| Lyra Kilston: Performa 05 was a great success. I saw how very small your staff was and the short amount of time you had in which to create a citywide biennial from the ground up—it was incredible. Besides introducing many different audiences to performance and greatly expanding people’s notions of what performance could be, the geographic form of Performa 05, that of having many different venues spread throughout the city, both worked to highlight New York’s diversity of art venues and showed that performance could exist in many different places—an esteemed uptown museum, a tiny downtown theater, or even a McDonald’s. |
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RoseLee Goldberg is the founding director of Performa, and Lyra Kilston is a writer who will contribute regularly to Performa’s blog during its performance biennial in November.
Lyra Kilston: Performa 05 was a great success. I saw how very small your staff was and the short amount of time you had in which to create a citywide biennial from the ground up—it was incredible. Besides introducing many different audiences to performance and greatly expanding people’s notions of what performance could be, the geographic form of Performa 05, that of having many different venues spread throughout the city, both worked to highlight New York’s diversity of art venues and showed that performance could exist in many different places—an esteemed uptown museum, a tiny downtown theater, or even a McDonald’s.
Looking back at Performa 05, what were some of the things you felt were most successful, or what did you not get a chance to do that guided your planning for Performa 07?
RoseLee Goldberg: The 05 model worked very well, and we’re still using it for Performa 07. If anything, we’re even more aware now of certain ways in which 05 succeeded, such as the fact that it was spread throughout the city as you noted. We now realize how much Performa is about New York City itself. Many people have said that the biennial activated the city in interesting and unexpected ways, which I found fascinating. The idea of a new kind of urbanism, animated by people criss-crossing the famous grid and giving it new dimension raises many exciting questions about cultural activism as a renewable force in the city. Watching people cluster on street corners, figure out our blue maps, and take off with a sense of exploration and discovery to connect the dots was amazing.
I’ve also had time to ask myself questions that I hadn’t stopped to ask the first time around: What makes this particular three or four week period different from all the other busy weeks of the year? How does a biennial create a spotlight in the cultural calendar and provide a framework for particular ideas to be examined? It has become more and more clear to me that Performa is a biennial for the city of New York; it is about harnessing the amazingly creative brainpower and determination of all the extraordinary individuals who spend their lives thinking every day about what culture means and how to use it to create a deeply humanist existence in our daily world. I cannot stress enough that Performa is a collective effort; it is an aggregate of knowledge, analysis, and talent; it provides a chance to take a reading of how the city thinks.
LK: This year one of the thematic focuses is the legacy of the Judson Memorial Church Dance Theater, and how it has influenced dancers in Europe, particularly in France. Can you explain why you’ve emphasized dance this year, and how the Judson Dance Theater impacts contemporary performance?
RG: For Performa 05 I had a precise mission, which was to insist, once and for all, that performance is integral to the history of art, not an addendum to it. The emphasis was squarely on visual artists making performance, although as we know well the art scene of New York in earlier times—especially the 60s and 70s—made little distinction between disciplines. There was an intimate mix in the downtown scene, both personally and professionally, of avant-gardes in all media. I felt it was time to open the doors and windows between the dance world and the visual art world again, to re-introduce them to one another. So we’ve approached it in two ways: by inviting choreographers whose work is highly conceptual and can barely be described as dance—such as Jérôme Bel and Xavier Le Roy—and also inviting visual artists who seem to be more and more interested in working with the choreographic form, with the kind of spatial and architectural analysis and precision that goes with dance—such as Kelly Nipper, Pablo Bronstein, or Aïda Rulova (whose use of choreography veers off in another direction altogether, spilling over into pop culture). Isaac Julien brings dance to the stage in utterly new ways as well; he uses film’s interior spaces as his stage for choreography. In his Performa Commission Cast No Shadow, in collaboration with British choreographer Russell Maliphant, he breaks out of the film space onto the stage. These are each entirely new visual approaches that change the way we see, and think, about bodies in space, space inside bodies, and narratives that the live body carries, by sheer force of its presence—its liveness.
For me historical context is all-important, so this particular discussion begins and ends with Yvonne Rainer, naturally. Yvonne surprised me by proposing an entirely new work when I told her we’d like to award her a Performa Commission. She said she wanted to do a version of Rite of Spring on a proscenium stage! I was bowled over, but the moment she began describing her ideas it made so much sense in relation to her entire career, and in relation to the ways we’re all asking what it means to be radical at this point in time. Her version of Stravinsky and Nijinsky’s Rite was inspired by Riot at the Rite, a BBC docu-drama about the riots during the opening night of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in Paris in 1913. Yvonne’s reworking of this radical piece, which created entirely new possibilities for 20th-century dance, is being put through the lens of its TV reenactment. There are so many ways to understand her approach.
LK: The movie version of the birth of the avant-garde completes the cycle of assimilation from radical to made-for-TV! I wonder if one day there will be a film like that about her. Something like, “On PBS, looking back at the Judson Dance Theater” showing actors in bellbottoms playing the audience members hissing and walking out of Rainer’s lectures.
A central facet of Performa is the commissioned works. How do the commissions come about? How do you see your role in working with artists to realize a new work?
RG: I began commissioning quite simply because I wanted to see something entirely new in performance. I couldn’t imagine spending the rest of my life waiting passively, pen in hand, to write about material that may or may not dazzle in the way that I felt performance should and could. I wanted to open new channels, provoke the future, ask artists to write the history differently. It all began while I was watching Shirin Neshat’s Rapture at the Venice Biennial in 1999 and thinking, “Why doesn’t performance feel like this? Why are we sitting through endless autobiographic monologues or watching people cut themselves? Why can’t performance be as sophisticated, aesthetically stunning, and as emotionally intense as this work?” As soon as I returned to New York I called [Shirin] and asked her if she would consider having her performers step down from the film onto the stage, live. She said she would and she created Logic of the Birds (2001): an unforgettable jewel of live performance integrated with a film triptych.
Seeing an artist’s work and feeling that there’s a deeply theatrical quality buried inside it that could be pulled out, made 3-D, and above all, transformed into a fully fledged experience is what drives the commissions. The past ten years have seen so many film installations in galleries, and I’ve always found the experience unsatisfying. I couldn’t figure out how to consummate it, to absorb it. Creating a live event and having the audience spend real time with the work while having the chance to be fully immersed inside the artist’s ideas and vision is what excites me.
LK: One of Performa’s most unique aspects is its encouragement of written criticism about performance, such as on the website’s blog, which written by many different authors. It is also unique in its emphasis on education, as seen in the Performa Not For Sale panels. These elements sustain an ongoing dialogue in the months between biennials. Why this is important to you?
RG: I’m an obsessed educator. I believe knowledge is pleasure and more knowledge is more pleasure. I believe that the more we understand about context and motives, the more we get out of a work. The purpose of art for me is to somehow experience life in a more heightened and intense way. I want people to feel things when they see things. The more people understand, the more they can change, or have their minds changed, or have an experience that really stays with them. That’s what live performance can do. You can look at a work of art in a gallery and have that experience as well, but I think that many more levels are reached when you’re actually physically involved and pushed into a situation.
LK: I remember at the Not For Sale panel on criticism, someone said that it is very important for a critic to be omnivorous, to know several histories at once. Unfortunately a lot of criticism today seems to just feed into a publicity machine. All one really has to do is describe a work, talk about the social problem it’s pointing to, and then you’re done. There’s very little real research.
RG: It’s upsetting because we need a different kind of information and we’re not getting it. If there’s no further conversation, it’s unfair to the artist. We’re creating a “writing live” blog—it’s really about the act of writing. Not the art of writing, but the act of writing. How do we grow a generation of writers who are comfortable writing across disciplines? We’re going to come up against this problem with Isaac Julian’s piece. The art critic is going to look at the film, and the dance critic will look at the dance.
Without sounding sentimental, I want to recreate something akin to what I got out of coming to New York in the 70s—a conversation about art that was not about the marketplace, not about how much things cost. Rather we discussed things that were not for sale, what on earth we thought we were up to, what we’re doing now, and how we can use imagination to change people’s feelings and ideas about culture.
