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[title]After studying puppetry, Gisèle Vienne began to work with dancers at the Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker studios in Belgium and found she could translate her fascination with artificial bodies to a unique brand of choreography. In Kindertotenlieder, which plays at New York Live Arts October 29 through Nov 1, Vienne creates an unsettling environment in which some of the dancers resemble holograms. On the phone from Paris, the choreographer talked about creating a mood.
How does one bring the idea of uncanny to life? In the haunting Kindertotenlieder, the French-Austrian choreographer Gisèle Vienne creates a trippy landscape unlike anything you’ve seen before. The setting is a snowy night. Life-size dolls and performers—some so still and glassy-eyed you feel like you’re having a hallucination—end up on a downy-white stage where a death-metal concert, featuring Stephen O’Malley and Peter Rehberg of KTL and an androgynous lead singer, takes place. Created in collaboration with writer Dennis Cooper, romanticism is at the heart of the piece. For Vienne, speaking in a phone interview from Paris, what we’re afraid of can be a subject of beauty. “I know that audiences really go through a journey,” she says. “When I made Kindertotenlieder, I was with a professional snowboarder, who was doing extreme sports. He was really going on the edge of what he could do. That’s what I’m looking for in an artistic experience.”
Why did you want to explore the notion of the uncanny? How did you start thinking about this piece?
I’m very obsessed by various writers and philosophers. Certainly one major influence behind this piece was a philosophy-economics book called The Accursed Share by Georges Bataille. This is a book dealing with—and I don’t know the exact English translation of this idea—unproductive expenses. How in an economy, there are spaces where communities are losing money and energy; it’s dealing a lot with religion and sacrifices and celebration. There are three different types of ceremonies onstage: You will see a funeral. It’s short, but there is a very clear reference to an Austrian pagan ceremony called the perchten parade, where you see monsters made out of furs. The third ceremony is remembering a death-metal concert. I thought it was interesting to make a religious, pagan and artistic crossing. These three concerns are also places where we are dealing with representing what we are frightened of and death. I was already working with the American writer Dennis Cooper, and we both deal a lot with confused, romantic teenagers who have extreme feelings. It is also putting these questions and concerns in a world that could be one of teenagers in the 21st century. And then I was very interested in depicting a new romantic work, really making reference to romantic heroes like Werther from Goethe. I’m coming very much from a European culture, and Dennis is Californian and from another generation, so I think it’s very interesting how our cultures are clashing. I wanted to make a link between the Cooper and West Coast teenagers and romantic teenagers from the 19th and early 20th centuries.
What is the deal with your wintry set?
In dealing with romanticism, it was very interesting to work with nature and weather and landscape. So a central element in Kindertotenlieder is the depiction of the weather and snow, and how you have these very introverted teenagers whose expressions and emotions are going through, not only their bodies, but also going through the music, through the lights, which are kind of extensions of their body and their emotional states. I think this is very typical of what you would find in romantic painting, where landscape or the architecture or the weather would be a strong reflection of the interior state of the character.
Actually for a visual-art work, I started to create these life-size dolls. They are very realistic, but when you see them live you understand, at a certain point, that they are dolls. Still, it is confusing; you feel like they are real people. When you figure out they are dolls, it’s pretty ghostly or spooky. This is a strong element for this uncanny feeling. So I started to make these dolls. I made a whole photo series. I went into the Alps in Austria and did a photo shoot that I gave to Dennis, and we talked a lot, and he started to write this piece. I was thinking about big mountain landscapes in Austria, and he was thinking about a snow globe. He actually wrote a poem about a snow globe that is not in the piece anymore. I liked very much that there would be something extremely realistic in the snowfall or in certain elements, but obviously when the snow is on the ground—even when it is a nice fake snow—that it looks like fake snow, and that we know it’s a set design. I like this mixture of the real snow element and then very obviously fake, theatrical elements. I think there is something very moving in this combination. So I was inspired by a snowy landscape you would find in the Alps. Then I must say that a strong element is also the lights. Patrick Riou, who is the lighting designer, has been a collaborator for many years. In painting, obviously the way you treat the light is a major element; onstage it’s the same thing. Sometimes it’s more discreet, and it’s underappreciated, but I really value and know how much the lights are adding to the mood. Kindertotenlieder, for me, was a beginning of staging the landscape and nature, and I developed it through other pieces that came later. It became very important to represent natural elements onstage.
How many performers are in the piece?
There are five performers—one actor, four dancers—and two musicians, Peter Rehberg and Stephen O’Malley. They are real musicians. The singer is a fake singer. And then you have 10 dolls. So there are 17 bodies onstage, but the 17 bodies have different qualities. One thing that is actually very particular and strange in Kindertotenlieder is that the five performers play their parts in very different ways. The actor is playing a super realistic studio type of acting. [Laughs] He looks very alive. Then you have two other guys who sometimes play realistic and sometimes feel more ghostly—they don’t look like they’re here with us. And then you have one other; it’s a boy, but played by a girl, and you don’t know if she’s a ghost or a hallucination—the way she moves is very stylish, but it could also be a human moving that way under heavy drugs.
What about the singer?
The singer is never realistic. There are different qualities of playing: You are questioning, are these two or three bodies in the same scene? Are they here? Is this body real and that one not real, and this body a ghost and this one is a hallucination? So there is a very strange vibration between the bodies you will see onstage. Who is really here and who is really existing and who is a hallucination? This was a very interesting game to work with; they are completely stylized—from an image that is a pure representation that you don’t even feel there is a human here with you in the same room as a human that feels to be really here. And of course the dolls fit in very well because they also feel like they can be here, but they can be a representation. They have a vibration in their confusing presence, too.
You say that the singer is fake—do you mean that she doesn’t really sing?
Yeah. She’s a dancer. In Kindertotenlieder, she’s really like a sculpture, like a type of icon. At the very end, you see a man holding her; sometimes she’s falling to the ground. She is central to the piece and has the admiration of the audience and her movements are actually very inspired by movements from religious paintings, which turn out to look very much like movements from rock stars. She starts out a very sublime, strong character, and then she’s a very destroyed and sublime character. I thought this is also something that is in the romantic aesthetic and in the culture of rock music and metal. There is something sublime coming out of the destruction, like with Kurt Cobain or Amy Winehouse—sometimes the more they become a ruin and are falling apart, the more they create fascination for the audience, I thought it was interesting to consider this fascination we can have in front of a body that feels beyond human, but that is also a dying body. So it’s more than human. I really treated her like a religious sculpture crossing with a rock star somehow.
She is so spooky and sad.
She’s really like a doll or a mannequin, and she is extremely good in this super stylish movement. And then at a certain point, she dubs a song by Jesse Sykes, who is a beautiful singer from Seattle; she has a very melancholic way of singing. Also, it was important for me that it’s not obvious if the singer is a man or a woman. There is long hair, but in the metal or rock culture, bodies can be very androgynous and the length of hair is not a question anymore. I wanted to have a very androgynous body, and the voice has also this androgyny and this fragility; I would say romanticism is really at the heart of the piece and how things we’re afraid of or a darker topic can be a subject of fascination and beauty also.
How darkness can be romantic?
Yes. It’s a very physical experience for the audience. We have performed it for several years, so I know that that people go through a journey. Of course, there are more theoretical topics in there, but it’s also a very physical, emotional piece where if you agree to go on the journey that we propose, it really touches all your senses. I hope the entire piece brings you to the edge of what you are afraid of or what is scaring you, but in a way that is stimulating. It’s the stimulation to go on the edge of what you can take. I think this is something you can understand from very intense rock music: You don’t go to a concert to hurt yourself, but sometimes the sounds are so intense and extreme that it could nearly hurt you. Yet it’s not hurting you, it’s stimulating you. So we’re investigating limits. It’s the opposite of macabre. It’s going to the edge of what you take to feel the intensity of life somehow.
How do you choreograph the extremely slow movement? The performers sometimes look like holograms to me.
It’s interesting you’re saying that. In the movement, as I said, they can look like dolls or pictures or very stylized or realistic, but I also try to show a different relationship to their bodies. One looks really present and you see his flesh; the other one can look like an image, and I guess that brings this hologram feeling. The weird thing is that we work in a very choreographic way and we worked on different movement qualities and rhythms for each body. The performers are dressed like an audience going to a concert. We didn’t work through a psychological way to get these movements, but through a technical, choreographic method. My biggest education is in music. When I work onstage, I create different melodies for the bodies. One of my big challenges is how to stretch and transform the perception of the audience. I don’t know if you have ever attended a Japanese Noh play, but I lived in Japan for several months and I was amazed at how when you would go to a Noh play, sometimes you had a lot of people sleeping at the beginning. In France, it would be rude if someone was sleeping! But I realized something. When you come in from the street in Tokyo or Paris or wherever you are, it’s like tuning an instrument. I find when you go to a Noh play, you get retuned. The first step is that you get retuned through the play: It brings you to another rhythm. You were in a different rhythm outside. First, there is kind of a rhythmical shock. When we talk about Noh play, you have to slow down and get in tune to the rhythm of the play. So there is this introductory retuning that readjusts your body. I’m very interested in achieving that tuning of the audience, to bring the spectator into a different rhythm than they are used to. There are also the lights and the music. I really consider every element onstage and work with the vibrations among those rhythms—they bring you to certain states. It’s easy to say that this takes a long time to tune onstage. It takes me a few weeks to really nail the piece onstage—it’s very delicate work. Recently, I saw a piece in Paris that surprised me; it was about hypnosis. The piece explained very specifically the techniques of hypnosis and this play was hypnotizing the audience.
Really? Did it work?
[Laughs] Yes! I got hypnotized. And I even knew it before I went in and was like, Okay, it’s never going to work, but whatever. I really got hypnotized. At a certain point, I was a bit more clear-minded in the piece, and then I got spaced out again. Most of the people really got hypnotized. I understand that what I’m playing with is optical and rhythmical and sound vibrations. We are not hypnotizing the audience, but there is a little bit of this technique in there. That’s why sometimes people tell me they’re hallucinating when they’re watching the piece because the rhythmical variations are creating this slight hypnotic feeling from the audience. I wasn’t aware of it until I learned about the techniques of hypnosis.
Did you study puppetry in Paris?
Yeah. As I told you my longest [area] of study was music, and then I studied philosophy, and then I studied puppetry. It could appear as a strange path, but I went to puppetry because I was very interested in movement and sculpture and visual art, and I thought that the challenge of contemporary puppetry could be movement and visual art. It was very exciting to study puppetry; it’s an ancient art form, so we got the chance to work with masters from all over the world and also with contemporary directors and artists. I worked a lot with masks and all the things that are not puppetry, but an extension of the family. After that, I started to work with dancers. I was invited to work at the studios of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker in Brussels, and I got to work with these amazing dancers. I thought it would be a bit foreign, but with my musical study and puppetry, which was actually about staging movements, I found my way in. I guess that’s how people started to be excited by the work, because my way into choreography was a little strange. [Laughs] You see in Kindertotenlieder, movements that I could discover through artificial bodies, through types of puppets. I’m also very inspired by how movies or video effects can create different types of movement. I have mainly worked with dancers since then. What I am really interested in, in puppetry is why in the 21st century our relationship to human-shaped objects—even if we can have a very rational relationship to them, we know they’re objects—we still have a different relationship to a human-shaped object than to a chair or a lamp. One of my central working subjects is our relationship to artificial bodies. They can be high-tech or low-tech artificial bodies; they can be a wooden sculptures or something elaborate. I stared working with dancers in ’99, and there was this big movement in European choreography called non-dance, and it was conceptual where people would mainly question the body. Some pieces would just be purely conceptual or theoretical. It was an interesting encounter, because questioning the artificial body and meeting a choreograph field that was questioning the body, obviously created an interesting, obvious dialogue. I thought it was great to work mainly with dancers in a relationship with these artificial bodies.
You mentioned you were thinking about figures from religious paintings for the singer. What era are you referring to?
We went through several periods, because you will find recurring poses. I was really interested in poses of martyrs, virgins or saints; I was looking for what is recurrent, what is coming back? What are the classic poses that would eventually cross several centuries? We looked at a big range of pictures: What from these poses, from these martyrs and saints, what would you find back in the culture of rock music?
How do you direct those dancers who look still, like dolls?
First of all, it’s always a state they’re trying for. We sometimes work through very long improvisations. I give them written instructions; they have a path and poses they have to go through, and then we have to work sometimes in long improvisations so they can slowly get used to the quality they have to achieve. These long improvisations also make them go into another state. They are really getting into some kind of trance, especially in Kindertotenlieder. They don’t have all the same techniques, but some are meditating a lot before or doing special types of exercises to get in this state. But I can also show them the type of rhythm and qualities we are looking for with video. Video can be sped up or slowed down or reversed. We work on this inverted dynamic; what is interesting is that they cannot do it exactly like on the video, so they have to find a strategy to reinvent these effects.
How?
Sometimes I feel like I’m working with the aftereffect. We would do a movement and then I would add effects and effects and effects. I would edit and make it like a video work. But it has to become very organic in the end. This is the work. Even if they have artificial movement, the body has to be very relaxed and soft. We work on the points of dynamic. You can find these techniques in hip-hop—they work a lot with movie special effects, but I’m looking for more vibration: How can I keep a more human quality, how can I bring some vulnerability and some mistakes and some organic things in there? In hip-hop, people can be amazing, but they’re very straightforward. They do it amazingly well from A to Z. I’m not looking for amazing, I’m looking for contradictions and variation from states. It’s going through different moods. Also, the performer is vibrating in front of you—you feel he/she is there with you and then disappearing again, and you have a representation of him or her or just a shadow—and then she’s coming back to you. It’s just about how she gets in the body and how she seems to leave the body. That’s what I try to find in all of these variations of quality in this sometimes very retouched movement. I told you the singer was more inspired by rock culture and religious representation, but there is one character where we work a lot on recurrent teenager positions.
How so?
How some teenagers would hold their body—what would it mean if they would hold it like that? I also work from one pose to the other. How you get from one painting to the next can also be a way of working in the piece.
Is Butoh is an influence?
Yes! Certainly. It’s interesting you’re saying that, because it’s actually very rare I get asked that. You’re saying it just makes me realize that when I was 17, I was living in Berlin, and I went to a Butoh performance that was extremely strong and had a huge impact on me. I had the feeling that I was already very much into artificial bodies, and for the first time I really saw the connection between puppetry and choreography. For some reason I thought it was later when I discovered the work of Maguy Marin or Josef Nadj—but I realize that when I saw this first Butoh dance, that’s when it hit me. It’s huge, and I forgot that! [Laughs] It was an important time in my life.
How did you meet Dennis Cooper?
I read his books and then in 2003, I started to work on a piece called I Apologize, where I was thinking it would be amazing if Cooper would collaborate on it. At that time, he was living in Los Angeles and I was living in Paris, so it wasn’t that obvious to meet up, but then I wrote him. He didn’t know about my work. I was, like, 27. But we started to write, and he got curious about the work and said, “You can use my text if you like.” I said, “That’s very kind of you, but I don’t want to use your text like that—I’d like to really collaborate, to work together on a project with you writing especially for it.” He was coming to Europe so I asked if we could work together for four days to decide if we should collaborate. He was like, “Let’s do it.” I didn’t know who the man was behind the text—he could be a sweetheart, or he could be some crazy person. [Laughs] He came and I had prepared a lot. Those first days were kind of a miracle because it matched so incredibly well. I realized, he understands what I’m saying. I don’t have to explain everything. That was incredible! He’s from ’53, and I’m from ’76, and I’m born in France. He grew up in California. We have totally different lives, but we have strong crossing interests in literature and in art. Also, there is something human: He’s an extremely nice and generous, beautiful person. After years of work, I realize other artists I’ve met who are doing intense work, sometimes they’re not very nice. It was so obvious that we could work together that I’m still amazed by it. It was planned that we would do this one performance together and now here we are 10 years later, and it’s the anniversary of our first premiere. There are a lot of writers I love and who I would love to work with, and I get offers and all that stuff, but there is this dilemma. With some artists, the more you work with them, the more you have to do with them, and it keeps growing. It would be a pity not to move forward.
Gisèle Vienne performs at New York Live Arts Oct 29–Nov 1.