The movement styles you’ve been interested in and responded to were all radical new forms. Early modern and postmodern dance, voguing and butoh each broke new ground in their expression. Is that a thread for you?

I was interested in how these dancers moved and why they moved in that way; in the theoretical ideas behind their work, whether that be questions of democracy in the early postmodern movement, or in butoh trying to recover some of the folk traditions of early Japanese theatre. I was interested in why these aesthetic changes happened and the questions I was then propelled to ask. I wasn’t trying to fuse these styles. This is something I continually correct because many people say, “Oh, you take a bit of this, you take a bit of that and you fuse it all together.” I don't do that. I'm not a fusion person. I work in the imagination. An imaginative premise creates something, makes me see what I'm doing in a different way. That's where my creative impulse comes from.  

Where did your impulse to be a researcher, a storyteller come from? Was it in you at a young age? 

At school we did something called the History Day Competition. Part of it was to develop performances based on a historical theme. One year, the theme was conflicts and compromises. We made a group performance based on these ideas, then it went to competition at regional and state level. I won the state competition six years in a row. That experience had a big influence on me, which you can see in my work—my way of looking at history and speculating about it. 

What next in terms of a period of dance history you may study?

I will end my current period of work this summer. I want to change my practice. I think that’s important, to keep growing as an artist. I don't think my next phase will be as research-based. Well, everything is research-based in a way; being in the studio is a kind of research. But I won’t dedicate myself to another archive, like I did exploring butoh. I want to shift.  

In your new phase, would you use works in your own repertory as reference points? 

There's no tabula rasa. Even when I switched from my first period of work to the second, the first lens through which I looked and the theoretical ideas that I got from voguing and early postmodern dance were still there. They didn't go away; it was more that layers were added. I'd like to work more specifically on music now, but I'm not sure how yet. I want to find a way of working that excites me.

If you could talk to your younger self, when you were stepping out on the Judson Church stage to perform your first work [“It is Thus From a Strange New Perspective That We Look Back on the Modernist Origins and Watch It Splintering into Endless Replication,” 1999], what would you say?

I've been thinking about that a lot, actually. The thing that comes to mind is, “Believe in yourself more as a dancer.” I didn't believe in myself a lot as a dancer back then—it came later when I did the “Dancer of the Year” project [Harrell was awarded Dancer of Year by Tanz magazine in 2018, after which he created a solo work of the same name]. I would also say, “Pay more attention to Ohno [Kazuo Ohno, butoh dancer].” I saw him dance twice and I didn’t get it. I regret that I didn't study with him. It was only after he died that I understood what he was doing because I was more mature. That's often the case in my history, that I missed things. But the “missing” is part of the fruition. It's like for “Deathbed” [2022]. I was at Katherine Dunham's deathbed and I didn't ask her about Hijikata [Tatsumi Hijikata, founder of butoh. Dunham performed and lived in Japan in 1957.] I wish I'd asked her about him, but if I had, I wouldn’t have made “Deathbed.” So it's a conundrum.

I wish I had seen Keith Jarrett play live. I had the chance and I didn't go. I met his wife, when she came to see “The Köln Concert” in New York, and that was touching. There are these little things, but that’s life. 

The UK premiere of “The Köln Concert” will be shown at Sadler’s Wells East, London, April 4-5.