IN-DEPTH// Ginger Krebs’ “Buffer Overrun:” The Future of Humanity, the Annihilation of Now

By Michael Workman

This performance has been in development for some time for you, at least a year working with your current ensemble, but also in various stages of artistic development prior. Can you tell us how this journey began and then evolved for you, and what its conceptual development has involved?
Yes, this piece has been in progress — not continuously but with the dancers, about a year. I guess, of that year we worked really intensely for six months. There was a gap. But yeah, we worked from the very beginning in May and then showed a work-in-progress in the dance studio and then I built this big, tilted platform that the whole performance happens on. I built that in June and then we did a first quick test run in July and we just really had 2 weeks in the space in July. Then we had a long gap in our rehearsal process and then we were hitting it hard in the beginning of November for the show. So now this big platform is rebuilt for the fifth time in this space. I’m pretty excited about how it changes the feel of the space. I built when we first rehearsed in uptown then tore it down and moved it and built it again in the Cultural Center dance studio, and then I moved it and built it again — but I’m pretty excited. I mean, you can imagine how the movement might be, what it might look like, but it’s really taken time to deal with the physicality of the thing, how it messes with your sense of gravity. I’m kind of pleased, it’s a lot of work, but it’s not like we could practice on the flat ground.

Part of it has been practicality. All of the artists I’m working with are established in their own right, with their own careers, so some of it was working around their availability. This piece seemed to require a lot of time to interpret the visual — the piece started at an even more of a visual way than some of the past projects. I made a bunch of drawings — to call them paintings is probably to elevate them — but prints, and works on paper. In the period before I even started working with the dancers, I made a bunch of images and I feel like I’ve been working with this set of ideas for awhile, even though I don’t think of myself as a drawer or a painter, but I’ve been interested in a kind of dispersed field of visual composition — such as when I think of a digital image, I think of it as comprised of many pixels, I think of the energy in that image as dispersed, versus a kind of … when I think of the weight of the body, I think a lot about, visually, in contrast to this dispersed field of pixels, almost like a cartoon, a kind of Sharpie line around the body that says “this lumpy thing here is a body because I say it is, because there’s this outline around it.”

So it’s a transposition.
I think I’m interested in the mismatch, in the way bodies are depicted on the screen versus the feeling of what it is to exist in a body and what it is to have to make effort to move. As opposed to the kind of weightlessness — bodies onscreen can have shape but not weight, and they can kind of move like everything’s easily reversible and so, even though this started out as a kind of visual inquiry for me, almost like the impossibility of them being both, of being like a cartoon-y kind of outline and this things sort of energetic background. I made this link — and maybe many people have, I don’t know, that the kinaesthetic experience of moving, when you’re not trying to make a move look a certain way but you’re trying to open up your sensory field, it has more this quality of tiny little nerve-endings that, for me, there’s a little bit of a correlation about how I think of this pixelated field and this strange correlation between the digital world and the physical world of weight and dimensionality.

Before I even worked with the dancers, there was a lot of reading research, movement research on my own and then making a bunch of images, for some reason was important. I would say that the progression, in some ways, it has been similar to other processes. In the sense that stage one is often just generating a ton of material and, initially I also felt like, with this particular group of dancers, they all have quite a bit of training. Other groups I’ve worked with, they don’t often have a lot of training, except the anomolous one here or there, and so it actually took more time at the beginning to almost articulate what the systems are in this world. And I think the piece addresses networks, systems, multiplicity and data in this way. This idea that we’re getting used to seeing ourselves from an aerial perspective.

The French call it the pensee de servol, the “bird’s eye view.”
There was this amazing documentary about drones at Facets that I went to go see and it was all about putting drone footage in the performance, because when I think about the bird’s eye view, a lot of it is vertical bodies transposed onto the horizontal, there’s a lot of planar stuff that messes with your spatial sense, but it tends to have a flattened screen kind of dimensionality. A drone pilot shot all this footage of me out on this landing strip. Stage 1, with the writing, it was all of these things basically trying to relate to these things about speed, forward momentum, this drive for efficiency, which to me connect up with economic systems, political systems, even more personal stuff like discipline. I feel like in my young life, as with a lot of these dancers, kids are constantly being told to hurry up or slow down, sit still, whatever, so we tried to think all these different ways that speed plays itself out in the world. So it’s very non-linear, but developing these constellations of materials that were interesting — I think about how Cheerios link up and become little rafts in the milk — that’s sort of how the piece starts to build. So stage 1 was really that: “Hey, here’s a lot of stuff!” and because the dancers are really skilled and can remember a lot of complex things, I could play with things like phasing in time like I’d never really been able to work with before. Just developing those systems took awhile because I wanted there to be a fair amount of complexity in what we were doing.

When you say phasing, do you mean transitions?
No, I mean like [composer] Steve Reich or a warping of time, say a dancer gets behind by four counts, everybody else gets behind by four counts, then maybe they speed up and catch up again, I wanted in time to almost recreate that feeling you get — I’m thinking of a horse race, but not a horse race — it’s almost that feeling you get when there’s no stable center, but everyone’s shifting forward to back in relation to one another, those kinds of time are very persnickety and mathematical. So that first phase was playing with a lot of those things, and the second phase was really short, really we just rehearsed for two weeks and it was the first time to see what it was like being up on that platform, also the first chance for Joseph Kramer, who’s generating sound for the piece to see what the sound could be like. Up until that point I had always just built my own soundtracks — and then there was this long break and November, we got the systems, we know what the world of the piece is, and then really trying to get much more specific about the roles of the performers and how they as individual, particular human beings relate to the material and draw out the humanness in contrast to all this really systematic, opaque and relentless objectivity. Because, while I’m interested in systems, I don’t want to make a piece that’s formal. I mean, yeah there are many important, formal things but I guess I’m wanting, in the piece as a whole, almost like the humanness of each performer to appear and then get absorbed back into the system. So, November especially was this time to find out what exactly could they feel really strongly about in terms of … in a way, when you have all this kind of tight choreography, you’re asking for a lot of obedience and you have to be well-behaved and execute the things 4, 5, 6, 7 times. I’m really interested in and concerned, you know, I would never want to just show a piece that was, “Oh! Interested formally in patterns and space,” I’m really interested in what happens to human beings when we have to adhere to these things, or this idea of an authority imposed from outside, how our bodies absorb that, how we cope with it, and when we fight against it. This last phase has been about trying to open up and find where the humanness is in the world. Then, most recently, in December, this piece has required a lot more precision, even more than past things I’ve done, and we’re also working with a fair amount of video imagery and constantly scrolling data presence in the piece, and trying to work how all the elements come together and not be redundant of one-another, cancel each other out, and so balancing all that is totally exciting to me, but it takes a long time.

It’s a lot to compose through these cascades of evolving experiential understanding! It seems operatic, all the different range of associations, including recurrent ones like speed, which seems as though it emerges as a kind of trope? Do you think the piece is Futurist or informed by Neo-Futurism?
That’s so funny that you say that. Yeah. This is like a confession that I’m not sure I wanna…; everything that I set out to make cutting-edge always has a retro-Futurist feel to it. No matter what. With this piece, for some reason, the ‘80’s — I’ve had to become way more educated about what performance art was happening and what was happening in alternative theatre at that time. Not that I want to make it…I can think of a lot of things that are way more contemporary than that, but when you say Futurist —

Oh, this notion integral to Neo-Futurism of the necessity to push back against technology, in some respects, against dehumanizing social behaviors. Narcissism, nihilism, the near-sociopathic lack of compassion implied in instrumentalizing other human beings for almost casual appetitive or bottom-line purposes. For me, it evokes this lack of empathy that seems so pervasive in our technologized social relationships to one another.
So, okay. I’m definitely not interested in making some blanket statement about technology, but I do feel like I have big concerns — I wonder if this shows up in the piece or not — to what ends technology is used. Who’s using it and for what purpose? I was reading a lot of Paul Verillio in the early stages of developing the piece, and being really interested in the idea of how, as the ability to execute things becomes exponentially faster, it’s almost as though the algorithm that makes something happen, happens faster than the human mind can decide, and I guess that’s like an example of where my concern comes in. And I think we’re at that point right now where things can get put in place way more quickly than a rational human being weighing pros and cons is going to be able to operate. So I think speed in that way could potentially be a [negative].

Yes, this ability to render things, relationships, in the physical world without judgement, and intentionally building on this almost self-destructive potentiality.
Yeah, and it’s almost like me looking at my own [behavior], but I’ve learned somehow to prioritize efficiency almost to a ridiculous degree, just in terms of my upbringing, of what was the most important thing: getting the job done quickly and correctly. I learned that was way more important than the way you treated the human being you did the project with. It’s the way Capitalism filters down, there’s this idea, you’re going to maximize efficiency, on some level to make money for somebody, but the way that filters down and affects interpersonal relationships, that’s deeply troubling to me and I’m guilty of it. I wanted to make this piece, in large part, to question these things that I see myself doing. And sometimes it’s a funny thing, sometimes I can laugh at myself noticing, “Ooh, wow! It’s really important you shave 30 seconds off your travel time!” Sometimes it’s funny, and sometimes it’s really upsetting. It’s like impatience with other people, it’s harsh.

So, in a way, for you, this is about slowing things down?
It’s funny. When I was proposing to make this piece, I set myself up with some personal challenges about seeing what would come up if I were deliberately inefficient. This is a real departure, but at the beginning of thinking about this piece, I had this residency in Wyoming and I just decided I was going to see what it was like to get from point A to point B without using the highway, but going through cattle country with fences, to know what it would be like to constantly be diverted, take the path that’s set up for us to go most efficiently. I was trying some things like that, and when I was talking about the November phase of the project, one of the ways to try to … if the world were a piece of all of these systems, has either been about being influenced by coding and loops and constant forward motion of something. And even this sort of harsher quality of correcting … there’s one section in the piece where which two dancers are interacting I hope in a way that’s disturbing but not in an immediately nameable, but one person sort of adopting the passive aggressive role, like “I’ll yield to you, but according to my own agenda,” and the other person in the more managerial role, trying to get somebody to adhere to the thing they want them to do. Anyway, these sort of power dynamics are there.

It reminds me of [novelist] Jonathan Franzen’s essay on how technology has begun to alter the scope of our relationship with selfhood. Code as an imposition of the engineer’s own perspective on others. When you get a multiple-choice in a range of settings that’s presented in that predetermined way for you, your range of available actions are self-limiting based on those available options.
Totally! You’re constrained, which is a kind of a consumerist constraint. In contrast to something like Fascism, where there’s an obvious bad guy, what’s interesting to me now, I don’t know if this is post- post- whatever … nothing’s very clear, power’s always underground and it’s always shifting.

There’s certainly a clear nihilism that motivates most struggles over power. In interpersonal relationships and otherwise.
And I think that there’s the absence of a clear sort of anchor. Zizek is another guy I like a lot, he has this example of the Fascistic Father tells their kid, like, “I don’t care if you like it or not, you’re going to go visit your grandparents.” But now we’re like, “Do whatever you want.” On the face of it, we’re given all this choice but actually the imperative is still there, but it’s not owned up to directly. Anyway, there’s something connected there. The piece as a whole, I’d be curious to hear if it strikes you this way, but in a kind of perceptual vertigo, which I think the inclined plane has a lot of effect on that, but I think it’s also what we’re working with about the gaze and vision and not having an anchored place to look? Some people, without any sort of suggestion on my part, they had said they were kind of sick from viewing some of the earlier versions. I was interested in this idea of nothing ever stopping, and even this notion of a constant undertow which I hope that the scrolling text is going to help to establish that quality but it’s also really built into the choreography too. Instead of having a horizontal flat floor and architecture that tells us that we are here in this space, this constant orientation toward — whether it’s your phone as you walk down the street or Google Glass, where you’re seeing the diagram of the space superimposed over the space — and that we’re doing this as we move through the space. I’m really interested in what that makes possible, or what that shifts?

I think it’s really fascinating how they’re using code to do things like scientific modeling, it’s extrapolated and set to the actual physics, so much energy exerted by the pull of gravity per square meter, modeled after the actual physics for things like the Mars missions. That sort of thing.
Yeah. This idea, I think about it in relation to opacity, and this will be our focus in our training the final weeks before the show, after tomorrow’s nuts-and-bolts blocking, at a certain point the face can almost blur into the rest of the body, just be a part of it, but at other points, I guess they’re like characters that emerge. But they’re not just characters because, for instance Elise, one of the dancers, part of her vocabulary has sort of been inspired by this notion of the anxious pet that wants to make everything okay. There’s this sort of very disturbing undercurrent of violence happening between these two other performers and Elise is in this role as…you know, how a pointer is sort of looking to something outside and then orienting herself to that thing, then trying to decide … looking at the audience and seeing “how is the audience taking this, is it okay with them?” and then sort of scoots over and, I don’t know if you’re a pet person, but I’ve had dogs and when there’s some fighting in the family they’ll sit, thinking that “Oh, that’s made them happy in the past,” and so little by little, this sort of opaque, blurry systematic-ness, how these individual human beings cope with the relentlessness, maybe even the boredom of that, I almost want the specificity. Their roles, their characters are really influenced on many hours of process with these particular human beings. But I’m not interested in oh, “Now it’s Elise’s moment to be herself!” I’m not interested in that. So, in that sense it’s not freeform improv, like “I’m going to express myself now,” it’s improvisation but we’ve worked long and hard to come up with a vocabulary of really charged things that hopefully in the moment of performing, she can really connect with and feel dynamically connected to. So yes, for the audience one of the things I hope is that they see…I mean, in one’s dream scenario, that the audience can see something of themselves. In the struggle of these performers to emerge a kind of systematic driving forward of “be productive, be productive,” that they could maybe feel the poignance. On the one hand, it’s a physics things but, for some reason, for me, when I think about the antidote to this sort of world that is more and more influenced by abstract information, I think of two things: human effort and work. And for me, the effort of going uphill, it’s very poignant for me to watch these bodies going up over and over.

Certainly; it recalls Sysyphus.
It is…I don’t want it to seem quite that bleak, but there’s something noble and beautiful to me about how human beings try over and over, even when it’s misguided, it’s effort. And for me, with this piece, where action is so much the point of departure, the physical work of this thing is something that feels somehow … I feel like I can trust it in this way that I’m not so sure about … and then the other thing, which is a little different, and we’ve worked from this in rehearsals, what is the sort of opposite of all this speed, quickness, hurry, faster and this notion of patience. Patience in-particular not as a notion of just going along with things, not just mellow and going along with things. You mentioned in your email that you’re a parent?

Oh yeah, 11 years and counting.
So yeah, you know about this. I feel like parents know about this. It’s the painstaking work of calibrating your speed to the speed of someone else. And it’s something I have so much respect for, maybe because it’s not my strong suit at all, but it’s this decision I think can only come out of love. What a hard lesson to learn over and over! If there’s early on in the piece this sort of frontal gaze and the movement of the body is yanking the head along, what’s it like, engaging with this notion of what patience is, to also shift your awareness to the kind you have when you’re listening and not just trying to make something happen. It’s a really different quality. It’s not like you’re ever really going to have the answers, but I thought maybe I’d figure out a little more. Part of the thing is just “Gosh, I don’t know how to fix this and I can try and try and I can try to shift this awareness to this place of humility. I’m not going to push my agenda, but it’s so delicate because I think we also live in a world that tells us to be passive, not think and just kind of…fuck it. So when I think about patience, I think about it as a moment by moment yielding, not an easy float down river, and how much that enters the piece, I don’t know. But that’s been an important guiding idea for some of the material that … if the world establishes this constant undertow, what the audience will see, again ideally, is a sort of reflection of themselves or something they can relate to, but also individual human beings that are struggling to defy that relentless forward motion or to sort of, with humility, try something different. I guess it’s this opacity thing that, in certain moments, the humanity of the individual performer would sort of crystallize, even if a moment later they’re pulled back into the world. One other thing to say: these kinds of dynamics are things I’ve worked with in past pieces, but in this one, I didn’t want there to be some big showdown of opposites. Even that to me seems too clear cut, for this moment you sort of make these little gains then you’re pulled back into it. I wanted it to feel more a lost then found quality, with the piece as a whole might feel more like a loop in the end. I mean, it’s not a loop, but as opposed to “we have a trajectory and we’ve moved from here to there.” And I hope that wouldn’t come across as a super-dark, negative, hopeless read on it. You know, whenever there’s a big revolutionary artistic moment, whether it’s in Hip Hop or something like that, how more and more quickly that’s co-opted by the market and sold — we’re at a point where that turnaround time is so fast that maybe the 60’s were like the last time where it could come out and be like “dum-dah-dum!” And maybe that’s fitting for that time period, but for this time period it’s so…gains are made and then taken into the whole. So that’s what I really wanted, that emergence and absorption of the individual humannness, it’s not like it comes out and it’s clear and we leave the show feeling …

…feeling whatever programmed emotion you’re supposed to have.
I want it to feel very slippery, very slippery. And that’s actually one of the hard things because it requires a real finesse on the part of the performers, and this is what we’re waiting to see. My real hope is that those moments will come out and that, whatever kinds of nerves happen when the audience is there, my hope is that it doesn’t become rigid, because all this subtle emergence thing requires a kind of porousness on the part of the performers … and that’s asking a lot.

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Ginger Krebs, “Buffer Overrun,” at the Chicago Cultural Center’s Storefront Theater, 66 E. Randolph St., Chicago IL 60601. (312)742–8497. Thu, Feb. 4–7, 7:30pm; Sun, Feb. 7, 2:00pm. Admission $10–15. Performances by Ginger Krebs, Sabrina Baranda, Elise Cowin and Joanna Furnans; audio by Joseph Kramer.