Open
Thumbnail photo: Jennifer Allen
Jeff Larson: Okay, here we go! So, to begin with, very broadly, what would you say you are working with in this process?
Jennifer Allen: I started with this idea of the title, “Open,” which was the first thing that came to me a couple of years ago, and that’s usually how I start—from the title. There’s a title that comes to mind, and that embodies an idea or a metaphor that then I want to build or go deeper with. So, that was a many–layered thing—I’d been doing lots of yoga and meditation, so the idea of “openness” in many different permutations and aspects. Personally, being open to life and change, having lived in New York for so long and it being such a dense environment—the idea of open space was really appealing to me. And also, in the beginning, it was a response to all the stuff that’s been going on in politics and in the world, with things feeling very violent and overly dense…with imagery and information and people piled on top of each other and the planet becoming more crowded—all these kinds of thickening images; so there was a desire to go to a real woooosh—a wide open space. The metaphor I kept having was just of the universe, and going back to that spaciousness. I wanted to make something that was open spatially, but was also addressing personal issues about how to be open personally to others, in relationships and individually. So, that was the beginning concept. All of the, like, investigations of dance-material in the beginning were all about trying to find that place of openness, physically, which started to translate as we started working into a lot of childhood things, which I hadn’t expected at all. In order to see them being as open as possible, I started giving them instructions like, “do this improvisational score, but do it as a ten-year-old.”
Jeff: Right. And this is with Katy and…
Jennifer: With Katy [Pyle] and Heather Olson. And I wanted them to feel very comfortable, so there was something about giving them instructions like, you know, “you’re in romper room” or I gave them a whole series of improvs of them being different animals: now you’re monkeys, now you’re frogs—so that they could just be like jumping around, being ridiculous together, and I felt like that had broken down a certain awkwardness, or whatever they might have had together as two strangers. So that was…it just started going in that direction more and more—of pulling out, I like to get personal stuff coming from the people I’m working with. Heather’s solo came out of—she always ran around and pretended to be a rhythmic gymnastics person in, like, her yard, and she pretended to have the ribbon and be running around, and I think it was maybe in our conversations about that, because I had a memory of my first dancing was dancing in my living room in my house. And I would put on Grease and ABBA records, and I would create whole scenarios, and I would dance all around the furniture very carefully, but like, choreograph whole things in that living room, and there was something about that kind of earnest, like: when you’re very young you’re trying to do something that you see others doing—and that you know is a real thing—and you want to replicate that as earnestly as you possibly can, but you actually have no idea what you’re doing. And there was something about the combination of the earnestness and desire and probably about the naïveté about that that was really endearing to me, and so watching her really working hard at being this rhythmic gymnast, but not really doing anything at all was really endearing to me. [laughs] I think I really like to capture not just a quality, but an emotion—it’s not like I want to “do sadness” or anything like that, but—whatever the spirit of this idea of openness is, it was like trying to capture that, like you would try to capture a genie—something that you can’t really get, but trying to see if you can get that.
Jeff: Well, it seems to me that maybe it’s even a sort of capturing—almost a moment in time, or a memory— As you’ve brought these other performers in: how do you feel the work has been influenced—or has it been influenced—by the additions? And that includes your relationship to performing in the work, too, because I know that your thoughts about that have changed.
Jennifer: Yeah, definitely…so the piece started as three. Some of this was a little pragmatic—a lot of this was pragmatic. I don’t think the number was important, I know I wanted to do something with Heather, because I’ve just always wanted to work with her, and I really wanted to work with Katy, so some of it was a personal desire to work with the people. And then I moved out of town, far away [laughs], and so then that became a really important part of the process of how things got developed, because I just wasn’t here.
Jeff: Well, while you’re there, why don’t we talk about that, because that’s another question I had. I mean: not even just logistically, but how do you think that may have affected the choices you made? Not only in terms of the people, but, I don’t know, the content even.
Jennifer: Well, the openness became even more a part of my life, because I embarked on this gigantic, major life change where everything shifted, and that became this theme, of being open to anything, and then moving out to the Midwest, where it’s all open—it’s just all wide open sky. I live in this tiny town surrounded by cornfields, and it’s completely flat, and you go out there, and that’s what it is—just big, open space. Definitely that then became, “oh, right, that’s another aspect of what this [piece] is about.” But it’s weird, because when I think about the piece I’ve actually made—and this is why it becomes hard for me to talk about—because there’s the idea, and then what actually comes out… It’s not that it’s completely different, because there was a trajectory that led it to where it is, but it’s almost shocking when I watch the dance now, and look at it, and see that it’s become a picture of a past, or of, as you said, a moment in time—probably about my own childhood and other peoples’ mixed in—that is definitely about a certain amount of spaciousness; but I guess the reason why it’s interesting to me is because my intention had been to be about something that’s looking forward and yet the piece feels like it’s something that’s looking back. Anyway, what was the question you asked me? About the move and how it affected…right. My process had to change a lot. I’ve always worked a lot on my own, and a lot with video. Like, this past show that I did was all solos, so I would work with someone, videotape everything, go work on what they were doing on my own, and come back to them with new stuff—we would change it—and that process would go back and forth. So in a way, that stayed the same. But I did a lot more work on my own out in Champaign. So a lot of choices were being made in my own head, working with myself with the camera there, and then I would come back to New York, and throw things at them—
Jeff: —in very intensive…in bursts of time.
Jennifer: Yes, in bursts of time. Exactly. So then, like throw all this material at them, have them do it, work on ideas, come away with that, and I would work more on that, create more things—so that’s sort of how each thing has happened. And I know I’ve always had a fairly god-like hand over my stuff [laughs] but this process has forced that to happen even more than it used to… I used to like having more stuff coming from the dancers, and more moments from improvisation, and even just being able to spend more time with them in the studio, where you are hanging out over time; I guess it’s not just having more time, but the duration of time, because when I’m here for a week, I’m seeing them every day, I don’t get to see them and let a week go by, see them again, and to allow all of that time that elapsed to inform something that may have come up in rehearsal, and to allow things to shift.
Jeff: But as far as you performing in the piece—and as you’ve added these other performers into the process—what has that development been like? Because there was this initial developmental period, and then this new period approaching the show, where it’s taken on a different…
Jennifer: Yeah. Again, so much of it is pragmatics. For sure, it would be easier if I were in the piece, because I can be with myself the most! [laughs] So I can rehearse myself all the time, it’s easy to give myself a solo part, or it’s easy to give myself a part in relationship to someone else and know that it will be what I want because I can control that to a certain extent; however, I felt that with this piece more than ever, I really wanted to see it and it became—sometimes it’s been easy for me to see it while I’m in it, but for some reason this time it’s been really difficult for me to really see what was going on while in it. And I think I was craving that: to be able to step out and really watch. And I had—because Jillian [Peña] lived in Chicago at the time, when I moved out there, I had wanted to do something with her, and we had talked about, “Oh, we should work together in some capacity” and when this piece seemed like it was going to keep developing, I said, “Oh, I’d love for you to be a part of it,” so that was very natural—bringing her in. Um, and so it was going to be the four of us, and then again it happened in a very random way in a conversation with Katy and I where we were rehearsing, and it was literally—I was doing the part that I’d always done with her in the past, we were rehearsing, and I was like, “Ugh! I really wish I could see this, I wish someone could be doing this for me.” And she was like, “Oh, you should ask Eleanor [Hullihan]—she’s not very busy right now!” [laughs] “You should ask her!” And I was like, “That would be great!” So at first I was like, I don’t have to be in it at all, I can just step out, teach her my part, and then I can really, for the first time, just sit there and watch and construct, and that was really exciting to me. And then as the piece kept going, and once I added people, I wanted there to be certain roles, and I had decided in my mind that Heather was fairly on her own, and some of that was also pragmatics, because of her scheduling—she wasn’t available all that much, so she basically committed to keep going if it [the piece] maintained a structure where she was just coming in on her own and rehearsing, so she would have to be pretty much solo—so then I evolved that into the idea that she was always isolated and on her own, and not really participating with anyone else. So it was sort of like as I gave roles to everyone and it kept developing, I realized I couldn’t really take myself out completely—that there were certain relationships, or pairings, that I wanted to keep. So that meant that I had to stay in there. But each time I watch it, I’m unresolved about whether I need to be in there. And it was interesting to examine my own feelings, like when I imagined not being in it at all. I was excited but then there was a moment of ahhhh! I won’t be performing! [laughs] And that was funny to examine my reaction to that. But I’m trying to keep my part very minimal, which is also very funny to me—to try and make the choreographer be the person who looks the schleppiest onstage. [laughs]
Jeff: Oh! Well, you’re bringing up the roles that you’ve been developing—almost out of necessity, to a certain degree. Do you want to talk about that a little bit? In terms of making decisions about the roles and relationships within the context of the piece. And what does it have to do with, you know, that initial impulse of openness?
Jennifer: Mmmm hmmm.
Jeff: How do those things end up connecting? Or do they?
Jennifer: [pause] Huh. [laughs] What a complex problem! Um, I don’t know if they relate to the initial concept. The roles are something, I think, that happen in my dances because—and this is another one of my things—I like to make something that’s very much somewhere in between an abstract painting and a play. I’m not a fan of words, so I don’t really like plays that much in general, because I get bored with the talking. If I go to a play I’m bored with all of the words, because I’m never really convinced that they’re expressing what they’re trying to express. But I have this pet peeve with going to see dances, where the dancers are not supposed to be people—they’re supposed to be these objects moving around in certain shapes and in a very particular way. But, I hate that artifice as well: like, now we’re just these shapes, and we have a certain blank expression on our face. That distancing mechanism that happens in a lot of contemporary dance has bothered me for a long time. Which is why even though I don’t necessarily want to make a narrative with my dances, I like to think of [the dancers] as characters and people. So that they have a role, and their relationships to each other—even if it’s just for the five minute duet that they’re doing—like I just added something yesterday with Katie and Eleanor, and I was like, “Ok, this is the moment when your friendship of years breaks up.” And I want you to turn in this way, and you turn in this way, because it’s a result of that emotional moment. But it’s not like I’m telling them, you know, through the whole dance, that this is your part—
Jeff: But, how do all the parts—you know, if you kind of take them all and line them up in front of you—I mean, there’s clearly a unity when you see them all, when you see them all together. And I feel like it does have something to do with that sense of openness, or being open to possibilities. You talked about Heather’s sort of youthful reminiscence of this time, and it seems like a lot of the role-playing tends to be in this very youthful place.
Jennifer: Yeah, I mean, that was definitely a theme that continued: in the initial explorations, once I hit on that as the sort of portal for really investigating that idea, then that became a lens. I wasn’t necessarily wanting to make a dance about children, but it’s become that, for sure. Um…and also there were all kinds of other layers in there that had to do with us specifically as girl dancers, so that a lot of the memories and the things that I was trying to get them to look at and explore was just what that life is like, as a young girl dancer—that you spend your life in a studio, basically. And that also has to do with the, um, that idea of openness, I think, which is the yearning for the other kind of life. I mean, as ballerinas, if you start when you are six, you’re there every day in a studio, working really hard, and looking out the window, and looking at the world passing you by. And the other things that are happening that you’re not experiencing because you’re there, doing this thing that can produce amazing results, but there’s also that kind of, um, rigor that it requires, and the constancy.
Jeff: Yeah. And as a kid, you don’t have the same appreciation for those results, and I’m just thinking to my own experiences not as a dancer, but doing plays as a kid.
Jennifer: And musicians, and athletes, and a lot of kids that are groomed for something BIG at a young age. I watch a lot of gymnastics, like the Olympics, or something, and these young girls, there’s so much of that passion being funneled to this thing, and there’s something beautiful about that, but also really tragic to me because they’re so young, and like what’s going to happen in five more years? Where do you go from that? What happens after that?
Jeff: Well, it also seems to me that there are glimpses of that self-awareness to come, that kind of…the blooming awareness. And especially as young women, which plays a really big role in the piece.
Jennifer: Yeah, it’s huge. I did this with my last piece, too, and there isn’t even any flag waving about this, it’s just like: this is the reality of dance. A lot of girls are training, really young, doing this their whole lives, so I just want to honor that and make dances for them—that’s what I want to do. Because there are very few worlds where you see that. And that’s definitely a consistent interest of mine—I want to explore that, the good and the bad, in terms of the relationships, like, different levels of friendships, whether they are crushes or … or the ferocity of feelings you can have toward your best friend, and then, like, the break up of a best friendship. I mean, it’s ridiculous, but we all know that it happens, and we’ve all experienced it. It’s like: this kind of friendship where you do everything together and you dress the same and then you break up. And this kind of friendship where you fall in love, you know? And then maybe you move apart. And you don’t necessarily break up, but there’s a distance. And then there’s all the girls hating that girl. And all that kind of stuff.
Jeff: So with those relationships and everything sort of bubbling in the center, coming back to the layers that you’re kind of bringing on now, as we sit here with this lovely little unicorn in the room who is joining the process, and talking about the other, sort of, presences with the live sound, and I guess the movers and the tea party; it has some kind of relationship to that original impulse of openness, but—it’s a very different sort of staging ground that you’re creating—but I feel like it’s something that’s common to your last piece as well. It’s a very distinct, beginning of possibilities, and all of these indications of potentials. And it activates imagination, in a way.
Jennifer: That’s great. [both laugh] I’m so glad that looks like what is happening! Probably by the end of this piece—maybe by the next one—I’ll know what my thing is. I took some composition class with Tere O’Connor a while ago, and he just said this thing that stuck with me that I loved so much, which was something like: people always are talking about trying to change their habits, and change their habits, and do something different, and he said something about really exploring what your thing is first, because there’s almost a way that then that doesn’t allow you to really sink deep into finding your niche, or what you want to explore. I think there’s this concept out there that people are always writing the same book over and over again, or they are always making the same movie over and over again, and that, you know, that’s part of the development as an artist and as a human being. Like, in a way you can’t remake the ideas coming out of your brain—you’re making you. In all of my pieces, I‘ve always done this, where I’ve wanted to have multiple realities happening simultaneously. Which is just what I feel like happens in the world. So there’s the dance piece, which has all this drama and has these women, and has these roles, and they’re creating this one world; but then, there are these objects moving around, and at moments they relate specifically to what is happening in the dance, but at other moments they are functioning more abstractly in their own world. And the same with the video: it’s this other layer that’s placed on. And that’s when I really start to feel like—it seems cheesy to say it, but—I feel like I’m a painter of objects, and of life, and people and things. I look at the theater as a canvas—and this related to the idea of another aspect of openness to me: it’s not necessarily “chaos,” but more like a Dadaist sort of nonsense, the tarot card that’s zero, which is the fool, which is like “anything is possible”. You know, April Fool’s day, anything can happen. April Fool’s day! [both laugh – interview conducted on April 1] Yeah, so that’s how then these other elements make sense to me, and then within that, not wanting things to feel cluttered, because I did want to still have some sense of space.
Jeff: Spaciousness, right.
Jennifer: Right. So that even though I wanted to bring all of these things in, I wanted to use them judiciously, and sparsely, or in ways so that they did not clutter the space. And that still feels like a very tenuous balance that I’m trying to figure out. It still feels like this thing that is in process.
Jeff: What about the sound, specifically? I mean, you’ve made this choice to have live sound from two different sources.
Jennifer: Yeah. So one thing I did want to do differently from things I’ve done before is I’ve always done my own sound design before: finding music and layering it and putting it together. And I really wanted to take that responsibility off of my shoulders. But, I have really specific ideas about sound and how I want it used. I wanted a very sparse, more environmental soundscape. So that was my desire—and I’m trying to think how I ended up hooking up with Chris [Peck] …oh! I know! I had been listening to—when we were improvising I had some Sean Meehan, like a recording he had given to me of him and this guy Toshi which was just very minimal, very sparse. Lots of space in the sound. Or using soundscapes of insects, something to give it that kind of cchhhhrrrr, the open space. But then, when he gave me this CD to play for them, I listened to it and I started playing that, and I became really enamored of that sound, and I wanted there to be live music, and then that also became the other layer, which was the gender layer: here are the women dancing onstage, and here are the men helping support. So as that developed, I liked the idea visually of there being more men around the sides of the space as part of the community of making this thing happen while the women are dancing. So that’s why it became important—I wanted live music, and then to even push that further: it’s this sparse electronic music and all of these men around this equipment making this sparse music that seemed really funny to me. So then in talking to Chris, he was like, “Oh, you’re using that CD? We could recreate that CD live, because we did that,” and so then it just sort of blossomed into that idea of him and Steve [Rush], who made the CD with him, flying in from the university where he teaches! [laughs] So the whole thing has exploded like a bomb! A forty-minute piece with all of these people coming into town! [laughs] It dissolves once it’s over, but for that moment, all of these people come to participate in that event of making this magic for people to come see. And then I had a light-bulb moment where I was seeing Heather doing that ending solo dance, which was her dancing in her yard, doing that, and I really had this moment of like, “Oh! And then my friend David [Nuss] should be playing drums, because that’s what he did when he was ten.” He was drumming in his basement, wanting to play for Metallica, or something like that—he wanted to be a heavy metal drummer.
Jeff: And it certainly creates a relationship that we haven’t experienced in exactly that way until that point in the show.
Jennifer: No, not at all.
Jeff: Which is exciting. So talk to me about the roles again.
Jennifer: Yeah, I was just saying off the record [laughs] I was just thinking again about something that started to develop when I was dancing for other choreographers, which was how much I investigated—I mean, I guess with most of the people that I worked with there was a context, or a certain level of theatricality, involved in the piece. I mean, there were no direct narratives, but they were never pure, abstract dances, so there was always some of that going on. But, I really would—it’s like, through the whole dance, I would want to invest every particular movement with a continuation with whatever role I had made for myself within the construct of the piece. And in reading Gelsey Kirkland’s autobiography, [lowers voice] Dancing on my Grave. [laughs]
Jeff: Wow.
Jennifer: [still laughing] She talked about doing the same thing, and I felt it was so inspiring, and I felt like I had this kinship with this amazing dancer, which made me feel really great. And it was funny, because she talked about dancing for Balanchine and, you know, really abstract dance, and not feeling satisfied with it, because she had this really strong desire to give it some kind of character, or some realism for herself. And she worked with some kind of theater coach separately from rehearsals with anyone else to create that. So that’s part of my working process as well: to make sure that I’m imbuing all of the varying movements with something that’s personal for each dancer so that they can really have that connection; to me, it transcends—it allows the movement to transcend into another place. And that is more interesting to me than watching a standard arabesque. I realize I’m always trying to have them alter their head, or alter something so it doesn’t look like an arabesque anymore, but it looks like they’re intending to do something and this is a byproduct of what that was. To me it really changes the dance vocabulary—makes it look different.
Jeff: Yeah, and …I guess you’re assuming something different about how the audience—or how you’d like the audience to watch it anyway. I mean, our own ideas about the way that we view things have a very direct relationship to the way that we think the audience is going to view something.
Jennifer: And depending on whether someone goes to see dance a lot, or whether they hardly ever, they’re going to look at it completely differently, and I think a lot of times I am more interested in—and this is an awful thing to say—but I am more interested in making dances for people who don’t go to see dance that often. I want people to be able to look at it and see something of themselves in there. Which, I mean, might happen when someone goes to see Cunningham, but I feel like if you go to see that, you’re being more impressed by the technical prowess of the dancers—which is great—but I’m less interested in doing that myself, as a choreographer.
Jeff: Right. Well, the last question I have actually has something to do with the audience, too, and it has specifically to do with the dancers’ roles, the many other layers that you’re constructing around the dancers, this kind of community that’s coming together for the performance—but then we talked about this additional layer that you’re going to have each night, which is the audience. I just wonder about how you see, or if you see, those many layers of the community around the performance, how do they change the picture of the performance for the audience? In terms of talking back to the beginning germ of the whole process in your title and how now adding in these layers on top of all of the work that you’ve been doing over the past couple of years with the dancers—what is that adding in terms of that original idea of openness?
Jennifer: I’m aware of this tendency in myself where I have an idea and it has multiple facets, so on the one hand—and when we were in the space rehearsing yesterday—wanting to make decisions about when dancers are not necessarily onstage, when they’re off, that they’re kind of hanging on the side, near the audience: there’s definitely a sense where I want to make the audience feel like they are a part of something. So now when I’m not dancing I’m hanging out over here, but it’s not in a totally casual way, so there’s still a presentational aspect. It’s definitely both sides of the coin—it’s like sometimes I want it to feel like we’re all a part of this, but there’s always this awareness of, “But this is a theater and you’re sitting here watching it.” And I think I’ve always loved the theater, and the constructs of theater, and I want to play a lot with that idea of now we’re out of the picture-frame, but even when we’re out of the picture-frame we’re always really in the frame, because you’ve come and sat down in these seats and you’re watching this thing happening. And so any pretense of making “real life” happen is still a pretense because you’re watching theater.
Jeff: That’s it. There’s something unique about taking the time to consider those entrances and exits and relationship of on versus off stage and what that space—whether it’s active, or—and in this case it’s incredibly active.
Jennifer: Yeah. I’m always thinking of the frame, and I’m becoming more and more aware of that, and that frame sometimes being curvy and ornate, sometimes being square. So there’s something about now I want the frame to be like this, now I want the frame to be more amorphous—but I’m always constructing the frame that everything else is being seen in. And that definitely…I’ve become super aware of. If anything, the thing I’ve become the most aware of that has evolved for me is that framing of things; and probably as I’ve delved more into making video, then recognizing what I’m doing, whether it’s with live dancers onstage, or whether I’m making a video, is the construction of the frame, and the objects in the frame, and how they are in space, whether they are live or not, and just an awareness of what that is. Which is why it’s felt progressively more like—I like to think of it as I’m making a painting that comes to life. I had that developing, but I became more self conscious, or aware, of it just in the shift of having moved. Well, I guess it maybe became more concrete when I went to [the] MacDowell [Colony], because it’s mostly visual artists there—I was definitely the only choreographer, and there aren’t that many who go—so just having those conversations, and hearing how they talk to people about their work, and how they look at it, and hearing how they looked at my work, and talked about it, and recognizing, oh yeah, that is definitely something I pay attention to but I hadn’t had the word for it, or understood it in that capacity. And I feel like I’m more surrounded by visual artists at U of I, because my partner Deke [Weaver] teaches in the art and design [department] there, so all of his pals are there, and…yeah.
Jeff: Very good!
Jennifer: Thank you, Jeff. Thank you so much!
