In February 2012, artist/writer/curator Marissa Perel spoke with dancer/choreographer Katy Pyle about the development of her dance form, “Ballez,” and the early stages of her piece, The Firebird. Here, they rejoin with members of the cast to discuss each performer’s background and experience of Ballez, alternative approaches to the idea of failure in queer performance, and motivations for the piece, which was presented at Danspace Project, May 16-18, 2013.

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Marissa Perel: I am talking to Katy Pyle about her show, The Firebird. We’re here with Jules Skloot, who plays the character of the Firebird, Cassie Mey, who plays the Sorceress, and 4 other members of the Ballez, who perform as princes in the piece. Katy, I interviewed you last year when you showed an excerpt of this piece at Dixon Place. What I remember most is your remark that this is the kind of ballet you wish you had seen growing up. Could you expand on that?

Katy Pyle: I wanted to see (and am now seeing through creating this) different kinds of bodies than the classical super small body that we’ve seen in ballet. In this work, I see people who have radically different gender embodiments than what we’ve seen in classical ballet, people who are different sizes partnering with each other. The female-assigned people partnering with each other in general is a big deal. I didn’t see any queer ballet at all and certainly not a story ballet. Maybe there was some contemporary dance that was “gay,” but I didn’t see women dancing together period. If I did it was in an experimental context, it wasn’t a classical story ballet, so thats something I wanted to see. I wanted to see people take the theatricality of these structures and the playfulness of them and put that forward at the front of the experience. I would always watch these ballets with amazing costumes, amazing lights, amazing dancers, but I felt they were just doing the technical elements. I was like, “You’re a fucking fairy, man! Why don’t you care?” It felt like a consideration of the way things are embodied was last on the list, and yet the potential for fantasy was so present in my mind — what I wanted to see, but was not there. It seemed almost disconnected from the performers intentions.

Photo of the princes by Hedia Maron

Marissa: To realize this, you’ve been teaching Ballez. You have a class that’s been part of the rehearsal process and you’ve been teaching it to dancers and non-dancers. I’ve actually never been to a class, but I’m curious about this issue of embodiment and how dancers who are technically trained but maybe not trained to embody their sexuality can do that in this dance, and then how people who aren’t trained as dancers can execute dance and embody their sexuality at the same time.

Jules Skloot: That’s a big question. In thinking about structuring the classes, we spent time talking about the importance of making it a welcoming place, and energetically prepared ourselves as teachers to welcome people.

Marissa: Were you seeking to create a different environment from a stern, judgmental technique class?

Jules: As you can imagine going into a more formal ballet setting, there are assumptions of what people know about the code of how to be in a dance class, and the code does not necessarily include eye contact, or smiling at each other and saying hello, and it certainly doesn’t include, “What is your name and your preferred gender pronoun?” That is something that we include in any Ballez class. I like that it’s built in so people coming to their very first class have the experience of being asked that question and understand it is a relevant question to the space, and for folks coming week after week to know their answer can change.

Marissa: So fluidity is a value in the class structure. You can change pronouns, and still be identified as you want to be and dance.

Jules: Right, that’s actually part of the class. We get to take these forms and play with them, experiment with them, and be fluid in ways that maybe we wouldn’t outside the class. We all hold onto parts of our identity for various reasons: for safety, for our well-being, for expressing who we are. It can be a really good experiment to jiggle up our sense of ourselves, how we wear ourselves and embody ourselves, even if it’s not something we want to do everyday or in public walking down the street. You can learn a lot from trying different things on.

Marissa: Is what it’s like for you to be part prince . . .

Katy: . . . part bird, part firebird, part tranimal? Jules is always fluidly shifting roles.

Marissa: Did you [Jules and Katy] collaborate on how Jules would embody the Firebird? How much of the character comes from your own process?

Jules: It was very much a collaboration; talking about the story and taking this vision of what a Ballez class and a Ballez company could be. As the story of The Firebird emerged, we thought about how the story would shift from the traditional Russian folk tale. Katy and I have been working together for a long time in a dance conext, so there’s a lot that we know about each other, and quite naturally parts of me got entwined with the character of the Firebird. Katy knows the places that might be harder for me to go to, which are vital for embodying the character of the Firebird. So, she’s been able to coach me into the places and physicalities that aren’t as natural to me, or that are even disturbing or scary and also exciting.

Photo of Katy Pyle by Alex Escalante

Marissa: Are those places that are scary and exciting gender places, a dance places, or a combination of these?

Jules: More a dance place, but the lines are really blurry around that. We’ve been talking a lot about the Firebird’s focus being very direct, almost pointing in a straight line. As a mover, I tend to spiral and swirl with an internal focus, so it’s been exciting and hard to learn how to shift my focus and take on this character.

Marissa: Does aggression play a role in your dancing?

Jules: Sure, there’s aggression. It’s more direct action and taking on an animal — the wildness of it. Maybe Cassie has something to say about that.

Cassie Mey: My background and much of my performance history is in the realm of abstraction and using technique in an embodied and present way, so coming into this process and having to take on the role of a character, I had to find the dominatrix within. She’s really powerful and magical. She embodies wisdom. She’s all-seeing and all-knowing, but she is immature emotionally or she doesn’t have an open heart in the way that she needs to experience. It’s her heart-wisdom that evolves through the piece. She’s very clear and focused and direct, but also cold and withholding, which creates this power dynamic.

Marissa: And she needs to be worshipped?

Cassie: She needs to be in the power position, but maybe not worshipped. We’ve talked about her relationship to the princes and the garden; they are consensually adding to this fantasy together. She’s creating the land around it, but it’s a consensual journey — the princes want to be taken care of in this realm, they want to have all the fruits of this experience as the sorceress gives it to them. They’re willingly residing in the garden as a polyamorous community that, as Katy puts it eats, shits, sleeps, and fucks together.

Katy: All within a classical ballet genre. That’s the fantasy to me of what that was.

Photo of Katy Pyle by Alex Escalante

Cassie: As a performer, it’s been interesting to express my sexuality in dance. Dance and sexuality have occupied separate realms my whole life and this is the first convergence of that. Being seen as queer in a dance realm is exhilarating and terrifying. It brings up a lot of emotions and helps me investigate my relationship to the queer community, to being out, and to exposing the way I feel sexual in the world. Exposing those fantasies for the world is exciting and empowering. The first time I saw Katy and Jules dance in Covers I freaked out; I had never seen anything so hot and moving and sad and funny all at the same time because I felt myself reflected for the first time in a piece, I felt that whole part of me.

Marissa: So now we can pass this around to the princes — briefly talk about what your background is, if you have dance training or not, and not only what the process has been like for you, but what you feel you bring to your role as a prince uniquely within the group?

Sam Greenleaf Miller: My performance background is varied — I danced a lot as a kid and grew up going to queer clubs, so I have that very much inside of me. I’m also a classically trained musician and toured as a musician for a number of years, so mostly my performance background is musical. In the last 5 years, I’ve collaborated with Vanessa Anspaugh and Geo Wyeth, who is a musician and performance artist. So, I’ve been moving away from standing onstage with a guitar and singing, to moving, which is very much a part of my life in another realm. It’s been exciting to start this process with Katy and to learn about my body in all sorts of new ways. I started taking Ballez class this winter and it was my first time doing any sort of ballet movement. It was intense because I’m 35 years old and I was a beginner at something again, which was a humbling and totally fun experience. I realized that I really like the form and it somehow suits me (at least Ballez, I don’t know about ballet). I felt like I could bring parts of my gender, sexuality, experience, and the way that I move in the world into the form and have the form help me refine it. I don’t totally know what I bring to my role. I think I bring a lot of exuberance, play, and care for my other princes and the company.

Lindsay Reuter: My background is a lot of dance training growing up, studying dance in college — all abstract in the same way that Cassie mentioned. I’ve never been asked to have a face when I was dancing, let alone that my face be genuine and reflect my body. For me, it’s really important to have a fluid gender identity where I can present whatever I want at any time, and there’s room for that in Ballez. Reinventing yourself all the time is celebrated and never questioned. I’ve been thinking about who I am as a prince in the piece, and there’s a quality of earnestness that’s really important to me. For example, just trying really hard (which I think is kind of how I am all the time). I’m the person who never gets sarcasm because I take people at face value; there’s this sweet childish, big eyes, big heart. [Laughter] If I titled my prince, I’d be The Prince of Wanting It, and that’s relationally important in the dance. I’m never a prince by myself; I’m always a prince with other people, and I really want to foster that.

Effie Bowen: I grew up doing theater and went to college for dance. It’s been rewarding having a dance process where I feel like I’m always right when I’m in it. I like pretending that I’m good at ballet, so I think I bring that. I started ballet really late and I can’t really finish a traditional ballet class. In Ballez I can pretend I’ve been doing ballet my whole life and I’m amazing at it. It affords me a confidence that I’ve never had. This is the container where I can put on something and escape into a fantasy that I wouldn’t normally go to. Regular ballet underscores how I’m failing at this thing I’m striving for, but in Ballez I already have it. In Ballez I’m Nijinsky.

Francis Weiss Rabkin: I am a writer, a poet and a playwright, and my relationship to performance has been as far from the stage as possible for most of my life. As a child, if I ever had to perform in a class play, I played inanimate objects. One time I played the hill on which the billy goats grazed. I’ve been dancing with Katy ever since the first work-in-progress showing at BAX, and that was my first time dancing in a stage context. I used to only dance at dance parties and at clubs, so I was interested to hear Cassie say that performance dance was never sexy to her. I’ve only experienced dance as sexy, as a space where I feel hot and there’s the fluidity. My most intense dance partners have been gay men; that queer fluidity of attraction between a female-assigned person and a cis-gendered gay men, feeling seen in that world. To bring only that experience to a performance setting is very strange because there is something very protected about queer dance parties; you’re communicating so much, but in a closed world. Bringing that energy to a mixed, critical audience through performance is a leap.

Photo of the princes by Christy Pessagno

What I am bringing to this experience is that I’m the “Prince of Going Through It Right Now.” Most of my life I’ve felt really disconnected from my body; as a child I thought I was literally invisible. In the time I’ve spent working on the Ballez, this relationship to visibility has become about being seen, being seen again, being seen some more, and being seen more accurately and more deeply, as well as emotionally experiencing the range of the excitement of being seen and the terror of it, holding those feelings for as long as I possibly can, and then going onstage with them. I bring a lot of language around emotion, and I’m willing to talk about the complications around emotions and share that in rehearsal and outside of rehearsal. I have the capacity to dwell in and be stable in hard feelings.

Marissa: I’d like us to talk about some hard feelings. I was was disturbed by how The Firebird was listed in the New Yorker. I felt that is was minimizing Katy’s conceptual artistry and her choreographic mastery both because of the amount of quotations around the nouns, and that last line, “recently divorced lesbian who goes into the woods to figure herself out.” There is something really matter-of-fact about the way this language. When is the practice of art making divorced from “figuring oneself out?” If this was a write-up for a male choreographer making a queer dance about his identity, I highly doubt that the New Yorker would describe the work as “figuring himself out.” I was surprised because of how I have seen the press  praise the concepts and narratives of certain choreographers, but this sounds slightly mocking or ironic.

Katy: I got a lot of great comments about the New Yorker write-up on my Facebook page. Our acting coach, Jibz Cameron had the best line, “Too bad your ‘ballet’ isn’t making ‘sense’ to the ‘writers.’ You’re too advanced creatively for their ‘brains.’” [Laughter]

Marissa: I noticed in your piece description, you mention “queer failure.” I’m wondering if this kind of mis-reading, or marginalization of your talent in the New Yorker speaks to that concept. I’ve been thinking about the term a lot, and what it might mean in the context of the Ballez. I learned of this term from Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure, but it seems to have pervaded many cultural contexts quite suddenly.

Katy: I am taking on these monolithic cultural structures and putting these really incredible, beautiful embodied humans inside of them to show how the structures fail to hold us. If you’re looking at this as a ballet and judging it from a classical set of terms, assumptions and value systems, then we are failing at every single fucking thing we do. We’re not doing any of it right. We try to do these things and we do them wrong. But, the ways we do them wrong are actually worth looking at and interesting to watch, and shows how the world is actually failing us.

Francis: I’m thinking about the ways in which the world can fail us, and can fail so many kinds of people — it fails even the most normative people. I think there are two painful things that happen for a lot of us in Ballez: pain from the way that growing up in the tradition of ballet has shaped one’s sense of self, and pain from being gender-nonconforming in a world that really wants you to be. And then, there are people who have both. I think about the ways in which I feel super lucky that I didn’t have ballet training as a child, I don’t have that pain at all because I haven’t fit in since being a little baby.

Marissa: Is that lucky? That doesn’t sound lucky, that sounds like a lack of permission that you felt.

Francis: Maybe, but I didn’t want to go to a class that told me I was fat or clumsy. No one saw me at all, so I didnt get that judgment, I just didn’t get seen.

Marissa: I identify a lot with that for myself. “If you can’t see me, I can make up who I am.”

Cassie: I definitely get prickly around the ‘queer failure’ banner. I understand what it’s trying to do, I think. I don’t feel like a failure, so that is hard to identify with. I feel more empowered. Reclaiming the word failure seems like an easy out and I think we’re worth more than that. As artists, we are very seriously making a piece about liberation and freedom. So no, we’re not failing! It’s almost a sassy retort to say, “Okay, you think we suck so we’re just going to fail harder,” but I think we’re beyond that irony.

Drawing by Jibz Camero

Sam: I want to say something different, not in defense of the word failure, but that we use it in response to success. I’ve been slamming up against the realization that I’m not following a path that leads to “success.” I’m not thinking about babies, marriage, and a career in these very stable ways and I’ve had to come up against my own internal sense of being a failure, taking that inside myself and actually loving it, loving the ways that I’m failing. Artists have failed society’s expectations for centuries, and we are good at it. It’s our job.

Marissa: Even normative heterosexual artists have been failing society’s expectations, but there’s more permission or choice about it. There isn’t the added layer of enforced otherness or alienation, as there is with the queer label.

Sam: Artists are total freaks and failures. No, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with me. No, I don’t think I’m failing, but I am a person of this culture, I am made of it, and those narratives are inside of me. Especially as I get older I am smack up against my peers, choosing not to do these things that would make me much more legible and more accepted. I am thinking of failure as a means of liberation.

Effie: I think the idea of failure is fine as long as it’s not an excuse to stop trying. We are not trying to fail but we can acknowledge the presence of failure without giving up.

Sam: It’s not our participation in the work that is dealing with failure, we are not as artists trying to fail.

Marissa: What about the function of irony and humor in the Ballez? It’s definitely a part of The Firebird.

Katy: I feel like I am often put into a category of being ironic and funny, and honestly, it’s serious to me. I am a different kind of human than a lot of other humans and I see the world differently. Whether that is from having five concussions [laughter], I don’t know what it came from. What makes the material I work with funny is that it’s so real, and that is actually what I want to see. I am an extreme person by the regular standard of the world, and people think it’s outright humor, but it is actually playfulness. I think playfulness is a huge value to me, and it’s important to show that on the stage, but it’s not fake. There’s nothing fake about it. The fantasies that I have are extreme, and that’s what I’m putting out there. People laugh because they’re uncomfortable, because they want it too, but they don’t want to say so. I think laughter is cracking open a space where we can all acknowledge that we want these things that are beyond what we are allowed to want. That’s the function of humor in general. I have several friends who are comedians. I see them performing their truth onstage and people laugh, and it’s heartbreaking to me because it’s sad, it’s intense, and it’s real for them. I think as performers and makers we put ourselves in a vulnerable position of really showing our truth, and people respond in all kinds of crazy ways. I’m not trying to keep people from laughing, and I want to create a container where you’re allowed to laugh, cry, cheer, shout, have a response. But irony functions as a cultural code to keep people safe by keeping the unfamiliar at a distance, and then emotionally reacting or not reacting from that distance.

Marissa: Right. It’s about what we can we understand now. For instance, does your personal truth align with the cultural values of the moment for it to be accepted? You don’t have any control over it and it’s a totally artificial way to look at art or at a person’s work, like, “It’s okay to talk about this now so I’ll talk about it.” Or, from the perspective of the reviewer or presenter… “It’s okay now, but it wasn’t five years ago, or maybe it will make more sense five years from now.” Do you see your creation of the Ballez as a new dance form? Do you intend to continue to teach Ballez or make more things with this group of people? Where do you see the future of this work?

Katy: This is something I absolutely want to continue, and I want to continue with these people. I think it’s powerful. People who are coming to class have had really profound experiences. There’s something we’ve stumbled upon that I want to keep doing. We’re supposed to be teaching classes this summer and I have a residency at Dixon Place next year to work on a new Ballez, Sleeping Beauty and the Beast. I feel like the thing that is hard is the money part of it, and the large-scale company model obviously doesn’t fit into the current economic structuring of dance, which I think is unfortunate because there’s a lot of power and potential that can come from a big group of people. There’s a greater diversity of ideas and responsibilities. This is a whole field of research there that is really powerful and important, but we have to figure out how to keep it alive!

Effie Bowen performs, choreographs, writes, runs, knits and puts bananas on things.

Cassie Mey is a dancer and archivist for the Dance Oral History Archive of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. She is proud to have helped Katy Pyle launch the Ballez Company and The Firebird! She is also currently working with Dean Moss; and has performed and collaborated with Molissa Fenley, Jillian Peña, and Geo Wyeth among others.

Sam Miller is a performing artist and astrological counselor living and working in New York City. Sam worked as a touring musician from 1999- 2007. Since, she has performed as a mover and musician in the works of Vanessa Anspaugh and Geo Wyeth and currently dances with Katy Pyle.

Marissa Perel is an artist, writer, and independent curator. She is currently the organizer of Lobby TALKS, an artist-driven discussion series, at New York Live Arts. She will be teaching Touching Into Text, a hybrid reading and movement class for classclassclass at Arts @ Renaissance May-June 2013. She writes the column, “Gimme Shelter: Performance Now” on the Art21 blog, contributes to Bomblog and P-Club, and is a former editor of Critical Correspondence.

Katy Pyle is a multimedia performance artist whose works explore fantasy, queer failure, and the lineage of performance. With the Ballez, she is working to upend the heteronormative conventions of ballet through a process of wholehearted embodiment; subjecting queer and othered bodies to a form that fails them, and playing all the while.

Lindsay Reuter is a dancer and dance-maker living in Brooklyn. In her dance practice, she is particularly interested in (dis)ability and works as a behavioral therapist for students on the Autistic spectrum. She is on the curatorial team that produces the President Street Performance Series and makes duets about queer love.

Jules Skloot is a brooklyn-based performer, teacher and liscenced bus driver who loves working with Katy Pyle.

Francis Weiss Rabkin is a writer and performance-maker.

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Interview Date: December 17, 2012

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“And lose the name of action” at Walker Art Center, Photo by Boru O’Brien O’Connell

Marissa Perel: How long was your process in making And lose the name of action?

Miguel Gutierrez: There are multiple answers to that question. In terms of actually rehearsing with people, we started working in April 2011, for September 2012 premier, but we would work in intensive chunks, three or four weeks at a time. Last fall, at the LMCC residency on Governor’s Island, we did work for six or seven weeks. So it was these different kinds of time periods throughout a year and a half. Then, leading up to that, there had been at least a year and a half of “research,” which involved interviewing people and reading.

Marissa: And the actual experience of your dad’s hospitalization.

Miguel: Right. That’s what I was writing about today. I wrote that in the time that I began to think about this show, my father got sick, and was in the hospital for four and a half months and recovered, and I was in and out of a pretty significant relationship, I lived in five different apartments. That really fucked me up when I wrote that down today! And I made two other pieces—actually I made three other pieces and did three other research projects with other artists.

I made I Say the Word with Jenny Holzer at the ICA, Boston, and Heavens What Have I Done, then I made You are gorgeous and I am coming and then I choreographed a piece for the Fondu Set in Australia. I did another research project with Luke George. I went to many, many countries to perform and teach.

After I wrote that down this morning, I thought, “No wonder I’m invested in incoherence!” Look at this! My life is insane. The only thing that has felt coherent throughout all that time is my relationship to my mind’s ideas, my subjective imagination. It would make perfect sense that this show is partly about a sense of un-tethered-ness, or perhaps a different, associative approach to tethering. Look at this crazy lifestyle!

My ideas for the piece were already underway while I was making Last Meadow. When Last Meadow premiered, Phillip Bither approached me to discuss commissioning the next piece. I’ve realized that most pieces are that, they’re someone asking you to do something [laughs]. You create some abstract deadline, and then it just goes. I’ve been thinking about that as a phenomenon of making art. There were so many different kinds of things that happened during the time frame of making that show.

“And lose the name of action” at MANCC, Photo by Chris Cameron

Marissa: When did you start studying Feldenkrais?

Miguel: I had already been going to Jimena Paz sporadically for Feldenkrais lessons, and then in the fall of 2010, in the midst of my dad’s illness, we were about to do a tour of Last Meadow in France, I had a really transformative experience with Jimena. I’ve had pretty serious back issues since my early thirties, and I had a lesson with her where I felt so mobile after; I was restored to my younger body. It was like I was given back my younger body while having all the self-awareness I have now as an older body.

I found that really compelling, and then when I went to France to do the tour of Last Meadow, I was afraid of the rigor of that tour, and I ended up looking at a lot of videos of Ruthy Alon, who had been an early student of Feldenkrais, and again I just kind of aped her, I just did what she was doing, because she looked amazing, and I got through the tour without being injured. I felt like something in me was changing, and I wanted to learn more about it.

So, I applied to the training program, and I got in. Then when my Dad got out of the rehabilitation center, we set him up with a Feldenkrais practitioner in Florida, and he immediately responded really well to it. I was really happy to see that there was this kind of approach to working with a person.

My father experienced aphasia. It’s not that he can’t speak, but some days he’s able to answer questions better than others, or commands better than others. So I liked watching him work with this practitioner who wasn’t really demanding anything of him, just working with where he is. I saw how favorably responded to it.

I thought, “This is pretty awesome! If this can do that for my Dad, then I want to work more on this with other people.” It’s been fascinating to walk into something—this keeps happening to me, in my thirties–I encounter things or artists or people who give language to something I’m either already doing or already interested in.

That happened to me with Deborah Hay. When I worked with her, I thought, “Oh my god, this is all stuff I’ve been getting at, but I didn’t have these words.” The ideology of Feldenkrais, of meeting someone where they are, feels pretty integral to who I am as a person, director and teacher—not trying to make someone into something else. In my friendships and artistic collaborations, I feel like I’m pretty in tune with that way of being and that way of thinking.

“And lose the name of action” at MANCC, Photo by Chris Cameron

Marissa: When you started working on And lose the name of action with all these things in mind, did you have a vision or an idea of what the piece would become?

Miguel: The one thing that has stayed closest to my original conception is the spatial design of the piece. I knew I wanted an “unusual” configuration with screens, the multiple surfaces for video projections. I wanted to create a deflection and disorientation from what is front and what is back. Aesthetically, I thought I was going to make something very different than what happened. I had been researching the brain, watching boring DVDs, reading books, and so much of that research was dry. I suspected that the piece would have a dryness to it, or a kind of rationalism to it, like a “powerpoint piece,” or the “lecture-demonstration–performance, ” where there’s an overhead projector, everyone’s wearing regular clothes, the house lights are on, and that’s it. What I did not expect to make was a big ole’ mutha-fuckin’ spectacle.

[laughs]

“And lose the name of action” at MANCC, Photo by Chris Cameron

Marissa: Were there segments in the work that were based on improvisation, or was there set choreography?

Miguel: There is some. Hilary [Clark] and I have little improvisational moments twice in the piece, both when I go over to her when she’s sitting in the chair and she gets up and we kind of talk, we talk and then we move and we talk, and then later, when we’re both screaming text and throwing each other around, that’s improvised, and then the section where we’re running around in the dark, that’s improvised, and it’s very short. I think there’s one other section that’s improvised by KJ [Holmes] and Luke [George].

The interesting thing for me was trying to find seamlessness between what is known and what is not known, or what is set and what is not set. I’ve been disappointed that there hasn’t been more writing on the actual movement aspect of the performance. I feel the movement is a really big achievement of the piece, and certainly inside the larger trajectory of my own work, because I was trying to capture something about the strangeness and surprise of improvisational movement, and the way in which value is dispersed in all these different directions. If I get up and say, “I’m going to create this action, this sequential analog of action,” I’d be using a choreographic method for conventional dance material. I feel like the choreography of this piece is a real success because the movement reflects the spatial values, the temporal values, and the dramaturgical values of improvisation, which was my vested interest in the making of this piece.

“And lose the name of action” at BAM, Photo by Bylan Douglas

Marissa: I think the reason why there’s some emphasis on the text is simply because of the text becoming a centerpiece at points. It’s also easier for people to attach value to language.

Miguel: Sure. Always.

Marissa: Some people enjoyed your use of language, and others found it totally problematic, but I haven’t heard anyone say that about the dance, or that it is a dance. I was definitely invested in the text, because I’m invested in it. But because of it, and the style of the costumes, there’s a way in which we could characterize what you’re doing as experimental theater. It’s curious to me that because you choose to use a script, or you have a song, suddenly the dance is called into question.

I don’t think your piece is about theater in a way that a person could interpret it to be about theater. The parts of just dancing were where I felt inside of the piece. I felt empathic responses to this idea of disintegration or devolution from the relationship between action and sense and action and language. It made me remember experiences of my own body making sense to me, and not making sense to me, and the feeling of something being lost to me in the process of trying to understand it. That’s a crazy thing to choreograph, or direct!

Miguel: That loss that you’re describing, or detachment—estrangement, even, from a body’s experience, is for me a huge conundrum working in a form where the space of the person doing it and the space of someone watching it will never be the same. All kinds of things are projected onto that experience because somehow that experience is often valued as a visual rendering. If you come from dance, your body is trained to cohere, and integrate information, and that comes with all the baggage of visual rendering.

Really, dance is an unfolding proposition. We are so concerned with our presentation of ourselves, but I am interested in an experience of dance that is away from that. This body is central to allowing me to go away. If I didn’t have this body, I wouldn’t be able to go away because I wouldn’t be there in the first place. When I think about all the different places I was in the course of making this piece, geographically or emotionally—despair, love, abandonment, fear, mortality, just so many crazy places I went to, in myself, in this body, I experienced these things, I went through these things, and somehow I’ve always wanted dance or performance to accept that multiplicity, and to propose it, or offer it, because I don’t have an investment in coherence, actually, or in believing that things arrive in integrated ways.

“And lose the name of action” at BAM, Photo by lan Douglas

Marissa: Maybe that’s a way to talk about the script, as well. I’m thinking about the number of times in the piece when people were uttering and you didn’t know what it was, when KJ and Luke were talking and you don’t know what they were saying, and both Hilary and Michelle [Boulé] have these moments of talking to themselves, or even moving like they’re schizophrenic, or as if they are doubled. It took me a long time not to be frustrated with that and to realize that I can just watch their mouths move.

Then, in the video, there is a lapse between when you’d see Paul [Duncan] speaking and when you’d hear his speech, which I loved. It’s a crisp, clear depiction of one’s consciousness being muted. The piece had many different modes of speech; singing, talking to yourself, silent soliloquies, dialogues, and that literal script, when the performers were holding those folders, and yelling “fuck you.” At that moment language takes over. What is your experience of that moment in the piece, and how is that relating to the other elements of the piece?

Miguel: Well I love that it’s like this weird rupture, “and now we’re talking and you can hear it.” You can understand it, but it’s also this obtuse argument, and it’s this bad acting thing—we’re trying to be good actors, but we’re not very good actors [laughs]—and we’re reading a script because none of us could memorize the whole thing, or anyway—Ishmael [Houston-Jones] probably couldn’t [laughs]. We’re just enjoying something about it. I’ll also just put forward that rarely do I ever experience anxiety about things being different from each other, inside a thing.

I guess it was my early training with Joe Goode, where so much of the compositional training with Joe was juxtaposing things right next to each other, and sort of living for the frisson between the two things, and then just stepping back and enjoying the way in which meaning exists in these relationships between events. That compositional training landed so deeply in me, it’s almost like I found my home in that idea and it’s something I’ve employed and deployed ever since.

The idea that all of a sudden you can just be dropped into this crazy little Grecian situation comedy is really satisfying. So I always really enjoy that part, because I get to just play off Ishmael, who is so funny and ridiculous and game for anything, always. It’s also this weird father-son thing for me, like when you go off to college and you come home and you’ve read all those great books, and your Dad says these boring old things and you’re like, “Ugh! You don’t know what all the new books are saying!” The kind of hateful way that young people can be, it taps into a lot of those archetypes for me.

“And lose the name of action” at BAM, Photo by Bylan Douglas

Marissa: There’s a way where it felt like an assault, when you were screaming, and that was the only time in the piece where it felt like there was an assault, like you were trying to test our ability to sit there, which, for you, is tame [laughs] compared to other things.

Miguel: That’s interesting. That’s nice. Yes—and it’s all words, doing that. It makes sense. Certainly in my Dad’s situation, words have been used in all sorts of fucked up ways, like his idiot physical therapist, or the words of that idiot doctor. Words become so powerful there, and it’s enraging, because you’re having this different physical experience and the person is like, “Clearly, this person is…” and you’re like, “How could they be saying that? I’m right here. I’m the person who knows what the fuck is going on.”

Marissa: There’s a lot of rage in that.

Miguel: There’s huge rage in the way language then becomes the de facto way of constructing meaning, or it’s the reliable way. It’s like fuck you, all I have to do is touch this person to know that they’re tired, or sick, or hungry. There are so many other ways of experiencing knowing.

I’m just getting flashes of memories of participating in public demonstrations, and of my mother, a Spanish speaker in a primarily English-speaking country. Throughout my Dad’s crisis, all of the medical professionals flat-out ignored her; “Here’s this woman who doesn’t speak English, let’s ignore her.” She was the person who knew better than anyone what was going on with my Dad, but her knowledge was not respected. She was incredibly frustrated and angry as a result of that. I’ve been so aware in my life of when people wanted to be heard and couldn’t be heard. Being bicultural you understand really early on that he who holds the language holds the power. Of course you’re going to want to fuck with language. You’re like, “what is this fucking tool?”

Interview date: September 21, 2012 (via Google Hangout)

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New York based performer, choreographer, writer and teacher, Jack Ferver spoke with CC Co-Editor,  Marissa Perel via Google Hangout about the process of making his new solo, Mon, Ma, Mes, which will be performed October 6 at Le Skyroom for FIAF’s Crossing The Line 2012. Ferver discusses returning to his alma mater, Interlochen as a guest artist, sculpting performance out of chaos, the art of the Q & A and the performance of persona.

Jack: I am back at Interlochen, my old school, where the seed for what I’m doing now really was planted. When I studied at Interlochen, you had to choose between being a theater or a dance major, so I decided to become a theater major, but take a lot of dance classes, and use the dance building at night to make my own work.

Marissa: How long has it been since you’ve been back there?

Jack: I came here a year ago to do a panel, which is why I got invited to make this work here. But before then, it had been ten years since I had been here. I’ve been here since August 31, and I haven’t been back here for so long since I went to school here. It’s like this constant mirror, where the birth of my superego happened. Plus, I’m working with teenagers, and they’re art teenagers, which is twice as intense.

Jack studied theater and dance at Interlochen from 16-18. Here, rehearsing “Mon, Ma, Mes”

When I was studying here, I was in the Bacchae, and the director knew that I had been studying Graham technique, so he said, ‘well, why don’t you choreograph your part?’ So, I’d learn the text by Euripides during the day, and then choreograph in the studio at night. It’s ultimately what I’ve ended up doing here with the students. I’ve taken three plays by Euripides; Medea, Elektra, and The Trojan Women, and I have done my own adaptation of Medea and Clytemnestra’s monologue.

Since it’s Interlochen’s 50th Anniversary, I wanted to use classics, and in the way that I do things, contemporize them. So, in the last scene of Medea, these three teenage lovers appear and have fights about heartbreak. In Elektra, there’s a youtube video of a girl who hates her mom, and misses her brother and her dad, while the death scene of Clytemenstra happens on the other side of it, and there’s a dance to Nikki Minaj’s Young Forever, while Clytmnestra is getting killed. The last piece, Trojan Women, has nothing classical in it. It has a girl hanging out with her friends, and they’re dancing around, and she gets a skype call from her brother in Afghanistan. She then sees him get killed, which is was a contentious incident that was reported to have actually happened to a woman’s husband this past May.

It’s been interesting working with these teenagers because I’ve been teaching them how to use their own lives, and improv, and Authentic Movement to build choreography, and creative writing to build text. So, I rehearse with them and then come home and write, then I rehearse for my show at FIAF, and then I rehearse with them again.

Marissa: How is rehearsing for your show at FIAF?

Jack: I wanted to explore persona, and the “Jack Ferver persona,” the concept of celebrity, and how people build that. So there’s a Q & A session, which I am creating for the performance.

Marissa: Is it with the audience?

Jack: Yes. Then, I am doing a dance.

Marissa: What is the dance?

Jack: Well, it’s a lot. I am processing just having re-performed my trio, I am trying to hear myself at the B-Out exhibition at Andrew Edlin Gallery this Summer. I made it 5 years ago when I was in a very different place in my life, and after having re-performed it, it just felt like self-abuse. I turned to Marc Swanson, whom I collaborated with for Two Alike this past year at the Kitchen. Two Alike was a difficult piece to perform but I felt a sense of efficacy and accomplishment with it. I am trying to hear myself is different, made on a younger body. So, I have been taking elements from it for my solo. I guess that’s where it begins. [Screams] In the tower of art I sit with Martha Graham over a ouija board!

Marissa: [Laughs hysterically]

“Me, Michelle,” Museum of Arts and Design as part of Performa 11.

Jack: This piece for FIAF is about loneliness and control, it’s an issue that is very present for me as an artist. The more you grow as an artist, the harder it gets. You get to see what doesn’t work much clearer and the line becomes thinner. When I made work earlier, it was ok to do things just because, intuitively, but now I am asking myself the questions of “Why?” “What am I trying to say?” “Why am I saying it?” This has come from teaching, and doing dramaturgy with students every day.

Marissa: Tell me more about this hardness. What are you getting out of this process versus the youthful feeling of being free and doing whatever you want?

Jack: Well, for starters, I’m alone. I am continuing to work on the Interlochen show for October 10th, but I am also working on a duet with Joshua Robin Levy for Prelude 2012 at CUNY the night before my show for FIAF.

Marissa: You are busy!

Jack: Yes, that’s how I like it! I think being at Interlochen right now while I am working on the solo is important because I have to look at how I started as a performer. It compelled me to do a lecture-performance at Crossing the Line, where I am going to talk about myself as an artist. I feel like it’s micro to macro dialogue.

[Google Hangout crashes and then restarts, and then Jack sings, “Witchcraft will make the Google Hangout happen!”]

Marissa: You were talking about the Q & A as a micro to macro dialogue.

Jack: I feel like the Q & A explodes what the audience wants from us, what the audience expects, what we want when the audience comes, what we expect. It’s like any relationship, which is part love and part abuse. There’s a duet going on between us and the audience that is part love and part abuse, there’s a duet among audience members and how they relate, and between the artist and himself, who he is and how he relates to himself when performing. In A Movie Star Needs A Movie, I made a Q & A at the end to push this sense of grandiosity.

Marissa: Is it grandiosity or self-reflexivity?

Jack: It’s drawn from a sense of narcissism, like how artists talk about their collaborators by referencing themselves.

Marissa: What do you mean?

Jack: It would be like if someone brought your name up to me in conversation and I said, “Oh, I know her, she is so brilliant. She had marvelous things to say about my work, and how I am breaking the zeitgeist.” So, it’s really not about you at all. I am dealing with the thrust of choreographic control, and how we wrestle with control, this obtuse narcissism and neurotic behavior.

It’s like the beginning of The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, “… a girl gets a scholarship here and a scholarship there, and ends up driving New York like her own private car, but I wasn’t driving anything, not even myself.” That is totally me. I got to Interlochen and to New York by scholarships and by a movie. But I wasn’t driving, I wasn’t in control. I rehearse every day, I meticulously script my material, but I still don’t know what it is. Chaos reigns.

I’m sculpting the performance, my dramaturge is looking at it, Marc is looking at it, but where is it coming from in me? What is it? The thrust of my work is psychology. Making work is a lot of analysis; why are you using that music? Why do I use cold lighting?

“Two Alike,” The Kitchen, May, 2012. Photo by Paula Court

I think I’ve said to you before that artists are the stomach of society and they are digesting the indigestible. It’s a lot of energy to channel and sculpt. I make art so that people won’t feel as lonely as I have felt. That is what I get out of seeing great work, too.

Marissa: How do you allow the chaos to occur to create material that you then sculpt? Where is the place of chaos in your process?

Jack: Chaos happens in the creating of the dance, the script and the performance. The Apollonian tactics for the Chthonic matter, thank you, Camille Paglia, are how you rehearse, cut and edit the original material. So the making of choreography is a meditation on what you are trying to say.

Marissa: Do you know what you’re saying yet?

Jack: When I walk into the rehearsal room I know what I want to say. This new dance is a meditation on loneliness and control. I film it, I look at it; just like Gia [Kourlas] said “just because it feels good it doesn’t mean that it looks good.” I try to write every day and figure out how to line the bullets up, so when you shoot the gun, you hit them between the eyes. So that’s how I metamorphose the chaos.

And then I talk to my collaborators, so I’m putting the chaos out there. In the duet with Josh, I am looking at the dramaturge- performer relationship like the therapist-client relationship, and how the dramaturge tries to get the performer to another place, which doesn’t always work.

Rehearsing “All of a Sudden,” Photo by Al Hall

Marissa: Do you need to get into an intense feeling of isolation to meditate on loneliness and control, or is that feeling always there and it’s a matter of focusing on it?

Jack: I like what you said in the second part of that question. I feel all the feelings, Marissa! All the time! So it’s a matter of tapping in. It leads into deeper questions like, “Why am an artist?” As Martha [Graham] said, “Ambition is not enough, necessity is everything.”

I need to do this. There are certain things that I have to explore as an artist. These compulsions lead me to both difficult and rich places, and they are not easy to separate. For instance, in going to back to my dance-making process, I was very oriented toward repetition in Two Alike because it was about finding a sense of safety in an unsafe childhood. My compulsions, personally and artistically, brought me to where I am today, but they also made me develop traits that made me into a monster.

Marissa: How?

Jack: Traits that I developed in my childhood to be safe, I don’t need as an adult. But I can’t get rid of them. It makes it very difficult to negotiate the world. So, I watched Opening Night. I watched it here, where I grew up, where I took dance every day. It seemed appropriate to think about what it means to be haunted by an inner child, or a super ego. Everyday I’d be rehearsing, going to dance class, theater class, then I’d read Blood Memory by Martha Graham, night after night. This thing about the solitary artist and that it’s self-imposed had a great effect on me, and it illuminates what it is to be back here.

In my childhood I was becoming so isolated, but I was also validated in my isolation by being an artist. This made it ok to cut off, in fact encouraged, to cut off friends and family. It took years to break apart, and it remains a cunning reality. I’ve been doing this since childhood, and the discipline at Interlochen. I’m happiest making art, it’s where I know what to do. I can struggle here.

Marissa: When I saw Two Alike, I interpreted it as a meditation on death.

Jack: How did you come to that?

Marissa: It was something about the eradication of self. When you put the blanket over your head, I saw it as you looking to eliminate the pain by eliminating yourself. But it sounds like for this new solo, you are being present with it, living in it.

Jack: Yeah, that is probably true. I feel it is at once trying to be present with it, and to step in and out of that performance skin.

“Two Alike,” The Kitchen, May, 2012. Photo by Paula Court

Interview date: July 6, 2012

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