first published in
RASHAUN MITCHELL with Nancy Dalva
Interface | Baryshnikov Arts Center | March 14 – 15, 2013
One of the things that Western dance, and particularly here in America, has not explored in any formal or technical sense, is the disciplined use of the face. Every other part of the body has been subjected to many kinds of motion, the face left to its own devices.
—Merce Cunningham, “The Function of a Technique for Dance,” 1951
Enter Interface, choreography by Rashaun Mitchell, who
danced in the Merce Cunningham Dance Company from 2004 until the
company’s closure at the end of 2012. After the success of his Nox
last year, Mitchell’s run at the Baryshnikov Arts Center sold out
almost immediately, and a third late night performance was added. If
there is something that’s “must-see” right now, it’s his new work.
Rashaun Mitchell. Photo: Nicholas O’Brien.
Nancy Dalva (Rail): How did you begin?
Rashaun Mitchell: We were at residency at the
Dragon’s Egg in Connecticut, which is already a very magical and remote
place. I felt that it would be necessary to bond on an emotional level. I
wanted to foster and develop the relationships, get to a place of
comfort with each other so that we could experiment without fear and
self-consciousness. I asked them to walk with me into the woods during
the day, to walk in silence and to take turns leading. Someone asked how
we would know when to switch leaders. I replied with a shrug. It was a
beautiful and intense walk. We got lost. That was the point maybe.
Interesting things happen when one is lost. When we finally got back to
the studio, I asked everyone to share their feelings. Tears are
contagious. Then we danced. I don’t think any one of us will forget that
day.
I decided to build the material from movement generated by the
dancers. I set up a series of improvisational prompts, filmed them, and
combed the footage for material. Then we began the meticulous process of
learning the material and organizing it. About 70 percent of it was
ultimately tossed. I also used certain techniques that I learned from
Merce, applied them to different situations. For example, we
experimented with separating the body, the way that Merce would build a
phrase in layers: first the legs, then the torso, then the arms. We did
this with the legs, the torso, and the face. We identified a list of
emotions and each dancer was assigned a different part of the body to
express a gesture pertaining to that emotion. They were then combined to
make one total body gesture or phrase. This creates a movement language
that isn’t naturally attainable. It allows for movement that is beyond
my own personal tendencies. In this way I relate to Merce.
Rail: You use Merce’s dancers. (Silas Riener and Melissa Toogood from MCDC, and Cori Kresge from the Repertory Understudy Group.)
Mitchell: The use of Cunningham dancers in my work
is mostly a practical choice. I started making this piece at the end of
2010. I made it during breaks in the Cunningham contract. I needed to
work with people who had the exact same schedule as me. But certainly,
there is an advantage to speaking a common dance language, to knowing
someone’s dancing so well and finding ways to stretch that and push
bodies and minds to explore new ways of moving. I think we were all kind
of craving that. We kept putting the piece aside to continue the Merce
Cunningham Dance Company Legacy Tour, and each time we returned to the
piece, I had to reconsider my initial motives. Because of this, the
piece changed so many times that its identity became confused for me.
Instead of fighting this consequential result, I decided to incorporate
it, to create a circuitous structure that reflected my state of being. In general, I find that most solutions masquerade as problems initially.
Each dancer is unique and has certain preferences, skills. I think
it’s important to consider each individual’s interest in the project.
Time is precious and there’s never enough money. These dancers all
deserve to be paid buckets for their talents. This is why the extensive
process needs to be something particularly worthwhile for them. But it’s
difficult to satisfy everyone. Some people love to improvise. Others
like to be told exactly what to do. I tried to strike a balance, to keep
everyone engaged and invested. The dancers got used to me changing the
entire piece with each new rehearsal period. They were forced to keep a
distant relationship with the movement throughout. The piece has
multiple-personality disorder, on purpose. But in the
end, I’m the one to contextualize the movement, to place it in a
particular space-time relationship, to draw out particular qualities.
Function and necessity are important to me. I have to understand why
something exists. And dancers bring their own set of stories with them,
so my ideas have to be filtered through other people. This social act
and transference is the part of the process that most excites me. It’s
also the most difficult. In this way, Interface is
autobiographical. Whatever the task is, it has to feel believable coming
from that particular person. Melissa is the most talented mimic I’ve
ever met. In addition to her exquisite technique, she’s very exacting,
very reliable. Silas is completely committed to everything he does
physically. He usually makes a choice that I wouldn’t make. This excites
me. It creates a tension. His face is also extremely expressive. He
dances like a knife. And sometimes it’s funny. I love this combination.
Cori is very open, very sensitive. Her body is extremely malleable. She
also adds a lot of conceptual information to the process and is an
excellent improviser. I’m very lucky to work with these dancers.
Rail: In watching you perform in this piece (in Boston) and in Nox, I came to the retrograde realization that your extrovert performance in Merce’s work and in his roles really was performance. I
saw you become a watcher, attentive and alert but standing back and
allowing things to develop in a space you made for someone else to dance
in. So, is this work of yours somehow more you, more Rashaun? More your
own temperament?
Mitchell: I exist as a watcher in my pieces because
of the practicality of having to view what it is I’m making. I love to
dance and I love to make dance but I haven’t quite figured out how to do
them simultaneously. I’m working on it and have spent the latter part
of this process trying to re-incorporate myself as a performer in this
piece. My plan is to deal with this problem head on, in another piece.
I’m creating an evening length solo for myself for a future project.
This is terrifying, so I’m doing it. Again, problems equal solutions.
Rail: When I saw an early version of this dance in
Boston, some of what went on between the dancers and in the projected
images seemed possibly to be about mirroring. Another clear possibility
was that performing the physical act of a gesture absent the underlying
emotion effected the same neural response in the brain as does feeling
the emotion first. (Feeling follows form versus form follows feeling.)
This leads us down many possible paths of thought about movement, about
mimesis, and so forth.
Mitchell: I read a lot of writing from
neuroscientist Candace Pert, among others. She states that evolutionary
evidence suggests that we instinctively mimic other people’s behaviors
in social situations as a way to communicate and express understanding.
She writes “that the receptors on our cells even vibrate in response to
extracorporeal peptide reaching, a phenomenon that is analogous to the
strings of a resting violin responding when another violin’s strings are
played. We call this emotional resonance, and it is a scientific fact
that we can feel what others feel.” Basically there’s a lot of research
out there about this stuff. It’s mostly geared towards healing
techniques. I’m not trying to heal the world with my dance. This isn’t
art therapy, but I do think the ideas are useful in thinking about the
relationship between people on stage as well as the relationship between
the audience and performers. When I go to see shows, I spend a lot of
time observing the audience. I like to see how watching movement can
affect one on a physical and visceral level.
Rail: So, your dancers learned their facial
movements as choreography. Not as acting. Just the movements. How did
this work, what kinds of feelings surfaced expected or unexpected? It
seems like the opposite of method acting. It seems to be reliable,
because technique based. You aren’t using sense memory to trigger
emotion, or telling a story. You are relying on the movement itself—of
the face—to generate narrative in two ways: by evoking the response in
the audience as such a gesture does, and because the dancer him or
herself is responding to the physical trigger.
Mitchell: The dancers and I have
definitely found that expressing an emotion physically can in fact
induce the emotion itself. The most emotional part of the piece for me
is Melissa’s solo. It’s the one part of the piece where the face is
covered. The face is so expressive, but the body really feels. The face
is the surface of emotions. It’s the part of emotions that is seen. So
along with body language, this became my concern. The visual component
of emotions became a really enticing tool for me to use. Expression is
decoded and rearranged. To take that a step further, footage of the face
is spliced and projected. I was thinking about making sure the micro
movements were seen from afar, but it’s not narrative, so that doesn’t
necessarily need to be followed chronologically. I am also exploring the
idea that we are all connected. It’s very Buddhist. I am not a
Buddhist. I do think it’s fascinating to think of the self extending
beyond what is visible, what is felt. I tried to actualize this idea by
creating material with conjoined bodies. I was trying to create an image
of a utopian body, a body that is multidirectional, a body that has
more.
Rail: And the images on the film?
Mitchell: The idea for the décor came from a trip to
Turkey. The mosques I visited in Turkey didn’t have representational
images or iconography, but rather a series of abstract images,
architecture, calligraphy. I admittedly know very little about the
history of Islamic art, but from my personal and subjective experience,
this did not concern me. I even prefer the not knowing because my
imagination runs wild. Regardless, the transference of beauty and
serenity and focus was very real and palpable. Each tile being different
and bumping up next to the other tiles creates a whole that is larger
than the parts and this notion reminded me of dance making in that there
are a series of images or movements and depending on how they are
arranged, meaning shifts slightly. Depending on where a given movement
is placed in time and space and in relation to other bodies, the
implications change, so I began thinking about alchemy, optics,
psychology. I took photos and sent them to Fraser Taylor as inspiration
for his design. We also felt that these patterns related to the
visualization of the inner working of a brain or the cellular patterns
that the experience of emotions might create. The result is a very
graphic interpretation. The entire space is transformed. I’m treating
the Baryshnikov Arts Center’s Gilman Space like a site-specific space.
This is an overarching interest of mine. I’m not presently interested in
dance as a product that exists in a fixed mode with fixed coordinates.
Why wouldn’t any space, with all of its idiosyncrasies, affect the
identity of the piece? Dance is not in a conceptual vacuum. It exists in real time and space. All of the features of the space are considered.
Rail: The title? What does it tell us?
Mitchell: The title came to me suddenly, as most
ideas do. When it came to me, I immediately hated it because it was
almost too perfect. And it reminded me of a Cunningham title. But it was
a persistent bugger. Even though I was making a dance that was
utilizing the face as a tool, I was actually more interested in the
moments that exist between the faces that are made. When people refer to
the piece, they say, “Oh, the piece with the faces.” But the faces only
make up a small portion of the material. It’s the in-between moments
where the dance really exists. This is Inter-face. The piece is
also an extension of my desire to connect with people and an
examination of the successes and failures of those attempts. The point
of connection between two or more things is the examined locale, which
is an ambiguous and disorienting terrain. I refer to this place and
moment (where one thing becomes another) as an interface. The points of
connection between the performers and the audience and the outward reach
of energy from the performers are treated as a palpable but ebbing part
of the puzzle. The interfaces are the material that isn’t seen, the
invisible strings of connection. It feels like a new way to approach the
notion of authenticity in performance and conveying emotion and
meaning. Because it’s kind of absurd anyway that we go to see shows
expecting to learn something about our lives and hoping to be duped by
the staging, but it’s what we do and we hope to be transformed. This is
my way of making sense of all of that and poking fun a little bit too. I
find that to create in this deconstructed way actually produces very
whole, very inevitable results.
