Last Meadow
This is the second part of an interview with choreographer Miguel Gutierrez. Part 1 can be found here.
On working with New York City youngsters:
I do this thing in New York where I volunteer for Theatre Development Fund. They have a program called Open Doors, it was a program started by Wendy Wasserstein who had this belief that New York City public school kids should have the ability to go see dance and performance in New York for free. So each year it’s a different group of kids, this year it was such an amazing group of kids, and we take them to 6 different performances, mostly dance, I’m like a mentor in dance, so we focus on dance. And it’s like an art education thing, so you take them to see it and then you talk to them about the performance afterwards.
And it was really interesting, this year the kids, just because of who the kids were and because of the performances we went to, we were able to get into some pretty heady, sophisticated conversation about what is performance and what is dance and what is art and what is expectation and what is entertainment. Yeah. That was super-exciting to me. That work is totally life-fulfilling, you know it totally makes me happy to be alive kind of stuff. It’s just 8 or 9 kids, or 10 maybe? You get to know them a little bit and they have to write journal entries about the performance and the discussion. They got pretty saucy in some of those, which I love. I love when people are candid. So, that’s actually one of the main reasons I stay in New York, is that program. Even though it’s not like I do it all the time, but when I think about moving, I think, no, cause then I wouldn’t be able to do that thing that I love doing.
On possibilities of technology in performance:
Jesse Hewit who’s the California rep [for Freedom of Information] gave me this kind of incredible book to read, which I’m not going to remember the title of right now [Shoot an Iraqi], but it was by Wafaa Bilal who’s an Iraqi born artist who had done a piece two years ago in a gallery in Chicago. I can’t remember the name of it either, but he, very different, he set up an interactive gaming interface where you could shoot paintballs at him in the gallery, “shoot an Iraqi” basically, this kind of idea. And he did it for a month, he lived in the gallery for a month and he was always there. And this book is sort of part documentation of that project, part memoir. It’s definitely humbling, ‘well, gosh, 24 hours is a lot’, but this guy did this thing for a month. I mean, it’s so intense and it was fascinating, again, this idea of using technology in this way to sort of have this direct relationship to an art project. I mean, in that case the technology was the art project. It was through people all over the world, he got shot at something like 60,000 times. But then there were fascinating things in that book about how there were people who created defense forces where they would like hack into the program to keep the gun from pointing at him. It just created this online tension and just that idea of this interaction between the gaming community and violence and the idea of the remote body. And so that was really in my brain as we were doing Freedom of Information too. Because it was so much about, this idea about imaginary bodies.
On living consciously in the world:
I feel like that action or that piece, yes, there is the original conception of the action being in relationship to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and I feel like that is still real for me. But there was something in doing it that was just about this idea of consciousness in general. And what it is to be conscious over time, to remain conscious over time, and what it is to consider another body, to hold that presence of another body, to be outside of yourself and to be inside of yourself at the same time. Which I think is such a basic sort of thing when you’re thinking about response to war, it’s like, ‘what does it take to feel what is happening?’ And you know, I don’t know! That project happened and I didn’t come out with a halo on my head or touching the children and healing them on the streets. I don’t think it was about that. I think it was about being like, ok, it’s on me to live consciously in the world. And I do feel like that project has had an impact as a result.
On false boundaries:
And something that has come up for me ever since is this very basic idea of – my body has more energy than I think it does. We all have more energy than we realize that we do. And as a result, we have more compassion than we think we do, we have more patience than we think we do, we have more generosity, we have more love. It’s like every moment that I encounter a boundary in myself now, I can’t help but think, maybe there’s a space beyond that boundary. You know, which is not to promote like co-dependent behavior or like kill yourself working. No, it has nothing to do with that. Like I said, compassion could be about self-care, or self-care can be about compassion, so I think it’s just affected that perception in me. Definitely in performance I’ll think, ‘oh my god, I can’t do this’, but then I think, ‘no, you probably can actually.’ So that’s interesting.
On claiming dance ancestors:
I think I’ve chosen my history. I feel like I’ve done some work to find out who my antecedents are. And to understand what the lineage is that I’m inside of. It’s funny, you know, god bless them, but I look at that wall of photographs in the corridor [Texas Woman’s U., department of dance], and it may be true that they are, but I honestly look at that and I’m like, these are not my ancestors. You know, I look at that and I think, like some of them are, but a large number of them I don’t consider in that way. And instead, I think of someone like Ishmael Houston-Jones. I think about the obvious Judson people. But then I also think about other performance forms and other artists. Then I also think about Marina Abramovic or Günter Brus. Like I think about, and that was a very conscious choice I made a few years ago to sort of claim that as dance history for myself. You know, I think about Akira Kurosawa, I think, ok, that person is a choreographer. Or Terence Malick.
Why is that so rare?! I don’t know. I think it has to do with education. I don’t mean to be presumptuous, I don’t know what education is everywhere. I can certainly think about my own dance education that I got in college, which was like, these are the dance people. It wasn’t about even locating those dance people in a relation to an art historical context. I think it’s just the nature of the way I think about stuff. And the legacies that interest me and the artists that interest me and not placing a box around it. I guess because I don’t reduce the experience of dance to vocabulary and movement. And I think that’s a lot of why it happens, cause people think, oh, that person and they moved that way. Which, yes, enormous enormous enormous enormous component of the experience. But I guess I think about like, well, what was the artist’s work about? Like what was the project of this artist’s work? So if that’s how I’m defining the people who inspire me, or who are my ancestors, then it doesn’t matter if they’re in dance or not.
On being inspired by a variety of people:
I feel like these experiences of inspiration, I was talking about this with my roommate in New York, I’m ready to be taught by anybody who’s interesting to me. I mean, there’s an artist, a young woman at Hollins University, whose work I think is really frickin’ smart. She’s like a frickin’ sophomore, and I’ve seen a bunch of her work. And yeah she’s young and her work is maybe young, but I look at her and I think like, OK!, you’re a peer artist, or I’m learning from you. Like, who cares if she’s 18 years younger than I am. Like that has nothing to do with, I’m not looking that way. So it’s like I think we still struggle with this modernist model of like mama and daddy. Like Martha and Merce. And also that we’re always looking upwards to this thing and I’m guilty of it too. And a lot of those artists, like Merce Cunningham, one of my all-time favorite artists in the whole frickin’ world, so it’s like I have it too. And I can enjoy my own hero worship and it’s useful to me.
We all pick our heroes, we all pick our histories, and I think it’s….I was very impacted by all the identity politics of the 80s and the early 90s, all this attacking of the canon. All of this thing of like why are we supposed to learn this particular trajectory? And it’s ironic because now I actually want to know that trajectory, like now I’m ready to read Plato, and what was Plato saying, you know? I don’t feel threatened by that now in a way I might have when I was 18. But I do appreciate that all the work of that time was just about saying, genius is all around you. It’s like all around you all the time. It comes in lots of different shapes and sizes. I really feel that that’s true. I really, I’m sort of astounded by all different kinds of artists all the time.
