Laurie Anderson Uses Language to Look Through Time at the Wisconsin Union Theater

press photo courtesy of the Wisconsin Union Theater

Last time I wrote about Laurie Anderson, in 2008 (when she did a show she called “Homeland,” at Overture Hall), my piece ran in Isthmus, and my editor (who was much better at writing headlines than I am) titled it “Queen of Quirk.” “Quirk,” according to the dictionary, means “characterized by peculiar or unexpected traits.”  It’s true that Anderson is a master of the unexpected, but peculiar she’s not. In fact, what’s so unexpected about her, in today’s clown-ruled world, is that she rings so true, so human, so honest and sincere.  She’s also sensationally complex.  She’s an Artist, with a capital A.  Her powers of observation are uncommonly keen.  She’s a storyteller. A poet, a violinist, synth empress, composer, dog lover, world citizen. Chicago-born New Yorker. Buddhist. She gets her points across via many different media – electronic instrumentation, film, drawings, paintings. And words – always words. 

The Artist returns to Madison – to the Wisconsin Union Theater’s Shannon Hall – next Friday night, Feb. 9. Her performance is titled “Language of the Future.”  It’s a tag she’s used before, but it won’t be a show you’ve ever seen. Her titles are just frameworks for telling stories. On them she spins narratives from the ongoing rush of the universe. Threads from the past, plus riotous future colors, weave through the fabric.

She’s rushing through the universe right now, gathering material. 

“I’m on a retreat, doing a lot of writing,” she said from somewhere in California when I reached her by phone late last week.  “I have a lot of projects, an overwhelming number of projects.  For the last year, my reaction to what I see – it’s disaster – is to work as hard as I can, and I don’t know if that’s helping or not. I’m really not sure, but it means I’m doing too many things.  On the wall here I have notes for four essays to do by tomorrow. One’s about the Arctic, one’s a poetry project – it’s all unrelated stuff.”

CulturalOyster: But that’s what you do, weave unrelated stuff together...

Anderson:  Yes. I see things as moving pieces and see how they might relate, and a lot of them actually do pretty well. There are a lot of moving pieces in my life. I have a couple of things coming out that bring some of them together – a book called All the Things I Lost in the Flood [works from the archives of her four-decade career, annotated with her own recently written commentary] will be released on February 7, and a few days after that there’s a record I did with Kronos Quartet called Landfall, and there’s an album called Songs from the Bardo – it comes out later – that I did with a Tibetan singer, Tenzin Choegyal at the Rubin Museum [in Manhattan]. It’s texts from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which are so beautiful, done with a small ensemble.

CulturalOyster: Since this is a pre-show inverview for your Madison performance, I’m interested in your process, and what you might weave together for that.

Anderson:  “Language of the Future" is always changing.  I struggle with it a lot but it’s really fun to do because the way things are moving, it’s colossally crazy.  In a sense I’m trying to be a journalist – at least that’s part of the approach – so I need to update things really quickly.  Language is the future, and these days we haven’t the slightest idea of what’ll happen tomorrow.  The stress of that is really getting to me, I’m feeling the stress of living with it. I try not to get my sense of identity from my government but it kinda happens, and there’s a fair amount of that in “Language of the Future,” with stories and images about identity and national identity.  You can imagine, I rewrite every half-hour.

CulturalOyster: Some of your stories, like some of your titles, reappear in your works in different contexts — I remember you talking about taking your beloved rat terrier, Lolabelle, to California after 9/11 in “End of the Moon,” which you did here (at the Wisconsin Union Theater) in 2004, and that story appears again much later in your 2015 film Heart of a Dog.  Speaking of dogs and language and the future – I’ve had terriers all my life, and they actually communicate much better than most people, but – you’ve been kind of clairvoyant before, so in future, given how much new dog science is being done all the time now, will we be able to hold long, clear conversations with them about profound subjects?

Anderson:  I think we can do that now. Their words don’t sound like our vocabularies but their emotional range is huge – they don’t say “that is delicious,” or “hilarious,” or “sad,” but they have all of that.  As people get less skilled emotionally it’s more important than ever to spend time with animals.  Last weekend a friend of mine put her horse that she had for ten years out to pasture, he went lame.  He’d been ridden every day and had lots of horses and people and carrots in his life every day and he went to pasture with only minimal shelter from the weather, which the other horses wouldn’t let him into most of the time anyway, and no contact and no riding.  And we came to visit him and he was like “Oh, finally, you’re here! This is all a big mistake, get me outta here, let’s go home!” – and when we left him there my heart was completely broken.  I was horrified.  Sometimes when you don’t have language the emotional force of abandonment is so much stronger.  People aren’t as clear.  It’s not fair to say this, but you can leave your mom in a nursing home and she may be conflicted about the home, or have Alzheimers, and what’s going on with her can be opaque, but the signal from that horse about being abandoned was really clear. 

What you ask about animals and communication is really important.  I have to say in this last year I feel there’s a lot less civility.  There was a guy in a bike lane in New York who jumped out of the lane at high speed just to ram into me. The level of hostility is unbelievable.

My favorite sign from the women’s marches last weekend was “I hope you’ve noticed the lack of nazis on our march.” 

CulturalOyster: Going back to your storytelling technique, where I was asking about your frameworks – their boundaries are permeable, since stories like the one about Lolabelle in California cross from one to another. How porous is the line between memory and fiction?  

Anderson:  I think its really true that we’ve forgotten more things about life than the things we remember. The way our brains work, they match patterns and fill in the sensed information.  So I notice that and try to work with it as an idea. We’re often not that aware of what we’re seeing in front of us, but present experience is built on past experience – you use it to predict what’s going to happen so you can protect yourself.

On the subject of experience and the brain I have to mention David Eagleman’s book The Brain, in which he writes about how mental processing and story construction work.  I find it fascinating, but I don’t understand it at all. But in terms if frameworks, telling a story – like the dog story – in a film you tell it differently than in other media. There’ a picture so you don’t have to say what things look like – you can see the beauty of what’s going on.  And you don’t have to tell about time, or if something is really frightening you don’t need to repeat that it’s frightening. 

So it’s fun to experiment with telling stories in different forms. I’ve been experimenting with virtual reality.  It’s completely wild.  I love programming sound for it, you can make an earworm that’s looping around your head and then move out of that space and destroy it – it’s thrilling, and you have a really interesting competition with the senses.  Your feet say you’re standing in a room but your eyes say “I’m standing on a cliff over a raging sea and I’m about to fall” – and your eyes win.  But for me, it’s not about creating a scene and putting you in it – the work I’m doing is its about flying and words, it’s very different from what you think of as virtual reality.

CulturalOyster: I just interviewed Moses Pendleton, you know, the artistic director of Momix – and he was saying he thinks people will immerse themselves in virtual reality in the future instead of going to the theater, so maybe theater has no future.

Anderson:  I don’t know what people will do with virtual reality in the future, but I do know that because of technology people are becoming more introverted and less outgoing.  They just look at their devices nonstop and the level of pain involved in that is enormous.  It’s ridiculous that it’s called “social media.” 

A friend here was telling me about conversations he was having with people in Silicon Valley.  One of them said positive things about the opioid epidemic because people lose their jobs and they get angry and they’re out driving – so it’s better if they’re sedated instead. My friend says you can’t believe the entitlement of the people designing the tech stuff these days. 

I look at my own contributions and I’m horrified! 

The media keeps you trapped.  It really is true.  It’s not bad to use clichés sometimes and being trapped in the news cycles is the fate of most people I know.  That’s the great thing about the marches – they do get people out and then they’re wide awake.

CulturalOyster: I’m going to go back to your creative process one more time. Your stories are made up of threads that you weave together to make a whole that’s greater than its parts. You pull elements of your work from wakefulness, dreaming, and meditative state, and from music, painting, film, digital tech —  is this a big, unwieldy process that involves juggling divergent realities, or is it a harmonious process that takes the Buddhist idea of separation as mere illusion as starting point?  Or does the actual process fall somewhere in between those extremes?

Anderson: Nothing is harmonoius, not even Buddhism. People would prefer to think that meditation is about bliss, and my bottom line is I do believe we’re here to exist in bliss and not suffer, but along the way, in order to really experience what’s going on I think there’s a lot of suffering.  Writing isn’t easy, it’s torture.  I’ll never believe a writer who says “I sat down to write and it’s fun and I’m connecting all the threads.”

If I hear that I think “oh no you’re not, babe, you’re lyin’ to me.” 

To write you gotta take the white gloves off.  You’re ripping things – and yourself – apart, and trying to experience what you’re really feeling.  And that’s a mixture of things that includes failure and fear. I try to be open to those things and just notice what sticks out.  That’s the only way I can describe what interests me – it’s what sticks out. It has emotional punch if it’s good.  Sometimes ideas are nice and calm, but for me if it doesn’t have the emotion I have to look at it a little more or throw it away. We’re encouraged to ignore emotions more than we used to be, to try to sound clever and package ourselves as slick – but really you’re thinking “no, I’m not slick, I’m a complete mess, but I can’t represent myself on my Facebook page that way! Oh, wait...Facebook is the enemy...”

CulturalOyster: I don’t have a Facebook page.

Anderson:  I don’t have one either. With social media you’re getting robbed and they’re  selling you back your own information.  You’re getting stupider and poorer and lonelier and everything else.  But it’s in your pocket and it’s buzzing and you’ve gotta go “what is that?” and you think you better get it ‘cause it might be a nuclear alert like in Hawaii.  And then it’s too late, you tuned in and you can’t tune out.

CulturalOyster:  Last time I interviewed you – before “Homeland” – you said “I’m struck that so few artists, relatively speaking, are attracted to politics these days.  You can think about the color blue your whole career, but we have sharp tools and we’re suposed to be very observant.  I can’t help using those tools responsibly.”  

You’ve already told me that “Language of the Future” will be politically responsible.  Now I’m wondering about the other side of the coin.  In that 2008 interview you also said that whenever you write something new it starts with where you are at the time.  Your own life has changed a lot since 2008, and you lay a lot of that out in what’s probably your most personal story so far, Heart of a Dog.  In that movie you weave together internal and external strands — 9/11, Lolabelle, your mother, JFK, your husband Lou Reed – all of them gone now – to make a whole that’s much bigger than its parts.  Can we expect some “where you are now” threads in the upcoming performance?  

Anderson:  Yeah, it’s very true, that’s always part of what I do.  In the book I just wrote [All the Things I Lost in the Flood ] I could see that.  “I lived by the Hudson River” – a million things start that way.  I was able to go deeper into language in the book than I can in other ways.  I say language is a disease communicable by mouth – I’ve said that for decades – but wait, it’s not alive.  It’s right on the edge of life, but it works like a lifeform, it’s a set of rules and it can go viral in a second.  I began to really see what I could make of that, to move some of those ideas around – so the book is really a collection of essays about how language effects imagery.

CulturalOyster: Prosaic question — is this a solo performance?

Anderson:  Yes.

CulturalOyster: What sorts of instruments and technology are you using for this show?  Readers like to know.  

Anderson: With tech, I’m working on revisions to my rig – it’s a bunch of software and pedals and a viola – hopped up stuff.  I hope it works – sometimes I take it out too early and it doesn’t drive as well as it could.

CulturalOyster: I have no worries whatsoever about that!

 _______________________________________________ interview by SK

Momix to Make the Desert Bloom at Overture Hall

      Sonoran Gila monster in Opus Cactus    Momix press photo

Momix. Mo-dern dance, mix-ed with balletic pointework, gymnastics, sleights of lighting, and circus-y tricks. I call it dance-tainment, but Momix artistic director Moses Pendleton calls it visual theater.  Whatever label you want to put on it, it’s always fun and fabulously inventive. Momix brings Opus Cactus – a full-length spool of dreamlike, moving tableaux that played Overture Hall when it was brand-new, in 2004 – back to that venue on Tuesday, Feb. 6. 

Pendleton, as an English Lit student at Dartmouth in the early ‘70s, discovered abstract dance theater pioneers Alwin Nikolais and Murray Louis and found his calling as a choreographer. Pendleton co-founded Pilobolus Dance Theater in 1971 and left that company a decade later to start Momix.  There are still some similarities between these two venerable arts organizations, and in the works of both, Nikolais’ theater of magic and illusions and Louis’ sense of humor remain vivid after all these years. 

I’ve interviewed Pendleton a number of times.  In addition to Nikolais and Lewis he always cites jazz, and the Bread and Puppet Theater as his main inspirations. Last week, in preparation for the return of Opus Cactus, I asked him (on the phone) if he’s acquired any new gurus since we last spoke. 

“I’m glad you asked,” said Pendleton, who lives and works in rural Connecticut.  “I don’t think I ever give the morning sunlight and the bluejays eating my sunflowers enough credit.”

Opus Cactus leaves no doubt that nature plays a huge role in Pendleton’s creative process.  So I asked him another question about that. 

CulturalOyster: When Opus was new, you told me

“I go into the world of nature and make contact with other forms.  It’s an environmental, psychological approach.  To create this piece I spent six weeks doing quality research in the Sonoran desert, walking at sunset, seeing all those strange formations in changing light.  Then I brought the mystery of this scene without water into the dance studio to create with it.”

So here’s my question: Today, our natural resources are being sold to the highest bidders, and the Sonoran desert might soon be cut in two by a “big, beautiful, impenetrable wall.”  Do the changes in our social reality change the impact – the importance – of Opus Cactus?

Pendleton: I never heard anyone say that before, about the wall making the work more important.  I don’t really know the answer to that. The piece was done fifteen years ago and it still has resonance. People are seeing something positive and uplifting and strange that lets them escape their own realities for an hour and a half.

But the natural resources of your own imagination and the freedom to think freely are definitely in trouble.  We need to nurture those things.  It’s a tricky world as to what’s fake and what’s true.  Since I deal with fantasy and fiction I just worry about being true to my own nature.  The world is filled with negative news – that’s what’s fit to be print.  For me, I try to escape a lot of it, though. I read five newspapers a day to keep up with what’s going on, but then I want to hide from it.  Whatever we come up with [in Momix’s creative process] is more on the positive and hopeful side. That doesn’t mean I don’t have black thoughts, but I don’t revel in them or try to put them out in what I create.

CulturalOyster: You’ve done new work since Opus Cactus – what made you decide to revive that particular piece? 

Pendleton: Alchemy, which I did in 2012, is my latest and favorite, but it never got on the full US circuit – it’s too bad that one never made it to Madison.  But there was a lot of popular request for Opus Cactus, and we did it again a couple of years ago – our agent in New York likes it and gave it a twirl.  We found enough sponsors to tour it again, and it’s like a new generation is seeing it for the first time. 

CulturalOyster: The company must have turned over quite a bit since 2004, when I first saw Opus. I know your dancers have a some input into your works, in that you ask them to interpret your ideas rather than giving them pre-set choreography. How does company turnover change the work?

Pendleton: When you build on new people do you invest in their natural abilities?  That’s what I do. I have a series of improvs that get people to play with the theme and you start sensing what’s inside of them and you make the sessions into serious play, videotaping every day and finding new material that way.

People bring different abilities to the table. In one scene a woman comes out of a cactus.  Once she was on pointe – that is, that dancer’s interpretation was balletic. The current girl is very good, but she does it differently.  The process goes on and on – now we have a young dancer, eighteen years old, with wonderful classical technique.  She’s very good on pointe, and she’s learning Opus for the first time.  I’m looking forward to seeing how she interprets the pieces.  It [the woman emerging from the cactus] is a very challenging solo but I think it would improve the piece if she can handle it.

Opus has changed in a lot of ways.  The structure is the same as in 2004.  But when choreographers get too close to their work they can’t make necessary changes.  When you revive a work, you have the opportunity to come back to it with fresh eyes.  You have a chance to say “that was good, but let’s see if we can’t make it better.”  It becomes an old piece interpreted in new way.  By watching it and teaching it after you’ve been away from it you learn more about it. The process revives the memory and then you change the memory.   

CulturalOyster: What’s next for Momix, after the Opus Cactus tour?

Pendleton: This year I have a lot of pressure to do a new show. We’re hoping to premiere it about a year from now, which means I have to get to work in March. There’s a lot of interest in doing our own interpretation of Alice in Wonderland, using that known story as a red line. If we do something like that and we want to make a caterpillar, is it made of four people?  How physical do you want to make the imagery?  It’s not just one human body, but collectified bodies. The question is how to use the body to see the non-body – to get forms that aren’t just human but also non-human though having life force (or not).

I’m doing a lot of photography. I’m trying to see how the new piece might start with photographs – is there a way to mix that interest into the fabric of a new work?  With Balanchine, people would say what’s your next piece and he’d say I don’t know, I haven’t chosen the music yet. For me right now it’s sit by the fire every night with coffee and candlelight and listen to four or five hours of music. There was an exhibit at the Whitney not long ago about synesthesia – paintings made through music, the way people can sometimes hear colors or taste sounds. Maybe using photographs with a score for whatever we do next will turn out be something like synesthesia.

               

                                        _____________________________________  interview by SK

                                                                                                  

SHE comes to the Bartell

Kaleigh Schock and Damien Johnson rehearse
"Mingus Dances" in the studio  © SKepecs 2018

by Susan Kepecs

The headlines, on any given day, reveal an unprecedented wave of women standing up to male entitlement. The uprising you see on TV is centered on politics and pop entertainment.  In the more rareified world of ballet, the making-art part – choreography – has been (mostly) the province of men. Marius Petipa. Michel Fokine. Anthony Tudor. George Balanchine.  Jerome Robbins.  Alonzo King. Justin Peck. Alexei Ratmansky. Christopher Wheeldon. And that’s just a few. Two years ago, playing off this fact, The New York Times ran an article called “Breaking the Glass Slipper: Where are the Female Choreographers?" This is partly hyperbole, since women do choreograph ballets[1] and have throughout history, but still, change is in the air.  New York City Ballet is showing works by several emerging female choreographers this season.  Dallas’s Avant Chamber Ballet, the home company for Madison Ballet alum Madelyn Boyce and current Madison Ballet soloist Shea Johnson, has run a Women’s Choeography Project for the last three years.  And Madison Ballet spotlights women choreographers in its second repertory show of the 2017-18 season, She, Feb. 2-3 at the Bartell.

“It’s a show I’ve wanted to do for years,” says artistic director W. Earle Smith.  “I’m really excited about it.  This show will go down as one I’ll be forever glad that I did.  I think it’s an important show; we need to support women choreographers and give them opportunities to show their work.  I’ve thoroughly enjoyed watching the show develop – these women are very diverse, and each brings a different voice to her work.  The result is really compelling.” 

Former Madison Ballet board president Betty Custer, who’s also chair of the Overture Foundation board and a community leader in many other ways, introduces the performance.  “She’s going to speak to why it’s important to support women in leadership roles in the performing arts,” Smith says.  “There’s no better person to do this.  Her introduction is an important aspect of the show.”

On the bill are works by four female dancemakers working today. One is Nikki Hefko, whose performance career spans classical, neoclassical, and contemporary repertory with Dance Theatre of Harlem, with which she danced for for a number of years, and Madison Ballet, during the company’s first few professional seasons (she was Madison Ballet’s Peter Pan in 2008).  Hefko is now the artistic director of the New Orleans School of Ballet and also of her own company, Nikki Hefko & Dancers.

            Also contributing a piece to the She program is Chicago / New York choreographer Jacqueline Stewart, who frequently sets her quirky, quasi-balletic contemporary works on Madison Ballet.

            New to the company is Katherine Kramer, whose background is tap – she studied with ace hoofers Brenda Bufalino and “heelology” virtuoso Ralph Brown. This is the first time she’s set her work on a professional ballet company.

Windy City choreographer Stephanie Martínez, who danced with River North Dance Chicago and the now-defunct but once wonderful company Luna Negra, sets one of her works on Madison Ballet for the first time.  “Non è Normale” originally was commissioned by Joffrey Ballet Chicago in 2015. 

            Finally, for historical context, there’s Bronislava Nijinska’s Stravinsky-scored, peasant wedding-themed Les Noces[2].  The work was created for the Paris-based, avant-garde, early twentieth century Ballets Russes (for which Balanchine also choreographed in the 1920s), and it premiered in that city in 1923.  But Nijinska had only left Kiev two years earlier, and Les Noces – like her brother Nijinsky’s Rite of Spring, which premiered a decade earlier (and caused a riot with its startling modernism) – reflects the anticapitalist, anti-patriarchy exuberance of Bolshevik art.

“The Stravinsky / Balanchine relationship makes this piece a natural for us,” Smith says. He’s restaged Nijinska’s work for this program.   

I watched an early runthrough of the program last week; the dances weren’t done in the order in which they appear on the playbill, but this is how I saw them.  Martínez’ “Non è Normale” is contemporary but balletic. Its timing is stretchy and varied, its flow gratifyingly constant. It’s mostly set to a contemporary Italian classical score, but a playful jitterbug to the title track danced by Madison Ballet’s best jitterbuggers, Kelanie Murphy and Jackson Warring, breaks the piece in the middle and adds unexpected angles that deepen the experience of watching the work unfold.

Kramer’s contribution, “Bow” (the title refers to boats, not reverence), is modern dance, with lots of undulations.  It counterbalances the rest of the show – there’s not much here that’s balletic, though the women are on pointe. 

Stewart’s piece, “Gait N Heel,” featuring three women on pointe and five in (very) high heels, plus three men, is likely to provoke feminist controversy. I’ll reserve judgement till I see it onstage, but Smith loves it. “I have to tell you,” he says, “it’s one of her best pieces. The dynamics between the women on pointe and the others in heels is very true to form in terms of her style and voice.”

Hefko’s two-movement “Mingus Dances” is neoclassical bebop – how great is that?  It starts with a stunning adagio pas by Kaleigh Schock and Damien Johnson, powerful dancers making their debut as Madison Ballet soloists in this piece. The pas is followed by a fast ensemble foxtrot that’s loaded with Harlem style.

            For Les Noces, which is set on the whole company and which I saw last, only the fourth movement (the wedding feast) had been sketched out. The counts are astounding. “Two phrases of six, then six fives and four sixes,” Smith said, clapping out these shifts. There are lots of small jumps and stomps in sixth position that feel utterly tribal, an echo from Rite of Spring.

“One two three, one two three, one two three four five six seven eight nine,” Smith counted, as the group marched forward, then back, then to the side.  It was hard, the dancers didn’t know it yet, and everyone was laughing. “We’ve got plenty of time,” Smith said through his own giggles, kicking the hilarity up a few notches. 

Les Noces isn’t the program finale, but it should be. By the time we see it onstage it’ll probably be wonderful. 

---

[1] Women were (and still are) pioneers in the modern dance movement (think Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, Ruth St. Denis, just for starters), but they’ve have also made their mark in ballet choreography. Agrippina Vaganova, best known for standardizing Petipa’s ballet vocabulary, created her own versions of Swan Lake and Esmeralda for the Kirov in the 1930s.  Between the 1920s and the 1940s, Bronislava Nijinska, sister of Vaslav Nijinsky, choreographed some 80 ballets for Ballets Russes, Paris Opera Ballet, the Polish Ballet, and other companies. American dancemaker Twyla Tharp, whose choreographic career began in the realm of 1960s postmodernism but runs the gamut, has created ballets for ABT, NYCB, Paris Opera Ballet, the Royal Ballet and the Joffrey, among other companies.  Jessica Lang set her contemporary ballets on companies across the world for two decades before starting her own outfit in 2014; Jessica Lang Dance performs at the Wisconsin Union Theater in March. But – this is the point – by comparison to the number of male choreographers working in the ballet idiom, the number of women creating ballets is miniscule. 

[2] Les noces is French for “the wedding,” or “the nuptuals.”