Trajal Harrell, A Way of Moving

In a career spanning almost 30 years, American dancer-choreographer Trajal Harrell has created a body of work borne of a rich imagination and an enquiring mind. Taking some of the ideas underlying early modern and postmodern dance, voguing and butoh as starting points, Harrell’s choreographies cast a speculative gaze over dance and cultural history, presenting alternative scenarios through a unique movement language. The results are captivating and utterly original.

The inventiveness of Harrell’s work makes him much in demand. He and his company, Zürich Dance Ensemble, are regular invitees at major dance festivals, theatres and arts institutions across the world. Harrell undertook a two-year artist residency at MoMA (2014-2016) and staged a month-long performance exhibition, “Trajal Harrell: Hoochie Koochie,” at London’s Barbican (2017). He has also received several high-profile awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2012 and a Silver Lion at the 2024 Venice Biennale.

Zürich Dance Ensemble in “The Köln Concert” by Trajal Harrell. Photograph by Reto Schmid

Alongside works in his repertory such as the “Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church” project (2009-2017), “Caen Amour” (2016) and “The Romeo” (2023), “The Köln Concert” (2020) is often performed on tour, and is soon to receive its UK premiere at Sadler’s Wells East, April 4-5. This year, 2025, marks the 50th anniversary of jazz pianist Keith Jarrett’s legendary Cologne Opera performance and subsequent live album, which inspired Harrell to make the dance. The piece also features the songs of Joni Mitchell.

Before his arrival in London, Fjord spoke to Harrell on Zoom about “The Köln Concert,” his practice and where he’d like to take his work from here.

Hi Trajal. Are you looking forward to coming to London?

Yes, it’s a great audience in London.

Has being based in Europe for a while now impacted you and your work in any way?

It’s more about the structures I’ve worked in. Many of my latest pieces came out of the German state-theatre system; I was at the Schauspielhaus [in Zürich, as in-house director] for five years, and at the Munich Kammerspiele for two to three years before that. You have enormous resources and this facilitates a specific way of working and a different support system. Of course the work itself has a lot of influence from America, my growing up and studying there. But my company has had most of its touring and support in Europe, so, yes, there's a way in which I’ve grown comfortable here, though the structure of support is always changing. It’s not static.

How do you approach presenting a work like “The Köln Concert,” which you’ve performed numerous times, for the many different spaces on a busy tour?

We work on the performativity, so that we're present with each audience. An important aspect of my work is “togetherness,” a sense that this event will only happen tonight. I'm there at the beginning when the audience comes in. I see them. The audience in Barcelona will be different to the one in London, and that gives us something: to be there, to be present with them.

You’re on the artistic faculty of the Rose Choreographic School based at Sadler’s Wells East. What are your thoughts on the premise of the school – an “experimental research project?” There's a synergy perhaps with your own practice, in terms of the investigations you’ve pursued in your work.

I like the idea a lot. I think Martin Hargreaves [head of choreographic school] is doing a fantastic job. I'm excited to get started. I’ll meet some of the cohort for the first time before our show.

Do you think giving young choreographers the opportunity to develop their ideas without some of the pressures of funding and performance is a good way forward?

I don't think there's one way. I think what's interesting about what the school is doing is they're offering a programme that can respond to choreographers’ needs. It's artist-centric. That's an excellent way to work. Your practice is your practice, and to go deep into that you need to be very specific.

I was lucky in that when I came up in New York, we didn't have a lot of eyes on us. I wasn’t touring and we were able to experiment. I didn't have the pressure of making pieces and institutions. You had one gig a year and you worked on your piece, then you did your four nights, then started again. Something about that was very good for me. I got to fail a lot, and try things without the pressure of the market apparatus. But I know people who’ve had very different trajectories, or who went to P.A.R.T.S. and got out of school and did immediate tours and co-productions, and they were fine too. There's no right way. You just have to stay attuned to your own needs, and hopefully you have people around you who can give you good feedback as you go along.

Trajal Harrell and Zürich Dance Ensemble in “The Köln Concert” by Harrell. Photograph by Reto Schmid

Music is central to your work. When did you first hear Keith Jarrett’s “The Köln Concert?”

It was around 25 years ago. I was in Tower Records in New York in one of the CD listening stations. I saw the album cover, pressed the button and was floored. I didn't know music like that existed; so in the gut his vocals and the way he was responding to his own playing. It was astounding to me and I knew it was a very special piece of music. I listened to it over the years and thought, “One day, I’d love to dance to this,” but I knew I’d have to have some chops behind me before I did that. For a young choreographer, it was not the kind of music where you just say, “OK, I'm going to make a piece to “The Köln Concert.””

Did the improvisatory nature of Jarrett’s playing in that performance resonate for you?

Of course he's someone who worked on being in the moment. But if you were to talk to him, he would probably say the concert was not his best work. It was pretty early in his career and has become a legendary moment, but it was also about the people who were there that night, how they were feeling. There was a synergy. That was incredible and I connect to that sense of togetherness in a live performance, whether it's improvised or not, and the potentiality of what those moments can bring. You long for those moments when everything comes together, but you're not in control of them. You just have to hope, bring the ingredients you have and do the best you can at that time.

“Liveness” is a word you've used in relation to your practice and performance. I interpret that as embodying the present moment and conveying an immediacy in your work. Would that be accurate?

Yes. I recently had a performance when I was not feeling so well. I had a cough that wouldn’t go away. It was irritating. But sometimes when you have an obstacle like that, it focuses you. You have to go deep within yourself, and sometimes that makes for a better performance because you're so attuned to what you have to do that you minimise other things around you. Your focus becomes very strong. Oftentimes, hurdles or limitations can be gifts.

Is it important to you that you still dance as well as choreograph?

It is. I've been working since 1998, and I still dance in most of my pieces. For my next project though, I may not be in half the works. I still think performing is what I enjoy the most. It’s a question for me: “What does the future hold?” I still want to dance and tour, but touring is demanding. In 10 years, I won’t be able to do it with the same energy as I do now. How to continue and rebalance? I don't have an answer yet.

Thinking back over your career, has your choreographic craft changed? Obviously one hones that as an artist, but do you approach your creative process now in the same way as earlier?

There’s a familiarity of going into the unknown, but I don't have a formula. I’m always starting from ground zero, though I'm better at conceptualising what it is that I want to do now. What is clear to me today was not as clear 20 years ago. There was a style of moving to develop and that took a while. It came with “The Köln Concert” in 2020, when there was a consolidation of a way of moving that I shared with my dancers. It became a dialogue that we have. That was something I didn't do before. I was working with the group, and I was working with myself, and the two were not conversing. Politically, I didn’t want to create “mini-mes,” or for people to dance like me. It’s not my ethos. I think that's what makes the work so exciting. You see a shared style of moving, of dancing, but everyone is very specific to themselves.

Trajal Harrell in “Judson Church is Ringing in Harlem (Made-to-Measure)/Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning” at the Judson Church at MoMA PS1. Photograph by Ian Douglas

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.

Rachael Moloney

Rachael Moloney is a freelance writer and editor covering dance and the arts. She has studied ballet as well as modern and contemporary techniques, and has worked on and contributed to publications including Departures, the Financial Times, Fjord Review, Sunday Times, Time Out, Vogue and Wallpaper*.

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