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