Critical Correspondence

Karinne Keithley in conversation with Aynsley Vandenbroucke

Karinne Keithley and Aynsley Vandenbroucke talk about Montgomery Park, a work that Karinne workshopped in July 2010 at Mount Tremper Arts and will premiere November 4-13 at Incubator Arts Project.

Interview date:  October 12, 2010

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Karinne Keithley: This is going to be the first full iteration of Montgomery Park. It’s a work in two halves: The first half is in the form of a museum, and the second half is in the form of an audio-video chamber operetta, which is what we built at Mount Tremper. It’s going to be happening at The Incubator Arts Project, which was Richard Foreman’s Ontological Hysteric Theater, which is exciting to me especially because the last time I actually got it together to do a full production was in the same building, in St. Mark’s Church, where I did Tenderenda at Danspace Project downstairs. It’s a building that I used to work in, so the idea that I’m doing a play about a conscious building in a building that I spent a lot of time communing with is very happy to me. A felicitous coincidence.

When I first started working on Montgomery Park, I allowed myself to imagine it without thinking about the possibility or impossibility of actually staging it. I imagined walking people through this completely built mansion. Every room would be fully installed and would have talking walls and sometimes exhibits. It would be this very, very dense architectural and textual experience.

I wrote Montgomery Park for speech. The text is supposed to tumble and fall, and it fits a mouth. But it’s unwieldy as a performance text, because it’s really long. The text is two sets of tales with a bunch of other additional pieces. The first set of tales are these founding tales, and we did them as monologues at a semi-staged reading at HERE [Arts Center] last fall. There was a sense that there was so much text that it was built to slide by. The experience of actually listening was for most people extremely elusive. So I started thinking about a better way to deal with the volume of text in Montgomery Park.

I allowed myself to think about what form the delivery of the text could take. I did think pretty freely and patiently about that and decided that I wanted to build an installation to replicate the idea of walking through these different chambers. I was going to make an audio guide, like being in a museum, and everyone was going to have their own. And then I realized I couldn’t possibly afford to that, because museum audio equipment costs something like $500 a piece, and the crappy MP3s make me sad.

This idea evolved into installing the the full text of the tales on the walls. Then I realized that I wanted to take a lot of the information and imagery out of the tales and present it in another way. I’m trying to reiterate the story in every sense and method possible. It’s in diagrams. It’s in timelines. It’s in the text itself. It’s in the songs. It’s in the captions for the museum exhibits. It happens in the dance.

The information that grounds the play keeps pulsing at you. It never comes at you complete square, but I’m trying to reiterate the basic blocks of it enough to stabilize the sense of the story, which is this: There’s this building. It’s something like an asylum. It’s conscious, and people can combine with it and set the whole thing on fire.

The museum is made as if this place were real, and we had all of these archives and could make a display out of them. The audience will come in and have some time in the museum before they go into the second chamber, where the operetta happens.

Aynsley: I’m curious how you curated that museum exhibit.

Karinne: I’ve described the text as slippery, and I’ve tried to think through the whole thing and identify the little points of stability. When I refer to something particular in this text, I turned that thing into a visual image with a caption that explains it. So part of [creating the museum] was attending to the script and bringing its images out in a fairly simple fashion.

I also did some recuperation of things that got cut along the way. The founding tales historically move through 1910, but mostly cover just about ten or twenty years. And then the fire story, which is the basis of the operetta, all happens in the ’80s. Not that any of the time is clear, but I forced myself to actually map it out against my desire to make everything both the 19th and the 20th century at once. So there’s this 100 years of history that are not addressed in any of the writing that I did. I allowed myself to imagine that [time span] and took a lot of things that I had written originally. I had written a lot of talking rooms, and I wrote this one room that had all the propositions of Spinoza’s ethics embroidered onto little flags that filled up this whole room. I embroidered one and a half of them before I gave up. So I brought the flag room back, brought these things into the story that had been part of the imagining of it, but had gotten cut a long the way.

It’s very much an act of pleasure for me. What do I love about this story, this history that I’ve tried to make? I’ve thought about the project as how to create the history of a building and not a story about a building, so it suggests this form. If you listen to it right, that’s what it says.

Aynsley: I’d like to hear about the slippery quality of the performances of yours that I’ve seen. [This quality] sets up a space where there aren’t concrete things for me to pin everything on. There’s something about that [space] that makes me feel like you respect me as an audience member. It’s a place that I can enter into in my own way, because you’re not telling me exactly where to go. I’m curious about that slippery quality and how you determine how much information to give and how much to allow it to be open.

Karinne: This space is what I believe in, aesthetically. This space where we’re all persisting alongside each other and moving in the current of the piece, with just enough impetus to have an experience of pattern, but without enough knowledge to turn it into something that can be an object. For some perverse reason, I’m just devoted to this idea, even though sometimes it can be so difficult and esoteric and hard. I don’t know if it’s really what people want. I do love narrative, and I do love art objects. But I think the slipperiness—the feeling of being in that space, where it’s moving and you can’t control it, but you’re definitely inside of it—is my favorite aesthetic experience and something that I try to create.

[Part of making this experience is crafting] the tent poles that you need to keep it aligned and aloft. [The work] needs some amount of grounding; you can’t just be out in the wildnerness. [The grounding] comes through pattern and through allowing it to sing and dance at you, with you. I’m devoted to doing just enough to keep that thing palpable without turning it into an object that creates a separation between the thing itself and the audience. I think of the mind of the piece as a shared project between what’s happening on the stage and what’s happening in the audience.

Now I’m going to contradict myself. I entered into writing as a choreographer, comfortable with this extremely intuitive way of judging the fitness of one thing next to another. I was resistant and continue to be resistant to rules of narrative and ideas especially about playwriting. I’ve given up on the idea that I’m a playwright per se, just because it’s such a heavily guarded term, and it seems not worth the fight. I’ve been so resistant to narrative, because I’ve been trying to figure out what is it to take a choreographic mind into a textual process. As I get more and more comfortable with the process of writing and develop different ways of working, I allow myself more and more to ask how do you tell a story. Because I love stories, actually. I don’t want to just be in this weird, hover-y space. I want to be in the space of a story that is an exquisite experience of that story. It requires a kind of balance between the two for me.

Montgomery Park is one of the first stories that I wrote, actually. So the question of how much information is a question of counterbalance. How much information do you need to have a sense of where you are, so you can be comfortable not knowing where you’re going? But for that not to feel like an aggressive lack of information, but an actual pleasure of discovery.

When I read through the text, I realized that I had so much key information that I understood very deeply that was referenced only once in the middle of a big enormous sentence that had five different ideas all cobbled together inside of it. It wouldn’t do anything bad to the text to send the image out in advance, so that when you heard it, you could associate the two. I’m trying to trust in the idea of iteration and reiteration. There’s no suspense in the story, so there’s nothing to spoil. You know from the beginning that the building is conscious and it sets on fire. Those are the only events.

Aynsley: Could talk a bit more about how you create a room that’s supportive, that holds the project up like the tent-poles?

Karinne: To me this is the biggest question in performance right now: What is the room that this happens in? My own interest in it is part of a collective question that I see going on around me. How to have an experience instead of consuming something? The energy behind that question has very high stakes, if we’re still doing this performance thing. How do we embrace it’s live-ness?

The word “room” has become really helpful to me to rethink “theater” and “stage” and get rid of those terms of separation. If the audience is going to be alongside [the work], they need to not already know what it is. You need to not allow them a space to just sit back and evaluate according to terms that already exist. At the same time, you need to make sure that you’re not humiliating them or creating a kind of phony version of participation. For me, creating a room versus a theater has to do with finding ways to gesture towards a circle, ways to be closer, ways to not be in the second row behind someone else, ways to create a kind of luminosity that goes everywhere, instead of just onto the actors.

It’s a very secular version of a religious practice. What is the space that we come into as a special occasion where something happens? I think of that as a realignment or calming, or something that’s a useful part of our weekly or monthly calendar. Just the idea that that room could have two sides is fundamentally weird to me. So that’s why I’ve started to put the word “room” in my head and keep asking myself what room it is that the play happens in.

When we do this piece at the Incubator, I have to compromise the room a little bit in order to make sure that there’s enough chairs and enough space for my museum. It’s a pragmatic compromise on my room, but I think it will be nice. It’s good when you encounter that kind of friction, of having to solve for a space.

Aynsley: Especially related to that secular religious experience, what is the experience of performing for you right now?

Karinne: That is such a big question. Having moved away from New York, the practice of performance gets a little bit harder to imagine continuing, because I’m not in a community. It’s made me realize how much there is a congregation. I don’t mean to imply that there is a theology to it, but there is something analogous to the gentler side of art practice and the good of what you can imagine a religious congregation offered at other times—and still today in some delicate and sweet places that we don’t hear about on Fox news.

I think about performing as being in the room with other people. At the same time, I see it less and less as something that I need to do. When I started writing this piece, I knew that I wanted to write it for myself to perform with Katy Pyle as my companion—that was a very very early intuition.

I quit performing. Or, I quit my identity as a performer a while ago. I came back to performing, but I never came back to the idea that this is the context in which I have my particular identity in the world. So performing has become a very quiet and pleasurable thing for me, now that it’s not the full conception of who I am.

I think of myself more as the author of the work than as a performer of it. My work is comprised of so many subterranean ways of working that I don’t feel like I can just hand it over to someone else. I consider myself one of the people who can best figure out how to do it without inflecting it with too much craziness.

The thing that led me to quit performing was that when I tried to perform, I tried to make myself transparent and just give and give and give and give. I found it to be a very difficult emotional economy to sustain. So now when I perform, I just try to make myself available to the piece and to take a very task-like approach to the work. Singing is my very favorite thing to do, and my other very favorite thing to do is to dance. And performing is also an occasion for singing and dancing. And dancing is something that doesn’t tend to happen for me when I’m not in a room with other people. In fact, this is one of the first places where I began to recuperate dance for myself after spending some years wandering as an exile in the wilderness, far from my home.

In a weird way, performing is not what’s important to me about this. I just want to create the event. I don’t know what comes after this. I don’t know whether having left New York will prompt me to write and record and not seek a performance context again, because I just live so far from anybody who I could collaborate with.

Aynsley: How have you found that incorporation of movement, whether it’s you doing it, or just the nature of having dance incorporated into this piece?

Karinne: It makes me only want to do more. There’s no stage vocabulary that’s more delicate and slippery than dancing, if you can get it away from something that seems to signify. And that it’s just this perfect pitch within the multiple tones of a textual-sound-singing-dancing-performance piece. Dancing again is incredibly satisfying. I wish that there was more dancing in this. I’m always working against my own impulse to just stand still.

Aynsley: That’s why I like you.

Karinne: And certainly I want to keep dancing. It took me a while to realize that I wasn’t writing plays. I was writing for a genre—which to me is most exemplified by other people who I’ve worked with, like David Neumann and Big Dance Theater—where dance and text and singing are put together. It just took me a while to figure out. It’s interesting how slow and how dumb one has to be about one’s own work in order to allow it to take its own groundhog-y time. I’ve become extremely patient, because I don’t have a lot of ambition for having an art career, because I’m making my living as an English teacher. I’ve become extremely patient for what the form it is that it takes.

Aynsley: That’s what makes you such a true artist, that you’re bringing in such a depth of curiosity and interest in so many different parts of our experience of being alive. We need to end our official conversation, but I want to tell people that they have to ask you sometime about Emerson and Thoreau and about your technique of speaking in a way that allows the language to be slippery. Is there anything else you’d like to say?

Karinne: Just how good it is to leave New York and actually have enough space to live in, and how sad it is to leave New York and all the people to think with. That’s where I am.