did] This is what I made for him. I really wanted to equate myself with the stillness of the audience, so I hung my sculpture over the audience, and I hung under it remaining completely still for the duration of the performance.

AL: And how did you come to work with Anna Halprin?

JA: I had gone to Esalen to do a workshop with her but I was too in awe to introduce myself. I just did the workshop and then a year later, I decided to write her. I sent a thank you letter along with my catalogue and told her how much the workshop changed the way I think. Anna said, why didn’t you introduce yourself? I know Loving Care. She said, if you’re ever in San Francisco, come have lunch. So, I got myself to San Francisco to meet with her. And then we were applying for NYSCA, and we needed a choreographer to apply with. I said, I can’t ask Anna. And my assistant said, she can only say no. So, I sent her a letter. I wrote, I don’t know anything about the dance world; this may be totally inappropriate, but would you be interested in working together? I told her the idea of my dance retrospective and asked her if she would ever consider doing it. She said, come on over. She completely ignored my idea. She called me up, and she said, I have a great idea for you. I can give you the paper from Parades and Changes.

AL: Wow.

JA: My jaw dropped. I could care less about the dance retrospective at this point. It was a privilege to be in dialogue with such a historically significant work. I worked with her on her deck for a week. I lived in her house, and we spent every minute together. On the first day, she gave me the paper, which was perfect, because it was material and I could treat it just like I do materials in the studio. I didn’t have to worry about how I move. I just paid attention to the paper and let it direct me. She knew exactly what she was doing.

AL: So, the whole of her structure was giving you the materials?

JA: That was the crazy thing, especially from my naive point of view. She gave me the paper, and just said, ‘you may want to take your clothes off.’ And that was it, no instruction. Day one. We went down to the deck, and I had my roll of paper, and she’s sitting there on the bleachers, and I start to interact with the paper.

AL: What are the specifications of the paper?

JA: Just a roll of brown paper, the kind used to ship a package in the mail. She had a huge roll. I’m sure she works with it all the time. So, we pulled a piece off the roll. And, then, I was waiting for instruction, but there was no instruction, so I just kept going. Stephen told me, you’re working with a master, you go and do whatever she says. Don’t even try to collaborate. This is the opportunity of a lifetime. So, ok, I went with the intention of doing whatever she told me, but she didn’t tell me anything.

…So, no instruction is coming, and I’m working and working and working with the paper, maybe two hours. It got dark but I didn’t notice. And then I hear a quiet voice saying, ‘you can stop now.’ I guess she was just waiting for me to stop, and I was waiting for her to stop me.

The next day, she called the Berkeley Museum and said, ‘we’re coming up. Janine is here, and we’re going to perform a dance at the museum.’ I said to her, ‘Anna, you can’t do that.’ She replied, ‘yes, I can – this is what museums are for.’ It wasn’t advertised. I just turned up and did it. There were five or six people that watched.

AL: Did going into an art space do anything to…

JA: Terrible, it was terrible. Anna’s deck is magical. I thought I was just being sentimental and then I took Stephen Petronio and Adrian Heathfield out there, and we all agreed; it was the deck. Something happens on that deck. It gave me permission to use time in a different way. Not to mention all those feet that have danced on that wood. But as soon as I was done, she called up all her friends in Marin and said, ‘this artist is here, and you should really come see what we’ve been working on… and we’ll have a potluck!’ So, seventy-five people showed up, and I performed for them.

AL: She is just composing these experiences as she goes.

JA: That’s the crazy thing with Anna; everything is that open. Stephen was shocked. We went there to work, and whoever turned up, she put in the piece. So, it was the secretary, the Feldenkrais practitioner who came for breakfast, everyone. She ended up not leaving for the whole day. Tamalpa was doing a workshop, so at lunchtime Anna took the whole workshop and invited them to work with me and Stephen.

AL: And it’s a conception of dance, of the practice, the ongoing exploration, being as important, or more important, than the finished artwork.

JA: When we were there, Stephen wanted to come away with a score. He wanted to know what are we doing? And the very last time we did it, and we knew we were about to leave, she kept opening it and opening it. And then she said goodbye. And we were wondering, well, what do we work on? And she said, ‘oh, send me some videos.’ I wondered if that is a position or an insight from being ninety-five. She is much more focused on the process than the outcome.

AL: I don’t know that she’s ever been any different.

JA: I don’t know. Her work and her way of working was always radical. When I look back on my experience, working with Anna is about entering into a philosophy. Anna has taught for her whole life. Learning from her is much deeper than getting instruction.

Comparison of Gian Lorenzo Bernini “Ecstasy of Saint Teresa” and Janine Antoni in collaboration with Anna Halprin “Paper Dance” (2013).

AL: So, then, do you feel any allegiance to stay faithful to anything from the work with Anna, or do you now go and just make something from that experience?

JA: It’s interesting because I didn’t realize the freedom I was taking until I saw the way that Stephen has been handling the way we work with Anna. I feel like there’s room to make decisions, and we have to make decisions about how to take what Anna made and re-site it in the gallery context, which is very specific. Of course, the decisions we make will be, hopefully, in line with what Anna has created. But I also feel a certain responsibility to it… I mean, she’s asked me to put it in a gallery. She knows what that means. But solutions that work in a dance context with a dance audience don’t always work in a gallery.

AL: What specifically?

JA: Well, with Anna, one needs to consider her relationship to scoring and community rituals like the Planetary Dance. The score is a set of visual and verbal instructions. In the gallery or museum, you don’t have that. I mean, there’s participation, but it’s always a concession to have to tell people what to do. The work should create a response that is meaningful in terms of their interaction with it. But you have to give them autonomy to make those decisions. And whatever decision they make creates the meaning, and should be embraced.

AL: Though there’s so much explaining in visual art.

JA: Right, but not explaining, as in what to do. In the art world there is the big explaining, which is more about contextualizing the work but not Anna’s form of explaining. Such as “let’s just put a score on the wall.”

AL: For the audience…

JA: Yeah. So, for the upcoming exhibition, there are all these questions that are still in the air about how this translates into the gallery and what is the most interesting way to do that. There will be the performances, and then there will be the context created by the installation for those performances because something has to remain there for three months when the performance isn’t happening. It won’t be documentation in any straightforward way.

AL: There will the space for three months and, then, you and Stephen together will create a performance work as an event in it?

JA: So, Anna made a piece called “Rope Dance” for Stephen and me to perform, “Paper Dance” for me to perform and she gave her work, The Courtesan and the Crone to Stephen to perform. And then Stephen and I will make a work together. And all four of these pieces will have an installation for the duration of the show. And the thing I’m sure won’t happen—one should never say that—is that it won’t be straight up documentation of the performance. And it won’t be performers doing the pieces the entire time. So, we are looking for some way to solve that problem: the duration of viewing an exhibition and a performance, and the physical space of viewing an exhibition and a performance.

AL: Something that signals the performance’s existence.

JA: Right. There are many examples of artists dealing with performance and retrospection in the museum context. Having performed Marina [Abramovic]’s work in her retrospective at MoMA, you have experienced her decisions intimately.  So I have been thinking about that in relationship to Xavier [Le Roy]. I’m looking at all those models really carefully. In order to get a new perspective on my past work, I have engaged not only another form (dance), but also the work of two other artists from that form (choreographers).

AL: What is it about your work with dance and with choreographers that you feel is what you want to bring into a gallery space?

JA: Well, if you think my work has always been in this terrain between object, performance, and relic, I’ve been exploring this territory for a long time. If I can take what I know from that exploration and apply it to the way dance is being seen, that may be the biggest contribution I actually have. …But I’m talking like I know how to do this; I have no idea.

AL: I do feel that things can hold bodies, that they can hold movement.

JA: I think you’re right. I feel like I’ve done that to some degree. Then there’s the question: but is it an artwork? I’m making incredible forms with paper, but somehow that’s not enough for me. The paper forms are not objects I would make to remain in the world. And I have certain requirements of objects I put in the world. And so I’m in a funny place.

AL: That’s interesting. So, you remove the body from that, and it doesn’t stand?

JA: I mean, you could read the body in the paper…

AL: But it’s not a physical thing you stand behind as an art object?

JA: What dance allows for is endless malleability. Creating a kind of life that is reinvented over and over again. To still dance is, actually, to lose that malleability. These seem like very provocative gestures [with the paper]. They feel more like drawings than sculpture – drawings that speak about process rather than autonomous objects.

AL: And then it’s a question of, if you’re an object maker, but the interest is when they get activated as choreography or danced improvisation, does it have a weight as an intervention in dance history? And is that important in the context of a visual art exhibit?

JA: Well, that’s my big fear because I realize I come to it from the art side. People from the dance world are seeing something interesting that I almost can’t recognize myself. They seem to be fascinated by watching me in the process of making sculptural decisions and how the material is moving me—because it’s telling me what I need to do to it. And then there’s something else that has to do with some kind of movement that comes from an inner listening. Those two things combined seem to intrigue.

AL: You are a strong performer.

Janine Antoni in collaboration with Anna Halprin. Paper Dance. 2013
Photographed by Pak Han at the Halprin Dance Deck

JA: I’ve performed very few times in my life. I mean, I perform things in order to make objects. When I moved Anna would say, “She is so innocent,” as if to say don’t touch her because she might lose this. And then there’s Stephen who’s completely aware of what he’s doing. She puts us together and says, how’s this ever going to work? They’re moving from totally different places.

[Pulls up a video clip of Antoni performing Paper Dance.]

JA: So, I call up a friend of mine, Chris Sollars when I was heading to the Berkeley Museum to do Paper Dance. He is an ex-student and a great artist. I ask him if he come by and photograph the performance for me? After I perform Paper Dance he says, funny thing about that dance, I saw every piece you’ve ever made in it. So I guess I have come full circle to the retrospective idea. It makes sense that if I’m improvising, all I have to pull from is my past work. And life. What I know to be true. [Shows a series of slides that have body postures in relation to the paper that very closely mimic images of Antoni in performance of other works.] This was pretty uncanny and it opened up a whole new way for me to think. I felt like if I did Paper Dance and had a retrospective at the same time that, then, the dance would become programming for the retrospective. So, I felt instinctively that I should hold back the work so that people would have to find the work in the dance. Or that the work would be in the dance, and whether people wanted to go there or not was up to them.

AL: One thing that improvisers always struggle with is that you get to know your way of moving, your movement habits, so well.

JA: Yes, Anna does not want me to repeat myself. And, of course, the dance has changed radically. I can count on the physical material to keep it fresh. I guess I have counted on that throughout my career. Material is unwieldy, and I am in an improvisational duet with the material. It is an endlessly surprising partner and it keeps me responding in the moment.

AL: But the idea for your retrospective, that your body holds and performs your history of sculptural forms, is a really nice one.

JA: And the question is: is there a way to do that without actually putting the work there?

AL: Without also visualizing your history in objects?

JA: Yes, I don’t know how to do that, but I’d like to figure out how.

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Janine Antoni employs an amalgam of mediums including performance, sculpture, photography, installation, and video. Her body is both her tool for making and the source from which her meaning arises. She carefully articulates her relationship to the world, giving rise to emotional states that are felt in and through the body. In each piece, no matter the medium or image, a conveyed physicality speaks directly to the viewer’s body.

Janine Antoni was born in Freeport, Bahamas. Antoni has exhibited at numerous major institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC;  The Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain; The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Magazsin 3 Handelshögskolan, Stockholm; Haywood Gallery, London, Sammlung Goetz, Munich, Germany.  She has also been represented in several international biennials such as the Whitney Biennial; Venice Bienialle; Johannesburg Biennial; Kwangju Biennial, South Korea; Istanbul Biennial; S.I.T.E. Santa Fe Biennial: Project 1 Biennial, New Orleans;  and Kochi-Muziris Biennale, India.

Antoni is the recipient of several prestigious awards including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship in 1998, the New Media Award, ICA Boston in 1999, the Larry Aldrich Foundation Award in 1999, an Artes Mundi, Wales International Visual Art Prize nomination in 2004, The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2011, a 2012 Creative Capital Artist Grant, Anonymous Was A Woman Grant in 2014 and A Project Grant from The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage to collaborate with choreographers Anna Halprin and Stephen Petronio at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia for a 2016 exhibition. She currently resides in New York City.

Abigail Levine is a New York-based choreographer and performer. Her work has been presented at venues including Movement Research Festival, Mount Tremper Arts Festival, Danspace Project, Center for Performance Research, Gibney Dance, Roulette, The Knockdown Center, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Movement Research at the Judson Church, SESC São Paulo, Prisma Forum (Mexico), Hemispheric Institute Encuentro (Montreal), Días de la Danza (Havana), Benaki Museum (Athens), and Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival (Cairo). Abigail was a reperformer in Marina Abramovic’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art and has also performed recently in the work of Clarinda Mac Low, Carolee Schneemann, Larissa Velez-Jackson, Will Rawls, and Mark Dendy. In 2014, she learned Yvonne Rainer’s iconic 1965 work Trio A, coached by Pat Catterson. She holds a Masters in Dance and Performance Studies from NYU and was the 2013-15 editor of Movement Research’s digital performance journal Critical Correspondence. Levine is currently visiting faculty in dance at Wesleyan University.

–Mariana Valencia, co-editor

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Mariana Valencia: Hi Strauss, what have you been reading?

Strauss Bourque LaFrance: Hi, I have a little stack in front of me of the recent books I’ve read, or am currently reading. They sort of span topics, and book genres. The one I’m currently reading is called A Little Life, it’s by a woman called Hanya Yanigahara. It’s a novel, it’s the first novel that I’ve read in a really really long time. I just read The Painted Word by Tom Wolfe, which is a really short book probably from the 1970s, all about painting. I also started looking through Who You, I See which is a book my friend Robin Cameron made, she made it a few years ago, it’s this beautiful book that she wrote and designed and each page has an anonymous story about a different artist that she knows and she only identifies each artist by a letter that may or may not correspond with their actual name. And then there’s also some beautiful sort of cyanotype collage paintings inside.

Mariana: So these are all pretty distinct, pretty different from each other, they’re not three whole novels.

Strauss: Totally

Mariana: So…

Strauss: I typically read… I try to read a couple things at once. I usually have a book that’s my immediate subway read that I’m trying to get through. And then there’s the book that maybe I’m looking for inspiration from, and maybe don’t read the whole thing and rather flip through it, or read in parts.

Mariana: Is there one in particular of these three that is that book for you?

Strauss: Yeah, the Robin Cameron book is a great book to sort of pick up and read about a certain person she’s describing, put it away, reopen it to a different page. It’s not linear in any way and it’s not something that I wanna read (Mariana: front to back?) front to back, yeah. I also try to keep a coffee table book that’s in rotation with the other books I read. I think they offer something different visually but also content-wise, they’re sort of more direct in their topics and I don’t carry them with me but I always have a couple coffee table books back home that I’m focusing on.

Mariana: Yeah, I’ve seen a lot of those Strauss, you have a very large collection, larger than mine. It’s obvious that there’s a leafing-through component that’s part of your research. It makes sense for them to be part of your research, the references, the compositions, your art highly depends on compositions, highly, in a way that’s unique to other compositions and I think that something about a coffee table book and the set-image is a really big instigator of your surmising. Ideas of  decomposing something that’s really put together, and deconstructing it, to arrange it into a new set of shapes. Or taking something that’s a very strict image and recreating it with another set of items as reference. That’s a huge part of your practice, it makes sense to me why you would have those books.

Strauss: Yeah, I think that’s what’s interesting to me about talking about what you’re reading because it makes you wonder and it makes you think about how you’re using the book, because there are so many different ways to use a book. And coffee table books specifically provide…(Strauss picks up and drops a book on the table) coffee table books provide text for understanding a certain subject or handful of subjects but it’s also the design of the book that becomes this really important part of the experience of looking at it and that part is what’s so inspirational about books like that and I think that’s why people like to look at them so much. You start to see the book as an object as a collection of images that can inform your work or your project or whatever you’re doing. But I find that I sometimes look for books, for non-coffee table books that have the same kind of sort of sculptural presence.

Installation view, Strauss Bourque-LaFrance, “No Aloha,” Rachel Uffner Gallery, September 7 – October 19, 2014

Mariana: Do you find that sculptural presence in something more poetic, or is it more like a series of essays in a book?

Strauss: Yeah, or artist-made books, or anything sort of printed matter, for sure. I hate to read a book that I don’t like the cover of or the design of….but that wouldn’t stop me (laughter)

Mariana: I really think that, it’s really true, I identify with that as well and it’s that thing, it’s the judging a book by its cover problem; I really live by that.

Strauss: Yeah, you absolutely should and wine.

Mariana: Okay, so you should judge a book by it’s cover! And wine! I think the book view is that there could be editions of books that completely ruin the way that the book has looked, completely ruined. I see new editions of Penguin classic novels, or Lorca poems and it’s like, “Ahhhhh! You ruined it because the best one was the 70’s cover!”  And really it’s about which edition you attached to first. There are several Toni Morrison books on my shelf that are from before I was an adult, their marked age is enough for me to want to read them. I say, “Oh, this is from before.”

Strauss: Totally, that’s why I picked up this Tom Wolfe book because the cover is this ridiculous 70’s cover with these tiny cutouts of Tom Wolfe spread across the cover, around the text it says “The Painted Word” and…

Mariana: With an imaged man.…

Strauss: Totally, and he’s really funny and he’s sort of a dandy and he’s really sarcastic and kind of campy and when you read a book like this, that’s such a classic old-school book on modern art, it must be an old copy of the book rather than a new version of it. There’s something about it being from the original time period that makes it (Mariana: Yeah, from the time, yeah) it sort of makes it more special and brings me closer to the specific time that the author’s talking about.

Mariana: Yeah, It’s the first window into the book, the cover, because then the rest is whatever you absorb from it and then you create new images of what the words mean, but the cover of a book is the thing that also moves me into a book. With A Little Life, though, it’s more about the title.

Strauss: Totally, well I was mentioning…

Mariana: I’ve started A Little Life recently, so I have a little of a background to your current reading…

Strauss: And I just heard a little background about the cover of that book, she was interviewed on NPR and typically apparently when you write a novel, you aren’t often allowed to choose the picture, I guess the publisher chooses the picture for the cover or the cover design, and Hanya really really wanted to use this image, this Peter Hujar photograph for the cover and after hearing her describe why she wanted it for the cover it sort of made sense why it couldn’t be anything else. The image perfectly captures one of the lead characters of the book, emotionally. This, intense back and forth of being in pain and being overjoyed or something. And the picture is actually of some guy having an orgasm.

Mariana: Oh, (Strauss: Mmhmm) I feel similar that the image suits the character. But I don’t know if from the cover of this book, that I would’ve bought it based on the cover.

Strauss: Yeah, well it’s your typical sort of suburban-style really big-looking soft-back novel.

Mariana: Yeah, it seems like it’s gonna take a long time to read (Strauss laughs) and perhaps that means that I would have it for a while which then means that I have to look at it for longer… I don’t think this is a criticism of the front cover, but I think that in my aesthetic alignment to books that….this book wouldn’t necessarily fit my standard. Except for the title, A Little Life, which I love.

Strauss: I totally don’t keep very many novels, because I feel like the chance of me reading them more than once is so rare.

Mariana: Where do you put them? What do you do with them?

Strauss: I give them away.

Mariana: I should do that. I definitely don’t do that. (Strauss: Or I like sharing them with friends) I might read them again though…There are a couple that I reread, seasonally.

Strauss: Yeah, those are the ones to keep, but then the ones that don’t seem like they would travel with you over the years, you can usually weed those out.

Mariana: I’m going to take that advice, because I don’t know what to do with books sometimes. They’re not like clothes. I can make a pile of giveaway clothes in two seconds. I really like books, and their experience…(Strauss: Well, books are more…alive) Well they’ve made me feel alive, so yeah, they have that capacity so they are alive. They’re the only thing that I feel is worthy of moving along with my plants. (Strauss: Yeah, totally, they’re the only objects you really need) and maybe…my crystals. (Strauss: Same. They’re all in the same family.[Laughter] You don’t really need any of your dishes…) The plants, the books, and something to wear are the main things to keep for me. (Strauss: Totally) What else?…God…I sold my CDs, some of them, some are in their 90s case still.

Strauss: You still have CDs?

Mariana: I still have CDs, I don’t know why but I should get rid of them. They’re in those binders from the 90s (Strauss: Yeah, Caselogic) I have about 300, obviously I was a member of Columbia House.

Strauss: Yeah, I was too. But why don’t you digitize them?

Mariana: Well I did half of them but these are the ones I haven’t yet, but really, when am I going to do it? They’re something I really don’t need to keep, that and costumes for dances, or old makeup. “I’m never gonna wear that lipstick again, it’s from prom!” (Strauss: Oh my god) I’m making myself sound like more of a hoarder than I actually am. I’ve been reading A Little Life too and I read similarly to you, several books at a time. I have to admit it’s been a long time, about a year and a half since I’ve finished a novel that I’ve started. I think I’m actually going to finish this one.

Strauss: Well, you have to finish it’s one of those things.

Mariana: Well it’s a page turner. (Strauss: Yeah) I’ve been reading is A House Of My Own by Sandra Cisneros, about her career, a collection of memoirs through her work about residencies she’s had in Greece and the Southwest… she writes these memoirs from when she was in her 20s and so she describes herself as being extra extra foolish during those years, where she would eat baguette and drink wine and call it a meal for a day. It’s nice to hear those kinds of things that we fault ourselves for, it’s like “God, I was so crazy then”.

Strauss: Totally, I love reading biographies and autobiographies of artists. I read Ann Truett’s Day Book and it’s one of those. You have a lot of those moments where, there’s something really comforting when you hear another artist who’s had a career that you admire and respect and you’re so interested in, for them to expose, their vulnerabilities within their careers and their insecurities, and their troubles…

Mariana: And that they have heartbreak and…

Strauss: Of course they do but it’s so funny especially when you’re a creative person and you’re around so many creative people, and everyone’s trajectory is different and you can’t help but always think about your practice in relation to other people’s and your success in relation to other people’s and it’s good to read about other artist’s lives and how they’ve gotten to where they are and how it’s not always how you perceive it to be, that success and…

Mariana: Well, it’s interesting to read about them as people, because, I don’t know them, I don’t have coffee with them. I have coffee with my friends, who happen to be artists, getting to know people whose art I knew first through probably an image, is rad. Reading about them really makes the work connected to the body that it comes from. A person with experiences that aren’t just magically slapped onto a successful path, it took a conversation or two, it took a couple times of not getting anything out of many conversations, or it took years of doing things one way until they did it a different way. I didn’t finish that Andy Warhol book that I can’t even remember…

Strauss: Oh, Holy Terror?

Mariana: Yeah (Strauss: Yeah) that one was good.

Strauss: Totally, I thought that was a really good retelling. There’s so many books about Andy Warhol that I sort of skirted around or started and never finished but that was one of the ones that was a page turner for sure.

Mariana: Yeah, and his voice is so lovely, I can hear his personality, what was the guy’s name? (Strauss: Bob Colacello) Bob! Yeah he really wrote his little sass tone.

Strauss: Yeah, he is a beautiful writer, and so smart.

Mariana: Yeah. Do you read the paper?

Strauss: I don’t read a physical newspaper. But I read a newsfeed that is an app on my phone. (Laughter)

Mariana: What’s it called I didn’t know there was…

Strauss: It’s just the Newsstand. I think everyone’s phone has it. (Mariana: Oh!) But it sort of determines, it’s not an algorithm but I chose at some point the publications that I’m interested in.

Mariana: Oh, that’s how that works?

Strauss: Yeah, so in the morning, I sort of just scan and it gives me a handful of articles from the different publications that I would tend to read. Sometimes I just read a headline and sometimes I’ll actually go into the stories. In the studio I have NPR on so much that I feel like sometimes I hear too much news or something. That’s why I don’t read the paper as much, but I do have this weird romantic idea that one day I’m going to start getting the Sunday Times, physically, and I’m gonna read it up.

Mariana: It happens and it’s going to come, if you choose to. I just started getting that.

Strauss: But I won’t get it until I have a backyard.

Mariana: Okay, so…so first it’s a matter of real estate. That makes sense.

Strauss: Well, I’m not sure if I would ever even receive it if I ordered it at my apartment.

Mariana: Well, that’s real, because even at my apartment, I don’t know where it goes sometimes, and I only get The Weekender.  It takes me a week to read, I didn’t even know what the Newsstand was for on the phone, so you’re saying if I add other publications to it, it would be like a salad… with, sauce.

Strauss: Yeah, exactly. It’s like The Atlantic, The Observer, The Wall Street Journal, The Onion, it has everything. (Mariana: Oh, okay) You can even get Vogue, Cosmo.

Mariana: I would love me a Bazaar. I used to read that a lot when I was a kid, actually I got most print in my face when I was a tween. I had Bazaar, probably things my mom was like, “Why are you… so different?”

Strauss: Yeah, I grew up in a magazine house for sure.

Mariana: Yeah, it’s very normal for me to have stacks of magazines, I would get Bazaar, W Magazine, why was I getting W? I memorized designer names probably but it’s not like I bought designer fashion.

Strauss: That’s why magazines are great, it’s like fantasy.

Mariana: Yeah, and I know so much about fashion because of them and it must have been the images, the editorials that really drew me in or “On the Street” or “This Month’s Trend” those pages, it put, like you said, the fantasy of the editorial into the actual streetwear and it gives a connection to this really fancy world. Somehow I knew what to pay attention to, how to figure out what my eye was, what to look out for in the world: Fashion. Still do.

Strauss: Yeah, totally, same. We used to get a ton of magazines and my grandmother got so many too we would get all of her old ones. But there used to be a stack of Vanity Fairs on the back of the toilet in the bathroom closest to my bedroom and still to this day I think about that cover with Demi Moore where she is pregnant and naked and…(Mariana: With Rumer [Willis])  there are certain images even from magazines which are so fleeting that just stuck with me, just because the fantasy of then, the time you look at them. I keep certain magazines too, for reference, when they’re special or have some kind of articles that I want to hold onto, I like keeping a little stack of magazines to remember.

Mariana: That’s good. I guess I don’t have that practice. I guess before I would throw out a novel I would throw out a magazine, excuse me, repurpose, not throw away. Did the cutting up of images from magazines enter your art then? Or did it happen later, was finding these images…

Strauss: No, yeah – always, collage was one of the home projects, collage and Sculpey, that’s what we did when we were bored and I’ve been cutting up books ever since.

Mariana: “We”, as in you and the other kid? Your parents?

Strauss: Yeah, me and my brother, or me and my mom, I guess that’s another part of my book world is that some of the books that I buy are specifically for destroying or repurposing. Sometimes they’re of content that I am actually interested in and would probably read but for some reason, at the time I might make better use of it as an object to cut up and to use in a piece or something. That’s also something that I’ve done with books that I get rid of, is to just use them in the studio.

Strauss Bourque-LaFrance, Repairing Your Signs, 2016, basswood, stain, acrylic, oil pastel, wax stick, New York Post, 29.75 x 16.25 x 2 inches, (75.6 x 41.3 x 5.1 cm)

Mariana: Do you read on the train? Do you take the train?

Strauss: Yeah, I do take the train when I have to and I don’t have time to walk somewhere and I always carry something to read on me.

Mariana: When you don’t carry something to read on you do you ever listen to a book? I’ve never heard a book on tape.

Strauss: No, I haven’t either, I actually don’t think that would work for me, neither would a tablet for reading. I have trouble reading on a screen, I think a lot of people feel that way. I need a physical book in my hand, I need a paper, and I think I need that for my attention span too, I like to hold the object and to follow the words, it helps to absorb it and if I’m in the car I can imagine a book on tape working, because I listen to a lot of podcasts in the car, but typically I’m not that interested in hearing a book on a tape.

Mariana: Yes, I like moving through the pages of a book as part of the reading process, I think that’s huge and getting so close to the end.

Strauss: Well there is something about that! Where we have so little time to do anything, to find time to be able to read a book, especially one like A Little Life that’s 800 pages long, it’s really overwhelming to even think that I have time to do that, but when it’s a good book it not only goes fast, there is that sense of accomplishment that you’re getting something from this, that you can see the progress you’ve made as you go through.

Mariana: Totally, and it gets older. Since I’ve started reading A Little Life, I’ve decided to read it before I grab my phone in the morning before I do the screen time of looking on Instagram, which is another kind of reading. It’s image-deciphering, liking, not liking, going on and I wonder, if you are having a good time reading something, does it take time away from another way of distraction, or…

Strauss: Yeah, I think that it does. I’m not as disciplined as I would like to be in that way that you were just describing where my book is the first thing I reach for, even though this particular book I’m super into and I’m really excited to get to the end of it, I make time for the sort of digital reading I do, whether it’s visual like Instagram or it’s more reading in Newsstand, or whatever, a lot of the time the books that I’m reading end up being for the subway. But I do think about that a lot every time I check Instagram and end up getting on it and getting into one of those k-holes where you can’t stop until you get to the last place you looked, the amount of time that that takes is just, it’s actually really kind of crazy, and you know, if I were to replace that with pages in a book every time, it would surely be more satisfying, I think.

Mariana: Yeah, I think there’s a lot of guilt, for me, in looking on “instant media” which is my old person way of calling all of social media. The end of my instant media moment is so ridden with guilt, while I’m doing it I’m so satisfied though. Sometimes I check the time and all of a sudden I’m on instant media, which is why I got a watch, because I didn’t want to keep checking my phone every time I had to check the time. I have guilt about it, maybe it has to do with when I came of age, when print was still relevant, I didn’t really encounter the information from the World Wide Web until college. That’s so different for kids now, they’re looking at the internet for the source of information, whereas we weren’t allowed to use the internet for a source. When I was first writing papers, it was like, “Nope, you must find it first in the encyclopedia” and then in books, in print, researching, the legwork of research has completely been cut. Perhaps because I was told that it was lazy to look at the internet then, maybe that’s why I’m still like “Oh my God, I’m so guilty for looking at the internet at all!”

Strauss: Well I feel like you have to question any platform, any social media or device that you’re using, I think that you have to question anything that you’re using that much. Something that takes up time in your day. I think that anything that you’re willing to spend that kind of time with, like the way we are with Instagram, and the time it takes to go through your feed, I think you have to question that information source. It’s so prevalent, I always think about if you can trust it or not. Instagram specifically has this amazing way of enlarging a community and connecting different communities but it stops somewhere along the way because I think it is so just visually-based, it ultimately becomes a sort of narcissistic place for everyone, when it could maybe have a potential besides that. I know I’ve definitely met a lot of people just from having it which I think is interesting and I think sometimes you connect with the people you follow who you don’t already know and sometimes you don’t. You know, sometimes I learn from the images I see, sometimes I want to reference certain things I see and, yeah, some days I want to give it up and some days I think about how important it actually is or could be. But I’m constantly questioning it, and what it’s doing to me. (Laughter)

Mariana: Yeah, am I being fed anything?

Strauss: Well yeah, I kind of feel like it’s, it’s something I would talk to a therapist about for sure.

Mariana: I talk about my books with my therapist.

Strauss: A Little Life is a book that I would totally talk about if I had a therapist, I have visceral reactions to the writing in this way that I haven’t had, God I don’t know the last time I felt that. It might have been in the days of reading Autobiography of Red (Mariana: Anne Carson?) (Laughter)

Mariana: That was the one I was going to say! That is a seminal book in our history, amongst our group of friends, Anne Carson’s,  Autobiography of Red…

Strauss: I think we’d all still put it on our top whatever lists.

Mariana: That’s a book I reread seasonally.

Strauss: Yeah totally, I would never get rid of that book it’s like a bible.

Mariana: It is like a bible. And many of her other books became so as well. I wouldn’t get rid of my Joan Didion books either, there are certain books I wouldn’t get rid of. There are huge parts of A Little Life where I’m amazed that these men live a life together, they live in a shit apartment and they do holidays together and it’s a really familiar group. It’s not the Instagram expanded community, it’s the base.

Strauss: A familiar community but it’s a rare community, that’s a reason why I’m really into this book is because I feel like it’s interesting for me as a queer man. But the book is all about these very very nuanced and very sensitive male relationships that you never read about never ever ever, and I think it sort of reminds me of a show that was on HBO briefly, called Looking which was about a group of gay friends, and it was a very specific more tender depiction of a group of gay men rather than raucous, overly-sexualized, etc.

Mariana: Is that based in San Francisco?

Strauss: Yeah, and A Little Life does a similar thing, where sexuality doesn’t come up all that often in the book, but it’s sort of implied that these boys all love each other whether any of them are gay or not. And it just sort of really really looks at how male relationships operate, when sexuality actually isn’t at the forefront of it, these are all raw emotional men who care about each other, which is just a really rare depiction.

Mariana: It is rare, and it’s more easily found in a group of young women or girls…like sisterhood, is different from brotherhood…

Strauss: I think that this is different from brotherhood as well because it immediately made me think of the term “bromance” and how that is used these days and how overused it is and how lame it is and it’s one of those terms that’s basically created so that a certain type of person can feel comfortable being a certain way with someone. I think it’s really unnecessary, if you love another man, it’s because he’s your best friend, that’s why you love him, and it seems pretty reasonable.

Mariana: That seems like enough of a statement, that two men can care for each other.

Strauss: It happened with metrosexual too.

Mariana: Yeah, that was the other term I was just about to say.

Strauss: And that’s why this book it seems to delete all the work that’s been done there, under the idea of bromance or metrosexualism, it feels so stripped of that in a really really nice way. Where it’s just fluid, it’s so fluid.

Mariana: Right, it starts at why wouldn’t this be true. This is how these young men relate and care for each other and live together and this is their life together.

Strauss: Yeah! And what if more men in the world could actually feel comfortable projecting vulnerability, sensitivity, (Mariana: care) care, and tenderness. That’s the problem with the world, really, you know? I mean, it’s dramatic to say, but it’s sort of like…

Mariana: No, but it is, it’s expected for male bodies to be void of that. It’s a weakness to show that you have those qualities and if it’s not a weakness then you “must be gay”… We live in New York and there are a lot of printed images, of words, anything from a misspelled sign on a laundromat window to smart advertising on the subway. How do those words or images sit with you in your life as content?

Strauss: Yeah, because we’re always reading…

Mariana: I’m always creating language from someone else’s mistake, or someone else’s really smart thing it’s all…

Strauss Bourque-LaFrance, Where the Fuck Did Monday Go?, 2016, basswood, stain, acrylic, oil pastel, wax stick, New York Post, 48 x 24 x 2 inches, (121.9 x 61 x 5.1 cm)

Strauss: Paying attention in New York is such an important thing and I’m constantly aware of the surfaces and the signs and the imagery around me, because, even though you’d think with so much of it you’d start to ignore it, but I feel like here I pay really close attention to it because I need to. There’s some kind of need I have to find nuance in the scape of New York that’s so busy and crazy. I also am obsessed with graphic design so I really like to see how that’s used publicly and how it’s used on different kinds of surfaces or walls or areas or is it wheat pasted or is it a billboard or is it the little “Back in five” sign, I feel this need to capture that and hold it as a reference.

Mariana: Do you have any other top books?

Strauss: I’ve been reading a lot from a big stack of Art Forums from the 60s, the late 60s/early 70s and I’ve been…

Mariana: Were they so skinny?

Strauss: They’re very skinny and they’re smaller but they’re still square format, and they’re such treasures.

Mariana: Where do you get them?

Strauss: I got them in a thrift store. The 60s and 70s set the tone for art in such an intense way and all the work that’s throughout these Art Forums is the work that’s still so heavily referenced, and it’s all the heavy hitters that really made mid-century abstraction and minimalism and all that, it’s been really fun to go back and read what it was like back then and then also imagery-wise, a lot of it’s in black and white, and the ads, the ads are such a good part of Art Forum in the older issues. It was also a really great time in graphic design and everything was minimal and it’s before people named shows conceptual names…

Mariana: Oh, so it’s just the artist

Strauss: Yeah, so it’s the artist’s name and the gallery and it’s just all about this simple graphic design where almost every ad looks like a business card.

Mariana: Oh, I love that.

Strauss: Me too, it’s so inspiring.

Mariana: That’s great, a recent thing I’ve read, that was inspiring, because it’s meta, is the letter by Yvonne Rainer, that speaks to her experience of New York as being so different from the market and professionalization of dance and art at-large today. I keep this in my mind, the simplicity of artists engaging with their work. They had enough space for bodies here then, and because they all had a room, they got to make work in it.

Strauss: Well, and now there’s so many destinations, you go to the place or the thing so specifically and everything’s tight and determined.

Mariana: And codified, all the rooms have styles. Rooms meaning, anything from theater house to galleries, (Strauss: rooms) yeah, rooms now have a style because they became a thing, a time, an art space. Making dances or choreography or time-based work is about putting action out, just being active.

Strauss: Oh yeah, yeah that’s the great part about performance and dance is that it can’t exist the same without the audience. It’s a medium that still involves the presence of other bodies to make it happen.

Mariana: Thank you!

Strauss: Thank you.

Mariana: Bye New York.

Strauss: Think we talked about books enough?

Mariana: Yeah.

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Images: courtesy of Rachel Uffner Gallery and Strauss Bourque LaFrance

-Mariana Valencia, co-editor 

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Travis Chamberlain: Alright, good afternoon ladies and gentleman, thank you so much for coming, very excited to see you guys here, braving the calm before the storm. My name is Travis Chamberlain, Public Programs Coordinator here at the New Museum, and I’m also the curator of Performance in Residence here. We do a series called Renew, Replay, which this residency is a part. The residency is called Movement Research in Residence: Rethinking the Imprint of Judson Dance Theater 50 Years Later. Alright, so it’s a massive residency that’s taking place from, started in September and It’s running through December 16th, it involves a series of public programs much like this one, this is the first contextualizing program that we have as part of the residency, but the really main component of this residency is a series of four week-long performance research residencies, where we have 5 different individual artists and one collective and one collective apparatus, that are all responding to four audience-nominated prompts/proposals, regarding what are the most relevant issues that contemporary performers are carrying with them today that they feel began with Judson Dance Theater. This program is made possible in part through the support of the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, Education and public programs are made possible by a generous grant from the Goldman Sachs Gives at the recommendation of David and Hermine Heller.

Wendy Perron: I thought we’d kind of divide it in half and first talk about what these two women remember, you know, what your experience of Judson was, and the second half would be sort of the rethinking part in the sense of what was the legacy, what we think the legacy is and what you think it is, so we want your input in that too. But I want to start with when I, about 30 years ago I got very involved as a faculty member at Bennington College in doing a whole Judson Project reconstructions and videotapes and stuff, and Yvonne was part of it, and Trisha Brown was part of it, and David Gordon, and what I found doing research is that whenever you think something is the beginning of something, it really goes back before that. So July 6th, 1962 was the first concert of Judson, but there were things before that, obviously there was a Robert Dunn workshop, where we have Movement Research reissued the edition of the tribute to Robert Dunn, which was 1997, but before that there was something called Dance Associates and Aileen was part of it and I have never really heard what that was and it was in the 50s, so I’d love for Aileen to say what the Dance Associates was, I know Jimmy Waring was part of it David Vaughan was part of it, and I think Paul Taylor too (Aileen: I think so too) So I’d like to hear about that and to know if Yvonne knew about that but let’s hear from Aileen first, because what was that?

Aileen Passloff: Jimmy Waring was not only part of it, it was he who organized it. Jimmy Waring saw us all as artists, not any kind of kind of hierarchy, so if you were a writer you were included, if you were in Mr. Balanchine’s company, you were included, if you were a sculptor, or a painter or a dancer, Edwin Denby was part of Dance Associates, thank god, yes as was Paul Taylor, as was Marian Sarach, so that there were modern dancers, ballet dancers, Tanaquil LeClercq, one of Balanchine’s wives, the gorgeous gorgeous dancer, was also part of it. It was central to who Jimmy was that the doors were open, all inclusive, we were not playwrights or writers or sculptors, all of us were artists interested in making something that was beautiful, that had some kind of truthfulness in it, you know. Anyone, so that was Dance Associates.

Wendy: But did they get together and talk or was it a performance venue?

Aileen: Okay. We–Jimmy Waring lived in a slave house, in the back of another house that had no heat, and we all sat and talked about projects that we were going to do, and what needed– there were– John Herbert McDowell might have been part of that group as well, so that there were composers there as well as dancers and playwrights and actors and miscellania, I don’t know whether Dance Associates presented work or not, but I know my earliest performances with Jimmy were at the 92nd st Y

Wendy: What year?

Aileen: Oh goodness gracious…if I say it I’ll be lying. (WP: In the 50s?) In the 50s, yes, and the music was Hy Gubernick who was also part of that group. That’s what I remember of that time. This incredible sense of collaboration of people. Nobody having their nose in the breeze, only what needs to be done, let’s do it. You know…it was about community as I think Judson was also about community.

Wendy: And were you aware of the Dance Associates?

Yvonne Rainer: Vaguely, I mean I don’t remember where I met Jimmy Waring, I wanted to…I think I wanted to dance with you, Aileen.

Aileen: I know, and I was too stupid to know how to use you (laughter)

Yvonne: Yeah, and so–

Aileen: Because you had this piece at first called Tea and the...something something

Wendy: Tea at the Palazza Poon is the piece you saw

Yvonne: Yes! I saw Aileen dance this solo where she sat and she had a bustle and she outlined her breasts and nipples and she put a pencil in her mouth and she did things I’d never seen…I hadn’t seen much dance but I thought, this was at The Living Theater, and I thought, “Oh, I’d like to dance with her” so at that time I just started dancing with–dancing–studying with Merce Cunningham and so I thought, “ah she goes to Jimmy Waring’s classes. “Somehow I knew that, so I thought, “I better go where she goes” and that’s where I met you, and I don’t know whether I put it to you boldly, that… so I started studying with Jimmy. And Jimmy was this amazing person who could make, what do you call it… silk purses out of sow’s ears, I mean he had all kinds of people in his company, they were too short or too inexperienced or too this or too that, to dance in so-called “professional” companies and he found ways to make us all shine onstage, so within a year, I think, this was 1960 and within less than a year he invited into his company, so I didn’t dance with you, I got to dance with Jimmy. And, yeah.

Aileen: I sent you to Jimmy, because I thought, “Oh, all I know about is classical ballet”, ‘cause my background was School of American Ballet, Ballet Russe, Ballet Theater, all I knew about was that, but I knew enough to know she was hot, but I didn’t…

Yvonne: No, you didn’t see me do anything

Aileen: I could see who you were. I knew who you were. (Laughter) And so I said go to Jimmy, he’ll know how to use you.

Yvonne: He gave a ballet class where he sat and he did this (Laughter)

Wendy: An addendum to Jimmy because I just did a conversation with David Gordon and Valda Setterfield, and that’s how they met, was in David’s Gordon’s class. I mean, Jimmy Waring’s class, and Jimmy said, “you two should do a duet together.” So, that’s the beginning of that story also.

Yvonne: Matchmaker

Wendy: Yeah, so he was very much the beginning, and obviously the whole, interdisciplinary thing, he was very supported by him too.

Aileen: He could see beauty in everybody, you know.

Yvonne: But his work, you know, it was very eclectic, he would do the pure white leotard and type and Cunningham type of stuff and he would do these campy, all-inclusive, collage kinds of things also, I mean he had a lot of different dimensions in his own work.

Wendy: And also I think he designed costumes for some people, and he did sound for some people.

Aileen: He wrote music. He wrote music for Bellis In the Garden He designed costumes, he did the flyers…

Yvonne: He sewed the costumes. He often would bring the materials to class and he’d be embroidering… they’re very elaborate costumes sometimes too.

Aileen: Do you remember…I could shut up I know how to do that…one time… Jimmy would have us sew on little things, a little piece of felt, and a little piece of jewel, and a little piece of net, and a little pearl, and he would sew this little thing and then he would put it under six layers of a skirt, and I would say, “but Jimmy nobody’s going to see that” and he said “but they’ll feel it.”

Yvonne: “They’ll sense it” and (Aileen: he was right)

Wendy: Because you could sense it, right?

Aileen: No, it was, the audience senses everything it was about that, it was about having respect for the audience in a very deep way. He had respect for us and he had respect for them.

Wendy: Now, let me go to another influence, because we could be here forever but we do want to end by 4:30. So, another influence– Anna Halprin, which I don’t know if you studied with her but I know that Yvonne did and other Judson people did. What was her influence on you.

Yvonne: Um, carrying things. I took her summer course and it was the activities took place on this open-air dance deck in Marin County and it was there I met Simone–no, I met Simone in New York…

Wendy: And Simone suggested you go to her…

Yvonne: Right! She had performed with her already and, yeah, so I went out, in fact drove across the country with her. And Trisha was there, I met Trisha for the first time, so there was a lot of running around that deck holding tree branches and stuff. I mean, they were beautiful madrone trees, and it was a lot of the work was very nature-oriented, which was kind of alien to me, I never gravitated toward either performing in nature or interpreting it in any way. But, I was absorbing everything that came my way in those days and the idea of carrying something while you were moving…they were also…Lamont Young was there that summer and doing, giving assignments for sound and people were, extemporizing with sounds while they moved, and I remember a piece I did… Oh that’s where Trisha pushed this broom with such force that her body was momentary horizontal, parallel to the floor and she was splayed out in the air.

Wendy: Sorry, I have to interrupt you, because when I worked with Trisha in the 70s she tried to make us do that. Not with a broom, but she tried to make us jump out, and hover, horizontally.

Yvonne: Yeah, she could do it.

Wendy: We assistants had a mat under us but after a while she gave up because we couldn’t really hold it that long there. Some of these ideas keep going. Um, so was the word task thrown around at that time?

Yvonne: I didn’t hear the word task, maybe it was thrown around but I didn’t become aware of it until much later after Judson when Annette Michelson came over to me and she says, well it’s clear you’re involved with “tasks” and “oh, yes, that’s what I’m doing”

Wendy: I’m going to move to another influence, Merce Cunningham and John Cage, for both of you, what was your experience in being around that or being Merce’s work be around at that time, I know you were studying there, so I’d like to hear both of you talk about that. (Yvonne: About Merce’s influence?) Merce and John.

Yvonne: Oh, well, Merce always said we were John’s babies, not his. (Wendy: We meaning Judson Dance Theater) Yeah, right.

Wendy: And, so why did he disclaim you? (Laughter)

Yvonne: That’s interesting, why did we reject him, you know, when we started making work that ended up at Judson. We all studied with him or performed with him, I didn’t but Paxton, (Wendy: Yeah, Steve Paxton) Judith Dunn (Wendy: Judith Dunn, Valda Setterfield…) Valda, Barbara Dilley (Wendy: Deborah Hay were all part of Judson, all were dancing with Merce) Dancing with him, and their own work was as far from his as they could possibly get, but that was… I have to say something now, there’s something in the…I’m reverting to a very solipsistic curmudgeon mode now. There’s something in the The New York Times today announcing my shows at Danspace later in the week. It says “she eliminated technique.” (Laughter) The, I mean, in the spirit of disabusing or dismantling preconceptions, or misconceptions about Judson, that it was all about pedestrian movement. I mean…it was not. You can attest to that and there was all kinds of work and I, I think to distinguish myself somewhat from the real minimal work that was going on, or anti-dance as it was called, then, I was using everything that came my way, including a classical adagio that I learned in ballet class, you know? Including what I’d learned from Cunningham, the spareness, the clarity of what he gave us to do, the way of doing one thing with the upper body and something else with the lower limbs. So, I would say I was involved in a kind of eclecticism, as Jimmy was, previously. So, and then of course the Dunn class introduced the aleatory, the chance methodologies of Cage. So all of this was feeding into I and my peers who were exposed to Happenings, to the Pop Art, to all kinds of things that were happening at the same time.

Wendy: Do you want to talk about Merce?

Aileen: Sure I do, I want to talk about everything. When I first saw Merce Dancing I fell in love with those solos where he looked like a sataur or something like that, they were so, like an animal, really. (Yvonne: yeah, it was very animal-like) And that really blew me away, you know. Later on, it seemed to get to be about something else and I was a little bit…I admired them but it wasn’t the same kind of deep effect on me as those early pieces, the early group pieces as well as those early solos which were exquisite. Merce would come to see my company as would did John Cage, and he saw Barbara Dilley-Lloyd in my company, and he saw Valda in my company, and he saw David Gordon in my company, I mean, I had hot dancers, I had extraordinary dancers. I felt so lucky to be in this time where I was seeing Merce’s work and her work. I remember the first time I saw Yvonne’s work–I had a studio on 8th Street and 2nd Avenue and I shared it later with Yvonne and with Jimmy, but there was a meeting of Judson there the first time and Steve Paxton was showing something (Yvonne: where was this) at 8th Street and 2nd Avenue at my studio (Yvonne: Oh, right, we shared a studio on the top floor)

Wendy: The two of you had the same studio (Aileen: Yes!) (Yvonne: with Jimmy. The three of us)

Aileen: Yes, I found that studio, I invited Jimmy in and I invited you and then later Simone, or I think Simone came in. And we looked at this work and we sat in a circle afterwards and you said, “Could everyone say one sentence about this work that we had seen” and it was something of Steve’s and I was like dumbfounded, because I couldn’t find the passion in it. (Yvonne: Oh, where’s the passion?) Yeah, ’cause I was used to that something else this thing.

Wendy: Was it Flat the one where he takes off the shirts and hangs it on himself?

Aileen: No, it was my lack of perception, (laughter) no, for truth, for truth I just… I had never seen anything like that and I had never seen anything like that. But man, you know, that (sound) and it wasn’t like I understood it intellectually, I understood it viscerally. As I understood your work, later. You know, it made an imprint on my flesh, about how I looked at everything after seeing their work, you know, it just…it changed me. But it was not that it came in through my head, it came in another way, you know. But, you know, you speak about full-out dancing. I think what Yvonne does is full-out dancing, and what I mean by full-out dancing is fulling committing oneself to that action you’re taking, not playing it safe, not standing outside of it, but just do the work–not doing more than the work, not doing less than the work, doing the work. And Yvonne did that and I tried to do that in my work and sometimes I succeeded and sometimes I didn’t. Anyway.

Wendy: Can I ask you about John Cage, and, he was, as Yvonne said Robert Dunn was teaching these chance technique in the workshop that were from the Cage ideas. What did you think of the chance methods, were you using them–

Aileen: I used them, because I learned them from Jimmy, you know, who copied scores for John, and for Merce by hand, this way, you know.

Wendy: Jimmy Waring copied scores for John Cage?

Aileen: Yes, for John, yes. He didn’t feel the edges of that John over there, it was all of us, it was this big, you know. Different story. No no go interrupt me.

Yvonne: It’s very interesting hearing you describe Dance Associates and, which is almost a description of the openness of the Judson workshops. But I remember that Jimmy, when we first…after our first concert Jimmy said to me, “Oh it will be good for informal presentations,” because he was dedicated to the proscenium art, right, and that was where you always performed, in that kind of situation. (Aileen: It’s true)

Wendy: So you felt a slight dismissal or something (Yvonne: Yeah, yeah, yeah) and Jimmy didn’t actually perform as a part of Judson Dance Theater ’til later. (Yvonne: Yeah, later he did) So he was kind of acting like you were the children or… (Yvonne: Yeah, right.)

Aileen: Can I talk a little bit about Jimmy. He was my mentor, my teacher. If I know anything at all about making dances I think I learned it from Jimmy. Because Jimmy taught me to say yes to everything. No was a closed door and yes was an open door. So it meant try it! Find out something about it, you know. Jimmy’s work, which, it’s as Yvonne said, he loved proscenium, he loved the yegelef, vaxt all the gorgeous rich old costumes, and old music, but he also knew about, it was Jimmy who taught me about electronic music. He taught me… Jackson McLow, we went we listened to poetry, we went, we saw everything. We climbed up a fire escape at City Center to see the ballet every night, he taught me how to do that too.

Yvonne: I snuck in at intermission.

Aileen: Oh, that was more discrete. We went up the fire escape.

Wendy: David Gordon talks about that too, David and Valda talk about Jimmy Waring as their mentor, told them what museums to go to, what films to see, everything.

But, I also want to talk about The Living Theater, because I know that his studio was in the building of The Living Theater, and you guys were, your piece was done at The Living Theater, the one that you first saw. So what was the influence of Living Theater on both of you.

Aileen: Oh, also thank God for The Living Theater. I mean, I can’t talk about The Living Theater so much without talking about the politics of that time, that was the time of the Vietnamese war, the time of McCarthyism, it was a time of repression, and the work that was going on there was in revolution. Of saying we can’t stand that anymore we have to do something different. You know, and yes I mean I did Falk I did Yeats plays there, I did… Larry Kornfeld directed Full Moon in March, I also did something Frank O’Hara, it was a whole bunch of stuff, I was doing plays there.

Yvonne: Yeah, I went to everything there, Brecht and Pirandello.

Aileen: The Brig!

Yvonne: Yeah, The Brig was one

Wendy: You were acting in plays or performing in them?

Aileen: Yes! Acting and directing and choreographing, whatever needed to get done.

Yvonne: Tiny stage, yeah.

Aileen: Jimmy did dances before The Wall at The Living Theater… were you in that?

Yvonne: That was just before my time with him, yeah.

Aileen: Because Julian Beck did the set for Jimmy

Yvonne: Uh huh, right. I thought he did that at Hunter College, no?

Aileen: Living Theater, yeah

Wendy: Was that a political piece?

Aileen: No, it was an archaeological dig, you know Julian Beck made a set that was so rich and so layered and dense and it was like you shake dust off a place and it’s life and something you’d never seen before, it was filled with mystery and sense of discovery, there were little doors that opened up in the set

Yvonne: And he used all different kinds of music, Mahler and —

Aileen: Yes, it was an extraordinary piece

Yvonne: Yeah, I’ve heard about it. Jimmy gave me my first opportunity to present my early work, and I think we shared that program, 1961 on The Living Theater stage, and I did Three Seascapes I think, and something called–

Aileen: I think it was called Three Satie Spoons

Yvonne: Three Satie Spoons!

Aileen: …which was an assignment in Robert Dunn’s class

Yvonne: Right, right, and you did something (Aileen: Poor Jimmy, gave me everything) Yeah

Aileen: Jimmy paid for the studio, I really talk too much, I’ll be short. Okay, Jimmy said “you should choreograph” and I said, “but I’d rather dance,” and he said “who else do you think is going to choreograph for you?” (Yvonne: yeah…) And I thought about that…he was right! And so he rented a studio for me, he paid the studio for me, he sat in a corner and read a book some place, then he took me home to his house and fed me scrambled eggs, so… Jimmy did this for me

Yvonne: This brings up something else…the economics of that time. Jimmy worked in the mailroom of Time Life and out of that he paid for you and his costumes, and rental of spaces of all that. You could do that then. It was a full-time job, right? But then, we, Judson, we did not talk about real estate, or. I didn’t even know how people made a living, I had a small stipend from my parents, someone had a part-time job, someone…Steve was dancing with Merce and got a small salary. So, we had no ambition or no idea of making a living from what we did, and this gave us a certain kind of freedom, to fool around, to play, to fail, to fart around. And that is the spirit out of which that, those concerts came.

Wendy: I want to ask you about the word ordinary, because Robert Dunn would say in his class, you know, “go from what’s ordinary,” and I wonder if you think, this is for both of you, but the thing about the technique you know that someone says you eliminated technique, is that some writer confusing “ordinary” with “no technique”? What did it mean to you, this value of ordinary?

Yvonne: I remember the very first workshop in which Robert said “do something that’s nothing special, and as he spoke (gets up to do something) and he covered a lot of territory.

Wendy: And he liked it right, he thought that was a great dance, the one that you just did, right?

Yvonne: No, no. It was nothing special. (Laughter) But, you could start bringing these nothing specials into the dance arena, in through the palace gates of high art. I mean they said of me, in one review of those concerts, “she walks as though she’s in the street” this was anathema to the dance critics. You were supposed to transform this ordinary body into something more than human, and that was the…they spoke of aspiration. You were always supposed to aspire to some higher realm, as a performer, and Jimmy provided precedence for that.

Aileen: We looked and we saw that maybe walking in the street was just as beautiful, or just as important as that arabesque, you know. Or those fouettes, or whatever it was that I also was in love with. That’s still my practice and my study, and also the ugliness was something worth investigating, as well as beauty. That ugliness can be just as interesting, or provocative in some way, and so… it was about that, and daring to look anywhere.

Yvonne: I have to mention one other experience I had that was very inspirational for me. Erick Hawkins who had danced with and married Martha, he was married to her. Well, he… I went to something called, up at the 92nd Street Y, Here and Now with Watchers he did very mythological things, however, in the middle of all this, female dancer carried one of his objects, she walked and placed it center stage and walked out. By that time, this was ’57, I was beginning to go up to the 92nd Street, every weekend there were modern dance concerts, and I had never seen anyone just walk, and put something down and go away. This was ordinary. So, you know, already this idea of the ordinary was around to be grabbed and exploited.

Wendy: And didn’t it also relate to what the visual artists were doing?

Yvonne: Of course detritus and junk (Wendy: found objects), and cartoons, (Wendy: soup cans) and the whole nine yards, yeah soup cans.

Wendy: I think it was a major shift, because I think it did help teach people that someone walking in the street could be as beautiful or as watchable as someone doing an arabesque.

Aileen: And what we were wearing, too, what we wore in the street was quite as interesting or maybe more interesting than those tutus or what was called “dance costume”

Wendy: Unless Jimmy sewed it… (laughter)

Aileen: But I remember it was revolutionary the time I wore stockings and heels and a dress onstage, that was very shocking. I didn’t do it to be shocking, but rather to show, my God this is also beautiful.

Wendy: You were also both in Al Carmines’ production of Gertrude Stein’s What Happened. You both were performers in that musical. Al Carmines was the senior minister who actually said “yes you can come and do dances here” but he also was a composer and lyricist, but I never saw What Happened, what were your roles like that you did in that.

Yvonne: Well, we were the two who couldn’t carry a tune, right? (Laughter) (Aileen: absolutely, couldn’t carry a tune to save my life) I remember standing next to you around the piano and we looked at each other, lip synching.

Wendy: Why did he have you in it then?

Yvonne: Well, you know, we had performers who couldn’t dance, why not some singers who can’t sing?

Wendy: And this was part of Judson Poets Theater, which was another sort of, it was all at Judson Church. There was Judson Poets Theater and Judson Art Gallery, which made a context for you guys coming there. And I do… (Aileen: It was Howard Moody, who opened those doors and said “Playwrights, come on in! Sculptors, come on in! Dancers, whoever you are, writers! There’s room for you in this place, doesn’t matter what your sexual preference is, anything, you’re welcome!) But, I mean, probably many of you know this, but some people don’t so I just want Yvonne to say it again. After studying with Robert Dunn in those workshops and deciding you wanted to show your work, Judson was not the first place that you went to.

Yvonne: Ah, okay. There was this annual, what was it called… (Aileen: An audition, kind of) auditions, at the 92nd Street (Aileen: I think they  had an annual audition for young people) yeah Young Choreographer’s Concert, every year. And Jack Moore was one of the jurors, there were three, Marion Scott, Jack Moore, and someone else (Aileen: Martha Hill probably…) no, not Martha Hill, I don’t think so… anyway we auditioned. Steve, Lucinda Childs, Ruth Emerson, Trisha and I went to the studio somewhere downtown. (Aileen: It wasn’t at the 92nd Street Y?) No, it was downtown, and we all, Steve, I don’t remember what Steve…Oh! Steve did that dance where he marks ballet steps, right? I forget the name of it. I did Three Satie Spoons, I don’t remember what Trisha did.

Wendy: I think that might have been David and not Trisha

Yvonne: Oh, maybe it was David, okay. And we were all redacted. Yeah. Interestingly, years, some years later when I revived that first solo of mine and Nancy Green, I taught it to her, it was at this little theater, The Cubiculo over on the west side. (Aileen: Oh yeah! 51st street.) Jack was an old friend of Nancy’s and I was at the rehearsal and Jack was sitting behind me and he leaned over while Nancy was performing and he said, “We were wrong…” (Laughter) “Vindication”

Wendy: But, that rejection made history. (Yvonne: Yeah! Then we had to look for a place)

I want to open it out to people but before I do I just want to ask…although I actually hate getting into definitions, I just want to know what does postmodern mean to you, and where do you think the word first came up. (Laughter)

Yvonne: Could mean anything in the last 30, 40 years. It hasn’t been supplanted by anything, they don’t call it post-post, but I don’t know, maybe someone in the audience can define it.

Wendy: Okay Liz, yeah. This is Liz Keen who was also part of Judson Dance Theater.

Liz: I was there,  I was also part of Dance Theater Workshop in the early days, which siphoned off people who didn’t say no to drama or narrative, but I always think of that time as…by predominant modern techniques were Graham technique and Limon technique and everybody who was in those companies who was doing there own work, and everybody who studied there, they all used those that vocabulary, and for me that vocabulary was worn out. It no longer was the old wine in the old bottles, and so when I think of postmodern I think of the break with those vocabularies. I mean, certainly in relation to Judson.

Wendy: Yeah, I think of, what Judson did was really clean the slate and start at the beginning. And I felt like each one of you did that in your own way. Steve’s way was doing very un-passionate walking, Trisha’s way might have been falling, you know your way was what you did that eventually became…eventually fed into Trio A. But I think each of you had a way of just scraping everything down to what your beginning was, and sort of built it back up again. Um, Mimi

Mimi: I just wanted to… you mentioned Edwin Denby and as a person who personally he inspired and certainly mentored me in my life, he wrote a great book called Dancers, Buildings and People in the Street and I wanted to recommend that to anyone who has not read it, or his other dance writings.

Wendy: Yeah, on that note I just want to also recommend the obvious one is Sally Banes Terpsichore in Green Sneakers, and she also wrote Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theater from 1962-64, also in talking about the bodies, the ordinary bodies, Deborah Jowitt has a chapter in her book, Time and the Dancing Image,  I think the chapter is called “Ordinary Bodies” in which she talks about how the whole aesthetic changed.

Mimi: There’s also Mildred Todd, The Thinking Body (Wendy: Yeah), really inspiring book

Wendy: Yeah, which is more about somatic practice.

Mimi: More about feeling one’s own gravity, and one’s own movement from oneself, which I think slowly in movement research in particular has evolved enormously.

Wendy: Well, and people like Elaine Summers and June Ekman were very much part of that somatic practice movement. Back there?

Paul Langland: Hi, it’s Paul Langland. I wanted to ask you more about Robert Ellis Dunn’s background and was he friends with Jimmy Waring and John Cage and Anna Halprin and Cunningham or…where did he come from. I know when I talked with him once he talked about how Laban worked, really just enlightened him so much, but where did he come from and what was his relationship to you folks?

Yvonne: He was a trained musician, he accompanied Merce’s dance classes on the piano, he was a disciple of John Cage, and what else…

Wendy: He also accompanied for Martha Graham’s classes. (Yvonne: Oh, I didn’t know that) And he’d been a tap dancer and he took John Cage’s class at the New School in Experimental Music and a lot of seminal musicians took that class. (Yvonne: Jackson MacLow and Allen Kaprow I think) Yeah, people who did the Happenings were in that class too, and actually, Cage was before the Robert Dunn. Before the Robert Dunn workshops Cage was teaching at the Merce Studio and he handed it over to Robert Dunn he got sick of teaching the class. But that’s why Barbara Bryan and Movement Research reprinted the Movement Research Performance Journal that was a tribute to him because we had about 30 different people–Yvonne was one, and I think Paul you were one weren’t you? (Paul: Yeah, I have something in there too)–who wrote about what he gave them and we also have like a short bio too. He performed before he became a trained musician, performed as a tap dancer and maybe some other kinds of dance too.

Paul: That’s fascinating. Oh, and something unrelated, I can tell you that when I was a young dancer coming to New York in the early 70s, one of the books that really struck me was Don McDonagh’s The Rise and Fall and Rise of Modern Dance and one thing that was fascinating about what he did in that book was sort of to map all of the lineages even though the lineages were only 12 years old or something at that point.

Wendy: And there was a chapter on Jack Moore, in the book, your favorite. (Paul: I think so)

Mimi: But also, getting back to the question about language and where postmodern came from I don’t know where postmodern came from but there’s an analogy with the term “performance art” which I also hate, which is, that was used retroactively. I know when “performance art” started to be used, which is the late 70s. It was (Yvonne: Preceded by body art, wasn’t it?) well, and other terms that, yes, were part…body art was one part of it, and there was need for a term that was more all-inclusive I guess by a certain point, by the late 70s, and you started to hear this term, “performance art” and then the first title for Rose Lee Goldberg was not Performance Art, which it was when it was reprinted, it was… I think it was Performance Live Art from 1909 or something like that. (Wendy: Interesting because “live art” has come back as a term) Yes, yes. And actually in a way I prefer that anyway.

Wendy: Well, I conquer with you about the use of “performance art” because I started writing for the Soho News  in ’75 and our page was called “Concepts In Performance” but the term “performance art” came later, it wasn’t that, um…

Sherry Milner: I just wanted to say (Wendy: Want to introduce yourself?) Sherry Milner. I came to looking at Judson and a little later, but, I’d say 69, through politics, and through knowing Living Theater and through being in an anarchist group, and so I started at that work about, maybe ’68 through that, through the idea of both ordinary bodies and non-hierarchical structures, so for me, I was looking at, looking for, really (and I knew Cage’s work) but looking for a kind of work that really was putting a certain kind of non-hierarchical politics into action, in a way. And we were in a group actually we were in a dance of Nancy Topfs for a year. We were the two non-dancers, I think there was one other, which was fantastic, it was a dance that was again, cast-based, that could generate from anybody in the group could generate a set of movements by doing certain kinds of things, and it was interesting, also, politically, because of course there came a certain point where she would see certain things happening–because we met every weekend, we did perform–and she would say “Oh, I really like that do that in the performance” and for us, the two non-dancers this was outrageous, and so of course, ultimately we confronted that and said “but this is non-hierarchical, but this is not right,” and she said “but it’s my dance” and so there was that and we tried to kind of– of course being really obnoxious upstarts and we were really obnoxious when I think of that–

Wendy: Nancy Topf also has a wonderful piece she’s written in that Movement Research Performance Journal on Robert Dunn.

Sherry: Oh, I should look at that, because I haven’t…but she, so I tried to organize the other dancers, to say wait a minute, this is really based… we have…these are principles that we really uphold. I read Yvonne’s manifesto, and I went to everything. And of course the other dancers, who were young, 18, said, we’re dancers, we need choreographers, we agree with you but we’re not going along. So, it was actually, in both ways very empowering, but also, again, those connections between art and politics are ever worked out. But for me I continue to look at work and then I took Yvonne’s class at Cal Arts too, and I remembered doing performances, in that you, in that seminar, as well (Yvonne: We did a lot of jumping on sofas) Yes! I remember that. Sort of like Kristina Talking Pictures actually, it showed up, later, jumping on sofas. But that sense of the connection between, of the relevance. Not just in terms of what people were saying but really people finding other structures in which to organize work, really, at every level thinking about principles, what does it mean to create community? What does it mean to organize people in space, what other kinds of ways can we use to do that organization? And obviously a lot of that comes from Cage as well, but the non-hierarchical approach was extremely important to me.

Wendy: As your talking I’m thinking of the “Flag Show” “The People’s Flag Show” because that was a moment where the politics really came to the fore, that was later that was 1970, right? (Yvonne: 1970-1?) Do you want to say something about the “Flag Show”?

Yvonne: Well, it was a very Jingo-istic period in American, in US history, where desecrating the flag was a criminal offense and Steve Radich was a gallerist who had shown the work of Marc…anyone…? (Aileen: Di Suvero?) No…he’s (someone: Morell?) Marc Morell, yes. A sculptor, and he draped it with… I didn’t see the work. Anyways, John Hendricks, and Michelle Wallace and Faith Ringold organized this “Flag Show” at Judson, where anyone who did anything with the flag could participate and there was a Jasper John’s flag, Kate Millet had an installation, a toilet with a flag in the toilet, and I was invited to do something at the opening and a few of us knew Trio A, I taught it and so I got these five-foot flags around our necks and we took off our clothes behind the flag and we did Trio A twice, and I thought of it as a double-barreled protest attack against censorship and misplaced patriotism, I guess. Yeah ’71 the Vietnam War was still going on…

Wendy: I have another question, because in all this planning about Judson this fall, one of the questions that has come up, or, almost accusations of like, either Judson was all white, or it wasn’t all white and where were the people of color? So, what is your response to that?

Yvonne: I was just about to bring that up. We certainly did not exclude anybody from these workshops, anyone who presented work at these workshops could get on the program, and the programs were organized by a nominated committee of three people. I was on one of them or two of them. We, when was this…’62 the freedom bus rides, voter registration in the South, this was about to happen, I must say for myself I was not very tuned into that, we did not do outreach to bring different ethnicities and people of color into our orbit, we were kind of oblivious, and a lot of the political, my own extra curricular political activity had to do with the Vietnam War, so racial issues didn’t surface for me until much later, and feminism was still a ways away, the second wave of feminism, although implicitly what we were doing was a lot of us were involved with a kind of feminism where women lifted men, we were anti-ballet, the ways in which ballet idealized and subjugated the female, bodily and metaphorically. So, yeah. I mean, we certainly did not exclude anyone, for any reason.

Wendy: When you say the women lifted the men, do you feel the contact improvisation came out of Judson?

Yvonne: Well, it came out of Steve. This was Steve’s brainchild. And it came out of our residency at Oberlin College as the Grand Union, and he taught the first workshop in contact there.

Wendy: But he was doing… in Grand Union he was doing a lot of falling and partnering and stuff.

Yvonne: Mm, yeah but I guess with Trisha. I don’t know, I wasn’t involved. I never did contact, so…

Wendy: Actually, it would be great if you would also talk about how Grand Union…how that evolved, because you were working on a piece that was Continuous Project Altered Daily and that sort of became the group that did Grand Union, and when I came to New York in ’69 Grand Union was still going strong, and that was really–

Yvonne: No, it didn’t get started til ’70, ’71

Wendy: So in those early 70s I saw that, and that’s kind of what led me to Judson, it was like “woah, where did this come from?” it was the most amazing group of people performing, again and again and again. So, how did that evolve? How did Grand Union come about?

Yvonne: Well, this is really post-Judson although all the participants, except for Becky Arnold (Wendy: And Douglas Dunn) and Douglas Dunn, yeah, were active in Judson. I made a piece, yeah, Continuous Project Altered Daily which had these components and an indeterminate temporal structure. We performed it at The Whitney Museum, ’71 I guess, and Barbara Dilley, who had a reputation in the Cunningham Company as being a troublemaker she was this restless sensibility, always pushing the limits, like in the…the one time where Merce, you know, there were contradictions between Cage’s ideas and what Merce allowed himself to do, and there’s this dance called Story where the dancer’s could go off and put on different costumes and come back and there was, they had, he gave them permission to make choices, and Barbara took all her clothes off and came on nude, and that was beyond the pale, from what I heard. So Barbara was pushing me, okay, there are moments in Continuous Project where they could improvise and there is documentation I saw  for the first time this year in Europe with Steve improvising, doing this beautiful thing with his back, he had this wonderfully supple back, and so Barbara kept, “maybe we can introduce our own work” and so I kept opening up the stable doors and trying to shut them, and so finally there was no turning back, and it became a totally improvisatory work, which began with residues of my work falling away, and finally we realized we couldn’t even rehearse with each other we didn’t, so we would get these gigs, we did a lot of touring, and Oberlin was one of the venues, residencies, and we would just come into the space with our schmattas and our records and it would begin. I lasted two years, I mean I couldn’t do it without being stoned I mean the pressure was too much, but they went on for about, until 1976. They went to Japan and went all kinds of places. One of my favorites stories from that last tour, is David was getting ready to leave, he had had enough, and there he was in Japan, and the rest of the group was on-stage in this theater warming up, this is hearsay of course, but this is the way it was told to me. They warmed up as the audience was coming in. David was sitting in a very disgruntled mood down in the dressing room and there was this full samurai costume in a closet or something, and one of the, it was a very talky group, they had all kinds of riffs about doctors and patients and one of their riffs was about Attila the Hun, I can’t tell you anything else about it. So Barbara, and maybe Nancy or Steve doing this Attila the Hun thing. David came up and there was an entrance upstage, and at a precise moment when they were involved in it, he threw open the curtains and said “HI HON! I’M HOME!” in this samurai outfit.

Wendy: I remember seeing that but then David told me it was in Minneapolis but then I saw it in New York, so I think he repeated it, I think it went over so well in Minneapolis or Japan that he repeated it again in New York, because I never forgot him saying “Hi Hon! I’m home!” (Laughter)

Yvonne: But he didn’t have the samurai costume!

Wendy: I don’t remember the samurai costume, I just remember there was this thread about Attila the Hun, and I thought that he had thought of it that second, so later, like a few months ago when he had told me that he had done it in Minneapolis, I was very disappointed because I realized that he was re-running a bit that worked. But it was hilarious and there were many other really funny things that happened…ongoing arguments between David and Barbara Dilley.

Yvonne: I think one of the things that fascinated the spectators and made them come back over and over was you never knew when the nasty kind of competitiveness would erupt. I had trouble with drawing I would come as a spectator and enter and that didn’t go over well. Shit or get off the pot, you know.

Audience Member: Apropos of Grand Union, I once saw some footage, it must have been at a college, and it seemed like the text was excerpts from student, from a fiction class, the students had written love stories and somebody was reading it while the dancers were improvising together…it was such a comedy, you could just imagine these very naive kinds of love stories and the activity like “Hi Hon, I’m home” onstage. Liz Keen brought up the issue of DTW and this, I forget your name but you brought up the politics and the aesthetics and the different kinds of hierarchical ways of making dances and I was thinking about Barbara Rohan’s Parades and I was also thinking about DTW which was sort of coincidental with all of your activities, and wondering, was there any relationship between the two, or thinking about it or awareness of it or rejection of or anything?

Wendy: Between…? (Yvonne: Barbara Rohan?)

Audience Member: Yeah, because she was a little bit affiliated with DTW I think

Wendy: She was, very much

Yvonne: Who was the founder of DTW? (Wendy: Jeff Duncan) (Audience Member: And Art Bauman, yeah) Jeff Duncan, right, oh. I wasn’t very, I went to some things, I wasn’t very aware of them, there seemed to be no connection, Liz could you?

Wendy: I want to answer it first, and then Liz, I think Liz should answer it, ’cause she really was a pivotal person there. Gus Solomons was another pivotal person, Kenneth King, and I was surprised to look on this list which I have, of all the Judson performances that Jeff Duncan actually performed there too. The reason I was surprised was that Jeff, and Jack Moore, who were two of the founders had both danced with Anna Sokolow. That was really the sort of 92nd Street Y contingent that Judson was working against. So it was really very different aesthetics. I mean, I think it was also a collective and it started in Jeff’s home, which was on 20th street, but a lot–Phoebe Neville was also someone who’d been at Judson and was at DTW, Nancy Topf. So there were a lot of people who migrated to DT but I felt that there were a lot… I felt that the aesthetics were different because of that foundation of, very much the Dance Theater Workshop very much wanting to embrace the theater part of it. But Liz what do you feel was the connection?

Liz: I think theater is a good, I think that you’ve hit something very important, because the emotion was important. It was a different approach and it wasn’t quite…I think there were also connections to music, that it didn’t go quite as far into the abstract sound, as had been going on. It was a melange of people with different interests too, but I think that the theater maybe, acting, emotional thing not being excluded, is an important aspect of it.

Wendy: Okay, Paul wanted to say something.

Paul: I wanted to add to this because Dance Theater Workshop is where I landed right away in 1973 when I came to New York, and it was like, sort of like Movement Research is now, it was a home for young students, and there were all kinds of wonderful teachers there and people like Art Bauman, Jeff Duncan, Judith Scott, Jack Moore, they would say “Oh, Anna Halprin’s in town, you have to work with her” and I’d go and work with Anna Halprin, and they completely, Jeff had seen the first showing of contact improvisation the year before. He thought it was fantastic. I did a showing of contact improvisation in the spring of 1974, they were completely open to it, we were working with Caroline Brown and Nancy Topf was around and Laurie Pritchard who’s here also, we were scholarship students together. So, I experienced nothing but completely open-minded support for young students and expanding their visions. Oh, and I think Jeff told me, he said, “Paul, I’ve heard Yvonne Rainer is teaching at School of Visual Arts,” and so I went over and I crashed your class, and… (Yvonne: Were you in my class?) Yeah, I crashed your class, and you let me audit. I just walked in, I don’t know how I got through security. And I ended up performing for 20 minutes on the first day which was terrifying, but you let me stay. But that, that was because, so anyway, it was very…they didn’t have like a one-ideology vision, it was very eclectic. But they were so open and nurturing, and a wonderful experience for me, first arriving.

Wendy: I mean I arrived also, a few years before there, and what I remember is if you were one of the young people doing their series, you had to help with the mailing, and that’s how I learned, I learned all of the zip codes of Manhattan by hour after hour, doing the mailings there. Laurie did you want to speak to that?

Laurie: Yeah, well, I was going to say that, Wendy, you taught there… (Wendy: I did, I was a substitute for other people, like Barbara Rohan) But I thought it was arts pragmatism that made DTW the service organization that it was, which was running the mimeograph machine and typing the mailing labels and all that stuff (Wendy: And doing the letraset) because the reason that people joined was not, after a while, aesthetic, but more so that they could do mailing and get a press list and things like that.

Wendy: It was a real cooperative and I’ve thought about it from time to time, about how DTW has lasted, whereas Judson sort of burned itself out, I mean as a venue. I mean, Movement Research has taken it on, but as a presenting organization, DTW lasted.

Pat Catterson: Pat Catterson. I was going to say, the first time I saw your work Yvonne, was in a concert at Riverside Church that was sponsored by DTW, and Judith Dunn was on the program, and Kathy Posen, and Jamie Cunningham and you.

Yvonne: Where was that?

Pat: It was up at Riverside Church but I’m pretty sure it was sponsored by DTW.

Yvonne: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Wendy: I think I saw that too. Barbara Moore.

Barbara Moore: I wonder if the reason for it lasting is the change in the funding situation. When Judson started, there was no funding, and you know, it was all… a lot of this enthusiasm and openness, and thinking back, you know, to my own experience at that time, and having people have other jobs, always, and you mentioned Time Life, and you remember the actress Florence Tarlow, and some other people, they were proofreaders at Time Life, and sometimes they were on the night shift, because it was 24 hours a day, and they were getting like $15 an hour, which was just, an amazing salary for that period and and the funding really didn’t take off until later, and when you talk about DTW having lasted, they were formed at a time when the funding was something you could work with, and plan about.

Wendy: Yeah, I think the NEA started in ’64, I think, so

Barbara: Well, New York had it first and the NEA was modeled on New York, I believe, New York under Rockefeller, the State Council, whatever. But it wasn’t something that was an accepted continuity, until a few years later. (Yvonne: Or expected.) What? (Yvonne: Or expected) Yes, exactly, and actually I know in my experience, you know, sometimes in later years, as it got into the 70s, people would say, “Well I want to do this piece but I can’t do it unless I get the funding” and Judson was totally…you know that was irrelevant, almost. You did it, because you really had to, there was a passion about it, and an obsession with doing it, whatever it was.

Yvonne: And it was free, we didn’t pay rent.

Barbara: And the theater was, that’s right to attend it was free.

Yvonne: And they gave us the gym for workshops, and all we had to do was raise money for postage. Steve designed the first flyer, and folded it up, scotch tape, and postage stamp, which then was what, probably… nine cents.

Wendy: You know, we only have a few minutes left and I do want to get to the issue of what is the legacy of Judson? So, you know, because we’ve talked about what actually happened there and things happened after, but for some of the young people I’m looking right at Arthur Aviles, and you know, Paul Langland and others of you… what do you guys feel we’ve received, we’ve been handed down from these wonderful artists? (Silence) I’m asking you specifically, and then yeah, Patricia Hausbauer too.

Arthur Aviles: I was lucky to have been introduced to Aileen when I went to Bard College in 1981. You know, Puerto Rican kid from the ghetto, going to the boonies of New York, didn’t know what it is that I wanted to do, and I found dance there and Aileen helped me to understand that walking was dancing and that gave me a connection to something that was not possible in the culture that I came from, in the way that it was, and you know, I think maybe that’s it. That’s what she’s given me, and I thank you so much for that.

Aileen: Thank you, Arthur.

Patricia Hoffbauer: Well, you know I came from Brazil in 1980, and I remember seeing Yvonne on the cover…maybe not the cover… maybe like the 10th page of Dance Magazine (laughter) 1978 (Yvonne: I was on the cover once! Maybe it wasn’t the cover…) but when I came here I had total modern dance training, I went to NYU, but I think we were already, by then, we had all been, somehow, exposed to some ideas (Yvonne: subjected) yeah subjected, subjugated, but at the same time I think these dance departments, perhaps not Bard, but NYU resisted with everything they had to allow any kind of more postmodern ideas to come in, so we had Graham until ’84, 83′ so we looked for those things after, when we graduated, my class. But I think that everything was in the air, there was change, Judson… I don’t know when Movement Research started doing…no…Monday nights, you know there was a whole moment that things start to cohere for me, but I think yes, this idea of amplifying, not this thing that I feel poor Yvonne is cursed with, the “No Manifesto” that she has said “no” to everything. (Someone: If you hadn’t mentioned it!) (Yvonne: yeah yeah yeah, you had to mention it) Somebody mentioned it before (Yvonne: I didn’t!) but so yes, I think it was amplified in many ways, and I feel me and Emily [Coates] and Pat [Catterson] honored to be part of The Reindeers.

Wendy: Whom you can see this coming weekend. Deborah Lohs, back there. Another young choreographer.

Deborah Lohs: I read Terpsichore in Sneakers in college, and it blew my little bun off. I came in, and it was all pulled back, and in my pointe shoes, and it blew my mind. It blew my mind, so the first piece I ever choreographed in college was so influenced by Lucinda Childs, it was just dancers running in and out of wings and like, it was permission to depart. From what I had known. That’s what this has given me a permission to depart. So thank you.

Wendy: Yeah. Good way of putting it. Anyone else about the legacy? Okay Paul, and then Pat. It’s great to have all you choreographers in the audience:

Paul: I think one thing that is really powerful about the legacy of Judson is that it blew open the doors of dance to integrate it with other huge movements in art and I came from visual arts so when I first saw the Judson Dancers, I wasn’t interested in dance. But I immediately got, that all the Judson work was not mysterious to me. So one of the legacies is and why the world is so huge now in dance, was it blew off the doors, it brought visual arts people to dance, it brought theater people to dance, it brought adventurous musicians to dance and it basically said dance is soaked in all these other fields, so now dance can be at MoMA and a commercial venue, and those generative postmodern ideas are evident in all those different mediums and in that sense it was just an over-the-top success, explosion of not only wonderful new ideas but the resulting popularity of those ideas and actually greater access to the art world at large, to the world of dance, in my opinion. (Wendy: Thank you)

Wendy: Wait, give it to Pat, sorry, across to Pat Catterson.

Pat: I was already making dances in college before I moved to New York, but I had seen Yvonne’s picture on the cover of Dance Magazine, and I put it on my wall. I didn’t really know anything about her but it was so unlike anything else I had seen on the cover of Dance Magazine, and it was just so filled with movement, I loved that picture. And, I studied with Judith Scott at Northwestern, and she told us about Happenings, and she kind of did a Happening, so you know, whatever there was to find out, I tried to find out then. So I was making dances then, but as I said I saw this concert at Riverside Church, was just my second week in New York, and then I saw the Billy Rose show, and I didn’t really know what to do with any of it and it wasn’t all written about like it is now, so it wasn’t all canonized and…(Yvonne: It was panned that Billy Rose show, he was so incensed, Clive Barnes, he spent two Sunday Arts and Leisure columns putting it down.) Right, and so, I just, I didn’t know what to do with it but I think what happened for me, and then I got to meet you and was doing my first concert at Judson, for me it’s what Patty said, it was about enlarging rather than narrowing, and it made room for who can dance and what can be in something called “choreography” and it allowed me to be a choreographer and do my first concert without having danced in a major dance company, I could just say I’m doing it and did it. So, for me, it made room for me. I felt there’s room for me, and also I think I was really inspired like someone like you or Viola, even, very strong independent women artists, really inspired me.

Wendy: Thank you. Levi. Oh, but don’t you have something to say, Levi?

Abigail Levine: A similar sentiment, into a more general category, but I was up at Beacon, I saw Yvonne’s show, and the feeling of sort of what crystallized about what this piece of history has done for me is I watched this show and rather than thinking about dance I was thinking about life, and there was, I was seeing, you know, women who were doing things rather than this technique, this particular sliver of things that was a world apart, and I think particularly in terms of work, and so this idea that it was not professionalized, during the Judson days, is really interesting to me, and sort of as my generation is looking to this legacy but with a real bent on professionalization, and how those can sit together, and whether we’re kind of fighting, I mean maybe it’s necessary but maybe we’re fighting against a certain current by sort of insisting on sort of our own professionalism as we look, as we are inspired by all the connections that Judson made to politics, to different kinds of bodies, to different ways of building community.

Wendy: Thank you.

Audience Member: I’m not coming from a dance background at all, I actually come from an art background, and didn’t really know anything about postmodern dance, you know I had heard about it through the art world but never seen anything. And, very early on, I was in a residency in Japan and I was making a film on a girls basketball team and it was about movement, and there was this raised proscenium in the gymnasium and it was really at that time that I dove into the history, and just reading Sally’s Book, and the Manifesto that no one wants to talk about, it really gave me permission to work with a medium and movement that I never expected, and I mean, all of you have really, you’ve changed history and inspired so many people. I wouldn’t have been able to make that work or the work after that or the work after that if not for the work that you all did, so thank you.

Wendy: Ok, Emily, and this will be the last one.

Emily Coates: I’m Emily Coates. It’s a quick question for Aileen and for Yvonne, about this question of legacy, I would love to hear you both talk about potential misinterpretations of the legacy that you see spreading out into the world.

Aileen: First, I worry whether there is a legacy at all, you know. I think that one thing that happened out of Judson was to prove that dancing wasn’t an elitist activity, for the chosen few, because you know they took, I was part of it, Yvonne, we were an odd, crazy bunch of people, but there was an urgency there, and that’s what… I don’t see everything… I don’t see nearly as much as I should see, I’m ashamed to say I don’t know as much about Movement Research as I could, and I should know, and I’m going to change that. But when I go to the theater, often I either end up sick to my stomach, or wanting to cry, because I can’t find the dancing in it, I can’t find the need to move. We had no…we made things that were crappy, we made stuff that didn’t work, it doesn’t matter, but there was an urgency to speak, something inside that we had to do. I can’t find that. What I look at is at best like a run-on sentence that I can’t see the beginning or the middle or the end to, that’s one way I look at it, and the other way it’s filled with some kind of acrobatic tricks, as if dancing wasn’t a very powerful and important thing. Dancing, taking action is about as powerful as I know about, you don’t need to gussy it up. And I don’t think people realize how powerful it is, that when a human being who has a whole history and a whole life and a smell and has eaten dinner and maybe has loved somebody or something, gets up and moves, that’s something else. That can change the world when that happens. And people don’t know that now. They don’t know it, now. So, I don’t know what the legacy is.

Yvonne: Well, there’s always a danger before this whole series, that there was…Judson was mythologized and there were all kinds of misconceptions, now there’s a danger of it being fetishized, and yeah, people, young dancers ask me when I talk, “where can we go? you broke all the rules and now what can we do?” I think dance always is in sort of in a rut that has to be broken out of. I mean the young dancer wants to explore this body all over again, reinvent the wheel, it’s a constant reinventing, and not knowing, because there are a lot of records now, in the 60s there was no video, right? So who did 16mm documentations of our work, so a lot has been lost, which is counts for the mythologization, right? So now, there is all this available material, the Library of Performing Arts, and all kinds of archives, but the young dancer/choreographer wants to explore the limits of what a particular body can do. That’s only one way into dance, right? And I think it is a very dangerous route that has to constantly be questioned and subverted and overcome and transcended and I mean you have to struggle with this wheel that maintains its shape from one generation to the other. So that’s all I can say, and also repeat what has been said over and over to quote or misquote or paraphrase John Cage, “there is nothing new under the sun there are only new ways of organizing it” so exploring one’s own body is one of those ways. But I think it must be thought of as only one possibility, one component of a total picture of what the body in voice and musculature can do. So when you think of it that way it remains an open field and not just my beautiful body, I can get my leg up to here, or whatever. I mean I still. I use the beautiful body with the leg up to here, my ex-ballerina here, but there’s something else she does in this program while doing that.

Wendy: I want to say a different point of view from Aileen’s point of view, because I see a lot of dance. Like almost every night. And I do see incredible things happening. And just looking at this audience, I saw Deborah Lohs in a Doug Elkins performance at the pillow that was fantastic, I saw Rebecca in a Roseanne Spradlin performance that had incredible urgency and bravery… I see things all the time that make me proud of (Yvonne: hopeful?) …yeah, it’s not even about hope, it’s about the present, it’s not what I think could happen it’s what’s already happening and I do think it’s a very exciting time. (Fades out)

– Biba Bell, co-editor

___________________________________________________________________________________________

December 4, 1983

Mary Overlie: So, I’m going to try to lead some questions into hopefully some intelligent discussion of these two artist’s work. [To audience] Ahh! Much louder, okay. During the course of the evening if either of you want to direct the conversation please do so. Onto issues that are interesting to you or questions you have about each other’s work. So, let’s begin. The first few of these questions are questions I’d like both of you to answer. So, you can take turns answering them. The first one is, based on the works that you’ve shown tonight, would you talk a little bit about what concerns are being dealt with inside that work? Let’s take Steve’s answer first.

Steve Paxton: Analysis. The isolations and the vibrations are coming out of that first piece and those pedestrian’s concerns. After I cut away everything I knew about dance, which wasn’t a whole lot, but after I cut it all away and looked at what was left, and kept looking at it, I found finer and finer gradations of movement. I think knowing about something is the beginning of learning how to do it. After a while understanding it was going to get finer and finer, became the image that I was working with. I think that inspires continued looking in that direction. So that’s right now what I’m looking at—very fine gradations and changes inside of larger movements, and all the little points.

MO: When I watched your work… it’s very hard to talk intimately and then talk up. So, I’m going to pull my voice in again and you tell me. [laughter] When I watched what you did tonight it seemed that, the first impression I got was that whatever you were working with was coming all the way into your skeleton. And it kept coming back in and back in and then being put back out from…

SP: Could you decide… Why did it seem to be coming in instead of emanating from the source I had? I just wonder about the directionality.

MO: Well, no, well, and then it would come back out again.

SP: Did it seem to be coming in and out like that? [laughter] No, I’m curious! Was that the general perception?

Audience: Yes. No. [laughter]

SP: Yes? Some people saw it that way and some people didn’t see it that way. Okay, I just was curious.

MO: I’ll add another part of that conception then. That maybe instead of saying coming in, although I will stand on that, that the movement kept producing, or what your were doing kept producing very, very fine movement from the body. Which then…. you know I’m lost about what I was going to say about that. But that’s what I saw and was the interesting…

SP: What I thought of as you said that—say that I was [stands up] into something very small, it would depend upon where focus was and everything too as whether it was perceived as in or out I suppose, but if I was into something very small it might be that eyes used to seeing movements at least somewhat larger, you know, as small movements, that when it gets to be extremely tiny and vibratory at the same time the mind has to consider a smaller arena. And that might seem pulled in. I don’t know. But that is what struck me. What were larger movements—movements that were sprung from the vibrations into larger structures might have seemed coming out.

MO: I want to stow part of that point away for this discussion about theatricality later on in the evening. Would you like to answer that question?

Bill T. Jones: What was I dealing with?

MO: Yeah.

BTJ: Well, I was dealing with this small room in New York for one thing. I had coffee was a piece that I just sort of came up with a few days ago trying to make a videotape for a commercial TV show. And I thought, I was trying to… I guess I should back up and say that often times what I’m dealing with is poetry, trying to deal with poetics. It could be spoken or be in my body, I use a lot gestures which are exotic. I always feel, whenever I’m on stage, that it is a place for transformations. I feel it is almost a mystical place, therefor I am allowed to stretch and do all sorts of things which are ritualistic and because the context can be shocking. I can say things that I would not normally say. I try to open the gates to, if you believe in a subconscious, in what I say and in what I’m doing. The first dance was about a concern that I’ve been entertaining for a while now, which is classical music. And so far I’ve only been able to deal with the Romantics. What I was doing tonight was to talk and put shape to the things that I feel and see, and at the same time listen to Arthur Rubenstein play Chopin. So that I know when the glissando comes I want to hold no matter where I am.

My process in the past has been very indulgent in that I dive full force into what I’m feeling—the antagonism or whatever. I often time go into almost an ecstatic state, and I can’t remember what I did. I think that for me, growing finer is about being able to have that happen on one level and deal with another element, which is… for me now it’s music. In the second dance, when I discuss this in situations I say, Oh this dance is about an uneasy truce with tradition. I know that… I didn’t watch the dance but I was hard put to imagine I was hitting an arabesque. And I know that this scene, I don’t know what this scene is about. But I know that I find myself more and more these days playing large houses, and people who applaud for technical tricks. All those things are coming into me but I play them back only as things. I like to quote shapes from ballet. I like to quote shapes from ethnic dance. And it’s all held together by something that I’m feeling and the space that I’m in.

I’m very much about performance; I’m not so much about analysis. And as you were sitting over there watching me I was thinking, I was wondering, what is he thinking? This man who has influenced my thinking so much. I’m thinking, what is he thinking? Well to hell it… Arabesque! [laughter]

MO: Yes. Your work to me seems, it seems many, many different things. But one thing that it seems is eclectic, in that sense. The word eclectic would be…

BTJ: Diffused. Unfocused. Right

MO: No. That’s not what I mean by eclectic.

BTJ: No, I’m just being naughty.

MO: That’s one of my notes to talk to you about. Naughty and nice, naughty and nice. Okay, I’d like to go on to the next question.

BTJ: But that’s an interesting point, eclecticism. Because another pat explanation that I come up with, and I still hold to it, is that I was very influenced by the work of a person like Louise Nevelson. Rauschenberg somewhat. But, they are in to construction and assemblage. How do you say? Collage. Whatever you say. And that’s what I think about myself. Now when a performer does that it looks… I know that when we were in Bucharest they would say, Now what is the style? You Americans look like you are constantly experimenting—what’s the problem? Can’t you find a style? [laughter] This is what they were saying. So yes, I think that is my modernist legacy. That is the thing I have inherited, this eclecticism.

SP: Does it translate really to performing arts though? Or, isn’t there a funny dimensional change when you take it from pictorial to performing arts?

BTJ: I don’t know. I don’t know, Steve. If I do this [turns] and then I do this [flips the bird]. Most people’s minds they were caught up in Oh, is he going to make the turn? And then suddenly a social grace was corrupted at some point. So, they do, and it does. It’s the same thing that I feel when I’m looking at a row of beautiful found objects and then I find a chunk off a cornice or something like that, looking at Nevelson’s work. That’s the way I think about it. But do you disagree that it doesn’t really translate?

Bill T. Jones, Video still

SP: Well because you used the work quoting movement from different sources that is being brought to you by the audiences in a way. The topic seems brought up by audience reaction to certain kinds of movement. The audience might know…

BTJ: Well actually that was not quite accurate when I said that. It’s true now more than ever but ever since I’ve been making solos I’ve performed this way.

SP: I wonder about quoting because it’s a little like the problem of pretending to be something when you’re acting or…the whole idea of pretense or quoting, it doesn’t seem to me to work the same way on the body of a living being that it does on the page or, you know, in a work of art.

BTJ: You don’t like my dancing. [laughter] No what I’m getting at…

SP: It presents a problem, which I’ve been wondering about for years and thought might be some kind of issue for you too, which is: How do you not actually experience what you are pretending to experience?

BTJ: Oh, I do.

SP: And how, if you’re quoting, how do you… When is it a quote and when are you actually doing it?

BTJ: Always, always you’re actually doing it. Always actually doing it. But you’re working on different levels. I am working on different levels. When I go into the studio and I dance certain things come out, and I look at it. When I’m performing onstage I feel all sorts of presences go through me. I can’t hit an arabesque without feeling an emotional state that it makes me feel. Ecstasy. Or when I do a roll I feel a certain thing, or a run I feel a certain thing. And I feel that my skill at this point is that I can go from them quite easily. And I realize when I try to teach other people what I’m doing the thing that is missing is the internalizing is not there. I have no problems with acting. I think that it is very valuable, acting. Because, like I said, it’s a space for transformations. And I believe very much in shamans, and this person is now taken up in something, he is now the animal of the forest. Right? And now he is the healer—he’s going to touch that woman and she is going to be healed. Now he’s the infant. All of these things. I believe in that. I believe that is what my gift is. You don’t like that, do you? [laughter] That’s something that I’ve been wanting to speak to you guys about! [laughter]

MO: I want to say something! In defense, somewhat, of modern or postmodern dance, in a way, it seems to me that there is always this delicate question about… that you two are involved in as well as every one who is working in this way now. And that delicate question is that you have an idea and you’re involved in working it out, physicalizing it, and performing it. And then the question becomes: Is it working? Are people seeing it? You sort of touched on it when you said that the pedestrian work a very good level of investigation for you but that it wasn’t working as a performance. I understand you say that… or that…

SP: No work does, performance, it didn’t actually occur though. Because I always brought it into a room. In other words, Lucinda’s [Childs] way of doing it actually included pedestrians in the composition, pedestrians who were unconscious of being in the composition, which is the requisite way to get the most ordinary, pedestrian kind of performance.

MO: So what you were saying is you didn’t reach your ideal.

SP: No, I tried and tried. And I liked the pieces I made but they didn’t achieve that particular… they didn’t get to the kernel of it, you know. I like shell that I made, however.

MO: I guess that’s what I’m saying. In the act of working in this context that we’re all trying for an ideal and it’s a question of whether we’re making it or not. And that has something to do with a personal acknowledgement of how far you’ve gotten along and actually realizing that ideal… or ordeal… ideal. And some of that’s audience feedback. You get your audiences and they…

BTJ: Well you know that’s a big question, like what is success? Or something like that. I feel that there is a need to perform for, finically, to perform for more people, for me. And there is also a need to challenge them. I have that personal need. My heroes, I find, were quite a challenge to me. I would like to be that. But also there’s a need to communicate with people. It’s the whole accessibility argument. So, if say that I want to set out to make a virtuosic dance that is somehow subverted by attitude, there’s a large portion of the population that’s going to appreciate it as purely a virtuosic dance. When they see the hitch-kicks at the end and the split leaps and so on, then they’re ready to applaud. This happened a lot in Europe, like in that way. But then there’s another side of the population who like to see Ah! See he’s really goofing on what he’s doing now! And we’re in the ‘in’ crowd. We’re understanding that what he is doing is really not very valuable, but the rest of these people don’t understand that! For myself, I tend to, sometimes I’m confused, but other times I feel very happy there is this sort of enigma about it. I think that I measure my success each time I perform—I know how I feel before, and I know what the faces of the audience look like, and I know how I feel afterwards—if it was true or not, what I do. That’s how I measure success. I think, the problem that I’ve often had with my predecessors, the postmoderns, has been a feeling that this is… that sometimes they don’t care that I’m there as an audience. Now that’s… in this life we have to be that way. If Joe Blow does not like my work and he’s not going to give me a good review I have to learn to live with Joe Blow. Bill Jones sits there and he watches this person perform and this person is going through some permutations of a structure that I lose interest in in the first 10 minutes, maybe that’s my problem. But I personally, I think it’s his problem too. I think performance is a communal, sort of, a two-way thing going on. And I measure success in the way that I’m able to touch people.

MO: I’m reminded right now of an Italian student I had, I learn a lot from my students, and he said to me once, he said, “You know, one of the things the people in the United States do not do easily is discuss differences.” As if things need to be over here with complete approval, or if there’s some disapproval then it’s all disapproval. That we don’t easily just sort of say, Well, I don’t like you but let’s talk, or, I love you but let’s talk. It’s more, If you love me let’s not talk about it at all! Or If you don’t love me let’s not talk about it at all. We have a hard time coming to a….

BTJ: Some of us have a hard time…

MO: Approval or disapproval of something.

BTJ: Yeah. I think I’m mushy now. I find myself often on panels these days, trying to discuss, dispassionately, work. And I find, personally I feel very privileged to be there, and also I find myself always willing to give the edge to anybody. Because I’m an art groupie. I love to watch people work. I love to see an idea, and if it doesn’t work I like to at least feel I’m in touch with the idea.

MO: Yeah.

BTJ: I think that the, when I say… Steve was asking me earlier we use stage fright, and I was trying analyze something that which is very kind of ironic, that he and I are here performing today. In that I think there is a thing which is there are people who are Contact people, is this true? There are Contact people and there are “classic” post-Judson people, you know? That means they still believe a good deal in the unsavoriness of illusion. The unsavoriness of popularity. The unsavoriness…

SP: Why are you putting it on a group?

BTJ: No, I’m asking a question right now! I’ve come to you and ask you is this true? Does this exist?

SP: I don’t know. It’s just such a polarized question. Because you said, for instance, that a performer has to communicate or you measure success with the communication with the audience.

BTJ: I measure my person… We were asked about ourselves personally.

SP: Yeah, but you started with a postmodern framework and a question you had about postmodernism and the boredom that was generated by certain performances. But if you’re going to have a research branch of an art form, and most art forms do, you’re going to get some research that doesn’t connect, in the way that you were connecting quotes, which are, you know, grands jetés and arabesques, which are the basic dance vocabulary. You’re working on that kind of literary level where the quotes are instantly known and you’re playing with, it seemed to me, dance movement rather than were you playing with the poem that you read, in which…

BTJ: No. I wasn’t reading it. I was improvising it.

SP: Really.

BTJ: Yeah.

SP: Well, anyway, the repeated phrasing, the way it came up and the way the imagery interplayed as you changed phrases slightly and things like that as it went on. It seemed to me your dance work was rather like that and so one got used to a kind of vocabulary its sides, dimensions, and the kind of play that you were doing with it. But there are new things to be discovered, which, when presented, will be not a language, yet. And can thereafter be quoted, but first their quotes are going to be the same kind of indecipherable… Finally it gets disseminated, people start using it, and a kind of language awareness grows up around it. And then quotes are really possible. You can do a Contact quote now, whereas at one time it was not seen in that light. Or a postmodern quote, you can do that now but at one time that wasn’t possible. I think one gets bored partly because one doesn’t know what’s going on. One can’t follow a line through. And one is not being stimulated.

BTJ: Actually, I get bored sometimes with Minimal music now.

SP: Hmm.

BTJ: And I think I’ve read enough about it, I’ve heard some of the best. I can get bored with it, you know? I mean is that because I don’t know what’s going on? They might say they get bored with Bach to, that’s possible. I was talking earlier to Arnie and he said, look, I don’t think this should get polarized because you have probably a lot more in common than you do not in common. I think I was responding to something you were… I got defensive because something you were trying to say about a question you had, which was that very euphemistic and circumlocutious way of saying I don’t believe something that you’re doing. I feel…

SP: I don’t think, tell you straight up—I think in what you’re doing that needs growth, in the shamanistic aspect that you mentioned. Which is that I think you’re going through states so fast that you don’t actually hit something. I saw how you were doing, I saw that you were hitting a lot of them and some of them were quite strong. But that’s not the issue. The issue that I was trying to raise before was: Can you pretend anything as performers or actually are we actually living through it? Or, on some level. You said if you believe in a subconscious you were trying to make that available. Well that subconscious, it seems to me, relates to films and advertisements and your own imagination in such a fundamental way. It’s so gullible, you know, in terms of those images. So if you are an actor who pretends insanity for the run of a play what happens to you? What happens to it? And do you need help at the end of that? I was thinking of the Marat/Sade situation some years ago. Do you know about that? People who got in great difficulty for pretending constantly in that state.

BTJ: I think that’s very extreme. Don’t you think, Steve?

SP: No. I think it’s very ordinary.

[murmurs]

BTJ: So in other words, all of the anti-illusion… this is like now people never have emotional problems. [laughter]

SP: [laughter] That was a nice jump forward. I wish it were true! I don’t think we can have an un-illusionistic reality. I think there’s a lot of illusion in all of it. I tried to do pedestrian movement, and I looked at pedestrian movement, and I found it very magical. Almost everything you said about your work, with its grand jetés and beautifully articulated technical… especially the air, the flying stuff, you know, the shamanistic states that you pass through, I think it’s all just within the substrata as well.

BTJ: What do you mean, the “substrata”?

SP: The stuff I looked at, you know, standing still and walking. The substrata of dance is the way I was thinking of it at that time. I think it’s all there anyway! In a way I felt, at that time, there was only theatre magic. There was only vivid pacing and fantastic things to see. It seemed a time of a kind of fantasy, even if people weren’t doing… I mean, there were overt fantasies and then more realistic fantasies but they all seemed rather fantastic to me.

BTJ: Are you talking about then or…?

SP: I’m talking about the early 60s. I was interested in the substrata at that time. And I decided it… in the way that fourth position is seen as a step when you walk, so all that theatre magic is actually going on anyway and something to be dealt with. It is an illusion. What we think is going on affects what goes on.

BTJ: I think I know what you’re talking about.

SP: You know what I’m talking about. [laughter]

BTJ: [laughter]

[laughter]

Steve Paxton, Video still

MO: To come back to… That was an amazing talk because it touched on many of the things that I wanted to ask already about illusion.

SP: So are we finished?

MO: We could be!

BTJ: No we’re not finished because I’ve got to rap you now!

[laughter]

BTJ: Well, I mean I’ve never stood in a room full of people and been critiqued like that. But if I could dare turn it around now and say… I wonder if it’s not possible to work one’s way into a corner?

SP: You don’t like my dancing?

[laughter, applause]

BTJ: I like the… I like, you know… Actually I’m going to be honest with you, what I’ve seen of Steve Paxton…

[laughter]

BTJ: No, no! I’m at a disadvantage. I’m at a disadvantage because I didn’t come out today because I was sitting back there thinking, well if I come out a stand around it will be cold and I’m going to be too nervous and involved in his energy and I won’t be able to bring fresh energy. But the first thing that I ever saw you do was a Contact workout taped in Italy. Taped. And we were all sitting around, and it was interesting. Then I later, at Symphony Space, believe it or not, it was the other thing, not to mention the pictures I’ve seen. But, I saw you warming up on stage. Then I saw Laurie Booth dance, and I thought that in seeing Laurie Booth dance I was seeing you dance, which is probably unfair to him but I don’t know if that’s necessarily a bad thing. I understood even more. Then I saw the tape of the walking piece here today. The only problem I ever had was that I thought that it might be ungenerous. You’re situated in a place which is not generous. It’s a place… I don’t know… Your experimentation in a way could… I’d like to see more, more movement! Not necessarily do more but about dancing. More about the history. More about…

SP: One reason that I was trying to express what was happening in the 60s and why that existed was because there was only generous dancing!

BTJ: Well now we’re in the 80s!

SP: Now we’re in the 80s. It still exists!

BTJ: What still exists?

SP: I mean, Alvin Ailey is performing tonight, I think. Or if he isn’t he has been and I’m sure the ballet is on and I’m sure there are, you know, 75 concerts that deal exactly with that material. Is it ungenerous to decide that maybe there’s a glut of that material on the market? And that maybe something else would be…

BTJ: You’ve been, you set a lot of times at Universities these days, maybe?

SP: No.

BTJ: I taught at the Harvard summer dance program this year and I was amazed at the attitude people had. People think that this is 1963. There are people there who will come to New York and become totally disillusioned because they have no sense at all as to how the machinery works. We are not all Yvonne Rainer. I’m not interested in seeing you do Trio A again. I don’t want to make Cry again, or Frontier, or Letter to the World either. But I think that you have a tradition. I think often times people get blinders on and they think all of that, I shouldn’t know about it because it will somehow corrupt me. Now I’m going to take my technique, where it is now. I’m going to take my own little vision of what the big kids do, the big avant-garde kids do, and I’m going to start making avant-garde dance. And I think that it is sort of denying a whole bit of tradition. Now you are a superior mover. And you’ve also worked with one of the “masters” of this era. I see that in your thinking and all. But I feel that for you, and many people making this type of work, they’re babies. They really are babies. And they will never grow because they have prejudices, so many prejudices. For myself, one reason that my movement has gotten big, that I chose to do the solo that I did today—it’s not the only thing I do. Recently I did a solo in St. Louis that a woman claimed to be, the chairman of the department that brought me there, that it was all port de bras. What was this, this is not dancing. You know, I’ve been there. One reason that I do this because I am working in bigger spaces, and there are people who have got to see me way back.

SP: That’s why that whole tradition developed.

BTJ: Right. What is it about this special little laboratory that we have in lower Manhattan that we have these new ideas that have not yet taken form? And we want to be funded year after year. Now, who are we making them for? This is an old question too. How can you make the next step? I heard Peter [??? 31:51] say, this may be angry but he said, Let’s face it! Balanchine did everything that postmoderns do back in 1929. I thought, what an outrageous thing to say, Peter! But he’s not so far off! The only difference is the man has made his minimal statements. The man has made his statements about pedestrianism. I had a critic tell me that Fokine’s Sylphide was all running steps, was small pedestrian motions put together to music. They were so sophisticated they could work on many, many different levels. I think we work ourselves into a corner. Now I don’t know your work enough to even talk about it in that way. But a lot of people think that this is what, this is the vibe.

SP: What is the vibe?

BTJ: That this is what you should do. When I’m watching your work I should not feel that there is an ego on stage. I should not feel that I am seeing anything presentational or illusionistic. I should feel that you’re trying to manipulate… You mentioned Ailey because Ailey is one of the hottest companies around for getting audience response. If I get audience response, this guy is somehow not on the mark. Tonight, when I usually do this [demonstrates] I usually smile. But, I thought about performing at the Kitchen awhile back, Julie West said to me, You a bunch of my friends came, and they were in Trisha’s company, and they thought you were so cold. So tonight I played it cold. I did the hottest dancing I could. I did it cold. And I say, What will they say now? [laughter] I’m talking a lot but I hope that I’m saying something that is solid.

SP: You said a lot that is. The thing I’m interested in is: Is it possible to work yourself into a corner? And what you said about student work and what the expectations are when you’re not a member of a Soho dance class. And I don’t know that that’s anybody’s responsibility. You know? I mean if somebody wants to come to New York that’s their problem and watch out. [laugther] And if they don’t like what they see and they’re disillusioned, well, that happened to people when they looked at Cubism too. What can you do? I make the work that I make and I make the best work I can. And presume that whoever comes to see me work or see my work is used to that by now.

BTJ: Who’s going to pay for this work?

SP: I don’t know. My work? Who pays for my work?

BTJ: No. Let’s stay away from Steve. You seem to be independent. You live a certain lifestyle. But I mean, other people… When I hear complaints about, Here I am, I am—they use me—this is postmodern and he’s black. Right? And then there are people signing petitions to cut off the funding for postmoderns. And I sat on a panel this year and they’re talking about alternative spaces… I don’t know this is getting away. You should crack the whip…

MO: I’m following!

BTJ: People on the panel were of the opinion, Look at these people’s funding! 75% of their funding comes from the NEA! What about the box office? What about the community involvement? Dadadadada! And then the other people who were sitting there, places like the Spoleto and so on, they were cut back $300,000, are saying Well is this really fair? We bring in 50% of our own revenues and they get 75% from over here! And we subsidize these esoteric experiments? And so I am, even though… I am put on the aisle side of the postmoderns—I there to represent them. I have to somehow say This is what makes American Art the leading Art in the world! This is the laboratory! These people making experiments down in Soho are in ten years going to be informing Jerome Robbins and New York City Ballet and he’ll be making his first Minimalist ballet! Dadadada! And they look and they say, Oh yeah? How many of them are really doing it? How many of them are contributing to any fo the major companies? How many of them have their PR together or their image together to get outreach to larger audiences, to really make a vital change in the scene? And I don’t know! I don’t know how many of them there are. Our generation, my generation, has been accused of being careerist. I think that’s because we hit the ground running. We saw the ground rules right off. They 70s were over. They cut us back and we’ve got to get out there and compete with all the big kids. Just so we can feed ourselves and continue making our work. So then you start thinking about things like repertory. Repertory’s got to suit the ladies in Iowa and also the young intellectuals downtown in New York who write about you and help you get your reputation. We have a lot more weight, I think in a way, than you people who were allowed to, as they said in a condescending way about you, the Judson people. It was like a bunch of precocious children that were being encouraged to play. This is a quote from something I read in Edinburgh last year—they had the whole big thing about the Judson. The feeling you got from looking at Grand Union was they were a bunch of precocious children and you felt good…

SP: Grand Union is different than Judson. So that’s…

BTJ: Oh boy, here we go!!

SP: They’re different decades.

BTJ: Well it’s similar. You know what I’m saying Steve?

SP: No.

BTJ: A lot of the… Well maybe I’m… Okay let’s talk about Judson then.

MO: Let me say something here. I se a lot of concerns about money coming in, which I’d sort of like to shelve because it’s not about…

BTJ: I know. I know what you’re saying.

MO: … work. What are you doing, what are you doing? Etc. But I would like to say in relationship, that art movements and inside that at different times, that inside that there are different artists with different relationships with money. There are artists who never ask for a grant. And there are artists who work and never show their work. There are artists who pay to show their work. There are people who live on grants. There are people who… you know. And I think that it’s not—for my sake, for the sake of listening to what you’re saying—fair to lump a large number of people together under a tag. Maybe you’re in the head of doing that from sitting, listening to grant…

BTJ: Well you do.

MO: I don’t apply to grants.

BTJ: Bravo. [laughter] So, I’m the one, I am the exception here.

SP: I think grants are dangerous precisely because it causes you to live beyond any real means that you have. It’s a dangerous thing the government did in giving grants and it would be very easy to wipe out quite a few artists these days just by stopping them.

MO: Yeah.

SP: They could no longer afford the materials they’ve gotten used to.

MO: To further, and finish that thought, is that performing in the last 75 years or so has been rolling into becoming a larger and larger field for more and more people to participate creatively in. It’s become a lot of people, a lot of Americans now compared to 70 years ago, are putting their creative effort into performance. And performance, in particular, has a very difficult financial situation as we all very well know. It is person based. It’s very hard for a performer to make a product and let it sit in the closet for 20 years until the public catches up to it and then he has an income. There’s a very tight and frightening leash on a performer, which, when you begin to discuss it becomes very loaded. How are you playing the game as a performer, as a choreographer, with that go-stop-eat-don’t-eat problem? I’d like to ask an innocent question. This is for my own consideration because I like to think about big, chunky things. Space and time are two traditional, choreographic tools. They’re part of dance, as you said before. And I’d like both you to talk about what are some of your theories, or ways you have worked through or are working now with those two things, just space and time.

BTJ: Space and time? Well the first piece, I didn’t think it dealt a great deal with space other than that I was making sculpture shapes as I was talking, space was very much in narrative. The second piece, which is something that I often deal with, dealt with the lines and directions, and a nugget of movement that is manipulated along those trajectories. I often times improvise with a spatial pattern in mind. And a good deal of my work is improvised in that way. The thing that holds it together is its relationship to space. One reason I’m working with music more and more is because it sets a sort of time structure, a sort of framework on my loose improvisations. I’m going to think about it a little more. You, Steve?

SP: Well, the spaces are getting smaller and the time is getting shorter.

BTJ: Could you elaborate please? [laughter]

SP: I could say less. [laughter] Well you didn’t see the thing I did. [Steve dances] And…

BTJ: Now, what’s happening there?

SP: What’s happening there…I’m working with very small movements, and some of them vibrating, using that vibration thing to spring into larger movements, you know, to take the momentum in the way that it’s going and take it larger than the vibration itself. So the vibration is small. But isolations, taking vibrations to different parts of my body.

BTJ: You used music…

SP: I used a harpsichord sonata, yeah.

BTJ: And was it a pulse in the music that you were relating to, or…

SP: It’s, the, uh, it’s all that filigree, yeah, vibration, that’s set up very much in the upper register. But I wanted to say something about post-modernism and performance that you got at before. That if I did what you do, that is use the face to convey attitudes, I couldn’t do the movement. Because the head has to be working in all kinds of different positions, I mean that is the movement. The head is part of the body. And you’re using the head still as a social instrument a lot, not all the time. But it keeps coming back to that. And that’s a theatrical tradition for dance that I’ve never…

BTJ: And I felt my face was very closed today.

SP: Closed, but your head was in the social mode. It expresses closed-ness, or coolness, or whatever you’re doing. And I remember that about Cunningham. There was this thing of the mirror head. [laughter] And in ballet, too. And it relates a lot to that thing about the theatre, you know. That in the theatre, first of all, maybe you’re spotting light is way back there. But you’re also dealing with that thrust to the biggest space that you can, for all those economic reasons that we’re not going to talk about and all the reasons that renaissance theatre. There’s a lot of reasons for it, I suppose, but one of the things it does is make movement have to be big! The same way we have to raise our voices now when we perform in a big theatre. And this stuff is just weird to do in a big theatre.

[laughter]

BTJ: Have you seen the new Jerome Robbins piece?

SP: No.

BTJ: Well he has acquired a huge group of people along the backside doing things like that, and the freeze makes the statement. The movement is very small. Now, what you were showing before. I remember last year, sitting with a person. And I was doing these arms here. And he said, ‘Now I could take you to a place where people could do that better.’ And I said…

SP: That’s the most annoying kind of…

BTJ: You know, it’s annoying, but what you’re showing me, Steve, I have the same kind of feeling right now. There are little kids who are breaking and doing strutting who are [imitates Steve’s movement] and vibration and that stuff. And I’m wondering, what is the experiment? Now, I feel your responsibility, if I can be so bold, and which I feel is my responsibility, is to take that and make a symphony. We know there are kids on the street who can articulate from here to there, improvising and will never be able to repeat it. And they’re masters of it.

SP: And never be able to structure it. And drop it after a couple of years, and forget it entirely.

BTJ: Now it won’t be dropped, because it’s been absorbed now into the mainstream. They’ll be doing it on Solid Gold, right? But I’m saying what can we do with it, with this knowledge. Can we make a symphony? Can we make a huge opus out of it? And that’s what I’m finding not happening with the ideas that, I don’t know, I guess Harvey Lichtenstein might disagree with that. He has a lot of faith in the experiments people have been making.

MO: I think… Could I say? Again, when you say what are we doing, I mean, I wanna separate that because different personalities address the world in different ways and we do not all have to build the palace, you know. I wanna build a house. Someone wants to live outside. And you want to see it all come together. I think that that question has a loaded, um…it has an opinion in it that we should all do, we should all be building, we should be bringing in more money, or we should…I think that my feeling about it is that we all make up our mind about what we are doing about that. I also have to say that just from a personal standpoint, breaking… it’s taken me two years to recover from the impact of breaking, etc. etc. But my feeling is now, having thought about it for a long, long, time, is that those kids, wonderful and talented as they are, are not doing the same thing as postmodern dance. And that, if you look at it with a refined eye, the concerns behind what they are doing are entirely different. And the use of the body is entirely different, and the presence is different. There’s a lot that’s different about what they’re doing. Not to take away from either form, but I think that… I mean, I’ve had so many people come up to me and say, ‘How are you going to relate to it?’ [laughter] I didn’t know, and so I thought about it for a long time. And I think that basically, I don’t have to relate to it. Because I’m not related to it, and there was an assumption that I was. And, from my side, from looking at it very closely, I think that we’re not related. Postmodern dance is not related to it.

I’d like to take my question out again, with a bone in it. Which is that, I have a major disagreement with both of you. And I’ll preface that by saying, I feel that tonight if a person could impersonally listen to the tapes or go back over our discussion, one of my favorite things could come out about this, which is, and I think that all three of us like this a lot, there’s an analysis of dance, loaded and unloaded, agreed and disagreed upon, that’s wonderful. The mirror face—you know, that’s wonderful. A student of dance could go a long way on working with a mirrored face. You know, words like are very exciting to me. Anyway, my bone is that in terms of space use, um, to drag us all back to the long, immemorial tradition of seeing dance. Which is that it seen in space, and that it is staged in some way or other for an audience and that it is visually accepted. I wonder how, in relationship to that history, and the fact that we’re seeing in the round or three quarter round or proscenium, how it is that you both have taken the stance that you don’t deal with spatial, um, element that is part of choreography. How is it that you have removed it?

Mary Overlie, Video still

SP: Well let’s look at this production right here. The school, Renee asked me to come and do this situation, um, as I remember I didn’t bring the correspondence with me, but there was a rehearsal time yesterday. It wasn’t there when I called, however. There wasn’t any time to rehearse in the space. The space such as it is has a lot of possibilities. It’s one of the most expensive aspects of producing dance is space, you know. I’ve been trying for the last fourteen years to build a studio up in Vermont, and it’s always just beyond my grasp. However much I earn, it always costs quite a bit more than that, you know. I can now afford the studio I was trying to build back in ’72. It’s never gonna happen, I’m sure. Here, today, the time I have to think about the space was the hour and a half while the chairs were being set up and the TVs were being set up and people were talking to me and I was in here considering the space. And that is very often the situation. Come in here and do your thing in our space. Who can consider time and space under those conditions? It’s outrageous. It gets… the more, I’m sure, that you’re touring, you know, it gets more like that. Cunningham, I remember, here was Cunningham studio which at that time was probably about where that second column business and lentil is, something like this space, in which he built his dances. And one of the places that he had to accept, for financial reasons, was a space that was something like 14 feet deep. Am I going to close to the camera? [laughter] I’m sorry Cathy. Something like 14 feet deep, something like this. And twenty eight feet wide. It was a half circle. It came to about this wide, you know, and he had to put the dances he made for this space onto this space, and furthermore because John Cage was going to play 45 minutes worth of music, we had to dance the steps so that they came out to be 45 minutes long. I mean, that’s insane. The work that we did there, whatever it was, I mean maybe Merce felt that piece of indeterminacy, spatial indeterminacy, was part of the game, and I guess it is. If it’s a game that we are playing, that is one of the pitches that is pitched. But, uh, it’s hard to think about space. What is…Who is given time? And you really have to push to get that time.

BTJ: Well one thing that I think is something that I feel like I’ve inherited is an elastic relationship to a space. And that is that in the early dances that we were making in trying to emulate Judson Church or Grand Union, or whatever you talk…  probably Judson Church more. These were situations in which you would have this structure, now let’s take it down to the corner, and do it there. We have this structure, let’s go to the museum gallery and do it there. We came out and do it in the middle of a field. Now, when I have my own company, and these works are set — repertory set — I like to feel like I’m not afraid, even then. There are reasons why I demand more and more now. I try to say, look, if I’m going to come, I want this space. And the more power you get the more you can demand the spaces you want. And you might get a reputation for being a bastard but you get what you want by demanding it. I mean, you can’t make… If you have a beautiful, gigantic piece like Lucinda’s piece with Rauschenberg — not Lucinda, Trisha’s piece with Rauschenberg recently, I mean, why would she want to hurt that piece by doing it in a space that isn’t going to show it well. So if you respect her enough and you want her work there, well get her the right space or she doesn’t go. I don’t know if that’s her attitude, but that’s my attitude.

SP: I’m sure her attitude is partly that and also well, my company is going to suffer if it doesn’t perform this month. So, the space is quite right but…

BTJ: Well you stretch it a little bit, but I think it’s possible to get what you, there’s one thrust and it goes back to this whole element of your profile, and what you demand. If you’re going to rehearse…if you’re going to perform in a large space you should probably spend the money and pay for a large space.

SP: But really the ideal thing would be to know what the space is and build the role for it.

BTJ: Yeah.

SP: Because space is a magical element. I mean, it’s impossible to invest in it enough.

MO: I’m sorry to cut this short, but I have gotten so involved in what is going on up here that I forgot that it was almost 7pm and that we were going to open it up to some audience questions. So, would anyone who would like to direct a question to these two artists raise their hand. Danny?

Daniel Lepkoff: I don’t have a question but I just have a comment about the whole thing that’s been happening here in terms of the dynamic of polarizing Bill and Steve. I felt like that I saw a lot of similarities in my… maybe it was the space and that it was a solo, but it’s my experience watching Bill dance and watching Steve dance, that Bill and Steve both appreciate for themselves maybe, the environment and the mental support or mental imagery that they wish to have to move. And I see that, different environments, but also you see two people who are both very beautiful movers and very involved and have studied their own movement moving, and in the moment of movement, in certain moments, I’m reading your body, and I’m reading their bodies. And in this context where I feel it’s close enough to do that, I feel like I’m engaged in watching your physicality and I’m engaged in watching Steve’s physicality.

BTJ: It’s a wonderful thing to be close, isn’t it?

DL: Yeah, so on that basic level who cares about post-modern this and that? [applause] I’m an animal. I have animal perceptions about animal movement and that’s what I’m seeing. I get… When is a situation in which those perceptions in me are not able to be there for whatever reason, like this is a personal thing…well…When there’s a lot of hype in a situation, when I can’t see that this is a person dancing, when I feel a lot that there’s so much about what they want me to think they are, and it happens in all kinds of contexts, you know. But what if I’m sitting way in the back in a big space and I can’t really see what they’re trying to…

BTJ: But you know what, Danny, you were going to try and dance Proust, right? It is not maybe so important that you see the dance but you better damn be well sure that you see the choreography and that you see the narrative unfold. There are times that this physicality we all love is of the utmost importance. And this is a time when it should be. But if you’re going to dance some big thing… A lot of people who I love as dancers, I would like to see them involved in opera. I would like to see them as a part of a huge thing. You know what I’m saying? I’m not so precious about the animal perception, although it is a wonderful thing.

SP: Yeah. I thought Proust was a writer.

BTJ: He is.

SP: Not a choreographer.

BTJ: No, if you were going to dance his work, people do…[laughter] You’re wondering why, that’s a whole other story. It’s just one of the greatest works of the twentieth century. So why not.

SP: But it’s been done. I mean, it’s already been written. [laughter]

BTJ: Vibration has not, Steve? Give me a break! [laughter]

MO: Okay, is there another question?

Audience member: So, choreography is very important to your performance, right?

BTJ: I think it’s very important.

Audience: If you compared your choreography to the performance, which in a sense is more important to you?

BTJ: When I’m dancing solo, I think my performance. When I make an ensemble, it’s the choreography.

Audience: You’re making a solo for an audience or for…?

BTJ: Or for myself.

Audience: Right.

B: Right. I make them for both people and I don’t mean to hedge but, in other words, I want to sing today. I said to Cynthia earlier, I feel like dancing today. And I chose to do a set work because I want to dance well. I want to show my turns, I want to show my dancing. Because people like Danny see the beauty of the person on one leg turning, they’re going to see a person in the air. That’s what I wanted to do today. There have been times when I’ve gone out there and said to myself, “I want to go out tonight and give those sons of bitches a hard time.” So that performance was very important. But today I felt like it was a very special and privileged position to be in so I wanted to just dance today. So it changes, is what I’m saying.

MO: You had a question?

Audience: To me, what I’m trying to figure out too is two major distinctions. I want to know what it is about postmodernism that includes Bill. Because it’s my conception of it includes him and I don’t understand it. I don’t understand what it is. Because I feel the way that I dance and the feelings that I have about it are more similar to his and I’m trying to go back to it and figure out what my connection to it is, because I feel that there is a lot about it that I don’t understand.

MO: I will say that I don’t think I was trying to define modern or postmodern or make distinctions, personally. Because my feeling is that the term postmodern… about three years I started to want to call everything ballets again. Yes, because I feel that’s much more equitable. And that within the history of ballet, in the ’19-duh-duh-duhs,’ whatever, a movement began…a ballet movement began. Or something rather else. In the history of painting, a movement of Dadaism began, and that was a clutch of people, they put their name on it, and they wore the t-shirts. And the way that we’re describing postmodern and even modern, I would argue, includes everybody who started working at a certain year, and under a certain aesthetic. And it’s very unfair, I think. And very difficult to define that.

SP: Who did that? Who invented that term?

BTJ: Sally Banes.

SP: It’s just so weird.

MO: And Edwin [Denby] invented term modern dance.

SP: That’s from way right field. He is viewed on these panels as a postmodernist or somebody who can speak to that. But it all depends on your viewpoint.

Audience: Well my viewpoint is that I guess after seeing it, because I’ve never seen you perform before, and in your dancing, I guess my perception comes from what I’m seeing. I could hear you say some things…I didn’t see it. My perception of what that is, whatever that is… And I don’t know, I think there’s a reason to make a distinction.

BTJ: Well, that first piece I did…

Audience: It’s something to think about, which I think is something important. Because it makes you think about certain things. But I didn’t see any movement…

BTJ: My manager would thank you for that. She wants me to stop being—to using that word. Because she says it’s not accurate. It’s not true to try to say that I’m postmodern. And I’m not precious about it. Except that it oftentimes helps me explain some of the aberrations in my choreography. For instance, the first piece, if you did a stand-up monologue, normally, you would not repeat like that. And maybe the imagery wouldn’t jumble together like that. You would maybe see it on the printed page, but one of the things the postmoderns were doing was borrowing from other art forms such as literature and painting and so on. That might’ve been a post-modern device. The piece that I did here—the repetitions in it, perhaps, the eclecticism in it—maybe, you might say, it was postmodern. Sometimes it was virtuosic and sometimes it’s pretty pedestrian. In other words, those rules might make it post-modern. But I think you’re right. I don’t think it’s a useful term. And I think that almost everybody would agree.

Audience: I think it’s a useful term. It stands for something…

BTJ: Yeah…[laughter]

Audience: I mean, there’s a reason that word exists and refers to something and I think it’s valuable. But I don’t you need to get locked into that definition. It’s interesting to me, you know, it offers a challenge, and it’s something to understand and to relate to or get information from if you don’t relate to it, you know, and to learn from it.

BTJ: How many postmodern dancers in the house tonight? [laughter] There’s one.

MO: See in light of this discussion, this becomes an issue about not that you’re asking how many post-modern dancers there are in the audience but how many dancers out there who are called post-modern who want to be called postmodern.

BTJ: Could you answer that?

MO: Do you know what I mean? How many people who are considered postmodern in press, by their friends, or by an audience want to be called that name? In light of this discussion of saying I argued against it and now you’re saying, I’m not going to raise my hand because I don’t want the title even though I’m considered a postmodern dancer.

BTJ: Well do you consider yourself a postmodern dancer?

MO: What? No, I make ballets. [laughter]

S: I want to say one more thing about this, that if you’re looking at Bill’s movement, did you find whether he’s modern or postmodern, a lot of the movements that seem the least postmodern are actually quotes from modern or ballet movement and so really can’t be seen as his movement. [laughter]

MO: Therein lies the danger of words and captions.

Audience member: We’ve backed ourselves into a corner.

SP: Is this one of those?

BTJ: Could we have another question? She got us off.

MO:Could we have another question?

Audience member: I want to ask, first question: when you talk about pretending, what was a question earlier, do you do any pretending when you perform?

SP: Not… It’s so complex, it’s so complex. Because it’s there in the substrata as well, which has to do with the difference between what you feel and what you think might be appropriate and the imagery in the forebrain, what you think might be appropriate, being sort of a guiding sort of system for the body. So there are moments when I feel the rise of something in my being, which I know I’ve provoked. I don’t know if that’s pretending or whether the thought about the feeling or what. I have found the whole thing very dicey to deal with. Because it seems to me that one of the interesting things in modern and, well I suppose in all the arts, but it’s been investigated from a modernist point of view, and into the… Oh God, helpless! And, for about the last twenty years has been a really concerted interest in imagery and the way it effects movement and using imagery to affect movement means to change bodies, to affect posture, to affect choreography, the imagery, the idea you have in your head. Complicated and sophisticated systems of imagery have been created to arrive at these things, and with that research comes really a lot of questions. A lot of questions about the kind of fascism of the ordinary dance class, as opposed to the freedom that’s being proposed here. Or, on the other hand, as it was brought up earlier, the kind of namby-pamby-ness of this new image technique as opposed to the strict-line, more disciplined, and certainly effective work in regular techniques. So exactly what’s going on in my own mind, as I said I just have a question about it. But in terms of pretending, I remember a film that I once performed in. There were two Chinese women, sisters, who had to pretend in this film, which was a satirical film from the get-go, anyway. They had to pretend to be Siamese twins and the hero of the film who was a real…the character was quite a bastard. He was an abortionist on the run and willing to perform abortions quickly, but he didn’t have much time and, that kind of thing. His position relative, and it became a kind of running joke throughout the cast, his position was…his character’s position was putting down these Siamese twins. And there were lots of Siamese jokes going around. And we were digging for material and off-camera as well, we were digging for material. You know, Siamese jokes and Oriental jokes, and the thing got going as a syndrome and the thing got really distressing. I was alienated from the entire situation because of this one element. Because it got so pervasive that nobody could tell who was pretending, who was actually racist, were we making a racist movie under the guise of making a comedy. It just got very complicated for me, and I’ve never resolved it. I would like to see it resolved. I would like to find a resolution to it. But I just find pretense a kind of dicey issue.

BTJ: You know, Steve, I made a solo last year which is called Three Dances and the first section I come out and pretend to be doing a pas-de-deux. No! Pretend to be doing an adagio. As well as I can, to music like Mozart or Chopin. And then, I did a piece in silence which was all shape oriented. And then the lights change, hit, Peter Gordon comes on, screaming horn, people shouting, the music is blasting, and I swear I say every filthy word, “Fuck your mother in the ass! You goddamn white son of Adam!” Then at the end of it, I would smile, and present. Now, to do it well, and God knows certain critics wrote about it. That he seemed almost out of control, and his anger—what is he so angry about? And all this, blah blah blah blah. Although finished like this, with a smile and so on. But that moment was real. That moment was real, and to be honest I couldn’t have been that angry every night I did it. I was turning it on, and I have enough of that right underneath the surface to turn it on, so I don’t know. At that moment I don’t know if my experiment was how far can I push this negative emotion and far can I make it real. And then be able to pull it back. Now, that’s what I mean by acting and pretending.

SP: Mmhm.

BTJ: You know, you hit an attitude, and be there, and then move away.

Audience member: I have a question about that kind of thing. What is first for you? Is it the altered state of consciousness or the emotion that you’re trying, or the movement you’re trying? Which is first?

BTJ: Which is first? The altered…?

Audience: Which is first? Are you…

B: More and more it’s the movement. It’s the vehicle for which all this other, the things that you mentioned, will come through. See I really feel like it’s interesting to see Swan Lake, because I like to see the way she does the pas-de-deux where she tells the prince good-bye, or whatever, because they all do it differently. And these women really believe it. The good ones can be really right there. So for me, the movement is first. Let it be beautiful choreography. Now let me see a good interpretive artist do it. A good improviser’s gotta do it all at the same time…

MO: Cynthia, is it ok that we’re going over the seven o’clock time limit? Is anybody? What is the priority of the space here? Yeah, let’s take another question.

Audience member: I’ve seen both Bill and Steve perform, and I saw you do a piece with Lisa Nelson in the first benefit concert, which seemed to be the seeds for the same piece I saw last Spring, in Danspace, in the church.

SP: It was half of that piece.

Audience: And I’ve seen you do on art on the beach, which I know was first put together or performed in Iowa.

BTJ: Yeah.

Audience: And recently you did a piece for Alvin Ailey. You keep talking about your repertoire. When you finish a piece, is it finished in a sense, choreographically, like the choreography doesn’t change or the essence of the piece didn’t change. And I get the sense from you, that that piece evolved over five years. Now when is the piece finished and if it’s finished it’s in your little bag and you can walk around with it, and is the piece finished for you in that sense, or is it much different? Because I sense that you seem to fulfill it over time. Does your piece get reviewed and changed by you? Or are you saying they’re set.

BTJ: Do you wanna go first?

SP: Yeah, because it’s short. They don’t seem to finish in that sense. Sometimes… I made some pieces in New York that I call temporaries. They only got one performance and I’ll never do them again. So I guess those are the most finished now that they’re done. But everything else seems to change. And one of the changes is space, and new performance areas and considerations. The other thing is, if you’re working with improvisation, for something like Part, a piece we do three or four times a year, in that interim time, one changes. And so you come—I put on my dark glasses and white pants again and I’m a new person underneath, and I have to dance that out. So that’s…

Audience: Would you call that choreography? Or at least I’ve heard people say Steve’s bringing this piece that’s…

SP: Uh, uh-uh-uh-uh-uh…I don’t know what… It’s again a rather polarized view of what’s going on. I see it more as a kind of spectrum. The music stays the same because it’s on tape. The costumes stay the same so far as the laundry allows us. And, uh, I wear dark glasses and she wears a mustache. And it’s always Lisa and it’s always Steve. But the movement changes. Although, within a stylistic or similar range. But the actual movement changes. So, there’s a spectrum of possibilities. You can go for all out change every time, which is so drastic and difficult. You can go for all out the same every time, which is so drastic and almost impossibly perfect to, you know, perfection difficult to achieve. And then there’s all that stuff in the middle, and I play to those gradients, more.

BTJ: For myself, depending on the piece I feel frustrated about it’s out of my hands now. I can’t even go in and change something I don’t like or if I don’t like the way they’re doing it, they barely have time because it’s such a big operation, it’s so expensive. It’s there. And, I mean, I’m going to talk to him about it, but, I mean, I don’t know, it’s there, that’s the form it’s in, and if I don’t like it, they’re going to do it all over the world no matter what. With my own work, however, I know that Arnie and I have a piece, Arnie choreographed it, called Continuous Replay which we have been doing for five years. It’s built around an idea, but the personnel keeps changing, the length keeps changing, the music keeps changing. So it is possible to change, and the Brahms piece you saw tonight, the first section, except for the arms, is pretty improvised. Except I know that there are certain things I want to do in it. I like to keep a lot of improvisation in what I do, all the time. When I make for other people, though, I have to trust in them more, because I don’t trust them to improvise as much.

MO: I think that we’re going to cut this. I’d like to say, though, as a capper that I am very appreciative of both of you of taking out your true responses to each other’s work. In the last few Studies Projects… Sometimes when people gather together to talk they pull away from really piercing an issue because maybe it’s uncomfortable and you may not arrive at an easy, nice ending, etcetera, etcetera. I’m very appreciate of your honesty, and I, for one, got a tremendous amount from a lot of it. Thank you so for coming.

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My question is: Were there any lingering thoughts from our conversation that we started two weeks ago?

I felt like Sebastian’s reasoning was really, really solid. The idea of continuing to create this container for purposes of process—what comes out of that is dictated by the people who inhabit it or that local community, those who bring their ideas and experiences.

I think about the idea of the rhizome, an underground structure that spreads laterally…

On the other hand I could imagine something going on from where we sit kind of feeling like I can’t reach it. It’s kind of far away. I find myself really curious about this idea of being able to have an experience and then take that experience and drop it somewhere else and stand back and watch and see how that grows or what comes out of it

That’s what I struggle with. A framework that can be lifted and placed in any island, in any realm.  What about the responsibility to the process that has already started..?

The process that includes the rest of the folks that are already involved?

The process that involves all of us, that we started a year ago, and, even to the extent of breaking the conceptual framework—this was going to be a year only. That year will be up in March but how can it stop? Some connection to process that happens across bodies, like actual living real people.

It’s not just a conceptual framework.

And also because its one thing to set up a framework and its another thing to actually put it in motion. It’s actually the putting it in motion that makes it feel like, well actually…

Hi Hi, glad you could make it. We’re taking a pause, Kristianne just walked in.

[Chatter, compliments, greetings]

OK, continuing… What it means to continue the project, to continue the school, and what continues. What it means to set this structure, to see this as a structure, to see this as a template, to airlift it and place it in another population. Which reminds me of the parachute thing that Joy brought up. This idea of…what was it?

Like a parachute artist.

I just start writhing, just the notion of that. This art thing that functions like a community service provider in a thinly-veiled way… It really frightens me to think that anyone would see the work in that manner. Not that I believe that that’s the only way such an approach would be received but I think it’s there in the air, potentially. So there’s that thought versus this kind of commitment, fidelity to our group, and continuity of our process. Which feels like it’s still processing, right? And where does that go? And, which… I’m going to stop talking. Which is interesting in relation to social sculpture. A frame is set that creates a type of social architecture, and then that thing moves, continues to live on, ideally outside of the thing that set it up.

I wonder if, I don’t know, kind of like in our current, kind of cultural, whatever it is, conundrum. It’s… how do I say it? It seems like the modern movement, it was a way of divorcing ourselves from tradition. So, that’s left ritual out of a lot of what goes on as our practice. It seems.

By modern movement you mean Modernism?

Yeah, Modernism, which kind of coincides with the growth of industrialism, and capitalism, and communism, and its colonialism. It’s all of that. As a contemporary modern person, I sometimes wonder, does that mean that I’m just at this moment and in the know… contemporary guy? Or does it mean I’ve accepted a colonialist kind of agenda? Or something like that. So, I don’t know. To make a long story short I wonder if in some ways to create a social sculpture, something that actually does create a process that stays alive, either in the community or in the bodies of the people that come into the project. If it’s because that really affects some kind of social change or it’s an experience that people take with them. I’m not always confident that I can do anything I want on-stage  or raise any issue I want. The audience, they only take away from it what they choose to or what they’re prepared to. But some kind of experiment in community, that is an art-making at the same time, it’s kind of a different beast.

WXPT’s Meadow, photo: Christopher Wormald

What came up for me… ok, first I’m going to start with my questions. How can I support what’s happening next? Like you were saying… I’m going to start with this image—talking about the parachute. I was thinking about the way epidemic spread works… One person who is affected goes to a different place and when that person leaves, it continues to grow. Then there’s another start there, and this might be even the people who were exposed by that first person or possibly a different, unknown start altogether. Without it being such a dark image, this feels like how this process and structure has felt. Because from the very first day, I couldn’t see how I’d be a part of it. I didn’t see, as I can right now, how much it’s changed me in a really subtle way, also in a very prominent way. I know that that came from that experience. And then being aware of those two possibilities—like I have the choice to either keep going with it and still be riding that process or sit with it for a little bit and let it stagnate. Or the other way around, take it with me and move onto something different. I think what was wonderful about this structure is that it was inter-layered. So, yeah what you were talking about, audience, as the artist who is putting in the work on-stage, you can put whatever you want in there but the audience gets to choose what they take in, how they take it in, and how it affects them, right? But what’s so beautiful about dance and this structure itself was the beginning, this inclusiveness of where people were… Letting the progression of the structure evolve with the people who are in it, and who’s not in it, and who’s added later and, you know, all of the complexities that we added to the group because we are all individuals who are living very real lives that are very opposite and different. And so to the level of the performance, coming from whatever they, the audience, sees and then accepting what they cannot see. Which is the process within us as a group and within us as individuals. Because the process for me never ended after the rehearsal ended. It was also in the drive home—three hours of driving back and three hours of driving towards—that was part of my process… sitting with the things I heard and experienced just echoing in my head. And it’d produce this energy, energy, energy, and that brought me back to rehearsal the next Saturday. The multiplicity of these layers of this structure…

I’m really struck by what you said about meeting people where they’re at, and that becoming what drives the process rather than this kind of concept that people’s lives have to serve. It more comes from the people that are involved. Or at least that’s a significant layer.

I remember from some rehearsals we had, you, taisha, sent us some videos or some articles and stuff, and here I am thinking I’m going into rehearsal and we’re going to be talking about this. And then the conversation completely goes somewhere else. There’s no attachment to whatever’s brought up. But whatever’s brought up is what brought us to where we’re at that moment, so it’s not wasted. I felt like that was very tangible for me, and it made sense to me right away. After the first three rehearsals it made sense. I’m like, okay, this is how we’re working. Yeah.

I think it is productive for me to not be fixated on the thing. Like, we’re all going to bring backpacks to a rehearsal, so we can all do a “backpack dance,” and that’s for what that backpack-ness brings into a room. I’m not interested in the backpack but maybe what posture comes from the backpack or the conversation that comes up—where people got their backpacks and in relation to where. I don’t know. Get away from “about-ness” and move more toward creating, thinking of ideas more like fascia, you know?

They’re interconnected.

Yeah, that ideas form architectures, or that ideas are sculptural. They’re not things you can point at singularly. It’s the whole.

In some ways it feels like the impossibility of the whole task. Like the whole endeavor to set out, even to do, to make a piece or a project with so many people in a limited time. And the subject matter being so important and so big and so vast. And people coming from so many different backgrounds. The impossibility stacked upon other impossibilities I think in some ways made that atmosphere…there’s so much there that it really lent itself to this undercurrent of energy and ideas that were sometimes spoken out loud but sometimes not spoken. I’m reminded of something that Turay mentioned the last time we met, not just about the art-making but about how we relate to each other as a company. Even in decision-making process, whatever that means… To communicate by speaking but also what’s communicated by not speaking. I think that would be another desired element in the bundle. Somehow fostering those two kinds of communication, or many different kinds of communication, through touch, through dance, through making, through speaking, through sharing.  Then we find ourselves in positions where right now, or the last time we met, we’re trying to function as a collective or a governing body and trying to make sense out of these ideas and trying to make a decision about how to move forward. It’s interesting to me that we participate by talking out loud but also by not knowing how to and silently agreeing or disagreeing. Just being in the soup of things. It’s not going to be a consensus but it does lend itself to a richness and a kind of communication that feels really solid no matter what, with all of the things that we’ve talked about. There was really the possibility of not only wildly different opinions or feelings about different things, but it feels like the communication between everybody was… full of respect is not really what I mean… in real consideration of each other. That is a different way of communicating than a regular school or an academic setting. I think those hierarchies were successfully challenged. The thing that you say about ritual, Heyward, is interesting to me because that seems like a satisfying way to transmit information instead of a capitalist art-making/branding thing. We did this thing and now you do this thing and it’s the other iteration of it. Something about passing information along in the way that we did—people who came into the workshops or the idea of learning a tradition or learning a ritual, or creating your own ritual seems better or more in-tune with what I think we’re going for. I also wonder what would happen with the experiment if we, I don’t know how plausible this is, or even if anyone wants to do this, but the idea that everything continues, like the virus. It starts in another place and we continue our practice, and everyone eventually interacts. The idea of that spreading is amazing. I don’t know if that could happen, but…

Today I was coming from a rehearsal. I wanted to choreograph for an alumni and I brought up the experience of being a part of WXPT and then talked to them through my own lens of how the process unfolded for me. The thing is everyone had different entry points of how they came into this project. I appreciate the unknown of why I’m here. I didn’t know what the decision-making was and I didn’t know that I was going to be part of it. I was an hour late! [laughter] I told you, I was like, “Can I just watch? And you’re like, “No, you’re dancing.”

WXPT’s Meadow, photo: Christopher Wormald

Yeah, you were thrown into it.

Even the first performance, I was thrown into it too. A lot of my experience was: How do I fit? Okay, I’m a part of it somehow, and I’m trusting that I’m a part of it, but how? And then also understanding how it was all similar to my own experiences. Can I relate to taisha’s experiences and what she’s talking about and to Turay’s experiences of what they’re talking about? There’s just all of that. I got into so much of the politics… I have never been so much into that. I’m this immigrant who came into the U.S., and actually the main thing that I had was knowing that I needed to learn English. I knew people were judging me because I didn’t speak the language, so that was the main priority. I didn’t understand it quite yet that, oh, I’m seen as a second-class citizen because of my identity. None of that, until being in this process, and it was a long time, over ten years, of living here. Being bombarded by real-life experiences and talking about it, for me, started this curiosity. I feel like a lot of younger people take that as reality. We just accept it. But there was a kind of resistance in the existence of this structure… And, having these conversations. So I feel like, yes, we keep going, and I’m keeping it going, that work that I’m working on.

I feel like something similar happened with me that makes me really interested in what will happen in a different place, in a different city, in particular. In my mind and heart I’ve been politically conscious and engaged in similar conversations. But I feel like the pairing of getting to know this particular group here and also being new to Los Angeles, the conjunction of those two things have made me think about race and gender just in a very different, heightened way. In a way that I feel like I maybe took for granted in New York, just being around a lot of people or feeling like some things were more okay than they were. This very tight-knit group came together just as I was settling into a city that is very isolating, and very segregated. I think about race more here, and I didn’t expect that at all. I really wonder about Texas, and I wonder what other places are like. It’s very different everywhere.

I’m reminded of really close friend who I’ve known for a long time. This one conversation… Recently I was telling her about WXPT and she had this response where she was kind of like, now that I think about it I think we should have just let the South go. And her reasoning was we fought this really, really bloody war, to keep this part of the nation that had this very questionable economic, based-in-slavery, as a part of the whole. And part of that conversation was, things are getting better there too, but her thought was that if we had just let the South go, maybe it would have been better for what wasn’t the South. And the South itself would have maybe made more progress. It would have been left to its own, whatever it was doing. That was also around the time that the Confederate Flag was taken down in South Carolina, the time that we were having this conversation. That was when we were doing our thing, too. I thought that that was a really interesting response.

My father’s from South Carolina, so I still have some aunts there. I remember when that debate was going on, finding out about why the flag was there in the first place. It was there because basically white law-makers put it there to protest the integration of the schools there. A part of me wanted to call my aunt, and go “why are you living in that place?” A part of me just couldn’t. Maybe part of that comes with growing up on the West Coast, or something. It’s not like the West Coast is heaven or anything like that when it comes to race relations. But, yeah, it’s needed. I have to say that all my information about the South is second-hand. I’ve never been. My father avoided it, until he was really old, going back to the South. My mom and her sisters weren’t allowed to spend time at friend’s houses because they grew up in neighborhoods that were mostly white. From my grandpa’s experience, you could have anything done to you and no one would be held accountable. It’s like… here we are again.

When you mention the word, stop policing yourself some time ago, this little trigger went off in me. Policing, who are the police? The whole thing gets into very dark stuff around our bodies and how bodies of color have been made to carry a certain thing. It’s really pretty hard to shed. It’s woven into the fabric of how people think and relate in this country. It’s locked in there. Sometimes it’s like a bulldog. It’s got its teeth in and it won’t let go. And then, here comes Donald Trump. It’s really wild stuff. I’m curious to be able to have the opportunity to witness or have some experience of how people in the South would actually…what their process would be like, or what would it bring out. Maybe different experiences. There have got to be a lot of correlations. The generation of people that migrated here from the South are either really, really old or they’re starting to not be with us anymore. It’s taken me a long time to get it that people migrated, and that there’s a body that’s supposed to be there. It has meaning. But, the rest of the way that I live modern life tends to abstract it. I’m not really satisfied with it being abstracted.

Wait, I lost it. What’s the “it” there?

Which “it”?

You said you’re not comfortable with it being abstracted.

That the meaning of bodies moving across geography impacted by an experience or an ecology that’s either social or cultural. That’s either supported or destructive. The unfortunate thing in our country’s case, a lot of it has been not so nice.

My question that’s following that is, then, as a community of people coming from different places what do you call that?

As a community coming from different places?

Existing together in the same… sharing same place, geographically.

Yeah, does that then, because of space, does it make them a group?

I don’t know. Because it starts to get into that “what is a nation?” kind of thing.

We all carry our own cultures and our own histories but then all of a sudden you’re in this configuration of different people. What is that, as a whole? What does that make all of us, together? I feel like this is one thing that I never understand. It’s so simple in this structure that we’ve created together. We all had these similarities and differences and our own identities, but that together was the art of dance. Making art together. And then somehow that made us a company. Does that make sense?

WXPT’s Meadow, photo: Christopher Wormald

I feel like that’s the thing, thinking of a dance company as a type of population, as a type of community, as a type of collective body. What happens if you hold the framework of the dance company but change all of its rules and change how it operates, and what it does, what that group of people do when they’re together? Otherwise nothing, I would say, is our common denominator. All the way to the fact that you live all the way in a different county and Kloii’s over there and everyone’s backgrounds are different. No one is the same height and no one thinks the same thing about performance. It’s kind of like the company became this arbitrary kind of border.

Yeah, that’s a whole other tangent. From my own perspective a lot of this was in filling the limits. The question of what can art do and the limits of my own practice in relation to the things I wanted my practice to take up. And feeling like I can’t take them up with just my body. I can’t take them up just in doing solos for this or that audience. When we all came together I didn’t know what we were going to do. I just knew that it was important. That it’d be a catalyst for people to create meaning together in whatever form that might take, and to keep listening to what comes up. The fact is that I was so terrified to have some of the conversations that we had, early on. And also quite terrified by everyone’s sense of why they were there. Like, this person is expecting this, and this expecting that, and this person is expecting, and. Whoa. Who is going to be right? Who’s going to get the thing that they want? Maybe just for this time, surrender. I think that was what was helpful, actually, about holding it to a year. This is a container that can be held for a year but not much longer, to some extent. Which is what makes it feel so fraught now. Because it got set in motion, now what does it mean to break it? Or to let the timer go off and say, “done!”

I think also what’s come up is a broader question of authorship. It’s not my choice to say that it’s done, because it’s not really mine. The relations that have been built and the experiences and what people take on and utilize and trouble in their own work or their own relations, and that belongs to you, and you, and you. I know there’s this moment when my father got sick and I just couldn’t do anything, but felt like it was important to keep the process going. I thought maybe I’m going to be overthrown, and maybe that’s great! Maybe that’s what needs to happen. Even though I was afraid to have a lot of conversations, I did feel it was important that they happen, and that we kept returning to the body, to practice in some way. But now I have this impulse for us to now just be in the studio. It’s like we had to work all this up to actually be able to have like a real experience in the studio. It would actually be so satisfying.

It probably is obvious or sounds redundant, but it feels like the school or the approach or whatever we’re doing, we’re uniquely poised to address all of this stuff. All the trauma around bodies and bodies in migration and history of bodies. It does sound so obvious to me but most of these conversations are just conversations. Or they’re people online, writing feeds or arguing with each other or in schools or not talking at all. It’s so rare for people to even talk with people who are different from them, and to consciously get a group of people together and work through these things in a non-linear way, with the body. That’s the point of it. It feels like the inherent value. It’s very powerful. I would imagine that if it did take all this time to get to that understanding I would be really interested to see what comes up physically, after all of that.

Can I ask you something? Maybe a closing thing… Maybe you can modify this. What’s a single question that is still lingering for you concerning this process? Maybe a question that came up before that never got solved. A question that remains. Something that never got addressed. A question that needs to continue to be asked. Something that needs to be in the room of this conversation. Or just something that has been stirred up.

I have one thing that I’m still trying to find answer to as an artist and, in the process, everything we’re talking about feels relevant. How then can I put that in the body, and what gets put in the space in the work? What’s taken out and what’s that filter that we’re using? How is it going to be translated? Not even translated, but put in. Because translated makes it seem like it’s turning into something else, that the body is there the whole time. How is that, what’s the word? I don’t know what the word is to describe that, but it’s not translating. From this conversation, from all of this growth, from all of this insight to movement, to the physicality of the body, and all of that.

What are we manifesting? What gets manifested?

Yeah, what gets put? What is that filter? What’s that line or how does it get crossed? That’s has been the ultimate thing from the very beginning ’til the end. I’m still dealing with it.

WXPT’s Meadow, photo: Christopher Wormald

Yeah, it makes me begin to wonder afresh, something like, “what is art?” You could say that in some way art becomes the filter. What is art doing, or who made art? Did I make art? Or are we making art? And then, did the definition of art change? Does art reside in the body? Where is art? And, then there’s the body stuff. How is your body? What’s going on there? Maybe by being more aware in some way that I’m not aware of yet how other people are experiencing their bodies I’ll better understand who I am. There’s something about personal identity that it’s constantly morphing. I like that. I like that we have created an opportunity to work and grow in ways and to create questions. We have to enter those questions with our bodies in order to maybe find an answer but maybe just to get to the other side of the room. Or something like that. To have a sense of the space, in a way, that we can understand bodily.

How does your body experience your pressure? Or whatever it is that we’re talking about. How is then the body dealing with it as an entity?

My questions are similar. When I said before something about the inherent value or virtue in this endeavor or this experience, and we’re all, even though our experiences are really different, in pretty strong consensus of the transformative elements of the whole thing—interpersonally, politically, physically, dynamic and transforming. That radically challenges the idea of making a product, an art-product. That seems really clear to me and then for some reason, just because it was brief, the experience of actually performing, I feel like I still have questions about what happened. Not just what people thought, because I actually didn’t get a ton of feedback, I got people’s impressions that for the most part were very visceral and emotional. Not too lengthy. For some reason there’s a sticking point for me where I wonder about…either conceptually or…What’s the word? What was made, what was crafted, what was presented? Because I feel very strong about that transmission from us to the audience. Being in the space and having the space, I saw how that changed a little bit as time went on. I wonder how that changed from night to night as time went on. If we had a longer performance practice what would come up from that? I don’t really know yet what my specific questions are regarding authorship but I know that I have the desire to talk more about that. There’s a lot of like quasi-utopian language around the formation of the group. I get really excited about those possibilities and then you know, the real-life practicalities of everything, it’s like it can’t ever be perfect. But I wonder about that transparency between all the levels of the people involved and thinking about the dancers in the company as workers. There always is a level of slight…it’s not even exploitation but the performers are always at the bottom of whatever this thing is. By participating in any way in this structure of art-making or art-world, I feel like there is always that thing there. It can’t be divorced from that. What are the ways we can continue to challenge those things, those roles, or just talk about it more? It’s not a thing that I feel very comfortable talking about either.

Talking about what?

The politics of this is our job. We’re all getting paid for this, paid for our efforts, and it’s a labor of love, and it’s what we’re doing. But it also has all of these different aspects to it. Yeah, I’m interested in different ways of addressing…

I was also really aware of a shift in the paradigm between dancing in an outdoor space and being dancers in an art space. Wherever this continues to happen, it’s a whole other set of questions to think about. Yeah, I have too many questions, I think.

I have to go, this is the shitty part of this, that I have to stop. You can continue this conversation, but this is my cue that I have to leave. Thank you so much.

WXPT’s Meadow, photo: Christopher Wormald

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LACE presents The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People, a large-scale installation and performance platform by Los Angeles based artist taisha paggett. This project, which takes the form of a dance school, is shaped by the question, “what is a Black dance curriculum today?” The installation itself, developed in collaboration with artists Ashley Hunt and Kim Zumpfe, serves as a temporary dance school, performance space and home for dance company, WXPT (We are the Paper, We are the Trees).

The core of The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People is WXPT itself — a temporary, experimental community of queer people of color and allies, dancers and non-dancers alike. WXPT was conceived by paggett in early 2015 to expand upon the language and methods of modern and contemporary dance practices, to shift the ways dancers of color are positioned within the contemporary field, and to explore questions of queer desire, responsibility, migration and historical materials that inhabit our cultural imagination. The company consists of Joy Angela Anderson, Heyward Bracey, Rebecca Bruno, Alfonso Cervera, Erin Christovale, Loren Fenton, Maria Garcia, Kloii “Hummingbird” Hollis, Jas Michelle, Meena Murugesan, taisha paggett, Sebastian Peters-Lazaro, Kristianne Salcines, Ché Ture, Devika Wickremesinghe and Suné Woods.

In May of 2015, paggett organized evereachmore, WXPT’s premiere performance created for the Bowtie Project, a partnership between Clockshop and California State Parks to activate an 18-acre post-industrial lot along the LA River. Amidst the recent unfolding of state violence against Black bodies, evereachmore sought to forge new economies of resistance, and new sensations of time, space and togetherness.

Inspired in part by a “school for colored youth” that members of paggett’s family founded in early 20th century East Texas, The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People extends the praxis of WXPT into a curriculum and pedagogy. The installation at LACE takes up the form of a school as an artistic and social problem, building the school’s curriculum and infrastructure through physical and social sculpture, performance and image, where the roles of artist and viewer, dancing and non-dancing body, art and learning coalesce.

The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People will offer a program of workshops, weekly classes and micro-performances initiated by members of WXPT. The curriculum will be open to anyone, blurring lines between audience and participant, while especially encouraging queer people of color to join. Across the bodies of the company and the members of the public who join the school, the curriculum will build an accumulative performance score in weekly increments, culminating in the performance of a “collective movement choir” at the conclusion of the exhibition.

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This does not have to be a formal thing at all. I just feel there needs to be a beginning. Basically we’ve been in the middle of this project, and there are lots of wonderful things happening. Part one happened, and we scattered. And then part two happened, and we scattered. So it’s nice to have a moment to get together and have a discussion about what it means to move forward. And what forward is. At the beginning I imagined this as a one-year project. There’s something about, like, the time – time as a container, something to hold on, to hold the commitment in whatever form that means. There are a couple of starts. I feel like the audition was a type of start. I also feel like —

Lauren can you hear okay?

Yeah I can hear perfectly fine.

Ok, good. I feel like our first gathering in 2015 was also a start. I think it was March 28th or something like. In keeping to holding the container of that thing, I wonder what these last remaining two months should be for us. I want to open up a space to think about what our last chunk shall be, and then there’s this other thing to discuss which is this invitation from Houston to continue the project there. I’m wondering now, ‘where’s the conceptual structure?’

That’s a funny question.

That’s a funny question. What does it mean to break the code of one thing to allow this other thing to happen? Or maybe this other thing is meant to be a very separate something, and the processes of identifying what the template was might be of this thing. How might it be easily translated into a new environment? Or maybe it’s about breaking all of these rules … not about beginning again but just continuing to grow from where we’ve left off.

WXPT’s Meadow, photo: Christopher Wormald

So, everyone, please chime in as you can, as you’d like. I have a lot of questions myself about authorship. What I mean when I say this is this project is collectively ours. Who does it belong to when it moves to a different group? Does it keep belonging to more people? Is the question of belonging just a moot point to begin with? Also, WXPT often stands-in for your actual names and so in a way the representation of this collective also produces a disappearance of people’s individual credit. I’m thinking about that, which is a bit more, um, archives and credits and those things. And, so, and then there are other people. There’s Ashley’s input, there’s Kim’s input into the project. And then there’s just the whole reality of what happens when you put something in the different environment, and that whole history and new contexts that come up. I have a lot of questions about moving into this next stage and it all has to happen now. We’re going to Houston tomorrow. [laughter]. There’s no…hemming and hawing…action actually has to happen. And this is this weird…

I like how that sounds, ‘we’re going to Houston tomorrow.’

“We’re going to Houston tomorrow.’

Kind of country western.

Taisha: Yeah, totally. Yes. So a lot of questions about moving forward but then also not a lot of space to luxuriate in these questions. And also not a lot of support to do it, necessarily. Um, so there’s that to discuss. So maybe just to open up, because I would like to hear from you guys: What impression did this last project left on you and what does it mean for it to continue? What continues? What can continue and what can’t continue. You still there Lauren?

Lauren: I’m here, listening and hearing everything.

Ok. And then the other facet of this gathering is to have a platform, to talk about the work, that platform being this Critical Correspondence invitation. I think we would have this conversation anyways but this invitation formalizes it. Which is really nice. But I hope that that formalizing doesn’t make us feel formalized. And the letter provides an anchor to the conversation specifically as it relates to body and voice and the power that both things have, or the types of power that the body has that can’t really be articulated. This all feels relevant to the school and the concept of unlearning.

Would we like to read the text? That’s one question. My other question is: Are the Houston folks currently interested in having more folks there, and then we go there and build their community? Or is there a community there already? Or what’s the landscape of that?

Good question. Well, I began this conversation a couple months ago with Diverse Works in Houston. It’s a space that is committed to both visual art and performance and dance. I’ve not yet been there but we’ll see it tomorrow.

Oh, you’re literally going tomorrow??

[laughter]

Oh, I thought you were speaking metaphorically!

There are no metaphors in this conversation!

Going to Houston tomorrow!

[laughter]

That sounds poetic.

I wish it were so poetic! [laughter]

WXPT’s Meadow, photo: Christopher Wormald

What about funding to support people… What is there to support people and the process? Can a process even happen inside that space? The way we were able to be inside our spaces… What does it mean to have that process without the weeks and months that we had together before we got to the school? What does it mean to bring a group of people in to suddenly activate the space?

How long are you going to be in this space?

It’s probably somewhere like six weeks.

What are you doing exactly in Houston tomorrow? Like, are you just touring the space, are you talking about budget? What are you doing there?

I will travel there with Kim and Ashley and we will meet and we will see the space and we will have a conversation with the curator, who’s a very great person. We’ll talk about what is possible there. I’m going to attempt to have an audition but I don’t even know what that means…

Taisha, how does the authorship question tie into this? Is it that you’re thinking potentially to bring WXPT members with you? Or bring classes that were already created by members with you to Houston?

Yeah. I would love to bring everyone to Houston and it’s hard to even broach the subject because just thinking about plane fare for however many people is a hard thing. But that would be the ultimate goal. I hope that we can get started with a local group in Houston, perhaps a group that already has something in common. What that is, is a question. That already has something in common, and that what they start with is Meadow, some sense of Meadow. Either as a score—or the dance turned into a series of questions… And at that same time, we are in a process where we are also engaged in Meadow… And in this fantasy swirl [laughter] funds would appear out of the sky…

[laughter]

Right?

In walks Mr. Funds.

In walks in Mr. Funds, right? ‘From Houston!’ [laughter] It’s the oil man! oh geez.

Ya’ll need money?

Oils below thirty dollars a barrel in like, more than decades. So oil man’s not doing so well. [laughter]

That’s true. Ok, so in this fantasy realm with all the money that just dropped from the sky, we could travel to Houston, spend a week or so in a residency…

Ahhhh..

So there’d be a moment of exchange but our time in Houston would be very truncated for logistical reasons and we’d create another container to have a rich exchange with this new group. And then we’d leave them to continue it on their own.

I like moments of exchange. Similar to how we presented workshops to each other and the community here to experience workshops or offerings that were generated by other people that had some kind of direction that could meet us halfway.

Mhmm.

And inform us from their perspective, something like that.

And that would happen before the residency, right? Because they would open the school as the residency in Houston? Or that would be the end of the residency?

So let’s say the residency happens. Residency happens in a week, the performance happens that weekend, and then there’s an install period and then the show opens.

Gosh.

So that would be…

Are we recording right now?

We are.

Do we have any extra blankets?

There’s a blanket over here.

Thank you.

WXPT’s Meadow, photo: Christopher Wormald

Do we have a vision as to how we might have the encounter…? I like the idea of being changed by it somehow but I’m just thinking out loud.

Being changed by the encounter?

Yeah, rather than having the piece be defined beforehand…

Mhmm.

I have a question. Did you already send out an audition notice to, like, people in Texas?

You did! Was it the same one that we got in January of last year? Is it? Ok. I was wondering about that just in terms of the spirit that brought all of us together. It felt very contained in that audition, that notic you wrote out. So that’s cool.

Yeah I’m a little ambivalent about it, honestly.

About? The audition?

Mhm.

What’s that, in a way?

Did you hear that question, Lauren?

I did, I heard it.

I think it’s that question – what restarts and what evolves. I also feel like that original call was written in a very particular moment for me, a very particular moment in time outside of me, and so to just redo it sets it in amber, in a way. But then on the other hand, I’m interested to know what it means to cast that same engine, and what will it set into motion?

It feels almost like a Fluxist instructional set.

Mhmm.

Is that being the means to question and start another company? The questions around what does it mean to be a dance company or support each other as a community, in that structure. Those questions are being asked again, it just seems like a long time though. And separate from the school I think, um, yeah I feel myself anticipating a necessary loss… You know it’s all in the name of what we all do with performances necessarily ending and nobody owning, obviously, anything, and it’s all ephemeral. But some of those first questions about what it means to support each other as a dance company in terms of not really authorship but I guess labor and I don’t know I feel like I have lingering questions from the performance and the process and I don’t know if those continue in these next two months as we parse through what we’ve done together. Um…it just feels like even in a traditional dance company the dancer is the worker and the person who, you know, gets the least whatever… Whether it be financial compensation, or yeah, authorship, I guess. So I just want to say that out loud in terms of starting that process again. And with a new group how do we negotiate how to do this next part with all of us, or not?

Lauren, I just wanted to clarify some things for me. So the idea is that WXPT people from LA go to Houston for one week for a residency, and in that one week will be working with doing workshops witha nd teaching meadow to and exchanging with the people that you’ve auditioned there, and then that’ll lead up to a performance of meadow and then we’re handing off to them the concept of the school and then you’ll install the exhibit and then they will recreate the school inside of the exhibit? Is that the idea?

Yes, yes, yes up to the point, up to the specificity of them creating and moving forward with the school. I think it is a school but how the school is constructed can be reinterpreted.

OK. That they will create their own classes and share them with one another.

Yes if that structure is replicated.

OK.

Part of me wonders… Maybe being in these states of not knowing is most productive.

I feel like that’s been the only continuity, and I think it’s very important that if we were to talk about any type of supportive aspect of the work it’s that space of questioning, unlearning, and holding, you know… Holding these ideas instead of dissecting or knowing the specifics of things… I feel a lot of trust is involved in what the container of this project is. And when we were talking about sharing, exchanging… It’s something that’s core, that needs to be… The regular exchange of, what is this, what’s supposed to be produced, and the reality of, like, well we’re here, we’re feeling, we’re understanding, we’re watching, we’re in our bodies, we’re doing this thing right now. I feel like I’m still wondering about the expansiveness and the complexity of that space, and also the ways that we showed up in the performance of Meadow. To have what people would assume is a structure, um… But to feel so mentally expansive and dynamic, and just linger. And so effective. It felt so effective. So I’m wondering what it means to engage other folks in the conversation of listening. And the conversation of, you know, quiet, or in the conversation of unlearning.

Is it a mistake to bring in a new group of people? Is it the wrong direction.

Oh, well. What was I gonna say? I’m still pretty enamored with like the opportunity to have an exchange with other folks and the trust of extending ourselves into a space where we need to have that dialogue and develop or continue that trust with new people…? There’s something it seems about geography and the recognition of some kind of mutual intent, and having that build trust. It can be, it can have a really kind of profound impact on how people frame their selves, or their respective practice, and stuff like that.

I guess if I can jump in on that tagline… [something is spilled]

They say broken glass is like the ancestors are calling…

I’m worried actually…that was the universe saying, nope! Not you! Zip it!

[dog barking]

Izzy!

She’s like, you woke me up!

[barking]

Hush! Hush! Hush!

There’s nothing in it, that’s great.

[vacuuming]

I think that’s most of it.

Did you get under this table?

That’s a cool little vacuum.

Yeah, I know right?

What’s this, groupon?

Let’s get under your feet one more time.

Thank you.

You’re welcome.

During this interlude, I’ve been thinking about what it really takes to build community. And, to your question of, whether it’s a good idea or not a good idea to invite other people in—I think that’s whatever. I don’t know if that’s the right question, you know? But one thing I feel like I get a sense from this group and from other groups that I participated in is that community building really takes time. That’s an element that can’t be extracted, in my experience. And so I wonder if introducing a couple people or a new group of people to some ideas, concepts, and then walking away, or not being there for the rest of it, it assumes so many things. It assumes that we’ve communicated, you know, clearly, it assumes that the way we articulate and express our concerns for the issues that we’ve been dealing with are somehow similar… So, to walk into a new place and really present a project that I think has so much to do with local individuals, and where we are in life and the core of these questions, is a challenge. So I’m just bringing that up. It just feels like…there’s stuff there to mine.

WXPT’s Meadow, photo: Christopher Wormald

Mhmm. And related it didn’t feel like a challenge to invite people with us who didn’t start, who ended up performing, people who came to school and then stayed for rehearsal, that seemed seamless and added to the expansiveness of it.

That’s cuz we were there.

Inviting other people, it never felt like a big leap, it never felt really…

I can’t hear…could you turn up the volume? Thanks.

I was just saying it didn’t feel like a big leap to invite other people in to class who then performed with us, and we were wondering if that was because we were together the whole time in that process.

For this project to be about people and elements in migration, and location…those pieces, you know. I mean, transferring information… for some reason that feels really foreign, but um, engaging folks in conversation about dirt, and our relationship to our bodies, and our relationship to community and struggle… That conversation feels possible. Dance exchange, engagement feels possible. And then also, oh, there’s that thought, um…oh…transferring, transferring, um, I lost it. Shucks!

It’ll come back.

Ok!

Maybe it’s a question of language because what comes up for me, the words process and community… In the beginning it felt like this experiment with the rehearsal space and that process, which expanded over weeks and months… I do agree with Lauren—community building is something that takes time… What comes to mind when speaking about going to another location, projects that propose to potentially create something of a community, that whole parachute artist thing comes up.

What’s a parachute artist?

Dropping in, and out, like—

It’s this history of community art production, which sometimes produces great projects… When an artist comes from a different location and works within a very short period of time… with hope that the project may continue with maybe identified leaders or people that will continue the project as they believe, yeah. So, variations of that…

Yeah the community partners over there, that can be partners and collaborators with the local organization, [unintelligible] that knows the history and relevance to history and people there, specifically.

Right, as opposed to just the plop in and fly out…

Right! I think that there isn’t a specific formula and I like that there was this unknowing of what was going to happen in our process, which I felt valued everybody and everyone’s contribution and voice and body into the space. There was a value in that unknowing that created an environment where everyone felt like they could contribute and the opening of saying we’re gonna create a curriculum together and what is that going to look like. We don’t know, let’s create it. It formed and there was the support that we all had with each other that was really valuable and so how can those things happen in a condensed way or maybe that’s not something that needs to be replicated or…

Yeah, I guess I agree. I feel like I would hesitate if the goal in part is to recreate this idea of the school and that space of questioning and dialogue and development of workshops and community. I would almost feel like having all of us go there would be a big imposition like, Oh we’re going to teach you about community. Here’s a community that we developed. Not that that would be our intention or what we set out to do but I feel like just because of the numbers and the relationships it’s such a strong entity to go into somewhere and then try, as opposed to like letting something develop there. I would be interested in having a school established and be formed based on the similar questions and prompts that were given to us and then coming in at the end and having a dialogue with those people. That would be fascinating to me. To see where they ended up with the kind of a similar trajectory of prompts and play and community building that was also very flexible and not rigid in responding to what their needs were but coming from similar starting points and seeing where they ended up and seeing where we ended up. That would be an amazing mining of collective imaginations and ideas and realities. Um, and just like you say—I feel like I couldn’t go to Houston and have any sort of opinion on what community building in Houston should be or what any sort of cultural relationships should be. I mean, I would just feel so weird walking into a situation like that. And I guess I’ve had different times when I feel like such a California guy walking into an area and I feel like that perspective is so strong and different and not necessarily useful…What?

I said here comes the California guy.

Yeah some people really don’t like, also…

I think it would be fascinating, as you say, if you gave another group of people a similar set of prompts and let them run with it, then went to see and experience what they had came up with. That’s what sounds really fascinating. But the other end of it is that I don’t think us going there needs to be going there with the intent of going to impose our ideas on the people. I mean, they could do their thing, and that could be this autonomous thing that they do, but we could also go and kind of meet them in the middle and it could be more of a sharing and not us dictating. The meta-prompt could be what we did but we are here more to interact with you than say this is the way things should be or something like that. That could be a very rich experience as well.

And you’re saying that’s more possible at the end?

I’m just saying I’m skeptical of the idea of being able to do that with a large group of people and I feel like it would be such a strong statement to have a large group of people with such a developed history and ideology and experience as a group walk in and not feel if I walked into that room as a participant or somebody coming in for the first time, even if it was subconscious, I would automatically be looking to them for keys, physically, emotionally, pedagogically into how I should be behaving in the space—what I should be doing, what was appropriate, what was not appropriate. Even if it was just things like, “I feel really comfortable taking my shoes and socks off in a certain way.” I mean, I just think that influence would be so immediate and so present from the beginning that there’s no way that it would not be hugely influential in terms of what their actual process would end up being. Not that we would go in at all, of course, like trying to impose our ideologies. Thinking of Taisha’s as the thru-line, and the person who brought us together with a specific set of questions, continued to give us certain prompts and parameters that we’re interpreting, that as a thru-line to me makes a lot of sense to then move that to another location like let that course play out and then compare the two petri dishes at the end of the experiment and see what came up. Because I feel like that other petri dish would probably have a lot of information that we didn’t have, that we didn’t come up with on our own, but was still coming from the same kind of ideas and the same impetus. That could be really helpful and be really great.

I really like that idea even though I presented a counter argument. I think that essentially Sebastian is right on at least in terms of what you’re saying about us coming there as a group that had an experience together potentially conditioning the experience for them. For sure. It may not be immediately obvious but I think it would be really interesting to not have that happen and to somehow be able to compare the two petri dishes.

I will also say that that is definitely coming from the place of like a strong idea of the larger goal and what is interesting to me about this project… I feel like the larger goal is looking at how to be, how we develop community and conversations, and some other larger things, as opposed to having a myopic focus. Because if that’s the goal then, yes, we should all go there and then figure out ways to share and be stretching and pulling what that means in a different location…

Well, yeah. No. It’s so good to think about all these things. Conceptually this could be a compare and contrast experience and different outcomes. But, when you think about…

…The meadow

The meadow! [laughter] And then to think there’s like community, in the institutional sense, in a buzz word sense, and then there’s like actually what it takes to really commit to community, and then there’s process and what it means in an institutional sense, and then the cliff’s notes sense, and then what it really means to commit to process. I think it’s kind of interesting, what you’re saying Sebastian, and it’s where my head goes—keep to the conceptual structure. It’s interesting to think that the conceptual structure gets broken by this need to actually stay not faithful because that sounds like lying, but to stay…just to recognize that some things can’t be cut off and just restarted.

I found that that’s where most of my curiosity is coming from—looking at this project with a sense of expansion, I think you touched on it in the beginning, that conflict between the restarting and expanding. I think now we’re discussing people and bodies and our relationship to that, sense of expansion. I’m wondering what folks’ ideas are around what this. What expanding this project looks like, or expanding these concepts, expanding these actions. And then also the invitation is curious to me, too. Because right now I’m feeling very grounded by [sigh] certain moments in the project, like the spell casting project, hearing songs of mourning or historical videos, and seeing Black bodies and people and holding space and moving through space and actually just witnessing each other. And our relationships to these things. I’m thinking about that invitation they gave to bring what you’re working on. Bring it. Then your choice to be, ‘well I’m working on this.’ And so I’m curious about specifically your ideas around beginning this project and feeling present with it now and what it looks like to expand it and then I’m also curious to hear what other people think about you know our relationship to the project and then what it feels like to expand it.

It’s interesting what caught me in what you just said, or stuck with me…What is this? That brings me back to some of what Sebastian just brought up. This is this experiment that conceptually involves… how can I say… the development of certain kinds of petri dishes, and so how is that most properly brought. If we or taisha are to bring that, what are we bringing? What form does that take? I don’t know. Does it take the form of delivering prompts and then stepping back or does it take the form of having bodies actually be there? How do we position our bodies within that conceptual framework? Does my body need to be there? Who knows. Maybe that’s a question we each need to ask ourselves, for some reason. I’m not sure. Do their bodies need to come here?

Are you leaving? Are you actually leaving?

For Texas?

[laughter]

Nice to see you Ashley. Did you get your grant application in?

Yes.

Yay!

[applause]

Sorry to cut you off, Heyward. Or interrupt.

Yeah, what are our bodies doing? Does my body need to be there, what is my body doing here, what has it done, what’s its relationship with Joy’s body? Who are we collectively? I don’t really have a firm answer. That’s the annoying. Maybe there’s something I need to unlearn still. I don’t know.

This ties back to or brings up a new idea for me regarding the ownership question because I’m realizing it’s less about authorship or ownership of material or product and it’s more about this kind of revved up feeling of us having a lot of work to do. A lot of questions were raised and experiences were felt deeply where it feels like this is not a semester, this is a life-long school. This is a life long commitment to speaking in the way we speak to each other, making space the way we make space for each other. These things have created models for me that I don’t feel like I’m done with, personally. On a bigger scale regarding the project, it feels like there’s so much to do, and it’s not done, whatever, it won’t be done. But whatever that means, whether it’s my own body continuing to do that with the same group of people or whether it’s a new one, I think that’s the underlying desire. Does that make sense that it’s not authorship but it’s… I’m not done thinking about this yet. You know?

To continue to be in part of the conversation…

Continue that research that we…

Bodies not done embodying this work.

Yeah that too.

Like questions of authorship assumes an object.

Yeah. Or even like…

Like a thing that’s fixed.

Right, or choreographic material, or like the look of the show. But it doesn’t even really, that’s not really what I mean at all. But some kind of continued engagement with a particular way of practicing.

Philosophically you could extend that question into some kind of inquiry into the body’s position in culture. It’s part of what’s got me going on the words thing that was in the text. It’s like this fantastic experience of starting all of our conversations with the pronoun question, which is a practice that I hadn’t done before but it’s changed me I think. And those pronouns have to do with identity or gender or sexual orientation, or something like that, but I felt like… “he’s back from Texas!” That meadow, the school in meadow, created this thing, “what is dance?” Is it self-expression, is it ritual, is it a formal container? I dunno, that could go on and on and on. And then there were moments during the performance where I felt like the ghost dance was there. Is it bodies engaged in some kind of entreaty having to do with their condition vis a vis nature, or social circumstance? Then there’s another layer having to do with how Black bodies have been positioned historically within the American post-slave trade context, and stuff like that. There’s just so much. It doesn’t fit neatly into dance, and if I were to say: “what if I called it performance art” well, I could, but that’s one way to grab a certain piece of it. But you know, I think, like Devika is saying, that continues. For me it’s not something that I’m gonna have resolved either for who knows how long. I’m reminded of that by the Lakota thing having to do with the seventh generation. It’s probably that as a contemporary artist I’ve learned to think of authorship in terms of – I’m doing something that belongs to me, and, either exhibits my intentions or furthers my career or like it does something it hopefully does something of value.

I’m glad you mentioned that because I think that’s what I think about when I think about expansion of the project… My relationship to my body, and… If I’m there with thinking about the life of this intentional space, you know… Oh my gosh it’s going to get really interesting now, but I felt gifted with the exchange, and I felt like it has been something that I’m engaging with. I think that dancing and moving weekly with a group of people, where we were sharing space and engaging material together that is related to social change, that’s related to very personal and collective things… Then to be asked to share the ways that it’s transformed us… It’s hard to explain something so transformative. I think it’s more than just a project. When I was asking a question of what do you think about um WXPT expanding? What do you think about Meadow expanding? What do you think about this movement this engagement we had expanding? I feel very close to again this word of engagement… I’m touching this idea or I’m touching this project from a space of openness and freeness about its own evolution. I think you asked me when we first opened the conversation, what did you gather from the exchange. Let me think… What it means for the work to continue and what we got from the process… I’m there with that. I feel like, Ok, that specific question of what it means is something I want to explore more. For me to see this work continue would mean that the idea of unlearning is carrying on, that the idea of questioning is carrying on. That I could just stop there. I feel very connected to that, and I feel like that’ll come back to me. That is something that I’m still participating in, whether the project’s in Houston or not. What I gather from engaging all this year was that some things aren’t going to be processed through verbal exchange. My whole relationship to space and time and bodies, [laughter] is something that has the capacity it should be! And it’s a big lesson, and thanks and I think that I would want to see that continue. And of course, yes, I mean, ask the people in Houston. [laughter] Ask them what they want, and my suggestion is commune, and communion. Maybe just being present and going on the trip and then coming back and talking to us about it. Keep your communication open, and maybe as a community supporting you, as your body travels through space and time and projects.

I would just want to tack on to that, like a slight ending, that it doesn’t need to be like an end. It’s not an end. It’s a continuation. Just like what you were saying, whether it’s supporting you in your travels or things come back I very much don’t feel like this is an ending point. I’m interested in continuing this into perpetuity. So however that happens I’d be interested in that. I think sometimes it is important to just that and let it shift and evolve and, maybe we can find like the exact road trip halfway point between Houston and LA and then meet there.

I’m thinking about the summertime [laughter] and the performance, you know, that we had, and the actions that were performed. We were running past each other!

I know!

And you were going out so far! But it felt like, Ohhhh! coming back, we were so connected and so stretched!

That was intense.

It was so intense! We’re doing these things and we’re moving with this slowness, and my eyes are here in front of my hands but I felt everything, everyone around me. It’s a microcosm and it’s macro. Gosh, I wonder if that’s the principle. I wonder if that’s something…I mean, for me, I felt like yeah, I just want to dot this thing, and embrace that right now, because I trusted, I feel like just a little bit. I trusted the beauty and intention in trailing and traveling and tumbling and moving slow together with this aura of awareness and each other. I just wonder about those principles [sigh] and what ongoing culture looks like supporting that kind of awareness.

I feel like a really big thru-line for this will be the physical space made in this gallery. I will say that I personally felt very disconnected from the process of that formation and our process. In a lot of ways that was my biggest area of discomfort. I feel like that space kind of ended up being imposed on us and our process. That it was never fully explored by us before the school began and integrated into what we were doing and what that meant to us. Even so much so as I feel like the conversation or the illusion of this space including the makers being Ashley, Kim, there was some integration but there was definitely not any sort of reflexive push pull in terms of that process. That made me kind of uncomfortable. I feel like it’s a big question for me then that that was such a strong element that will be replicated there, feels like a bit of disconnection from like that process of Meadow and that kind of expansion. Whereas I feel like it was really about integrating that environment, the practice. We only got to that point in the final performances in that process, when I started to feel like what that space really meant and what an exploration of that space and energy meant. It was very different. It was actually something that felt a bit scary to me, which is not bad.

To interact with the space?

Yeah. That confinement and that artificially created space and really kind of figuring out the boundaries and what it meant, it pushed me into some unexpected place. Also we did the piece for like two hours, bumping our heads against that wall… But I do feel like it came out of the environment that we had kind of landed in. I just wanted to throw that out because we haven’t talked about that aspect of it period. When we walked into the room it was kind of discussed, but a lot of it was just forming the curriculum and having the workshops happen but none of that stuff was really engaging with the materials and the space and what that physical space meant in any sort of way.

For me something that came up in, as you’re speaking and then remembering the space… There’s something in that moment where we came in as the space was being built. There was something that I trusted in that, that it was specifically coming from like your personal story, and like the origin of the school, which is in Texas right? And I don’t know anything about the geography in Texas but is there any relationship between…

I have no idea what is being said here they are laughing.

It’s about four hours outside of Houston.

Where your family had the school?

This particular school.

Wow. All right. All right. So there was…

So there was something in that trust that I was like, OK, Yeah. I know that there’s a special relationship here and I’m here to have that with all of you all, you know. Yeah but there was something about, how this feels for me, this is my interpretation, but it feels specific to you know, that history, your history.

Mhmm.

WXPT’s Meadow, photo: Christopher Wormald

Thinking about what you guys were talking about with the space, also what gets translated into performance and what we did so briefly even though it went on for a long time, but it was really brief… But questions, being really interested in how hard it was and the hard physical work, and questions I have about whether it means translating the work from the company or the school into a performance. Or whether it’s the training of a company. This feeling of expansiveness, unlearning, holding space, how can that arrive alongside with this idea of rigor? Or either physical rigor, because there were moments, there was so much trust. I felt really buoyant with all of you, that it felt a little scary physically in the space, on my body. And rigor also in terms of like really adequately preparing ourselves for what task we’re doing, and, being able to do that in a way that. Even though these words that I’m saying right now kind of sucks all the air out of it. It’s both of those things. It’s allowing for anything to happen, allowing for all these interactions to be possibilities, but then a strong desire I have to have a kind of rigor. I mean, rigor isn’t implicit in asking us to do a task, all of these things together, and we embodied that, I think, ferociously. But also rigor in terms of preparation or training, or whatever that means, implicit in the investigation together.

Rigor…rigor and physical practice. Or that or just a type of awareness of?

And I think not just physically, I think, like, organizationally, or in conversations around practicalities for performing, or structures of the school, I mean both ways. Or maybe all ways. I wonder if that’s even possible to exist with all of this really special and beautiful space, and possibility, because I think somehow it was both of those things for me. And I think that’s a huge challenge.

There was a challenge for me especially early on jumping back into this process in August or whatever it was, feeling like the lack of rigor in terms of like rehearsal attendance, really practically. The danger is that immediately my response started to be: if this is not important to people, if this is something that is optional and not something that’s worth doing for someone else, well I’m just not going to do it either. I could have made that choice too. And so it was a challenge for me in that period of time to not do that, and instead say No. I’m making this choice to go to these rehearsals because they have been scheduled and because this matters to me and because I can do it. I can make that commitment for whatever reason I had to trust that everybody was committing to as much as they could within those parameters. I think that just fits in for me because I feel like it is a really hard balance. I don’t know what the answer is at all, and my goal in experiencing this was to only think about myself, in the context, and to make those decisions to do the very best that I could and commit as much as I could to it from the beginning.

This is also a community. How are we supporting each other and we’re all coming from different schedules, different means, different places to be, cars, not cars—how do we support each other? Those are realities too that came up.

I have to go, which is another hard reality. I have to leave, and I really don’t want to go. This is really important.

No, I understand. It’s 9:40.

Well we can stop here. I think it’s fine to stop before we’re exhausted. Though if people want to continue the conversation that’s fine too. But I think, for my own brain and needs, it’s been really productive.

Lauren, are you still there?

I’m here.

Can you see, Kristianne?

So I think what would be really nice, actually, is to throw out a few follow-up questions via email.

In terms of moving forward, and moving forward with your voices and thoughts, I would love to have your continued thoughts on what it means to expand this project. I am not interested in anything that diminishes the quality of the experiences we had… And, so for that reason, I feel like this doing of the school again is a very sensitive thing and it’s important it’s done in the right way. I think the right way will find itself, like the way we found this. This did not know that it was going to be this, so I think that Houston will also become what it needs to be. But there are extra challenges of its remoteness. Please keep throwing out thoughts and I’ll put out an email to see if people want to get together again and or add to the dialogue digitally, remotely, snail mail, and all that stuff. Lauren, any last thoughts?

No, it’s good to see everybody!

So nice to see you Lauren, thank you for chiming in! Have a great…Enjoy Fresno!

Yeah, I’ll be back this week, so I’ll see you guys in person.

And then the question as to us meeting, there’s more to discuss. We’ll just say that. I guess this is a dot dot dot, and to be continued.

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LACE presents The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People, a large-scale installation and performance platform by Los Angeles based artist taisha paggett. This project, which takes the form of a dance school, is shaped by the question, “what is a Black dance curriculum today?” The installation itself, developed in collaboration with artists Ashley Hunt and Kim Zumpfe, serves as a temporary dance school, performance space and home for dance company, WXPT (We are the Paper, We are the Trees).

The core of The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People is WXPT itself — a temporary, experimental community of queer people of color and allies, dancers and non-dancers alike. WXPT was conceived by paggett in early 2015 to expand upon the language and methods of modern and contemporary dance practices, to shift the ways dancers of color are positioned within the contemporary field, and to explore questions of queer desire, responsibility, migration and historical materials that inhabit our cultural imagination. The company consists of Joy Angela Anderson, Heyward Bracey, Rebecca Bruno, Alfonso Cervera, Erin Christovale, Loren Fenton, Maria Garcia, Kloii “Hummingbird” Hollis, Jas Michelle, Meena Murugesan, taisha paggett, Sebastian Peters-Lazaro, Kristianne Salcines, Ché Ture, Devika Wickremesinghe and Suné Woods.

In May of 2015, paggett organized evereachmore, WXPT’s premiere performance created for the Bowtie Project, a partnership between Clockshop and California State Parks to activate an 18-acre post-industrial lot along the LA River. Amidst the recent unfolding of state violence against Black bodies, evereachmore sought to forge new economies of resistance, and new sensations of time, space and togetherness.

Inspired in part by a “school for colored youth” that members of paggett’s family founded in early 20th century East Texas, The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People extends the praxis of WXPT into a curriculum and pedagogy. The installation at LACE takes up the form of a school as an artistic and social problem, building the school’s curriculum and infrastructure through physical and social sculpture, performance and image, where the roles of artist and viewer, dancing and non-dancing body, art and learning coalesce.

The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People will offer a program of workshops, weekly classes and micro-performances initiated by members of WXPT. The curriculum will be open to anyone, blurring lines between audience and participant, while especially encouraging queer people of color to join. Across the bodies of the company and the members of the public who join the school, the curriculum will build an accumulative performance score in weekly increments, culminating in the performance of a “collective movement choir” at the conclusion of the exhibition.

Back in November we went to see Jérôme Bel’s Ballet (New York) commissioned by Performa at three different venues: Marian Goodman Gallery, Martha Graham Studio Theater, and El Museo del Barrio. After each performance we’d grab dinner (at least four burgers were consumed in the process) and discuss our thoughts. When we got home and it came to writing the piece, we had to isolate ourselves in separate rooms and communicate by Skype because in person we were too easily excited and our conversations got too tangential and unwieldy. So here is what made it into the slightly distanced (but hopefully more cohesive) version of our conversation.

– Davide Balula and Julia Trotta

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Julia Trotta: So let’s just try to describe the piece first.

Davide Balula: Ok.

JT: Ha! In some ways it’s so simple, it’s hard to describe but I think it’s important to establish the structure before starting to analyze the piece

DB: Yes, it’s all very linear. Very narrative. One thing happening at a time.

It’s like in a book that has different chapters. It’s kind of a history of dance that becomes less and less rigorous as it unfolds.

JT: Well that’s already analyzing. I guess my thought was that we introduce the structure: 5 acts, 13 dancers, 3 venues. The acts: Ballet, Waltz, 5 minute group improvisation in silence, Michael Jackson (the Moonwalk) and a Bow. The dancers: A motley crew. From a ballerina to a 10-year-old boy, to a girl with Down’s Syndrome, to a pair of brothers who look more like wrestlers than dancers, to a girl in a motorized wheel chair… The venues: A commercial art gallery, a legendary downtown dance studio, a proscenium stage.

DB: I wanted to describe my impressions when I arrived at the first venue and discovered the piece.

JT: OK, that’s great. So the first venue was Marian Goodman…

DB: The venue was left as is with a show of photographs by Jeff Wall where characters are almost in life size.

JT: Right, big portraits that almost became part of the audience.

DB: The seating was simple. Chairs and pillows on the floor. No stage rising. People had to seat next to each other, touching shoulders and faces/expressions visible under the same normal fluorescent light for everybody

JT: It was intimate.

DB: The piece even starts without people noticing. Someone comes out and turns to the first page of a simple sign that reads, “Ballet.” Silence.

JT: Well then Chopin starts playing and the cast starts coming out one-by-one.

Jérôme Bel, Ballet (New York), 2015. A Performa Commission. Photo by Paula Court, courtesy of Performa

DB: Besides the two ballet dancers in uniform, each character tries his/her loose version of a pirouette, walks to the other side of the gallery and waits there in plain sight. When the last dancer is done, they cross the gallery again one after the other with a clumsy and amusing “grand jeté.” End of act one.

JT: Right, the different ages and body types and ability levels. All wearing their own costumes. It was very watch-able.

DB: Entertaining, yes.

JT: Awkward but uplifting. And then the second act was the Waltz.

DB: This time, in the exact same way, they come in pairs and it becomes about the couples, the odd pairings: tall and short, awkward and elegant etc.

JT: Some same-sex pairs.

DB: I think we can also describe the case of the wheelchair which was also an other moment.

JT:  Yes, for the girl in the motorized wheelchair the Waltz presented a kind of “problem.” But her partner just got up on the front of her scooter and they twirled around the room.

DB: With some sort of grace I felt.

JT: Yes and seriousness. I remember her face being very concentrated.

DB: Then they all go back again backstage until one more page is turned.

JT: And the next act was the 5-minute improvisation with the whole cast which I thought was kind of the crescendo of the piece.

DB: Yes. Dancing in silence. Didn’t seem to have any direction and occupied the whole space. All very loose, informal, amateur…

JT: Yes, they were making their own decisions and there was no reference to a specific kind of dance.

DB: The improv part was really the moment where everybody could be “homogenized”, and they were in some way, but also that was when quality and creativity differentiated people more than their body type and ability, I thought. The antithesis of Ballet where criteria is based on perfect execution, neck size or weight/size ratio.

JT: And then the next section was “Michael Jackson.”

DB: Yes, which pushed the new style into POPular moves that everyone knows.

JT: So it went back to individuals moving across the room, one at a time, each doing a version of the moonwalk to Jackson’s Billie Jean.

DB: “Says I am the one who will dance on the floor in the rouhound” (music)

JT: Haha, exactly! I think I remember you saying it was kind of like Soul Train. People in the audience were really getting into it at that point. Everyone smiling, tapping their feet. It kind of felt like we were all parents at an elementary school recital.

DB: The music seemed louder after those 5 minutes of silence. It also brought the piece in a very entertaining place. At that moment. Very lose. Very casual. Very friendly. It was a very light and happy moment. It almost felt like the piece ended here.

JT: Well it kind of did. The last act was the bow.

DB: Once again. One after the other. “De-introducing” themselves.

JT: Well, yes. But I saw it more as a moment of recognition for each of them.

DB: Yeah, they all received their own moment of applause. Just for them.

JT: But it was structured the same way as every other section. A new page on the board, each one making their way across the room, one at a time. So it was framed in more performative way than how we usually think of bows, as the moment where the performance stops and we recognize the person behind the performance.

DB: It was another way to compare each individual.

JT: Yes, even their bows were revealing. There was one really awkward guy with glasses whose bow was just as awkward as I imagined it would be.

DB: It’s true, it did have a very personal character.

JT: And the ballerina in pointe shoes and a tutu was formal and over-the-top for the setting, but it made sense for her.

DB: And at that point we almost got attached to each person. Almost knowing a bit of their history…

JT: So what did you think of the piece? And by that I mean what did you think of the first version of the piece at Marian Goodman?

DB: That is a question that is funny to ask right after you see a show. And we have seen 3 versions of it now and it was long time ago so I’m sure my opinion has changed at this point.

JT: Well, yes but I guess I’m wondering if you can recall your first impressions, if you can remember what it felt like to know the piece just as this isolated version at Marian Goodman?

DB: My first impressions were very positive.

JT: Yeah, I mean we went and had a burger after the show and we had a lot to say at that point. We were pretty energized.

DB: It approached the idea of judgement in a way that was light and friendly and accepting, which I found stimulating. Especially because I don’t see such diversity very often in the arts. Either because I don’t necessarily look for it, or because it is not very often presented to me. So opening that type of conversation was a very powerful thing I thought.

JT: Yeah, I mean I remember us talking about about beauty. That variety is interesting, and what is interesting is oftentimes very beautiful. Perfection is shoved down our throats and can be so boring. Movie stars, fashion ads…

DB: And not only about abilities but simply about norms, criteria and expectations.

JT: Exactly

DB: Yes beauty is central here. How we define it or more precisely how it is defined FOR us.

JT: Like the girl with a limp did a pirouette and it was just as interesting as the ballerina in this setting, maybe more so.

DB: I am not a dance expert but I really appreciate a clinical execution and perfect synchronicity of a ballet movement with the music.

JT: Of course, me too.

DB: So it was interesting to see that criteria here was shifted.

JT: And the ballerina needed to be there as a reference to the “right” way.

DB: The piece is called BALLET and of course you come in with a certain idea of what that means, but your expectations got adjusted right from the first minute of the piece.

JT: But I think I was still was skeptical after the first performance. Like the piece was too easy or manipulative on some level.

DB: Yes it is kind of an uncomfortable comedy show.

JT: The second time we saw the piece it was at Martha Graham Studio Theater at Westbeth, which was formally Merce Cunningham’s studio. The structure of the piece and the cast were exactly the same.

DB: That time the venue was a proper dance context. Historic. It was in full daylight, sun rays entering the room, beautiful windows open to the city…

JT: The setting was a bit more comfortable.

DB: It was more appropriate, with a proper dance floor which effected the movement.

JT: And there was stadium seating, chairs. But it still was not a full theater. There was no backstage.

Jérôme Bel, Ballet (New York), 2015. A Performa Commission. Photo by Paula Court, courtesy of Performa

DB: I remember we were seating higher up. Not on the same floor level as the first time, higher than the dancers. The sound was louder, the sound engineer was almost on the stage and visible.

JT: And as it was the second time seeing the piece so I think we were more critical. We kind of knew the cast already and knew what to expect.

DB: I guess it got me more aware of the differences in the “set design.”

JT: Yes. That was always a question. Why do the piece in three different venues? Of course that made us hyperaware of the setting. But I think I remember you thinking that it was less successful there.

DB: The dancers felt tense to me this time. Maybe because I felt them further away? Also the day before there was this crazy attack in Paris.

JT: Well yeah, I remember feeling a lot more emotional and I think it did have to do with how devastated we were that weekend. The attacks, fear, paranoia…

DB: Yes it was very shocking, especially the target being the Bataclan which is a cultural venue. A place I knew intimately and even had performed there a couple times.

JT: And this piece being about different types of people coming together, celebrating difference. It felt kind of therapeutic to see at that moment.

DB: But I guess seeing the piece for the second time removed all effect of surprise, and maybe increased my expectations.

JT: Yeah, I agree with that. There is a little less magic when you know what’s going to happen. But I actually thought the improv was incredible at Westbeth.

DB: It’s true. It was. It was very communal. Warm.

JT: They cast seemed a lot more comfortable with each other and the movements were more fluid.

DB: People playing with the natural light beams, people interacting with the architecture more, standing on the edge of the windows etc… and really touching each other more, circling and caressing one another. It really seemed to me that the cast was more intimate at this point. You could tell they knew each other better. You could see they had developed affection for one another.

JT: They seemed more confident.

DB: I must say that seeing it for the second time made me less receptive to the “comic” moments in the piece. They felt less amusing to me, maybe too self conscious. Like when the young kid gets lifted up during the waltz, or highlighting by a funny movement a particular moment in the music etc. It felt less authentic. And I remember telling you this right after we saw Will Rawls perform a couple days after.

JT: Yeah, you said that seeing Will’s piece (also referencing different categories of dance) made you think about Bel’s piece more in terms of its relationship to entertainment. And we discussed how Bel’s Ballet was structured like a reality show competition or a beauty pageant with different categories, but that it took out the hierarchy and the idea of “the best,” which those things are always about.

DB: Will’s piece was so tense and difficult for the audience. A very different type of discomfort. It was more demanding in some ways. Whereas like you say, the beauty pageant format was already something you didn’t have to question much. It’s a conventional format that people know well.The effects can then become more orchestrated and the reaction of the audience more predictable.

JT: Right, it’s a formula.

DB: It’s true that seeing the Jerome Bel’s piece through a prism set by Rawls, I started to analyze all the mechanisms as very calculated. But some of the “formulaic” gestures were probably just repeated by the dancers because they felt the audience would react a certain way… Maybe somehow, the performers were trying to seduce the audience or something.

JT: And it’s also unclear how much direction they were given by Bel.

DB: Yes that’s true. You couldn’t tell who was making the decisions. But you could feel the dancers slowly looking for more clapping.

JT: And that was amplified in the last performance.

DB: Maybe the amateurs were becoming more professional ?

JT: Getting used to each other and the piece.

DB: Yes, exactly. The scale of the venue increased drastically for the last version.

JT: Well you almost missed it! But it started with a slide show that wasn’t presented in the other two venues.

DB: True. Luckily they held the door right before and I snuck in at the very last second! I had to sit in the last row of the Mezzanine, which was pretty interesting actually.

JT: Well I was downstairs in the orchestra.

DB: The “slide show” was presenting images of a lot of different venues. You were seating in a theater and made to look at other theaters.

JT: It was lots of different performance spaces, exhaustive in terms of what that could mean. From opulent theaters, to plastic chairs in a back yard, to a weird stage in a mall… Not sure it resonated in the same way for people who hadn’t seen the other two versions at Goodman and Westbeth, and most in the audience hadn’t.

DB: Indeed. They probably questioned why he was showing those images which seemed to have nothing to do with what followed.

JT: But regardless I think it made everyone in the audience conscious of the setting. Which was a large proscenium theater with a big, red curtain and lots of velvet seats.

Jérôme Bel, Ballet (New York), 2015. A Performa Commission. Photo by Paula Court, courtesy of Performa

DB: In that type of theater you seat in the dark. You can’t really see the person next to you. The performers have some powerful light on their face and they can’t see the face of the audience either.

JT: That’s true, it’s a very different experience for both performer and viewer. But after having seen the piece in the other two smaller venues, I felt like a proud parent when I got to the last space. Like, “they made it!”

DB: Haha!

JT: It felt the most “successful” in some ways just because of the scale and the drama of the setting. And the number of people in the audience.

DB: Yeah it was more professional. Even between the acts the dancers were hidden behind the side curtains this time, no longer visible, not waiting for one an other as they were before. Or at least you couldn’t witness that fact that they were all watching and reacting to each other as in the previous venues. You couldn’t see all the hiccups of missed departures etc.

JT: Right, in the other venues there was no off stage. The whole ensemble was basically visible at all times. Here it was more formal. But once it started I got uncomfortable. Or nervous.

DB: And this time it was de-humanized in some ways. I remember that the improv was signaled by a voice before, and for this one, the signal was just a light flashing for the beginning and the end of the five minutes. You could definitely feel that pageant scale being blown up. You felt more glitter.

JT: Right. What was so nice about the piece in the other, smaller venues was that the pageant format didn’t hold up in some ways because it wasn’t about the best or the most beautiful. The ballerina wasn’t any more interesting than the old man. But in the big theater things started to change.

DB: Even their hand-picked outfits looked different, more conscious on stage.

JT: Yeah and people in the audience started to clap for their favorites, which made me really upset.

DB: Haha yes that’s true that was very awkward.

JT: It provoked competitiveness. Everyone tried to be more spectacular to get claps. So in some sense I feel like the last version, however sensational, was a failure.

DB: I wonder if people felt that as well or only those who had seen the previous ones? The fact that performers were thirsty for recognition somehow.

JT: I’m sure only those who saw the other versions (probably about 5 of us) felt that way. And during the bows there was a woman in front of me that didn’t clap at all which made me furious.

DB: That’s funny.

JT: And it would have never happened in one of the other venues.

DB: Because here she was in the dark ?

JT: Yes, that’s probably part of it.

DB: She would feel judged not clapping when others were showing so much enthusiasm.

JT: And I actually thought the performances in the last version were not as strong. You could feel their nerves. They were more self-aware.

DB: Most of them were probably performing in a big theater for the first time? You could really see the ones who were comfortable though. Like the woman in the black and white unitard. She was clearly trained in contemporary dance.

JT: Yeah I mean when we saw the piece for the first time at the gallery I said that I could picture myself participating. Doing the moves with them. The last time we saw the piece participating would have been my worst nightmare.

DB: Your dance moves are pretty impressive, though I must say, I don’t think I’ve seen you do the moon walk.

JT: The best conditions don’t necessarily make for the best setting for this piece. Just like the most technical dancer doesn’t necessarily make for the best performer for this piece. So to me it just confirms success and perfection as being challenged, as over celebrated. Does that make sense? I can rephrase.

DB: It felt important to be able to relate indeed, and it helped a lot to be at the same level as the performers. A more casual setting definitely seemed more accepting. I wonder if you become more critical as a work becomes more “successful” or if it just tells a different story.

JT: I think that is absolutely true. Higher stakes. Well in the Performa description it said, “Jérôme Bel takes a group of trained and untrained performers from New York on a bold adventure across the city to consider how each environment—dance studio, white cube, and theater—frames the ways we look at and ‘feel’ dance.”. So I guess he was conscious of the successes and failures of each venue.

DB: I wonder if Bel would try to produce an intentional failure?

JT: Well it wasn’t a disaster.

DB: Not at all. It seemed people left very happy. But I remember feeling a little disappointed. Not that it was less interesting of an experience. I was just much more critical, more judgmental of his intentions etc.

JT: I’m not sure if it’s as complex as we’re making it. Maybe we’re just looking very closely. It’s a tolerant piece… you can do it in a backyard or in a big venue.

DB: I liked that about it. In fact that is what I liked the most.

JT: In the end I was thinking that if I saw it on America Has Talent I would think it was exploitive, so is it exploitive?

DB: You could probably watch it on MTV.

JT: Right, but I think we’d be kind of disgusted by it if we saw it on MTV

Or maybe not, I don’t know.

Jérôme Bel

Ballet (New York)

Run time: Approx 30mins

Marian Goodman Gallery

November 7, 2015

Martha Graham Studio Theater

November 15, 2015

El Museo del Barrio

November 19, 2015

Dancers

Hashiel Castro

Hector Castro

Alex Clayton

Moriah Evans

Madison Ferris

Frog

Casey Furry

Anne Gridley

Charles Krezell

Megan LeCrone

Shelton Lindsay aka Professor Cupcake

Etienne Servaes

Chai Smith

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Davide Balula is an artist living between NY and Paris. His practice investigates chance encounters, random patterns, and the materiality of time. Although he works within various media, including sound, installation and painting, his art can take the form of recording devices, unusual measuring tools, and scientific experiments. He regularly collaborates with chefs, dancers, and musicians on performances and improvisation concerts.

Julia Trotta is based in New York. She advises private collections, writes and makes films on art. She is currently in production on a documentary about her grandmother, art historian Linda Nochlin.

Critical Correspondence invites founder of WXPT (We are the Paper, We are the Trees), taisha paggett, to discuss their most recent project, The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People, a large scale installation and performance platform presented by Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) during late October – early December, 2015. As a prologue to WXPT’s two-part conversation, to be published in our March edition of CC, paggett offers a letter written to her collaborators and fellow participants just weeks before their extensive project filled with classes, workshops, talks, events, and performances. Included HERE is an audio radio feature on The School which specifically features the final performance, titled Meadow. These written and audio pieces provide anchors and counterpoints for WXPT’s broader concerns, projects, and discussions.

LISTEN HERE

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LACE presents The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People, a large-scale installation and performance platform by Los Angeles based artist taisha paggett. This project, which takes the form of a dance school, is shaped by the question, “what is a Black dance curriculum today?” The installation itself, developed in collaboration with artists Ashley Hunt and Kim Zumpfe, serves as a temporary dance school, performance space and home for dance company, WXPT (We are the Paper, We are the Trees).

The core of The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People is WXPT itself — a temporary, experimental community of queer people of color and allies, dancers and non-dancers alike. WXPT was conceived by paggett in early 2015 to expand upon the language and methods of modern and contemporary dance practices, to shift the ways dancers of color are positioned within the contemporary field, and to explore questions of queer desire, responsibility, migration and historical materials that inhabit our cultural imagination. The company consists of Joy Angela Anderson, Heyward Bracey, Rebecca Bruno, Alfonso Cervera, Erin Christovale, Loren Fenton, Maria Garcia, Kloii “Hummingbird” Hollis, Jas Michelle, Meena Murugesan, taisha paggett, Sebastian Peters-Lazaro, Kristianne Salcines, Ché Ture, Devika Wickremesinghe and Suné Woods.

In May of 2015, paggett organized evereachmore, WXPT’s premiere performance created for the Bowtie Project, a partnership between Clockshop and California State Parks to activate an 18-acre post-industrial lot along the LA River. Amidst the recent unfolding of state violence against Black bodies, evereachmore sought to forge new economies of resistance, and new sensations of time, space and togetherness.

Inspired in part by a “school for colored youth” that members of paggett’s family founded in early 20th century East Texas, The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People extends the praxis of WXPT into a curriculum and pedagogy. The installation at LACE takes up the form of a school as an artistic and social problem, building the school’s curriculum and infrastructure through physical and social sculpture, performance and image, where the roles of artist and viewer, dancing and non-dancing body, art and learning coalesce.

The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People will offer a program of workshops, weekly classes and micro-performances initiated by members of WXPT. The curriculum will be open to anyone, blurring lines between audience and participant, while especially encouraging queer people of color to join. Across the bodies of the company and the members of the public who join the school, the curriculum will build an accumulative performance score in weekly increments, culminating in the performance of a “collective movement choir” at the conclusion of the exhibition.