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CHRIS BURNSIDE
Chris Burnside: A Retrospective
Part 1
Mary Flinn:
This is Mary Flinn, editor-in-chief of this particular issue of Blackbird,
talking with Chris Burnside. We're starting out with a chat with Mr. Burnside
rather than a video or an audio. As a dancer, which he is, in both Richmond
and New York and other places, he has worked both with storytelling and
movement and with traditional dance, and this fall he will be having a
retrospective concert of his dance works in Richmond, Virginia. And we're
going to try to put these both in a little bit of a context and let you
follow them by looking at his work as we post it through the summer.
First, why don't we talk
a little bit about what you've got coming up this fall in terms of the
retrospective concert, and then we'll talk some about the storytelling
pieces that you've done with movement. How many pieces will be in the
concert? How many of them are you resetting, how many are new, do any
of them use language?
Chris Burnside:
The September concerts are going to have six different pieces in them.
Four of them are from the recent past and the not-so-recent past. They
were created from '95 to 2000. And then the other two pieces are going
to be brand new and they will be premieres. It's the first concert of
just dance work that I have done since '91; from '91 until the present
I've been focused professionally out and away from VCU with my monologues.
So I've had several sort of full-length tours and have gone out and about
doing the monologue work. Really important to get out and about. If you're
in a home base . . . like Richmond is my home base, its an incredible
city, I feel like it's a city of artists, I feel like I've been very supported
here, but this is my home. And I feel like a new piece that you do in
your home, some people can be totally rooting for you a hundred percent
and not looking clearly at what the work is, and some people have their
expectations about, "Oh, this doesn't seem like the last piece of
yours, it seems really different, and I like the old stuff better."
So I love to go out where people don't even know who I am and do something,
and they have no reference point for me. I have no history with them.
So then the work lives in the moment, which is what performance is. So
it's really, really a positive process to leave home, go out, and perform
for strangers.
That's what I was doing a lot from '91 until a couple
of years ago. It produced all different types of different experiences
for me, and a lot of it has to do with where you perform, and who the
producer is. One producer will be totally together and have their PR out
and will know how to network the community, and you arrive and there's
a full house. And then you just fly with these people, because if there's
a full house and there's more than a couple of people, if you've really
done your homework with your piece, somebody in the audience is going
to respond to most everything. Somebody will get your skewed viewpoint
of the world at that moment in the piece. If it's a smaller audience,
then the chances of that happening are fewer, so then you have less perspectives
to work with who are responding to you, if the audience is smaller. So
then I've performed for all different sizes, for producers who didn't
get their PR out, and I arrive and there are eight people in the theatre,
and you've come a thousand-some miles to perform for them, and then you
have a journey anyway, and it ends up being generally a positive experience.
A lot of times if there are fewer people in the audience, moi has
to work a lot harder. There's less energy coming back toward me.
MF: In these different
situations, I know there is to a degree a level of improvisation in the
monologues; does it change?
CB: Yes. I would
say that there's a great deal of improvisation at the beginning of the
process. But after I have performed something for two or three years,
I feel like I have honed everything down to the exact word, the exact
vocabulary that fits in that spot, that produces "the picture"
I'm looking for.
MF: Do you do
it all verbally? Do you write it down or develop it all conversationally?
CB: Every one's
different. Fort Head was all written. I just wrote and wrote and
wrote and wrote, I had just legal pad after legal pad of all the stories
I could remember. Fort Head actually came from the first Gulf War.
I could not stand that on CNN, the cameras were on the front of the missiles
diving into the houses and exploding. That seemed to be something we shouldn't
be seeing. Or at least that was my perspective. And then I started remembering,
because I had put many layers between 1969 and now, I started remembering
my experience in the Viet Nam army. I didn't go to Viet Nam, but I was
in there for two years.
MF: Were you drafted?
CB: I was drafted.
MF: Would you
describe a little bit about how you and "Fort Head" sort of
interacted in the first place, just so folks will know?
CB: Yes, so I
was drafted on December 6, 1969. Two weeks later they came up with the
lottery system. I was at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, taking basic training;
they said, "Oh, they have a lottery system now," and so we all
stood around waiting to see what our birthdays were going to be with the
first lottery, and my birthday was August 28, and it was like 361. So
I would probably not have gone if I had somehow delayed my induction for
two weeks.
I spent basic training at Fort Campbell, Kentucky,
and then was assigned to Fort Hood, Texas, which was in Killeen, Texas.
And Fort Hood, Texas, was better known as "Fort Head," Texas,
because of all the drugs that were there. So I basically, it was an artillery
fort and I thought that's where I was, I thought I would be there for
a short period of time and then be sent overseas. With all my commercial
art background, I was supposed to have been assigned . . . I later found
out that there was a number for your job description when you left basic
training. I think mine was like something like 71-Q or something-20 or
something. I kept saying, "What does this mean? What am I going to
do?" And they would go, "We don't know what that is." So
later, they eventually said, "Who can type?" and I raised my
hand and got put in the headquarters company. And I found a book, and
looked up this little MO, your job description, and I was to be a commercial
artist, for the newspaper. But instead I typed, and because I typed, and
could type well, I didn't get sent overseas. So I spent my entire military
life at Fort Head. One of the ugliest places I had ever been, and it was
not a good fit. It was not a good fit; the sensitive young artist, gay
young artist, and the military. The artillery fort. I learned a lot; I
think I taught a few lessons along the way as well.
The thing that I remembered most when I thought about
reviving my experience, looking at CNN during the first Gulf War, I just
remembered the process where they trained us in basic training. And they
started to, initially, from the very moment you got there, to break you
down, so that you became more and more desensitized to the eventuality
of killing somebody. And I noted every step of the way and every change
in the rhetoric, and was appalled, and frightened. And I realized that
they were so good and it was so big, that eventually I would be someplace
and I would kill somebody. And I did not want to kill somebody. So all
that came flooding back, that I thought I had safely put away, because
I would say it was the low point of my life, and I thought that was all
long distant past.
With CNN I just started saying, I would just like
to share some of this process of how they do get you ready to do something
that you inherently don't believe in doing, ethically don't believe
in doing. So that's where Fort Head came; and that started off, I wrote
down everybecause that was a long time ago, that was from 1970 until
the piece I made probably in '94 or '95. So that was like 25 years. So
I wrote everything, every story I could remember, and then I just started
going into places. The first place I went was Dick Carlyon's evening art
history class, went over to the Hibbs building and did, I think, maybe
15 minutes, and then I kept going back and I kept going to different places
until it became 20 minutes and then half an hour. Eventually it was an
hour and 35 minutes in running time. It was the longest I had ever been
onstage as a performer. But in a dance concert a piece might last maybe
a half-hour at the most, and then you go off and you change your costumes,
or you're not in the next piece, or you generally don't dance all evening
long in every single piece. I remember like at about 35 minutes I just
kept looking, when I was onstage the first time I was doing it, I just
kept looking for someone with a big hook to come and drag me off because
I was like, "This seems way beyond the grace period for one person
to be in the spotlight." But I stayed beyond that. That piece was
really a powerful experience, and I did it all over. I did it up in the
mountains a couple of times in Virginia, did it over at JMU and got some
letters from people that were initially horrified at who I was and what
I was revealing and then ended up being affected by it, and felt like
they had met somebody different. And those kind of responses were what
really affected me. They made me feel like what I had done was, what I
had made was worthwhile.
MF: I saw one
of the versions here and it was very funny, as well as very moving, as
I recall. There were some things in there that were so quirky that they
were not laugh-out-loud funny, but like viewing through a prism where
you're getting a side view rather than your usual straight-on view. But
it was a perfectly wonderful evening spent at the theatre. It was very
theatrical, I guess I'd say.
CB: I think humor
is survival. When I knew I was in trouble in the army was maybe fourteen
months into my stay in the army, I stopped laughing. And I did not laugh,
I remember just going, "I've stopped laughing; nothing seems funny
to me." And I didn't laugh for maybe eighteen months. From my depression
at where I was and the mistake of the decision of having let myself be
drafted, and. . . . So, yes, just to see it all again from a sort of black
humor kind of viewpoint was really important. If you can't see the humor
and the insanity in everything, then I think it becomes too serious. I
think it becomes overwhelming, I think life does. Unless you can see just
how ridiculous a lot of this is.
MF: When did you
first find that doing something like a monologue could be a theatrical
experience that could work for you, for somebody who had done mostly traditional
modern dance or contemporary danceI wouldn't say traditional dance
in the sense of ballet or even Martha Graham. You were a dancer rather
than a writer or an actor.
CB: Initially
my trainingbecause I actually came to VCU when it was RPI [Richmond
Professional Institute] and got a degree in communication arts and design.
In the middle of all that in college I had a cataclysmic religious experience
at a dance concert and just decided that was what I was going to do, started
training. So from the time I was twenty I was pretty much every day training
in dance. Certainly my performing career was all dance.
At one point I was in New York. I lived in New York
several different times. I auditioned for this woman named Bella Lewitsky
in Los Angeles, went out there, danced for her, lived out there for eight
years, toured the United States and Europe, taught at UCLA. Eventually,
had never really liked UCLA and moved back to New York City and had another
performance reincarnation in the early mid-eighties in the downtown performance
scene. And initially, I just went to the auditions as a dancer, had never
really been comfortable on stage speaking, had tried to sort of veer away
from that. I think that's what dancers do. I think dancers generally are
not comfortable speaking. So a way to hide that and still be in front
of people is, if you're physical, is to dance. So this incarnation from
like '81 to '85, I was in the downtown kind of performance art scene,
but in the dance side of it; and eventually I auditioned for this guy,
and might tell you a little about that audition and that experience. At
one point he had, he decided he would have each one of us tell, we had
thirty seconds, it was a strange little piece, it was about human happiness
and what we'd do, all do to try to stay happy or to regain our happiness.
And we had like questionnaires we'd put out all over New York in phone
booths and restaurants and bathrooms and people would send them in. They
would answer these questions and send these flyers back in. And out of
all those answers came sort of the piece, and we each had a suitcase in
one scene and we would stand on top of our suitcase and we had thirty
seconds to tell something that had happened that day to us.
I found, when we were doing it in New York, it was
at The Kitchen, every night, no matter what I said I had done, people
laughed. So that was like sort of heady. And eventually we took this piece
over to a theatre festival, an international Theatre Festival in Brussels.
There were performers from all over the world at this place, and one night
we had performed our piece, Tim, because it was Tim Miller, was the choreographer,
said that there was another American who was performing at midnight and
did we want to go to see him. And the person we saw that night at midnight
was Spalding Gray, and it was entrancing. He had like 15 or 20 years of
performances that he had been involved in, and he had just put all the
names on a card. A Carol Channing version of Hello Dolly. The Laurence
Olivier version of blah-blah-blah, and this went on and then he shuffled
the cards, and then he just put them in this little box and then he would
take the card out and then whatever that was and whatever order that was,
that production, he would tell an anecdote about it. And it was very funny,
very human, very life-affirming. So I left Brussels and went, "I'm
going to go back to New York and I'm going to do something like this."
Because besides being terrified to be in front of an audience and speak,
one of my jobs in my familymy father's side of the family is incredibly
intense. Genetically, I don't know what it's about, but it's very intense,
and my father was always upset about something at the supper table. And
I found that if I could cut through his intensity and whatever he was
dealing with with an anecdote from school, that we could detox the whole
situation. And we could have a pleasant meal, and other people could get
a little smidgen of the attention. So that was my role in my family; I
would tell the stories that would divert from the intensity. So I came
back from Brussels, I decided was going to tell these stories about this
older woman neighbor of mine that I lived in Venice with in this apartment
building right on the beach in Venice, her name was Opal Kelly, because
my friends had always loved these stories. So I made a thirty, it was
a forty-minute piece, and it wove stories about Opal . . .
MF: What was one
of the stories about Opal? Can you remember any?
CB: She
was a cantankerous, just really, really . . . she was in her eighties,
and she was a spitfire little lover of life, and spoke her mind to whoever
would listen, and even to those who didn't listen. She would speak her
mind.
Part 2
CB: One of the
stories had to do with . . . at that point I was in a gay men's support
group, that a psychologist had in Hollywood, and the first night that
I joined this group, the group was arguing. One person thought that drag
was fine, and this other guy thought that it was just, you know, anti-gender
and was completely upset. And I had never been in drag. I initially got
uncomfortable by the conversation, and then finally just blurted out my
first night, I said, "I don't understand what the big deal is, that
you want to have a drag party and you want everyone in the group to come
in drag. Really, in the importance of everything in the world, I don't
think that's a big request."
So we decided we would have this, one of our meetings
was going to be at this guy's house over in Hollywood and we were all
going to come in drag and have our therapy group in drag. So I went out
and bought a big huge blond Diana Ross wig and made a dress. It
ended up being much, much bigger than I thought, this thing of putting
on the opposite gender's apparel. The first night I put on my wig . .
. and my fear was I was going to be so beautiful that I would be mistaken
for a woman. And I put on all this stuff and looked in the mirror, and
I was not beautiful. And it was devastating to see that I wasn't very
beautiful and that it had turned out that to actually do this thing of
putting on women's clothing was really huge for my little identity. My
little identity could hardly handle that. That was six o'clock at night,
and I went to bed at 6:30 that night and slept for the first time for
like 16 hours, it wa so monumental. Later got more comfortable and went
downstairs. Kelly, I told Kelly about it, she lived on the floor below
me, and she wanted to see me. So I went downstairs and I put on my dress
and my wig and she said, "Oh, the dress is all wrong." And so
at some point I was in this little old lady's apartment, she was eighty-something,
and I was standing there in my blond Diana Ross wig and one of her big
huge blue-flowered beach mumus, and some big shell earrings, and I just
went, "I don't know how I got here. I don't know how I got here in
this little old lady's apartment in her clothes," and she says, "So
what are you doing, are you getting dressed up? I want to see your makeup
before you go." I went, "Oh, no, I'm not driving from Venice
Beach all the way to Hollywood in drag. I will get ready there, at this
guy's house." And she was like, " No, no, no. I think you should
get dressed upstairs. I think you should walk down, find your car in the
parking lot, and drive across town as proud as anybody. And don't let
anybody say anything to you, and go to that party." And I was, that
was not what I did, you know, I drove across town and got dressed at the
party. But that's who she was. She was a great mentor of feistiness. I
just gained a lot from her. So that was one of the stories that got woven
into this forty-minute dance.
What was interesting about it was, when I came back
to New York, I didn't know how . . . I didn't write, I didn't speak on
stage. So I extemporaneously told my stories, and made the dance, and
the closer we got to the performance . . . because I had never had a performance
in New York. I had made one, like I think 12-minute dance when I lived
in Los Angeles, and that was the extent of my choreography slash performance
creativity.
So the closer we got to the performance the more I
stuttered and ummed and ahed and paused and forgot what I was saying,
and then I would say maybe two-and-a half to three weeks out in the performance,
I really panicked and just went you know, "This is my New York debut,
as a maker, and I'm just gonna lay a big huge egg." So I wrote down
every word of the story, and then because I was a mover, I put every word
of the story to movement. I put every word of the story to movement. And
then, because I was so terrified, then, when the audience came in, I remember
they sat down, I was just going . . . And I told all the story that went
with it, my words just came out of my mouth because I had practiced so
much and went with all that . . . movement. And I just remember it was
like being in a dream and that the audience was roaring and all I was
doing was remembering the movement but my mouth was working with the gestures.
And it was really successful. And I thought I had discovered this gigantic
thing. But later when I came to VCU and was teaching movement for actors,
the acting teacher said that's what everybody does. You marry the words
that you're going to speak in the play to blocking and movement and gesture,
and it's like, "Well, but I discovered it, too."
MF: You've done
more work since then, I know here in choreographing dances. When did you
first make a dance for, not the one in LA, but otherwise. Did you start
that in New York?
CB: That first
piece I started in New York, the choreography came when I moved down here.
That first concert that I did up in New York that had the Opal Kelly stories
and the movement, I split with a woman friend of mine, we split the concert.
What would happen in New York, though, was you would put together something
with somebody, it would be successful or not successful, and then for
me, I would have to then spend the next year as a waitron, paying off
my MasterCard, so I could make another piece or have another concert up
there. So when I came down here in '84 as the guest artist, I found that
there were lots of people who wanted to be involved, either as dancers
or as audience, there was space to rehearse in that wasn't fifteen dollars
an hour, like New York. And I reluctantly took this job down here. I thought
it was going to be a great compromise leaving New York. I thought things
were going well up there, but in fact it was not a compromise at all.
It was the beginning of the flowering of an incredibly productive, rich
part of my career, because I came down here, and I didn't have to worry
about the finances of it. And I wasn't doing anything else but teaching
dance, and I could make dance there in the same place where I taught.
So then, the choreography, all these ideas that I
had had for years, just poured out of me. And I learned a lot. I was a
late starter, I also had some real physical limitations as a dancer, and
I just kept worshipping at the altar of dance, waiting to get good enough
so that I could eventually make something. So then eventually, at like
33 or 34, I decided that time was getting short, and that if I was going
to make something, I should make it. So then here at VCU I just started
making lots of pieces. The thing that was surprising was that my commercial
art and my visual process of making, which had been from, like 5 years
old through college, was an incredible basis for structuring and thinking,
organizational, and that it transferred over to choreography. I don't
know how it did, but it did, and I felt like I was able to do some fairly
good pieces off the bat because of my visual arts background. I feel like
that's something that I bring to the choreography arena that other choreographers
don't have. I feel really fortunate that that was my background, the visual
arts.
MF: What dancers
or choreographers did you admire, whose work also fit into yours?
CB: I really like
Jane Comfort's work, its movement and text. I think there are amazing
choreographers who they are kinetically, kinesthetically driven. They
are movement-vocabulary driven. I thought Bella's [Lewitzky] work, the
best of her work could be staggeringly beautiful. And she had a vocabulary
like nobody else. I thought Merce Cunningham is a genius; his capacity
for invention seems bottomless.
MF: When he was
here a few years ago, he and the chair did a little thing together that
was fascinating.
CB: I was very
moved by that. Martha Graham, I thought a completely different idiom,
but she was visually incredibly strong.
MF: Now do you
feel that you have put all these things together and found your own vocabulary
and choreography now as strongly as you found your own vocabulary in the
monologues?
CB: I think it's
a process, and I think I've become more and more who I am, as my vocabulary
gets smaller and smaller. The aging process has a way of honing everything
down, especially for movement.
MF: I was talking
to somebody just this weekend who said that he remembered some artist
who said once upon a timeit may have been Red Groomsthat when
he was young, when he was in the studio, there were about fifty other
people there with him. As he got a little older, maybe twenty-five. When
he got really old, it was just himself there, that the voices of other
influences had stopped. Are you finding that that's true?
CB: I have a list.
I write in my journals, and I have a list that I made maybe eighteen months
ago, that was just like, these are me. These pieces and these themes and
how I want to do them are totally me, and I want them done before I'm
done choreographing. Two of those pieces are in the September concert.
MF: Which ones
are those?
CB: They're both
the new pieces, no, there are three of them, really, that were all on
this initial list. But the two new pieces are on that list, and one of
them is based on the work of Caravaggio, his life and his work. I just
read this book, called M, I can't remember the author [M: The
Man Who Became Caravaggio, by Peter Robb]. I read it two summers ago,
and it was little bits and snippets from this pope writing to this bishop
about Caravaggio and what they were going to do with him; he was this
really dark, wild, violent person, and getting into trouble. And it was
a very dry read to begin with, but somewhere about page sixty it started
to unfold like a murder mystery to me. And the more I read, the more I
realized that everything is the same, and that he was at the end of the
1500's, and he was fighting for survival as an artist, and who is a patron,
and who supports him and who doesn't and where does that come from. He
was fighting for his identity as a gay person, and he was a violent person
in a violent time. So nothing's changed at all.
So as I was reading this book, I just felt like these
visual images, some kind of moving tableau began to unfold and I just
went, "Hmm, I want that done." I don't think I have been mature
enough to have ever been able to address this issue before. But now I
feel like I am, and if I'm much more mature, I'm not going to be able
to. So that's on the list and that's going to be seen in September. And
then this other new piece is based on, it's inspired by two things: a
short story by Tennessee Williams and the work of the painter Paul Cadmus.
And I also think it's completely different; the Caravaggio piece is really
dark, and is violent, and I think is totally visual in its impact. This
other piece is narrative; it's sort of like the short story. It's the
story of a gay man and a straight woman who meet in a bar and realize
that working as a team they do much better in the meeting men category
than they do as working as a solo.
MF: What's the
title of the story?
CB: "Two
in a Party." And then I merge that with, kind of inspirationally
marry that to Paul Cadmus's The Fleet's In and Sailors and Floozies,
to the two sailors in this piece, and it's bawdy, and I think very funny.
Only one person has seen it, but she laughed a lot when she was watching
it. It has music from, it's inspired by the thirties and the forties and
the fifties, and it's sort of like a big drunken party.
Those two pieces were the two that were on my
list, and I feel really good that I did them. I feel they both made me
incredibly nervous to begin and to be in process with. Less this one than
the other one. But the Caravaggio piece I feel like I was the most insecure
as a maker than I have been in years and years. And the process, I was
just like, "I don't know what this is; this seems really dark."
And I've learned that if I'm really nervous, that that generally makes,
I know I'm on a good path. But this was the most insecure I got, too.
So it was a difficult process, but I think what came out of it, I'm not
totally done yet. But I feel like the draft of it, I go, "Oh, that's
what I saw, that's what I saw."
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