PODCAST: MY CONVERSATION WITH STEPHEN PETRONIO & STANTON WELCH

MERCE CUNNINGHAM'S LAST INTERVIEW

A CONVERSATION WITH ELIZABETH STREB

BORN TO FLY

originally published in

Catherine Gund’s documentary of Elizabeth Streb’s Extreme Action Company is part biopic, part adventure film, and part travelogue, taking viewers from the company’s early years to Streb’s more recent one-day occupation of London, where she staged her own super high risk version of the Olympics. Before the film opened in New York, the choreographer met with the Rail’s Nancy Dalva.

Nancy Dalva (Rail): What we see up there. Is that you?

Elizabeth Streb: Yeah, it’s me. Does it look like me? Does it remind you of me?

Elizabeth Streb after cutting herself while cooking. photo: Born to Fly

Rail: It’s a movie about you, but you exhibit a curious absence of what usually passes for ego. Or perhaps it’s just a larger scale ego that dispenses with the trivial.

Streb: I like that. That would be the good news, right? It’s really more about the essence of my movements than it is about me or my persona. I’m unaware of my persona. I am not performing at any time. I am trying to be. At that point when the movie ends—I didn’t even sleep that night.  It was me in my most essential second-to-second existence.

Rail: Were you aware of the cameras?

Streb: No.

Rail: Did you edit yourself as you went, somehow?

Streb: No.

Rail: Did you have any involvement in the post-production, or have any approval of the final cut?

Streb: No. I gave Catherine and her team carte blanche. It was about getting outside the context of those who know me or my work. To get outside the context of me or knowing the work is really what this is all about. People stood in lines to see this film at film festivals. To be first in the season at Film Forum feels again like an absolutely thrilling chance to tell a wider audience about these ideas and the people willing to accomplish these ideas. Some of the people in this movie are the people the movement happened to. We had this experience of extreme movement.

Rail: That moment when you are about to walk down the curved facade of London’s City Hall—from so high up—were you scared?

Streb walking down London's City Hall: Born to Fly.

Streb: Yeah, I was really scared. More of failure or that my rope was going to break. Even with Trisha’s walk down the Whitney [Trisha Brown’s “Man Walking Down the Side of a Building,” which Streb performed in New York City, at the Whitney Museum] I knew that if the guys let go of the rope—

Rail: Is it about trust?

Streb: You abandon trust. It’s just a detail. But I did think, “This is going too far.”

Rail: Do you feel that way now?

Streb: It’s over; it’s immaterial.

Rail: Would you do it again?

Streb: I would do it again, yes. I pray for the next opportunity to be that extreme or that crazy. If you believe in the present tense as being the subject of any presentation of extreme movement, there is, for sure, no time for reflection, or to even notice that I am rather than I do. There’s the next step and the next step. It was the most outrageous experience—all I did to prepare for that walk was to get hung up on a wall. Why does movement have to be on a stage or in a place you go to see it? Movement! A flash in the sky as you walk down the street. A body where you don’t expect it.

Rail: In the beginning, your work was you. Does it feel separate from you now?

Streb: I guess the answer would have to be yes because I am trying to discover something in the world that is true, not something I suspect beforehand. I am not very sentimental or very hopeful, so I don’t care.  It can exist without me, but it’s nothing without the dancers who have helped build it.

STREB EXTREME ACTION COMPANY in London: Born to Fly.

Rail: Isn’t your work answering a series of questions you give yourself? What are you asking now?

Streb: How do we make movement relevant? What movement is relevant? I no longer believe you can connect moves, I believe they start and stop. Ballet and modern dance go up, but they don’t land. And this thing about dancing to the music is utterly idiotic to me—that just isn’t a good enough reason unless somebody loves music. When I poke at questions I don’t ever really feel I answer them—if the questions are deep enough. That’s my goal: to figure out what question.

Rail: Is the movie one of the propellers?

Streb: Again, the movie is not my work. It’s a really great introduction for the majority of the humans in the world who don’t know Streb. I am honored that Catherine decided to make it. She’s been graceful, and remains curious, and we’ve had a great time. I am curious about the audience, so I sit there and try to get a sense of what they respond to. I sat through every screening at every film festival. It’s been very informative. It’s really exciting—you can feel it in the audience. The movie encapsulates action.

AN INTERVIEW WITH STEPHEN PETRONIO

first published in

 

STEPHEN PETRONIO with Nancy Dalva

Stephen Petronio
Confessions of a Motion Addict
(Createspace, 2014)

Stephen Petronio—iconoclastic and iconic, subversive, game changing, elegant, with just a gleam of something slightly depraved glinting off his spiky ear studs—is celebrating 30 years as a choreographer with a debut as an author. Here, he discusses it all with his new reader but longtime watcher, the Rail’s Nancy Dalva.

Petronio/Grenek.

Nancy Dalva (Rail): What do we learn about you in this book that we don’t learn from your dances?
Stephen Petronio: I wrote Confessions of a Motion Addict as text about my life and the forces that move me into action, both in the world and on the stage. While there is succinct discussion of my creative motor, dance works, and the collaborators I’ve worked with over the years, I wanted very much to verbally construct the back-story of my life.
It was important for me to create and perform with words: to paint my childhood and ascent into the New York dance/art worlds and the touring life that has been so key to who I am. So much of my dance is about the sound and force of motion, and Confessions is about the sound force rhythm of language.
I write quite a bit about the pleasures of the body (i.e. sex), that magic that is so outside of the dance realm. I suppose I thought it was important to track the stories in my body, repurposed for sensual, aesthetic, and spiritual interest. I also write frankly about substance (booze and drugs) use and abuse in Confessions. I thought it was important to parallel my interest in the extremity of these experiences and how they may or may not relate to my art making.
And you get a healthy taste of the crazy Italian family that I came from and how it impacted my social and professional needs.
Rail: I feel as if you have taken the same material and channeled it into two forms of performance art: one is choreography, the other is autobiography. Which one is more veiled? I am thinking here about the “truth.” Autobiography, in general, is seemingly so truthy, yet is a form rife with displacement, projection, selection, delusion, revision, and every other complexity arising from self-reportage.
Petronio: If you have the eyes to do so, you can see straight into my soul when you watch a dance of mine. They are always constructions wrought from mind, body, and taste—my taste, fueled by my desire.

AN INTERVIEW WITH LIZ GERRING

first published in

   

LIZ GERRING with Nancy Dalva

glacier | Alexander Kasser Theater, Montclair, NJ
September 19 – 22, 2013

Nancy Dalva (Rail): Why do you do this, make dances?

Liz Gerring: I’m completely absorbed with investigating movement for itself as well as movement as a means of personal expression—creating beauty perhaps.

 Photo: Miguel Anaya

Rail: How do you begin?

Gerring: The piece usually begins with an idea that originates from a particular dancer—or dancers—inhabiting a movement sequence that becomes the beginning of a “story.”

Rail: And the ideas?

Gerring: Ideas come from a few sources. Music tends to stimulate my mind to conceptualize movement—either my body responding to the melody or rhythm, which sometimes combines with the words (of a pop song, for example)—which manifests itself in an imagined action, gesture, shape. I tend to personalize, so I may see myself as the subject of a state of mind or emotion, which then transforms onto a dancer executing a step. Sometimes a dancer can inspire ideas—once again, I either personalize them (I see them a certain way and attach movement to them) or, on a purely functional level, their particular attributes suggest movement combinations or possibilities. In this way, the dancer is critical for the process of inspiration. I’m much better at people than patterns, I think, so floor plans of motion are tricky for me, although almost always the movement I have conjured in my mind exists in a particular point in space. In this way the dancer is always present in the three-dimensional world.

Rail: In the theater there is music and occasional silence.

Gerring: There is definitely music—I consider music to be the most important element other than the movement. I have primarily collaborated with one composer for the past 15 years: Michael Schumacher. During that time we have developed a relationship with the music and dance that is specific to my choreography. The music initially played in the studio during the improvisation process has nothing to do with what exists at the end. This may consist of pop songs, classical, a wide range of contemporary composers, and I draw from this both imagery and rhythmic content. The process of creating music for the dance happens usually after the section or phrase is finished, and happens in conjunction with the musical idea for the whole piece, so it often becomes a stabilizing element for the dance.

Rail: Do the dancers get their cues from it? It feels more like atmosphere than metric instruction.

Gerring: There are synch points for the dancers—sounds that are meant to go along with specific movements. The dancers either listen for the cues or, more often, Michael or the stage manager will cue the music so the dancers are free to inhabit their own dynamic without having to worry about “following” a score.

Rail: Are there stories in your work?

Gerring: Always a story—sometimes it is my own story and sometimes it is the dancers’. Throughout the creation of a work, which can take up to two years, the dancers become characters in the piece in some way: what sections they appear in, what movements they are doing, and who they are doing it with.

Rail: Is there then a subliminal narrative? Something about showing but not telling?

Gerring: Absolutely. Perhaps this is the dialogue the audience member is having with himself as he watches the piece unfold.

Rail: You made a dance called she dreams in code (2011). Do you dream in dance?

Gerring: Only bad dreams (rehearsals gone awry, etc.). I do, however, often go to sleep at night thinking about a particular dancer or dancers doing specific movement—sometimes this becomes an initiating factor in rehearsal. It actually relaxes me to think about movement while I am going to sleep—I’m not sure why. Sometimes when I am working on a piece, I will use this time to try to solve a choreographic problem I am experiencing at the time. I think the nighttime lends itself to a type of imaginative state, but this is all in that conscious time before actually falling asleep when I can let my mind wander—

Rail: Can dance ever be “abstract”?

Gerring: I don’t think anything involving humanity/performance can be completely abstract. So much is brought to the movement by the mere fact that humans are doing it. And the fact that there are people onstage brings it into the realm of society, but I think for me this is all the narrative required: witnessing dancers. More would draw attention away from the visual picture.

Rail: Why call your new dance glacier? There aren’t polar bears, or artic explorers, or ice metaphors. Are we to read anything into it about Trisha Brown, whose choreography you love, and who made a beautiful dance called Glacial Decoy (1979)?

Gerring: The title came from Michael, the composer. It was the title he gave to the piece of music that became the initial inspiration for the work. The reference to Trisha is accidental, but considering the huge influence she had on me, not an illogical one. Of course Glacial Decoy as a title implies something completely different from glacier. This title refers to the scale of the work (as opposed to temperature or location) and to time: a slow moving land mass—this being the largest work I have done to date in terms of theater, dancers, and I think length of time creating. I do wonder what Trisha would say and am curious also how she got that title.

Rail: I think perhaps it comes from her own appearance in the work—a quartet with a fifth person mysteriously appearing (but not with all four of the others visible)—hence “decoy.” And as for glaciers—those white Robert Rauschenberg costumes! As if cut from ice floes. So, since we are talking about non-narrative dance and Trisha, let’s consider what I think of as “the arc of inevitability.” Something about structure, rhythm, pacing, that lets us have a sense in a work without a story that it has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Gerring: This is a tricky one and something we spend a lot of time thinking about during the creation of a work—especially of interest in the current “one-hour” format in which most modern dance is placed. Obviously something must happen over this time, but what? I agree that this is where the structural elements come into play (rhythm, etc.) and that perhaps this corresponds to an intuitive sense of conflict resolution, which is essential to “the arc.”

Rail: Sometimes I ask myself about a given choreographer, “How would I know this work was hers if I didn’t already know it?” Or I ask it about a given dance. So, Liz, how do I know a dance is yours?

Gerring: Hmm. Well, I often think that I am making the same piece over and over again—that my life is one long dance piece with only the scenery (visual collaborations) changing, like the weather. I have been working for many years within my own personal body language—so this is specific to me—and developed certain techniques of executing movement that I impart to the dancers. And then there is always a type of music that can be categorized as contemporary electronic, I suppose. It’s really sound that creates an environment in which the dance occurs. I think I am setting a scene—a landscape of nature—and these landscapes are very similar in how they are constructed and what activity occurs within them.

Rail: Do you ever wish you could just go into a theater, clear the stage, turn on the work lights, have the dancers come out in their own practice clothes, and let the curtain go up?

Gerring: Yes, usually my preferred way to look at work is in the studio with daylight as lighting. Again it is that absence of pretense, in that nothing is forced or created to add to what exists movement-wise. It is dance in its simplest, most pared-down form. The lack of pretense is a huge cornerstone of my value system.

Rail: You seem to be both modern and contemporary at the same time, a kind of, shall we say, formalist for the 21st century. I love this a lot about you.

Gerring: Thank you.

STEPHEN PETRONIO

In advance of his New York season, some wonderful rehearsal video of Stephen Petronio's new work, and an interview with him in The Brooklyn Rail:

first published in

  

 

Like Lazarus Did | Joyce Theater | April 30 – May 5, 2013

Nancy Dalva (Rail): Your newest work, Like Lazarus Did, premieres this month at the Joyce Theater. Why not As Lazarus Did? Are you “liking” resurrection?

Petronio: You’re such an editor! The title is from one of the songs—from a publication of American slave spirituals that sparked the original idea for Like Lazarus Did. The language is lost to that era, but the songs giving off a faith and sense of elevation so far from the wretched plight of those singing these songs. Son Lux, a composer I’ve worked with on British and European projects till now, brought me this book of songs previously only passed down through oral tradition. Totally inspiring! Of course he’s using them as a springboard for new creation.

Stephen Petronio. Photo: Sarah Silver.

Rail: You are premiering a dance about resurrection during Easter season. Is there a credo in it? Some personal statement of faith, or rejection thereof? Did you go to church as a child? Did the pageantry appeal to you?

Petronio: I’m a fallen Catholic: attended parochial schools, wanted to be a missionary as a child. Wanted to be chosen. I suppose that resonates and the theatrical aspect is supreme. I mean, it’s hard to beat mystical transformation and redemption in gold trimmed vestments.

Last year my father passed, and I was sitting in the church that I attended in my hometown youth, and there was a priest speaking so eloquently about my father’s final resurrection. It really hit me hard—the power and comfort of that promise. And it’s power as a commodity. Who would want the ultimate prize—immortality—yet it’s a product that’s never seen or proven. Very impressive feat.

Resurrection and immortality: the final triumph over death is deeply bedded across many cultures. The need to continue is irrepressible. One of the only certainties in life is its end, and we can’t quite resolve that. The Judeo-Christian lore of Christ raising Lazarus from the dead, an act necessary to prove his divinity: the penultimate miracle that tripped his conviction of heresy, angering the high rabbis of Jerusalem and setting into motion the ultimate sacrifice of his life.

From the the sacrificial virgin whose death is necessary to promulgate the growth of crops in the pagan-themed Sacre du Printemps, to the phoenix rising from her dust to reemerge immortal and omnipotent, to eastern religion’s cycle of reincarnation: the continual need to renew, to look back at forms again, to bring them forward to see what remains of the original, or to see how something transforms.

Rail: Tell me how you made the dance. What was the participation of the dancers?

Petronio: My first instinct was to resurrect previous Petronio dancers, bringing forward signature roles in the bodies of new dancers and allowing them to transform in the process. I’m always fascinated to feel the essence of my early stars in the roles we created together after so many years still unmistakably there, but transformed by the current body and mind reinterpreting. But unlike a reconstruction—I sought out transformation in the new body and allowed myself free reign as the current artist I am to spring off from these sources.

Then I began to call back other iconic figures I love—small flashes of Michael Jackson, Merce [Cunningham] and Trisha [Brown], mythological figures, the snake and the phoenix—to see what emerged. And of course, so much of the early me, the initial sequencing and spinal whip that I was born with, to go back to see what it is now. I also looked to some formal devices like retrograde and accumulation, to revisit and retrace movement over and over to see how it changes and how it’s the same.

Rail: I saw a piece of yours in that strange Ukrainian dance hall on Second Avenue. You started out “dead” but then you seemed to raise others from the dead.

Petronio: Or from sleeping. If you take being awakened from sleep as a kind of resurrection—well then, you have Sleeping Beauty, just to begin. Not to mention the phoenix.

Like Lazarus Did is ongoing and evolving. Each new resurrection has a different set of concerns. At the ballroom, I was very interested in who was empowering whom: I as the author bringing the dancers to life or the dancers as my resurrected instruments breathing life back into me and my ideas.

Rail: How do you feel when you get up in the morning, Stephen? A whole new world? Or same old same old?

Petronio: I am extremely hopeful in the morning and have a very short memory. So my perceptions don’t feel same-y. Mornings are a renewal for me. I wake up fast and running.

Rail: Are you in this dance? And if so, who are you? Is there a role or are you playing your own role?

Petronio: I am the author; the snake; the fire starter.

Rail: Who’s doing the costumes? Décor?

Petronio: The costumes are by H. Petal, a British designer I’ve been working with on and off since 1990. The décor, including the element of the dramatic: the incredible artist Janine Antoni, who works in many mediums but will be making a “living set” where she’ll be suspended in a sculpture above the audience for the duration.

Rail: Your work has for a long time participated in the fashion world, and the company is always attired in something you don’t see anywhere else, as much runway and designer playground as theater. Why why why? (You detect a note of despair here, but that’s only me, because I love the work as is in the studio. Just the dancers and the movement.)

Petronio: What we wear is a key into who we are alone and in the world. Yes, stripped naked is delicious, but the discovery of the perfect thing to wear in motion is as exhilarating to me. The dance world’s chronic suspicion of the surface of things can be a denial of an important element of the whole.

Rail: When I look back at certain works—not only yours—I find the choreography is as fresh as today if not tomorrow, but the mise-en-scène dates it. Yes, no?

Petronio: I love it when the mise locates a thing in time and space. That’s part of the journal of the time we are capturing in my works.

Rail: You seem to be working again with a chorus. What’s with this? Where’s the appeal? It’s as if you are working on a Wagnerian scale. Every possible element. And yet, stripped down, your movement itself is formalist, unencumbered.

Petronio: I’m social and want as many different artists reaching for something together as I can manage. The Young People’s Chorus transforms the experience of the work for an audience, and we are now a part of each others lives. This is our third work together at the Joyce, and I will work with them as many times as I can in the future. We are building a language and history together.

I come from a history of multidisciplinary stages and must take that as far as I’m able. It’s a much lonelier world without my partners. I spend so much time alone with my dancers and I love that, but I am a social animal, and dance is a connection both with internal power, history and tradition, the social sphere, and then forward into the unknown.

Rail: Do the Like Lazarus Did collaborators all know what the others are doing? Is the dance finished first? Are you working to the music?

Petronio: The music—working with it and in the theater, including the singers, all of that. All the collaborators and I are working from a directive I’ve built, an arc from dirge to invocation to exploration of literal and abstract rumination of states of elevation. The work finalizes in a kind of birth. We are all building along this arc simultaneously and together.

I say invocation and Ryan [Lott] builds an alleluia. I say rebirth, Ryan delivers a lullaby. Janine studies this and internalizes this into a mental focus and sculptural form. Every day someone sends off some new discovery that in turn sparks off something else. It’s heaven.

Rail: Any advice for your audiences? Your reviewers? Things your dancers wish you would tell them?

Petronio:  1. Every second/moment is an opportunity for a kind of letting go and renewal.  2. Let’s not get too literal.

Rail: What question that people ask you annoys you the most?

Petronio: “Oh, do you mean like on So You Think You Can Dance?” 

©Nancy Dalva 2013

VICKY SHICK

first published in

 

EVERYTHING YOU SEE
VICKY SHICK with Nancy Dalva

DANSPACE PROJECT | APRIL 18 - 20, 2013

The next installment of choreographer Vicky Shick’s ongoing collaboration with artist Barbara Kirkpatrick, sound designer Elise Kermani, and lighting designer Carol Mullins unfolds this month at Danspace Project. A dancer’s dancer, a teacher’s teacher, this lovely and beloved woman is so unfailingly modest it comes as an astonishing contradiction—even in the theatrical universe of introverted extroverts­—that she goes out on a stage and holds the room in suspended animation, captive to her reticent elegance, her giraffe ways, her silvery, organza movement. Hers is work that is the opposite of epic: economical, allusive, elliptical; given to fleeting apprehensions, elusive epiphanies. And so, we tried to pin her down.

Nancy Dalva (Rail): If we think of your work as a series of short stories—as I do—where is this new one in relation to your recent work at the Kitchen? And La MaMa?

Vicky Shick: The nature of this dance is much more chaotic and that is unsettling. Not the individual little parts but the flow, the transitions, the connections—the whole. Usually the unfolding of an idiosyncratic logic grounds me; it’s harder to find now, the reason being that I’m constructing a dance with two fronts and audiences sitting on two sides. So in a way, there are two dances being performed simultaneously, while these two dances are also one big dance.

Rail: I know you say you don't work in narrative, but there is always to me the sense of a subliminal or suggested narrative.

Shick: Yes, I think my tendency is to have that hint of narrative, as I did in those two pieces you mentioned. This time, I’ve had to let that go and try for something more abstract because of the two fronts and the dancers switching sides. It’s unwieldy and messy, which I don’t necessarily mind, but the lust for that “hint” is, perhaps, inexplicably creeping in and interfering with needing to let it go.

Rail: Who is in it?

Shick: The dancers are Jodi Bender, Donna Costello, Olsi Gjeci, Lily Gold, Jon Kinzel, Marilyn Maywald, Heather Olson, Wendy Perron, Laurel Tentindo, and me. Some of them I met in classes I’ve taught, some I’ve danced with before, and some I’ve had very long histories with.

Rail:  How are you making the piece, working with these dancers? Can you get them in the room all at once when you need to?
Shick: It is almost impossible to get them in one room at one time—and I haven’t yet. In fact, one person lives in California. Even the scheduling is daunting.

I love working one on one or with a duet. I’m very interested in individual phrasing and highlighting imperceptible details. I have a notion that I don’t want it to look like coined dance movement, and yet I am drawn to it being very physically articulate and specific. I’m excited by individuality, “realness,” and intimacy, and want to somehow find a way to accent that. It’s definitely easier to locate that in a solo or duet. I would love my dance to look like film or real life.

Rail:  Where does a dance start for you? A movement, a notion, an image...

Shick: I most often start in a studio by myself, trying to find a movement vocabulary. I never start with an idea. Sometimes I do have an image that I know I’d like to include, but I always know it’s just a little spot, a little decoration, not the nugget that defines the whole. Again, I love working with individuals and with duos; it’s how I feel I can begin to define a world, a progression and an intimate relationship. I actually have infinite patience for these situations and find great value in the tiniest changes we might make. 

Rail: I see a lot of dances that call up universal emotions, some quite powerfully. But only yours seem to show me how I feel, I mean particularly, acutely, me. I don’t know what is going on, but I know the feeling behind whatever is going on. You’ve made me think that it is possible to “read between the moves” of choreography the way one “reads between the lines” of something written.

Shick: I hesitate to try for emotion because I know that’s not how to achieve it. However, I would love for people to feel something. Earlier this year, I fantasized making a dance and calling it “Sadness,” but I realized I didn’t have the courage to do it, to take on something so huge, and, in some deep way, knew that it wouldn’t be for me—someone nurtured in the age of abstract minimalism. I wish I could create a tragedy, like in some slow devastating Eastern European film, but I have to settle for some vague nuances that might point toward it.

Rail: You danced with Trisha Brown for six years. You have made your own work for decades. You are a cherished teacher here in New York, and in festivals, in workshops, at universities, and in your own hometown, Budapest. You perform in other people's work as a dancer—with choreographers including Yoshiko Chuma, Deborah Hay, Iréne Hultman, Risa Jaroslow, Daniel Lepkoff, Barbara Mahler, Juliette Mapp, Wendy Perron, Stephen Petronio, Susan Rethorst, Sally Silver, and Sara Rudner. You are so gentle about it all, but yet your own eye is so keen, so discerning. It seems to have inherent difficulties on so many levels, pragmatic, practical… And yet. Vicky, are you happy in your work? Is there some underpinning of pleasure that informs us, as we watch you? Or of sorrow? As a dancer, you are somehow affectionate with us, your public, and yielding to your dancing partners. What are you feeling in there?

Shick: I love dance; I love dancers; I love trying to make a dance and spending tremendous amounts of time in a studio with the people with whom I am working. I feel unbelievably lucky to have danced with many people—some of my dearest friends—and, right now, to be with these particular nine people working, laughing, struggling, learning, snacking. But I am most drawn to the rigor of practicing a physicality—defining and refining it over and over again, and then some more. And for this, too, I have a lot of patience, which, however, results in very slow progress….

©Nancy Dalva 2013

RASHAUN MITCHELL

 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.

A CONVERSATION WITH DOUGLAS DUNN

Originally published in

Douglas Dunn, 1985. Photo by Susan Dunn

Nancy Dalva (Rail): Tell me about this new piece, Cassations, if you will. First, the title. And its meanings.

Douglas Dunn:  A cassation is a musical form of the 18th century. One by Mozart begins the piece, a way of being literal with the title, though when I came across the word, liking it right away, I had no idea what it meant. Other words fly off it like rays from an exploding star: caissons, causation, creation, consummation, cremation, etc. These aural associations make the word all the more agreeable as a name. But even more appealing, and surprising, is that the term also has a thoroughly disparate denotation: nullification of a legal decision. This esoteric definition fits well with my inner evolution regarding format. Logistical considerations mixed with shifting aesthetic concerns have over the last few years been pushing the work away from both the three-pieces-of-20-to-30-minute schema, and the evening length piece made in the four to six weeks leading up to a run. Several circumstances—working on the company archive, no longer keeping repertory, and having to gather dancers anew for each project—have been conspiring to suggest the making of short dances that might (or might not) be happy shown next to one another. Buridan’s Ass was such a compilation. Partly because of the unabashed beauty of the music all the way through, Cassations is a more coherent gathering of bits. But the title’s legal signification offers unfettered permission to do one thing, or one kind of thing, then to “nullify” it by doing something completely else. This is often my MO anyway, but to be able to advertise in the title the freedom to be “coherent” or not is a pleasure of complication/integration rarely encountered and surely not something I would have achieved rationally. The setup allows that surprise may result not only from disparateness but also from similarity.

Rail: Who are your collaborators for this piece—decor, costumes, light?

Dunn: I’m dedicating these performances of Cassations to three longtime collaborators, all of whom are involved with the piece. Grazia Della-Terza has danced with me since 1980. Her presence always helps ground my tendency to flail both in life and in movement. Mimi Gross has contributed costumes and sets off and on over the same span. She usually has an historical take on what I’m up to and designs accordingly. Her responses help me see into the work and thus nudge my intuitions. Lighting designer Carol Mullins and I have also worked over many years and in remarkably disparate situations. She has a way of asking questions that turn out to be essential to doing, in fact, the things others of us are capriciously imagining.

Rail: Is the work in any way narrative?

Dunn: When a dancer enters the artificial environment of the stage, she is immediately a character. Unlike a literary character, however, she is also flesh and blood. Dancers are highly active, yet passive, too, in the sense that they move at the bidding of another.

In general, my intuitive response to these contradictions has been to focus on rhythm, shape, and tempo, allowing the combination of personality/personage to emerge as it will. During the making of Cassations the strangeness of these discrepancies begged for more attention. The amount of symmetry and unison in the piece was tending to emphasize the prescribed aspect of the dancers’ task. Out popped “Women’s Weapons / Men’s Poles,” a section that brings specific character, at least in generic, gender-related terms, obviously into the foreground.

Letting moves rather than ideas about them say what to do next sometimes leads to unanticipated meanings. The resulting sequences are often interesting in kinetic terms, too. Working thus without exterior narrative purpose one must, of course, be wary of falling into choreographic habit. But experimenting on this level of three-dimensional texture means that memory is likely to be triggered if former figures surface. Mid-level in the intuitive mine is the best place for me to work, reaching down to chambers below for raw ore, maintaining an awareness of above-ground enough to come up for air if necessary. If dancers are present, I ask them not to horse around physically or verbally regarding what might be next, in order that my fertile befuddlement not be inflected. The occasional accidental gesture, made while a dancer is trying to accomplish what was given, is fair game. But unless I were to reformulate and re-name my company as a collaborative enterprise, I would never ask a dancer to supply material. I’m dedicated to the lineage of individual vision. Nor do I want to compromise any dancer’s future as a choreographer.

Rail:  Oh, lineage! Modern, postmodern, post-postmodern, modernist—you have danced through it all, made dances through it all. Your list of teachers ranges from Ted Shawn to Margaret Craske, among others; you danced for Merce Cunningham, with Grand Union, were in the legendary Twyla Tharp’s “The One Hundreds” and Trisha Brown's “Roof Piece.” Where are we now in dance?

Dunn: Freedom of choice is basic in modern dance. In fact our tradition is an anti-tradition: you are supposed to kill off your mentors, presumed to show something new and different. Over time I notice that my work falls into a middle ground. It wants to be neither radical nor conventional. It wants to keep the sensual, textural elements of dancing, rather than the conceptual or spectacular, in the foreground, so that no blatant, one-dimensional “meaning” takes over. But it wants also to have layers of consciousness embedded in it. The conspicuous classical tendency indicates a weakness for elegance and delight; playing off of that essence allows the dancers to engage in some degree of commentary on themselves and on other dancing.

Rail: What qualities in your dancing and in your choreography have persisted over time, and what’s new?

Dunn: Just when career fatigue began to seem onerous, several feelings came up to fuller consciousness to offer balance: that to watch people move in stylized fashion is endlessly interesting; that facing the unknown in a situation when I have the choice and opportunity to act constructively is meaningful; that even though modern dance is consistent in not making the slightest dent in our materialistic culture, its interest in beauty is at least harmless.

 Rail:  Is there anything you are particularly curious to find out about this work when it meets the audience at the 92nd Street Y?

Dunn: I wonder if seating viewers in the round will make them uneasy. Where to sit? What’s the “best” view? We’re going to have an intermission, so they could change places. A few of the sections of the dance were made for one front. It was interesting to reconfigure them for 360 degrees. Some I left alone. My work doesn’t usually focus a spectator’s gaze; she has to choose. In the round this choosing is all the more obligatory, or shall we say available. I’m guessing some of the groupiness of the piece is a response to this added variety of viewpoints, maybe also to a weakening of my dedication to fragmentation … or is it that the fragments are getting bigger, and some of them end up becoming their own little worlds?

Rail:  Thank you for that “she.” In a moment when my gaze is so often locked in and to resist is to deny the choreographer, it will be  marvelous to experience that liberating obligation to choose, and the tension you propose between a controlled authorship and a loosened viewing experience.  And thank you, too, for this interview, conducted by written exchange. As you have noted, “Dancing is dancing/Talking is talking.”1 Just so. And writing is not dancing and writing is not talking. Writing is writing!

1 http://douglasdunndance.com/writings

©Nancy Dalva 2012

MARK MORRIS

originally published in

MARK MORRIS DANCE GROUP, DIDO AND AENEAS

MOSTLY MOZART FESTIVAL, AUGUST 22—24, AND AUGUST 25, ROSE THEATER

Dido and Aeneas, choreographed by Mark Morris in 1989 to the Purcell opera of 1689, takes place in an entirely self-contained world—except for the golden light designer James F. Ingalls sends streaming in from off stage, like the sun setting over the Aegean. The simplicity of the set (benches), the backdrop (a turquoise and ocher painting of map of the Mediterranean by the artist Robert Bordo), and the costumes (Christine Van Loon’s simple black sarongs and sleeveless shells) establishes an archaic feeling, neither baroque nor modern. Timeless, yet distant.

Mark Morris                  Photo: Amber Star Merkens

In this setting, Morris danced both Dido and the Sorceress, two profoundly contrasting roles (some see them as flip sides of the same character), just as ballerinas often danced both White Swan and Black Swan in Swan Lake. He was a marvel of interiority and compression as Dido, and exteriority and expansion as the Sorceress. He had considered also taking a third role, though this would have been complicated: He would have been playing both Dido and Aeneas, and he would have had to make love to himself.

In 2006, he handed off his roles to two of his dancers. Amber Star Merkens became the Sovereign Queen of Carthage, and Bradon McDonald a fantastically debauched and profane sorceress. This was a terrifying moment for ardent admirers of the original. Morris had danced the dual roles for 11 years. He was Dido. He was the Sorceress. And then he wasn’t, and yet, the dance—which frankly, one never wanted to see any other way—was still wonderful. This was the one run for which Morris divided his roles between a man and a woman. Later, McDonald played both, and now Merkens will.

When Guillermo Resto played Aeneas to Morris’s Dido, he was entirely believable as the son of Venus and a recent hero of the Trojan War. With his long dreadlocks gathered at the nape of the neck, his dark good looks and rugged ways, his strong stance, his sarong dangerously ready to part at any instant, he was the King of Testosterone. You perfectly understood why Dido fell for him. I thought he fell for her too, only departing Carthage to found Rome because fate—and history—cruelly summoned him.

Recently, during a conversation in his bright green office at the Mark Morris Dance Center in Brooklyn—it has everything but parrots, and there could be a stuffed one I didn’t notice in the razzle-dazzle, bazaar-like atmosphere­—Morris disabused me of this romantic notion. Sporting a post-rehearsal swathe of cloth of an exotic origin draped over his polo shirt and shorts, and Christopher Robin sandals and socks, he heartlessly told me that Aeneas is a brute. A cad! That it was all about sex! Without sentiment, he considered his current occupation during Dido. He’s now in the pit, leading “the band.” This is nothing new: He has been conducting since that same BAM season when he handed over Dido and the Sorceress. On March 8 of that year, he stepped onto the podium, raised his baton, and laid down the music for his dance called Gloria like laying down a floor: a secure ground for the dancers, at whom he barely glanced. (He trusts his company, after all. He rehearses them.) Surprisingly, he is not a dancey conductor, as was, to choose the most obvious example, Leonard Bernstein. (Watch him conduct the West Side Story studio sessions on Youtube. He’s sensational.) For Morris, dancing is dancing, and conducting is conducting.

Nancy Dalva (Rail): What has the reaction been to your conducting?

Mark Morris: Some people think it’s a publicity stunt, which it’s not, or ask what makes me qualified. Conducting isn’t giving a music lesson. I’m not teaching people to play their instruments. We were bringing Gloria back and Nancy [Umanoff, the executive director of the Mark Morris Dance Group] suggested that to renew my interest in my piece, why not conduct it? So I did. I always have been responsible for the music incorporated in my shows. It’s not enough to have good music; you have to have good players and it has to work within the context of my shows. 1996 was the year I made my live music vow. I work with stars and I work with fabulous musicians who aren’t stars. I know what I am doing and so I conduct. I have had coaching. I have very good teachers—and I’ve had very good, smart people ask me why don’t I conduct my work. Dido was the second thing I conducted. I’m adding Jesu, Meine Freude and A Lake.

Rail: Have you been influenced by any conductors of the past—Bernstein, Stokowski…?

Morris: No, I don’t think that way. But one of the conductors who strongly instructed me to conduct my own work was Maestro [James] Levine, who conducted the Orfeo I did. It isn’t just me—but I am the one who has the final say and the final touch to get the music and the dance linked. The Mark Morris Dance Group Music Ensemble is a core of a small number of players who can swing in and out of a string quartet or solo piano up to a full orchestra. A roster. We travel with our band. (If it’s a full orchestra we use local musicians.) I approve everything.

Rail: Does conducting feel like performing?

Morris: No. It doesn’t. You’re facing the other way, for one thing. You have to be alert and energetic, but you’re the only person who’s not performing. It’s nervous making. I get very agitated. It’s wonderful. Exciting. Fun. Difficult. Lay the beat down—secure and true. There’s no mystery except it’s always different. You’re always a little ahead. By the time you hear music, it’s moved on. If you start listening you automatically slow it down. It can’t be just mechanical, or why would you need live music? My dancers know the music inside out, which most dancers don’t because they are not required to.

Rail: What do you love most about Dido and Aeneas?

Morris: I don’t know, I can’t say that. [Pauses] It’s very very good. It happens so rapidly and efficiently. It’s a beautifully designed piece.

Rail: Is it a love story?

Morris: It’s a tragedy. (That can be a love story.) The most important aspect is that it’s a tragedy. Because he’s not in love with her.

Rail: He’s not in love with her?

Morris: He’s never in love with her. He’s just a man. He has other things. It’s a convenience thing. He has sex with her. Aeneas never sings with the orchestra. He only sings with continuo, harpsichord, and cello. He doesn’t have an aria. He doesn’t get a tune. He gets a soliloquy when he’s summoned to Rome.

Rail: Is he torn when he has to leave?

Morris: He’s not torn. No. Uh-uh. Calling something a love story is a terrible idea because it makes it stupid. It makes it a chick flick. It makes it a Disney movie.

Rail: Does love make you stupid?

Morris: I don’t want to talk about that—does love make you stupid. I don’t want to analyze my own work. When you pose an idea, it puts me in a corner I don’t like, because I don’t want to decide what people get from it. I have feelings about it, but I am not going to tell you the secrets of it even though I have eyes and ears. “Is it a love story?” is getting too specific—but it’s a love story. There’s love in it. If one knew the story and was interested, one could find a whole lot of details.

Rail: I feel as if you made it just for me.

Morris: Good. A lot of people feel like that, and they’re right.

©Nancy Dalva 2012