Wednesday, March 29, 2017 // The Statement
6B
Personal Statement: 
The Politics of Art-Making

Editor’s note: Amy Chavasse is a professor 

in dance in the University of Michigan’s School 
of Music, Theatre & Dance. Her teaching inter-
ests include contemporary dance technique, 
improvisation, composition and social issues 
on dance. She is also the artistic director of 
ChavasseDance&Performance.
R

estlessness and curiosity have 
always been incentives for my 
practice as a dance maker, per-
former, improviser and educator. 

It’s looking like it’s high time to let righteous 
indignation find its way back into my choreo-
graphic considerations.

Finding methods to survive the next four 

years as an artist, humanist, environmentally 
aware citizen, a student of science, a supporter 
of Meals on Wheels and a believer in the bene-
fits of diversity will resound in the ways I craft 
my next dances and move through the world.

I’ve been donating to the Southern Poverty 

Law Center — a nonprofit organization for civ-
il-rights legal advocacy — for years. I recently 
finished reading the biography of its founder, 
Morris Dees, and I’ve joined, like many oth-
ers, the American Civil Liberties Union. I’ve 
increased my donations to Planned Parent-
hood to reinforce myself and construct a buf-
fer against the mendacity and absurdity that is 
part of the noise of the day.

Writing about the Brussels-based choreog-

rapher Meg Stuart, dancer David Hernandez 
comments: “Drawing the eye of the public 
to what is important is an investigation that 
relates to the way we are reading people’s bod-
ies every day of our life. How someone enters 
the room or is holding herself — the animal 
part in us sizes up a situation intuitively, like 
a plug directly into the brain.” Cultivating 
“sizing-up” skills feels crucial now. My cho-
reographic research survived Donald Rums-
feld — one of the first dances I performed 
here at the University of Michigan was a work 
inspired by Rumsfeld’s tortured rhetoric and 
reasoning. It was called “Not Mistaken” and 
involved a large vat of pudding and lots of his-
trionics.

Although I dance to toss little nuggets of 

self-satisfaction to my ego, to feel a combus-
tible blend of physical and intellectual exer-
tion, I more intensely dance to imagine other 
realities, to slip into the skin of other people or 
creatures.

My experiences broaden as I age, as does 

my willingness to expose the urgency of my 
intentions. Consequently, my encounters with 
imagined ways of being in the world expand 
and surprise, heightening the tension between 
illusion, desire and subterfuge. Age gives the 
gift of loosening attachments to inhibitions 

and vanity. I wish I had known this sooner. My 
heroines and mentors are women who became 
more experimental and radical in their art-
making and as they grew older, rather than 
tacking toward the reliable dullness that 
comes with settling into the familiar, conser-
vative and acceptable.

I make dances to wrestle with raging ques-

tions, to deal with the discursive clutter and 
noise that fill my thoughts. When asked what 
her dancers are about, famed contemporary 
choreographer Pina Bausch answers: “How 
people behave in their desire … and what 
moves people, not how they move.”

I also keep in mind this question: Does my 

art serve a purpose beyond fulfilling me or 
advancing my career? After the election of 
Donald Trump, I’ve been looking at how — or 
if — it’s possible to make political dances that 
matter or invite change. There is so much noise 
and disruption inside my head and a feeling of 
being under attack — it is a familiar feeling.

During the eight years of the George W. 

Bush administration, I threw myself whole-
heartedly into making dances with “state-
ments,” with overt points of view, with 
embedded challenges to the status quo and 
to counter the damaging rhetoric and actions, 
the consequences from which we are still suf-
fering from.

“81 Questions” was the first politically 

driven dance I made. I latched on to the 
number of questions submitted to the House 
Judiciary Committee in the lead-up to for-
mer-President Bill Clinton’s impeachment 
hearings in 1989. It was an examination of 
hypocrisy and grandstanding. I recall the 
reviewer of my dance describing it as ellipti-
cal and containing several absurdly graphic 
situations. I don’t think it was very well 
constructed, but it was an itch I needed to 
scratch.

I began my autodidactic education around 

how to make work that has integrity, shape, 
momentum and interest outside of the politi-
cal motivation that launched it. The movement 
and the movers still had to be translucent with 
intent, sharp with alertness and full of pres-
ence. I’m still deep inside this education. It 
became interested in tracking hesitation, 
infallibility and failure, alongside smug self-
righteousness. Showing multiple angles, con-
fusing the point of view became an interesting 
challenge to me. I guess what I’m saying is that 
I veered more toward parody.

“I Sleep with Ann Coulter” takes a scathing 

look at hypocrisy and the flagrant act of public 
lying as a handsomely profitable career choice 
— themes that are front and center again. I 
made and premiered this solo in 2007, after 

enduring one of Ann Coulter’s many cyni-
cal tirades. In this one she railed against the 
“fags” and “miscreants on the liberal left” who 
were polluting society. Constructing a move-
ment narrative, a kind of cheeky personal 
declaration, I told the story of being Coulter’s 
secret lover, patiently waiting for her to return 
home to me each night.

If the audience sees my work and asks, 

“What is going on and why?” I find this a valu-
able response. I think we should be asking this 
question more often, and with more urgency, 
about art and the events unfolding around us. 
Viewing a dance, or experiencing any work of 
art, is not a passive activity. Questions should 
arise constantly. Answers either align with the 
various questions or do not. The idea of liking 
something or not liking something shouldn’t 
privilege the sensation of expectancy, disori-
entation or repositioning that can occur when 
we encounter something new, or something 
old presented in a new way.

“Hunger for the Longing (a biased history of 

seduction)” seeks ways of exposing the misin-
terpreted folk mythology surrounding Woody 
Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” through 
movement, theater, video and music. As “God 
Bless America,” with its themes of overt patri-
otism saturated the public conscience, Guth-
rie created this iconic work to counter what 
he viewed as misleading representations of 
nationalism and common good. Examining 
and (de)reconstructing ideas about seduction 
and indoctrination, I used multiple versions of 
Guthrie’s anthem to the common man, honing 
in on the latter and less well known verses.

“All I Ask of My Enemies” is a duet with 

video that examines the concept of enemies 

— how we decide who our enemy is, how 
we treat those identified as the enemy, the 
opportunistic nature of naming one’s ene-
mies, the use of force and coercion once the 
enemy is captured, and how human nature 
is subverted when one person claims power 
and superiority over another. It grew out 
of my research on the torture and abuse at 
the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad in 2004. 
I found and then scoured documents from 
the National Security Archives, in particu-
lar a policy paper titled “Prohibition on the 
Use of Force.” It contained the most beauti-
ful language that described the most dis-
turbing acts, which I adapted for the work. I 
augmented the contents of the archives with 
my own words and songs. A video, created 
by video artist Sue Rees, supports the absur-
dity of the exchange with excerpts from the 
Roadrunner — Wile E. Coyote cartoons, 
intercut with James Bond movie footage.

In reminding myself that making art 

should feel driven by more than tactics of 
survival, I’m reclaiming my embrace of the 
unique ways that movement expresses desire 
and can expose or imagine an alternative 
reality. “Emi, Amy and Mimi, the Celebrated 
Love Partners, and their Bicycle Emi Nomo,” 
is a new trio collaboration that recently pre-
miered in New York.

It imagines a world in which three charac-

ters are bound together in a shared memory 
of something lost. The characters sing about 
orgasms and bicycles and imaginary adven-
tures. While continuing to refine this new 
work, I’m looking ahead to tackling a thorny 
topic, to dealing with my righteous indigna-
tion. 

by Amy Chavasse, Associate Professor of Dance

PHOTO COURTESY OF AMY CHAVASSE

