Critical Correspondence

Cori Olinghouse in conversation with Thomas DeFrantz

MIT Professor of Theater Arts Thomas DeFrantz speaks with New York choreographer Cori Olinghouse. Cori discusses VOIX DE VILLE, which premieres at Danspace Project February 3-5 as part of Platform 2011: Body Madness – Absurdity & Wit, curated by Judy Hussie-Taylor.

Interview date: January 4, 2011

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Thomas: It’d be really terrific if we could start talking about your pathway to the new work that you’re engaged in now. Especially in terms of coming from a strong performance background with Trisha Brown, to the vaudeville and the eccentric dance that you are working with now. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Cori: Yeah, absolutely. So I had danced with Trisha Brown from 2002 to 2006 and I actually left the company with a pretty bad knee injury. It was a very difficult time in my life; my father passed away from a severe case of alcoholism and also my partner, at the time, and I had broken up. It became an extremely pivotal time in my life and I could see that humor, joy and transformation were really necessary in my art-making practices. I began to look at other forms of movement. I think that there was something inside of me looking to explore humor, anger, pain and pleasure in movement. In my exploration of other forms, I began to study a lot of different artists. I began to study the old silent clowns: Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, as well as Grock, Max Wall and other eccentric dancers. I also started to study voguing with Archie Burnett and Benny Ninja, from the House of Ninja. I was also really moved to see various performers from the underground such as Kim Aviance, Princess Xtravaganza, and a woman I danced with in Bill Irwin’s work, Ephrat Asherie.

Around this time there were two powerful teachers and mentors that were a part of my journey. The first person that I had begun to work with was Bill Irwin. I had been moved so deeply, and still am, by his ability to shapeshift, create illusion, and by the sheer magic of his work. After working with Bill, I also started to study voguing with Archie Burnett, grandfather of the House of Ninja. Right away I could recognize that he is a master at what he does. I was very moved by the way he approached his students and began to fall in love with voguing. During this five year time span since leaving Trisha Brown’s company, I had been going through a very deep journey of my own; starting to breakdown my own dancing identity and seeing if it’s possible to go from a postmodern understanding of the body to a different kind of understanding that incorporates a deeper sense of identity and expression. That’s where it brings me today. And this process, that I’ve begun, feels very much like a life-long process that I’m very much in the beginning of.

Thomas: There’s this wonderful strand in your narrative. You were looking for joy in a certain kind of way, or certainly a release that re-tooling your discipline, or re-tooling your technique, helped you access somehow. Is it something that you experience physically in these other forms? Or was it just as much a part of your emotional creative sensibility that you were looking to shift?

Cori: Well, I think that there was something in me emotionally that was looking very deeply for joy. It was a very important need that felt related to my survival as a person. But as an artist, the body was my point of entry because it is where my expertise and background are. This was the base where I began to unravel myself, and also unravel my understanding of all the movement languages that began to interest me. It was through this process of working with the body that I began to look at a deeper form of expression. But part of this was looking at the structuring principals and the composing elements and patterns that are inherent in these forms. And as an improviser, I was taking some of those principals back into my creative work.

Thomas: How does it feel? How is it helping you understand your relationship to the corporeal in a different way? Or how does it vibrate for you with the techniques that you’ve been working with the last couple years?

Cori: Tommy would you mind just talking a little more about the word corporeal?

Thomas: Sure. You know, body, but bodymind self. We abandoned [René] Descartes a while ago and [the term] bodymind. Dance artists and performing artists understand that that division makes no sense. The self is a concept I like to engage sometimes to think about how the systems of the physical, or the corporeal, are embedded within systems of emotion, systems of memory and systems of the imaginary. Maybe another way to think of [corporeal] that’s more everyday is the self. Maybe the corporeal is related to the self? How do you organize all of your information and put it into vaudeville techniques, or a Buster Keaton movement, or something that Bill Irwin’s working on and then find your own methods of that as an artist? What’s it feel like to you?

Cori: Well I think that has been a very interesting moment for me because in many ways part of this journey has been about my exploration of how trapped I began to feel in the postmodern aesthetic, and opening myself to other possibilities for expression. It has not been easy. My very first experience studying with Archie was a really funny moment for me. We were in class. He was teaching runway and also teaching what it means to stylize movement. This was the very first time I had walked into his class. In the moment of working with runway, I remember I chose to walk in such a way that was completely not stylized, or at least my understanding of something not being stylized. [Stylizing movement] was so utterly unfamiliar to me that I literally did not know how to engage. And in that moment, something really interesting happened. Archie caught it right away, of course, and he was able to completely mimic and replicate my non-stylized walk. In that moment I was so moved because coming from movement, as a practitioner of Alexander Technique and also as an improviser, one of the most important things to me is the affect of observation. It was so clear to me that right away Archie had this absolute ability to razor sharp observe exactly where I was disconnecting–and that’s exactly what he called it. He started to talk about this idea of emotional connection, and I was thinking, “emotional connection?” My whole entire dance life I had been taught “neutral.” Suddenly I questioned, “What does this mean to be emotionally connected?” So even though I had something in myself that very deeply needed to come out, that [“neutral”] performance mask and the function that I had been operating in all these years from had been quite blocked. Part of my experience in terms of feeling and entering these forms had been about breaking through a very deep nervousness and a very deep shyness.

The other thing that was happening around the time that I started studying voguing, specifically, was that I had been going though a break-up that was pretty difficult. [Since I have] the kind of personality that has a very difficult time expressing anger, when I started to study voguing it was this place where I could go into a very extreme expression of an opposition in the body that felt very intense. And because it was still coming through the lines of the body and through some of the things that I have worked to understand in my own body for years and years, it felt like a very safe place with structure where I could explore qualities that normally would be pretty blocked.

Thomas: You’re looking at eccentric dance as much as vaudeville, and vaudeville is maybe just an umbrella to think about eccentric dance. But voguing and vaudeville are dances that are very theatrical and very much about pushing energy out towards the viewer or an audience, or witnesses or other competitors. The energy has to be much more visible I’d imagine in these forms.

Cori: Right. I think I’d go back to this idea of starting from a physical base because in this moment of frustration I had the emotions and the experiences as myself, personally, and then I had my [experiences] as a performer that were so different. The point of entry for me really was the body because the body is a safe place for me to inhabit. Where I could start to look at, specifically in the Alexander technique, how different kinds of body organizations create a certain kind of energy, or dynamic, or power, or thrust, or opposition–[These] are the words I was thinking of… For the first year in my studies I was purely looking at these things from a movement analysis perspective, which given the nature of these forms and the kind of expressiveness they employ I realized was, in a way, a kind of oxymoron in and of itself, but for me it was my cultural base and my perspective. So I spent a lot of time using the principles of the Alexander Technique, which teaches about observation and [asks]: What really is your behavior? What are you trying to do? And where are you trying to go? I would be standing in the mirror next to Archie, for instance, and see, “Well ok, he has all this power, but where the hell is it coming from?” Certainly I knew it was coming from his being and coming psychically and spiritually from another dimension. But I started with the body, and so I would see, “Oh, well he clearly has a ‘pushing-up’ from the floor from his legs. He clearly has a very strong grounding and root every time he uses his arms.” Then I started to see, “Every time he uses his arms out in front of his body, they’re clearly opposing the center.” Then I started to see, “Every time he moves forward in space, he has this ‘forward and up’’”–that is described in the Alexander Technique. In Archie’s movement I could see this very direct use of space, and oppositional ‘forward and up’ energy from the head opposing the back.” The words I’m describing come from the Alexander Technique, but it’s very important to me to also say that I think at that time when [F.M.] Alexander came to understand head ‘forward and up’ and ‘back back and back’, he was finding a way to articulate what happens when somebody is very organically and efficiently engaged in themselves. With Archie, Bill Irwin and some of the people I was studying with at the time, it was very clear that they all had this sort of intrinsic ability to connect. So even though I couldn’t at first get to an emotional connection, I could get to physical connection. I started to use that as a way to see if I could unlock something deeper in myself. It’s a question that I’ve posed myself. It’s not even been something that I feel I necessarily have resolved, or that I even have the answers to at this point.

Thomas: I wonder if Alexander, in a way, is giving you a kind of a speed dial towards being embodied in these forms? Because obviously [the] Alexander [Technique] is not the only way to think about training in these techniques, but it is certainly a way for you to get connected. It sounds like it was really productive to work that way. Is there a point then in your studies where you abandon that, with the social context for the dances.

Cori: Yes. I don’t know that in my work I specifically address social context, but I think what has been interesting to me, and has been for a number of years, is this idea of shapeshifting and transformation. In a way the piece I’m developing now for February has been very much a frame in which I can start to go into a deeper level of exploration and leave this very physical movement analysis perspective and start to put it back into a greater whole. Which again becomes about what does it mean to be able to be expressive? What does it mean to be able to shapeshift through forms? Is it possible to enter a different kind of performance energy? In the piece I’m creating now, I am very much using [those questions] as a frame for all of this research.

Thomas: It’s beautiful. I was actually thinking more in terms of your own engagement with vaudeville, or eccentric dance, or voguing. But you kind of answered that in a larger context anyway. I was thinking more about how eccentric dance and voguing are both social dance forms that then were adopted by a larger public. When they first came out, they were both American inventions; American social dances that become theatrical forms and then wind up in movies in the case of a lot of eccentric dance, and are on television in the case of voguing with America’s Best Dance Crew. So these forms start as social forms that are actually learned by being around people who want to do them with you and then they create these theatrical forms. That’s why I was wondering if you found a way to release yourself from the Alexander [Technique] to be in the social engagement with your teachers and your dancers. Has that happened in a way that’s different from working in a postmodern company?

Cori: Yes, absolutely. This is obviously a really important point to discuss. The way in which I started to break this down for myself has been to enter the underground house culture. I have been spending time over the last year as both an observer and participant in these frames. I’ve had some very moving experiences witnessing some of the artists I’m studying with. I had one thrilling experience earlier this year, when Archie was coaching me in the club. I see it as a new kind of practice space. That’s been a really important moment in terms of me leaving a very analytic perspective and being able to enter something that is much more about the culture; it’s about a musical sharing, a certain kind of rhythmic impulse. Again, this is something I’ve had a real shyness around. In the moments that I’ve truly been able to allow myself to let go and be part of the social fabric, it’s been so moving to me that it started to really almost breakdown. It started to shift some of my needs and some of my wishes for myself as an artist. I feel like this is something that I’m at the beginning of a journey with and something that I’ll continue to explore. And who knows? Maybe I’ll start to enter the culture much, much more deeply.

Thomas: It’s so wonderful to hear you say, “letting go” and talking about concepts like release, when you started as a Trisha Brown artist, of course, based around this idea of release. But release always has it’s own context in a way. The kind of postmodern release that you had there is really different from this sort of release into a different art form. I love this idea of shapeshifting and not reinventing yourself as an artist, but re-engaging your own sense of your creative process and your creative modalities through these forms.

Let’s talk a little bit about gender and sexuality in these forms. Because both eccentric dance and voguing are really male forms, they’re forms that engage a kind of feminine in a way. These were dances that made very masculine bodies look feminine somehow. But they were dances that made men seem flexible; they both spawn flexibility and eccentricity of intention. And when you were talking about the different teachers you’ve had, they were almost all men. I’m curious about that.

Cori: That’s been really fascinating to me and really important. Within my own gender and sexuality I identify as a queer artist and as somebody who’s androgynous. So the thing that’s been interesting is that I actually identify very much with the men. When I was in the Happiness Lecture with Bill Irwin in Philadelphia, I played his double at one point. I remember there was a female clown who’s in the clown community here in New York that had done a really interesting interview with Bill. One of the things they talked about was, “Well, where are the female clowns?” and “Is there a place for women in this world?” And I remembered thinking, oh this is interesting because in a way I identify with–you know in the way that I dress, and the way that my hair is, and the way that I move–I very much identify with some of the mannerisms of the men. So when I go into some of the hyper-accentuated female movements of vogue, those movements are not something I necessarily I identify with. This embodiment is a kind of mask. I feel like I’m trying it on–this hyper-sexualized hyper-feminine kind of body. Even though it’s not a body that I identify with in my daily life.

And in the piece that I’m making gender feels very much to be a part of the fabric of the piece. Another performer, Eva Schmidt, and I begin [the work] as baggy pants vaudevillians, and by the end of the piece Eva transforms into this almost Ginger Rogers kind of bird character. I also shapeshift into a bird, but my bird is a much more boyish bird. And there’s a solo that comes before the moment where I morph into a bird–exploring the idea of how a performance front gets constructed. The front part of my body is very two-dimensional and vaudevillian with a fake vest, a fake tie and buttons. Then in the back, that whole façade of the sort of boy front literally starts to open; the shirt starts to open, deconstruct and fall apart. You can see my entire back. And then it becomes a very female message. And then with the two men in the piece [Neal Beasley and Kai Kleinbard], we explore how they go from vaudeville into a further expression of gender. We start in something that’s quite fussy and kind of prim, and then when their performance front starts to break down and fail, we see them start to embody themselves in a different way. It is a very exciting and unusual moment. It’s been so moving to watch Javier [Ninja] and Benny Ninja as performers because I experience them very much as people who are very fluid in their expressions of identity and gender. This feels very integral to what I’m working on as well.

Thomas: Who are some of your sources as you were getting interested in eccentric dance and vaudeville? Were there other artists you were thinking about? Or what had you seen that got you excited? You mentioned you studied with Bill and he’s very available, of course. His work is kind of classic in terms of what was called 50 years ago new vaudeville. Are there other artists that you were also looking at?

Cori: Other eccentric dancers?

Thomas: I don’t know. I was thinking about Philippe Decouflé. I don’t know if there were any other artists you were thinking about.

Cori: I think a lot of the people I named in the beginning were people that were really moving to me. I also was looking at some of the early animation, like how the Olive Oil character got constructed. She was a character that was really fascinating to me given that she’s so noodley and long, and I had come from this sort of noodley and long Trisha Brown perspective, so that felt like a cross over. Also looking at early footage of Betty Boop and Mickey Mouse. Some of that, I’m aware, had been constructed from actual eccentric dancers. In this piece I’ve been researching and studying Buster Keaton, so that’s been really important to me given that he’s the stoned-faced clown. Coming from the strict neutrality of postmodernism it’s been very interesting to study somebody who was the stone-faced clown, who in his movement patterns has that ability to have that kind of passage of weight and release with his limbs, but yet he’s a clown and has the ability to create narrative expression and comedy. I also mentioned Max Wall earlier who was one of the musical performers who had inspired John Cleese and he is just phenomenally funny. When you look at him it’s just like, “What creature is he?” So I think looking at very unusual characters and people who work with transformation and who literally use their body to turn themselves into other images. [Earl] “Snakehips” Tucker is another one and using the metaphor of a snake. Being like a human boa constrictor he literally used his pelvis and legs and all that mobility to create this whole other imagery. Kim Aviance is very fascinating to watch because of the way she combines her expression of gender and sexuality with the extreme ease and fluidity in her movements. I also was studying a bit with David Shiner. His ability as a clown to provoke an audience and he has these real street chops as a circus and clown performer, was really, really inspiring to me and also utterly terrifying. It was interesting because when I first started studying with him I had only really taken a weeklong workshop, but it was still a really pivotal moment for me. It was right when I left Trisha’s company and I was in a classroom of all actors who had the ability to at any moment switch on any kind of character, voice or narrative or so on. And I had the ability to create different movement qualities–if you gave me an image I could go into image but it was abstract. It was really interesting because he didn’t quite know what to say to me, or what to do with me. And I didn’t know either. But I was really moved to watch his work. It feels like there’s a whole variety that I’ve engaged with, I’m sure I’m leaving a lot out, but those are some that come to mind.

Thomas: Well, that’s a really remarkable range of artists who’ve been inspiring you and helping you through your journey as you’re finding the next shape that you want to take on. You’ve already said what you’re after in the project and the longer journey as well, but maybe since we are at the end of time, you can just try to articulate it again. What is it you’re looking to find out for yourself, hoping to share with your audiences in the work next month?

Cori: In my work next month I want to very much do two things: I want to set up a platform to look at artists who are all working with this idea of transformation and shapeshifting. And within this frame, create a dialogue to bring together different dance cultures. It feels very much like an experiment to me. It feels like a situation that I’m setting up to pose questions. It’s important to me to make visible some of the masters that I am influenced by. And then in my work, I want to look at this world where there’s five of us in the cast. I’ve worked with each of the individuals in a very specific process, but I’ve again engaged with the Alexander Technique and also with improvisation, to pull out the interest and the sources that influence all of those five individuals. So within the work that I’ve created, even though there’s this landscape of vaudeville and this logic of shapeshifting, there’s also this very important premise where I’m trying to really reveal the individuality of the performers within the work.

Thomas: Well, good luck with the show. And I really can’t wait to see it.

Cori: Thank you Tommy.

Thomas: Thank you.