Listening to the World with Abigail Levine

On a Saturday afternoon in late September, the air feels electric in an upstairs rehearsal studio at Kestrels, in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn. Red extension cords cross the floor to power coffee grinders. Dancers kneel close to the small appliances to match the sharp whirring sounds with sustained notes of their own.

“Can you get a little more intimate with your grinder?” asks choreographer Abigail Levine.

Abigail Levine's “Six Quiet Dogs.” Photograph by Maria Baranova

Dancer Julian Barnett plays with how high to go with his “aaaaaaaaahhhhh.” As he backs away from the grinder his arm reaches skyward as if to catch the top of the runaway sound. Other cast members, including Martita Abril, Anna Azrielli, Kristopher KQ Pourzel, and Levine, join in, layering machine noise and voices. Composer Paula Matthusen observes from behind a large sound board and seems to mix real time recordings over the cacophony.

This exploration is just one inventive section of Levine’s evening length work “Six Quiet Dogs.” But all over the studio inanimate, even ordinary, objects lie in wait for bodies to activate them and unleash their sonic potential: oranges, coffee mugs, tiny plastic cups, paper, fabric, pencils, metal chairs, plastic eggs.

“Six Quiet Dogs,” has its premiere October 23-25 at Target Margin Theater in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. The performance will be accompanied by a chapbook of texts written by Levine during the work’s development titled “Words Begin as Sound.”

For Levine, who also has a background in literature, a good object is one that could be considered a “mutable symbol,” having more than one connotation. And ideally, that object is also capable of making sounds.

To say Levine is a dance maker is to neglect all the other modalities she brings to her works, including text, drawing, and sound. As a performer she has appeared in retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art with Marina Abramović and Yvonne Rainer. And her own choreographies have found homes both in galleries and on stages. “Six Quiet Dogs” is the culmination of a two-year assignment Levine gave herself, in the wake of the birth of her daughter and the death of her mentor: pay attention to the world through sound.

But in the midst of the project, in December of 2023, Levine lost almost all the hearing in her right ear due to an immune response to a virus. She has since recovered about 40% of her hearing, but the uncanny coincidence is not lost on her.

“This [“Six Quiet Dogs”] was going to happen before I lost the hearing in my ear,” said Levine. “It was kind of crazy that I’d been paying attention to sound for two years and now, I can’t not pay attention to it. It was a strange case of life entering art.”

We met for the first time in August and then followed up on that informal conversation over Zoom in October, circling back on the relationship of words and objects to her practice, the lasting influence of working with Abramović, the layers that underpin sections of performative text in “Six Quiet Dogs,” and the generous exchange between artists and audience that happens in the theater.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Abigail Levine's “Six Quiet Dogs.” Photograph by Maria Baranova

Back when we met in August, I was taking some notes on our conversation. Reading over those, four words I jotted down feel important: object, duration, labor, task.

Those are the big ones. Yeah.

I think I know what I meant with those notes, but can you talk about your relationship with those words?

Sure. This can be a very big ball of yarn, but right at the start of studying composition, I was kind of miffed about how you make decisions about what to do with a body. But as soon as it was about object and task—like I'm looking at my daughter's sand bucket, push this bucket across the room with your whole body—I knew exactly how I wanted someone to do it. So there is something about the physicality and the choreography of bodies in relation to objects, bodies in relation to task, which has an automatic purpose to me, a narrative arc too. It just made sense, and I knew how to shape it instantly. Whereas the angle of an arm, or the sweep of a body, remained much more mysterious to me, for much longer, as a maker.

Duration and labor came into clarity and importance when I was hired by Marina Abramović to be a part of her 2010 retrospective at the MoMA. I was instantly drawn to time as a material, and it just felt so emotional and intellectual and of the world. That dovetailed with the very unsexy reality of being a contractor, and then, after something of a negotiation, an employee of the museum, where our labor divided by time had to be quantified in dollars. There was a lot of disagreement. What is performing and what is that skill, especially when it's standing naked, staring at another naked person in a museum? Alongside that all was the fact that we had to pay our rent.

Were we objects? Or performers? Or representations? It was a crazy stew. I was also doing a master’s in performance studies at the time, and so I started chewing on exactly those four terms you brought up.

Was there a particular object and/or task that you used in the beginning of the creation process for “Six Quiet Dogs”?

If you look at the 10 years or so before this, you will mostly see me facing away from the audience. For this work, I decided I should face towards the audience. The birth of my daughter was also about six months before I started working on this. And of course, that [experience] has this like down the front of the body and out towards the world [physicality].

Pencils and oranges were early objects, and they both get deployed down the front of the dancers’ bodies in different ways. And that was certainly tied, in my mind, to both the physicality that's related to birthing a child and carrying a baby, and then also deciding it was time to allow myself to be seen in a different way.

Abigail Levine's “Six Quiet Dogs.” Photograph by Maria Baranova

There is a companion chapbook of writings that go along with this work. Can you tell me a little bit about the score and how the writing developed?

The last piece I made, “Redactions,” at The Chocolate Factory in 2022, I thought of in the broadest strokes as bodies and language and what they do to each other. I walked out of the theater and was like, “oh, sound is in between! That's key. Let's go there.” A lot of that was due to a wonderful mentor that I had, an early experimental electronics composer, Alvin Lucier, who passed away in December of 2021. His signature work and a theme running through much of his work was using language as musical material, and often the language would dissolve into sound. This was a way into musical composition for me, as someone who comes from literature or is just more of a lay person—also the embodied-ness of it.

And then I had this fear, even before my daughter was born in October of 2021, that as she developed language, she would lose a certain intensity and immediacy of her experience that I had fought very hard to get back to through dance. I knew I had to usher her towards language, but there was also some trepidation. Like, once you know something is a ball, it's just a ball, instead of this magical, colorful orb that somehow ricochets off the walls and makes this cool sound and you can also slobber on. But it turns out I was wrong. [laughter] It’s all okay.

[Laughing] It’s true. Long after you've told kids what objects are, and their purpose, they usually persist in using anything and everything as noisemakers.

I decided to just write based on attention to sound. And in those first months and even years with my daughter, our world was very localized. I had what felt like these three concentric circles of looking at her and our inner world and play, looking out the window at whatever I could see, and then whatever I could take in about the world, which was often on the radio. It was just at the start of the war in Ukraine and then the war in Gaza came, you know? I could write in my notes app on my phone while nursing with my other hand. I kept that as kind of a practice, in absence of being able to resume another kind of studio practice. Some of those writings turned out to be performance scores that I've asked performers to speak, or even songs, which is also a new venture for me.

As Andaluz, my daughter, got a little bit older, she would do things that were very like my choreography: carrying rocks slowly across the floor, pushing stools noisily down the hall, singing along with appliances and sometimes I would take notes on them and try them out. There are actually some scores that are only moderately elaborated from things that she would do.

One of those performative texts I read in the chapbook and I also experienced in your rehearsal is called “Don’t Listen.” While Martita Abril is speaking, the rest of you are in tow, assisting and distracting. How did that one go from the notes app to the studio?

The text itself is playful and maybe has a little bit of this same wish and worry of what do we lose when we're just thinking about meaning, versus, the totality of an utterance, its sound, its intention, its emotion? And then the promise of Lucier’s work that you can make it back into music, or something to be in a room with. So maybe it’s prompting my reader/listener to that, but then there's something of a little goofy joke about making a piece about sound and listening and attention and the first thing that is said is, “don't listen.”

But it goes on then to say: hear the words, let them sort of settle in your body, and then leave again. What if you respond without even knowing what someone said? With my longtime collaborator, the composer Paula Matthusen—who is also music faculty at Wesleyan, where Lucier taught, where I taught and did my undergrad—we talk about how to process the voice, what to do with music in relationship to speaking and text, and then dancing. I went for amplification here, really wanting the words to be heard.

We both much prefer corded microphones. Because you don't have the ease of it working smoothly that just invited sticking all of us behind her. Then it became a little Groucho Marx-y, and then it had this echo of Trisha Brown’s “Spanish Dance,” which I love and think about a lot. Then there’s always this point where anything I bring in, or I'm trying to make happen, kind of falls away, and the thing becomes itself and tells me and us what it needs to be. With this, I also thought of Martita. She emcees Movement Research’s Monday nights at Judson, and she’s amazing as an emcee. What you read on the page is mine, and what you will hear from her is somewhere where my prompt meets her interpretation.

Does Paula mix the sounds live in the performance?

Yes. I have discovered the hard way that recorded music doesn't work for what I do. With very few exceptions, she is intervening live in the piece. One of the other vestiges from working with Marina Abramović is she never had us practice the actual pieces we did. She trained us in the why of what she did, and to build the physical and mental strength, and then just said, you get it. Go interpret it. And there's something of that liveness of risk that I think serves what I make well. I try to get all of us to the point that we know exactly what we need to do, but we're still a little bit on the edge. We can't do it in our sleep. We have to be awake.

Your cast is a very distinguished and deeply experienced group.

The cast and Paula have all come with me from the last piece to this piece and that's been really meaningful. I felt very certain after the last piece that we were not finished. I've been working with them individually for four years. They're so solid, and also, they're all makers.

A question came up in a showing we did: how much am I shaping what they do? And I do, but I also see what I'm doing as making space for what they do and doing that in new way, a more nuanced way, than the last time. Who I've brought into the work is a major chunk of my work.

After this experience of a frontal work—a work for a theater—do you have any sense of how it might change your approach to a durational work in a gallery?

I have this body of work of durational pieces that respond directly to visual artists from the 60’s generation, and I already have in my head that the next thing I'm going to do is return to the next one of those works. This back and forth between making a work for the theater, where you come and stay for the whole thing, quite possibly always accompanied by a publication in some form, alternating with one of these works that I think of more as a durational object, that you can come and approach for as long as you want and take or leave—I feel like I need these different modes of working in order to keep answering back to those important words: object, duration, labor, task.

With the durational works, I want to continue to layer on different access points: text, and the gentlest or subtlest dose of participation. Being in the theater, it's such an exchange. It feels, from my perspective, like such a generosity that people come and experience this and stay with you for this time. So opening up the durational works to a little bit more of that exchange, the interpersonal give and take, is a vestige of being back in the theater.

Candice Thompson

Candice Thompson has been working in and around live art for over two decades. She was a dancer with Milwaukee Ballet before moving into costume design, movement education and direction, editing and arts writing. She attended New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, graduated from St. Mary’s College LEAP Program, and later received an MFA in literary nonfiction from Columbia University. From 2010-2021 she was editorial director of DIYdancer, a project-based media company she co-founded. Her writing on dance can be found in publications like Andscape, ALL ARTS, ArtsATL, The Brooklyn Rail, Dance Magazine, and The New York Times.

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