Revisiting figures on a field: An Interview with Dean Moss and Isabel Lewis

MATTHEW LYONS: To begin, Dean, I thought I would ask if you want to rewind and think back to that time when the piece premiered in 2005. Can you share what you remember about the initial encounter with Laylah Ali’s work, and how that got the ball rolling and led into figures on a field?

DEAN MOSS: In 2001, I went to the Studio Museum in Harlem’s Freestyle show and saw Laylah's work, among a number of terrific works. But I was very much struck by Laylah’s work and came back and said, “Oh, this is amazing, it would be so dramatic.” There was something about the violence of it, about the pending violence of it that fit with what was going on with the precarious nature of being Black in America. And I loved the formality of her work. Then I looked at her body of work, I just fell in love. Christina Yang was also a curator at The Kitchen at that time, and we shared an office. I was talking with her, and said, “I think this work could be a really great performance. How can I facilitate somebody coming and doing this, you know? Maybe I can talk to her.” And so, Christina contacted Laylah, and we started a conversation. Then in 2002, I did a piece called Supplement at Danspace, which Layla came to see and decided we could work together. Going forward, as the piece came together, there were some key moments. I remember I did a showing at The Kitchen where Sarah Michelson came and said that she could see Laylah Ali's influence in the work, but she couldn't see my own. This is before I added the docent tour of the work, and what precipitated this added feature of the work that then kind of parsed the difference between the white cube and the black box and played into what was experiential about the performance, how people were involved, how it could expand beyond the theatrical setting and implicate both the artists and the audience in a kind of not so flattering light, you know? To set up a critical circumstance here. And so, that's what opened up the work and was a big change in my own practice. All precipitated by this work.

ML: Isabel, can you share what you recall about being in the audience at that time?

:ISABEL LEWIS: Absolutely, yes. I remember the starkness of the imagery, I remember feeling so struck by something that had such a deep resonance with me, how I felt and thought, my interiority, and my Black subjectivity. Somehow to see this staged in this formal and precise way, and the conceptual turn inside of the work, with the docent tour. It did so much work somehow, theoretically and conceptually, but it had a kind of a light touch. Nonetheless, it was so conceptually brisk. And it thrilled me, because I thought I had no examples for this kind of gesture. I had not experienced this kind of gesture in dance. I was never told the story that Black people make dances like this. I came from classical ballet. I studied at Alvin Ailey. I then left the track of Ailey and went to search for more strange and experimental forms, and I went to the right place, New York City. Exchanging with artists like Ishmael Houston-Jones, Miguel Gutierrez, and DD Dorvillier, and meeting Dean, and definitely it was a very thrilling moment. Also, I remember feeling so strongly, and I think it's close in time that I was dancing for Ann Liv Young inside the work The Bagwell in Me in which Ann Liv performs as George Washington and I perform as Oney, George Washington’s revenge-seeking former slave, in blackface. And I remember how both of these works seemed to speak, in very different ways, to a conversation that wasn't really out in the open in the dance scene. We weren't really dealing with race in the way we have been more recently. Both of these works, in very different ways, were raw and exposed the brutal truth that maybe we were not as far along as we thought in relation to conversations about race and Blackness.

ML: Dean, do you want to say anything about the reception of the original production? What do you recall about either the response from the community, the kind of private response, or the press and public response?

DM: The private response was pretty good. And the press, in general, was strong. I got press, negative or positive. A lot. A lot of press. I was of course struck by the New York Times reviewer who compared the costuming of the piece to kids in Harlem, who stated in his title that we used basketballs. They didn't recognize that it was a dodgeball game. They saw black people and balls and thought basketballs.

ML: Yes, I read that and was struck by that too. It says, “The six main dancers wear various forms of costuming resembling what might be found on a Harlem playground. Yet there is no exploitation of hip-hop or breakdancing.”

DM: Yes, he came in with some clear ideas of what he was going to see, and when he didn't see it, he decided to put it in the review anyway. So, I was perturbed. Laylah suggested that I write the Times. At that time, I didn't feel so empowered that it would make any difference. When I look back now, I see how overwhelmingly positive it was, the press and the response. Apollinaire Scherr did a really fabulous write up in Newsday, and so did Helen Shaw in The Sun. Anyway, I got some very nice write-ups, but at that time, it was difficult. And it wasn't until years later, at least 10 years later, when I was doing a residency at Baryshnikov Arts, when somebody, a Black man, somebody I didn't know, came up to me and said, “Are you the guy that did that piece?” And at that point, I realized, “Oh, it had an impact.”

ML: I remember learning about the collaboration between you and Laylah from an early season of the documentary series Art21 that profiled her. For me, who was at that time outside of the dance community, a light bulb went off. It was fascinating to get behind the scenes in the creation process of a performance. I just went back and rewatched it, and it's a fascinating record of that time, and in hindsight, thinking that this piece actually premiered the same year that the Performa Biennial launched. It's a year before MoMA creates the Department of Performance and Media. I feel like the piece happened right on the edge of this renewed interest in dance and performance on the part of the visual art community and those institutions. At the same time that the piece is looking at that exact meeting, and staging the problem. In a very prescient way, I'd say.

DM: I'm about to say something, but I feel like Isabel could probably approach this a little better. I think all those things were happening, and there was an expectation. I thought that this kind of work, the work that I was making would launch, in a way. But I have looked back, and I feel like it was a bit too brutal a work to push me into a place I thought I wanted to be. I'm very happy with my career. But, at that time, I had ambition, and I thought, “Oh, this is going to do something!” I got all these great reviews, and I got a great response. And I was in a very interesting place with The Kitchen. And so, it's interesting what or who got launched when performance moved into visual arts at that time. I didn't feel at the center of it. I felt on the periphery of it, and I remain on the periphery of it.

IL: Yes, it's also interesting for me to hear and reflect on. That it was not exactly embraced. Meanwhile in the art world I feel questions around forms of display and presentation remained particularly urgent through the aughts up until 2015. By 2013 the works I called hosted occasions started to be curated more so by the visual arts than the dance world, which still saw my practice as this kind of ungainly thing that didn’t adhere to the theater logics. By this time Tino Sehgal had long been making choreographic work in the museum and then also Xavier Le Roy, Trajal Harrell, Jérôme Bel, Maria Hassabi, Boris Charmatz, and Eszter Salamon. With the rise of Anne Imhof’s work and now Florentina Holziger’s in connection with the dynamics of social media and mediation of the experience of performance via the smart phone, the spectacle came back in a major way. I am not against the creation of impactful, visually striking experiences, but what disappoints me are the creation of conditions where the public must compete for a vantage point to see, or photograph the work. The ability of performance to make us aware of the terms of participation, what it means to be together, the politics of seeing and being seen, and the troubling of that relationship, which is so much, I think, what figures on a field speaks to and is what inspires me about performance. I thought that the re-energized interest in dance and performance in the art world was going to take us deeper into the interrogation of vision and commodification. And it feels like rather went so far into gloss and image and seduction through certain kinds of very not surprising aesthetics, let's say. Speaking very generally here, today in visual art spaces rather normative ideas of youth, beauty and able-bodied fitness persist in performance with few exceptions meanwhile, inside of the performing arts, the mediation of the body and its terms of visibility have gotten more complicated and more interesting, maybe thanks to artists like Claire Cunningham, Marlene Monteiro Freitas, and Ligia Lewis.

ML: I think that offers an interesting way for us to talk about the remount, because, as you said, you've been based in Europe for quite a while now and you have also newly come to this position in Vienna, and it seemed that quite early on you made inquiries about remounting this piece. I'd love for you to talk about how the seeds of that idea started, and what gave you the impetus to make this proposition, especially because remounts in the performance and the dance scene are not so common, especially in the New York / American context, and it usually happens for very specific reasons.

IL: Yes, thanks, Matthew. I think in the continuation of the scope of my artistic work, hospitality as a method gave me the chance to look at the terms of coexistence, to negotiate them and re-experience them. This artistic research led me to go for the possibility to direct this institution, along with my colleague Rio Rutzinger and the decision to apply together. It wasn't something I had really had my eye on or had been planning to do, but when that opportunity presented itself, and Rio suggested it to me, I said, “Yeah, let's go for it.” I realized I actually have so many questions about what institutions can or can't do. What would it mean to be in the decision-making center of the institution as an artist and what could I do with that? And so, right at the beginning, I was thinking about this house, Tanzquartier Wien, its black box theater and two studios where we also produce. And I started to think about what I cherish about the space of theater and asked myself which are the works inside of the space of theater that were so impactful to my own way of thinking about performance. Dean’s figures immediately came to mind. I wanted to share with the public I'm addressing here in Vienna, something of my artistic roots, where I’m coming from, what my point of view is and how it formed. I also had the sense that in this first season I wanted to remind us to interrogate these terms of visibility in the theater, and I wanted to highlight artistic practices and works that complicate something about our relationship to spectatorship. And I do think it is a reaction to the rise of spectacle in such a non-critical way I had this deep desire to experience the work of so many artists who do have complex and poetic relationships to mise-en-scene, and to bring some of them together in a season; Tiran Willemse, nora chipaumire, Jeremy Nedd, Rita Mazza, Tino Sehgal, among others. So, for me, figures on the field was somehow right at the top of the list of works that really made a meaningful impact on how I see anytime now when I go into a theater. It brought awareness to the violence of seeing. Which is also what's so brilliant in Laylah Ali’s paintings. And so, I pursued having these conversations with Dean and Laylah, and I also got to speak with Christina Yang, who was so generous. And in each of those conversations, I was more and more convinced of the need to remount this work. Contemporary dance is always chasing the new. It also has by now a rich history that is still writing itself that we can refer back to and reflect upon. I knew figures had not yet had a reception here in Europe, and I thought it would be really important to share that seminal work here and create this intergenerational exchange by casting Vienna-based dancers and makers.