Revisiting figures on a field: An Interview with Dean Moss and Isabel Lewis by Matthew Lyons

MATTHEW LYONS: To begin, Dean, I thought I would ask if you want to rewind and think back to that time when the piece premiered in 2005. Can you share what you remember about the initial encounter with Laylah Ali’s work, and how that got the ball rolling and led into figures on a field?

DEAN MOSS: In 2001, I went to the Studio Museum in Harlem’s Freestyle show and saw Laylah's work, among a number of terrific works. But I was very much struck by Laylah’s work and came back and said, “Oh, this is amazing, it would be so dramatic.” There was something about the violence of it, about the pending violence of it that fit with what was going on with the precarious nature of being Black in America. And I loved the formality of her work. Then I looked at her body of work, I just fell in love. Christina Yang was also a curator at The Kitchen at that time, and we shared an office. I was talking with her, and said, “I think this work could be a really great performance. How can I facilitate somebody coming and doing this, you know? Maybe I can talk to her.” And so, Christina contacted Laylah, and we started a conversation. Then in 2002, I did a piece called Supplement at Danspace, which Layla came to see and decided we could work together. Going forward, as the piece came together, there were some key moments. I remember I did a showing at The Kitchen where Sarah Michelson came and said that she could see Laylah Ali's influence in the work, but she couldn't see my own. This is before I added the docent tour of the work, and what precipitated this added feature of the work that then kind of parsed the difference between the white cube and the black box and played into what was experiential about the performance, how people were involved, how it could expand beyond the theatrical setting and implicate both the artists and the audience in a kind of not so flattering light, you know? To set up a critical circumstance here. And so, that's what opened up the work and was a big change in my own practice. All precipitated by this work.

ML: Isabel, can you share what you recall about being in the audience at that time?

ISABEL LEWIS: Absolutely, yes. I remember the starkness of the imagery, I remember feeling so struck by something that had such a deep resonance with me, how I felt and thought, my interiority, and my Black subjectivity. Somehow to see this staged in this formal and precise way, and the conceptual turn inside of the work, with the docent tour. It did so much work somehow, theoretically and conceptually, but it had a kind of a light touch. Nonetheless, it was so conceptually brisk. And it thrilled me, because I thought I had no examples for this kind of gesture. I had not experienced this kind of gesture in dance. I was never told the story that Black people make dances like this. I came from classical ballet. I studied at Alvin Ailey. I then left the track of Ailey and went to search for more strange and experimental forms, and I went to the right place, New York City. Exchanging with artists like Ishmael Houston-Jones, Miguel Gutierrez, and DD Dorvillier, and meeting Dean, and definitely it was a very thrilling moment. Also, I remember feeling so strongly, and I think it's close in time that I was dancing for Ann Liv Young inside the work The Bagwell in Me in which Ann Liv performs as George Washington and I perform as Oney, George Washington’s revenge-seeking former slave, in blackface. And I remember how both of these works seemed to speak, in very different ways, to a conversation that wasn't really out in the open in the dance scene. We weren't really dealing with race in the way we have been more recently. Both of these works, in very different ways, were raw and exposed the brutal truth that maybe we were not as far along as we thought in relation to conversations about race and Blackness.

ML: Dean, do you want to say anything about the reception of the original production? What do you recall about either the response from the community, the kind of private response, or the press and public response?

DM: The private response was pretty good. And the press, in general, was strong. I got press, negative or positive. A lot. A lot of press. I was of course struck by the New York Times reviewer who compared the costuming of the piece to kids in Harlem, who stated in his title that we used basketballs. They didn't recognize that it was a dodgeball game. They saw black people and balls and thought basketballs.

ML: Yes, I read that and was struck by that too. It says, “The six main dancers wear various forms of costuming resembling what might be found on a Harlem playground. Yet there is no exploitation of hip-hop or breakdancing.”

DM: Yes, he came in with some clear ideas of what he was going to see, and when he didn't see it, he decided to put it in the review anyway. So, I was perturbed. Laylah suggested that I write the Times. At that time, I didn't feel so empowered that it would make any difference. When I look back now, I see how overwhelmingly positive it was, the press and the response. Apollinaire Scherr did a really fabulous write up in Newsday, and so did Helen Shaw in The Sun. Anyway, I got some very nice write-ups, but at that time, it was difficult. And it wasn't until years later, at least 10 years later, when I was doing a residency at Baryshnikov Arts, when somebody, a Black man, somebody I didn't know, came up to me and said, “Are you the guy that did that piece?” And at that point, I realized, “Oh, it had an impact.”

ML: I remember learning about the collaboration between you and Laylah from an early season of the documentary series Art21 that profiled her. For me, who was at that time outside of the dance community, a light bulb went off. It was fascinating to get behind the scenes in the creation process of a performance. I just went back and rewatched it, and it's a fascinating record of that time, and in hindsight, thinking that this piece actually premiered the same year that the Performa Biennial launched. It's a year before MoMA creates the Department of Performance and Media. I feel like the piece happened right on the edge of this renewed interest in dance and performance on the part of the visual art community and those institutions. At the same time that the piece is looking at that exact meeting, and staging the problem. In a very prescient way, I'd say.

DM: I'm about to say something, but I feel like Isabel could probably approach this a little better. I think all those things were happening, and there was an expectation. I thought that this kind of work, the work that I was making would launch, in a way. But I have looked back, and I feel like it was a bit too brutal a work to push me into a place I thought I wanted to be. I'm very happy with my career. But, at that time, I had ambition, and I thought, “Oh, this is going to do something!” I got all these great reviews, and I got a great response. And I was in a very interesting place with The Kitchen. And so, it's interesting what or who got launched when performance moved into visual arts at that time. I didn't feel at the center of it. I felt on the periphery of it, and I remain on the periphery of it.

IL: Yes, it's also interesting for me to hear and reflect on. That it was not exactly embraced. Meanwhile in the art world I feel questions around forms of display and presentation remained particularly urgent through the aughts up until 2015. By 2013 the works I called hosted occasions started to be curated more so by the visual arts than the dance world, which still saw my practice as this kind of ungainly thing that didn’t adhere to the theater logics. By this time Tino Sehgal had long been making choreographic work in the museum and then also Xavier Le Roy, Trajal Harrell, Jérôme Bel, Maria Hassabi, Boris Charmatz, and Eszter Salamon. With the rise of Anne Imhof’s work and now Florentina Holziger’s in connection with the dynamics of social media and mediation of the experience of performance via the smart phone, the spectacle came back in a major way. I am not against the creation of impactful, visually striking experiences, but what disappoints me are the creation of conditions where the public must compete for a vantage point to see, or photograph the work. The ability of performance to make us aware of the terms of participation, what it means to be together, the politics of seeing and being seen, and the troubling of that relationship, which is so much, I think, what figures on a field speaks to and is what inspires me about performance. I thought that the re-energized interest in dance and performance in the art world was going to take us deeper into the interrogation of vision and commodification. And it feels like rather went so far into gloss and image and seduction through certain kinds of very not surprising aesthetics, let's say. Speaking very generally here, today in visual art spaces rather normative ideas of youth, beauty and able-bodied fitness persist in performance with few exceptions meanwhile, inside of the performing arts, the mediation of the body and its terms of visibility have gotten more complicated and more interesting, maybe thanks to artists like Claire Cunningham, Marlene Monteiro Freitas, and Ligia Lewis.

ML: I think that offers an interesting way for us to talk about the remount, because, as you said, you've been based in Europe for quite a while now and you have also newly come to this position in Vienna, and it seemed that quite early on you made inquiries about remounting this piece. I'd love for you to talk about how the seeds of that idea started, and what gave you the impetus to make this proposition, especially because remounts in the performance and the dance scene are not so common, especially in the New York / American context, and it usually happens for very specific reasons.

IL: Yes, thanks, Matthew. I think in the continuation of the scope of my artistic work, hospitality as a method gave me the chance to look at the terms of coexistence, to negotiate them and re-experience them. This artistic research led me to go for the possibility to direct this institution, along with my colleague Rio Rutzinger and the decision to apply together. It wasn't something I had really had my eye on or had been planning to do, but when that opportunity presented itself, and Rio suggested it to me, I said, “Yeah, let's go for it.” I realized I actually have so many questions about what institutions can or can't do. What would it mean to be in the decision-making center of the institution as an artist and what could I do with that? And so, right at the beginning, I was thinking about this house, Tanzquartier Wien, its black box theater and two studios where we also produce. And I started to think about what I cherish about the space of theater and asked myself which are the works inside of the space of theater that were so impactful to my own way of thinking about performance. Dean’s figures immediately came to mind. I wanted to share with the public I'm addressing here in Vienna, something of my artistic roots, where I’m coming from, what my point of view is and how it formed. I also had the sense that in this first season I wanted to remind us to interrogate these terms of visibility in the theater, and I wanted to highlight artistic practices and works that complicate something about our relationship to spectatorship. And I do think it is a reaction to the rise of spectacle in such a non-critical way I had this deep desire to experience the work of so many artists who do have complex and poetic relationships to mise-en-scene, and to bring some of them together in a season; Tiran Willemse, nora chipaumire, Jeremy Nedd, Rita Mazza, Tino Sehgal, among others. So, for me, figures on the field was somehow right at the top of the list of works that really made a meaningful impact on how I see anytime now when I go into a theater. It brought awareness to the violence of seeing. Which is also what's so brilliant in Laylah Ali’s paintings. And so, I pursued having these conversations with Dean and Laylah, and I also got to speak with Christina Yang, who was so generous. And in each of those conversations, I was more and more convinced of the need to remount this work. Contemporary dance is always chasing the new. It also has by now a rich history that is still writing itself that we can refer back to and reflect upon. I knew figures had not yet had a reception here in Europe, and I thought it would be really important to share that seminal work here and create this intergenerational exchange by casting Vienna-based dancers and makers.

ML: Let’s talk about the process of remounting it. It was a completely new cast, so I'd be interested to hear from Dean, first how you thought about the invitation and what you thought about in considering taking this on, and then how you approached casting it, transmitting it, and whether it felt like a remount, or a translation, a transposition, as it's separated by not only time, but also geography. It's a different context on multiple levels. How did that process go?

DM: Thank you so much, Isabel, for reaching out to me. The question of how to do it was right at the top. We talked about finding people and the dearth of Black dance artists in Vienna. Expanding the idea of who this cast was and how they were made up was a big question right away, and how we were going to do it. We decided that we're going to cast it in Vienna and not try to bring the past people back, as none of the past people were available. We got on that problem pretty early. Rio and Isabel set up auditions, and we combed Vienna for artists of color, but also immigrant dance artists. And so we got a relatively wide range. Interestingly, there were two Americans in the final cast and one Brazilian and one African. The original cast also had two Africans in it and a Puerto Rican man, so it was always an immigrant kind of story in the casting. But that's how we did it. That's how we pulled that together. There was an audition in May. A fair amount of people came, and it was very nice, well put together by Tanzquartier, and then we had some adjustments in the summer, as people backed out. They could or could not do it timing-wise, and so there's some adjustment, but it all worked out very well. I'm very happy with the cast. They did fantastically well. There is time. There's a kind of mindset that we worked in 20 years ago, and there was a different kind of commitment in the way that people work. It was just different. When I look at those two videos, I found that I was younger and dumber, and more insistent upon something I wasn't sure of. I insisted on a kind of harshness within the work that, to me, when it got transposed, is ever so slightly more careful. Even myself and the choking circumstance is a little more careful than I was 20 years ago. And that little edge 20 years ago made all the difference in the world. Still, in Vienna, it was enough. I noticed the difference, but I think it was enough that the meaning came across. It was formal and harsh and light all at the same time, and I think that still comes across and is still part of the meaning of the work.

ML: Isabel, were you present in the rehearsal room?

IL: I would have loved to be more present in rehearsals but I checked in every day with the dancers on a vibe level, knowing that, as you said, Dean, it was such a different time: what was demanded from me, and what I demanded of myself as a performer 20 years ago, and what can be asked of performers today has changed. I wanted to make sure that I would be available for this younger generation of performers that have grown up working completely differently. And I was checking in with Dean. I knew that Dean was tuning his way to direct, to respond to that change and I trusted him. I admit that I have a nostalgia for this certain intensity, this sort of do-or-die-ness, that level of commitment to performance-making and performing and how hardcore we were at a certain time. I think the work did manage to hit this register of intensity. Experiencing the work here in Vienna I felt that the palpable tension in the room was not dissimilar to the feeling I remember from The Kitchen. In the last 20 years we've had just so many more graphic images of violence being consumed and circulated, especially of Black bodies. And to see the docent scene now, it was so uncanny, because it still felt so resonant this current moment in time when dark tourism or disaster tourism exposes the pornographic pleasure being taken in the voracious consumption of images of violence.

The scene stung. It stung back then, and it still stings now.. One of the questions that came up in the aftertalk that was addressed to the performers about how they dealt with this kind of violence in the work, and one of them responded so articulately. I wish I could remember exactly, word for word, but she basically put into doubt her own generation's cult of so-called care. She basically called out something about an assumption about what we think today is care, and what the limitations may be of what is an aesthetics of so-called care, but is it really? And in a way, inside of the building of these images, somehow feeling more cared for than things that claim care today. I hope I'm not misrepresenting her thoughts, but this is what resonated, at least, with me.

DM: I totally agree. It was something about, and I'm having a hard time remembering, but I think what I was struck with was, as you said, a kind of outing of care, but it was something that also all the dancers expected. And I would expect that regardless of place. As long as I was in a Western-developed circumstance, I would run into this problem. It goes against a kind of basic sense of what care is and how it looks. Let me parse that out a little bit. Because I had some lovely discussions with the performers, trying to bring them back into the mindset or let them understand the mindset of 20 years ago as different than now. Some of the social questions that were touched upon by the work 20 years ago were questions that were more at the forefront now in Vienna. But, along with that sort of sense that there's an appropriate way of addressing these questions, and that way of addressing these questions shut down some of the work’s brutality. We were very careful with this group of people, and I think If I tried to do figures on a field anywhere else, it would be the same. I would have to be careful with people's physicality and how they thought of themselves. And how they thought of themselves had to do with their ambition, and there's something about that time 20 years ago where there wasn't an ambition to make a living doing this. You couldn't. That was impossible. It made you very forceful about your ideas. It made you ruthless in a way that people who can now think about having a life, and having children, and trying to stay in this field, and making art that can turn into some kind of livelihood…in experimental art? No! You can't be the rebel AND have the bedroom set at the same time. That was a given, you know? Here today they're still juggling it, and so how they are about their bodies, and how they are about physicality, and how they are about understanding, it made the demands of the work difficult for them. That ruthless kind of formalism creates a kind of brutality. And it's not brutal, but it's a kind of ruthless formality that the performers would constantly soften so that they could live through it, you know? This is an indicator of the times and what is possible. Because it is more possible to live and have your children and make experimental work now, and it wasn't twenty years ago.

ML: Did you notice a difference in the other performing body in the work, which is the audience? Your pieces are so incredible at turning the fourth wall into a trapdoor. All of a sudden your spectatorship is implicated. It's indicted. I'd love to know more about how that may have happened in the room with the audience, or in the aftermath as people realize, “Oh, I can't just sit back and chew on this. In real time, in the moment, I am a part of this, and it's looking at me as much as I'm looking at it.”

DM: Isabel brought up the aftertalk, which I think was extraordinary, and it was a great pleasure. We had a relatively full house, and everybody stayed for the talk. We could have done the aftertalk for the length of the show, for sure. More than an hour of talking. The audience was extremely engaged. I don't think they had seen something like this. As you say, be implicated, but in a kind of real, formal way before, and they were very curious about it. And I felt like that lifted me, made me feel like the audience accepted it, or was ready to hold it in a space to examine. They were willing to hold it, not just dismiss it, but to hold it and let themselves look at it for a while. That was a very rare and lovely experience. Can you speak more to that, Isabel? It was really wonderful.

IL: I could sense this huge curiosity, especially from the younger generation. I felt that they had had a peek into a part of a dance history that they didn't know about. I had this feeling that many people were like, “Ah, what exactly was going on there in New York in the early 2000s?” I think they felt like they could access a portal to a certain moment in time. Some of the press failed to really take on the work conceptually. It just didn't fit into a Eurocentric dance historical narrative of the Americans who established themselves in Europe in the 1990s and early 2000s. There were other reviews that really got into the nuance of all that the work offers, all of the self-interrogation that it asks of the viewer in terms of the act of seeing and the act of witnessing, and what it means to sit silently and consume those images and be reminded that you're looking and that you're being seen while seeing, and that seeing is doing, and that there's always a choice in it. There was a kind of electric feeling in the room, I have to say.

ML: I also thought about how much imaging is a part of everyone's lives so much more now. We're all framing and creating images and making choices that are aesthetic as much as political every time we hit Photo or Video. Dean, I know you're in the midst of another creation. Did the process of remounting this work from 20 years ago affect your current project in process?

DM: Thank you, Matthew. figures on the field was the first work that I used an audience, and what I learned from it immediately was how much more I liked the audience, how much more I like this aspect of audience participation, and what happens to the audience when there's somebody on stage who’s from the audience and how wild that can be. And so the next several pieces focused more on that. The next piece was Kisaeng becomes you. And that's where I had Korean dancers bring in the audience to be courtesans, both the past kind of courtesans and modern-day courtesans, and kind of lay the relationship between courtesans and experimental artists and the audience for those roles. Then the next piece, Nameless forest, came in and I wanted to understand community, so I had 20 people on the stage. And that asked, “What do we do? How do we touch? How do we make a relationship? What's psychological? How do we deal with compassion? How do we articulate compassion in a work?” That then led to John Brown, which again began with Laylah Ali. We had a nice working relationship, a little more distant than figures on a field, but again, that brutal aesthetic comes back. And now I'm working on a piece where I'm working with a shaman, and we are looking at a kind of philosophy of experience. What is virtuality? We use a VR headset in the piece, but the work itself, theater itself is a virtual world. And I realized, looking back at all my work, that what I'm doing is taking an audience member, or taking a group of people and putting them in a virtual world where they have to parse what reality is here and reflect on that reality, the generation of reality. And this new piece, my seeking gut, is working with a Korean shaman and a 3D animator, and we are trying to put these elements together in a work that includes psychic reality as a kind of virtual reality and parses that along with everything else that I have traditionally done. Enough said. But I'm extremely excited about this work. I like that it plays with near death. I like that it's about being reborn. I like that it's pulling at the fabric of reality in this time, when so much does exactly that. The fabric of the reality that we, each individually, are constantly generating. And so the work, I think, is very exciting and potent.

ML: Excellent. Let's stop there.