35 minute read
Beyond Narrative
by SDC Journal
ANNIE-B PARSON in conversation with SAM PINKLETON
SDC Foundation's podcast series, Choreographers in Conversation, invites choreographers to interview other choreographers whose work excites them as a way to learn more about their craft and preserve the stories of these fascinating artists in the industry. In October 2022, Sam Pinkleton spoke with Annie-B Parson about process, adding dimensionality to narrative, and the choreographic mind. Their wide-ranging conversation has been lightly edited for print; the podcast—along with insightful, in-depth interviews and panel discussions about the working processes and experiences of directors and choreographers over the past four decades—is available on the SDCF website.
SAM PINKLETON | I was hoping that we could talk about process. Can you talk about what you’re in rehearsal for right now?
ANNIE-B PARSON | I’m really just prepping right now for rehearsal. I’m not in the space yet. Both of the projects I’m working on are large-scale operas, which is pretty new for me. There are, I think, over 70 people in each one—one is Candide and the other one is The Hours. I’m really thrilled to be in the opera world. So far, both of the operas are very open to experimentation with the body in space, and both of them are ‘dance heavy,’ meaning in one of them, the dancers never leave the stage. They do a dance from the beginning to the end for two hours.
SAM | Are you working with people who identify as dancers?
ANNIE-B | In both cases I hired a cast of, I think, 13 dancers for each opera. I hired the most virtuosic dancers I could find. The Hours is all women, female-identified or female-presenting dancers. I was looking for dancers that were pretty butch I find that to be ultimately more beautiful, more feminine, plus it’s about three women, one of which is the great feminist Virginia Woolf.
SAM | I’ve done a few large-scale operas. On the first one, I felt like I had fallen out of a spaceship onto the surface of Mars and that my job was keeping people from running into each other. I had three hours to keep people from running into each other. You said this is new for you and I’m curious what feels different about it, beyond just perhaps the scale or the palette that you have to work with?
ANNIE-B | Well, in one sense, nothing is ever different, because everything is based in composition, everything is energetic, kinetic. Everything is about rotation and locomotion and duration and the basic elements of choreography. Whether you are working with a pop band or the symphony orchestra, a marching band or a ballerina, or a chorus in the opera, you’re still dealing with compositional elements. What is different in each one is the emphasis on story; I’m narratively challenged. The narrative to me seems minor compared to the light and the space and the sound and relationalities.
What seems new is the emphasis on this little part of the body that is between your chin and your clavicles, which is your throat! It seems like there’s this hot circle drawn around this voice box, around the throat. The emphasis on the voice is pretty extraordinary. I do think it already has affected the way that I’m generating material and I can’t really describe it. Maybe we can talk about it after I’m all done.
I’m happy you asked that question because I’m realizing that I’m so affected, even on terrible recordings, by what these people are doing with this tiny part of their body. The other thing about opera that I always noticed, even though I hadn’t seen that much, is the imagination in opera is so far out. I once saw Pavarotti, and he was quite large at the time, and quite old, play a very young prince.
SAM | Nobody cares.
ANNIE-B | They don’t! When he died, it took him like 10 minutes to get to the ground, and nobody was bothered that it wasn’t realistic! Everything is very unreal, and I love that. In a sense, I feel like I’m born to it. So we’ll see, we’ll see.
SAM | Folks ask me, “How did you start doing opera?” And the answer was, “A director asked me.” My experience was, I think, probably a less confident version of your experience. The way you do opera is you start doing opera. But I hope that more people who would think they would never show up in an opera room develop a curiosity for that form, because it can be bonkers.
ANNIE-B | I’ve been reading about [director] Yuval Sharon’s work in Detroit. That stuff is so large scale, it’s so everything, there is no element that is not addressed. And now he is redefining the use of the proscenium in opera. I think it might be the future.
SAM | Can I go back to a question of narrative? When you said that about the story, my eyes turned into giant heart emojis. I’m directing a play right now, and I love the play. I love being in the room, and part of why I love being in the room is because it is a room that can hold abstraction and image.
ANNIE-B | What play is it?
SAM | You Will Get Sick. It’s a play by an amazing, amazing, amazing writer called Noah Diaz, who just graduated from Yale; it’s a weird little five-person play, and people get attacked by birds and somebody turns into a scarecrow. I’m in this room wondering about why we always must make only one story for audiences. I’ve always felt like human beings look at images and put them together no matter what; and, actually, I don’t feel that I can control that. I don’t want to control that for them.
I have seen your work in a narrative context, and it has elevated the whole event to something that to me is more emotional. I’m curious how as a collaborator you encounter something that does have a story built into it, if the director cares about story, of course.
ANNIE-B | I really don’t give it more attention than any other element—or I enter it through a different door.
SAM | Awesome.
ANNIE-B | I just don’t know how. If the director is asking me to make a dance about a narrative moment, for instance, I might ask, is it about conflict? Then that’s what I’m working on. What is conflict about, from a kinesthetic perspective? It’s about weight, in a sense. Maybe if I give my weight to you, then that sharing of weight, that trust, gets interrupted or dislodged. There are ways kinesthetically and through all the compositional elements of motion to show that. That’s not exactly story, but it might help add dimensionality to the story. I don’t know how to do story ballet. I don’t like story ballet, and I think it’s a bit silly and odd.
SAM | Do you always distill it down to a word or two? Or would you go to the director and be like, “Hey Alex Timbers, what’s this actually about to you?”
ANNIE-B | I guess I would just vibe something.
SAM | Then when you’re on your own with your people, you might say, we’re making a thing about conflict, as opposed to, we’re making a thing about Bob who went to the store or whatever.
ANNIE-B | Well, maybe I would even be like, we’re devising a dance about an interruption of sharing our weight. I’m not very conceptual.
SAM | You’re working with kinesthetic words from that time.
ANNIE-B | Always.
SAM | Thrilling.
ANNIE-B | Pretty much always.
SAM | Even if we’re doing Arthur Miller.
ANNIE-B | Definitely.
SAM | I feel totally liberated by that, but I don’t always trust it. I think part of that is—and I really want to know what you think about this—part of this is because I have spent a lot of time in this weird job called “movement director.” I love that it’s a job because it gives choreographers work. But I have many, many, many times been in theatre rooms, capital T theatre rooms, where we are doing a capital P play, and we are telling a capital S story. My job is sometimes to keep people from running into each other and sometimes to make the couch come on in an elegant way and sometimes to tell somebody what their shoulder might do if they were much older, but it’s often bound in a kind of narrative realism that actually, I will confess, doesn’t interest me. I’m not excited about it. The real secret is, and I feel weird saying this out loud because I’ve done a lot of it as my job, I don’t enjoy it at all. I’ve been a part of some amazing shows in that role, and I feel very grateful to have witnessed process in that way because I’ve learned so much, but the joy of it has actually been as a collaborator-observer and not as a choreographer.
ANNIE-B | Well, the one is very generative and the other one is not.
SAM | I’m a problem solver. I’m the urgent care, and that’s fine. It’s better to have a choreographer in the room than not, but when I allow myself to think the way that you think— which is, I’m sorry to simplify what you just said, I’m actually not going to worry about narrative, I’m going to worry about composition—my work is always better. It’s also always more fun, because I sometimes feel like I’m pretending to be someone who cares about these important theatre things in these important theatre rooms, and the fact is I don’t. I’m excited to hear this from you because I think of you as a theatremaker.
ANNIE-B | Yes, definitely.
SAM | A theatremaker who I and many others really look up to. I think it’s very hard to trust myself to be like, I actually don’t care about that. And guess what? The show’s not going to suffer. I’m just going to go through the back door rather than the front door or the side door or whatever.
ANNIE-B | I really believe that it adds a dimensionality to the narrative. The swagger of the story is so overrated. Also, our training is the opposite—of course we feel this way. You don’t go to dance class six times a week for 20 years and walk out wondering, how can I tell a story?
SAM | When you say your “training”—can you tell me what you mean by that?
ANNIE-B | My training was dance class, modern dance, and ballet for at least 20 years—6 times a week. If you didn’t go Saturday to ballet, oh my God. The only thing that you could do was just show up, and that showing up was so rigorous. Do downtown dancers still do this? A lot of class was moving through space, as opposed to yoga, and we always called it class! Which I think is really sweet in a certain sense. It’s not a class or classes, it’s just “class.”
SAM | Yes. Class.
ANNIE-B | I also studied choreography in high school and in college. I went to school as a painting major, as a visual arts major. My advisor was [contemporary American painter] Barkley Hendricks, which is insane! I left the art department because I was more comfortable in the dance department. I don’t know, it was just kind of a fluke.
SAM | Were there dance or choreography teachers who you’ve carried with you?
ANNIE-B | Bessie Schönberg, very much. She was extraordinary. When I had her, she was like 90. Robert Ellis Dunn, who was also extremely old when I had him. He was the pianist for John Cage and was the teacher at the Judson Church. When I had him, he was so old, and he was a smoker, and he would stand outside the classroom, smoking, with his head poked in the door. Even just to get that sliver of him was a huge, so valuable—what a genius. I learned so much from him, and it was all about the basic ideas of postmodernism. Nobody ever talked about content.
SAM | I want choreography students to know that it doesn’t always have to be carrying a couch across the stage. Can you just say why we should all care about Bessie Schönberg?
ANNIE-B | Okay. First, I think we should make a piece where we just carry a couch across the stage.
SAM | For 45 minutes.
ANNIE-B | That’d be incredible. Please!
SAM | Yes, actually.
ANNIE-B | Bessie Schönberg was in the [Martha] Graham Company. She came from Germany and taught at Dance Theatre Workshop, and you really didn’t study with her until you had done a number of pieces. She was not a dancer; she was a choreography teacher—so it felt very different. It was very European.
You would bring a piece in and she would respond to it. And the way the class was set up was quite difficult, because you had to have dancers and there was no money for them. You had to figure that out. How were you going to pay the dancers, get them in rehearsal, and bring enough material in? And the piece wouldn’t be finished, because she didn’t want you to be finished. She wanted you to be in the middle of it. So you would bring something in— isn’t this cool? And then she, every week, would watch it progress and respond. The only thing you were not allowed to do was talk about your work.
SAM | Cool.
ANNIE-B | She said that if you talk in response [to something she said], you have just released the pressure that you need to make that thing. “Just hold that in, whatever that thing is that I did not see, go choreograph it, so I can see it.” She was terrifying and brilliant. And she would just say a few sentences. There were no assignments in her class; that was more [the style of] Robert Ellis Dunn. He would give us an assignment that looked a lot like an algorithm or a math problem. With Bessie, she would just respond. It was so intense—I can’t even describe it. I remember one time I was working on this piece to Stravinsky, to “Les Noces.” I had this idea I was going to choreograph all the rhythms in “Les Noces.” So tortuous. After she looked at it for a few weeks, she said, “You’re going to be compared to all the greats. You’re going to live in the shadow of all the great choreographers who have tried to face Stravinsky and particularly ‘Les Noces,’ and I’m afraid for you that you are going to not survive that. So I suggest that you throw the music away.” I took her advice and I threw the music away. And then I got a commission from ADF to work with a contemporary composer. I kept all the Stravinsky rhythms in, maintaining the complexity and the darkness, but we danced it to new music.
SAM | Just placed it in other music.
ANNIE-B | Right, I put this other piece of music on top. Since then, I’ve done that many times; it’s a very interesting process. But it really was Bessie, she had this way of just cutting through everything. After each showing she would say, “You can dismiss the dancers now.” Because she didn’t think the dancers should hear her talking about the dance!
SAM | Liz Swados, did you ever know Liz?
ANNIE-B | A little bit.
SAM | Liz was one of a few really major forces for me who basically pushed my face into the ground and was like, “You can be better than this.” Her class was set up the same way. We would just go up to 890 Broadway with stuff that we made, and she’d sit there in her giant jean jacket with her giant keys and just talk about it. We couldn’t defend it or explain, because she would be like, “Why is there an author’s note? If it needs an author’s note, then the work isn’t done.”
ANNIE-B | Right. Right. Right.
SAM | It shook me into being a maker of things. It was terrifying.
ANNIE-B | It sounds very similar.
SAM | Very similar to how you describe it. You just kind of shook something off that I want to go back to, which is that you made a piece to one piece of music and then you took that choreography and placed it on another piece of music, and I’m sure it revealed dimensions that you never knew were there.
ANNIE-B | Yes. Magic.
SAM | I feel like one of the many terrorisms of process, especially as a theatre choreographer, whatever that means, is having to come into a room with 100% originality from zero. To completely reinvent both the job of the choreographer and the notion of choreography. In fact, many of my teachers, many of my favorite pieces, have an element of recycling or remixing or a thread from another piece. I’m curious, especially in some of your theatre work, how that has applied, or if it has.
ANNIE-B | Well, first, I’m interested that you are saying that that expectation is there for you to be original.
SAM | Oh, it could just be my insecurity.
ANNIE-B | Because I feel with much theatre, choreographically, there doesn’t seem to be any attempt to find new ideas. Most often the dances seem to be just a rehash and a trope of something I have seen.
SAM | I think the extreme pressure to be original leads to a total lack of originality, because we’re working from fear as opposed to possibility.
ANNIE-B | The vocabularies that people use are so limited on the stage. Particularly the reliance on the front body, and on unison…
SAM | If they face upstage, no one can see them talking. So therefore, that’s off limits.
ANNIE-B | I know. It’s so limited.
SAM | Bananas, right? Seventy-five percent of the body is not allowed just from the beginning, it’s just off limits for the duration of the performance.
ANNIE-B | For most directors but not all directors. But I think I have this sense, or belief, that is almost like religion; we’re not making anything new. That there is no such thing as originality. It’s all in a sense, repair, response, reaction, redemption.
SAM | There’s no such thing as originality is the billboard that I would like to put in Times Square. But sorry, I interrupted you.
"Choreography is the aesthetic organization of the body in space. So that could include steps, but not necessarily." —Annie-B Parson
ANNIE-B | I think there’s so much going on that has to do with being responsive and in a sense, reactive when you’re making things. Sometimes just noticing and materializing, what’s going on in this room. I had a really interesting reckoning here at SDC when, I don’t know if you’re aware of it or not, but there was a whole mishegas about cast members co-opting the identity of “choreographer.” At issue was if you made some steps, you assume authorship of the choreography. But that’s not what choreography is.
SAM | Making steps?
ANNIE-B | Making steps. That’s not what choreography is in my opinion. That is a generative collaborator.
SAM | Okay. So what’s choreography?
ANNIE-B | Choreography is the aesthetic organization of the body in space. So that could include steps, but not necessarily.
SAM | Okay, so what’s a choreographer?
ANNIE-B | A choreographer is somebody that works with ideas of placing the body in space and investigating what the body can do and express in space and time. And sometimes that has to do with stillness—that’s the choreography as well. And sometimes there are no steps.
SAM | And how does one become a choreographer?
ANNIE-B | I think by seeing.
SAM | That’s a good answer.
ANNIE-B | I think a dancer and a choreographer essentially are unrelated beings, just like there’s often little relationship between a musician and a composer, or an actor and a playwright. These tasks use quite different parts of the brain. Not that the same person couldn’t hold both gifts, but it’s rare. The choreographic mind—it’s a very unusual mind, don’t you think?
SAM | For sure. I’ve made a lot of things that have steps in them and making steps is by far the least interesting part of the process for me. Or I should say the notion of making steps in my living room that I will then go in and regurgitate to a group of bodies. I have a weird, gangly, scarecrow body, so I feel confused about making something in my living room and then being like, “Here is my blessing of this perfect choreography I made.” I just don’t understand that. But I feel like making steps is, again, in the best of processes for me, at least a tiny part of the concept.
ANNIE-B | Yes, steps can be a great generator for a larger idea, or they can be the central idea, or they can be unrelated. So if we’re talking about theatre, you are looking for the uber concept choreographically, of the tonality, the nature of this piece. That is what a choreographer does. You could work out some micro aspects first, and some of it could be the step-making. But overall, I feel like there needs to be some driving aesthetic of how the body is used to express this particular play or opera.
SAM | So you’re in prep right now for two operas. Maybe prep always looks the same for you, but what does prep look like right now?
ANNIE-B | I just listen to the music and dance in my living room.
SAM | Heaven.
ANNIE-B | Right. Sometimes it feels like you have a movement idea that has to do with steps, or sometimes you have a completely different idea that has nothing to do with steps. But I go song to song, and I say, “In this song, I feel like everyone should be very far apart and facing different directions and they’re like trees in a forest”—whatever your concept is. They don’t move through the whole song. And that’s the choreography.
SAM | And you write that on something and then you do the next song.
ANNIE-B | I make notes and drawings and go to the next song. Sometimes what I write is exactly what happens. “I Dance Like This,” one of the songs in American Utopia, is exactly what I wrote on the piece of paper. It took me two minutes to choreograph that, I knew exactly what it could be.
SAM | You came into rehearsal and said, this is where we’re at.
ANNIE-B | I asked David [Byrne] in rehearsal, “Could we stop for 16 counts in the middle of the song and have silence in the song?” He said, yes. So in that 16 counts, everybody dances the choreography that I made, and it’s perfect silence, and it always makes the audience laugh. I came up with that idea listening to the song once. Then there are the other songs that take me a year to figure out! I hammer away at them, and I go through different ideas and I’m never happy, and so it varies. So that would be with a song cycle, when I’m working with singers and/or musicians.
SAM | When you’re saying “song cycle” in this context, that also might mean the Lorde tour.
ANNIE-B | Yes. That was a wonderful experience. Have you seen it?
SAM | No, not yet.
ANNIE-B | I started that project by listening through her set list and dreaming about the visual world it could exist in. And then after that, the amazing associate, Lizzie DeMent, and I worked from there. We developed the material in my living room together.
SAM | So you always start alone.
ANNIE-B | I always start alone. It’s such a precious time! It’s that “fresh” thing—the newness that you only experience once, so I don’t want to hear the phone, the doorbell, my husband, nothing.
SAM | Oh, they’re out of the room.
ANNIE-B | They cannot—
SAM | It’s you and the music.
ANNIE-B | Yeah, because there’s only one chance of the fresh thing, right? There’s only one chance.
SAM | Is that an hour or is that a night?
ANNIE-B | Again, it depends. It can be days in this first phase, and after I have some sketches, Lizzie and I will go into the next phase, where she and I will work together on the ideas. If we’re working on something where the performers have no dance training, then when we get into rehearsal, we teach them the material rather than create it on the performers. Some dancers are trained to generate material—a very unusual group of people—and some do not have this training.
SAM | And different from dancers who have BFAs in dance and have taken dance all of their life. Or at least some of them.
ANNIE-B | Because those dancers, though they are great to work with too, have never studied choreography. So you can play around a little bit, but that is not their training. If you haven’t studied contact improv or choreography or any generative form in dance making, then you probably won’t be very comfortable playing hardball! Because when I’m working with dancers that have been trained like that, the metaphor would be a very high-level tennis match where I am hitting the ball so hard in the back corner, and they’re hitting it back to me so hard, and then I’m hitting it back, etc. To me, that makes the deepest, most textured material. My less interesting material can be when I just bring it in.
SAM | Same.
ANNIE-B | Because there’s no collaborative generation.
SAM | Strong same.
ANNIE-B | Right. Right.
SAM | I did a big musical several years ago and I was very ultimately proud of what I did. We made all of the choreography for a full-length musical in five days in a studio, because I had six dancers who spoke a generative language, different generative languages, but it’s the tennis match. It just felt like we would get to the end of the day, and we smelled terrible. We were like, we made five numbers, huge step! But it requires trust, and it requires shorthand, and it requires care and preparation. I find that that Double Dutch doesn’t always happen.
ANNIE-B | I’ve worked with two brilliant virtuosic ballet dancers. Their brilliance was in interpretation. The movement would be set— there was no tennis match—but the relationship between me and them and the material had to do with how they danced it, which was crazy, what they could do.
SAM | I find that I often default to assuming that everyone is going to want to be a collaborator or co-conspirator or creator. Then sometimes you get there and—
ANNIE-B | They’re like, no.
SAM | The person’s like, can you just tell me what to do with my fucking hands? How do you feel that out, especially if you’re working in theatre?
ANNIE-B | I think I kind of assume especially in musical theatre, they really don’t have that kind of training. When you don’t have training in something, you’re uncomfortable doing it. You might try because you’re open, but you really don’t know how to play that sonata on the piano because you never learned how to play the piano. You know what I mean?
SAM | It can feel like a bonus if they’re like, “Hey, I learned this stuff.” You feel like, “Oh, you actually want to make something.” You want to go like, “Great, great. Let’s get on that path.”
ANNIE-B | There are some musicians I’ve worked with that are very experimental with movement; I think songwriting is a craft that has some similarity. You can enter the door through that. But mostly I kind of assume they don’t want to.
SAM | You were just talking about the Lorde tour, and you were talking about an opera, and you were talking about American Utopia. Aside from what you shared about whether they’re people who identify as dancers or not, do you come into those rooms any differently depending on what the so-called form is?
ANNIE-B | I think so. I think I must. But the seeds of the material, no, I don’t think so.
SAM | Cool.
ANNIE-B | I think the material is, as I said, based on these compositional ideas in a sense, but it could be done in a more virtuosic way, or a more pedestrian way. To me, that’s all interesting. But do I personally walk in feeling different? Yes. I think certain people intimidate me, or I feel like they’re going to be scared when somebody says, here’s the choreographer and they are not dancers. So, I’m always starting by saying, “Please don’t be nervous. I’m not going to ask anything of you that you’re going to be uncomfortable with,” and I try to stick by that. But I do sense that they’re very nervous, particularly musicians. I have choreographed a lot for musicians, and they have a very different vibe about the body.
I had a fabulous conversation once with a musician, and I was giving him a note, and I was like, “I know you understand that you’re supposed to walk across the stage six steps and stop with your right foot in front, but I don’t want you to get all wiggly on the stop and feel the music. Really, I want you to be very still and simple when you get to that moment.” He just looks at me and he says, “All these years on stage as a musician, I just felt so free in my body. I could dance around and play my music. Now that I’m working with choreography, I don’t feel free.” And I said, “Choreography’s not free.” It just isn’t.
SAM | And can you please stand still at the time when I need you to.
ANNIE-B | Yes. When you improvise in music, you are always improvising in a key, or you have a certain framework; the structure is very limited, unless you’re a genius! I can hear that you’re in a certain framework—whatever the key is, whatever the tonality is, whatever the vibe of the song is, the dark versus light, all this stuff, you’re in there and you’re playing around in this very narrow space that’s not free. There are a lot of stipulations, gates, doors, limitations there to play within. I call these rubrics, and you understand those. I said to him, it’s the same in dance.
SAM | And you don’t question that. That’s your operating system.
ANNIE-B | It’s your operating system and you respect it, and your task is to understand how to be free within this beautiful structure.
SAM | I’m curious about audiences, and if when you’re making—whether it’s an opera, whether it’s American Utopia, whether it’s a show with Big Dance Theater—whether you’re thinking about the people who are going to come or how they figure in it all.
ANNIE-B | I think I’m making it for you. I’m making it for other people that do this, that I respect, and I’m hoping that you could look at it and get ideas and be stimulated. I think it’s a real waste of time to try to figure out who your audience is and how they’re going to digest the material. Also, for me, often the audience has problems with my work, not in American Utopia, but in Big Dance. They may find it strange, and they’re looking for the story, and all that stuff. So I try not to think about it too much.
SAM | Did anything change for you when you started seeing your work in front of arenas of people who were at a rock or pop concert? It’s a long road from Abrons Art Center to 9,000 screaming people.
ANNIE-B | Well, it’s sad; I really feel like the downtown dance form [is that you] work typically for two years to raise money, work for 18 months to create a piece, schlep all your props with little assistance, perform four nights for 99 people, and maybe get a review that is cursory and nowhere near as thoughtful as what you put into it. It’s a terrible model, and it works less and less for me, because I got spoiled. Because every single night in these big shows, thousands of people were seeing the work eight shows a week. And I like that.
SAM | I mean, that fills me with joy, but also, I want young choreographers and directors to see dance theatre and be excited by it. That’s so much more likely to happen, I think, in the context of a kid stumbling into American Utopia with a rush ticket than walking into Abrons.
ANNIE-B | Way more likely.
SAM | One of the things that was so moving to me about seeing American Utopia and Here Lies Love—and I anticipate will be moving to me when I see Lorde—is people who thought they were going to just be drinking and bouncing around are being forced to be confronted with big ideas and composition. And actually, my hope is that you see that and then you might end up at Abrons Art Center. But the reverse feels less likely.
ANNIE-B | Less likely. But we can remain hopeful!
"When you walk into the studio to make something, you don't know what the hell you're doing. That confusion...is really precious. You're always making it up. You never really know how to do it—and that is why your work may be new and good." —Annie-B Parson
SAM | American Utopia makes me feel like musical theatre, however we define that, might not be dead. I want so deeply to believe that strictness and protection of values and aesthetic and taste can be duplicated. American Utopia wasn’t just one little flash that happened.
I know that we should probably stop talking soon. But I know so many choreographers who, when I ask them about their teachers, you’re the first name that comes out of their mouths. I’m curious how teaching falls into your practice and forms what you do.
ANNIE-B | This is going to sound very contrary, but early on I decided that I would never teach what I do, because when you walk into the studio to make something, you don’t know what the hell you’re doing. That confusion— some people romanticize it into mystery, I would just call it a kind of confusion—is really precious. You’re always making it up. You never really know how to do it—and that is why your work may be new and good. As soon as you can formalize it and teach it, it suddenly becomes known and understandable to you, a commodity, and then it’s not interesting to you when you’re actually making your work. So I always saved my experiments for myself. When I got tired of them and I would never do them again, then I start teaching them. But I would never take something that I’m in the middle of, maybe even five years in the middle of, and bring it into a classroom.
SAM | Can you tell that to my eight-years-ago self?
ANNIE-B | You can really waste a lot of your good stuff figuring out how to teach it. You know what it’s like to teach. You have to be able to articulate very difficult aesthetic ideas, and it’s really cool to be able to do it, but once you’ve done it, it’s gone.
SAM | Some last questions. How do you define musical theatre? What’s musical theatre to you?
ANNIE-B | I’m not very familiar with musical theatre, so I don’t really know how I would define it, but it seems like it’s one of those forms where you sing from an emotional place like—I feel so bad, I need to sing; I feel so happy, I need to sing; I feel so excited, I need to sing. A potentially interesting path. It’s unfortunate that it’s so littered with tropes. Here Lies Love is such a rare piece of music, what David Byrne wrote, and I hope it inspires composers in musical theatre, because he really does not use one trope, not one.
SAM | How would you define the difference between a director and a choreographer?
ANNIE-B | Traditionally, of course, the choreographer attends to the issues of the body and dance, and the director attends to issues of the uber thrust of the subject matter, narrative, and container. There is this tradition that I call a couch play—where the play is staged as people just sitting on a couch talking to each other—I think it’s a crime. We have bodies. And so a director could be somebody who works with dancers or works with actors, and there’s no text and there’s no story. It doesn’t have to be the traditional mode of approach.
SAM | When you’re in rehearsal and you really thought it was going to be great, and then you put it on its feet and it’s unwatchable—what do you do?
ANNIE-B | Well, I try not to cry in front of people! And I often will have a really bad night’s sleep. But sometimes—and I hope this happens to you, you can pray to Hypnos tonight and see if it happens—I figure out a new path in my sleep. I wake up really tired—but with a new idea!
SAM | Wow!
ANNIE-B | You have to come up with a second solution. You can hammer away at it. You can turn it upside down and reverse it and slow it down and do all sorts of stuff and see if you can get something out of it. Usually it needs a revamp, unfortunately. And sometimes that comes to me in my sleep.
SAM | Do you come in with one idea or six ideas?
ANNIE-B | Now I feel like I only have one. How about you?
SAM | I am working on only having one because I feel like I fall back on the two and the three and the four—or they’re just like doubts on my shoulders.
I will often set something up as the “bad idea” version—“The thing I tried today, I thought it was going to be great, it wasn’t great. Let’s just do the bad idea version. We’re all going to be so embarrassed by how stinky it is.” Often that ends up being the best thing. It’s manipulative of me because I sometimes know that.
ANNIE-B | Yeah. Well, you sound fun.
SAM | I believe in rehearsal being fun. If rehearsal’s not fun I don’t want to do it. There are too many other problems in the world that I could be tending to rather than suffering in rehearsal. If I’m going to tend to suffering, I’d like to be tending to actual human suffering and not at Ripley-Grier or whatever.
Can you please tell us about your new book?
ANNIE-B | It’s called The Choreography of Everyday Life. It’s a book that’s in a braid structure, so it has a choreographic structure; it also has a choreographic structure on the page. It’s about looking at the world through choreography. Like this table, for instance, that is between us right now; that is a choreographic object. It’s separating us in space, and determining our relationality.
SAM | It’s giving us composition.
ANNIE-B | It’s deciding where our bodies should be in proximity to each other. So proximity is a compositional element. It’s a lot about how we move in space, how we moved in space during COVID-19, how we moved in space in the protests in 2020. It’s about ecstatic dancing; when Biden was elected there was ecstatic dancing in the street, like ancient dancing. But it’s also about my husband and my son reading The Odyssey, and what that’s about from a choreographic perspective, and how Penelope’s dancing this solo that’s in reiterative loops. I think some people would call it a personal essay form. You don’t need to be a dancer or a choreographer to understand it at all. It’s not one of those books.
SAM | It sounds like anybody who cares, even the slightest bit, about how bodies move or even that we have bodies should read it immediately.
