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 every—because 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 dance—I 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 training—because 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 family—my 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 time—it may have been Red Grooms—that 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."