Intangible Display, Shadow Dramaturgy in the Work of Nikita Gale

Ligia Lewis: Hi Nikita. 

Thanks for agreeing to this conversation on dramaturgy, a term I use generously inside my work. When I consider the role it plays for me, it is an inconstant yet loyal friend, offering surprises and unexpected turns, but one that is essential to my practice. Ideally, it is how I imagine my work meeting a public. 

Often aided by a conversation partner whom I name dramaturg in my work,  I use their eyes or knowledge to speak back to what they see, witness, and experience and from there I carve deeper into my process. 

As an artist who may or may not consider an audience when creating work, I’m curious: does the presence of different eyes on your work influence how you shape it? Could you share how you begin and whether the audience’s experience is a factor when you “stage” your installations?

Nikita Gale: I always think about the audience in my work. But I also always have to remember that I am the first audience, so it has to work for me before I expect it to work for anyone else. In many ways, the audience (be it one person or thousands, human or non-human) is a conversation partner. This goes back to Stuart Hall for me and his theories around the production of experience being one that is co-produced by the creator of a work and by the interpretation of the work by those who encounter the work. I love this idea because in many ways it makes the work feel like some kind of offering that gets placed into the circulation of cultural and social life and it then takes on a life of its own. It also feels like a relief, too, in a way, to know that you’ve made something that you just have to release into the care of the audience’s attention – which in and of itself is a kind of generosity — to experience this thing and hopefully find some reflection of themselves in it. 

I am obsessed with this 1983 essay by Lorraine O’Grady “Performance Statement #3: Thinking Out Loud: About Performance Art and My Place in It”  (it’s not lost on me that this is also the year I was born) where she references Hegel’s term “preservers” when describing what an audience is. An audience preserves and reproduces the work through experiencing it. I know that when I make something, a different version is created each time some new entity encounters it. 

Someone else I think about when I’m creating the conditions for experiencing my work is Rick Rubin, the music producer. I’ve heard him talk about his belief that his job as a producer is to  help artists sound more like themselves and I believe that is how I like to think about my relationship to my audience: my job is to present you with an experience that gets you closer to some part of yourself that you feel alienated from. The work that has always left the most lasting impressions on me has always been the work that makes me feel like I’ve been given permission to do something that I’ve felt has been denied or is unacceptable. It’s honestly one of the many reasons I am such a huge admirer of your work. I feel like I’m being given permission to be a more dynamic, complicated, ecstatic, hilarious, nasty, gentle, exhausted, vicious, sane version of myself. I think this is the greatest reward of being able to do the work that we do. 

Another important aspect of my work is centered around accessibility. For a while my work was often characterized as “sound art” which in turn created a framework in which my audience became “listeners” or the practice of “listening” was a central means for experiencing the work. None of these terms ever totally felt right even as I had begun to use them in describing my own work. A huge part of that uneasiness stemmed from the over reliance on these terms that prioritized one typical human sense — the sense of hearing — over other sensory inputs. And also the inherent ableism of terms like “viewer” and “listener.” 

As far as staging is concerned,  you’re creating an experience even before you enter the exhibition space. This is actually why I have such a hangup about artist portraits. At the Barbara Kruger retrospective at LACMA a few years ago, there was this part of the exhibition that I found so poignant and hysterical where she curated a room with dozens of artist portraits from the museum’s permanent collection. It becomes part of the work!

LL: I was particularly struck by your 2023-2024 work, TEMPO RUBATO, the installation for which you were awarded the Bucksbaum Award from the Whitney Biennial. I love this piece. Among the many crafty aspects of the work and its conceptual rigor,  I was immediately drawn to the absent figure, the interpreter, within that work. Could you share what that role is for you and how it shaped how you wanted to figure them through their absence?

NG: I feel like I am always asking questions about the limits of liveness, particularly in this moment when even the events we refer to as being “live” are so heavily mediated by technologies of amplification. TEMPO RUBATO is an archive of touch. It brings to the fore that moment of encounter between the performer and the instrument while removing the “aesthetic” content of the music, or in terms of more commercialized music production, the “product.” Another thing that I believe this work is doing is dispersing and displacing the pressure of being a point of identification back into the exhibition space and creating a situation in which the interpreter (the audience) is the figure, not the performer. It’s also an archive of Black creative labor that goes beyond vision or sound. The keypresses that are played back on the piano are from interpretations of a Scott Joplin piano performance of “The Entertainer” originally recorded in 1902 and a piano performance by Beyoncé Knowles of a song called “Die with You” 113 years later in 2015. 

LL: Incredible. It does feel like Joplin’s interpretation is presented in a manner that requires further inquiry and commands interpretative analysis. I deeply appreciate the acknowledgement of the interpreter, a role often obscured by the institutional heft of an otherwise (dead) composition over a (live) interpretation. I am also struck by how the work suggests that interpretation can never be fully captured because the space between the notes is what offers resonance and style, qualities that arguably can’t be reproduced.  

Does this work serve any other purpose for you, in consideration of its historical references?

NG: I was curious about the idea of the archive as it relates to performance. Of course, there’s the score that is reperformed by different performers over time, but I recently went to the last night of Saint Heron’s Eldorado Ballroom performance series curated by Solange Knowles at Walt Disney Concert Hall here in Los Angeles. I wrote down the phrase “archive of experience” in my Notes app at the end of the night. I left with this big question of how do you create an archive that you don’t simply read but actually experience with your entire body? This was something that was also driving some part of my thought process with TEMPO RUBATO.

 LL: Do you see this work as a kind of homage to the genre that so deeply inspired you, or as a kind of container to hold the gaps we experience when conjuring our most beloved memories? I am also thinking about the richness of some aural traditions —ones that aren’t archived in a Western sense but live through the body and the transference of memory across generations. Like, a good thing never escapes the body.

NG: It was hard to put into words how deeply moving I found the performances from that night. The program I attended was called Glory to Glory (A Revival for Spiritual and Devotional Art) and it focused on the theme of spirituality in Black creative expression. I grew up in a moderately religious household as a child, and Sunday mornings always involved going to church. My mother also spent some years as a musical director for churches when we lived in Alaska and Georgia, so my relationship to that lineage of performance is fairly direct and was really thrown into relief by experiencing Glory to Glory. I had a visceral experience of remembering the importance of so many of the gospel songs that I heard performed by the Women of Worship GMWA Birmingham Chapter. So much of American popular music comes out of blues and gospel traditions, so it totally makes sense that all of my years of attending choir rehearsals– sitting alone in the pews watching my mother direct the musicians — would come back full circle as me being totally obsessed with the music that has been so heavily-influenced by this genre.

The sound transformed the space in a way I’ve never experienced in the Disney Hall before. And seeing organist Dominique Johnson perform a solo on the Disney concert organ was unbelievable. I thought the building was going to explode. It made me think about control and containment – how a genre or a way of being could overpower an exclusionary or oppressive structure to a point of failure. It was very Henry Dumas’ “Will the Circle be Unbroken.” 

LL: Can you speak a bit about the title? It was the title that first prompted me to consider its dramaturgy—particularly your playful and nuanced provocation on time: historical, metaphorical, and material, as it relates to Black expression and experience. Would you mind sharing some of what you were thinking about when you chose this title?

NG: The term “tempo rubato” is a term used to denote the liberties taken by a performer when performing a score — so it’s most commonly manifested as slight shifts in tempo (timing) of the performance to add individual flair to the documented score. This was interesting to me. This way of asserting identity through how one moves through time. The words literally translate from Italian as “stolen time” or “in robbed time.” As if through performance, something is being taken away from the score for the benefit of the performer (and the audience).

LL: How essential is this reference to your work? Do you see it as a point of departure or rather a point to dig deeper and share another aspect of how to make visible the invisible? 

NG: It’s so essential for me in terms of what’s driving the desire to make the work, but it feels less essential as something that needs to be known preemptively before someone experiences the work. It’s funny because I feel like I’ve kind of been making work about the same thing for almost twenty years! But the more I work, the more I realize there is work to be done. Sometimes it’s about making visible the invisible, but more often it’s about creating a structure where it’s not necessary to change anything about the intangible thing and becomes more about creating the right stage for an audience to feel that intangible thing. 

LL: Absolutely. There’s a certain power in making room for what resists being named or fully seen, but sensed nevertheless. And of course, offering the feeling that you’re listening for the first time permits the gravitas of the (intangible) thing to happen. 

NG: To go back to my thoughts about Rick Rubin’s philosophy of helping people sound more like themselves, it’s more essential for me to formulate a scenario where people get to feel or sense something familiar in an unfamiliar way. I also love a Trojan horse. Mike Kelley was a master at this — taking something so ubiquitous and drawing you into the dark, dank chambers of associations and references.

LL: Can you recall what aspect of the work first appeared to you? I ask because the visual component of this otherwise sonic installation is so powerful—particularly when placed within the exhibition space: dead center, isolated, and lit in a way that evokes the ghostliness of the absent performer.

NG: I’ve been thinking about this work for such a long time, at least four years. I guess the first aspect that revealed itself to me was the sound of the mechanism of piano keys. I like listening to instrumental piano recordings, and at the time I was listening to Ryuichi Sakamoto’s async and Tim Hecker’s Dropped Pianos and being totally gagged by how they were mic-ing their pianos so that you could really hear all of the creaks and friction of the keys and the pedals. The recordings really heightened my awareness of the body working to bring the musical idea out as a sonic object. Those sounds were the index of the physical encounter which I feel is something  contemporary popular recordings work very hard to hide.

LL: This title pulls at the notion of stolen time, which, for me, inevitably evokes all that has been taken from Black people and Black expression — a kind of theft. Yet, at the same time, it suggests another narrative possibility. One way to break with the temporality of dispossession is to create a counternarrative or form.

Do you perceive your work as breaking with past harm to create a multilayered and multivalent poetics — a kind of writing or creating against the grain of all that has been taken?

NG: I spend a lot of time thinking about the ethics of being an artist. I think asking for another’s attention is a really vulnerable act, so when I put something into the world, it is always preceded by this question of “do I want to receive the generosity of another person’s attention through the vehicle of this idea that I am sharing?” I’ve lately been thinking about how I make work about entertainment while not making my work too entertaining in the process.. It’s a funny line to navigate.

A central tenet of my work as it exists in the form of “artwork,” as well as how I choose or refuse to represent myself as an artist, relies on a compulsive suspicion of vision and visual culture. I think over the last couple of decades we have seen something shift in how mainstream visual culture receives and consumes Black figurative imagery. It’s like Blackness always has to mean something. There are lots of people who can speak more eloquently and conceptually than me about this concept. When I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, this form of representation was mostly available to me in my Black home via paintings my mom might buy from the National Black Arts Festival or somewhere like that. Another avenue of my access to these images was through music videos. It felt very culturally hermetic and segregated in a way, images of Black people were mostly consumed by Black people. Here, I use the term representation intentionally because there seems to be this very contemporary plague wherein representation and visibility get conflated. I think institutions are overloading on the superficial visibility of “diversity” without making foundational changes that would reflect the representations of the cultural perspectives of the figures they are exhibiting. I do think it’s unethical. It’s just another form of dispossession. 

So yeah, I’d like to imagine I am breaking with past harm, but at the personal expense of having my work and ideas circulate more slowly because you often have to be in the room with the work to experience it. The work is slow and tedious and heavy, hard to move and hard to store, and requires lots of instructions. Sometimes I feel like an absolute psychopath, but it’s the only path forward that feels right. I do feel grateful to some extent for this way of working because it seems to repel a lot of the kind of exploitation that accompanies forms that circulate more rapidly.

I also tend to make things that seem to have less of a frame built around them, which I think feels a little more insidious and cynical and sinister and threatening, even in the very worst of conditions this “tempo rubato” space of agency cannot be contained and can and will exist beyond colonial and capitalistic frameworks. There’s a moment kind of early on in W.E.B. Dubois’ Black Reconstruction where he refers to the newly emancipated Black population of the United States as a black mass. That phrase really captured my imagination when I first encountered it because it felt really ominous and exciting — this mass of an emancipated force of labor, of social life, of creation, of excess that would become an intangible, inexhaustible resource (from which to extract) for all of its aforenamed features centuries into the future. 

I think my work TEMPO RUBATO points to this thing that you cannot duplicate. It’s the thing that exists always in excess; it cannot be exhausted; it lives in the influence, the contamination, the liberties taken between the score and the audience. It operates in the space between intention and audience. 

LL: Dramaturgy, particularly as I use it, is a loose term — a container for the capacious unfolding of conceptual and material processes. I am a big fan of conversation partners and am always eager to name them, as I see their role as animating the otherwise invisible social dimensions of creation.

Do you feel you have conversation partners who help sustain the urgency of what you want to create? If so, who are some of these folks?

NG: Wow, there are so many, living and ancestors. God this is such a hard question, and I’m afraid I’m going to forget some names so I feel like I should just answer this by saying “I love you all and you know who you are.”