Making Ends Meet
Thumbnail photo by Robert Nieves
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Hilary Clark: Hi Larissa. It’s nice to be talking with you. You just performed Making Ends Meet at Food for Thought at Danspace Project and Dixon Place on the Brink Series. What are some of the ideas behind Making Ends Meet?
Larissa Velez: Well, using the title as a starting point – this piece was created during a period where I’d broken my toe, and it was creating serious complications in my life on many levels. While on crutches and in financial distress from it all, the piece provided an opportunity for me to look at some of my deepest fears and how I could approach them, some of which were: the fear of the unknown, fear of death, the collapse of my world as I knew it, and so meeting your own end became a big theme. In the structure of the work there are a lot of fragments that are glued together through various means, and so in a literal way making these ends meet creates the whole of the piece. On another literal level, being afraid to not be able to support myself in this city and having to make my ends meet in that figurative way, I find this is something that interrupts my artistic process and affects it. So the piece began to represent a layering of all those kinds of conflicts and ideas.
Hilary: You first premiered this piece in June?
Larissa: Yeah, at the Terranova Solo Arts Festival at PS122.
Hilary: Can you talk about some of the changes that may have occurred since June for the piece that you showed at Brink?
Larissa: Sure. In June, the piece was created all around dealing with my broken toe and how something almost so subtle and small can make you feel pitiful and useless. Then between June and October, I suffered a very hurtful and intense breakup of my intimate relationship and had this Brink Show coming up. I originally thought I would make a new piece but I decided to recycle the solo from June, because I found the premise to still be completely applicable – to take the piece and revisit that source material, and infuse it with all of the new pain that had happened between June and October. So the structure of the piece is very much the same, but I think the meanings are even more heightened. I was working with a heightened level of exposure because Dixon Place itself is a much more intimate space. There’s a feeling being in this little private living room, and I really wanted to get into this idea of the audience being let in to some more intimate personal details, and how that would charge the source material from June. So this aspect of exposure – exposing secret emotional things and adding that layer onto the older work developed it in this other way.
Hilary: I find in the piece that you deal with some of the things that you are speaking about abstractly and literally; abstractly with movement through the subtlety and range of the physicality and literally through some of the video that you use and the song. Maybe you can just speak to that a bit.
Larissa: In a lot of ways when the piece was finished and I was about to show it, I started to get some doubt like, ‘boy Larissa you’ve really gone to a place of literalism, and is it a dangerous place?’ I always felt a sense with the audience that I am shepherding them through a very real life situation. In the piece there is a very clear reference to reality television shows. The confession rooms are an example, and using those diary entries as a vehicle for showing material. So I find there are portals through which you can show content, and frame the content with a real world reference that anyone can understand. So I used a song that is supposed to be a regular ballad and then broke down that structure. I feel like abstraction is the glue, or the transition point where a literal reference comes up and then it gets torn down allowing this whole other experience to emerge. Through abstraction a lot of the inner conflict and complexities are able to live a little more fully, then right at the moment where that might be going where I would consider too far, a literal reference comes back. It’s like a switching on and off, on and off.
Hilary: This piece has a lot of components that you have been working with over the years, some of which you’ve mentioned – singing and video. If you wouldn’t mind telling us a little bit about your background in regards to that specifically?
Larissa: I went to college. I got my BFA in Dance and was mainly choreographing and I would always create the soundtrack for the pieces. I made them in a very raw way, tape deck to tape deck, usually having a lot of tape decks playing at the same time! As soon as I left school I kind of ditched choreography to get into computers and making music that was a little more high tech. I had these ideas about becoming an electronic musician, and then I kind of scrapped that. I then got into Internet web art, trying to become a persona on the Internet making something like music videos using Flash. What I found was that through the years there was always such a separation in these endeavors, and I feel like in this piece there’s finally this integration of all of that and my need to derive and create homemade content. I feel like I found a system through this piece of housing all of it, and the experience of performing it is the glue that binds all of these things together.
Hilary: One aspect of this piece is considering the common person as celebrity. There are quite a few references to reality television and American Idol. Can you speak a little bit about that?
Larissa: It’s always been an obsession of mine – the aspect of the common person, the common audience member. The TV-watching American has always been a theme of interest for me. Reality television and our new popular culture have exposed this need for any person to try to become famous. It’s an interesting theme that always comes up in my real life as an artist. American Idol and those kind of competition shows are such fertile ground – the whole world is able to see a very harsh critique process that artists go through with themselves in making work, with their peers and with entities they are meeting who would validate their work by giving them grants or whatever. That aspect of being chosen is a big theme for me. I relate to that sense of in one moment you are given a minute and a half, two minutes to completely prove your worth in front of millions. I feel like it’s a metaphor for all of us in our lives that we constantly feel that we have these chances to really be our fullest selves and the pressure we put ourselves through to be that. In the piece I made a very clear literal reference to: this is my moment, here is the climax, here I go, I’m gonna give it my all, I’m gonna show my fullest range, and then I sing (and I am not a trained singer – I enjoy singing so much but it makes me very, very uncomfortable). So the first time I performed the piece I was absolutely terrified – commenting on that and yet also experiencing those pressures. I wanted to sing in this American Idolesque, clear and crisp and fully emotionally embodied way. I found what was most important about that was offering this very literal experience and having it completely deteriorate in front of the audience, and snapping back into the prowess that is involved in trying to sing something and “be on”, then it deteriorating again.
Hilary: There’s so many layers to what it is you’re working with – be it in the physicality, the way in which you comment on your own physicality or comment on your own experience. How did you generate the material for this piece?
Larissa: Well the movement for the piece originated with the limitation of my broken toe, although I got into the studio and had some idea that the piece was going to be wholly physical, and highly chaotic. Let’s say you were to take a gesture and form that gesture in space and a tornado came and flew you across the room and you were maybe forced into seven gestures that you didn’t necessarily want to create. I worked with this theme of being moved by energies outside of yourself, and that you had no control. I was going to really fling and throw myself around and then I broke my toe and I couldn’t even walk! Being so fearful and thinking that I wasn’t even gonna be doing the piece, I decided that I’d been given an opportunity. Because of my lack of mobility, the piece would just have to go somewhere else. Eventually I was able to walk and hobble around on one foot. I thought what kind of movement would derive from this physical limitation? And so I videotaped myself. I always come from a place where I feel there’s no separation from rehearsal to performance. I just asked myself to be really present and I improvised and taped it, and pretty much memorized it verbatim. So much of that source material till this day is exactly the same and the movement for this piece in particular was pretty much made and recorded in two days. I feel like when you honor every day, although the material stays the same it gets infused with new meaning based on where you are. I focus on the music similarly. Going back to that sort of tornado aspect of being blown and moved by forces outside yourself, I had also been working with a soundtrack that was very similar in the sense that it was very chaotic, a cut and paste of many different sound bits. I am always in the process of creating soundtracks, and at any point when a particular bit of meaning gets derived in a movement sequence and there needs to be a layer of sound that can add to it, I have my bank and I just cut and paste. Collage is a big aspect of my work, so there’s the collaging of sound, the collaging of video source material, the collaging of movement, and all of this content is always in the recycling cabinet I guess you could say.
Hilary: What is in your sound bank?
Larissa: I am not allowed to say because of copyright! (laughter) There’s a lot. I basically spent many years in collaboration with an amazing artist, Brian Belott, and for about seven years we sampled just about anything we could get our hands on. We manipulated these sounds, cut them up, and I have libraries and libraries worth of cut up existing music, like thirty or so seconds, or one second or two second segments of Mozart and Beethoven and Morton Feldman for example. I have a lot of vocal improvisation that I have derived through the years with you (Hilary Clark) and Brian, that I have cut up and made libraries of. There are sound effects, sounds taken from the street… Basically I feel like everything is open and fair game for the chopping block, so I’ve got a lot. And in this piece in particular, I had decided to use old video footage that was not created specifically for the piece, but was some private vacation footage of my ex-partner along with more intimate photos. None of that was created with the intention of using them for art in any way. But I found it an interesting choice for myself, this aspect of exposing something that was quite sacred and meant to be of just my own personal, private use. That aspect of exposing myself was new to me because I had always used video that was specific to what I was working on at the time.
Hilary: It’s interesting to hear you speak about the generation of the movement and the way in which you generate your sound and I think, in all of it, there is such a level of subtlety and range that has always excited me about your work. I’ve been watching your work for ten years now, and in this piece specifically the themes of emotional deterioration and exposure come up. It’s interesting that you chose to take a very specific aspect of your personal life and bring it in to the material. In many ways you’re saying everything is available, more than you ever could have imagined.
Larissa: Well, through this piece I came to believe that everything is fair game. Interestingly enough, when I was going through this breakup and making this piece, I had a conversation with Brian Belott, and he was giving me a little lecture about how my breakup was not an interesting source of material for art. Not that it isn’t an interesting source of material, but that it should not be a subject. I really took that in, and agreed, and then all of a sudden I had issue with it. I find interesting the aspect of going through something in your personal life and where the alchemy of the artistic process comes in. You have real life situations, and allowing them to springboard into a new and different meaning is the beauty of the creative process… How you take something and allow it to go somewhere so that something else can be born, so there is a rebirthing. But at the same time, what’s important to me is how can it be framed so that you are accountable for your material. I would not wanna assume that aspects of my breakup are interesting to others. They’re obviously highly charged for me, but it can be framed in a very specific way. I feel that way I am accountable for the choices that I make. Shepherding the audience though an experience that acknowledges their attention span, their everyday references, is major. I find you have to be very clear about what it is you’re working with, how you are putting it out there. I used a very symbolic object of my relationship with my ex-partner, these beautiful wooden birds that we had bought on vacation. They were lovebirds, and they always symbolized our togetherness. I thought we were gonna last forever and all that yada yada. I videotaped myself destroying these birds as a symbolic gesture for myself. It was my own cathartic experience that I had to do. Since I couldn’t break the plasma TV or tear the walls down, I broke the birds. I used that in this piece. It ends up being a very comedic segment, these damn coconut birds wouldn’t break, but I showed the breaking of those birds in a totally different context. I find there to be layers of meaning that then allows people to kind of slip and slide through, that allows me to take this highly personal content and reorient it.
Hilary: I always find it interesting because you are making commentary on your own very personal experience. Potentially people may not know the significance to you personally of those birds, but we’re watching on the video, we’re watching that they’re not as destructible as we had thought they might be when we saw you coming at it with the wood stick…
Larissa: (laughs)
Hilary: In a lot of ways, it shows this process of really painful deterioration. Maybe if you can speak to, a bit, the way you comment on some of that personal material so many times in the piece…
Larissa: I think taking a moment to step outside of yourself, in a spiritual aspect even, creates a separation so you don’t take yourself so seriously. I find that there is always an aspect of bringing up a meaning, observing and separating – that as we choose to separate, it depreciates a little bit in a good way. But I also feel like I want to be honest, and I find there is a generosity of being vulnerable enough to put out, you know, “I don’t like how this is going right know.”
Hilary: Which you said in the video…
Larissa: Yes, and I always find I’m really into this aspect of dance that… at a certain point audiences are really having a good yawn and waiting for it to be done. I really like that aspect of boredom, but I love in pieces really being able to comment on: “oh here we go again… here it is – the ten minutes of boredom”, I like really just kind of being able to be in something completely and then separate enough to comment on it. I also think it provides a good punch line, which is important for me to move people – physically moving them with laughter is always such a vital aspect of my work and my need to create work.
