Some questions for Miguel Gutierrez about Last Meadow, collaboration and Portland’s clean air

For TBA:09, PICA asked our friends in the arts community to sit down with this year’s festival artists and talk about their work. Writer, artist, and community cultural advocate Tim DuRoche caught up with dancer and choreographer Miguel Gutierrez to ask him some questions about his opening weekend premiere of Last Meadow.

Tim DuRoche: Cathy Edwards mentioned a comment from you recently about, “simultaneously comprehending the banality of living in an everyday body, and nonetheless continually desiring to be transcendent within that same body.” How much does that underlie this work? Does that notion become more meta (say to consider the banality of the American Dream, as the everyday body) in Last Meadow?
Miguel Gutierrez: I think that this idea, this perception of a torturous duality, runs through all of my work. It’s woven directly into my interest in dance in the first place. Dance is a space where I get to encounter the depth of my belief and doubt in everything. Its combination of strangeness, humility and sincerity is both alluring and frustrating. It will never do everything I want it to do, but then, neither will anything or anyone.
I think I’m still in the process of understanding what the relationship of this idea is to Last Meadow. I think I generally feel less desperate than I used to in relationship to my body, to what I want it or dancing to do. I sort of feel like my body is just this trigger or antenna for a ton of other shit that has nothing to do with what I’m “doing.”
This piece has to do with myths for me – the myth of the father/country/hero, etc. Myths are, by their very nature, static fictions that we construct to organize an otherwise unsustainable, infuriatingly dynamic reality. I don’t know if we’ve hit that for sure or not in this piece, but it’s something I’m very interested in.

TD: When I first read about Last Meadow, ” the space of waiting, where what you need never comes,” my mind immediately went to the pensive male anxiety of James Dean in Giant (the image of Jett Rink in the car foregrounding a sprawling western landscape). What initially fueled your imagination for this piece?
MG: I wanted initially to make a piece that focused on the idea of misinterpretation in multiple ways: in the literal, linguistic sense, in the ways that dance is always, endlessly misinterpreted (as language, as representation, as a mere exercise in heroism), and in the ways that the idea of “America” is misinterpreted (I travel a lot, particularly to France, which is a great place to notice the ways people get themselves to believe something that may or may not be true for the sake of believing in something).
So, anyway, that is the stuff I wrote the grants for the piece about and such.
Then I was on my way to France and borrowed a friend’s 2-DVD set of East of Eden. Once abroad, I went to watch it and the movie was missing and so I just watched the Special Features disc. There were a bunch of wardrobe tests that the actors did for the movie which fascinated me and which I totally interpreted as little silent dances. I became transfixed by James Dean and began to project all of the ideas I’d been having onto him.
TD: Can you talk about the metaphor of “last meadow” briefly?
MG: Well it’s a beautiful sounding term that describes two not so great things: scarcity of irrigation for the last meadow on a farm and scarcity of blood for the brain due to a systemic weakness of the heart.
My dad had what appeared to be a stroke last year and in reading about stroke I came across the term in Wikipedia. It’s haunted me ever since.
I mean I love the poetic nature of the phrase, and its inherent gloomy romance. I mean, there are so many images, memories, feelings that it conjures. I like that it puts an organic, “outside” frame onto a piece that happens so very much in a theater.
TD: Describe your collaboration with Paul Chan (who served as dramaturg)? As an established multimedia artist in his own right who traffics in rich conversation around the anxiety between past/present, politics/privacy, I’m curious if Chan’s role served as a springboard for the visual “dramaturgy” and pulse of the work.
MG: Well I hate to disappoint you, Tim, but my work with Paul was not really a collaboration. Basically he came a couple of times to rehearsal and we talked about the piece as it developed. I had hoped that he would be more involved than he was, but his schedule didn’t really allow for that.
I love Paul’s work and what he does, but I wouldn’t say that it was a springboard for the visual life or pulse of the piece. He is able to look at things and filter them through his brilliantly informed and imaginative mind, and that was great to have around on those few occasions.
However, something that I was reminded of, in the few interactions that we did have, is that visual artists are not always great at looking at dance. They see what they see, lock onto the visual components of it, and place it in reference to external things right away. While this is certainly useful to do with any piece of art, it’s not always the most nuanced reading of dance, I think. So if anything, my interactions with Paul (and many others who came to watch the piece in process) taught me that was I was dealing with was not a dramaturgy that was exclusively visually coded, or theatrical/narrative, but rather I was dealing with a “dramaturgy” of the choreographic – which for me is about the ways that bodies/light/sound interact with one another in time and space and how those interactions create a perceptual field that is not intellectual but sensation based.
It’s disheartening how elusive the discourse of dance remains for people in other fields. People are (or can be) taught to look at obscure works of art, read super fancy books about those piece and about philosophy, and yet seeing bodies move just looks like a bunch of stuff, happening. I wish there was more two-way traffic between the visual art fields and people working (interestingly) in dance.
TD: Outside of your Powerful People company, you’ve worked with some phenomenal dance/performance artists (many past TBA performers) like John Jasperse, Jennifer Monson, Deborah Hay. What kind of influence have you gleaned from others for your own process as a maker?
MG: I am a fucking sponge, and I am really good at taking in people’s sensibilities and supporting them and finding my own space within them. I have a pretty good memory for things that I’ve been in and for the ways they were made, and this often feels like a curse or burden in going into my own process. But I pretty much accept it now and see appropriation of tactics as just part of the way the world works for me.
I would say that my work and my friendship with Deborah have been extraordinarily meaningful and powerful for me. She has developed language for and a point of view about dance that I can deeply connect to. Her ideas about the power of the body to activate perception of the intangible (my phrase, not hers) are absolutely brilliant.
John taught me precision and doubt. Don’t be easily seduced by what you make. Probe and keep on working.
But for that matter I also learned that from working with my dear friend Erin Cornell, making pieces with her in the “late 90’s.” (if I can get away with writing such a phrase now…)
I learn all of the time from the artists I admire, young and old. It doesn’t matter to me. I am ready to be taught at any moment by something that excites me. That may sound hokey, but it’s fucking true.
TD: What other art forms do you find yourself drawn to for inspiration?
MG: I listen to music all of the time. I make it also. I write poetry and read the work of others. I have gotten more into experimental theater in the last couple of years. Sometimes looking at painting absolutely destroys me and I get really emotional at museums by myself. I love movies, am endlessly jealous of what you can do in film – so much with so little… I dunno, I like it all…
TD: What are you looking forward to in Portland? Any other artists you’re particularly eager to experience at TBA?
MG: I am looking forward to the clean air and beautiful green landscape that, if I recall correctly from dancing with John there in 2001, circles the city. I am looking forward to catching up with a bunch of dear friends from my past who have landed in Portland, including my first big love. I’ve been pretty consumed with this show to think about other people’s shows – forgive the self-absorption, but hey it’s our premiere. Once I’m out there and the show is underway I’ll be able to see things more clearly. I love seeing shows right after I’ve performed – it’s when I’m nicest.