Liz Sargent in "Botanica." Photo by Paula Court

“For years, some of my favorite French surrealist pornography was Bataille’s Blue of Noon and Louis Aragon’s Irene’s Cunt,” Jim Findlay explained about halfway through our interview. For the first thirty-some minutes, we’d been discussing plants, some 200 of which surrounded us as we sat in the middle of the set for Botanica, Findlay’s new show (Jan 28 – Feb. 25; tickets $10-$30), giving the big gallery space at 3LD Arts the earthy, loamy smell of a warm greenhouse. Asking what else we needed to discuss in terms of understanding the show, Findlay offered that we had yet to talk about French surrealist porn, at which the conversation changed hue from green to blue.

“So I spent some time researching them, because I had wanted to do something that had sex as a major part of it,” he continued. “They’re both books written by a male, with a first-person narrator, about an amoral woman in their past who they’re still obsessed with, and can’t get over, and who’s unavailable. The amoral love of their life kind of thing. Louis Aragon’s Irene’s Cunt is basically 150 pages of he can’t get this woman’s cunt out of his mind,” he explained almost apologetically. “About trying to figure out how to stop thinking about Irene’s cunt. And Blue of Noon is more sort of this story about this guy’s relationship with a woman who’s falling apart at the seams, she’s a drunk and completely amoral. Kind of destroying the world with her sexuality. Just not going to live by the world’s rules. And I discovered that the books are written about–the woman Aragon was obsessed with and the woman Bataille was obsessed with–were the same real world woman. A woman named Colette Peignot, who wrote under the pen name–and was part of the Surrealist movement–’Laure.’”

Word has been going around about Botanica for a while now, spurred mainly by positive feedback when a selection of the work was shown a year ago at APAP, while Findlay and his collaborators were in residence at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, where the show was envisioned as a twelve-hour long installation performance (“I’ve been calling presenters, telling them, ‘I was just kidding, it’s only 90 minutes long!’” Findlay joked.) Add to that early experiments starting two years ago, as well as a well-received showing at Prelude last year, and it’s a rather buzzed about show–for good reason. The set alone is an incredible piece of design work (by Peter Ksander). The audience is seated at the back of the space, facing towards the front windows of 3LD; downstage-right a small but completely functional greenhouse angles up and off; center-left is a large scientific research station, all brushed steel and clear plexiglass, that wouldn’t look out of place as a setting in CSI; upstage, right in front of the windows, is a rather anodyne living area. Plants are everywhere–in the greenhouse, throughout the living area, in media res on the experiment table. The entire stage-left wall is divided into small cells from which the tendrils of seedlings coil up toward the light or down toward the floor.

Welcome to the biodome in which Botanica takes place.

None of this should seem all that surprising to those familiar with Findlay’s work. A long-time designer with the Wooster Group and a co-founder of Collapsable Giraffe, Findlay is an artist with a well-established reputation. Botanica marks a new phase in his career–an opportunity to define his artistic voice as the primary generator of the work, outside a more collaborative environment.

But for all that about French Surrealist porn, the original inspiration that led to Botanica was far less esoteric and literary.

“It was about two-and-a-half years ago, and I was in Lyon, France working on a show with Ralph Lemon, and I had a dream about Liz Sargent,” he explained, “who’s a woman I’ve been friends with and is a choreographer and installation artist, who used to be a dancer and hadn’t really been performing in New York. But I’d always had this idea that she’d be great onstage. But in this dream…” he paused. “I just had this dream where I saw her in this room that was just filled with plants. I saw her in this environment that was just wall-to-wall plants. The floor was plants and the ceiling was plants. And I just knew immediately that there was a performance in there.”

Findlay’s process was slow and iterative. Along with Sargent, he knew he wanted to work with Ilan Bachrach and Chet Mazur. The four began meeting for exploratory sessions at the Collapsable Hole, the converted garage-space Findlay shares with Radiohole in Brooklyn. One of the ideas that came to inform the piece was the pseudo-science theory of “plant consciousness.” Although Findlay’s research ultimately led to engagement with noted plant experts at such places as the New York Botanical Garden, an early inspiration was the 1970s pop-psychology book The Secret Life of Plants. Partly based in hard science, the work also relied heavily on investigations by the likes of Cleve Backster, a polygraph expert (“If you do any research into it, you sort of discover that anyone who calls himself a polygraph expert is lying,” Findlay wryly pointed out of the oft discredited technique) who experimented with lie detectors on plants in the 1960s.

Based on those initial sessions, they began developing ideas for exploratory improvisations and installations to be presented in mixed-bills, like Avant-Garde-Arama, that would give them to chance to explore human-plant interaction. But fundamentally, it was still based on the image from Findlay’s dream, with the content emerging from the explorations.

“The first thing we did was sort of like an installation improv version at a, Ugly Duckling party at Invisible Dog. And right away, somehow, Chet started having sex with plants,” he explained. “I just wanted Chet in a room with three plants. And at the time I was trying to embed speakers in the plants to make the plants talk. I was always trying to make the plants talk. How to interface with these plants with technology that would bring them alive in a theatrical way. And at that time I had three other performers on remote microphones in the space, so they were forty, fifty feet away, couldn’t see him, but each of them was physically linked to speakers in the plants. So they did a forty-minute improv where the plants competed for his attention. You know, ‘I’m thirsty, I need water,’ so he’d water one. ‘No I’M thirsty, don’t water that one, water me!’ And that kind of somehow, magically led to, you know…” he trailed off with a wave of the hand, as though the result was obvious.

“You put a few performers and microphone there, and someone’s going to start fucking.”

With eroticism brought into the mix, the show began to take shape. The literary menage-a-trois between Aragon, Bataille, and Peignot served as the model for how the characters in the piece interact: two scientists and a caretaker/gardner, living in a biodome and experimenting on plant cosciousness, with a sort of ephemeral female character metamorphosing between human and plant object-of-desire. Findlay admitted that such a narrative-centric piece was new territory for him, but he’d come to embrace it as part of his personal artistic exploration. Although mainly known as a designer, he passed off the job to Ksander, one of the few people whose work we knew well enough to feel comfortable stepping back and letting him handle it without being tempted to meddle.

Instead, Findlay concentrated on working with the performers to develop further ways of using technology to interact with plants. Sonically, the piece is scored with live sound by inserting contact-microphones into plants to be experimented on. “You hear the plant hearing them,” is how Findlay put it. As the performers touch, romance, and torture plants, the audience experiences the sound conducted through the plant’s living material, mixed through a sound-system that combines it with samples of actual recorded plant sounds (using technology well outside a performance’s budget), with the result being an interplay of actual live and recorded plant sounds. It’s particularly arresting to hear the result of tasing one with a consumer-strength electric taser. Findlay and assistant director Maurina Lioce, who was tending to the plants while we talked, were both laughing at their inability to convince audiences during work-in-progress showings that it wasn’t faked. When the performer tases a plant, the audience is, in fact, hearing that plant being tased.

Findlay’s engagement with the show, I suspect, is owed as much to such challenges and the themes the show took on as a transformed into a dark comedy: not only of finding a performance vocabulary for seemingly inanimate objects like plants, but also for the sheer challenge of working with them at all.

“Over the course of this I’ve gone from knowing nothing to being scarily into plants,” he told me. “There’s over 200 plants in here, and at least the hundred that are potted–not the seedlings on the wall–the hundred that are potted I know them all. I know their personalities to a certain extent.”

At the beginning of the processs, “We would kill plants at an amazing rate,” he explained. An important influence in a somewhat ironic fashion was Rob Besserer. Best known to the artistic community as a dancer and performer who’s worked with everyone from Baryshnikov to Meredith Monk, Besserer’s side job is as a plant arrangement designer, a specialty that likely has a more specific name than I’m aware of. (“He calls himself a ‘greensman’ or something like that,” Findlay said.) Besserer helped Findlay and the others understand how to work with–and keep alive–the variety of plants featured in the show, which was a long and tricky process, as they discovered with the sail plants he brought them.

“Some people call them ‘peace lillies’ but I call them ‘sail plants’ because ‘peace lilly’ is so…” he trailed off. “We got them, Rob brought in a bunch of them, and said, ‘Here, try these.’ And we had them for like a week and they were dying, the stems were lying flat over the edge of the thing, Maurina’s calling Rob, saying, ‘Rob, we don’t know what we’re doing, these plants are dying, we’re killing them, what do we do?’ And he’s just like, ‘Put them in the shower.’ Just put them in the shower for like fifteen minutes running and then do the same thing again tomorrow. So we did it for a couple days, and they still looked like the sickest–”

“We didn’t put them in their for fifteen minutes,” Lioce said from across the stage. “I’d put them in there and just leave it running while we rehearsed.”

“Yeah!” Findlay agreed. “We didn’t water them for fifteen minutes, we just left them in there for, like, hours.”

“Rob said they need more water,” Lioce explainded. “He said, ‘There’s no way you can give them too much water,’ so I was like, ‘Well, here’s a shower.’ It worked, though.”

“I mean, they were just flat,” Findlay continued. “Then one day, we came in and they were all…they went from all their leaves drooping over the edge of the thing, literally nothing standing up, and then we came in one day after showering them and they were back up. That was the moment I was like, ‘Holy shit, we did it! We rescued these plants!’” He paused, chuckling. “But yeah, that was the moment I was like, yeah. My little Grinch heart grew one plant size that day.”

Popularity: 3% [?]

A few weeks ago I had a conversation with Brad Learmonth, Director of Programming at Harlem Stage, to talk about their upcoming season and get a peek into the future.

Can you tell us a little bit about how you got to Harlem Stage and what you do?

Well, it’s a long story, but I’ll be here twenty-four years in February. It’s kind of a ground-up story for me. I started as an assistant to what was the executive producer at the time and within three years became Director of Education. For a decade I grew that initiative while working on other programming with the Director of Programming. I eventually became the Assistant Director of Programming and in 1998 became Director of Programming. There was a big transition – Patricia Cruz came on as Executive Director and Laura Greer, my predecessor, left that year.

Essentially what I do is oversee all of the programming of the institution. So I do the long-term planning, creation, development and implementation of programs, including education. Now, though, my program and arts education manager, Simone Eccleston, has really taken over the direction of the education program, much as I did in the 90′s. She’s really brought it back up to a good level and increased its growth.

Twenty-four years is a long time, you must have seen a lot of change. What is Harlem Stage doing now?

Well, it’s a very exciting time for us. We had a bit of an economic challenge when we moved over to the Gatehouse in 2006 after a two-year, $26 million renovation of our building, the Harlem Stage Gatehouse. As happens with a lot of organizations when they undertake something that big, we stepped out a little too far on our programming and had to pull back a bit. So we went through this turnaround and under Pat Cruz’s leadership it was a huge success. We are now in a really good place, especially given the situation in the economy. We’ve been doing extremely well for the past couple of years, not just surviving but even, I would say, in some ways thriving notwithstanding the challenges that everyone is facing, the tremendous challenges in fundraising We’ve launched a new series that has had huge success that targets young people and brought other programs back into their full realization – the film program, the Waterworks program, which is our signature commissioning initiative.

And we’re about to go into our 30^th Anniversary season! We incorporated as an institution in 1982/1983, the paperwork was filed in 1982 and it was signed, sealed and delivered in 1983. So we’re going to have kind of a soft launch of our 30^th anniversary season starting in January 2012 and go into a hard launch when we have our 30^th anniversary gala on May 21^st,. Starting in September 2012 we’ll go into a full campaign of 30^th anniversary programming which will focus on the institution, highlighted by three world premieres from our Waterworks program, along with quite a number of other significant presentations and projects.

We’re also embarking on an ambitious five-year plan. For the last year we’ve really been looking at our programming, institution and mission and honing our vision so we can really distinguish ourselves in what has become, locally – and I mean immediately locally – a very healthily competitive field in Harlem.

Where we were sort of the reigning presenting institution in Harlem for decades, there is now a real scene being created now in Harlem, again; one that’s bringing people back in a way that hasn’t happened in a long time. Harlem’s always been a vibrant community, but it tends to be under-represented in the media. While it has never lost its vibrancy, it is definitely coming back in a big way. So as we look at the immediate landscape, and the national and international landscape as well, we’re looking at ourselves as an institution and really trying to hone in on what really distinguishes us.

We’ve been working to identify what we’re going to focus on more fully as we define the future of the Harlem Stage.

What are the implications of that in terms of programming?

Well one of the ideas that we’re working with, something that we’ve identified as central to what we do, is the notion of “Dig Deeper.”

Harlem Stage presents programming that is, by its nature, investigating the deepest part of the creative process, the most expansive and innovative thinking that artists do. We also investigate issues that resonate for people in the culture today – particularly artists and people of color, because that’s what our mission represents. All of the artists we work with are in some way or another activists both in their communities, through their art and in the world. Often they’re addressing very challenging and difficult issues in their work.

So we support the creation of work that takes a deeper look, that is both socially and artistically bold and adventurous. At the same time the artists are doing it in a way that not only transmits great information but also offers the possibility of digging deeper and, dare I say, entertains you or transforms you, the way art should.

So we’re using that idea of Dig Deeper to look at how we can broaden our offerings and our activities All of our humanities components are going to be looked at more closely and marketed more visibly. They’ve always existed but sometimes it seems like it’s the best kept secret. So we’re going to be working on really letting people know what we do and giving them a way in.

You said this spring is a “soft launch” of the 30^th Anniversary. What does that mean?

Well, what you’re going to see starting in the spring is programming that reflects the “Dig Deeper” idea that came out of the focused thinking that is part of our strategic planning process, and as we move forward that’s going to get even sharper and sharper.

We begin the season with – and we actually end the season – with two vocalists who are extraordinary innovators in their field. One is Jose James who opens the season for two nights and four sets on February 10^th and 11^th.

Its kind of a pre-Valentine’s thing if you wanna look at it that way because he’s very smooth and sexy and he sings a lot about that kind of thing. But he’s an extraordinary artist with an exceptional voice and incredible vocal and stylistic range. He spans the worlds of hip-hop and soul and is very much in the jazz world as well. He’s worked with great jazz people like McCoy Tyner – he’s got several albums under his belt and with us he’s going to be doing all new material from his upcoming album. Jose’s an exceptional artist that we’ve recently discovered and we’re very excited to be presenting him.

At the end of the season in June we’re going to be presenting an artist we’ve worked with for over a decade: Tamar-kali. She comes more from the Afro-Punk movement but is also an extraordinary composer and singer who tackles everything from Nina Simone to jazz standards. We’re going to be presenting a program called Voices, which over the course of three nights will feature the three ensembles that represent different strains of her creativity. One of evenings will feature an acoustic string ensemble, then she has another project called the Pseudo-Acoustic Sirens and finally she has a group called 5ive Piece, which is a pretty hard-hitting blow-the-roof off rock band. So we’re going to be doing all three of those, for the first time for her, in one program. We’ve worked with her many times over the years. Exceptional artist.

I’m just curious – how did Tamar-kali get her name? Does she have an Indian background?

No she is African-American, I think she might be from Brooklyn but her family is largely from the Gullah community off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia. Tamar-kali is her created name. It has a lot of various meanings. Tamar was a very powerful female figure in the Old Testament and Kali, of course, is the creator-destroyer deity of Hindu mythology. There’s a lot of stuff going on in that name and there’s a lot going on in that artist, that person. She’s a phenomenon.

Harlem Stage has a penchant for identifying artists who, like Sekou [Sundiata], we really stick with over the years. Artists who we feel are exceptional voices with exceptional vision in their particular craft and in the field in general. We try to develop a relationship with them that nurtures them and gives them visibility while celebrating what we try to do as an institution. Tamar-kali is one of those people that we’ve really stuck with for over a decade now and we’re really trying to sit down with her to figure out what’s next. “What have you got up your sleeve that we can help you move into the world?” Same with Vijay Iyer. Jason Moran is someone we’ve worked with for over a decade, we gave him his first platform as a band leader and he’s been a great friend to Harlem Stage every since, creating great things. Of course Sekou was probably the exemplar of that relationship with us over a twenty year period, and there are others. We really try to nurture artists that gives them a platform to discover who they are or further that discovery and we just join in with them.

Great. Sorry for the digression! So back to the season – after you open with Jose James, what’s next?

Following Jose James we’re doing a four-part program, called “A Tribe Called Quest: Innovations and Legacies – A Movement in Four Parts”. That was created by Simone, our program manager, and it’s going to be really looking deeply at A Tribe Called Quest’s contribution to and influence on the whole hip-hop movement of the last decade, plus. Tribe not only created incredible. [positive, music in the genre of hip-hop, but they were really innovators in terms of blending it with jazz. They just took the genre and created a new language for the music that has been hugely influential.

That will kick off with a panel discussion called “Footprints: A Discussion on the Innovation and Impact of A Tribe Called Quest”. The next night will feature a Tribe Called Quest Tribute from the Revive The Live Big Band headed by the trumpeter Igmar Thomas with special guests. That will be followed, on the same night, by an after-party called “SPIT: Speaking In Tongues”. DJ Cosi will be playing the music of, and inspired, by the Native Tongues Collective which was comprised of the groups De La Soul, The Jungle Brothers, A Tribe Called Quest, Leaders of the New School, Black Sheep, as well as individual artists Monie Love and Queen Latifah. The final night will be a concert called “Beats, Rhymes and Beyond” featuring The J. Dilla Ensemble. J-Dilla was a producer and DJ and musician that died very young of lupus but was instrumental in moving the Tribe legacy forward. The J. Dilla Ensemble is an ensemble out of Berklee College of Music in Boston that celebrates his music.

For us this is not only a celebration of great music but it also helps us advance the idea of contextualizing these younger generations of musicians not just as songwriters or DJs but as composers. People are re-thinking what classical music is – understanding that it is not just Western European-based music but that there are classical musics around the world which are different for everybody. That’s something we’re looking at in various ways – we’re working with the Cuban composer Tania Leon and Symphony Space on their annual February series called Composers Now and Jose James fits into that as well.

But in that context the Tribe Called Quest program really represents a much deeper look at a particular movement, elevating the idea of looking at hip-hop and its innovations in a way that people like myself who aren’t really of the hip-hop generation but appreciate it – to have a greater understanding and appreciation of the work. Also we could offer a platform for Simone, whose a younger programmer, to do her thing and present it to audiences – which is important to what we do as organization.

Then in March we’ll start our monthly film series that we do with our primary partner, Black Documentary Collective, and a new partner, Media That Matters. They bring in great short films that get paired with these great documentaries.

At the end of March we’ll be presenting the Afro-Peruvian singer Eva Ayllon across the street at Aaron Davis Hall. She’s been in the business for over 40 years, celebrating Afro-Peruvian music. She’s an amazing vocalist and it’s a free concert – so that’s very exciting. We’ll be presenting that with our long-time partner, for twenty-five years, the Carnegie Hall Neighborhood Concert program

In April we have our annual dance series, E-Moves which is in its thirteenth season of showcasing emerging and evolving choreographers. We’ll have eight emerging choreographers who are, in many cases, presenting their very first works some of which have been supported by grants from our Fund For New Work grant program.

The E-Moves program has grown into kind of a university, that’s how we think of it. We audition artists and then we set them up with a mentor that they work with for a period of six to eight months while they create their works. They have open rehearsals where they come into Harlem Stage and present the works-in-progress with their mentors and we give them feedback and then they go on to present the full work in E-moves.

The evolving choreographers that we’re working with this year are an Indian-American choreographer from L.A. named Sheetal Ghandi and Souleymane Badolo who is from Burkina-Faso, and they’re both presenting new works. We’re very excited about that because it brings more of an international dialogue to the series.

Then in May we really concentrate on our jazz programming which includes the second annual Harlem Jazz Shrines Festival which we do in consortium with The Apollo and JazzMobile. There are between 30 and 40 events over a week’s period, they’re all $10 and the three organizations work together to celebrate the Jazz Shrines of the last 100 years. We identify the places in Harlem that were seminal in creating or providing a platform for creating the music we know as jazz.

Each of the organizations takes three or more of the shrines and celebrates them either literally, because they still exist, like the Lenox Lounge, or we recreate some idea of the shrine such as the Savoy Ballroom, and we bring in artists that pay tribute to it, though not necessarily literally, because the idea of the program is both to look back and move forward.

This year we’re celebrating Cecil Taylor with three pianists: Vijay Iyer, Amina Claudine Myers and Craig Taborn. We are also bringing Cecil in the week after the festival to perform himself, which will be an amazing experience.

We’re bringing in The Mosaic Project by Terri Lyne Carrington which is a project celebrating women in Jazz – women in music, really. She created this project a couple of years ago and I think they’re up for a Grammy this year. That will feature Terry Lyne, Nona Hendryx, Lizz Wright and a host of other artists performing with them. After that we’re going to be presenting a “Tribute to Club Havana San Juan” with The Havana San Juan Orchestra led by Louis Bauzo, then our gala is on the 21^st and we end with Tamar-kali. So we’re bookending the season, as it happens, not really by design, with these two amazing vocalists.

The program is a great mix of disciplines and has a strong intergenerational component. How is that going to play out in the humanities programs?

Well, the Tribe Called Quest program starts with a panel that will include at least one member of the original Tribe and other people that are important to the movement. The reason I’m not telling you them yet is that they’re still being confirmed and Simone is really working on that project, so I’m going to give her all the credit on that one. But that will be really looking at and understanding what Tribe’s impact was, which is why the panel is called “Footprints”. These are the tracks that these artists laid down that other people have since followed. And then the other three movements then not only celebrate their music but the people that followed them directly – Native Tongues, J.Dilla Ensemble.

With Jose James we’re trying to formulate a humanities program that is specific to him. What we try to do is work with the artists to see what’s going to resonate for them and what’s going to get their voice heard in the best possible way.

We’re going to have a much more interactive component on our website and for some of these artists the Dig Deeper aspect may only be there, but for everybody there’ll be something there. You’ll always have the opportunity to dig deeper by going to our website and seeing film clips or audio clips or reading or hearing interviews, and exploring a variety of ideas.

With our E-moves program we have discussions with the artists and the mentors that will follow two of the programs. And we’re going to be showing films this year that will highlight some of the programming that we’re doing. One of the films we’ll be showing is the 2007 film Movement (R)evolution Africa which talks about contemporary African choreographers and features Souleymane Badolo. And we’re showing a new film by David Rousseve, a short film called Two Seconds After Laughter which was filmed in Java. It doesn’t directly relate to Sheetal’s work but David Rousseve is Sheetal’s mentor and there’s some connection to the movement because of the Indian connection in Indonesia, so we’ll find a way in there. But it does give another look at a more international scope of dance and how its being interpreted from the traditional into the contemporary.

With the Harlem Jazz Shrines Festival there will be whole week of humanities components around that. We work very closely with the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University and they are a collaborating partner in the festival. They will be creating a series of humanities events on their own and we’re going to do symposia. We’re talking about possibly doing symposia at Columbia around Cecil Taylor and have scholars present papers that will then get published. We’re really trying to celebrate Cecil Taylor in a way that he really has not been celebrated and really deserves.

As part of celebrating Cecil we will we have the three pianists in a wonderful set-up, where we’re going to have two pianos. Each of the pianists is going to do a solo and then they’re going to do duets with each other in combinations. So some of the humanities may be artist talks where we discuss not only Cecil’s influence on them but also on the music itself. He’s one of the geniuses of the last century so he needs to be recognized.

And every film presentation is followed by a discussion with the filmmakers and a wine and cheese reception. We’re very big on receptions, because we believe that breaking bread with artists and audiences is a wonderful way to complete the experience. It also gives people an opportunity to have a little bit of one-on-one, not only with each other, but with the artists.

I was going to ask about that. It seems that you do have a lot of opportunities for people to engage in other ways beyond just being an audience member.

It’s really about building a family for Harlem Stage. We tend to look at it more in terms of family and friends – but it all amounts to community. For us it really is about creating this living organism that is more than just: “We’re the presenters and you’re the audience and you buy a ticket and come see the work and isn’t that lovely.: It’s a much more in-depth experience. And its not just about “here’s a great lecture” either – its really about rubbing elbows with people and breaking bread, and having a reception is certainly a way to always do that. We also have great dance parties – The Uptown Nights series – and we have a lot of events that begin and end with a DJ set: there’s a bar, there’s food and it’s cabaret style seating. We try to create an atmosphere, where appropriate, that’s not just a proscenium look at art.

With the Cecil tribute we’re going to put a platform in the middle of the space and we’re going to surround it with seats, probably cabaret style seating, and serve wine and some food (that doesn’t make noise!) and really celebrate this evening and celebrate this artist. We want to give people an opportunity before and after the show to mingle with themselves and mingle with the artists. That will also provide a way into the context and the content of the work whether its that night or later, online.

Another project we’re launching is the Harlem Stage Reading Circle which is more than a book club, because a lot of the works we present are inspired by literature or historical material. So we’ll be reading in groups of people and then we’ll have a potluck dinner or some kind of gathering – always with food – to explore the content and context of the work.

For instance we’re working on developing an opera called Makandal by Carl Hancock Rux that was originally inspired by Cuban author Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World. So we’ll offer an opportunity for people to read the book and then gather – it could be a dozen people, just a half-dozen people – twith Carl and other artists connected with the work in question. We’ll discuss the book, discuss the work, discuss the content and the context of it as it relates to the work that’s been created or is being created along with how it resonates with the world today.

We’re also developing a project with with Vijay Iyer and Mike Ladd that looks at veterans of color in conflicts. We’ll be looking at what it means to be a veteran of color in this day and age in the United States military. What does it mean to go over to another country, be shooting at people of color and then come home to the challenges of being a person of color here.

These are all things that are resonating in the world as we speak, and that move through the art that we’re creating. Makandal deals with freedom, immigration, revolution – all these things that couldn’t be more appropriate or poignant to be creating a major work now that deals with those issues.

So we’re interested in finding ways to engage those people who want to be engaged in a deeper conversation and discover how that can be a further transformative experience beyond just coming to the show. The performance can be an extraordinary experience in and of itself – but how do we take it deeper and offer something to people that choose to take that journey, encourage those people that are on the fence and drag the rest…

These sound like big projects. Are these Waterworks commissions?

Yes, Makandal and Vijay Iyer’s project Holding It Down – The Veteran’s Dream Project are Waterworks commissions. The 30^th Anniversary season will start in September 2012 with Holding It Down, which has been in development for several years now. It is being created by Vijay Iyer and Mike Ladd with Maurice Decaul who is a veteran poet. Patricia McGregor is directing and it has a wonderful ensemble including Guillermo Brown, Pamela Z. and Kassa Overall.

Then we’ll close the year and the 30^th anniversary season with the world premiere of Makandal which we’re also producing, which is somewhat new for us. We produced one other project over ten years ago that was kind of a “trial by fire” experience. We have ventured into that land again a little by default – and that’s a really long story I won’t go into – but Makandal has been in the works for over four years. It was written and conceived by Carl and conceived of by Carl. It is composed by Yosvany Terry, the Cuban composer and saxophonist with the visual design is by Edouard Duval Carrie who is a celebrated Haitian-American artist. And now its being directed by Lars Jan, who is this kind of wunderkind out of CalArts and we’re going fully into the next phase of development beginning in January.

So these works – Holding it Down and Makandal in particular – will be in full development stages through the spring and in Makandal‘s case through next year.

And once again we’ll be creating “Dig Deeper” kinds of events so people are aware of these projects as they’re in development. While there will be some of the traditional show-and-tell work-in-progress showings or open rehearsals, we really want to use the Reading Circle to build awareness and engagement with the work. Its especially appropriate to Holding it Down in which they’ve taken the dreams of veterans and woven the poetry of veterans into an evening of music, text and video design – it’s a really powerful piece. So we’ll be looking at veteran poetry and other relevant works.

Makandal deals with Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Cuba in contemporary, historical and mythical settings. So for that the Reading Circle might engage with any number of works that inform the process – the writing of Alejo Carpentier, Isabel Allende’s recent book Island Beneath the Sea, the works of Maya Deren which also includes film. All these things are sort of ripe for the picking for a reading circle that looks at the history of Haiti, its revolution and the consequences of that revolution. It provided and still provides a lot of inspiration to the world. And of course there’s the complicated relationship between Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Cuba – not to mention the rest of the world – and how those intertwined histories inform those islands and those cultures – and how they’ve informed our culture. You know when the Haitian revolution happened a lot of those slaves came to New Orleans and that’s one of the reasons you have vodun in New Orleans. And how the music came from Cuba to New York. I mean, there are so many connections and so much information that we just don’t know – we certainly don’t know the details. We know broad swipes of information if we’re into the music or the culture, but there’s so much detail there, so much complexity. And its really rich material.

So we want to find ways to investigate all that information because Carl certainly does, if you know his writing. He’s a brilliant writer with a wealth of knowledge and in that libretto is buried a treasure of historical and mythological information. Unpacking that a little bit is not only fun but allows you to enjoy the piece even more.

What’s the history of Waterworks?

Waterworks was created as the signature commissioning program for Harlem Stage when we re-branded the institution and moved over to The Gatehouse in 2006. We had previously been Aaron Davis Hall, Inc. – that still is our legal name – but now we’re Harlem Stage. Waterworks looks at master artists who are really exemplary in the field, giving them larger commissions and extended development periods to create new work that has artistic merit but also looks at issues of social justice, arts and activism. Four works were created to open the building, including one by Sekou – 51^st Dream State, Roger Guenveur Smith, Tania Leon and Bill T. Jones were the other three artists that created work. And its gone on to be our most significant commissioning program.

I remember coming up to meet you when Bill T. was loading in. I remember a lot of red drapes.

That was the piece he created for Waterworks and it was created specifically for the Gatehouse. He was very inspired by the space. He saw the space when it was completely gutted and empty four stories down. It was magnificent. We’re going to be celebrating that renovation more as we move forward. He created Chapel/Chapter for the space and he completely wrapped the inside in red drapery and it was all done in the round. It was a great piece.

The Gatehouse is a historic landmark building that was part of the aqueduct system of New York State in the 1800′s. It literally fed the first clean drinking water to New York City in the 1890′s. It was the gatehouse where the water was gated as it flowed down from Croton Aqueduct. So we work with that water imagery/metaphor a lot and it definitely feeds the institution in many ways. Not the least of which is…. Well, you know, if you believe in such things, there’s a real kind of spiritual connection when you come into the Gatehouse building. A lot of artists feel that. They feel very – they feel a real energy in there that’s powerful to them and allows them to embrace their creativity. So a number of works have been created for it.

What are the other commissioning programs beyond Waterworks?

Commissioning is something that is really significant to what we do, and from what I’ve gathered in the field we seem to be one of the few organizations who are trying to hang on to the idea of being major commissioners.

We also have a commissioning program called the Fund For New Work, that gives emerging artists their very first commissions and opportunities to develop new work. And we’re looking more deeply at giving mid-career or evolving artists more support. That’s an area where we haven’t had funding. We’ve had funding for emerging from the Jerome Foundation and for the Waterworks program primarily from Time-Warner but also other organizations like Nathan Cummings, but the evolving part has been elusive. We’re going to be more aggressively looking at that because that’s a huge bunch of artists that need support.

One examples of that is we’re commissioning Kyle Abraham for his new work Boys In The Hood which will have its premiere at Harlem Stage next November. He’s an artist we gave his first emerging artist grants to, and we’ve been working with him ever since and he’s come up to be a really celebrated choreographer. We’re going to be giving him his own week of presentation in November. He’s an amazing young artist who’s really grown a lot and I really love working with him, he’s a great spirit.

So Waterworks is our major, signature commissioning program but commissioning overall is a big thing for us. We’ve actually created a Commissioning Circle which is another way of allowing individuals to support work – you can become a commissioner of a work or a co-commissioner of a work at different levels. So we’re giving people an opportunity to invest in work in multiple ways, including financially.

That’s an interesting idea – letting donors target their donations to a specific project.

Well, it’s a way of offering people a form of targeted giving that may resonate more for them. And they have a personal investment in the creation of a work that gives them access to to the creative process in a way that not everyone will have – special meetings with artists, and things like that.

But moving commissioning front-and-center seems pretty innovative, or at least it sends a message about the organization.

A lot of organizations have very creative ways of parsing out ways of donating. You know. you can buy a year’s worth of toe shoes for this much money. A lot of dance companies have been innovative in that way – but this is specifically toward commissioning, and really letting people know what that means and what’s involved in bringing a work from concept to presentation.

We want to get supporters involved in the process in a way that works not only for them, but for the artist. It works very differently for each artist: their process is different, their comfort level at being exposed while they’re in the creative process is different. And there’s a dialogue that goes on there. Some artists become more comfortable and find ways that really inform the work for them. You know, they discover that being a little more vulnerable or open in the creative process can be a win-win. So it’s a wonderful opportunity for audiences and it opens up the dialogue for artists to find new ways to connect through their art.

One of the things we’re really looking at as we move forward is the fact that not enough people – especially people that are, in theory, really close to us either geographically or in the arts field – really know the breadth and scope of what we do. So we’re looking to find ways to make ourselves more visible and to let people really know what’s going on at Harlem Stage. And we’re really going to be looking at that as we move into the 30^th anniversary and the future. We’re doing a lot of great work and we want people to know about it and be a part of it.

Popularity: 2% [?]

World of Wires, From L to R: Laine Rettmer, Tanya Selvaratnam, Jon Morris, Sarita Choudhury, Jay Scheib, Mikeah Ernest Jennings. Photo Courtesy of Jay Scheib

Capping the trilogy Simulated Cities/Simulated Systems, World of Wires is Jay Scheib‘s adaptation of filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Welt am Draht, opening Friday at The Kitchen. Catching Scheib on the phone during his final week of rehearsals, he talked with me about science fiction, simulations and the new work.

World of Wires is your third production in the trilogy Simulated Cities/Simulated Systems created in residence at MIT. What’s it like making work there and what has the environment offered to your process?

Six or seven years ago I asked a group of students what they expected to be doing in 10 years and one student said she’d probably be the first woman on Mars. That was the first I knew there was a really serious Mars program out there in the world. Then a month later I had a conversation with Joe Gavin, the guy who directed the moon lander. He was the lunar lander brain. He said he wouldn’t go to Mars unless it’s a one-way trip. He didn’t want to be involved in a mission to Mars to go there and bring back rocks. The only mission he’d do is to first build a habitat, and then six months later send people, and then after that send supplies and more people and actually have a station on Martian surface. This is the famous one-way mission model, which was essentially adopted and there’s an entire community of people who are engaged in that.

So that’s the seed that started the human simulation trilogy. I learned about the Mars Desert Research Station in the Utah desert where scientists and researchers go and wear spacesuits and live in full simulation for months at a time. So I began putting together the pieces, combining that with some of my other interests. Although I’ve been doing other productions in between – operas and plays, the ballet in Hong Kong – this trilogy it has remained a real focus of my life.

For this part of the trilogy you focus mostly on the disciplines of computer science and artificial intelligence. Can you describe how those areas helped you generate material and the interface with professionals or research in these fields?

For this production, someone approached me after a performance of Untitled Mars and said “Oh my god, do you know the work of Nick Bostrom?” So I found this guy who is the Director of the Future of Humanity Institute and Professor of Philosophy at Oxford University. He wrote a paper called Are You Living in a Computer Simulation? In the white paper he speculates that there’s a pretty high probability that we are in fact living in a computer simulation. It turns out that the idea has a healthy following. The article is brilliant and synthesizes a number of interests that I’ve had over the years growing up, reading about simulation and finding myself drawn into the world of MIT and artificial intelligence, so its been an interesting ride. A lot of artificial intelligence is actually like Amazon.com can tell you what you want based on your preferences. We have these computers gathering information and drawing conclusions about our lives, which can be pretty nice in a way, but is also very dangerous.

There’s also my love of science fiction, which in the United States, is one area where, in my mind, really interesting thinking about the world and the way in which its changing is reflected. I don’t draw a line between science fiction and literature. I find that many of our science fiction authors are the greatest we’ve produced. The ideas are interesting. I worked with Philip K. Dick first and then spent a couple of years building a piece based on Samuel R. Delany novel Dhalgren and getting to know Chip Delany was really the highlight of the decade. Now we’re working with a novel by Daniel F. Galouye called Simulacron-3, although the piece is really based on Fassbinder’s adaptation of Galouye’s Simulacron-3. Galouye wrote this novel that’s about people who discover that they’re living in a computer simulation and it’s one of the first novels that contains the trope of plugging yourself into a network. I found that interesting pre-Matrix.

So in The Matrix, would you take the red pill or the blue pill?

We make a joke about that! In the play, this character in the Garden of Eden pours a whole handful of pills into his hand and everyone gives him advice: “Only take the blue one…Only take the red one.” I agree with Mikéah Jennings who decided in the performance to just eat all of them. That’s what happens. It would just double the affect.

I understand that a robbery you witnessed at Duane Reade influenced this work. Can you talk about what happened and what it got you thinking?

So Galouye writes in Simulacron-3 that simulations have this uncanny ability to migrate into the real, and sometimes the simulation becomes real before you expect it to, so if you want to test the theory, try simulating a bank robbery. Enter a bank with a fake pistol and stage a robbery and very quickly a customer will die of a real heart attack, the bank teller will hand you with shaking hands real money and the police officer will likely shoot you with real bullets. This is kind of a bland example, but of course if you told the cop that you’d be robbing the bank with a fake gun, you wouldn’t really learn a lot about bank robberies. It wouldn’t be a worthwhile simulation. So this is one of those ideas that stuck with me and there was something about it that didn’t make sense to me.

Then a couple of years later I was in a Duane Reade drug store on 111th and Broadway and I found myself in the middle of a really violent robbery. I had a gun held to my head for what seemed like an hour and was probably only about 40 minutes. People got beat up and hurt really badly and there was a moment where he pointed the gun at someone else and I saw it and I swear it was fake. I didn’t test the theory at the time but it stuck with me forever where I thought that’s definitely a fake pistol and if he pulled the trigger, maybe a little fire would have come out the end like a lighter or something. So that was a really scary horrifying event. There is nothing funny about what happened in that room, but the pistol – I still carry that with me that the pistol was fake. Was it all real?

In terms of working with your performers, can you give an example of what you might ask to do in rehearsals to work with this material?

We spent three weeks on Governors Island thanks to a residency from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. We took the ferry and hung out on an island. We watched a lot of  Fassbinder films. We read the entire novel out loud. We read the screenplay based on the TV series. We improvised for two and a half weeks and came up with a list of tasks: maybe that’s 10 entrances and exits, someone has to accidentally get hurt, and we improvise with these small event structures. Then we showed a work in progress assembled again in November. This is where things got interesting. We decided that in order to start the project we’d make a different work by Fassbinder first. We did a little work on a play of his called The Garbage, the City and Death and then switched to another early film called Katzelmacher. We actually shot our own version of Katzelmacher, in which we improvised text and new situations in a week and a half. Basically, we made a knockoff Fassbinder film and that’s how we started our preparation and re-entered this work. We had a studio in Tribeca for a month in an old office building, then had another residency with the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural Center on the Lower East Side, a month on Governers Island and one at MIT.

What else are you thinking about during these final rehearsals before the opening?

The thing I’m thinking about a lot right now since I am making final decisions, is that I am onstage during the whole play, which means that there are almost two plays. The play staged for the audience and the play that I see. I’m operating the camera the whole time. What comes from the Katzelmacher experiment is that essentially the making of the production is also the making of a 90-minute single take film. So there are a number of dimensions to the work, which is an interesting prospect. It’s not staged in a traditional sense because I never leave the stage. It’s a live film, but at the same time, because we’re working on material that questions live-ness, we are trying everything we can to continue questioning live-ness from beginning to end and there are a lot of things that go into that. I don’t think I should say anything else about it!

World of Wires runs January 6-21 at The Kitchen. Tickets $20.

Jon Morris and Mikeah Ernest Jennings in Jay Scheib’s World of Wires from Jay Scheib on Vimeo.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Molissa Fenley presents two NY premieres on a single evening program, at Judson Memorial Church, Monday, January 9, 2012 at 7pm. Tickets are $25. The one-night-only program features two new ensemble works, Credo in US, set to music by John Cage, and The Vessel Stories, set to music by Philip Glass. Fenley has choreographed over 75 works in her 35-year career in dance. Both Cenotaph and State of Darkness were awarded Bessies for choreography in 1985 and 1988 respectively. She is an associate professor of dance at Mills College, in residence in the spring semesters, and often teaches choreography at the Experimental Theater Wing of New York University.

Having been immersed in large-group, college-based ensemble dances as an undergrad, Fenley’s State of Darkness was something of a game-changer for me as a young dancer. Performed to Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps Fenley was a small, powerful female artist who revealed a durational depth for solo performance that I was completely unprepared for. We spoke this morning about her newest works and the shifts between her solo and ensemble works.

Can you tell me about these newest works? How did you come to each of them?

Credo in US is to the work by the same name, composed by John Cage. I was commissioned by Mills College to use this piece of music. It’s great to be given an assignment like that and another stipulation was that it had to take place in the Mills College Art Museum. Our college was welcoming a new president and we wanted to showcase the new gallery. I walked in to check out the space and there were these walls everywhere and I decided to use live feed so that anyone anywhere in the gallery could see what was happening elsewhere. Of course, Judson doesn’t have that and we’ve also done the work in a proscenium space, which gives us a different way through the work, as well.

Last year’s Prop Dances at Joyce Soho was a foray into working with whatever items the various artists made. I would have to live with what they gave me, so I got into this idea of working with props, so I asked the dancers to listen to the music and to write free associatively with any images that came up. They did this for two days. Pots and pans came up – the music is a range with gamelan, radio, buzzer, a wonderful cage work where it’s all over the place, piano and a boogie woogie sound and early jazz – so the dancers gave me these images of a foot stomping diety, call and response, helmets, fighter planes, soldiers, forks and knives. I put their lists together, pulled out some similarities and went to Home Depot and found anything I could in common with their images and with these props, the work made itself. I also asked each dancer to choose a minute of the score and to make a phrase from it and incorporated them into the whole thing. That’s one of those shifts from my solo to group work, where I involved the group in my choreographic process.

with Phillip Glass

Vessel Stories is a very different affair. It’s a Philip Glass string quartet composed in 1987 in homage to Brian Buczak, an artist who had died of aids and was a partner of the Fluxus artist Geoffery Hendricks. Geoffrey was celebrating his 80^th birthday and he commissioned me to make a dance piece to the music piece he’d commissioned many years before. It’s in 3 parts. I was using ideas from Brian’s writings and his interests in Masonic architecture and I’m using the space as he would have used a painting. The music is very beautiful and melodic, not what you’d associate with Glass. His string quartets are very romantic, gentle and moving. That’s something Im focusing on – gentleness and togetherness.

How is the work changing for New York?

The last time we performed at the Judson Church, I really enjoyed the 3-sided audience versus just the one front. As a dancer, performing that way, it’s interesting to have wherever you are serve as a new front. Credo’s been done with a front that’s everywhere and a proscenium, this will be it’s first time with the 3 sides, that takes it back to its original form. I’m looking forward to that. And the Judson is so wonderful, warm and embracing and that floor is beautiful. We’re not bringing in lights and embracing the intimacy. It allows you to truly see what you’re seeing. Theatrical lighting puts things at a distance and the ambient light puts us all in the same space, we’re not in the void and the dark.

It’s wonderful to see your company working too, to see these wonderful dancers do this work. Are you working more collaboratively with your dancers now?

For 94 Feathers in Prop dances, I was at Mills and my dancers where here in NYC. So, I wrote out a series of instructions like

94 Feathers

plie here and stretch here and sent it to them and asked them to translate it in their own ways. There is a clear understanding between us, so if I said “use your arm like it was an axe” they know what that means in my vocabulary. They introduced their own idea of what it might mean and what it might do. I used that more in Credo in the sense that they would come up with the phrase, but I worked very formally in Vessel Stories. No one made up any material but me. I’ve been interested in exploring in new ways of creating, but I have a deep interest in formal choreography.

How do you manage the distance creation?

I’m usually at Mills from Mid Jan- Mid May and then I come back. I have a New York gang and a California gang. The California dancers have just arrived, so I am getting the New York company together with the California company. I have this bi-coastal life, having been at Mills since 1999. There are a lot of dancers out there that I have personally trained. They’re dancing coming up through the MFA program and go on to their own work. The program is very intimate, I spend a lot of time with the MFA candidates on their projects and final thesis concerts. We all keep in touch.

It’s been 12 years of this bi-coastal process. The semester goes by very fast. I don’t feel this huge separation. I feel that I’m continuing what I would normally do here. It hasn’t changed how I work, though I have less time. There’s no time in the studio by myself during the semester. By the summer, I am ready to make a new work. A lot of my teaching choreography is a way for me to come up with new ideas, it’s when new things get put in the back of my mind to explore for myself too. When you are mentoring someone who is doing something interesting, it becomes a diaologue that you can put into your mind about new forms or new methods. It provides me with a new way of thinking about getting into the studio. I give myself those assignments. I like to use the teaching as a real laboratory of remembering those experiments, then formulating them for myself and using the new ideas.

When you are training dancers, what are you working on? How do you work with them to get what you want from your dancers? There’s such a clarity of aesthetic that your dancers perpetuate.

There is a lot of emulation, I’m doing the phrase right next to them. I give them a phrase and we go over it and over it. The actual translation is very close. I’ve had a rehearsal director to makes sure the translation is close. There is also the eye you have for your own dancing. You can see if someone is doing something quite differently, some of it comes out of the corner of your, or a intuition. We do a lot of pure drilling and going over it like “the arm does this and the weight shifts there.”

How have your shifts from solo to group to collaborative been prompted. Does much of it come from necessity or from different interests?

Often, I want to make a work and I’m the only one around. So, it’s a solo. I’ve gone through my career of shifting from solo to group a couple times. Invariably everything could be done as a solo. It could be my part within the group form.  But, sometimes I’m working with a group and someone moves on from the group or  something disrupts the situation and I think now it’s time to trench in a make a different kind of work. I’d rather go somewhere new, rather than having to bring in a new person and restage repertory. Often, something I worked on as a soloist becomes a group work. In fact, quite often it happens that way, especially when I’m working with a new company where I take phrasing from solos and make it into a group piece and they shift. They happen side by side.

How do you work with other companies?

When I work with other companies – ballet companies – I come in completely prepared with what I’d like to do. The actual spacing is contingent on the dancers, it’s pure traffic between bodies. Dancers are great in being able find their paths, to manipulate the space to create a way to fulfill that. The actual phrasing and movement vocabulary is pretty clear. I don’t arrive and say “now what?” I have a game plan figured out. I find those situations so interesting to meet new dancers. Often, I get there and the dancers have been chosen. Rarely, do I audition them. Directors usually chose those with an affinity for what I do. It’s always been very successful, not easy, but a nice translation. The director’s usually have an idea of what I do before they ask me.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Chatting with Lebanese artist Rabih Mroué on the phone a couple weeks ago, I was surprised to discover that his work Looking for a Missing Employee, which comes to PS 122′s COIL Festival this month (Jan. 6-9; tickets $25/$20), was an older piece, from 2003.

“It’s a very old piece,” Mroue admitted, “but I just presented this piece [during its opening run, in Beirut] only two nights. In a way, I was asked not to do it again.”

“By whom?” I asked.

“By the family of the missing employee, actually,” he told me. “They asked me kindly, actually, not to present this piece unless I come back to them to let them see what I’m doing in it. And I felt it would be a kind of censorship, and this is why I decided I don’t want to go negotiate with them and I preferred not to show it in Lebanon anymore.”

Mroué is one of the most internationally known artists working in Beirut today. With work that ranges from theater to performance art to visual art, he’s developed a reputation for exploring the challenges facing the complex multicultural–and civil war-scarred–society of Lebanon. His theater has toured internationally (though this is his first US tour, taking him to Pittsburg, Minneapolis, and Seattle as well as Vancouver’s PuSH Festival), his art has shown in important institutions throughout Europe (this year, he’s at Documenta 13), and he’s even produced a film with the ne plus ultra of French actresses, Catherine Deneuve, Je Veux Voir (2008). A second piece, The Pixelated Revolution, is also being presented for one night only on January 9.

The product of a secular family committed to religious tolerance and pluralism in an often balkanized country, Mroué ‘s life was marked by the conflict that’s been a hallmark of Lebanon for decades: a civil war that lasted from 1975 to 1990; incursions and partial occupations by Israel during and following that time; and occupation and meddling control by Syria that continues in one way or another to this day. Mroué ‘s grandfather, in fact, was assassinated for his writings.

In Looking for a Missing Employee, performed by the artist himself, Mroué used the story of an actual missing employee–a worker who disappeared in the early Aughts, whose story he followed through the newspapers–as a lens through which to explore a more nefarious and complex part of Lebanon’s history: the some 17,000 persons who disappeared and remain unaccounted for during the civil war.

“The idea came by totally chance, by accident,” he told me over the phone. “I was collecting photos and news about missing people, that has nothing to do with the war. Just people who are missing for no reason. And there was this employee [who disappeared] and I cut out his news brief and the second day, there was another news story, and the third day another news story, and so forth. And suddenly his case became a big scandal in the whole country and I found myself following it and collecting all the articles and news about this missing employee.”

“And then I found that I had a really big archive about him, and I decided to do something out of his story, out of his case. And that’s how it came about,” Mroué explained. “But what was actually interesting to me about the missing person was–it’s really something that I didn’t realize at the beginning but only later–I thought that I was maybe really surprised how one can go missing, or how one can disappear, in a country such as Lebanon. Because Lebanon is known as a very closed society, like, it’s said that everyone knows everybody else. And for me it’s interesting for me to think that still, in this country, one can slip through cracks, still one can vanish. For me it was a kind of sign in a positive way.”

The experience of the war has had a huge impact on Mroué ‘s work, and on his approach to creating theater. Like many experimentalists, his approach was driven by a need to communicate something beyond what he could through a standard, more traditional theater vocabulary.

“There’s a difficulty today, for me, let’s say, to see theater and do theater, in the way I used to study it,” he told me. Labelling his approach to theater as “oblique,” or obscured and indirect, explained it in terms of a failure to realize his ambitions through a more traditional exploration.

“Especially what I was trying to do, creating or researching for body language,” he said, “a body which is imprinted by civil war. Because I was actually trying to find physical theater, visual theater where the body of the actor is the main role within it.”

“After some years I found myself at an impasse,” he continued. “And I didn’t reach anything with this research, and I found that every time I represent this body onstage, I find it’s [less], it doesn’t reach the experience that my body had during the civil war. So this is how I started to think about, how can I represent this body in theater? I started to put this question in my theater works, and I started actually to talk about this body, and not to show it anymore. And in other words maybe what I’m suggesting is that this body is represented by its absence. In this manner–this is my suggestion–maybe we have to look to theater in an oblique way, not in a direct way.”

Beyond simply a desire to present Looking for a Missing Employee again, Mroue acknowledged that partly, his choice to make this his first US presentation was born out of a desire to present a piece in English for English-speaking audiences. Much of his other work is performed in Arabic. Asked if he anticipated challenges for American audiences, potentially unfamiliar with Lebanon’s history, in approaching the show, Mroué only acknowledged that some local detail may seem unfamiliar, but added that this was true of every non-Lebanese audience, not just Americans. Otherwise, he was adamant that it would not be an issue due to his approach.

“I’m not afraid that the audience will not understand. For me, I’m sure the audience will understand,” he said. “I deal with the audience in an equal way, in the sense that they know as much as I know. I’m not doing theater to teach them, and they’re not coming to the theater to learn anything from me. I’m there to put some ideas, some questions, to share with the audience.”

For more information, see here for an interview via CNN, and here for a post on the Walker Arts Center’s blog.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Stephen Fiehn in "Let us think of these things..." Photo by John Sisson

For twenty years, Chicago’s Goat Island was recognized as one of the most interesting and challenging theater groups in the world. When they decided to disband with a tour of their final show The Lastmaker, which finished in 2009, it was obvious that although the company was through, the artists would surely continue making work. Now, New York is getting its first taste of post-Goat Island work, with Every House Has a Door‘s Let us think of these things always. Let us speak of them never. at PS 122′s COIL Festival (Jan. 5-9; tickets $20/$15).

Founded by Goat Island’s Matthew Goulish and Lin Hixson, the company is intended to serve as a vehicle for project-specific creations with artists unable to devote themselves to a longer term engagement with a company. Although they’re on their third or fourth piece now, Let us think was their first. In fact, the idea behind it was born of the final Goat Island show, when a Croatian presenter in Zagreb, Marin Blažević, suggested they produce an international work with Croatian artists. Selma Banich and Mislav Cavajda began collaborating with Hixson, Goulish, and Stephen Fiehn, a fellow Chicagoan and recent transplant to NYC with his company Cupola Bobber. Over more than a half-dozen intensive residencies in Chicago, Zagreb, and England, Let us think was developed. I recently spoke with Hixson and Goulish over the phone about the show; Carol Becker has a long interview with them in the current issue of the Brooklyn Rail which is also well worth reading.

The genesis of the show comes from several sources all pointing to the Serbian film director Dušan Makavejev. Makavejev is an experimental and provocative filmmaker from the former Yugoslavia who spent many years in exile in the United States, where among other things he taught at Harvard, including lecturing about Ingmar Bergman’s films. At the same time Hixson and Goulish came across his groundbreaking film Sweet Movie, Goulish came across an essay about Makavejev’s work by the American philosopher Stanley Cavell, at which point the possibilities for a performance exploration began to open up.

“It gave us a way to approach an intercultural collaboration,” with their Croatian collaborators, Hixson told me. “And as we got into it, it was like Cavell was a stand-in for the Americans, and Makavejev was a stand-in for the Croatians and the ex-Yugoslavians, and Bergman became this third thing that none of us really knew that much about and could respond to.”

“Initially it was [Makavejev's] biography that was very interesting to us and the way he spanned…the way his life spanned the issues we were hoping to access with this collaboration,” Goulish added, “with the dissolution of Yugoslavia into seven different countries, the international utopian dream of the initial multicultural society that you sort of saw in the idea of Yugoslavia. That you sort of see in the idea of Makavejev’s films, with their international casts. But one thing that happened immediately, in the first conversation about Makavajev, between us as collaborators, it became acutely apparent that he was not very well known in the ex-Yugoslavian states.”

That added another layer of interest for the performers from Croatia, who saw part of their mission as reintroducing his work to their contemporaries.

The show was mainly developed from a story they heard about Makavejev at Harvard. In 1978, in order to deliver a lecture on Ingmar Bergman’s films, he edited together more than 20 scenes from 11 films to play within the space of only an hour. After contacting Makavejev, they were able to track down his editing notes and used the classroom experiment to build a piece through mediated experiments. As such, Let us think is both a deconstruction of film and, in essence, a performance lecture.

“Why performance lecture? Or why film in a performance? Our response to those questions always circles back around to this question that Lin continually asks as a director: ‘Why is it live?’” Goulish told me over the phone. “Or what is this piece’s ‘live-ness,’ what is its reason for being in a room with a live audience rather than in some other mode? And I think her way of answering that, and our way of answering that, is actually by trying to keep those different strands separate, by not trying to merge the film and the performance, by not merging the lecture and the performance. And that’s where you get into some of the potential for…I mean, for me, it’s a kind of lecture performance when someone comes out onstage before the performance and makes a pre-show announcement, and says, ‘Please turn off your cell phones, the show is about to begin.’ Because the show has begun, but here’s this person announcing, ‘I’m not part of the show, so I’m just a messenger telling you to do X, Y and Z, and then the show will start.’ And I think we try to exploit that for comic potential, in that first the actors will do a pre-amble in lecture-mode, and then they will do the performance they just introduced, which is a radical shift between the two things. They never quite occupy the same territory.”

“Our specific interest in these films, in Makavejev, is the experiments we’re talking about, where he showed three Bergman films at once, or he edited a number of sequences from different Bergman films into one new film, those were done in classrooms,” Goulish said. “And they were a kind of ecstatic pedagogical experiment. Treating the classroom as a kind of theater. So there’s also the interaction between the performers and the classroom, and the classroom and the film, and this sort of impractical but very exciting way of bringing all those different questions into one container.”

Filmic vocabulary came to heavily influence the piece, but in complex ways. Not only are Makavejev’s films potentially unknown to audiences, but they are purposefully left out of the performance; audiences only catch glimpses of them during the show. The company’s intent, in other words, was to force the audience to experience film through live performance, something which the audience is essentially informed of in advance, allowing them to play with the gaps between expectation and what’s actualized onstage.

“The film is actually playing in the performance room, and they [the performers] are watching it, but the audience never sees the film until they’ve seen Mislav on the computer,” Hixson explained, “you can see a scene from WR [Makavejev's most famous film], but that’s late in the performance. The audience does get a glimpse of that. But it was important to me that we never see the film, actually. Except for these glimpses. That you only see the film peripherally. So that technology is embodied to the performers. You see it through the performers.”

“The other part of the question of ‘why is it live?’,” Goulish added a bit later, “in this case, is what is the affect on the body of the performer in playing out these films live? To interpret them for an audience who can’t see them. What does that do to the body of the performer over the length of time? How do they sweat? How do they eat an apple? How do they drool? How do they get chocolate on their hands or clothes, how does the stage become slippery and more dangerous over the seventy minutes of the performance?”

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“We started doing small video screens, partly because we wanted to start cautiously,” William (Bill) Cusick was telling me, “and partly because we had no money at all. And we’ve always worked within our limitations. Kenneth’s work started really small, because he’d build it in his living room. We rehearsed for years in his living room.”

“This is the first show that wasn’t built in a living room,” Kenneth Collins offered. “Even Americana Kamikaze and Welcome to Nowhere, which have toured internationally and played to houses with three-, four-hundrd seats, were designed and built and fully rehearsed in my living room. Which was a small living room! It wasn’t a loft.”

“It was a sixteen-, eighteen-by-twelve room, and the sets were eight-foot-by-eight-foot, sitting in front of a bookshelf, next to a leather sofa and the TV,” Cusick continued. “And it wasn’t like he ripped out his living room, he lived there, it was real. And we’d all come and rehearse there for a couple years…”

“This is the first show that we’ve had a larger environment, which is our rehearsal studio, to build the work,” Collins continued. “And again we’re scraping, we’re hitting the walls, we’re up against the columns.”

Cusick: “This show is almost three-times as large. It’s twenty feet wide and twelve feet high.”

Collins: “But it’s a philosophy of being able to make the work that an audience sees onstage in the studio. And again it’s one of the ways that we approach making theater more like visual artists, perhaps. Because the work in the studio is what’s of primary importance to us. It’s the work we present to the public.”

This was the weekend before Christmas, and I was sitting–shopping bags of gifts around my feet–in the loft of a Soho cafe where Collins and Cusick, the creative directors behind the company Temporary Distortion, had agreed to meet to discuss their latest, Newyorkland, an exploration of the life and myth of the American cop, which premiered at On the Boards in Seattle a couple months ago and makes its way to New York as part of PS 122′s COIL Festival in January at the Baryshnikov Arts Center (Jan. 12-28; tickets $20/$15).

Of all the interviews I’ve done of January artists, this was easily my favorite. Not to sound trite, but the two make a great pairing. Collins, the director and designer, is angular with shorter hair and tattoos, while Cusick, the video artist, has longer hair. Both wore all black. The former can be elliptical in conversation, while the latter can speak enthusiastically about film and video and television. While one responded to a question, the other would sit quietly, occasionally looking bored, but intently listening, jumping in to add to the conversation, occasionally finishing the other’s sentences. And sometimes they seemed to forget all about me and conversed among themselves about some point on which they different perspectives, evidence, I suppose, of the creative frisson that drives the company’s work. Really, I’m not trying to be cute here, but transcribing our interview was a fascinating exercise in trying to capture just how differently these two incredibly smart, thoughtful artists described their work, even as they demonstrated a deep understanding of the other’s process.

Temporary Distortion was founded around 2002 by Collins, who met Cusick in 2004 at the Lincoln Center Theater’s directors lab. Notwithstanding his education in film, Cusick is himself a long-time theater artist. At the time, he was working as an assistant lighting designer but hoping to make the transition to directing, and parlayed his design experience into the directors lab. Shortly after meeting Collins, he caught two of Temporary Distortion’s early shows in quick succession.

“I saw his show at the Ontological, and it was easily the most unique experience I’d ever had to that point in my life in a theater,” Cusick told me. “My participation level was so far beyond anything I’d experienced, that when I watched the show, I had so much going through my mind, in so many ways, that I wanted to get that out of my head and onto the stage.”

Collins, for his part, was already working in the intensely sculptural mode that continues to define the company’s production design aesthetic, putting his actors in “claustrophobic box-like structures” influenced, as he suggested, by the artist Joseph Cornell.

“I’ve always been interested in, how do you make theater that’s more like a form of sculpture?” he explained. “How do you view the work on stage in the same way you look at sculpture in a gallery? How do create that sort of detachment with the audience and give them the time to view the work in that manner?”

The two began collaborating and today form the artistic heart of Temporary Distortion. Collins continues to develop intensely constructed spaces for his artists to perform in, separating them from one another. Cusick’s contribution comes in the form of video elements projected throughout the performance in diverse areas of the tightly constructed space. The work they create is often fragmentary, pulling together video segments that use recognizable filmic tropes, found-texts, and music that re-combine and explore that the aesthetic and content of the show’s subject.

“We’re working in a non-narrative video format, non-narrative visual format that can complement that sculptural installation,” Cusick offered, “basically creating video art to complement the performance art, and actually integrated to create a new form.”

The company’s most recent work has been in the field of deconstructing film. Welcome of Nowhere, about “road movies,” and Americana Kamikaze, about Japanese horror, were Newyorkland‘s immediate predecessors. Like those shows, Newyorkland is a complex document using a variety of sources to present the world of the police officer. But the new work may be a break from that tradition, depending on whose perspective you take.

The genesis of the piece comes from a phone call from Cusick to Collins as they were finishing Americana Kamikaze. They’d been mulling over a couple not quite satisfactory subjects for their next show, when Cusick sat down to watch The French Connection with TaraFawn Marek, the company’s costume designer. Inspired by the film, he suggested that they tackle cop pop culture for their next project. Collins had grown up in a family of police officers, so there was an added connection.

“It very quickly morphed into a project about deconstructing the profession of police-work,” Collins commented, though, “rather than deconstruction the film representations of police-work.”

“We spent about a year thinking of it as taking apart Dirty Harry, taking apart The French Connection,” Cusick continued to explain, “looking at it that way. We watched forty films, fifty films each, and then starting getting into the non-fiction literature, and the fiction begins to feel really frivolous. It begins to feel really repetitive and formulaic, and even insulting to your intelligence. How do you take apart something that simplistic? And then you begin to look at where it comes from. And the cop culture–it’s been said before that police work is the most mediated line of professional work in America.”

“We think of ourselves as very familiar with it,” Collins added, “although that familiarity is based on a fiction.”

So Newyorkland is a departure from the previous shows, which were primarily concerned with genre representations. Here, the company set out to explore the reality of police work as much as its representation. Sources were often as not non-fiction. Calling it an “assemblage,” Collins said: “Really, that’s what we’ve done in building the text and all of the content of this show, is to look at documentaries, to look at interviews, stories that I heard growing up in a family of cops. William went through–”

“The NYPD manual,” Cusick interjected. “There’s two scenes that are completely deconstructions–”

“–of found poetry in the police manual,” Collins finished.

But whereas Collins saw the work mainly as an exploration of the gap between the reality and the representation, Cusick maintained that from his perspective, and his work as the video artist, it remained similar to previous explorations of genre film, referencing dozens of different movies and TV shows.

“What starts as a film genre,” he said, “we realized is a cultural genre, a whole sector of our culture.”

Newyorkland features four live actors and more than twenty in the video segments, which offer a stark contrast to the live performance.

“It’s ironic in way, because there’s a very cold sort of formalism onstage, but in the video we allow ourselves to be very…” Collins searched for the word. “I don’t know, what’s the word? It’s almost the opposite…”

“Intensity,” said Cusick. “There’s another level of intensity in the film.”

Asked to speak more about the process of creating the disparate elements of the piece and how those relate to one another, the two talked about the challenge getting together a long, mixed segment of video and performance they call, internally, “Role Call,” in which the officers get their daily assignments. The company used the event to offer a lens on the challenges facing officers as they present themselves professionally.

“It starts with the traditional Hill Street Blues beginning, like, ‘All right item such-and-such, we got this going on, this item, this is going on, keep an eye out for that.’ And with the video, it’s a follow-shot,” Collins explained.

“It’s the most complex shot in the whole show,” Cusick continued. “An unbroken shot, one long take.”

Collins: “A dozen actors…”

“With a twelve pound camera on one arm, on a Steadicam with no vest. Usually with a Steadicam you have a vest that counterbalances it,” Cusick explained.

“We had a location we dressed as a police station, I think rather convincingly,” Collins was speaking more to Cusick than me at this point.”And we had a number in uniform, a number of officers dressed as detectives, and as Bill followed–there’s a whole choreography set up ahead of time…”

“I’d follow one guy, he’d turn off, I’d follow another guy, he’d turn off, I’d catch another, follow him, he’d turn off…” Cusick recalled. “I worked on Law & Order, and they use Steadicam on every single episode. I remember watching them do it, and it was this really brilliant camera operator who’d wear a vest, and he’d have–they’d use a film camera, so he’d have a sixty-pound camera, and he’d be running down the street, following the cops.”

“The reason it was difficult,” Collins said, turning back to me, “and why we struggled with it, was we had this video sequence which in a way was very fixed because it’s a one-shot–you can’t edit and retain the essence of what it is. And we had a text we also liked, and had an inherent rhythm to it, and no matter how much you edited the text, it had this inherent rhythm to it. And we had music that John Sullivan, our composer, composed during a rehearsal that we also liked. And the three were just missing each other for months.”

“Off by five seconds, off by ten seconds…” Cusick concluded. “The first time we did it, I could see it in its ideal state, and we didn’t get there till six months later.”

There’s an extreme level of perfectionism that goes into a Temporary Distortion show (“When we get to putting a show onstage, we’re done,” Collins told me. Added Cusick: “The only thing that’s not cued when we arrive at the theater is the house lights”), but the results are startling. Newyorkland benefited from an unexpected synergy with public events, opening opposite the crackdown on the Occupy Wall Street encampments nation-wide, in which police were caught in the middle between opposing political units, and often cast as the bad guys in the drama. The show’s deep appreciation for the reality of the police officer’s experience and the challenges facing them in their highly mediated but little understood job is another example of extremely thoughtful and boundary-pushing work going up in January. I heard from numerous people in Seattle how compelling the show is, how strangely timely and important and perspective-shifting it is right now.

It’s also worth noting for those who, like me, missed the company’s previous work, that Americana Kamikaze is available online from OntheBoards.tv; Temporary Distortion will be the first company with two shows available from the site.

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Amber Gray, Libby King, Heather Christian, Mikaal Sulaiman & Brian Hastert in The TEAM's "Mission Drift." Photo by Rachel Chavkin

“When we were working on Architecting, towards the end of our time on Architecting, this was in spring 2008, Naomi Klein spoke. The Shock Doctrine had come out, and this thing she talks about of ‘disaster capitalism’ ended up being a major thing for Architecting in terms of Brett Butler and Scarlet O’Hara,” Rachel Chavkin explained. It was earlier this month, and we’d met for lunch at a “bourgie” (to use her term) cafe near NYU, where she was teaching, in order to discuss The TEAM‘s upcoming US premiere of Mission Drift, a hit at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, as part of PS 122′s COIL Festival (Jan. 8-29; tickets $25/$20)

“But it didn’t feel like we’d fully gotten to solve it,” she continued, “in part because Architecting was so sprawling, and quite deliberately so. But it just felt like we weren’t done with this idea. And that sort of led me to ask the company the question that Klein talks about but hadn’t fully answered for me, which is, ‘Why does American capitalism have its particular character? What defines American capitalism specifically and why did it become that way?’”

That’s a hell of subject for a play to tackle, but based on my experience catching it as a work-in-progress at the 2010 Ice Factory Festival…well, while I reserve the right to change my opinion based on the final version going up at COIL, I’ve previously described it as one of the smartest pieces of political theater I’ve seen in a while. And I’ll stand by that for now. Fun, engaging, intelligent, non-didactic, and touching in a surprisingly humane way (given the stated subject), it challenges the standard for political theater in America and is one of the shows I’m most excited to see this January.

The TEAM coalesced around Chavkin back in December 2004, mainly consisting of fellow NYU alums. The name was originally based on Chavkin’s college nickname (I did not get that story) but, following the advice of an accountant from the Field who said they’d never be able to incorporate a company named “The Team,” the company decided to make it an acronym. In fact, the first group writing assignment was to come up with what “team” stood for, and the combined result was the portentous “Theater of the Emerging American Moment.” Today, the company has nearly doubled in size, mainly with other NYU-trained artists but also including a couple designers with experience at the SITI Company, owing no doubt to Chavkin’s further training at Columbia with Anne Bogart. Chavkin serves as artistic director of the company and the director of the company’s shows, though, given the collaborative nature of the endeavor, she describes herself as an “editor,” bringing together the disparate strands developed through the generative process.

The TEAM's Rachel Chavkin and Amber Gray, with the Edinburgh Fringe Herald Angel Award they won for "Mission Drift."

Mission Drift is the sort of play that suffers in description. Essentially, it tells the story of two couples. The first is Joris and Catalina Rapelje, a fictionalized version of the couple known proverbially as the American Adam and Eve. Married in the Netherlands in 1624, the couple moved the North America the same year and ultimately settled in New Amsterdam, where they’re credited with giving birth to the first European child in the city; today they count some one million Americans as descendants. In Mission Drift, the two exist as perpetual adolescents who set out from New Amsterdam in the Seventeenth Century and follow the westward expansion until 1890, when the Census declared the “end of the frontier,” with all supposedly “vacant” land in the United States settled. The two find themselves left in the city of Las Vegas, where they set out to create a new frontier through capitalist enterprise.

Joan is a native of present-day Las Vegas, consigned to working odd service sector jobs while engaging in a form of urban archaeology by preserving the ever disposed signage of the strip as a volunteer at the “Neon Boneyard,” an amateur museum experiment I was surprised to discover is real. (Sadly, apparently, others have, too; according to Chavkin, when the company visited a couple years ago it was still below the radar. Recently though she heard from a friend there that the city’s Office of Cultural Affairs had learned of it and, unintentionally echoing a line from the play, the friend told Chavkin that they “looked at the Neon Boneyard and saw dollar signs.”)

Joan’s erstwhile love-interest is a member of the Southern Paiute tribe displaced by development, forced out of his home by the city pursuing the water rights to his family’s well.

What ultimately unfolds is a drama of conflicting interests, with Catalina occupying the role of frontiersman, longing for the possibility of new discovery and in love with power of creation to cultivate the emptiness of the American desert. Her path is related to the rapacious capitalism Joris indulges, but whereas he’s in love with the accumulation of wealth, she’s is driven by a different need, and this conflict ultimately draws them apart. For Chris, the Paiute, either way, the city they’ve built as developers has displaced him (and whoever said the desert was empty, anyway?) and he rebels against the very existence of Las Vegas. Joan, a non-aboriginal native of the constructed city, finds herself displaced from her own home through the rapacious development of the Rapeljes (mirroring, of course, the real estate bubble that popped shortly after the TEAM began the project).

Oh, and Mission Drift is also a musical. Of a non-traditional sort. With performances and music by the amazing Heather Christian as Miss Atomic. Got all that?

“I think our endless process–and probably endlessly frustrating process–is one of the things that gives our work the density that I hope people associate with our plays,” Chavkin told me.

The TEAM’s work is devised through a lengthy and intense process. I asked Chavkin to describe the process of developing the final work, and for simplicity’s sake, she limited her explanation to the character of Joan, by way of example. Beginning at an early workshop at the Brick Theater in 2009, four of the company members were working on different things. Jess Almasy was interested in developing a character who believed she was Joan of Arc, envisioning the role as a Wisconsin transplant to Vegas. Jill Frutkin was interested in the issue of prostitution, and discovered an organization called Hookers for Jesus, comprised of born-again former prostitutes seeking to help others leave the profession. Libby King was fascinated with Hunter S. Thompson. And Kristen Sieh was interested in playing a tumbleweed, or desert native. The name “Joan” stuck, elements of one or another enterprise went into the final character–a Vegas/desert native, volunteer at the Neon Boneyard, and a theme-restaurant waitress–while others went by the wayside or were incorporated into other characters (the Rapeljes became the immigrants to Vegas).

I knew that an important part of the development had taken place in Las Vegas itself, but when I asked Chavkin who had supported their residency and work on the ground, I got an emphatic “No one.”

“We fundraised like fucking crazy and we tried for support,” she said. “And now I’m thrilled to say we just got a grant from the NEA to bring the final work back to Vegas.”

Ultimately the company paid out of pocket or relied on donations to spend a month in the city, and in her role as director-cum-editor, Chavkin arranged a tight schedule of “field trips” to experience the place in the mornings, followed by intensive work in the theater the University of Las Vegas donated for their use in the afternoons. In their field trips, they met with and interviewed members of the local culinary workers’ union, to get a sense of the labor reality in Vegas. They visited the Atomic Testing Museum (the testing of the bomb also figures apocalyptically in the play). Another trip took them to the Springs Preserve, an institution devoted to the history of the desert ecology and sustainable development, which ultimately features prominently into the work’s theme.

“Las Vegas–which I actually didn’t know before we started this piece–used to be a fertile valley,” Chavkin told me. “It means ‘the meadows.’ And it was totally green, totally lush. It was an oasis. And that was due to the Springs Reserve, which was the aquifer underground that got destroyed in the Fifties, it was tapped out very, very quickly.”

Another exercise took them to the Luxor casino, where each member’s assignment was to interview three people: an employee, an apparent non-employee, and then whoever they wanted. The intense engagement with the city had a profound impact on the story that the company finally presented in Mission Drift.

“The entire way we portray Las Vegas, I can trace it back to a couple interviews we did,” she recalled. “One was with a guy who worked at the culinary union who turned out to have been born and bred in Las Vegas. He was about sixty, as was the head of the office of Cultural Affairs for the city, also in her early sixties. Both of them born and raised in Las Vegas. Very unusual because Las Vegas was a town of about 300,000 for a long period of time. And we heard from both of them almost the exact same thing, which was, this this used to be a small western town. This used to be a small town. Vegas used to be for the locals. It was this phrase we just kept hearing again and again and again. And when we asked about the destruction that had been wrought by the mortgage crisis, every single one of them said, ‘We think growth is good. And we don’t think growth is bad, we think it’s good that Vegas is growing as a city. We just think it grew too fast.’ So I think the entire thesis of the play, that there is something unsustainable about the marriage of capitalism and the frontier, came from right there.”

The one caveat I’d really like to add to all this is that, notwithstanding the influence of thinkers like Naomi Klein on the work, the reason I have so much respect for this play is that the TEAM is so decidedly opposed to easy answers. No matter what you ultimately think of Klein’s work, she is rather easily caricatured as a leftist taking potshots at ideological enemies. The TEAM are not. Their entire portrayal of the shape of American capitalism through the stories they tell is deeply sensitive and avoids easy answers or taking potshots. Intelligently, the company appears to have jointly come together in an effort to present the shape of our economy–including its disastrous boom-and-bust destructiveness–as a function of something deeper in the American psyche, the longing for creating things, for expanding the frontiers and filling the empty spaces our European ancestors imagined the deserts and plains and mountains of the frontier to be. Watching it the first time, I was struck by the thematic similarity between Mission Drift and Cormac McCarthy’s remarkable novel Blood Meridian, even as they diverged radically in tone, aesthetics, and politics. Mission Drift is, as Chavkin also pointed out, a Western, one that links disparate elements together to pose a vexing problem–perhaps the most vexing problem facing our society today. It was the novelist Chad Harbach, lately the lauded author of The Art of Fielding, who posed it to me years ago in a Seattle bar: “What if growth itself is the problem?”

And beyond all of that is the fact that it’s just a damn fine story. “It is by far and away the most emotional of any of our works. It’s, sort of–separate from the politics for a minute–it’s just an incredibly emotional story, because we tell the story of capitalism in this country through the lens of a marriage dissolving, and a marriage that you really love,” Chavkin said. “And now I hope we’ve done a really good job of allowing you to fall in love with these characters and root for them, in the way you sort of root for this American thing of setting out for the territories. And then they just become horrible, and monsters of themselves and lost within that.”

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Toshiki Okada, the Japanese playwright and director of the company chelfitsch, is already recognized as one of the most exciting artists of his generation. His 2004 play Five Days in March, which explored the links between the day-to-day life of young Tokyo hipsters and the US invasion of Iraq using a combination of anti-performative techniques, movement, and richly colloquial dialogue, established Okada internationally. The show toured widely and built bridges for the artist with presenters in the US and Europe.  This January, chelfitsch brings a triptych, Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner, and the Farewell Speech, to the Japan Society as part of Under the Radar (Jan. 5-14; tickets $22).

The following interview was conducted by and translated from the Japanese for Culturebot by the Japan Society. For scholars and Japanese speaking readers, the original, including Okada’s responses in Japanese, is available here as a PDF.

Your company’s name “chelfitsch.” I know it’s a childish version of the English word “selfish,” but I’m curious where it came from, and what it means to you, if anything?

It meant myself when I named it.  Because I thought myself childish and selfish.  I was twenty three years old.  But it changed its meaning after the company’s name got to be known.  When a critic said “chelfitsch” describes the social situation of our time in Japan, especially Tokyo, I was somehow convinced of it. Then I got to like using this explanation.

What were the ideas you set out to explore in Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner and the Farewell Speech and what influenced the script? I understand it’s a triptych—is it three separate plays or are they interconnected somehow?

I created this piece when the “non-full-time employees” issue [Editor's and translator's note: temporary employment is a rising issue in Japan as companies have been able to hire more and more employees on temp contracts; this has created a two-tiered society in which younger workers have been denied access to the security and benefits their parents enoyed as Japan's Fordist model is transformed; see here for an NPR article] became a serious problem in Japan. That is, my play was influenced by this ongoing issue.  At the same time, I wanted to address the universal issue of unemployment through the portrayal of Japan’s local situation, which I believed that non-Japanese audiences could sympathize with.  I think that audiences can enjoy each of the three parts of this triptych even if each one is presented independently.  However, because the three parts have become so closely connected to one another (from Japan Society: “Air Conditioner” was written originally as a stand-alone play and the two other parts were added three years later), I now believe that the three parts should be presented in sequence as one evening-length piece.

What is the creative process like working with your actors? Do you bring in a finished script or does the text change through collaboration? Do you provide them parts of the movement, like a choreographer, or do the actors generate the movement through improvisation?

My text changes constantly–it even changes daily throughout the rehearsal period. Especially for this piece, subtle changes took place often, because I tried to sync up the music with the performance. There are various ways of creating movement.  Since I am not a choreographer, I am not capable of creating movement from scratch. Instead, I ask my actors to extract natural movements from each of their lines and I simply pick up these moves, or manipulate them. For example, I instruct the actors to “exaggerate their movements” or “repeat the same movement over again.” Sometimes their particular movement inspires me to come up with another and I suggest that the actors try out these new movements.  Basically, improvisation is the starting point of setting my choreography, but improvisation takes places even during the performance.

You’ve said in other interviews that since the success of Five Days in March that you’ve been thinking more about how you want to affect your audience, citing Bertolt Brecht. What are you trying to accomplish in Hot Pepper…? What do you hope to convey?

There was a time when I began to think about a method of linking text and body movement, different from the method that my company developed during Five Days in March. One of the ideas was to widen the apparent lag or gap between the text and body movement and to exaggerate the performance into something like dance.  I tried to materialize this idea in a few shorter pieces.  Hot Pepper was the first full length piece based on this idea.

Your writing is hyper-colloquial, but now you’re creating work with the expectation that non-Japanese speakers will see it. Does this affect writing in any way? What has been your experience touring and performing for non-speakers? I saw both your version of Five Days in March, as well as Witness Relocation’s English version, and the experience of the text was very different.

I believe spoken language in theatre is important, but at the same time it is only part of theatre.  And I think also language must affect the body that speaks it.  Language affects not only speech but also the whole performance.

With all the touring, you’ve been exposed to many other artists and their practices. Has this affected how you create work? Have you responded or been inspired by others?

When I sit in a café of a theater where my work is being performed, I really feel what type of function the performing arts play in the lives of the local people living in the city.  I have experienced this feeling in each of the different cities where my work has been performed.  These experiences have influenced me greatly and I have begun to hope that theater will have more of a “public function” in Japan’s society.

Since your work seems to deal with the experiences you or your friends or your collaborators have in their daily lives, I’m curious what’s happening for you now, and where you may be going in your new work. I know it’s been a tumultuous time in Japan, with political shifts and economic issues and of course the Fukushima incident. Are these things you’ll be responding to in future works?

Currently, I have a strong interest in writing fictional works.  You might say that everything that I’ve written/created has been fiction, however, when I was creating my past works, I wasn’t consciously creating ‘fictional’ plays.  Since the earthquake hit Japan, I’ve strongly felt the need to write fictional stories.  I have started to consider “fiction” as not an “unreal fabrication” but rather an “alternative” to reality.  I think the current society in Japan should change to this alternative reality.  That is why I have started to think that “fictional stories are needed.”  I will make my next new work with this idea in mind.

For more information, PerformingArts.jp has two extensive interviews with Okada, from 2005 and 2010. For all of Culturebot’s coverage of Under the Radar 2012 see here, and for all related APAP 2012 events, see here.

Popularity: 3% [?]

With so many known commodities invading the festivals this January, lesser-known and emerging artists can get lost in the shuffle. San Francisco-based choreographer Laura Arrington is one such artist. I first caught wind of her work a year or two ago and she’s one of the people coming in with a strong bit of buzz–Big Art Group’s Caden Manso, for instance, told me just a couple days ago not to miss her work. Hot Wings, the 2010 piece for four dancers she’s bringing to American Realness, is an exploration of gender, the body as animal, and violence. Funny and maybe a bit discomfiting, it earned plenty of praise in SF last year, and you have only two chances to catch it: 7 p.m. Thurs., Jan. 5 and 4 p.m. Sat., Jan. 7 at Abrons Arts Center (tickets $15).

Hot Wings seems to have a very interesting genesis; you’ve said it was an extension of some of the ideas you worked with in your prior piece Fingerbird, which is a response or taking off from the famous ballet The Firebird. What was Fingerbird like and what specifically continued to interest you that you took from that experience?

What was Fingerbird like…? Well, I listened to a lot of R Kelly while we made it.  No, Fingerbird was very artificial. Firebird was a source, but so were a lot of other stories of fancy symbolic birds. Kosinski’s The Painted Bird is one of my favorite books, and as an image it’s a favorite…it sort of takes the metaphor of the bird as transcendent and flips it on its head. Also, In a sort of silly way, R Kelly’s song “I believe I can fly,” this song that borrows a trite kind of plastic sentiment, sung by a complicated pop star, but that ultimately gets me…maybe I’m an idiot. But I like those silly intersections between what’s funny, meaningful, and stupid. When you know better…but, still…you still love the metaphor of flight, the image of the bird, the voice of R Kellly… I sort of likened the bird to a trite or conventional representational imagining of a broken woman.

Photo by Robbie Sweeny

You’ve said two things in relation to this piece that fascinate me: one is the idea of a woman (either gender really, but this is an exploration of gender) as an animal, the body versus the brain perhaps, and you’ve also suggested you’re interested in violence within the piece. Yet it’s pretty funny at many moments. Can you sort of elaborate on the animal and violence concepts and how they related/how you explored them in the piece?

I think the intersection btw humor and violence is a pretty high-traffic intersection. Anything that is as real as aggression or violence has the capacity to be received as funny. I mean humor is often camouflage for something darker and more real.
The animals are integral in the trio of pieces in this series. My most recent was about and starred my dog. It was called wag. A deer features prominently on Hot Wings, and Fingerbird was all birds. I love animals. That’s not super interesting but it’s true true true. There’s a lot to say about the animals, but it’s better to not…

I think even you’ve suggested that this piece is somewhat aggressive in terms of its relationship to the audience; what can the audience expect coming into the theater and why make a choice like that?

I wouldnt say aggressive, or maybe I did… It does ask the audience to be involved in ways other pieces may not. I don’t want to say too much though. Audience participation is such a dirty word to folks, so best not to say it!

Given the ways the audience interacts with the performance, and what you’re trying to do with them, did anything happen during the original run that surprised you? Did you see anyone have a sort of memorable response? Did anyone respond negatively?

It’s always a surprise to see how people respond to instructions. It’s always a surprise to see how groups of people create their own identities and personalities. I’m always so so curious to see how my work gets read by people. A lot of people think Hot Wings is hilarious, other folks it made them cry, other folks thought it was stupid, other folks clever… You never know, or at least I never know. I’m always so curious to see how the group identity of the audience can kind of take the piece on. The end of Hot Wings had vastly different responses. Again, I dont want to say too much as I dont want to give too much away.

What it’s like creating work in San Francisco? What opportunities exist there for you as an artist and what are the biggest challenges you face?

Man, I really love SF. Its a special spot, and it feels very homey. I have a really tight knit group of collaborators/friends. The Off Center/Ernesto Sopprani, Jesse Hewit, Keith Hennessy, and a lot of other folks make it a fantastic place to make work. It’s easy to do shit there. It’s in a pretty vibrant little moment. More and more outside folks are coming in, which is great, because my biggest critique of SF is that it’s a bit isolated.

For the entire line-up of the ambitious 2012 American Realness Festival, see here, and be sure not to miss one of January’s hottest parties, American Pussy Faggot! Realness on Sat. Jan. 7, with downtown impresario Earl Dax’s Pussy Faggot!. For all Culturebot’s coverage of APAP 2012 related events, see here.

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