On the occasion of the three week festival ‘The Winter Laboratory’ (WinLab) at Independent Dance (London), curator Frank Bock talked with choreographer Meg Stuart. This is a transcription of the talk the two of them had.
Bock: Before the interview we spoke briefly about the fact that you are not showing work here. To be invited here to talk about you’re work, without actually showing work, feels somewhat strange, doesn’t it?
Stuart: Normally when there is a talk, people have come to see a performance. There’s always an experience or reference point to start from. To be here, talking without that, is something new for me.
Bock: I imagine you’ve already given a lot of talks about your work, presenting yourself in a certain way and I was curious to have a conversation with you about what moves you and what kind of material you are interested in. The way you work with identity for example, who we are, what we can inhabit, what or who through our bodies we can inhabit.
Stuart: In terms of movement, I very often work with the idea of a fluid identity. Are we capable of completely changing who we are or do we change only what we pay attention to? In a series of movement, I sometimes think more anatomically, other times I focus more on the thoughts inside my head, the images I produce or the gap between what is there and what I put out. For example, in one of my solo pieces Software, I’m constantly morphing from one identity or image to the next. It can start of on the surface, very classic and poppy but then it changes and becomes more about the distorted vision people can have about themselves. It becomes a fluid operation where there is a tempt to go into something but there is always a moment of detour where you reach for something that is recognizable but then it curves, becomes something else. It’s this searching for the curve between things that interests me.
Bock: Can you say a bit more about the abstract? Earlier you told me that the body can never really be abstract, that it is always full with something or someone.
Stuart: During the workshop we talked about the difference between abstraction and reality. I think they are quite close to each other. They seem very different at first glance but once you’ve unpeeled the layers, you see the connection quite clearly. I work a lot with imagination and exteriorizing my potent inner world. You can dissolve into your imagination. You can become something else. You can dance with invisible forces, traces and presences and even become them, dissolve into what you see and experience in the world. It doesn’t always have to be produced, it can simply come to you as well. It’s not just about being there and marking the world but allowing things to move and transform through your actions.
Bock: You work a lot with authentic fiction, the idea of concretizing states and living them in a certain way…
Stuart: Yes, it’s about living inside a certain circumstance. Realities and truths can change rapidly. For instance, I know something to be true right now but it is possible that in a few moments the set of rules will have completely changed. I talk a lot about micro narratives, partly because when I first started dancing, I thought of partnering in terms of equality: I lift you, you lift me and we lift each other. Later on, I decided to introduce a set of conditions, as you might do in a more theatrical scenario. This creates a different perspective on the concept of time. You create a different kind of urgency. One move matters because there is a next one coming. The past has meaning because it influences the now. As a choreographer, working with this set of conditions is very important to me, because it adds weight and meaning to the work and makes it harder to resolve.
Bock: So you work with accumulation rather than with narrative? Through accumulation, you create histories on stage?
Stuart: It’s hard to say. With every new piece I ask myself the same questions: “Who are these people? How do they move? What is in the melody of their movement? How stylized are they? Are they people or are they energies?” The conditions of who is moving aren’t clear right away. There goes a lot of work into that and once that is established, other things appear. The word narrative has a bad connotation and anything that gets close to it, seems dangerous. I’ve always been attracted to things that are ‘not done’ in a way. So I’ll say that it’s narrative, just for the fun of it (laughs). But I think it really is micro-narrative, which means that when it happens, it could be just for a spot in time, it could last for over an hour but it can also collapse. I made this piece, called BLESSED, where the performer, Francisco Camacho, moves around in a cardboard set. After 20 minutes it starts to rain. The set begins to dissolve and turns into trash. This is probably the most narrative piece I have ever made. You just couldn’t go back, recut and set up. This is what’s happening and this is how it will end. So the piece was more about how to respond to this inevitable course. How does the performer respond to what is happening to him? It was very interesting to be working with this set condition that works almost as a text. I usually don’t work with text and I enjoy playing with forms and structures and mix them up but this piece was a nice break. And in the end Francisco doesn’t freak out. There are moments where he almost lets go and questions his faith but ultimately he adapts and becomes completely part of what is happening around him.
Bock: In a way, the set is writing and I remember you talked about dance-writing as well…
Stuart: Yes. What I mean is that the body has its own intelligence. There are certain things we don’t understand but we have the capacity to translate them physically. And it isn’t always clear where this information comes from. Do these words or moves come from within me or do they come from somewhere else? This interests me.
Stuart: You brought this book called The ontology of the accident by Catherine Malabou. It talks about destructive plasticity. In the book, there is this woman, who ages in an instant. The aging here isn’t something that happens continuously, but in the blink of an eye. I always thought of plasticity as something positive: We can reinvent ourselves. We can shape shift. We can change and channel and move. We have the freedom – or pressure even – to reinvent ourselves at any time. But then there is this destructive plasticity: You get Alzheimers or someone dies and things change irrevocably. You become a new person.
Bock: We have touched on the idea of trauma and this negative plasticity seems to refer to the idea of being so old that you can’t relate to your old self anymore. You become the other to yourself. This is a counterpoint to the self-development we spoke of earlier and I’m curious what your response might be.
Stuart: I think she says there will always be a limit to the incense of reinvention. At one point it stops. At first, this idea made me sad but then I thought: “Ok, it stops. Now what?” At one point she says:
Life can be defined as a harmonious agreement of the movement of the body. This is the definition of the health of the organism, assuming an accordance between its parts. On the other hand death occurs when the parts have their own autonomous movements, thereby disorganizing the life of the whole and breaking up its unity.
I find this funny, because when I started out, I was quite certain I was working with trauma. Esthetically I thought it was cool: I put up my arm out like this and I don’t know what my hand is doing. I was playing with the idea of something that is happening with my body but I’m not really present, I’m completely vacant. This was completely against my training and against being in a harmonious whole. When I read what she wrote now, I feel much more interested in recovery. Some parts could be numb, dead or not there even but we keep on moving because we have to. We are figuring out how to move but we are still in dialogue with other people, we are still communicating. I find it interesting how things sort of twinge or get excited when they are in proximity with something or someone else.
I’m always talking about changing states. You’re in one state and you radically change to another and back again. Lately I realized it is not about changing, it is about staying. It is staying with something more than you want to, committing. You let it linger. You feel it but you can’t name it. It’s just a way of thinking about things and it can change as well. I used to think I was obsessed with trauma but things have changed. In general, I feel that things are lighter, more integrated now.
Bock: But the process of recovery is about the integration of something positive happening. In her book, Catherine Malabou talks about a kind of indifference. She uses examples of French workers in the 80s who lose their jobs or lose their identity with Alzheimers. They become a shadow of who they were and they almost have no relationships. But when I hear you talk about states, I think there is something of trauma in that. Something can start from zero and go to ten really quickly and turn into something else. I think trauma couples the coming up of fear and anger. Say these two states can be completely locked into each other and it can be quite arbitrary as well. Things can get over-coupled in a very powerful way, having there own intelligibility but not necessarily fitting in an everyday narrative.
Stuart: And you can’t always control what triggers them or how they lash out. She describes Alzheimers as if you are both alive and dead at the same time. Having no memory is as close as you can get to being dead. I have had moments where I was grateful that I didn’t remember anything and I love that when I’m dancing with people, I often can’t remember what we did afterwards.
I have a question for you, that actually is a line from my solo Hunter. When you don’t have any memory, what do you dream about? I wonder if everything would be blurry or if we would digest the day but get the subtitles all wrong? Do you know what it would be like?
Bock: Memory is based on image and affect. It is based on experiences that have some affective quality. Anything that has a certain quality of emotion in it, will stay in your system. Anything that has a certain quality of emotion in it will more likely stay with you. We need things that have some sort of felt quality.
Stuart: Do you work with transpersonal or false memory, as if you would remember experiences that aren’t your own? Does that happen with people you work with?
Bock: These facts of a story haven't always felt important. I haven't really looked for facts in that way partly because I work in a more aesthetic way through phenomenology. So I am interested in the aesthetic process of describing pasts.
Stuart: Do you mean the way people talk about their past?
Bock: Yes, how they speak of it. There is a quality to how I’m receiving what they say. It isn’t about searching the truth or trying to piece together what might have happened.
And you were talking about that in Hunter?
Stuart: At a certain point I mention it, yes. In Hunter there is a big section where I am blogging and chatting. I talk about people that influenced me, cultural heroes. I mention Trisha Brown and the fact that she is losing her memory. I’m only talking about memory for a short moment. But often when I’m dancing I have had the experience that I’m remembering things of people that I haven’t even met. Maybe I have met them or I wanted to have met them, like a fantasy. As I told you, when I first started out, I was working with trauma and the idea of something that is happening with my body but I’m not really there. Over the years I started wondering: “If I’m not really there, who is there? Other people could be! I can channel and filter or even be a psychic.” That is what started it, what cleared the space to play with it as material. It can be people or energies or even something more abstract.
Bock: It is a very potent idea of picking in other people’s memories and working with this sense of selfless, wider body. I recently read an article about the use of words. It said that every time we use the same word, we’re altering it. Every word, every utterance of life somehow has a carrying forward of experiences.
Stuart: And would there be an end of it, like the expanding universe that at some point has to retract again?
Bock: There is a limit to everything?
Stuart: I think we are very much aware of limits. It is like a collective hangover. We have done so much and now all of a sudden, there are these limits and they have timelines and deadlines and they are real. It moves our conscience about what is happening now and the choices we are making.
Bock: Do you refer to limits in terms of capacity?
Stuart: Yes. For now everything is fine but one day it will end and we won’t be able to do this or that. It is about resources and the sense of depletion.
You have your practice, you’re involved in dance but you are a psychiatrist as well. Do you think dance is healing?
Bock: That’s a good question. There is something about experiencing art that is healing. It allows a re-experiencing of life. Art has the capacity to connect people. So yes, I would say dance has a potential for healing, but not in the sense of “Get up and dance!” and then you’re cured.
Do you experience that in your work? Do you feel as if you are making a difference?
Stuart: I feel grateful to be able to expand the borders of what I am and to meet people in this other force. I guess it keeps me sane. Years ago I wouldn’t be sitting here at all because I had a lot of problems with talking but step by step and by what has happened with my work, I opened up. I like dance because it doesn’t pretend to have solutions. We translate what we know to be true and keep shifting up the experience of it. I wouldn’t say Pina Bausch healed her generation, but there was a lot of collective trauma in Germany and she put it out there and into imagery without saying “This is my topic” or analyzing it. I’m sure that it wasn’t her mission but for a certain period of time, it meant something.
Sometimes I feel this obsession with healing goes too far. Do we have to be healed or have healing experiences all the time? But it does interest me in a way. I once made this kind of kinetic sculpture where all the dancers and the audience laughed together. Of course, I know that it’s good for your health and it can also be a practice but what interests me is the idea that you go to see a performance and that together with the dancers and the rest of the audience, you become part of the sculpture.
Bock: Are you talking about All together now?
Stuart: No, this one we did for the Politics of Ecstasy with Jeremy Wade. It opened the festival and it was very simple. Afterwards we had a silent diner on the floor. I know that it is close to other practices but I think that it is something that is happening in general: Dance is pulling into the visual art world, looking for information to use, looking to create different kind of works. There is a merging of people’s skills. We are trying to build other kinds of structures and other ways of solving problems or relations with people, which I think is very interesting.
Bock: This way of accessing relationship through the body and through collectivity is very interesting. There are certain things that you can do with embodiment that are being wanted by other art forms.
Stuart: Making art is hard. You are giving something and questioning it at the same time. I think it is part of the process and an important aspect for me as well. What do I stand for? What do I construct? How do I speak? What is my work about? You’re constantly putting yourself on the line. It is confronting at times but at the same time very important.
Bock: You work a lot with other artists so there seems to be a great interest in meeting other people and figuring out how they work…
Stuart: I like working together and to be in a space with other people. If I would go back in time and decided to make work in a room all by myself, I probably would have produced things as well but I somehow find it fascinating to see other artists making their work. They could be the script or text and I imagine their work and try to put myself in it and meet them.
Bock: Were you on your own in Hunter ?
Stuart: I’m the only one on stage but there were a lot of people involved. There was a video designer, a sound designer, a stage designer, a dramaturge, … It wasn’t just me slogging it out on my own. I have had some moments alone for sure but not that many. Of course, there are very different forms of collaboration. Is every decision going to be made together with the other person or is it you who in the end makes the decisions?
My company and I made this book, Are we here yet? , which was published for the first time in 2010 and has recently been reprinted. It is about the company’s work and mainly about the politics of collaboration and making work together. It contains exercises as well.
Bock: Did you change or add anything in the 2nd edition?
Stuart: We changed only a little bit. It was out of print so there had to be a new one.
Bock: Did you want to?
Stuart: No, I thought it was pretty good the first time (laughs).
In the middle of the book, you will find a series of exercises and the first one is ‘Look at your own body as if you were dead’. The second one is; ‘You’re the last person on earth’, and another one: ‘Your personal future body’. They are rather unconventional exercises. I didn’t even realize that I had exercises because I normally just freewheel in the studio but Jeroen Peeters (editor of Are we here yet?) pointed it out to me and convinced me to share them. The first one might seem a bit dark ‘Look at your own body as if you were dead’ but just lie down, imagine you’re dead and see if you move. Just start from there and see what happens.
Bock: Do you still dance?
Stuart: I’m happy when I’m dancing. If I don’t feel good in my body, it’s very hard for me to lead or to teach a group because I feel that a lot comes through. I can make a new work while sitting on a chair, just by watching people, seeing how they move. I guess I get really fascinated by other people. But I have to remind myself to get in there. I feel that it’s very important. So yes, I still dance.
Bock: From a wish to be 'in the material' differently?
Stuart: I still surprise myself. Sometimes I know that I’m doing this or that again but then there are times when something just pops out or I end up doing something that comes from a place I don’t understand. I think that is important. You often start rehearsing, thinking that you are going to do a certain scene but when you start dancing with other people, something completely different comes out of it.
Bock: And you follow that?
Stuart: Yes, or I just look at it.
Bock: And do you have a sense of the other bodies that are in your gestures?
Stuart: Definitely, I feel as if my work is made through other people. Over the years, people have been coming into the work, shaping its tasks and scores with their own interests and their own work when we meet. So they are making and shaping the work as well. And if they reconnect, it feels as if you’ve met them. But that is just one practical way, you might be mean on another level…
Bock: Well, I guess it maybe relates to an idea of channelling which you often talk about. I am now thinking about you and Philipp Gehmacher and if the two of you take on some imprint of each other. How actively are you working there with an attunement to a sense of you that is wider than your own?
Stuart: I think you refer to a piece I did with Philipp Gehmacher that is a very specific dialogue. I made two pieces with him and we have a kind of ongoing dance connection. We don’t articulate what we’re talking about but we are talking about histories and events that are not spoken out. Through the misunderstanding, we come to an understanding. It can be very practical, for instance, the interest in working with the arms or with the gestural body but it is a very unique connection.
Bock: I like the idea of communicating through misunderstanding. There’s something very rich about that: Knowing that there will always be something that you are missing, something that is incomplete but you do understand a provisional meaning.
Stuart: Good dances are made in that mode. You have to dance to find out more. You don’t dance to prove yourself right or to prove the other one is right or to prove a theory right. You dance to keep talking in order to get closer and to understand. I’m very fond of that idea.
Bock: You have to keep moving.
Stuart: Yes.
Bock: Does anyone have something to add?
Audience: Isn’t all communication based on misunderstanding? Can we ever fully understand the other?
Bock: I believe it is an ongoing project. We never really arrive.
Stuart: I feel very comfortable with being disoriented, not only dance-wise but in general. I long for it. I live in Berlin and my German is ok. I can speak a bit and to a certain level, everyone understands me. But some parts will remain missing, like gaps and for me that’s a relief. It creates space to be my own world. It triggers this personal response. I become more aware of all that is between an experience or a dialogue or between two people. In general, there is a lot of projection. While talking with others, we put a lot of stuff in front of them that is not theirs, just by being there. The fact that we understand what people are saying, that we understand their words, doesn’t mean that we are really present. I think that is something performance can do. Maybe it’s because you can manage the time and people are forced to stay. It might seem old-fashioned but it is a very precious thing to be able to say: “Look at this. This is fascinating. Pay attention to this!” To insist and find out that they are willing to accept your insistence because they are sitting in a chair and the lights are out. I think that is very special about this set up as opposed to other set ups.
Bock: Distracted set ups…
Stuart: Yes, distracted. This is very special about performance. Even if it feels as if we question it all the time: “What are we doing as performers in these old-fashioned theater spaces? What is that?”
Audience: You talked about the fragmented body and the attempt to connect to the body and I’m curious how you relate all that to the aging body.
Stuart: In Norway, people are supposed to retire at the age of 42. So when you get there, they tell you you’re done. I guess that is one way to deal with it. Aged body, experienced body, knowledgeable body… What to do with it? It creates a certain urge. For now you still have the energy and the power but how do you transmit it? What do you share? How can you offer what you have before you loose interest or it becomes too tiring to jump around? At a certain point, this question occurs. But it seems as if things are changing. Young and old aren’t two separate entities anymore. Last September, there was this event, organized by Peter Pleyer in Berlin about New York in the 1980s. Sasha Waltz (my roommate in New York in the 80s) and I were there, Yoshiko Chuma and a lot of others as well. It was a mix of younger and older dancers and it was nice to attend an event where people aren’t sectioned into different groups. It is liberating to see that something is shifting in the world of performance.
Audience: Do you go back to dancers you worked with on many occasions and do you work with that past? Do you incorporate it in your work? Or do you prefer working with new people, people you don’t understand that well yet, in order to go back to that gap where there is room for exploration and misunderstanding?
Stuart: It is usually a mix. I reconnect to people that I’ve worked with before. They could have worked with me on a piece right before or it could have been years earlier. But I always invite new people as well, to balance the two. In terms of my own work and my habits as well. I would say you have this integrated body, as opposed to the fragmented body and you are integrated or connected to very strange things. I see that when I’m making work. You combine this weird image with that thing or with this spot. The idea that the connections are stretched or not necessarily obvious is another sense of integration and of connectivity that is not just…
Audience: … just a position?
Stuart: Maybe. Not always. What I wanted to say is that there are ways to create another sense of being connected.
Bock: So it is a kind of ‘smashing things together’, that don’t necessarily go together?
Stuart: Yes. It’s funny. It might seem as if I know what I’m doing but I often feel that I don’t know that much about anything. I think that keeps me young. Or is that silly?
Audience: Do you think if you would understand completely what you are doing, you might lose the ‘surprise of the physicality’?
Stuart: Yes. That is interesting. You try to force your own misunderstanding, as if you are looking for your own amnesia. But then there are moments when you know it and you face ego and a lot of other things. I think you have to keep checking. It’s not that surprising…
Audience: I think it has a lot to do with the other person. You don’t know exactly who this person is but you work with him. Your work is a lot about this ‘not knowing’ and I wondered if there were moments where you collaborated with someone and it didn’t work, because of this ‘not knowing’. Has this happened and if so, how did you react? Were you flexible? Or did you think: ‘Not again this way’?
Stuart: I give people a lot of space and I very rarely tell a designer or artist what it exactly is that I want. That can be pretty tough, especially if, for example, you’re a designer making the set. They are pretty much in open hands. I give keywords of course. They are not completely in the dark but yes, it can be quite hard and sometimes I don’t say enough. It happens that the sound designer makes a score and wants to put music in every single moment of the performance. Then it’s very hard for me to say: “Not right now… and not here and there either”. That happened to me with someone I know really well. But when I feel that I can’t give somebody honest feedback or that I can’t be direct, there’s a problem. They could be the most brilliant artist or dancer but that means that something is blocking, me or them. That’s what happened with this musician and I haven’t worked with him again even though his work is brilliant. While working with him, it was hard for me to be direct and then things go wrong.
I had familiar experiences in my younger years, while working with famous visual artists like Gary Hill, Ann Hamilton, Bruce Mau. I was the younger one and to me, they were the big star. I was impressed by them and had to keep myself from saying: “Just do whatever”, which wasn’t easy. I was overwhelmed by their presence and collaborating with them didn’t go so well. It didn’t go wrong either. The pieces went well, but I had to jump over something. I didn’t give up. When I’m not sure about something, I get pretty silent. Afterwards I’m happy when I do know. Things can spiral out in the process for a while and other people might panic, but I don’t. I can just let it hang. I’ve known to continue after a deadline so I’m pretty tenacious with the project.
Bock: I remember reading somewhere that the sound and light people you work with very much enjoy the process of working with you because of the space and knowledge of theatre that you bring. The 'safe hands' that you are, is somehow really trusted.
Stuart: That is something that I have earned through time. Just to reassure younger makers: In the beginning, it didn’t feel like that at all! With every proposal I would do - maybe because I worked a lot with friends - they would have doubts or disagree. That was hard. Later on, when I had made a few pieces that worked, all of a sudden that changed. In a way it becomes harder as well. You have to start battling your own history, your own limits. You have to deal with yourself. It doesn’t really get easier but people start trusting you and in that set up, you start to trust your own choices. It’s a kind of gift that comes with sticking to what you believe is true and hanging in there. But in the beginning it felt as if you had to convince everybody about everything, including yourself.
Audience: How much is your work set? How much is free? I imagine that you have quite a long making process. How much do you trust that in the performance things will appear the same way as they did during the rehearsal process?
Stuart: It gets quite specific and detailed, even to the point where I say: “This part has to look improvised so don’t do this and that and that.”
Audience: You’ve talked about states. In a performance, how much is there actually about finding the states? How much is that just part of the process? And when you have actually found this form or shape that you tried to achieve, how can you achieve it in the performance?
Stuart: By doing it more, doing it when you’re not in the mood, doing it again, doing it every day.
Audience: So it becomes like a second skin?
Stuart: Hopefully.
Audience: This summer, I saw your performance with Boris Charmatz in Berlin, as part of the Musée de la Danse. The two of you were doing this play with memories: “Do you remember this?” And I wondered how much of that was a mode.
Stuart: This was absolutely not set. It was an exposition with Boris Charmatz. It will come to the Tate in May so you will get the chance to see it. Boris and I have a kind of shared dance history, a spotty one but a shared one, and we play this game where I do a move and say “Do you remember this?” and then he’ll do a move from a dance I might or might not know and then he repeats the phrase to me. It’s a game for an improvisation, a structure for an improvisation. Nothing was set in this case. There was no rule.
Audience: No, but I was amazed how much you were using the archive of your work. It made me think that your work is quite set because you can draw from specific moments, which are very small and very detailed.
Stuart: Yes.
Audience: I have a question about the title of your company ‘Damaged Goods’. Can you tell me where the name comes from?
Stuart: It was the final line from the first review that I got on my first evening length piece in 1991, Disfigure Study. I don’t remember if it was a good review, actually. It probably was ok. At the end the author wrote: “Everyone was shown as damaged goods”. At that particular moment in time, when dance was quite virtuosic and quite energetic, it felt a bit ‘anti’ and I liked the idea that someone would be selling a dance company as damaged goods. It stuck and I still like it and now and then I ask myself if it should still be called damaged goods. But it’s still there and it’s still transiting, still moving, so it’s a part of the work as well. The company is still going. It gets support in Belgium and Brussels since the very beginning.
Bock: This seems like a good place to end. Thank you.
Stuart: Thank you.
