Self-Interview on AT LARGE
OBJECTIVE:
In this interview, I will address the questions afoot in my current project, “AT LARGE,” as well as the question of what I want to say with it—not in terms of a message that could rather be articulated in a text such as this one, but what I want IT to DO—what kind of experience or understanding would I like a viewer to come away with.
STRATEGY:
Because writing alone is for me always some form of self questioning and answering, forcing myself to clarify by addressing the imaginary or potential opposition, advancing and defending, the rhythm of explicit question and answer is usually subverted in the flow of thought. In order to use this rhythm which is already installed without disrupting it, and yet be able to track and organize the questions and answers that direct (and mis-direct) the thought, I developed the following format for this self interview:
I will use bold to tag the words or phrases within a question or answer that can produce further questions or that demand clarification. Questions and clarifications stemming from those bold sub-issues will appear in italics. I will underline sentences and phrases that arrive at answers to the above main question. I will use ALL CAPS to emphasize something merely for the sake of emphasis, as it is the only available form of emphasis remaining after the above meanings have been assigned. Traces of this format remain where they were used, and disappear in gusts of inspir-/explanation.
DISCLAIMER:
In efforts to make this acceptable reading material for others, I tried editing and revising, but it’s hairy and dense and seems impossible. I have decided to leave the original text more or less as a time capsule, and an honest response and rigorous attempt at the task of self interview. At worst, the below excess of words is vain, masturbatory, obsessive, manic, and excessively introspective. At best, the below excess of words is generous and holds a few gems of crystallized thought that hold in them a ray of hope for extended relevance to others.
COMMENCEMENT:
I hereby commence this self interview.
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Let’s start with the first question. What do you want to question with your current project?
“AT LARGE” is a piece motivated by a very huge and dangerously simplifying question: “what is the position/role/purpose of dance in the world at large?” This is a question that I realize is grossly impossible, even stupid, mostly due to the generalizing/globalizing/universalizing aspects of the two words “at large.” Therefore, that is where I take up residency: in questions such as how very general kinds of values about dance (pleasure/expression/authenticity/virtuosity) do or don’t persist, and are or aren’t supported in various systems of visibility and production, specifically within the overriding force of globalization which today encourages dissemination and mass-distribution on ALL levels of society and culture. Baudrillard speaks about universal truths (democracy, human rights, etc) being value-deflated and meaning-drained because of their co-opting by economic and political processes of globalization. So what happens when media, such as YouTube, television, or even documentary movies (such as RIZE), which are also participating mechanisms of cultural globalization (not always directly linked with economic globalization), replace body-to-body transmission of dances? Does this alter our sense of “universal truths” in dance or are we no longer concerned? When everything is accessible, everything is everybody’s, everything is treated as cultural currency, and appropriation (rather than belonging or not belonging) is the common mode of relation to what exists, everything is doubled, imitated, transmitted virtually, simulated, represented— choose what-ever language you wish to speak about it, we no longer seek shared values by agreement or consensus, but individual truths by positioning in relation to each other within an infinite fractal horizon of Others. Finally, any values or truths previously considered universal are also thrown on the menu of free-for-all, mix-and-match, choose-your-own-adventure assimilation of cultural codes, values, and references with which individuals invent, define, and situate themselves today.
All of this may seem totally obvious as a part of our reality, which we all know, experience, and understand. But it is something I think has not been dealt with directly in the medium of dance, in the physical doing of dances, where this cultural condition is happening “at large” and inadvertently. It is apparent in social dance phenomena: the mixing, spreading, infecting, morphing, virtual participation and reaction via YouTube. It is apparent in the dance field in the tendency and demand for dancers to be capable in as many dance forms and techniques as possible, and how “contemporary dance” in South Africa can share similar esthetic values as “contemporary dance” in Brussels, it is apparent in the choreographic dilemma of oversaturation where every code including the acknowledgment of codes has been claimed and rewritten.
As each body has a certain limit to the amount of different things it can do, and any specific physicality demands training and practice, the dancer must choose and s/he becomes a mix of what s/he chose over time to pursue or erase, what s/he was trained into or out of, and what s/he blindly habituated. In both of these cases—the way dance forms are spreading in a more general public and the way dance techniques are circulated worldwide in my professional field—what is similar is some kind of challenge to the fixity of cultural context and the emphasis on individual implication/choice. So the work we have set ourselves in “At Large” is to take the physical/personal catalogue-body that exists in the training and versatility of a contemporary dancer and further this body’s relation to Other bodies, other dances, dances taking place in other realms, and see how we can not only be the ready-made evidence of our circumstances, but re-invent the ingredients of our recipe of self construction, play the field in wider and other fields, perform the global experiment unto our selves, and see how we can overcome these codes to reflect upon and challenge our relationship to dance and our position in it as well as an audience’s.
WHY?
The point for me in taking all of this up is to challenge the consensual hermetics of my own perspective: in an artistic process, in an artistic field, in various milieus of that field. This is not about exoticism, not about eclecticism, not about generalization, but about using general, external, and other perspectives to reflect upon my own: going all around, within, and to the edges of what is considered dance, what I have been educated to consider dance, what other people consider dance, in order finally to dance. By taking on various positions and values of dance, gathered by interviews with professionals in the field, gathered by obliging ourselves to see all the dance performances we can even if it’s not our interest, gathered through commercial contexts, virtual contexts, by learning new dances, and by simple observation of how dance is distributed, understood, talked about, exchanged, taught, performed in these various spaces, the purpose is of course not to find and deliver THE answer to the question of the position/role/purpose of dance in the world “at large” nor to glorify all positions besides the one I am placed in, but to mobilize, to get unstuck, to get on with dancing in a way that is directly and explicitly about how, today, to get on with dancing. So in a sense we pursue a meta-dance: a dance about dance that is as equally a dance as much as it is a reflection upon what is a dance.
In order to achieve this, what we (project collaborators) must admit and eradicate or deliberate is that in the “contemporary dance field” (as in other fields of existence), we are always in the process of socially constructing norms and defining boundaries and categories for the individual. This is not a value judgment, but a mere fact of our conditions: we are consistently in a social construction of likenesses, by physical proximity, the formation of milieus within the field, the processes of consensus that color collaborations, and of course in processes of authority and discipline (education or CHOREOGRAPHY PROPER in the classic sense). I have no problem with norms, belongings, communities, agreement, or even consensus as such, I just think we ought to be aware of them, and in fact, if we want to make all that is written here the stuff of our performance, then we have to be very careful with the way we communicate with each other in the making, how we work together, and how the individual remains crystallized and sharp around the edges, in order to make visible that which I am talking about, which is a research upon specificities within generalities, an appropriation of them, rather than a resignation to them.
Finally, in respect to WHY, I think the largeness of such a question is interesting in that its impossibility normally pushes it under the rug and its simplicity makes it very easy to leave behind in favor of more tangibly problematizable questions, questions that lend themselves more easily to concrete artistic productivity than to semi-sociological/cultural/anthropological hypothesizing. But it is this silly question which has been itching at that unreachable place on my back, scurrying around in my blind spot, boiling my blood, and pulling me in and out of love with the medium of dance ever since I had the capacity to question the value of what I am doing with it, and if I don’t take this fabulously fortuitous opportunity of time, space, and clever, talented, capable collaborators to rip it to shreds in this way, I’m afraid I’ll never get on with more important things and be able to make anything else than a dance which is only conscious or concerned with itself being a dance. It’s not artistic puberty, it’s just an ongoing process at a crucial moment. OK, fine, it’s artistic puberty. QUE VIVA!
Returning to questions/terms remaining in bold from the above:
so what happens when media such as YouTube, television, or even documentary movies (such as RIZE), which are also participating mechanisms of cultural globalization (not always directly linked with economic globalization), replace body-to- body transmission of dances? Does this alter our sense of “universal truths” in dance or do we not care any longer?
Well, in the dance field (which is slow and not so affected by this culture storm if it doesn’t want to be) about 50 interviews with professionals in both New York and Brussels revealed that certain universal values withstand a lot of differences: everybody still dances primarily for some kind of pleasure or satisfaction, and in watching dance, is attracted and satisfied by believable visible pleasure of the performer/dancer. Also, we are still apparently looking for self expression as well as an ability to identify the person through what they are doing when dancing. So in all of this, we do apparently still look for authenticity, we are after the real thing onstage. The question of whether other stages and other contexts of seeing dance or ways of transmitting it besides watching live performer/live bodies alter our investments in it is unsure and would demand another interview process for comparison. But these values do seem persistent indeed, and capable of trumping all other frames, surface interests, or reasons for dancing and seeing dance. But MY purpose is not to make generalizations in order to deliver universal truths, but to allow a multiplication of answers to create specificity and mobilize positions FOR THE AUDIENCE to move through. Hence why “AT LARGE with reasonable doubt,” the book portion of this piece, will not be an essay or book written by me drawing conclusions upon these interviews but a collage of all the transcribed interviews that hopefully maximizes the moving between positions (this will take some crafty editing) and allows for persistent values to be nothing more and nothing less than persistent values and observable as such.
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the dancer must choose
So we use personal taste, attractors, desires, our own actual processes of individuation as a way to set the limits of the “research,” to not get lost in all the options available to us when we decide we will make it our work to learn new dances from other contexts. This also provides for “how the individual remains crystallized and sharp around the edges.”
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From “What do you want to question with your current project?”
Is questioning actually the process?
Yes, I would say that questioning is the process. Early on, the question was asked by one of my collaborators, Manon Santkin, “Is this a process where the question wants us looking for an answer, or a set of answers and delivering them, or is this a process where the question continues to motivate a search?” Her question was geared towards the inclusion or exclusion of doubt arising in the process. Doubt in terms of: when we ask about “the position/role/purpose of dance” do we concern ourselves only with affirming it, or are we allowed to say, “dance is boring and worthless,” for instance. I answered that I would prefer the latter, and that we construct a position out of that that can be utilized and materialized. We have since then thought the process as one where returning to the basic question continues to produce further possibilities and gives the piece a gravitational center around which a very broad and inclusive range of positions can be taken up, including doubtful ones. But what is ironic is that by allowing and including doubt, allowing ourselves not to only search for the affirmative and motivational answers, we diminish doubt as a dead end and mobilize doubt as a position to pass through. This is extremely exciting and allows me as a maker to feel that there is no part of my collaborator’s brain or potential or interest that has to be left outside the studio doors, but that all modes of criticality and distance are instruments not only to strengthen the work, but to broaden its perspective, which is not just a value as such and a pleasant way to work or some kind of political correctness, but a choice that is consequent to the motives of the work itself, which strives to achieve a virtual kind of at-largeness via inhabiting/assuming a multiplicity of possible perspectives. And I say virtual kind of at large-ness because we cannot tackle much actual at-largeness from the means to create a dance performance for the stage, and I accept this to a certain extent: the actual at-largeness efforts are there, but have their limits in by-productivity, mainly in the form of a publication and video installation in the lobbies, and perhaps other forms as well, time and money pending of course. But these other media will still most likely reach few more people than those that come to see the live performance, though they extend the experience of the performance to a larger space/time frame of consideration and allow for other perspectives to be tackled than those of the three performers.
Finally, an important distinction here is made: THE POINT OF “AT LARGE” IS NOT TO COMPETE WITH GLOBALIZATION BY TRYING TO EXPORT OUR LITTLE DANCE-WORLD PRODUCT BETTER. (Although it previously was the idea, but all smart-ass attempts at that were simply not feasible, such as our effort to get the Radio City Rockettes to perform Trisha Brown’s Accumulation in The Judson church, or the invention of a fake social dance fad, which we abandoned and then decided rather to re-instate as a part of the project with the invention of “Scratching.”... the success of which is of course less than questionable).
As you can see these options are not only limited in terms of production requirements, but in fact, they are actually limited, in that they can only be an ironic gesture in relation to the question. So by taking the choice early on of returning again and again to the same basic question and not spinning off too far on the tangential developments of the question, or rather spinning off in several directions but not choosing one as the landing point, I think the hope was basically that this central question that unifies or connects all of the products of the project is the one that pierces through and is shared with the audience.
Yes, but this is actually the question now—whether or not your question becomes the audience’s question, or as you said above, if this question is the gravitational center of the piece, or if it is actually just the gravitational center of the process. Are they not looking at something else than your questions when they look at your material(s)? They are in a way looking at answers; however, they may all be spin-offs of the same question. Do they appear as symptoms of the same crux, do they all lead back to the same issue, or do they rather produce several sub-issues?
I think they produce several sub-issues in fact. Because although the process circulates around the same question, that question is finally not what the spectator sees—I think the spectator so far sees (as I gather from showing one month into a 3-month process) a very diverse set of dances, diverse ways of performing and transforming those dances. Our thinking about dance itself does not produce a reflection on dance itself, but rather makes more visible the values and perspectives that we take up in relation to dance—entertainment, pleasure, technicality, virtuosity, expression, communication, literal meanings, history, culture, etc. By doing several of many, we don’t say anything about them, but we each pursue some kind of investigation and expansion of our own relation to a widened scope of movement(s). So rather than putting the viewer in the position of understanding, accepting, or disagreeing with some statement we or I deliver about these versatile perspectives on, and capacities of, the medium, it can be great if we manage to produce a state of questioning and reflection in the viewer, rather than resignation in regards to the excess of different ways of being onstage. I think this can of course be controlled to a certain extent by the “how”: by being deliberate and responsible about this diversity, perhaps we can achieve our desired appearance as personalized documentarists and individual catalogues, the effect finally being that the performer becomes the direct instigator of thought and experience.
OK, but communicator of WHAT thought and WHAT experience? Produce a state of questioning and reflection OF WHAT in the viewer?
Well, I think the role of the viewer has mainly to do with recognition here. Everything he or she sees is placeable in some way. All positionable in relation to varying perspectives on the medium of dance, or varied positions of spectatorship. The very diversity of possible actions and ways of being onstage generated by the same stupid basic question is not just intellectually but materially fascinating to me, in that options of esthetic, tone, style of delivery, shape, form, etc. form a material arena where style becomes content. The how becomes the what, and I don’t just mean in virtuoso performing. If the what is dance, dance dance dance dance dance dance dance dance and more dance, people stop caring about what dance we do, which is exactly the point, as I don’t see any importance of one over the other anymore in my reality, whether we lift our left arm or do a triple pirouette or krump, the viewers just want to get underneath that material to the why we do it, by looking at how we do it. The way we frame, perform, order, deliver, connect, relate all these different dances is therefore responsible for content in this piece because of the very breadth of movement that we choose to make available and possible for ourselves in it.
Why such a breadth of movement possibilities? Could you not make life easier on yourself and the viewer by choosing to do less different things?
Well, no.
1) For selfish reasons, a.k.a., personal interest and desire: because of a very serious dancer-performer-doer investment and interest in being a maker, I want to make something inside of which myself and the dancers feel potentialized, mobilized, moveable changeable unfixed not simplified not type-cast not situated on time-out, not limited to re-execution of the thing that satisfied the question one day before, not obliged to land on the same conclusion every day in regards to a moving questioning process. 2) For “sociological/anthropological/cultural observation reasons”; because that diversity of material is the reality I am confronting deliberately in this piece: a contemporary reality of hugeness, fragmentary-ness, Wikipedianess, endless relations and information accessibility, decenteredness, a world of oversaturated signifiers and infinite relativity, where no meanings are stable and codes are used abused and reused, where we are searching for meaning and attempting to build meaning out of codes which are shifting and sliding, where cultural currency is fast and furious, where things belong to everyone and appropriation is like Corn Flakes for breakfast, where the individual is not even a social construction of a set of cultural conditions, but a moving target whose whole being and engagement with the world depends on quickness not only to access and absorb information, but to immediately have an opinion about it and their own version of it. We are dealing with adaptability, flexibility, instability of meaning in a cultural condition that is beyond postmodernism in the sense of context defining content, but in a bizarre conflation of context and content where context digests content and spits it out again and context is not even stable. I am also talking about context as the individual, because I think the idea of culture and belonging and society as capable of establishing norms or consensus is disappearing in our contemporary reality, and therefore I think to work as super individuated individuals in relation to a surplus of options is relevant here now today in that it IS here now today. 3) Because I am bored of the idea that a piece has to be about one thing and not as complex in its relation to thought as everyday thought is, as complex in relation to experience as everyday experience is. 4) I am making a dance from thinking about dance, and therefore whose dance/what dance is indeed a field of questioning that I am not interested in simplifying or landing on.
So it seems the challenge, therefore, is how to make a piece which is not schizophrenic but flexible.
How do you make a piece which can contain all of these interests without falling apart at the seams or turning into an undecipherable mess?
By materializing the solutions and proposals from the questioning and beginning to map them, a web of ideas is materialized. The work then is how the material constructs a concept as a world, a question or set of questions which then can be activated in the mind of the viewer.
What is the role of mapping in the process and/or product? Is the map a tool for your organization of your thoughts or something that should reveal itself in connections visible to the viewer?
Mapping is kind of a visual organization process that allows me to connect, relate, and position all the spheres our research is taking up. Sometimes the map is a set of concentric circles, noting realities that a dance is made within (individual- collaborators-studio-dance field-theater-dance public-polis-world—and then finally this overarching globule called the internet which touches on any of these realities, or hovers around them all, in some way). But mapping also of the questions, where the off-shoot questions of the question can be set in relation to each other in a kind of flowchart. All this mental organization helps sometimes in thinking how to structure the material finally, so that the relations that we are building can be reflected in the piece, spatially and temporally. In terms of composition (what comes first what comes next) but also in terms of where things take place, and in what form or media (in a book, in the theater, in the lobby, on a screen, what kind of screen), before the “show,” in the “show,” after the “show.” So that is kind of the role of mapping or the extent to which I relate to it.
I want to go back to the term “dead ends” that you introduced way above, because I think it also relates to how to make a piece which is not schizophrenic but flexible. I think this notion of “dead ends” is key to your understanding of how to structure and carry your piece. And maybe it can be used in the mapping process as well.
Yes. Thank you for catching that. It’s true that if we want to avoid landing on an answer or delivering A message, we have to be careful for periods. Dead ends. Conclusions. So, because we flirt with very essentializing perspectives, but at the same time inhabit many, it’s about passing through them, seeing how long to spend in them before they grow a period at the end, and how to slide out of them so that the thing that comes after does not negate or erase the thing that came before, but seems like a reasonable connection, and then the connections build a movement of thought in the viewer, a willingness to accept several perspectives in the same viewing experience, and hence how we get at stating nothing through uttering everything, and hopefully how we allow our own process of challenging our own perspectives to become a viewing experience of challenging your perspective as a viewer. It’s also about how to create a field in the mind of the viewer, where they are keeping things in store and placing them next to each other even though what they receive is still subject to the persistent linearity of time. And finally, in some cases this may mean avoiding dead ends and always sliding, but also I am thinking that dead ends are useful in escaping the linearity of time: if we always slide, we are always in a line, in a line that wants to lead to a period. But perhaps by choosing where to divide and cut, chunks of material can coexist and be understood in relation to each other in retrospect, which may be a useful tool in creating a mental map in the mind of the audience, instead of a single stream.
What do you mean above for material to construct a concept as a world, a question or a set of questions activated in the mind of the viewer? And how would you like those questions to be activated in the mind of the viewer?
I will answer now first the question just above about the concept as a world. This is important because, while I very much try to avoid values about dance, what it should be, what it can be, what kinds of dances or processes or performances I think are more pertinent than others, I can definitely assert for myself a very strong position that I have for my own interests in the medium and how I would like to engage it. Which is: I am not interested in the material (live performance/ dance) illustrating a concept, or in the terrible mistaking of concept for thesis, a message that has to be ordered and delivered under the guidance or authority of a prefab “concept,” but rather in MATERIAL CONCEPTUALISM / CONCEPTUAL MATERIALISM.
What do you mean by “material conceptualism/conceptual materialism?” (Besides that it sounds completely pretentious).
I mean that the concept acts as a field of research in which material is generated from that research, things are produced, and the very important step we have now, at this stage in the work, where we have a wealth of material and some time to make a “piece” out of it, is to consider carefully how that material feeds back into the concept, has the possibility to change and develop, improve the concept, and even creates connections within that field of research that propose a different concept than the one that is the base for creativity. So what I mean by material conceptualism/conceptual materialism is that neither domain rules over the other, but that both have the ability to form and shape each other in the process of making a piece, which for me is especially important in the field of dance/performance/movement, where I can use my body as a tool for information, get to understand what it is capable of doing TO a concept, not just with or under a concept. And that the domain of the concept is not understood exclusively as a linguistic one. Which is CRUCIAL to a notion of media specificity, what makes it a dance and not a self interview or a floral arrangement. A self interview can do TO a concept also, and is at this very moment doing a fantastic chiropractic overhaul to my concept, but all the media products of the questioning process should also be able to do some version of that. OR NOT—this is not to say that everything that is made inside the fence of the field of questioning is great because it was grown in that soil, but to say that we can also do some weeding, and therefore tidy up/tighten the material conceptualism.
Ok, fine. So basically you describe a pretty general process of making stuff, a ping-pong between material stuff and ideas/thought. That is fine and well. But now, as you acknowledge above, where you are is a crucial moment. It is a moment (among many more, I hope) where you now have to step back a bit from the material, what has it been generated BY and see what it generates, so that the material plane/domain of thought, meaning production, conceptness, can do what you say you want it to, which is to change, improve, develop the initial concept and create connections within the field of research that propose a different concept than the one that is the base for creativity. But are you serious about the material being able to propose a different concept than the one that is the base for creativity? Or do you actually know exactly what you want the material to do and now you need to do some weeding in the field and figure out how to do it efficiently?
Well, this is interesting, because at first I thought I knew what I wanted the material to do and now I realize that the material itself has a lot more to offer than a fulfillment of that desire. I set out simply saying I wanted the material to communicate/ share my questions. After this most recent showing, it seems that the problem is that the audience didn’t just want our questions, they wanted my/ our positions in relation to those questions. Which is slippery because I am not interested in taking up and asserting A or MY position(s) with my artwork for several reasons which will be unfolded in the remainder of this text (see politician vs. performer), but it is also both difficult and ironic for the very simple reason that my position in relation to the questions is resolved or changed by doing the work, and therefore shifted, and therefore moving all the time. This is exciting to me as a method of making, and even an overall artistic disposition: shifting through positions rather than choosing one and asserting it. It’s also this very feedback between thinking and doing, concept and material that makes me interested to enter the studio each day. So each time an answer appears, it’s a matter of going back to the start of the question and asking again, to get another answer, to come up with many potential positions/solutions/ answers as material. Besides this method being chosen in consequence to the piece being built on a breadth of answers to one simple question, to me there is no point in over-rehearsing what you know when there are more things to discover. It’s funny because this is actually the problem with “problematization”: finally there is no problem. It gets solved. Then what. Busy work, or a new problem. :-)
Ok, so now that you have defined what you mean for material to construct a concept as a world, I would like to focus on that as a question or a set of questions activated in the mind of the viewer. How would you like those questions activated in the mind of the viewer? Or how do you think that is made possible?
I think the desired response mechanism would be a basic “read between the lines” capacity that I think most people have: a kind of gestalt effect of gathered signs. When people are used to assume that the whole is different than the sum of its parts, they invest in the connections between what is presented as a family of pieces of information, and it is not necessary to provide the didactic dotted lines between the lobby installation and the moments onstage that employ the same devices as the dances on YouTube that are seen in the lobby and et cetera. In this way, reading the book afterwards at home or on the train or several weeks later, the gestalt effect also connects the performance to that other place and time and the between spaces are larger, and there is more space for the spectators mind to do the filling-in. Perhaps it’s a good antidote to a show which is a potentially over-dense barrage of information.
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THE POLITICIAN vs. THE PERFORMER:
Herein lies the crisis of authorship: the artist can never be taken as documentarist/ observer, but is asked for her editorial, opinion, position on the matters she presents. This to me is problematic, not because I strive for objectivity, and not necessarily because I (I as author) would like to, or think it possible to, disappear behind the strength and thingness of the material itself, but because I would like for the material (especially now I speak of the YouTube material) to speak for itself rather than for people to try to decode how it is supposed to be speaking for me, or us, or the “message” of the piece. There is no message, only interest, and therefore I would like to be able to share my fascination with things as they are without standing between the viewer and those selected things. I would like my framing of those things to offer no more than a window upon that which is accessible to them otherwise and an opportunity of time and space to contemplate them under a slightly different light.
How can I evade being put in the position of the politician, whose citation of any existing phenomena must be aligned and embedded in an argument or agenda other than pure observation and gentle, unencumbered analysis of what is?
Perhaps the solution is to aim for as dry and clear as possible, as hands-off as possible a presentation of the YouTube clips, letting them stand as something like field research, which is precisely what they have been. Therefore, rather than trying to sew together tricky connections, the material can appear as a sort of index or catalogue, organized as factually as possible towards an actual documentation of things which are going on out there and visible/accessible to anybody and everybody to varying degrees via the internet.
I want to address this issue of the material speaking for itself rather than speaking for you. First I think this is impossible. Because you chose the material in some way it will speak for you at least as a (re)presentation of your interests.
Yes. No problem for material to present interest (of author[s]). Problem for material to be mouthpiece or stand-in for agenda of author. Now, here I have to draw a distinction between existing material which is displayed as a document (YouTube and video) and existing material which is taken on by the performers (live). Because here is the line where I think “existing material” cannot function as a ready-made and where the performer herself can also not function as a ready-made. In the sense that the material, because it is performed by a person onstage, is in a position where it cannot speak for itself, but is in a heightened relation to the deliverer where the material either speaks for the performer or the performer speaks for the material. Which is the main friction of the live performance element of AT LARGE: I am interested in how, in confrontation with an endless sea of over-saturated codes and referential feedback, one manages to create meaning for oneself, and I consider this a highly individual process on a basic level of subjectivity in communication and meaning production, but also a highly individualistic process as a product of an overall cultural climate I think “we” (globalized Western civilization) find ourselves in today.
A note on we: I admit, as a U.S. American, I probably have less resistance to this state of “cultural free-for-all,” considering that the individualistic consumer model of identity construction is largely a product of “American” capitalism and of the fact that U.S. culture is a culture so explicitly built upon the mixture and appropriation of already existing cultures in uncontrolled, unaccounted for, and unintended ways, starting with the country’s rapid colonization by Europeans, followed by the importation of slaves from Africa, and by the early massive influx of immigrants through Ellis Island for the industrial revolution, all within a matter of less than 500 years. I note these obvious facts because I think older countries with more history, while they do participate in the cultural free-for-all and do engage with the speed of exchange, absorption, consumption, and adaptation, also have an older, slower-cooked national cultural identity or values whose traces are more indelible and identifiable, more of a traceable thread in the mix than a BRAND of mixing.
So, finally, the question of the material speaking for itself or speaking for the speaker is THE question of authorship, identity, and making sense of the world today which I think the live performance of this piece can tackle in a way that is specific to the medium of live performance. One form of this friction is in the topic of self expression—literally, how one manages to express oneself using all of these codes, and where is there even a notion of oneself when we are dealing with a self that is post-social construction, some kind of monster of a drive to assert one’s individuality, bred with a basic drive to belong which is insatiable and sliding, considering that that to which s/he can or might belong is multiple and shifting.
So I think my particular interest in using/recycling/quoting/adapting existing material is supported by a suspicion about ready-mades. I think ready-mades don’t exist in the performing arts, or are nearly impossible, precisely because of the performer, the distinction and potential of distance between the performer and the performed, and all the attitudes that can be placed between the doer and what is done. This to me is a medium, a rich field of play between context and content, where the performer provides context on her very own simply in the way she does what she does. By taking this field of multiple possible perspectives as an invitation to use/pass through more than less, the performer becomes a site of at-largeness, the performer as an individual avoids being in the position of delivering the truth inside of this web of ideas and reference, and keeps the at -largeness from condensing, landing, settling, or shrinking in her “her”ness. Here again arises the difference between the performer and the politician: the politician must choose one position and decrease the distance between himself and what he says, or else he is fickle or dishonest. Why should the performer be held to the same standards of consistency or honesty? I am not interested in the theater as a place of getting to the essential truths, but a place to question what might be assumed or forced into the truth-box outside of the theater.
The impossibility of ready-mades and the use of reference/adaptation is close to my other impossibility in the performing arts which is abstraction. What’s interesting to me is that all attempts and methods of abstracting the body can be identified within a genre or style or movement in the performing arts that are connected with different moments in history, fashion, other arts, cultural views. So rather than the possibility of true abstraction, we have several ways to signal abstraction based on different periods in time when abstraction of the body was attempted, codified, accepted. The thought that any movement is potentially abstract because movement itself is meaningless without the context to define how it should be understood is actually not true, because there is no context left unclaimed, unconnotated, and therefore no possibility of meaninglessness (besides in the bad sense, where such meaning has not been cared for and we are left with “meaningless garbage,” but I will not discuss meaning in not-deliberate art because analyzing the work of those who do not analyze it themselves to me is a waste of time and is no more or less valuable than the activity of dream interpretation). The impossibility of abstraction because of reference brings me to my interest in the unitard and other such “abstract” dance costumes—they are vestiges of a time when the costume was used to turn the body into a purely formal medium, and now they stand as signifiers that say “Graham” or “Cunningham” or “Nikolai.” So if what we are left with is an endless feedback of reference and recognition, wherein there is no escaping what exists (this is what I mean by the contemporary state of over-saturated codes, which I think exists in all media including language), one had better be deliberate about how one appropriates and uses what exists, or, in my case, make that whole game of referral to context as content and as signification part of the game of meaning production.
I think that is part of what is desired from the audience with this piece. For them to engage in a game of meaning production with the performance.
Yes indeed. And for that to be active on many levels at once so that no element is meaningless, or just there to support another, more primary element—i.e., there are no “just pants” —there are clingy movement pants, aerobic fitness pants, hip-hop pants, rock’n’roll pants, swing pants, hammer pants, street-wear pants (casual, dress, 40s 50s 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s) ... each of which signify a different reading of the action, a different context, which, when developed enough as its own line of visual communication then it becomes fully functional and autonomous as a potential field of play in the meaning production game. So then the costumes that are worn outgrow their position as support of the action and can then weave their way in and out of alignment with the action, in the forms of agreement, confirmation, dissonance, conflict, compliment, displacement, etc. in relation to the body that is moving inside of them.
And this goes for every other medium or element engaged, hoping that they all affect each other, and the viewer’s sensitivity to significance and signification is pulled from several perspectives at once.
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You frequently mention or allude to a resistance to delivering a message. But do you think this is an invented pressure, I mean, do you think anyone is actually looking for a message?
Yeah, they are. As much as I think we are over interpretation in the sense that Susan Sontag has been read and reread since the 60s, and as much as I think the majority of capitalist society is all about experience in the sense even consumer product relations are all based on experience today, I still have found that, with everything I have made (with the exception of “ELEANOR!” which is blatant and obvious and basically full-on didacticism excused by stand-up comedy) someone has always asked me, “What are you trying to say with this?” or says something like, “But what do you want from the audience?” And this need for a message from either the side of the doer or the side of the viewer is not just about didacticism but about motivation—WHY do you want to make THAT thing. And sometimes there is a gap between the WHY and the WHAT, or the WHY is not evident or implicit in the WHAT.
I think this is the very basic crux of this whole self interview: that what I research or what I am interested in, and the products produced by that research or interest are NOT one in the same, and that the products do something else and function in another way. Therefore, there is always a wild goose chase, as performed in this text, of understanding that relationship and gaining some control over it.