Daria Martin (DM): It may look as if the films have been designed methodically to unfold in sequence, but in fact they've evolved in an unplanned way, guided by strong interests and semiconscious desires. I think it was Marguerite Duras who spoke about writing as a process of groping in the darkness toward a distant light. Writing for film is like that for me—an instinctive impulse—so it is only in looking back on the films' progression that the logic is spelled out. I called my first three films a trilogy because, in retrospect, they seemed to provoke and then resolve a dialogue: In the Palace poses questions (blackness, voyeurism, holding poses); Birds provides counter-questions (whiteness, participation, frequent breaking of poses), and Closeup Gallery perhaps begins to resolve or at least to distill those questions. For example, the trilogy's engagement with hand-made magic is made literal and concrete as well as symbolic in Closeup Gallery.

The role of the films' performers has evolved from the assumption of static poses to enacting increasing degrees of movement, and, looking back, this gradual "awakening" is parallel to a slow move from my former painting practice into the full possibilities of the film medium. Also, the direct references to particular art movements or pieces in the earliest films have with time become more imbedded within my growing visual language, and sometimes within a loose narrative structure.

One way that the more recent films depart from the trilogy is that they have moved away from my self-enclosed studio and out into the world, away from manufactured, possible worlds to engagement with actual ones. Loneliness and the Modern Pentathlon and Soft Materials both work with existing phenomena that tie into the work's conceptual strands. Soft Materials takes off from intriguing research on embodied artificial intelligence and Loneliness weaves a fiction around an anachronistic Olympic event. They use occurrences in our culture as traction to broaden the work's sensibilities.

YD: I think it is quite significant that Beatrix, having been involved in modern dance earlier, and I, who recently did an exhibition about formalism and the impact of modernity on younger artists, invited you for an exhibition. These themes seem deeply rooted in your work.

DM: It's the first time I heard that Beatrix used to be involved in dance but somehow I’m not surprised! The connections you've mentioned are significant indeed because you've touched on two poles of the work: abstraction as against figuration, or more specifically, the use of sculptural form and painterly colour as against the performing body. The trilogy of films beginning with In the Palace arose from the context of my graduate school training in Los Angeles in the late 1990s, when my peers were turning to Greenbergian modernism as a touchstone for a new sense of agency, a way out of over-theorised postmodern academia, or a guiltless indulgence in beauty. I was also attracted to the sense of freedom that this return to "Modernism" seemed to promise, but I worried that what many artists were doing willfully shut out the whole arena of the body and its vulnerability. So in searching for a place to begin, I turned instead for inspiration to the some of the stumbling first moments of 21st-century modern culture, when the modernist project hadn't yet worked out its parameters (if it ever really did) and was open to the contamination of humour, exaggeration, pathos, play, and awkwardness. For example, I was intrigued by Oskar Schlemmer's direction of the Bauhaus theatre program: he combined instruction in the arts of vaudeville with an application of his own rigorous painting practice; he created a continuum, not always seamless, between the dress-up games of the Bauhaus' gala costumed balls and his own self-serious, pseudo-scientific study of abstraction. I'm very attracted to awkward clashes like Schlemmer's: areas where Apollonian control and Dionysian release come into conflict.

BR: My past involvement in dance did not have any influence at all on having invited you for the show in Zurich, but of course this "reference" did reactivate knowledge in perceiving your films. I was very intrigued by the formalist understanding of what early modern dance created in relation to crossovers to visual art practice (as you mentioned with Schlemmer) and especially to the interaction of sculptural forms and three-dimensional movement. I understand that for In the Palace your reference is Alberto Giacometti's The Palace at 4 am (1932), which is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Can you talk more about the spatial and sculptural concepts that interested you? Thinking of Giacometti's sculpture that creates a kind of spatial box in which activities can/might happen—it also reminds me of another artist you seem to refer to a lot in your work, Joseph Cornell.

DM: The relationship between film and sculpture is an interesting paradox. On the one hand, film is extremely articulate in describing form, space, and volume. Unlike video, it doesn't flatten its subject through a grid of pixels; unlike photography, it can actively move around its subject. But on the other hand of course, it's impossible to fully capture the bulk and volume of sculpture on the ephemeral medium of film; it's a relationship that doesn't quite work. That not-quite-working can generate an emotional tension, a little bit like the uncertain desire created by a psychological projection, or by the experience of romantic love directed towards someone who might or might not care.

Giacometti created The Palace at 4am before he began making his famous existential figures. Whereas Giacometti explained those attenuated sculptures as being a result of directly observing people in the distance of a cityscape, compressed by the atmosphere around them, the pieces made around the time of The Palace at 4am seem to be compressed in the mind, by another kind of atmosphere. These sculptures, quite small, resembled game boards or maquettes; many looked like models for something that could exist on a much larger scale.

The Palace at 4am, as practically anyone who’s seen it will agree, has a particularly evocative feeling, as if the figures within it have each been caught within their own dreams, simultaneously sleepwalking through the same house. When I used to visit it at the old MOMA in New York, it seemed vast and diminutive at the same time—its scale shifted in the imagination. The idea that sparked In the Palace was a desire to literally realise my own fantasy to inhabit this small sculpture, to blow it up to human dimensions and to populate it with performers.

After measuring the sculpture in MOMA's archives for the accurate proportions, it was quite a shock, months later, to finally stand inside the 25-foot high version that I built with my art-school friends. It wasn't until the thing was lit, within a darkened sports arena, that you felt a hint of the isolated atmosphere of the original sculpture. In the process of making all my films, I hit this odd point of shock and recognition, where a mental fantasy suddenly meets the reality of a collective physical effort to realize that fantasy.

This is an aspect of filmmaking that really fascinates me: the voyage of the work's existence from its beginnings as a daydream to its translation into a real-world event when it is filmed, and finally to its return to an ephemeral presence when it is projected. In a way, the film projection, the light streaming from the projector, is like a maquette or model: physical space and action has been compressed, but the on-screen images hold the potential, in the imagination, to expand into an entire world, to spring to life.

Joseph Cornell, who filled hundreds of boxes with delicate selections from his collections of objects and images, is an artist who has fascinated me for many years. His boxes seem to compress emotional experience; sometimes, like Giacometti's early sculptures, they take the form of a game or a maquette that seemed to invite, yet exclude, participation. These boxes seduce you into complicity, yet they also shut you out of their self-contained worlds. Like The Palace at 4am, they suggest a whole world growing from a lap-sized space.

YD: I would like to get back to Schlemmer because, especially concerning his ballet, there are more striking similarities we haven't yet mentioned. Just the title Triadisches Ballett (Triadic Ballet) already indicates the structure of the three components it was built of. I read that just like Daria's trilogy: it starts with a funny, burlesque scene, here all in yellow, then the Schlemmer stage becomes pink and in the end turns—again comparable with the trilogy—into black. Besides these formal analogies, it is most of all Schlemmer's fascination with what he called "artificial figures," which also seems evident in a different way in Soft Materials. But whereas Schlemmer's fascination with progress and the machine age was not tainted by any doubts, the figures in Soft Materials seem to be both using and being used by the machines.

DM: Schlemmer created a kind of science of the body that was oddly irrational—an awkward fusion of art and mechanics. The performers usually appeared in baggy body suits padded in the hips and shoulders, almost exaggerating both their masculine and feminine attributes. Perhaps they were meant to represent androgynous "everyman" and "everywoman" but instead they looked like awkward aliens making mischief.

There was plenty of humour in the Bauhaus performances—mime acts and moustachioed masks and lots of staccato trotting around the stage. Schlemmer built his theatre around what he called the "play instinct." The ridiculousness of his performances is difficult to reconcile with the seriousness of his diagrams, drawings, and paintings; there seems to have been a "split" there; he apparently felt that his performances were inferior to his paintings. You say that his optimism was untainted, but I think that there might have been a kind of secret, lingering doubt there; a doubt about how the presence of the real human body might corrupt the kind of unblinking faith he felt for his painting practice.

My first films set the performing body in relation to sculptural objects. At times the constructed environment around the performers—sets and props—almost appears as important as the human presence. And yet the sense of bodily frailty and fallibility is always hinted at. These films set up a parity between the delights of artifice—form, colour, sculptural space—and the complex nature/culture entity that is the human body.

Soft Materials was an experiment in introducing the vulnerability and tenderness of human flesh and feelings to animated yet man-made objects: robots. Working with scientists in the field of artificial intelligence seemed like a natural extension of my involvement with the notion of artifice.

BR: I find it quiet interesting that the robots you worked with for Soft Materials have a really old-fashioned aesthetic; they appear to refuse recent high-tech knowledge, and yet they also seem to work against the suspicion we have of post-mechanic machines/technologies. These robots also seem to refer again to a modernist, specifically a handmade, look and to early utopian concepts of the relationship between humans and machines, with an underlying dream of a functioning and an interaction between the two, which keeps humans "in power," pre-sci-fi kind of. And these robots again remind me of early modernist dance props.

How did you find the AI (Artificial Intelligence) Lab at the University of Zurich, where you shot the film? What exactly where you looking for? (Funnily this all happened before our plan to do the show at Kunsthalle Zürich.) Can you also speak about the scientists' ideas behind using these "old fashioned" models?

DM: AI is an emotionally loaded area in the popular imagination, and I wanted to remove the sense of fear of these objects, to move away from paranoid fantasies of machines taking over humankind and toward a far more open area of poetic and metaphoric possibility. I also wanted to keep this experiment somehow "grounded." The robots at the AI lab at the University of Zurich appealed to me in part because they look, as you say, quite "low tech," their parts held together with gaffer tape, plastic cogs, and wheels. In appearance, they reminded me a bit of the "new sculpture" coming out of Los Angeles recently—formal work made with DIY materials. The scientists at the lab work like artists; their desks are completely covered with raw material, a big mess. The lab is also very open to outsiders, making a policy of inviting professionals from other disciplines to visit the lab and this is how I found them.

What is fascinating about these creations is that, despite their rather rudimentary appearance, they actually represent the forefront of artificial intelligence research today. They are products of research into "embodied artificial intelligence," a cutting edge field of AI that seeks to create robots that "learn" from their environment. Rather than being programmed in a purely pre-meditated, rational way, instead they evolve behaviours based on trial and error interactions with the real, physical world; they "feel" the world around them. Many of these robots are designed using animal morphology, and some develop the fluid, lively movements of animals. Others are less recognisable; for example, "Eyebot," the robot in the film with multiple rod-like sensors, mimics the multifaceted perception of an insect eye.

Watching these robots in action, it is difficult not to anthropomorphise them, to imagine that they are experiencing a fundamental state of wonder, like a human infant. They caress, toddle, probe, bump into things. Their exploration of the world around them reminded me, oddly, of performance experiments of the 1960s—for example Carolee Schneemann’s works in which performers approached their environment in a state of unmediated directness. In Soft Materials I wanted to create a fiction in which the performers and the robots are each discovering, in an intimate and frank way, the existence of the other. So I asked two performers—one a dancer, the other an actress—to form a tender relationship with the robots, to enact scenes that were simple, even basic, in the manner of toddlers relating to their toys. In actual fact, the robots in the film are not physically responding to the performers; this is an illusion created by the two performances.

I suppose the film celebrates a kind of animism: the possibility of objects having life. The potential for robots to develop "real life" or "souls" is a huge object of fear in our culture, and the subject of countless post apocalyptic sci-fi movies. It is certainly within that cultural context that Soft Materials was made, but this is not a film about nightmares. Perhaps the film's fictional world has something in common with the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark's experiments with sculptural objects in the 1960s. In a complete perversion of ethics of both art and science, Clark used hand-made props to psycho-dynamically "treat" the viewer, who became her patient.

I don't think that Soft Materials reiterates modernist ideals of a functional relationship between man and machine wherein "man" safely dominates. What seems the dominant element to me in the film is the performers' receptivity and vulnerability. Of course, those characteristics are quintessentially human, and by fictionally endowing the robots with those qualities also, "humanity" does win out. One could say that the foregrounding of those qualities is part of a humanist, or perhaps feminist, sensibility.

YD: For me there is a certain tension when you present your films in the most precise way, using 16mm film rather than video to create a very high image quality and at the same time revealing, for example, the hand-made nature of the costumes, or in contrast to the high mannerist movements and looks of the actors showing a natural shy smile or direct glance into the camera. In this way you seem to reveal "the making of the film" a bit, and by doing so, using similar techniques Bertolt Brecht employed in his "epic theater" to stimulate a deeper intellectual involvement of the spectator. I mention this also because of Brecht's strong belief in the social and political function of theater. Obviously there are themes like the social interaction of people or our relation to progress and the continuous development of technology, but in general you seem to avoid direct political issues, don't you?

DM: The politics of the films lie in the way that they work with imagination and fantasy. I've always been woefully introverted and, frankly, like a lot of my generation, disconnected from active politics. But I am also very sensitive to the culture around me and painfully aware of how it impacts on my feeling of what is possible, of how the world can or might be perceived and received. It seems to me that we, in the accelerated high capitalist world, live in very fragmented times, and this fracturing has called up, as compensation, all sorts of commercialised visions of "authenticity" (the Apple ads, for example). Contemporary art can of course, in its shallower forms, just fill up, in a superficial way, that craving for authenticity: a collector buys a hand-made oil painting because it reminds him of a wholesome devotion to craft, for example. But of course, art also has the power to shift our perceptions of the world in subtle but intimate ways …

I hope that my work creates that shift by moving the viewer through fictions that are conceived and crafted in a way that is somehow distinct—distinct, at least, from mainstream images of fantasy. So much of the imagery we consume through TV, movies, video games, magazines, is ingeniously computer generated, and has that slick, impermeable, and ungrounded surface quality. In my work I want to bring dreams into the physical world, to embody projection. These "dreams" may be esoteric at times, but explicit flaws like shadows on the backdrop allow viewers both an entry point into and an escape route from that obscurity. The seams, holes, and outtakes that are woven through the process and into the product of filmmaking are roads into and out of the work; they allow the viewer the option of participating or leaving. There is something in common there with Brecht, of course, but mine is a much gentler kind of consciousness-prodding.

In the newest works, those overt references to the physical making of the films—the provisional costumes, the actors dropping poses—have mostly melted away and have been replaced by moments of vulnerability or self-referentiality that are more smoothly integrated into the works' fictions. Actors, in a rather traditional way, often provide the point of entry, through revealing an emotion within the film's fiction, or, even more literally, revealing their flesh. Performers also "act out" rituals or activities, which, in their discipline and creativity are not so different from the process of making art: athletes train or weave on looms, dancers perform a scientific experiment. In a sense, all of the films record scenarios that could be said to stand in for the art-making or film-making process. I would say that performing that process alone in this day and age is potentially political.

BR: Maybe we should go back for a moment to dance and film and the reactivating of the utopian aspiration to bring together the different art fields. This has not only been a theme in early modernism, but has also been an ongoing discourse since then, especially between film, dance, and sculpture. I'm thinking of Martha Graham and Isamu Noguchi, Merce Cunningham and John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg (especially his long lasting relationship with Charles Atlas to translate dance into film), Trisha Brown, Donald Judd, and so on. More recently Michael Clarke and Sarah Lucas are other examples among many others —but your work also brings to mind video clips for music, for example some of the dance related films of Chris Cunningham or his music clip for Björk which uses robot imagery. Do you think about any of these? How do you see the influence or development of this cross over  between media? And can you talk about utopianism, as you understand it?

DM: There’s a longstanding romance between art forms at least through the 20th century—writers looking at art, artists listening to musicians, fashion and art in mutual fascination. There’s always something about another medium, which seduces, the things it can do, which one’s own cannot. At the moment I’m amazed by the freedom and discipline of musicians improvising together onstage. That camaraderie, communication, and intense interdependence is virtually nonexistent amongst visual artists today, unfortunately.

My generation has come of age in a time that’s increasingly interdependent and hybrid on the one hand and increasingly fragmented and isolating on the other. It's a paradox: so much information is at our fingertips, yet collective direction seems unclear. The hybrid art form—the "total artwork" or Gesamtkunstwerk that the Bauhaus celebrated—is all around us in commercial form: video clips, television, and especially films. Of course, even the most commercial Hollywood films integrate image, text, sound, and usually music; they are the legacy of Wagner’s opera. For my generation, coming of age in a time beyond postmodernism, a cross breeding between genres is completely taken for granted.

In my work I try to fold that interdisciplinary approach back into a more intimate and private realm, one where a kind of internal "utopia" can unravel. And so fantasising about past moments where this cross breeding has happened in a less commercialised way—Graham, Noguchi, Rauschenberg—is a way of finding some traction, of escaping from our contemporary culture's slick version of Gesamtkunstwerk. My work seeks to reassemble this romance between the art forms, to backtrack in time and perhaps suggest a different method for those paths to be forged.

YD: Tell me about your personal background. I know that you were born in California 1973 and did your Master of Fine Arts at University of California in Los Angeles before moving to London in 2002 because of a studio grant at the Delfina Studios. Your first degree was a BA in Humanities. What were your subjects?

DM: Humanities was a major at Yale that attempted to survey the Western Canon, and its prime virtue was that it was completely cross disciplinary—we were encouraged to make connections between literature and philosophy, art history and music. I wrote my senior thesis about Joseph Cornell, the artist I mentioned earlier, and Emily Dickinson, who was one of his muses. Both Cornell's boxes and Dickinson's poems were like tinderboxes — incredibly compact and intense and loaded with obscure passions. Cornell dreamt about Dickinson and I dreamt about him. It was a lineage of repressed identification. I became more and more involved in researching the details of Cornell's life — visiting his old friends, and so on — until I reached the end of that string and realised that actually I wanted to be an artist myself. Of course that realisation was liberating. With time I’m also becoming more interested in looking back towards the legacy of growing up in Northern California in the 1970s.

YD: You started with painting and only later turned to film. What were your reasons for changing media?

DM: Probably because I didn’t have the tools to create entire worlds within paintings, whereas there seemed to be endless possibility within the medium of film. Film as a medium is like a Cornell box: an empty container waiting to be filled with whatever one desires. I kept hitting the wall of opacity with paint on canvas, whereas there were layers of transparency in film, a medium perfect for moving with desire.

I first saw Daria Martin’s film Birds (2001) projected in the crumbling loft space of the temporary Bart Wells Institute in Hackney, in an exhibition curated by the artist David Thorpe. We climbed up a stepladder onto the damp and dark topmost space before the 16mm film flickered into view. The moving image conjured by the projector feeding its strip of 16mm film through a beam of light was intensified by the rudimentariness of the surrounding situation which it suddenly illuminated: the simply constructed wood and perspex screens around which the performers move and the coloured poles which they manipulate into lattice-like patterns were unexpectedly echoed by the physical structure of the roof's beams above the make-shift viewing platform; the film's title was given a certain animality by the pigeons resident in its shadowy, woodwormed corners. Because of this, the primariness of the materials used in the film – sheets of coloured acetate, cloth, wood, paint – not only framed the bodies of the performers who touch, move and are enclosed by them, but they also felt all the more tangible.  Despite the marked difference between the ultra-clean, white studio of the film and the deteriorating Victorian roof space, my relationship to the piece was not purely one of physically suspended immersion in the image but of increased haptic investment. At a level removed from the rest of the exhibition this space also perfectly suited the nature of Martin’s work, as a kind of elevated and private 'hideaway'. 

The world in which we live in the early twenty-first century takes for granted a high level of social connectedness mediated by technology, a situation which is often popularly lamented as being at the expense of primary contact between people. A great number of contemporary artists have made work attempting to counter technology's refraction of experience and its complicity with the capitalist ideology of 'spectacle' culture. Working against high Modernist painting's prioritisation of optical engagement with an artwork, the Minimalist artists of the 1960s such as Robert Morris made a feature of the viewers phenomenological engagement with his 'blank-form' sculpture placed directly on the floor. In the 1990s, the generation that have been characterised by Nicholas Bourriaud in terms of 'relational aesthetics' – Rikrit Tiravanija, Liam Gillick, Mauricio Cattelan et al – made work which encouraged literal participation in a collective situation, addressing the 'realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space.' Daria Martin's films all depict the staging of relations between people as choreographies mediated by objects or formal rules.  But what is striking in her work, as distinct from the viewer's physical constitution of installation environments in the 60s or the 90s, is that its invitation to participate in its world is opened only through the imagination. Despite the fact that they represent relationships between people, the films conjure an atmosphere of intense solitude, inviting an intimate form of communion between artist and viewer mediated via the film's fantasy world of suspended disbelief. At the same time, a sense of haptic identification with the sculptural matter with which Martin builds her costumes and sets rubs against the immateriality of the projected image, complicating the idea that it marks the boundary to a separate sphere into which the viewer has no physical access.

The twilit and isolationist titles of In the Palace (2000) (after Giacommetti’s surrealist sculpture The Palace at 4am (date)), Birds (2001) and Loneliness and the Modern Pentathlon (2004-2005) hint at the private space in which they are conceived to exist, and at the work's essentially romantic basis. Martin's work investigates the individual imagination as it inhabits or draws upon the real fabric of the outside world, in this sense treating the film medium traditionally, as a 'window'.  And yet the artist stages a direct level of sensory communion with the viewer which seems to temporarily suspend for the viewing subject the fact that they exist on the worldly plane. This is part of the fantasy of becoming immersed in the work, at least.

Her films, derived firstas textual scripts, have something in common with Maurice Blanchot's characterisation of writing as an 'affirmation of solitude'. Blanchot writes of transferring thought to written text and of the extent to which this transfer, unlike speaking out loud, severs the subject from acting and inter-acting in the world at large; "to write is to break the bond that unites the world with myself. It is to destroy the relation, which, determining that I speak toward 'you' gives me room to speak within the understanding which my word receives from you… To write is to withdraw language from the world" (p. 26, Blanchot). In choosing the film medium, Martin is able to depict a world of acting subjects, who relate to each other physically. They are, in Blanchot's terms, separated by their outwardly communicative gestures from their own interior being. At the same time, her films open up a space which invites a direct channel of communion between artist and viewer that sidesteps usual modes of communication in the form of bodily gestures or verbal exchange.

The evocation of solitary fantasy is most evident, and related to Blanchot's observation, in the profoundly silent nature of the films: the dancers and actors never speak, their interaction is gestural and mimed, always set to a musical soundtrack, setting them in a sphere which is at one remove from us. In the earlier films, Martin frequently uses material scrims and blank studio spaces which give the space inside the film a sense of being 'screened off'.  The performers are often posed still here too, which, in combination with her use of props and objects, lends the work the appearance of sculpture. Karmen Mackendrick has written of stillness in dance as an equivalent for silence in the use of language, describing Bataille's claim that language 'cheats' in concealing the violence that silence implies (p. 145). Martin's work is daring in its embrace of that quietness and stillness that goes against the grain of the film medium and its very ability to capture movement. These early works test the boundaries of her separateness from the world, oscillating between abstracted distance and voyeurism. In a climate excessively concerned with connectedness, Martin stakes out territory which appears not to be afraid of solitude.

Given that Martin's films are all, in a sense, edited sequences from recordings of elaborately staged performances, it is revealing that she consistently chooses to repress live presence into the immateriality of film. Rather than choosing to situate such performance in the theatrical context that requires a live audience to constitute it, Martin creates films that can be conjured into the present in the darkened space of a gallery installation, for just one. Although the technology Martin uses is not new (preferring the quality of 16mm film) she registers that very contemporary form of isolated contact with which I began, tapping into the intimacy and fantasies offered by communication technology's capacity for virtuality. Making film recordings instead of live pieces enables their looping and repetition. The action is preserved and can be repeated in a way that connects with Blanchots conception of writing's reiteration, a form of stasis that connects with the core of 'being'. In this, Martin reinterprets the classic eighteenth century Romantic artist’s struggle to distinguish between internal subjectivity and external object, or the world at large, via the mediation of the image. In making films that combine abstract aesthetic form with performed action, Martin's actors become in a sense 'puppets' and their presence registers a split between her own private subjectivity and Blanchot's 'worldly plane' in which internal subjectivity is necessarily repressed. Moreover, the films stage and dramatize the split between the imagination and the world outside. Like the presence of the male figure looking out onto the sublime, Romantic landscape in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, Martin often focuses on a central female figure within the film who serves both as a kind of stand-in for the artist's own subjectivity, and as a 'threshold' marking the boundary of this other world.

Essential in this discussion of solitude, though, is the fact that the making of Martin's work is unavoidably collective. It is a generative process, not an entirely controlled one, relying on the participants 'playing her game.'  Martin first writes a script and treatment for her films which includes details of the film's aesthetic, its atmosphere, the filming style and the movements and attitudes of the characters, as well as technical instruction for the camera.  Extracts from her treatment for Loneliness and the Modern Pentathlon read, "the camera tilts back up to the first floor gridded window where the headmistress stands; the camera slowly zooms towards her." Or, "she is a woman of unplaceable age and enduring sexual charisma; her face silently speaks of a life well lived". This script, a fantasy dreamed up by the artist in private, is then realised through the participation of a large team of people – from the individual performers who carry out the artist's instructions, attempting to inhabit her vision, to the choreographer who invents the movement patterns, the designer of costumes and the production and camera crews and post production editing. The degree of mediation at stake in making the primary conception of the script and the artist's formal composition – with its abstract basis – manifest is something that Martin deliberately embraces. The linearity of the script-text and the compositional visual patterns are literally fleshed out. The encounter with real people as the substance and subjects of her medium creates the essential texture to Martin's imagined vision. Not only is this visible through the individual characteristics of the actors, but also in specific areas of the films, such as her use of 'found' locations and narrative situations which provide real-time frameworks for playing out the artist’s ideas.  

One of Martin's earliest films, In the Palace (2000), shows a group of performers posed still inside a scaffold which might equally be the stage of a pole-dancing club, a commonly found venue in LA (where the film was made) or nearby Las Vegas.  The male and female performers are dressed in hand-made looking aluminium foil and fabric costumes which resemble those seen in early modern dance performance by Martha Graham but their skin and bodily contours are nevertheless revealed.  Despite the static petrification of this 'performance' in which the dancers remain for the most part still whilst the camera rotates mesmerisingly around them, the piece has erotic overtones. Occasionally we catch a glimpse of an embrace between them - silvery made-up skin touching skin under the cold blue light. In common with the mood of Giacommetti's piece, Martin's film appears to turn the suggestion of erotic spectacle and its drive towards revelation and display into a deathly space of memory and latent, rather than explicit, charge. She pulls back from the potential offered by the live situation, as though wanting to crystallise the moment as sculpture.  The piece contains a kind of petrified ecstasy, both sexual and fantastical, corrupting remembered fragments of theatre, art and of dance history with the factuality of the real context in which they are revived, as though the artist wants to inhabit them and preserve them at once. The static atmosphere is intensified by the soundtrack which includes thunder and rain rumbling in the distance, like an approaching tropical storm which never comes. Throughout the film's 7 minute duration, the figures remain together yet isolated in this art historical cage. 

Birds (2001) conversely, sets the performers free in a white photographic 'infinity' style studio space which is mapped out by the relative positions of moving bodies and moving structures. As though the space is too wide, too far-reaching, the figures position themselves in relation to screens, sticks and hoops, making lattice-like grids against which their own shape is set.  They are in turn playful and serious, but seem to be stranded in this borderless place with its conflation of history and curious futurism. As with In the Palace, though, wind blows through the set and its suggestion of 'naturalism' charges the pure artificiality of the scene, as though it is connected with the elements despite being an indoor space, and yet we know that this too is a deliberate and artificial filmic construct, 'breathing life' into the scene. In Closeup Gallery (2003), the last film in the trilogy, a focus on a magician's hands dexterously shuffling, spreading and picking up cards sprayed as Malevich-like red, blue, black and green rectangles on occasions viewed sandwiched between the layers of the revolving, 3-tier glass table - proposes them as equivalents for the performers in Birds who move between fabric scrims, wearing coloured squares of acetate and painted paper costumes. In the Palace, Birds and Closeup Gallery present elements of idealism represented as early twentieth century modernist abstraction transferred to situations referencing the secular rituals of the strip club, the magazine fashion shoot and the Las Vegas style magic show. 

What is at stake in the work, then, is the degree of 'directedness' or artistic control versus the input of the individuals, and real objects and places, that Martin works with, whether she literally invites improvisation or not. The films reveal the extent to which real, performed action and the specificity of a built or customised set always exceed the formal principles through which it has been set out. Martin has said, "In general I am drawn to ideals: primary colours, cohesive communities, ordered cosmologies and beautiful bodies" but at the same time, she ways, she wants the work to embrace awkwardness: "I intentionally include in the edit moments in which the performer drops their guard, stops acting, allows themselves to relax, reveals exhaustion". Indeed, in both In the Palace and Birds Martin captures the performers breaking at the end of the shot or smiling.

In Soft Materials Martin complicated the relationship between 'actor' and director, working with an artificial intelligence lab and two dancers trained in contact improvisation to effect a complex collision of man and machine. The dancers' naked bodies are shown as vulnerable and real against the metal antennae of the artificially intelligent 'being' in the opening shot whose rods resemble the barrel of a gun, and Martin shoots flesh as it is seen through the grid of steel wires or juxtaposed with the metal teeth of turning cogs. But rather than containing this relationship within the early twentieth century narrative framework of the mechanisation of man of the anthropomorphism of the machine, or in surreally humanising it after Rebecca Horn, Martin blurs the boundaries with the setting together of two kinds of randomly generated rules which respond to, learn from and appear to become intimate with each other, despite one being human and one robot. The film creates an impression of tenderness in the sequence in which the female performer allows the fine plastic antennae of the intelligent machine to 'flutter' against her face, feeling the soft skin of her cheek, lending the robotan anthropomorphic quality. But at the same time, we are explicitly aware of the robot's hand-built, provisional construction from pieces of electrical and computer equipment. In Loneliness and the Modern Pentathlon, the formal idea of the sculptural object is substituted with a succession of 'readymades' which come with the readymade form Martin has chosen to structure her piece: the ritualised sport of the modern pentathlon and its accompanying kit, rifles, horse-jumps and fencing masks and swords. Martin weaves her own aesthetic threads through the found form of the sport using coloured ropes and ribbons pulled across the screen to make linear patterns;  the actors carry the white poles for the equestrian event back and forth across the screen in measured lines; in the shooting section the rifles are raised and lowered by a line of marksmen and women in choreographic succession. Martin's film treatment describes a desire for the film to "emphasize repetition and movement en mass", continuing that, "they do not depict military precision as much as a rippling, delirious excess found in baroque architecture, a stylisation of nature that abstracts yet intensifies its effect." However, the formal abstraction of Martin's composition and choreography and the rules of the sport are cut through by the suggestion of emotional narrative: a love triangle between the 'headmistress' and a female pupil, who is attached to one of her male peers. Martin conflates the rigour of sport-derived choreographic form with the emotive drive of the 'movie' narrative to explore the extent to which a real situation (signified by this twist in the 'love story') exceeds set patterns – whether they be the rules of a complex sport, or filmic convention.

Both Soft Materials and Loneliness and the Modern Pentathlon draw upon forms of choreography, the former free-form, the latter highly regulated. Martin admits a fascination with simultaneously designed movement. She acknowledges Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia as a point of reference, but her work complicates the frequent association of mass bodily movement with the subjugation of individuality in military or sporting displays deriving from Fascist politics. Slavoj Zizek rejects this generally drawn association in any case, arguing against the idea of "the allegedly proto-Fascist character of the mass choreography displaying disciplined movements of thousands of bodies." He writes, "the 'bad' bodily discipline, if there is one, is not collective training, but, rather, jogging and body building as part of the New Age myth of realisation of the Self's inner potentials." This boundary line – between performing oneself as part of a community and as an individual - is a distinction that Martin's work problematises: to what extent do shared codes or rules enable participation and to what extent to they oppress? Do or can these idealised and self-enclosed communities she represents thrive in reality if, according to Blanchot, the outward gesture of codified communication between people is produced at the expense of 'being' a solitary subject in an inward sense?

A sequence in Matthew Barney's Cremaster 3 shows one of the 'air stewardess' characters in the futuristic, sealed-off room of the living space idly playing with a bowl of red and green grapes, placing them in different patterns. These patterns are, surreally, played out to spectacular scale in a grand arena below by hundreds of dancing showgirls in matching costumes. Barney here stages the split between a daydream and its fully fleshed out realisation. But where Barney's vision is made in the airtight and glossy manner of a high production value Hollywood film, Martin specifically aims for a more fragile aesthetic. Martin has said she wants to go beyond the "seamless quality of Hollywood films because they don't allow breathing space for the viewer to enter or leave at will". Her props have more in common with the provisional nature of Maya Deren or Jack Smith, she incorporates elements of spontaneity or mistakes which recall the recorded performances of Carolee Schneeman. Where Barney employs one hundred idealised female models, Martin deliberately seeks realness in the people she casts, whether they be actors, athletes, dancers and/or friends. She chooses individuals for their qualities of vulnerability and readability. 

In her staged tableaux for film, Martin presents equivalences for the dream or fantasy space of the mind as it processes and recycles the material it consumes. Images from history and the present are equally available to her as references and resources, woven together to make a fabric of continuous present. A.W. Schlegel wrote that the mind has its own 'ideal time' linked to ideas of an eternal, a-chronological truth.  Henri Bergson developed this idea as psychological time: the world experienced as a continuous progression rather than as a succession of identical separate moments, similar to how we hear music. Woven throughout Martin's films, always set to specially composed musical scores, are elements of formal composition drawn from her training as a painter, from art history: the constructivist painting of Popova, the stage and costume designs of Sonia Delaunay or Varvara Stepanova, the Triadic Ballet of Oskar Schlemmer or Fernand Leger's film Ballet Mecanique. Martin draws from these sources a set of patterns and archetypes quite specific to art history: lattices of wooden poles or ribbons, choreographies, sculptural costumes and props are woven together to create complex formal arrangements synthesising the arts into a magically conjured immaterial space.  

Despite the seductive visuality of Martin's films and the work's temptation towards complicity with its fantasy, there is always a degree to which the work itself prevents this, pushes one back to an awareness of its construction, its fakery and its surface. Martin's choice of the film medium seems to be specifically – and politically – aware of its own power. Unlike the utopian aims of some of the work that Martin references – the way in which constructivist theatre quite literally set out a 'world' in which the performer was depicted in harmony with objects, the gesamtkunstwerke - Martin's work registers a different kind of utopian agenda, an attempt to reclaim some mental or imaginative space, some potential for collective understanding beyond what we are fed by marketing and branding strategists. Where Stepanova had faith in the possibility of abstract art's potential functionality in the everyday world – as costume design, furniture, political poster design – Martin's utopia is concerned especially with the artist and viewer's relationship as it is mediated via the fantasy space offered by her medium. The artist is fascinated by Jungian ideas on the unconscious and its archetypes or 'primordial images' which might act as essential points of connection between people across cultures and across time.

In contemporary, late-capitalist culture, short moving-image advertisements on television represent a world which we are invited to be a part of as consumers only. A pop cultural anti-equivalent of Martin's work might be seen in the advertisements for 'Gap' shown on UK TV in 2001, for example, showed a group of young, beautiful people wearing Gap clothing dancing in choreographed unison against a white background. Writing on dance, Randy Martin has made a negative comparison between the cathartic, collective identification with the protagonist of Greek Tragedy and the pop cultural spectacle of 'marketised consumption' in which "one watches anonymously but constantly for that image which might finally give place to identity. This process of watching life go by outside oneself means that the virtual life of the spectacle looks back, casting judgement on the onlooker as a negative reference to what he or she lacks." Martin's work addresses the extent to which advertising co-opts our relationship to images and fantasy, attempting to substitute for those deeply buried collective archetypes relations to a commercial brand. Martin seeks to locate her work in a recognisable world; to graft the aesthetic realm with the vernacular of everyday activity with her use of real people and situations, employing a povera frankness of her materials.  In so doing, Martin digs into that ephemeral, two-dimensional image space with deeper perspective.  

Martin borrows from the familiar pop-cultural image-world as much as from other areas of art, theatre and dance history, but she refuses to be satisfied with its interiorlessness, substituting fallibility, sensuality, awkwardness and humour for its hard flawlessness. In the worlds of her films, Martin stages relations between acting subjects that fall in and out of conventional gender roles, predictable movements or positions, rubbing the two-dimensionality of text or abstract pattern against the flesh of the world. The work is political in the sense that Jacques Ranciere describes the ‘distribution of the sensible’ in the wider social sphere; "The artist only ever lends to projects of domination or emancipation what they are able to lend them, that is to say, quite simply, what they have in common with them: bodily positions and movements, functions of speech, the parcelling out of the visible and the invisible" (Ranciere, p.19) Martin's work tests out the fantasy that the solipsistic space of the individual imagination might incorporate forms of collective history and memory. The work stages, on the one hand, a fantasy of how social or communal experience might be played out according to aesthetic codes and patterns – recalling, for example, the feminist project of Californian artist Suzanne Lacey titled The Crystal Quilt (1987) in which a large group of older women arranged at differently coloured tables moved in unison to make 'patchwork' patterns– and at the same time the work problematises the necessarily directorial relationship between the root of that aesthetic impulse and its material realisation. This contradictory longing is mediated for the viewer via the otherworldliness of a film projection set to music so that the artist is able to both offer her world and pull it back, to expose the bulkiness of the real materials or bodies she works with and to flatten them as dream-like visions. The seductive qualities of Martin's work makes it mischievously double-edged in its appeal: the films have the power to colonise and propel the viewer's appetite to devour images at the same time as interrupting and prizing loose compulsive, learned habits of viewing.

These can be reached through the following:

Anna Halprin
Carolee Schneemann
Zeena Parkins
Nina Fog

Daria Martin: As you know, I am interviewing four women performers of different generations, to trace the virtual arc of a lifetime. You are the oldest, at age 86. What is it like to have been dancing for something like 70 years now?

Anna Halprin: Actually, I've been dancing since I could walk. As a child I had a learning disability and I made up for it in other sensorial ways. I could express myself through movement and that's what determined my becoming a dancer very early on.

It's because of my passion for dance that I've extended my learning to the outside world. Dance has always been at the center, and I've branched out to bring in other forms of information: I've worked on researching anthropology, physiology and Gestalt psychology. All my life I've known this is what I can do, this is where I find my meaning, and this is how I find ways to connect to people.

DM: And how does that branching out work as you reach into your 80's? Is the expansion, with dance at its center, continuous? How does ageing affect that expansion? Does it keep growing?

AH: It's not as much ageing as it is just time. Let me tell you a little more about my work's development.

As a youngster I was content to do anything motor oriented but when I was a teenager I began to question everything and I aligned myself with the modern dancers. I could understand what their revolution was about: they wanted to find something that was authentic for them as human beings instead of telling fairy tales. So I was attracted to modern dance until I realized that the approaches were very idiosynchratic—that a technique was based on that particular individual's aesthethic preferences plus that particular individual's body type. In my rebellious adolescent years, if I didn’t have that particular body type and preference, I began to feel like I was becoming a clone to someone else.

DM: You didn't have Martha Graham's long swinging hair. . .

AH: I didn't have her long hair, it just wouldn't flop back and forth.   And you know Doris Humphrey always did fall and recover, fall and recover. And Martha Graham did contract and release. And I felt that there was something different from that, something connected to the way that the natural forces work. I had a teacher at Wisconsin University named Margaret Dobler who was a scientist and an avant garde educator. I'm very grateful to her, the foundation she gave me. It's not that she taught me how to dance, she didn't – she didn't dance – but she taught me how to approach the philosophy and science of dance.

DM: An objective observation of the body.

AH: Yes. So I was able to create an approach to dance that was more objective, anybody could do it. Within that objectivity each person could create their own individual subjective responses. I began to look to everyday movement. (Now it's called task based movement, it's defined as post modern dance). One reason I wanted to go back to these simple movements was that I was trying to find out how to move. And the other reason is that I wanted audiences to identify, and that was another way of breaking a barrier, besides the transgression of moving beyond the prosenium arch. I looked to nature as a guide as well. My relationship to my husband {Lawrence Halprin}, who is a landscape architect, brought an awareness to the environment and to nature.

DM: You still do solo work but now you sometimes work with groups of 100 or more. Was working with large groups explicitly a way to engage with politics and community, starting in the 1960's?

AH: Yes, it was all of that but it was also about getting such unexpected reactions from audiences. I realized that when I was creating my work, I was creating it in a vacuum. I was so intense on experimenting and exploring new possibilities that I wasn’t thinking about what this had to do with anybody else besides myself.  Who cares? - that I'm not dancing in the proscenium arch, or that I was experimenting with this or that, because the audience's expectation was so different from my own that I said: 'Oh, I need to stop and see what people were really like out there.' So that’s when I started developing dances for audiences to perform and then I would watch to see what was going on. What were some of the archetypes and what were some of the ways that people related to each other? I wanted more input.

DM: You felt that your own formal experimentations were becoming a little bit self involved.

AH: Yeah, exactly. It wouldn't matter if I wasn't in the field of performance art. But if I'm performing, who am I performing for, and why? So I started working with groups. What happens when people come together as community?

DM: How did those initial explorations lead you towards what you now call the 'Life-Art Process,' a reciprocal, enriching exchange between personal life and artistic process?

AH: In the process of working with dancers something happened that was unexpected. At the time, I was using space, time and force as the three elements to shape movement. So you can take an everyday movement, a walk for example, and you can shape it by giving different speeds to that walk, different directions to that walk, different dynamics, different forces. And then I began to notice that when we began to shape ordinary movement, a lot of emotional material began to come up. Let's get back to walking.  You could walk fast and you could imagine you were being chased. That drama, that association, would completely change the way you moved and the way you felt. You could be chased or you could be the chaser.  So all of a sudden all this emotional material was coming up. Some of it was great, and some of it was very scary. I remember one time working with this rotation of the shoulders, an outward rotation, and one man, opening up his chest while doing this rotation in the arms, started to cry. And I had no idea why he was crying.

DM: The heart was exposed.

AH: Whatever it was in his life that created this withholding in the chest was suddenly busted open. And I had no idea what to do.

DM: You weren't a therapist trained how to cope with such things.

AH: Well, I began to work with Fritz Perls. It's not that he told me what to do, he just taught me not to be afraid of emotional material.

DM: And so how did that change your response to emotional moments like that?

AH: If you're crying just give your tears some words to tell us what you're crying about. Just some simple little things, nothing deeply psychological. Ah, so you're crying?  What images do you have? Draw a picture of that feeling, so you begin to work with it. So then I began to think: there are forces that can shape and change ordinary movement, but what are the levels of awareness that you need to make a complete artistic statement?

First off, you need the physical craftsmanship; you need to know what you're doing so that you can always come back to that. It's like learning to play the notes on a scale. You know that if you rotate your shoulder this way, your back goes down and your head comes up. I know that movement inside and out; it’s objective but it has an emotional quality that’s very different than if I rotate my shoulders in and pull my head down; that has a very different emotional statement. It's very objective. It's not like I’m telling you to be happy or telling you to be sad. With the craftsmanship you are able to plug into the feedback process between the physical and the emotional.

DM: And do you think for example that the difference in emotional statements between those two rotations is universal?

AH: Absolutely. That's why I say it's objective. I mean, anyone you see like this (she curls up in a ball)  you know very well – no matter what country he comes from, whatever language he speaks, whether he's an adult or a child – this communicates something very different from this (she throws her hands in the air).  That's very universal. 

The second step is: there's a feedback process between the physical and emotional. Beyond saying "I am feeling sad" is 'I'm feeling sad BECAUSE...' Ah, the 'because' adds the personal life experience. There’s the connection between the inner and the outer.

I had a big awakening about movement at its highest level of consciousness and how that impacts on us when I discovered I had a malignant tumor.  I discovered that I had cancer in my body through a movement experience that was transferred into a visual image that then I could look at objectively and say: what is that in my pelvis? That grey thing there. I actually found the cancer through this movement exercise. So that was a great eye opener to realize that movement and dance, dance as ritual, could be rooted in one’s real life, one's REAL, real life – in reality. And so in order to do that I have to get out beyond the proscenium arch, I have to get out into life, I have to get out into nature, I have to get out into the urban setup, I have to get out into the streets, I have to get in direct contact with people.

This what got me into dance as healing. Because of my own experience I realized that dance can be very useful for people who have AIDS and cancer and other life threatening illnesses. Dance can impact emotionally. They feel that the fear can be translated into actions, into creating something that addresses their real life issues. And just the act of creating something is satisfying makes life worth living.

DM: You can transform your pain into something exquisite or articulate.   It's not just about catharsis is it?

AH: Not at all.

DM: This healing work you do, it's about transformation.

AH: Absolutely. The wonderful thing about the medium of movement is that it goes beyond words. Now, that's almost trite. And at the same time it contains a lot of knowledge. The idea of language... and thinking with what you already know... see, language describes an experience you've already had, otherwise there wouldn't be a word for it. So thinking with language is very limiting; it limits your ability to think with your whole body. Your whole body thinks! The brain may be the place you sort things out, but it isn't the way you think. The thing that’s so exciting about movement as an art form – maybe this is true of any art form - is that you can tap into images, feelings, associations that you didn't even know were there.

My aesthetic development really came out of this ongoing internal search: trying to redefine dance in all its forms. Why? Why dance? Who cares? What value does it have? 

So when you talk about how I've changed due to my age? It isn't so much that I’ve aged as that I'm constantly finding layers and it just takes time. It’s a constant discovery. This is what keeps me going.

DM: Do you consider yourself or your work feminist?

AH: Oh, definitely, definitely. I'm interested in how women approach the world in a distinct way. I've noticed, for instance, that my husband and I approach our work differently: he'll go into a situation with everything planned to a T, while I'm flexible in giving up control, letting the materials guide me, letting people's responses guide me, and I consider that kind of flexibility – to give up your preconceptions about what will happen – a feminine trait.

I've also noticed that men and women, when divided into groups in workshops, do things very differently. In one workshop recently, the men were lifting each other in the air, building these great pyramids. They immediately got into a sense of teamwork. They also did a lot of making formations where a single person would go in the center and do something very inventive, then another man would come in and the first men would go out. The women, on the other hand, were in smaller, more intimate groups. In the end a swaying started, that resonated with each person's own needs at that moment. And then when they started doing something all together they got so excited they just started jumping. And they did this jumping, jumping, jumping, jumping, jumping.

I think it's a pity that women in the workplace feel they have to wear suits. It's as if women are trying to imitate men. Do you always have to wear a suit when you go to work? I think that says something. You're trying to establish a persona that says 'I can do what you can do.' They can do better. By bringing in a different perspective.

DM: Can I ask you one more question?  How do erotics play into what you do?

AH: That’s a big one for me. I don't usually talk about it. The first time I put that out was in "Parades and Changes" in 1965 when I was doing a performance in Sweden, and I knew that the Swedish people had a very different attitude towards nudity and working with the human body. Working outdoors, the naked body – any body – is so much more beautiful than any clothes you could put on it. I wanted to deal with the body as an extension of nature. I didn't want it to be viewed as: once you took your clothes off this suddenly spelled out 'sex.'

DM: Which at the time was difficult to do.

AH: It was impossible to do, I later learned. In Sweden it wasn't difficult but as soon as I did it in New York, in this country, it was impossible.

DM: Well, they must have interpreted the undressing in "Parades and Changes" as a kind of strip tease.

AH: Yeah, and as a sexual come on, titillation. 

DM: The performers made intense eye contact with the audience members, so that could have been interpreted as a kind of seduction.

AH: Yeah, but their expression was very non sexual. Their expression was like a baby. Do you ever look at a baby's face? They just look at you without any expectation. They just look. You know, it's so beautiful.  I just love looking at a baby looking at me. They just look at me, it’s so beautiful. One of the exercises I gave to these dancers was to look at a baby and notice how the baby looks back at you. So it had that kind of innocence, an existential 'it just is what it is.' Without any projections. 

DM: And now you are working on a dance based on Rodin's erotic drawings? Does the pair of dancers embrace in a sexual way?

AH: They're not totally naked. It’s very sensual. But it's sexual in the same way that Rodin's drawings are sexual: the craftsmanship is so beautiful.

You should see Terre! She's just... she's just...elegant. She's so... she's got one of these incredibly luxurious, big, voluptuous bodies and she's just totally free and totally open. She has just tremendous range.

Springtown Road, New Paltz, New York
10 April, 2007

Daria Martin: Do you want to tell me about your cat project?

Carolee Schneemann: Sure. I have all these notes on the distinctive behaviors of my cats. For example, I studied a litter from the moment they were birthed, lying on the floor for hours to see what were their characteristics: who gets to the top of the pile, who gets the bottom, who cooperates, who gets pushed off, their physical coordination. The subject of cats is irreducible for me: as Collette has famously said, 'Time spent with a cat is never wasted.' The particularity of each is very vivid; just as chickens have individual personalities (if you have patience for chicken attention), these cats are endlessly interesting and various.

DM: One thing I've always wondered about your affection for and attachment to cats is: Do you see them as symbolic of human relationships or as something in themselves?

CS: I see them as something in themselves, but I also learn a great deal from cats. All the kinetic exercises that I evolved early in the 60s are based on observing the interaction of my cats: grabs and falls, tumbles, weight bearing, the assumption and trust in muscularity that it will make the correct response at kinetic impact... to sliding, to skidding, to all the different movements. Cats, in their playing, fighting and runs were adapted to performance principles.

DM: Did you ask your performers to observe cats, to consciously imitate them?

CS: No, no no. We were working with the manifestations of motion and weight and dropping and falling and lifting. It would be stupid to refer to cats; it's just my private influence. Certain cats teach me ways of paying attention, of taking time.  

DM: I remember a story you’ve told about your old cat Kitch. You described her as inspiration in your artistic transition from painting to performance. You had observed Kitch traversing a fallen tree from indoors ...

CS: ...from our kitchen. A tree had crashed down on this fragile little shack where {James} Tenney and I lived in Illinois, and it was a disaster.

DM: And yet this wonderful thing came of it: you saw the cat move along that fallen tree from the interior to the exterior, and thought, "Oh, I have to get out like that." You'd been painting the landscape from your studio, but seeing Kitch make that bridge to outdoors made you want to be in the landscape?

CS: Well, I had been painting outdoors and Kitch would go with me. But it was the momentum from the inside to outside that impressed me, and that was when I did my first 'instructions for the movement in landscape.' What inspired me was Kitch’s complete acceptance of the deformation of space. Our kitchen was ruined, the roof was ruined, the window was smashed in, and here she saw this beautiful, smooth passage, just walked out the limb: she made it something wonderful in an instant.  You could go from the kitchen sink directly out to the streambed.

DM: It's a rich image. You, too, were a boundary breaker in the 60's, but you pushed across those boundaries, to my eyes, gracefully, seamlessly.  It makes me think of the way you shattered taboos around the body: in celebration, sensuously, not by engaging in issues of rape or trauma or harm to the body. In a way, you, your work, was an erotic bridge.

CS: Well, these are luxurious positions, as we know, and in a way one needs always to qualify or quantify it by saying that this wasn't a body that was abused; it was a body that had the privilege to grasp the political capacity to demonstrate pleasure, to experience pleasure.

DM: Yes, and to do that fearlessly.

CS: Well, shamelessly, that's a tremendous good luck and privilege, just as a cat is able to teach humans something when it is surrounded by death and destruction.

DM: It tells us: there is a path there.

Because this series of interviews is linked to feminism, I wanted to ask about your relationship to this complicated subject. You’re happily heterosexual; your work celebrates the joys of heterosexual sex. You’re obviously no man hater. And yet I was reading recently that you are very interested in Valerie Solanas' Scum Manifesto. I wonder if feminist scholars have a hard time pinning you down? Do you have a way of describing your own feminism?

CS: Well, feminism is full of various myths and contradictions, and the social basis of my pleasured work is posited to a community where the ecstatic is live and present and positive. That sort of premise is completely in counterforce to hypermasculinity, to militarism, to patriarchy, to all the forces that suppress not simply pleasure but the ability of a woman to define herself and to discover that she belongs to a powerful, creative history. All of this was pretty much suppressed when I was growing up, so there was a constant sense of being embattled and stifled. So my study of war, male violence, and the deep need to control and subjugate, which has defined male power, is the balance: feminist integrity is claimed against those odds.

DM: So tell me about Valerie Solanas.

CS: It made perfect sense for her to attack Andy! It was natural for a crazed, isolated, tormented, narcissistic young woman who belongs nowhere in culture, to identify with the Factory, the only queer community of artists. To Valerie, Andy was her periscope, the source of recognition she craved, an imagined source of belonging to some deep, abject, creative, marginalized place. She had this amazing clarity of how the patriarchy is structured and what it means. Andy hasn't a clue. He can’t be bothered. She walks right into the lion's den.  

DM: There's a certain kind of support and then sometime rejection from gay men in the art world that's particularly sensitive for me, and I imagine also for your work. There's a sense that gay men may be the only ones who will 'get it' because they have a developed sensitivity to tolerance, difference, suffering, sexuality, but then there can occasionally be a very particular brand of misogyny from gay men that's all the more hurtful because identification is expected.

CS: Well, all my major curators are gay men. I've never worked with a female curator for a solo work. Most committed collectors and curators of my major exhibits are gay men!

DM: They identify with you? 

CS: Yes. We've been talking about it. We've been trying to figure it out.

DM: What are the theories? Because in a literal sense, gay men have less exposure to female sexuality than anyone.

CS: Well, they recognize a shared aspect of physical desire — we love men, we want men. But also my work has to do with risk, and explicitness, in a way that perhaps corresponds to aspects of gay men's struggle to put their form of sexuality into the center. I have a very close friend who is fighting for the power of the anus in the way that I've fought for the life of the vagina. And we have this wacky, wonderful correspondence where he's writing about his precious asshole.

DM: You can mentor him, huh?

CS: I did, he was my student.

Many of my prime supporters have been gay men, but women also fight for the work and believe in it. They're usually not in a position of curatorial authority. And there are also gay men who detest the work, who think its slimy, cunty, and disgusting, and gay women who hate it, because its too heterosexual.

DM: Are a lot of your fans heterosexual women?

CS: Oh, yes, yes, it’s confirming, releasing and positive.

DM: I was blown away the first time I saw Fuses. In my experience, it is one of only a small handful of depictions of sex on film that captures the tender textures of lovemaking: frank, emotional, subjective, free, unhindered, celebratory.

One question I've never heard asked of you: 'you have a very beautiful body; it's fit, voluptuous, articulate, and desirable.'

CS: Thank you! I need to have a poster made of this so that everyone can agree with you. 

DM: (laughing) I'm sure you don’t need a poster to advertise that fact. I'm just wondering whether you think that your body's beauty is a conduit into the viewer's pleasure in the work; in other words, do you think that a film like Fuses would have been as effective in conveying pleasure if you had a conventionally less attractive body?

CS: No, no. I was very lucky that I had this acceptable material to work with because it can enter the culture in so far as it resembles what the culture values as a sexual, beautiful body, but it can also destabilize because it's not fulfilling the expected meanings. You don't get the come shot, you don't get whatever it is that the culture in its male traditions has posited – it's not quite happening – so that’s why it's been persistent and disturbing and useful.

DM: The film is also wonderfully edited, constructed around musical, quasi sexual rhythms.

CS: I was honestly hoping to capture the sensuous rigor of Bach, to construct some aspect of an interior structure that is not programmatic or explicitly sexual or explicitly demonstrative but that carries a complex formal development. This is created mainly in the counts of editing, the shifts of color: 12 yellow, 2 red, 2 blue! There's an underlying score for colors, and gestures—gestures become parenthetical. So there will be an arm raised, and so many cuts and intercuts, and then the arm comes down. Then there will another set of gestural units. It's hard to explain because there isn't an exact formal language to describe it.

DM: There is a rigorous formal structure underlying the film's content that may be sensed only subliminally by the viewer. I wanted to ask you about how craft functions for you: it seems to me that craft girds the feelings of free sensuousness, of liberation, in your work. Do you launch from that formal control?

CS: But I'm a classicist, really.  I’m a traditionalist. When I had a scholarship at Columbia, I drew from the live figure for eight hours a day, I copied Dutch still lives, and I painted landscape influenced by the formal structures of Cezanne. I enjoy teaching drawing more than just about anything else because it takes you further out into space and into time.

DM: Out of the subjective realm and into a more objective one?

CS: Absolutely. You know, the subjective realm is just crap. Just a lot of bad dreams floating around.

DM: (laughing) Well, its interesting you say that because in your writings you often refer to literal, sleeping dreams as starting points for your work. How can you work from these obscure manifestations of the unconscious? How do you transform them to communicate with others? Do you abstract, finding the underlying archetypes of the dreams?  

CS: I research them. It's a kind of art historical psychoanalysis. Where has this lemon been all its life and how has its meaning changed, its form and its coloration?

DM; This is an objectification process?

CS: Yeah, I go into the history. For instance, Vulva's Morphia started with a dream. I had all these piles of research lying around my studio, on feminist cultural positions, Lacan, lack, absence, cultural problems, teenage pregnancies in Texas, witchcraft, cliteradectomies.  And then I had this dream where a male voice said "You will never be a visual artist again unless you get rid of that mess of research papers on the floor. Why don’t you let Vulva do the talking?" So I went upstairs and said, "OK, give me a line for Lacan, for St Augustine."

DM: Did you put yourself in a trance, like in automatic writing?

CS: Yes, it was as if there was a person there that would tell me what to do. I only wanted one sentence.  "Can you give me a sentence here?"  "Yeah, sure, easy." I organized my many images through associations to metaphoric and actual vulvas.

DM: You're interested in archetypes and their manifestations in the world. Have you noticed differences between the sexes in the performance workshops you lead?

CS: Yes. It's very interesting to see how violent the men get. They'll set themselves up as a team of warriors, with strange, invented weapons, before you know it. While the women who have been asked to work with their experience of rape have thrown away every potential weapon and are wrapping each other in sheets and rolling each other in warm water. 

DM: Anna Halprin, in our interview, said an almost identical thing about her workshops in which men got into athletic, team building exercises and women created very fluid dances. Culturally, socially, in the West at least, times are different, but when you get to the primitive body level, some things stay the same?

CS: In all my workshops, a unifying theme emerges. Sometimes it’s drawing, sometimes it’s death. In this particular group it was rape. I wanted them to feel safe, to explore any kind of ferocious revenge images that might be lurking in their unconscious. The women only did the most tender things. And the men had lined up on the wall rows of red balls in sacks. It was quite a while until we realized they were sacks of tomatoes side by side, and then they took a hammer and they smashed them all to bits! (laughs)

DM: A big clean up job! 

Your work is so much about the pleasure of the body, but there's also this parallel strand of the ferocious.

CS: Well, the menace. I always work with what menaces the body as well.  I've created projects about the Vietnam War, about the destruction of Palestinian culture. 

DM: Your work makes surprising connections, some subliminal, some explicit, between so many different entities. War and pleasure, painting and performance. You articulate how these things communicate with one another.

CS: I'm so happy when people begin to see it.

DM: The cat Kitch walks along that log, a bridge connecting.

CS: And around it are trashy weeds and flowers and mortar and another insipient tornado – or: just a hot Illinois summer, 106 degrees.

Daria Martin: You use foleys a lot in your work: I've seen you make music with moving ball bearing chains, flapping paper, crumpled plastic, rubbed sand paper. And you combine these with processed sound or with acoustic instruments. What do foleys mean to you? Do they provide a point of 'access' for an audience unaccustomed to experimental or avant garde music?

Zeena Parkins: Most importantly for me, I'm continuing a proposal that started in the middle of the last century with Pierre Schafer and Pierre Henri who used found sounds—musique concrete. A door creaking, breath, a train's sound were addressed as musical gestures, and sometimes were processed through self-created tape recorders. John Cage made the same proposal: turn on a faucet or a radio, hit a brake drum.

But I do think that when an audience sees you using these 'instruments,' they feel a connection; maybe some find it humorous. It gives people a way in, a door.

DM: Your electric harp, on the other hand, is unusual, an esoteric instrument; your audiences may not have seen one before.

ZP: It's a one of a kind. It was developed originally out of necessity when I joined Skeleton Crew, the first band I was in, in the mid 80's. Tom Cora and Fred Frith wanted me to play the acoustic harp but it quickly became apparent that lugging a large concert harp to gigs would be logistically impossible, so we thought about building an instrument that would approximate a harp.

DM: It was the world's first electric harp?

ZP: Yes, of its type. There have since been companies that have made regular hollow bodied harps with pickups on each of the strings, but that's different from the electric harp. The prototype was a triangle literally clamped onto the end of the keyboard, made out of a few 2 X 4s and used guitar strings and pickups bought at a local music shop.  It might be a stretch even to say it was a harp but I insisted on calling it a harp. It was apparent from the start that – yeah, this is a great idea.

Together with a couple of master instrument builders, I've since collaborated on designing two new models, and each new model gives me more control and flexibility. It's a feedback loop: my work has developed as the instrument has developed. We considered the choice of wood: how hard, how resonant, how moist. We added a stripe of ebony up the side. It was a huge transformation, just changing materials. We adjusted the shape of the wood to make more room for my hand to play the upper registers. We trimmed wood to make it lighter and more portable. We put a whammy bar on. We changed the placing of the pickup in relation to the strings. It's been a really interesting and rewarding experience to actually create an instrument and to figure out what's needed to make it better. I must add that Douglas Henderson was key in the development of the instrument.

DM: You also play acoustic harp, piano, accordian. Your original path pioneering on the electric harp must be very different from your early experiences as a pianist, where paths to innovation have already been worn. Do you deal with legacies?

ZP: It's impossible not to deal with legacies when you’re a trained classical pianist because it's all about referring to previous remarkable performances of a particular piece and how do you wade through the weight of legacies to find your own voice? I liked playing piano but it was too bogged down in the grip of what was expected in training – learn new pieces, play competitions, do auditions. Beethoven sonatas, Chopin etudes, Brahms waltzes, Rachmaninof this and Tchaikovsky that. It's very isolating. You're very alone in this world.

When I discovered the acoustic harp in high school, I felt an instant affinity for it. Ergonomically even:  it keyed into my dance background. I was intrigued by the physical challenges of the instrument: pedal manoeuvers coordinated with hands on the strings. I enjoyed engaging with and solving those physical challenges.

I was playing in an orchestra in high school and it was so thrilling to get to play in this big musical organism. The physicality of being surrounded by that kind of sound, and then being a part of creating that sound—I got quite a rush out of that. Being inside that sound world was extremely inspiring.

But I knew I didn't want to be a classical harpist. Through these various musical experiences I was beginning to decipher where my interests really lay.

DM: Was the breakthrough joining Skeleton Crew?

ZP: The breakthrough was quitting my training as a classical pianist, learning to play accordian, and joining the Janus Circus, a small theater troupe. This gave me permission to start thinking about music in a different way. The breakthrough was getting away from music on the page, learning tunes by ear, learning folk songs, beginning to improvise. New possibilities began to filter in. And then I was asked to be in a group, New From Babel, a project of percussionist/lyricist  Chris Cutler, who for years had wanted to work with a harpist. It was a truly fortuitous encounter and we were both thrilled. I hadn’t played harp in 3 years. I instantly recognized this as a door into another world. I went back to my home town of Detroit, got a job in a clothing store, hired a harp teacher there, and basically what you call woodshedded. I practiced hours every day, extremely focused, sponging off everything that my teacher had to give me. And from that moment on I knew 'This is IT.' Difficult to identify what 'it' was exactly, but I knew this was it.

DM: It's interesting to me that the development of your artistic voice, which is very distinct, has happened partly in relationship to others. You collaborate a lot: with other musicians, with dancers, with filmmakers, with visual artists. You employ others to realize your vision, you lend your talents to others' visions, and you work in equal partnerships with collaborators. You also grew up in a musical family; two of your sisters are part of a string quartet that you sometimes compose for, the Eclipse Quartet. Why do you think that collaboration is a draw for you?

ZP: I wonder if it's because I practiced for so many years alone- those wonderful piano pieces. I enjoy the exchange of information in collaboration and I learn so much, I find it so rich. I certainly expect it to extend the range of what I would normally do.

The other thing I'm exploring which takes this concept of collaboration one step further is co-authorship as a composer. I'm doing this project with Marina Rosenfeld. The idea is that once a month for 12 months we're going to exchange objects – pictures, text, music notation, a literal object — collect these objects and artifacts together, and together we're going to make a score—it could be a little film, a video, a picture, a series of texts, or sound. The orchestration will be two pianos and electronics, each of us playing the piano. Part of the appeal of the orchestration is that we're both pianists: sort of like the fallen pianists return! I'm very excited about it. I am also interested in the idea of negating single ownership of a work, this is particularly interesting. There is a precedent in the world of contemporary music—at least one I can think of – a co-authored work by John Cage and Lou Harrison (daria I need to fact check this and will later today!!)

DM: A bit like Marina Rosenfeld, who crosses over between new music and the art world – you also do quite a bit of that intersecting; I'm thinking of your recent installation at The Kitchen, the use of physical space in your work, the way that you visually present yourself onstage, and your collaborations with visual artists. Do you want to talk a bit about your relationship with the visual arts?

ZP: I'm quite stimulated musically by visual input. Visual information – it's a huge source of starting points.

It happens most obviously in scoring for films, whether documentary, narrative, or experimental. The response is not static to these moving images — it has more to do with where it's coming from and where it's going than about what a specific image means. It's about a before and after: movement, both temporally and emotionally. The thing that intrigues me is the transformation from one place to another. How is visual or narrative transformation described or translated into a sonic gesture or a collection of sonic gestures?  Sometimes it's not so obvious how this happens. And then when you step back, when you're done, you can analyze and say 'Oh, yes, that corresponds.'

DM: I'm curious about how that sense of movement, or transformation works when you improvise. Do you connect pasts and futures in improvisation?

ZP: Well, there is some kind of profound split in the brain between being so connected and aware of where you are, where you've come from, and possibly shaping where you're going on one hand, and also being in a totally unconscious place on the other. Sometimes I have an improv experience where afterwards I can't remember it at all – 'what just happened?' But the unconscious part is another kind of concentration. And I think the skill is developing the ability to be in various layers of presence.

DM: You have a very strong presence onstage; your playing is strongly physical and gestural. I know that you have a background in dance, and have worked quite a bit with dancers as well. In your album Necklace, there's a piece called '16 feet plus a cello' that sounds like a squeaky stampede combined with the wailing string instrument. Can you talk about this piece?

ZP: I was working with the French choreographer Emmanuel Vo Dinh, observing her troupe dance from different points of view: from the audience, from the sides of the stage. The stage itself was a hollow, wood surfaced construction, and the sounds coming from these 8 dancers' bare feet was so rich, I knew I had to have it. These recorded sounds were cut up, processed, and layered with the cello.

DM: Have you used body sounds in other pieces?

ZP: Yes, for Money Shot, made for the choreographer Jennifer Lacey, I used breath sounds, skin against skin, slapping my ass into a microphone.  For John Jasperse, I used the dancers' own sounds recorded from rehearsal, for example their expression of exhaustion after a strenuous movement combination and a particular stomping section that seemed to rattle the space. Recently with the same company I also started to give the dancers movement and sound instructions, that relate in some way to the choreography, and these I record and place in the score. When these scores are played together with the live dance, this brings in an element of working with time in terms of past and present, of memory. This layering creates a transformation from different time zones, from different spaces and places of being in the body.

DM: It seems that dance has influenced your work in literal ways — you carry a strong, physical presence onstage and you've incorporated body sounds into your music. Has working with dance also changed your idea of how music can work spatially, in relation to the performers and to the audience? Does your music 'dance' around the audience?

ZP: For me, an immediate relationship with space occurs when working with someone engaged in movement. Architecture cannot be denied. Architecture defined not only by the space that you are in – which would be articulated differently by someone who is moving and by someone who is creating sound – but also by the physical architecture of the body. That is, how this system the body behaves and interacts with its surroundings both physical and internal. I try to define the space within the space. Sound can act as a support system or a perfume. It can be a porous substance to move through or a raft-like structure to float upon. Sound does not always have to be the 'subject;' it can be a character appearing and disappearing. The body negotiates through these orientations. The body has an intimate relationship with the space created by the sound.

This is always difficult to articulate and I am still searching for specificity but the end result is that these multiple layers of relationships between sound / structure / body / movement have lead me towards using multi-channel sound diffusion systems, or particular placement of live performers, in most of my work for dance since 2000. I can transform the body by transforming the space through the placement of sound.

DM: Some of your sound installations are highly atmospheric, slightly ghostly. You also seem to be fascinated with various ghosts of the past. Your album Isabelle is a portrait of the 19th century writer and explorer Isabelle Eberhardt, who traveled in Northern Africa dressed as a man, joined a Sufi sect, and died in a flash flood when she was 27 years old. You describe your album as a soundtrack: you actually wrote an accompanying screenplay, a structure from which to work. Can you tell me what drew you to Isabelle as a character?

ZP: I suppose her fierceness was the magnet. To that, you could add courage and audacity. This woman was possessed in the sense that she owned her direction and destiny. She didn't float along waiting for something marvelous to happen. She hurled herself head on to the beauty and dangers of Northern Africa. I am not saying that she had a death wish, but with an attitude like this it was never going to be a long life. Yes, the piece moves in and out of direct references to pivotal moments in her life. Another component however is impressionistic movements that address the beauty and cruelty of both the emotional and physical spaces that she inhabited.

DM: Simultaneously describing interior and exterior spaces seems to be an ongoing concern in your work.  One of your current projects is called Rooms for Claude about surrealist photographer Claude Cahun, who, as you said to me earlier, 'questioned and dissolved the notion of articulation of a single self.'
Can you tell me more about this project? Do each of the rooms you sonically articulate describe a psychological space? Are these as much self-portraits of you as they are portraits of CC 's self-portraits?'

ZP: Originally it was intended to be a kind of sonic portrait of Claude's self-portraits. In fact, I wanted to imagine the sonic qualities of the rooms or spaces that Claude chose to take these self-portraits. A nifty trick. What drew her to these backgrounds? They are distinctly not neutral. How do they influence or color the primary subject matter of her photographs? And conversely how do her characters alter her environments? It all sounds like so much fun to me — juicy material.  Maybe it will live on as an installation – all yet to be realized.

For me both Claude Cahun and Isabelle Eberhardt represent models of unstoppable bravery in life-long roller coaster paths, in pursuit, at all costs, of their singular modernist artistic visions. Perhaps for them as for me, it’s impossible to imagine that another choice is possible.

Daria Martin: What drives you in your art, your acting?

Nina Fog: In each of the multitudes of artforms – dance, visual art, performance, song, architecture –   there is that drive, that desire to express a very particular feeling, often a feeling bigger than those of everyday experience. Perhaps it's a feeling that you can't express, possibly: that sense of exploding with emotion. Love, for example. There is so much artistic material based on love. The act of chasing after these things which maybe, just MAYBE can be expressed – this pursuit itself is the work. Perhaps that pursuit to capture experience, similar to the pursuit of memory, is what makes us human. Do animals remember? Do they have memories? Maybe memory is somehow tied to our impulse to make art.

DM: As I'm interviewing four artists of four very different ages, and you are the youngest of the four, I'm interested to touch on the issue of imagined versus real experience, memory versus projection. For me, the grand example is also love. Crossing that line dividing before and after falling in love for the first time made an enormous difference in my experience of artworks or songs or literature ABOUT love. After falling in love, and after having my heart broken, every pop song made sense.  Before that I'd dreamily imagined it all, but suddenly, in experiencing the emotions, I knew what our culture had been talking about all that time.

So I'm wondering, in acting, when you embody characters that have had experiences beyond that or different from your own, which would be true of almost any character you play, unless you were playing one very close to home, how do make that embodiment authentic? Do you search for your own experiences that are akin to that character? You described a character you’d once played who'd been in solitary confinement in prison and to understand that experience you referred back to your own memories of darkness. In acting, do you always access to your own personal memories?

NF: The personal experience will be a key, an important link, but from then on it's also about really imagining something different. As humans we all have the capacity to do that, the ability to empathize: to listen, to observe, and then to imagine. The fact that one can just pick up a book and really live the experience if it's written well—this is the power of empathy.

And also very important is the use of this tool, the body, with all that it contains: the ability to feel, to sculpt, to mold, and to imagine in its own way. I don't use purely personal memory because that's not going be enough and that would personalize things too much. There's got to be objectivity. And one can be subjective in another way.

DM: I'm curious about acting technique, and its use of objective and subjective information. You've described your set of techniques as a toolbox, from which you can pull different methods, on a continuum between the Dustin Hoffmann American method acting model and the Lawrence Oliver model of "just act." There’s a famous story of the two of them acting together in Marathon Man. Hoffmann ran for miles to achieve the necessary exhausted body, and Olivier sort of viewed him as an idiot savante: 'What the hell is he doing?' If, as a gross oversimplification, method acting is about working from inside out and the more traditional, Englsih model is about crafting the outer image and letting that filter in -

NF: – that’s not a specifically English thing. One could nominate certain famous individuals as representatives of English acting, but then I would say for the density of subtext and sensitivity and emotionality of their performances, they come quite close to the 'method acting'/'American' way.  I would say that actors’ work (English or not) is informed by their writers, directors and surroundings; the writers and directors are in turn influenced by them, and their surroundings. The crafting happens both inside and outside.

One example, though, of an actor working through the body isa story Jeremy Irons told of having the challenge of creating two different characters for the same film. He found a simple way in. One point of focus for one character was here on the neck (creating a lift of the head) and the other was from here, the forehead (creating a forward movement of the head). These simple but effective points let him into the two different characters.

DM: Do you think that this physical way of working functions for you because you have a strong physical intuition, a strong connection to your body?

NF: I'd like to think that, yeah. Of course, everyone is connected to their body, from creation to birth, through life – naturally! We just don't always know it, or think about it, apart from in extreme or extraordinary circumstances. So as a child, like any other, I loved to move, and experienced the joy of being a living being rushing through slopes of grass and up cascades of rocks. Every child has that – and it stays in adulthood, but often fades into the background. I guess I only started thinking about how rich and informative the body can be, once considering being an actor, and whilst in training.

It almost feels wrong to mention The Body, as if it was an isolated entity, when it is all connected – no matter what you do. But for the purposes of bringing out this innate awareness, it is necessary to isolate, observe, and so learn.  You'd wonder straight away – how can you isolate something that is so much a part of you, inextricably connected? And that is perhaps where the art, science, and practice of the actor begins. You are your only tool, so you really have to use all of you – voice, heart, mind, skin, bones, muscles, eyes...And like an instrument, it is important to tune it everyday: see, what sound do I make today, then – how can I make this sound, and this sound, and this very different sound? Then, of course, there is the ability to be sensitive with other bodies – almost 'read' another body with your own. What is between people is intrinsically important in scenes, and that can be said just with how the bodies are in space, without a word being spoken.

One of the strongest and most obvious things my teacher said to me is 'The body doesn't lie.' You can change something in your body and you’ll experience it. You can do this with your body (she opens her chest and reaches her chin subtly in the air) and you'll feel different. Because whatever you do in your mind will come out in your body and whatever you do in your body will come out in your mind. 

DM: And I hear that scientists have proven that now – that actually if a person smiles, even smiles a fake smile, then chemicals associated with happiness will be released in the brain. The gesture always works.  

NF: And it's not static, it's always moving. You can't just hold something. 

The best thing in making choices is to simplify, to dilute your impetus to one word. Do this. Do this.  You've got to really do it, REALLY do it, just for that moment. If there’s too much stuff to think about it’s hard to really, really do this one thing. And then the complexity will come through the doing. Not just being one state, one emotion, but being open to express everything.   So this (she gestures strong hands and a hard face) might seem aggressive and strong, but there can be joy in that anger...(her face breaks a smile within that tension). Never to exclude. My teacher said "whatever you create is not a lesser being than you are." Whatever you create has the potential to feel everything, to be everything. Never exclude. Don’t reduce.

I go through a process of researching and digesting – and then I'm going to forget it. And just live. Live. 

DM: That process of research filters into your daily life, doesn't it?  Because as an actor you may be called on to play so many types of roles, a diverse population of people – you need to be constantly observing, tucking away information into a kind of filing cabinet in your mind. It reminds me of the gathering process of novelists. Perhaps some of this information will be magnified in your work. For example, in researching playing a murderer, you might observe someone having a fight in a parking lot, and see a certain quality of rage that could be useful. 

NF: Yes, that's right, and even to grasp moments in oneself when one thinks "I could kill." Some people call it the dark side of acting but I think it's quite healthy, actually.   How can you take that thought, that feeling, and translate it into a different context? That's what I mean when I say we all have the potential for anything. Given extreme circumstances – and often plays are condensed version of life — people are capable of all kinds of things. 

DM: You mentioned earlier Asian performance art forms that work from the outside in. You've done a lot of training in Butoh, the Japanese modern performance artform developed after the second world war, and although I know you have mixed feelings at the moment about that world, might you talk a bit about how Butoh works? I’ve heard Butoh described as an artform that's meant to embody formlessness paradoxically. What does that mean?

NF: That's right. That's where I get my ambivalence about Butoh: it is so full of contradictions. Basically, it's about chasing formlessness and having no technique but there is nevertheless a kind of technique to reach that state. This might involve working with movement patterns that help 'empty' the body (and mind) - bring it to a state to be ready to transform. People might use elements of yoga, tai chi, chi gung, or their own warm up routine – anything that opens the body/mind, makes it receptive. From then on, working with images and states, using animal work – finding ways to totally transform – it is up to oneself to find one's own technique, the one specific to one's own body. It's an artform that involves a more meditative state than what I've been describing about my acting training. It's almost an internal state of being that moves you. The original people that developed the work talk about 'being moved.' There’s a lot of inbetween-ness. I know that Butoh works when the reaction is: "What is this? I've never experienced this before."

DM: Butoh really wouldn't lend itself to film, to stop and start, action, cut and now do it again, would it?  Do you want to say anything about the difference between acting on stage and acting on film?

NF: I'm at the stage now where I love both and I think both involve different kinds of concentration; both have extreme possibilities. In performance the possibilities are reflected immediately, the exchange with the audience is intimate, and you are in real time. There is no way back and that kind of excitement is amazing. And the same with film, because once the word action is said there is no return; you build up energy and boom! you release it. The possibility for detail and introspection in film is one of its big advantages.

DM: By introspection do you mean the audience being able to see thoughts in your face?

NF: Yeah, film is very much the director's vision, and if the director decides to look into a character's mind then there is the possibility to pick up on something very small. In theater the audience can choose where to look whereas in film the audience is directed.    There is such a concentration in film work; it's a real challenge, a good challenge for an actor to give these bursts of life. Stage work is, on the other hand, a reminder of the full breadth and length of experience.  The two ways of working compliment one other. 

DM: You grew up the child of two classical musicians in Vienna. How did hearing music throughout your upbringing effect you?

NF: I'm more and more conscious of it now; I've recently discovered it's very important for me. It's something that people have said about me:  "Your performance has musicality."  And that’s quite a compliment. It's not about singing; it's about rhythm, timing, intonation, delivery – all these things that I wouldn't consciously craft because the technical aspect would get stifling. Maybe musicality is a way to connect to the audience in a more universal way, a language that people who do not understand the text will still feel. My mother's English is not so good and when she watches me in an English language play she will understand my performance in a different way. Going back to roots:   Shakespeare's language is extremely musical. It s textural, it's muscular, its full of living, moving intentions, dreams and pronouncements ...it's got heartbeat. It's poetry. It's music as well.

DM: So: sounds, the way you form text with your voice, and moreover gesture – all these things contribute to the physicalization of meaning.

NF: Yes, I hope that when people watch they are experiencing on a total level. It isn't just text.   Seeing, listening...all your senses...smelling, feeling...these are probably the things that stay with people. 

DM: You literally embody the words on the page. These black and white words just suggest potential.

NF: And of course when it comes to actually working you can't think 'Oh I'm going to embody that word' because that’s not going to work. But there are all these things we've talked about before in an actor's toolbox to get you there.

DM: It must be strange to go through all that work to get character and context, and then to be stuck with these words you have to say. I always marvel at how good actors can invest these words with real vitality.

NF: You can look at it another way round. When the writing is good, they are not a restriction, but rather like signposts: a compass by which to navigate. The words are an invitation to live.