Interviewer and Title:

Yasuko Yokoshi, Julie Alexander and Kayvon Pourazar
in conversation with Beth Gill and Danielle Goldman

Date, Print, Audio:

2.24.10 |

 

Main Interview Body:

 

Danielle Goldman: I can start. We have the opportunity to talk about Tyler Tyler, the upcoming piece that will be shown at DTW. Before we delve into a more specific conversation, Yasuko, could you quickly provide a bit of information for the reader about this piece? Maybe say a few words about how you conceptualized the piece initially, how it came to be, the nuts and bolts of this work?

Yasuko Yokoshi: It is my second collaboration with a traditional Japanese artist, Masumi-Sensei Seyama. I collaborated with her previously on a piece called What We When We. This is second time I am collaborating with her as well as her disciples, three traditional Japanese artists. One is an actor, and the others are traditional Japanese dancers. I am collaborating also with Kayvon and Julie from New York City. My attempt is to see two different forms side by side on stage and go to a beautiful place. Dance that you can strip down all the cultural codes, all that luggage that dance carries. Put two things, one from one culture and the other from another culture that are both called dance, what can you see. That is why it is called Tyler Tyler, two words, but the same word.

Danielle: Before we get to a specific discussion of Julie and Kayvon's experience working with these forms, would it be possible to describe their most salient features? To the extent that they are similar, how are they similar? To the extent that they differ from one another, how do they differ? How did you understand these two forms before engaging in this project?

Julie Alexander: I didn't know much at all about the traditional dance form before we started this. I did have a sense that whatever we were about to learn in this traditional Japanese form was steeped in a lot of history and culture, and was old and very specific. My sense at the beginning was that it was based on form and I was going to be learning this thing from the outside in.

Kayvon Pourazar: When I expressed interest to Yasuko in working with her, I didn't expect that it was going to be a project that related to traditional Japanese dance. The first thing I had seen of Yasuko's was What We When We, which I was very inspired by. The following project was a high school project that she did. The subject matter was the history of postmodern dance. When I realized that it was going to be related to traditional Japanese dance, my only connection to that world was my brother who is a Bejing Opera performer and director. That form is very bold and abrasive in my opinion. This is not what I experienced in What We When We, and I have always had an affinity for Japanese culture - architecture, food. I was surprised to see that the form we were working with was considered within the traditional Japanese dance canon to be postmodern. The costumes were stripped down, very plain kimonos rather than the fantastic made up faces and the fabulous colors. We went to see a Kabuki performance in Japan when we went there. One similarity that I didn't expect to find between the two dance forms was their postmodern status in relation to the canons they come from.

Danielle: Julie, you mentioned that you expected to learn from the outside in. Could you say what that entails? Is that how you were accustomed to learning choreography or approaching form?

Julie: Not really. When I arrived at some of the first rehearsals with Yasuko, she taught us these repertories with Kayvon and I individually. I would arrive with my body, my sense of dancing, my sense of history. I felt I had to see what Yasuko was doing and try to imitate it and then understand through moving what it felt like on my body, what it meant for me in terms of dancing or finding a place inside of it or finding the story. A lot of what we are doing is narrative. When the dances are done in Kabuki form, they are done with songs that, like a musical, will tell the story. I don't understand the language of these songs so I don't understand the narrative. I am not used to working in a narrative framework. Trying on this dance and moving through it and understanding how each subtle gesture is a part of this larger story, I had to see it visually, imitate it, then understand for myself where it comes from for me, which hasn't started to come until recently.

Beth Gill: I was provoked by the same sentence, working from the outside in made me think about what your expectations might have been initially in terms of the kind of space each of you individually could inhabit inside of this project and what your experience was inside the project and the form. My experience from working as a dancer and choreographer in contemporary dance, I feel often the individuality of the dancer is a large part of what makes the form of the dance. I am curious about that tension.

Julie: That is an interesting thing to tackle especially in the context of cross-cultural collaboration. What I see especially in Japan is that the notion of me inside this dance is very American. In the traditional Japanese dance world, there is such a sense of hierarchy and a sense of not yourself at all in the dance, but serving the dance or the teacher or the form.

Danielle: In traditional Japanese dance, you are dealing with narrative and character consistently. I love that you use this word 'arrival' as being significant in the encounter. We all arrive with stuff. Julie, you mentioned arriving with your body, your sense of history, and your sense of dance. There is an ethnographer named Sally Ness who talks about dance as being a de-familiarizing practice. Part of what dancers in the US do is they learn choreographies that they don't already know. That entails a defamiliarization of habit or those things you think you know. One interesting thing to ask would be whether, at all, this process of engaging with another form defamiliarized those things that you arrived with: your sense of your body, or history, or your understanding of dance.

Kayvon: During the first few months of rehearsing and learning the repertory, I definitely felt that all of my training up to that point was meaningless in this context. I feel I need to be extra familiar with the traditional Japanese form if I want to feel like I am coming close to doing it. A traditional Japanese dancer has trained and practiced for decades and this material comes out of them as if it was nature. It really becomes natural to them. We are faking that sense of being natural. We are able to fake it well, being contemporary dancers that are somewhat neutral in our bodies, not tainted by habits, but they are obviously there. I feel them when I am away and not practicing as much.

I do find that we are in the thick of it in a residency situation and particularly when we are working with the Japanese artists from Toyko that the repetition and the practice puts you more immediately in touch with the thing that you are trying to attain. In a similiar way, when I practiced ballet in school, I remember this saying that when you are away from it for a day or two, it takes double the amount of time to get to where you were. I feel something similar in this form except there are moments when I am away from it if I am approaching it correctly, there is an awareness with all of the information that has accumulated up till then that all comes to together in a performance or run of it.

Yasuko: I must remind you that I am as fake as you are. I have been familiar with this form for only seven years, and I don't live in Japan. I only do periodical training with long absences. My familiarity with dance is closer to you rather than the Japanese dancers. If a well-trained dancer taught you, it would take triple the time. Its good they don't have to teach you. Their training is only mimicking. I teach you by remembering how I learned and struggled with it.

Julie: The first time we saw the Japanese performers in Florida, I noticed that their weight is in a different place. When I see the Japanese dancers dance, I see the expression of the dance. When I do it, I feel a larger, more gross shape of the dance. What I am trying to learn and focus on is how to allow the dance to emerge without me or my technique getting in the way. A lot of times it is simple. Yasuko will say, just make it the most simple pathway, which may or may not be the most simple pathway to me.

Kayvon: It is exactly that simple pathway that made me realize that what I thought was a neutral body, my own body within a contemporary dance context, was actually really aware of  specific aesthetic ideas and being seen in the context of this aesthetic. I also discovered that I never really thought about starting and finishing. I saw the arc of a particular movement and I always felt like I did it in the purest way as a contemporary dancer within the contemporary dance context. But in traditional Japanese dance, there are layers with one movement, how it starts, how it ends, the arc it goes through, and all these variations that I never actually considered in other types of dancing.

Danielle: Is there a relationship between the detail and the fact that the dance is driving narrative?

Kayvon: Yes, absolutely. That is a big part of it: how to tell a story with your body, how every single movement is not just a movement, but it is a paragraph. There is a way to start the paragraph, there is a way to end the paragraph. There are ways to do that well and ways to do that not so well. The decades of practice that Japanese traditional dancers have makes it second nature to them. Having that training in their body, that ease expresses the narrative so much better. We struggle with that. So much of the narrative is based on nature, on mountains, rain. You can see their bodies really express that. They become those things.

The contemporary dance that I am doing in this particular work is informed by the traditional dance in terms of working with the accumulation of information. In other projects, my way of going about the movement has been to attack it fresh. Let's let go of how I have been doing it so far and come at it fresh. This is a different way of developing within the project.

Beth: What is the presence of contemporary dance in the project?

Julie: We generated that material together in rehearsals. There is a duet that Kayvon and I made together that then I transferred my role to Kuniya and now it is a duet between the two of them.

Kayvon: The intention was to draw out personal histories within dancing. There is some jazz stuff and some songs that we sing too. I sing songs related to my personal history.

Yasuko: I struggled when working with Kayvon and Julie with what kind of dance they should do. After many trial and error struggles, I came to the conclusion that traditional dance is basically about a collective group effort to preserve the form whereas contemporary dance is about the individual self. I wanted to investigate Kayvon and Julie's personal history as dancers and create material from that history. That's how I conceptually approached the movements and choreographed my idea of contemporary dance.

Danielle: I would love to hear more about the partnership that Yasuko was talking about - the notion that there's a collectivity at play in the traditional Japanese form, which is in some ways at odds with the individualism found in US forms. What does the duet between Kayvon and Kuniya demand?

Yasuko: In Kabuki dance and in traditional dance, they pretend-touch, but they don't touch.

Danielle: So you guys touch?

Kayvon: Kuniya supports me, but very minimally compared to the way Julie would support me. I finished a Chinese Day parade on Sunday. It was really crowded and I had a sense that proximity did not matter. As a collective, everyone was in it, everyone was pushing and shoving but no one was offended that someone was in their space. It felt very natural. In Asian culture and even in Iran, I feel a similar thing happens there where there isn't so much personal space that each individual has and therefore they get offended if someone comes into it. It is an interesting flip side of that, when in a performance form, that kind of physical comfort and ease with one another doesn't seem to be present in the same way.

Yasuko: They do change clothes on stage. They touch and take off clothes as part of the dance. There is one dancer whose role is to support the star performer. The idea is to enhance the beauty of the person who is dancing, to supplement them. The supporter tries to be invisible.

Kayvon: There are interesting moments where he has to hold my foot or go under my arm pits. That kind of thing that is just not done. You don't touch people in those places.

Beth: Where is the duet at now?

Yasuko: For the traditional dancers, the section is out of their norm. What I am asking them to do on stage, even though I don't change the dance, but in the context, I am challenging them in an aggressive way. I am a contemporary artist. They must do what they have been doing for years, but do it in a totally different context.

Beth: Are there energetic shifts that take place as you transition between the different dance forms?

Kayvon: We had a structure not so long along where we had to go back and forth alternating, one section was contemporary dance and the next section was traditional Japanese dance. That structure felt endless. It felt like such a long piece for me because I felt like I had to put on a whole new person to go back a forth between the two. Now, it feels more streamlined. The Japanese dancing happens mostly in one place and the contemporary dancing happens in another chunk.

Danielle: It's interesting that your experience of labor affected how you experienced time - that being asked to shift between modes resulted in a feeling of endlessness.

Kayvon: The piece is now longer than that structure even though it doesn't feel that way.

Yasuko: I wonder about the experience of the audience. Are they going to go through that shift as much as you go through it? My attempt is to not to have that shift. Can I do that? Can it look like one thing called dance?

Danielle: Do you have a sense of what it would mean to successfully perform this work? What are the tasks that are at the forefront in your mind?

Julie: The task at hand in any performance, which is highlighted in this piece, is to keep the specificity and rigor inside of it and also to keep a sense of lightness, play, and spaciousness to allow it to breathe, be large, and have its own life.

Kayvon: My idea of a successful performance is to serve the form, to find that common ground between both contemporary dance and traditional dance. Essentially, I feel like this piece is addressing form across boundaries. How we see these Japanese dancers, they lose their identity inside of their work in their service to the form and to their teacher. The form itself encompasses a lot.

Yasuko: One traditional Japanese teacher told a dance student from the west: “You have such an amazing flood of imaginations. I can see it. But for this dance, you don't need any of it.” Serving the form means that you are not you, you are the dance. Let the dance itself speak, not you try to make the dance. The repertoire has been traditionally danced for hundreds of years. I want contemporary dancers to serve themselves to the form that they created, because that is their history. I demand from them a similar rigor throughout the piece. I can see the intense focusing and tension that they have in making themselves fluid, relaxed, and soft.

Julie: Of all the projects that I have been involved in, this has been quite a long process. We've been able to live inside the contemporary dance material that we made for a while now before having performed it. So there is an attention to it that we are able to give a lot of different levels.

Kayvon: It is a strange paradox because doing the form correctly doesn't mean that every performer does it the same. The teacher does find the things that you are able to do well and highlights those things but there is a sense that comes from Japanese culture of everything being well placed  and integrated within its environment. If I am doing it well, I am not popping out in any way. Within the dancing and the context of this piece, I can integrate myself well.

Yasuko: The best compliment that my collaborator Masumi-Sensei gives is “You didn't do anything that bothered me.” That is a compliment, not to pop out.

Beth: Contemporary dance deals with the self and traditional dance deals with this collective agreement or effort. Working within abstract forms as a way of viewing can create a collective. There are a lot of crosses.

Yasuko: I use these two elements that come from totally different places but land on exact same spot. That's what needed to be worked on in this piece: how to show that things called aesthetics or beauty are same. That is what the beauty is about, simplify the beauty narrower, make it small. The big question to ask is what is contemporary dance.

Beth: I feel that contemporary dance is defined by that question, whereas the traditional form, there is no question.

Yasuko: You don't ask. In any traditional art form, in dancing or music, you don't ask questions of teachers, because there is no question. But both traditional dance and contemporary dance are aiming the same place. That is a fascinating paradox that we live in.