Can I play it for you: A conversation between Juliana F. May and Hilary Clark

This conversation between Juliana F. May and Hilary Clark emerges out of a failed editorial endeavor. Seeking to illustrate the dialogic nature of dramaturgy— where two (or more) people hover around a single work—several proposals were made to artist-pairs to participate in a score: 1. devise a single point of departure; 2. write contributions separately; 3. annotate each other’s work. No one accepted this prompt. May and Clark requested to push the format to a discussion. And given the dramaturgical relationship Clark has to May’s practice, this shift made sense.

What follows is a conversation on the intimacy of friends, fellow artists, and trusted partners in the process of making new choreographic work. Never defining “dance dramaturgy,” they nonetheless identify their anxiety about dancing around this concept as an almost ineffable aspect of the partnership they have built over many years. This anxiety hardly keeps May and Clark from providing a window into the way they practice, embody, and perhaps even perform this relationship—almost as though the reader were listening in on a private phone call.

This itself reveals a layer of dramaturgy that is rarely described in the existing literature: the selection of someone you’re willing to fail in front of; the person to whom you show the sad attempts on the way to articulating a work—and on the other end the person who is willing to be with your desires (for the work). There is an earnestness, a vulnerability, in showing someone else what you’re interested in—a willingness to want that is dangerous. Finding someone else who wants what you want is a cliché trope of relationships. Is a dramaturg someone you learn to want in front of without the need for mutual recognition—even if, ultimately, such affirmation is exactly what one desires?

—Joshua Lubin-Levy

Can I play it for you

A conversation between Juliana F. May and Hilary Clark

Juliana F. May: So, we're not anxious at all, but we should say that we are anxious about this, because it immediately formalizes something that I feel we so lovingly like to keep informal, which is interesting. Maybe that's a problem for me, my inability to formalize it in some way is endemic to, or interesting to the relationship.

Hillary Clark: What does it mean to formalize it versus not formalize it? I just think there is an easiness, potentially, about the way that we just go into conversation. 

JM: I don't feel nervous as much anymore because I forgot that we were recording. Because it's about a witness, right? I don't want to witness. And I think it's why it's also really hard for me to bring people into the work. I don't have, really, anyone come into the work besides you. I feel like you're one of the only people that has come into the work. When I think about Family Happiness, for sure. I don't know if you came into Folk Incest, or-

HC: I did, yeah.

JM: You did?

HC: Yeah, I did.

JM: But you came into Commentary in 2012 and 2013 and when I couldn't figure out how to end the piece, I have this memory of me being on the phone with you, lying on my floor and you just being this doula, in a way. I don't know if you resent that kind of word-

HC: No.

JM: ... of, like, what were the roadblocks for me in why I couldn't end the piece. And so, I feel, through friendship, we've also just established such a deep trust, like friendship-motherhood dance.

HC: I think I've always had, obviously, investment in you and my care for you and the care for your work so that there could be this... I feel aware of being listened to at the moment, but-

JM: Yeah. I feel maybe you should talk about why... Just like when we got this email... I feel we were both really interested, and also felt like imposters.

HC: Also, the process feels so intimate, is the thing. And that feels collaborative, even though it doesn't feel like I have to be...what are the words? I have no desire to shape the work.

JM: I just want to talk about this moment at the end of Family Happiness where you were truly my person in the room, and I had formed the first half of the piece but couldn't for the life of me figure out how this 20-minute dance was followed by this 20-minute song. No one was moving around the space, and the dancers were just sitting in fucking chairs singing this 20-minute song. I was like, "such a transformative moment!" and you just looked at me, and you were like, "Why aren't they moving?"HC: And I can just piggyback on that question is, when you first started working on this piece, you sent me the song. It's a musical song…

JM: Joseph And the Technicolor Dreamcoat!

HC: Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat! And then, you kept talking about Glee and you kept talking about all of these other aspects of your secret musical theater history and your secret musical theater love, but that you're abstracting it, like, essentially you're fucking musical theater on its side a little bit. You're using it as a frame, but you're actually creating an experimental blend of practices.  And so, I remember thinking about that in the moment, that there's a certain reference for you to staging. I don't know if it's performativity, but there is a nod.

JM: There is a nod, there's a desire for a real sincerity and a cheesiness, but that is using some of the dryness of how postmodernism functions to replace the fake optimism in musical theater with actually some bones of real feeling, real subject matter, and lyrics that are unpredictable and don't have the same formula as a pop song, but also wanting to actually be in that formula of the pop song. Can I play you the song I wrote, really quickly? Because I just feel like this...Because you and I, we're on the phone, our kids are in the background, and I'm always hesitant to share this piecemeal way of our engagement, but it's not piecemeal, it's just, our lives are constantly parallel to this conversation. 

[plays song] Can you hear it? 

(singing) "Hillary Clark, don't you know that you're my favorite person. Hillary Clark, you are not nothing ever to me. I know that Hillary Clark is my best person. Hillary Clark, I know you could be inside of..." Okay.

HC: How do you feel about starting a new piece?

JM: I feel really excited. I told myself last night, because I was stressed that, "Oh, it's just gonna be like every other piece," or something. And then, I had to really coach myself and say to myself, "It can be totally whatever..." I feel like Tere [O’Connor] actually says that to his students, like, "you can do whatever you want." And there's just so much freedom in that, in the thing we don't know.

HC: Well, and that you've been slowly filling your basket to bring into the first rehearsals, filling your baskets with some of these songs... some things that you've been working through thematically as something to explore. Those things, they're all in the basket you're walking in with.

JM: Yeah, they're all in the basket, there's new people I'm working with, so I want to onboard them to a way of working.

HC: And what's the way of working?

JM: I guess the way of working is improvisation and this solo practice. The score for Family Happiness was this: be bold, be kind, don't impress. I forget the fourth one. Be urgent, or something. Be kind to yourself, basically, open scoring with those four, five words.

HC: And is there direction physically?

JM: Not now. I'm starting to see movement that is based on place. It feels like theater, again, imposter, but it feels like a setting or some kind of landscape. Yeah, there we go, there we go. It's like [a] fake theater-setting landscape. And then, I think what is always there is pop music.

HC: And pop because it's self-referencing, is it catchy? What makes you think pop?

JM: I think it feels great to dance to, it feels like an immediate landscape. Chloe D'Angel, in one of my workshops this summer was like, "Oh, this is immediate landscape." And sometimes you just need an immediate place to be.

HC: Well, it's funny, Eric would always be like, "How do you know all of these pop songs?" And I was like, "Because I go to the literal bodega to listen to them."

JM: I go to the bodega, I go to my car, I go to the park to escape. It is about an escape.

HC: Okay, so there was somebody from Glee that sang this song that you loved and you were secretly listening to this one song over and over. I want to talk to you a little bit about—and this is not what I do normally as a dramaturg, but we have to be patient—the obsession of repeating the song. Is there a feeling that you want your work to be a ballad, or to have that kind of resonance? I know you don't want your work to be a ballad, but let me-

JM: No, no, let's say I want my work to be a ballad.

HC: Let's say you want your work to create the landscape that a ballad creates, right? I need to listen to it from the beginning to the end because there's a particular sensation, feeling that my body gets into—that's the place I need to be.

JM: That's what I want. I think there is something embodied, but I don't understand what the embodiment is yet. That's why, at the end of Family Happiness, when you were like, "Why the hell aren't they moving around," I was like, "Oh." It really hadn't even occurred to me, really. It's very hard for me to admit that I don't know how to do something. It was just very hard for me to admit that as some leader, or whatever, that I didn't know how to do it. And you and I had long conversation.

HC: Well, part of that conversation, if you don't remember, was, like, what if you went way deep into your musical theater, choreographing only a front, right?

JM: I want to understand what a postmodern musical is, and how can I start to work on the music and the dancing more together. And that's a scary thing for me. I know that I'm interested... I texted Miguel, maybe I texted this to you too, that I think I'm going to make Portishead the Musical. Yeah. And I was watching footage of Beth Gibbons from Portishead sing. It's incredible how she sinks into the mic. It's so internal, the state of singing.

HC: That particular body, that particular embodiment.

JM: And how to arrive there with each performer. I think that's what will be new in this process, is finding their singing. We began to do it in Family Happiness, but I felt I wasn't ready to really go there with each person individually, yeah.

HC: Didn't I have this conversation with you that for a long period of time I would study how male singers walk to the mic?

JM: No. Wow.

HC: Never?

JM: No.

HC: Particularly Country singers, and it's more so in how they come towards the mic and how they come away, the way in which their bodies would kind of engage, and the stepping forward into the mic and the receding.

JM: Who would you watch?

HC: Okay, so I watched The Highwaymen, which was Johnny Cash and all of these old Country superstars. And then I would just start to watch other... Who else was I watching?

JM: The mic is so important.

HC: Well, it makes me think about that relationship of, like, the Portishead singer, do you know what I mean?

JM: And she's literally fucking melting into her mic.

HC: Exactly. 

JM: I've been really watching The Cure a lot, and listening to “Plainsong” for probably 10 years, since Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette movie, I've been thinking about, I don't even know what you would call that, but just the drama of The Cure…Are you pulling up The Highwaymen? Wait, I can't hear it.

Highwaymen: (Singing) "I was a highwayman. Along the coach roads I did ride, with sword and pistol by my side. Many a young maid lost her baubles to my trade. Many a soldier shed his lifeblood on my blade. The bastards hung me in the spring of '25, but I am still alive. I was a sailor, I was born upon the tide."

JM: Is that Kris Kristofferson?

HC: Yes.

Highwaymen: (Singing) "And with the sea I did abide. I sailed a schooner round the Horn to Mexico... And when the yards broke off they said... But I am living still on. I was a dam builder across the river deep and wide where steel and water did collide. A place called Boulder on the wild Colorado. I slipped and fell into the wet concrete below. They buried me in that great tomb that knows no sound. But I am still around. I'll always be around and around and around and around and around and around."

HC: So, they do this thing where often they walk back and they walk forward, and it's this unison vibe where it's like they're following the rhythm together. I don't know, it's just so specific within the physicality of the body.

JM: And I think, honestly, that simplicity is what I'm looking for. Because what's so cemented in my head about musical theater is how the movement is so literal. And it's so connected to jazz or ballet. And some of it really hits.

HC: Witnessing of the storyline is really all it does, do you know what I mean? It's not a dance that emerges out of the embodied sense of experience, or something.

JM: It's meeting the needs of the structure of the song. All of that can also be really exciting.

HC: Is this the dramaturgy?

JM: I wonder what the root of the word dramaturg is.

HC: I actually literally pulled it up the other day.

JM: You did? Why are we so resistant to that word...I think it feels like there's this vibe of that person giving you context for everything, or something. I've had this vibe from other choreographers that have been looking down on that concept, and I'm trying to understand why. And is it about resources and lack of resources?

HC: I think it's always about scarcity, because really, it's just a place of dedicated conversation to your work and someone being... Like, I am in process with you and the work. I think one of the things that you and I have talked about a little bit is, because I was a dancer with so many different people in an experimental dance context, I would get given the direction from that choreographer, and then I would build out how I related to that direction. And that's just a little bit... It's a larger, expanded version of what I feel you and I do. I can try to place myself inside the work if necessary, but I tend not to. More, it's about just this... what you’re hearing, what you're processing, reflecting back, I don't know. Again, I'm being recorded, so I'm saying—

JM: No, no, I love what you're saying on so many levels, one, because you have that experience of such a deep lineage of working with so many different people, I feel what you're saying is that how material gets transposed is a process, a deep process for you and your role as a collaborator. Almost, the definition of your role as a collaborator is to be in your own process with how you get and how you telegraph all of that information. And it feels like that is what you're doing with me, and that is/has been built out through the course of our friendship. The friendship piece feels really important.

HC: Also, there's certain things that we wouldn't necessarily expose about why things were built or why things are getting thrown into this metaphorical basket—but I can ask you about those, if this is something that you want to continue to include or consider, a different kind of embodied recommendation or embodied direction, like, what would that do to it?

JM: I like the idea of a recommendation, actually. I told Iris McCloughan, who is also going to be dramaturging with me, about this work, Mathilde Monnier’s frère&soeur and the sort of choreographed violence that she goes through, but not wanting it to be so choreographic more like looking at violence, essentially. And Iris said to me, made a recommendation, essentially, "what if there was an underbelly of care inside of that section?" I don't think about care in that way.

HC: I also start to think, is there a process that's developed that has care around it but you can actually still explore ideas of violence. Trying to be careful in violence is no longer violence. I wish we weren't recording because what I would really say is, because now I'm editing myself…

JM: Yeah.

HC:... but I feel like it's the trigger warning a little bit.

JM: Right, like what do they protect against? 

HC: And do they keep people from actually going into what their actual interests are?

JM: That's a hugely important question for me also in my teaching. I feel that people are so afraid of their interests, and that as an artist, I really don't want to be afraid of my interests. I don't want to be afraid of loving the fucking Glee music, I don't want to be afraid of the violence that is also there, I don't... Yeah.

HC: That's where a dialogue can start to happen between the performers and yourself around, "Oh, how does violence get represented in this improvisation for you? This is how I read it. Can you bring this more forward?" And then, that consensual kind of conversation is present, care is the bubble, and if I wasn't being recorded, I might say—

JM: Well, there's a lot of fake care, too, because there's a lot of worry. If you're using care to protect against conflict coming up with your people, then it's not actually care, it's just actually a defense mechanism.

HC: So, how do you want violence to be represented?

JM: When I was younger, it was represented with violent nudity or talking about violent things, and now it's in the lyrics. Because music is really allowed a less conflictual route towards beauty, and also towards difficult subject matter.

HC: It does make me think about proposing to the room, what are the ways that you care for yourself and one another when in discussion around violence? Because people have all different ways that they might want to... Sorry. If I wasn't being recorded...

JM: The recording is a real theme, though, right?

HC: We're in a performance.

JM: We're in a performance. But it's this thing of, what if I were really heard?

HC: What if I was really heard.

JM: What if someone really heard what I was thinking.

HC: Right.

JM:…and wanting, and knowing that some of my wants are kind of unconscious, which can be really dangerous. You don't know what's going to come out.

HC: Yeah.

JM: I'm not unaccountable to those things. That's important to say. But I am interested in that process.

HC: And it's like, I don't know, proposing a safe enough... Sorry. Who's calling me?

JM: I also always... classes, or whatever, they were safe, but not too safe. I think we can stop recording.

HC: Okay, I'm going to stop recording.