Survive Cycle
Thumbnail photo by Valerie B. Barnes
Alejandra Martorell: I thought I would just invite you to talk about whatever aspect of the work you want to talk about: whether it’s conceptual, or process-oriented, or personal, or wherever you are at right now.
RoseAnne Spradlin: Well, let’s see. What were some of those words you just said? “Conceptual, process, personal…” I don’t think I am very much of a conceptualist in terms of how I go about my work. I am probably much more of a process-oriented person, and definitely personal. I have a personal approach to my work, I think. I mean, who doesn’t, really? So, I’m not sure what that means except for that if it doesn’t have something kind of personal infused in it, then I haven’t really done what I’ve wanted to do, or what I find most satisfying. You know, sometimes it does turn out that it kind of lacks that somehow, and that’s very mysterious to me how that happens, how it does happen and how it doesn’t happen.
So, not being very “conceptual” I feel like is always the difficulty that I run up against, in terms of being able to talk about my work, being able to sell my work, being able to…you know…get grants. Even working on this show for DTW, we had this big sit-down the other day where it was like, ‘Is it going to be a white floor or a black floor?’ And I was like, ‘You know, it could be white, it could be black…’ [laughs] And the DTW people were like, ‘Don’t you even know if you want a white floor or a black floor?’ [laughs again], and I was like, ‘You know? Not really, because once I see it, I’ll know what is right for the piece, and it could probably work either way. Some things will be brought out by the white floor, and some things will be brought out by the black floor.
Alejandra: Do you think that there is an appreciation of what right now is considered to be “cool” that implies a more global view of work, so that there’s a multiplicity of elements and a theatrical idea of what stage performance/dance is at this point in history?
RoseAnne: I think that must be an expectation. There’s a lot of emphasis on the kind of art-direction-side of work right now, and the kind of questions that that might bring out. I’m not not interested in that, but I just feel like in a space like DTW, there are such limits anyway in terms of how you can really approach the space, I feel like I’ve accepted it for this project. I’m not trying to change the space really.
Alejandra: Does it also have to do with resources? Like the ability to think in that scale? Where every detail is taken care of?
RoseAnne: Probably. I do think it has to do with that, too, but I think also it has to do with something about my work, and me. I am very much a person who tries to make it work. Whatever the circumstances are, I try and make it work. So I feel like I can make it work on a black floor, I can make it work on a white floor. I think it will work either way. I’m not trying to make a black statement or a white statement [laughs]. And I’m not by myself on this: the real hang-up was with Glen [Fogel], who is making the video element—he really wanted a black floor, and then Joe [Levasseur], the lighting designer, who was much more interested in lighting something that was on white. So, I was holding the middle space and trying to get everybody to wait until we see more of the elements in the space, so that we can actually see what it is.
I think I work that way as an artist: I really work by seeing what it is, and not so much thinking about it ahead of time. To me, that way of working is pretty boring. I know it must be exciting for some people, but to just think up a project, and then the whole thing is about…
Alejandra: …making it.
RoseAnne: Making it. And that doesn’t appeal to me, somehow. I think that a lot of people think that is the way artists work. Some people must work that way, but I think that in reality, I doubt many people really work that way. Even people whose work seems like it’s that way, probably they don’t really work that way. You know what I mean?
Alejandra: Yes.
RoseAnne: How can you know what you are making before you’ve made it? To me, what you are going to make then, is something that has basically been done, either by you or by somebody else. Because otherwise, you wouldn’t even be able to imagine it, right? [laughs]
Alejandra: When I saw the rehearsal the other day, I had this moment of goose-bumps, because I realized this is the space—and also the time—where this incredible tension between process and finalizing occurs. And I could feel it, and it’s really exciting from the outside! [laughs] It’s really hard when you are in it, but it was voyeuristically pleasurable to witness that spark of moment, that tension, though I could also think, this sucks! This is so difficult!
RoseAnne: Yeah! I guess I’ve been feeling that because on this project, I have more collaborators than I ever had before. I feel like I’m the one who keeps wanting to say, ‘Can we stay in the process of it? Can we stay in the process of it a little longer?’ You know? Even with the dancers, I feel like I get in this fight with them like, ‘Don’t spend your time trying to figure out where that’s going to go on the stage, because we might change it!’ [laughs] And then all that is going to be wasted. It’s like: just try to do it…and even one of the dancers kept asking me on Sunday, ‘What are we doing next? What are we doing next?’ And I was like, ‘AHHHHH! Would you stop it?! What do you mean, ‘what are we doing next?!’ Because I don’t know! If I knew, I would tell you, but this is just unfolding right here in front of your eyes! That’s hard for me.
Alejandra: That’s an amazing capability on your part: to embrace staying in the moment, and look at the work, and keep listening to it to see what is going on. Because I feel like that’s the hardest thing, especially when the time approaches…
RoseAnne: Yeah.
Alejandra: How do you do that? Is that something that you’ve grown to embrace, that you’ve taught yourself? Or is it kind of a natural instinct, or interest you have?
RoseAnne: I think it is how I work naturally, and I think what has grown over time is just my confidence to say that I know this is the way I work. And not have to always feel like I’m doing something wrong because I’m not meeting somebody’s expectation. Now I can just come in, a little bit more so, and say, ‘I’m really somebody who is working in the process and I’ll be working on the piece up until the end. And I have this, and this, and this, and I don’t know how they are going together—yet.’ So I feel a little bit more confident about saying that is how I work and that somehow I know it will come together. I guess that is something you get over time, because you go through so many times where you don’t know how it is going to come together, and then you find it does. Or it does and it doesn’t, or it always comes together and then sometimes it’s more successful than other times.
But, I think that interest must come a lot from my experience of studying with Bonnie [Bainbridge Cohen], and that approach to looking at the mind and movement. Bonnie always says that the brain is the last to know. If you are really in a new experience, the brain is the last to know. And if the brain is the first to know, then it means you’re doing something you’ve already done before. That the primary, first order experience doesn’t come from the brain, really. She says it comes from the cells. That sounds very esoteric for people, like, ‘Cells? What? What does that mean?’ But I know that can translate somewhat into the creative process, and it’s just that thing that people talk about, like ‘being in the process,’ or maintaining that space of being undecided. I think that that is what it is.
Alejandra: That’s fascinating. Can you just talk a little bit more about your process as a creator in relationship to your process as a student and teacher of Body-Mind Centering? Also, how does not being in the work affect that process of being in the moment, in the process, in the body? I don’t know how much you work out what you are working on in the piece on your own body before you invite dancers, etc.
RoseAnne: Yeah, it has changed over time. Maybe I’ll talk about the second part of the question first and then go back, because I think it’s a really big issue for me right now: not dancing in my own work, and not really making the movement up myself so much. I do make it up in a certain way, but in a certain way I only make it up in the very, very beginning. I quickly give it over to the dancers and then try to continue to work on it through their bodies. It can be a lot of pushing and pulling, and sometimes misunderstandings. I know that can be very frustrating or irritating for the dancers for somebody to be saying, ‘Ok, I want you to improvise with this,’ and then to also have veto power over it [laughs], like, ‘Ehhh…No…Not that, not that. That wasn’t the direction I was thinking about.’ [laughs] It’s a very odd thing to be trying to sit in both of those positions at once. But I don’t know how else to do it, really.
In this piece, I feel like I’ve been struggling to try to find vocabulary that’s interesting to me. When I made up my own dances for my own body, it’s so totally different. Because I don’t think that things that I made up ever really looked like any sort of technical approach—they didn’t really look like “modern dance,” they didn’t really look like “post-modern dance” either, or they didn’t really look like this or that; they were just some sort of weird amalgam. Now I feel that with other people, I have to be a lot more conscious with what I allow in, and what I consciously try not to allow in terms of stylistic and movement choices, and certain default choices. Like all of those choices that people take for granted, and I do, too.
So I’ve been really, really searching for vocabulary, and a lot of it does still come from me physically, somehow. I know that my way of accessing it is different. The more time that I have, the more time that I am willing to spend helping the dancers access it in a way that I might. But when there’s not a lot of time I can’t help them that much. That kind of process takes a lot of time. To get people to wipe the slate clean and just go to their body and start from nothing and find whatever it is you are looking for and bring it into external movement. That can take a really long time. Somehow in this process, I haven’t felt like I’ve had the time to do that as much as I would have liked.
Alejandra: Is it different with the people that have worked with you for many years—like Tasha and Walter?
RoseAnne: Yeah, I think so.
Alejandra: Do they have more common ground with you?
RoseAnne: Yeah…and they certainly know a little bit more about my likes and dislikes, you know? As a mover and dancer, Tasha is the closest to me. Not that I ever moved like she moves—she has so much more technical facility than I ever had as a dancer—but her way of approaching dance as self-expression—I feel very at home with that. That way of approaching it makes sense to me. She, to me, is always very natural in a certain way, even when she is being dramatic, it is somehow kind of natural to me. The other dancers I’ve worked with, they’d often take several different strategies to get something going that works for me, and works for them. Ultimately, it has to work for them, or else it would just be a disaster![laughs]
Alejandra: Right. When I was at the rehearsal, I was thinking about the very strange and conflicting relationship between choreographer and dancer. I think it came up for me because the way that I see your work, it seems like it is sprouting from this very intense, very personal place, so there is that strange dynamic between whose personal? You know? The person who is making it or the person who is onstage? That became very palpable for me.
RoseAnne: In this dance, it’s been really interesting to me that what was once the first layer—the outer layer, the choreography, what I thought was going to be the dance—has largely been cut away, and at some point I just decided to try to bring in this underneath layer that had more to do with the dancers. I started asking them, ‘Well, what’s your attitude about this little part of the piece—like when you come onstage there, what do you think you are doing? What does it feel like to you? Do you like it? Do you not like it? And how would you do it different? What does it have to do with that other person over there?’ So we started bringing in this other layer, and eventually that layer took over, so that’s mostly what’s there now.
Alejandra: That’s very interesting…
RoseAnne: And I would like to even be able to do that more. I don’t know how much more I’ll be able to do in a month, but I just thought that ultimately it’s a lot more interesting for a lot of us to work that way. But it still takes a lot to pull it out of people. I think a lot of people…I mean, of course, you are a dancer, you have a million things going on in your life, you go to rehearsal and somebody’s trying to drag something out of you from the inside! [laughs] And you’re not sure if that’s your material, their material, or are you going to share that material? It’s confrontational, sometimes, and it can be kind of uncomfortable, and there are boundary issues.
Alejandra: It makes sense that if you understand your work as being very personal, you are bringing that very notion about the work to the making of it and bring it to the final product.
RoseAnne: Right, right. And whenever you try that thing that artists do, like where you try to take something and make it bigger, you make it more, compound it, or enlarge it, take it to an edge, or whatever you call it—the more you do that, the more uncomfortable it can get, in a way, for choreographer and the dancer.
We were talking about…you didn’t see any of the video, did you?
Alejandra: No.
RoseAnne: Because one of the things that Glen did—the person who is working on the video—he started out by doing these “screen tests” of the dancers, taking off on the Andy Warhol screen tests, where they just sit in a totally dark space with the camera on them for a while. We started off like that, and then he interviewed them—right now we don’t think we’re actually using any of the verbal stuff, but we’re using their faces, and I think that the piece is starting out with one minute of each person’s face just huge—covering the whole back wall. They’re moving, but minimally, just blinking their eyes, or whatever…
That wasn’t how I started the dance, but that came in fairly early in the process, where we started doing some of that recording; we’d gone on this residency for a week to Pennsylvania, so there was a lot of time to sit around, and talk…I was comparing it somewhat to sex, you know? In that, do you want to be with somebody who is going to lead you into new territory, or not? Do you want to just be like, ‘This is what I do, and I don’t do anything else!’ [both laugh] You know? And I think that some people are in that category of ‘this is what I do, and I really don’t want to do anything else! And stop it!’—they don’t really want you to come in, and that’s really hard to work with for a choreographer.
In a certain way, if you are making work like I make, you need your people to be somewhat…um…what’s the right word? Available? And willing—willing to go into that unknown, uncharted territory. And when they start resisting, you can’t do anything. That’s the way I feel, and that’s sort of what has happened during this process with different people at different times, there’s been a lot of resistance that has come up. And I can’t do anything with that! If you resist me, I’m stymied, it shuts the door, I can’t do anything with that unless I just want to struggle with you, and actually, I don’t have the energy to come into rehearsal and struggle with people—or the interest. Like, I’m not that interested in doing that, you know?
I don’t know why in this process more than others this has come up, but I think it’s partly the subject matter…partly the people…partly just the point in time in terms of me and my work and the length of time I’ve been working with certain people, and adding in new people and the chemistry. It might be a little bit of growing pains, because I think I’ve been asking people to give more and be a little more responsive to the whole enterprise, more than I ever used to. Which is something I think you just do if you are trying to keep it going. I mean, you can’t do the whole hundred percent of it yourself—it is just impossible to do that. You need other people to own a little bit of it. But anyway.
I think there is a lot of blurriness around the expectations and rewards, and that sort of thing. In this process, I had two people who were in the piece who didn’t stay in it: the first was Chase [Granoff], who got injured. That was a really big blow to me, to lose him, because I felt really good about working with Chase. And figuring out what his injury was, and what it was going to require, that took a really long time—it took about a month—to figure out, ‘Ok, he’s out of here, and he’s not going to be back.’
Then I had another person who took Chase’s part and who only stayed two or three weeks, and then quit! And I’ve never had that happen before! [laughs] And I really wasn’t prepared for that. So now I have Cédric [Andrieux ] in that part, and he’s great, but new—new to my process.
Alejandra: You mentioned subject matter; I’m curious to hear what is your subject matter—a simple question—in the piece. Is it very concrete?
RoseAnne: No—it’s not concrete. And that’s probably another reason that it’s been a little bit difficult. Because I think that what we’re working with has been kind of elusive, for both me and the dancers. I had this idea, which was kind of a hold over from my last piece, where I was exploring something about getting rid of things. As opposed to, lots of times—especially in this culture—we think, ‘I need more of this, I need more of that, we need more as a country, as a dance community…more this…more that.’ So I was kind of looking at the opposite of that. It was something that I was feeling in my life, actually. I need to cut away—I can’t carry this baggage anymore! [laughs] That’s how I was feeling, like I need to lighten my load, I need to get rid of all of this stuff I was carrying around with me. I was thinking psychologically and physically, so that’s a weird thing to try and bring into a dance. How do you do that?
But eventually it kind of worked its way into being, I think. Ok, so it was about cutting away, and then it became about breaking down. Breaking something that’s very formed down into its most basic matter so that it’s no longer formed, it’s no longer structured, it’s no longer even a “form,” and you just take it back to material. So that’s kind of heady, actually.
Alejandra: But descriptive of what I saw.
RoseAnne: Yeah, ok, good! So we went through a long process where we just tried to do that with movement—like in some really obvious ways with movement phrases: break them into tiny little pieces, or take something that was holding and let it break, that sort of thing. And then eventually it meandered into being a bit more about the relationships, too. Because it seemed like that’s what was happening in the process of making this piece: it just felt like the relationships were breaking down, and changing form, and refusing to solidify from one day to the next. It just felt like everything was constantly shifting. So, I think, as I try to push the piece a little bit, I try to figure out how that is reflected in people-to-people relationships a little bit more.
So that’s kind of the subject matter.
Alejandra: It’s really fascinating to me how seeing a rehearsal, because if I had to describe what I saw—
RoseAnne: What would you say?
Alejandra: Well, I wrote down, “partialization”—is that a word? I had a sensation of the theater as being this huge empty space, and a sense of the space being a protagonist in a way, and of people letting go of sequence, and just coming into the space to take on a little part of it, and do what felt like a remnant of something, a very partial aspect of a whole.
RoseAnne: Mmm hmm…
Alejandra: It’s funny, when you said that you tried doing these very literal things with movement… It’s fascinating to me what “concept” and “obviousness” are, because there’s this way in which things come to be that is very evocative, and eloquent and yet, in a way, it came from the very literal—’let’s do the most obvious exercise.’ That phenomenon baffles me. That’s what I saw, but I saw it in such a mysterious way.
RoseAnne: Well, one thing I felt like I got a handle on right away in the process—and I also said this to all the collaborators—was that I wanted to try to make it a visceral experience. Not something necessarily that people would be able to follow linearly, like ‘that happened, and then that happened, and then that happened’—you know? People wouldn’t walk away from the piece like that, but hopefully they would walk away having had an experience maybe more like you’d have with music: you can’t necessarily pin words on it, but you know that you went somewhere. So that’s what I think we are trying to create—this sense of having a visceral-level experience that kind of shakes you. We are trying to do something that will be somewhat unsettling—and not for the sake of being unsettling, but to feel like the ground is shifting under your feet, or something like that.
So a lot of the wiggling that they do—a lot of that has been cut out. There used to be these long, long sequences of just all this movement that had to be done with the wiggle. I don’t know how well it’s working now, but I know that when it was longer, I would start to feel really unsettled! And I would kind of sit there, and start wiggling in my chair—of course I am very synced up with them empathetically, but…anyway…
So I hope that that happens by the end: that people feel like that they had an experience. [laughs]
Alejandra: Another thing that I thought about while I was watching it—and I wonder how much of it is your work, and how much of it is particular to this piece, or the dancers—was something about openness and rawness. I’m thinking of Paige’s movement when she’s doing that lunge and also the lifts where the whole body gets spiraled and exposed and open. And also there’s those things with the hands that remind me of the conversation that Miguel and Neil had where Miguel was talking about Neil’s gesture with his hands. I was noticing hands are very prominent.
RoseAnne: Yeah.
Alejandra: And I think that is part of your work.
RoseAnne: Yeah, and I think it always has been.
Alejandra: And now I’m wondering if that had to do with that rawness that I was feeling, especially in the women. So in a way, that’s like “signature RoseAnne.” Is there language for that? Do you have an explanation or understanding of what that is?
RoseAnne: You know, I don’t talk about it to them, they just do it. It just comes out—I don’t know how it comes out, but it just comes out. But, I will say that in Bonnie’s work, she says that the parasympathetic autonomic nerves express through the hands and feet, and what they express is engagement and personal intent. I think that is really part of what that is: that rawness comes from that visceral intent…and because you use the hands to reach out and take hold of things and to express like that, I think then when you abstract that into movement, it still has that feel in a way: you are reaching out to get something, or…I don’t know…that’s all I can come up with!
Alejandra: Do you think the thing about resisting you that you were talking about before gives that section some sort of tone—sometimes a struggle between the person moving and the group’s movement?
RoseAnne: Yeah, that’s right. There is that layer.
Alejandra: Is that also a signature of your work?
RoseAnne: Yeah.
Alejandra: That you don’t erase any part of the personhood. It’s always the dancer as full-bodied person…multidimensional being. Not like the dancer performing something that was put on them. It’s just a big difference.
RoseAnne: That’s definitely something that I am interested in; that’s what I want to see. I want to see them being individuals.
Alejandra: You talked about collaborating more in this project.
RoseAnne: Yeah, because I also have Chris Peck making the music. I’ve used live music before—and I’ve commissioned several composers before—but usually, I’ve sort of commissioned something that has already almost been created, and is not totally from scratch. And this feels just more from a totally beginning place. Also, I think that with a piece like this, what the sound is can color it so much. I think that we’re on the same page now, but for a while, Chris and I were really trying to communicate, but not always successfully communicating about what we were thinking. Or at least, I don’t think I was communicating to him somehow what I wanted, but that’s partly because of what I said: I didn’t really have the full form of what I wanted. It’s kind of hard to communicate about something when you know don’t know what it is! I feel for him! I think it’s turning out ok now…
And then the video—I’ve done some pieces with video in them before, but I always did it myself, so this is the first time I’ve ever had anybody else.
Alejandra: And he started from a blank slate? Listening to you?
RoseAnne: Yeah. And what he’s doing has a lot of me in it. For one thing, he decided to record a recreation—we recreated this scene from my last piece, where somebody cuts the clothes off of somebody else, and they are wearing many, many layers of clothes, so it takes a really long time—so Glen recreated that in the black space at DTW. But he did this really brilliant thing with it, which was he had these two different strobe lights on it, so he videoed it totally in the black with these strobe lights. And it was Tasha who cut all these clothes off of Walter—basically, in the dark, with just these strobe lights and these enormous scissors, so it has almost like this horror movie kind of feeling to it. You can hear the “Sh-wooh, sh-woosh” of the scissors cutting, cutting, cutting, and sometimes she rips the fabric, and you can hear this ripping sound…and he videoed it really up close, so a lot of it is pretty abstract.
That image came from my previous piece, but he did something else with it that made it his piece, and it’s interesting, because it looks a lot like his work. But I think Glen and I—our aesthetic, and the way we are as people—we kind of had this immediate connection like, ‘Oh! I get it! I get you.’ So that’s been good….that’s been really good.
And then even though I’ve worked with Paige before, I hadn’t worked with her in a long time, so she’s come back into it after a long time away. And Cedric is totally new to me—and I’ve never worked with anybody who has been in a company like the Cunningham Company before, so…at first, I was so fascinated by…it was like, ‘Oh, gosh…they really do that so well!’ Because a lot of times, my work is so slow—and especially in the past, my dances would progress so slowly and if anybody moved anywhere it was always walking, and it was always slow walking—and then I just saw that Cedric was able to dart around, and it looked very natural, and I was like, ‘How do you get to that?’ And he was like, ‘Oh, you know, Merce is a very impatient person when he works with us! He just likes us to move.’
So that was interesting—having that influence come in, and I got interested in having the piece move more quickly from one thing to the next thing. That’s been a new little experiment.
And what did you think about all of the partnering? Because the partnering is something I feel a little funny about: everyone kind of doesn’t like partnering in a way, because of all of its associations with mainstream dance…
Alejandra: Really?
RoseAnne: Like males-lifting-females, kind of thing. I’ve tried to break that up some, but we’ve struggled to get the men to be lifted, but they’re just not easy to lift! They’re hard! Even to have one guy lift another guy is hard! I finally came around and said, ‘Ok, we’ve figured it out! This is why women get lifted! They’re smaller!’ [laughs] You can actually get them up in the air without having a backache after, or pulling your neck out of place.
Alejandra: The idea of male/female was in my head, because I was thinking about what I said about the woman being different in the piece than the men; being—I don’t know how to say it. There is something about their bodies that’s more open, literally, maybe.
RoseAnne: Yeah.
Alejandra: And the quality of the openness is very particular. It’s a kind of… not tearing, but in that realm of open. So I was reading that gender thing, but that was then offset by the idea of “partial.” When these crazy lifts happen out of nowhere. There is no buildup towards them, but they are a peak. So that is interesting, and it’s an interesting thing, structurally, that all of a sudden this is happening, but you didn’t see how it got to be there!
RoseAnne: What you’re saying about the women, I know that body place, and that’s probably what just comes naturally for me. The men—I’m really interested in men right now, as creatures. I don’t know who they are! I don’t get them, really. [both laugh]
I’m interested—I want to know more how they function. It’s partly because at this point in my life, I kind of totally failed at the relationship thing: I was married for a while, and then I had one major relationship after that, and neither of them lasted. I don’t really get guys, I don’t know how their minds work, and I don’t know what they feel! [laughs] Like I know what the women feel—or maybe I’m wrong, but at least I think I know what they feel.
Alejandra: That’s tricky, because…well, what I’m about to say—not what you just said, but what I’m about to say—can be so un-P.C., but I have to say that watching that rehearsal, a similar thing happened to me: I had a level of absorption with Paige and Tasha that was very, very different than with Walter and Cedric. With Walter, there’s that section in the middle where he goes into the floor—he’s just like a scribble that doesn’t stop, and I was fascinated by it, but my fascinations are different with each one.
RoseAnne: Uh, huh.
Alejandra: There’s a different kind of admiration, and I think it’s colored by the admiration of…I don’t know…to me, watching Walter, I felt like, ‘That is beautiful,’ and watching Paige and Tasha, it’s more like, ‘that’s a place. That’s a way of being.’ And I think that what that says is I know more of that world, because I can see more three-dimensionally in it, whereas the other one is like, ‘Oh…wow…that’s very pretty…’ You know? Not in a bad way, but…
RoseAnne: It’s so interesting! What is it that is analogous for the men? What kind of place can they be in? I don’t know what it is! I feel like I haven’t yet been able to create it for them.
Alejandra: It’s really exciting to hear that you intend to keep on working, that that’s your mindset right now.
RoseAnne: There’s such a conversation now—which is good, which is totally good—about what is happening, about what do we need, about what has happened, did the scene fall apart, or not. Sometimes I read the Dance Insider when it comes across my computer. I read something today where he [Paul Ben-Itzak] began railing again at the Joyce—and BAM—that you should lead your audience instead of pandering to your audience, you should lead your audience to the new work. And I totally agree with that: that is what presenters and producers can do and should do. They should take the risk.
On the other hand, I do feel like I lived through the days, here in the downtown scene, where it was more about personalities—like, who is an interesting artist?—meaning, who is an interesting personality? Almost a kind of celebrity-cult type of thing. And I think David White kind of created that somewhat, and maybe Mark Russell did, too, although they both also had really good points of view. I think they strengthened the community in other ways, but that personality cult is actually really bad for artists, because it’s so momentary—that’s the thing! You can’t be the personality for very long! The whole thing is about moving on, from one personality to the next personality to the next personality, just like the celebrities on T.V. or the movies. You’re not that hot that long—you know? That totally goes against what it’s like to be an artist. To have a lifetime as an artist, you have to keep working. It’s not about being an appealing personality, really, it’s about your work.
Alejandra: Or about arriving at a success…
RoseAnne: Yeah. So I think that that’s a trend that I am wary of when it raises its head. I’m hoping that that one doesn’t come back right away. Where you have to somehow look like you’re an interesting personality in order for people to like your work. That also starts operating a lot when people don’t actually know what they are looking at, so they don’t know how to judge the work and they judge the person instead. I hope we don’t go back to that. I feel like we did that—we saw what that did.
Alejandra: I don’t know if this has anything to do with what you are saying, but it makes me think of the whole Gia [Kourlas] statement about New York not being the hub of dance anymore. And not about what Gia said—because I don’t remember what she actually said—but about what people interpreted it as. The line that was out in the street, was ‘there’s not good work out there right now.’ I feel there is a lot of good, mature, work now. Maybe there is a “cutting edge, young, sudden-stardom” phenomenon going on alongside a group of people who mature in their work, and that work is just more mature than any sudden stardom can be. But there might be a preference in the culture for that sudden-stardom quality.
RoseAnne: Well, I think that is always there, and I think it’s pretty much built on—what do they say?—on clay feet, or something like that. People look for a little savior, and they are always hoping that…
Alejandra: So, it’s kind of produced partly by the artists themselves, and partly by the producers, presenters and press?
RoseAnne: I mean, it’s just human nature. It’s just like wanting the new relationship because you think that this one is going to be different from the last one! [both laugh] You know?
Alejandra: Yeah…
RoseAnne: And then, they say, they are all the same one, actually.
I think that the scene feels fresher to me right now—with more potential. Not to say that everything new is good—or young is good—but at least it’s sort of whatever that weird fear was that was operating, it seems like it’s dissipated.
Alejandra: Thank you for talking with us.
RoseAnne: Thank you.
