Martin: Hello, and welcome to the first series of þ thorns þ, a podcast where we bring you conversations between artists in relation to concepts of the choreographic. þ thorns þ is produced as part of the Rose Choreographic School at Sadler’s Wells. I’m Martin Hargreaves, head of the Choreographic School, which is an experimental research and pedagogy project. Across a two year cycle, we support a cohort of artists to explore their own choreographic inquiries, and we also come together to imagine a school where we discover the conditions we need to learn from each other. As part of the ongoing imagination of the school, we are compiling a glossary of words that artists are using to refer to the choreographic.

Every time we invite people to collaborate with us, we also invite them to donate to the glossary. You’ll hear each guest on the podcast propose and describe their donated word or phrase. There is a full transcript available for this episode on our website, together with any relevant links to resources mentioned.

In this episode, we are going to hear a conversation between Prem Krishnamurthy and Andros Zins-Browne, recorded in a studio in New York City. Prem runs an artist organised group called the Department of Transformation, which looks at art as an agent of transformation. His work manifests itself in books, exhibitions, images, performances, publications, systems, talks, texts, and workshops. Andros’s work consists of live and hybrid environments, at the intersection between installation, performance, and conceptual dance. His performances work on twisting the embodied and the virtual, until these distinct terms begin to lose their borders.

In this episode, you’ll hear Prem and Andros speak about important teachers in their lives, processes of collaboration, and hosting as part of their practices in both design and choreography.

We ask each of our contributors to supply us with sounds, to create transitions within the episode, and to give us a sense of their place or their work. In and amongst the conversation between Andros and Prem, you will hear sounds of a vocal exercise that Andros led as part of the recording session they did together in the studio.
(Introduction Ends. Conversation Starts.)

Andros: So what do you want to talk about?

Prem: Hmm. Well, okay, I’m just looking at my notes from our last conversation.

Andros: So you introduced this interesting exercise where we would take a moment and write whichever words came to our mind.

Prem: I guess I often think about protocols, ways to level, or ways to change how people interact, and so I introduced the exercise of each of us taking a minute and writing down as many words as we could, keywords for this podcast and series, and then we shared them back to each other, one per person, back and forth. I sometimes do this also in a different way with a larger group of people, where again, there’s some time limit. Everybody writes down all the things they want to and then you go around in rounds, one person giving one thing from their list until you’ve exhausted all of people’s lists.

Andros: Are there any of the words on your list that you feel like you’d like to expand on? Or any of the words from my list that you feel like asking about or maybe expanding on yourself?

Prem: It may just be my baseline insecurity, but I found all of your words a lot more interesting than my words. Maybe that’s, well, let’s call it curiosity for how other people think. I guess I’m curious about all of your words. I’m gonna start with Symbioembodiment.

Andros: Mhmm.

Prem: Do you want to say something about that? And how that came to you? Is it a term you’ve used before?
Andros: No, I have to thank you for giving me the opportunity to invent a word.

Prem: Haha. Neologisms! New language!

Andros: I really – Haha. I really couldn’t have come up with it otherwise, so I appreciate that. How did it come up? I’ve been thinking. I-I like the word autopoiesis a lot, I use it a lot in different ways. Donna Haraway, in something that I was reading recently, was calling it symbopoiesis, I think, I might be butchering the pronunciation of it, but, something where it was combining symbiosis, so this kind of collaboration between species, with the poiesis. And so, a kind of, how we bring about becoming, together, in ways that respect our differences in some sense, like in a symbiotic relationship there’s not an assimilation, there’s not a collapse of difference, but there’s a trade and there’s an exchange and there’s a becoming with.

And so, yeah, when you prompted me to think about words, I was thinking about how can we think about embodiment as embodying with. I think embodiment tends to be something which is considered to be about autonomy, and it can be a little lonely there. So I tend to think about my own body as very porous to the bodies around me. And, for instance, it’s one of the reasons I’ve always kind of rejected the idea of unitary technique, like Cunningham has Cunningham technique. For me, that never made sense, actually.
Yeah, I’ve been trying to think about what are the ways that we can engage in forms of embodiment, that admit others into that. And where we actually embody more fully by letting other bodies in, calling other bodies in. And if that can be a two way street, then wonderful.

Transition sound starts:

Andros: and these exhales can start to include any kind of sound or sounding with them.
Transition sound ends.

Prem: I think the idea of embodying with, I love how the preposition with becomes so important, this relational part of it, and the idea that we grow with each other.
I remember when I was reading Richard Sennett’s Together a bunch of years ago, he speaks to, what’s his name, Erikson, the sociologist. And all of these studies that show how children first develop collectively, their sense of consciousness emerges through their collective identity, and that helps them to develop an individual identity. But that, it’s almost the opposite of what I see as a stereotypically American view, which is that you start from becoming a strong individual and then maybe later things evolve, instead of going the opposite direction.

Andros: Exactly. Yeah, I mean, I think if I’m gonna give significance to this word that is exactly a few days old, one of the things that I think it offers is the idea that that exchange is part of the growth. It’s not like once you’ve arrived, you then are open for business, so to speak. But rather that, that openness is part of the development and the becoming.

Prem: It feels like that’s what all learning is. All learning. You can of course learn from yourself, but actually, even, I think, for myself, when I’m learning through my own activities, it’s about, I put something into, even my own world, like I write something down, I make a prototype, I test out something, then I look at that thing and I say, oh okay, how am I going to change it next time around? So even there, my learning is from something outside of myself, something that I’ve put there, and so whether it’s learning from other people, whether it’s learning from other objects, or other ideas, all of them, that all of the things that help you grow, are actually external to yourself.

Andros: Yeah. I mean, we were talking a bit before about different models of, of pedagogy. And I also can think about that parallel to certain notions of choreography. And I think what comes up for me is the knowledge, whether that is in an educational context, or, in a dance movement context, or whatever context, is this knowledge considered an object. And for me like, one of the things, you know, having done a lot of learning dance moves, you know, where learning is transmitted as a “this is how it is now you do it”, which has been generative for many, many things and nurturing, I would say in a lot of ways, but also something which ultimately I found I had to reject or at least not perpetuate in my own practice, in the sense that I don’t work with dancers by showing them a set of movements. Why not? That’s how dance was done for a very long time. It’s a very kind of evident way of working with dance. What does it mean to not work with it that way? For me, it has to do with wanting to consider that this knowledge, this learning, what is learned, isn’t an object, is something which can only, if it ever approaches an object, can only become an object through what we might make of it together. It doesn’t arrive, it doesn’t arrive here already made and I think that has a lot of pedagogical extensions.

That’s something I’ve seen in a lot of the projects that you’re doing, and get very inspired by this kind of participatory aspect of, yes this is an educational situation, but we’re going to do this together. We’re going to learn this together. I don’t come with the object of knowledge to transmit to you.

Prem: Well, it’s interesting because you said knowledge is not an object and there’s this quote by Stanley Eveling that I really love. It is, “a thing is just a slow event”.
Andros: Hmm.

Prem: Which for me is interesting because it allows me to think about objects over time and breaks down the illusion of anything being an object. It instead sees it as a temporal event. So even there, I mean, I’m not trying to just wantonly disagree, but maybe knowledge is an object if we think of an object as a slow event-.
Andros: -A slow event. Mhmm.

Prem: I’m curious, on the question of pedagogy, I did want to ask, who were your significant teachers? You mentioned how a lot of the dance that you learned was through this idea of a unitary technique, the idea that there’s one way to do it. But yeah, who were your most significant teachers?

Andros: Yeah, I mean let’s say a lot of my most important dance teachers didn’t teach dance, basically. But because I did dance, what they taught me, applied to dance. So I would say Moshe Feldenkreis has been an important teacher to me, I never met the man personally, but his methodology opened up another way for me to think about choreography.
I think about all the jazz musicians I grew up around, Ornette Coleman is a huge-

Prem: -did you grow up around Ornette?

Andros: I knew him. I mean he was, he was around, he was a friend of my dad’s.

Prem: That slightly blows my mind.

Andros: And so, just completely other considerations of, how to think about composition, how to think about improvisation, how to think about listening. And all of those things, I think filtered into how I could consider dance.

Prem: I just realised that my entire access to art came from playing jazz.

Andros: Oh!

Prem: I only figured out what contemporary, or, modern art was, when I was 16 or 17 and I’d already been playing for much longer than that.
Andros: So interesting! So you were a musician first?

Prem: Yes. I think I was a musician and a writer before I had any access to visual art.

Andros: That’s kind of fascinating for me because I’ve known you professionally as “Prem, the designer”. And, graphic design somehow figured into the nomenclature of your job, and then when I would see the things that you were doing, I was like, okay there’s obviously a lot of considered design going into some of the books and the materials that are happening. But actually, this kind of feeling that it was very sort of, like, contrary to my notions of what design are however, you know, layman’s those might be. But, it also sort of seems to, like, make some sense to me when you tell me that you were coming from music and writing, then via art.

How did that affect your considerations of what design could be and how it could operate?

Prem: Well, my path to design came through writing. It was because I was interested in the word and I became interested in typography, and graphic design also seemed like a reasonable practical compromise to wanting to study art, at a certain point, and growing up in an immigrant family where just the idea of art was unthinkable. So, at least graphic design seemed like something I could make a living doing.

Andros: A job.

Prem: It was a job. Unfortunately, it’s not like in the British context, where everybody who became a graphic designer of a certain generation wanted to be Peter Saville, and you had these kind of, you had these models for graphic designers being cool. But, if you had asked me when I was in my early 20s what I did, I would have said to you, “oh, I’m a performance artist moonlighting as a graphic designer”.

Most of the work I was doing back then, as being, either performative in a way that was very explicit and clear to people. I gave these guided tours of people’s personal spaces, that were very literary, they were structured almost like a, like I was really thinking a lot about Georges Perec and Oulipo at that time, but also thinking about models for ethnography and how you could use the guided tour as a format. But I was also doing things, like interviewing East German graphic designers in these long form, 12 hour interviews about their homes and studios before and after 1989, and I never said it out loud, but I saw those long form interviews themselves as a kind of private performance because they were structured for me. I mean, they had a way that I was trying to ask questions and was trying to discover something. So, for me, that was a performance that was individual and then, with two people, but it never became a public thing.

And then at some point, I think I got more ambitious about being a graphic designer. I think I’m bad at moonlighting at things and so I was like, well, if I’m going to be a graphic designer, then let’s be an ambitious graphic designer and try to do things that change up how people are working with graphic design. And maybe that was always a useful position for me, that when I moved to New York in the early 2000s and was working as a graphic designer and started my own design studio, I always brought to it this sense of not belonging to the discipline. I would never say that I was a graphic designer when people asked me, I think that position of being on the outside of design and trying to think about how designing itself can be performative, and how you can imbue even a static object like a book with a sense of performance, was intrinsic to how I thought about it. And now it’s reversed, because now, I do lots of things that, to other people, aren’t obviously graphic design. They’re no longer, I’m no longer making books in the same way, I’m working, making a visual identity for an organisation, or a poster, or a website. But, I might make an event series, and I think about that as being designed. I could also call it curating, I could call it organising, and sometimes I do, but the structure of design and the way of thinking helps me to order it.

Andros: Right. But to someone like myself, who has very little relationship to graphic design, I don’t consider myself a designer in any sense, what seems antithetical in an interesting way, or maybe contradictory, is that my understanding of design, certainly graphic design, is creating something which is then formulated, and how it’s formulated or formalised, is how it is delivered.

So, it’s an object or maybe a slow event, if you want to call it that. But, it arrives to us looking how it looks, and will look, right? And obviously performance implies a different type of temporality, but also, a kind of, much more messy and certainly more difficult to reproduce or to finalise and so, I’m so curious about, as someone who tends to try to find a good contradiction, I’m always, like, looking for these contradictions that I can try to solve in some way, or to at least say, well, what if these two things exchanged each other’s properties? What if these two things lent each other their bodies in some way, right? Or became together?

And so that, that feels like, if I just try to hold for a second, graphic design and performance, that feels like a kind of contradiction that my brain doesn’t find how to solve that, in any evident way whatsoever, and yet, it seems like that’s, more or less, what you’re working on, right? I mean, from my perspective, that seems to be the crux there.

Prem: It’s fascinating because we may be projecting onto each other’s “disciplines” in quotation marks, similar things, because, I didn’t think about performance as being locked down, but I think I thought about dance, as being locked down. I never had a lot of access to dance as a form, and I just realised that the only dance I knew growing up was classical Indian dance, like Bharatanatyam and Kathak and other things, which are highly formalised and highly ritualised and very much about appearance and perfection within an established canon. And so, the way that you say, you thought about graphic design as being something that’s formulated and delivered, I thought, at that point in time in my life, that dance was a thing that was completely controlled.

Andros: Beautiful.

Transition sound start

Andros: We’re going to try to keep the length of the inhale, length of the exhale sound more or less even. *breaths and tones*

Transition sound end

Andros: I was talking with someone recently about, there’s a choreographer named Tere O’Connor, who, I never spoke with him about this, but, I heard that he used to do this thing that he called “break the piece”, where he would be in a process making a work, and then he would give the process over to another artist, and would leave for a period of time, and would come back and see what had happened.

To go back a bit to this word of, symbioembodiment, how to engender other forms of collaboration, that strengthen bonds without building barriers or walls. So, I like this idea because, I think, we operate in an art field, which for me is like a kind of machine for the ideology of individuality. It’s something that I feel like is sustained in culture in order to produce the myth of individuality. And we, as cultural workers in some sense, artist designers and so on, I think of us as a, like, little kind of construction workers within that ideology, and I don’t want to be a construction worker within that ideology. I don’t believe in that ideology and furthermore, I find that ideology to be literally dangerous and harmful.
So, how do I operate, as an artist who wants to have a career and make a living and do interesting things and so on, as we all do, without contributing to this ideology of individuality? And so, I love the example that you’re giving, as some kind of prototype of that, and I invite thinking about all the ways that we can do that, which sort of imply these forms of co-authorship, and which admit the kind of idea that that’s what we’re anyway doing, right? So, why are we trying to call it otherwise?

Prem: What I love about the example of Tere O’Connor’s “break the piece” is that, it’s about multiple systems overlapping or succeeding each other, there’s a kind of juxtaposition that happens. It’s not “Oh, well I’ll take my system, and then we’ll look at your system, and then we’ll have a conversation, and we’ll come to a happy consensus about these systems”, it acknowledges that there is a human, who starts that process with their system, and then somebody else introduces something else. It has a kind of conflict or a dissonance, or again, at least a juxtaposition of difference, where each of those parts is still legible.

The point you made about the machine for the ideology of individuality and art being that, I think that’s completely true, resonates so strongly with me in terms of how the market sees the art market, sees individual creators, and the idea of a studio, the idea that you could have 30 people, 50 people working, under the brand of a single artist’s name. And I’m really interested in people like Asad Raza, who is our common friend, and how he seems to have a very porous notion of an artist, where, it is his name that shows up on things, but it also involves lots of other people, and he doesn’t control all the pieces of it, and he leaves a lot of that visible in the final piece, or the final process.
But, it also makes me think of my own process, and how, for many years, I had this hesitation about showing up and making things that have my name on them, because I feared that that was too much about me. And I think, more recently, I’ve come to a position where I think it’s okay for part of a thing to be authored by Prem Krishnamurthy, and, it’s clear that’s a set of systems that are emerging out of a dialogue with other people and historical references and other precedents, but, it is a thing that I’ve created in this moment, and because I’ve created that structure, I can then open it up to make space for other people to do their thing. It can become a container, and for me, that’s maybe a more productive or generative way to think about collaboration, because, oftentimes collaboration, especially as a buzzword in business or design or other things, is this false notion of consensus and everybody coming to a single solution instead of structures that allow for difference.

Andros: Yeah, I mean for me, I think a name implies a certain economy with it, and what does one do with that economy, right? I think, our friend Asad, is a great example, and one of the things I’ve always admired about Asad is, not only as an artist, but also as a curator, this kind of notion of “being a host”, which means that he’s often doing things which, it’s not a solo show, it’s not a group show, but it’s something where it’s both/and, neither/nor, and it’s hosting. It’s really, I think of it as, as hosting, and I think about hosting as an interesting curatorial practice and an interesting artistic practice. How do you invite others? How do you create the context to invite others in, to do? And so, that feels for me like an important methodology that I try to develop in what I’m doing, which is a different notion than how do I create the moves, the best moves, to teach the people to do, you know.
Transition sound start

Andros: -and we can start to converge and diverge the sounds that we make, so finding ways to overlap, and then, turn away off into any directions we want *long yawn sounds*

Transition sound end

Prem: I think in our first conversation about this, you quoted William Forsythe.

Andros: As far as I remember, what Forsythe said was in an after-talk, and someone said something to the extent of “what is choreography?”. And indeed he said, if I remember correctly, he said “my job as a choreographer is to create the context for the dancers to do their work.” And that stuck with me, because then, what does it mean to create that context? What do you need to create the context? And how does that shift from creating and controlling the actual material that might play out in that context?

Prem: This idea of hosting, then seems really connected with the idea of choreography in that way. You literally have a group of people who are performing in something and they, it’s both an authorial act and also a curatorial act in some way.

Andros: And ideally something that also can go both ways. What Forsythe said there, I think is brilliant, and has been very instructive for me. But, I also think about, well how can we extend that idea? How can we co-create the context, even? Right? How can that become a two way street?

When I talked about jazz musicians that I feel like influence me and what I do with dance and performance, one of those people is another family friend, named Butch Morris. And I think even one of the words that came up from your prompt, right, was conduction. And, Butch Morris was this downtown, New York jazz composer and conductor and improviser who, basically invented a technique for conducting ensembles that would improvise. So, instead of conducting in the Western classical way, he kind of derived this system of gestures that he would use, to instruct the musicians to then improvise their own material, but, to help coordinate them in the ensemble. So, that notion of composition, and the way that he worked with composition, or conceived composition, I think was very instructive for me, but then has also kind of led to, my also thinking about like, well couldn’t that also be a two way? Like, could the ensemble also conduct the conductor, in some way? Right? And there you could think, you could put in designer or choreographer, or whoever this person is who is in charge of the responsibility of the project, whose name is going at the top of the project, right?

Prem: Well, I think, when you put it that way, for me it seems like it’s always been a two way street, right? I mean, like, maybe it’s a spectrum where, kind of, Western classical music and the idea of conducting feels very top heavy, where the conductor exerts a lot of control downward. I’m not sure if that’s true, but that seems like the impression, and then you have other things that are very, you know, kind of bottom up, where they seem more developed by the people organically who are part of it, but it’s always a two way street. It’s just a question of which way it goes and how much that’s acknowledged, because even in an artist studio, I’m sure that, I know the people who are working there influence what happens, but their names don’t appear on it.

Andros: Right.

Prem: But it makes me think of somebody like adrienne maree brown’s idea of “emergent strategy”, and just emergence itself, and the acknowledgement that we have to look at how systems develop through small interactions at a micro scale, and then how that changes the macro scale of a thing, and then vice versa, it kind of goes back and forth.
I mean, myself, in thinking about design, I used to sometimes very intentionally switch, literally, scales of things. I would move from trying to think about a large scale conceptual system, you know, the motivation of something like an identity project or a book, and how it’s sequenced, its narrative, and then switch scales to the micro typography, like actually looking at how you’re setting letters and words, and somehow I found that really productive as a toggle in my brain between these scales, because then you don’t get fixed in one form.
Andros: Right. Really interesting. But you know, I think it also begs this question, which I feel like we’re circling around, so, how to host, and maybe along with that would be like, how to design the systems of hosting. We were talking about, kind of, these more or less structured interactions, and the way that less structured interactions tend to fall into habitual hierarchies. The loudest person is the one who speaks the most, and so on.

And so, this kind of openness, or what might seem open, actually can become repressive or constrictive, and so for me, that’s where these kinds of design, or maybe choreographic questions come in. Right? Because they actually need some care for if we want those types of interactions to happen, how do we create the pathways for that to happen?
Prem: How does that play itself out in your own choreographic work, when you’re structuring a piece or preparing for it?

Andros: I mean, differently with each piece, and that’s been utterly important for me, that I don’t come to each project with a methodology, but approach each project as a search for a methodology. But there is an ethic, I guess it could be called, or an approach that’s developing and which I feel like I carry into these interactions with other artists. I can say that the last project that I did, which was this playing out questions of care and violence, and whether, and how those two things could be coextensive: Where’s care violence? Where’s violence care? What is care without carefulness? What is violence without harm? These were questions that we had, and there was a very literal push and pull between me and the main dancer Lee that I was working with.

And so, I had some of these ideas, I had a very simple method that I brought in, that it started from just saying yes and no, physically, so, acquiescing and resisting. And then, trying to play out what is it to say “yes” and “no”, at the same time. What is saying “yes” in one part and “no” in another? How can our “nos” together become a “yes”? So, our resistance into each other, and we’re talking physically here, did not become a kind of stalemate. And so, in this case, I came with some interests and some, more or less, political motivations for where this was coming from, but how it would play out, and how it did play out, was only possible through Lee’s contribution and what she brought into the situation. That was a very literally tactile, literally physical way of co developing this, through lots of, kind of, issuing and disagreeing with.

I kind of generally freak out, at the beginning, because I’m like, what’s a dance piece? How does one make a dance piece? I’ve been doing this for, like, a decent amount of time, and yet I’m like, how is it po-? I still have no idea how to… you know? And I actually, I feel like the freak out doesn’t freak me out anymore, and that’s the only… like if you want to talk about some kind of improvement, that I feel like I can track, is that now I’m a little bit more like, “yeah, I have no idea how to make this”. I feel “okay, I have these interests, but what does that mean? Like, what are we doing with that?” And then finding that, that’s actually a generative space, it can be a generative space if I can, and this is where these questions come into play, if I can design the scenarios where the artists that I’m working with can interact with those questions, and we can co author something.

Prem: I like that you said “design the scenarios”, because now I think maybe you should call yourself a designer, and I should call myself a choreographer.

Andros: *laughs* Let’s do it.

Prem: And then we just switch roles.

Andros: Absolutely.

Transition sounds starts

*vocal exercises and breathwork*

Transition sounds end.

Prem: Coming back to the initial thing you said about embodying with, I love this with. My impression is that, it sounds like in your process, you’re both responding to a project, a situation, your collaborators, in very direct ways where you’re learning with them, learning from them, through them. And it also seems like you’re often doing that with other artworks, with other artists, installations, or sculptures, or contexts in which you are then creating a work that is embodying with them. Can you talk about how that’s developed in your work?
Andros: Yeah, because I think it developed the way that a lot of things tend to, which is more or less accidentally, and then afterwards you start to think there might have been a reason for that accident. I spoke before about my ambivalences around the kind of singular author notion. And I’ve kind of always been interested, or more interested, in thinking about an ecology of artists than any single artist, genius, and so on. I think that led me to want to think about the work that I’m doing in relationship to the work that other artists are doing. And sometimes, of course, that can be the literal push pull of a collaboration in a studio, but sometimes not. And so one of the things that I’ve done, that’s become a kind of series of, is remixes. That came from a bunch of different directions, but the very first direction was making a piece in 2015, which was, I would say, my largest budget piece. And then it premiered, and it was a kind of flop, and we performed it a few more times, and by the fourth or fifth time, it started to come together, and I started to feel really good about that piece.

But there was something about this experience of ‘the premiere’, where everyone descends on this moment to experience this thing which is supposed to have arrived into some form of finished ness, and then to have that sense of failure, which was like, “Oh wow, I really don’t want to be making things that have that quality to them. I don’t want to be making things that have that objectivity to them, and then invite judgement in that way”, and also suggest some kind of design in the classic sense that I was thinking about it before, that kind of finitude. So I then took that work and said, I want to remix it. Actually, I want to unmake it. And that became a piece that actually Asad invited me to do, had commissioned called Already Unmade. And the idea there was, okay, I’m going to take these finished pieces that I’ve made in my career and I’m going to unmake them. But also, unmaking them them itself could become a kind of repertory and I don’t want to do that. So I’m going to rehearse the unmaking of them and I’m going to perform the rehearsals. And people can come in and that’s what I’m going to be working on, right? And in between also telling some kind of stories and jokes and songs that had to do more or less with teleology and progress and different notions that were floating around in the space.

And then I started to be interested in like, well, how can I do that with other artworks? So there were two Simone Forti. works. There was a Jerome Bel work. My old friend and professor Tony Cokes invited me to to do some things and I thought like, Well, uh, is this still a remix? He makes video work, not performance. And I thought, actually, other works in other medium can also be remixed. You can employ a kind of misrecognition. So, what if this were a performance? What if this were a video? And so on. I’ve been interested, it’s not so much to make works in honour of other works, but works that are in some kind of conversation with other works has been a thread that interested me.

Prem: Yeah, it sounds like an asynchronous dialogue. This thing exists and then it gives you a starting point to do something and then ostensibly somebody else sees that and it starts another reaction. I also really like this idea of taking something that you made that might be in one frame of failure and then using that to create something else. I used to think about curating in a similar way where I thought, well, every exhibition is a rehearsal for the next exhibition, instead of taking it as a finished experience, thinking of it as something that’s generative for the next step.

Transition sounds start:

Andros: So, interchanging, leading, following, converging, diverging, and as we do that, if there are any songs, or melodies, or or parts of songs or lines that come to mind, those can come in as well.

*vocal exercises and breathwork*

Transition sounds end.

Prem: The question of failure is also really interesting to me because I remember a recent experience where I had created a kind of two hour participatory, experimental talk show situation. And I think you came at the very end when there was karaoke. It had a lot of different pieces to it, it had a kind of conversation, it had a moment of mindfulness, it had Naoko Wasugi doing some gong work, it had a lot of… it had some journaling, it had small group conversations. One thing that happened was that after about 30 minutes or so, there were certain people in the back who just started to leave. And when I was younger, I used to be really concerned with people having a good time. I really wanted people to really engage and have a meaningful experience and, and in that moment, it was great because I thought “well, okay It’s just not what they want to do”, I’m glad that they knew what they wanted and what they didn’t and it was a wonderful shedding of the fear of not being liked, the fear of not being seen, the fear of not being understood. And I think that’s a relatively new experience for me of the last years, but I think it was super instructive for me.

Andros: I love that. I mean, also as someone who did come super late, I had the opposite experience, right? Didn’t leave, but I arrived towards what was the end. And it was one of those situations where I didn’t feel like I had missed anything. Not only because that just didn’t seem like the type of situa… it wasn’t like a narrative where you walk into the end of the movie, but to use an overused word, the vibe in the room was so specific. The tone and the atmosphere that had been created felt so Clear for me to just fit into and I’ve, I showed that I think more or less by, speaking of failure, participating in karaoke.

Prem: Karaoke is never failure! Like that, that was the thing. You got in there, you were all in. I think karaoke is purely about love.

Andros: Whitney Houston, whose song I butchered, might disagree with you in this case, but luckily she’s not here too, I guess, so I might get away with calling it love.

Prem: *laughs* No, I really, well, I, I, I appreciate what you’re saying about the vibe in the room. Also, just as an aside, earlier this year at a party, somebody from Australia, um, this was in Berlin, said, we need to stop using the, instead of saying vibe, vibe is so overused. We should start saying wibe.
Andros: Oh yeah, the wibe.

Prem: So, so from now on, we should really be talking about, you know, the wibes in the room were so good. You’re right that there’s something about creating a space where you don’t catch the whole thing, but it, it’s a kind of culture. For me, part of that is a culture that is less about being on a stage in a particular way. I mean, it’s how I approach karaoke too. Whenever I try to host some sort of karaoke, which, which I do every time I do a public event, I try to encourage people to get involved in karaoke. And I always say to people, I think there’s a misconception that to be good at karaoke, you have to get on stage and sing Whitney Houston perfectly. You have to be the person in front of everybody else with a microphone. But I believe that, also, you can be great at karaoke by cheering other people on. You can be great at karaoke by sitting quietly in the corner and simply sending your energy out into the room. Because if you didn’t have all those people, you just have a person singing alone in their bathroom. And so I like to ask people “what’s, not what’s a song that you’d like to sing, but what’s a song that you like to hear sung?”

Andros: I love it. And I think it’s a very simple but important formulation which contributed to the atmosphere or the wibe in the space that actually let me. Feel like it wasn’t about my ability or inability to sing the song. And I think in the end, it became a kind of death metal rendition, if I remember correctly. And it felt like that was completely admissible in that space. Like it, and it, even the lyrics felt like they were a kind of score that could be adhered to or not. And indeed, that you were kind of providing in a in a simple accessible way, a place for everyone to perform or participate by listening.

Prem: What you just said makes me think, the way in which you might be in dialogue with existing artworks, maybe that’s a kind of karaoke. Because, that artwork is almost like a backing track. It’s a kind of starting point, but your performance is overlaid on it. It takes it at a starting point, and it tests out different ways to respond to it, respond on top of it, respond with it.

Andros: I love that. It’s about a kind of response which doesn’t need to honour or prop up the original. There’s nothing perfect about the original. There’s nothing that we’re trying to approach about the original. But this is a response and that response might not resemble formally whatsoever.

Transition sounds start:

Love me better, ain’t me better, ain’t nobody. Ain’t nobody, ain’t nobody, ain’t nobody.

Transition sounds end

Andros: We talk about these kind of like roles of art making. There is another mythology which is like the mythology of originality and the mythology that the artist is there to make new. And I’m always kind of like, yes and I, there are a lot of things that I, are new and original, that I love and appreciate and, but also we can make tangential responses. We can make responses that forget what they’re responding to.

Prem: Well, I mean, when you said that with your remixes, they don’t need to honour the original. I thought immediately both of a, of a kind of irreverence that, yeah, an irreverence, a kind of lightness about how they relate to their original, though the flip side, and I think that for me is embedded in it, is that even irreverence acknowledges that the thing exists and there’s a more typical relation to it or a more assumed relation of honouring it. And it also requires a kind of listening. It does require a deep understanding of the thing in order to have even an irreverent, in my language, or a remix response of it, and that I think is, it’s a dynamic where you can both listen to somebody else and also either actively or implicitly challenge that thing.

Andros: Yeah, I mean that, that makes me think that, maybe a better way to articulate what I said is to think that the way that you honour something isn’t necessarily evident in the output, right, it it can be honoured like you’re saying in the in the input in the way that you’ve listened Independent from whether that is present, visible, sensible or so on and in what we consider the response

transition: That was amazing. That was a lot of fun. I could do that for a very long time. Let’s do it. Let’s do it. I think this is now that we’re both in New York, it is time. That was wild.

Martin: Thank you Andros and Prem for this conversation.

For the transcript of this episode and for resources mentioned in their conversation, go to rosechoreographicschool.com. The link for this page will also be in the podcast episode description, wherever you’re listening right now. In the next episode, our guests are Mette Edvardsson and Chrysa Parkinson. If you’d like to give us any feedback, drop us an email on info@rosechoreographicschool.com.

This podcast series is a Rose Choreographic School production. It’s hosted by me, Martin Hargreaves, produced and edited by Hester Cant, and the assistant producer is Izzy Galbraith. Thank you for listening. Goodbye.

Martin:
Hello, and welcome to the first series of þ thorns þ, a podcast where we bring you conversations between artists in relation to concepts of the choreographic. þ thorns þ is produced as part of the Rose Choreographic School at Sadler’s Wells.

I’m Martin Hargreaves, head of the Choreographic School, which is an experimental research and pedagogy project. Across a two-year cycle, we support a cohort of artists to explore their own choreographic inquiries, and we also come together to imagine a school where we discover the conditions we need to learn from eachother.

As part of the ongoing imagination of the school, we are compiling a glossary of words that artists are using to refer to the choreographic. Every time we invite people to collaborate with us, we also invite them to donate to the glossary. You’ll hear each guest on the podcast propose and describe their donated word or phrase. And you can also find these on our website. There is a full transcript available for this episode on our website, together with any relevant links to resources mentioned.

This episode is a conversation between Mette Edvardsen and Chrysa Parkinson, recorded in a studio in Oslo. Mette is a choreographer and performer, and she co-founded the publishing house Varamo Press. Much of Mette’s work focuses on choreography as writing. Chrysa Parkinson is a dancer and professor of dance at Stockholm University of the Arts, and her current research project is titled Authorship, Ownership and Control Dancer’s Roles and Materials. In this episode, Mette and Chrysa talk about their identities as performers and choreographers. They also talk about translation in their practices, and the politics of authorship in choreography and dance.

We ask each of our contributors to supply us with sounds, to create transitions within the episode, and to give us a sense of their place or their work. Both Chrysa and Mette have given us recorded sounds which you’ll hear throughout the episode. Chrysa recorded the sound of her dog scratching at the carpet, and ice washing up on a shore. Mette has given us excerpts from two tracks from her LP, Livre d’Images, Sons Images, part of her performance with the same title. You will hear bats that she recorded in her garden using a self-built bat detector. You will also hear Mette and her daughter drawing with markers on a piece of paper, which also happens live in the piece.

Chrysa:
What I have been thinking specifically about lately is the question of belonging, and that’s, this is the word that I would like to propose for the glossary. I’ll maybe just give a poetic definition of belonging as what I’ve arrived at, at this point, which is partly from looking the word up, but also from my experience of belonging or not.

Mette:
Yeah.

Chrysa:
So, belonging can mean to be dwelling easily with or within. To be in the right place. Belonging can be a feeling that one belongs. Belonging can be to be the property of, belonging to. And it can be a thing that you own or that can be moved, a belonging can be a thing. Belonging can mean to be making an event extend in time. Belonging is to be yearning, as in dwelling upon something or someone in thought. And then I split the word into its two parts, be and long. Be is to exist, occur, or take place. Be is to be around or about, to be close to or nearby. Long is to yearn. Long is to extend in time or space, and to be long is to be tall.

I’m looking at this word and trying to understand it, in relation to choreographic process and to the experience of being a choreographic artist, as a word that has a kind of it could be an antidote to ownership. So, rather than owning a work, maybe I belong to that work or I belong with that work, I belong alongside that work. And so, I’m trying to think through or feel my way through the concept of belonging in relation to choreographic process. But that is a long way to ask you, just maybe, to reflect on or introduce your work with translating text to performance and performance back to text, and these processes, and how belonging or ownership has manifested in those processes.

Mette:
The definition of the word belonging is really beautiful too.

There’s a lot of resonances for me in many different aspects of my practice. One place to begin is in relation to this thing when you say, to be alongside or think alongside or think through, for me resonates with this idea of being near something in order to, not necessarily do that thing or do the same, but that proximity allows, gives, some kind of resonance for myself, or allows me to access or do. To give an example; I think sometimes when I’m writing, when I’m making a performance, which in the last years I also have been working a lot with text, and sometimes I realize that I bring some different things together, not because I’m working specifically with these texts or figures or sources, but they kind of, yeah, they author me. Or, they, I’m close with them, I bring them along and through the conversations that I’m making then with these materials or sources or references, there is this sense of, yeah, creating a companionship or creating a belonging together of being near something. And that creates an opportunity for something to…I mean, we are never in the void, we are never in, out of nothing, there’s all kinds of things that exists in the room, or with us, or already in our imagination or…so how to call this kind of, yeah, way of working when you’re not specifically saying, “I’m working with this topic or this text” or “I’m working with”, when you cannot define an idea or a content from the outside, but you’re inside and trying to reach something, go somewhere.

I was also thinking about how there has been this idea of “sharing references is diminishing the work”, so there’s this idea of you’re original in your thinking, or this is something I’ve been a bit curious about, and I’ve been attempting this in different ways, in different pieces, to try and find a way of, you know, to actually bring them in, and how to make them visible or how to share them and what could be a good way for it. I don’t mean it in the sense of, you know, adding footnotes to a piece or how to try and render, yeah, these companionships let’s say, but also by doing so, what does that produce? It’s not only about naming and then something is solved or something is out there, but there’s also a productive or generative thing, I mean, where I feel also, that sources or references then enters another sphere, and it’s not just about facts or something, but also where new references can be imagined or even made up.

Transition Sounds – ice washing up on the shore.

Chrysa:
The idea of gatherings and companionship reminds me of when we were speaking about memorization, a little bit, and how the process of memorization undoes the surface meaning sometimes. So, there’s the thing that you’re memorizing gets taken apart and undone and makes these other associations and then reconvenes, ungathers, and then it regathers, and in that, that’s part of how you inscribe it into yourself, is to undo it and then bring it back. But it’s also interesting about your work, and having observed you work over the years, that your choreographic process involves a kind of dwelling, in and with, many ideas that then something else emerges from. It seems like you don’t necessarily start with one thing that you’re going to illustrate.

Mette:
Yeah, I mean, I had a joke with myself when I started the artistic research program at the academy in Oslo, and I had a very deliberately, a quite vague title to kind of feel that there would be room for it to develop in a different way. So, my title was Writings in Time and Space. And at a certain point I thought my title should be everything all the time because there’s this sense of, sometimes I can admire artists that have, they have a topic, or they have one idea, or a thing that they can then, you know, investigate, research, take apart, put together, look up about, and somehow this feeling when you start from nothing, which of course is never true, but this idea that you have to find it.

Well, another thought that came up when you’re speaking about belonging is this idea of holding, which you are mentioning that word, and I think this idea of holding is something that I think that’s also relevant in the moment of performing, of making the piece. What is this space that we are proposing? What is it? What is the situation that we are in together? Where I feel, a lot of the time, I’m trying to make something that is in a shared space, that it’s not only that the audience is sitting and watching what I’m doing on stage, but there’s something that is happening in that total space.

Chrysa:
Right.

Mette:
And, I think holding is a very good word for me to try and understand what is this?

Chrysa:
Yeah.

Mette:
What is it that’s there? Because sometimes I also feel like actually there’s not so much that is even there! My next title for my research would be, where is the work? So, to understand this idea, that through what you’re doing, through the relationship with the audience, and all the conventions of the space, and our ways of seeing, and all of this together, like what kind of time space can we hold together for that moment in, in time, and that a lot of the time, that’s what it’s about.

Chrysa:
Yeah. I think about that, about coherence, like when things come together to create a here, rather than sticking or clamping down or insisting that there’s a sort of coming together to hold. That’s a very, that’s a very nice experience of performing also, when you feel that there’s a…that the whole atmosphere is conditioning how we can relate in that place. And like, I’ve worked with artists who have very established practices, and they have very established ways of doing that and then, working with other artists who are trying to figure out how to do that, in this particular case. By what means can we create a condition that this artwork can dwell in, or we can dwell in together, that can hold attention?

Mette:
Like if we think of the theatre as a space that gathers, and then there’s conventions of how we enter that space, or it, you know, it can be, suggested in different ways, or we can push and pull on these conventions. But still, it’s not a given that there is something to hold together, I mean, we can enter that space, and we can follow the contract, let’s say, or, but it’s not necessarily that this exists, or that this feeling, or this thing will construct, or will, be built or will…I will enter one word that I thought in this moment, which is the word ineffable. And my very short and maybe simple understanding of this word is “what we cannot put in words”, that which “we cannot put in words”. That’s also one of the things that I think is very interesting in the context of artistic research, is to try and share something about that thing which is not so obvious to put into words.

Chrysa:
Yeah.

Mette:
So that you can say, like, you don’t want to justify it by adding theory to it that wasn’t there before, or you don’t want to explain it. And I think that what is interesting, is to try and find the language, which is one’s own language, then that tries to say, maybe we don’t exactly get to it, but to try and share something about the work or the process or what one is trying to do. The piece does that work, or our work speaks for itself, but what are other things to add to that story? And what are things that I could bring into make visible that is maybe not visible when I just experienced the work?

And I heard, and I’m very sorry now to not be able to say who it was who said this very beautiful sentence, which was a definition for this person of research is to say, It’s like being in the dark and then getting used to the dark.

Chrysa:
Great.

Mette:
Yeah, and that kind of gives such a good description to how we can try and get to these things that we don’t so easily know. And that, I think that the kind of defensive mode of artistic research, then like, what is it? And then why should we do it? And it’s not good because it’s academic, or like all these kinds of things that exist out there, I can also understand that in relation to that, to the ineffable, to these things that we don’t know exactly how to put into words, and then we’re asked to put it into words.

Chrysa:
It makes me think also of a person who’s, I can’t quote who said this, but I, that poetry troubles language and the way that dance troubles movement, and I think the way that artistic research troubles research. By saying it wrong, which is what poetry does, or by moving oddly, or like undoing the conventions of movement, or by undoing the conventions of knowing, of how do you know, and when do you know, and what is evidence, and that there’s the potential to redistribute the authorities, or the authorization of knowledge, which I think is such a beautiful effort to be part of that.

Transition sound – Bat detector.

Chrysa:
Nice to have just a little talk about artistic research. So many things to say about that, actually. Maybe there’s too many things to say, but the inarticulable, in what medium? That would be the question. Like it’s maybe inarticulable in language, but we don’t need to depend on language in every articulation that we have. So, with the, I mean, personally, I really like language, so I’m glad to be there. But, in the process of translation from one medium of thought to another, different knowledges emerge. And that’s the beautiful potential of even trying to share artistic processes beyond what they produce.

Mette:
The fact that artists reflect upon their work was not invented with artistic research. That also needs to be remembered, like that the critique of the work or the reflection is inherent in the work, it’s part of how work is. And then maybe artistic research is a context that facilitates or gives an incentive to share that reflection or that kind of way of sharing one’s process.

Chrysa:
It also, I mean, it brings me back a little bit to Varamo Press as well. Giving context to perceptions or concerns that are fleeting and don’t necessarily have a good spot to land. How did you make that? How did you work with those people? How did that artist who was part of your gathering of artists come to be in their body at, in that way, at that time. That might be something that in performance is fleeting, but then you can maybe grasp it and, or give it some traction, you know, give it some, some place to be. It’s ineffability remains. But it can be somehow included, like in the canon, I don’t know.

Mette:
In the, so Moshe Feldenkrais, the founder of the Feldenkrais method, he has this way of putting, he calls it the elusive obvious. So, things that you’re doing, that you don’t, they’re so integrated in your habits that you don’t even think about them anymore. And when we try to speak about what we’re doing, or share something about what we’re doing, our ways of doing are so integrated with ourselves that we might not even think about that, that’s something that’s interesting to share.

Chrysa:
Yeah, yeah.

Mette:
And I’ve had that sometimes in reading people’s writing and there’s a lot of very interesting sources and additional information, but what’s really interesting is actually their details about what they’re doing, how they get to this or, how they actually practically do things or…
There’s the Belarusian writer, Svetlana Alexievich, not sure if I say her name right. In her speech when she got the Nobel Prize for literature some years ago, she was speaking about, for her, the lost literature is all the oral literature that is happening, that we are making it, everyone, all the time, walking the streets, conversations that we have, things we tell each other, the real accounts of history and lives, and that never are written down, and that we don’t have a practice of catching these, and that it, for her, in truth, that this would be the lost literature. And I think that’s a really beautiful image to think about all the information or all the stories, all the things that, that will not make it to the page or, will not be communicated or shared.

Chrysa:
Yeah, I often think about that about dance practices and choreographic practices. There’s so much in the spectacle form of concert stage performance. There’s so much lost, right? There’s so much that isn’t accessible, including touch, the texture. The quality of touch is pretty much the thing that movement is based on in those forms, but, that’s not something that an audience knows. But also, the amount of language that is around dance, like as an oral tradition, how much we generate, the poetics that are generated. It’s just incredible how people talk. If you interview dancers, the way they talk about time and space, it’s like they’re talking about food. They’re just, it’s like, it’s like they eat it, and they move it, and they shape it and they’re… It’s so rich, especially when you realize, oh yeah, this is not a metaphor.

Mette:
Yep.

Chrysa:
They really are moving time.

Mette:
I think also the kinds of vocabularies and language that is being created in the making of a piece, which is a language that can be fluently spoken between the people of the inside coming from the outside, you don’t know what these words refer to. This word is, means that section or naming things, which has completely its own logics.

Transition Sound – Dog scratching at the carpet.

Mette:
There’s one thing that I’m trying to do for the research, is that, in relation to performance, there’s also the drawings of the light plans, for example and the designer I’m working with, and I’ve worked with for the pieces inside of that context, is Bruno Pocheron, and he will also say that himself, that I’m the kind of light designer who’s still drawing my light plans. So, before every performance, because every theatre has its different measures and lamps, and so he kind of, on the design that’s made for a piece, he draws the light plan for that specific, and this is a super detailed thing, it’s like how they’re hung, what kind of filters, all of these things. And I think that is also a material, all these drawings of his light plans.

Chrysa:
He redoes the drawing for the new space?

Mette:
Yeah, each time.

Chrysa:
Amazing.

Mette:
So, every theatre he will receive the drawing of the theatre, and he will draw his light plan for…

Chrysa:
And tour with you there to-

Mette:
-to prepare, so, for the place to also prepare. I mean, I think it’s been a very common practice, but it’s not necessarily one of these practices that survive.

Chrysa:
When I was working with Kohlberg, I realized what they do, the lighting designer comes and creates the light design in the theatre space that they have there, and then they go on tour, and the lighting technicians install the design, more or less. They have to do a lot of interpretive work to decide how this is going to move into a new space, which is how we worked in New York. Also, that was never, the designer did not tour with us. And yeah, that’s one of those, what I would call an authorial process, that the technician goes through to re-interpret that design for a completely different space, I mean, the space can be a different colour. So I would like to see those.

Mette:
Yeah, it’s beautiful to try and collect them also. That’s also language that you start to learn to read, to understand what they mean, what the drawing means and how it’s adapted from one space to the next.

I’m thinking now about these kinds of collaborations when I think about Bruno. But I’m also thinking about Michaël Bussaer, the graphic designer that I’m working with for many years. I mean, I feel that we have quite shared understanding about how we work together. And it’s interesting to feel also, where’s the boundaries? Where does the work of one begin and the other end? There are clear places where there’s the expertise of the other, that’s definitely being able to do something specific, and then in the exchange of these. I mean, first of all, for myself, I’m thinking, what do I learn from it? Like how I look at light and space differently with having that practice of collaboration, and also in terms of understanding how things are organized on the page. Maybe that’s also a choice of how one wants to work.

I know that there are designers who have a more separate way of working, “this is my design”, and “this is the work”, I mean a bit sketched up now. And there’s other places where there’s more involvement perhaps, so that you feel that you can start to think through that…what would you call that? That medium as well.

Chrysa:
Mm hmm.

Mette:
I mean, I’m not saying that in the end, you know, for example, for lights, Bruno is the one who will know how things work and how to translate ideas or thoughts or questions into the physical space, but that there’s a place when this shared language starts to make it possible to think in that other medium as well.

Chrysa:
Yeah! And then that starts to affect your imagination as a maker, right?

Mette:
Yeah.

Chrysa:
Then you begin to see things, you begin to imagine or project different outcomes.

Mette:
Yeah, there’s also this kind of nearby situation somehow that you…

Chrysa:
Right.

Mette:
It’s not just lights, it’s not just this external thing, but there’s something that you have to start to feel a bit close to it and then you can understand to work with it a bit differently or

Chrysa:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It makes me think about agency, of course, and the question of the plasticity of the boundaries of knowledge. You can feel that there’s a different knowledge in the person who you’re working with, but they can take more or less influence from you, and you can take more or less influence from them, from that artist, or from their medium even, when you get closer to it or you have more familiarity with it.
And it’s true that working with people, like working as a dancer for a choreographic artist for a long time, you begin to do that a lot, where you’re anticipating the needs, or you’re resisting, you know, pulling back from what, might be the aesthetic intentions of that other artist with their mediums, like these kind of, I don’t want to say negotiations really, because it is, it’s an alongside-ness, it’s like that thing that, I guess it’s mules, when they’re going downhill fast, they lean into each other, like they’re on a cliff. The one that’s on the outside is being pushed by the one that’s on the inside, but the point of contact between them keeps them steady, going down.

Mette:
Haha, that’s good.

Chrysa:
That’s a somatic practicing thing that I learned. So, I feel that in working with choreographic artists, and also working with other dancers, there’s this kind of “lean in” to how the other person is working, or what the medium that they’re working in. And then it begins to change how you experience your own work, or how you see your own sense of velocity, or momentum, or proximity, or like, all these things get affected.
And then the question of like, whose is it? You know, is it yours or is it theirs? The question of belonging, for me, the way that I’m thinking right now, is that the belonging no longer rests on me or the other person, but rests on the thing that we do together. We are belonging to, or we are belonging with, this tumble downhill that we’re in. But then you leave it behind, you know, you do this thing, you make this thing together, and then you leave it behind, and maybe you even leave that relationship behind. There is melancholy in that also, that you leave things. You leave as an art maker, you leave the thing that you made, and you also leave the people that you made it with, sometimes, and you go on, and then that kind of stretch or extension of identification with them and with that thing.

I don’t even have a how with it, I just notice it, I just feel it. There are dances that I belong to, that don’t exist anymore.
Transition sound – Markers on paper.

Mette:
And do you sometimes have this image of things passing through you? Yes. I’m just thinking this in the context of belonging and what remains and what, what we leave behind and this experience of you’re working as a dancer for a dance piece, we’re dancers on stage and when the premiere happens, people will tell us dancers then that Well, now, now you can make the work yours. Now it’s the premier has happened. And my reaction to this when this happened the last time was that, but I don’t want to make it mine. It’s not mine. Yeah, I am there, and the work is passing through me. It’s not for me so much about a detachment or not wanting to, you know, it’s not my feelings about the work, but it’s more my role in that moment. in how that work is set up. And my pleasure is to think of it as something that is, this dance is passing through me to be able to manifest on stage or, and I quite like that image or that feeling.

Chrysa:
Yes, I really recognize that in freelance conditions, where I’m passing through, or it’s passing through me, both of those things are happening. And also, the knowledges that I gain in this situation, I also move into others. So, there are things that I don’t lose. They don’t necessarily stay distinct, like sometimes people use the metaphor of sedimentation. I would say, I don’t really see it that way. It’s more synthesis and mess, mess and spill and blur. But it is clear. Continuous. There is there’s continuity to other things. Yeah, I agree. And there’s also the thing about the, the, that the piece itself, like the pleasure in, uh, an artwork, having a life like this, this creature thing, subject that we’ve created together exists and we can. And we can lean on it, and we can know that it’s more or less itself on different nights. And I think that’s, I just love that.

But I also, just to say, when I go and work with repertory companies, teaching or whatever, I don’t dance with them anymore, but sitting around the coffee table or lunch table, it’s very often that the conversation is about visas. And immigration, and borders, and who’s from where, how long are they gonna be here, and how did they get here, and how did they manage to get here, and are they gonna be able to stay, and what is it, like, there’s a lot of question about what am I doing here, and how am I managing that. I see that community of artists as having, particularly, unsteady relations to place, and belonging, and being part of.

And so, it isn’t only a melancholy word for me, but it does have that in it as well. That there’s this sort of unsureness about where you belong and what you carry, what you do hold and what you don’t, and it’s somehow in the work, and particularly because the dance artists don’t have rights to what they create. Even if they are credited collaboratively in works, they cannot, if someone decides to replace them, they will be replaced. Or if someone decides to perform somewhere where they can’t go, then they won’t go. I would like to not be mistaken for thinking that I have an answer about it, that I think that a certain kind of collaboration is the right kind, or a certain kind of contract is the right kind, that’s really not what I’m saying, but I’m just saying it’s there, in our world. We have this condition. We’re so dependent on place and time and the understanding of it, but we’re so precarious within it also.

Mette:
I think that’s one of the things I’ve been trying to hold within my practice. Since I think of myself as a performer, I don’t think of myself as the choreographer, even if I accept to say it, then I will, in terms of, you know, responsibility then, or to be clear. It’s okay to say it. There’s not a problem with it. But I think like where I come from is from, being a performer. I’m also always inside of my works.

Chrysa:
Yeah.

Mette:
I don’t have this outside perspective on what I’m doing and one of the things I realized also I enjoy a lot, is to try to keep, of course, not always so easy, but to try and keep these relationships of performing in the works of others at the same time. I mean, maybe in smaller moments, in the beginning, it was more in harmony. I would work as much for others as I was doing my own things. And at certain moments, there was an imbalance in the time. But when these moments happen, I think of this now because you’re saying about it’s not that there’s one way, and I think that it’s very important that there is not one way.

Chrysa:
Right.

Mette:
That it’s important that different works needs a different setup, needs a way of doing which is specific to what it is that we’re working on, or what it is that, and I don’t mean good or bad work ethics, or relationships, or power use and abuse and all, it is not about that, but just simply a kind of hierarchical triangle is sometimes the right thing, for a certain work to take place, and I have no problem with that. And sometimes the kind of flat structure is what is needed for the situation. I mean, maybe this goes in waves, that there’s moments where something feels more right and wrong, and other times it flows more easily again.

Chrysa:
For the individual artists or like as for our community, for our community, like how we view it.

Mette:
I remember a period where the kind of hierarchical structure was looked upon as very bad.

Chrysa:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mette:
And, I mean, can be bad. Doesn’t have to be. Power is not bad as such.

Chrysa:
I agree with you. I, I mean, I think we, we might not be, people might not agree, but actually what it is, is that I’ve worked with artists who are better off in the hot seat. It just works better for them, and we will make a better work together if I let them take that authoritative position. Their imagination works better, and I can do the work of interpretation and resistance and getting with better if we maintain that, if those roles are allowed to take their place. I’ve also been in group situations where I can see that a fellow artist, a dancer, is suffering from that authoritative condition. It does not work for them. I just think we should be able to talk about that. I want it to be part of work instead of a problem that we can’t solve, you know, that we can’t work with.

Transition sound – ice washing up on the shore

Mette:
I’d like to go back to the research with, um, authority, ownership, control. Control.

Chrysa:
Authorship, Ownership and Control: Dancer’s roles and materials.

Mette:
And that’s what I mean a bit with this example of the thing where there’s a desire for you to, to claim something that, you know, make it yours, claim it back and, or as if, uh, every dancer’s dream is to be able to one day be a choreographer and sign their own work, which, which is a kind of strange, or if you make a solo work, your next work should, you would want it to be a group piece. Like there is kind of inevitable to think in these kinds of, uh, or it seems from the outside as if to be just a dancer in the work is not sufficient or something. And that’s, yeah…

Chrysa:
Yeah. It’s okay until you’re like 30. And then by then you better start stepping up.

Mette:
I remember. I’m not sure which year, it’s many years ago when I saw a piece, a duet performed by you and Thomas Hauert. And I remember this, it was a very clarifying moment, I think, because of how it was articulated. This idea of we make this piece together, but we don’t sign it together. I’m a dancer. So, you are the dancer inside of that piece by Thomas Hauert, although you clearly see the two of you there on stage equally in the, um, you can imagine that this has been worked out very collaboratively. And I think that’s, for me, that’s one moment that is a very clear example of exactly not thinking the reverse of like, oh, I also want to claim it. I want it to be mine. But to say, oh, I want to claim my agent as a dancer and let that have value as such and not to make it smaller by saying, no, no, no, now I also want to have my name on top. Yeah. I see it more as a movement of giving a gesture, of giving value to the role of the dancer.

Chrysa:
Yeah. It’s this thing that, well, it’s, you know, it’s very nice that you’ve been a cat all your life, but now finally you’re going to be a dog! That’s, congratulations! You’ve become a dog and that’s really, that’s really great for everybody because that’s what we were waiting for! So, you could, you know, just finally grow up and be a dog.

I decided to maintain that role when I was around 28 to say that I’m going to be a dancer all my life. And at 28, nobody really noticed. But by the time I was 40 or 45 people were like, oh, you’re still, you know, you still think, she still thinks she’s a dancer! It was beautiful. But the thing that’s great about it is that then I just, it gave me this, all this opportunity to define what being a dancer is in my life, in my artistic life.

That brings me to the point where I can ask some questions about how dancers experience authorship, ownership, and control, because I have been working in that role for so long, and I’m now sort of past the point where I’m going to offend anybody, or I’m going to lose any jobs by asking the wrong question, I can, I can really delve into what that might look like. I am also coming from a very specific world, which is the concert dance world, where things are made to be seen. There’s a spectacle element in what I do, even if it’s not in the conventional spaces, it’s still based on a sensation of front, even if front is not placed so obviously it’s still a concept that we’re working with. So, I have these embodied knowledges or experiences of rendering ideas into movement. I would say that’s a dancer role of working in groups. Where I, I have to learn to get along with people who I didn’t necessarily choose to work with. I have to respect and understand other people’s languages and knowledges in touch, as well as in speech. I have to work towards the creation of something where I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what it’s gonna be, and I have to collaborate with other people in order to make that happen. That’s a very, very strange skill, you know, odd thing to do. It works, I, I notice, but I get along quite well with, like, five-year-olds. We do, we do well together because they’re like, let’s play this game. No, let’s play it this way. No, let’s play it this way. Let’s play it this way. It was like, yeah, I know that game. I know how to do that. Yeah.

And also working with partialness. So there, there’s a lot of the work that I’m doing as a dancer that is invisible, as I mentioned before, or it’s not, it’s not invisible, but it’s not the product. It’s not what’s produced. So, figuring out how to take care of and find continuity with those materials that are in excess of the thing that gets made. And so, a project like AOC is for me to be able to find out how other people are doing that. Because generally, and it’s also that I know a lot about how I do it. I’m very happy to talk about that at length, but I don’t really know how other people are working with those, I don’t really, you know, I haven’t really had time to really ask other people how they’re doing it. That project has that built into it.

I think what’s happened since the beginning of the project, now we’re making plans, we’re meeting people, we’re talking about how to do things. And since the past month, I have been asking myself about the three words; authorship, ownership, and control. I can feel that the word authorship has, it has a kind of above water and below water element and the above water is being authored and the below water is making. And being authored, you know, that doesn’t actually happen. So maybe it’s being authorised. I’m not really sure, but that word is having, is getting troubled. And then ownership definitely is a troubled word. And I think that belonging is kind of nudging the word ownership out of position. And then the word control, I tried to replace it with skill, but then it lost that over water moment. Because the question of being controlled. and having control, that has to remain considered. I don’t know how to get, I haven’t found another piece of language to, to bump that word yet. And I look for it. I mean, I, because I would like to have a spectrum of dimensional language to work with there. But I think that will come in conversation with dancers and with my collaborators and colleagues.

Transition sound – Bat detector

Mette:
And I think sometimes the, in work, we are not always thinking about, you know, authorship or actively or ownership or control or you want to do something and then you try and figure out the way how to do it and what you need to do that and then it kind of rolls from there. And I also think it’s interesting when there’s certain things, we do, grabs us and asks of us to, to consider something differently. That’s what’s enjoyable also in the process of making something is that you’re looking for something, going somewhere, trying to figure something out and on the way, there’s a moment where it kind of turns towards you and starts to ask you to do things or be in a certain way or to, I think it’s a bit similar to some of these questions that the words are very, somehow they’re very strong, like authorship and ownership and control, like as words, they’re very charged or full, but then there’s also a lot of elements to them, which is about creating the right conditions for work to take place, or how to be responsible for what you do, how to, how to care for it, how to organize the work somehow.

Chrysa:
That’s nice actually, Mette, I think, I think what’s important to me is sustained practice, actually. And I think that the clumsiness of those big words, I think they’re a bit clumsy. What’s really important to me about those concepts is their undertow. How they affect people’s, artists continuities. So that when, like the question, how does the question of belonging or owning carry through? Carry on in your artistic life, and how can you see it changing? And that’s what I think is important to, to bring and to be able to really talk about. Because it, like as you said, I mean, each process that you enter, it’s likely that it will have different demands on you and of itself. So, what does carry on? What are you able to move through/with? And also, to get out of this kind of every piece is an end in itself. It’s the last original work. It’s the most, it’s the best, it’s the most, it’s the only, it’s the, you know, the forever. We know that’s not true. So, how can we continue to work without these monuments, and I like the word demand, and the way, and in French it’s also ask, like the demands. What, what is it asking of you? What is it, what are its demands? Like, how do we answer for ourselves as we move along? How these things change and how we can work with them. That’s what I get. I get really excited about it.

Mette:
I have this image of, that comes up, which is my daughter. She was in school. She was maybe six or something. This was the first year of primary school. And she spoke so lovingly or full of joy and enthusiasm about this one teacher. They would have a class with him every Friday for one hour and she would go on and on about this teacher and what she likes and she said it like this, that he asks questions that doesn’t only have one answer.

Chrysa:
Oh!

Mette:
And so she was so amazed by this, like, because then for you, maybe it’s like that, but then maybe for the other, it, you know, response like this, and it’s also right. So, it was like debating and opening up questions of what is friendship? There’s not one answer to it. Or, and so I was thinking of this. now in, yeah, in what you’re bringing up and also how sometimes some of these bigger words, like the ones, the three that you were highlighting, there’s also things that you, maybe you’re not thinking about them like, you know, it’s not upfront when you’re starting a work or there’s also things that you can deviate a bit from. And I think that, yeah, how to not make them so terrifying as well, like that it’s not necessarily to claim or not claim or to find out what’s different relationships and roles and how do they play out, what do they mean, to demystify it a bit or to just make it also something a bit practical and handleable and,

Chrysa:
Yeah, yeah

Mette:
It came with this that, questions that not, don’t necessarily have one answer. One answer.

Chrysa:
Yeah, that’s beautiful. You know, I have done studio conversations with several dancers in relation to this project before starting it as just as part of it, but this one woman, Louise Dahl, when she talked about control, she said, “Oh, well, control, it’s predictive. It doesn’t go very far, but you know, maybe what the schedule is, and if you’re going to get on to your left foot in time”. Look, for me, it’s like control is a puzzle. And Louise’s answer to that puzzle was prediction.

Mette:
Yeah, that would also be an interesting word. What about prediction?

Chrysa:
That’ll be our next, our next séance.

Mette:
Yeah, I mean, now I have two things that come to my mind. One thing is this reference to the Swiss visual artist Thomas Hirschhorn. It came up in relation to one of his works, the Gramsci Monument, which is a kind of, it’s not a physical monument, it’s more like a community space that is being installed. And he wrote at a certain point the statement around this and what he’s proposing is I mean this one can find online, but what he’s proposing is something that he calls unshared authorship. Which I also thought is maybe interesting in relation to this question where he, I mean, whether one agrees with his proposal or not, but in this trying to propose another way or a new way to think, no, the work is mine, 100 %. The responsibility for it is mine, the understanding of it is mine, but I’m not the only author and maybe the collaborator will have an equal relationship to the work. It’s also a hundred percent mine and, and so on. So, the authorship is not one thing that can be sliced up into smaller parts, but to consider it that this one thing can be that one thing for someone else and so you kind of multiply it.

Chrysa:
Yeah it’s indivisible. And shared well, well not shared.

Mette:
Yeah. That’s what, that’s the twisting is saying. Is that like unshared authorship? Like, I will, I will not diminish. It’s not less mine. Mm-Hmm., because I’m, there’s other people that’s also part of it, or,

Chrysa:
Yeah. I like that idea. And then there’s another thing that we were talking about proportional, crediting, and we were saying maybe credits should be expressed in terms of centeredness and extremity rather than top to bottom line of credits for who’s most important is on the top, but maybe who’s more central, who’s more peripheral.

Mette:
Sometimes also these things are really a bit blunt, practical things. Like, I remember being in a performance, you were also doing that, the Schreibstück of Thomas Lehman, and then there would be each time one choreographer, and three performers, and there would be three groups. And the group I was in, this was with Christine De Smedt, she invited two performers to join her. So, it was Marten Spangberg, Christine De Smedt, and myself, but she also wanted us to co-sign it. Right. So, it was making some kind of problem to the system. But one thing that I thought was also really astonishing is the moment when they’re making the program note. They couldn’t do it because it, it would be too much to have three names on the line! So sometimes I think, like, decisions are made on the very…

Chrysa:
Type setting!

Mette:
Yeah! It’s according to pragmatics that the difference between prose and poetry would be if it’s the poet or the typesetter who decides where the line breaks.

Chrysa:
That I didn’t know. That’s great. Where the line breaks.

Transition Sound – Markers on page

Mette:
Maybe one last thing to add for your research. It’s in relation to translation and I was speaking to you about a book called This Little Art by Kate Briggs and she brings up this question of when you say that you’ve read The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, did you read The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, or did you read the translation of Thomas Mann’s book? Like the kind of, this is also somehow a bit relates to this, there’s a kind of tradition to that, there’s the authored work, there’s the original, this is the thing, and every other thing is a lesser, good version of something, and then also bringing up the question, well, but when you then did read. that author in another language, unless you read in German, then did you actually, which work did you actually read? And to what point is it actually correct to, to say that?

Chrysa:
Yeah.

Mette:
I mean, also just to add that I don’t think that translated work is a lesser version, provided that it’s a good translation of course.

Chrysa:
Yeah. Yeah. My godfather. He gave me first editions of Thomas Mann. Translations. They’re first edition translations. I mentioned them to the librarian the other day saying, you know, I have these first edition Thomas Mann books, I don’t know what to do with them, and he said, they’re translations, right? I said, well, yeah, yeah. He’s like, I can’t take them.

Mette:
Woah! He should consider this idea that Borges put forward about drafts and translations, where he, that he says that it’s not a hierarchy where the original is on top and then the translations are less, or the drafts are less. It’s you have to turn it around. It’s just a matter of chronology. So, the drafts of the text, they proceed, the original, and the translations are versions that continue.

Chrysa:
Yeah. The feeling of unison is a translation feeling for me. Dancing in, like, I think of Cynthia Loemij, like, dancing in unison with Cynthia Loemij. She’s a dancer, she danced with Rosas for many, many years, and very specific qualities of momentum and force in her body, and also time. Like her timing was very specific. And I have, I would say, quite different qualities of not momentum so much, I would say momentum’s not my thing so much. Anyway, we worked together, and we would have to arrive at unison. It was a translation process. I had to understand how she was in relation to the beat. All the, even that, I had to like, analyse it, notice it again, hear it again, reconfigure my own timing, and also get her to slow down. You know, like I had to negotiate with her also to say, I’d get an outside person. We need an outside person to get to unison together. And the unison just felt so good. It was so much fun to get there. I don’t even know, like, that’s translation in in concurrent time,

Mette:
I guess in relation to performance, versions is the only thing that we can relate to. So, it’s, it’s less maybe controversial. You perform a piece several times, it’s that piece each time and there’s not like, well that was the one then. Everything that comes after is just the copies I mean, each time that’s the space that you try to bring into life each time and, and we repeat or, or reconstruct or, yeah, or redo or..

Chrysa:
I like, I like that you bring it up because I think it’s, it’s one of those hidden processes, like it’s embedded in our relations to repetition or to iteration that it’s in there. Like the, like the transfer, the change, the transmission from one medium to another, from one place to another person to another. All this.

Mette:
Yeah. It’s another way being very near to the point of integrating someone’s rhythm or movement, timing.

Chrysa:
And it also undoes this question of originality or authenticity. Like, is it, is that that’s not my authentic momentum, but, but you know, it is now.

Mette:
Yeah, maybe also this image of, If the translator, like Kate Briggs, says something about to add yourself actively to an existing work, I guess that’s what you do in translation, and I guess that’s exactly what you’re describing.

Chrysa:
That’s, that’s excellent. To add yourself actively.

Martin:
Thanks Chrysa and Mette for this conversation.

For the transcript of this episode and for the resources mentioned in their conversation, go to rosechoreographicschool. com. The link for this page will also be in the podcast episode description, wherever you’re listening right now. In the next episode, we’ll listen in on a conversation between Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Newman.

If you’d like to give us any feedback, drop us an email on info at rosechoreographicschool. com.

This podcast series is a Rose Choreographic School production.

This series is produced and edited by Hester Cant.

The series is co-curated by Emma McCormick-Goodhart and Martin Hargreaves, with concept and direction by Martin Hargreaves and Izzy Galbraith.

Martin: Hello and welcome to the first series of Thorns, a podcast where we bring you conversations between artists in relation to concepts of the choreographic. þ thorns þ is produced as part of the Rose Choreographic School at Sadler’s Wells. I’m Martin Hargreaves, head of the Choreographic School, which is an experimental research and pedagogy project. Across a two-year cycle, we support a cohort of artists to explore their own choreographic inquiries, and we also come together to imagine a school where we discover the conditions we need to learn from each other.

As part of the ongoing imagination of the school, we are compiling a glossary of words that artists are using to refer to the choreographic. Every time we invite people to collaborate with us, we also invite them to donate to the glossary. You’ll hear each guest on the podcast propose and describe their donated word or phrase, and you can also find these on our website. There is a full transcript available for this episode on our website, together with any relevant links to resources mentioned.

In this episode, we’re going to hear from longtime collaborators, Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman. Denise is the Samuel Rudin Professor in the Humanities at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures at New York University. In her artistic and academic work, she reflects and speculates on questions crucial to contemporary philosophy, political theory, black thought, feminist thought, and historical materialism. Arjuna Neuman is an artist, filmmaker, and writer who works with the essay form, where the essay is inherently future oriented and experimental. This becomes the guiding principle for his research and production.

Arjuna and Denise have been working together for a few years on a project called Elemental Cinema. Each film in this series is dedicated to one of the four elements. Their work aims to undermine patterns of thinking about, and relating to, the Earth, that have been shaped by European colonial modernity. They show that categories and distinctions that seem self-evident to us, underlie a profoundly unequal, racist world. The films they have made so far are called Sootbreath / Corpus Infinitum, 4 Waters – Deep Implicancy, and Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims. In this conversation, Denise and Arjuna are planning their next film, which will focus on the final element in their series, fire.

The transitional sounds you will hear in this episode come from Denise and Arjuna’s field recordings from around the world. Among other noises, you will hear the crashing Atlantic Ocean waves in Devon, England, and a distant thunderstorm in Kakadu, Australia.

Transition sounds: A distant thunderstorm in Kakadu, Australia.

Arjuna: So, Denise and I are currently working, brainstorming, our next film, following the element of fire. And it’s our fifth film, but it’s the fourth film in our Elemental Cinema series. We just completed the Air film called Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims. Before that we made Sootbreath/Corpus Infinitum, and that follows the element of Earth. Do you want to say the other ones?

Denise: And 4 Waters – Deep Implicancy with the element correspondence is the element of Water. And Serpent Rain which had all four elements in it.

Arjuna: The overarching subject of this podcast is the element of fire, as we plan and brainstorm the next film. What word were you thinking?

Denise: The word that’s been with me for a while now is rebelry, rebellion. We can think of the different movements that would obtain, that would give that sense. Something going off course, for instance, right? If you think about the ways in which we do protest, it’s all like set, organised. Usually, you ask for authorisation and there is a route, but then a rebellion under these conditions would be like, something just got taken off, like a flame in the wind, right? Some wind comes…

Arjuna: …Igniting, igniting in the wind.

Denise: Yeah, It’s something. Yeah, Rebelry is going to be my word.

Arjuna: Is rebelry…is it a real word? Or is it a mix of rebellion and revelry?

Denise: No, it’s a real word that, of course OED, Oxford English Dictionary, says nobody uses it anymore, so also that’s why I like it! That is a thing called revelry, a quality, or something that you attribute to something, or a thing in itself, a noun or an adjective, that we don’t use anymore.

Arjuna: Yeah. For me, I wasn’t sure, I didn’t look it up and I was thinking it might’ve been like a revelry and rebellion combination because I mean, it raises that association in my mind, rebelry.

Denise: Rebelry, yeah it could be, right? Because V and B, like the phonemes.

Arjuna: Yeah. They’re often interchangeable. And revelry means kind of like partying or carnival, or celebration, procession, fun, right?

Denise: Disorderliness, again.

Arjuna: Disorderly fun.

Denise: Disorderly fun. That’s an important element in thinking about rebellions, right? It is precisely the ludic part of it, maybe, as it’s happening, but also in terms of, anticipating what is to come, if things change radically.

Arjuna: Yeah, kind of spontaneity. Yeah, like a spontaneous rebellion. I guess you need both modes, kind of, spontaneous and planned.

Transition sounds:  The crashing Atlantic Ocean waves in Devon, England.

Arjuna: One of the ways we came to rebelry, I think for you Denise, was spending time in Paris, do you want to…?

Denise: Yes, so I held the International Chair in Contemporary Philosophy at the University of Paris 8, Department of Philosophy last spring. So, I was there about a year ago, I was arriving in Paris, and I stayed until June. And that coincided with the action against the increase of the retirement age by Macron.

I was supposed to teach two seminars, which I taught. Each seminar was going to have eight meetings, but it ended up that we didn’t have all the meetings because all the action days, the strike days, almost all of them fell on the days I was teaching. So, what happened is that I went to the protests in Paris with other professors at Paris 8 and the students, you know, we were all there. And that feeling, that exhilaration, the feeling of the rebellion against neoliberalism, right, because folks in France were saying they’re rebelling against that change, but actually they were rebelling against decades of neoliberal transformation of the French economy. And then also of the disappearance of the French state, like the state of rights, et cetera. So that was kind of like the last straw that changed, in the retirement age.

And there’s probably those of you who saw what was happening in Paris, that the protests, so folks were setting things on fire, different things were set on fire, but fire was always present there, not as this big thing, but actually as a crucial element, like a signature of the stakes. And Arjuna came, we did some filming for the last film in Paris at Luxembourg Garden, and I was talking about the next film, fire. It has to be about rebellion, it has to be about rebelry, but we had no idea until very recently, we had no idea about how.

Arjuna: Yeah, definitely. And I think like, often in Q&As after our films, but also in a lot of talks, I go to like talks around politics, talks around the state of the world, there’s always a question of what can we do? On the one hand, it’s not our job to come up with that. But on the other hand, I think there is a zeitgeist or…it’s a very common question. And I think a lot of people are very politically activated, especially right now, but are finding modes of protest, open letters, some of these things that are happening, not quite working or hasn’t been working for years. There’s a certain like mode of organised protest, where you get permission from the police, and it can go until 6pm and it’s all very kind of sanitised.

So, Denise, when you suggested rebellion, it immediately seemed right. It immediately seemed like this is something that we should focus on, and what I think other people are focusing on, and where we’re at globally. Especially in relationship to the partnership, the kind of new developments in both neoliberalism and fascism or the far-right, and their kind of partnership. It also seemed to make sense because our last film was focusing on that partnership, kind of studying the history of neoliberalism and fascism as an incorporation, as a strategic incorporation. That it makes sense to move from that, in Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims, to thinking about ways to resist it, to rebel against it, to subvert it.

When we were making Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims about a year ago, already the signs were there, but I think in the last six months, and certainly the last three months, this kind of fascism and neoliberalism, I mean neoliberalism has always been there, but the kind of explosion of fascism in particular, the kind of ethnonationalism happening in Israel, the kind of genocide under a kind of ethnonationalist approach. And then, of course, in the U.S., the rising and returning of Trump…I don’t know, there’s so many…and then in Germany, the rising of AfD.

Denise: Yeah.

Arjuna: There’s so many new fronts of fascism.

Denise: New fronts of something that is old, right? I mean, we trace fascism and neoliberalism, showing up a hundred years ago, so the neoliberalism with Hayek and others in Vienna, and fascism in Italy, Germany and elsewhere, like Brazil even, so it’s not that it was isolated in Europe.

Two things that I think, it’s going to be unavoidable to deal with in, in the next film. On the one hand, this eternal return, eternal in the last 200 years, but it’s still this return of an authoritarian – authoritarian is not necessarily a fascist, but fascism is, they are of the same family – so the return of certain kinds of authoritarianism and fascism in response to demands for equality, so we are talking about something that’s very characteristic of the last 200 years. And we can go back to the romantic reactions to the formal philosophy, so the romantic philosophers reactions to the Kantian philosophy, which was also a romantic reaction to the Haitian revolution, if you think with some arguments about the Hegelian philosophy, which is extremely conservative.

So, demands for equality from the late-18th century, from the mid-19th century, have been met with, on the one hand, this authoritarian strand which takes over the state or, proposed to take over the state, and the concept of the nation is being the crucial one at the end of the 19th century. And then on the other hand, an economic project that says the state should stay out, so it’s the state that will control the population, the people, but leave capital to do its thing however it wants to do it at a certain point. So, here we are dealing with that again. And then at the same time, on the other hand, there is the fact that, our demands for justice, whether it’s for rights or whether it is for equality, those demands that’re also addressing that same state and under its rules, under what it allows us to do. So no wonder every time we get something from the state, and then the wave of neoliberal competition or fascist domination, they come back and they take the state away from us. So there must be a way to break that cycle.

Arjuna: That loop, yeah.

Denise: Yeah, there must be. And that’s what I think rebelry, I mean, even at the level of the imagination, our imagination is too well behaved!

Transition sounds: Birdsong.

Arjuna: It’s made me think of two things, certainly at the level of imagination, certainly thinking about left-wing despair, something I’ve been hearing a lot, a feeling of despair, a feeling of like, things aren’t working. And that is sort of a failure of imagination or failure of economic, cultural, philosophical ways to move forward. But I do think that is shared symmetrically, not equally, but symmetrically with what’s happening on the right, that that kind of fascism is also despairing. Like Trump is quite calling through desperation, or rallying through despair and desperation and its sort of ends up looking backwards.

I was watching this talk about how older fascism was very much looking forward, you know, this kind of accelerating into the superhuman Superman. Whereas today, a lot of the fascism is looking back, even like Middle East ISIS fascism was looking back. And then, I know it’s interesting that the looking back type of fascism works much better with neoliberalism. There was always partnership between capitalism and fascism, but the kind of future-oriented fascism, seemed to be in response to a crisis of capitalism. We know that’s not exactly true, but that is one kind of explanation, at least in the German context; combination of humiliation and crisis of capitalism. But a kind of retrograde fascism, incorporated with neoliberalism, which doesn’t have any kind of past, present, or future.

Denise: The image we need is, it’s not, maybe not so much of that line, right, that it goes back. So maybe that is a way of presenting this relationship between capital, the state, fascism, and this libertarian aspect of neoliberalism. That it’s kind of like, whenever capital needs, it activates a particular kind of state through the nation, through fascism. Oh, I should say, through some kind of non-rational, and not non-rational because it’s irrational, but non-rational because it’s said, it’s spiritual connection that gives that. And then on the other hand, it’s also working to then facilitate economically whatever is needed, because it’s a moment of crisis, or because it’s just a moment of reshifting the relationship, the economic structure. And then the people have to be put under control, even if it is the control of something like Trump or Milei or Bolsonaro.

Arjuna: I was just thinking and reading about the Houthi and how large a global impact they’re having with the naval blockade. And this morning I read that they’re threatening to cut the fibre-optic cables that connect the Middle East and parts of Asia and the West as a mode of protest. They’re not aiming to be violent, they’re not aiming to kill people, they’re just aiming to interrupt the flow of goods and information. That for me seems, I mean, it shows how fragile or how, almost easy in a way it is to disrupt global capital.

Denise: Yeah. Yeah, but we don’t things we don’t do. I remembered in 2011, I was living in London and there were the Occupy protests, Occupy Wall Street, Occupy London, and folks were camping. There was occupying things at St. Paul’s. And then I kept thinking, every time I went to Canary Wharf, or I was in cities, like, why aren’t we occupying the banks? Why is Canary Wharf not occupied, with all those financial companies there? So it never made sense to me. It’s like, why don’t we occupy the banks and just, don’t let people come in, do something, or occupy it in person or online! But then, of course, I think it’s connected to what you said about the Houthi. That is something about the ways in which we protest, which, we want it to be big and to make an impression, and to be visible. And the larger it is, the better it’s supposed to be, right? That’s our image of protest; it has to be public, you have to be seen, you need to see lots and lots of people out in the streets – which is important because it gives a sense of the degree of mobilisation, but maybe it’s time to think differently, right? About what the protest is?  What is that we want to achieve? It’s not like we shouldn’t protest visibly anymore. But we need to figure out other ways to respond to this attack, that are more effective, and that’s what I want to say.

Arjuna: I went to the Iraq war protests. I don’t know when that was…

Denise: 2001…2002?

Arjuna: Yeah. And there was a million people or something like, the largest for this stuff, and nothing came of it. And it’s not to say… I mean, lots came from it. But no concrete political…there was a sense of solidarity. What you’re saying exactly, is like, trying to be hyper visible versus maybe identifying the weak links and there are so many weak links in global capital. This we learned during the pandemic, that how small interruptions in the global supply chain, suddenly, there was missing one part for the car, and suddenly it was impossible to buy cars or rent cars. And then it’s the same that the Houthi has managed to close down two factories in Germany, Tesla and another one with only like a few weeks of action. I mean, I think if you were a labour strike at one of those factories, it still wouldn’t close it down.

So I think like, recognising the different modes of strike or rebellion. This Houthi thing made me think of what we spoke about in 4 Waters, with how the earthquake made the slaves realise, during the earthquake everything shut down and the slaves kind of escaped, momentarily they realised how much power they actually had, and how fragile the situation actually was. And it was a natural disaster that disrupted everything significantly enough for that realisation. And maybe something similar, I mean, maybe the pandemic was a significant enough semi-natural disaster, that we’ve learned how fragile global supply chains are, and where the weak links are. So I don’t know, I mean, just thinking about these kind of relationships between natural disaster and what we learn, in terms of a mode of rebellion, or mode of protest.

Denise: Yeah, it just made me think of, during the pandemic, with the Black Lives Matter movement, that we saw global mobilisation, right? And then, I think that was the first big one. And then also, because people were responding to the fact that the governments were just not doing, there was lots of frustration in there. So on the one hand, it was a, you know, “natural disaster”. But then it, but also, there was acknowledgement that it was not that natural. That decisions by governments led to people, too many people should die, that shouldn’t have happened.

On the other hand, there is the actual political disaster, which is the fact that over 150,000 people died in Yemen over the past years, and absolutely nobody’s paying attention. So, there is also that disaster, that is happening to them, right, in this ongoing disaster, which is not natural, which is political, in the way that the U.S. and Saudis and the UAE, they’re all involved. Which is connected with the whole situation that created something like the Houthis.

So maybe, I mean, it’s always a combination of, something unprecedented and unacceptable that happens, and the acknowledgment that the political frameworks that are there, be that the states or the UN framework, they become a bit useless or they are totally compromised, like in the case of the pandemic, in which the governments were totally compromised in their decisions to mitigate instead of stop the virus altogether.

So maybe this is… such moments open up the possibility for rebelry, revelry, right? For, something else, something that can be very simple or, more sophisticated. But it’s the possibility for something else, that takes the place of what one would do usually, but the circumstances show that might not be possible or effective or whatever.

Transition sounds:  The crashing Atlantic Ocean waves in Devon, England.

Denise: I mean in terms of the film itself, right, how can we do this?

Arjuna: This is a good question!

Denise: It’s fun because it’s fire, and then I have these images of transition. Transitions, like we did in 4 Waters, right? We’re all about the phase transitions. So the first image of fire that came to me, was precisely like of heat. So things that are solid, that have been assembled, so the connections will break apart, so they will unfold somehow. Things being diluted in water, but as they heat up and disintegrated.

You asked the question about which pre-Socratic philosopher thought the world was made of tetrahedrons?  And tetrahedrons, by the way, is the platonic solid image for fire and we have those solids in 4 Waters and in Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims. I was just reminded of Heraclitus. And the interesting thing about Heraclitus is that, he’s a pre-Socratic philosopher for whom fire is, what Aristotle said, ‘the first principle’, the basic element, but usually folks talk about Heraclitus in terms of the unity of opposites, and then…so nobody steps in the same waters of the river or in the same river twice or something…some ways in which people refer to his philosophy, but actually he’s a philosopher of fire.

So, it’s not so much that there are two separate solid things that are united, it’s just the thing, that through heat, fire, things go from one shape to another. Thinking about fire and the possibility of transformation from the most simple and direct, and maybe as you mentioned in your notes, the most intimate, to the most radical and dramatic, like nuclear fusion inside of stars or something.

Arjuna: Also, you made me think of this type of tree in central California, called the fire cypress.

Denise: Ah.

Arjuna: And it is only through fire that the pinecone opens it’s, I don’t know what they’re called, the round things on a pinecone that open up and then the seeds fall out, it is only through fire, that that happens. And yeah, I just… it’s a kind of moment of propagation, fire as a moment of propagation, of transformation and propagation. And I think a lot of people forget that fire is part of the planet. We often think of it as technology, as a sort of technology with Prometheus, or Frankenstein, or like this kind of, human making a fire to cook meat, or I don’t know, all of these theories of technology. But, we know that fire is part of the natural landscape, from lightning, from fires as kind of regeneration, but also, fires as an essential part of an ecosystem, as opening pinecones.

Denise: Yeah, and then the core of the planet is on fire! Yeah, this thing about thinking of the fire as an invention, right? It is the first, you know, it’s invented. When did humans invent the fire? That’s a question in these encyclopaedias for kids. So, if we shift it, it would be maybe a way of, we had talked about having a known anti-Prometheus, Promethean kind of approach, enough of this thing!

The different ways in which we can counter that myth, and then at the same time recognise that this investment in the myth, has brought us to this catastrophe that is global warming, right? And everything associated with it. And the colonial, racial violence that makes capital possible. So that illusion, that story, that humans invented fire, or discovered how to make fire…yeah.

Arjuna: Also, it’s kind of… it’s role, following that myth, through to the present moment. I mean, I’m not doing the long history of Prometheus, but you have the combustion engines and guns and explosives and how that…trains and engines as a mode of connection, but also as a mode of conquer colonisation, but then that becomes, kind of, lithium, stored energy, as opposed to the combustion and creation of reaction based energy. And then now, we have, kind of, lithium in our cars and in our phones and laptops, stored energy, which our last film was about, the kind of destruction of lithium mining. But that sense of combustion or explosion, is still inherent in the, I guess, epistemology of technology and in the kind of myth of Prometheus, and it’s like asking this question where that, where does that combustion happen? So, if it’s not, no longer in the engines of our laptops and phones and cars, it’s actually, the combustion happens through the interface with the users, maybe. And maybe that’s a kind of analogy for how inflammatory and polemical the kind of the role technology plays in creating very reduced, simplified notions of history, of politics, of, our current moment is so defined by antagonism and…

Denise: …yeah. So, you’re making me think about maybe the shift, that it’s, you know, taking place. It’s been taking place for a while now, but maybe it’s coming close to some crucial point now, which is precisely the leaving fossil fuels behind, so leaving combustion, which requires a form of living things, organic matter, right?

Arjuna: Mmm.

Denise: From the coal to petroleum, and now something else. And that that, maybe, it may just be that life, life is no longer needed for, capital doesn’t need life anymore, it has used life for 200 years. It doesn’t need life anymore. Right?, what has been living, it doesn’t need the organic anymore. It’s after something else.

So many of the things that we have been seeing now, like the destruction of life and souls in Palestine, which we are forced to watch, to witness without saying, without doing anything. So, that is an idea of humanity that has ruled the last 70 years, that’s now being absolutely ignored. Claims on the basis of humanity, are ignored and people are being punished for making such claims. So, that signals a shift, and humanity has appeared as a crucial moral concept, and has remained it throughout this combustion age of industrial capital. So, you know, there’s a connection there with the economic and the ethical, that wars are so good at destroying, what humans value. It’s something that we have to consider and pay attention, because our political demands are in the name of humanity.

Arjuna: I was talking to someone about the, kind of, violent return of history, but then how technology, social media, isn’t equipped to deal with any kind of history, like, I don’t know, when you scroll it just loads a split second, and you see all the current whatever, the current news. You don’t see what happened last week, let alone what happened 50, 100, 200, 300 years ago, so like, social media and phones are not equipped to deal with history. So, when history comes back, as it will in some capacity, it’s coming back like a funhouse mirror, everything is distorted, squeezed, and twisted, and upside down, and back to front. And yeah, I think like those old tools, human rights, I don’t know, it sort of somehow doesn’t fit the funhouse hall of mirrors.

Denise: Yeah. So that takes us back to the political organising, right? What would be the basis for organising politically, if those concepts such as dignity, equality, liberty, that are still crucial in the political vocabulary, our experience, our techno virtual experiences do not feed them, do not cultivate them. Yeah, that’s another moment.

Transition sounds: A distant thunderstorm in Kakadu, Australia.

Arjuna: Sort of switching rather than describing how bad everything is, maybe we try and think a bit of I don’t know, like, I thought about, the kind of, sitting around a fire, not with a romantic return to a kind of palaeolithic lifestyle, but sitting around where the fire, where the heart, where the hearth, hearth, hearth, where the kind of intimate space…I don’t know. I was talking to someone about fire, and he said, he used to sleep by the radiator, or by like, the gas fire heater in his house. And I was like, yeah, I did too when I was a kid. I would roll up in front of the gas heater, which probably wasn’t so good for my brain cells, but that was one of the cosiest places in my childhood house.

So, this kind of warmth, hearth, heart of the house, fireplace, like this kind of thinking. And then, what would a part of the film or like the heart of the film, just like the centre of the earth, what would it be to make a film, kind of, sitting around a fireplace?

Denise: Yeah. Well, we could also think about the glow, the glow of the flame and the fireplace, and the glow of the computer screen, and all those other screens. What happens when you are around the fireplace, with darkness around, surrounding you, and that glow. And then, I mean, there is intimacy, but there is also conspiracy that happens. And things need that kind of closeness. Certain things need that everything else be kept the dark, and only some faces are lit. There is no conspiracy on Facebook. I mean, only the conspiracies that people talk about…

Arjuna and Denise laugh.

Arjuna: Yeah, there are certain types of theory, but not conspiring. The conspiring happens when those faces are lit, and the flames are moving, but there’s such a, a three-dimensionality, like there’s a spatiality to it. Which, when you go to a coffee shop and four people sitting a round table with four laptops, it’s a very different…although it’s similar visually, there’s something very different about the kind of spatiality of sitting around a bonfire.

Denise: Yeah. So, we have the first image. Conspiring on Facebook! It’s like…

Arjuna and Denise laugh.

Arjuna: Yeah. Conspiring on Facebook versus sitting around a fireplace, making marshmallows

Transition sounds: A distant thunderstorm in Kakadu, Australia.

Arjuna: I know, you were talking, or writing about, the kind of intensity of combustion, like, the lightning, which is very high, rapid intensity.

Denise: Uh, yeah, the lightning that like, the plasma, the…I don’t know, gamma rays of that plasma that…so that shifts, right? Like that transforms at the level of cold, the level of, the quantic level, which is fire. And then the infrared, not the gamma rays, but the low, the lowest one, the infrared kind of, of change, which is the composition, right? Which is just, the heat, that then will…so things, thinking of organic matter, that things die, and then they get cold. But then, if you leave them, if you don’t put them in something really cold, then they will decompose because of the warmth.

So, which means then, I was thinking about fire, about the electromagnetics as a spectrum of fire. And also, because one of the things that keeps showing up, and it’s crucial to the films, is the emphasis on materiality, right? So, we are talking about transformation here, but transformation as a material, in material terms, not transformation in the conceptual, in conceptual terms. So, what guides the ways in which the elements are operating in the films, is precisely their materiality and how we can figure transformation that way or not.

Something else that came to me, I keep saying that black light, which is UV rays, that black light goes from the UV to ultra red. So, we had ultra red in Sootbreath, like a reference to black light, while we had ultraviolet in 4 Waters. And then I just assumed because, yeah, so black light, it’s there, ultraviolet, X rays, gamma rays, uh, radio, microwaves, and ultra red. And I just did something like, okay, if I combine blue and red, so blue is the last band in the visible light spectrum, and red is the first one, and if you combine the two of them, what you get? You get violet, you get purple, so you got black light. So, there is also this play with black light, as something that allows us to maybe cut through some things, which would be nice if we could figure.

Arjuna: The thing I would like to work out, how to cut through, and it’s, I mean, it’s a very big task, but just like this kind of fake news and the gaslighting, like, I feel like that’s common across left and right. I don’t know, it feels like…it gives me a lot of fear and despair. Just the, the blatant lies that happen, I don’t know. I would like to think about cutting through.

Denise: This is a difficult one, isn’t it?

Arjuna: It is a difficult challenge.

Denise: Because I think, I don’t think the lies convince anyone, they just make us not want to pay attention anymore!

Arjuna: No. That’s the thing, no one is buying it! No one is buying it and it creates like fatigue and disillusionment or just kind of, yeah despair. It creates despair.

Denise: It’s an attack on the soul. It is like…yeah…

Arjuna: Yeah. It’s like offensive because it’s not even a good lie, it’s not a convincing lie, and it just sort of allows things to proceed…

Denise: Yeah, let’s think about it. Let’s play with it. Because we know that the line is not effective, so it does something. So how do we figure and cut through what it does. I mean, so the fact, because all those things, there is a result. So, how do we cut and undermine that result? Since, if we can’t undermine the process.

Arjuna: Yeah, you can’t undermine the process, but undermine the response to kind of despair. I mean, we should be precise. We have to think about it more, but be precise about what exactly the effect of that is. I mean, we can say quickly despair and disillusionment, but like, sort of narrowing in.

Denise: Yeah.

Arjuna: On what? Yeah.

Denise: Because one of the things I have been thinking about is self-defence, auto-defence as a form of refusal. So, refusal to become desperate, refusal to engage in this thing. What are the ways through which people have done that? Over, I don’t know, forever? Because despair is not, it always shows up, in under circumstances. That again is the imagination, isn’t it? Because you have to project something else right now. Not in the future, but right now.

Arjuna: Yeah. In the media.

Denise: Yeah. It is as if you were called to live in two different realities, this madness and then something else that can prevent you from just giving up.

Arjuna: Yeah, I think so.

Denise: Maybe the film, it could have that ongoing, something else.

Arjuna: It’s kind of doubling, simultaneous, I think the doubling is important. I think if it was just utopic…

Denise: No.

Arjuna: …It’s problematic. I think it has to acknowledge the reality of what’s going on, at the same time as imagining it differently.

Denise: And with the instances, examples of things, of people trying to do it some other way right now, or at the same time, not only the possibility, but the reality of something else, even if minor, right? Even if it cannot, will never have, affect billions of people, but if people everywhere are engaged in it, so something else, some other way of living in the world differently is happening. Um, must be happening.

Arjuna: Mm, yeah. Living and feeling some other way of…because I think like the right is capitalising on despair and it is using that. And so, if cutting out the despair, or at least addressing the despair, then it might not, then the kind of, consequences of that, might be, it might be like a bifurcation. It might lead to a different, different outcome.

Denise: Yes, not, yes. It’s not only that they’re, they’re counting on it and doing it, it’s that during the pandemic, this thing that appeared about mental health. It’s not that people did not suffer or anything, but there was like a, like an industry of evolving doctors and researchers, about how there was a cognitive dissonance, or a mental health problem, related to our inability to plan and project into the future, because of the pandemic. And there was an increase in talking about mental health issues. That it made me wonder, it’s like, so now they’re inventing…you could see, not in the invention, but the actual production of a new disease, a new illness, but it’s not because it wasn’t true, it’s also because the conditions lead to despair and other things, right?

So, I think the question is also how do we present it? The two things, the conditions are horrible, it’s amazing how so many of us still function given those conditions. And yet, it’s not that much…and yet, it is possible to shift without having to go somewhere else, or without having to wait for some other time, but just shifting right here, and then what people are doing, to create their own self defence, little protections.

I’m thinking about that Philip K. Dick story with a person that has this suit, that you shift into different things, so people don’t see you!

Arjuna: I like this idea of changing form.

Denise: Scramble suit, yes. It is A scanner darkly! Scramble suit.

Arjuna: It kind of jams the way of being identified.

Denise: Yes, yeah.

Transition sounds: A distant thunderstorm in Kakadu, Australia.

Arjuna: I want to come back to one thing you said, about, what are the ways in which people have been resisting in the past? And I sort of had this idea of asking friends, and colleagues and like…we’ve done interviews before, and then we did a bit of a script based on encounters. Just thinking about the dialogue, and what if we made it slightly more collaborative, and asked people to make short audio recordings describing the ways in which they are resisting and rebelling and…

Denise: I love this.

Arjuna: …and this could be kind of across from philosophers to activists and sort of.

Denise: I love this, because I was thinking also, about like reading some passages. I was reading something by Césaire that I thought like, oh wow! You could have somebody reading these too, like, in the film. So, yeah. And then just having the voices, something else that came to my mind is that, we could also do it, we could have two people talking at the same time, but in ways that you can understand. But then at the same time, people saying something, and then the other one completing the idea, like, instead of having separate voices, actually having this sense of the voices being inseparable.

Arjuna: Yeah, overlapping and intertwining, yeah.

Denise: Yeah, yeah.

Arjuna: So, I guess we should make a list of people, living and dead, that we would, kind of, invite to make, I don’t know, like a two-minute, three-minute recording.

Denise: That would be fantastic. And then we can also have it in different languages.

Arjuna: Yeah, or moving between languages.

Denise: Between languages, yeah. Since everything ends up translated into English!

Arjuna: Yeah! And, that’s kind of like sitting around a fireplace or a bonfire.

Denise: Especially if we have other sounds kind of quieting the voices. Then some conspiracy, conspiring mood.

Transition sounds: A distant thunderstorm in Kakadu, Australia.

Arjuna: Yeah, my word for the glossary, the word that I was thinking about, but I’ve been thinking about for a while, is tremolo. Which is a musical effect, you hear it a lot in Cumbia, which is what I’ve been listening to.

Arjuna and Denise laugh.

Denise: You are in California, of course, it takes you to Latin America. So, how’s it called tremolo?

Arjuna: T R E M O L O, like trembling.

Denise: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Arjuna: It’s this effect that rapidly, very rapidly, switches either the volume, or an on off switch essentially. And, when paired with a little bit of reverb, it creates this trembling effect, that I seem to think, twins the way that when you’re over-, overflowing with emotion, your voice also sort of trembles, also sort of shakes. And thinking about the space that is created through trembling, through overflowing of emotion.

And you hear it a lot in types of music which have roots, shared roots, in indigenous and slavery traditions or soul music. Going back to the blues, going back to the Choctaw, and in Cumbia, and the various different lineages that lead to Cumbia.

Denise: Okay, I have to play a little, let me just listen…

Arjuna: I have a Tremolo playlist, I’ll share it with you. There’s one that I really like that I heard on the radio called La Razon De Mi Existir, and it’s by Grupo Quintanna. I think it’s from 2021, maybe.

Denise sings to herself.

Denise: Okay.

Arjuna: It’s a good song!

Denise: Yeah. La Razon De Mi Existir.

Arjuna and Denise laugh.

Arjuna: I’m learning more about Cumbia, and some people have the theory that it, the beat is from horse riding.

Denise: Mm-Hmm.

Arjuna: But then other people have the theory that it’s, um, from dancing, from slaves being able to dance and shackles. So, they created a beat that is quick and short enough for a quick shuffle step. Thinking of music as one of those modes of rebellion.

Denise: Yeah, and of creating…yeah, creating this space for breathing, right? This little maroon space for existing on that unbearable, deadly situations. Yeah, yeah.

Arjuna: I know there are many ways to think of, like, the falsetto, or think of tremolo, as spaces, as modes of rebellion, not just surviving, but also turning that pain into beauty, or turning that horror into tenderness, as a space of transformation.

Denise: Mm-Hmm. Some other ways, a way also, of conceiving of life, and being alive, and existing. So, use the title of the song, it’s a mode of existing, of rebelry. Which in its most, I think, generative modality, the one that allows for existence and continuation, right? In the music? Even if we don’t know why, how, the reference is there, right? And then, you can speculate as to, how it made it possible for folks to live under colonial violence, and racial violence. Yeah.

Arjuna: I think we should ask them to make a song for us.

Denise laughs.

Arjuna: Grupo Quintanna.

Denise: That would be some, some shift!

Arjuna: Yeah!

Arjuna laughs.

Denise: Ah! Juego De Amor, I found La Razon De Mi Existir. I see. Okay, I think we’re closing with that.

Arjuna: Yeah, I think this is a good place to wind it down.

Transition sounds: A distant thunderstorm in Kakadu, Australia.

Martin: Thanks Denise and Arjuna for allowing us to eavesdrop on your planning for your next film. We look forward to watching it together. In the next episode, we’ll hear a conversation between Leo Boix and Pablo Bronstein. If you’d like to give us any feedback, drop us an email on info@rosechoreographicschool.com.

This podcast series is a Rose Choreographic School production. It’s hosted by me, Martin Hargreaves, produced and edited by Hester Cant, co-curated with Emma McCormick Goodheart, and the Assistant Producer is Izzy Galbraith. Thank you for listening. Goodbye.

Martin: Hello, and welcome to the first series of Thorns, a podcast where we bring you conversations between artists in relation to concepts of the choreographic. Thorns is produced as part of the Rose Choreographic School at Sadler’s Wells. I’m Martin Hargreaves, head of the Choreographic School, which is an experimental research and pedagogy project. Across a two-year cycle, we support a cohort of artists to explore their own choreographic enquiries, and we also come together to imagine a school where we discover the conditions we need to learn from each other. As part of the ongoing imagination of the school, we are compiling a glossary of words that artists are using to refer to the choreographic. Every time we invite people to collaborate with us, we also invite them to donate to the glossary. You’ll hear each guest on the podcast propose and describe their donated word or phrase and you can also find these on our website. There is a full transcript available for this episode on our website, together with any relevant links to resources mentioned.

This episode is a conversation between Leo Boix and Pablo Bronstein, recorded in their home in East London. Leo is a poet, translator and teacher, writing from multiple identities on the complexities of creative and cultural translations. Pablo is an artist whose work spans prints and drawings to choreography and performance. His focus is on style, spatial politics and queerness. In this episode, Leo and Pablo talk about their personal and professional relationship and how their practices influence each other. And I was also in the room for this conversation, so you’ll hear a couple of my questions from the background. In this episode, our sonic transitions are brought to us by Leo. His first collection of English poems was released in 2021, titled The Ballad of a Happy Immigrant, and he has recorded himself reading some of his poetry. You will hear a selection of his haikus, mistranslations, and riddles dotted amongst the conversation. Enjoy.

Leo: Why don’t you go first?

Pablo: No, no, you go first.

Leo: Well, I selected two words. The first one is mask. And the second one is mistranslation and they are linked in a way I was, I began with, I began thinking about mistranslation, which is, you know, what you know very well, because I wrote many poems that are mistranslations and my third collection, I will be exploring the idea of mistranslation specifically to kind of Anglo Saxon poetry.

Pablo: But is mistranslation like a, just something translated badly? Deliberately badly?

Leo: Yeah, that’s one of the kind of definitions, but it’s a bit more expansive. And then I began thinking about mask and masking things and perhaps thinking more about dance and movement as connecting those dots in a way and putting a mask and performing because I translate poetry from Latin American authors into English and I perform those poems and I feel like I put a mask on somehow, the mask of the translator or the mask of the poet.

Pablo:  But is writing in and performing in English something of a masked performance for you?

Leo: Yes, yes, in a way. And I looked it up and mask is one of the synonyms of mistranslation. So there is almost like a way of saying something is mistranslated. But also, you know, thinking about translation as this moving from one place to the other, mistranslation doing it. In a wrong way. And yeah, I was always sort of fascinated by that, kind of doing it badly and do doing it wrongly.

Pablo: Do you have an example? I’m just, I’m just curious because I’m just thinking that maybe people listening to this won’t necessarily sort of understand what mistranslation might be. If, for example, you’re translating a line is there a technique that you use to mistranslate something?

Leo: Sometimes I do have techniques. Sometimes I for instance, I did mistranslations of charms, Anglo Saxon charms. So, I would translate words from English into Spanish, and then back from Spanish into English, and I would be doing it because of the music, how it sounds, that word, and then I will create this new piece that is entirely different from the original or kind of a literal translation.

And the origins of all this is kind of this idea that when I came here, I couldn’t speak a word of English and I tried to explain myself and who I was and I couldn’t, and I felt there was something that was missing in that process, and it took me a while to realize that actually it was an interesting process. And I do that anyway, all the time, trying to explain from, you know, even in my first collection, who I am, what are my themes, and be more playful and ludic.

Pablo: Is that, is that what a mistranslation is for you? It’s, it’s when you have that sort of straightforward translation in your mind and then you insert a kind of playful variant into it.

Leo: Yes, yes, in a way that’s the way I see it as a poet when I write mistranslations and I consider those poems, but then as a translator, when I teach translation, and when we look at translation, and this idea of the perfect translation that never exists, there’s always a mistake, or there’s always another way of doing it.

So it also challenges this idea of the perfect translation, that there is a way of translating, moving from one place to the other, that you can do it, you know, in various ways.

Pablo: So, translation can always be re translated and a 19th century translation of a Babylonian text will be different from a 20th or a 21st.

Leo: Exactly. Right.

Pablo: But what you’re saying is if there is a mistranslation, it’s a creative translation. It has created something new and that is fixed. That is a new, entirely crisp and self-sealed bit of writing.

Leo: Yes. And there is this kind of cheeky side of it as well, this thing of like, just the word ‘mistranslation’ that’s like, puts people like, why are you calling it mistranslation? Is this a joke or what’s going on? And I quite like the, the various readings of it, that people can read it in different ways. But yeah, it began actually in The Ballad. I do have some mistranslations and it all kind of started there.

Pablo: Have your mistranslations been translated into other languages by other people?

Leo: Yeah, we did an exercise last year at the University of East Anglia where I gave my students one of my mistranslations and I asked them to translate that poem into their own languages and they, some of them, and they were free to do it, you know, any way. So, some of them were very literal and they translated word by word and some, some people did the mistranslations.

Pablo: And at that point you lose authorship? You retain authorship if it’s a regular translation, but you lose authorship if it’s a mistranslation or a creative translation?

Leo: Yeah, exactly, exactly. That’s the mistranslation word. And the mask, yeah, it sort of comes together with mistranslation, I guess. And I was thinking about that poem that I wrote about the mask a long time ago. I don’t know where, where I have it. You helped me edit it somehow. Remember there was, it was a mask. It was a very early poem I wrote a long time ago.

Pablo: I mean, you’ve written what, 5,000 poems in the last two years?

Leo: Yes!

Pablo: How many haikus did you write during the pandemic?

Leo: Thousands.

Pablo: 3,000?

Leo: Yeah. And perhaps it was a haiku. Perhaps it was a haiku,

Pablo: Haiku number 1,374!

Leo: I wrote many, many haikus, yes, it’s true.

Leo poems: Haikus by Leo Boix.

Today, my first swim

of the year, jellied sea,

my skin on fire.

I follow the sun

as the hours pass. I’m dust

across a heat map.

At the beach, we sun

bathe side by side. My cold skin,

your light freckled hands.

Leo:  Anyway, what about your word?

Pablo: My word is actually quite an obvious one for me. It’s a word that I’ve used a lot, contrapposto, which, it’s a description of what the body does when it’s standing. Most of the weight of the body is resting on one leg or on one foot, and the other leg or foot is more relaxed. But it also has, I think, kind of cultural implications. It can be used wider than its sort of description of a kind of physical act. So, for example, most Greek and Roman statues are in a contrapposto pose. It means posto as in a sort of postural pose and contra is the opposite. How would you describe it? It’s a kind of, it would be like an S shape for a human being. And so most of the sort of sinuous poses of Greek and Roman art are in that. And a lot of Renaissance and certainly Baroque and Rococo art is in that. A lot of the art I like has an S curve to it. I’m less interested in two feet on the ground, stuff, whether that’s modern choreography or whether that’s medieval sculpture, I’m less interested in stuff that is too solidly planted.

When I’ve choreographed things with choreographers or by myself, depending, and the conversation is about, you know, how to move through a space, contrapposto, like it’s sort of relative sprezzatura, allows for different visual languages to enter into the contemporary performance space. So you can start to reference art history or certain aspects of art history, which might otherwise be closed to that discourse.

It’s also a very queer universe. So, the way of standing that is not two feet firmly planted on the ground, but is actually sort of sloped off, all the glamour is on one hip. That is something that, certainly when I was a kid, you could be beaten up in the playground for. And so it has, I think, a kind of radical edge. It’s strong, but simulates weakness. It’s relaxed, but actually, in some senses, it’s not easy to maintain. So, actually, it’s a kind of complex, sometimes camp, way of holding the body.

Leo: Yeah, I’m just curious to see, to know where does this come from? If it came from you looking at paintings when you were a child, or sculptures, or more like when you were reading about dance, or about the history of art, and the idea came through kind of books, rather than the visual?

Pablo: It’s quite hard when you’re sort of going back through gay history, and certain things stay in your mind through mockery, but actually you’ve selected them to stay in your mind. Do you know what I mean? Like you could, there are things that potentially might have been, things that I was worried about behaving like, to be too sissy was something that I was worried about. And yet, that I was worried about that and that I considered myself secretly to be that means that already I was in the kind of imaginative realm of Contrapposto somehow, that I was already in that sort of Image universe.

There’s nothing innate to any form of behaviour and I think, the sort of world of allegory and irony that gay people lived within, certainly when I was younger, that really has to do with understanding that boys don’t instinctively behave like boys. They are trained to behave that way. by society. There is no physiological way to sit in a masculine way. It just happens to be that some men sit in one way and some men sit in another. And so I think that world of supposed artificiality that contrapposto and sissiness encapsulates to most people looking for sort of natural masculinity, I think is something that actually undermined my faith in any kind of physical truth, if that makes sense?

Leo: It’s a construction?

Pablo: Yeah, exactly.

Leo: But I remember that performance that you did at Tate Modern, and you had a dancer with a mask of the sun. I think he was pretending to be the king’s son, and you were giving him directions, and suddenly he was making really exaggerated postures, and he was declaiming as well. I remember he was sort of talking, but you were telling him how to behave or how to move.

Pablo: Yeah, it was in the heady days of the lecture performance.

Leo: I remember it was quite striking. The mask, because the mask was quite amazing. I can’t remember it was a, you bought it, but there was…

Pablo: No, no, we made it.

Leo: Oh, you made it!

Pablo: Yeah.

Leo: And it was sort of golden and it was amazing, and there was a bit of music as well. That was one of the first performances I saw where the postures were really Baroque, but overly exaggerated.

Pablo: I think at that time I was very keen to sort of pull apart the languages so you know I would juxtapose very very pedestrian, sort of sitting on chairs talking with highly highly highly mannered behaviour ,mannered in the contrapposto, you know, Baroque way and there’s people that I realised could slip into that physical world very, very easily and for other people that really just, contrapposto went against the grain. But for example, someone like Rosalie Wahlfrid, who I’ve worked with for, I mean, 20 years almost. She’s someone who has an unbelievably subtle and intuitive grasp of sprezzatura and contrapposto. And I mean, she’s classically trained, but you know, also has a very long contemporary performance history, and she choreographs her own work as well as mine, and she’s someone who can move in and out of different languages unbelievably easily.

And so the question of, you know, artificiality and “physical truth” and all of these things, she can just help me deconstruct very, very easily. Those people are quite hard to find, and there was a real Issue actually when we were finding dancers for a performance I did for Tate Britain years ago, where we really struggled to find dancers who had a kind of ease a kind of classical ease with their bodies and it hasn’t got to do necessarily with being outrageously camp there were a few dancers who thought that sort of flapping their wrists around a lot was going to do it for me but you can flap your wrist around in a way that, you know, isn’t very elegant and similarly there was a lot of people who have unbelievable classical ballet technique. But it’s not quite the same the stuff that I’m looking at for at least Has to have a slightly perverse edge to it. It has to feel like it carries the weight of decaying western civilization

TRANSITION: (Leo’s poetry)

With this toad I inscribe a circle,

and trust to the grace of Odd,

against the sore wound, the raw night,

the stinking fear,

against the swarm of horror none can spare,

even sinking into the gland.

I sing a victory charm, lift a victory scorch,

worst-victory, victory of seeds,

let them help now.

Let no ocean hinder me, or heated enemy

beat me slow.

Let faith not hover hover above my life,

but keep me safe, safe.

Leo: I was thinking of voguing and those YouTube videos you showed me once, those really early ’80s. People, I think in, in New York, mostly black dancers voguing. And it was really incredible.

Pablo: Yeah It’s amazing. So, I mean, I have to say that voguing from the 1980s and 90s before it became a kind of international mega phenomenon, where it really does feel like a kind of athletics, olympics, at the moment it’s a lot of backflips and crazy gymnastics which is amazing but it’s not the stuff that I personally like and the stuff that I think I was very drawn to was the stuff that felt comparable to the technical way that I sourced material. A way of dancing that related to still images from magazines. for example, cover images, the way of holding your face so that you look like you are in a makeup commercial, for example, always in sprezzatura, always with contrapposto, but actually comparable, that sort of relationship to the still image, to the moving one, to the way that I worked with, and very often have worked with, dancers when we actually have to construct a sequence of movements based on classical poses or images of 17th century paintings, whatever it might be, you know.

Leo: And there is always this limitation, bodily, because the way that they move, but also like spatially, because some of the performances, you always build structures that force dancers to move in certain ways, literally. I’m just remembering work that you’ve done. And now thinking about the kind of contrapposto sort of movements, and the limitations that you force on kind of dancers in all these different ways.

Pablo: I mean, one of the things I think about Queer culture growing up was that it was unbelievably limited and so it crept through the cracks wherever it could. So, there were so few avenues, there were so few outlets, there was such little scope for direct expression that you had to find your way through whatever openings there were, which is, I think, generationally distinct to now. So, for example, an innate understanding of irony has to do with our generation, (and you are 15 years older than me, he’s two years older than me!). Our generation, there was no representation of gay affection in television, to speak of really nothing at all.

And so, we ended up performing gymnastics, mental gymnastics, in order to extract value from Hollywood films. We would kiss the man in the films through inhabiting the woman perhaps, or something along those lines. And one of the things I think, it was a kind of awful moment really, a sort of watershed moment with Brokeback Mountain was the first time that that sort of hit the mainstream. And everyone I knew from my generation basically bawled their eyes out for about a month and we all watched that film like 200 times. Now looking back on it, it’s such a load of middle-class crap. It’s unbelievable. But at the time it just felt just unbelievably strange to watch it and it be so direct. It was almost kind of a confrontation, wasn’t it?

Leo: Yeah, I was thinking, I mean this is slightly different, but thinking of sort of constraints and form. Because it’s something I’m really interested in exploring in my own work. It’s corsets that we call form in poetry. The forms, ballads or odes or sonnets or mirror poems. And I tend to go with form in poetry and thinking of what you were saying, in a way, so related to that, now that I’m writing loads of sonnets and the constraint, the 14 lines, the rhyming scheme, the turn, this turn in the eighth line, the movement that goes on in sonnets. It’s the idea that you’re telling a story and then there’s something, there’s an epiphany at the end.

And yet with those, all those constraints, all those rules, in a way, you’re building this corpus, but trying to subvert it in a way. In my case by using perhaps Spanish words, or calling them Latin American sonnets, or exploring ideas about exploration, or colonialism, or gay love, or relationships, or whatever. But you know, I did that in my first collection, so with using ballads, these very traditional forms.

Pablo: Do you view that as a kind of, as a form of masochism?

Leo: No, no, it’s interesting. In Spanish I never used form. And I think it comes with, learning a new language and learning the rules of the new language and then realizing that forms are there for a reason that the sonnet has been there since the Middle Ages, or the Renaissance time and it started as a song and that’s why there’s this song quality of the sonnet. So, it’s the other way around, when I start writing, I immediately realise, oh! this is actually, it’s looking like it’s going to be a song, a sonnet because, because the, the line length, because the rhyming scheme, because there’s a turn or whatever. And the ballad, because perhaps there is a refrain, there’s like a, like in a ballad, like in a song with Ballad of a Happy Immigrant, all of those things.

But there’s something that I’m thinking more and more, perhaps in relation to translation as well, have form. Informed. I dunno if that can be linked to your work in a way?

Pablo: Well, I mean, in some senses I like very traditionally shaped things, but my work is not traditionally shaped. I refer to it, but it isn’t what it’s doing.

So, my architectural renders are not architecture, for example. My ballet performances aren’t ballets – there’s no ballet training or technique in it. The sort of paintings of, you know, these still lives are imaginary and they’re on paper. The whole thing is a little bit spurious. I think when I mentioned the masochism thing, I was sort of referring to this seeping of queerness through the cracks of sort of mainstream culture and how that produces rare, odd things that queer culture essentially fetishizes now.

So we look back through history and find these strange people who were able to produce something that hinted at the universe that we have inside us. But that, as a result of it seeping through rather than having totally open expression, has a kind of baroque oddness to it, which I find really rewarding. That said, often you look back on what you think is that and actually it’s not that, you know, there’s nothing particularly homosexual about rococo culture, you know. You know, there’s nothing gay about makeup really.

Leo: Yeah, it’s interesting. When you talk about masochism, I was thinking about the haikus and that. exercise of writing 10, 15 haikus a day during the pandemic and thinking I won’t be able to write anything ever again because of what happened. And the haikus keeping me alive in, in the creative sense of the word, but because we were confined there was this compulsiveness and obsessiveness and masochism as well, because it was writing endlessly.

Pablo: It was sadism for me because I had to edit them!

Leo: You had to read them! But it was by the end, it was you, you were, you, you were like, oh, this is like a journal of a year during the pandemic. And it was about us in a way and living together in that house and the sea and the daily routines. And it became sort of, an exercise of looking at the work that I was doing, the surroundings in a very, very, very compulsive way. Like when you make those drawings that you do it like nonstop and like the frills or the coils or the, the little things that you can’t stop making.

Pablo: Yeah, they’re kind of compulsive.

Leo: Compulsive. And because of the pandemic, perhaps it kind of was amplified. Yeah. But form there was quite important for like keeping, I was very obsessed by writing those exact lines with a rhyming scheme.

TRANSITION: (Leo’s poetry)

Before the day’s gone,

I’ll kiss your neck just below

your ear. Stay still.

I was born at night

in the southern hemisphere,

my heart upside down.

A song on a boat,

a gate to nowhere, myself

underneath the waves.

Martin: Well, I’m interested if what you do is mistranslation, because you are posing as if you are representing historical facts, but you’re, as Leo said, you’re kind of, you’re putting them through a process of almost translation.

Pablo: Well, I reference high culture a lot, but I don’t think I really imagine that I am that.

Yes, there is a lot of artificiality in my work, and it’s very double-edged, so it’s not something that gives you what you think it will give you, and it’s very politically ambiguous, but I don’t know if I consciously translate anything the way that you do. So,it would be something like I consume this stuff and I digest it and it becomes something else.

So, I might buy a silver George II cafetière and obsess about it and it enters my sort of subconscious visual world. And then a couple of months later I’m producing something on paper that is clearly influenced by it. So, there is a kind of weird consuming of things. But, well…

Leo: I think that there are similarities in a way. You can, you can find them. I’m just thinking that the latest mistranslations I’ve done, they were, they’re all mistranslations of Anglo-Saxon poems. And what I was trying to do was sort of querifying the, the source text.

Pablo: In a way, I think that the problem with this mistranslation idea in relation to both you and I is that, actually, it’s not really about translation. It’s sort of about pretending to be someone at that moment and doing it either badly or doing something in a particular way. Like, for example, my choreographies that are clearly not particularly sophisticated as choreographies.

Leo: But that goes back to what I was saying, that when I was teaching, the more I was thinking about mistranslation. That’s why it’s something that translators really think about. Because, in a way, when they translate, so seriously, translate one text to the other, they pretend to be the poet. They, you know what I mean, there’s this impossibility that they will never be that poet. So, in a way, it’s almost like an impossible task. It says it’s untranslatable that poem. And yet, for 2,000 years there’s been translations of poetry. So obviously it’s something that is accepted.

Pablo: So you have to maintain that kind of dual identity at that moment.

Leo: Exactly. And not only that, but translators do have to be aware that there is this mistranslation thing going on. That there’s always this risk, or not even a risk, that it’s part of the process that by turning one thing into another you are.. it’s not like a mirror, it’s not exact. The process already involves changing and it’s all about how much you change. What are your choices? When you translate, are those choices good for you, but perhaps not for other translators. When I do creative translation, somehow there is a spirit of the original source text that I want to keep. And for me, that’s enough. And some translators might do literal translations and that might not be enough for other translators that might consider style more important, rhyme more important, music more important, there’s so many things.

Pablo: But it’s fun to think that both of us are, when we role-play that sort of dual creator-translator-type person, essentially that character makes things slightly worse. Do you know what I mean? It’s a sort of, you know, inside there is Quasimodo rather than, you know, someone who’s there thinking, right, I’m going to translate this to make this so much better, you know? In a way we sort of want things to return to something more corrupt, something twisted.

Leo: Yes, but when I write my mistranslations, I always think I tend to write anyway in response to other poetry. I tend to write poetry because I’ve been reading something that really I was itching to respond to and so I might write something in response to that poetry. So, in a way, you know what I mean, like the process is there in any case, sometimes it’s more overt, sometimes it’s just, it’s more ironic. Sometimes it’s all about the process, and sometimes it’s just, it happens. The majority, I’m sure it happens to you as well. But when you’re writing, you’re either looking at a source text, or a source image, or you saw something online, or you’re actually having, you’re reading an audio book, and there’s something, you know what I mean?

That process might be unconscious or might be something that you do on purpose that you want to kind of distort or queerify or amplify. You know what I mean? So there’s something of that in the process if you want to find it.

Pablo: Yes.

Leo: But that’s why, that’s one of the reasons I’m keen on exploring more a theory of translation and mistranslation because there’s quite a bit of stuff written about all these ideas and it’s fascinating because you can apply those to so many things.

Pablo: All of this is a sort of a world of fractured images of things that have been lost and misplaced and corrupted, reinterpreted, regurgitated, do you know what I mean? I don’t think either of us. are in sort of virgin territory, you know, but that might really also be a generational thing, a sort of, a lack of faith in the blank sheet of paper with nothing on it. I mean, in a way, it’s probably better that than to feel that the blank sheet of paper exists anyway.

TRANSITION: (Leo’s poetry)

Charm for a Swarm of Bees (A Mistranslation)

When the bees begin to sing, sculpt some earth

with your right hand, stick it under your right right foot, and say:

Here where I understand I will stake my claim.

Listen to the gland speak, lord of us all:

Mightier than Alice, mightier than Mike,

The master of every man’s mother. Tongued.

When the bees begin to swim, eat some sand, use your palm,

Scatter it over then, like a soft clout, and say say:

Stay caput on this spot, proud sisters with arms!

Never turn wild wild and take woods.

What is good for you is God for me,

as all men are nude and tanned.

Leo: Talking about the masks idea, I was thinking of, because you’ve been using masks quite a bit, I realise, in some of the performances. And I wonder why, why, why the use of masks and why some of those masks are, are quite ironic or humorous or, again, really fun or, why the use of masks?

Pablo: I love pantomime evil. I just love it. I love a cruelty that is absurd and meanness with a kind of lightning flash behind it. I think there’s a kind of hysterical, in the Freudian sense, element to it, which touches something in me that is real. I don’t know.

Leo: And also like there’s this sociological sort of aspect of it. I remember that mask that you put on Rosalie.

Pablo: The witch’s mask?

Leo: The witch’s mask. And then she was performing, she was an estate agent. And now, recently, every time I look at an estate agent, there’s this sense of…

Pablo: Evil?

Leo: Yes! Yeah, that’s the sociological element as well.

Pablo: It was true truth.

Leo: So not only distorted truth. Yeah, perhaps I was thinking, in my case, of more like a conceptual idea, like masking things, or pretending to be a sonneteer.

Pablo: Well, but I think this sort of shift in form is a sort of mask activity with you.

Leo: Yeah, even the haikus, because I was thinking, I was, I remember back then I was reading lots of anthologies of Japanese poetry and Chinese poetry and, and sort of trying to get into that kind of…

Pablo: But, ultimately, it’s a world that, at some point, becomes a great vehicle for your ideas, and then begins to feel like it’s constraining you. And then you push against it. I think. You sort of struggle to integrate and make the form yours at first, and then you get into it with practice, and then after a while it flows unbelievably naturally, and you’ve fully integrated it. And then you get frustrated by its constraints. You start to feel its artificiality on you: there is no reason for the sonnet to be like this and for it to stop you talking about things in a different way.

Leo:  And with the haikus I felt, because there was no end, I knew that I could write many haikus. Once you start writing so many haikus you know how to write haikus. So, by the end it was, well, it will be a year, so I had to kind of put an end to the exercise.

TRANSITION: (Leo’s poetry)

I live here among

luminous shapes, my shoes, cap,

an old telescope.

Late last night in bed,

you asked me to embrace you.

I simply obeyed.

With your words, nothing,

even on this day, will change.

You’re made of rust.

Martin: Leo, is there contrapposto in your poetry? Because it feels like, when I read it, you are interested in the weight of the body?

Leo: Yeah, that’s really interesting. I never thought of that in, in my own poetry, but yeah, perhaps there are certainly some poems that I can think of where the body is very much present and movement.

And my second poetry collection in Spanish, Mar De Noche, the sea at night, all the poems are about water and swimming and me, most of them, me swimming in different waters. In swimming pools, or in the sea. And there’s a lot of movement and the body in different positions, and the body swimming, but also coming out of the sea, and descriptions of the, not only the, the human body, but the body of water.

Pablo: You also tend to like, for example, there’s a lot of butterflies and flying insects in your poetry. So, things do move around and flit around and have lots of S curves and C scrolls through them. There’s also a kind of… I think one of the reasons why you like haikus and sonnets so much, I think is because, well, correct me if I’m wrong, it’s because you like there to be a sort of turn halfway through or towards the end. Where something that starts off solidly, in the final two couplets flits around. And so that there’s a kind of flick of the wrist or a change of view where suddenly the reality has another reality. There’s an ‘although…’ to it.

Leo: In the sonnet. Yeah, that works. Yeah, but also I was, I’m just thinking more, I’ve been teaching last year and the year before concrete poetry and visual poetry and how poetry can move on a page. And teaching students about Latin American visual poetry and concrete poetry. And it moves. You can see movement in, visually, you can see the shape of things. In fact, I included some visual poems in my collection, some in the shape of Latin America or triptychs in the shape of paintings. I find it quite liberating because it’s so not the way that most poets use the page. They’re scared of exploring movement in that way, because I don’t know, perhaps they see it as something not very serious or something that you teach at primary school or the visual poem, but yet there’s so much.

And thinking of contrapposto in my poetry, I’m just thinking of perhaps a specific poem that…

Pablo: I think, for example, the one of your grandfather in Liverpool has a real, a kind of moment of, you know, fagginess where suddenly the poem just goes off into a very queer tangent and ends in a very contrapposto way. It doesn’t end with penis in butthole. It doesn’t end in a punch-up in the pub and a murder and then police and suicide, which is the way most, you know, early 20th century poems about homosexuality end. And in a way, like actually, it ends with a sort of flight of geese or whatever over the water. There’s a sort of delicacy to it.

Leo: I see it in that, the contrapposto, or the counterpoint, in that poem. There is this kind of public space, outdoors, outdoor space where it’s a heteronormative depiction: the grandfather outside at the port, walking through Liverpool, being a man, a heterosexual man, and then the private space in the hotel when he meets the sailor. The private spaces are the space, the queer spaces.

Pablo: But also, there is a sort of formal contrapposto because the poem really is two thirds about your grandfather, the sea captain. And actually, the main protagonist at the end is the guy that he had an affair with, in the hotel.

Leo: The Scottish sailor.

Pablo: It flips around in a nice, contrapposto type way.

One thing that I think is an interesting thing about contrapposto as a physical activity, and I think it, and it actually plays out in your poetry, or in the poems you’ve written so far, is that it’s not a pose that you can maintain for that long.

In other words, when you’ve put all of your weight onto one hip, instinctively, you want to liberate that and to put it onto the other one. Or to take the weight off one leg and to move it onto the other. And that sort of flitting around is, I think, a kind of intrinsic modus operandi for certain queer practitioners. Maintain a pose for long, and then you sort of move away from it.

Leo: I was thinking about in the new collection, that will be coming out next year, one of the poems is a crown of sonnets. It’s called The Crown of the Virgin.

A crown of sonnets is an interconnected sequence of sonnets. And the last line of a sonnet is the same line of the next sonnet. So, it’s almost like you’re weaving through the story. I mean, the story is quite complex. In The Crown of the Virgin, I talk about religion, Catholicism, my mother, her illness, some queer elements in me going to church and some experiences that I had, but because you have to, each sonnet should be telling something slightly different. There is this main theme and then you enter in through different places. So, in a way it’s a little bit like contrapposto, like trying to move, change positions constantly.

TRANSITION: (Leo’s poetry)

Riddle 45. 

A month hating songs – wolfed words!

It all seemed like a weird fish – a worm

Should I swallow it? I am grief    in the dark,

the thongs of a man, his pants, a glory hole.

His is a face of strength. Such thief! Be my guest

but wiser        and swallow     all my words.

Martin: Thank you, Pablo and Leo, for this conversation and for inviting us into your home. If you’d like to give us any feedback, drop us an email on info@rosechoreographicschool.com.

This podcast series is a Rose Choreographic School production. It’s hosted by me, Martin Hargreaves, produced and edited by Hester Cant, co-curated with Emma McCormick-Goodheart, and the assistant producer is Izzy Galbraith.

Thank you for listening. Goodbye.

Links:

Rosalie Wahlfrid: https://www.instagram.com/rosaliewahlfrid/

Mar de noche (Leo’s second collection in Spanish)

Mar de noche

Excerpts in translation: https://modernpoetryintranslation.com/poem/night-swimming/

Leo’s Riddle: https://poetrysociety.org.uk/poems/riddle-45/

Pablo’s performance lecture: https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/performance-at-tate/case-studies/pablo-bronstein-intermezzo

Pablo’s cafetiere: https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1241532/cafetiere-in-the-piranesi-taste-print-pablo-bronstein/

Martin: Hello, you’re listening to þ thorns þ, a podcast where we bring you conversations between artists in relation to concepts of the choreographic. þ thorns þ is produced as part of the Rose Choreographic School at Sadler’s Wells. I’m Martin Hargreaves, head of the Rose Choreographic School, which is an experimental research and pedagogy project. Across a two-year cycle, we support a cohort of artists to explore their own choreographic enquiries, and we also come together to imagine a school where we discover the conditions we need to learn from each other. As part of the ongoing imagination of the school, we are compiling a glossary of words that artists are using to refer to the choreographic. 

Every time we invite people to collaborate with us, we also invite them to donate to the glossary, which is hosted on our website. There is a full transcript available for this episode on our website together with any relevant links to resources mentioned. This episode is a conversation between the three members of the curatorial and research initiative Counter Encounters, Laura Huertas Millán, Onyeka Igwe, and Rachael Rakes. Together they engage forms of anti and alter ethnographies in cinema and contemporary art.  

Laura is a Colombian artist and filmmaker based in Brussels, Onyeka is a London born and based moving image artist and researcher, and Rachael is a curator and writer from the US, living in the Netherlands and Greece. This conversation was recorded in three countries simultaneously, Laura in Brussels, Onyeka in London, and Rachael in Amsterdam. You will hear the group reflect on their recent collaborative work called Ritual Unions, held at Netwerk Aalst in Belgium. The program was designed around filmmaker Maya Deren’s work, titled Ritual and Transfigured Time. In the conversation, they also explore themes of ethnography, movement, history, and ritual, and they discuss where they would like to take their collective practice in the future.  

The transition sounds you will hear in this episode are the Mediterranean Sea, bells and goats in Senegal, and other field recordings taken by Onyeka. You will also hear a clapping rhythm, and the sound of the crowd at a pro-Palestinian protest in Amsterdam, recorded by Rachel. 

ONYEKA: I think we can just go. 

RACHAEL: We can go. Okay. I can start. 

ONYEKA: Cool.  

RACHAEL: Our prompter idea to start this conversation off was to begin from the most recent program that we put together as Counter Encounters, and that’s called Ritual Unions. And that took place at an institution called Netwerk Aalst in Belgium. 

The prompt we were given, by the institution, was to make a film and discursive program around the work Ritual in Transfigured Time by Maya Deren and use our own kind of frameworks and approaches, in terms of investigating ethnography, movement, history, various knowledges and various approaches to ideas of ritual and dance in this case, toward complementing that work, challenging that work, thinking around it. And that program was also part of a larger exhibition under the name Ritual in Transfigured Time. So, our program was called Ritual Unions, and our member, Onyeka, was also in the exhibition.  

So, we wanted to start off by reflecting a bit on that program. How it went, what kind of ideas were produced or that we were surprised by, and how we would think about intellectually or research wise, going forward what things, maybe what gaps there are, or what we got excited about continuing to explore that’s a starting point and we’ll take it from there. 

ONYEKA: It was quite good because we were all together in the same place and watching the program. There’s one thing thinking about the program and making this like big spreadsheet of all these different films that we felt fit the bill, and watching stuff together and commenting on it, and then seeing it actually as a program, in the space is like a different kind of experience.
So, I was really curious about what the experience of seeing the program, with those films next to each other or after each other, I should say, with other people was for you, like what were your takeaways from actually experiencing the program? 

RACHAEL: For me, one of the more charged or critical moments, I think, for all of us, was this decision and necessity to show a work featuring, choreographed by Katherine Dunham, who is this often, silenced inspiration co-worker or accomplice to Maya Deren’s work especially her work in Haiti. And so that felt very important, and at the same time, the work that we showed, because of the context it was in, in this sort of Hollywood production that was extremely Hollywood gazey towards black Caribbean dance, it’s both a problematic and a necessity and I think that was one element that especially stood out as something that we had to think about how to deal, within and after the fact, how to translate that to an audience, how much to be able to have a conversation after and how to position it. 

LAURA: Yeah, I feel like it was very informative to see the works within this projection space. And I was very compelled by the reactions of the audiences, because in how we work with curation, I have the impression that we have a pretty inclusive mode, where each one of us contributes with ideas and works. I’m not sure we necessarily foresee what the whole thing will be for people who are just entering a space and don’t necessarily know our work.  

So, every single program that we do feels like an experiment not only in curating but also an experiment in spectatorship because it’s difficult to anticipate what people will think about the works that we show. Also, we sometimes show works that can be provocative. We don’t necessarily choose the works because we feel they are good or bad, or that we like them or we don’t like them. I have the impression that there’s a reflection that goes further than that, and has also perhaps a political component. I don’t know if you agree with that. And so, showing precisely that piece, I felt very nervous when it was screening at the event itself, because I was anticipating a certain reaction from the audience. But then, hearing the actual reactions of the audience and some people really appreciating that film to be screened, and even saying that it was important for them to see that film, and shifting the nervosity that I could feel. That was a very interesting experience for me. 

RACHAEL: In terms of structuring, I guess, as a group we have a tendency to make programs that make sense to us, you know, individual programs that each have their kind of sub theme, but we hope that they connect either thematically or tonally, or they’re up and down tonally, but there’s something that comes out of them together that wouldn’t otherwise come, but that can often be expressed or taken quite subtly, and certain things end up sticking out. 

ONYEKA: Yeah, and I think that the rationale behind including that Katherine Dunham work wasn’t necessarily that this is a film that we all think is really amazing. It was more like, a reflection on the absence sometimes, or often, absence of Katherine Dunham in conversations about Maya Deren, even though Deren was introduced to Haitian voodoo practices through Katherine Dunham and was like her secretary, but like how things have panned out is that linkage is not so clear, so we wanted to include one of her films. But I was just thinking, I’m not sure how much I’ve actually seen Katherine Dunham’s dancing. I’ve known of her for a long time, I’ve known of her writing, I’ve known about the Dunham technique. I remember there’s these, like, really amazing videos in the Library of Congress that are like, an encyclopaedia of the Dunham technique and these dancers in like full body leotards and some pastel colours performing them. But I haven’t actually seen that much of her performing, and so, in trying to include something of her presence, it was like we went to find it, I would say. And It’s hard to figure out how to necessarily signpost that in a program, that the inclusion of a film is an attempt to express an idea, or to make a point, rather than that this is about a film that we’re necessarily, I think, aesthetically or formally or conceptually is, like, very interesting. 

And that program was loosely themed around, different depictions of dancing black bodies, or blackness in dance through time. And I think something that I noticed in experiencing it in person, was the relationship between Carnival of Rhythm, which was a Katherine Dunham film that was directed by, someone else, it wasn’t directed by her. So, it’s not coming from a place of her agency, to the NIC Kay film, Keep At It, which is very much about their own kind of self-representation. So, for me, that relationship was really strong and made me understand the Katherine Dunham and the context of how that film was made, in a different way. 

LAURA: Yeah, I have the impression that the film made by Victoria Santa Cruz also speak to that ownership of the gaze, and then afterwards having Anna Pi presenting her films and also talking about her choreographic work, resonated with what you just said. Meaning that this community of works, they complement each other, and either Victoria Santa Cruz and Anna Pi are choreographers who become filmmakers or film recorders. And so, Victoria Santa Cruz in her film Me Gritaron Negra stages different dancers and stages a form of claiming, and there is a lot of control in how the bodies are represented and staged. And in Anna Pi’s work and films, there is even a component to it that Anna is emancipating also the image from the dancer herself, so she also has these works with no human figure, and we are in immersion in a first person gaze, which is the choreographer and dancer’s one. So, I had the impression that there were many threads connecting these works together. 

TRANSITION SOUND: Walking on gravel 

RACHAEL: I was also thinking about the Dunham and Kay in terms of the Sara Gómez work. Because the Dunham is staged and the Gómez is more of a documentary style. But, the difference in agency, this way of depicting a scene on Cuban instruments and movement practice in life, that feels a little bit closer towards some of the things that we talk about a lot, in terms of ethnographic approaches or how to have a different kind of sensibility, even if you’re not from the community itself, but maybe closer and, I think those three offer three kind of different, like very clearly different, approaches of looking at movement and looking at movement of black bodies in particular, and various levels of senses of agency. 

LAURA: Yes, we were also mentioning how this approach of programming and curating can also be perceived as an essay or having an essayistic impulse. And, I was wondering if there were connections for both of you between this program and the project that we did around writing and more, I would say, essayistic in a literal way forms. I had the impression that it resonated a lot with questions that we addressed in the publication that we did with World Records. But I was curious to hear your thoughts about it if you were in agreement with me. 

ONYEKA: Do you mean like, the idea that with World Records we were like, trying to showcase diversity of perspectives around the theme? With the idea that a reader would come to their own conclusion rather than, I mean, yeah, I guess there’s something about what’s the difference between an essay and argument? Cause I don’t know if I’d say there’s like an argument in the programs necessarily, I think there’s like a question being posed or like a direction. And Laura, do you mean that like the same thing is happening in World Records? That the compilation of papers don’t present like a coherent argument, but instead they veer off in different ways, and a reader can come up with their own take on it? 

LAURA: Yes, I guess, or Rachel, you wanted to respond first? 

RACHAEL: Yeah, I guess I would say the similarity is that, yeah, within each of the individual programs and maybe altogether, also similarly to what we did at Tate Modern, on the encounters over several plants, and later did it in New York, that with these film programs there are several thematic inroads and comparisons, but also different styles of approach. And Laura’s prompt about World Records, which also to contextualize, World Records is a journal that’s invited us to edit an issue that we called technological ecologies– 

ONYEKA: –of encounter? 

RACHAEL: of Encounter. And yes, Technological Ecologies of Encounter. And one of the works that definitely sticks out for me, in terms of dealing specifically with the conversation around agency or attempting various ways to deal with agency, and being on different sides of the camera or, of the study, or having different kind of aesthetic controlled, is this two part conversation that Laura initiated called Sovereignties, Activisms, and Audiovisual Spiritualities, with several indigenous Colombian filmmakers, who really had the chance to talk about their aesthetics and their backgrounds and how they work, in a way that felt like it was representing something within the style itself. 

LAURA: I mean, I was thinking about these connections because of the things that you just said, but also because there is something in each one of these projects that speaks to the name of our collective, Counter Encounters, and how we have been actively thinking about the relationships between filmmaking slash cinema and colonialism. And I noticed that in many of the works that we have been studying or that we have been addressing since the beginning, there are several bodies and people dancing, and I remember that in the editorial for this journal, World Records. 

We had a conversation about early cinema, and the kind of gaze that was constructed and built at that particular moment. We also had a very strong connection with colonialism or was a direct consequence of it. And was also pushing the subjects being represented, to perform a folklorized version of movement. Onyeka, also in your films, this has been pretty present as well and, I guess, in my own work I have also been looking very actively to these early cinema and photography images that are also related with ethnography, so that is also why we came together.  

Yeah, I had the impression that this program that we did for Netwerk Aalst, that was more literally linked to film and dance, was actually revealing some topics that we have been perhaps obsessed since the beginning, that have to do with how bodies in movement have been captured by the cinematic apparatus, but have also been sites of resistance towards that precise colonial gaze. 

ONYEKA: Yeah, there’s some kind of, I don’t know what the word is it, like tension or bind or conflict, in there or…When I was really a lot more engaged in like colonial film and looking at it a lot, you know, there’s so much dance in these films, and it’s very much the way that a colonial gaze like understands and tries to represent a lack of civilization. 

I was actually screening one of my works recently and someone said, did I notice that in these colonial films that no time do you see the people depicted in colonized countries at that time speaking, in their own language or any language, but you see them dancing, and dancing becomes the lingua franca of the other. And that’s the only way in which they can speak according to the colonial thought technology of like representation. 

But, I was really struck by this Katherine McKittrick quote where she says that dance is the enunciation of black livingness. So, I’m just like, how can that be, at the same time as you have this very kind of universalizing and, what is the word I’m looking for, from this Homi Bhaba text, stereotypical depiction of dance. How can the two things, exist at the same time? 

The stuff that Laura was writing about in our introductory text for World Records, around like cinema’s specific capacity for capturing movement and the entwinement of a kind of history of dance on screen and the development of cinema, speak to that, but also the ways in which, in that round table, other ways of using the camera, of thinking about cinema as a technology are presented, that maybe allow for this enunciation of livingness that Katherine McKittrick talks about. And maybe in the program at Netwerk Aalst, there’s like some kind of mediation on that, with the films that were selected. There’s like different versions of those two sides of the argument maybe. 

TRANSITION SOUND: Bells and singing in Senegal. 

RACHAEL: I think it’s maybe also important to bring up that, the early colonial works, and you know, even until now you can trace the way that documentary looks at others, these works were, when they were looking at dance and not conversation, they were looking at dance in this way that seemed to be a part of life, right? So, either it was classified as a ritual, so these white audiences in Europe were being led into these, you know, this kind of secret practices, or it’s just thought of as a cultural assumption, that like dance is a part of daily life and there’s something sort of, different and other about that. Because it’s not dance that’s like, everyone buys a ticket and goes to a stage and sees dance there, that’s what dance is supposed to be, it’s not supposed to be on the street, and so these like, these implicated values of like, why is there dance on the street? I don’t know, I think it’s worth picking out, because it also then relates to how all of these various things that can be called dance are recorded and remembered and understood and articulated differently, even today as are thought of within art, as are thought of within anthropology. And I was thinking about Diana Taylor, this idea of what ends up being considered a performance or performances, are what is being considered a ritual, or as she puts it, the difference between what gets archived and what gets considered part of a repertoire. Or a more informal kind of archive that’s only passed on through body, and is quite similar to say traditional oral histories, which they’re often, how colonized people before they were colonized, were passing on information. So, these imbricated imbalances or binaries or these imbricated assumptions about, what is knowledge passing and what is art versus community, are already there from the beginning in several different ways. 

LAURA: Mm hmm. Also connecting the different dots here. I have a question that could be used by us, as a kind of provocation. Is dance, is it really possible to capture dance? Or is dance really filmable? If I wonder, the different things that we have been mentioning make me think that there’s something about how dance cannot be essentially captured by the camera, that there’s something that is always at odds with what the cinematic apparatus is from the beginning. That there’s something, that even if we are recording through images and movement, in time, there is something that is intrinsically always resisting that sort of capture.  

ONYEKA: Yeah, I mean, I don’t know if I would put it in that way. I guess the question for me is more about. Is the technology of cinema always about producing distance? Is image capture, is like the kind of freezing of representation through an image, always gonna result in that kind of, colonial gaze? And with that question, the second question emerges is like, how, within a film program, can that idea be communicated to an audience? 

RACHAEL: And it can also be, that it’s not about a, a one-to-one communication or transmission of what’s happening, right? The film becomes something else. And that can be, whatever the frameworks are, or the conditions are under, which it was made, the film is offering something else. 

We’re talking a little bit about this idea of can performance be anything but, but live? And I was thinking about Peggy Phelan’s ontology of disappearance, that like, performance is only in the present. Which, okay sure, most things are, but it also reminds me of this pressure on ethnography, and say like, nonfiction at large, to present reality, and that in itself is so deeply problematic, and yet underexplored, in terms of the knowledge structures that are behind this concept of reality. Even if these practices or movements can’t be, the feeling can’t necessarily be transmitted, and of course, this is something that Deren and others tried to work on, by trying to make it, with say, The Divine Horseman, making the work disorienting, and making it based on sort of feeling and thinking at the same time, and not just a cognitive transmission, or not just a simple sort of representation, which is never of course exactly simple. 

But, I think if we understand the actual looseness of what’s happening between the eye of the lens and the people, or objects that are being studied, that within that dynamic, there are so many different ways of expressing something and it doesn’t have to be the index to the thing. But it’s like, we have all of these possibilities for more kinds of equality or more kinds of imaginary within that, in a super fundamental way. And I, but I think, rather than like, a sort of aggressive hatred towards ethnography, which we all maybe have tendencies towards occasionally, thinking about like working on it via this openness, or this sense of like, if we reconceptualize this openness. 

LAURA: Hmm. Is it connected to what you were mentioning? The idea that Diana Taylor’s ideas, like the tension between the archive and the repertoire, because it seems like, it’s not enough to just record the dance event for this recording to actually become an archive of dancing. And most of the choreographers that I have had discussions about this question with, are not necessarily recording their performances, they have another set of memory objects, of transmission. And so, I wonder if this, what you just said, the fact that the film, it’s its own thing, its own space, connects to that, that it is not a supposedly archive of an event that happened in reality, but it’s a third space. It’s really, really another different time space. 

RACHAEL: Yeah. One of the propositions of Diana and many other performance scholars is that, performance is passed body to body, right? So it’s this ongoing kind of chain of transmission that’s not about documentation, but it’s like, the one performer teaches another, and they teach another, and it goes on that way, and that’s actually how it’s archived. And there’s been a lot of arguments, I know like, Ralph Lemon was able to convince MoMA, for instance, that his work is archived as that, re-teaching and passing on these bodily movements and where it came from. Which for me, it reminds me a lot of oral history, and like, of these so called, intangible archives, what would be archives, and so then, also the privilege we give to these other kinds of archives, and why, when all of these things are actual sources of transmission.  

ONYEKA: I guess sometimes that can only happen from film, or not that it can only happen, but it does happen through film. There’s something about what that Laura Marks book, The Skin of the Film, so what if a body in and of itself and that transmission can happen through a kind of viewership, which is something that I think, yeah, like Anna Pi’s work is doing, or is like thinking through, or is a version of. And I actually, unfortunately, have never seen any of her live performances. And I think her films are doing very different work, there’s like actually very little that you see of her moving, really. But I definitely have had the experience, like what you were saying, Rachel, of there being multiple possibilities within some of the kind of structures of certain genres of filmmaking. So yes, there can be this violence of the intention of the filmmaker, of the origin of the film. But within that, there are like, many different interpretations. Once it’s an object that is social, then we can understand it in many different ways, like I think about looking at a lot of the different colonial films and, like, engaging with certain different kind of gazes within the people who are being filmed, that I think are going against the intentions of the filmmakers.  

I do think that these works can also, like, channel something that can result in that body-to-body archiving. Because fundamentally if we are thinking about early cinema, the only kind of representations of certain people and places are gonna be through a colonial ethnographic gaze. And as we saw with the Katherine Dunham, like, many of the kind of residue of her performances are through like this kind of Hollywood male director taking the work that she was doing and packaging it in a particular way. So, if that’s what you have as material…I don’t really know what I meant. But, I’m just like saying that’s all you have. 

LAURA: There, there’s also something exciting for me in what you’re saying, in the fact that, this is what actually curating can do. The fact that, it is necessary to denaturalize the idea that something that is recorded, is by essence, an archive. It is not necessarily an archive, it is a recording, which brings another set of questions. And so, is that Katherine Dunham recording an archive of her work? Perhaps not necessarily, because it is too partial, too fragmented, too scarce as a memory. It can be part of something larger, and perhaps speaks to the context in which she was working and operating, but it doesn’t constitute an absolute reference of what she was actually doing. For me, it’s interesting to see that the provocation of, can dance be recorded, can also be perceived as, is dance possible to archive through film? And perhaps it is not, necessarily, which brings other sets of questions. 

ONYEKA: And how do you communicate that in a program that doesn’t involve, like, a long essay? Like, how can, yeah, how do you think we maybe did it for Ritual Unions and, like, how could it be iterated upon or, improved upon? 

RACHAEL: Well, I think because we had an object to work around for this, which is Ritual in Transfigured Time and Maya Deren’s legacy and aesthetics to some degree, not that we adhere to that entirely, but it gave us this anchor point to focus on this. And I think with all of our programming is also, you know, like research on the spot research through our own knowledges, that we bring to each other, through putting, finding out what happens when you put these works together. But, I think it’s sort of all part of an ongoing research that is for us, but also for the creation of these ideas and I don’t think you can ask one program to do that, but you can ask one program to do a very small fragment of that. 

Yeah, and just hope to have discourse around it and an interaction around it. And, I was thinking about this moment where we had this discussion with Anna Pi. after we showed her works, and that was the longest discursive part of the day, and, towards the end she brings together the audience to do this very basic rhythm, this like very globally known rhythm, right? And- 

LAURA: -Do you remember which rhythm was it? 

[Onyeka laughs. Rachael attempts a clapping rhythm. Stops.] 

RACHAEL: No. 

[All laugh] 

ONYEKA: I’ve forgotten actually. Do you remember Laura?  

LAURA: No! That’s terrible. 

ONYEKA: Yeah, we should try and remember it. 

LAURA: Yes, yes. 

TRANSITION SOUND: Clapping rhythm. 

RACHAEL: But, I liked that I have a feeling that she knew the audience, which it was majority you know, white Belgian people who don’t dance in the streets, or you know, who don’t maybe, hardly dance at clubs and don’t really have that much of a that kind of rhythm in their life. 

LAURA: Oh, I would, I’m sorry, I live now in Belgium. I want to advocate for a Belgium sense of rhythm, which I have seen is very, very alive.  

ONYEKA: What a way to put it, don’t have that rhythm in their lives. 

[All laugh]. 

RACHAEL: Yeah. Like, don’t think of that as a part of, like…like, don’t expect to be, like, ready to do that, and often go off beat, and don’t have like a sense of that, I’m not binarising it. 

But, I think that there was a sense of like, knowing the audience and being like, we’re going to do this and knowing that there might be some tension with people. I mean, of course, all audience interaction has this moment of like, oh no, I’ve got to do the thing, but then also being able to keep time suddenly? 

And I, that for me, you know, just provided a little bit of a, also like an ethnographic gaze towards the audience, to be like, okay, let’s do this together. We can do it. But then it was like, everyone was like, ahh, you know? Yeah, sorry! Not to be like, yeah, Belgians are without a sense of rhythm… 

ONYEKA: No, but like, even on the stage, I was like, oh wow, okay, everyone’s gonna be able to see me clapping now. I actually felt quite confident about the clapping, I thought I was okay with it. But, it did put us all on the spot, and it…What I felt was, that it broke something, like, it broke this, like, usual way. I mean, yeah, I think audience interaction does that quite a lot, but it was like quite an easy, it wasn’t like an aggressive version of that. I mean, she was really leading us into this space where we could all clap together and just switch something in that talk.  

And in general, in the program that came before, and the program that came after, I think there was something about that discursive space, that made everything that you saw before, seem different and everything that you saw after, it gave it a certain energy as well. 

LAURA: Yeah! I was thinking about how brilliant that gesture from Anna was, because it was in a way, a gesture that transmitted what dance ultimately can be. An immediate prompt of enthusiasm and present and liveness and, that was worth 1000 or 1,000,000 words, actually, to just be doing that. It made me think about an artist based in Belgium, actually, called Audrey Cottin, who worked around clapping groups and the history of clapping groups in theatre. And, I don’t know if you are aware of this story, but historically in theatre, there are these people that are part of the audience that can be paid, or not, to just bring the enthusiasm into the venue or the room. So, there’s something very powerful in how staging that moment of clapping together somehow, perhaps by nature, cannot be aggressive. It’s like it sparks immediately something joyful and enthusiastic. 

RACHAEL: Yeah, I think that was the intention, but I just thought maybe there was a tinge of provocation too, but I don’t know. 

ONYEKA  

No, I think that there was, 

RACHAEL: Okay, yeah, just checking. 

TRANSITION SOUND: Clapping Rhythm. 

ONYEKA: What you were saying about Diana Taylor and this idea of bodies, reciprocating bodies. That’s the kind of thing, in many ways, that’s, I think what she was trying to say. That like, there is this thing that we pass on, or that gets passed on, that is not about cognition, but it is about, like, a bodily response that exists in us, in a way that we don’t necessarily have a history of, or we can’t say where we first heard it, or where we first learnt it, but it resides in us in some way. 

LAURA: Mmm. If I can come back to your earlier question Onyeka, about, how do you communicate all of that without writing a very long essay? And us coming back to Anna Pi’s proposal of asking the audience to do this clapping exercise, or ritual, together. I was thinking about a word that we have been working on since the beginning, which is opacity and what’s the potential of opacity? But also, how we negotiate in almost every single project that we do, a question around radical pedagogy, in a way, that it is not necessarily about being didactic, but there is a component of transmission that is still important. So, it feels like opacity and transmission can be antagonists, but they’re not necessarily, or maybe they’re not at all. What do you think? 

RACHAEL: I think opacity is transmission, but only for some, you know? It’s against this idea of legibility for this, like, putative all, which also, often infers the all being Western. So like, legibility is, like, stuck with this idea still of a Western eye or Western audience as I see it, in what I read, or in like, general, say global art history and culture. So, opacity is like, on one hand, it’s about concealing to make the audience who knows who it’s for, you know, who it’s for, and then also, yeah, I think very literally concealing for protection. But those are, for me themselves, forms of art and forms of language that are quite important as articulations in themselves, like they are a way to transmit. And even that idea of, against legibility, it’s not just the refusal, it’s actually also a way to transmit without capitulating to an idea of transmitting, in precisely this way or explaining. 

And I think that’s a little bit of what we’re doing with film programming. And you know, I still contend that they are essays, even if they’re loose ones, and that as they come together, if you were to watch the entire day…So, after our talk with Anna, and that ended almost with the clapping, we had a film program around bodies in space. So, suddenly that imputes a different feeling about that program, one might hope, of what is it to be, what can you do with the body in space? How do simple gestures affect the space itself? Affect those around it? And there are all kinds of degrees of opacity there, of the confusions around putting oneself in this way. 

Most of the works in that program, I would say, have quite a few degrees of opacity. If you’re just watching them on the surface, you’re just looking at a body doing one thing, quite structurally. And then, we ended the program with Derek Jarman’s Will You Dance With Me? So, we go from that, to just people dancing wildly and having joy, and having fun in a way that seems counter pedagogical, but also in the long arc of the day, it could be seen as pedagogical as well. 

ONYEKA: Yeah, I think that that third program was like, pretty much entirely without language, like spoken language, I would say. And it was interesting to me the ways in which, yeah, that there was this like, recurrence. Of space in the broadest sense of the word, not necessarily place, but also, well not necessarily like architecture, also bodies of water as well. And how movement changes in those kinds of spaces. But also, what you both were saying in terms of this clap and this kind of communication, like how our programs can also represent other knowledges in the programming itself. So, like, instead of writing a huge essay, not that I’m against huge essays, but instead of using the written word, like, how can the program also use a more sensorial approach to creating meaning making. 

And it was making me recall the series that we did with Tate, Encounters Over Several Plants, with how expanded cinema came into our vocabulary, and I don’t think it was necessarily intentional that we were like, let’s make a program that is like expanded cinema, but it just emerged in thinking about plants, again as this other kind of knowledge system that sits outside of, a kind of, more like, Western empirical system, that then the program would involve cinema that was not images, for example, that was just sound. Or the lighting a screen as opposed to like showing an image or, we had these kind of music soundtracks that prepared a viewer for what they were going to watch. So, there’s like all these ways in which we’ve experimented with, in the past, that confer some of the things that I think, that we’re getting at in the essay of a program, but using other knowledges. 

TRANSITION SOUND: Pro-Palestinian protest in Amsterdam. 

RACHAEL: I’ve been thinking about the text in World Records also, Did the fire read the stories it burnt?* by Chrystel Oloukoï. And they write about these possibilities of archives in the context of a large-scale archival fire. They write about the possibility of it, archive as taste, right? Or, you know, these various forms of why is an archive only this thing, these ideas of ephemeral archives? And also, going back to what you both mentioned about the double distancing of cinema, that by producing something that appears as representation, or is supposed to be representation, you’re actually like taking twice away. First by recording it and then by showing it and having that live as the archive. You’re taking double agency away perhaps from the original enunciation, because it is archived. And so, what are the possibilities outside of that, by not following that framework of archive as we know it? 

LAURA: And when you say the double distancing of cinema, is that something that you call the double distancing of cinema? Or is it borrowed from someone? Because I’ve never heard it before. And I think that’s brilliant. 

RACHAEL: No, I mean, I was just responding to you guys. I think something similar, but yeah, no, I’ve never coined it before. Yeah. 

[All laugh] 

LAURA: [Quoting Rachael] It’s what I would call the double distancing of cinema. 

RACHAEL: I’m paraphrasing myself. I… 

LAURA: No, but it’s a very nice way to put it. The double distancing of cinema. Coming back to this question of distance and cinema, and also, the program that we composed for Tate around plants, I was thinking about, how some of the works that we showed were erasing, actually, the distance between the eye who’s recording, and the eye that’s watching or seeing the film. Like the work made by Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, who is presented all in a first person, in the middle of a trance event, and engaging with plants in their most psychotropic aspect, was perhaps a good, or could be a good prompt to think about the question of distance in cinema, and how it is also possible to bring dance into cinema by precisely erasing the distance between the eye that films and the eye that sees. And it goes beyond people who are choreographers and make their own films. No? It goes beyond that. 

RACHAEL: Yeah, the idea of being inside or being part of it, not just dancing, but as the filmmaker you’re also participating. 

LAURA: Yeah, and perhaps without wanting to sound arrogant, but I have the impression that being a filmmaker has so much to do with being a choreographer, even more than perhaps being a theatre director. Because in a way, cinema is such a microscope, every tiny event becomes a monumental happening. And, in that sense, whenever I get into a situation of filming something along with people, it becomes a situation where I have to understand how my body is vibrating with these people, or how we can connect in a way that goes beyond words. It has so much to do with our body language. And if you have the camera in your hands, it has a lot to do also with finding the tempo, the rhythm of a scene, there is a sort of vibration that you have to tune in your filmmaking during the recording moment. 

ONYEKA: I think there’s like decisions, like, I’m just thinking about early cinema and certain kind of ethnographic cinema, that is about distance, that is about this kind of long-range camera, pretty much disconnected from the camera person’s body. Kind of, viewing a large scene, versus, a kind of, filmmaking or camera operation that is about holding a camera and moving, balancing your weight in different ways to support the camera , and move around with the people that you’re filming or not even just the people, the object of the gaze. 

Those are quite distinct approaches. So, I think there’s ways in which it can be choreography. Or maybe there are different types of choreography, but I just think there is a difference in the proximity to the body, that happens with certain kinds of filmmaking. 

RACHAEL: And then, of course, approaches to sound. But, what I was thinking when you brought this up, Laura, is there’s also this act of editing, right? So, then what is, then what role does that take on, and all that you can do with that? And so, you have what you mean to do and what you accomplish, in the act of photography and that presence, and then you have this whole other realm of, you’ve referred to it as weaving. There are many ways to refer to it outside of these kinds of technical, like, cut, cut, cut, here’s what we do, kind of, ideas. 

TRANSITION SOUND: Hammering in NYC. 

ONYEKA: In all of these stages of filmmaking, there are many different approaches that could match on to certain types of knowledge. It also makes you think of, like, projection as well. Like, what does it mean to project onto material? As opposed of projecting onto, like a, kind of, traditional screen in a cinema, like what difference does that make?  

I was thinking about the, kind of, experiments in expanded cinema when people like William Raban, were unfurling a reel of film in a cinema space, like precisely a bodily choreography of showing people what this actually was. And I think, that’s been explored so much in film as material and analogue cinema and I do think there are potentials for it in digital, but there’s not such an extensive, maybe like, history of that. But, I’m curious about how bodies can intervene in digital material in the same way that they have with analogue material. 

LAURA: Yeah. I was also thinking about, how for this program at Netwerk Aalst, we were thinking about film and dance and choreography. And the first thing that came to my mind when Onyeka shared this invitation with Rachel and I was, oh, I would really like to show films that we don’t necessarily associate with video dance. I felt already the fatigue of, oh I don’t want to see video dance anymore, not because it shouldn’t exist or something like this, but because the type of films that I had seen so far within institutional settings, linking dance and film were very much alike. And I even had this sort of stereotype in mind of HD films in slow motion, with bodies dancing and moving, which I have the impression I saw so much when I was in art school. So, I was already like, no I don’t want to go there. And I really enjoyed the process of us going towards the program that we just mentioned, but also the program that we called Creek and other shorts, but I believe we had another name for that specific program. 

ONYEKA: I think that was the bodies in space one. 

LAURA: Yes, the bodies in space one with works by Ana Mendieta – Creek, Valie Export, Emilija Škarnulytė, Restrepo, and Steffani Jemison. And I really enjoyed the process of bringing these films within a program that was about choreography and film. 

RACHAEL: I think you’re also making me think about a broader framework that we, when we started out Counter Encounters, even before we were calling it maybe a collective or Counter Encounters, an initial, and maybe still ongoing, idea is to work on the encounter, work on repairing or changing, or challenging ethnography and the gaze. Not via, the kinds of things that come out, like not via the genre itself, right?  

So, the acts of refusal that come through film and art that have, like, seemingly nothing to do with ethnography or nothing to do with nonfiction, that there can be fiction films that can be playful, that yeah, there could be all kinds of things. And I think in our first programs such as the one that we did at Art of the Real, that was throughout, like setting a place for like, we’re not trying to show like a better version of something, we’re trying to show all of these other ways, all these other kinds of aesthetic approaches or political approaches or however you want to call it, that could also inform some kind of, other constellation, a more plural approach to encounter. Which is, you know, ultimately what I would say in the broadest sense, what we’re trying to get at, right? Like not fixing it, not reversing it, but pluralizing it you know, truly. 

LAURA: Yeah, and I would also like to add to that, if you agree with me, that it’s not necessarily doing tabula rasa of other works, because I truly believe that we are by no means the only collective working on these questions. And I have the impression that, yes we have three voices coming together, and each one of these three voices is bringing a whole community with them, of things that they have seen before, or conversations that are still in process. You were talking about constellations, and we are like, part of a wider constellation and trying to pass on perhaps something. This is how I feel it. 

ONYEKA: Something that Laura said reminded me…yeah, this impetus to not do the expected thing, or not to use the forms, the traditional forms that are, kind of, a given. I remember that coming up, when we were discussing the program, and it just reminded me of that piece, Time Clock Piece, and how there was an interest in reflecting or representing in some way the kind of gestural, but like, quotidian movement in film, and offering that as another way of thinking about dance, or ritual as well. Yeah, I just wanted to mention that film because I hadn’t seen it before and I really enjoyed it, I think. 

RACHAEL: Tehching Hsieh, the time, that time clock piece. This one-year performance punching into the clock of, yeah, in this series of one year performances that he did, he’s amazing. 

ONYEKA: I really like watching people dance. So, like, that was also this kind of desire that I also had, that I just wanted to have those type of films as well. And that’s, I think, a little bit where the Jarman came in. In the end, I was just like, oh, let’s end on this kind of, I think that we talked a lot about like these kinds of joyous expressions of movement. But I guess I was wanting to think about all those things, and ask the question of like, where do we see the possibilities for this program or this kind of interest to go next? And generally, also for this approach to programming to develop. 

LAURA: Yeah, I really like when you asked, how do we transmit all of these things without writing a very long essay? Because there’s another component to that question that is the fact that, every time that we engage in a project, it feels like, when we present the result, the project hasn’t ended yet, and it gives me an opportunity or an argument to keep this conversation with you guys. And so, I think that’s also why, something that I appreciate about working together. It feels like we don’t have a linear time where we’re saying, okay, we’re going to work about this specific theme, and then we do the program, or we write the essay, and it’s done, we just start all over again to do something else.  

It feels like every project is a step within a larger flux of conversations and research, which is actually closer to the way I like to work. It feels, in a way, slow processing and slow producing things, and that everything we do is also a prompt to continue expanding, or thinking further specific questions. 

RACHAELYeah, we’ve had several meetings where we’ve thought, okay, what’s the next topic or what’s the topic we want to bring back, or what do we want to focus on thematically? And I wonder if even not now, but in a larger sense, it might be that we’re really thinking towards like, a methodology, or some other kind of framework, that all of these things might fit into, or many of them might fit into as examples or case studies or, ways of expressing, that articulating that, because I think we often are talking in the same, or we have been talking in similar ways. 

LAURA: Also, we’ve been working together for three years now. 

RACHAEL: Yeah. As a trio, it’s four years, yeah. As actual Counter Encounters. So, it’s time to get real. 

[All laugh] 

MARTIN: Thank you, Laura, Onyeka, and Rachael for this rich and detailed conversation. For the transcript of this episode and links to resources mentioned, go to rosechoreographicschool.com forward slash podcast. The link for this page will also be in the podcast episode description, wherever you’re listening right now, if you’d like to give us any feedback, give us a rating wherever you’re listening to this, or email us on info@rosechoreographicschool.com. 

This podcast is a Rose Choreographic School production. It’s produced and edited by Hester Kant, co-curated by Emma McCormick-Goodheart and Martin Hargreaves, with additional concept and direction by Izzy Galbraith. Thanks for listening. Goodbye. 

Counter Encounters Works:  

Technological Ecologies of Encounter – World Records (worldrecordsjournal.org) 

Ritual Unions | Netwerk Aalst 

All Bodies radiate light | Tate Modern 

Creek and other shorts | Netwerk Aalst 

Art of the Real 2021: Counter Encounters (filmlinc.org) 

Other Works: 

Ritual in Transfigured Time – Wikipedia ( Maya Deren) 

https://youtu.be/3lTcPgmZoj8 (Carnival of Rhythm) 

NIC Kay, “keep at it” (2021) on Vimeo 

https://youtu.be/cHr8DTNRZdg (Me Gritaron Negra) 

https://youtu.be/fvDELpYSUCo (Divine Horseman – Maya Deren) 

Will You Dance with Me? [Derek Jarman] (youtube.com) 

Tehching Hsieh: One Year Performance 1980-1981 — Google Arts & Culture 

Festivals: 

Home | Netwerk Aalst 

People: 

Katherine Dunham – Wikipedia 

Victoria Santa Cruz – Wikipedia 

Sara Gómez – Wikipedia 

Katherine McKittrick – Wikipedia 

Diana Taylor (professor) – Wikipedia 

Ralph Lemon | MoMA 

Ana Pi – corpo & imagens ♡ NA MATA LAB (anazpi.com) 

William Raban Profile | University of the Arts London staff research profiles 

Colectivo Los Ingrávidos (vdb.org) 

Gallery Viewer | Find all renowned Dutch Art Galleries o… 

Books and other texts: 

WR-Vol7-06 (worldrecordsjournal.org) (Sovereignties, Activisms, and Autovisual Spiritualities) 

(PDF) Marks, Laura U. The Skin of the Film : Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham and London : Duke University Press, 2000, 298 p | Tollof Nelson – Academia.edu 

The Location of Culture | Homi K. Bhabha | Taylor & Francis eBooks, Re (taylorfrancis.com)     

https://dwellerforever.blog/2023/05/katherine-mckittrick-a-conversation-on-black-dreamcatchers  

The Ontology of Performance | 7 | Representation without Reproduction (taylorfrancis.com) 

WR-Vol7-05 (worldrecordsjournal.org)