Last month, New York choreographer/performer Miguel Gutierrez was kind enough to sit down with me for a bit and share his thoughts on a wide variety of fun topics. The printed word doesn’t really do justice to Miguel’s language, which is full of meanderings and asides and inflections. Miguel is also just a joy to be around; you wish he was in your family so you could have him livening up your table at Thanksgiving. He’s so articulate and thoughtful that I’m breaking the interview in two parts because there was so much interesting material to work with.
Was able to sit in on an open rehearsal for Last Meadow as well as a showing. Since the work is still in progress, I won’t do a full review, but I will say that at the end, I felt like crying, but wasn’t sure why. And at one point, the connection with the performers was so intense that I had to look away. And that was during a rehearsal. I really hope I’m lucky enough to see it again. Premieres in Portland in the fall at the TBA festival and then comes to DTW in New York.
On Last Meadow, his current work-in-progress, with Gutierrez, Michelle Boule, Tarek Halaby. Lighting design Lenore Doxsee. Sound design Neal Medlyn.
The material for the piece all comes from the three James Dean films and we’re sort of just ripping off whole chunks of those movies, but not in any way, shape, or form because I’m interested in recreating the movies or in reconstructing them, or even deconstructing them. I’m interested in taking these external influences and sort of allowing myself to be inspired by the figure of James Dean to create this exploration into the choreographic. And the choreographic sensibility that applies not only to space and the body and action in relationship to the space, but also to sound and also to language and how these things kind of interact with each other, and sort of smear over each other and smear on top of one another, in the hopes of confusing people.
On the virtues of misinterpretation:
I can say a little bit about what led me to this interest. Before we started working [on Last Meadow] I was interested in this idea of misinterpretation. I was in a lot of situations, in other countries and different contexts, where I realized that I didn’t understand what was happening, and then I sort of realized that I feel like that a lot in my life, that I generally feel very outside of things and I kind of observe things and I’m like ‘what’s actually going on there?’ And then I thought about how dance is essentially this misinterpreted or noncommunicable language, or how people treat it as such. They treat it as this language that needs to be decoded, and then the general public feels dumb because they can’t decode this thing that they feel like is somehow privy to only a few people.
There’s not this thing that this represents something else, and I feel like dance’s weakness is often seen as that, and I’m intrigued by approaching that as its strength at this moment. And literally there’s this thing that doesn’t make sense, that doesn’t work, it’s not rational, it’s not experienced rationally, it can’t be reduced to a rational experience. And that maybe it shouldn’t be, you know? And that maybe it’s about our ability to expand our perceptual faculties into this other realm, (obviously I feel like I’m not the first person doing that by any stretch of the imagination), but for me it’s the first time that I’m really understanding, that that specificity of that particular project has made itself known to me, and it’s strange to … I feel like the last few years I’ve always been keeping dance at an arm’s length, of sorts, and being like, “no I’m making performance, I’m making pieces, I’m making these things, they involve these other kinds of elements, and yada yada yada, I don’t just make dance”, and then to instead to like re-embrace this idea of dance and expanding its definition and expanding my own perception of it, so those are the things about this piece.
On being a maximalist:
I think I’m a pastiche kind of artist. I kind of made these different things, I sort of assemble them. I’m not like a mono-conceptualist; I’m not someone who starts with this one thing and then it’s like I’m proving the theory of my idea through the piece, and then by the end I’ve like proven it in this ascetic, stringent thing. I think I’m this maximalist, kind of like, it’s coming from here, it’s coming from there, kind of rolling in each other. And that’s been fascinating too because the piece is dovetailing a little bit with a relatively recent interest I have in neurology and cognition, and modes of cognition.
On the central interest:
There’s such a pressure in dance-making, or the art world, to whittle down to the one thing that you do, like ‘I am the artist that makes everybody spiral all the time’. And I think I’ve had this thing with myself where I’m like, ‘oh, I don’t know what my one thing is, what’s my one thing?’ Something that you can brand yourself with and I definitely think there’s something to be said for becoming specific and mature as an artist and realizing like ‘ok, the center of your interest is this’, and I do believe that I have that. I think the center of my interest is existence and our experience of how we experience the turbulence and the complexity of being alive. And I think inside of that a huge sort of operation in my work is desire. How we experience that through desire, the desire to feel things, the desire to be seen , the desire to activate the space, the desire to be multiple perceptions of yourself. I think that that’s in there. I don’t make things where everybody’s in red all the time. You know what I mean?
On funding, the diy model, and self-starvation in dance:
It’s not for funders to tell an artist how to make their work. Which is an inherent problem of the funding model as it matches an artist’s biorhythm. At this point, I’ve sort of matched my artistic biorhythm to meet the timelines of these external structures. You know, it kind of works, it kind of doesn’t work, sometimes it works. I kind of make it work because there’s not a lot of other choices. But I think for other artists it’s challenging.
And then secondly, I was sort of like, ‘what frickin dance person is not diy and hasn’t been for the last x number of years?’ I’m at a place where I don’t want to do it all myself. Yeah, I can write the grant, I can do the e-mails, I can find the costumes… I don’t want to! Does there ever get to be a moment where someone else gets to take this over? I mean, I have an administrator, I’ve had collaborators, so it doesn’t apply to me so much, but it struck me as a very young response. Of course, when I was in my early 20s, I was like, ‘yeah, do it yourself, like new economies, this kind of thing’, and it was a strange moment of me being like, ‘wow, I’m in my late 30s, like I want something different now’. I work with people who have children, I can’t ask them to travel in a van and sleep on a floor and do the show. Like, they need to sleep in a real bed, they need a crib, they need a thing, they need a babysitter, there are other kinds of realities that emerge. So I was thinking about that and how dance, I feel like dance is so constantly, is like self-starvation. We’re so incapable of asking for what we need, we’re so incapable of learning what we need, we’re so incapable of being clear, like, ‘yeah, I deserve to get paid $20 an hour’, at least. And stand behind that without feeling weird about it. You know, there’s this extreme volunteerism in the community, and I think that’s beautiful that there’s this incredible generosity and part of the reason I stay in the dance community is because I love that generosity.
But I don’t it like when it genericizes the value of everything. That’s a really dangerous comment to make, but I do feel like sometimes it like if everything is equal value, then you don’t know how to treat something differently. And I don’t think money is the defining value or factor but I do think it’s important for an artist to feel like you can say, ‘well, I’m worth this, or my time is worth this.’
On “success” in the dance field:
And I think it creates lots of really problematic relationships with that notion of success. I mean, I think I’m viewed as a “successful artist”, I’m not incorporated, I can’t pay my employees health insurance, I don’t have health insurance, I haven’t had health insurance my entire adult life, I don’t have a savings account. When we have gigs, it’s great that we have gigs, but we don’t have like three gigs in a row where we have a tour. We have like a thing that happens, then 6 months passes, then we do another thing. And I feel like I’m doing well, but if I think about other places in the world, other artists I know doing differently in their work. These things are relative. I don’t mean to demean the value of what’s happening in my work, but economically, you know, we’re talking just about money, it’s not like I’m making my money from my work. And it’s never been that way. My economic reality has always been patchwork income. Always, always. I’ve always had money come from three different places. Like a job that I did there, the person I danced for there, a piece I’m making here. It’s never been like, oh, I go and make the one piece and the money comes rolling in.
On artists organizing politically:
Something that came up in the panel [The New Economy Smackdown] also was the way in which artists don’t organize themselves politically here in this country. That’s something that I’m super-conscious of, I mean, I travel to France all the time for work that I do there. And France is like they’ll strike at the drop of a hat, but it’s like, they shut the country down! A few years ago the technicians in the theatres had a strike and that shut down all the summer festivals. It shut it down. There’s issues and there’s problems with unions and with the union model but I think it’s also interesting the idea that there’s a collective of people who feel like they’re like, ‘no.’ when’s the last time that you knew a bunch of dancers who went to a community board meeting and were like, ‘no.’ It doesn’t happen. So that was discussed as well which I thought was good to talk about.
Teaching as an act of generosity:
Teaching gives me a very specific thrill, because I think teaching is essentially an act of generosity, at its best. And so, there’s something so powerful about creating this space in yourself and having that space in your life where you just give. You’re like, ‘I’m going to pay this much attention to you, or I’m going to give to you this much of my information.’ I’m going to choose to see you as possible and capable. So I think teaching does that. And in a situation like here [at Texas Woman’s University] where the students are willing to receive that, then it becomes all the more thrilling.
Miguel and cute Texas baby Gus Gamblin
