Four Choreographers: Interviews with Kaye, Self, Eginton, and Chuma

- CHOREOGRAPHERS JOHN HOWELL Most labels are snakes eating their own tales and "post-modern" dance is a particularly hungry python of a pseudo- narrative is not something that's overlaid, but is available in the category. I talked with four material itself. choreographer/performers whose work has strong performance features-they Areyou trying to stir up a neo post-modernJudson? say yes to persona, props, narrative, costumes, music, (in a word, theater)-which let the tax- Ihaven't achieved that yet in performance. onomical chips fall where they may. I deliberately chose pairs from opposite So in contrastto Thick As Thebes at the Kitchen which hada story backgrounds: Jim Self and Meg Eginton share i histories of their own choreography followed by Yeah, it was a narrative. tours as dancers in the Merce Cunningham company; Pooh Kaye and Yoshlko Chuma come you'resaying now thatyou're not connecting up the units, thatyou're letting to dance with no formal dance training, just them be what they are? unusual personal experience and concerns, and a need to express them kinesthetically. Or letting the content develop out of what the units are. In other words, because the material is just there, it sets up possibilities-it's not theatrical. What's on your mind aboutyour choreography now? What's "theatrical" to you? First I would say that I don't choreograph. I don't have the level of To me, it has to do with image, with metaphor, with intrepretasophistication of putting material together to come under the tion, and how you perform something, the particular manipulaheading of choreography. Since my process always tends to be tion of performance dynamics. I have nothing against theatricality. reductive instead of elaborative, I don't want to be responsible for I really like it. saying I choreograph. What's on my mind lately about movement and performance is . . . I think I'm in transition, leading away What areyourdiscontents with it? from narrative and expressive. themes and formats into simpler, clearer motives that are more isolated, focused on the content of I've just gone too far. I storied myself out. I started off with graneach fragment that I work with, on a movement as opposed to a diose themes like life and death-TAT was my expressionistic series of movements. I think I'm going against the times because display about death-and now I've reduced myself down to makeverybody seems to be getting into expressiveness and content. ing tea at home, household stuff, love poems. I don't have strong feelings about any new direction so I'm just trying to open things You think it's a backwards transition?Against theflow? up for myself so something can start to happen. I'm going to do a piece in the spring and I'm thinking of doing it with a I guess it's what I'm missing: some kind of purity or purism that's simultaneous dual cast, one of children and one of adult males and just about totally disappeared. I mean work that had been done in females to point out differences and ambiguous cross-overs betthe art about the nature of materials and trying to bring out the in- ween men as men and men as children, and women as women and nate expressiveness that's in those materials, so tham expression or women as children. There's always been something child-like, or innocent, runningthroughyour work. I think I generate almost all my material from my childhood. Right now, my own personal concern is being an adult in touch with one's own gender as well as the androgynous child and where the two meet or don't meet. You think of childrenas androgynous? They have their innate differences but I think that the way they experience information is very direct, therefore androgynous. That's also the time when the kind of information that's appropriate for each gender gets set up, but until then, there's a real ambiguity about the motivation to get it. That pure motivation doesn't belong to gender. I've always been interested in that kind of consciousness . Now what interests me...