Filmmaker and installation artist Catherine Sullivan and choreographer Meg Stuart in a relevant conversation for anyone interested in the performing arts. Here they speak of mining the history of the avant-garde tradition, crossovers, contamination, and emotional overflow in ensemble-based work.

The following text is a web exclusive SNEAK PREVIEW of the full-length conversation that will appear in BOMB 104, Summer 2008.

 

 

Catherine Sullivan, still from Big Hunt, 2002, 5-channel video projection transferred from 16 mm film (black & white, no sound). Total running time: 22 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures.

Catherine Sullivan What you’ve been able to do is just remarkable in its insistence—you have the talent to make it happen and know the way in which you need to work to produce a certain effect. Insistence! They should teach that in school. Does your situation reflect a deficit within our own country? Your work, in some sense, embodies the surpluses of time, space, and support necessary to make it, and these surpluses are more readily available here, outside the U.S.

Meg Stuart It was actually such relief to be part of the Flying Circus Project and to go to Asia alone, without an entourage. It’s a project set up to bring together several artists, without the need to create something—but that’s not typical. There is a certain amount of pressure that comes with the work and support I have. It’s important for me to make solo work, create improvisation events, and collaborate with other artists, just to disrupt the process. The artistic scenes in Berlin and Brussels are very political, active, and engaged. This is very inspiring. Unfortunately there aren’t really many places in the U.S. that are interested to produce work that’s pushing things forward.

 

Catherine Sullivan, Triangle of Need, 2007, installation view, Walker Art Center. All images of Triangle of Need courtesy of the artist, the Walker Art Center and Metro Pictures.

CS In a positive sense, you’re a celebrity. You can talk about the work on one level, but there’s this other level of watching someone insist upon a way of making work: this is what I need to survive creatively. Knowing it’s an American choreographer who is navigating this East German theater context with such success is really exciting. You’re the first female director at Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz in Berlin, and that’s huge. You have created this amazing company that’s very well fortified.

One of the reasons I wanted to do this interview with you is that, dance people and art people need to talk more. (laughter) In the early 20th century, visual artists, dance and theater people worked together and shared ideas more frequently. Now it’s hard to develop those kinds of collaborations. I think it’s something about the nature of performance itself that raises the stakes so high.

MS Do you feel like you’re pulling dance and theater into the visual art context because there is no possibility for them to coexist in a theatrical setting?

 

Meg Stuart, ALIBI, 2001. Photo: Chris Van der Burght.

CS I always liked the idea that the work would be situated amongst a variety of forms. I came to making art as an actor. I studied theater, which is inherently cross-disciplinary. It’s a big mess, though, because I work in the theatre, and the notion of “theatricality” in some spheres of the art world is fairly flat-footed. The reference is either to a negative heightening of the viewer’s self-awareness, or to something that is overtly presentational or artificial. “Painterly” lost its currency as a critically viable term a long time ago, and I am an advocate for retiring “theatrical” for the same reasons.

MS There’s an interest now in dance actions or in this idea of the physical past realized from the body, imagined…and in putting them into other kinds of spaces beyond the theatrical space. There’s always been this need for one art form to penetrate the other. However, when I collaborate with someone, it’s not to connect—it’s a rupture; I’m trying to disrupt flow in movement. I’m also disrupting my process and that keeps it vital. I had to write a text for a dance platform some years ago and the first sentence was: “Words I’m not afraid of when I speak about dance: narrator, excess, emotions.” I could even throw in pathos and sentimentality now. I guess I try to poke and respond to the consensus of choreographers working in my field.

In what way are you affected by your peers? Your work is not just this overload of filming found images, known or recomposed. I observe flickering emotional states that are caught. I sense these performers are looking back at me, which requires a very direct response. It’s quite jarring. It relates to my interest in social choreographies. I like to track the movement of ideas. How people place themselves geographically in the world. Something is always moving—for me it’s not only the live body. The word choreography has ceased to be a bad word. (laughter)

 

Catherine Sullivan, The Chittendens, 2005, installation view, Metro Pictures. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures.

CS Why would you be afraid of those words to begin with? Were you responding to a particular climate? I find these ideological struggles very interesting, especially when they become about purification. One has to wonder why, at this moment in time when the avant-garde itself has generated its own conventions, its own traditions, would we still be confronted with perspectives that position emotion, excess, and narrative against objectivity, reduction, and non-narrative? This made sense 40 years ago, but I find it preposterous that we would return again to an Oedipal formation. We’ve seen works made in a number of modalities by now. For me, it’s a question of aesthetic politics and what they are symptomatic of. What could potentially be violated by excess, what’s at stake to begin with? I look at contrasting paradigms as symptomatic and I often collaborate with people whom with I have something and nothing in common.

MS I hate assumptions in choreographic practice. Around 2000 there was a schism among choreographers, in Europe anyway, of those performing ideas and of others working with dance and theater concerns. With this conceptual approach there seemed to be an assumption that to articulate one’s ideas, one had to adopt a neutral pedestrian behavior, reject theatricality, and even resist movement all together. I completely support the ongoing re-examination of the performative contract of dance-making, but at a certain moment I felt like screaming. A lot has happened since the ’60s and Judson Church. It must be possible to acknowledge this research. What about bodies in crisis? Bodies that are not in control? What about complex physical and emotional states? Is it possible to give these irrational bodies a platform to address contemporary issues while embracing a theatrical context? I created ALIBI (2001) with these questions in mind. Dance for me is not analytical or rational, and it doesn’t need to be, but that doesn’t mean it is simply intuitive or free flowing either.

Dance is a messy business because our bodies and movement are influenced and sometimes contaminated, even by the quality of our daily life, emotions, memories, and experiences. I often describe the body as a container that receives and transmits signals, energy, and identities. Movement is one way of filtering and processing the accumulated input. There now seems to be a shift in the field, a renewed interest in physicality, movement research, dance vocabulary, and its origins. I find this exciting.

 

L: Catherine Sullivan. R: Meg Stuart. Photo: Tina Ruisinger.

 

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