Disappearing, Never Ending, Return
Download this conversation as PDF
Thumbnail photo: Zach Zieman
K.J. Holmes: Hi, Charlotte Gibbons.
Charlotte Gibbons: Hi, K.J. Holmes.
K.J.: So, I’m here to interview you and we’ve had a couple of conversations, which came after I saw you perform. One was a performance that you did at AUNTS [Blood], and the other was a piece you did at Anna Sperber‘s space [Picture of a Knife]. I also just saw a showing of your work that you’ll be doing at The Kitchen the first weekend of February. We had talked about your history, and where you came from in terms of dance, and I thought that maybe you could talk a little bit about that again. That might be a reference point to see where you’re going.
Charlotte: Sure. I started dancing when I was nine years old. I was really, really shy and I saw my little sister dancing, and I really connected to it. I decided I wanted to do it. She was dancing at this really strict ballet school, so that’s what I did until I was seventeen. It was Balanchine technique, and we were auditioning for SAB (School of American Ballet) and stuff like that. It was pretty intense, but I don’t know, something about it I really connected to—moving and using my body. I’d always been really physical, but that was when I started dancing. Then I went to SUNY/Purchase and I was still doing ballet—a lot—and then something else clicked. It was some modern class I was taking and all a sudden I realized that there was this whole spectrum of other things I could be doing.
I started taking Neil Greenberg‘s classes and doing improvisation with him. I realized that there was something about improvisation that was so rich and so mysterious that I really enjoyed more than anything else I’d ever done. That was when I started thinking about that as a form to investigate—that could be investigated for a lifetime, which is really exciting to me. He also introduced Body-Mind Centering ® in his class which was really poignant. He was just starting to take classes with Bonnie Cohen or maybe it was Rosanne Spradlin; so he was learning, and we were learning as he was learning, and that was really exciting.
K.J.: That makes me think about what you said about working with your dancers. To have a kind of approach to understanding who they are through your ideas, and letting more of them come out. And maybe that was a model of learning through learning… learning through leading in a way.
Charlotte: Yeah, but learning at the same time as being, in a weird way, the authority of the rehearsal or the leader of the improvisation. Something that I really took out of Neil’s approach was a sense of wonder in everything. It was new to us, but he was really clear that these things were already within us. And that’s a lot of what I work on now, actually.
K.J.: One of the things I am struck by seeing your work over time, and also seeing you in class as a student and dancing in my work, is that these are moments that could be looked at as being transitional. I started thinking that the time in between me viewing you is actually the way that you work, it’s almost as if that’s a moment of all the other times in-between. Does that make sense? Because watching the rehearsal of the new piece the other day, I thought that it was about exploring the space in between decisions, not so much about the decisions.
Charlotte: Absolutely.
K.J.: So, there’s something about me witnessing you that allows me to consider you’re in transition, in between the times of your pieces as well.
Charlotte: [laughter]
K.J.: That’s really abstract, but there’s some way of making sense of how different your work appears to me. Rather than the work is holding everything, it actually continues to just be the space in-between other things.
Charlotte: Yeah, totally.
K.J.: How does that make sense with the segue from your training in college, with Neil and BMC, to what you’re doing now? What is the piece that you’re doing now? What’s the title of it again?
Charlotte: It’s called Disappearing, Never Ending, Return, and that’s a title I came up with some months ago when we were just beginning to work on it. I was on tour this summer, and I was thinking about the work that I had just done, and thinking about the ways in which I want to continue working. It was really about a transition in quality. We started working on it thinking about the ideas of lightness and ascension and descension, and what that means, but also lightness of meaning too. We were talking a lot about not having to define things or shape things, with language or otherwise. So we just started out sleeping. Something had happened to me when I was on tour. I fell asleep right before we were going to perform. And the guys in Eagle Ager whom I was performing with woke me up, and we just performed. It was this weird space that I was in where I was so open, and I was yawning and still half asleep, but I was performing. There was this really light quality about everything. Sometimes when I perform with Eagle Ager it feels really forced, kind of like a struggle. It is just a transition between the material that we’ve all decided upon and where I am right now. But in that instance, the way that I entered it from sleeping, I had this dream sort of quality about everything and it was really interesting to me.
When I came back in the fall, I started working with Christine Elmo, Noopur Singha, and Anna Sperber, and we started just by sleeping. And it was really interesting! For the previous piece, we had prepared by doing this intense exercise before it began. I thought [about] how the shifting quality I was looking for might be engendered by actually sleeping before we began the score.
K.J.: What was the quality you were looking for?
Charlotte: The quality I was looking for was a quality of lightness and getting away from expression. [In] the piece before, we were dealing with these heavy ideas and the quality became very definitive. I think that I wanted not only a quality of lightness, but a lightness in the way we approached what we were doing, so that we could have this intense or even spiritual investigation without it having to actually be intense for us or for our experience. I was thinking what a lot of people say about the quality of emotions, and I believe that it can be very true: that emotions are just an energetic state that’s either emanating from the quality of your life or something that’s going on in your body. That was how we began. It was really a response to the work that I had done before.
K.J.: The other time that we talked, you spoke of your idea of the body without organs. In terms of BMC work, the organs hold our emotions, and now you’re working with lightness of emotions. What created that shift for you in terms of that?
Charlotte: The last work we were exploring an idea of the body without organs, but we were also working a lot with the heart. I have always been fascinated with the idea of forgetting about the anatomy and the things about the body that I know, and trying to come up with my own way of approaching the body, anatomically or energetically. We’ve also been following a lot of body studies, and it’s been helping us a lot. We do work with the organs a lot, but recently we have also been trying to approach the organs and the internal space with our own way of accessing it.
K.J.: How would you describe that?
Charlotte: It’s kind of a new thing, so it’s not entirely describable, but I guess it’s based more on our own sensation and our own experience. I tend to talk a lot and bring a lot of information in that informs much of what happens. How can we gather our own information about what’s happening, because it has been a really long investigation, a long process of creating the work.
K.J.: Because you worked for eight months on the other piece before you showed it?
Charlotte: Mmm hmm.
K.J.: And how long have you been working on this new one?
Charlotte: Since the end of August, so five months. The body without organs thing… I was reading a lot about body art, performance art, and thinking a lot about that and about individual ways of approaching the body. [It] reminds me right now about the idea that all the fluids in the body are essentially the same fluid and as they pass through different membranes, they become something else. There’s all this separation and all these different systems in the body, but it’s all really one thing. It can be. I don’t know. It’s so many things.
I think that’s what really interests me the most: the transition between our ego and our body—our mind and our body, how we separate that. I always want to go around and ask people, ‘What’s your relationship between your mind and your body?’ But, I don’t think I can answer that question, so…
K.J.: Last time you said that the whole body is a center, not “a center”, but the whole body is center. That would speak to the mind then having…
Charlotte: The sort of non-hierarchical approach to the mind and the body. What we’ve been working a lot with lately, the viscera of the mind and the minds of the entire body, the minds of each separate organ.
K.J.: That’s really beautiful, the imagery of the viscera of the mind, rather than that every system of the body has a mind, which is a BMC approach; but that the mind itself might have all of the attributes of the different systems. The viscera of the mind, or the fluid of the mind, or the endocrine of the mind, or…
Charlotte: Absolutely, which it does, I mean, it must.
K.J.: And in some ways, you’re exposing that in your piece by what I saw, looking at you sleep, and then watching you emerge from sleep. There’s something that you’re showing about the inner world, what’s underneath what appears to be happening, or the depth of a dream or a…
Charlotte: Yeah. That’s what I mean. There’re so many different ways to think about this work and this process and this project. Specifically, one of the things that it becomes most about is that it’s really about the body. But we think about it like we’re not even trying to show anything. We talk a lot about the exchanges and the underlying support and the underlying movement that happens within the body, and how that comes out in our relationship to the world.
So, we started simple, sleeping. The score was a progression from this sort of non-presence to an almost borderline performative presence, but always keeping ourselves and our structure in mind, a constant reminder of an inner exchange. How can we keep our health in mind through holding this idea of the language of our fluid exchange or the language of our inner workings. We’ve been questioning if this is a language of sustenance and survival, and how can we always be working with that. And that everything we do transitions through that sensibility.
K.J.: Which sleep is—sleep is really a way that we sustain our health… things passing through us while we’re out of the way to take care of us.
Charlotte: Yeah, and that’s really what it was for me. The last piece we did in June was really intense, but it was also really very mental, and our bodies became this sort of conduit to get to this state in our mind. And now, it feels almost just the opposite, like we’re trying to bring our mind more to the state of our bodies. K.J.: Is it through a repetition of a practice that you can begin to steer your mind, or is it something about being aware of watching the mind move? When does it become composition, and when are you just following what’s going on? Or is that composition?
Charlotte: It’s a good question. Lately, we’ve been seeing a lot of composition arising out of it. But, I feel like what we do most is follow ourselves. I see communication and composition in everything. In every action, every non-action, there’s like this web of communication, whether it’s an internal communication between your mind and your body, or communication from one organ to the next. I’ve just sort of given up on the idea of controlling a composition, which some people might find fault or flaw in, but, well, that’s not the point.
K.J.: But it challenges what you do, I mean as an artist, to bump into what other people think.
Charlotte: [laughter] Yeah.
K.J.: Is it to create something for that reason, or does it support you really following what you’re wanting to follow?
Charlotte: I feel like my impetus for doing that is just so that I can make aesthetic and qualitative choices, but I’ve been really enjoying keeping it really open because I feel that this work in particular has a lot to do with a sense of possibility. The course of the score is really like one huge long transition.
Jeff [Geoffrey Nosach], my lighting designer, the other day said that he realized what the score was, and that is was like this expansion of time between sleeping and waking, and like the transition between unconscious and conscious. I had never worded it that way, or even really thought about it that way, but that’s really kind of what it is. That typifies a lot of the things I’ve been thinking about for the past few years – that there’s so much information in our environment and in our field, and how can we meet that with the information that we hold within ourselves? I like thinking about information in a more mysterious way, the information that maybe we can’t describe with words.
And a lot of what this piece is about is finding our internal language and not having to define it, but follow it. I was reading Heidegger’s On the Way to Language. It is really kind of crazy, but I really enjoyed it. He used this phrase “the nearest nearness?” I don’t remember exactly the context, but he was talking about the relationship between a person and language, and how there is this “nearest nearness” that is constantly being overstepped or overlooked, like a transitional space that you jump over just to get to the next thing, whether it’s uncomfortable or if it’s something that’s just always been in transition. That’s always been interesting to me, that there’s a place where you find yourself that you know it’s a transition. What if you stay in that place? What if you’re constantly following the “nearest nearness” and never skipping through the places that you would normally want to? We think about it also in relationship to presence. And how can we really move through this idea of non-presence to presence in the most grateful way that we want without having to all of a sudden take on everything.
K.J.: It speaks a little bit to where the decisions are made to compose. Often times I’ve witnessed, in myself and then in watching people work, that there is a certain tonal difference that happens when somebody starts to make a decision, when they start speaking to themselves about what they are doing—punctuating—it sounds like what you’re exploring is that there is a decision making that’s going on that’s underlying, framing, your decision-making in language by remaining in that place of it making sense somewhere else.
Charlotte: Exactly. It’s very much the bulk of the duration of the piece, dwelling in that pre-language state. And a lot of times we’ll get up to this point where we feel this urge to say something, which happens.
K.J.: I noticed that it did happen the other night. They were using words sometimes.
Charlotte: I guess what we’ve been really trying to do is to follow sensation in the beginning of the score, and to stay with our sensation. Almost cut it off before it hits the perception line, which is impossible. But to be following yourself almost from behind and sensing what you’re sensing and staying in that sensation state until there’s this information that needs to come out. We talk about it with a ‘yes’ and ‘no’, like when Bonnie talks about the digestive organs, and the mouth and the anus, saying ‘yes’ to what you want to take in, and whatever you don’t need, you give it out. What if expression instead of being a way to typify and exemplify your experience in a symbolic or gestural manner, is just what you need to get out of you?
In a way it’s like defecating, like ‘There, I’ve had this experience. I’ve taken in all of this, and in order for me to sustain this balance or something, what do I need to send out into the world?’ I’ve found it’s a lot about balancing the in and the out. I’ve done a lot of work where I feel like I’m constantly, for myself and other people, in a place where I’m always giving and pushing so much. The piece is definitely a lot about balancing that and nurturing a performer.
And what is the quality of watching, which I don’t even know because I’m dancing in it. What is the quality of watching someone maintaining this sort of a balance?
K.J.: That was actually my next question. What is the audience’s role, and what’s happening for them if you’re in this particular state? The more that you’re in this state of consciousness, in transition, where are they watching from? Where are they resonating from? Breaking expectations of performance values.
Charlotte: That’s interesting because I think of how I’m still very early in my career, early in making things. In school, it wasn’t that I wanted to be breaking boundaries, and being off the wall. And still I don’t want my work to be about not being traditional, but there was something about the traditional idea of theater that didn’t assist what I’m doing. And the way that I’ve been thinking about the audience for the past few years is that they’re very important to me, but I feel I just let it be a given that people are going to be watching. With this score, I’m very interested in how people are going to react to it. They’re watching a process, in a way, of a performer becoming a performer without having a sub-score of being demonstrative or realizing a goal. What is watching the process of someone stepping into themselves and being watched?
The way that we approach the viewer through the score is that in the beginning we don’t pretend that they’re not there, but we’re just going through what we need, and then we gradually are opening up, taking in more and more stimulus, and moving out to the world more. We come to a point where we decide to include the audience more in our experience. I’m interested in what it is to see this process unfold from a person that’s completely disappeared and sleeping, because they’re inside of this sort of blanket-womb, and in a quality of not performing and not having a sense of urgency as far as a message or to complete something or to define something. I’m interested in what it is to see it because the reason we’ve been making it is to have and to show this process.
K.J.: I’m wondering what’s contemporary about this work, and if it even enters your mind? Where do you see it fitting in with other things going on in the world? In that way of letting a process be seen, being in transition. It sounds like it’s not about making work accessible in a usual way, but also letting another kind of accessibility of your aesthetic come through. Does that speak to what else is happening in a larger world? And about the value of art?
Charlotte: For me, it’s a lot about returning to my origin. Everything begins and ends here, in my body. To acknowledge that is just a step. I don’t know where it’s going to lead. But it’s to my realizing something. The thing that I’ve thought about dancing is that everyone should dance, and everyone should have this relationship to their body because it’s helpful and it allows you to really be within yourself. And not just be able to express yourself or able to be comfortable with your image, but also understanding more about what you’re made of.
K.J.: Could you speak about your last piece you performed at Anna’s, which had more artifice to it, more objects which represented something about the outer-inner world, externally? Also about the solo you did at AUNTS. In our last conversation, you talked about blood and the idea of blood and ritual, and what we hold in terms of our family’s history and what we aren’t allowed to express in certain places, one of those things being shame or the family stories that we don’t talk about.
Charlotte: That was another place of transition where I felt I wasn’t feeling generative. I wanted to be moving, but I was feeling a lot of judgment about it, and a lot of shame for feeling the judgment, or for not generating what I wanted to generate. And then I said to myself, ‘Well, what is this transition… looking at where I am right now, I don’t know where this is coming from, but what is it if I stay here for a little while?’ And all these ideas of shame and sexuality and violence were there that were really pretty extreme. But it was really going very far into what I was feeling at that time, and that helped me to just have an allowance for being where I was.
K.J.: Maybe this refers to what you were speaking to about digestion—that something being expressed through the elimination phase of a process, actually lets there be room for something else to come through that’s not just working something out of history. Almost as if this new piece could be about what is new? I am curious about the piece at Anna’s, when Noopur almost went out the window. I remember thinking and talking to you a little bit about that afterward—that it was frightening, almost suicidal, and it was the place between birth and death that the window represents. And that’s a big transition. That piece ended with a very rigorous unison repetition up against the wall as if you all were about to dance up or through it, so here you are pushing against something. And this new piece, you’re coming out from the inner part of this womb, like you say, almost like the space between death and birth. There’s something in that for me about having released something that is historical in the body through performing a certain ritual and what has been cleared, in a certain way, to make something else.
Charlotte: Exactly. That’s actually how I think about the last work and this work as far as the birth and death thing. I really enjoy seeing everything on every scale, and how it fits all together like that in my mind. This idea of being born, almost in the beginning of the score, but not having to have any definition or [not having] to pin down an identity for yourself—that has been pervading a lot of the work we’ve been doing: having the sense of liquidity of identity and decision-making. In this work, we try to allow ourselves to not identify with what we’re doing. Or if we do, not to be identified by that until we come to a place where we decide that this is something that I identify myself with, or this is how I identify myself right now. I don’t even know that I’ve ever come to that place. And I like that a lot because, for myself, I have trouble finding language… a lot. And I see that shows me how I think about language, and that… I don’t know.
K.J.: You also spoke about identity in the last interview, how you were all wearing wigs in the piece at Anna’s. That you felt wearing wigs allowed the performers to not identify with themselves so they weren’t so limited in their own emotions, and then it would allow other, non-emotions to come through, or allowing themselves to look at themselves differently, so then they would be viewed differently as well. But now it seems that they don’t need the wigs as much as the actual process of letting that happen.
Charlotte: Now it’s becoming more about the identity as an ego and as a mind state that almost can be limiting. And the way that we’re getting around that is being kind of esoteric, like allowing ourselves the space to be rolling around and maybe it might look like we’re in some sort of improvisational class.
K.J.: So, that also defies, maybe, the identity of a movement, like people are going to say, ‘oh, it looks like contact improvisation, or it looks like they’re just taking a class.’ But by remaining within, like you said, “the nearness of nearly” longer, then the action becomes unidentifiable, as if, ‘Oh, that’s what they’re doing. Oh, but they’re still doing it, are they doing what I think they’re doing?’
Charlotte: Yeah, and within us, we’re sort of erasing our identity by becoming more of what we actually are than an archetypal idea of identity, or this idea of identity from collecting information and that’s what defines us. I’ve been thinking a lot about trying not to be knowledgeable, or not to be, ‘I know this or this information’, and that maybe information wasn’t something that really had so much to do with me. It was kind of a funny idea, but I get it a lot because I feel there’s so much value placed on what we know or from a logical processing. There are so many other ways of processing that I’ve really become interested in.
K.J.: So, the ego and the hierarchy and trying to remove that. You had also spoken before about the choreographer as god. There is some kind of emotional content within this. I’m just quoting you that you “didn’t want the dancers to take on the burden of emotions, so by making more of an android place for them to be in, they wouldn’t identify.” I’m just wondering about that, because this new piece seems so clearly female. There’s something about the female body in there, and you’re all women. I know Jeff, the lighting designer, and Steve [Cooper], the musician, are not, but they are on the outskirts, it seems to me, as an audience. So how has that shifted, and is there something less about the android quality? It also seems like there is something about letting go of the hierarchy and your own relationship as the choreographer to let something else happen, but you are steering it as well?
Charlotte: As far as the woman thing is concerned, I’m a woman, so I can’t really get away from that. I’ve always really hated the idea that my work would be associated with feminism.
K.J.: Not wanting to be feminist. But is it feminist because it’s female? That’s another identification to some terminology.
Charlotte: We’ve been noticing recently that we leave the process, or score, and we take it through our day, and we actually feel there’s this sort of rejuvenation or regeneration that happens. There’s this sense of health that surrounds the whole thing. That is really interesting to me. When we’re in the score, we fluctuate between this sort of reverence and irreverence and spiritualness and silliness. A lot of what drives me to want to make things, which is something that Noopur talks a lot about too, is showing people that they already have all of these things always. You don’t have to search for it because it’s always there. We practiced a score that was: presence, omniscience, manifest destiny. [laugher]
K.J.: I was just reading that, in my notes. How does that relate to this?
Charlotte: It relates a lot because wherever we are, we’re existing within all of these worlds – within the spiritual world and the comical world, and the physical world – and we found that we can move through these places without having to give more weight to one or the other, a non-hierarchy of qualities. As far as the choreographer being god thing, this work feels very different in that in the work that I was talking about previously I was asking them to go to these places that were really uncomfortable for them. Then I was following them around physically illuminating them with a light and asking them to illuminate these places (inside themselves) and stay in these places. In that way I was designing and allowing, with my authority, that: “I am going to not only allow you to do this, but ask you and push you in this direction”. And it became very uncomfortable. And, I don’t know, maybe that’s what I was talking about.
But now I feel a lot more on the same level because we all kind of have the same role. Actually, we are all different. We’ve all sort of identified these different roles that we play within the score, but there’s no sort of hierarchy about our roles within the piece. A lot of times I feel like I’ll have these very simple ideas and we’ll work with them for a really long time, and then I’ll feel like they’ve gained so much depth into what we’re doing, that I can’t even get there because the ideas are my conception, or something. I feel like I can experience it less. Which, maybe god doesn’t experience things, but we experience things. Maybe I am god [laughter].
K.J.: Well, a sense of something that already has the idea of what we are, a higher power? Even the idea of giving over control, what is it that move us? Is that god?
But you did say too that we’re taught not what we need to know, that the knowledge is already in us, we already have it, because it’s in the body- what we call the body, a cellular knowledge. Oh, this is good, you said “What’s in our genes and in our cells, it’s left behind for scholarly knowledge.” I mean, here we are talking about a dance that’s about the place before language, and how to hold ourselves back from taking that step to language, but we are talking about it.
Charlotte: Yeah.
K.J.: Which I think is really exciting because it allows us to create a language that’s body based as well. So, we’re not just explaining the dance, but we’re describing a state, and the only way to really understand it is then to go see this dance. In a way, dialogue from another part of our psyches that exist.
Charlotte: Yeah, I always sort of struggle with that because I look a lot to different texts and different forms, other people’s ideas. But I think the things that I connect to the most have more questions than answers.
K.J.: I was thinking the same thing, something about this transitional state, about keeping the question open.
Charlotte: There’s something about that that I really connect to in everything that I do. It’s a lot about the power and potential we hold, how it can really manifest if we give ourselves that allowance. But the idea of becoming or manifesting can also be a question, I think. And I enjoy that because there’s so much definition, there’s so much product and there’s statement involved in what we do and where we are. I’m never going to have a manifesto, but if I did have a manifesto, it would probably just be: questioning.
K.J.: The other day you said that your piece was something about formlessness to form, but then again, it wasn’t about form as product. Form more as question in a certain way.
Charlotte: Yes. One way we thought about it when we began working was that when we were going to sleep, we were disappearing completely. And as we were waking up, we were gathering the pieces and parts of ourselves and coming into our voices and our sight, and sort of reshaping ourselves however it happened that day. So, really taking this idea that whatever definition or form or identity that we hold in our body, we can really reconstruct in any way that we want. De-construct it and reconstruct it. This piece is the process of formation and it’s about the process of us coming into ourselves, and then coming together and forming this group or this tribe, but we’re just together.
K.J.: To me, it feels political in a certain way when I look at the two candidates that won in the Iowa caucus are the two people that say they are going to do the most change and are the most unknown. ‘We’re not going to the old regime’: Obama and Huckabee. They’re both relatively new on the scene and I think that there’s something about wanting to be in a place where there’s possibility in a lot of the world. I think that the body, the space of the body that you’re talking about is political in that way.
Charlotte: A lot of the things become political to me because of the way we’re losing any pretense of what performing is or what is acceptable. We do some pretty ridiculous things, and not just be doing ridiculous things, but I think it happens because we have this openness and this sense of potential or possibility. We also work with an idea of inevitability and non-inevitability, and a process of returning. Rather than finding a new communication—I feel like people talk about that all the time—I think about returning to the most basic, survival-level of being within the body. Today, surviving has a lot more to do with the higher knowledge and your mind’s relationship to the world. And what I think a lot about is returning to an older sensibility, this ‘originary’ place.
K.J.: Originary?
Charlotte: I feel it in my own life and in my own processes when I become disconnected with ultimately what I am… my guts. [giggle]
K.J.: …and your heart.
Charlotte: My heart.
K.J.: Certainly. There’s this book, The Biology of Transcendence by Joseph Chilton Pearce. He writes how, in terms of evolution, there are traditionally four centers of the brain, and that we evolved from the low brain to the right and left and then the higher brain, a place where we actually hold a sense of hierarchy and authority. He says that if we stop our evolution there, that’s where aggression and violence comes from. He believes there is a fifth center of the brain, and it’s in the heart—that we actually have to return back to the body to continue our evolution and think from there, from the connection of our head and our heart. That allows us to have an openness to our affect in the world, and also, like what you’re saying, about having health, nurturing, a returning back in order to then reach out again.
Charlotte: That’s a lot about what we talk about, this concept of recycling our focus—that it is about every transition going through our organs, through our viscera, our body, without making the transition in the mind. Stepping to the ‘nearest nearness’, recycling the focus, always going back in. I don’t know if it’s being a performer or being a person or where we are right now in the world, but once you start going out into the world, it just seems like you’re just reaching further and further out: communicating or just existing. And it’s always helpful interesting for me to think about returning back. That’s part of what the title is about – this sense for the performers, that we’re turning, constantly, we’re turning back to ourselves.
K.J.: Disappearing, never ending return—so great that you start the piece in sleep. It seems like when it ended, there was a beginning too. Noopur’s solo at the end, and you guys witnessing her. I don’t know if that happens as a ready-made decision, but there’s something really powerful in her state of abandonment. That happens throughout the piece, there’s something about that moment where I can then re-look at what I just saw and see the whole piece as being that.
Charlotte: I feel like the end of this project right now is really the beginning because it is one transition, the whole thing. I feel like we’re beginning to find some place of arrival when we end, but we never really arrive there definitely. I’ve been interested in continuing the process and maybe the duration of the piece, and seeing if there actually is someplace where we arrive, if there is this new sense of definition without definition. I was actually thinking that this is some sort of a preparation, this openness to then step into maybe something that we do try to do all together, something where there is a goal.
K.J.: And I think that’s where the beauty of what language actually is, like in great literature, great writings, these things that have been written that are containers for something about this openness.
Charlotte: Yeah, the first step is connecting to the language with my entire self, and not just my analytical self. Reconnecting in that way and then seeing where the language goes, or where we can take it.
K.J.: Perfect timing for it. I’m so curious about watching work that reflects somehow with what’s going on politically and then environmentally. Do we have to make really hard decisions, or do we have to open up the space around what is happening and see what else is right there and comes to us.
Charlotte: Maybe it has something to do with the idea of zeitgeist or something. I think it’s a Jungian concept that I was reading, that within a certain period of time, everything that’s made or said or done reflects that time. So, I like to think that what we’re doing without making a statement or saying this is political, or this is about this time, it already contains so much about the time. Maybe even more so because these people, without being told what to do, are reflecting and constantly reflecting each other in this situation.
K.J.: …and in your piece.
Charlotte: Yeah.
