Interview: Trajal Harrell and Moriah Evans

Moriah Evans: Here we go. Trajal Harrell, 2016, July 27… How are you?

Trajal Harrell: Good, I’m tired—I left very early this morning; had to drive to Jacksonville, Florida from my mom’s in Southeast Georgia, then two hours on the plane to New York. It’s a three-state day… And tomorrow, three countries.

ME: Do you sleep?

TH: Yeah, yeah. My neck pillow’s my best friend.

ME: You were talking about your mom. You’re close with your family still?

TH: In my life I have four hubs: New York; Georgia, where my mom is; Vienna, where my partner is; and Athens, where I have as my kind of European base to go between tours. I try to go to Georgia as much as possible.

ME: You grew up and were born in Georgia?

TH: Yes, in a small town, Douglas, Southeast Georgia with about 10,000-12,000 people. I like it very much.

ME: When did you start doing artistic work?

TH: I did gymnastics, from age eight to twelve, so that was a big part of my physical development. I did drama club in junior high and in high school; then I went to Yale where I was still involved in drama and theater. At Yale, David Herskovits of Target Margin Theater came to direct a show and he introduced us to Six Viewpoints of Anne Bogart. Soon I realized that I wanted to work through my body and didn’t want to speak onstage. I left Yale to go to a drama conservatory up in Providence, Rhode Island. I was making this dance-theater-poetry-performance art-y stuff. I asked my dance teacher if it was dance or performance art. She thought it was performance art. And I said, “Well, I think I want it to be dance.” And she said, “Well, you need to study dance.” So the next day I quit the drama conservatory and started studying dance, at Brown and at Roger Williams College. I just never looked back.

I was naïve. I really thought that being a choreographer was like being a theater director. I thought, “I’ve worked in a theater for a long time, and I directed a little bit in college, okay, I’ll be a choreographer, I just won’t use words.” That was my concept. I had been introduced to the postmodern history in college, so I knew I was not going to train to be a Cunningham, Graham or ballet dancer… I knew it was possible to make work as an individual, and that work could have a spectrum of virtuosity, body practices and language. I wanted to make my own work and do my own thing. I didn’t want to spend a lot of time doing other people’s work.

ME: And didn’t you have a period in California?

TH: After Brown and Roger Williams, I came to New York; I couldn’t understand it, like, “This is too much.” So I decided to go to San Francisco, where I started to ground myself as an artist for two years. Then I came back.

ME: When you came back to New York, did you find your home in the downtown community?

TH: No! It was quite the opposite. This is 1998. I was expecting to see all this postmodern dance, but everybody is doing release, Cunningham and very anatomical Susan Klein-Barbara Mahler-Trisha Brown. It looked a lot like modern ballet, so I was very confused about that history—like, “What is this ‘release’ that everyone is doing?” and no one could explain it to me. I met Audrey Kindred who hired me to work in the schools program for Movement Research, and then Sarah Michelson offered me a residency. Subsequently, Sarah, DD Dorvillier, and I worked for a year on two journals—the release technique journals. Working with Sarah and DD introduced me to a community. In 1999 I did my first piece relating fashion and voguing.

ME: Is that the piece with the long title?

TH: It Is Thus From a Strange New Perspective That We Look Back on The Modernist Origins and Watch It Splintering into Endless Replication. It’s the last line of an essay by Rosalind Krauss in the book The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths.

ME: What happened in this piece? Was it at Judson?

TH: It was at Judson. And it was kind of a fuck-you piece. I felt that I didn’t have a community, really, and that no one knew me, and I was weird, and all the things I was trying to do were very… freaky. So when I—

ME: But wait, what were you trying to do? Why were they “freaky?”

TH: Well, because I was really dealing with pedestrianism—sitting, standing—and people were doing release. Here I was, trying to be what I thought was postmodern.

I had gone to my first fashion show and my first voguing ball, and I was floored. Both of them were more postmodern than what I was seeing in the theater. I went into the studio—just as a joke, I was making fun, and I thought, “What if you did a minimalist voguing because voguing was so flamboyant and extravagant? What if you made voguing minimal?” Minimalism was such a big idea in early postmodernism. So I made this little piece of three minutes to a Yaz song “Ode to Boy.” I just walked, posed, and gazed. And I really thought, “Oh my god, I’m going to do this at the Judson.” I literally had this gig at Judson Church, and I just showed up. It was like going to a different country or something: “Why are these people doing all this kind of work that looks like it could have been made in the 80’s and the 70’s?” Now I understand a lot more about the connections to body practices. It was a fuck-you piece, it’s like, “you don’t get me but I don’t get you either…”

When I finished the piece, the whole room erupted into screams and clapping. I think I will never hear applause like that again; it just came out of nowhere. I just remember standing there like, being like, “This is weird. I didn’t expect this.” But then I left! It wasn’t like I stayed around for whoever’s show it was. I left!! I didn’t know anyone.

ME: You weren’t indoctrinated into rituals of behavior in the dance community.

TH: No. And I was not in the community. But I realized something was there and that was when I started to really research and commit to this relationship of voguing and early postmodern dance as well as the history of runway movement and the fashion spectacle.

ME: Let’s talk about this process of research—your first fashion show, your first voguing ball…

TH: Both of these forms were employing pedestrianism in a totally theatricalized form with a very strong performativity. I was super struck by the runway. Fashion shows are elaborate productions, and the aesthetics run the gamut. I was not in the fashion industry, so in a way, I had a distance on it. It felt like this weird theater form. These were performers; these were women, and they were models. With voguing it was a bit the same; I wasn’t in that community. I’d come, and there was this elaborate performance structure going on. You can’t tell who’s a real man, who’s a real woman, and you must question the idea of “real”. It’s also very ritualistic if you don’t know all the codes yet, with the sound, the movement, the costume, and the lingo… Voguing was connected, in a way, to fashion and fashion movement, and pedestrianism.

Part of the whole scene of voguing balls had started around the same time as Judson, the early 60s. I knew that drawing this connection would eventually have to have importance; it was just waiting for someone, waiting, you know, waiting. People had addressed voguing as a kind of movement vocabulary. But I didn’t see a model for someone who was taking it apart at the theoretical basis—I was trying to understand and unpack the kind of theoretical structures underneath it. What were the theories? What was “realness?” What was the notion of a house, and how does it relate to the history of fashion spectacle?

But I still felt quite alone. People were not supportive.

ME: They didn’t get the work? They didn’t understand the cultural forms it referenced? They didn’t accept the topics politically…?

TH: Politically, exactly, and in terms of the activism of the downtown community… They were dealing with the AIDS crisis and its aftermath. Suddenly I’m like, “Let’s look at fashion in relationship to Judson.” It’s probably sacrilege to some people. It was 2000-01—before fashion becomes part of popular culture. The experimental dance field, in general, comes from a very post-60s culture, and people in the downtown community saw fashion as equal to luxury. Luxury is one part of understanding material culture, but it’s as real as it is theoretical. But at the time it was like, “No, you cannot do fashion.” Even though half of them are rich, and many of them are funded trust-fund babies, yet that is covered over with the kind of look of poverty. There is a perception that fashion is about ultra-consumption and consumerism. Fashion is not about that; fashion is a way of thinking about how we relate to clothes and to the body.

ME: But who are you talking about? Artists associated with Judson Dance Theater or are you talking about downtown dance in general?

TH: Let’s just say: the fashion show audience was much more diverse than the dance audience. At dance shows there was me and maybe one other person of color. Downtown dance was not that diverse. It still is not that diverse.

ME: Who goes to fashion shows? How do you get into them?

TH: Fashion shows are private... It’s free to get in, but it’s very hard to get on the list. All kinds of people are trying to sneak in. You really had to beg your friend of a friend of a friend of a friend to get an invitation, or sneak into the tent and lie. First you have to sneak into the tents to get in, and then to get into the shows is another thing. You have to have another invitation. So I was doing all of that for a number of years.

ME: So, who were your friends—and what fashion shows were you particularly interested in?

TH: Well… One of my best friends to this day is a fashion photographer named Vicente de Paulo. He was very helpful… A friend was dating the design director of Calvin Klein, Joseph Carter (who has since moved on to be a design director Marc Jacobs), and he helped me a lot… It was people I would meet. I was asking everybody, I mean, anybody who had a friend… At that point I was obsessed with going to shows. It was twice a year and for two weeks. I was obsessed.

ME: They’re massive productions with so many people involved. It’s this very elaborate spectacle for a few minutes—just starts, and then it’s over.

TH: It’s spectacle for sure—it’s usually like twenty minutes—but it has an impact; like, it is a vision.… I will never forget: I was at my first Calvin Klein show (and this was my second fashion show) and I saw this woman coming down the runway in a yellow, scoop-neck, tank-top dress, and sunglasses and a purse—it was a vision. You’re like, “Who is that woman?” The way she walked; the way she moved—it was like a character; it was like Meryl Streep. It was like a person, live, but it wasn’t a person, and yet it personified—like, it was abstracted—a portrait come alive and moving. And that thing differentiated itself from the other women. When you saw that, you couldn’t see anything else! It was Gisele Bündchen. She is amazing. She knows how to move. One of the ways she became really famous was because she got noticed on the runway because of her movement. And there’s nothing like seeing Naomi Campbell walking down a runway. She’s amazing! They are amazing movers. The more and more you go into the research, you get into legendary models, people like Pat Cleveland, whom I had the privilege to meet at a party one day.

 So I start to understand the performativity of the runway. There’s a whole history of women’s movement, and a pedagogy that has been developing. This spectacle starts in the court of Louis XIV, is actually linked to the ballet, and shoots off into the fashion industry. It is very complicated—packed with many issues around material culture, class, the appearance of women, the gaze, sexism, body issues, and all kinds of things. I got so involved in the research: looking at a number of women on the runway who were very well known for their movement—very interesting movers, and footwork, you could call it. But try to find a book on the history of runway movement—it doesn’t exist! Yet, here was this history of movement that’s complicated and incredibly connected to the history of dance; particularly if we look at postmodernism, we could posit that this is a history of dance.

I could feel that this was my life’s work; something I could go into and never stop. All the branches: the voguing, the runway, the material, the fashion, the minimalism, the art history, the visual arts; all this stuff is in there—sexuality, sexual orientation, cross-dressing. It’s a life’s work to untangle them and to assemble them in different ways. The voguing/postmodern thing was a no-brainer. I knew that in time it would have a place where it could come to visibility, and people in the dance world would have to take notice of it. It was waiting for someone; it was too easy. Theoretically, it was too close, too emblematic of contemporary culture, and the questions that we have around many things.

ME: Can you speak about some of the pieces before your series—like Notes Less Than Zero, Showpony, Quartet for the End of Time.

TH: Comparison or parallel traditions and the tensions between them playing themselves out in the archetypes of the space of the runway was always a foundation for my work. Since 2001 with Notes on Less Than Zero, how cool gets written on the body has been a major theme; this idea of cool was the first thing I really examined from a mostly-American perspective. There’s a piece between Notes on Less Than Zero and Showpony; it’s called Before Intermission (2006). The relationships in those works are not that clear to me. In Showpony I began to look at the idea of community and how we perform different facets of community—who is in that community; who’s visible; who’s invisible; how do we value attention and non-attention; and the performance of competition—those are various things in Showpony. What was different with the series was that I took away all those layers and brought the foundation to the forefront. This question of “What would have happened?” was always the work, but I never made it the subject of the work, and that’s what became very easy for people to see. It became topical, and it became easy—not easy, but discursive in a way that invited people into the discourse.

ME: How did you come to making the subject of your work this historical imaginary proposition that asks people to make associations before you show them anything? It’s a very efficient, accessible way to move ideas through the world.

TH: I don’t know the exact moment, but I know two things. André Lepecki came to see Quartet for the End of Time, with whichI thought I was making a breakthrough because at the very beginning of the piece I used a slideshow of models, of prints. So all of a sudden I was taking the body and choreographing runway through the slideshow in a very different way. André Lepecki said, “I was so into that first beginning, and then those models came, and I was wondering what did this have to do with this work?”

ME: But you had all these political images, I thought, at the beginning of Quartet for the End of Time? It’s eerie. I have a dark kind of memory of it.

TH: It’s eerie, weird… They were photographs from, David Bergé’s grandparents’ anniversary party (David was collaborating on the visual material) mixed with strange pictures of people looking at art in institutional spaces with heavy dark music playing. And there are scenes from the movie Babel. You can’t really tell what it is… It’s intense in the beginning, and that’s what we loved. Then the runway show came, and for me it was an abstraction. I was forcing you to look at the loss of the body. But the fact that Andre Lepecki had no basis to see the slideshow and the models as a way to re-think my work shocked me. André had curated Showpony, and there was fashion in Showpony, buthe didn’t understand the depth of my relationship to fashion history and research… It woke me up.

The second thing: when I was in junior high and high school, I did History Day Competition. You can do a paper, a lecture, you can make one of these projects with boards, or you can do a performance. I made group performances, and I won first place in state competition every year, for six years in a row. I’m probably the only person in Georgia who’s done that. Those experiences were a big part of my understanding of making work; like, I made work on these history ideas. It was always a situation of conflicts and compromises… So… I think I just went back—“going back to basics” of my history of performance.

In the very, very beginning of the series, when I had the idea, I was making a solo called Paris is Burning at the Judson Church. I went ahead and had a meeting with RoseLee Goldberg, but she thought this title was too generic. I thought, “Really?! ’Paris is Burning at the Judson Church?’”—it was a very unique title to me, personally. I don’t know how I got to “Twenty Looks,” but I started thinking about looks and fashion. If she hadn’t said to me, “Ah, I think that’s generic,” maybe I wouldn’t have gone on to make this other title, this other series, and the whole thing.

There was a real urgency with the series and when you come from New York. Having to carve out a space for myself, that came from that feeling of weirdness—which becomes even larger when you start to play on the international scene. When I first did Small in Brussels, no one knew what the hell was going on with me—like, “What is that?” When I started to tour a lot I thought for sure it was going to stop, so I said yes to everything. There was this underlying panic, and it took a while for that to subside, to realize, “Okay, I have a career, I have opportunities…” Of course, it could end, anything could happen. It’s not about urgency anymore, but it’s about specificity and responsibility, and really understanding the kind of change that you want to make possible, that you want to inspire, and what you want to place in the world.

The series has something that I don’t have anymore or even want anymore. It’s like Jérôme [Bel] with “The show must go on,” or Xavier [Le Roy] with “Self Unfinished”—the work that you come to international visibility with is —in a way, a stamp. [Laughs] And, there’s just something about that moment… Sometimes later work or other work may never have that. It is very complicated in how things get historicized and marketed in the kind of history/ mythology of dance, and of one’s own oeuvre. The series is a very important body of work, and I hope it lasts, and I’m very happy to keep touring it, but I’m not trying to repeat it. I recognize that that urgency I had at that point came out nothing, in a way—not out of nothing, but it came out of a very specific context and a way of being an artist in the world, not having support and having to find an economy—when you have more support and opportunities, you have to find something else.

ME: That work had urgency also because of you–-your personality, the intensity and urgency of you. I was wondering if you could talk a little more about the trajectory of you, your identity as you came to visibility, your relationship to ambition. I’m interested in the trajectory of your performative role in the work. If we look at Small, it is just you. And when we look at Large, you’re master of ceremonies. And there’s a bunch of other iterations between, in every single size, or piece.

TH: Well, I don’t think anyone saw me coming. The fact that out of the independents in the U.S., I’m the most widely seen in the world, let’s say on the international scene is kind of a joke. In the NYC dance scene, when I was developing my work I was respected and supported by certain programmers, but I was never a star. At a certain point, I did have a certain kind of critical recognition in the community for my opinions more than my work. I think people were scared of what Sarah Michelson and I would think about their shows. We were brutal. And we were brutal with each other. Still are. And that has sustained me. Colleagues like Sarah, Ralph Lemon, Jerome Bel, DD Dorviller, Takao Kawaguchi, Maria Hassabi, Patricia Hoffbauer, you…..to name a few. All of those peer relationships still maintain a certain kind of urgency around our love of dance. And our will to keep making it. But I always feel myself on the outside of the scene.

I actually think, being from the South, engenders a part of that, but on the flip side I saw a lot of performativity in the world.

ME: In the South, just in people.

TH: In people, in places… in the Tennessee Williams way. When my work doesn’t have that engine it misses something. And I haven’t found out how to replace that outside of myself. What’s interesting is it’s in relation to those European dancers, educated at PARTS, that is reflective of cultural questions in the world.

This Southern thing… I keep coming back to my memories. My recent piece Caen Amour had to do with the first time I understood dance as a spectacle. Made to Measure is so inflected by going to Southern Baptist Church as a child and seeing this immense ritual of people singing, dancing and shouting. This expression was incredibly frightening and compelling. Or the kids in the street who danced all the time; always making, trading, and teaching dances… My grandfather who sung the blues on the porch… In some ways I came from nowhere, but because it was so culturally rich, because it was idyllic in that way that it held so many, perhaps, folk traditions and other kinds of traditions which weren’t necessarily named, but were lived. It was before the internet, so the grandfather is not in the house on the computer; the grandfather is on the porch, singing. Once I got older and began to cycle through and express—even if I wasn’t thinking about that stuff, it was thinking about me.

It’s kind of a cliché, but that outsider perspective is often a jewel. Even if I came here to New York, I was a Southerner. So I was always a bit out of it, in a certain type of way, and I think that that’s, perhaps, what I gravitate to, and what the work, in a way, mobilizes, and somehow fraternizes for people. I don’t fall neatly into the identity politics. Like, you know—yeah, the work is queer.

ME: It’s pretty queer. But it’s also conceptual—

TH: It’s also African-American, but it’s not; it’s also Asian…

ME: … deals with race, but escapes race; uses race; throws it away...

TH: But that’s what I mean, I don’t deal with those things at all, really.

I had a really profound experience in San Francisco that changed me as an artist. Life on the Water invited me to do a little piece. I made this dance, and after a guy came up to me in the parking lot, and he was like, “I loved your piece…that was so moving. I loved the way you dealt with the black man’s anger and race and our culture and the things that we’re going through.” I hadn’t thought at all, at all, at all, anything about race or anything like that. And I realized at that moment that no matter what I do, when I walk onstage and people see me, one of the first things that go through their minds is, “He’s an African-American male.” Race is etched on. So I don’t have to do shit. I don’t have to do shit [laughs] about race. It’s gonna be there! And I think it’s the same thing with being queer. People read that on my body! Ever since I was a little kid—I’ve never passed. Even if I thought I was passing, I’m sure I was not passing. People read that… so I don’t have to work on it! It’s written on my body. Also coming from the South, I never had to question if I was black. Of course, I’m post-black, but I’m also black. I understand that half the people in the world see me and they go, “Oh, he’s black.” Even if I’m post-black… I can hold both of those things together in my head.

ME: Well, in your life, too.

TH: Exactly… I’m sure it’s very vital in my work, but I’m not going into my studio and working on identity, my race and my sexuality and representation of sexuality or race at all. I’m much more working on craft and formal issues, but the minute I walk onstage, and the way I move, it’s political.

ME: When I came to know you as an artist—with ShowPony, Quartet for the End of Time, Small—a lot of your work was in the space of ideas. Not that ideas aren’t craft, but taking big ideas and putting them together or reframing them…that that was a feat in and of itself. You knew what you were doing, but you also didn’t know what you were doing.

TH: No, I learned as I went, for sure.

ME: You were putting out big ideas—just the proposition was an event in and of itself.

TH: Yeah. But I think that’s the nature of all art—if I know what I’m doing, I’m not going to commit nor be interested. An artistic project, is three or four years of my life, just the making of it, not to mention the touring of it. It’s got to be something that I can’t grasp fully. Something to keep looking at, keep knowing, keep going deeper and deeper into because the point at which you can’t go deeper into it anymore—it’s dead. I have gotten better at understanding the trajectory into this unknown.

I’ve been lucky in the last four, five years, because I’ve had dancers who could really help develop the work with me and embody a certain type of dance style somehow separate from voguing, that’s come out of this runway stuff and synthesize that from a place inside themselves. So it’s also been about collaborating with Thibault Lac and Ondrej Vidlar, especially… Rob Fordeyn, and Stephen Thompson too; I think Perle Palombe is very interesting because Perle is an actress—she’s the one whose history trajectory is probably the most like me. She comes from theater not dance. And I love the way Perle dances, like, “How’d she do that?”

ME: I would love to hear you talk about your sound—for me they are soundtracks.

TH: Yeah yeah, they are soundtracks.

ME: The affect and power of your soundtracks manipulate me a lot. They’re a texture with everything else that’s going on.

TH: [Laughs] I don’t know…

ME: You’re also very good at seducing the public—even when people resist your work in the first ten minutes by minute 50, you’ve seduced the public. It’s the performativity and the dramaturgy, but the soundtrack does a lot of that work. Part of it is also the way you configure the relationship to the audience, and the soundtrack is integral to that. How do you compile them? Is it form or personal? Are you specific with the references of which songs happen when and why? Or is it just what you “feel like”…?

TH: Yeah, no, it’s choreographed; the songs are specific to the point in the show. I collect music all the time; I’m addicted to music. The problem is that I can no longer listen to music for pleasure. It’s like I’m infected with a disease. I hear it and immediately start working: “Is it a part of my work, could it be?” So I’m always collecting, always listening, always making playlists… It’s very mysterious to me. With Made To Measure, I was like, “Oh my god, you’re not going to make a soundtrack with Duffy.” Duffy throughout—Duffy this and Duffy that, and people loved it, and I was like, “It’s impossible.” [laughs] It’s just a weird thing that I have, that I love doing, that I have a weird consciousness about. I do playlists on my computer and then eventually I work on GarageBand. All sound designers and sound technicians try to get me to stop doing it on GarageBand and iTunes. I always resist because people don’t realize it, but you feel my hand in it—like you know you could do that, too. I think that’s something—it’s not super complicated…of course, it’s super aestheticized and refined. “This is just made by one person on GarageBand; I could do that”—this feeling creates an intimacy with it. I want people to feel my hand in it. That’s something that’s very old-fashioned about the work—and by “hand,” I mean that literally and metaphorically.

ME: Do you want to speak a bit about relationship to audience?

TH: You can see Caen Amour multiple times because you move back and forth—you never see the whole piece because there are endless numbers of perspectives. This relationship to art started in Show Pony, when I start to investigate the idea of community in theater, this idea of togetherness and live-ness. This idea that Martha Graham had of theater as a verb before it was a noun, and how to enact that. It gets activated in different ways; Antigone Sr. certainly has it; Made To Measure has it, Small has it—I mean, there are certain strategies, like the written guides which facilitate it, let’s say, more and more. There has always been reading in the work. In Caen Amour I pass out the papers and everyone’s reading a paper. It’s a beautiful moment in the piece. We take the time. We allow them to read for a while. And everyone’s sitting there—I mean, maybe in Avignon it was quite beautiful because we’re outside and we’re in the Cloitre de Celestin, one of the most beautiful theaters in the world. It has two huge trees in the middle of the stage. So it’s a scene. In Frankie, I limited the number of people who could see that show so people are intimate with the sculptural properties of it, and close to the bodies, this thing that’s near you but not too near… The MoMA residency gave me a lot of opportunity to research and try things. It also gave me perspective on the work I want to do in the theater and the work I want to do in galleries and museums.

Now when I’m making a show, I’m not just thinking about the theater proper, but returning to the initial research about how do we enact this togetherness. This is what makes my work register for most people. We can talk about all of the different elements, but the elements come together to make this event-ness. When it works, you’re brought into the moment and into the theater, as a verb. I did the The Adventure with Mårten Spångberg, in 2006, and he introduced me to some ideas, and event-ness was part of it. That was a huge part of what I was working on in Showpony, not just making a show, but how do I make an event—what’s the difference between an event and a show. I was just now thinking about the entrance to Argentina—it’s a great entrance. I mean, coming with that dress through the audience is like, it’s like…

ME: It’s a good exit, too.

TH: Yeah, and it’s a great exit—but that entrance is something. It’s choreography lifted to the place of, “This is an event.” And that’s what I think I do.

It has everything to do with instincts. That’s what’s wonderful about performing a lot, a lot, a lot a lot a lot—you get to refine your instincts of dealing with such different audiences, and how they relate to the pieces in the moment. You have to change; you cannot be the same; it’s not videotape—that’s what is really valuable working with the people that I work with. Making the work is like 30%, and then starting to tour the work just changes so much because you have to adapt it. And then you start changing countries and countries and countries, and that’s the exciting part when you can ride that, but it takes a lot of practice. A lot of practice. There were times when it was completely nerve-racking crazy—you’re so worried about so many other things and there is a lot of pressure, and you’re not able to be there with that audience, in that moment…but the more and more you do it, and the more and more you let go of some of those other things that are distracting you, the more exciting it becomes. And that’s why we do it.

ME: Do you want to talk more about touring…?

TH: Well, what do you mean, “about touring?”

ME: Well, you’ve touched on it a bit—like you said yes to everything [laughing] because you were in a panic mode— so you have a show, like, every other day…

TH: I don’t say yes to everything anymore. I have enough.

ME: You’ve done so much of it.

TH: Well, I have a lot of pieces, and I get invited, so—it’s how I make a living, it’s how I pay the rent.

ME: Do you believe in touring, artistically—do you think it is a model that is great for the performing arts?

TH: That’s a good question.

ME: In terms of the circulation of ideas, which is also a free market thing—it’s a political question as much as it is the role of theater in localities, in communities—how do you connect global late capitalism with international avant-garde-ism, art market fair-ism, festival culture with social-political critique, proposing the new, and questioning what is the role of theater? I’m so conflicted about these things in my brain. I don’t have an answer… you have a lot of experience with it, so you probably have some feelings.

TH: One thing you bring up that’s very important to say from the beginning is that touring is not the only model for all work and for all artists. It’s one way to disseminate work, to distribute work, and I think for myself—at a certain point I decided that I wanted to make my living from performing. I wanted to pay my rent and feed myself—the thing I want to do for a job was perform. And that’s a very different way of thinking about being in the world. I love performing; I love doing it; I love being a performer. I’m not sure that I’m the kind of choreographer who will choreograph if they’re not performing. I like making my living that way, and I’ve made my living other ways, so I know I like it best. I complain about it, but at the end of the day I like it. It’s an okay living.

The interest in the work could stop at any minute, anything could happen—but now I can pace myself a bit more. There’s also some ego to being invited but it’s also how I make a living, which also relates to other people’s income, who work with the company, not just my own. That’s a certain pressure. Alongside that, you can start to balance that with the kind of performances you want to have, and how you want to enrich the world and yourself on a very specific level—“I want to do these performances,” and why. “I want to go to this place,” and why. “I want to go to this place again,” and why.

ME: Let’s talk about the Journal!

TH: I’m very happy that I don’t do it anymore. The Journal is part of a long trajectory for me. Maybe it was the last visible role I had in the New York community—but even that was kind of enlarged because the Journal’s international. One of the things dance suffers from is that we don’t have enough printed literature or digital literature. I think the Journal has an important role, and I think Movement Research is an important organization. People want to know more about what they see. I’m even using those strategies within my work itself. The Journal is an important thing, because in the U.S., it’s the most contemporary kind of thing we have. Yet it’s still done on such a slim budget! I’m talking about really dealing with the contemporary, experimental scene; there are other magazines that are broader. The issue of how do we, with the kind of resources we have for disseminating ideas and information about dance, besides the work, put resources into publications and discourse about what we do.? It’s something I really promote and try to do as much as possible around my work, so I feel very lucky that the Journal’s doing this issue. I’m working on another publication now.

The PJ is part of who I am as an artist, and I think that it’s by and far and large a huge part of my development and the way I think. But I think that, at a certain point, it’s not sustainable alongside trying to mobilize a performing career, and that’s why I stopped, essentially. And of course, it needs to be passed to other people so it can have new breath.

ME: It’s wonderful, and it gives you a lot, but it beats you to the ground… [Laughing]

TH: It does. Do you enjoy it?

ME: Yes! I mean, yes, and no.

TH: But I think what’s interesting about the Journal also—it also gives you a platform in the community. You have an opportunity to advocate for the type of work and the type of artists you believe have integrity—of course there is a responsibility to represent the community diversely and all these things—but I think there’s also a responsibility to who you are as an editor and to push forward the kind of work you want to see in the world and think is important. I really tried to do that as much as I could as an editor. There’s so little visibility in experimental dance, so the PJ is real estate. People recognize that, that the person who has that editorship has some power. So it’s a matter of how do you use it, and how do you not abuse it; how do you be responsible to it… and of course, it’s personal and subjective, and you have to own that; and there are things that you don’t do, and you have to own that as well. In that way, it’s an interesting platform, like curating or anything.

ME: I think the PJ precedes what institutions do…

TH: What do you mean?

ME: The canon of the artists and ideas that are in the Journal… it’s grassroots. Maybe the institution has the resources to make it into a tree, but what’s in the PJ is the proto-canon. Does that make sense?

TH: Yeah yeah yeah.

ME: It’s like, what will be historicized. Or what should have been.