FALL/WINTER 1998-99
George: Why don’t we start with you telling me how you see the evolution of Movement Research.
Edwards: My narrative of the story, and it is a bit of a constructed narrative, is that the old artist-run board came to a point where they didn’t want to do everything themselves. So they hired a part-time administrative person and that position changed hands several times, but never really amounted to anything. So, the organziation was sort of impenetrable to the people who weren’t part of it. It was practically like a service organization for twenty artists, and they took workshops from each other; it was really built around the idea of the workshop. And there were some other great things happening at the same time. There were artist-driven things like the Studies Project (the brainchild of Mary Overlie), which was curated by individual artists, and some of them were really fascinating, and there were a few dance series, one was at the Summer Garden, and that was a really big, exciting thing. But the core of the organization was postage stamp-sized and this administrative person was paid probably five dollars an hour, and also in-kind by being able to take workshops and classes. It was really a non-professional situation. And I think that situation lasted until Richard Elovich was hired to be the first Executive Director, he was probably hired as Director, and he turned himself into Executive Director; the others had all been Administrative Director or Administrator.
Elovich was a pivotal figure for the organization. In addition to moving the organization from a collective structure to a more bureaucratic one with a board of directors drawn from an entirely new group of people, including administrators and directors of other arts organizations, Elovich gave Movement Research a completely new artistic and political profile.
George: When was Richard hired?
Edwards: Well, I started in 1990, so he was hired in 1987, because he was there for three years when I got there. So from basically 1977 to 1987, it was a postage stamp-sized little organization. Richard came on and the board had remained basically the same, from my perspective, but they were getting less and less interested in the organization because they had moved on, in some sense. Richard actually was the first person to go in and say, I am the director of this organization. “You, the board, in a sense work for me and my vision, as opposed to me being there to do your mailings.” Previously the role of administrator was to say, “You guys have done the artistic vision part of this puzzle, and I’m doing the manual labor to make that happen.” Richard totally switched around that model, and began working in the model of David White of Dance Theater Workshop and Mark Russell of PS 122 and other Executive Directors and he reshaped the board. He didn’t pull in a money board at all, but he pulled in a somewhat high-powered administrative board – Laurie Uprichard (of Danspace Project) joined the board, Bill T. Jones joined the board, Cee Brown from Creative Time and Art Matters joined the board, Jennifer Monson (choreographer) joined to board, and other artists he felt were representative, Yoshiko Chuma.
George: Were these artists you’re mentioning people who had taken workshops during the early years?
Edwards: These were people who Richard knew personally to some extent. He had directed the Monday night series at the Poetry Project at Danspace, and he had done a lot of performance art things himself. So he knew people. And I think that someone like Eiko had actually taught an annual workshop at Movement Research for several years until then. And Bill T. Jones, I don’t know that he had actually ever done anything at Movement Research except for one very famous Studies Project, he and Steve Paxton. Richard knew Bill T. historically because they were both gay activist figures. I think they were on a march to Washington and Richard said that they were sitting on the bus together and Richard asked Bill to join the board and Bill agreed to.
Richard embarked on a really ambitious re-envisioning of the organization because the infrastructure of the organization was not up to his vision. That’s my reckoning of the situation. He wanted to go on full-time, he wanted to make a reasonable salary, he wanted to have an assistant, an administrative assistant and interns in the office, he wanted to do a permanent presenting series instead of occasionally, he wanted to do a lot more workshops, and he really wanted to introduce performance art. Karen Finley taught a workshop, Reno taught a workshop, there was just a sense of excitement around the program. It wasn’t only performance people either, but dance people like Stephen Petronio who were not only doing Contact Improvisation.
So Richard had this great expansive vision. And he was a real out-there activist, but as the years went on, the financial problems of the organization became more acute. When I came there was a real situation of robbing Peter to pay Paul, where, for example, you get a grant for artists, but you spend it for administrative salaries or overhead, and then when you have to pay the artist six months later, you have to dip into something else, and that was a problem. And I think there was also a sense that organizationally we weren’t fulfilling our promise to artists, which was also true. Because we weren’t paying people on time, we weren’t really paying people enough, and the fund raising was inconsistent.
George: Do you think under Richard there was a rift in terms of the organization’s connection to its own history?
Edwards: In a sense, yes. I mean, the history was still reflected in the organization, but he maintained a lot of the workshop teachers, I think purely for financial reasons, because he knew that those workshops would make some money, thirty percent of which would go back into the organization. But, the context in which those workshops existed was an organization that was becoming really radicalized, and those artists teaching workshops weren’t welcome in the rest of the organization. They wouldn’t feel comfortable in the Studies Projects, which were about issues of censorship of HIV, for example. I think the breaking point, when the older group of artists finally rebelled, was the publication of Performance Journal #3. They came to me and Guy and said, “Let’s separate the calendar of workshops offered by Movement Research from the journal. The calendar and the journal are not reflective of each other. We feel uncomfortable being in that environment.” It’s not an ongoing battle anymore, but it really was for a year. And we felt like I was really important to keep the two integrated and to both provide increasingly political workshops to match a more political profile of the organization. Not that we have a single political stance, but one thing is that we really do feel grounded in contemporary culture, not in the culture of the 1970s. And it is politicized in certain ways that those artists in the seventies weren’t politicized, and they haven’t changed. I mean they have their houses in the country. A lot of those people moved up to Vermont in the eighties; some have moved to upstate New York. I’m not saying they were rich and successful, but they were able to remove themselves to some extent, and the rest of us, the younger people, like Donna Uchizono and John Jasperse, don’t want to, they’re part of this particular mix, we don’t want to step away, it’s what makes art interesting to us, is that it’s reflective of a particular culture. But anyway, on the other hand, I think we’ve also toned down the journal a lot from Performance Journal #3, I hope not in a substantial ideological way, but I think we’ve broadened it, deepened it, and made it more interesting than this sort of in-your-face statement which that was a little bit.
George: Whose idea was Performance Journal #3?
Edwards: That was Richard. Richard kicked off so many things, I really feel like the vision has shifted now. Richard was bored with artists and dance when he left. He didn’t enjoy working with choreographers, and he didn’t enjoy working with the old guard. People didn’t really feel a connection with him or the office. They came in and they did their workshop and just left. It was all disjointed. But I think that the difference in vision that Guy and I have added is that we actually really do care, and we want to make relevant things happen. And we take pride in the fact that we are so rooted in the dance community, that’s really important to us.
George: One thing that’s really interesting to me is the connection to Judson Church, a space which links Movement Research to an earlier moment in recent dance history. How do you see your connection to Judson and the post-modern dance movement that has become synonomous with that space?
Edwards: In one way, it’s simply that Judson was willing and interested in supporting whomever asked. I think that’s what happened for those artists in the sixties, and what happened in the nineties when we just went back to the church and just asked. I think in another sense, it was our feeling like we want to shamelessly capitalize on the Judson legacy and get a lot of visibility from doing that, and it was irrelevant how consciously we worked with that or didn’t work with that. To be honest, Guy and I used to joke that we were sort of happily exploiting Judson, which I think was actually fine and great, there was nothing negative about it. I mean, all these young people really wanted to do things there, see it, and feel like “I performed in the same place as the founders of post-modern dance.” But, no, I don’t think there was necessarily an organic connection. I mean, the work that they were doing back then, I feel like it was all about abstraction. Even though it was also incredibly pedestrian, I think of it as fitting in with the visual art of the time. And now I feel like a lot of dance is both about really politicized identity stuff, or it’s about really beautiful dance movement, neither of which was happening back then. Ideally, I think that what’s happening at Judson now and what happened back then reflects the artistic sensibility of a certain era. And those sensibilities are different.
George: I think no matter how apolitical the work from the seventies may appear by nineties standards, they really felt that the new ground they were forging artistically was politically relevant. Wendell Beavers was saying that the Movement Research collective was even more radical that identity politics because they were breaking down people’s whole ways of seeing.
Edwards: Yes, definitely. I see it as a continuum. In no way do I denigrate what’s come before us. I think it’s our burden to live up to a lot of the research and development that happened before us. But, still there are clashes. I still remember this one conversation Guy and I had with Simone Forti and Steve Paxton after Performance Journal #3. They said, “We want to go out to lunch with you and express some of our concerns and thoughts,” and they really took us to task on a lot of things. We were flabbergasted, because we thought of those two, especially Steve Paxton, as having the most out-there, in-your-face, political, disruptive sensibility to the status quo of the sixties. But they said, “This journal is all about sex, it’s all sexual identity, sexual identity, can’t anybody talk about anything more than their genitals?”.
George: So you were surprised by the force of their reaction?
Edwards: I was shocked. I feel like Simone and Steve actually really listened to us, which was great, but I don’t feel like they agree, underneath it all. We had this fantastic conversation; I wish that had been tape recorded for all time, beccause it was really intense. There was Simone, Steve, Cathy, and Guy, this major difference in generations, but all having had responsibility for the organization at one point. And they said, “You know, we don’t think the workshops should be seen in the context of the Performance Journal.” They brought that up, saying, “We’re not interested in this. Why is it so important? Why is it so relevant? There are other things really worth thinking about.” And we just tried to say to them, “Isn’t that what people were telling you in the sixties?” It was just so weird. But in the end, I just love the fact that they cared so much to say anything. I thought it was pretty great.
Note from LG: Movement Research founding member Cynthia Hedstrom read the transcript of my interview with Cathy Edwards and noted a number of misperceptions and rifts across generations. She eloquently responded to my conversation with Edwards by writing (in a 15 October 1995 personal communication): “and what does building a house in Vermont have to do with not being politicized; it might mean becoming more politicized – it is a really strangely damning connection to make. The perception that there was not ‘politicized’ or ‘really beautiful dance movement’ happening in the 1970s is very strange and sad to me. Perhaps [the misperceptions] are the tragic reality of dance – that once performed, is gone. One cannot really know it without having seen it.”
Laurel George is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology at Rice University and writes on history of funding for experimental dance and performance in the United States.
This reprint of Artists Incorporating: Business Savvy Meets Creative Experimentation, by Laurel George is taken from Corporate Futures, The Diffusion of the Culturally Sensitive Corporate Form, George E. Marcus Editor, 1998 © University of Chicago Press.
