Interview of Maya Dalinsky by Anouk Llaurens
Anouk Llaurens: Thank you for accepting to do this interview, Maya. My first question is: "How would you situate yourself today?"
Maya Dalinsky: I regret having read the questions before because I thought about them too much. And yet, it's good to think about it. I was very happy that you asked me to do this, because I rarely take time to look through my notes, and the way I’m situated today may be a lot of projection and not a lot of realistic delving into where I am. So it was nice to go back to my notebooks and take a look at things. And it gave a lot of perspective on where I am today.
I’m a dancer from the US and I live in Copenhagen. I’m a freelance artist; this means that I must create the conditions for working. For most of the projects that I want to do or things that I want to research, I have to make it happen.
I’ve been quite busy this year reconnecting with my solo dancing, which was unexpected. But it makes a lot of sense considering that I’m in a new place, and I don't know a lot of people, but I have access to space and I have time. So, I've been really enjoying dancing a lot.
I’m trying to find ways to dance with others and to practice dancing in front of others, or in front of an audience. I work with improvisation, spontaneous composition, so having a chance to dance in front of others is the best way to refine what I’m doing. So that's where I’m situating myself today.
I have another practice that’s activated every now and then, the "videowalking"and I feel that it's relevant to mention because that's where a lot of Lisa's tools have a one-to-one correlation with what I do. But that's not the most active thing that I’m doing right now. It's dormant and occasionally, I pick it up again, when there’s a demand for it. But I’m not actively looking for opportunities with it right now. And winter is coming, so I’m just going to the studio and dancing online with other people that work with solo improvisation. And I organize a two-day lab with musicians once a month, that's also improvisation based, that's working with people.
Anouk Llaurens: So you would situate yourself only through your work?
Maya Dalinsky: Yeah that's what I’m trying to do. I’m a parent and when I go back through my notes and my journal, I would resituate myself also in time as someone who is starting over. Is that a restart ? And I’m noticing that I came to a new country, a new language. I haven't fully grasped the dance scene here yet or the arts network. So, I’m still feeling that I’m restarting even if I’ve been in Copenhagen now for three and a half years. It still feels like a really long transition. The past few years I was so busy parenting, and I don't want that to be at the forefront anymore. I want to be an artist again!
Anouk Llaurens: When did you meet Lisa and her work, in which conditions? When and how?
Maya Dalinsky: That was the exciting part, going back into my notes. I knew that I hadn't ever heard of her until I started working with you and Julien Bruneau in phréatiques [1]. That was 2010, so fifteen years ago. And I think it was definitely through phréatiques [2] because in those early years, we were busy with "the two sides of touch" [3] – I refer to these explorations with the hands and eyes closed as "the two sides of touch".
Anouk Llaurens: Was that in phréatiques, or was it in my research Visions?
Maya Dalinsky: We did a little bit in phréatiques. It was like a warm-up to get into the real work which was “sensing and drawing”. I remember bringing in the calls and the reporting to situate ourselves. I remember standing at a piece of paper with one hand on small objects and then someone would go 'report' and describe our experience out loud.
Anouk Llaurens: The "sensing-drawing-thinking score".
Maya Dalinsky: Yes! How these calls would come and activate another layer of your brain while being in the middle of this deeply immersive task, and the sensation of my brain trying to make a pathway between what I was doing and what I could say about it. This is deep stuff that I can mix as an answer to your further question afterwards.
I encountered Lisa herself in 2012 because Brune Campos organized a two-week intensive with her in Molenbeek. And that was great. And then of course Lisa’s work was so present in Visions when we were working with you.
Anouk Llaurens: What was great for you in the encounter with Lisa?
Maya Dalinsky: What was touching when I met Lisa was the personal nature of her work. When someone asks you "what is it?", you start by saying "there are these tools to help you communicate in real time with other people through improvising,” let's say. You give a first answer to lay the groundwork. And the more I started thinking about what the tools are that I absorbed over the years, the more I realized that there’s something about the transmission that’s so personal to Lisa. I got to know all these tools in that extremely immersive work with you and Julien. Then I ended up in a workshop with Lisa and it was like, "I know you already and I 've never met you before," because I had to embody all of these things that you've developed. And I don't know what other human activity we do where you do that to such an extent.
Anouk Llaurens: What do you mean by “personal”?
Maya Dalinsky: Her personal life and experience have yielded these things that are in constant interaction with the world and are not finished objects. And you enter this, you become a part of it. And it's all through co-presence and through learning and doing and embodying and trying and communicating back. It was a really big moment for me because I was surprised by how strange it felt to meet the actual person after having been involved so intensively with things she has developed, communicated or taught.
Anouk Llaurens: Through Julien and my research?
Maya Dalinsky: Yes, through you two. But that's how it is in dance in general, that's not specific to Lisa. The people that I've learned certain techniques from, especially if they’re really established techniques, I've learned from the “disciples” of such and such. I learned Klein technique from Hanna in Berlin who worked directly with Susan Klein in New York. There are legacies, I guess. So that was the biggest surprise: getting to know her (Lisa) after having delved into her work. And furthermore, getting a chance to observe her do her own work was really fun! Because everyone is a really good student of what she does, and she is the least precious about what she does.
Anouk Llaurens: Yes, you are always less precious with what you do because it’s your research. You’re free to experiment and change because you’re in a research process.
Maya Dalinsky: And I find that really inspiring. It’s interesting that all this stuff that I’m busy being so curious about, jumping into and trying to understand, came out of her real need. Not just her, personally, but also a whole context, a whole generation of artists one might say now in retrospect, that had very distinct needs at that time. Needs and “revendications”, desires, political, societal but also artistic needs. And it was exciting to observe her teaching. It made me see the way she cultivated a space for us to engage with things, and she was always offering lots of stuff and letting us do our thing, mainly. But all of those practices, that whole approach, which I think is a radical shift from what came before, it comes out of need. And seeing that inspired me to be like, “Well, not just follow your interest but what do you need? How are you addressing your needs?” I remember in the workshop she talked a lot about survival: “How are you surviving the environment?” And that really resonates, not just in the situation here and now, but on a general level. For me survival and needs are related. How are you surviving what you are doing or what you want? How are you surviving this life?
Anouk Llaurens: It's interesting that you talk about surviving your own needs, because most of the time, I’m busy surviving other's needs [laugh!] ‘How do I survive the collective conditions?’ is my main question.
Maya Dalinsky: Yes, I don't think you can single-handedly figure it out. Working with others is really important. How are other people or the environment, if you don’t have other people to work with, giving you feedback indirectly and directly about your own needs or your own condition? In her workshop, it was interesting to see that in operation. You’re in this big group for ten days and doing all this really intense stuff. Intense because you use a lot of concentration and you’re busy with maybe one activity at a time and the complexity just grows over time, and as you delve in and follow your interest, it's like stuff is opening up and at some point, you know, you can't contain it all, it’s all just the environment you’re in. You've established this new environment with lots of people, a new artistic or poetic environment. That's where I found myself encountering this question: What are my needs? What do I need right now to stay active or to stay present in what we’re doing, or not? And then, what do I need after this is all gone?
And you can't achieve that same immersive experience by yourself. It’s a little hermetic when you do it alone in the studio after a while. You need feedback. There are so many kinds of feedback: the feedback that comes from seeing the struggles or the joys of others that may be foreign to you.
I didn’t realize what an intensive training I’d had in Lisa Nelson’s work until I started looking at my notebook, and it was all “Julien, Anouk, Lisa, Julien, Anouk, Lisa” with the occasional sprinkling of David Hernandez, beside my own solo practice going on.
What was interesting for me in Visions was how the camera made its way into it. Everything made so much more sense because Lisa had taken so much time behind the camera, understanding dance as a visual art form and as something you consume through the eyes. And I think it's really interesting to embrace the camera as a tool when you’re a dancer. Not just to revisit what Lisa says but also because of this feedback thing. When you’re on your own and you don't have the company of dancers to work with, the camera is an interesting tool bringing in a whole other set of considerations.
Anouk Llaurens: I guess this is also what Lisa did because she was living in isolation in Vermont. I don't know if you saw her short movie called “Jump Cut” where she is jumping and shouting to mark the highest point of her jump. She is filming herself, so it's not only about the activity of filming but also as you say, for the feedback.
So it’s in the frame of Visions that you started working with the camera, right?
Maya Dalinsky: Yes, the camera and all the baggage it brings, including the technical reality of it. How it will malfunction or how you think it's doing something and then when you review the footage, you realize it was doing something else. There are a lot of things to explore in that relationship. It is a tool that is recording but not making choices, it's not self-aware, it's manipulated by someone. That whole period was very interesting and that’s where the videowalking came from. And then later when I did my MfA, I discovered that videowalking was already becoming an artistic format in its own right that other artists were busy using, which I find really exciting.
Anouk Llaurens: I want to hold you back before we talk more about that work. Yesterday I was working on my interview, and I remembered the score we started to develop with the objects in Bains Connective that I call “live document”. And I remember you introduced the call “inhibition”. Do have any memory about where this call came from and how it came in.
Maya Dalinsky: I don't have a real memory of it, but it's reminding me that inhibition was coming from a solo I was working on that was very much inspired by Rosalind Crisp, who is also a contemporary of Lisa’s. There’s a nice interview with her and Lisa, there’s an audio file somewhere when they were in Poland. I was really inspired by Rosalind's prompt of "slowing down the beginning". That’s where our agency is as an artist, because once you've chosen then you’re following the consequences of that choice. But when you’re in the beginning of something, you’re still feeling it out. And it’s funny because “inhibition” is a kind of texture of that beginning. Inhibition as the flip-side of beginning. Cutting off the development or cutting off before it goes further. Holding back before going too far too quickly. Which is very different from truly prolonging the beginning.
Anouk Llaurens: Yes, and it's not really slowing down the beginning, it's more radical, it's about cutting. There I see a relationship with Lisa's Tuning Scores as an editing practice.
Maya Dalinsky: I think that it also has to do with attention. The more you do these exercises or use these tools, the more the intervals of attention dilate. There’s the attention of being hyper-focused on things, sensing and listening to the sensing. There’s the split attention of noticing and then noticing your noticing. And as soon as you get into that, you get into a kaleidoscopic form of attention. I think that's also what resonates for me in Lisa's work, this thing of the attention, your immersion in these different levels of attention and how they’re interacting with each other. And also, how you might orient your attention in order to have a side effect, or unintended consequences. That was something that came up a lot in the workshops. We would all be focused on pretty much the same tasks but by virtue of cultivating an awareness, an attention, you’d see all the stuff that slips through the cracks, unattended consequences. And you see that they can also be choreographed sometimes, or not, maybe you don't want to.
Anouk Llaurens: “Slips through the crack", that's a beautiful expression. I’m very interested in the notion of “crack”.
Maya Dalinsky: Yes, slip through the crack, this is life!
Anouk Llaurens: Is there more to say about where you met Lisa?
Maya Dalinsky: I met her through that work with you and then through the workshop. It was also nice to meet her also through her relationship to Contredanse. I saw her once when she was preparing her video game. I came as an audience to support and see what she was busy with, that was very exciting. And then she came to my house once, to do my videowalking piece.
Anouk Llaurens: I remember that. Let's talk about that later. I’m slowing down the beginning.
Maya Dalinsky: It's nice to remember all the instances. I feel that I worked much more with you and Julien, that was ongoing, and then the appearances of Lisa Nelson in the flesh are quite few in my personal timeline, but very specific. What I’ve always identified with, or what I find still inspiring today, is to have a dance artist who didn’t really join any companies or produce spectacles and diverted her attention into many different kinds of activities, to feed her own interest and sustain her own survival. I find that really inspiring and very courageous. I think it's not easy to follow your own interest and stand by that, invest in it, reinvest in it and develop tools to keep going, even when there’s no outside force giving continuity, like recognition from society. I find that very touching.
Another thing that I carry with me is this notion of “following your interest” not being a kind of ‘fortune cookie’ message. That’s something I witnessed her do and that I realized is extremely radical. It’s not taught in your conventional parcours as an artist. I was never told, when I was in ballet school, to “follow my interest” in anything. My interest wasn't even a topic of discussion or a factor in the equation. And when I first encountered that in Lisa’s workshop and how serious she was about it, that was huge. It’s not fluffy, it's not “follow your interest because it's fun”. It's how you get to the real stuff. It applies in the moment and more on the meta level of how you pursue a career in art or how you live.
Anouk Llaurens: I find it very profound too. I repeat it as a mantra when I teach.
Maya Dalinsky: It's super profound and it's not so easy to do. It's very confronting to decide what you’re interested in. That's also one of the ways that you get to harvest the stuff that slips through the cracks. By deciding to follow your interest, you’re also neglecting all the things you’re not interested in. It offers this clarity.
Anouk Llaurens: Yes choice, clarity, editing. You’re editing and sometimes life is editing for you.
Maya Dalinsky: Then I feel like through practice, you learn to follow your interest without questioning why you’re interested in it. It sounds counterintuitive, but if you stick to the rigor of that, it helps to stay committed to something and be busy not with “what” I’m making but with “how” I’m making it. That situates the “making” in a whole other place, which I also prefer. I have a preference for that over making “art objects”. Some are of course amazing and do great things too, but it’s not the kind of thing I’m interested in.
Anouk Llaurens: So what is your interest then?
Maya Dalinsky: For instance, I’m at the beginning of a process right now where I want to make a solo. And if I’m not questioning so much ‘what it is I’m making’ but ‘how I’m making it’, I come back to the needs that are driving me: I’m alone right now and I like to spend time in the studio, composing with how every sensation can become an emotion. This already is going to lead me into a whole other thing than if I say, “I’m going to make a dance solo that will be twenty minutes long.”
Anouk Llaurens: You’re emphasizing the process and the methodology; what's your score and then you will see what it makes. The object is a consequence, it's not the starting place. The solo is the consequence of listening to your needs and setting up conditions to meet your needs.
Maya Dalinsky: Exactly. If I start questioning “what it is” then I will make decisions already and I’m just executing a decision. That's also possible but not what I’m interested in right now. It's very liberating for me and it goes a little bit against the grain.
Anouk Llaurens: Let’s enter the last question, "What are you making out of these aspects that touched you? What are you carrying with you in your own work?” I would be curious to hear about the videowalking piece that started from Visions. What could be relevant for you to talk about in this frame of research on the heritage of “Tuning Scores” today? What is your interest?
Maya Dalinsky: First, I’m curious what Tuning Scores encompass for you. Is it just the calls, or is it also the “Blind Unison Trio” and all those exercises that are satellites around it?
Anouk Llaurens: Tuning Scores for me is many things: Lisa's presence, her mind, her radicality, her way of transmitting, the tools, the ‘pre-techniques’, the warmup, the different scores. Working with a camera is obviously part of it because everything started from there. The circulation between dancing and filming and combining both is completely part of Tuning Scores.
Maya Dalinsky: There’s a lot of stuff I lift directly from my experience with what we’ve done. There are two fronts: I host music and dance improvisation sessions with musicians once a month. A lot of those Tuning exercises, or warm up exercises, have been a lifesaver in working with musicians because the ones I work with aren’t considering their place in space beyond the acoustics. But that’s of course very interesting. And then for instance the “Blind Unison Trio” is so reliant on visual composition in space that it's been interesting to propose that and understand where there is visual and acoustic crossover, or not. We’re just very active with some of these scores and a whole bunch of other ones just for the pure fun of research and relating across disciplines. And to put things in terms that everyone can understand. That’s what I also admire so much about Lisa's work, is that, of course it has its own vocabulary and it's a very specific set of tools, but I find them quite accessible. You don't have to be a dancer to use them. I’ve noticed that when we do some of these exercises as a group, we get to work much faster with the musicians than when I bring in other somatic exercises. So that's one aspect where it's very clearly still active.
And then I have what I call now "embodied cinematography". It's a series of scores and exercises that integrate mobile recording devices. Some of it is videowalking, but I’ve also developed ways to duet via Zoom at a distance or live in the same space with my friend Jac. You use your mobile device, your phone, you’re in the same room and both video-conferencing with each other. The basic score for this duetting is: "I move, you move". One goes, the other goes, and you don't interrupt each other. Then you have different options of what moving can be: I move my body in space, that's the first layer, but then, another layer could be that I move the camera. And then a third option can be that I move the perspective; if your phone can do selfie mode, you can film yourself or film outward. So you have these three layers of movement, the back and forth, and the fact that you’re in a shared space, which gets you in this trippy zone where you are composing, you're choreographing, you're busy with dance and cinematography at the same time. That's one example of an evolution from the things that I started with you that were so rooted in Lisa's tools.
In Visions with you, we started with the verbal calls and then we brought the cameras in. But our camera technology is so different from the camera technology that Lisa was using. The technology at her time required you to process the image in another place and on other equipment. You film on one thing and then you’d take it out and you’d go to another machine to process those images. So you sit with them in a different place and time, and you sit with them in a different way. Now it's all one device, even being able to replay the thing directly after filming it without rewinding is a technology that affords different kinds of things. And that's also why the videowalking was possible, because I can do a playback on the very device that I filmed on. It enables me to consider the trajectory of the past and reactivate it in the present, which wasn't something available until cameras got lighter and had integrated screens. I grew up with a shoulder cam and you could playback things in the little viewfinder in black and white.
To make a very concrete link, I taught a workshop this summer in Ghent in videowalking and these practices. I also bring in some other stuff; it's kind of a buffet of possibilities that you have for integrating the camera into your dance practice. What's important about that–and this resonates with Lisa's work–is that I'm not, like, trying to make a nice video, but the camera is a feedback tool, and it's a really specific one. It's giving you very specific information. I’m curious about how we use that information and what is relevant about it for what I’m busy with. But it also opens up a lot of possibilities for new forms of experiencing space or of enacting choreography. How these devices can serve our needs as artists or as people rather than the platforms they create for you to distribute your image. I’m less interested in that. I’m interested in the agency of the person using the device. And aside from the Zoom dueting, it might yield no images in the end and the experience that you've had has to do only with the moment, the live moment.
Anouk Llaurens: Is there an audience watching this?
Maya Dalinsky: It's stuff that I do mainly in workshop settings. But I do believe there is an audience for it. For instance, in the videowalking, you can make videowalks through public space. And depending on how you choreograph them, it might very subtly capture the attention of people in that environment. At this workshop in the summer, on the second day, we made videowalks outside because it was a really nice day.
Anouk Llaurens: So what is a videowalk?
Maya Dalinsky: A videowalk is a first-person perspective video shot in one unedited sequence (when I do them), in a given space. What you see on screen is stuff in the environment. That’s the video. And the walking itself is when you play that video back in the same space and you ask the spectator to line up the frame of the device with the reality. So you press play on the video and the challenge is to continuously align the video with reality, so the video takes you on a walk through the space.
By virtue of doing it a lot, especially when I made that piece Way of Life in my house and I had people come over and they were all busy enacting versions of me in my own home–it was really fun to watch–I realized how much my own body informs the video. It's shot from my height, with my eyesight, there are things I could get from really low cause I’m small, and then I saw tall people trying to do it and they were really struggling. I’m right-handed so I automatically put things in my left hand to use my right hand and lefties are like, "Ugh!". And when I started researching that during my master’s and afterwards, I really enjoyed understanding how much choreography is just this perception of space and the framing of your attention in time and space, and how this little device can capture that or offer a place for that to be contained.
Anouk Llaurens: When I did the videowalking in your house, it was so sophisticated, so many layers, simultaneous tracks. I remember the appearance and disappearances of a character in a ninja suit. And it reminds me of the notion of visibility and invisibility in Lisa's work.
Maya Dalinsky: When I made that particular piece, Way of Life, I had been busy working with the video recording device in this way for three years. There was already the magic of the format itself, the media itself, that's very satisfying, and I wondered how fiction could play a role. I was happy because I didn’t set out to create those dramaturgical lines, but by virtue of doing a lot of videowalking in my home and noticing my own home environment through that framework, a lot of things came up. And it was clearer what kinds of fiction or characters would lend themselves to an interesting videowalk.
At that time in my life, I felt that my home had become invaded, because I had just had David, he was still a baby. For me the home environment had turned into this place where sound was constantly activated and it was all the sounds from David’s toys, and all the sounds you don't have control over because there’s just an extra person living there now. That was one track. And then the track of that house spirit was another because, having this baby, stuff would always be missing. It felt like there was a little house elf going around just trying to make your life difficult. You know how it is when you just have a kid, and you’re breastfeeding, and the stuff is just out of reach or it's not where you left it. It's not the end of the world but it has made this moment so difficult. And you feel a little bit desperate and sad like, “Oh, I can't even put butter on my toast!”. Because being a mom is so engrossing that even simple tasks suddenly become these giant hurdles. It always felt to me like there was some kind of malevolent spirit at play going : “Ha ha!”
Anouk Llaurens: So that work came out as a reflection of your life at that time and served also as a survival strategy to survive this other kind of order, interferences created by a newborn entering your life, your space, questioning your habits.
Maya Dalinsky: Yes, I learned a lot.
Anouk Llaurens: And the invisible spirit was you in a black ninja suit, appearing and disappearing. It's a certain kind of fiction, spirits in the house.
Maya Dalinsky: Yes, it was inspired by Miyazaki and manga. Of course, everything in that piece was very personal, because it was in my home. The point was also to invite people into that level of intimacy. And I think when you have a camera it gives you license, it gives you permission. I find it extraordinary that all you do is place a tablet in their hands and people have license in your own home to do things. But of course, it's guided. There’s one track that's inviting people to go through my stuff, go through the kitchen drawers, go through my photos, and it's very confronting for people who are polite because they have to make a choice: Do I follow the piece, am I respectful of this person's home?
That was my master's thesis. And I had so much fun making it. I took my time. I had a deadline but from start to finish, it took me about six months. I can't remember the last time I dedicated six months to something continuous and it reminds me that maybe it's not a bad idea to set another–I don't want to say "goal"–but to commit to a process for a longer period of time with a certain regularity and see what comes out of it.
Anouk Llaurens: Yes it takes time to let a form mature enough to share it. It’s difficult to do it, to have this time, especially when you’re mixing so many contexts. It’s different to research with chosen friends and artists, than with students. And as artists we have to do this all the time, take every occasion to work, but sometimes it’s premature to share.
Maya Dalinsky: Yeah, it’s hard to stay committed to following your interest. I’m actually surprised by the resonance of phréatiques that started in 2010, so fifteen years ago. Of course, we’re not researching together anymore, but the resonance of that and the activation of all of those scores somehow stay present in everything that I do. I’m just realizing that I still feel excited and interested in all of this world Lisa Nelson has kind of started. I haven't even reached the bottom of it. It's so generative!
Anouk Llaurens: Exactly! In my interview, I’m talking about fertility, Tuning Scores as a fertilizing practice. It's very generative for everyone, very powerful.
Maya Dalinsky: I haven't made videowalks in a while, and I’m mainly facilitating workshops because I got so interested in the process. There’s something about doing it with this set group of people in a time space that's really fun. So I started to want to do the workshops because that's the only situation where you can have those conditions: a group of people doing the thing over and over again in a set time and space. And then the media echoes the conditions, and the conditions echoes the media and we have this weird feedback happening in the sense of “Larsen” like, feedback that’s getting noisy, it's getting loud and messy. I started offering this work more as a workshop rather than a finished videowalk piece because it's interesting for groups. What's nice is that I have to introduce the fundamentals and they come from Lisa, for example just calling the beginning and the end. This is the tool that I use all the time in my life. Start-end. Go-end. And if you don't have that you can't do this work. In the workshop some people have a really hard time saying out loud "begin" and "end". It's very uncomfortable, they’re shy to use their voice and to interrupt others. I had them working in pairs to make it a little less scary. You work with your partner, you build up some trust so that you can try these tools. I ask people to pair up with someone and we practice without any devices first, just watching each other. I ask them to do simple things. First we do some "Two Sides of Touch", and then after I say, "If you don't know what to do, just touch or look at the space. That’s your material. Of course if you have other ideas in mind go for it!” There is one mover and one camera person. First you get used to doing things in front of someone else and can change roles. Then you add the calls and only the person doing calls. Then calls only come from the person watching.
Anouk Llaurens: If I translate what you say in Tuning Scores’ terms, the watcher is with camera the mover is without.
Maya Dalinsky: Exactly. And then when the cameras come in, the camera person says when they begin and end. Both players are in their own time, that's when it starts to get interesting.
Anouk Llaurens: So it’s a dialogue.
Maya Dalinsky: Some people work very nicely together and they find a way for it to be like you said, a dialogue. And to flow and transition between performing and filming. It's kind of what my hope was. There are so many ways you can frame this and there are so many outcomes you can lean towards. My hope is that people get a chance to see this transition from doing to seeing, framing as a watcher, framing as a doer. They are dynamic and you have agency in them too, you are not subjected to them. You can compose.
Anouk Llaurens: Framing is composing. Now I would like to talk about your performance on Zoom. Did it start during Covid?
Maya Dalinsky: The one I performed for you in January, yes. I practice solo improvisation on zoom. I meet people online, other individuals who want to move or want to do some soloing and need a witness. I'll be there witnessing on Zoom and we'll just exchange. I work with Susanne Bentley, Titanne Bregenzer and Marie Hallagher, who is one of the few Danish dancers I’ve connected to. It comes from a need to practice and have someone present while I practice, and to connect to other people who like to do this kind of solo work. But the secondary effect is that it also got me back into this relationship with the screen, kind of despite myself. It’s a substitute, I use it as a matter of necessity, so I don't want to think of it as something nice because I want to fight for the live contexts!
Anouk Llaurens: I understand, yet your project reminds me of Lisa with "Tune Zoom". I saw her recently and I told her, "I don't know when I’m going to be able to touch and see you again in the flesh!” She answered, "Well let's Zoom! It's exactly the same." I was a bit shocked and amazed by her answer!
Maya Dalinsky: I have to say that in my residency, when I performed for you and Julien in January, the second phase of that project was having a live audience and a Zoom audience at the same time in the studio. And that interests me much more than the pure Zoom, because suddenly the question of the audience became really interesting. You have a triangle of gazes: the live audience, the live performer and the online audience. As a performer, I have a relationship with the people on Zoom and a relationship with the people in space, and they have a relationship whether they are caring about it or not. They are not performing yet for each other unless they see each other, and this I find interesting.
Regarding technology, I know I have an ease with it, but I also want to be naive about it. What I loved in Visions was approaching the camera the way monkeys would approach tools, you know, “ah, it’s this thing”, and you’re running your finger over it and feeling all the textures of it.
Anouk Llaurens: Yes, exploring the camera as an object first, not knowing, taking it as an object with its affordances.
Maya Dalinsky: Yes, and also like an object in space and on equal footing with its function as a recording device. Of course, you don't forget entirely that it's filming or that it is proposing something for later, but you also bring that other layer of what it is, and this is what I like, actually. Rather than replacing one by the other, how does the accumulation of the device with the live setting propose new things?
Anouk Llaurens: Yes, enriching instead of replacing. When I teach people often say, "Oh it's much easier when I have my eyes closed. When I open my eyes, I lose something." And I say to them that’s an impression, because in reality they’re gaining one more layer of perception. I know that the visual layer comes with judgment and that can feel limiting–like losing a layer of spontaneity–but it is possible to use vision as a tactile sense, so not so much an intellectual one that judges.
The impact of technology on our bodies and life is a big question. Because of so-called “progress” and the crazy fast evolution of technology, we’re losing human abilities, because technology is replacing/doing a lot for us. So how do we maintain the archive of human’s abilities alive in our bodies? It may not be possible to keep all the layers, but how do we integrate and play with new technologies to gain, rather than deprive us of abilities? How does it serve us, or not. It’s a field where Lisa is very strong, and I see similarities in both of you in the sense that you’re not afraid of technology.
Maya Dalinsky: Yes, If I could go back to school I would want to study the history of technology. It's interesting because when you have kids, you see them born into a place where the stuff is all there because it is interesting how, in the slice of time you’re on the planet, you see a certain evolution of things. I’m trying to imagine the timelines of all these people involved in your project and Lisa, who is older. Our timelines cross and in that crossover, there is a certain technological landscape. And then of course now that I see David, my older son, who is nine, and his relationship to technology, I’m always super reactionary. But then I say, "Oh no, but this is the status quo for you, of course." I see it as an evolution of something that I knew before. Like now there is so much discussion about AI, and I’m like, "Well David, you're gonna have talks with your kids about the world you lived in before AI the way I talk to you about the world before the internet.” And I get a little freaked out, you know, I don't want to resist this change. But now I’ve been on the planet forty-three years before AI started becoming available to the masses, and it's a little like, wow, what are we doing with this?
Anouk Llaurens: I’m reading a book called “Nexus” by an Israeli historian, Yuval Noah Harari, at the moment. The book is about information, and information is connected to technology of course. The question is, can we still make choices about technology that create and sustain human agency? Regarding AI–non-human intelligence– what choice do we make? Do we continue the research or not, do we pause, do we reverse, do we redirect?
Maya Dalinsky: Yes, especially when you see the interests involved, which is of course not the topic of this interview, but you should always ask, “Who is it serving?” If you want to make a parallel to the social and political environment in which Lisa developed her work, it’s also about critiquing the interests of the power structure, you could say.
Anouk Llaurens: Yes. Her work is empowering people, it supports their emancipation. And as we cannot avoid technology, how can we make it an ally?
Maya Dalinsky: Exactly. And where do you find your agency in it? I think I see a crossover with Lisa's project: she’s making a game, she’s using the technology to make a video game. I love video games! I embrace video games way more than I embrace AI. If all computer-based technology were to die and just one survived and it's a Nintendo console, I’d be super happy! That's what brings me a lot of joy! But I think it’s about the creative relationship to technology versus the consumer one that is important.
Anouk Llaurens: And in this case they are creating a game so that people can learn about themselves. It's a study.
Maya Dalinsky: It makes this whole interaction with the computer a tool again, which I really love. It's even changing your physicality with the machine, with which you maybe had a determined routine already. Because that's the thing about mobile phones for me: we have a habit now, it's a pattern, like a little prosthetic. When you have someone else's phone in your hand, it's like “Oh, who are you? I don't know you.” Even if it's the same device. It's great when things are built into that to help feedback to you and make you rewire. And that opens up the space for political thinking again. You wake up a space where questions can come in through fun and through curiosity. And that way you just break this very capitalist relationship that we have with our stuff now.
Notes:
[1] http://somework.be/media/Julien%20Bruneau/homepage/portfolio%20phr%C3%A9atiques%202012-.pdf
[2] http://www.idocde.net/idocs/904
[3] “The two sides of touch” is the name given by Anouk LLaurens to a Tuning Scores exploration. It is about the reciprocity of touch, touching and being touched. You rather explore an object or small part of someone else's body (hand) through touch or explore yourself through the touch of objects or another body.