Not About Iraq
Thumbnail photo: Steve Gunther
Daniel Linehan | 2.22.08
Hi, it’s Daniel, and I’m very excited to be doing an email interview with you for Critical Correspondence.
Let me start by saying that I am not very familiar with your work (although I do remember seeing a very beautiful dance film that you made about mothers and daughters), but I did a little online research and found your MySpace page, and I was very interested in what you wrote about what ideas and questions you are working with now:
“”What is my civic responsibility as an artist?” This question has been driving my choreography since 2002, when I began creating a collection of dances I now call, Not About Iraq. Through a set of poetics only accessible through dance, these pieces question the place of the body in matters of heroics, valor and truth. As much as these works are about being a citizen and an artist, they are efforts to find ways that dancing can conjure meaning and speak about our experience. I am always having an argument with dancing, and simultaneously longing to love it more. So these pieces are reconciliations, working to understand what dancing can and cannot do in my hands. They are pieces about dancing, about the body and the mind, and the way dancing strikes metaphors about vitality, impermanence, beginnings and endings.”
There’s so much to talk about in this passage! I feel like I was possibly dealing with some similar issues in the last piece I created, a solo called Not About Everything, in which I spin around in circles for half an hour, and at once point, I talk through a long list of what this dance isn’t about, including Iraq, Darfur, 9/11, time, space, energy, etc. I also write a check to a different charity each night and ask an audience member to mail it, an action which I recognize as limited in scope. It tries to address the question of an artist’s civic responsibility but also, to be honest, it fails in some way, because even though it is a somewhat performative action, I don’t think it quite gets at the nature of performance itself and how performance specifically can address the question.
Can you talk more about how you address the question of the civic responsibility of an artist in your work? To get at a more fundamental question, why should an artist feel like they have any responsibility at all to the culture at large? I feel there is a very strong formalist tradition in the dance field that often makes it difficult for dance-makers to address such questions for fear of being didactic. How can dance address these issues in a way that other forms cannot? What are the “poetics only accessible through dance”? If it is true that dance is a form that does not lend itself to meaning and “aboutness” in the same way as other forms (writing and language, for example), what is it that dance specifically can do? How can dance have any relevance in the context of these larger concerns, and is this what you are talking about when you say you are “always having an argument with dancing”? (Is that a leading question?) These are very broad topics, but I guess I am especially interested to hear if and how these questions relate to the project you are working on now.
Victoria Marks | 2.22.08
Dear Daniel, I love your questions. I don’t have any hard core answers, of course, but I do feel that the questions you ask are at the heart of my choreographic explorations or something bigger than that.
I am aware that I have a very privileged life. I am comfortable in many ways. I EXPECT to have healthy food on my table, to have my children go to a decent school, to be warm, to be safe, etc.
I am aware that many more people in the world do not share my expectations, and define “happiness” (if they should even consider this to be a right or an expectation) in different ways. So, as an artist or simply as a human being, I must ask myself, even if I cannot come up with satisfactory answers, to whom am I responsible? In what world do I live? What should I allow myself to see? What am I a part of? I eat meat. How to hold the dissonance in my mind that I love animals and would not want to take an animal’s life? Similarly, how to hold onto the creative dissonance that when I go into a studio to work on a dance, down the street there is a man dressed in rags sleeping beside the garbage bin and all across the world people suffer. Am I not connected to all? And is my prosperity not indirectly yet surely connected to others’ lack of prosperity? Now, my own critique of the preceding is that these are the words of a guilty and privileged liberal, and so what? Tear yourself up, Vic. This sense of connection cannot be an end in itself.
I think it is interesting that we both named our dances “not about…” (Of course, my own title consciously pays tribute to Neil Greenberg’s piece, Not-About-AIDS-Dance which opened a great big door for me on the possibility of dance to speak in it’s own language about the world outside and inside of it.) I think all three of these title, yours, mine and Neil’s, speak to the way dance is situated in a larger context, and by their nature ask how dance lives in that context.
You said: “I feel there is a very strong formalist tradition in the dance field that often makes it difficult for dance-makers to address such questions for fear of being didactic. How can dance address these issues in a way that other forms cannot? What are the “poetics only accessible through dance”? If it is true that dance is a form that does not lend itself to meaning and “aboutness” in the same way as other forms (writing and language, for example), what is it that dance specifically can do?”
I mostly don’t like dance. And, I also love it deeply. Mostly, I love it when it does things I don’t understand—when my own expectations about its limited capability are broken. I don’t like it when it is didactic, or works as an anesthetic, or, and this may be the same thing, reinforces conventional values of beauty, ability, etc.
When I wrote about “the poetics only accessible through dance,” I was thinking about the way dancing conjures meaning in a way that is different from writing/words. Wishing to be an artist and a citizen, I get muddled about how to “act” in the world, and what information (words) to “trust.” If I can’t trust that I understand how things are, if I don’t know the “truth” about what is going on, how can I act? This is a central conundrum for me. I believe that most “information” we get these days, made more so because of the internet—high speed mass communication—is totally spin, no matter what the slant. This question of connecting ACTION to meaning, and to the subjectivity and relativity of meaning is something that dance is very good at. So, I thought I would try, in Not About Iraq, to query how dances “mean.” In this piece, I am not concerned with information, but with the slippery idea of “knowing” (or so I think).
I want to understand better what you mean by a “performative act” and what is “the nature of performance”? Why did you think your solo did not “succeed?”
Daniel | 2.24.08
Dear Vic, I think the centrality of ACTION that you bring up is so important to dance and performance. Perhaps this relates to the idea of dance not being about something: dance is not ABOUT something; it IS something. Dance is action, a kind of indisputable fact taking place before the audience, and this presents an alternative to the virtual nature of so many of our other perceptions coming to us through the internet, through words, etc. I’ve heard this idea that words can lie (as recent politicians have demonstrated, for example), but dance cannot. But I might just be playing with words and meaning here: dance can be ABOUT things, just in a different way than language. In the last few piece I’ve created, it’s been important for me to use both dance and language, to layer these two very different forms and let them exist together, and to communicate in their own ways.
And maybe this idea of success and failure is another play on words. In some way, I can’t ever say to myself that I’ve “succeeded” as an artist, because if I succeed, I would no longer feel any reason to keep making work. The failure to do what I’ve set out to do and the desire to keep trying to do it are my driving forces.
This idea of writing a check onstage is connected to the idea of action. If a performance is a place for action, then what happens if I take an action that is normally a private economic action, and try to transform it into a public artistic action? People often laughed when I wrote the check, I think because of the incongruity of a private economic transaction taking place on a public stage. I think I did address the question of an artist’s civic responsibility, but I can’t say that I “succeeded” because I think that implies that I’ve answered a question that maybe can’t be answered. A performance is a powerful site for action, but just as language has its limitations, action is limited too, dance is limited too. But the very fact that I am doing it—that I am continuing to engage in this action—says something, too. I believe in words; I believe in dance; I believe in action, as limited as these things are. The action of spinning around in circles accomplishes absolutely nothing (it fails) on the one hand, but on the other hand it does accomplish something—people tell me they have a visceral response to the action, for whatever that’s worth.
I think the notion of disempowerment enters into this discussion, too. I often feel disempowered in the face of the knowledge of so many fucked up world situations. Creating a performance is like a dialogue between feeling I can do nothing, but wanting desperately to do something. I CAN create action and meaning in the face of powerlessness and meaninglessness, but I will also always be limited in my attempts to do so. That’s kind of my relationship to the phrase Not About Everything: it’s not a negation; it’s a desire—my desire to create something that actually is about everything (I’m pretentious enough to want to do that), but also a recognition of the impossibility of that desire. Does any of this relate to your title, Not About Iraq?
I’m interested also in how you relate to beauty. It’s interesting how you said you don’t want dance to anaesthetize, but you also don’t want it to reinforce conventional ideas of beauty. Thinking of the word “aesthetic” (feeling, beauty) it sounds like you don’t want dance to be anaesthetic (non-feeling, non-beautiful) but you also don’t want it to be conventionally beautiful. Do you want it to be beautiful in some way, though? How does the beauty of an action or a dance movement relate to its meaning?
I’m also interested to ask, how does the actual process of making an actual dance enters into all these abstract ideas? How do you go about creating movement, or deciding what actions to use? Or how do you create a structure that allows for the possibility of movement (if it’s an improvisation, for example)? How do you travel from this action-less world of ideas and words into the realm of action—into the concrete world of making a dance?
Victoria | 2.24.08
Yikes! I want to think about what you wrote about ACTION, but my first thought is that I have never made the connection between anesthetic and aesthetic! Thank you for pointing that out! I had to go to a dictionary and sure enough, the word aesthetic comes from the Greek: aisthetikos of sense perception, from aisthanesthai to perceive. Thank you, because this observation seems so very important. So I think the question for me is, when does “beauty” serve to enliven our sense of being alive as perceiving, sensual beings, and when does “beauty” deaden that very experience? I seem to come up saying that conventions of beauty (my own conventions) can be deadening.
In Not About Iraq I am both fascinated and seduced by the pursuit of beautiful movement and also distressed by this desire. I think I deliberately point up ways in which dancing can anesthetically draw us away from the world of real experience and real “perceiving” as I also fall into my own fascinated spell of making movement. I CAN say without equivocation that I struggle with this. And, that struggle is in my work.
I would say that forever, every time I make a dance I have to answer the question, “why make a dance?” The dance itself has to answer that question, or try to. The question comes up, because as I said before, I live between loving and hating dancing. Sometimes, I have thought, (even though I simultaneously don’t believe it), that dancing is “heroic.” Simply the belief in action and what action can do…that is heroic. I mention this, because in the thrall of that belief, I make movement that attempts to attempt to be, heroic.
I imagine that part of the drive for your continuous spinning, is to NOT embrace the creation of a movement vocabulary, because that automatically suggests a commitment to a set of values or aesthetics. Could this be right? Could you help me understand the critique of dancing that lies within your choice of action? What happened to the desire for a choreographer to make their own never been seen before expression of the body? It sounds funny when I write it, but I believe that has been a guiding ethos for many contemporary dance-makers. Do you agree?
So here we are back at thinking about ACTION. Good. I’m wondering what an “ACTION” is. Back to the dictionary, I’ll be right back. Ah.
So, I won’t copy all the definitions of “action” out, but I appreciated thinking that Action is not only about “doing” but about altering or changing something by the doing of it. This could be a change in one’s state (blood pressure, heat…), in the environment (in the air around you, in the room), or something else. This takes me back to your saying that dance is not ABOUT something, it IS something. I like that. And I would add: It IS something and it CHANGES something. Maybe, when dance is ABOUT something we are looking at it as an intermediary. When it IS something, it is primary. It is its own language, not needing another to translate it. Perhaps you choose the word “ACTION” because it is different from “dancing?”
I want also to respond to the notion of “truth.” When I hear: “words lie, but the body tells the truth”, I have a complicated reaction. Was it Martha Graham who pronounced that the body didn’t lie? I think bodies can be quite adept liars in many cases. That said, there are certainly things about me, housed in my body, that speak volumes about the paths I have traveled in life. Body counts are real, if the persons doing the counting are accurate. Death is real. So those bodies don’t lie. This aside, I certainly don’t want to entrust choreographers with “the truth” of the body. We are all trying to understand how meaning (or experience?) is conjured in dances. When is “truth” a useful concept and when is it a smokescreen? (BTW, is “meaning” a suspect word for you? I ask, because I’m anxious about it.)
I hope you’re well.
vic
Daniel | 2.26.08
Hi again, I’m really interested in what’s being discussed, even though I also I have this sense that I can’t quite grasp it, that it keeps somehow eluding my full understanding. I think this always happens when I talk about dance (or actually, when I talk about anything), and I wonder if it also has to do with the fact that this is an email correspondence, so there is all this time in between responses for my mind to change and for me to start thinking the opposite of what I was thinking yesterday. I think that’s actually kind of cool.
I think it is probably true that I do use the word “action” sometimes in place of dancing because of my own ambivalent relationship with dance and because it seems like “action” allows for more possibility than “dance.” What interests me about making dances has more to do with energy and the presence of bodies and the nature of live performance and motion and change, and I feel like the word “dance” doesn’t quite encapsulate all of these things. But then again, “action” has it’s own limitations, and if I use only that word, maybe that also limits me and prevents me from making dance phrases and dance improvisations. I kind of want to be able to do it all, or rather to not be limited by how I think I define myself, so I try to come up with different words all the time to describe what I do.
I don’t necessarily have a critique against dance phrases or against dance improvisations, but I think in “Not About Everything,” I was partly trying to figure out if there was another kind of physical experience that wasn’t a dance phrase or an improvisation, to push beyond the boundary of what I thought dance could be. This may seem like an old trick—didn’t they already discover in the 60’s that a “dance” could be anything?—but I still felt that by calling myself a choreographer, I was limiting myself in what I could do and I wanted to see what those limits were and if I could get beyond them. That makes me think of what you said about choreographers trying to make their own never-before-seen expressions of the body, and even though that idea sounds uninteresting and even “old-school” to me, I think that I am partly driven by a similar boundary-pushing desire, just in a different way.
To be honest, I am also a little suspect of the pronouncement that words can lie but bodies tell the truth. Part of me likes it because it somehow justifies why dance is important: because dance presents this rare truthful situation of real, honest live bodies. But what about the virtuosic body that tries to hide the effort of its dancing, as in the balletic ideal? And what about the fact that bodies themselves are what produce words: through neuro-chemical and electric processes in the brain that result in specific vibrations of the vocal chords? It seems that dance is often in a position of having to justify itself to the outside world, and sometimes we come up with false idealistic notions of dance in order to justify it, and we begin to believe these things. With the common lack of funding and other kinds of support, it’s like we need to build up for ourselves a kind of religion about the power of dance in order to keep ourselves committed to it, to keep ourselves from quitting. Maybe it’s more realistic to accept its limitations and accept our love-hate relationship with it. What do you think?
I like this notion that dance changes. It’s not that dance is ABOUT something. Maybe it’s not even true that dance IS something—Dance doesn’t concern itself with BEING something but rather BECOMING something (and then becoming something else, and then becoming something else…). Dance changes. Maybe it doesn’t even always change anything other than itself. It’s a process of motion and change and time passing. It can’t be about everything, it can’t be everything, but maybe what it can do—re-create that weird universal phenomenon of the fact that everything changes—maybe that’s enough. Or maybe I’ve only thought up a new justification for dance.
Would you mind telling me a little more about your desire to create heroic movement? I have this immediate impression in my mind of the presentation of the heroic body, as in a Paul Taylor dance, for example, which is something I don’t feel aligned with, and I don’t think that’s what you mean. You’re not talking about the BODY being heroic, you’re talking about MOVEMENT that tries to be heroic. I’m really fascinated by this idea, even though I’m not sure what it means.
Hope you’re well.
Victoria | 2.29.08
Daniel, I have been feeling a bit overwhelmed lately. Just trying to keep up.
You say: Maybe it’s more realistic to accept its (dance’s) limitations and accept our love-hate relationship with it. What do you think?
I say: I agree. I like loving and hating dancing.
You say: I like this notion that dance changes. It’s not that dance is ABOUT something. Maybe it’s not even true that dance IS something—Dance doesn’t concern itself with BEING something but rather BECOMING something (and then becoming something else, and then becoming something else….). Dance changes. Maybe it doesn’t even always change anything other than itself. It’s a process of motion and change and time passing. It can’t be about everything, it can’t be everything, but maybe what it can do – re-create that weird universal phenomenon of the fact that everything changes – maybe that’s enough. Or maybe I’ve only thought up a new justification for dance. I say: I’m sold on it, too. I like that I’m always learning about what dancing is from other people. Like yourself.
You say: Would you mind telling me a little more about your desire to create heroic movement? I have this immediate impression in my mind of the presentation of the heroic body, as in a Paul Taylor dance, for example, which is something I don’t feel aligned with, and I don’t think that’s what you mean. You’re not talking about the BODY being heroic, you’re talking about MOVEMENT that tries to be heroic. I’m really fascinated by this idea, even though I’m not sure what it means. I say: Uh oh. What is the difference between the body being heroic and movement that tries to be heroic? There is a part of me that is still enthralled by the heroics of a Taylor dance. But this aside, my interest in heroics came from, I think, the sheer labor of the body. Most people measure their bodily labor and try to reduce it. Dancers don’t. They enjoy physical labor and see it as something else (perhaps a function of the imagination, of thought, of being alive, of being sensate…). In fact, dancers can be obsessed by the desire to move. I find this extraordinary and heroic. It is subversive to commit so much to dancing/moving/action. This is heroic. Lots of times I question the ability to “DO” something, to “change” something. Can a dance really change anything? Does action matter, in a dance? So, I tried to make a dance that would stave off “endings.” I called it “against ending.” it started at a penultimate moment and insisted on not ending. I thought this was an image of dancing as heroic, like the way superman flew around and around the world and changed it’s direction.
I think it is heroic to believe in something when no one, even yourself, believes in it. What is your fascination with heroics?
Daniel | 3.2.08
Hi again. It is interesting to think of heroics in terms of the labor of the body. I wonder if being heroic is special or not. I recently read Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and one of the things he says is that in older mythologies, the archetype of the hero was an extraordinary individual, whereas the modern hero can be anyone. On the one hand, I wonder if this democratization cheapens the idea of a hero, but I also like the idea that everyone is capable of heroism—in other words, that heroism isn’t special, heroism is human. This ethic means that everyone can be active, and we don’t have to wait passively for the extraordinary hero to come along. Not to say that heroism is easy, just that anyone is capable of it. We all have bodies, and we can all labor with them. I suppose for some people in the world, they labor mostly with their minds, but of course the mind is also part of the body.
When the point of virtuosity is to prove to the audience that you can do something that they can’t, this seems to hearken back an archaic version of heroics in which the hero is the special individual. On the other hand, experimental choreographers in the 60’s seemed to go to the opposite extreme and do ordinary actions, as if to say, we are only going to use our bodies in ways that everyone else uses them. I think my interest in heroics lies somewhere in the middle of these two extremes, using the labor of the body, not to prove what dancers can do that other people can’t, but rather to show what the labor of the body is capable of.
Dancing, movement, action, change, being/becoming, heroics, experience, (a)live-ness, presence, loving-hating, subversion, extraordinary/ordinary, performance, failure/success, doing, truth?, meaning?, not-about, not-ending, not-having-an-end. These are some words that are coming back to me in this conversation about dance. What about “play,” I just thought?
It’s hard, to say that anyone can be a hero, because I also want to believe in what you’re saying about dancing and dance-making being a rather extraordinary and subversive thing to do in this contemporary commercialistic context. Is this a contradiction to everyone being capable of heroism? Also, how do you go about staving off endings? Does this mean also trying to prevent yourself from having an “end,” having a “goal,” immersing yourself in the process, in the movement?
Victoria | 3.10.08
Dear Daniel,
Apologies for this long gap in our conversation. I am on a plane now, headed for Chicago, where we will perform not about iraq. I like traveling, for the way it makes for longer hiccups of time. Time to write to you. There is a movie on, which I am not watching. But if I was, I know I’d be in tears. Something about an orphaned child prodigy who finds and brings back together his parents. That’s all one needs to know, right? When I glance up, I start tearing up anyway.
Reading your further thoughts on heroics, what comes to my mind is, that we are NOT all heroes. I appreciate your cautionary thoughts about the cheapening of the notion of heroism through democratizing it. I think we need visionaries, wise leaders, and extraordinary acts of courage, or caring. I long to have something to believe in, and to be led, by example. The images I come across, that epitomize heroes are either “martyrs” or “superheros,” the latter of whom aren’t even really human. But why are we even discussing heroics in the first place? A few ideas:
1. I DO want to valorize dance. Coming from despising it, I also believe that re-imagining ourselves, experience, and/or the world through our actions is way cool. The way, in our imaginations we can create change is a step toward change. Dancers have an abundance of tools for imagining and experiencing at the same time.
2. While we are all “capable” of action, and of participating in change (now I’m thinking of citizenship), we rarely do. Why not? I think I have substituted, unwittingly, the notion of “heroics” for the possibilities of ordinary responsibility. What are we capable of doing, if we set ourselves to it? Why don’t we?
3. Over in Iraq, and in the other “theaters” of US operations, there are many kinds of martyrs. Some people think they are heroes. I don’t think I think of these people, US soldiers or islamic terrorists or whomever, as heroes. I think they are more like dancers, believing in and executing someone else’s choreography.
Who are your heroes?
Can we plan to meet up while I’m in NYC?
vic
Daniel | 3.15.08
Hi Vic -How are you? Yes let’s plan to meet up in NYC…when will you be here?
I wonder if we should wrap up the conversation soon, since I am sure you are getting busy in the midst of your show.
A few thoughts:
To be honest, who I consider to be my heroes is always changing, but I do notice that my heroes have always been artists of some kind. Off the top of my head, some of my heroes have been Trisha Brown, Tere O’Connor, Agnes Martin, Arundhati Roy, Michael Haneke… Eventually, I usually cease to think of the person as a hero, and then it’s like the work that they put into the world is the actual hero. I’m not sure if that makes sense. It’s interesting that you asked that question to me, because I hadn’t thought about it, but even though I have this habit of questioning the value of art-making, my heroes have always been artists.
I agree with you, creating a dance is a way of imagining change, and realizing change and action of some form. The creative process is a way of somehow being a participant instead of a bystander. That makes me wonder, what is the role of the audience? Are they invited to be bystanders instead of participants? Does the whole audience-performer relationship encourage a deadly passivity in the viewer? Or does it ideally encourage some kind of activation, maybe a mental activation, in the viewer, something that opposes passivity? This question might not be easily answerable, and of course it depends so much on each individual, and it depends on the performance in question and the values of the specific artists and the specific viewers. But I wonder if one of the reasons I am in dance is because I believe that the nature of live performance is inherently more activating and less placating than other forms (a Hollywood film, for example). Does this mean I am against satisfying an audience, because satisfaction kills the desire to be activated? Perhaps…but I do want to engage and interest the audience. At the same time, I don’t have the answers, and so it’s not like I can have a specific idea about how I want the audience to be activated…I don’t want to proselytize a specific course of action to them.
It’s complicated! Performance is a platform for raising questions…Is that enough? I guess that’s one of the questions…
Victoria | 3.15.08
Dear Daniel, i’ll be in nyc as of the 23rd. would you be able to meet for lunch on friday the 28th? I would like that.
I agree. It is time to end our published conversation. So here is my last posting:
I appreciate your questions about the audience’s role. How does a dance (and where and how it happens) tell the audience what their job is? To me, the audience is very important. I definitely see myself involved in an activity about communication. I think a lot about transmission, and the complex processes of non-verbal communication. Sometimes too much? I have to curb my appetite for over-analyzing and trying to over-control what happens between a dance and it’s audience. Here’s an example:
Dear reader of Daniel and my correspondence, i know you are there, and i am thinking of you. I hope you will come see my piece at Danspace.
I will try to reform.
vic
Daniel | 3.15.08
It was nice to have this dialogue with you, Vic. Thank you.
