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Time Out New York | May 8, 2014
Q&A: Liz Santoro talks about Relative Collider, Gia Kourlas
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Q&A: Liz Santoro talks about Relative Collider
When Liz Santoro was a student at Boston Ballet School—before she switched to study neuroscience at Harvard University—she looked down on modern dancers. As she put it: "Oh modern dance—that’s for lazy, untalented people," and and felt, respectively, confused and in awe when choreographers Ralph Lemon and Twyla Tharp came to stage ballets. Now, part of the contemporary world, but still of the analytical mindset that attacted her to ballet and neuroscience in the first place, Santoro brings her new Relative Collider to the Chocolate Factory.
Liz Santoro, a meticulous choreographer who explores the art of paying attention, is fixated on the nervous system in her new Relative Collider. What happens to performers and audience members during the intimate experience of a dance? For Santoro, who trained extensively at the Boston Ballet School before trading in her pointe shoes for a neuroscience degree at Harvard University, the braiding of movement and sound is enhanced by another force. “I don’t need to sit in front of each audience member for five minutes and check in,” she says in an interview from Paris, where she lives with collaborator and partner Pierre Godard. “It’s about the collective energy.”
When did you move to Paris?
Actually I still live between New York and Paris. The main reason is my partner, who’s French. We met in 2006 when I was performing in Paris. About three years ago, I applied for a work visa, which is mainly so I wouldn’t get kicked out every 90 days and could work and not have to leave for a certain period of time and come back. We work together on all my projects. He was pretty much a co-curator in the piece Watch It, which I made at the Museum of Arts & Design, and he also shared much of the conception for this current creation.How did you begin Relative Collider?
There’s a lot of stuff in there. The easy thing to say first is that it came from the piece before, which at the time was We Do Our Best. I had already started this piece before I made Watch It. I wanted to understand this idea of what’s possible to exchange in a dance performance. I had this written, very clear pattern that we started with the feet early on, maybe a year and a half ago. Also, there was a portion of We Do Our Best with footwork. It’s a long sequence of steps that never repeats. It’s impressive and it’s hard to do, but—this is going to sound really bad—I never really cared about it. It was always just a means to an end. The work in We Do Our Best has this hyper nervous-system awareness that gets installed from the beginning and is a fundamental part of the work. What ends up happening in that section of that piece is that your nervous system has already started to vibrate. It’s not just, Oh I’m onstage, so I’m a little shaky or nervous, but it puts you in a different place of executing something that would probably be much easier if it had been done in the straight, more traditional way that we tend to perform-dance. I was wondering, what if that was an entry point for making something?Could you describe the footwork?
The foot pattern was made with [dancer] Cynthia [Koppe] very early on, and it’s just eight sets of eight. It’s extremely simple: right, left, right, left, right, left, right left; and the second set of eight is right, left, right, right, left, right, left, left. And the third is right, right, left, left, right, right, left, left. The rest of them are slightly less obvious, but they’re pretty simple. For example, the seventh one is just four rights and four lefts. It was stationary, just heels moving. You’re standing and you pick up your heel and put it back down. So super basic, super simple: something that anyone could do, anyone could learn. On top of that, also coming out of We Do Our Best is that the photographs from that piece are a lot more efficient as an artifact than as a video.They’re so striking.
Yeah. Especially the photographs of the section we call “The Triangle.” It’s the longest section: You’re onstage and in this performative situation and you’re checking in with yourself to be present; you have the people in front of you, the audience; and you have the people onstage with you. It’s a triangulation of presence, energy and feedback. When you’ve been performing your whole life, you really know how to put on the show and give something to the audience. I was wondering if I could not use that. And that doesn’t mean getting in front of people and being a big mess, but what if I interact with people in a different way? And actually receive them? We did a lot in research and physical work with the nervous system and being in front of people. I’m endlessly fascinated by how things change when you’re watched by someone. It’s pretty remarkable just to be home alone in your apartment or house and the way you behave, and then as soon as there’s just one other person there what that changes—it’s so huge. And then when you think about being on a stage, you’re actually choosing and organizing and setting that thing up to invite people to come. People buy tickets; it’s a certain length of time that they’re giving to you and you’re giving to them and what that produces for both sides. What ends up happening in the triangle section of We Do Our Best is there’s no actual choreography or improvisation going on. It’s really just letting your body and nervous system respond to the situation that you’re in.What does it look like?
You’re standing. You’re not really moving around, but over time your arm will touch your leg or your head will move. You’re not choosing for these things to happen, but you’re letting yourself be in the situation, so those photographs from We Do Our Best are very gestural. They look chosen. But to my eye, they’re not chosen; they’re coming out of something that I can’t quite put my finger on if I were to just see them, not knowing what they were. So I was looking at those photographs, and I put those—for lack of a better way to say it—those positions of the upper body on top of the feet pattern.Did you do it chronologically?
I tried to, but it didn’t always work out that way. Mostly.And that’s where you found the 64 positions of the arms for Relative Collider?
Yes. There are 64 feet and 64 arm positions that go on top of those feet. Then, as if it wasn’t seemingly complicated enough—although it’s very simple and straightforward—we worked with this musician, Brendan Dougherty, who’s American and lives in Berlin. He worked on the sound and was only with us a few days toward the end of the project, but we were communicating via Skype and e-mail for months leading up. We were playing with the idea of having the 64 sets—we were calling that set A—but what if we had a set B and a C and a D? We drove ourselves mad. One day I was talking to Brendan about a foot pattern. He’s a percussionist by training, and he said, “This reminds me of the drumming exercises that I used to do for hours and hours.” He sent us an entire book of all these exercises and a bunch of people doing these paradiddle exercises on YouTube, and I flipped out. It was just like, Oh my God, I want to do this for the next 20 years! Then Pierre, who is currently doing a master’s in natural language processing—which is the way that computers and humans process language—made a simple program. He plugged in the pattern and it spit out some options; one was something that created a palindrome with set A, meaning that if you lined up, from start to finish, the 64 feet of set A and put this other set next to it—which we now call set B—it would create a palindrome. The piece premiered in Paris. I’ve been spending the last few months trying to explain all this in French and that’s actually quite hilarious.Can you explain the meaning of the title? What is a “relative collider”?
I invented the title in a way. As I started to think about this piece—this is really embarrassing, but I was doing an online course in physics. I had done physics in college. I was always really disappointed in myself because it was my worst class. I couldn’t make sense of it. I couldn’t understand why it was so hard for me.Was this at Harvard?
Yeah. I studied a lot of neuroscience and biology. Organic chemistry was one of my favorite courses, and I had a chip on my shoulder about this physics thing, and I was like, I’m going to get it, I’m going to do this. This idea of relativity in performance is obviously something we’re all interested in. Everything is relative, to be super brief about it. [Laughs] But my relation to the audience, my relation to the space that I’m in, my relation to the other people that are onstage with me, and also the way that things are framed and referenced—the communication about a show, where you’re doing it…all the questions that you, as a journalist, have to ask to put that relativity in place for people. That’s a main thing that happens in the study of physics. There’s that, and I put two words together: atomic collider—this idea of making two things collide to then understand what they’re made of. That’s where all that came from. You can have the relation, and you can have the structure but then what is the action?Is that why you focus on the idea of being watched?
Exactly. Being watched changes your behavior and your decision making so tremendously. Your nervous system is always doing a dance. I’m trying to take advantage of that and use it because I’m trying to understand it.How do you use it?
When I talk about the footwork in We Do Our Best or even the feet and arms in Relative Collider, I’m not so concerned with those as steps or those as things. I’m using those as an object that I can carry out in this performance setup; there’s an activity that’s happening, but really I’m trying to use the nervous system to give me the possibility to have a feedback loop with the audience. I want to have the audience be aware of what it is that I’m doing and I’m searching to also be aware of what [the audience is] up to. That’s going to then inform where I go from there. I don’t need to sit in front of each audience member for five minutes and check in, but it’s the collective energy and the situation. The room that you’re in, your brain has filters so that it takes a photo of the surroundings. It’s not having to retake that photo every nanosecond. It takes the photo, and if there’s a change—someone walks in and something flashes or if there’s a smell like smoke, that new information will come in. I’m also trying to understand how as a performer I can play with those kinds of filters. We have a foot pattern that’s super simple, but then we have all these variations that we do with them. Then we make them locomote. It wasn’t my intention; I would never come into rehearsal and say, “Okay, guys, you’re going to come up with five different ways to do it—one, jumping; two in turnout, etc.” The variations never came from me trying to make variations. As a trio, we ended up amusing ourselves and there was a constant generation of these variations, simply out of pleasure.Do you have text as well?
This might take a second to explain. So if you imagine—I’ll take the second phrase of set A. It’s right, left, right, right, left, right, left, left. So if you’re not locomoting, you can move your feet in that way; as soon as you try to locomote and you repeat one foot—like you do right and then another right—what the body does naturally is it syncopates, so it goes right, left, right and right, and that and is actually your left foot helping you take a little mini step forward so you can repeat.So you have this syncopation going on.
What ends up happening in rehearsal is if we locomote any of these, we have that syncopation built in. What happened is I asked Pierre if we could take all of the patterns that have already been made and then wherever there’s an and, find pieces of text that had those ands in the same place? So they are performed at the same time. For example, in that second set of A, right, left, right and right, left, right, left and left. There’s an and between the third and fourth word of a sentence and there’s also an and between the seventh and eighth word. We had the whole pattern written out. Then he wrote a program that then wrote the text that we used—I think there were 50,000 texts that we could access that are open-sourced.Project Gutenberg?
Precisely. Then it would spit out any sequence of words that had that same setup. It’s also important to know that the computer is spitting out these phrases, but Pierre doesn’t know what’s coming at him during the piece. Every time he hits the enter key, he has a new eight sets of eight with all these ands in the same places for set A and set B and every time he hits enter, there’s a new one in front of him, In the sixth one in set A it’s really strange to have “and, word, word, word, and, word, and, word, word and word”—it’s super uncommon to have those. If you’re lucky, you can get some Shakespeare coming at you, but a lot of the time it’s the Bible and the Koran. And since there are fewer of those, some of them might repeat. One day, one of the phrases that came out was, “This is a very nice dance.” It didn’t even have any ands to it. He also restricted the first phrase to eight words but no ands and also restricted the length of those words, so it was given some kind of constraint: I think the maximum is five characters in a word.Are you obsessed with Twyla Tharp’s intricate The Fugue? Or any other dance?
[In surprise] I don’t have any dances I’m obsessed with. It’s funny you mention Twyla Tharp. I don’t relate to her work now as an adult; for a number of years I haven’t thought much about her work, but it did have a huge impact on me when I was younger because I was a student at Boston Ballet School and when I was probably 12 or 13, Boston Ballet did this program called “On the Edge,” and they had a bunch of modern-dance choreographers that came and made or set work on the company, and there was some Cunningham work—there was maybe a total of six to eight pieces. Ralph Lemon was one of the choreographers, and he asked if he could work with some students for his piece. I was in it with a few of my classmates, one of whom—do you know the ballet dancer Sarah Lamb?Sure. She’s a principal with the Royal Ballet now.
She was one of my best friends in ballet school, so a bunch of us were in this Ralph Lemon piece.Was that cool?
It was cool, but at 12 when you’re really a serious ballet dancer, you’re just like, what is this guy doing? I had no idea. There’s another classmate of mine, Tilman O’Donnell, who went on to dance with [William] Forsythe for a little while and is now dancing in Europe. I remember Ralph asked one day, “Do you know any kids’ songs?” And you ask that to a bunch of 12-year-old ballet students, and they just look at you. No one could respond. I think Tilman had some song from some kids’ show, like, “I like to eat apples and bananas” so we had to jump singing this song, and I was rolling a watermelon across the stage and doing this kind of dance movement and I was like, what is this? I remember feeling really bad for Ralph. I know that sounds really obnoxious, but I think young ballet students are inherently obnoxious creatures despite themselves, and I was like, Oh this poor guy—he’s working with us. I knew he was serious about what he was trying to do and I did see some beauty in it, but at the end, I was like, Oh this poor guy is stuck with these snotty kids. We had modern-dance class once a week, and I was like, oh modern dance—that’s for lazy, untalented people. Just totally obnoxious. So I was able to sit and watch some of the other pieces from backstage and I remember they did In the Upper Room and Brief Fling. There are those plaid tutus, and I think they even had royal-blue pointe shoes. I remember seeing those costumes—I was like, what is going on? This is so cool. I was flipping out.They’re by Isaac Mizrahi.
Yes. It was like, I’m interested. In Ralph’s piece, we were in burlappy sacks with pajama cut—I was like, Ahhh. Adding insult to injury, we’re wearing these burlap sacks. I was in the costume room, and I could see these tutus coming in. Later on, I got to see Upper Room from the audience and that just like blew my mind wide open. It was the days when you made mixtapes for your friends, and Sarah and I would make mixtapes for each other and she would always put “surprise number 2” and it was always a Philip Glass section from Upper Room. We would dance around in her basement trying to be like those dancers. Anyway, it’s a bit embarrassing. But that was my first Twyla Tharp experience; that was a big one. I haven’t thought much about it. I can’t come up with a piece that I’m obsessed with.I thought that you might have one—you have such an analytical mind.
That comes a bit more from my interest in science. But there is also something that hooked me with ballet, because of pattern and precision—you can really get obsessive in that exactitude and the sequence of things. I don’t really care about the steps. The steps let me do something else. If I know what the movement phrase is and it’s really precise, I know it’s a glissade; I know after the glissade, I’m going to do a jeté. If I can really get those things squared away, then something else can happen and that’s maybe where that comes from. I had a Russian ballet teacher during my last years of ballet school, and she didn’t speak any English and she was my teacher for four years. I feel like I understood everything that came out of her mouth. She just turned 80.Who was she?
Tatiana Legat. She’s incredible. There was the placement of your little finger and all that kind of stuff. I got a lot out of that. The thing with Relative Collider is that I’m letting you see what I’m doing. We’re in the same room at the same time. The fact that you’re watching is doing something to me—and not in a bad way. It’s in a way that you can have an experience as an audience member, where you’ll actually be part of something. [Laughs] If you want. I could make a piece where a really talented actor reads a moving text onstage or blare some strong music and get you going. There are things I could throw at you. There are things I could give to you, but I think you could also just go home and watch TV. I’m being a bit obnoxious.I get it. Why did you quit ballet?
Up until my junior year of high school, I was 100 percent sure that I was going to do that for the rest of my life and then in my class, I started to have friends who had moved on from my class that were starting to dance in the corps de ballet; I had friends who were starting to audition for ballet companies. And then my senior year there was a tacit situation with my parents. I knew they weren’t going to be so fond of this idea of me continuing with ballet, so I applied to a bunch of colleges just to keep that going in some way, and then my senior year there were a few moments where I was able to do some corps de ballet work with the company. It was a bit of a collision of sorts of watching the experience of some of my friends who were starting to embark in a career in the corps de ballet and having a taste of that on my own. It was a moment of disillusionment. You start to see what’s in front of you, and I think you can have this fantasy. The hard work of a ballet class that I loved so much was a means to an end: If I can really get the technique down, then something else can happen on top of it, but when you’re in the corps de ballet, you don’t always have that at your fingertips. It’s not coming to you in spades in terms of opportunity to play with that maybe as much as I would have wanted, and yeah, it was watching friends and having a bit of that experience of my own—it was like, Oh, maybe this isn’t what I thought it was going to be. I started to see something that drew my 17-year-old brain to question it, and I had these college-acceptance letters, and it was like, Oh well what if I try that? I also had a friend at the time who was going to Harvard and had stayed in my ballet class. I think I thought, I can actually do both and maybe figure it out as I go. By the time I got to Harvard—your head kind of explodes with possibilities that you had never seen before. It was my 17-year-old brain: I’m going to become a surgeon. That’s what I thought I would do. I was always interested in dissection, in understanding what’s inside of things. I was like, I’m going to be a surgeon for dancers. I was 17. I wasn’t that much smarter than I was when I was 12 and feeling bad for Ralph Lemon.Perhaps that interest in dissection—that has something to do with what you’re doing now in terms of dissecting movement.
Yeah. I feel super lucky that I did have that experience. You can’t study dance formally at Harvard. There’s no department there. It’s not an accepted field. I have to say that when I did move to New York City, I’d never had any formal dance training outside of my ballet training, except for taking workshops or research. There was nothing formal. I’m super grateful to have had those four years of doing something. To really nerd out on organic chemistry and really take some of those things that have a huge role and a huge place in the work that I’m doing and also [that helped] in terms of my working with Pierre because he’s an engineer by education and is a very strong mathematician. I think that’s something that’s important about the way that we communicate in the work: There’s an interest that I have in what he’s doing and he doesn’t come from a dance background, but these things overlap in the way that we can communicate and the way that our interests weave together.