Austrian choreographer Chris Haring and Irish visual artist Aoibheann Greenan talk about dissolving boundaries between forms, the ‘impotential’ in the creative act and how materials and ideas inform their work.
Chris: I think it’s really interesting what you’re doing, mixing sculptures with the things that you’re building live. When I looked at your web page, I was caught by a video I saw there, about The Perfect Wagner Rite…

Aoibheann: Oh yeah…

C: And you spoke about cultural and sexual voyeurism, you say it’s a shallow form of interaction, ‘worldviews that are born out of media and pop culture impressions more than out of reality’, and there I could link immediately to the show we’re doing because in Deep Dish the performers are at a dinner and they use a handheld camera to go always closer in to the food… the body first enters and then mingles with the food, by the end the performers are almost disappearing into it…

A: Yes…

C: I like what you said about The Perfect Wagner Rite, because it becomes a very, very voyeuristic thing the moment you start to work with the camera. In our performance the live picture is also projected on a screen at the back and the audience sees it, so it’s not only the spectator who is a voyeur but also the dancer or performer is a voyeur and suddenly everything is voyeuristic.

A: Yeah… it’s interesting you say that because I think The Perfect Wagner Rite operated on a really similar level. One of the performers operated on two levels – he was our pornographer, so he followed us around giving the performance of a voyeur, but he was also creating this voyeuristic condition for the audience. Because there was this real sense of wanting to see more than you could from your particular vantage point. So he had a selfie-stick and a phone and everything he was picking up, the live feed, was being projected onto a screen behind us, similar to how your show sounds, the live feed became the visuals in a sense, this really excessive imagery… but then also at a certain point he goes so close to the performers that you can’t make out what’s going on any more and it becomes distorted, so it’s like the more you probe the less you can get at the thing and it’s kind of this tension…
The Perfect Wagner Rite, Aoibheann Greenan

​C: I agree with that, you come closer to something but at the same time, you look at the surface, you work with something that is maybe superficial, but when you come much closer you feel like a child that opens the teddy bear to see what’s inside and suddenly it’s destroyed.

A: Yeah, the closer you get the more it distances itself…

C: Maybe the new form of voyeurism or pornography is gastroscopy… just think about all these CSI or criminal movies, you see how the bullet is entering the skin, and you see what’s inside, it’s a completely different universe… it’s perverse… There’s this idea of the curiosity of looking at things as an artist and I think I see this also in your work, with the sculptures. But you also have the need to perform it somehow…

A: Yes, absolutely. I think… I don’t know how it is for you in the world of dance… well you seem to me someone who is very fluid in your disciplinary boundaries, like your work with Michel Blazy [a visual artist who collaborated on Deep Dish]… his work is beautiful…
Michel Blazy. La vie des choses

​C: I mean in dance, for me it was always like this… Liquid Loft [the company Chris works with] was founded in 2005, and since then we’ve been trying in every piece to search for the reason why we dance. I see the works we make under the umbrella of choreography. Choreography becomes a method to do something or to express something, always with the body at the centre of intention. And maybe this brings me to the next point: How do you choose the media or the material you work with?

A: For me, it’s usually the idea that comes first and then it’s thinking about how best to express it in the medium, but then also knowing that I’m working with really limited means because there are only so many things I can do and make myself and then it becomes a question of getting other people involved and then it finds its own groove. But always the idea is at the forefront. But for me, performance just became… I was making these really highly performative spaces, these almost caricatures of cultures that I was seeing around me in tourist sites and I was always really interested in the idea of how the visitor or tourist performs when they enter these really highly encoded spaces. And so I was trying to recreate the conditions, almost trying to manipulate them in some way or play with the modes of mediation you find in these tourist sites, like the walkways and the viewing stations and things like that, and then I guess… that was my tip-toeing into the world of performance.

C: Yes… through the interaction with the audience?

A: I was always really interested in audience interaction, but it’s this really degraded form of interaction. I feel like there’s a real trend in gallery spaces to engage with the audience, but to what end? I sometimes feel like there’s not really much thought given to what that interaction is. So sometimes my work takes on the guise of that, but it’s a completely debased form of interaction and all it does is show its inherent lack… that’s one line of inquiry I'm following in my work. I’ve never worked with a stage, the performance always happens around the installation and in the space of the audience.

C: Every visual artist is always jealous of that – that we have the attention of the audience for one hour and they can’t leave.

A: Yeah! I think this works really in The Perfect Wagner Rite because when Steve [O’Connor – the camera man in the show] was going around with his phone filming, he was also getting footage of the audience members watching him and that was being projected onto the wall, it’s almost like you’re in this space you can’t escape and you’re seeing yourself seeing…

C: Yes, but this question of performing on a stage or elsewhere, I think if you create performances for a long time, it’s something everybody has to go through, because stages are made to present work … and anyway dramatic art, visual art… nowadays, what is what?

A: Yeah, I don’t really buy this… this argument between performativity and theatricality and one being more authentic than the other. I was watching a talk about this recently, but one of the speakers was making the point that theatricality challenges the illusion of unmediated representation… he’s saying at least its honest about its artifice, it presents itself as artifice, as opposed to performativity which is, quote unquote, ‘real’, but is essentially a performance as well… does this make sense?

C: I think so but, you know, the stage as we experience it nowadays is here and now, like, it’s in the iPhone, because everything is recorded or everything is videotaped and often the new stage is the screen and that’s where, I can imagine, our spaces, yours and mine, meet in a very fluid and normal way. Performance by itself is anyway very visual and your works, your sculptures, are very performative already, so it makes sense if you continue with this…

A: Absolutely, whenever I’m making anything I’m always thinking about how it can be further utilized. I’ve never been happy with a static art show, like a thing on a plinth and a picture in a frame… I’m always thinking about how they can be performed in a more dynamic way or reassembled or pushed further.

C: How do you choose your topics? You said before you come up with the idea first.

A: I guess one strong thread throughout all my work so far has been something to do with tourism … invented cultures and traditions and rituals, and I’m really interested in the ritualistic patterns that govern our lives. I’ve used quite over the top rituals in shows before… incantations and sacrifices, really hamming it up stuff. Lately, it’s been an invitation that might prompt something… The Perfect Wagner Rite made sense, because I was asked to engage with German culture…

C: So you took on the superstar! Wagner’s Ring Cycle. There’s pressure there. But what I find interesting is if you come from another field, if you don’t know the history of the form, if you just jump in you might see things others might not…
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A: You’re unhindered as well, there are less rules … you approach the topic in a novel way. I don’t think it’s art’s job to get it all right. With my work I’m almost saved sometimes if I get things wrong because I often take the position of the naive tourist so there’s often deliberate misappropriation happening, so it’s a get out of jail free card if I really fuck something up.

C: There’s a very strong focus on gender in your show it seems.

A: Yeah, I mean, I guess that wasn’t even totally conscious when
I began making that work but it became quite a central thing… I was essentially rewriting The Ring Cycle tongue in cheek through my own fetishistic ideas of Berlin and Berlin culture… one of the very prevalent things is BDSM culture so that came in through the imagery but then in the performance it became a lot about gender swapping and drag.

C: Funny, cause it is such a big topic nowadays in performance that is almost permanently there. In Deep Dish for example we have three women and one man… gender is not a topic in the show but you can imagine what happens if you work with themes of decadence, voyeurism, vanity… I knew I didn’t want to have two men and two women, I didn’t want to have two ‘couples’, for some reason I didn’t want to have three men and one woman … and most of the time the man is filming …

A: I guess power relations always come into it when you make decisions with gender… so is that quite a big consideration for you then when you’re choosing your dancers?
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C: I think it becomes a natural thing to consider it because the gender topic is a big inspiration source for many performances that we see nowadays and I think if you create a performance at least you have to be aware of the decision you make concerning that, what kind of gender is there or no gender at all…  but if you get to the level of granulation of things, when you go really up close, take the surface away and look at the details in order to build it together again to see what comes out, it doesn’t matter any more if it’s male, female, both or in between.

A: The Perfect Wagner Rite could have been a totally different show, it’s just I was working with the culture that was there. All the objects are completely fetishised, all the motifs from The Ring Cycle become sex toys, which is more harking back to what you were saying about what I was saying about creating a parallel between cultural voyeurism and sexual voyeurism and the libidinal drive within consumerism, so it was tongue in cheek. I wouldn’t want to be tokenistic and be like ‘hey, here’s my queer performance because queer performance is cool now’, no, that show could have been another show… I think whatever you take on you just have to do it, all the way…

C: I find it interesting because with the performative act, if I look at your pictures before, of previous works, it doesn’t seem 
such a main topic for you.

A: No, it’s not a driving force. I think the themes in my work tend to dictate the outcomes so it made sense if I was taking on Wagner or George Bernard Shaw, to think of the gesamtkunstwerk. The reason I chose an operetta as a style was because it was an amalgamation of Shaw the playwright and Wagner the spectacle-maker.

C: Fusion kitchen, good! With Liquid Loft [the company Chris works with] we mostly work in series… I always have the feeling that when a performance is finished, you have to see it with an audience, and then months later you reflect what actually happened. And the topics are mostly too big to do in one show, even if the show is eight hours long. So often I work with the history of our other pieces. So Deep Dish is from a series called The Perfect Garden, where we worked with artificial paradises. I was interested in working with Michel because he’s a guy who takes away the fear of the vulnerability of decaying, he finds the beauty in the colours of mould for example. But when we worked with his organic sculptures the results always felt too small, I thought there must be another way to interact with it than just using it as a stage set, there was this need to come closer to the materials, closer to the topic…

Michel Blazy sculpture, 2002
A: Yes, and how to create that intimacy with a live audience…

C: Yes, and for the next piece in the series we brought the dancers into his sculptures, covered in glue, so with each movement, they left traces. By the end they were in a cage of glue… but still I felt like we were working with a stage set. With Deep Dish we brought all the knowledge we’d gathered and ended up on the dinner table, a one-shot movie where the screenplay is written on the table and the performers come closer and closer with a handheld camera, finally they even disappear into it and suddenly then I felt satisfied. This is mostly how we work on topics - one topic arises from another…

A: Yeah, you have to see it in the live moment for any issue to present itself … I think that’s the ideal way to work. So have you and Michel been in a long-term collaboration?

C: For Perfect Garden yes, inside performances, outside performances, installations, a movie, three stage performances, so over three years we’ve worked together.

A: I do feel we share a lot of affinities, in that you come from a performance background but you’re always thinking visually. The visual stuff comes naturally to me but I’m always thinking about how it can be orchestrated in a way that incorporates movement.

C: I actually come from a music background. The pieces I make are thought like concerts and symphonies, but the thing that inspires me is the visuals… because they’re not so connected to a timeline.

A: For me what I like about dance is the open-endedness of it as well… for example, the show I’m working on now, I’m dealing with big themes like feminism and posthumanism and I guess I’m trying to figure out where I stand in relation to certain ideas  by making the work intuitively. So I’m working with an aerial performer and the work is based on A Cyborg Manifesto…

C: Donna Haraway! She’s my hero! My first performances were all about cyborgs and Blade Runner…

A: Yeah! There’s a real sense of metamorphosis in the piece so to approach it through dance and movement as well as visuals seemed obvious … I’d be curious to know what you’ve done in the past with cyborg imagery…

C: The first one was a workshop in Hamburg where we just looked at old sci-fi movies and the ideas they had about how the body should move and how it will look like in the future. The cybernetic organism was a big inspiration source for me always, and early 90s techno culture, everything unisex, everybody running around with short hair… it looked at that time like we’d get over the gender problem ... but then something happened - as soon as somebody was holding a camera on stage, it was a so-called ‘multimedia piece’ and all these topics became suddenly secondary and got lost for a while … nobody works with media in this way anymore, because we use these gadgets in everyday life. It’s part of the game and it’s just another tool. On the other side, I find it very interesting to have these artists who need to have these possibilities in order to create something.

A: I was listening to Giorgio Agamben talking about the act of creation and, I’m going to get this wrong but, he was saying that within the creative act there’s potential but also impotential, there’s resistance happening in every creative act, and it’s actually this resistance that defines the style of every creative artist. He gave the example of an opera singer who couldn’t hit certain notes, which gave this other quality to her voice, gave her a particular style. I see these kids coming out of college now and they can run every single software programme, I feel like such a cavewoman…

C: But they don’t have the same experience as you…

A: And there is something to be said about not having all the means at your disposal because then you have to force yourself to be creative and come up with these long-winded solutions that inevitably don’t end up where you’d intended but bring you somewhere new. I think you need the long process.

C: Yes, absolutely. When we were developing Deep Dish, the performers had to learn to live with the camera, because they’re doing everything live on stage. That opened up for me another world suddenly. Because I could really take myself out of the situation and leave them there …

A: In this autonomous space?

C: Yeah. The system itself is always right somehow. You’re not the creator, you just let it go. You find something or you support something, but then it grows by itself … that’s also what Michel Blazy says that fascinated me so much. He said when he started working in plastic, he made his creations and his sculptures, but they always broke, something went wrong, he almost gave up. So he said he would let the things grow, let them do what they needed to do, and not guide them any more, but just support them. I really like this – it gives me hope.

A: Yeah, and liberation as well. I really love the idea of the two of you coming together. Even the idea of using organic material in work is rare.

C: He’s been into it for a very long time. He brings such a knowledge with him. He’s just sitting there like a child, trying out things.

A: But I mean, that’s the essence you want to keep as an artist – is to be just playing like a child.
Deep Dish by Chris Haring/Liquid Loft will be presented at the Abbey Theatre from 26th - 27th May 2017 as part of the Dublin Dance Festival.

Headline image: Deep Dish, Michael Loizenbauer

Posted: 25th May 2017