Interview of Myriam van Imschoot by Anouk Llaurens
Anouk Llaurens: Hello Myriam, thank you for agreeing to do this interview. You've been talking to Lisa Nelson for many years, haven't you?
Myriam van Imschoot: Yes, from 1999, when I first met her during the On the Edge Festival in Paris, curated by Mark Tompkins almost 23 years ago. I’ve changed so much since then. At that time, I was focused mostly on research, writing, and conversation for a doctoral thesis on improvisation.
In 2001, I took the Contredanse workshop in Brussels with Lisa, where I met Baptiste Andrien, Franck Beaubois, you, and many others. I was also able to observe how Lisa was using tuning score tools in her projects around that time — for example, in Emmanuelle Huynh’s Hourvari (2001) at the Centre Pompidou, as well as in her own project Theatre of Operations / An Observatory, presented two years later at the same venue. I went to Vermont a couple of times. But in that same period, I fell ill, which led me to reinvent myself and rethink my desires — toward becoming an artist working with the voice as my main medium. My relationship with Lisa changed over time — naturally — with these transitions.
As a young writer and researcher, I found myself drawn to improvisation with an almost political sensibility. It made me question aesthetics, mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, and alternative modes of production and transmission. While Mark Tompkins, with his festival, had aimed to raise awareness of the history of improvised dance by highlighting artistic lineages and connecting key figures to a new generation of artists, I was interested in the fertile ground for an oral history of compositional methods. What had happened in Western art to create the conditions conducive to the emergence of improvisation as an art form — and, at other times, to its erasure or neglect? I had to meet the artists and engage in dialogue with them.
Anouk Llaurens: Why orality?
Myriam van Imschoot: In the classic definition, history begins with written documents. I didn’t agree with this temporal demarcation. History had to be thought of differently. There is the bodily transmission that occurs when we dance, as well as the laboratory of thoughts and ideas in spoken exchange — with as wide a variety of registers as dance itself. With many people from Judson Dance Theater, Grand Union, etc., still alive, that history was palpable. I conducted interviews with June Ekman, Elaine Summers, Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer, Deborah Hay, Steve Paxton, Simone Forti, etc. I was in touch with Katie Duck and Mark Tompkins, David Zambrano, as well as improvisers from the British scene such as Julian Hamilton and Body Weather artists. Soon, two voices began to gain more weight for me: those of Lisa Nelson and Steve Paxton.
Lisa’s work is on attention — a kind of way of sculpting the faculty of being attentive, which produces something. It is simple and complex at the same time. Attention can create realities. It can compose — whether it is an individual act or carried out in a group. Moreover, these “results” of the art of attention can manifest themselves in any discipline, or we can frame them as we see fit: as a dance, a haiku, or — why not — in my case, in the form of a sculpted conversation.
This is when I began to apply Lisa’s methods and developed the “keyword interview,” or the “dialogical monologue.” I call it a monologue because it’s one person talking from a keyword — like a verbal improvisation, supported by the listener’s attention. Like Lisa, I began to understand that the interview could become a protocol you could play with. For example, we would choose a keyword — Stillness — prepare briefly, and start. It would become a run, which could last ten, fifteen, twenty minutes. The goal wasn’t to be exhaustive, but to make an “episode.” Lisa talked a lot about how to structure time, which was a fascinating practice. We could do a second, third run, etc., and take a pause to “report” and ask questions.
In these interviews, the most important thing wasn’t the monologue itself, but attentive listening. Even if the listener didn’t speak, the quality of listening could determine the dialogue. It was from then on that I began to understand that my practice was about the act of listening — and what it produces.
I did several “keyword interviews” with Lisa and also with Steve, each bringing their own personality to the keyword score [1]. When at some point Lisa introduced me to someone not as a historian and writer, but as a conversation artist, something stuck. This was an important turning point in my transition. She had seen something in me before I could even name it. Conversation became my testing ground: playing with forms, perceptions, states, and relationships. I’ve explored this in different contexts, including an event organized with André Lepecki at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt during the Tanzkongress. I was leading a focus group, inviting Lisa, Amos Hetz, and others. We created a score for structuring speech and debate differently, with instructions like pause, elaborate, and exemplify. The idea was to understand discussion as a process of collectively negotiated composition.
It wasn’t always easy, but when everyone felt responsible for what was taking shape, it became a unique experience.
I believe this inspired Lisa to invite me to engage in a public encounter at the Centre national de la dance (CN D) in Paris. When was it? 2021.. She did not want to have a traditional dialogue in this set-up. She threw me back into the game, and we played.
Anouk Llaurens : Have you left semantics at some point?
Myriam van Imschoot : Yes. Orality made me interested in the voice as such. This transition was initiated by an illness lasting four or five years. Lisa, who loves talking about health and is very wise in this area, became a guide of sorts. She approaches life's problems with the same tenacity as an artistic project, and that's when I understood that some friendships come from attraction to a certain idiosyncrasy in thinking. When I'm creating, in the studio or practicing, Lisa can enter like a scent, a layer of time. Sometimes I wonder how Lisa would do something, or how she would solve this or that question.
Anouk Llaurens: Yes, it's the recognition of this presence and this influence, even if you work with the voice and it takes other forms than the Tuning Score.
Myriam van Imschoot: I'm at a point in my life where I see that an unorthodox, truly "bastard" approach has developed. And when you talk about Édouard Glissant in the text [2] you sent me, I recognize myself quite a bit. I worked little by little, with one little thing at a time, step by step. This created something that I'm beginning to recognize with a logic of persistence. It's a subject that interests me enormously: discovering my own methods while being engaged in shared, transcultural processes, where tradition and heritage also play a fundamental role, as in the YouYou Group [3] . It's only now, looking at what happened after ten or twelve years, that I'm beginning to understand the affinity with Lisa's work throughout this very journey.
Anouk Llaurens: You mention YouYou Group as well as shared and transcultural processes, in which tradition and heritage also play a fundamental role. I am very interested in the notion of tradition myself. I am engaged in traditional practices like Kashmiri yoga, Shiatsu and through the practice of the Yi-Ching. I tend more and more to consider Tuning Score as a kind of traditional dance because it transmits fundamental tools to survive as an individual within a community. I also see that traditional dances for example are re-appearing because it might be a necessity of our times after cutting all the roots. This being said, I wonder how you cope with modernity and the notion of tradition.
Myriam van Imschoot: Walter Benjamin is a philosopher who helped me understand what emerged with modernism, with industrialization, and how perception itself was put into crisis. For me, modernism—if I take a shortcut—is a practice of profanation and secularization. You know, the famous declaration of the "Death of God!" Maybe because I come from a religious family, I've always had a problem with the arrogance of that narrative, as if it could apply to the entire world. Modernism proceeds through rupture, rejecting the old order so the new can emerge. However necessary it might have been to liberate oneself from the shackles of the past, modernism ended up trapped in a series of cuts and death declarations, each one coming faster than the last, until there was nothing left to break away from. Art history is the cartoon version of this, with all the successive 'isms', and in the end, it's just a charade for the production of the new, which, of course, serves capitalism all too well.
The more I worked with other cultures in groups, the more I realized what a harmful narrative this had been. In the YouYou Group, I'm with people who are religious, who live in a world where God is not dead, and they're no less contemporary for it. Meanwhile, in the art world, we've seen a return of spirituality, animism, indigenous mythologies, and rituals—and in the wake of that wave, religion has resurfaced as a theme once again. I find it fascinating. How do we organize our values?
The ruptures, to me, feel male, oppressive, and patriarchal, rather than honoring the more intangible threads of affinity, connection, transmission, continuity, and survival. In a feminist sense, parenting, caring, solidarity, and so on, are perhaps more life-affirming ways to move through time as a collective. I like to believe in the living knowledge of practicing communities—rhizomatic, transmissive, malleable, full of emergence for other manifestations. I'm not saying this just because I'm getting older, but because the importance of lineage and transmission has always been intrinsically part of my worldview and my art practice.
Anouk Llaurens: Yes exactly, this is what I am trying to convey through this research and publication. I don't want to cut; I want to continue. Or I want to cut to see how it continues. There are fundamental things to take with us in Lisa's work! Attention is so fundamental; listening is so fundamental. How can you cut from that?
Myriam van Imschoot: There is nothing to cut from, you would lose a lot.
Anouk Llaurens: and the work supports you to continue your own life.
Myriam van Imschoot: Yes. Not that tradition can't be constraining in its own right—think of the conservative versions of it. Walter Benjamin distinguishes between the tradition of oppressive power relations and the tradition of the repressed. The latter is the tradition of the margins, which we need to keep being reminded of, with its potential and unfinished business still to be accomplished. And it has much more to do with emancipation than with power dynamics.
Anouk Llaurens: Exactly!
Myriam van Imschoot: So it's this kind of tradition that interests me—not preservation or restoration. It's alive, it changes, it transforms, it mutates, and at some point, you look at it and say, "Oh, this is a whole other animal!"
To go back to Lisa, I find it inspiring that someone who hasn't presented many dance works in Europe still has such a strong following. In contrast to Steve, who accepted his place in the various movements of dance history as both a prerequisite and a curse of being an "avant-garde" artist, Lisa's relationship with history is more complex. Her work hardly appears in any dance history books, yet it has inspired many, and tuning groups exist both in Europe and America. This makes me think more along the lines of fostering cultures as practicing communities. I feel at any rate this is what happens in the YouYou Group.
Anouk Llaurens: Where does “youyou” come from?
Myriam van Imschoot: It's spread across North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, India, and the Basque country. Some cultures in Romania and Hungary also have youyou -like shrieks. There are different techniques. You can modulate a long, high-pitched tone with your tongue, or use your throat, or various techniques to help shake the sound and enhance the vibrational effect of the trill. You can add a tail at the end of the trill, like a tag, or introduce it with a call, like I heard a Jordanian member do. Sometimes the trill varies within the same country—you can hear significant differences between Casablanca, Tangiers, or Oujda. My favorite is maybe the Egyptian zaghrouta , which sounds melodic; that's how I heard it while living in Cairo.
Now, a big pleasure in the group is hearing these different voices extended, each with its own timbre, technique, and story behind it. Comparison happens organically. Who does it, when, why, and what are the functions? Because we have people from different backgrounds, we're not only more curious, but also more open to accepting different uses or experiments. We're thirty members in an open group.
Anouk Llaurens: And how do you function? Are you teaching each other?
Myriam van Imschoot: Yes, we teach each other, which is how it works traditionally—by imitation. It's not one person who transmits it, it's a collective immersion in a sonic realm with its own affect and liveliness. It's a very strong experience. Ultimately, you become inclined to do it in a particular way, which is often not even a conscious choice, but more of a tendency. It's your ear and its appetite that lead the voice.
Anouk Llaurens: So you understand your voice through hearing multiple voices. That's tuning!
Myriam van Imschoot: Exactly, it can only tune within multiplicity—a very fine process. And that's why we always say, when we do workshops or organize a Club Zaghareed , it's a collective pedagogy.
Anouk Llaurens: How do you give a workshop, then?
Myriam van Imschoot: In fact, we try not to use the term "workshop." We call it a Club Zaghareed , and ideally, it's facilitated by more than one person. I work a lot for the group because I have privileges and can access funds, etc. but in fact we consist of a group where most women have strong alpha energy and different systems of decision making and influence interweave. If there's an argument, the oldest women in the group will often have moral authority, as is common in many of the cultures the members come from. Over the years, we've created a philosophy, a particular code of conduct, as well as a need for social experiment and an approach to the voice that's anchored in our bodies and our stories.
Anouk Llaurens: Stories, like storytelling—what kind of stories?
Myriam van Imschoot: The stories of our voices. Have you seen The Gift [4] , the movie?
Anouk Llaurens: Yes!
Myriam van Imschoot: That's an example. Four women—Sarah Léo, Fatiha El Mhrabet, Anissa Rouas, and Malika Mdregg—are portrayed in the film, and they reveal how the youyou affected their lives through stories and song. It's only at the end of the film that you find out how they're related. I make my own work aside from the YouYou Group , but I must say that the YouYou Group is my great learning. Blind learning! Haha!
Anouk Llaurens: What do you learn?
Myriam van Imschoot: It's always a bit different, depending on the moment. (Silence) But one thing is the relationship between the voice and the space. There are particular ways of listening and particular ways of voicing when you start from a relationship to space. I've learned a lot about resonance and how to give myself over to it completely. Trance comes into play here, too. Maybe that's no surprise when you think of the youyou as a cry of joy that can trigger emotional states.
When I work with trained singers, I can see how they've "wired" their singing differently and how difficult it is for them to be receptive to all these factors. In the YouYou Group , we may hardly meet each other outside of the group, but we've developed an intimacy I've never experienced before that makes us travel with our voice. Although youyou isn't part of my own culture, I've become native to the particular culture we've been constructing as a group. We practice social togetherness in sound, and I wouldn't want to miss it for the world.
Anouk Llaurens: Are there men in your group?
Myriam van Imschoot: For now, we say we are an all-women group, but one that is hospitable to men. If men come, we welcome them, but that doesn't change the fact that it's an all-female group.
Anouk Llaurens: And traditionally, the youyou is more of a feminine expression, right?
Myriam van Imschoot: Men can do it, but sometimes they do it out of mockery. In the Basque country, men really do it, as it's common for both men and women to do irrintzi (similar to youyou ). In our group, there is a majority of Belgians of Moroccan descent, and for them, it's not so common for men to do it. When the YouYou Group gave a workshop at RITSC, we didn't make a big deal about the fact that we were in a mixed group of men and women. The men youyou'd like there were no tomorrow, and we invited them to perform with us in Mars, where we wanted to expand the range of singing with deep voices. But when they couldn't join, we learned to sing deeply ourselves, which was very interesting. We realized that, as women, it's not so common for us to dig that deep. The "low voice" of women is often underrated, even rejected as an "abject" voice. However, we insisted that while we may not have the warm drone of men, we have a range that's worth exploring, even if it sounds uncanny. Hoda Siahtiri, an Iranian artist, was in Mars, and she brought her own insights to the practice, inspired by her research on lamentation in the Bakhtiari people of Iran.
Anouk Llaurens: It’s beautiful! It makes you want to join your group!
Myriam van Imschoot: We try to keep it a community project by accepting all the incongruities among us. When an artist joins us, it's important that she doesn't project her own assumptions. Nobody is in their usual place, including me!
Notes:
[1] The keyword interviews were published in Conversations in Vermont (2022), an online interview publication edited by Myriam Van Imschoot in collaboration with co-editor Tom Engels, focusing on Steve Paxton and Lisa Nelson.
[3] http://oralsite.be/pages/Club_Zaghareed_FR
[4] http://oralsite.be/pages/Le_Cadeau