Choreographing a Blueprint for Survival: A Conversation with Miguel Gutierrez

Gordon Fung: You have a connection to Chicago through the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. You participated in the Low Residency MFA program there at the height of the pandemic. Did you focus on performance during that time?

Miguel Gutierrez: No, I ended up focusing on drawing, which was the last fucking thing I expected to do. I thought I would be working on video. But weirdly, like right before I got there, I had been starting to draw a little bit, just like doodling and stuff in LA. And then I decided to take it a little bit more seriously and people were encouraging, and I was like, why not? Let me just push this practice.

GF: Do you think your experience in this drawing program influenced your choreography or other time-based works?

MG: Yes. I mean it’s funny. So, I resist. When I started the program there, I felt like a lot of people were trying to impose the idea of, oh, now you’re choreographing with the pencil, or they were trying to make these very annoying comparisons between dancing and drawing.

I feel like when people don’t know about dance, their default notion of dance is a romantic one, a kind of lyrical, romantic sort of almost balletic idea of, it’s just beauty, dance, bodies, and harmony. I’ve always been much more invested in the affective experience of dancing, a kind of somatic exploration.

So, I’d never have thought of it in a shape-based way—or I hadn’t emphasized that, let’s say. And so, to map a gesture onto the idea of drawing, for me, felt very inadequate, but fine. So that was my initial rebellion, but I think over time in the program, I realized that yes, I am also involved in a visual art medium, dance is a visual art medium, whether I like it or not.

And actually, I will say that one of the things that affected me the most heading into the project was this book that I found at the SAIC library by Mira Schendel (b. 1919 Zurich, Switzerland; d. 1988, São Paulo, Brazil) called Monotypes (2015). She’s a visual artist born in Europe but then was in Brazil in the fifties and the sixties. And it’s this book, I just love [her drawings] so much. They’re these weird, I don’t know if it’s pencil or some kind of ink pen, but they’re on translucent paper; and they’re very kind of crude but beautiful and spare.

And that became a huge compositional inspiration [for Super Nothing]. When I was in my conversation with the lighting designer I sent her a lot of those drawings and my own drawings, which are very invested in blur and shape, kind of like mysterious codes or symbols, but there’s also a lot of interest in the space around them on the paper. And I think she really got the memo with that, in terms of the design and the way that the light and color function in the piece.

GF: How do your collaborators inform your creative process? Can you share a bit about how you select dancers and how you work together in the studio?

MG: Well, in terms of selection, it’s always a sense of who I want to be in the room with, or some sort of instinct. I’m listening to instinct because I work mostly project to project, so it’s usually a different group of people for each piece, and I can’t really fully describe it. Other than that, I suddenly feel compelled to spend time with a person. And maybe sometimes it’s someone I’ve worked with before.

Often, it’s someone I’m seeing perform in someone else’s work, or I just am like “Wow, that person really stands out to me.” Maybe they took a workshop with me. I meet people in lots of different ways.

I think I’ve held auditions three times, maybe, [throughout] my entire career—and for very, very specific reasons. So, it’s kind of more social or happenstance. And then I’m just imagining who will go with who, what ensemble of people intrigue me, what feels like it’s a good mix of people. I’ve had experiences where I started a project and I was like, “Oh, someone’s missing.” It’s suddenly a sensation of: “The recipe is not complete.”

And then in terms of how I work with people, it’s very interactive. I talk a lot about what is interesting [to] me. I invite conversation around that. And then we engage in a lot of improvisation. I generally guide people through some very basic values I have in improvisation, having to do with sourcing movement and letting it go in many directions.

In this particular instance [of Super Nothing], there was a lot of looking at video—archival video of previous rehearsal processes. There were also a lot of recordings of the rehearsal itself. And then reconstructing from video, which is a very common tactic that a lot of choreographers use.

But in this instance, I am always looking for a strange, I don’t know, an energy or a kind of compositional fascination. I couldn’t necessarily tell you, “Oh, I’m looking for every time that so-and-so crosses from left to right.” It’s never that. It’s just like, “Oh, there’s that. That caught me.”

And so, I’ll do timestamps, like, minute 2:07 to minute 2:11. Sometimes I want those four seconds. And sometimes it’s longer passages, it’s retrieving a strange thing, and then it shifts to some other form of craft where once it exists, there’s a lot of working the material, you know, faster, slower, changing position, changing configuration, changing order.

[With Super Nothing], there are a ridiculous number of small things that it comes from, which have been put next to each other or blended together. It’s just like if I were to really go back and I mean, we have it on the T-shirt actually, we have a T-shirt and on the back, it has all the names of the sections, and it’s kind of just two long columns. And it’s like for someone reading, it’d be like, okay, whatever that is. But we know exactly what every single little moment is.[1]

GF: When you create a work, do you have a framework of what the dance should be like? Or is it flexible for collaborators to contribute to the overall structure or materials?

MG: It’s never that I have an idea of what it should be like. No, it’s more that I’m finding it together with them, and there’s a kind of sensibility that I am compelled towards. And sometimes I think I want to do “blank” or “X thing,” but that’s not necessarily what emerges.

So then I’m like, “Oh! Okay, let’s see what this is.” And it’s completely dependent on who’s there. You know, there’s no storyboard, there’s no claymation. I’m not molding people into anything that I already know. It’s more like I’m dealing with who’s in front of me and finding out what’s possible together.

And then yes, sometimes I’m asking them to do something very, very specific. But even then, ultimately the interest for me is in how they embody it. It’s almost never been true for me that I imagine it and then it’s just what happens.

GF: How do you situate yourself within the history of dance? Do these former legacies continue to inform your work?

MG: Oh god, constantly. I feel like I’m always learning more about the people that influence me. I just went to the Ailey exhibition yesterday at the Whitney [Museum of American Art].[2] I’ve never necessarily thought there was a direct line from Alvin Ailey (b. 1931, Rogers, Texas; d. 1989, New York, New York) to me, but when you look at the work and then when you look at who he was influenced by, you start to see all these things are sort of swirling in history.

One of the biggest investments that I’ve made in the last, gosh, 20 years has been reclaiming a legacy of abstraction through [the work of] artists of color and queer artists, and detaching it from its binaristic relationship to the idea of whiteness, and realizing that it’s much more complex than that.

And so, I feel like I’m in the line with a lot of weird artists of color, queer artists who’ve been doing, did their work for a long time, or did their work before me, or maybe are still alive. And that the history of experimentalism has always involved artists of color, immigrants, queer people.[3]

GF: Since you have collaborated with a wide range of choreographers including John Jasperse, Deborah Hay, Alain Buffard, and others, what are some things you hold on to from those artistic mentors?

MG: They were each very different people. I always say that John is kind of a master carpenter. His ability to look at how bodies can fit together and be together in terms of design and form is really just exquisite. He has an incredible, incredible, eye for that, and it was very meaningful for me to work with him and to get to be that specific.

Deborah is dealing in the metaphysical almost exclusively. She’s dealing with these very seemingly obscure ideas that are at the same time completely grounded in the physical, but there’s always the kind of poetics to her approach to the physical.

I was in two works of Alain’s. But the piece that I was more known for, in terms of that I helped to create, was a musical. Or he called it a musical tragedy. It was called (Not) a love song (2007).[4] And with that, it was just a lot about permission, and he was just so excited by us as collaborators, and whatever we did, he was just really into it. And as opposed to some of the other people I just mentioned, he was very like, “Yeah, do that, try that, do that.” There was a kind of invitation to just experiment with something on our own. So yeah, I’m very much a product of all those influences.

GF: Super Nothing began with an invitation from MANCC to reflect on your own archive of work held there. What was that experience like and how did it lead to the development of this new work?

MG: It was very humbling in retrospect to see the amount of support that MANCC gave me. And in turn, all the artists that I was able to bring with me to those residencies.

Watching the footage, I was caught up in all sorts of funny little accidental things, or how the camera catches things that are not necessarily what you’re centering in the moment. So, things that maybe were not necessarily the important event suddenly have importance, or a dynamic that was never really named out loud being an undercurrent of the rehearsal or a driver of the rehearsal.

You can interpret or reinterpret what was happening according to what you know now. I think when I look at video from the past of myself, I don’t know or believe that it’s me. I don’t have some big identification with the figure of me. I feel more like a stranger to myself, and maybe more in line with my memory of the people in real time than what is shown in the video. So, it’s a very strange perceptual game that happens there.

GF: Super Nothing also received a number of other institutional grants, including the Randjelović/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist program at New York Live Arts. Support structures for dance is a topic you’ve written and spoken about quite a bit. How do these opportunities and systems of support impact the work you make and what audiences see on stage?

MG: I think a good dance takes a lot of time to make. Where we are at historically to move the form of dance forward, it really means that we need time and money so that people can get paid for their time. And dance is an expensive medium, unless you’re making solos.

So, all these residencies, all the co-commission support, I can’t even begin to overstate how critical that kind of support is. I don’t necessarily think you need a lot of money to make a good dance, but I do think that when you want to work with people of a certain caliber, and you want to ask them to give you however many weeks of their lives towards your project, it’s an ethical responsibility to compensate people justly. I still feel like dance never gets compensated at the level that it should.

So then when people come to see it, what they’re seeing is the product of a lot of consideration and a lot of care, and not just by me, but by the dance collaborators, by my manager, by my design collaborators, by the institutional partners, by everybody behind the scenes who has made the space possible—by the theater staff, marketing [etc.]. It’s an incredible network of people that make one show possible, which I think a lot of people think is a reason to shy away from live performance. But for me, it’s exactly why we should support it, because I think it’s so beautiful that that network is built in the service of a common goal.

So, when people come to see my work, they are experiencing what is essentially hours and hours and hours and hours of attention that has been paid on some level.

GF: Since you are presenting Super Nothing at various locations, are there any different approaches for each iteration? How does the stage design differ from one venue to the next? How do audiences change from one city to the next?

MG: Yeah, I mean, every piece you make is site-responsive. Whether or not you’re making “site-work,” you are essentially making site-responsive work if you decide to tour or if you’re lucky to tour, as we are right now—we’re lucky that we get to tour this work. Every theater has a slightly different aura to it. The design of it affects how [the work] is seen, the scale of the stage affects things.

What happens is I end up in a conversation with my designers, so mostly the lighting designer, the production stage manager, possibly the associate lighting designer, and my manager. We have the rider, we send it to the venue, and then there’s a conversation with the technical director at the venue. And then that’s a back-and-forth.

Our job is to try to get as much as we need to feel good about the design existing in its adapted form, and ideally the theater director is trying to do the same; at the same time, holding the reality of the budget and the awareness of what the venue has capacity for. And that’s a dialogue. So you’re kind of determining, “Okay, what are the deal breakers in that dialogue and what are the things that we can live with?”

I think my work is sometimes deceptively complicated because even if it’s not, like, super elaborate sets or super elaborate effects per se, there is a lot going on with the design that allows it to contribute to what the show is, but without necessarily calling a ton of attention to itself.

Each audience, every audience is different. Literally every night. But my performing experience in Chicago is [that] the audience is pretty savvy because there is a long and rich history of art in that city.

There is also really interesting racial diversity in Chicago. And that informs how people come to see work, and it holds such a strong legacy of its own, right? So, I’ve always been very happy to perform my work there because I feel like that’s in the room.

GF: In a recent conversation with Bill T. Jones for New York Live Arts, you said “Dance, at its best, teaches you how to experience the conduit of feeling.” Can you elaborate on that? How can a dance teach you how to experience it? What do you hope audiences will take away after experiencing Super Nothing?

MG: I never think in terms of takeaways in that sense, but I guess because I’m working in a non-narrative form, I’m not making a representational story—[for example] I’m not making a representational ballet—[so] you are kind of left with an impression, a feeling, and an association, because that becomes the default. Those are the default mechanisms to generate meaning because you’re not decoding a story. It’s not a forensic crime show.

Because it’s not these things, what emerges is this other privileging of sensation and privileging of experience. And if you can acknowledge that your experience is the meaning, you can let go of needing translation to find meaning.

If you can resist that, then it’s a pretty rich experience. It’s one of attraction, repelling, confusion, clarity, and pleasure. I wouldn’t say it’s never gonna be painful, but maybe the discomfort of being with something that feels unfamiliar.

Again, it’s not because some sort of rule book fell from the sky. It’s more just because the piece itself starts to offer its own logic to you. I feel like a good work situates you in the condition for you to receive it in the way that it wants to offer itself. And when you get to minute 30 of the piece, you’ve earned your way to minute 30; when you get to minute 45, you’ve earned your way to it. I am thinking suddenly of a ride at an amusement park, but not the ride itself—the line that gets you to the ride and how you have to organize it in a certain way to get people there.

Sometimes when you’re going to a rollercoaster, you hear the rollercoaster, but you’re underneath it and so you are prepped for this experience, sensorially, you have an anticipation that’s being built. It’s somewhat the same, structuring a piece. You are prepping your audience always for what’s to come, not because you’re trying to predict what’s gonna come, but just making the space for it.

There’s a kind of vibration that starts to become clear that allows you to say, “Okay, this isn’t gonna be like other pieces I’ve seen. I’m not going to just be looking at a bunch of dance phrases to the front and people being sexy, and me being like, “Woo.” That’s cool, and that’s a fun kind of dance that I like too. But that’s not what this is.

GF: You wrote an entry on the word “Spectator” for the In Terms of Performance website. There, you say that the word “spectator” for describing audiences “sounds ugly.” Can you elaborate on that? What relationship would you rather set up with audiences and how do you do that?

MG: Yeah. I can’t control the audience and why would I? I don’t have control. That’s why I’m resistant to this [question of] “What do I want them to come away with?” It’s like, well, I hope they like it. I hope they enjoy themselves.

I’m not the arbiter of someone else’s pleasure and I’m not making towards someone else’s pleasure. I’m making towards the dictates of the work. Sometimes it feels like I need to do this, and I don’t even necessarily like it or know why. In the making. I am satisfying myself, but I’m also frustrating myself with problems that I’m trying to solve. And sometimes they don’t get solved until the performance happens, and then I’m suddenly like, “Oh, that was necessary.” So, I ought to be very clear that I would love for the audience to come away with a rich experience and know that I have done everything in my power to put all of my thought and intelligence and care into it. But that doesn’t necessarily translate into someone else liking a thing, that’s just taste, right? You can’t account for someone else’s taste.

I am thinking about things like, “How are they going to see this thing? What’s the level of light? What’s the level of volume?” Whatever I do have control over, I try to address, but I absolutely feel clear that I’m not doing market research to see who likes what the best. If I were to do that, I would do a different thing. I wouldn’t make what I do. I would be working in commercial advertising.

But I do feel that the work is providing a space for feeling, providing a space potentially for longing, for grief, for a certain relationship to joy or identification for those people who maybe will look at this and see something—not necessarily about them, or as simple as like, “Oh, that person looks like me, I look like them.” Sure, that’s one idea of representation or identification—but maybe more like the gestalt of it addresses something in their hearts, or their soul, or their very way of being in the world. So that’s kind of what I’m occupied in.

Why I resist the word “spectator” is because it feels like an aggressive word and because, again, it privileges the visual. And why I have always preferred the word “audience” is because “audience” has the [etymological] root of “audio,” right, and so listening. It’s a room of people listening, which is not the same as a room of people looking at.

That’s a critical distinction for me, because the aptness feels aggressive in a way that the receiving does not. And the receiving means that there’s sensuality and the association, the looking at, means there’s judgment and decision, and I’m trying to thwart people’s conditioning towards judgment.

GF: You mentioned the process of listening in your dance. How does the presence of the audience influence your work?

MG: Oh, yeah. I mean, there are pieces I’ve made, like certain solos that I basically made in front of audiences. When I made This Bridge Called My Ass (2019), that piece starts with about a 45-minute improvisation. And we’re not changing the improvisation based on the audience, but certainly there is an energy awareness of how people are receiving it, and that starts to affect some of our decisions.

So, there is definitely a reciprocity that happens, and that means that the presence of the audience is absolutely critical. Again, you can’t know what the audience is thinking or feeling. You can look at someone and they look really unhappy, but that’s just the way their face looks when they’re concentrating. You don’t know. And with this piece, more than others, there’s been a really palpable sense of people’s attention, and that’s been kind of beautiful.

They may be primed to be attentive because of some of the stuff that happens early in the piece, and that has been interesting. I haven’t felt that so clearly sometimes, but I’m usually in the work, so I rarely get an outside perspective on it. And that’s a very different way of seeing and being with the work.