WHO’S THAT GIRL? Sucking her thumb, dead center, is Paige Martin
Paige Martin’s “familial reality” | The artist delves into a personal panorama for a new work.
By Gia Kourlas
http://newyork.timeout.com/articles/dance/84391/paige-martin-danspace-project-interview/2.html
For her first evening-length work in a traditional venue (thank you, Juliette Mapp), Paige Martin imposes some rules and stipulations: It is intended for mature audiences; photo-taking is allowed; and audience members should arrive at 7:45pm. In Panorama, Martin is thinking about how to relate a dance to an art exhibition (and vice versa), though as her chaotic imagination attests, it’s hard to say how evident that connection will be. What you need to know is that the work, part of Mapp’s curatorial platform at Danspace Project, “Back to New York City,” is that it just might, in the very best way, skew your perception. Martin, one of the most singular heroines of downtown dance, recently chatted in Chelsea.
In the “Back to New York City” catalogue, you talk about how you do many things, from designing rings to teaching Zero Balancing.
But so many other people in this book do too, and I have to say I was sort of worried about this strange glorifying of that. And luckily it’s not [the case] at all, because so many other people do it—but okay, go on.
The important point is that dance is your base, and you are adamant about that. How did that happen?
Well, okay, I’ll say this: Just on Tuesday, I was in my therapy session.… [Laughs] So much about how I’m making this thing revolves around having a different understanding of myself—or more understanding of myself. In the past, the “self” part of it was highly unconscious. It was more of using myself as a tool to generate ideas and let influences be there. But this time around—how that stuff comes through me or is reflected by me, I’m aware of it. It doesn’t mean this is, Oh, brilliant, yet. [Laughs] It certainly, unfortunately, doesn’t mean I’ve come up with something more focused. Artists get away with so much. I think dance people get away with much less because you’re already coming from this place where people don’t get what the hell it’s about, so you’ve got to have something that puts it in either everyday experience or a story you can sort of fall into, or [know that] you can relax because it’s just dancing. But I do feel artists get away with that a lot.
What category do you fall into regarding that?
Well, in the past I think I’ve often made things, at least on one level, that could be experienced as, Oh, it’s just dancing, relax—there’s nothing to get. Even if there is something to get. That’s not true of everyone’s work, certainly, but I do feel it’s important to take away that fear [of not getting it]. So when I was little, I would make dances—like, I referred to Black Sabbath [a work from 1999] as being cheating because it just was like making a kid dance, and the thing is I actually fall into that pretty much anytime I’m making any kind of work. What I mean by that is it was just pure, like how a painter might let their mind wander in the realm of colors and shapes and the relationships of those things. I just would think in terms of moving bodies and designing people, different rates of motion. I often made things in my head [as a kid], because it was just me, and then at a pretty early age when there was probably some space where I was able to show parents—I had a dad, a stepdad and a mom—as a kid would do, it would just be me there talking about all the various things that were happening: “Two girls would go like that and then cross over the space that way, and they’re coming this way….” There were always multiple people and it would just be me being a control freak.
Talking through it?
Yeah. That’s still my tendency in making things, and I think it’s why I like working with big groups. But I always get to the point—where I am right now—where no one’s coming to rehearsal and it’s not at all done and it’s right at the frustrating point. You cannot be like a computer, so you cannot have people move in this certain way without being super analytical and working for an hour on, “these people move now, and right at that other moment, you move to her. No! She moves over there….” There’s no other way. I always feel, What the fuck? Why am I doing that? I’m [creating a section like] that again, but it’s just so people have some dance to see that night. Really, that’s all it’s for. [Laughs]
This interview is going well.
Oh, good. So back to the therapy thing, it’s just funny. [My therapist] was saying it’s interesting that it was through dance that I really did carve a space for myself to have an avenue of expression. My growing up certainly wasn’t abusive, but you know the various ranges of psychic strength that we all have? Mine is obviously more in the tender range, and so it was just one of those growing-up situations that from the outside wasn’t at all bad, but for me and considering its little bits of damage, it was kind of immense. For pretty much my whole life I’ve had this real affinity with homeless people. It runs really deep. My upbringing was so ungrounded; what was sort of forced on me was taking care of all the stuff around me, so that I didn’t actually have any nurturing or real support.
You were taking care of your parents?
Yeah. And it was like I had to take care of them also in order to take care of myself. I also had to have this real hyperawareness of how other people were feeling. It was constant bombardment of their shit. I lost a lot of this packaging of myself—like safe space and support for self-development. It was always survival mode. I’m very resourceful because of that, and I think I’m a really good negotiator and judge of character and all that kind of stuff. That’s great. Woo-hoo. [Laughs] It’s only become clear in the last couple of years that part of my ego or whatever operates like I’m homeless. I really relate to that frazzled sense of ungroundedness and hypervigilance of what’s needed at every moment to keep myself afloat. I’ve lived like that for a really long time, and that’s changed recently, and it feels really neat.
Did you start dance training very young?
I started doing gymnastics. I really liked that, and it’s just funny, because I think of myself as being so nonathletic. My body feels very delicate; I’m very bone-oriented. I was probably seven or eight when I started gymnastics and later I was going to take some dance, too, and one night my stepfather stopped the car. We were in a used-car lot, because he would like to sit and talk about the possibilities of buying one. [Laughs] So he started talking about gymnastics and said, “Look, there’s ballet and gymnastics, and you can’t do both. Which would you rather do?” And I said, “Gymnastics.” Basically he said, “Are you sure you want to do that? Look at what they look like. If you got to the Olympics, you’d look like that, and how are you going to get a date for the prom? Can you consider that?” Swear to God.
That is just hilarious.
This is what I had to contend with at an early age. [Laughs] It really was a serious ultimatum, and it wasn’t exactly that I could make the choice—it was more, “You can’t do gymnastics because I’m not going to have you looking like that.” So I did ballet instead, and of course I really hated it for… [Pauses thoughtfully] Well, I’ve always hated it. I’ve always hated dance in a certain way. I mean, you know in Juliette Mapp’s Anne, Ikea and I—she talks about going to someone’s class, and the assignment is doing an improvisation using the wall, and she says, “I went to the wall and I realized I’m in heaven.” And I just thought, Holy shit—Juliette appreciates dance in a very particular way that is entirely different from my way. And not only is it Juliette that does that but probably a lot of dancers! [Laughs] I remember these kinds of assignments in auditions. I remember being at a Bebe Miller audition and you had 15 minutes to do this complicated improv but you had to make it up and probably do it twice, because you were choreographing something really fast, and I swear to God, those 15 minutes were like an hour for me. It was like somebody had given me acid. Those moments of when somebody’s like, “Just dance” or “Think about this and dance” have always struck me as nightmarish. That has to be the worst thing that anyone would want to do. Do you know what I mean?
I do.
And that’s also how it usually is going to a studio, thinking you have some ideas and you’re going to work on them. That beginning part is a nightmare. It’s different than being in front of people and having to do stuff on the spot; working alone is a question of, What is modern dance? I just try and bypass that as much as possible with giving myself an agenda like, Oh, I’m just doing a dance to Led Zeppelin. That’s why I imitate. I use something to branch off of, something that is connected to something else, like… [Long pause]. Shit. Who are the people that started doing…cultural dances from the world in the ’20s? A man and woman? You know who I mean.
Oh! What is wrong with me?
See, I do this to other people’s brains. We create a zone.
Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn.
Yes!
So you’ll start by imitating St. Denis and Shawn?
Yeah. This whole night [She lowers her voice.] is nothing new. It’s all just appropriation. I always appropriate. Even if it weren’t dance, if it was anything else that I had to accomplish in a creative way, it’s all pretty nightmarish to me unless I have something to start from that’s not mine. I’m just that kind of creative type. I can’t come from a blank slate. I like to manipulate. That’s where it’s fun for me.
I’m just trying to remember my original question.
Oh, sorry. Well, it was something to do with my dance-start age.
Didn’t you train at the Houston Ballet? What happened there?
[Before I went to Houston Ballet] I had these teachers, Anita Dyche and Franklin Yezer, and they were so great. They just gave me such a good foundation and a really thorough understanding of the body, rather than just [teaching] ballet, which is bizarre. I don’t know why it was that those two knew that stuff and danced in that particular way. I think they just had pretty basic ballet training—it was mostly Cecchetti or something. We did all kinds of weird things. [Dyche] would have me pick things up and turn on and off the faucet in the bathtub with my toes. All the time. We did strange exercises on the floor, and we used to hang over the barre and move our legs and twist our torsos and junk—and when I say “we,” I mean it was me and maybe somebody else. Once she did something strange in my sacrum while I was upside down—a rubbing thing—and it was like a Kundalini experience. It sent some kind of energetic effect up and down my spine, and she was sort of expecting that. She was cool. But the thing is, I was getting older, and I knew that I didn’t have a lot of turnout. I watched ballet all the time and I knew you had to have turnout, and it just seemed like they weren’t very concerned with that, and I started being really concerned with it. So that’s when I decided to try the Houston Ballet.
What happened there?
[The problem] wasn’t so much the turnout; it was my hyperextension that was really severe. I have the kind of hyperextension that manifests in a knock-kneed sort of way rather than a bow-legged sort of way, which can be really cool. There was a principal dancer named Janie Parker who had incredibly hyperextended knees, but the lovely bow-legged type, so they assigned the Russian lady who worked with her to me. I worked one-on-one with her for awhile and swear to God, after an amount of time, I was taken into the office, sat down with [director] Ben [Stevenson], and he basically said, “We think maybe you should consider college.” Isn’t that funny? I knew what it meant, of course. I was at the performing-arts high school at the time, so we were already doing modern. I was like, Okay, fuck it, I’ll do modern.
Your father was living in New York, so you spent some summers here attending the Cunningham school. Didn’t you also study at Ailey?
Yes, and it was just a harrowing experience. [At Ailey] they put everyone on a diet right away—in two weeks, you were supposed to lose ten pounds. I didn’t even know what a diet was. They’re telling me, “Eat salads and stuff like that.” I swear to God, another ba-da-bum moment: Two weeks later I go into the office, they weigh me, and they’re like, “You haven’t lost anything! What have you been eating? Have you been eating salad?” And I was like, “Yeah—chicken salad, egg salad, tuna salad.” Those Korean markets were kind of new with the salad bars, so I would do that and pile this huge thing up with all those kinds of salads. I loved mayonnaise. I would just eat tons of that. I didn’t lose any weight.
I can’t believe they were weighing students.
Oh, God yes. I was just getting hips and all that stuff, so I was like, Oh no! Already. And then there was Carol Fried, which was my first experience with Graham [technique] for real. She wore huge high heels, slacks and a full-length fur coat to teach class in. She was the most outrageous raging bitch I have ever met in my life. Even then it was like, It’s very glamorous—this is a Graham teacher, this is how it’s done. We all got caught up in the punishment aspect of dance—bring it on! I need it! So what happened was I had her class after lunch, and pretty much every day before class I would have a really severe tummy ache. It was like, This has to be my food, and I would change my food and yadda yadda, and all of a sudden, it hit me: It has nothing to do with the food, it has to do with going to Carol Fried’s class! [Laughs] Of course! Everyone was totally petrified. She would come over and use her foot on your leg and rant and rave at what an idiot you were and how bad you were and just shit like that. Anyway, that’s why it was harrowing.
I know you don’t want to ruin your show by saying too much, but would you talk about the instructions?
I can do that! That’s fine. They’re plays on words, and they’re intended to create a question. So it says, “Intended for mature audiences,” and we read that all the frigging time; it’s not inherent what that means. It has to do with context. We rarely see that in a dance situation. So I put that in there. The photo-taking is similar; it’s because we’re never allowed to. Although I will say that some restrictions apply. And what’s the other one? Show up at 7:45pm. Well, okay, first of all, that’s because I’m setting the structure of the evening differently. But I don’t like it when people arrive early.
Really?
I hate that. I hate that they will then sit and wait for half an hour—in preparation for seeing something—while we then “wait” for 8pm. It’s irrational. It’s like, Just frigging come at the time of the show. And so we’re going to start at 7:45. I would like people to have a different experience of showing up for a show. And then, hopefully, the other part is that they’ll be able to come and the thing will begin and after that they can deal with getting-their-ticket shit.
So people will buy tickets later?
We’ll see. It’ll all just be chaos. I want so badly to have my own people doing tickets, but that’s going to be quite hard.
How are you playing with the idea of an exhibition in the work?
It’s a little bit of wordplay again. On one level it’s simply that I consider anything to be shown at Danspace or P.S. 122 or wherever an exhibition. We don’t call it that; I’m not sure why. Art openings are referred to as exhibitions and a dance thing that has to do with performing is not. So it’s just a play on that. I’m changing it up because to me it’s an exhibition. And also I am doing something in the space; the way the space is set up, because I keep futzing with that, it would fall under that classification more strictly.
How many dancers are in it?
Well, there are a lot of people involved in one teeny-weeny thing. And then in another thing that’s a little bit larger, there’s like ten people. And otherwise it’s me and another dancer. I guess I want to throw in there too, there’s a lot of stuff that’s appropriated. Also, I’m just finding out that there are other elements that are just being done right now [by other artists]. Numerous times, it seems.
What is the background of the photograph you’re using to promote the dance?
At the production meeting, Judy [Hussie-Taylor, Danspace Project’s executive director] asked, “What is [the connection between] the picture and Panorama? I don’t get it.” And I said, “I’m just really abstract. There’s a connection there—it’s just super abstract.” [Laughs] But to me there is a tenuous thread holding it all together. The picture is a really old family picture on my dad’s side. It’s really cool, with paled ’70s colors. It’s something about my particular link to that family—I don’t really see them and I didn’t really grow up with them, but there’s a link.
In a way, isn’t the New York dance community another family for you? Maybe this is about family.
You’re right, but I wouldn’t say “family.” To me, somehow the idea of Panorama is linked to this: We are encased in a kind of familial reality. You go through your paths—and you can go pretty far away—but your history and genes are there. When I see that picture, there’s a part of me that loves that I am linked to all of that, and then there’s a little part of me that thinks, Wow. I can never get away. I don’t necessarily know what the feelings are around that. It’s not disaster or regret, but it’s just knowing that we’ve all got our set of shit, and who knows how deep it resides? On a spirit level, on a cellular level, it’s our own personal panorama.
Paige Martin is at Danspace Project Thu 8–Sat 10.
Read more: http://newyork.timeout.com/articles/dance/84391/paige-martin-danspace-project-interview/2.html#ixzz0kRcVTXBR
Read more: http://newyork.timeout.com/articles/dance/84391/paige-martin-danspace-project-interview#ixzz0kRcLRUVf
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