Following the success of her most recent work, The Green Surround, Heather Kravas has bravely delved into a new solo to premiere at Danspace Project on a shared bill with Jeremy Wade, October 5-7, 2011. She talked to dancer Jodi Bender about the vulnerability involved in her creative process, stepping outside yourself, and Kassidy Chism, the real-life YouTube phenom for who Kravas’s newest solo is inspired by.
Interview Date: October 2, 2011
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Jodi: Do you want to tell us a little bit about the piece and your process with it?
Heather: Sure. The piece is called Kassidy Chism and it’s a solo… I guess I’ll start with an easy way to talk about it, I’ll start with the title. I named the piece after a real person who, I think is thirteen now. Part of the research for this piece [was that I] learned a dance by a ten-year-old girl and that girl is Kassidy Chism.
Jodi: Her actual real name is Kassidy Chism?
Heather: Yes, her real name is Kassidy Chism.
Jodi: Do you know her?
Heather: I don’t know her.
Jodi: Did you find her on YouTube? Her name is on YouTube?
Heather: Yes, exactly. There were thousands of comments about her dance routine. I started working on the piece and I was thinking a lot about my own dances that I made when I was about ten. I was thinking about those dances not out of nostalgia, but thinking about the formation of identity and how dancing, for me at that time of my life, was really about serving myself and about copying others. I started thinking about the dances that young girls do now and they are super sexy.
Jodi: Right.
Heather: And I started thinking about the dances that I did and, actually, those were really sexy too, they were just really different. I was studying jazz acrobatics, but it was really mild contortionism in bad costumes. There was sort of a hyper sexuality about it. And, I have little girlfriends and I watch the dance routines that they make and they are copying Lily Allen and singing all the lyrics…
Jodi: Beyoncé.
Heather: Yeah, yeah! It’s interesting. It’s done naively, but it’s also done as a kind of self-instruction. So, I was curious about the appetite for that. And, how when I see it now, I am really disturbed by it, too.
Jodi: When you were young and doing that kind of dancing, did you have the awareness of the sexuality of it? Or, only looking back on it, are you now aware of it?
Heather: I remember a combination. I remember how it felt. Now I would say, “Oh, that’s really sexy.” I remember spreading my legs out and sticking my head between my legs. But, when I watch that kind of dancing and with what I am working on right now, it feels very vulnerable, as if one is being manipulated. But, I didn’t feel manipulated. I felt powerful. So, that’s what I am curious about. Where is the place that you feel powerful and where’s the place where you’re actually being manipulated? How much of it is kind of innate? Just the fact that we are gross animals and we do gross animal things, how much of it is learned behavior? And, if it’s learned behavior, who is it that we are learning from?
Jodi: Right. That’s actually really interesting – to watch young girls that don’t have dance training, when they are really young. When I taught young children, I saw toddlers come to dance class and roll around and spread their legs open without the context of learning it. They are actually kind of animal behaviors that you see very young bodies do that they didn’t learn through emulation and that don’t have that sexual context yet.
Heather: I guess that’s what I am really curious about, too.
Jodi: Where that line is?
Heather: Yes, where the line is. But, it’s not a judgment. You know, when I saw Kassidy Chism dance, there is a certain amount of vulgarity to it but what’s really gross are the comments that people have made about it. It’s not her dance.
Jodi: Such as?
Heather: People wrote, “Oh my God, why is her mouth open like that? I want to stick my dick in it,” you know, really gross, rude, lewd…and, comments after that: “She’s ten you pervert” and then after that a lot of racial comments, too. Because she’s this small, white child. A lot of comments on her sex, or her mouth, or race.
Jodi: What music was she using?
Heather: She made a collage – You and Dat [by E 40], T Pain and Kandygirl, and one song I couldn’t figure out. And, I am not performing to the original music. I’ve had some help making some original music of my own [laughs].
Jodi: Nice! Are you emulating the costume [laughs]?
Heather: No, I’m not. That was something I thought about… I didn’t set out to learn a girl’s hip-hop routine off of YouTube and put it to a piece of classical music. I didn’t take a post-modern approach to a rather post-modern proposition, you know? There are a lot of ways the piece could’ve been made. It’s a way to look at my own way of making something and my own history. And, I was able to get a little bit of perspective on it just by having this other thing. It is a little bit interesting to me how some of the movement I am working on feels so foreign to me, and I feel so bad at it. It’s a crossover in that I sort of always do this in my work.
Jodi: You sort of answered a question I was just about to ask. What does that feel like on your body now?
Heather: It feels slightly better now than it did initially. I still can’t believe that I am going to do it. I had to meet with a hip-hop teacher to help me and, hopefully, I am going to have one more tutorial. It’s really short. It’s only 3 minutes of a thirty-three minute piece. Everything else is durational.
Jodi: It’s an interesting thing to really learn it and embody it in a serious manner. And, actually have someone consult you on it and really know what it is to be inside of it, as opposed to using that vocabulary or tone as a commentary.
Heather: Yeah, it’s been an interesting problem. Because, at first, I was really trying to get every single facial expression and stray weird hip swing – I was really trying to learn it from the outside, in.
Jodi: Almost, in a very technical way.
Heather: Yes, and I wasn’t that good at it. I started getting better at it when I just tried to do the moves because [Kassidy Chism] is just trying to do the moves. There actually aren’t that many. Most people, when they watch it, their comment is that, “Well, she’s not even very good” or “The dance isn’t very good”. So, it’s not even like I am trying to do some fancy routine. It’s kind of just the basic thing, but that’s totally hard for me and kind of embarrassing. I think the whole piece is episode after episode of embarrassing acts that I perform.
Jodi: So, you have that as your base material…
Heather: I wouldn’t even say that is the base material. It’s like a point of entry. It’s a way for me to be able to say, “Oh, these are the things I am dealing with right now”.
Jodi: A point of entry. I like the way you are working with it, as you mentioned before, as a way to get perspective. There is a way to distance yourself from it in the way you are learning it and, at the same time, sort of immerse yourself in it.
I have a history, like everyone does. You know, growing up doing that kind of material. And, I have relatives that actually own a dance school in Arizona.
Heather: What’s it called?
Jodi: It’s called Bender Performing Arts [laughs]. And, there are YouTube videos of their students doing those kinds of routines online. But, I remember something similar to what you are talking about in terms of when I was at that pre-teen age, feeling really powerful doing those kinds of movements. But not really feeling them in a consciously sexual way. It just felt alive.
Heather: Yes, I think there is something about the physicality of them. Also, at an age when one isn’t actually quite as aware of their body. Like, you haven’t gone through puberty, so you aren’t aware of your changing body. You’re really in that “Great! I’m eleven!” and that really empowered place. I am surprised; I do [the piece] a little better when I am a little bit lazier about it.
Jodi: Yeah, that’s pretty much true for everything. So, this is a solo and the last thing that I know about that you did was The Green Surround, which was not a solo. There were nine women. Can you talk a little bit about what led you into making a group piece and then returning to the solo material?
Heather: I find that I often do that, actually, looking at my methodology over the years. I’ll work on a solo because I feel like I need to ask a pretty intimate question. Not even one that is necessarily something I can articulate. But, I need to go to a pretty internal place or I need to investigate something that is not as defined. I’ll do that for maybe a year or two. Then there will come a point where all of the ideas and research, whether through a series of performances or something that’s been kept more private, needs to be realized outside of myself. I need to see it. Generally, I consciously decide I want to step out and be more compositional about it. And, I like working in both ways and I hate working in both ways, too.
Jodi: How so?
Heather: Well, right now I feel really lonely and overexposed. And, I have to trust myself so much. And, generally I can pull it together to trust myself but there are days, like yesterday was a black hole. It was like I hated everything. I hated everything. And, I couldn’t even step outside and look at it for a second. All I could do was feel it. And, that was really horrible. “Like, really!? Do I have to feel my way through this?” That’s mortifying to me sometimes and it’s also amazing. Sometimes I feel with my solo work, I am able to get to some place that is less defined and more specific all at the same time. I can’t articulate it and maybe people can’t articulate it. But, it feels somehow close to a nerve. When I am not in the work, I get more compositional and I like that. It gets much more designed and formal. And, that could be a dryer experience. And that could be great.
Jodi: I know what you mean. Trying to articulate a little about that feeling…the specificity and non-specificity at the same time. Working alone you can go really, really deep and sometimes that gets really, really wide at the bottom of the pool. It spreads out.
Heather: You know, working by yourself, you get sick of yourself.
Jodi: Right. I am very fascinated with the idea of immersion and distancing, in both contexts. Whether I am the mover or maker/outside eye, the sort of permeable boundary between those things in general… Whether it’s your own work or someone else’s…. whatever your role is inside or outside of it… Would you say, with most of your work, when you start to work with other people, it has grown more out of your own, more internal practice? Or is it external motivation based on some other desire, who you are working with, or…?
Heather: It has almost always begun from what we are calling an internal practice, but I have to say I have an idea for something new. The next thing I want to make is more of an external inquiry or proposition. I am curious about seeing something and it’s definitely something that I can’t do.
Jodi: That’s a completely different entry point.
Heather: Yeah. I have always tended to say, “Really? I thought I was working on something different here.”
Jodi: [laughs] But, it always comes back to the same thing, right?
Heather: It kind of changes, at least for me, gradually. You know, maybe this piece has a lot of links to The Green Surround, you know? It does, it definitely does. And, on a bad day I am paranoid that people are just going to be like, “It’s just regurgitated!” But if I think about a piece I made four years ago, I see evolution. It’s slow. I am impatient.
Jodi: Yes. And there is gradation, and tangent, and different kinds of clarity.
Heather: Yeah, you think about a painter who only does, you know, black paintings for twenty years.
Jodi: Exactly! It is irritating, personally, to always feel like, “Ugh, I am working on that again?!” You know? That’s a frustrating feeling but that’s the work.
Heather: Right.
Jodi: We were talking about space in your work. Do you mind if we go back to that? First of all, you will be doing The Green Surround as part of [the Coil Festival] at P.S. 122 and I said I couldn’t imagine that in any other space. We were talking about the idea of you thinking about doing that in some other space. This is just getting into more of an observation as opposed to a question, but obviously we create spaces in performance for performance or rituals. I see in your work spaces inside of spaces. Almost like, Russian dolls. Cages come to mind.
Heather: I have been thinking a lot about cages.
Jodi: The Green Surround felt very caged, cage-like to me. And inside of it, there are certain areas of the space that are for certain things, or certain people, or certain activities. And, there was something you did at Movement Research’s HARDCORPS Festival where you separated the space with chalk into different boxes and the women were also going up and down the stairs in this routine way. That is something that I am curious about – your relationship to that [sense of spatial order]. Because, it comes up for me – I have a relationship to space where I really create territories. I have been fascinated by this fox, not even a fox…this creature in the Prospect Park Zoo, near my house.
Heather: Is he feral?
Jodi: He is a captive animal. You know, like five years ago I went to the zoo and he was doing this routine that everybody thought was cute, where he walked along this path and did this thing… and then walked to some other place and did this other thing… and then he would start his path over and do these things over and over. And then, I went with my parents two or three years later and he was still there, doing this same thing. There was something about the spatial territory and repetition and duration that was fascinating to me. That comes up for me when I am improvising or making things. I see a recurring structure sometimes. I am curious what that is for you?
Heather: I use repetition and duration a lot.
Jodi: What does that do for you?
Heather: I think I find it liberating. I hate making up movement. I can do it but I really don’t like it. I end up really not liking it and it doesn’t make sense to me. I think it’s because it feels to me like too many languages. It’s confusing to me. I find that I always have to do it. Like, in this piece that I am making right now I made up a ten-minute very dense, dance section. I am ninety percent sure it has been cut. It is probably way more material then is in the rest of the piece. I had to do that to figure out what most mattered to me. I make a lot of stuff, then I hate it, and then I have to ask, “What do you really love here?” It can be a perverse love. Love can be a lot of things, right? “But, what do you care about here?” And, once I can choose and just do that thing, what becomes interesting is that there is no way to truly repeat. If you try to do something the same way one hundred times, you are going to do it differently one hundred times. Within that supposed repetition, I feel like there are a lot of ways of seeing, both for me and for somebody else. I find that, when I am watching movement anywhere, what I most cherish is when I, as a witness, can have an experience of change. And, if something is changing too much for me, then I don’t get that. I guess I am interested in being able to provide something that is slow enough or continual enough that people can experience a change rather than me forcing one. Does that make sense?
Jodi: Yeah, sure, and on a lot of levels too. I feel like I had that experience watching The Green Surround. My way of seeing it changed over time, over the course of the piece. I found myself seeing from a political perspective… and seeing in terms of shall we say, the classic “male gaze” or a gaze that objectifies women… and there was a way that you set it up so slowly to really allow and invite those kinds of gazes to happen. Until you are so deep into it that you realize you are sort of implicated into watching in this way. You are experiencing new and multiple ways of watching, and I find that very powerful. And it was powerful for people around me too, in different ways [laughs].
Heather: Did you go on the night with the heavy breather?
Jodi: Yeah.
Heather: Yeah, that was interesting.
Jodi: Yeah, I am very interested, too, to talk to your performers about their experience inside of it. I would like to extend this interview to the artists if you would be willing to let me [laughs].
Heather: Absolutely! That piece, when I had the idea for that piece, it was a pretty dark moment in my life. But, the process of making it was actually really joyful. I knew it was going to be a really difficult piece to do. I knew, because I was working with so much precision, I was concerned about there being a working environment that was really heavy. Like, this isn’t perfect enough. I tried really hard to be aware of that, so we didn’t need to enter into that. I think as a group, we were actually really able to achieve a way of working that made it possible to be precise without a kind of heaviness. I so credit that group of women who were so amazing to work with. And, [Performance Advisor] Rebecca Brooks, too, who helped us a lot…Even if the piece had totally sucked, I would’ve still had a lot of fondness over the process.
Jodi: I think from a dancer perspective, I really value that. You go into it creating that kind of environment, when the work that you are going to be doing is so difficult. I was talking to one of your dancers and she said, “If I saw that piece from the outside, I would think I could never do that and that would be awful. But, from being on the inside of it, we did have that kind of working environment where it made it possible to do those things that were hard.”
Heather: Yeah, we kind of just had to go gently. And, I’d come to rehearsal and be like, “I have a little idea! Do you think, maybe, we can try this, just for today?”
Jodi: Yes, it’s a hard thing as a performer to really embody those difficult things but not be like a method actor…
Heather: I try to remember that now. I am my own performer and I do require a certain amount of gentleness. And, I think that is part of the reason that making The Green Surround was a good process. I can be really both a slave driver and a slave to myself and I don’t like that. I’ve gotten a lot of material from that but, it’s become less interesting to me. But, I don’t want to take it into the studio every time I come in. I have to keep in mind right now that even if I am working on certain kinds of exposure and manipulation, that I also don’t have to take that on.
Jodi: Right. That’s an inevitable part of performance in a way: Exposure and being an object.
Heather: For sure it is.
Jodi: I just need to be mindful of that in any process. Paying attention to that and where do you really go with that to be productive. When you need to be gentle… or is there another entry point for this? Is there another way to work that doesn’t have to be so slave and slave driver-ish?
Heather: I think in the past I have taken it to a point where I came to a block. The work wasn’t changing and I wasn’t changing and I couldn’t carry on. So, it’s also a way to continue. I would actually really like to be an old lady dancer some day or an even older lady dancer some day.
Jodi: Yeah.
Heather: I want to see more people continue and continue and continue. Good stuff. And there is attrition, for sure. Every year, it’s like, “Oh right, there are fewer and fewer people in their forties who are doing this and there will be probably fewer people in their fifties who are doing this.”
Jodi: Right. It’s hard on many levels, especially economically obviously. We find ways to do that. You aren’t just bi coastal, you’re bicoastal and tri-country?
Heather: Right, tri-country with a waitressing job on the side [laughs].
Jodi: The waitressing job offered us this lovely place to interview. So shout out to waitressing gigs.
Heather: Do you do that [waitressing]?
Jodi: I did that.
Heather: You did. I did that a number of times, too.
Jodi: I did that for a good decade: high school, college, and New York City… Now, I am the Finance Manager at Danspace Project. So, I do the arts admin thing.
Heather: Yeah, but that’s really better for your feet.
Jodi: Maybe. But, then you sit down all day.
Heather: So it’s bad for your back…
Jodi: Yes, bad for your back. It’s different. Pros and cons…it’s different, but we find our ways. Well, I think we did good. We’ve been pretty chatty. I think that was a lovely interview. Cheers!
Heather: Cheers!
