Artery: The AIDS - Arts Forum

Bill T. Jones Chats with Paul Kaiser

Bill T. Jones and Paul Kaiser in conversation, on April 7, at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. The event was held in conjunction with the "Sins of Change," a new media conference. Philip Blither, curator for performing arts at the Walker, introduced the artists.

INTRODUCTION by Philip Blither

Bill T. Jones is one of the leading dance makers of our time. He's made a career of enthralling, provoking, challenging, and deeply engaging the world around him. He's the winner of the 1994 MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Award, a Dance Magazine award in 1995, the "Bessie" Award, and many others. He has choreographed more than forty-five works for his own company, as well as pieces for major companies such as the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Boston Ballet, Lyon Opera Ballet and others. In addition to his work as a choreographer, he has also achieved success as an opera and theater director, a speaker, and an author. His memoirs, Last Night on Earth, were published by Pantheon Books in 1995. On television, his work has been seen on Dance in America, Great Performances, Alive from Off Center, CBS Sunday Morning, as well as the great documentary made about Still/Here by Bill Moyers.

Like the great American dance innovators who preceded him, he is always questioning...himself, his field, and his society. One of eleven children of migrant farm workers, he attended Binghamton College where he studied contact improvisation, modern dance, ballet, Haitian and African dance. It was there he met Arnie Zane with whom he formed a partnership in life and in dance. In 1992, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company was born, a collective of dancers of remarkable range of shapes, colors, sizes, movement styles, and backgrounds. They quickly gained international prominence, touring worldwide and developing collaborations with artists across the disciplines, including visual artists such as Robert Longo, Gretchen Bender, Keith Haring, Neri Ward and others.

In their duo work and when they appeared on stage together, it was not just their opposing physical appearances that was jarring to some and fascinating to others, it was their willingness to be so open about their sexuality. It was their humor and their irreverence, their willingness to confront the social and political issues of the time and, perhaps, most upsetting to some-at least to the modern icons of the era-was their willingness to embrace fashion and pop culture as part of their vocabulary. In 1998, Arnie Zane died of AIDS. Bill T. Jones continued on alone, creating a remarkable body of work. In the 1990s, he developed such monumental pieces as Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land, Still/Here, and other works that confronted issues of race, politics, sex, history, rage, and power. His involvement with entire communities in the making of these pieces gave him an unusual sense of power, yet inexplicably seemed to cause consternation in certain critical corners. He "examined subjects which united us outside of the aesthetic, the cultural and historical problems that we were having as a country and as a people." That was a quote from Bill T. Jones.

Since Bill and Arnie's first visit to the Walker in 1981, the company has returned here to this institution nine times. This rare relationship between an artist and an organization has resulted in major commissions, extended residencies, presentations, and just recently-we're two years into it now-an unprecedented four-year residency relationship that began with a major Walker-mounted exhibition called Art Performs Life dedicated to the work of Merce Cunningham, Meredith Monk, and Bill T. Jones. This ongoing residency has allowed us to witness Bill T. Jones' ongoing evolution and development as an artist as he has come to the Twin Cities community with such major works as We Set Out Early...Visibility Was Poor and next year, he'll be bringing in his latest creation, You Walk?. Just this week, Bill has been developing an new music theater work, doing the early stages of research around a piece called Loud Boy, which is a contemporary adaptation of Euripedes' Bacchae.

Paul Kaiser is a former visiting lecturer at Multimedia Art at San Francisco State University and is currently teaching digital filmmaking at Wesleyan University. In recent years, he's become the leading figure in the United States in making virtual dance works through the use of motion captured photography. In 1994, he founded the Riverbed Studio for the creation of digital art and in 1996 became the first interactive artist to receive a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. His projects include a multimedia exploration of Robert Wilson's early work entitled Visionary of the Theater, as well as other pieces. In collaboration with the artist Shelley Eshkar, Kaiser has developed two collaborations with Merce Cunningham: Hand-drawn Spaces and his most recent, Biped, which was seen here in town just last month at Northrop Auditorium, co-presented by the Walker. It was in 1999 that Kaiser and Eshkar first collaborated with Bill T. Jones on a piece called Ghostcatching. It was presented and developed at Cooper Union School of Art in New York. Their second collaboration, the one I mentioned, You Walk?, just premiered two weeks ago tonight in Iowa City at the University of Iowa. This work based on the radiance of Latin Mediterranean culture in the new world features digital projection work developed by Kaiser and Eshkar. Kaiser is currently collaborating with scientists at Bell Laboratory as part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music/Lucent Technology fellowship and he is also working on a new public art installation in New York City. Of all of the live art forms, none are, perhaps, more suspicious of the grand visions of cyberspace and the new digital media than dance, that most visceral, physical, truly non-virtual of art forms. In fact, some of the questions that were raised, as part of the opening session last night, about whether the evolution of technology will render the body irrelevant, redundant, unnecessary would be equally disturbing, even threatening, to most of the world of dance, a world where the reality of the body is unquestionably a central tenet. Even an innovator like Bill T. Jones has had his doubts. In an interview yesterday that appeared in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Bill was quoted as follows:

For a long time I thought technology was an anathema to the low-tech aspects of my art, my heart and my mind. I'm very much about the actual body sweating its face, but Paul Kaiser has shown me that what he does is extremely lyrical and can really help frame the work and the propositions of the work.

It's particularly appropriate, I think, that we host these two innovators, these two collaborators, on the Walker stage as part of the "Sins of Change" conference. Would you please welcome Bill T. Jones and Paul Kaiser?

GHOSTCATCHING

Paul Kaiser: This was billed as a dialogue but it's going to be as much a show-and-tell because we felt it was silly to talk about things that some of you haven't seen. I thought we'd begin by showing you the whole piece Ghostcatching, which, as Phil mentioned, we developed at Cooper Union but, subsequently, revised heavily before bringing it to Mass MOCA [the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art], this past summer. If we could turn down the lights completely and show that piece, we'll then talk about it.

[clip] PK: I noticed, when I was here for the earlier panels, that one of the subjects that came up repeatedly is the problem that digital artists and media artists are facing, which is...that despite the fact that digital files are potentially eternal, that's far from the case. In fact, so much work is quickly obsolescent because of changing technology it won't be seen again. I was reminded of this as being the condition of the performing arts. When we first started working, when Shelley Eshkar and I invited Bill into this process, it was a very opened-ended invitation. We didn't know what we were making in the beginning. The tension between us was between the performing arts on Bill's side and on my side, a desire for permanence and eternal perfection. [laughter] So, in fact, Ghostcatching is largely about that tension. Bill T. Jones: It's interesting that you remember it that way because I think I was resistant to the idea that you would ever be able to-quote-capture the dance. But, at the same time, I wanted you to. PK: Yes, and at the same time, you taunted me that we couldn't possibly capture you. [laughter] BTJ: Why was that said? It was because I felt that the technology was young and this technology grew so fast. At that time, Paul was having some real success working with Merce [Cunningham] and had worked with Robert Wilson. And you'd done something with Billy Forsythe, too. I felt that what the motion capture did best was catch lines, the linear. The sensors that are placed on the body...there's a limit. My movement at its most fluid is all about defeating straight lines. It's about undulation, drop, weight shift, all of that good stuff that is the Holy Grail, in a way, of a certain type of dancing. If you think of ballet as a paradigm here, then there's this other. I was saying that I didn't think that he could catch an undulation and we did have problems. PK: Oh, no doubt. We'll show in a second the motion capture process. It's certainly the case that you can't capture the undulations of muscle and flesh. BTJ: You can't really do that yet. PK: We can now; we couldn't then. [laughter] BTJ: It's amazing how fast it changes. PK: I'm sort of jumping the gun, but we actually started working with Bill in a very open-ended way and, essentially, put him through hell. The first two motion capture sessions that we did were on concrete floors in a video game, special effect kind of place in California. BTJ: I don't know how many dancers were in the room, but the dancers know that you just don't do that to your ankles and knees, particularly on a forty-seven-year-old dancer-even to a twenty-one-year-dancer, you don't. It causes real damage and you don't replace these so easily. This studio, which was quite expensive... They were going, "Oh, yes, we can do anything. We can do dance." We walked in there and it was really hell. PK: Before we go to the motion capture process, I want to say that at the time, you raised other objections which actually gave rise to this work, Ghostcatching. He was saying that it was an impiety really to capture dance. That's from this guy who uses videotape. [laughter] PK: We'll talk about that in a second. There is an impiety to the dance. It should be of the moment and the idea of trying to make a dance permanent was, as you said at that time, "to offend the great goddess of dance." BTJ: Well, I was being a little over the top. It's true. You have to stake out your position. To be sure, we all go in pursuit- to those choreographers in the room- of funding to do TV dance, even though they tell us, "There's no place to show it." Everybody wants to get their work done in, what we used to call "broadcast quality" for television. That, I say, is not performance. PK: Nor is this. The other thing is that people always ask us, "Is this going to replace dance?" It's not dance. How could it replace it?
COLLABORATING PK: I thought maybe we should talk a little bit about what led us to this collaboration. What led us to this collaboration was, actually, a previous collaboration that you had with Keith Haring. Shelley Eshkar and I were working with the Haring Foundation. The first time I ever saw these famous photographs was... Here I was boasting about how this wouldn't crash. Hold on. [laughter] PK: Blank the screen a second. Why should they see my ugly desktop? I was boasting earlier that that would never happen to me. BTJ: Let him sweat... Just kidding.
PK: What brought us to this was the famous photograph taken by Haring's collaborator Tseng Kwong Chi of Bill T. Jones' body completely painted with these amazing Haring designs. We saw, I think, six of these poses. At the time, I was playing around with the idea of, what I called, hand-drawn spaces, which is what this is, Ghostcatching in that style, where you tend to do 3-D with the look and the illogic of gesture drawing. We thought this was like an interesting inversion of that. It is a hand-drawn space- the whole body is covered with Haring's amazing [unclear] and figures. There were six of these poses and our initial, extremely lame, idea had to do with reconstruction. BTJ: Wait a minute. I thought it was a good idea. PK: I'm glad you liked it. Here's what it was; you can judge for yourselves. What I think was not a good idea was that we were going to attempt to reconstitute what we thought had to have been a dance. We were mistaken. You can tell the story in a second. There were these six poses and we thought, okay, let's try to reconstitute what animators call "all the in-betweens" of this dance that would lead you from one pose to another. So we proposed doing that with Bill and he was game. But it turns out that that was a false impression on our part, was it not? BTJ: Right. One day in London in 1984 I believe it was, Keith spent four and a half hours painting me and, suddenly- I didn't know- they threw open the doors and every tabloid in London was invited in...the photographers. Audience: Oh! BTJ: Yes, you've got it. Here we are, the Brits with their way about things. There's this black man painted and I'm completely naked. They're just shooting away and making their comments but it was the time. Keith and I were very close and I did it for him. I remember Kwong Chi saying, "Flatten the shapes. Flatten them." What I mean is I was doing things like this and he said, "You can't see it until the shapes become flat, like hieroglyphics, so that you can see the shapes." That's what it was. Then I began to get the rhythm of it and strike and strike and strike and so on. Keith and Kwong picked seven, I believe...the strongest ones. Paul and Shelley thought that, why don't you just do those shapes and then we'd like you to connect them. Now, that's where the fun part came in. I think that's when they were inspired to really try to use motion capture. I was doing what I do in between it and sensors were popping off here and there and I couldn't dance. Paul, wasn't it true that I couldn't dance for more than forty-five seconds? PK: That's correct. BTJ: It was a very interesting task. PK: I think we did five takes. The first one was very simple. He just pivoted. I don't think he believed that we could possibly get anything, so he did these very simple pivots. BTJ: Hold on. Remember, I insisted on doing it naked to capture the spirit, but I thought they were then reconstitute the body and paint them again. So, completely naked and the only thing holding these sensors on, these little pompoms, are adhesive tape, even here because I insisted on one on my dick. [laughter] PK: Which, by the way, was the first time that a dick has been captured for motion study. [laughter] BTJ: That's the reason why everyone says, "You should never dance nude because it's so distracting. We've determined that there's parts of the anatomy that don't swing in time with the music, right? [laughter] BTJ: So we wanted to try to see if motion capture could, in fact, do that and so we did. But they kept popping off in all these places. PK: You danced too hard. The thing about Bill is that the more... I shouldn't say this, but I will. BTJ: Say it, Paul. PK: If you want to get Bill to do really great work, you have to give him a challenge and annoy him slightly. He actually works best at a slight edge of anger. There was no problem with that because the motion capture... BTJ: Made me very angry! [laughter]

Ghostcatching Still

PK: These things were popping off his body. He just decided to push it further and on the fifth take, it was like he almost became a Haring being himself. It was, actually, a wonderful moment. In the piece itself, if I can refer to it in Ghostcatching, where the virtual figure is caught inside a box... The initial part if I can I could go to that... In this sequence, these are captured in this upright- I don't know what it is- telephone booth or a coffin, he's going through the motions of just key framing from one pose to another very conservatively. When he breaks out, he becomes a more fluid dancer in the section where he's overtaken by this kind of crazy, orange crouching figure. That's a Haring character- right, that thing- with the splayed fingers and so on.

What I thought we'd do now is go back to the video for a second, please, to show how motion capture works because some of you may not know. This was animated for a Night Line special broadcast last summer. You're going to see Bill T. Jones on that screen talking as well as dancing. Go ahead, please, with the second tape.

[clip presented]

PK: This is in the Brooklyn Navy Yard and we bought a dance floor to help them.

BTJ: And a slightly sprung floor.

PK: The dots on him are being recorded by, in this case, twelve cameras that surround this area. The cameras are not recording his appearance, which is a shame, you would think. But they're not. They're only recording those dots.

BTJ: That's how I move.

PK: We turn into this what's called the Biped, which is a software simulation and, then, we covert it to those hand-drawn slides. That's enough. Thanks. That's how the process works in a very quick illustration. It is a very peculiar thing to do. It's almost for the first time that you can abstract motion by itself and look at this motion divorced from the body, this odd kind of...

BTJ: I'm doing a solo show and Paul and Shelley have been nice enough to allow me to use this as one of the interludes between live performance.

PK: He needed a rest.

BTJ: Yes, I do need to rest. It's something related to live performance but it's different. The critics or writers are always asking me about why this was done. I think I'm correct in saying that you and Shelley were interested in knowing that once you remove- quote- bodily characteristics and personality from the dance, what is left?

PK: Exactly.

BTJ: That was once a threatening proposition but, now, I find it sort of reaffirms something that most choreographers have been struggling with, I know at least in the modern era, and that is that dance does not owe its life to music or story or...

PK: Or charisma.

BTJ: Yes, charisma.

PK: In other words, these incredibly charismatic figures. Well, dance may but there's a beauty to dancing and a beauty to choreography that I think, in some ways, is hidden from our view because we are so seduced by the beauty of the performer.

BTJ: Yes, but you realize there are very serious choreographers who have tackled this question by taking away music, taking away all of the accoutrement of illusion.

PK: But they have the body still. They say that Yvonne Ranier who did all of that was still the most charismatic performer, despite herself.

BTJ: Yes, that's true. If you look at a lot of Trisha Brown's work, Trisha has really worked to make it more theatrical, a great formalist and one of those persons who's been very hardnosed about getting rid of all the theatricality even though she has done an opera recently.

PK: What happened after we did the first motion capture session is we quickly realized that our initial idea wasn't so interesting because recreating old movement is less interesting than making something new. In particular, we were interested in this dialog we were having with you about what remained after your body was taken away. We were also interested in learning more about the way you do use technology already and, in particular, about the nature of your company. As Phil said, one of the special characteristics of your company is that you set your movements on very diverse dancers. They don't resemble you physically nor do they try. We learned, just in talking to you, the way that you work- which you can describe better than I- is by improvising and figuring out movements on your body, videotaping that, and then setting them on the bodies of others with Janet Wong, who is in the front row.

BTJ: Rehearsal director.

[applause]

PK: And with frames behind the whole effort.

BTJ: Is that where you got the idea of spawn?

PK: Yes.

SPAWNING AND SAMPLING

Biped, c. Stephanie Berger, 1999

BTJ: Paul and Shelley were inviting me in to help create a world and I would be the progenitor of several generations of beings. You can see out of this box, they're becoming different characters. They're drawn in different ways and they behave in different ways. So the term spawn came about. I realized one day it was very much what any choreographer does, when you take a movement that originates here and you give it to other people. But somehow or other you could manipulate and change, literally, the way the figures inhabit space and what they look like.

PK: One of the things that we could in this software we're using... I should say that the two hidden collaborators in all of this are two of my best friends: Michael Jordan and Susan Emkrod, who are among the greatest computer graphics programmers in the world. They designed the software which we used in alpha and beta form that is presently available at the St. Paul Character Studio. One of the things that they did was they allowed you to do what they call motion mapping. If we abstracted the motion from your body, we could set it on any kind of body of different dimensions and so on, which we did in this piece. They're famous for unleashing, kind of unwittingly, on the world a Dancing Baby. Maybe you've seen it. It was originally just a demo of their very early software showing that you could animate anything. And you could take an adult motion- I think it was a cha-cha motion, initially- and put it on a baby.

BTJ: That baby is doing flips.

PK: It's been doing much more since then, right. It's been taught new tricks.

BTJ: One of the things that I realized when we were doing those early motion capture sessions is that there will be a time in fifty to one hundred years... I wonder when they go back to your original dot pattern how that Bill T. Jones movement will be brought into the world. Who knows what will be done, what will be reconstituted on those dots?

PK: Absolutely. That's what I want to get to in a moment. Let's first go back to the process. Can we see the computer screen again, please? We thought, if we have the progenitor here, he could spawn different, what we called, identities. So what Shelley and I did, being non-dancers, was to observe your solo work, you dancing your full virtuosity. We would pick out tendencies of your dancing...

BTJ: From the improvisation, right?

PK: From the improvisation, yes. We would pick out tendencies in that and we would say, "We want this to do this only, take this to another extreme, and just do that and that will be your child. It will be a limited version of your full self." Let's show some of the rehearsal footage from this and you can tell us what you're doing.

BTJ: These names we came up with together. They observed and they would say, "That is as if you were a baby" or "That is as if you were a woman." I think this is the athlete.

[clip presented]

PK: Shelley and I had seen these as this athlete stuff. But in the improvisation, you put in what we later called makeshift woman. Tell us, Bill.

BTJ: You said, "Give me vocabulary," and I thought I'd give them something explosive but then I wanted to see if I could catch in a moment its contrast. So it's a very clich�d notion of woman, but it's the best that my body can do.

PK: One of the funny things about this is you were asking, "What would be made of this stuff in the future?" What's kind of shocking is how little of your motions we actually ended up using in the piece. It was cut heavily, heavily, heavily. For example, the woman never enters into it; although, the athlete is there screaming inside the enclosure in the middle of the piece. Let me show another one. The idea behind the athlete was we were sort of looking at Bill as athlete exerting force in the world. That was the prescription that we gave you. This one- this is no comment on your character, Bill- was dog. For dog, we said that the idea was not to act like a dog but to orient yourself primarily...

BTJ: Trying to make horizontal movement.

PK: Parallel to the floor.

BTJ: And with a quick focus. Is that how we broke it down?

PK: Yes, quick and a very changeable focus like a dog as he runs around looking at the outside world. Tell us about this. Hard or easy?

BTJ: There it is. [laughter] It was a difficult problem.

PK: I remember that this was one of the most exhausting.

BTJ: It was. For anybody who wants to try it, try dancing horizontally. You see what I mean? I would try to stay on a horizontal plane and not pantomime.

PK: That made it into ten seconds of the final twenty-second final piece.

BTJ: I had no idea how it was going to be used.

PK: No, we hadn't done this yet. The last of these examples... I think there were, in the end, eleven of these that we did. These are just three of them. This one was one of Shelley Eshkar's absolute inspirations, in my opinion. What he did was he looked at Bill and Bill is, in fact, at times, sculpting his own body. So this became important both in the beginning of the piece but particularly in the end. The idea is that he would be reaching outside of himself and rearranging his limbs and other body parts into configurations. That's how the piece ends is you have a huge phalanx of people doing that.

BTJ: Yes. It was a good exercise for me in making me analyze things that had become personal vocabulary, but isolated them, which I also resisted. Usually, improvisation comes out of a flow.

PK: I'll bring you to this still for a second before we move on to the next piece about the future. You were saying, "What would become of these motions? What would people make of these motions in fifty to one hundred years?" Leaving aside the problem discussed all day about whether anyone would be able to read this data then... If they can, who knows? The other thing to think about is that when this piece ends, it kind of loops back to where it started. At the very end, these figures are going in and out of phase, doing the same motions as in the beginning, the sort of Haring key-framed motions, but they've been multiplied. If you look carefully, you can see the different movements are propagating through the still connecting one to the other. There's this sort of vision where you're talking like Big Brother at all your little progeny.

What I want to talk to you about now is the following. I'd make a distinction between this kind of work as made on the computer, that it is hand-made. That's hard to explain. Every single key frame has been adjusted by a human being, every aspect of the animation, both the dancing and the visual composition. It means that Shelley or I have gone in and taken the motion capture data, positioned the cameras in a certain position. Nothing has been done automatically. Everything has been done by hand on the computer using an interface.

Let's look at a different scenario, which this points to. You were saying, "What would someone else make of this material later on?" Let me describe a scenario that it will be possible within the next six months or year. Let's say we had you as a progenitor on the computer dancing a solo in motion capture form. I think in the end, we had over an hour of material from, but let's say we had five hours all arranged as phrases, short clips. We could then have the computer algorithmically choreograph a piece based on principles that we said. We could say, "Start with this phrase," and we'd pick one at random from this big field of possibilities. It would say, at the end of that phrase or at maybe even at some point it was randomly determined in that phrase, "Look for transitions in that piece."

Then it could, according to rules or again by random procedures say, "Let's match his arm motion," and it would do an incredibly fast search of a huge search space of movements and find another phrase which continued or changed that. It would then generate a dance derived from your motions but which you did not choreograph. Not only that, it could then multiply that. So if we have this idea of spawning, at that point of decision where one was moving off this way, it could simultaneously choose another one which moved off this way, meanwhile, forming the anatomy of that body so that as you are being multiplied out, Shelley and I would not be in control of the nature of the next body. Shelley is the one who did the incredible modeling of these hand-drawn figures. But what we could do is set up the anatomy of those figures up to the computer, which according by rules and chance again, could determine different sizes of these progenies, so to speak.

BTJ: Would they all keep two legs and two arms or...?

PK: Whatever you want, but, yes, let's say they would. That creates a very odd thing where your motion has taken on a life of its own and the three of us, our conception, has given a push to something which, then, makes its own decision. What do you think?

BTJ: I went through this whole thing about ownership and the whole thing about emotional attachment to the original impulse in the work and it feels like a William Gibson scenario where you're setting loose things that go into the infinity of virtual space. I don't know. It feels overwhelming.

YOU WALK?

PK: Two days before my Christmas holiday, Bill and Bjorn [Ameland] invited me over and said, "Do you want to do this new piece?" I said, "What is it?" You were doing a very big, ambitious, huge new work called You Walk?, which was poorly funded and was happening right away. I said, "Yes." It was a wonderful opportunity because we had invited you into our process and, this time, you invited me- Shelley couldn't do it- into your process. Let's talk about that next. Tell me why did you want digital projections, if you were so suspicious of technology?

BTJ: I was no longer so suspicious. I was quite enamored after having seen what you did with Biped and all. I did have some trepidation about asking you because I think very highly of you as an artist. I wanted a shortcut. Bjorn is a brilliant designer. We were wondering if it would be possible to extend the world of the stage in a way that we could never do it with three-dimensional drops and so on because that's very expensive. So we were going to invite you to make environments that the dance could exist in. I wasn't sure how you would feel about that. What did happen? Did I tell you point blank that we were thinking, how can you take this...?

PK: You said two things. It wasn't just an enlarged spatial set but also titles. You wanted titles.

BTJ: Were the titles there initially?

PK: Yes. Sometimes the only way I would ever like to really make money is to do titles for Hollywood.

BTJ: I know; you told me that.

PK: So I was interested in that, not that these are Hollywood-like titles. But that does interest me.

BTJ: As Philip was saying in the introduction, our host in Bologna-the funding is very good actually; it's never enough; let's put it that way-had asked me to make a piece about the influence of Mediterranean-Latin culture on the New World. It's a big topic and I thought that I would make something that would not attempt to be linear. It would not attempt to tell the story because I don't know what the story is. It would be a series of episodes that would be poetic and evocative and would cross-reference each other and would have some elements that were historical. But more than anything, it would be a poetic response to a social-political issue. Therefore, I thought, I should really play up the fact that it is not trying to be one continuous narrative and why don't we make titles? I heard you say that you were interested in making titles.

PK: The other thing was that having completed with Shelley what I consider to be related works- Ghostcatching with you and these two pieces with Merce Cunningham, which were based on this idea of hand-drawn space- I was ready to move on. I'd been involved in drawing in other ways for about ten or fifteen years.

BTJ: Can we talk briefly about hand-drawn space before we leave it?

PK: What do you want to know?

BTJ: What do you mean, "hand-drawn space"?

PK: It came out of a revulsion that I had to 3-D before I really knew it. In the early 1990s and still a lot to this day, although it's getting better, the 3-D model was trying to model and render photo realistically and very accurately...every little glint of light, every refraction of light in this waterfall will be mathematically calculated and every detail will be rendered perfectly. The ironic consequence of that is that the more realistic they made it look, the more synthetic it felt to me. There was no room to think or feel in this. I had long been involved with drawing, not as a draftsman myself because I can't draw at all but with children and, later, with Robert Wilson and I thought we could take drawing and make that the model for a 3-D space. So that's what we began to do.

The other idea that I had at the time had to do with drawing as performance, the idea that Benjamin Weil was talking about in connection with Jackson Pollock that the performance of the drawing- I was working with little kids at the time- was more interesting actually than the finished product. So in this piece with you, in Ghostcatching, we turn to you. You are both a hand-drawn figure but also you inscribed lines into the air yourself, so it's both. It's, basically, drawing looking at dance but also dance doing drawing. Those are two of the aspects of it. So when you came to do this, I thought, okay, titles are interesting. It's an enormous honor to work with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, which is you but also your whole company.

BTJ: We were not going to do any motion capture.

PK: We were not going to do any motion capture. There were going to be no figures in the projection. Also I wanted to work with the digital video camera. I hadn't worked with a viewfinder for twenty years. I'd stopped making films in the late 1970s and I hadn't touched it since, so it was an interesting challenge for me.

BTJ: To go on from here, I might tell you where my ideas were when I brought them to Paul. He never minces his words when he thinks something is corny or what have you. There were certain images I had. A lot of this is my think storybook about a time before. The first section is called "We wore time shamelessly." I thought, wouldn't it be great if I could suggest, right over there in that corner, a believable fire. The stage is bare and there's just a fire over there. That fire, later, is inside of a cathedral. Could Paul do all of that? Then, at one point, there would be a wall of fire. That was the way I was thinking...how to use this magical technology to fool the eye and suggest a 3-dimensional world. Now, your response to that... At first, I thought you thought those ideas were too literal, too sentimental. It's interesting how we've changed. The things you were showing me, the things that had been done in Kitchen were extremely abstract, huge areas of white and black.

BTJ: So I thought, well, okay, this certainly takes a certain kind of lyricism out of the work.

[laughter]

BTJ: In other words, I'm not going to get flames and cathedrals and so on as I talk about the Old World and the New World meeting. But I thought, this is probably good for me that it isn't so sentimental.

PK: Eat your spinach.

BTJ: Eat my spinach, right. Yes, be tougher, right? What happened over time...

PK: It was interesting. Bill was saying, "Paul, be as lyrical as you can be." I said, "Okay, okay." Let's show the first clip on the third tape. We'll show you two parts to it.

BTJ: We have to apologize. This is VHS on a tiny camera in the back of an auditorium. This is just a document of the work.

PK: In joining this process, I had the incredible opportunity to work not only with Bjorn Ameland, in front here, who did this amazing set of scrims and backdrops, but also with Robert Wierzel, your lighting designer, who is a genius. You'll see in these projections that it's really a marriage of projection and lighting. It's as much a tribute to what he's done as anything. If we can roll that, please.

[clip presented]

BTJ: The piece was trying to talk about issues of longing and displacement. That light wedge that comes across suddenly... I would never have thought of that one single bird and what did it say about...? Think of a character like, let's say, Pocahontas. You know that the end of her life was spent in Europe. Can you imagine what it must have felt like to be so far away from everything that you know? The idea of liberation, the idea of her wanting to be free but being on display... He did that, just with that simple image, he suggested that to me. I feel that extends something I'm talking about in the piece as we talk about the radiance of Mediterranean-Latin culture in the New World. It's a very subversive thing that he does. There's a section that follows this...seventeenth century Jesuit opera written in the New World by an Italian-born Jesuit, [Domenico] Zipoli, an opera written for native peoples who've never been to Europe, never heard a Baroque opera, but trained by the Jesuits. Paul zoned right in on something about the ironic idea of faith. I don't know if we have any footage of it.

PK: Not here.

BTJ: There's a huge candle, a beautiful, somewhat realistic candle that just sits there.

PK: Just the flame.

BTJ: The flame of the candle just sits there and flickers. That with Bjorn's very beautiful, simple transparent drop suggests so much about the inner life and the actual political dimensions of the religious persons.

PK: It's interesting because when you came to me with this problem, I started to work on it and I certainly went down many wrong paths in trying to do this at the time. But, about two-thirds of the way through it, I realized that all of the projections I was doing were, in fact, scenic, however abstract, and had to do with the fact that the dance only activates a third of the overall stage picture. So I wanted to activate the upper two-thirds. Almost everything is either literally or figuratively looking up at something. I don't know if you can really see that, by the way, in that grainy, flickery thing but the bar that comes across seems, at first, to be this kind of Rothkoesque bar of light against this beautiful lighting that Robert created... But also through that, you get glimmers of hand-held camera movement, which is actually of water, the ocean. There's a horizon line.

BTJ: Or the slats on the...

PK: Slave ship.

BTJ: ...passage, what it must have been like to look out...

PK: That's what I was thinking. That was the whole idea. Also for me, it was like a return. This is the viewpoint and then you find it looked great and horrible. Then you have the bird looking up. I only wrote this afterward, not that it was a conscious thing. Where you have this picture of the candle above everyone...what I was really thinking was of a religious person praying and, even so, this devotional candle is something you are looking up at.

BTJ: We've had a lot of fun and, I dare say, a few sleepless nights on both of our parts about the titles. The candle Paul liked but when I decided in San Ignacio that we needed to start extracting statements from the Jesuit text, you had a little problem with that. For instance, you know how Baroque opera is: they go on and on and on and they're saying only three lines. But what is he saying? The whole first part, which is beautiful music, is saying, "Oh, life, you're too long. Oh, death, why don't you come?" He wants to die because he wants to go be with Jesus. What is the one title that we cooked it down to?

PK: Oh, death, how I long for you.

BTJ: Oh, death, how I long for you. Boom! That's fine but then you have the candle and you have words written over it and it gets really a little suspect. It's a little kitschy. But I thought, perfect because it looked like the prayer books that the Seventh Day Adventists were constantly trying to shove down our throats when we were kids.

PK: To this day.

BTJ: There's a lot of stuff flying around the piece, a lot of it owed to the way in which Paul's work interacts with the text of what I'm trying to get at.

PK: Let's move to the next clip, which I'll describe for a moment. The piece is very big, about an hour and forty-five minutes.

BTJ: Try two hours plus.

PK: It's really huge. There are many different parts. We're showing you a very small amount of it. The one part that we're next going to show is something called "Choosing Freefall", which you conceived of for the modern era. I'll describe one more thing about it, which is that "Choosing Freefall" comes in as a title in a way you'll see in a moment. What you're going to see in this clip is it's going out. It's being decomposed as a title while the dancing is going on underneath. Let's see that clip and then we'll discuss it.

Freefall

BTJ: Imagine that coming out of this section, you've just heard a beautiful Mozart adagio, one of his last but the sound is all produced by cassette players. That gives a very weird effect because each cassette player motor runs at a different speed. So you have this ethereal transmittal of music playing, but it's out of phase with itself because of the way that its sound is. The next section, "Freefall", is John Cage, good old John Cage, in 1978, in one of his most audacious experiments, which was a two-hour plus solo performance ["Empty Words"], sitting at a table with a glass of water and a light, reading phonons from Walden Pond, not the words, not the sentences, just the ahhh, the oooh, the ummm. He was in Milan in 1978 performing this quite amazing work and the radical leftwing students had been told that a revolutionary composer was coming, so they had to buy their tickets to go see and hear about Marxism or what have you.

[laughter]

PK: Let's have a look at that clip, please.

BTJ: We'll watch about three minutes of what is a ten-minute section.

[clip presented]

PK: Thank you. One of the features of this was that in this section, the two elements of dance and the projections are rule-based. Why don't you describe how you choreographed this section?

BTJ: We call it "The Game" and we have three phrases and a structure that has two teams. Each team is required to perform a sequence, which is, I believe, move out onto the stage together in a group, hold still for ten seconds, leave. The people that are left on stage are performing the phrase. The others stay off stage for ten seconds, walk back on and collect them and go off. Now, both teams are doing these actions but when they're performing this action, they can touch each other at any moment. Without breaking the line of the phrase, one person touches and picks up exactly where another person left off so it's constant switching, constant watching, and it's time-based: ten seconds on, ten seconds of performing, ten seconds off...leave the stage, other group comes on.

PK: It was within that idea that I wanted to build this animation..I wanted two things to happen so that the letters and letter placement are all going on these square trajectories and they're looping in and out of phase of each other and, also, those trajectories are gradually shifting and, therefore, going in and out phase with each other even more.

BTJ: Something that we don't see is that, at one point, the letters stop and it becomes all geometric figures. Then, he and Robert have a beautiful collaboration. What are those...not halogen lights.

PK: Sodium or something.

BTJ: When Robert's stage goes from this very moody dark to white, white, white, literally, this action that you've been seeing of Paul's begins to be absorbed in the white environment so it becomes very, very serene in its own way. It's white on white and you suggest movement, which we no longer actually see. It's a beautiful thing. Shall we do "Borealis"?

PK: It's getting late. We'll run the "Borealis" title sequence, please.

BTJ: Just to give a sense of what his titles do look like.

[clip presented]

BTJ: Now, it stays there for about the length of that beautiful, contemporary Portuguese Gregorian chant and, then, the titles disappear and you see what looks like fireflies. There's a pile of dancers, literally a pile. These fireflies, then, become, literally, a seething sea of things that could be stars if they were not moving so much. It's very romantic but breathtaking and obviously a technological illusion that you're now looking at a moving sea of creatures. Then, Bjorn's translucent screens come in that suggest, once again, this Hessterion or Gothic architecture and the notion of the piece is complete. The eternal elements, which is the sky or the primal ocean- excuse me if I wax too big here- but not at all natural, part of the system that is made in a computer and drops that talk about stone and the imposition of architecture in a world where there was architecture but not that architecture. It's translucent. Then, there are these dancers who have stopped dancing and, in fact, are only walking and retreating. So, it's a very complete and an enigmatic solution to what my host had asked me to do: talk about the influence of the Mediterranean-Latin culture in the New World.

PK: We have lots more we could ask each other, but since we've already gone on so long, maybe we should open it up to the audience if there are any questions.

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