Interview with Dean Moss
by Joshua Lubin-Levy
This interview took place on February 9, 2011. We met to discuss Nameless Forest, a multidisciplinary performance work conceived by Dean Moss and developed in collaboration with contemporary Korean sculptor, installation artist and poet, Sungmyung Chun. Nameless Forest will be produced in partnership with MAPP International Productions, and is scheduled to premiere at The Kitchen May 19-28, 2011.
Josh: Before we talk about Nameless Forest, I wanted to ask you a little about the process of choreographing this work. There seems to be a contradiction between the often violent content of your work, and the affectionate and caring way I’ve seen you interact with your performers in the rehearsal room. What is the relationship of this caring nature to brining such a visceral choreography to your dancers? In other words, how do you get a bunch of dancers to hit each other with boards?
Dean: Well, you know in American society violence is so much a substitute for sex. And so I think it’s an incredibly intimate thing to be violent, especially to be violent on stage. And part of the use of violence on stage is approaching metaphor in a very particular way – in a very direct way. To get a performer to go with you, you have to be intimate with that performer. And you have to have a kind of trust with that performer. Developing a mode in which you can work with the performer to bring out an activity they might not be comfortable with. Developing that process is really important to me because I want the use of violence to be specific and I need the performer’s understanding. I need this to be read as behavior in the performer, so that it’s generated by the performer and not that I am directing them. Part of the interest in my work and part of the reason my work has moved into audience participation is because I am interested in behavior and what happens when you have a kind of behavior-as-form presented on stage.
J: Now I’m feeling self conscious, because I imagine everyone starts their interviews by asking about the use of violence in your work?
D: I’ve been getting violence and transgressive – which can bring certain visceral things up in people minds so it can be useful for that. But it can be a little gray or fuzzy. As I get more articulate in my work, I move away from those terms. And I’m not sure where I’m going yet, but I think it’s more specific than those words are.
J: Well it also seems to be a term that is often brought up in discussions of masculinity – which you’ve mentioned is a theme of yours in Nameless Forrest. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about male-male relationships in the non-sexualized way you are using
D: I think Nameless Forest is partially about breaking down identity and thinking about masculinity as a part of that identity. But also it’s about having strong attractions to other men and masculinity at the same time of being quite straight. I don’t have a lot of male friends, but the ones I do have, they like space around them. We like space. So there’s a kind of whistfulness, a bond that you maybe would like to have more of and yet part of its definition is that there is less of it than there is desire for it. And so I’m interested in that. I’m interested in this desire. So the closeness is very interesting, especially the way my violence and my masculinity are some how combined. Part of it is a kind of resentment and a rejection of that Alan Alda, soft-male identity. Which is something I tried and couldn’t do. I tried to be soft. I’m not, I can’t do that.
JLL: Creating space is an interesting idea, particularly because the men in Nameless Forest get very close to one another. They’re playing, they’re jumping on top of one another, their movement mirrors and mimics each other – so they collapse in a myriad of ways.
DM: Well I think the space is a psychic space of isolation. In Sungmyung’s work that isolation exists in physical space. In my work that isolation has to be formed and it has be formed in relationship to something. So in the work there’s isolation presented by the Aaron character, and then there’s community presented by the group. But the group is also partially inside Aaron, and so the exploding of that single character into these characters is part of this isolation-in-togetherness. It’s a right of passage that is also a separation for these men. Then the women are tokens of that separation and their role in this male right of passage is to to identify what is lost within it, the responsibilities of it - to identify and give value to loss and isolation in the work as represented by the men. And through this we initiate the audience into our world, we engage directly with the audience. Bringing in the audience members is about initiating them to this sense of loss and isolation, exposing them to the pain (which accompanies any right of passage into adulthood or into knowledge) which is often about being able to endure the pain of being isolated from the community. And in many societies, many post-industrialized societies in particular, we have moved away from that sense of what it is to be a man, from that passage. Unless you go to war or go into the military, there’s not so many rights of passage, unless you do something to force this sort of isolation.
JLL: So you’re engaging the audience in this really active way of really putting them through it, so to speak.
DM: Putting them through it and then seeing it. Seeing somebody going through and also being involved in it. So the work becomes a kind of mirror of this initiation process so that you see the performance of it and are also involved in it almost simultaneously.
JLL: There seems to be an interesting parallel between this passage through isolation into community with your own progress as an artist. You described a turn in your work from the DIY model to a more collaborative method. Nameless Forest seems to be your largest collaboration yet, so I’m wondering if you could talk more about this shift.
DM: Being a curator, looking at work from a distance, doing the dance-in-progress program at The Kitchen, developing a composition workshop with Levi Gonzalez – all of this fueled this turn in that the idea of art doing things became more interesting to me. And once I did Figures on a Field and saw the effects of this docent led group through the work and saw the dimension it added to it – I think I was kind of floored. They bring something for real, it messes with reality in a way – which is something only the very best work does. I had started to explore this in a very small way through the Board Dance which was part of American deluxe, but seeing it that way made we want to do something that was even more radical, which was to try to replace the performers in an essential way, not in a peripheral way, but in the essential focus of the work, which would be that the audience would perform the core of the work. This became Kisaeng Becomes You, a work in which the audience is brought down and they recite the poem, they become the actual performance, and the dancers are reduced to framing devices for those performances – how to setup your audience to watch an audience member do something, to see that thing that they’re doing as the focus of the entire work. So the replacement of the performer became an interesting idea. In Nameless Forrest, by adding more artists to the work, I feel like I’m moving myself in a way, that I’m taking a back seat, I’m curating a work in the process of creating it. And I think I will continue in this process of exploring the absence of the artist, or the frame for the artist with the artist kind of removed – but the outline of the artists is still there and the work is the outline.
JLL: I don’t know of many dancers who are actively pursuing that kind of absence. Just as an open-ended question, what drew you to dance or the use of the body in the first place?
DM: For me, there is something really essential about the body and how you filter information through the body. I have a body. I like to move around. I feel my greatest freedom in motion. And in fact freedom is defined in my mind as motion. And so the body seems like a natural place to begin. I think then, I want to move out from it. And the set design for Nameless Forest is this fragmented body, or the monument of the body exploding. And the work itself presents the body as an act, an active and creative community or communal body. Dance, for me, has the most open, abstract and yet narrative form. Or at least it has that possibility. And it has an infinite relationship to the world, the universe. I can see my whole existence as body, as an organism. I am part of and I am this organism. It’s very expansive. It’s not about an object, or rather the objectness of it is optional even in the sense of performance-as-object. Even that is optional. And I like that it’s not text based. I so love that it is experience based.
JLL: Along the lines of this constant expansion – you’ve worked as a teacher, an artist, and a curator – is there one lesson you always try to impart to your students and one lesson you’d say you have yet to learn?
DM: Well, I think ultimately I’m giving and learning the same thing. In dealing with emerging artist I’m interested in opening their eyes to possibilities and I’m interested in putting myself in circumstance that open my eyes to possibilities as well. And if we tied it all up, it’s about opening my eyes and the kinds of things that force me to do that which brings us back to identity, violence, masculinity, community and isolation…all these things come out of trying to find a more open place.
JLL: Breaking apart that singular view, to find something new, only to break it apart again.
DM: Yes.
Josh: Is there anything I should ask you that I haven’t?
Dean: Well you didn’t ask me what I get out of collaboration. And probably because it’s obvious what I get out of collaboration. But also the collaboration forces discipline, and a discipline that is not your own. In all the pieces I make, I setup the framework, I assembled my collaborators out of a practical need or a desire to work together. And then, once I have them, I’m interested in their mind, in the discipline they have around their own practice and how to integrate that discipline. And also the aesthetic problem that presents itself when their aesthetic comes into conflict with my own and my own understandings. So, that’s really important. It’s akin to having to come to, or why we come to, a place like New York, rather than making work in isolation, in an isolated place, somewhere else. Because the community around us forces some kind of reaction. Not only does it feed you with other people doing creative things, but it forces a kind of reaction. The more I know about the things that are going on, the more I react to it and I’m changed by that.
J: So you come to a project with a practice that is behind you, maybe a method or a process, but then collaborating is about rewriting that method?
D: Rewriting it! Yes, thank you. Yes, it forces me to rewrite it. And because it forces me to rewrite it and it forces me into places that I don’t or could not predict, that I could not foresee, it keeps a kind of freshness about the work. I mean it changes, reworks, the idea. And reworking the idea is always more interesting than the thing I would have done myself. It expands my own practice. It opens up what I can see because I’ve brought in somebody else and forced, forced, violently forced, sometimes really violently forced myself to look at something that I hadn’t looked at, or was obscuring in some way.
J: So this kind of collaboration - which is not about building a safety net of other people or filling in the gaps – is really about bringing these minds together and saying the more people who are in this room the harder it is for me to stand up here, so I have to be really disciplined and really clear about what I’m doing. Like you were saying, it forces a discipline.
D: It forces a discipline but also it forces me to look at what they want, and what they are doing. And how do I incorporate that? How do I stay true to my own idea but at the same time try to graft my mind onto theirs.? They’re fulfilling something I would like, that I’ve designed, but then part of that design changes because of their input, because of my understanding of their input, because of my need to understand their input. In relationship to Laylah I couldn’t just look at the painting and make up something. That’s not what I want. . I want to know what her idea is when she looks at performers in a space, what happens to her idea of her work. Then she says to me, “This has to be cleaner, this has to be more perfect, that has to be looked at in a certain way.” Things that I wouldn’t necessarily do but that I’m open to. Ok, let me do this from your standpoint. Let me try to fulfill your needs. By fulfilling somebody else’s needs I come even closer to my own, which is a very interesting paradox and something I would say in ensemble work. Make your partner look good and you look good. Frame them and you will look better, you will be better on stage, you will perform better. Everything is about somebody else. And so the work, for me, if I make it about my collaborator I can more easily see myself, I can more easily understand what I want. But it’s also about leaving bits of myself with others because they have to struggle with me. And the struggles seems to be the medium in which we work. And that activity is what keeps the space for us to define ourselves as separate but also closer than we might have thought.
Joshua Lubin-Levy is a writer, performer and scholar. He is also a doctoral candidate in Performance Studies.