Archives for June 2011

We’re at the half-point in the year and it’s time to remind ourselves of the good job we do and then find time to indulge in a little extra special comfort. For me, that could mean a long walk, the beach, a favorite tune, a nap, window-shopping, holding hands with my husband, a movie, or calling my sister to chat and laugh. These are some of my favorite re-charging activities. They provide the inspiration and insight to tackle my to-do list. Finding ways to re-imagine and refresh our selves is ageless and ongoing. I bet you have a long lovely list of comforting things.

Standing out for me this month is the theme of visibility. It permeates every sector of society, yet the notion of being seen is particularly pertinent to those in the performing arts. Is success just about showing up? Does being present for each moment, no matter the outcome, ensure that we are fully participating in the directions our life is heading? To respond to these questions, it is helpful to stay away from judgment of how we are seen and what that audience–of one or 1,000–might be thinking. This strategy is to continue to show up, do the work, make projects, find funding and resources, perform, keep the attention on dance, thriving, while taking time to reflect and seek fun.

It used to be that June and the ensuing summer months were a time to take off from rehearsals and performances. Yet, in our anything-can-happen-at-anytime world, we are experiencing the production of shows throughout the year, and the variety of times and locations are expanding.

As previewed in the May issue of In Dance, the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival opens its 33rd season and highlights for a solid month an outstanding line up of dance. We are proud to partner with World Arts West, the presenters of the Festival, for the monthly Rotunda Dance Series. On June 3rd, the Festival kicks-off with a special opening ceremony and performance honoring the Rumsen Ohlone Tribe, featuring tribal song and dance, and the presentation of the Festival’s annual Malonga Casquelourd Lifetime Achievement Award to Tribal Chief Tony Cerda. Mary Ellen Hunt’s article provides insight into the ongoing struggle of the Ohlone and the emotional and financial realities that go into changing the federal government’s designation that they are a “terminated” tribe.

Mary Carbonara asks a totally different set of questions as she choreographically explores the controversial topic of killing–in the context of war. Based on her previous rigorous and highly physical work, these performances are not to be missed and premiere at Kunst-Stoff’s new space. Other standouts to consider attending this month are: Joe Goode’s new piece The Rambler at YBCA, Janice Garrett/Charlie Moulton’s work at ODC Theater, Sara Shelton Mann/David Szlasa’s ZEROPOINT, Nina Haft, and Dance Elixir among others with the SF International Arts Festival. Many more outstanding events can be found in this month’s print and online calendar.

A special treat will take place in the East Bay as Grown Women Dance Collective presents their annual Juneteenth Celebration, the oldest national celebration commemorating African American liberation from slavery. Tonya Amos describes the program as “honoring African American musical artists that have died since the year 2000 such as James Brown, Ray Charles, Michael Jackson, and Nina Simone.” With music like that, you will rock your seat.

Take time to acknowledge your specialness; and take time to comfort yourself.

— Wayne Hazzard, Executive Director

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This article appeared in the June 2011 issue of In Dance.

Recently returned from Mexicali, Mexico and currently preparing for her Home Season at the ODC Theater in June, Kim Epifano relishes traveling with the task of making art in another culture. “Traveling internationally is a loop for me because I come back to the home base, but what I’ve learned after all these years is that everywhere becomes a part of my home. The journey of home becomes a circle or loop, and sometimes it feels like it’s a ricochet, sometimes a mandala, sometimes it’s grounding and other times stirring.”

The border town of Mexicali, Mexico is one particular loop for Epifano. After an initial encounter during a southwestern tour with Contraband, she has returned four times in the last 15 years (1997, 1999, 2000, and 2011). While performing at a festival held at the Universidad de Baja California, Epifano built relationships with some of the local dancers, who later visited San Francisco for workshops. This exchange developed into an opportunity for Epifano to make two different dances in Mexicali with Paralleos Trenty dos, a five-woman company.

Epifano acknowledges the harshness for the community living on the border and recalls how crossing is nerve-wracking, especially going into the states. “With people so afraid to go to Mexico, working there is political in a lot of ways, and the more we penetrate that, the more it shows that Mexicali is a vibrant place…I made my home in a trailer one block from the border, where the high chain link electric fence always had a daunting feel. Sometimes I would cross the border by foot between Mexicali and Calexico to make phone calls. That was before I had Skype. It was always terrifying to go over the border; the thought of not being able to get out or back in always crossed my mind. I recorded the clinking, just sitting at the revolving gate. We used it in the sound score for the piece we made called Calida Fornax (which means “warm oven” in Latin) the phrase from which California got its name,” wrote Epifano, documenting the 1997 visit. “I was drawn back, Calida Fornax was so powerful and we matched each other so well. It was a great exchange between two countries. That relationship kept building and Hildelna Jauarez, one of women I worked with on Calida Fornax and Deseos Desnudos, is one of the main professors at the University de Baja California.”

For the most recent visit, Epifano spent seven days in Mexicali, during which she taught master classes and composition at the university and created a site-specific work with the students. “I love that it’s a border town. The culture is quite mixed–almost like no place or no time zone, in a good way,” said Epifano. “Its not only encountering a community on a border town, it’s a loop of knowing people for such a long journey and the artwork that I do that keeps bringing me back to them. Therefore, it’s a circuit of artistic and professional relationships that keeps going around.”

In addition to teaching at the university, Epifano engaged a group of dancers in a rapid speed process to make a dance music video in a bar they used to frequent, called Cantina El Norteno. At 60 years old, Cantina El Norteno is one of the oldest bars in town. “Every time we went to the bar we’d be dancing wildly and singing songs, with peanuts and beers and clamatos…The bar is a museum in its own right. All the photos on the wall are a very unusual collection of old Mexico photos with movie stars and wars and hunting themes. The place is covered in old photos, so it’s historic in there,” recalled Epifano. Capturing the site-specific dance on film allows for both the dancers in Mexicali to show the work and for Epifano to feature it during her home season at the ODC Theater.

“Luckily I know many dancers in Mexicali and they are very proud of the work we had made in the past together. So they trust me as a director, choreographer; with visioning an idea and making it a reality with them. With no money we got together a group of 7 dancers and 3 musicians. We had 3 hours of studio time and 4 hours at the bar Norteno. I felt indulged by these wonderful artists whose warmth, passion, and commitment to this moment together empowered all of us,” wrote Epifano. One of the dancers Epifano previously worked with has a band, Pura Pulpa, which provided the music, a mix of the traditional tunes from Mexico and original compositions with the sounds of the guitar, violin and tambourine.

In the studio, Epifano made quick assignments and tasks, creating sections to set in the long narrow area of the bar. On site, they placed the sections and performed the dance as a local videographer shot the work. “People would walk into the bar and just sit in the booths or try and sell something or want to play music and become a part of what was happening. The bartender just let us take over, all the while the performers were drinking beer as they performed,” Epifano recalled.

Looking to her performances at the ODC Theater this June, Epifano hopes to “Gather the pieces and places, the interactions of artists nationally and internationally, demonstrating the many different important loops and relationships that have occurred for me as an artist living in this busy hustling world, and how what really matters are those connections that occur when the art gets made.” Because of her wide web (which traces back to Contraband and Dance Brigade), much of Epifano’s work has been created and performed outside of San Francisco. The upcoming home season brings the international threads back to this community, which Epifano has called home for more than 30 years.

In addition to the dance film from Mexicali, titled Solo Lo Que Fue, the program of Epiphany Productions Sonic Dance Theater features Heelomali, a multi-media work developed with composer and digeridoo master Stephen Kent (of KPFA’s World Music Hour), and Burmese harp player Su Wai, as well as Alonesome/Twosome, a duet inspired by an air mail drawing sent to Epifano by renowned artist Remy Charlip and featuring live music by Epifano and Kent. Epifano’s photography from around the world will also be on display in the ODC Theater lobby.

Musing about her travels to places like Ethiopia, Turkey, China, India, Tunisia and Vietnam, Epifano wondered how to conduct cultural exchanges from her San Francisco home base and bring the experience of travel home. In this reversal, she engaged the Bay Area group, Refugee Transitions, forming a mentoring program for young teens arriving in the United States. For example, the Burmese harp player Su Wai performing in Heelomali, was introduced to Epifano through Refugee Transitions. Epifano is also working with two girls from Nepal and six Liberian teens. Stephen Kent mentors the Boys’ Band of Burma also from this organization. Epifano begins these interactions by inquiring what the youth already know–what dances, what songs–and lets the exchange unfold from there. Whether near or far, Epifano is a global citizen, embracing the cultures of the world for art making, connection and change.

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Epiphany Productions Sonic Dance Theater’s 2011 home season is June 17-19 at the ODC Theater. For tickets, visit odctheater.org or call the box office at 415-863-9834.

This article appeared in the June 2011 issue of In Dance.

If you walk into the cool quiet of Mission San Francisco de Asis, better known these days as Mission Dolores, there’s a curious, multi-tiered hut constructed out of reeds in the cemetery. That, along with a small columnar monument, are among the few hints that you can find in San Francisco of the Ohlone people who populated the Bay Area long before the Spanish settled here.

Now scattered in the mainly southern parts of California, the Ohlone–you may be surprised to learn–are not extinct as many people assume–indeed the U.S. federal government designates them “terminated.” Nine Ohlone tribes, hailing from San Jose to Pomona have applied for tribal recognition, which is granted by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. To date, none of them have received recognition, although one, the Muwekma Ohlone of San Jose, was once recognized, but then later declared extinct in 1931.

When you talk about his family’s background with Tony Cerda–the chairman of the Costanoan Rumsen Carmel tribe, who will be honored with this year’s Malonga Casquelourde Lifetime Achievement Award on June 3 at San Francisco’s City Hall as part of their appearances at the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival–he can rattle off a detailed history of each of his forebears, starting with ancestors baptized in the Mission in 1811. He’ll tell you who they were, what they did for a living and where their lives took them, and you slowly come to realize that the recitation is partly a savoring of family threads that he can trace back two hundred years, but it’s also partly a testament constructed out of necessity. One of the criteria for attaining tribal recognition is that groups must prove a continuous lineage as a community stretching back through historical times.

A Culture Disrupted
Cerda’s ancestors were among the many thousands of Ohlone at Mission Dolores whose culture was abruptly fractured by the arrival of Spanish missionaries in California. A hunter-gatherer society with a population that many estimate in the tens of thousands, the Ohlone lifestyle dramatically shifted to an agricultural base as more and more of the members of the tribe were converted to Christianity. By the early part of the 19th century, there were hundreds of Ohlone living inside the mission walls they themselves had helped to construct.

Life in the mission, as history records, was not kind to the Ohlone. Strict rules kept the men working in the fields and confined young unmarried women to monjerias, and if a convert decided that they wanted to leave, they would often be treated as runaways–chased down and returned to the mission where they faced punishment. As with many other native populations, the Ohlone were exposed to diseases previously unknown to them, and in the close living quarters of the mission, epidemics of such diseases as the measles would run rampant, decimating the population.

It was during such an epidemic that Cerda recounts one of his ancestors leaving for Monterey. It was the start of a pattern of migration that would lead members of Cerda’s family from Carmel to Pasadena, searching for work and for a place to live where, as Cerda delicately puts it, the political climate would be better.

Though identification with native heritage is now more often than not a point of pride, it was, in the not too distant past, often ill-advised, even dangerous to claim Ohlone lineage. From the time of the missions through the Gold Rush, Ohlone were targets for violence and retribution.

Fighting for recognition
Neil MacLean, the administrator of the Ohlone Profiles website, notes that the obstacles to achieving federal recognition are so vast that few tribes can mount a petition successfully.

“It takes an enormous amount of money to gather the documentation that’s required,” he explains, “and there are just no resources for that. So do you pay to mount a legal assault, or do you try to focus on preserving your culture?” Cerda is also philosophical about the idea of gaining tribal recognition.

“Not having federal recognition doesn’t mean they don’t know we’re here,” he says. “It’s an agreement made between one government and another.”

He cites Rosemary Cambra’s struggle for recognition as a kind of cautionary tale for tribes attempting to file a petition with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Cambra led a decades long effort to gain recognition for the Muwekma Ohlone tribe in San Jose, the tribe which was acknowledged by the U.S. until 1927. Stripped of their status by a bureaucratic loophole that declared the tribe “landless” and therefore ineligible for recognition with the BIA the Muwekma tribe has spent years attempting to get reaffirmation of their recognition. After filing petitions to be reinstated that were delayed throughout the 1990s, the tribe brought a lawsuit against the BIA, requiring a decision about their status. In 2002, the decision was finally returned, and although it was agreed that they had proven that members were descended from a historically recognized tribe and that the previous tribal recognition was not terminated legally, their status as federally acknowledged would not be confirmed. “Ask her how much she’s spent,” says Cerda, “Millions? Only to be turned down! It takes a lot of money, and people who would help us with that money would only be interested if we were building casinos. But we’re not interested in casinos, we’re only interested in the health and education of our members.”

Even without formal recognition of the tribe, Cerda notes that over 500 members of the Costanoan Rumsen are certified individually as Indians and that ironically, they have a tribal operations number with the BIA.

“Doesn’t that tell you that we’re recognized in a form?” he says. “But our right of indigenous occupancy was never honored. And they still dishonor it.”

But for now he concentrates on preserving the culture and educating the public about their history. Cerda explains that his tribe continues many of the Ohlone traditions, ceremonies, sweat lodges, even language.

“Language is what the Spaniards first took away from us,” he says a little defiantly, “Slowly we’re bringing it back.”

Healing at the Big Time
In a celebratory, yet also poignant moment of this year’s San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival, on Saturday June 18, Cerda’s Costanoan Rumsen tribe will host a California Big Time Indian Gathering in the Yerba Buena Gardens. Tribes from all over the state will meet for a day honoring the Ohlone that will include healing ceremonies as well as performances from the Elem Indian Colony Tribe, the Pit River Maidu Tribe, the Winnemum Wintu Tribe, the Shingle Springs Miwok Tribe, the Stewarts Point Kashaya Band of Pomo, and the Manchester Pomo Tribe–all open to the public for free. In addition, a Native Contemporary Arts Festival will feature arts and crafts.

“It helps us to let people know that we’re still here,” Cerda says of the festival.

Right now it’s about having a cultural survival strategy,” says MacLean, “We are looking for an ongoing cultural presence in San Francisco.”

What shape that might take is debatable. Cerda and the Costanoan Rumsen have made a concerted effort to keep the tribe in the public eye and they feel that a strong presence in San Francisco is important for historical reasons, but also for spiritual connection that they have to the land. In the past ten years, Cerda has made the journey from Southern California with members of the tribe to conduct healing ceremonies on Crissy Field–where ancient shell mounds mark the sites where the Ohlone buried their dead–and at Mission Dolores. “There’s over 6,000 of our people buried there under the blacktop of the parking lot of Mission Dolores,” says Cerda matter-of-factly, “So that’s why we did our ceremony there.”

An Ongoing Ohlone Presence
Although the Ohlone have conducted events in the Bay Area frequently, MacLean suggests that establishing something that’s a more solid brick-and-mortar would be the next step.

“One need of the community is a genealogical research library,” he observes, noting that it was a great opportunity for Cerda when Mission Dolores granted him access to their archives and he discovered the record of the baptism of one of his ancestors. “It would help members clarify so many things.”

A museum or cultural center, he says, where records and artifacts could be gathered and which could house a performing space would be an enormous boon to the Ohlone.

“If we think about a cultural revival and recovery,” MacLean goes on, “dance and music forms are one of the primary modalities as a way of preserving culture.”

During the Ethnic Dance Festival’s last weekend the Costanoan Rumsen group will also perform onstage at the Novellus Theater in Yerba Buena. Bringing the tribal members back to San Francisco, says Cerda, is expensive, but “as long as we can afford to come, we’re going to come, because that’s what it takes,” he says. “We’re bear people, bear medicine people, and it’s important to us to do these ceremonies to heal the land and heal the spirits of the land. That’s our culture and heritage and our religion.”

In fact, in the Yerba Buena Gardens Big Time, in addition to sweat lodges and talking circle ceremonies, the tribe will be performing healing ceremonies, which he says are very much open to the public to see and take part in.

“It’s important that we do these things, ” Cerda declares. “People in the city need healing too, not just people in the woods and in the mountains.”

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This article appeared in the June 2011 issue of In Dance.

What can dance do? I’ve always thought it can do everything and anything. As I’ve embarked on making a new work, What Does It Feel Like to Kill Someone? I’ve questioned that assumption a few times, wondering if I’ve chosen a subject that is too big, perhaps, or too elusive to be rendered solely by movement.

It started with an interview on the radio. A Vietnam veteran cum author was talking about his several books on his experiences in war. There’s lots of killing in these books, some of it by him. The interviewer asked him if he is frequently asked what does it feel like to kill someone. He responded with annoyance and evasion. He seemed to think it was a bad question, the obviousness of which irritated him. It seemed to me to be the most important question of all. And with that I began to imagine making a work.

I wondered not what a person thinks and feels before committing a horrible act, but before deciding to intervene or ignore it. I guess I take for granted that there are murderers and criminal sociopaths in the world. What I realized is that those who scare me more are the witnesses who do nothing, myself among them as I sit in front of my computer screen or watch TV. That became the springboard-how close to an act of violence must a person be before they bear some responsibility for it and how far away do you have to get to become innocent?

I began to make movement that felt bound and harsh, movement that tangled around itself. I asked the dancers to increase their muscular tension even while they did simple things. I was coming from the perspective that to do nothing is twisted, and in conflict with a better nature. We created duets and trios that circled and stalked, fragmented couplings and strained solos.

The treacherousness of the subject had me in abeyance. I hadn’t dealt with the issue. I hadn’t asked of myself or the dancers their true feelings or experiences with violence. I was reticent to showcase their personal lives or mine, but it was becoming all too clear that without our personal investment the piece would only be a collection of cliched bullet points: anger: check; fear: check; tension: check; more anger: check…

Meanwhile, the revolutionary upheaval in the Middle East and the assassination of Osama bin Laden have been pouring out of the media. Television and the newspapers are saturated with killing, real and fictionalized. The dance was feeling like just another artifact to heap on the pile.

Sara Shelton Mann blew me open during a recent conversation when she said simply, “I would assume that you want to deal with the poetics of the human spirit.” Of course, I knew the premise of the piece was huge and weighty and multi-faceted. To contemplate the poetics, the beauty, the lyricism and abstractions of the subject threw me into another strata. I was thrilled.

Then very terrified.

Making this work has had me on edge from the start. To be thinking and reading about, looking at and even looking for violence for the last several months has upped my anxiety level in palpable and subtle ways. I feel a nervous giddiness when something works in rehearsal, uneasy to be glad that something so uncomfortable can be satisfying. Announcing the project to friends and critics elicits silly responses, quips about how angry and dark I must be. I’m told even the panel who in part funded the project first met my proposal with nervous laughter. I’m not the only one who is uneasy about this.

I’ve often entered the studio to make a dance earnestly wanting to make an audience feel a certain way. I want them to feel the impact of my subject and the subtly and grace of its more abstracted parts. And with each immersion into the process, I come up against the reality that I cannot make anyone feel a certain way. I can only put things in front of an audience and hope they see things that interest them, move them, make them wonder.

How to do that is another story entirely. Margaret Jenkins conceded despite the challenges of crafting work, how she decides what to put in front of an audience is simple.

“Whether or not I want to see it,” she said. “One of the reasons I make work is to go somewhere I haven’t gone before,” she explained. “I discover things, I don’t find answers.”

Sara offered, “The moment my attention wanders I know that I need to stop and start again or re-edit.”

And so we began again. The dancers and I began discussing our perspectives on, and fears of violence, and despite the unease that came into the room, I felt a door open. I saw a different physicality and pitch even as the dancers simply sat and spoke. One of us broke down just imagining what kinds of violence could happen, how she feared being hurt in certain ways. As we moved again, it was clear things had shifted. Taking a suggestion from Sara we began honing in on certain things like how the dancers use their hands or the breath patterns in a phrase. A different arc began to bend. Somehow grace began sidling up against all the harshness.

How long does it take to decide whether or not to intervene on a threatening situation? There’s the assessment of relative dangers and the evaluation of whether or not it’s “worth it,” whether or not the victim deserves rescue and how one might fight or attempt to defend someone. That moment between choosing to fight or flee can be a split second decision that seems to go on forever. In collaboration with composer Peter V. Swendsen, we are imaging how the duration of the piece is that moment in extended exposure, with cacophony the sound of high impact, danger, and the visceral heightening of the senses that comes both with fear and aggression, and silence the space of indecision, peace, and memory.

The environment of the dance is KUNST-STOFF arts, a space walled by windows, with exposed brick and terra cotta beams creating intersections, corners and frames. The very room is one of many compartments, choices and perspectives. As with all of my work, where the action takes place directly informs what can happen. Our containers impose boundaries and barriers on us. Action from inside a box is of a different nature than action on a mountaintop. One breathes differently inside a cell than on the seashore.

I’m still so eager to “see” the work in my head, to know what it will look like and to have a sense of its momentum. Meanwhile, I’ve realized that the uncertainty and edginess that I’ve been feeling are the substantive elements of the source. It’s a hazardous subject, for sure. There’s a fluttery feeling in my solar plexus, a jaggedness, when we work. It has been difficult to stay in that discomfort and in spite of it find the movement, to find the breath, to notice our hands or the way someone reclaims their legs after a lift, how a touch is retracted, let go, why a wall stops you and when it can’t.

While I wrestle with the complexities of bringing What Does It Feel Like to Kill Someone? to the stage, I still maintain that dance can do anything. I don’t think there are subjects that are categorically impossible to dance or choreograph. As both Margy and Sara express in different ways, remaining present to the process and attentive to what interests me and where my questions lead is the only way to proceed. And, of course, the dancers and their contributions to the work are of paramount importance. To meet a person through the stage, to encounter a person in that state of being and doing, to care what they are doing and to look for their impulses and responses-these are the reasons I watch dance. It’s what makes me look harder when I sit in a theater, and it’s what I continue to look for when mining the stuff of my own work.

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Mary Carbonara Dances performs the world premiere of  What Does It Feel Like to Kill Someone? June 8-11 at KUNST-STOFF arts. For more tickets and more information, go to marycarbonaradances.org.

This article appeared in the June 2011 issue of In Dance.

Arriving on the West Coast in June, as part of a teaching/performing tour, Miguel Gutierrez will present his newest work, HEAVENS WHAT HAVE I DONE; the piece has been performed in many contexts and will present its newest permutation at the Garage (SF) in June. Gutierrez will also be participating in VERGE, a festival at the Garage in San Francisco, for international and national artists. Interested in enduring philosophical questions about desire, longing, and the search for meaning, Gutierrez’s work sits inside a legacy of process-focused experimental dance while drawing on far-reaching influences such as endurance based performance art work, noise music, ecstatic experience in social and religious rituals, the study of mind/body modalities like Body-Mind Centering, Alexander Technique and the Feldenkrais Method, and various histories of spectacle including Broadway, Vegas, and queer performance in alternative clubs from the ’80s until now. His pieces are notable for the interplay of movement, text, sound and light, which creates, for the performers and the audience, an immersive state of immediacy and attention.

Jesse Hewit: Miguel! Hi. On behalf of the Bay Area dance universe, we’re glad you’re coming to town! I’m looking forward to you interacting with some of the steady buzzing energy around queer dance and performance that’s floating around. Have you heard much about this?

Miguel Gutierrez: Yes, of course! I’ve been hearing a lot through you and Keith [Hennessy] and a bit through Abby [Crain], though I don’t know a lot about the specifics of it and I hope to get clued in when I come.

JH: Will you speak about your relationship to living/dancing/making art in San Francisco?

MG: I’m excited to come to San Francisco to perform. I’m also grateful that Joe Landini invited me, because I’ve been really disappointed that no one out there invited us to bring Last Meadow, the last piece that we’ve been touring, so I guess lo-tech solos are the way to maintain a relationship to the city. As for living and working there, the multiple times that I’ve lived in San Francisco affected me in such profound ways, that it feels sort of crazy to try to parse it out. It was in San Francisco that I came into the first fully realized version of my “self” as a young queer person and where I first saw performance [of Contraband, Ricky Darnell and the High Risk Group, Joe Goode, and others] that re-formed everything I had ever been taught about dance or performance, and which convinced me that there was no other path for me to follow. It was also where I was exposed to the politics of diversity–gender, sexuality, race, class, that whole shebang–which changed the way that I looked at the world, forever.

Repeatedly, it was a sanctuary for me, in my sister’s home, or in the bedrooms of tons o’ guys, or on the streets of the Mission, Castro, SOMA, or in the clubs I went to when I was 19. It was where I began to explore my own work, and it was where I developed my identity and skills as a teacher. It was where I learned that quality of life shouldn’t get cast to the side–although I seem to have a problem remembering that these days. Jesus, I have a tattoo on my arm that says “siempre contigo” [always with you], so that I’d “never forget” what I learned from living there. It was basically my first real home. For years I kept thinking that I would move back, but at some point I realized I didn’t feel that way any more, and that what I needed from it, I got, and that I now wanted different things. But I’m really excited about going there.

JH: You’ll be teaching for a few days after performing HEAVENS WHAT HAVE I DONE at the Garage. For those of us who don’t know, what is HEAVENS, and why did you make it?

MG: Well, I actually made it because I was asked to do something in a festival, and they couldn’t present any of my other pieces, so I went ahead and made something new. This is one of the main reasons I ever make anything–because I’m asked to. Beyond that, well, I’d rather let you see it and see for yourself, but I guess I’ll just say that it’s a piece that I only expected to do once for a very specific context but then I kept getting chances to perform it, and so I kept developing it and it turned into “something.” In that sense, it’s been a piece that’s reminded me to keep my practice alive, regardless of whether I’m making an “official” piece (the ones you write the grants for, or the ones that get advertised with postcards). I love doing it.

JH: Recently I was really taken with Ralph Lemon’s idea of “anti-dance.” What do you think is still interesting and/or important about dance? Is thinking through modes of dance and movement still generative for you?

MG: First, I’ll say “absolutely,” in response to that last question. It is still very generative.

The “anti-dance” thing is a huge topic. I understand that thing of wanting to talk about it–the “anti-dance” idea. That’s actually been a huge driver in a lot of my work. However, in my “research” (hateful word) lately, I’ve been interested in embracing the long (often fraught, yes), but ultimately intimate and now sophisticated (if I can dare to use that word) relationship to dance that doesn’t always need to point a finger at it first. As such, I’ve been interested in approaches to movement/dance that consider it as a mode of perception that (potentially) unifies a vast array of primary and esoteric senses, and that in itself, proposes a way into non-verbal, non-rationalistic or dualistic approaches to intelligence and poetics. Well, ok, maybe not “unifies,” because I’m not looking for a grand design, but rather dance is the container that allows me to look at this. I am interested in dance’s (and the body’s) archetypal link with the “feminine” (a tremendously reductive way of putting it) in opposition to a patriarchal approach to talking or thinking about the body or art-making. I’m interested in early 20th century developments of aesthetic and somatic understanding that put gestalt or an awareness of a total “situation” at the forefront of sensory experience and how dance (and dance-based performance) can be a really great modality to frame questions that emerge from that perspective.

I have this idea of late that dance’s ability to confound is one of the trademarks of its power, and one of the things that feels most interesting and vital about it. I know that, for sure these days, I feel the need to see things that I don’t understand. I like that dance continues to be my “home form” (the long marriage, so to speak) that I can place these different frames onto.

JH: I feel like you’re someone whose work is very much about transmission and is rather responsive to your audiences. How are you feeling about the role of audience these days? Do you feel like you have any responsibilities there?

MG: I’m aware of many different audiences. First of all, there’s the audience at a show, and they feel really different every night, regardless of where the performance is. Inside that audience, I experience many subsets of audiences. There are the people who you know, and there are the strangers. There are the “V.I.P.s” (presenters, local artists, etc); there are the haters who walk out or who stay, give you the evil eye or gross energy the whole time, or who are seething with envy disguised as criticism; and then there are the people who are super obviously into it. There are also those who are everything in between or beyond those previous categories. There are the hotties who you catch a glimpse of who you hope think you’re hot, too. There are the people who you think are sort of there by accident–in a good way (like their friend brought them, or for some freak reason, they saw an ad for the show and just decided to come check it out)–and the ones who are there by accident in a bad way. I guess that mostly what I’m saying is that I have a real distrust of the notion of “audience” as anything that is monolithic or truthfully perceivable by me. I know that I still, despite myself and despite the direction of my work, often find myself wanting more from the audience than I could ever hope to get. At the same time, I have noticed that I am heading in a direction where I don’t “need” them as much in the old way of “please look at me….” Something is shifting around that. Last Meadow was a pretty big shift for me about that. So was/is HEAVENS.

JH: Perhaps because the position of being a performance-maker can be so financially precarious, we often cast ourselves as being at the mercy of our audiences in ways that go a little too deep and become unhelpful. I also like your identifications of all the different types and permutations of audience; monolithic notions of audience definitely don’t seem to exist.

MG: Yes, and the other major experience I have of “audience” now is the imaginary one in the studio with me when I’m working; the audience of expectations, judgment, historical categorization, critics, etc. And of course, there’s a lot of experience of audience in me perceiving myself dealing with all of these questions.

As for responsibilities, I give a lot in my work. I am generous. I am generous in my performing as are the other folks in my work, for sure, but I am also generous in that I deal with big stuff in my work: big heart stuff, existential stuff, etc. Some people don’t want to go there, or don’t buy it, or, who knows? I believe in making the show as good as the show demands itself to be, which is a very personal process, and which really only reveals itself slowly and methodically through working. Sometimes it is responsible to keep people in the dark. Sometimes it is responsible to make them work a bit. But (and I think that this was a gift that Joe Goode gave me) I believe in creating points or resources for entering into the work: “invitations.” Granted, one person’s invitation is another person’s, um, non-invitation.

I also believe though, in making work where the work itself is a frame that encompasses presentation, pedagogy, and experience. At its best, the work almost “teaches” you how to experience it. I don’t know if that makes sense, but that is how I think about it. I think that there is a sort of invisible value that I hold while I’m making work that just gets in there.

JH: In general, how are you feeling about dance these days?

MG: Great! Confused. Happy. Thrilled. Convinced it is the most perfect thing. Convinced of its irrelevancy. Subjugated by it. Liberated through it. Completely bored by it. Moved to tears a lot by it. Knowing, and sage-like even, at times in my viewing of it. Surprised by finding something new in it still. Frustrated that I don’t allow myself to do it more. Secretly convinced that it’s the best way to just figure it out. Content to walk arm in arm with its weirdness, its smallness, its privacy and naïveté. Intrigued by everything I still don’t understand about it. Constantly gauging when I’m going to stop doing it.

JH: What are you looking forward to most in coming to San Francisco?

MG: I look forward to the drive to the city from the airport, which I really love. I’m excited to see my sister’s family. I’m excited to put my work in front of people there, and I’m really excited about teaching there, because I feel like I’m really working at something that I want to share and explore with others. I want to get some good food, meet folks, I don’t know, and see old friends. And, I want to go to the top of Dolores Park.

JH: Sounds pretty solid. Thanks for chatting, Miguel, see you this summer.

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This article appeared in the June 2011 issue of In Dance.