Oh, that’s how she had it so deeply in her body. You mentioned last week at rehearsal that you could see Ashleigh Leite, the original cast member, for a solo Taylor Massa was performing. Is that bittersweet?
No, it’s beautiful because they’re still with me. When I see Jeremy Nelson, or Ashleigh Leite or Kristen Borg—I still see Trisha [Brown] in my body. Every once in a while she comes out and it’s “Hey, how are you?” It’s a beautiful thing. Time collapses in movement, or it expands. You can look at it either way.
I did a very cheeky thing—I asked the dancers to go into the video archive and “Choose what you want.” Taylor chose Ashleigh’s solo from “City of Twist.” She happens to look like Ashleigh, she has the same body as Ashleigh, and she’s as mean a dancer as Ashleigh. I mean “mean” in the best possible way. Liv [England] is always saying, “I wish there was something slower.” She’s much more luxurious than my natural inclination. Jimena Paz had a very sensual solo in “City of Twist” that Liv chose and she did it beautifully. Larissa [Acebedo] and Nick [Sciscione] chose the unison duet from “Strange Attractors.” When those two brought back that duet I realized that I was making very blunt punched movement at the beginning of my career. That toughness was something I really wanted to see onstage because there’s a lot of grace in the world and that’s not me. When I began working to the Michael Nyman music, it really encouraged me to reach out into space in a lengthened, more luxurious way. So watching that is very emotional for me because it was a big change.
When you showed work from different periods all together last week, I could really see how emotional your work is. I know music plays a large part in that, but it’s also in the movement, right? How do you do that?
Well, I’m a feeling person. The part of dance that I love is the part that I can’t understand intellectually. It’s the part that I feel somatically. If I’m in my brain I don’t make very good stuff. But if I slip into that intuitive state, then stuff comes out. And sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it’s mean.
It seems that sometimes the music comes after you’ve made the movement, and sometimes you make the movement to the music. Which do you prefer?
I learned to make movement first because I was an improviser. I started improvising with Steve Paxton in college, so movement came from physics, not from music. Then in the ’90s, when I started going out with Michael Clark, he proposed that we make a version of “The Rite of Spring” together and of course, that music existed. So I started with Stravinsky—I mean, how audacious. I could make it in the way that I did because I didn’t understand—I don’t read music, I don’t know ballet. I can count to 8, I can count to 12, but I’m not looking at the score, reading it and laying my movement on top of it. I’m feeling it as I go along. There’s a certain rhythm—it’s very sharp—when the work is good. It’s usually a downbeat on half-time.
You mentioned that the work will be available for restaging. You’re fully in control of your archive?
I own the work. The board gave me personal ownership 15 years ago, around the time Martha Graham passed, when that whole thing was going on. The board acted very quickly to take care of me in that way.
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