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Jennifer Lacey and DD Dorvillier discuss joyful work, physical memory, eurhythmy, and DD’s process of making human future dance corps Danza Permanente, opening on September 15 at The Kitchen, co-presented with the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF)’s Crossing the Line 2012.

Photo: Thomas Dunn

Jennifer Lacey: Could you explain a little bit the system you use to make Danza Permanente?

DD Dorvillier: It’s the score of a string quartet, Opus 132 in A minor by Beethoven. It has five movements, and a long, slow adagio in the center of piece. Each movement we made differently; basic strategies had to do with reducing the melodic and rhythmic content to a series of themes or generic phrases. Some of it is so self-evident- there is a melody, which repeats in variations through the whole 1^st movement, in a different key or something, so we reduced it to a theme.

There would be a phrase of dance that would go along with that theme, note-by-note to try to embody that theme. And of course its totally subjective, the way that we made choices about the shapes of the movements and the way they were organized in space had to do with reading the music, hearing it played, our own references, what it made you feel like, how it made you feel like moving… Sometimes it was based on how the notes were moving: low to high, rhythm unfolding or something was in unison. Each of the different movements we found different strategies to translate.

Score used by DD/human future dance corps during the creation of the work

Jennifer: You have this tone of official-ness when you talk about it, like it’s a NASA science project. But there’s a lot of subjectivity present, the work relies on it, and is strengthened by it. Did you pretend you all needed to agree on a method or was there immediately a respect for the obscurity of individual interpretations?

DD: We agreed on ‘that’s the theme, the theme looks like this,’ but sometimes people had to do certain interpretations, so some people solved that first note by stepping to the left and some solved it by bending a knee, but that was a bit of a problem so everyone started stepping on the left, and that became the way to do it. There were some places where people solved those kinds of problems in different ways and we decided that, ‘Okay, that’s inherent to that instrument, Walter resolves like that, so that means that’s the cello.’

Jennifer: So they were responsible for an internal consistency, for their own instrument in the dance?

DD: Yeah, exactly.

Jennifer: When you were first making the material, there wasn’t just the relationship to the theme in the music but a relationship to words and to concepts and you were making vocabulary that was symbolic- making symbolic movement.

DD: The first four notes, first eight measures are a series of four notes that are kind of played back and forth between four instruments. They progress from low note to high note and vice versa. We listened to it as just four notes in a row; it had a kind of meaning or a kind of “feelingness” to it.

When we were in Seattle, we listened to the loop over and over, and we moved with the eyes closed, videotaping each other for 20-minute sessions. Many things happened. Knowing that we were trying to find something consistent so that we could make the patterns in the music visible and finally in that whole work it seemed like it was about a whole life, about evolution or a cycle or this kind of underpinning of life.

Then in the musical analysis of the string quartet with Zeena [Parkins], there was a lot of language about these 4 notes as the base of the 1^st movement; they function as this renaissance motet, they gave substance to the thing.

Jennifer: There are so many steps and it’s so structured, given the structure was in a way, a readymade.  Sometimes you were churning out steps in front of people and you were looking at people’s variations and deciding if that anomaly or if that mistake or difference was actually integrate-able or not, watching over a landscape and deciding whether to leave that tree growing or not- sort of a gardener’s capacity. I was wondering if you have anything to say about your experience of being a choreographer, or of choreography is in the making of this piece?

DD: It was really like being a gardener, that’s a nice image. It’s funny because it definitely is choreography, and I definitely made up a lot of it, and others made up a lot of the steps as well.  Gesture is not only in the sign but also in the organization of the body somehow, the organization of the body creates a rhythm just by bending or straightening, stepping onto a straight leg or going from a plie to a straight leg.

Jennifer: These are things that we know, but this process made it fresh, interesting, impertinent somehow… there are times when I wonder about the relationship of the making time to the performance time and then the appreciation time, the way it lasts in me as a receiver, but I didn’t have any questions about this piece. I was like, “That work was totally worth it!”

Photo: Thomas Dunn

DD: Sometimes our work is kind of what the piece is about, in a big way, and I think more than this piece being about choreography is really about the dancers: if you can trace a story in their performing and relationships. It’s about dancing and being an interpreter.

Jennifer: That’s why choreography is necessary; that’s the subject of their activity, the choreography. Accomplished dancers doing complicated choreography. That’s what it should be all the time, but I felt that this piece was particularly satisfying as a viewer. The choreography was well made, but the satisfying-ness of it was in the engagement, in the discussion of what they were doing while they were doing it and at the same time the difficulty; it didn’t look like they were struggling at all, but I could appreciate that they were working. And working with pleasure, working with a different sense of work. That is also quite interesting, this concept of joyous work.

DD: I think that’s the key. Sometimes I’ll wonder “did I make this piece just to see people work?” That’s not why I made the piece, and what I enjoy is not even the prowess of their memory, in the movement itself there isn’t much virtuosity, so what we’re left with is the excellence of their concentration and their joy as you say, the joy that comes from them.

Jennifer: It’s not joy like greeting card joy, there’s a certain kind of vivacity and aliveness to it. That’s why we’re here watching live performance!

DD: What’s interesting is that if you really listen and you have a good memory. You can hum the tune of the string quartet; you can hum one of the themes. I can now dance a theme, but that’s because I made it up and I know it.

Jennifer: Is that linked with an internal hearing for you? When you do the movement do you hear the theme?

DD: I hum the music just before so I can remember what it is. I tried really hard to make a distinction between physical memory and mental-physical memory because what I learned was to dance to memorize it so fully that there was no more “thinking” necessary, but here they have to be thinking all the time. There’s a physical memory that they have.

There are certain places where they have momentum, when they allow the momentum to take over and they have a natural counting rhythm, but in this case momentum is the most difficult thing for them to do, because if they go too much into momentum they lose the others. So, they either have to go all together in the momentum and know it or they have to keep counting.

It happens in different ways.  On a really good day the very opening is like butter; they’re just completely together. But I’ve also seen it when they’re just a little bit off, and its just totally different, so its just a minor way of connecting with the momentum of the whole group that kind of throws the whole thing off. “Are we going together or are we counting?” And they have to be able to do both.

Jennifer: Did Zeena talk about her experience as a musician? Is that how musicians play together?

DD: She didn’t use the language that I just used, but she has said, “When a musician sees this kind of 30-second note sequence, they don’t think about it as a dot for every note, they might think about it as exactly movement with a momentum.”

Jennifer: Movement through the notes, but they still have to keep time with the orchestra.

DD: But there are places where she was like, “they wouldn’t play it as if it was a series of notes, they are playing movement.” When we were first working, we were trying to do this truncated series of notes, and she was like ‘this is actually more like movement.’

Jennifer: I was privy to several skype meetings of you guys puzzling out the score, which was incredible because you have some musical training, but especially Zeena going at it as a musicologist. I found it interesting that there was this real scientific, mathematical integrity to your discussion, and then moments where it was like, ‘ugh, put it in the green pile!’

DD: We were trying to bring the music and the dance together, so she would come at it from the musical point of view and I would come at it from the practical problems of the dance.

Jennifer: Like, ‘we’re on the wrong side of the stage.’

DD: Zeena also has a dance background, so she would be like ‘can’t you do that with the arms instead?’

Jennifer: Why make music visible?

DD: I’m challenging myself now with this concept of making music visible because it’s with a wink and a nod. Making music visible is kind of a utopic promise.

Photo: Thomas Dunn

Jennifer: I understand you’re tongue-in-cheek about it because it also seems to be impossible unless you have synesthesia. In a way it’s pointless because we don’t see the music.

DD: That’s why I feel it’s kind of false advertising, but it’s an interesting language to use. I say ‘utopic’ because if I’m saying that we can make the music visible that means there’s no difference between music and dance, but in fact it’s the difference between music and dance that makes life so interesting.

Jennifer: I would say that maybe the disillusion of those differences in the piece is sort of a fantasy about the end of life or what happens when we die, rather than a utopic vision.

DD: It’s painful because if you can see what is heard then does that mean that you don’t really need to listen anymore? Or if you can hear the dance, then does that means that you no longer need to see it?

Jennifer: You do have a tendency, as I do, of these unwieldy blocky concepts that exist in the world and that influence people and ourselves, and you tend to go at them (as I do) as a screen for activity. But I feel like you are a much harder worker, you actually tried to do the thing that’s impossible.

DD: This work is about work. I don’t think I have a work ethic or something, but I think probably one of my modes of expression is obsessive-ness, and I’m very attracted to work that’s obsessive or extremely detailed. I’m actually really interested not in detail to produce beauty, but in detail for the sake of detail itself, which can be boring and dangerous. When you engage with that with other people it’s like you’re making a tapestry together. You need to put all that energy into all the details that go into just preparing the threads, and then you have that loom; everything has to be scheduled and negotiated…

Jennifer: It makes sense, and it’s also a bit old fashioned.

DD: Sometimes it takes itself too seriously.

Jennifer: I would say that it’s old-timey.

DD: It’s old timey… The references people made were ‘oh, its really baroque.’ It could verge on the territory of craft, which I’m not against, but the work isn’t really that.

Jennifer: What did you think of the Steiner eurhythmy videos? One was about using eurhythmy in education and one was a Beethoven piece performed by a San Francisco eurhythmy group:

DD: They’re both pretty great. In their effort and their sweetness and tenderness. The Waldorf proposition is kind of utopic, when I think about it as translation, when I kept watching them going through the different grades. I’ve used eurhythmy a lot; I’ve been very influenced by it.

In CPAU, Amanda had gone to a Steiner school and I had done a little bit of eurhythmy in Puerto Rico… and we watched a ton, so we kind of invented our own eurhythmy alphabet. As I listen to the woman on the Waldorf video, I actually thought there was something quite sincere about giving students opportunities to engage with ambiguous relationships with signification, with gesture producing meaning.

Jennifer: Yes, it does do something about the experience of oneself in relationship to a group.

DD: But, when I was also watching the aesthetic, I was like, ‘ugh, why do I always have to see this idea connected to this aesthetic?’ It’s overbearing.

Jennifer: It’s completely overbearing. We’re dealing with a tradition that is pretty anchored. It’s seductive and completely disturbing. A lot of language around Steiner is constant justification.

DD: I do think that Danza Permanente would be a nice offering to students at the Waldorf School.

Jennifer: Steiner himself said that eurhythmy was not dance, that it was making music visible and making language visible.

DD: That’s really funny! This is definitely dance…it will always be dance.

Jennifer: When you’re talking about utopian concepts it’s important that there’s a time of belief and investment. You’re not creating a system for the ages; you’re creating a system for this piece. The things you learn may carry onto the next piece or not, but it’s not about creating a language that will continue to develop and influence people and be functional beyond the making of the piece.

DD: Exactly.

Jennifer: At the same time, there’s a serious investment in that language in that moment, and I think that that’s an interesting quality, maybe, of our generation. Because we grew up in the cradle of modernism with these techniques that were meant to last longer than the body of their creator, and longer than the specific work that was being made; they were meant to support the work.

And then we got into the mishmash of the 80s and 90s where people needed to maintain a company because they had a certain vocabulary that had to be delivered in a correct and nuanced manner. And now we’re not doing that but I do notice that we really like to dig in there and be like, ‘this is how we’re behaving for this amount of time, and we’re really going to do it…’ But it’s disposable.

DD: I don’t know if it’s disposable, you can certainly reuse it.

Jennifer: It’s subject to entropy, and we know it.

DD: It’s mutable. The next piece I’m doing I really want to get my calves in shape because we’re going to be hopping a lot, but it turns out I hop a lot in all my pieces. So there are certain things that help when the others can do them.

Jennifer: That comes up in your work; that is for sure. I look at those dancers and I see stuff that we did 15 years ago.

DD: You said it very well; we’re not making techniques that are meant to outlast our bodies or the body of the work.

Jennifer: There is something that persists. Wally [Cardona] and I wanted to get rid of all of that stuff and it wouldn’t go away, so we just called it the ‘Wally-ness’ or the ‘Jennifer-ness.’ There is the hopping and there are certain gestures that I completely recognize as coming out of your body. Whether or not you have invested energy in developing technique, people reproduce forms all the time. They are vibrant and more necessary because they keep coming up rather than remaining as a result of preservation.

Photo: Thomas Dunn

Ana Isabel Keilson’s introduction: In 2010 I began my PhD in the History department at Columbia University, focusing on intellectual history and performance during Weimar Germany. While researching in Berlin, I met An Paenhuysen, a former visiting scholar at Columbia, who had just curated “Pause. Valeska Gert: Bewegte Fragmente” at the Hamburger Banhof with Wolfgang Müller. In addition to co-curating the exhibition, Müller published Valeska Gert: Ästhetik der Präsenzen (2010), which includes a reprint of Gert’s memoir, Mein Weg (1931). I was eager to talk with them about this important yet relatively obscure artist.

Interview date: July 14, 2011

Flier for “Pause. Valeska Gert: Bewegte Fragmente” at the Hamburger Banhof, Berlin 2010

Ana Isabel Keilson: Today is the 14th of July 2011. Can you both introduce yourselves? Say how you met and then we can just kind of go from there.

An Paenhuysen: My name is An Paenhuysen. I’m from Belgium. I’ve been living in Berlin for a while now. I’m a curator and historian. I met Wolfgang his show, Séance Vocibus Avium. Then we curated the show of Valeska Gert together, and now we’re working on a new project.

Wolfgang Müller : Yes. We fell in love. (All laugh).

An: Love at first sight.

Wolfgang: Mental love. Sounds horrible!

Ana: Why Wolfgang?

(They are interrupted by a phone call)

Ana: [Wolfgang] You can introduce yourself too.

Wolfgang: I grew up in a small village in Wolfsburg in this city where you don’t get an identity by birth, or some kind of no-identity. I saw it after awhile as a chance to look at where something like identity, or personality is built on. [To see] what is there, and what you can create. This is a theme I was always interested in: cognition. When I was kicked out of school, I moved to Berlin, and then to West Berlin, which was a very nice place.

Ana: When was this?

Wolfgang: 1979. West Berlin was a very interesting place because a wall surrounded it, and it was only reachable from West Germany. You had to cross East Germany, the Communist part of the country. In West Berlin, you had a half-city with coal heating, toilet outside upstairs. It was really not so modern. But this means that you could live very cheap. And you didn’t have to go to the army if you went to West Berlin.

This was a very good area to create something where you didn’t have to think of how you can make a profit out of it. Just create an idea, a concept. When you’re 20, you’re not a professor. You’re not somebody who is in an institution who has ten years time for making a research towards a master or post, or something like that. Time is money in that way. Here was a kind of free space because money was not so important. This is changing now.

An: Yeah. But it still has this a little bit, no? People are always at the cafes. People seem to have more time here, or are taking more time. Not this work pressure. In Belgium you have to make a career, and it goes very fast.

Ana: Same in New York. There’s a lot of pressure. So then I’m curious. What do you perceive as things that happened as a result of that? In the seventies, moving into the 80’s–and maybe trying to bring Veleska Gert into this–did you feel like there was an awareness among the people here that this was a special place to be?

Wolfgang: Don’t forget that she was an outsider. She came back after the war, and had a little flat in West Berlin. I have a magazine from ’66, a video I can show you, where hippies, freaks and Gert are part of it. She was really part of a subculture. There were a lot of gay people there, like Herbert Tobias, a photographer who photographed Nico, and also Gert. He was together with her.

Gert performing in slient film circa 1920, image from: http://raddestrightnow.blogspot.com/

There were a lot of outsiders in West Berlin. West Berlin was till the end of the wall, attracting just these people from all over the world. There were Americans, people who can’t stand America for some reason, they moved to West Berlin. Also Italians and French people and English people from everywhere. The art business wasn’t interesting. The galleries and so on were very conservative, but the atmosphere was very open-minded. The city, the general life was open.

An: But in the case of Valeska Gert. It’s not just about the outsider or about recovering strange people and freaks.

Ana: People know about Mary Wigman who very much is able to fit into those categories, and people don’t know about Gert. There is any number of artists, things that happen, events that take place. People don’t hear about it because they’re very particular or they happen in a specific place with a specific group of people, and it can’t get broadcast in the same way.

As a historian, my interest in some ways is not saying, for example, “these people are deaf. Let’s fetishize them. Or, aren’t they crazy and weird?” But it’s that they have a certain kind of knowledge that most people don’t know about. So what’s the act of recovery that has to happen in other forms of communication or with other kinds of interested parties that share this information in a different way? I think that was more my point. I think that your interest in Gert isn’t because you want to make a discovery of this lost artist.

Wolfgang: I think Valeska, she did really an art which is still not dead because she works just between the schools. She doesn’t solve things. When she performed “Baby”, and she has the old face, of course she knows that it’s grotesque. You see it when she’s performing and afterward, when she’s finished, you see this old woman, 75 years old who just did a performance. She makes a cut, a border, a wall. It’s very important. People assume she is that way [and not performing]. If she performed in the 20’s as a prostitute having an orgasm, then people think, “Oh, she must be very open-minded.” Of course she was, but it doesn’t mean that she had sex with everybody. This is a big misunderstanding.

Ana: Right. But there’s a practical level to it too, which is the art that we have of Gert’s. We have these fragments, a couple videos, some visual images, letters and other kinds of things. But if people don’t get to see these videos, then they don’t know what you’re talking about.

Wolfgang: That’s why we publish it.

Cover of book by Wolfgang Müller

An: It’s also a way of presenting. You can dig up all this stuff from the 80’s and present it in many ways. With Valeska Gert. It was very important for us the way that we presented her work. It was about concepts.

Wolfgang: Not [only] historical.

An: It’s in the vein of contemporary art. It’s not about her life that’s about  [being] a baby, young, and then old.

Wolfgang: It had nothing to do with the time, in fact. If a young performer would do the same now, it would be also good.

An : But it would be easy for Valeska Gert to be shown as  a prostitute and then an older grotesque dancer, or as a woman dancer. We had to discuss lots how we present her, because still today this was in one room and it was “Works made by Women” from the collection. Still today, the way we perceive art–we act as if the contemporary art world is free of hierarchies. If we go inside and we see a woman who works with the body and does the prostitute thing, we have right away this frame. So we tried to have another frame there for how people watch her work and to see the concept of her work. She happened to use her body, but that was not the main thing for us.

Gert performing circa 1924 image from: http://beverlyhillsbranche.blogspot.com/

Wolfgang: I mean everyone has a body, but she used the body as an instrument. This is something that people don’t notice. They think you are the body. They couldn’t imagine that somebody would make a performance and stay behind or next to this body. She doubled it in a way. This doubling is so interesting. She is not like Mary Wigman, who found a form and then built it to become a Gesamtkunstwerk. This is something else. Valeska makes deconstruction a big key of the work. It’s not deconstruction. It’s deconstruction–with construction. Very important.

For instance, it’s not like Einstürzende Neubauten. The punk world was such that we destroyed the stages.  I think this is déconstruction, word by word taken. For me it was always interesting to imagine Neubauten would play on stage, destroying and playing the big evil man, and then in the background you see a recommendation from the Berlin Senate, “please support for our American tour.” This is how this band from Germany made high art.

Ana: But I think that also takes a certain kind of self-reflexivity, or a self-awareness or self-consciousness. Like with everything you’re saying about Gert. She’s not stupid. She gets what she’s doing. One minute she’s this baby that’s–call it grotesque, call it disarming, and then she makes a break and is this old woman. She gets that she’s in control. She gets that that juxtaposition of the two is part of what she’s channeling in the work. I’m curious to hear you both speak a little more about the curatorial aspect and also the scholarship side because you’re both scholars. Scholarship has it’s own position in this kind of cultural landscape. [Scholars] as participants, viewers, audience and activists.

I believe that scholars are activists, and maybe that’s why I keep going back to this idea of recovery, historical recovery. You’re saying that you didn’t want the Hamburger Bahnhof exhibition to be historical, and that it was more about ideas in her work as a female artist. How do you structure a situation in which that can happen, because I think that from my perspective, it’s hard to say that an exhibition at a museum about someone like Valeska Gert isn’t historical to some extent.

An: Is it historical?

Ana: It is historical in the sense that she’s dead, she’s not living. She’s not very well known. Part of it is just about giving access to what she did. She worked with very famous people. She was an important actor in a moment to groups of people.

Wolfgang: Historical in that way, I would say. We plan not to make some kind of “This was Valeska, she’s grown up there and there.” There is an introduction to her work in a historical context at the front of the exhibition. But within the exhibition, we displayed in a way that was more about concepts than a timeline.

We put her work in communication with Marcel Duchamp’s work, or Marcel Broodthaers or VALIE EXPORT. VALIE EXPORT is still alive, but all these other artists are dead, and are/were more or less her generation. One of the Viennese Aktionists, Günter Brus, met her in a cafe and described her in the book, Old West Berlin. It was published a year and a half ago. Valeska was performing and acting in the same moment. In that way, she opened a space between these roles. We sought to show a wave of time and development where she was making many different kinds of work.

An: And to break conventions also. That’s what people talk about all the time. In 1975 she had this interview on T.V., on a talk show, and she talked about sexual education for kids. She said, “I don’t agree with [the way] sexual education [is taught],” As an artist, she performed an orgasm in the 20’s. She knows that people are shocked by her.

Gert performing “Baby,” image from http://strangeflowers.wordpress.com/

Ana: It also makes me that there’s something–it’s not just her–I mean it is just her, but it’s also what she’s doing when she’s using her body. It’s also bringing it back to this idea of the body. She’s occupying the middle ground between performance, between acting, between a public persona, going on these talk shows and saying things. She has this very big body of work as well. She’s not a writer. She’s not a painter.

Wolfgang: No, she is a writer.

An: She wrote books!

Ana: Excuse me. (All laugh). She is a writer. Thank you!

An: She also wrote articles on makeup.

Wolfgang: Yes! She also wrote about makeup in the 1920’s, very clever.

Ana: But I think that further making this gray area grayer (I’m blushing), there’s something about her that defies categorization. As a result you have to think about both her life and her work in a way that’s unique to her life and her work. I guess, in theory, one would want to do that with anything, any objective inquiry.

Wolfgang: In order for her to survive financially, Valeska opened pubs. Now, the pub as an art concept has become such a trope. This is something that I see in Damien Hirst’s and Carsten Holler’s pub art works, which were sponsored and received so much attention. When I read about Valeska’s pieces, I found it much more transgressive. In New York she said “My concept is a black woman singing with a deep voice with soul, and a white woman with a very high voice.” She was working with these stereotypes, and she brought them together so much better than [Holler’s] The Double Club.

An: She dances with Josephine Baker in a black costume.

Wolfgang: Yeah, but she keeps a white face. She doesn’t use black face. It’s a big difference. And white cloth.

An: And because Valeska Gert is in between these genres, we can show dance work and and this gets classified as “expressionist dance.” While she was alive, she didn’t have any success in the art world, which is in part because she defied easy classification.

Ana: With Wigman, it’s about a systemization of information and knowledge and art production. You can say “This is Wigman’s pedagogy and there’s the Wigman School. Hanya Holm comes to the U.S. and teaches the Wigman way.” You see it still with people who really cling to that kind of improv in dance, a certain way of improvising, a that’s really based on that system of knowledge. But it also makes me wonder about all these different things that Gert does. She’s writing articles about makeup, or she’s writing a book, or she’s performing and then opening bars. She’s always in everything and the work never transcends her, but I mean that in a good way. It’s always very particular to her personality.

Gert performing, date unknown, image from www.potz.blitz.szpilman.de

Wolfgang: Yeah, it’s invisible work because she’s so in-between that she disappears, in a way. She said it that when if she made jam as a performance, she just might concentrate on the jam. She’s not a total performer. Performers don’t claim her. Valeska said “Some people tell me I’m not a dancer, and some people say I am only a dancer.”

Ana: But that’s great for precisely the Wigman sort of opposition. No one can come to a consensus. Because she’s very particularly there, or invisible there’s no way of putting your thumb down and saying, “this is the Gert Method.”

An: It’s difficult to imitate it. There is this film by Volker Schlöndorff, Just for Fun, Just to Play: Kaleidoscope Valeska Gertt and it’s great documentary about her.

Wolfgang: She said you create art by your reflection, by the points you put down and then the image appears. You don’t have to work for it. She was not taking care of her image all the time. It was just about putting things together. People don’t understand when she performed being a woman in the concentration camp in 1951. This piece is still misunderstood. She shows a character, a different element of that identity. This is more frightening.

She always attracts you and then she pushes you away. It’s always touching and then throwing away, touching and throwing away. The space in between comes out. This is art. There’s nothing to identify with her or not identify with her. That is not the question. People always want solutions. In the left-wing newspaper, they write that she makes fun of Nazi crimes. It’s not making fun. That’s a misunderstanding.

Ana:  Maybe this is also a question of viewership. What do we expect to understand when we see a work of art? And what do we expect to understand when we see somebody performing something? Maybe those are different questions but it seems like, increasingly, people just want–especially with respect to seeing art, to understand it in a very superficial way. “I go to a museum. I see a beautiful painting.”

I don’t think viewers like to feel uncomfortable, maybe because we paid money and we want to be entertained. These are all superficial things. It makes me think of what you said about Einstürzende Neubauten’s performances, sometimes you want to go to a hardcore concert and see shit destroyed onstage and it gives you pleasure because you can’t experience that in your life. And then you leave and you’ve had a cathartic experience.

Wolfgang: Yeah, but that’s not the main reason. I think you make some art piece and it doesn’t matter if the audience feels good or not good. You have a concept, which is important. Then you should be independent. It’s not an autonomy based on your artwork, but that you shouldn’t care what people think. When Valeska dances Pause it’s nothing but it’s also something. Of course, people were not satisfied when she was performing a pause in 1920. They wanted to see speed and industry. In the midst of that scene she just chose to pause. But this shows that her way of using the body and performance is a very intellectual process.

An: You compared it to John Cage’s 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence.

Wolfgang: Yes! Valeska’s pause in 1920 set a precedent for this concept.

Ana: That’s a good note to end on. Thank you for the talking with me.

Wolfgang: Thank you, too.

An: Thank you.

Levi Gonzalez talks to the 2011 Movement Research Spring Festival curators about their ideas and experiences surrounding the events they organized for June 2-5, 2011 in New York City.

Interview date: July 1, 2011

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Thumbnail Photo by Ian Douglas

Levi Gonzalez: I’m here talking to Clarinda MacLow, Chase Granoff and Larissa Velez-Jackson, three of the four curators of the most recent Movement Research Spring Festival called Festival!*. The fourth curator, Gabriel Rivera, unfortunately couldn’t be here.

I wanted to start by talking about the structure of the festival. Each day had a theme. There were very defined but also very open concepts or umbrellas for the festival to live in and I was wondering if that was an idea from the beginning or was it something that emerged?

Clarinda MacLow: I think it emerged fairly quickly. It happened through a variety of pragmatic and conceptual meeting places and it was probably Gabriel who really pushed it. He was like, “Okay we’re not doing this over a long period of time. We’re going to make this efficient, clear and succinct.”

Chase Granoff: We all walked into our initial meeting with overlapping concerns and ideas of what we wanted to accomplish with the festival. Internally we started naming days as a kind of organizational method for ourselves and at some point pretty early on we realized that those names would allow an outside approach or understanding into the festival. We were talking about different ways of mapping a spectator path through the festival, be it if they could just go once one day and then two days later they could go again, or if they could go to three events in one day or one event a day,[etc.] and then giving thematic concerns to each day. Sometimes with festivals it feels a little bit like a free for all, where you don’t know how to find yourself within it as a spectator so we were hoping to have some kind of path.

Levi: It felt from the outside like the easiest festival to …

Clarinda: Navigate.

Levi: Yes. Each day had a geographic location even.

SOCIAL: Curators and friends at Judson social, Photo by Daniel Clifton

Clarinda: That was part of our overlapping concerns. I was very interested in site and I think Gabriel and Chase had a similar thing.

Larissa Velez-Jackson: I remember the day of our first meeting being acutely aware that we were really busy working artists, and so is the community we’re serving, and we were talking about serving the community in a really pragmatic way. Organizing things around specific localities was really important in making it easy for people and making it easy for us to attend and also to organize.

Clarinda: So we could be present. We wanted to be really present and we knew our lives were complicated. And I think we were trying to be present not just as curators but as full-on participants, and create a sense of participatory excitement. So that you could go and just stay in Bushwick all day. I don’t know if anybody ever did, but that was the idea. And I feel like it was even important as a fantasy.

Levi: Do you remember some of those overlapping interests?

Chase: I think one of the first things I remember was not having just performances. There’s already so many of these happening. I always personally feel that the MR festival gets announced pretty late in the season and everybody tries to fit these auxiliary events within their schedule of seeing performances. I find that if you try to battle with performances it gets complicated, but the festival also has a privilege of expanding ideas of choreography or of people’s expanded practices within dance. Many people within dance have shared interests that relate to their performance and dance practice, but aren’t necessarily that. Poetry or food, urban foraging, all this stuff felt very related. An organization like the Kitchen or Dance Theater Workshop, they can’t easily program an event like that. The Festival has a privilege that it can.

Clarinda: Yeah, we really wanted to take advantage of the wide-open nature of it, and the edges of practice were definitely a common concern.

Larissa: I remember the first meeting. We were all bringing up ideas and mine in particular was something about the fact that mixed bill dance performances seemed reductive, especially with the openness that we’re presented with in curating this. It seemed like, in various ways, all four of us felt somewhat similarly, and this was really a surprise to us.

Clarinda: Yes, because we are all really different people. Our practices are different. I think we do share something secretly and that the curators were well-curated, but at the same time how we operate and what our concerns are, are ostensibly quite different from person to person. I think one thing we share is pushing at the boundary of discipline or the boundary of what performance is and where it belongs. We all are a little bit contrarian. We really want to turn things on their heads. The art dance show, for example: “Let’s do something where we don’t let people perform, but we bring them in to participate in a way that may challenge a part of themselves that they didn’t know was there.” Things like that where we’re really trying to expand practice.

Chase: Another thread of thought in the creation of that event was that in the visual art world there are many initiatives that say its okay for visual artists without a performance practice to suddenly make a performance but we couldn’t name an occasion where the opposite was true. Where dancers and choreographers, people with a performing practice, can just make a piece of visual art. All it takes is for some organization or some opportunity to exist to say that it’s okay. It was really exciting to realize that with this festival we can. It wasn’t so much about being a troublemaker or pushing buttons of other organizations but just saying that when you come together as a festival, this temporary organization, there’s certain things that you can say are okay. As an individual if I tried to organize something like that it wouldn’t have the same effect or resonance.

Clarinda: That’s true. It was institutional license to make something different happen. But because even this institution has an imprimatur, it contains it in a way that people can see. “Oh, there’s an organization that’s sponsoring this so it must be real.” That’s just how it is. I think that we were able to utilize that and celebrate it. It was very celebratory in the long run. There was a lot that felt really happy. I don’t know if we expected that necessarily.

Larissa: Expanding the definitions of things was constantly a theme for us, and there was such a generosity about it. Opening to audiences that might not normally come, through the poetry dinner, as an example, which was attended by only a few recognizable dancers. It was constantly this obsession for us to represent the breadth of contemporary practice, which is expansive.

Clarinda: That’s interesting you [Larissa] say generosity because I do think that people got that feeling. What they said to us was “Oh, I felt very included.” All-inclusive can be something that isn’t rigorous, and we were clear that we wanted to be both inclusive and rigorous.

Chase: We tried to have space in the festival so it wasn’t totally jam-packed. We wanted to have a fair amount of activity but also to have some space for contemplation. We talked about potentially setting up events that structured contemplation into the event. We didn’t do that, but that kind of idea stuck around. We wanted people to be able to think.

Clarinda: I was specifically interested in participation versus contemplation. I think that caught on and came into this idea of “Well, what is participatory?” Is watching a performance participatory or contemplative? It is a kind of contemplation but it’s funny. The performance we did at Tandem was so raucous. I don’t know if you would say, “Oh, that’s contemplation.” I like these lines that kept coming back and forth. We started to see all the this versus this is not really this versus this. This is this. This is contained within this. You can be participating in something and you can be very contemplative.

Levi: There was a lot of space for contemplation inside the events themselves. The events weren’t so much about constantly keeping you stimulated or feeding you something. The two events I went to, which were the art opening and the social at the end, actually required your participation. The festival felt really geared towards the spectator in that way. It wasn’t so much, “Oh, I have to see this performance because it’s going to be really interesting.” It was more like, “This is an opportunity for us to experience dance in a bar. This is an opportunity for us to be in nature together. This is an opportunity for us to socialize.” It really did seem like the events were not necessarily structured around serving the artists who were participating, although it was doing that too, but also around the people who would be there to experience the event.

Chase: I think, without getting too theoretical, the festival was curated in a post-relational aesthetics. (All laugh) We were always trying to create a relational situation. We were always creating events thinking of the intended audience and what that relationship might be. I think a lot of the choices of artists had to do with that kind of relationship. What kind of dialogue would that artist bring to this space, to this theme? We invited artists into themes. Rather than saying, “We want this artist, because we like their work.” It was often like “We have an idea of a day, now–”

Clarinda: –who would fit that?

CHAOS: Tandem Bar, Photo by Karli Cadel

Chase: Yeah. I think that was also a way for us to push ourselves to curate different kinds of artists that aren’t always umbrella’ed under Movement Research, although I know that is a very broad organization. Sometimes people perceive A.B.C. or X.Y.Z. artist as being more part of the Movement Research community than others. I think that we were kind of trying to–

Clarinda: –show that the ideas around Movement Research, that formed Movement Research are more broad-ranging than the artists that may be contained under that umbrella so far. These ideas that Movement Research represents, in my mind, are something that go beyond the people that embody it within the organizational structure right now. And that’s fine. It has to be embodied and people have to represent it, but I think the festival is that opportunity to say, “What are the ideas?” Because it’s such a beautiful range of ideas that make up where Movement Research came from and where it goes.

Chase: I think with the art show that was a really exciting thing. We thought it was going to be like 20 or 40 artists and at some point we decided we should try to make this as big as possible so we set the number to have 100 confirmed artists going into it, knowing that come the deadline not everybody would probably get their art to us.

Clarinda: How many did we end up with?

Chase: I think there were 91 works of art. Something around there. That was really an opportunity to cast a big net. I was really interested in trying in whatever subtle way possible to give some exposure to a national contemporary dance scene, recognizing that there’s interesting communities of dance outside of New York City: Philadelphia, Portland, Bay area, Minneapolis, Chicago, Seattle.

Levi: Because it’s easier to participate if you’re sending an object?

Chase: And also to invite artists from those cities that wouldn’t necessarily be at a point in their career where they would be getting a season here.

Levi: How did you arrive at the name: Festival?

Chase: It’s always hard to name things. One of us suggested that the name could be a sentence.

Clarinda: Remember it was Festival, exclamation point, asterisk. The name is that whole crazy thing we came up with. Festival is the abbreviated name.

Larissa: I think it was like a paragraph.

Clarinda: Chase came up with the sentence and then me and Larissa and Gabriel fucked around with it and then shifted and expanded it. We had all that text.

Larissa: And then we realized that for press that it would never be taken seriously to have a paragraph as the title of something so it became the Festival!*.

Chase: We also realized that some of the themes in the festival involved a lot of poetics. We had a poetry event but also walking performances and urban foraging. All this stuff feels like a kind of poetics. We talked about the title as being–

Clarinda: –a demonstration of that.

Chase: For us it made sense that the title was also the explanation of the festival. We knew, like Larissa said, that it would never get printed in its entirety anywhere. That’s why the cover of our brochure, which we tried to make like a poster, was that. So there wasn’t an image representing the festival. It was language representing the festival.

Clarinda: Language as image as text.

Larissa: Every step of the way we were fully aware that we were artists involved in answering every question or in figuring the entire thing out. So when it came to the title, our curatorial statement was a poem of our title. I don’t think we even had a curatorial statement because it was the title. At every point we exercised artistry.

Clarinda: Right. Our creative faculties or our desire to transform. We didn’t go into our separate corners and do things. We did it collaboratively. I think we all felt a little more responsibility for one thing or another, but it was really more like that. It was more responsibility than ownership.

Chase: We were very aware that we were artists, but we also weren’t scared to let our individual aesthetic and political concerns come through the festival. We were very comfortable with saying, “We are a festival organized by four artists. We’re going to allow our concerns within dance and choreography and performance come into this festival and manifest.”

Clarinda: I think that that made it more inclusive strangely. Maybe it’s a little bit how if you write very specifically about an experience that more people can relate to it than if you try to contain multitudes. When you really address a concern specifically a lot of people can enter into it either as empathetic or as curious as long as it’s clear and well-represented. It has integrity.

Levi: It also has to do with the nature of the events being so participatory and experiential. I didn’t feel the sense of getting bombarded with someone’s aesthetic vision. It felt like an offering. When I think about the festival, and knowing most of you personally, I could feel your personalities inside the fabric of the events. I also felt your presence as hosts.

Clarinda: That was very conscious.

Levi: Much more strongly than I’ve felt in previous [Movement Research Spring] festivals. I really felt like you were there and I could approach you and talk about what was going on.

Larissa: Clarinda and I kept trying to get us to wear matching outfits but that never happened.

Clarinda: And that’s the one thing I regret! (It’s a pretty small regret.) But it was very conscious that we were present and available. And in some way that was a performative aspect. It certainly felt like it more than I realized it was going to. There was definitely a sense of “Okay, I’m on.” But it was also so we really could be available and serve in many ways.

Levi: I remember the art show being at Gabriel’s space and you [Chase] were barbecuing.

Chase: We just wanted to have a fun way to start the festival, to start it in a celebratory mode, as a social gathering. We didn’t start with a performance or an event.

Larissa: Yeah, get people drunk. Hang out. Talk about art.

Chase: I think it was a way of saying this festival is celebrating something. How can we actually manifest that celebration?

Clarinda: And Gabriel is always really good at putting on a party. I’ve only been there twice but every time it’s been a crazy good party. I think that that helps a lot, that we had his way of doing things and his space, and then all our intentions and our own individual celebratory–I have a feeling we all give really good parties when we give parties. I have a feeling that’s part of our characters. To me, it was nice to have a way to express that within a context and have it feel like a party and not just an event.

Chase: It was also exciting that we got to partner with Tandem Bar, because it ended up that the weekend we were doing something in Bushwick, it was also Bushwick Open Studios. So there was a really big audience outside of people who were coming just for the festival. Our attendance was double what we anticipated. We had budgeted for 150 people. We had almost 320.

Clarinda: That was another example of getting people in that would never have gotten in, because they just wanted to come to Tandem. They’d grumble and give their five dollars and go in and then end up dancing and watching crazy performances. I had no idea that it would actually work so well.

Levi: I heard it was kind of wild.

Larissa: Yeah and then the night continued on.

Clarinda: It got very wild.

Larissa: We basically just set up shop at this bar the entire day. Similarly to Chase being behind the grill at the [art dance show party], it was interesting for me to be in the sound booth. I kind of tech’d the whole thing, but I wasn’t just the production person doing stuff. I was running the timing of the entire evening and the night got crazier and crazier, more chaotic by the end. And for sure people were going to try and grab the mic and turn it into a free-for-all, but since I felt in a very privileged position to be the curator to press the microphone off and really craft what was going to happen.

Levi: You were an “experience” D.J.

Larissa: Yeah, very much. It was very organized chaos. It had the feel of this thing falling apart at the seams, but it was crafted in the way that we had been describing it and talking about it and figuring it out for months.

Clarinda: But it really did have a flavor of serious chaos, which was exciting. There were points where I think it could have gotten out of control. But when you invite the gods of chaos that’s what happens.

Larissa: It was about your ability to come and see a performance and your ability to come and get really drunk and dance and be a part of it all. It was a full blurring of performance and participation, as I feel like all of the events were in their own specific way.

Levi: Are there any other specific memories of events that you remember, or that struck a chord?

Clarinda: It’s all a bit of a blur.

NATURE: Poetry Dinner, Photo by Kim Olstad

Larissa: So many and they were all so different. I remember actually the day of the poetry dinner, watching Abigail’s slow motion falls, which was happening in Gowanus and a whole route on 3rd Avenue leading up to the poetry dinner. Some people attended but of course a lot of people from the street rode up on their bikes, curious. I just kept thinking how lucky I was to actually have been able to see all of these really different, beautiful experiences. Just to think that the night before was the madness at Tandem Bar, and then the day before that we were gallery hopping all over the place. We went to an incredible C.A.T. talk [Collective Arts Think-tank]. There was just incredible variation.

Clarinda: It’s more the juxtaposition than the specific events themselves, just the fact that you went from day to day and it was so different. Also just this wonder in the fact that the totally conceptual became manifest, and that doesn’t always happen. Usually it kind of gets away from you, which is okay too. I don’t know why it would be different, doing something curatorially rather than artistically, but it really was interesting to see something become fully manifest in that way.

Chase: One of the overall highlights of the festival was being able to partner with all these different organizations that are very artist-friendly and run by artists, but not necessarily typically involved with the New York dance and performance scene. The bakery Four and 20 Blackbirds, run by two sisters who are visual artists–I don’t think they know too much about dance and performance, but were super excited to be involved with the Movement Research Festival. A lot of the audience came because of knowing the bakery or knowing the chef. Definitely, there were some people there who do know poetry, but there was a good amount of people who aren’t used to poetry, at least not the kind of experimental and body based poetry that we had at that event. Tandem also, I think, is run by two sisters who are visual artists. I can’t remember. But they have some dancers that work there, so it was exciting then to collaborate with them. These two galleries on the Lower East Side that we worked with are super dance-friendly. It was interesting to have this C.A.T. (Collective Arts Think-tank) conversation happen not at a dance venue, but at a gallery. To have these gate-keepers of contemporary dance speak in a gallery setting.

Levi: It’s interesting to have the experience of these different spaces–the experience of Gowanus, the experience of your city, the experience of an art space or gallery with that conversation about dance. Hopefully that expansion exists beyond just the moment of the festival itself.

Clarinda: That would be nice.

Larissa: Or even the Monday night Judson. That expectation of coming to a Monday night Judson performance and actually just having a social gathering. Just celebrating being part of the community that you’re part of.

AUNTS/TAMTAMTAM/BERLIN

Saturday, November 5th, 2011

Flutgraben Gallery

Berlin, Germany

AUNTS traveled to Berlin to team up with TAMTAMTAM to put together a one night performance event to bring together Berlin based and American artists.  The event was created in the interest of cultural exchange, to test the AUNTS model for performance and viewing with artists outside of New York City and to work with other artists who experiment with the production and curation of performance events.

Artists who showed their work included:

Zinzi Buchanan

Christine Elmo (in video form)

Eric Green

Liz Santoro

Agata Siniarska

Jessica Taylor

Roxana Valdez Gonzalez

Elizabeth Ward

Katie Wells

With music from DJs Swadansi and Diamant

Special thanks to Isabel Lewis, Dmitry Paranyushkin and Johannes Wengel of TAMTAMTAM.

 A shorts program curated by Movement Research 2010 Artists-in-Residence Anna Azrieli, Laurie Berg, Yve Laris Cohen and Chase Granoff, in collaboration with Dance Films Association Director Deirdre Towers, and overseen by MR Program and Event Manager Rebecca Brooks. This event was a part of DFA’s 39th Annual Dance on Camera Festival. This partnership between Movement Research and Dance Films Association, now in its third year, was originally initiated by Mathew Heggem as part of DFA’s Annual Dance on Camera Festival. www.dancefilms.org

Thumbnail photo: Still from Yak Films’ RIP Oscar Grant

– PART 1 –

The evening’s viewing and discussion radiated out from an initial grouping of three short films selected from submissions to Dance Film Association’s 2011 Dance On Camera Festival. Each film centers around movement in relationship to landscapes, ranging from the natural world to the urban environment. The films posit the moving body as an active agent that designs its surroundings, while still being subject to the sublime. Watch them here!

30 CECIL STREET

Dan Canham/Will Hanke, UK, 2010, 7:20m

Shot in the dilapidated premises of the Theatre Royal in the Limerick Athenaeum building, Ireland. With a history that stretches back over 150 years, the Royal Theatre has been closed to the public for the last 13 years. Engaging with the atmosphere and past of this near-derelict building and using the soundtrack made up of four sounds and interviews with people associated with the Athenaeum, this short explores the state of a building once the hub of cultural activity.

DUNE DANCE

Zena Bibler, USA, 2010, 2:08m

Dune(s) dance on a blustery day in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. Choreographed, danced, and filmed on the spot in May 2010.

OANNES

Ivo Serra, USA, 2007, 6m
 

Oannes represents The GOD of knowledge to the Babylonian (Ea) and to the Greeks, cultures, and he was the last mythological figure to be connected with the lost city Atlantis. The artist sought to make this mythological being appear.

– PART 2 –

The second part of the evening featured films and videos selected by the curators, responding to issues brought up by themes in the original films, as well as this event’s curatorial process. Watch them here:

Anna Azrieli’s picks:

SMALL DANCE (performer Steve Paxton)
Olive Bieringa, USA, 2007, 1:30m

SMALL DANCE (performer Lisa Nelson)
Olive Bieringa, USA, 2007, 1:30m

Laurie Berg’s pick:

SUB PLEXUS
Sarah White-Ayon, USA, 2009, 6m

Chase Granoff’s picks:

MY HOME IS MY SHOES
Deborah Anzalone/Century Films, USA, 2009, 3:40m

WILL
unknown, USA, 1995, 6m

 

Yve Laris Cohen’s pick:

RIP Oscar Grant
Yak Films (Yoram Savion and Kash Gaines), USA, 2010, 7:30m

 

 

– PART 3 –

Samuael Topiary moderated a discussion that engaged all of the films and discourses surrounding this event:

Download and listen to a podcast of the discussion here!

Or get more information on this Movement Research podcast here

Movement Research’s Studies Project series is an artist-curated series of panel discussions, performances and/or other formats that focus on provocative and timely issues of aesthetics and philosophy in the intersection of dance and social politics, confronting and instigated by the dance and performance community. Questions? email: rebeccabrooks@movementresearch.org

What Sustains You? asks these and other artists to talk about their own sustainability as artists and persons, and the ways they are acting on the world to transform those structures and relationships. This is a departing point and the questions continue to be found as the conversations accumulate. We would love to hear if you want to participate or have a suggestion for people you would like to see interviewed.