I caught up with Small Wooden Shoe Artist Director Jacob Zimmer to chat about Dedicated to the Revolutions, a show he's been working on for over three years which opens at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre this week.
Dedicated to the Revolutions plays March 31st through April 12, 2009 at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre
Produced by Small Wooden Shoe with the assistance of One Yellow Rabbit's High Performance Rodeo and in association with Buddies in Bad Times Theatre.
Box Office 416-975-8555
Tickets PWYC - $25 :: Youth / Student tickets $15
Buddies In Bad Times Theatre, 12 Alexander Street, Toronto
artsexy.ca
smallwoodenshoe.org
Dedicated to the Revolutions is created by: Frank Cox-O'Connell, Chad Dembski, Ame Henderson, Erika Hennebury, Gillian Lewis, Aimée Dawn Robinson, Trevor Schwellnus, Erin Shields, Evan Webber and Jacob Zimmer
You've been working on this project for over three years now and it's finally coming to fruition. What does this feel like?
Great. Scary.
It’s interesting how things have changed over the three years, both in terms of our taste and interests and the exposure and profile of the work.
But the long development time seems mostly right – there were some gaps that were a bit long and some that were too short – but I think it’s important for me to have a lot of time and a lot of breaks for thinking. Most rehearsal processes don’t have much time for reflection and I think that might be a problem - or at least it would be for me.
There have been a fairly large number of collaborators on this project through its different stages. How do you decide on who to collaborate with and what makes a good collaborator in your mind?
Everyone in this process were people I first saw in other work and then met with and talked. They are all people who make their own work, which is very important for me. And then it’s a matter of creating an interesting and productive rehearsal hall that I believe will lead to an interesting and productive performance.
In terms of what makes a good collaborator - I think generosity and curiosity are vital. It’s a generosity to listen and follow as well as lead and propose - to be able to understand what’s happening and how to contribute to that. Patience and understanding are also very important.
I’ve been absolutely blessed on this project to work with many of my favorite artists in the city who have brought so much to the work.
I'm curious to know in particular about your relationship with your collaborator Trevor Schwellnus; specifically because designers are often the ones who have the least collaborative relationship to a traditional process. Can you talk about how you work together and what your particular process of design is?
The shows take a huge jump once we’re in the world that Trevor creates. They a beautiful and idiosyncratic and perfect for the work.
I trust Trev so much, and he makes proposals for the work in such a great way that we’ve ended up with a pretty unique process. It’s one I’m having a hard time describing. He’s in the room pretty early and has been involved in every show so we can get to the heart of things pretty quickly. We talk about big ideas and overall aesthetic values early and then once we’re in the theatre things just come to life under his eye.
He also brings a lot of thought and contribution to what we do on stage and is often our go to for a “bullshit meter” in terms of science and tech.
And he does amazing things with rope. Other people like tape, he goes with rope.
Some critics (who shall remain nameless) have described your work as "Post Modern". Do you see what you do as part of the Post Modern Period? Why or why not?
I get it, even if I disagree a bit and quibble about the typesetting (“postmodern” v. “post-modern” v. “post modern”.)
The postmodern turn in artistic and intellectual pursuits was vital. Deconstruction, poststructuralism, Critical Theory, and relational theories have been very important to me (and I think the to world.) So I am certainly a child of it.
That being said, I think this work in particular is an attempt to get past some of my issues with the hard lines and to generate proposals and engagement instead of only critique and pulling apart.
Aesthetically I get it too - though again, I think we want to move past some of the trappings (traps.) We avoid irony (we mean what we say, we also mean other things) and think about clarity, humour and pleasure for the audience a bit more then comes to mind with “postmodern theatre.” But again, I have a history with and deep influence from that tradition.
While were on the subject of critics, I've read some writings about your work that, while positive make me feel like the critic "just doesn't get it". What guidelines would you give people writing about your work to understand and talk about it?
I don’t think I can give guidelines. Part of what is nice about Dedicated to the Revolutions is that there are many levels to take the show, different ways to “get it”.
It’s true that some reviews (which are often so short and written so quickly after the show) focus on the humour and songs, and I’m ok with that - or at least I’d rather that then the “you won’t enjoy it, but it’s good for you” reviews. Reviews in this day and age are pointers rather than deep commentary. I’m happy if people show up and have to make up their own minds.
And I think there certainly is a role and a desire for deep commentary - but that requires space and reflection that I don’t feel the print reviewers have - and may mean that that kind of work happens after the show closes.
Maybe the only guideline is to think “What if they meant all of that?”
Song are a very important part of your performances, which is also a commonality in other artists working in a similar style like STO Union. What do you think song brings to the work?
They hold some of the emotional content and some of the humour. They are a different way of thinking through and talking about the issues of the show. And we like singing them and people respond to them – music is nice.
What do you think the 8th Revolution will be? Any sense when it's on the horizon? Is it already happening?
Maybe? Quantum and Nano and Bio tech all seem like “next things” - but I think it’s really hard to predict what will effect our lives and when. These revolutions often took decades to be noticed on a everyday scale.
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Jacob Zimmer is Talking to Chris Dupuis
As I See It: The Problem With Arts Journalism
I don't read the papers much, even though I should. I know it's both artistically and journalistically sound to keep up to date with what people are saying about art in the city, but I just never seem to get around to it. Maybe it's because the environmentalist in me can't stand having to deal with all that paper. Maybe it's that so much of the content isn't of interest to me and I have to wade through pages and pages of crap to get to the three or four pages in the arts section. Or maybe it's because every time I do read them, I end up getting mad. When I read Susan Walker's review of Dancemakers' Double Bill #1 in the Toronto Star last Friday, I realized that it's likely option number three that's the cause of my avoidance.
I think this review is a perfect example of the problem with arts journalism right now. Walker talks about these two pieces in such an uneducated manner, it's an embarrassment to her publication. I won't take issue with Walker's taste, as it's pretty obvious we're on opposite ends of the spectrum, but I will say that I think her lack of understanding of this particular aesthetic of contemporary dance is upsetting, given the fact that she's a dance critic for one of the largest papers in the country. If Ame Henderson and Michael Trent were creating a kind of work completely unheard of before, I might be more inclined to ignore Walker's ignorance about the aesthetic in which they are working. However there are lots of other choreographers out there who are creating in this manner, though most of them are working in Europe at the moment. Part of your job as an arts writer is to keep up to date, not just with what's happening in your city, but with what's happening around the world, so that you can provide your reading audience with an enlightened and educated view point about the work you are writing about. In this particular instance, Walker has failed at her job.
Art is many things to many people and as a critic it is vital that you learn to understand the difference between a show that is not within your personal taste and that's just plain bad. In this case, Walker simply took the easy way out that so many journalists do; she didn't understand the show and rather than take the time to do some research and maybe even (gasp!) contact the artists to get a bit more information about what they were trying to do, she just gave the show a shit review and called it a day. This is irresponsible journalism.
To be fair, I don't think this type of scenario (which is all too common) is entirely the fault of the writers. When you're reviewing work for a daily publication, your copy is normally due the day after you see the show, meaning there is virtually no time to do any research between seeing the performance and submitting your review. Writing for a weekly may buy you an extra day or two, but it's still hardly any time to process the work you've seen, find out answers to the questions you have, and write an engaging and interesting piece that your editor will be satisfied with. That said, journalists who decide to work for those publications need to take responsibility for preparing themselves as much as possible before they see a show. In the case of these works in particular, just glancing over the program notes that Jacob Zimmer wrote would have answered some of the questions that Walker had. Based on the holes in what she had to say about the performance, I would have surmised she didn't get a copy of the program, except that she actually references Zimmer's notes in her review.
I'm not saying that there shouldn't be bad reviews. God knows there's lots of bad work out there. What I am saying is that not understanding a piece of work because you lack the proper background and context, is absolutely no excuse for giving it a bad review. In an academic context, would it ever be acceptable to submit an essay to a professor about a piece of work saying that you fundamentally didn't understand it and it was therefore intrinsically bad? Of course not. And we need to start holding arts journalists (Critics as they like to call themselves) to the same standards.
I don't intend to harp on Walker endlessly. She and I have a very different aesthetic of work that we like, and it's not fair to blame her for simply not liking these pieces. I do think that this article is a good example of the larger systemic problems that exist within mainstream publications when it comes to arts writing. Most papers employ two or three writers at the most for their performing arts sections. People don't stop to question this, but when you compare performing arts to other art forms the problem becomes obvious.
Let's take NOW Magazine as an example. The performing arts section, has two principal writers and one or two others who occasionally pen things. In contrast, the music section has over a dozen writers, who regularly contribute. The suggestion here is that while music can fall into many different categories, performance falls into only two or three. Another great example it the music blog Pitchfork which employs upwards of forty different writers, even though they are actually very limited in what genres of music they cover. The simple lack of different voices in performing arts writing may be the biggest problem that publications and artists face today.
Most arts writers are trained as journalists, but have no formal training in the arts. As someone who works as both an artist and a journalist, I can say with absolute certainty that having credentials in one area, does not automatically make you an expert in the other. One would hope that over time, writers would take the time to learn about different forms of work, to travel, and to get a sense of the overall context in which the artists they are talking about are working. I don't think any of these writers are stupid. I think a lot of them are actually very good writers. However, I do think that in many cases they have become lazy, and don't bother to educate themselves or expose themselves to a wide range of different kinds of work, or to challenge themselves to expand their personal tastes.
None of this would actually matter except for one thing; artists working in performance rely on reviews as the primary means of marketing their work and selling tickets to their performances, because none of them have enough money for large scale advertising campaigns. Whether we like it or not, we must have our work reviewed, because it's the only way that people will hear about it. Can you imagine the shape that any other industry would be in if it's entire marketing campaign was based around things written about their product by a third party source that was in many ways totally uneducated about their product? The suggestion that companies selling cars or cell phones or big blockbuster films would use only these means to market their products sounds absurd, but as artists we've just decided to accept this. The spirit of the artist is used to being downtrodden, beaten-up, and abused, and I think in some ways that leaves us in the position of not feeling up to fighting against the systems that oppress us and prevent us from creating and showing our work.
I don't know the exact solution to this problem, though if I did, I'm sure I'd be a hugely successful artist by now. What I do know is that it's time for us as artists to start addressing the critical climate in which we work and to start challenging what people have to say about us. We've all had those occasions where we've presented work, gotten a bad review, but known full well that we deserved it. In those cases, the best bet is just to lick you wounds and try to do better the next time. But the next time you create a piece that gets a bad review you feel was undeserved and uninformed, write the publication. Take the time to challenge what the journalist had to say about it and point out the holes in their arguments. Similarly, if you see a piece of work that's great, but gets a bad review from an uninformed writer, challenge them on behalf of the artist getting the bad review. And don't let a bad review scare you off. If a piece of work seems interesting to you, but got a bad review, don't let that one person's potentially uniformed perspective influence your decision to buy a ticket to the show.
Essentially what I'm saying with all this is that I believe we as artists must create our own critical system within our community. If you see a show you love, take the time to tell your friends and colleagues about it. If you are curious about an artist's work, but don't totally understand it, call them and ask them about what they're doing. Putting the responsibility for understanding each other's work into our own hands won't eliminate the review systems of the mainstream publications but it will allow us to challenge our own assumptions about what we do and how to make our work better. And no matter your perspective, you can't argue that's a bad thing.
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Ame Henderson is Talking to Chris Dupuis
One of the new features I'm planning to launch here is a series of dialogues with artists called Talking To Chris Dupuis. The first is a discussion with choreographer Ame Henderson of Public Recordings, who's new work It Was A Nice Party is premiering as part of Dancemakers Double Bill #1 along side Michael Trent's And The Rest.
Click on the "Read More!" link below for the full conversation.
The piece is showing April 9-11 at 8pm, and April 12 at 3pm, at Premiere Dance Theatre, as part of Harbourfront Centre's Next Steps series. Go see it!!!
When I was watching the preview of the piece, I was really excited, not just that this piece is happening, but that it's happening with Dancemakers at Premiere Dance Theatre, because it's so unlike anything I've ever seen produced by that company or at that space before. Is the idea of presenting work in a venue this large something new for you or something you've been thinking about for a while?
I've been interested for many years in the idea of presenting work in that kind of a traditional theatre space and how to both honour that tradition and to break it. That's been one of the core goals for Michael Trent (Dancemakers Artistic Director) and I in this process. We wanted to examine how we can present work in a space like that in a way that fits with tradition, but also talks about what it is as physical space.
We knew we wanted the dancers to be onstage as the public enters. We decided we wanted the audience to enter from backstage, down the hallways, through the dressing rooms, so that they actually understand the perspective of the performers in the experience before they have to claim their own perspective as audience.
One of the things I've been thinking about with my own work, as I move to creating in smaller and more specific spaces, is that when you want to try to translate that work to other places, you come across all these road blocks. However, if you're willing to work in a proscenium format, you can show your work anywhere in the world. Is having a piece that can travel part of the decision to work in this way?
That's more of a secondary thing because I already knew it was going to be presented at that space when I was invited to create it. The question of how to make work that can actually resonate in that kind of space is of great interest to me because those kinds of large proscenium theatres are in abundance around the world, even though they are less and less relevant to the kind of work that I'm making. I've actually seen a couple of pieces in the last little while that deal with that kind of space, that I've been really inspired by, and I guess my interest now is sort of a byproduct of that. It's also interesting to think about presenting to big audiences. I just reread your Canadian Stage piece, about the demise of large scale work in Canada. I think a lot of artists are questioning how realistic it is to make work for audiences that large these days.
And now for that awful question journalists always have to ask; What was your starting point or inspiration for deciding to create this piece?
One of my first impulses was to try to find a way to use what I consider to be traditional choreographic approaches to create the piece, specifically the idea of learning movement from an outside source. I almost always make work that is really created by the performers and then collaboratively restructured together. This was an impulse to embrace a traditional choreographic model of giving an outside source for the movement and getting dancers to copy it. I'm pretty obsessed right now with exploring themes of authorship, appropriation, and re-imagining work that already exists.
How did you decide on the film clip from Fellini's La Dolce Vita?
I wanted a social gathering that was pedestrian, but that had a lot of choreographic features. When we first started working in December 2007, we were using a bunch of different films. Initially I was using a lot of bank robbery scenes, but we found they were very charged and anxious, which was increased by the task the dancers had to perform of copying them.
I knew I wanted a film of that era because I wanted to use something that was made before any of us were born. I wanted to make sure we weren't trying to recreate something that any of us knew in some way. Also in that era of filmmaking, especially in Italian cinema, they were using a lot of really wide shots showing full bodies, so the ability to translate the images to a three dimensional stage environment was easier than with contemporary cinema, where there are more close-ups. As I focused on that era of work, I started to find Fellini a really interesting artist to try to have a conversation with; His views of character, how he questions identity and social placement, and also uses appropriation in a lot of ways, are similar to what I'm interested in exploring right now, so I was able to find a lot of common with him.
La Dolce Vita in particular, is the best example of how his work lacks narrative line, but instead is made up of an accumulation of events add up to something that may not be easily defined, but results in some sort of feeling. I really respond to that and understand it as something I try to do with my own work.
I want to talk about the general context in which you see your work. I wrote a piece about Feliz Klassen's piece Weathering Architecture a few weeks ago, in which I talked about the new aesthetic of performance that is emerging right now. Most of the artists I was referring to in that piece identify as theatre makers. Even though your identify as a choreographer, I feel your work has more in common with them, than with Toronto Dance Theatre, for example. How do you see your work in relation the context of "new performance"?
I see those artists as my contemporaries because I think we're asking similar questions. What is it to create an event where people are really doing something? How can you be unadorned in a performance state? What does that mean to be yourself on stage? Those artists are my colleagues and I talk with them a lot. I find it easier to relate to them on a theoretical level than many choreographers in the city, but my focus is in relation to the dance tradition. Even though the questions are the same, I have a very different way of approaching them. I'm totally convinced there is a conversation to be had with choreographers in Toronto and I feel like I'm starting to do that in really small ways.
Working with Dancemakers is a good start.
I try to view my work in a larger context outside Toronto and I feel really connected with choreographers in other places. In that larger context, I'm not really doing anything that new. There are other people out there who are working in similar ways and asking very similar questions, just not so much in Toronto. That said I do perceive an interest in my work here that is really surprising and heartening. The people that are interested in what I'm doing are interested on a really deep level and they're very committed to it.
There's something to be said for that feeling of loneliness that all artists feel at one point or another in their lives, and that some people would argue is both central and essential to the artistic process; The idea of the artist as the outsider, looking back at the world from a perspective different from everyone else.
There are also systemic problems with the way that work is supported and presented. If I'm going to gripe about anything, it's the lack of presentation and curatorial vision. I feel like if artists were being encouraged in different ways by presenters the work they are producing would be more relevant. Some of the theatre artists you're talking about are being given space by specific curators to explore those things and it's helping the work to develop.
I think that part of what's changing is that people are actually starting to travel outside the city to see work again. I remember when I was in first year theatre school, we had a lecture about how all successful artists know the history of their artistic discipline inside and out. What I've started to believe in my current practice, is that it's actually more important to know what is going on in the world right now, rather than what happened forty years ago.
I'm pretty convinced that those things have to be in parallel. For me, understanding how contemporary work comes out of a tradition and what we are responding to as artists is so vital. I'm always very surprised by how little the people trying to create new dance know about post-modern dance creation.
I'm wondering how you see yourself in the history of dance creation. Is there a stream of work you see yourself being part of or a tradition you are carrying on?
For me it's more relevant, to think about the tools of choreography and how I can not abandon, but reimagine them. My thesis project at The School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam next year is about unison, something that has been a signature of traditional dance for centuries. I'm interested in looking at how that form can be reimagined, and how it addresses issues of power, autonomy, and authority. How can something that's been a signifier of traditional hierarchical structure for so long be turned on its head, without devaluing the tradition? I don't want to work in reaction to work that's come before me. I want my work to be an extension of it.
I see a lot of work and I want to ask the people making it if they've seen the work of the specific artists whose tradition they are carrying on. It's a bad question to have to ask--to see a new work, and think that the creator has no sense of what they are in relation to. It's the difference between understanding that something is in relation to something else, and thinking of it in its own bubble. When you understand the connections, it's really satisfying.
Do you think that part of that is the fixation we have in Canada on "New Work" and how everyone has to do something that no one has done before?
Yes, definitely. And in relation to this piece, that's one of the things I'm challenging. Can we do something old? What is it to translate something old and make it sing in this time? How can we get rid of this worry about newness and just focus on being here and doing something that engages with the world right now?
I think a big part of it has to do with our granting bodies because they'll only fund the first time you do a show, and after that you're on your own. Certainly with theatre, a lot of times the first run of a show fails miserably and you have to do it a few times before you get it right. For whatever reason, they've decided that we should just churn out as much new work as possible, and hopefully, sooner or later we'll have a hit.
It's the philosophy that lateral growth is more important than deepening the work and giving it enough time and resources to be developed in a substantial way. Thinking about the Netherlands for example; they fund work in this way that demands you show the piece multiple times in its development in a public context, in order to be able to get the funding to do it in the first place.
Which makes so much sense!
It seems to a lot of people that working on a show for three months is extravagant, but to me it feels like just scratching the surface of what I need for my work to be fully formed.
Coming back to the show itself; I was really impressed with how the dancers allowed themselves to be imprecise, for lack of a better word, in certain moments which is so counter to all of the training that dancers normally have. In my experience it can be a really difficult habit to break people from, since they've been getting taught since age five that you have to move your body in certain way and always be beautiful.
The two things that I said to them at the start of the process were that I wanted to create a machine that would not behave and that I also want the audience to know exactly what they are doing from the start of the performance. Part of making that machine that won't behave is that the task they are given is impossible in a certain way. They are trying their damnedest to recreate the movement in the film and the imperfections are actually genuine. For me as an artist, it's about trying to clearly define the task at hand, because the only way I know to get the state I'm interested in working with is to create a structure of systems that creates those moments. They don't create the imperfections, as much as the imperfections happen to them.
When I first heard about this project my initial response was "Oh, God, I hope they can do it!" because those dancers are trained is for a very different type of choreography. I'm wondering what the process of creating this show on them was like.
I found the dancers incredibly game to tackle this work and I think it really speaks to how Michael has envisioned the company and the group of dancers he's brought together. There's a certain physical virtuosity that's always demanded of dancers and my job was to help them translate that physical virtuosity to their minds. I could always reference their training because they have so much of it, so it wasn't about doing something you've never done before, as much as it was about using what they already knew to make this piece work.
It took a long time, but my work always takes a long time. It's about repetition and trying to get to that thing we want. And I never felt like they turned off. Now they're having a good time doing it, which was both my hope from the beginning and the thing I was most worried about being able to achieve. The only reason you can justify doing a piece like this is if the people doing it are enjoying performing it.
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