{"id":398,"date":"2017-04-24T17:42:42","date_gmt":"2017-04-24T17:42:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bard.edu\/wearewatching\/?p=398"},"modified":"2017-04-24T17:42:42","modified_gmt":"2017-04-24T17:42:42","slug":"in-progress-an-interview-with-michelle-ellsworth-of-the-rehearsal-artist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bard.edu\/wearewatching\/2017\/04\/24\/in-progress-an-interview-with-michelle-ellsworth-of-the-rehearsal-artist\/","title":{"rendered":"IN PROGRESS: AN INTERVIEW WITH MICHELLE ELLSWORTH OF THE REHEARSAL ARTIST"},"content":{"rendered":"

Michelle Ellsworth uses her expansive definition of dance as well as video, text, performance sculptures, and the World Wide Web to explore topics ranging from pharmaceutical art to experimental surveillance. Consistently commingling\u00a0<\/em>with\u00a0<\/em>technology and objects, her recent innovative works were highlighted in the New York Times\u2019 article Best of Dance 2015 under the heading \u201cDances With Gadgets.\u201d Among her honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship (2016), Doris Duke Impact Award (2015), a NEFA National Dance Project Grant (2014), a Creative Capital Fellowship (2013), and a USA Artists Knight Fellowship in Dance (2012). She has received three National Performance Network Creation Fund Commissions (2004, 2007, and 2016). Highlights in her performing career include presenting at The Chocolate Factory, On The Boards, Danspace, Diverseworks, and also at the Noorderzon, Contemporary Latitudes, Fusebox, and TBA Festivals.<\/em><\/p>\n

She spoke with Miriam Felton-Dansky about her work in progress for\u00a0<\/em>We\u2019re Watching, titled\u00a0<\/em>The Rehearsal Artist.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Miriam Felton Dansky:<\/strong> Tell me about the inspiration for <\/em>The Rehearsal Artist.<\/p>\n

Michelle Ellsworth:<\/strong> The piece that precedes this was called Clytigation.<\/em>\u00a0For that work I remixed Aeschylus\u2019 Oresteia <\/em>and looked at how the Trojan War impacted the legal protocols that appear at the end of the Oresteia,<\/em> when Athena sets up the first ever murder trial, and how profound that was for the legal system. I was looking at post-9\/11 conditions, and how legal protocols shifted after that with regard to the use of drones, surveillance, torture, and the suspension of habeas corpus<\/em>. Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben\u2019s work State of Exception\u00a0<\/em>(2004) as well as American philosopher Judith Butler’s Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?\u00a0<\/em>(2009) and Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence <\/em>(2004) came up for me. Some of these ideas from Clytigation<\/em> have lingered and become part of The Rehearsal Artist<\/em>.\u00a0 I have kept reading and trying to create a kind of kinaesthetic replica of what I\u2019m feeling, seeing, and thinking about in the geopolitical world and my personal experience \u2026specifically about watching and being watched.<\/p>\n

This larger thinking about surveillance came\u00a0up against my experience with being watched as a performer. I have this recurring thing that happens to me as an artist, which is that I like to make work but I have a profound resistance to performing it. I started thinking, maybe there is a loophole where I could use the idea of \u201cremote sensing,\u201d which allows you to get information about a subject without touching it. Does everybody know what remote sensing is?<\/p>\n

MFD:<\/strong> I don\u2019t. Could you explain?<\/em><\/p>\n

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Hypothohearsal for The Rehearsal Artist, front view. Photo by Satchel Spencer.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

ME:<\/strong> The military uses it. It\u2019s the acquisition of information without being on site. You can shoot a beam at something and then the data comes back to you\u2014like sonar. So I thought if I could get more distance from the audience, or if I could not know when they were collecting my \u201cdata,\u201d I would feel more comfortable. So, my lack of comfort in performing was colliding with this practice of remote sensing by the military, and the whole idea of knowing something from a distance. Then I started thinking about the relationship of performance to social science experiments, and that\u2019s what took me to the observation of performers or \u201csubjects through one-way glass, and the role of the audience as a practitioner of surveillance. This one-way transmission\u00a0amplifies the surveillance aspect but also insulates the performer from the presence of the audience.<\/p>\n

MFD: <\/strong>How did you start creating the piece?<\/em><\/p>\n

ME:<\/strong> I started with this awareness that I needed the ability to rotate around the axis of my nose\u2014because that kind of disorientation seemed important. I talked to designer Bruce Miller, who said: \u201cOh, you need a giant wheel, and then you can rotate around the axis of your nose.\u201d In my mind, the performers are like participants in an experiment. The language of science resonates for me: if I keep changing the variables in each performance, then I\u2019m collecting different their data. I call each run through of the work a “hypothohearsal,” because they are half experiments and half rehearsals. So there\u2019s the one-way glass, and this giant wheel, and the dancer\u2019s head in isolation. The performer or the \u201csubject\u201d doesn\u2019t have a sense of the audience at all, they\u2019re just looking at themselves through this one-way glass. I did a bunch of experiments a few weeks ago where I put twenty-two people in the wheel and the documentation of those experiments will be installed in the Fisher Center lobby.<\/p>\n

MFD:<\/strong> So, is each iteration of the piece different?<\/em><\/p>\n

ME:<\/strong> Yes. For the version that will be on display in the lobby, I had a consistent score, however\u00a0in the space I will be working on different subjects, and I will have many options. We\u2019ll do it 48 times, and there will be 48 different versions of the piece.<\/p>\n

MFD:<\/strong> Thinking about this as an experiment, does the audience come away with some kind of conclusion, or with information gathered?<\/p>\n

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Hypothohearsal for The Rehearsal Artist, side view.
Photo by Satchel Spencer.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

ME:<\/strong> I don\u2019t have any ambition as to how this piece reads to the audience. The art I find myself most responsive to is work that shifts my perspective or that helps me to reconsider, even ever so humbly or mildly, something that I had already filed on the shelf called \u201cI got that.\u201d If I did have an ambition it would be that. But it could just be about the experience of watching the dancer.\u00a0 \u00a0I was never that great executer of turns as a dancer. I could never do more than two, maybe three pirouettes. But now when I turn in the wheel, I\u2019m like \u201cwoohoo, I\u2019m turning now\u2026 I\u2019m a turning dancer!\u201d It can be visual, it can be geopolitical, and there are other components. I\u2019m definitely also working on the absence of my father from the planet, I think sometimes The Rehearsal Artist<\/em> is all a death practice. When I\u2019m in the head box it definitely feels like death practice. Whether that\u2019s legible in any way, I don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n

MFD:<\/strong> I\u2019m wondering whether the physical space of the Fisher Center has influenced the way you have thought about constructing the piece.<\/em><\/p>\n

ME:<\/strong> I wouldn\u2019t say the architecture, nearly as much as the generosity and the attention of the Fisher Center team and their philosophical commitment to supporting work\u2026that has been profound. It\u2019s been the house of \u201cyes,\u201d and for a premiere and an early iteration that has been really helpful.<\/p>\n

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Miriam Felton-Dansky is a professor in Bard\u2019s Theater & Performance Program.<\/em><\/p>\n

To find out more and to purchase tickets\u00a0<\/strong>click here.<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Watch the trailer for The Rehearsal Artist<\/em>:<\/strong><\/h2>\n

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