Choreographer/producer Marisa König Beatty talks with dancer/choreographers Scott Heron and Thomas Hauert about their collaborative work Like me more like me, which premiered in Charleroi, Belgium in November 2011. Although they come from different countries and backgrounds, Hauert and Heron share a mistrust of social and aesthetic conventions and a love of intense physicality. Hauert will be showing work at Judson Church on Monday, January 23, 2012.
Interview date: September 26, 2011
Download a PDF of this conversation
Marisa König Beatty: I’ve known your work independently of each other up until now, and it is, one can say, drastically different. I’m curious what you saw in each other that was interesting to you when you first met. How did you meet?
Thomas Hauert: We met in New York when we were improvising and dancing together [at the invitation of Jennifer Monson for the Fall 2008 Movement Research Festival]. I was surprised by him moving and his choices in his performance. He made me laugh while dancing.
Marisa: That’s the clip that’s on YouTube?
Thomas: Yes. There were some nice, exciting interactions.
Marisa: Exciting for you because it was different choices than you would make? Or exciting because of the sense of humor that was behind it?
Thomas: Yes, there is this sense of humor but at the same time a full dedication to whatever he does, to all the choices. And the choices are so unpredictable.
Marisa (to Scott): Is that an accurate description of you, humorous and unpredictable?
Scott Heron: I’ll take that! I think what I was attracted to was a really deep connection to my history as a dancer. I felt like I shared that with Thomas, having never met him. The source of the way dancing burbled out of me, not as a choice I made, but that just happened in my life. Dancing with him, I felt like we shared some spirit about that. I felt like we were kids, just the pure joy of dancing.
Marisa: That’s what I see. Maybe it’s because I’m coming at it with a layer of motherhood on top of it as well, but it’s very playful, the way that you two are interacting. Sometimes it looks like you’re about to fight [laughs]. I know it’s been a little bit of a challenging collaboration to be so far removed geographically from each other and to come back in very intense bursts of creativity.
[Laughter]
Scott: I didn’t feel like at any point I wanted to fight.
Marisa: Maybe it’s the image of the wrestling.
Thomas: And throwing shoes at me.
Yes, there were some bumps, but then we try and deal with them. I think that is true, what Scotty says, that there is a recognition of something in the way we approach movement.
Marisa: Is that what you tap into then, in the rehearsal process?
Thomas: Well it turned out to the only thing… [both laugh].
Marisa: Uh, oh.
Scott (to Thomas): Let’s discuss our difficulties, or the ways it’s been hard.
Marisa: With collaboration, it’s a shared process. You’re two different people so you must be working differently on a regular basis and now you’re forced to come together through this project, in a way that presumably, hopefully, brings something to both of you. So for me the difficulties are interesting if they are leading you to a new way of thinking about your own practice or your own process; less so if it’s just about butting heads.
Scott: Well no, it wasn’t about butting heads, it’s more like really struggling to find a common language. I have this assumption that Europeans do it differently than we do [laughs]. Like an intellectual approach, or something that is foreign to me in making work. Those are just my own assumptions that are not really necessarily true. I have a very un-intellectual way of making work.
Marisa: More instinctual?
Scott: Yes. What interests me is a logic that’s beyond logic and beyond words or reason; just inhabiting a world that is possible by enacting the possibilities of my physical body and not planning it out ahead of time. Opening myself up and collecting material and then figuring out how to theatricalize it. To me that’s the fun and craft part, staging, but I don’t really have a grand scheme for the parts, I feel almost like it’s a channeling process. That’s a really personal kind of process. Part of our difficulty was that we could just work and work and work but then it was “Well why are we going to commit to this or that,” whereas when I’m working alone, I just make the soup myself.
Thomas: I think that we had this initial click and recognition of something in our dancing, the way we’re approaching movement and enjoying movement. But then, I think what was very different was also the cultures we came from. I don’t think it’s the “American” and “European” thing, but somehow we come from very small subcultures, and the audience I’m used to performing for, or the crowds and the circle of people that I make my work in and the mechanics of that world is very different—the world where you have been working, and who you’ve been in contact with. I think that also somehow shapes the way of how you make work, and in some sense how you think about it.
Marisa: Do you have favorite parts of what you’ve been working on together?
Scott: I think just backing up, talking about our different milieu—
Marisa: [laughs] Milieux with an “x”?
Scott: Yeah [Thomas laughs]. I think one of our initial lines of exploration was just “what is a gay man.” Thinking about the clichés, and the images and the symbols, not that we were going to sit down and make a gay piece, but we were thinking about a lot about that. And then it was really hard to know, just everything I know about that culturally and how do you [Thomas] think about that? And what have the audiences already seen? And what is the baseline just on that subject?
And I wonder if there’s anything in that whole realm of investigation that can be shocking in either place? Or what is cliché? Or how educated are people on those kinds of issues. I had no idea. Because the whole idea of sexual representation is, in my work, there to be put on, taken off, and tossed around. And then I wonder how that is viewed here. And I think we still have some element of that part of my “way” of putting on the wig, or the dress, or the heels, putting it off and on and not necessarily making a big deal out of it. Just having fun.
Marisa: That was actually a little bit my reaction too. I find it’s no longer shocking to see a man put on a dress, or a wig, or heels even. So then the question becomes more what impression does it make on me? Or maybe how your using it, how you’re adapting into these personae, like this woman who I’ve now come to think of as the Banshee with her terribly-everywhere black wig, and the screaming into the microphone, just really a sharp woman, this character.
But yeah, you could say it’s been done before, men in dresses on stage. So does it actually continue to say something about sexuality? I felt it much more in the way you described it, sort of very natural, this is now me in a dress, and this is now me without clothing, and this is now me with sneakers and a hat. So it was in a way a non-dramatic series of transitions.
Scott: Now what was the subject that you launched into before I went backwards?
Marisa: That it was too early in the process to be reflective about it.
Scott: No, you were saying something about magical moments?
Thomas: Yes!
[Laughter]
It’s true, when we dance. But what we’re not so good at is at keeping or reproducing things. Somehow making a structure or form that we can reproduce from which we can actually construct something.
Scott: I guess that probably is a big difference in our working methods: our relationship to improvisation. My structure is often image based, and often uses a nonsensical story that I have in my head that I’m not necessarily trying to convey, but I go through that story to guide me in my movement. And the other thing I often use is tasks, and trying to accomplish tasks, often in a way that is ineffectual. Generally these are my bag of strategies, and I think Thomas’s strategies for how do you take this flavor and this beautiful, amazing freedom that you’ve found and choreograph it as improvisation? So [turning to Thomas], how do you do it?
[Laughter]
Thomas: Well, the things I usually get attached to when I see them in improvs are movement qualities or the mechanics between bodies, or some sort of spatial structure or movement system that can happen. And then, usually, I try and extract physical tasks or physical principles or rules of the game. And in practice, usually it something that then takes a while in rehearsing and practicing, but to go to that flavor or jumping it or making work on the floor, inventing exercises to practice different aspects of that. Then it’s very much a learning process for the body.
Scott: And I think that’s the place where we have had difficulties because I lack that kind of discipline to work on those kinds of specific ideas and I judged those ideas as “dancey” dance. [Laughter]
That was one thing we kept coming back to, trying to figure out how to mesh our systems.
Thomas: I think where we’re REALLY different is what I usually spend the most time on in creation is getting good at creating ways to get at the essence and composing at the same time, and playing together without people understanding each other. Really getting all of what the body and the brain, that kind of creative practice, getting really comfortable with that and then putting it together and *clap* then it’s the premiere. And I spend, so far, very little thought on how to perform it or—
Scott: The staging, too. I start getting visions of the staging at the beginning. I don’t work narratively at all, but I kind of start writing the script, in a way, as I’m making it. And it’s like we’re almost on backwards slopes because I kind of start there [indicates up with his left hand] and once I start envisioning the who picture, the dance is what I do to get from one place to the next. And you [Thomas] start with the dance [indicates up with his right hand] and then eventually figure out what the theater aspects of that are.
[At some point] I just determined that if I have strong ideas about things like that I’ll just throw them [into the process]. You know, I had some really out-there, really strong ideas about costumes and about someone sticking their butt in a bowl of milk. I mean, on the very first day, I woke up the night before and just had these visions. And it was like, no, that is not where we’re going to start.
[Laughter]
I mean if I was making the piece myself, I’ve already got those ideas. Of those dreams. But I couldn’t just say “alright, pull your pants down and stick your ass in a bowl of milk.”
Thomas: Because I would have to rehearse it for at least two months…
[More laughter]
Scott: And I don’t think that is ever going to come up in this piece.
Marisa: Such a tease…
