IN-DEPTH// aMID Festival’s Michelle Kranicke

By Michael Workman

Please note: the following interview picks up where the interview feature with Kranicke, Bebe Miller and Deborah Hay leaves off over at Newcity.

How has dance changed for you over the years? It does seem as though you’ve always had an intellectual approach.
I’ve always had an intellectual approach, absolutely. And I did, when I was younger, I would be inspired by things I read and I would set off to make a dance that was inspired by a book or a philosophical idea, but 9 times out of 10, that jumping-off point would really just go in a different direction, in a much more abstract, open investigative direction and as I’ve gotten older, as a choreographer, I’ve sort of done away with any kind of narrative as a jumping-off point for the work. I don’t. It’s much more conceptual.

It does seem like there’s a lot of crossover. There has always been visual art, poetry, philosophical blendings or hybridizations of form that have lent new directions and new possibilities to dance. The question now seems: where do you go with that? It does seem as though your background in multi-disciplinarity is informing your perspective as well.
It is informing my perspective and I wish it would inform more of the art form’s perspective. I was talking a little bit earlier about how dance theatre and dance, in and of itself, is abstract. You don’t look at a movement and immediately understand what it is, because there’s no language attached to it. So, from my standpoint, why even try to create narrative out of movement? Why even go that direction? Especially because, from a practical perspective, dance is a very poor art form. You have nothing to lose. There’s no big cash bundle there that you’re going to lose. You might as well just take the challenge. So I think, last time I saw you, we were discussing how I was frustrated with my own process about 4 or 5 years ago and I was also finding that I seemed to be seeing the same kind of re-organized steps on stage and I felt like the art form needed to push itself further. I started seeing a lot of performance, working through [performance art gallery] Defibrillator and I really felt like there was a gap there that could be mined and really allow dance to push to its edges a little more because it was safely entrenched in this place where it felt like it knew it could get an audience. And I get that, that’s a frustration. Nobody wants to play to a house of 5 people. But I also think that dance doesn’t have that big an audience anyway so why not jump off a cliff and try to see where the ending point is, where the gaps are, the edges where new ideas and new thought can arise?

Do you feel as though innovation has stagnated in the field overall, or is it just something you’re seeing specifically in some performances?
I feel like it’s been awhile since I’ve seen something where I thought, “Well, that’s pretty new or interesting.” I’ve seen a few things, but I think the form as a whole is kind of at this point of stasis where it’s like, “If we do this we’ll get an audience and be able to satisfy some earned income thing.” I also think that it’s so hard to stay in the form for a long period of time, that those sort of deep, intellectual investigations and the desire to cross disciplines doesn’t really happen too much. I mean, not cross-disciplines with another performative form, like theater —

Poetry, graphic novels, …
Sculpture! Architecture! And so, it’s funny. I’m working right now on a piece that I’m going to show several different studies from in this festival that will ultimately be part of a kind of larger installation work that I’m collaborating with my husband on, who’s an architect, and who comes from the visual art world, and we’re always frustrated when we go to see dance and there are props on stage and no one ever does anything with them. Or there’s a big collaboration with some very well-known visual artist or architect and it’s just this big thing on stage that people dance around, and I never really understood why that thing had to be on stage if you weren’t going to actually actively interact with it. I’m not saying that’s everybody, again, there are exceptions to every rule, but that’s been my experience. So, it’s interesting where the performance aspect comes in. There’s point where it’s important there’s a trained body doing this work, because if you’re going to put the body in tension or do something with an object that requires an understanding of shape or form, or endurance, or in a specific place where you’re in a position for quite a long time, especially one that’s very technically demanding, then you need to have that formal training. From my perspective, and especially for this festival, I really wanted to bring in artists that were engaging in a critical way with a lot of pushing…engaging with this idea of expanding, figuring out how they were doing that. And sometimes, that pushing to the edge is simply forcing yourself to create a movement onstage where you’re putting your body through the paces the way you did 20 years ago, and now you’re 70. And putting yourself through those paces is going to be very different 20 years later. It’s interesting because, originally, when I first got this commission, I started reaching out to all my heroes. I actually reached out to Meredith Monk who is celebrating her 50th anniversary year of being a performer and a maker and, of course, I couldn’t afford her, and she wasn’t available anyway, but what was great was that everybody was very gracious, everyone I contacted — all my heroes — all of them were gracious, which was really wonderful. But I got this movie of her where she remade “Education of a Girl Child,” she reproduced it 20 years later with the same cast and then there’s a solo she does and in this particular film, you also see the solo as she did it in 1989, then in the 1990’s and in 2008 and then you see her in 2015, and the thing that was so interesting about that was to see the very subtle distinctions and differences that happened to the movement as it was manifested in [simultaneously] a different, but also the same body. That was really cool.

What stood out for you as a signal moment, watching that, in thinking about your own work?
I’ll tell you, it was really great to watch. What stood out for me was this command. Small subtleties within the piece. When you’re young, you don’t understand subtlety so much, but you understand how to eat up space, take up room, make the largest movement really large and the smallest movement really small. As you get older, you start to understand the subtlety that takes place when you go from one place to another and as you begin to understand that more and more you can bring in this command of each little step along the pathway in doing that same movement because it’s not about going from point A to point B, it’s about every little incremental place from point A to point B.

Right, that virtuosity.
Yes, but an expanded kind.

One that’s more eternal … lasting, but internal.
Right. I work with my company a lot exploring this idea of internal versus external, inviting yourself to be seen rather than presenting yourself to the audience. How do you invite the viewer to watch you presenting yourself to the audience. It’s two very different things. How do you navigate going in and out. Let’s say you’re doing something still and minimal for a period of 10 minutes. How do you manage all of those involuntary things that just happen to you and your body that you’re so used to dealing with if you have an itch or have to sneeze, how do you deal with that internally while continuously presenting this idea of “I invite you to look at me now.”

That more mentally and emotionally aware state you can get from life experience, if you’re rigorously empathetic enough. Physical memory.
Absolutely. You get it from experience, and practice and practice, and … practice. So all of the artists coming into the festival, I’ve seen all of them perform in one capacity or another. All of my heroes! There’s sort of a tiered situation happening, in that there’s Bebe Miller, Bob Eisen and Deborah Hay performing, some seminal figures that people my age and younger looks up at, and then there’s myself and Sheldon Smith, who heads up Smith-Wymore Disappearing Act with his wife Lisa Wymore and there’s Pranita Jain — they are more contemporary colleagues, so we have a similar kind of aesthetic understanding right now, and maybe the people that are younger than us look up to us, but we look up to these other 3. So, I feel like that’s the interesting continuum. So, while someone may come to the show because they know Sheldon, maybe they won’t know Bebe because they just don’t. It’s amazing what people forget. It’s amazing how fast time is going. You know, my company members, they all missed the ‘80’s. They missed it all. So all of my musical references, and even some from the early ‘90’s, they have a hard time with. I love the fact that my heroes are here, but maybe it’s also somebody’s else’s hero?

And I think it gives the public just…some way of getting a handle on the historical contexts.
Right. And I think it’s important for the public to understand that dance is not just what you see on television, it’s not “So You Think You Can Dance.” That’s a great show, I’m not going to disparage or knock it. But I will say, it restricts the form and puts it in this very narrow bandwidth.

All the usual appropriations into popular culture.
…And there’s all of this conversation happening around the importance of making sure that everybody can see themselves on stage. And I think that’s absolutely important. All ethnicities want to be able to see some body onstage that they’re like “Oh, that’s my body, that’s my skin color, my sexual preference. That’s onstage for me to witness.” What’s not onstage for people to witness is “Oh, that’s my age. That person is my age.” Because most of the time it’s somebody who’s 20–30 years younger.

Right, the youth cult in this country. Is that as common outside the States?
Okay here, I’ll date myself: when I was living in France in the ‘80’s, it wasn’t so much, but I don’t know.I think it is now. Because of the global nature of our lives these days.

Well, and the attendant shift to a global market culture, with the youth cult manufactured in part by people selling beauty, how Capitalism appropriates that.
Exactly. Again, we have a very narrow definition of beauty. What is beauty? So, even in the Dove campaign, where it’s all “love your body,” I’m like “Yeah, but it’s not 60 or 70-year old women’s bodies.

Yeah, people get trained to think of that as if it were a grotesque. Which is a sickening idea.
Yeah. And they do think of it as something grotesque. You know, I can only speak to cultures I’ve lived in. I’ve lived in France and, at the time I was living there, there was this very deep strong respect for older women as extremely smart and powerful. Again, whether that is still that way, I haven’t lived there for a long period of time, since the mid-80's.

Regardless, the point is that in your work, you’re pushing back against convention, against these self-destructive received wisdoms.
Isn’t that what are is supposed to do?

I want to ask people in visual art this question the last so many years. Yes! Otherwise it’s just entertainment, isn’t it?
Correct. There’s a great guy who set up a journal for teaching artists, and he always said, “Entertainment is what you know, art is what you don’t know.” And I’m always like, that is so true. If you know it, it’s just entertainment. If you’re confronted when you see something, if you’re like, “Oh, that’s weird and different —

Yes. Art should unsettle.
It should unsettle. And unsettling doesn’t have to be a bad thing. It just wants to make you say, “Oh, remember that not everything is set in stone. Things can be different and we should be moving forward.” It’s funny, as I’m reading Nietzsche again

Great stuff, and most people don’t pick up on the fact that his entire project is anti-nihilist.
Anti-nihilist, absolutely. It’s about finding your deepest aspiration and pushing to get there so that when you are really devoted, the suffering is worth it. If you really aspire to this thing and you really, really want it, it’s where you want to be, you will suffer for it. And that’s okay. People will always twist and misuse writings for their own personal reasons.

One of my favorites is “Ignorance is bliss.” Do you happen to know what the original context of that quote is?
I don’t.

In the original Thomas Gray poem, it’s actually “Where ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to be wise.” There’s a prime example of where Pop culture appropriated and twisted an artwork to mean the exact opposite of what the writing clearly intended.
Ahhh! I have to say, I’ve come to philosophy later, because I don’t like not understanding things, so I tend to avoid — okay … that sounds really silly, because I don’t understand what I’m doing every time I go into the studio, and I’m perfectly happy to grope around. I don’t know what it is with language, sometimes I just want to grope around. I don’t think I have a lot of philosophical influences particularly. I don’t have a traditional dance background particularly, either. I didn’t go to college for dance or follow that trajectory. I was a Political Science major. I started off taking ballet class, but I came to it late, I was 13 years old already when I started. Then I left the country and lived in Europe for a couple of years. So I tried to absorb as much as as I could. So, I didn’t come to dance in this traditional way where all I saw was dance, because I was never interested in just dance. I was interested in visual art and theatre, and listening to music and I played the piano for 13 years. I was always interested in 13th century composers and melody, harmony and rhythmic changes. So, I had all of this soup of stuff swirling around in my self before I dove into creating dance. And it never dawned on me that “Oh, you can’t do this because that’s now how it’s done in dance,” but then what happened was, then you get into the field and run up against the political, cultural, industry things. This industry that says, “well no, you need to go about it this way.” And it’s not overt, it can be very subtle. It’s why I love the idea that you don’t have a background in dance, but you’re passionate about the writing.

Right, well, it’s about the philosophical investigation for me, of ideas across art forms.
You have a strong understanding of viual art. I mean, dance, for me, dance is just as much a visual art. It moving, it’s ephemeral. But so is so much visual art. There are pieces of artwork that I’ll never see again because I’ll never get back to that place.

I think that’s what drew me to what you’re doing initially, this attempt to add another layer to the world of dance, to expand and enhance it.
Let’s just expand the conversation, because I think even with its practitioners, the conversation can get so limited and so tight, and territorial. You feel a little like, “Oh somebody’s going to push those boundaries…” and people can get a little protective of what they’ve created themselves, and I think that’s death for the form. Absolutely.

Pop will eat itself.
My favorite Modern art story is the erased de Kooning. I love that. I love that this guy — and if you ever hear Rauschenberg talk about how he stood outside de Kooning’s door, freaked out and knocking on his door and talking about how he wanted to do this — and then the fact that de Kooning was like “Yeah, sure,” and then made him the most challenging, difficult thing to erase, he went through what — how many erasers? Like 50 erasers? But again, I think as an artist you have to constantly allow yourself to be challenged and keep growing, or you do become tight, and you do become territorial.

It’s also this problem of insularity. It reminds me of my ex-girlfriend, incidentally also a dancer, who had that problem; she couldn’t see the world from anyone else’s perspective, this escapist lack of empathy. The consequence, of course, is a delusional culture. Anti-intellectualism.
Well, the thing I think is interesting is you can’t continue to put yourself onstage, after a certain age, without expanding. Without being loose. You have to. You can’t get tight. Because you’ll find yourself confronted with things you can’t possibly do anymore. But what I think is really funny — talking again, about expanding the conversation, and you go from big canvases to small canvasses because you can’t physically do the movement anymore — like when we were talking earlier about Rembrandt’s late style — I mean, that conversation is just never ever part of dance. I mean, maybe with Cunningham, maybe with some very few people. But I think that idea of a late style, or of shifting what you do, it doesn’t diminish what you did before. No one thinks the early Rembrandts and the late Rembrandts, no one’s like, “Oh those late ones suck!” just because of when he made them.

Well, that’s always the sign of a true master, someone who has the range to change their entire body of work and reinvent themselves.
Exactly! So why can’t you change yourself in your own body, why does it have to be so filtered? I think a lot of it is economics and the status quo. You know, “It’s always done this way.” Oh, dance is this. Okay, ballet is one thing. It’s a very specific technique, it’s a very specific vocabulary. But I have a friend right now who’s trying to challenge that. She’s trying to think about ballet differently. And that’s a tall order. But I think it’s really great. I feel like, with dance, if we can’t do this, if there isn’t this capacity within the performer, then the dance won’t be a success. I think, as a choreographer, well, I’ve got this capacity to work with. This is what’s up to me, to work within that narrow parameter and spread it out. Figure out how to work within that parameter and come up with the most creative — have you seen that movie Wolf Pack? It’s a documentary about these kids that lived in New York on the Lower East Side, and they never, ever went out. Their father basically kept them in the apartment — for whatever reasons, fear of what might happen to them or this or that — but they got to watch movies. Their understanding of the world was almost entirely through movies and television and music. So, what they did is because they were locked up in their apartment — their mother home schooled them so they were very smart — but what happened is, they would create elaborately create or re-create these scenes from movies, for instance from Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction. But of course, they’re putting together their costumes out of cereal boxes, duct tape, markers and paint but I’m telling you, it’s the most interesting, creative exploration because it’s like “Okay, make reservoir dogs in this glass.” How do you do that? I was watching this, and I thought it was so creatively interesting because they’re in this very narrow hallway of what they could do, literally. So they expanded that in whatever way they could. And dancers are only getting more and more capable. There’s so much technique today, you can’t just be a ballet dancer or a Modern dancer, you have to be well-versed in all forms. Modern, ballet, West African, Hip Hop. I mean, if the choreographer wants to throw that in, and you as the practitioner, if you’re young and want to work with a variety of different people, you have to know those forms. But you know what, sometimes you can have 20 different ingredients on your counter and come up with a really crappy dinner.

I think, for me, while choreography is great, I also take a lot of inspiration from visual art, from film, the nouvelle vague and Godard, who I think is amazing. A lot of the Japanese directors, there was just a Wim Wenders festival I went to. Especially when filmmakers are experimental and they’re younger and pushing boundaries, what I love is looking at what they do with limited means, and then what I think is interesting about a figure like Godard is, here’s this well-revered filmmaker who drops out of making film for a long time and then he comes back and he’s working in video. And his newest film, which was a little bit hit-or-miss, but what I liked was he was like, “I’m going to experiment with everything. 3D. A little GoPro. A little handheld,” …and he did. And while the whole thing didn’t necessarily gel together, there were parts of it that were just amazing, and it’s about pushing those boundaries. So, I find film really inspirational. Visual art. Sculpture.

So, really it comes down to how the Popular conception of dance is insufficient to the form.
I guess I’m going to admit that, yes. I’m always surprised at the lack of knowledge of other art forms out there. I want to say it’s about the gaps, the gray area between the two. I think we talked about the fact that “Oh, you’re a dancer. Oh, you’re a performance artist.” When Zephyr was doing a lot of its performances at Defibrillator, people would say, “Oh, you’re a performance artist now.” And I thought, “No.” Why would we be performance art now, just because we’re in this space? Just because we’ve chosen to show something in a gallery setting. I think it’s so reductive, I think in the States, and it’s Capitalism, it’s so intent on defining, “Well, this is this. And this is white and this is black.” And you know why? Because people don’t know, they want to know, and they want an answer. You’ll go to Heaven if you’re good. You’ll go to Hell if you’re bad.

Right. People think I look like a girl when I’m wearing nail polish and a dress, but I’m not. And I’m intersectionally informed enough to rest confidently in my cis-male identification. Hopefully, this cultural moment we’ve been having, where ambiguity’s been getting ushered in as a more accepted part of our everyday experience, will take a more permanent hold.
It is. I’ll be interested to see how that translates artistically because I think ambiguity is being ushered in, and people will accept different people’s choices about how they want to live their lives as long as they never have to talk about it. As long as they just pass on the street and it’s fine. I think art forces you to talk, it forces that visceral reaction, that gut reaction where people can either think, “This makes me really uncomfortable.” Discomfort is something that people never embrace. I don’t like discomfort, but especially if I’m seeing something artistic and I start feeling uncomfortable, I think, “Let’s look at this again.” I’m the masochist, I’ll look at it again and see if I can find a new understanding of it. So, to that end, I don’t want Amid to make people feel uncomfortable — it’s not set up that way. It’s set up to make people expand their ideas, expand their understanding and, when something’s abstract, they tend to shy away from it. Because they have to bring their own meaning to it and they don’t want to. They want to, they want to be told. If you want to be told, you can go watch TV shows, which seems to be all the rage. There’s 7,890 million different kinds of TV shows.

The only thing worth watching lately has been The Cosmopolitans, Whit Stillman’s pilot. They sit around and talk about literature and philosophy the whole time. All his work is like that, it’s the best.
I’ll have to check it out!

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Readers can check out the aMID Festival at Links Hall, 3111 N. Western Ave., Chicago, IL 60618. (773)281–0824. Performances take place throughout the weekends of January 21–25 & 28–31, visit the Links Hall website for specific performance dates and times, and for tickets.