sarma

MORIAH:
Within two days I saw you perform in two drastically different works by two different choreographers - Dogheart, a collaboration with Jonathan Burrows, and En Atendant with Rosas. I also saw you perform earlier in the Fall a piece by Mette Ingvartsen, Giant City. Can you speak more about this process of moving between different models of choreography and dance practice?

CHRYSA:
In Vienna, where you saw those pieces, I was rehearsing with Jonathan during the day and performing with Rosas at night until we performed Dogheart on the last night I was there. I loved doing that.
It reminded me of working and studying in NY. I always worked with a lot of different people there because that’s how you got to perform enough. I always thought I would just work for one person, in a company, but I got used to switching between different projects because I had to. And versatility was something I began to respect for itself. But we toured too much with ZOO for me to really keep doing that. Just this year I stopped working with ZOO so that I could do these other things. What became very concrete for me in picking up this practice of versatility again was that I am more aware of my own practices and skills and techniques when I am not submerged in one methodology. When I am moving between different methodologies, my own approach is more exposed. I can see with more objectivity where I’m weak or where I can just go ahead and apply my existing skills. And the experience of layering skills is very rich.

MORIAH:
This switching back and forth and moving between methodologies and aesthetics, is this how you managed to develop your ideas about creating a “practice” for your work as a dancer?

CHRYSA:
I began to use the word “practice” to identify this thing that I do with hierarchizing information, and obtaining certain skills, and putting other skills on hold. It’s not something that I started to do. It’s something that I have always done. And then I started to call it “practice” because that made sense to me as a language bucket to put the thing in. It’s like that chronology that I did… you learn a skill and you keep finding it in other situations. It keeps showing up in different work.

MORIAH:
You said before that you wanted to speak about some of the dancers you worked with…

CHRYSA:
It’s always so hard because you leave people out and that’s always so weird.

MORIAH:
In your career you have had the opportunity to work with a wide array of choreographers, but you have also been engaged with a lot of different dancers. How do dancers work together?

CHRYSA:
When I was in NYC, I was taking open classes all the time. That just meant that I was watching a lot of people dance, very, very close by. You take class with people, and you are at the barre with someone, and you feel how they work and you see what they are doing… There is this combination of technical experience and taste. I could watch someone and figure out what they liked about what they were doing, and what I liked about what they were doing, and then I might take something from them. I would look for a certain lyricism maybe, or a dryness. And there were definitely technical things. Like Jeremy Nelson, he just made no noise. He would jump, and there was no sound. It’s just a physical thing. It’s like watching a mouse, watching another animal. That experience in NYC was very strong because there were so many people taking class, but they would all be working in different styles - Cunningham, Graham, Mark Morris,
contact improvisers, jazz dancers, ballet dancers, all in the same class. And because the fashion was to take ballet, they were all trying to do the same step, and you could just take from all these different sources what you wanted. I would take what I was curious about or interested in.
I worked with Tere because I liked how he danced, how he moved. Jennifer Monson also. I did not know they were good choreographers. Tere had this 19th century elegance, a mix of romanticism and sadness, but funny too. And with sexy, sloppy edges. Monson also had this strange anachronistic thing in her dancing. I could not place her in a style or time - she was in between classical form and passionate accident.
I remember Jodi Melnick who I danced with for Irene Hultman. Jodi had this quality of spontaneity everything she did looked like it was improvised, but she was always in the right place at the right time. She could repeat exactly, but I couldn’t see how. Teachers, choreographers and dancers all do this “imitating.” The interesting thing to me has been that I know I will never be as consistently capable of doing the things I like about what those people are doing as those people are doing them, but my curiosity or desire for it influences me all the time–in all aspects of performing and rehearsing, teaching and mentoring. There’s a lot of empathic imitation that’s unspoken. You just do it. It’s a learning tool, but it has all these repercussions for physical experience and also cultural identity.

MORIAH:
How have you played with your identity as a performer inside of different structures that you are participating in?

CHRYSA:
Maybe one of the things that is interesting is how material, concrete skills that I can feel physically, and know whether I am doing them, or not, affect perception of identity. I know when I am on the rhythm, or not, or when I am having to count in a certain way or not… Basic physical practices have value in different people’s work. Then there are the more ephemeral qualities of identity, and qualities of attention, qualities of concentration that are often a byproduct of actual physical skills. And one of the interesting things about being a dancer is that you really are an artisan, but you produce a lot of perception that goes beyond the mechanics of what you are doing. You produce perception of choreography by choreographers, by audiences and by other dancers that is tangible and interesting and curious and fun to talk about, but those things could be thought of as secondary or as byproducts of the actual doing of movement. The more that I think about practice, the more curious I become about the artisanal side of this work, which is almost technical activity. THE HOW: how to get from there; how to do it; how to retrograde it; how to put it to another type of
music; how to do unison with someone; how to improvise with someone; how to deal with a certain kind of contact or physical touch. Any time you deal with material, deal with food, or wood, or paper or you deal with the body, you are doing things to it or with it that then produce a lot of other activities around it… But, the essential basic activities are so productive and so defining actually…and that’s what I realize when I do a lot of different people’s work. There are these physical threads that continue to go through them. It’s very exciting to be in action in these very different contexts and still be really… still working on the mechanics. And the mechanics can be similar or I can find the thread in the mechanics, but the context is so different that they produce a whole other set of perceptions and relationships, and this kind of generosity of perception comes out of really simple, basic skills and techniques.

MORIAH:
How do you use both identity and perception to structure your dancing? And how do you use them generatively in how you approach your dancing or the structuring of your identity through dance?

CHRYSA:
Different dance techniques and different dance artists trigger you to see or feel things differently, they refine and develop your senses. People that I work with will change how I see something. They will change my sensation of force. They will change my sense of speed because of how they work or even the structure of a dance will make me feel time differently. And then when I look at other things, my perceptions have changed and… my sense of myself or of what I am responsible for, what I am capable of, changes, and then how I expect to be perceived by other people is also changed. There is a direct kind of growth pattern from working on physical experience to perceiving other people and being perceived by other people.
Also, I think I used the idea of structuring identity a little ironically. I do not really think that I have control over that. I think structure is coming out of me like a spider web or a snail shell. Anything that I build, the form has to be so volatile, chaotic, and I cannot control how people see me. I can only expand and refine my perceptions so that perception may be communicable…hopefully it’s communicable. That’s what we are trying to do with performance. So. I guess there is a kind of two-way movement of information. One is from perception to identity, and then there is this sort of outside perception of identity that you sometimes learn something from. People will say that looked wrong or beautiful when you thought it looked tragic. You get more information about it from outside, from other people’s perceptions. There is a loop between perception and identity, but there is a lot about identity that you cannot control. You can be sensitive to it, but there’s nothing to do about it really.
There are some cues that are recognizable to some people and not to other people. The layers of your experiences and your cultural affiliations or alliances are so mixed and so hard to untangle to the point that you can say this person sees me this way. It’s much more interesting to be confused by all the influences, all the possibilities… to be sharp in your perceptual abilities and loose in your identity.

MORIAH:
So as a dancer, you are busy with the simultaneous conundrum of internally perceiving while being externally perceived as… Can you speak about this dynamic? How do you negotiate this difference, or your awareness of this difference, when you are doing your own performance practice, or while you are on stage when you are in a situation in direct exchange with the audience, and there is a lack of control?

CHRYSA:
Perception is a skill and you have to keep getting better and better at it. It includes other people’s perceptions of you. And that is why dance is so traditionally hooked into taking class with a teacher, because the subjective experience is so strong that you need an outside eye to help you be more precise. There is so much internal influence and reference that you have to yourself that it can feel like something different from how it looks. I use other dancers and choreographers, and sometimes what people say to me as audience members - but mostly colleagues become that source. Perception is a skill and you have to keep working on and use everything around you to get better at.

MORIAH:
Why do all dancers like to smoke?

CHRYSA:
Because they like to feel their bodies.

MORIAH:
You seem quite committed to this idea of capturing a “practice” in a material form. How do you help people create and document on a daily basis, what you have termed, “PPPs”: personal performance practices? How do you start to codify or create tools of engaging or giving and getting attention?

CHRYSA:
That name “PPP” was kind of a joke that stuck… When I worked in Montpellier at 6M1L, I would do this interview, this ecosystem as art practice with them, and then we would pool metaphors or sometimes language out of those interviews, and find physical scores that related to each person. We would create a sequence of scores and they would adapt it by doing it daily from a performance sense - what “worked” as a performance. In terms of building a daily practice for people, I have not found a way to do it that always makes sense yet.
In terms of identifying larger practices with people, it’s more methodologically developed. Talking with people, doing the interview in conversation, especially more than once, things would come up. Talking through the interview we would find actions that they do, mixing, isolating, resisting, listening–some people need a lot of privacy - we’d figure out how they get that. We would find perceptual ticks and habits, games they play to inspire them, and techniques.
But, one of the things that I feel about the concept of “practice” is that it’s changing all the time. All that you can really identify are trajectories. You can identify some patterns and some directions. But once you consolidate the information into an object, a piece of writing, or a statement, it’s only partial because your perceptions keep changing and you keep getting new information. There is not one statement that’s going to define what you do.

MORIAH:
You had mentioned that you wanted to talk about working with Deborah Hay…

CHRYSA:
I think I said that because she was very important for me in confirming and giving me language tools to consider performance a practice and something that I could DO.

MORIAH:
What do you mean by that…?

CHRYSA:
Deborah micro-managed concepts so that performing became a series of more or less consecutive physical experiences - but on an atomic scale–tiny, tiny increments of thought and sensation. That scale of infinitely small time/space experiences made the physical experience of a performance much more accessible from moment to moment. Sometimes I get big ideas and it’s hard to keep up with them physically. She’s just very practical.
I realized working with her that some ideas can only be articulated physically. Intellectually, some ideas fall apart or they are kind of crumbly and wispy, but physically they are very strong. Those kinds of physical experiences are very exciting, and it’s very affirming for movement and being a performer. There’s something you can communicate by moving on stage with people watching, and you can do it better there than anywhere else.
I keep thinking of these street dancers from Paris, “Les Twins.” They remind me of Deborah, and of everything I like about dance.

MORIAH:
What are your goals as a teacher?

CHRYSA:
Like everything else, my goals as a teacher are changing, and they are somehow in response to the information I get from students. There was a point when it seemed really important to me to get more rhetoric in the classroom. More talking, more language articulation of what people were doing and thinking about while they were doing it. Lately, I am concerned about skill actually. I have a desire to encourage people to become more skillful physically. Because lately I have been doing a lot more written / set material again, I am curious, again, about how to relate to form accurately without losing the spontaneity and the vast imaginative potential of physicality. My goals are precision and precision for me means verbal, physical, aesthetic articulation. I am always trying to figure how to get closer to it.

MORIAH:
How have you managed to incorporate failure, imagination and generosity in what you are doing, in the process of learning to trust yourself as an artist? You have written statements that suggest ideas of patience, “allowing for careful consideration so that imperfections might be defined and distractions can be indulged.”

CHRYSA:
Some failures are more interesting than doing it right. Distraction is a huge resource. But you have to be sharp with those things. They’re tricky materials.
I think there is a constant negotiation with failure and precision. As a dancer you are often dealing with external forms, even when you are working with improvisation, there is often someone else’s voice involved. There is coordination with other people involved. There is a lot of compromise and a lot of dealing with physical limitation. Not every body can do everything. So there is something about accepting those physical limitations and accepting your…sometimes accepting the fact that you are just not that good at that. But when you are part of a piece, you are part of something that’s bigger than you personally, so your capacities within it are your responsibility, but there is only so much that you can do. You can’t be the star of everything, or be the best at everything, or do everything right. Dancers have to constantly deal with their physical frailties, mental weaknesses… You are always confronted with that, and it’s part of working to get to work with those weaknesses.
Working towards forms can make me very perfectionist. And I feel like I am always working towards forms, even in Deborah’s work. Because there’s an aesthetic there, and there is a way of being that pre-exists my involvement. So I have to antidote my perfectionism with an understanding that things are unfinished, and that I am not done yet, and that I do not always know. Maybe someone is asking me to do something because they want that weakness, and I do not have control over that. I think it also has to do with working with experimental theater that you are always trying something that may or may not work, and that’s part of the fun of it.
I think sometimes the things that I am writing and talking about are somehow a reaction… because I think there was a time when there was a lot of reaction against intuition in conceptual work, and also in dance there was a time when anatomical analysis in movement became so much the goal. That, for me, was very useful but also implied a perfectionism. Sometimes I find myself frustrated by the rhetoric of precision that does not include the actual frailties and confusions of physical experience. Sometimes I react.

MORIAH:
Why do you resist being identified with products?

CHRYSA:
I think I am a little more relaxed about that now than I was a few years ago.

MORIAH:
Does it have something to do with wanting a bigger frame within which the dancer is identified?

CHRYSA:
I find it to be really problematic in communicating with people, actually, when I am too identified with one thing. People won’t talk to me as openly because they see me as part of something. I think it actually has to do with factionalism in the dance world more than anything else.
People are very surprised that I would work with Rosas, or they are very surprised that I would work with Mette. They have this feeling that I am a “this,” and they are surprised that I would do that other thing. I like to cross the boundaries of one market niche or one philosophical shelf.... That has to do with feeling that you can embody so many complicated things, and they can come out in so many ways… physicality has this enormous capacity for expression, and it should not be limited or I do not want to be limited, by one social group, or one artistic intention, or one philosophical bent, or aesthetic source. I like to move through different things.
The thing about product is that product is always about industry, and industry is always corrupt somehow. So unhooking myself…It’s simple things like Vienna, I try not to teach there every year. It’s all a financial trap. You become dependent upon it and you become identified with it. There are all these traps.
I think I am just much more interested in people than I am in products. There’s something about a person that interests me, either the way they think, or the way they move, or something about their relationships with other people… and that is just so much more complicated than the thing that they represent in the marketplace. Or even the product … the piece that I made with Rosas, I learned some skills from that which were new for me. I do not know if I can necessarily transfer them into other situations, and that
piece will probably get performed quite a bit. It has some legs to it. So I’ll be identified with that product for a while. Whereas this piece I made years ago with Jennifer Monson called The Glint; it got performed very little. But, what I got out of that piece with Jennifer is still part of what I teach and what I am practicing. So the product itself, The Glint, is not what anybody would identify me with, but it’s still something I am working on. It’s hugely influential… But the product is not the piece necessarily; the productive part is all the byproducts of the skills developed working with that person on that piece.

MORIAH:
So I have noticed that you ask yourself a lot of questions… or you use that as a strategy to clarify what you are doing? But then how does that feed into finessing skill, into the doing of things…

CHRYSA:
I think getting to the concrete material of dancing is a problem. The actual activity of dancing gets obscured by a lot of theory, talk and analysis, sometimes, but I also think it’s necessary. I don’t know that asking questions is really the problem. I think that being satisfied with answers, metaphors, or satisfied with analysis, is maybe a problem. But questions, themselves, there is nothing inherently wrong with asking a question; it just has to be a good fucking question.
The questions I ask myself with movement: Why can’t I do this? What’s the matter? What’s not happening? What’s wrong? They help. I can start to work on it. I’ve talked about this with Janet Panetta a bit because the questions and “what you feel” can sometimes make you crazy as a teacher and as a student. A lot of reasons why not to do something come up. The point of asking a question is to help you figure out how to do it. It’s not to keep you from doing it. Talking about it, writing about it and thinking about it is fun. It’s like gossip. It brings up a lot of great stuff, but you don’t want it to get in the way of actually doing the thing.

MORIAH:
How have you re-imagined the existing standard and adapted principles accordingly, or adapted your principles to the existing standard in the different sectors of the dance world that you have been involved with during your career?

CHRYSA:
As a young dancer I was very interested in embodying forms, styles or techniques. When I began to work with choreographers who were trying to find their own forms, I was implicated in that search. And my understanding of those existing forms became included in the aesthetic we were trying to develop. With Tere that was really clear, our classical backgrounds of ballet and Graham, and in theater and visual art, were implicated in his search for another way of using those forms, and then I began to care less about what those existing forms had been and more about how we could use them or how I could use them to communicate my experience and / or our collective experience of culture, fashion and politics. So, going from adapting myself to existing forms and working very hard at that, I went to saying: No, now these forms are existing in another form in another aesthetic, and they’re being represented differently, and I am experiencing them differently and I am standing up for what they represent in this work. It’s really simplistic but I would say that Tere used ballet and classical culture ironically in his work, whereas I had taken them very, very seriously. Then when I found myself in an ironic relationship to that material, I felt like standing behind that ironic representation of that material - Yeah this is ridiculous, funny or strange, and it does point to something in the culture that is assumed to be correct, but has some faulty logic in it. Another crass example is Marten Spangberg’s Goldberg Variations, Powered by Emotion. So many people were angry with him for what they saw as taking the piss out of Steve Paxton, and Paxton was not. Paxton was pleased. That was a point when Spangberg was really like - “I think this is really beautiful. I love this.” It was a passionate failure to fit into a form. “I can’t do this and everything about my failure to do this in inherent to it.” It’s not just narcissistic - there’s a morbid sweetness in failing something you love.
That’s what I mean, you put yourself in impossible situations, and you make them possible somehow by how you perceive them and yourself in them. I have also had many times when I thought, You know, I am not good enough at this. I cannot do this. I have to train myself to get to do it. And it wasn’t just ballet. With Thomas, there were really a lot of things that were quite beyond me - you know, singing, and all these physical co-ordinations we worked on, spatial perceptions.

MORIAH:
You have expressed that you are interested in the difference between expression. And representation; for you, what is that difference? And how are you investigating it in your performance?

CHRYSA:
That’s also one of those statements that is a little bit of a reaction to certain aspects of conceptual dance work in which representation of ideas became very flat. For instance, you have an idea about semiotics, and you just act it out - this is a word and this is a word… Like Jérôme Bel … Jerome’s early work is really representational a lot of the time. I like those pieces. I don’t think that it’s essentially uninteresting, but in terms of being a dancer, representation is such a fraction of what you do, or a fraction of the experience of doing. I am interested in the other things besides representing. If you express an idea, you are engaging in a chain of events that is a result of your impact with that idea. But if you are representing an idea, you are acting out that idea. You are showing it. It’s like representational art. You are making that shape. You are doing that thing.

MORIAH:
What is the relationship between embodiment and coordination?

CHRYSA:
Embodiment is a word that I started using more recently. Coordination I used. By embodying, you coordinate ideas. It’s again this: there are so many layers of experience in the relationship that you have with ideas, but only by physically embodying them can you coordinate any of them. You can’t just think a thing. You have to actually physicalize it to coordinate it with other experiences or layers of experience.

MORIAH:
How have you sustained yourself creatively in NYC versus Europe?

CHRYSA:
One of the differences between New York and Europe for me was that in Europe my technical studies became part of the process of making pieces. With ZOO we were training ourselves to do the work we were going to perform. It’s a much tighter loop in terms of figuring out how to move. And that meant that the relationship between what I was studying technically and what I was performing was much more direct, whereas in NY it was often more oblique and selected. In NY, I could be working with Tere and studying Klein. Tere had no interest, philosophically no interest, in anatomy. He could care less about how the body fit together. So I had this vat of information that I was filling that was separate from what I was working on in the studio, but I was bringing it there. I was hierarchizing information, and deciding what I would study, and with whom, and who I would socialize with, separate from what I was working on as a performer. It meant that I was very conscious of my choices of how to do what I was doing. Then I might have to select a different route - Tere would say, That doesn’t look right, it’s too anatomical, I don’t want that. Irene expressed almost everything anatomically - she was shockingly clear, and challenging and creative in that language. The interchange of information happened with extreme variety, and in Europe that condensed a lot - maybe it went more into my teaching. The kind of stealing I was doing in NYC from other people was much more various, very light, but very high impact.
At ZOO, I consolidated my focus much more, and I also worked much longer everyday on one thing - eight-hour days on one movement task. It would take us about six months to make a piece. The impact of the other performers in that work was so intense and inescapable. I think it was very good for me - illuminating and humbling. Learning is inevitable in that situation; you’re confronted by your limitations daily, and learning is not always something you get to orchestrate and fiddle with. You’re part of an industry, you’re part of a group, you get the skills or you don’t, and it’s very clear when you don’t. You impact the structure of the piece according to the skills you develop there, in that situation, over those months of process.
When I work with artists who have to work more quickly, like I did in New York, or with Mette Ingvartsen this year - when the group is dominated by less familiar relationships, the choreographer is often working with whatever materials are available to them when they start. This can also be very satisfying and exciting, like making a meal from some one else’s leftovers.

MORIAH:
Do you think you consolidated all those influences into your own methodology or do you think you learned all these tools that you then sift through and use, according to the specific context? How do you adjust your practice according to each practice you are inside of? Do you stay fixed?

CHRYSA:
The demands of the situation change so what gets called on changes. I think I have made the mistake of trying to stick with something that I am interested in that I have learned, when in this particular process or with these people, it’s not really appropriate or it’s not relevant to what they are thinking about, so I shouldn’t bring it in… not try to impose that perceptual range to something that doesn’t need it. I guess there are maybe some skills that you have to exercise in order to keep them active, but there are other skills that become more innate and emerge when they are needed. I hadn’t worked with Tere for about ten years when I made this piece with Jonathan, but I immediately recognized the rhythmic skills that I needed as something that I had learned with Tere… Also, a lot of training has to do with preventing injury and working successfully physically. Some of those patterns that I learned with Klein have been really effective for me in preventing injury, using the hamstrings instead of the quads. It functions. Barbara made this clear to me: “I do not want you to analyze all this while you dance. There is an effect on your body, and you use that when you dance.”
I end up compartmentalizing information partly because of teaching. I am aware of the source of information that I have. I think there are so many stimuli in the classroom that I am confronted with whether or not to use this or that piece of information. Dancing for people is so hard that you basically just go in and you try to do whatever you can to make the thing work, and the skills come up that are useful. If you hold onto a way of working too hard, it will probably fuck the piece up.
Something that is really important to me and has become more evident to me is that working as a dancer is about making pieces and about performing. It’s not about structuring an identity, a career, or even learning - those are things that happen, maybe. Working on pieces and making a piece as good as it possibly can be has a lot of compromise in it, and you have to use a lot of intelligence, sensitivity and intuition. You have to empathize with aesthetics and ideas that might not be your own. I think that that leap of embodied intuition towards something that maybe you did not choose is a really particular skill and appetite that dancers have. It’s very exciting to do that when you feel it working - you are throwing yourself into something and suddenly it starts to take shape, and you have put your whole self into it and it’s making a structure happen around you, and someone is selecting, putting one thing after another, and you feel the logic of it affecting your own intuition towards what you have leapt into doing with that person or group of people.
I think that’s sometimes missing in the discussion of being a dancer: how much empathy it takes towards a group and a choreographic intention. Maybe more traditionally it used to be thought of that way, but now I think people often think, “What am I doing here? What am I getting out of this situation? What am I learning from it? What can I carry onto another situation? What am I developing in myself?” But actually, making a piece may sidetrack you completely from what you thought you were building up as an individual artist. You are in this piece and suddenly it’s calling on all these skills that you are really surprised by or that you did not expect to be employing. When you can follow through on what a situation needs, it can be a really rich experience that can be quite tangential and then open up other directions, but sometimes it also means putting on hold what you think you want.

MORIAH:
Do you think this practice of empathy that you spoke of… Do you think that is the consequence of being inside of some sort of group situation, or form? Or you are trying to help something along? Do you think empathy is different from perception?

CHRYSA:
No. Empathy is perception – a clump of perceptions you use all at once. I think empathy allows you to perceive things that maybe you wouldn’t arrive at as quickly. You can make an intuitive leap towards an alliance with an affection for a thought that you might not get to by breaking it down and analyzing it. Maybe empathy is a jumpstart. If you need to just click into something, it’s a useful tool. I really think empathy is a skill and a tool and you figure out when to use it. With working in groups on choreography, it’s okay to project. With teaching, you have to be more respectful of the distance between you and your students. If I mistake the Chinese calendar for ballet but it produces the same thing, it’s okay. But if I mistake someone’s scoliosis for a movement habit, it has more consequence, it’s more destructive. Or even if I mistake someone’s shyness for arrogance…

MORIAH:
Lets talk about CYNICISM and SINCERITY in the world in general, and / or dance specifically. These days, is cynicism just a fact as opposed to a strategy?

CHRYSA:
Cynicism is really a pessimistic POV. And I am not sure that’s the cream of the thinking that’s going on. But I think there is a reaction against irony that I hear in pop music, and I hear it in how people talk. I like that. I have a desire for sincerity, embodied experience. Also, it is a reaction against analytical thought, which is funny because I do spend a lot of time articulating and analyzing things. But I also feel that analysis overshadows other qualities of thought that are more functional in terms of physicality, performance and communication. At some point I wrote this sentence down: “I have learned these techniques to avoid embodiment and I am dissatisfied by that process.” This is a feeling that I have. It’s not all of my feeling. I get frustrated with my capacity to distance myself from what I am doing. I feel that less lately.
So, I think, about the question of cynicism or irony: in the 80s there was a lot of irony. We really used that as a way to critique what was happening culturally. After the Bush years, it’s just not ironic anymore. It’s just fucked. It’s not weird; it’s really bad. Being able to recognize that something is really fucked up changes your responsibility, what you are capable of responding to. And your responsibility becomes more to do with what you really, really want to do, to do what you really believe in - to really localize yourself.