Create Something Old

Katinka Deecke (KD): In “The Romeo” you work with historical imagination and historical phantasy, as you have done occasionally in your career. You create a past that is different from the known history taught in schools, a past that might have been possible, that might have even taken place, only that we do not know about it, because there is no evidence. How would you describe the specific historical fiction that runs through “The Romeo”?

Trajal Harrell (TH): I’ve been working with the “what if” since 2008 maybe. I started these propositions as strategies to get the audience and ourselves as performers on the same page. I wanted to have the performative event have a dynamic of questioning and analysis that would be within the dance but that would sync our thinking and imaginations together. In the case of “The Romeo” I was trying to think what I could do for 2000 people in the audience… It was the first time that I would make a piece for so many people. I began to think about an imaginary dance and about the idea that the myth of dance itself would be the connection between the audience and the performers, that dance itself would create the eventness. I think the historical imagination makes the performance. In the case of “The Romeo” it was very important to me that it is not representational, that it is not a dance that represents anything. I wanted to imagine a dance with many dancers, a dance that had moved to different cultures and countries and had been transformed by this trajectory. Somehow the dance that we see in the theatre would be the tracing of these transformations. But everything is to be speculative. We wouldn’t pin down which cultures, where or when something comes from or took place, but all of this would exist in the imagination of the audience and the performers. One of the misconceptions about “The Romeo” that I have been seeing is that people write about it like it is a dance for everyone, like a popular TikTok dance. But it is not. It is not supposed to be representative of a popular universal dance. It just is an imaginative possibility to happen in the room that night.

KD: “The Romeo” will have its premiere at the Palais des Papes which since Jean Vilar of course has an aesthetic, artistic history, but which has also a much longer past, a history of politics, of power and of religion. How does the piece interact with this history of the place? How does the piece inscribe itself in the struggles of the centuries that the building has gone through?

TH: For me it has something to do with the sense of history itself. With the Cour d’honneur I was up against a big emblem of history and architecture, and I stayed away from exposing that in a specific political way. I transformed it in the sense of wanting the dance to be something old. I wanted to create something old. I am a contemporary choreographer, usually I make things new and that are of today. This was the first time I tried to make something of the past. I was trying to make something that we could believe was as old as the Palais des Papes and has elements that are even older than the Palais. In that way the historicity is contained within the structure of the dance. But I did not want to address specifically any events that happened in the Palais and I didn’t address the religious connotations neither. Of course, anytime one deals with historicity those things become possible. They become potentialities in the dance, but I did not try to underline them.

KD: By reaching out into ancient times “The Romeo” enters in dialogue with history. At the same time, dance as an art form is an art committed to the pure moment, which, unlike paintings or architecture, is not created to last. It almost could seem a contradiction to talk about history and dance at the same time. What is the tension between the present moment and the duration of history that “The Romeo” unfolds?

TH: I think that is the trick of the piece, or the artistic maneuver, and why it was so hard to make it. As I said, I was trying to make something very old and yet it’s a complete fiction because it’s made now. It can only exist in the moment. It’s a real magic trick to get people to believe that they’re watching something old, but in the “now” that I’m proposing as “all we know is a fiction”. We didn’t go through research, look at real dances and recreate them. It was all in the imagination, it was all me playing around with what I thought could possibly be, or have been. This is the artistic maneuver. It is a contradiction of terms; historical imagination is always like that. But I think the magic of theatre is when people believe that they are on the same page; that you believe that the other people are thinking what you’re thinking and they’re seeing what you’re seeing and believing what you’re believing. This kind of speculation among people in one place and one time is what I try to go for.

KD: During rehearsals we talked a lot about the music, about the soundtrack of “The Romeo”. “The Romeo” has a different approach to music than many of your other pieces, not only because the soundtrack doesn’t work very much with frictions, ruptures, surprises, but also because all the music in “The Romeo” comes from a comparable cultural environment, namely white, male Western music of the 19th and 20th centuries. How did this selection come about?

TH: It’s funny that people ask this. I’m never symbolic in the music. I remember this piece of music from Jean-Jacques Beineix’ movie “Diva”, “Promenade Sentimentale”. That led me to Satie and I had this album “Satie Slowly” and I just got engrossed in it and couldn’t pull out of it. Once I found this feeling, I couldn’t let go of it and that was something that was very – I want to say difficult but I think it was – surprising to me too. As I went through the process, I thought I would maybe change it or find a variation but it just did not feel right. At a certain point I wanted it to have a very classical feeling, that you get when you are listening to classical music, although it is a very particular strain of classical music. It is driving from Satie and from piano music. It’s very heartfelt and serious but I wanted it to also have an abstraction; I wanted people to be able to abstract the dances. I felt that if I had too many variations of different genres and different styles of music, which I often do, it would lose this abstraction. There is lots of classical music in my work but it had never taken such a foreground. It was not cultural though, I was not trying to make a statement about proposing all Western white male music. I just loved all the music. There is a softness, a kind of dreaminess that allows you to go on this journey with us in time. It just has something about imagining a temporality that is moving and breathing and contracting and expanding. And you know, somehow, I love country music but I couldn’t see Johnny Cash. (laughs)

KD: It sometimes seems to me that music and your dance are like two strong currents that at one moment get closer and at another moment move away from each other and then mix again for a moment. Only to separate again afterwards. Could you tell a bit more about this relationship between your dance and the music?

TH: The first thing is that I have to love to dance to the music. As we tour and play the pieces a lot, I realised very early in my career that you have to want to listen to this music a lot if you’re going to dance to it. So, the first thing is love; to feel that I love it so much that I could listen to it almost forever and never get bored. In a way the soundtracks of my pieces are like my good friends. There, the music is different to the costumes, I don’t have access to the costumes in the same way that I have access to the music.

I also have an interest for how music creates dramatic propositions and how you can use music over time to create a kind of landscape of entrances and exits and possibilities on the stage. I have done a lot of soundtrack collage but now I want to go deeper into pieces that are already structured and built and not so much about me putting together a collage of things. I want to go deeper into whole pieces of music.

KD: You just mentioned costumes and how you relate to them. How are the costumes associated to the choreography and to the space? Here in the Palais des Papes we observe the historic encounter between fashion and the popes, which is surprising only at first glance… You propose here (and you always do) a specific dramaturgy of costumes, not only for the piece as a whole but also for each specific dancer; you develop the costumes to stress and disclose the individuality of each dancer, which seems to me to be almost an opposite movement to what is done in fashion which nevertheless is an important inspiration to your work. What is that process of the costume creation like?

TH: As a young child my mother was taking me shopping a lot, therefore I like shopping for clothes. And usually that is the way I get into the piece. The costumes are the first tangible thing I have. When I am alone and start to work on a piece the music and the costumes are the first tangible things I have in order to create the world of the piece. The costumes allow me to get more into the specificity of the dancers and the dance itself, more than the music. The music tends to be much more about the world of the piece, the eventness of the piece. Costumes allow me to get into the people. I go shopping and say “Oh, this could be good for this person, that could be right for that person”. But “The Romeo” was a bit different. Usually, I work with the costumes right away from day 1 of the rehearsals. I start making the piece and I start putting the costumes on people. With “The Romeo” I didn’t do that. The piece was very hard to make and I did not want the costumes to fool me or trick me, I knew that I could not just fall into my normal habits. For the first time I had to find the dance itself. So, I waited before I brought the costumes into the rehearsal. I never had done this before and it was strange for everyone because we were not used to this process.

KD: The dance Romeo, whose history you imagine, is not simply a sequence of steps or movements, but also a mindset, a mindset in which dance is a part of life with its big events and its banal incidents. If we speak about the Romeo and more general about the position of dance in human realms: Where is dance situated, in our lives and stories and histories?

TH: I propose in an imaginative way that dance is very important; and that it stands in history alongside politics, alongside wars, alongside cultural history, alongside art history, alongside medicine. I try to propose that the things that you see on stage, although they’re completely fake in a way, are part of our fabric of everything that is humanity and our human civilisation. The dances we deal with and that we try to propose fictionally are not small entities. They are big ideas! They have big functions in culture and society. That dance could have an important place in culture and history, is something I try to say. I also felt I had to go for this because I was here in the Palais des Papes at the Festival d’Avignon invited to dance in the Cour d’honneur in the first edition of the new direction. I felt that I had the chance to state something and I asked myself: what am I going to say? I felt that I had to say this, about the place of dance in human life and history. I did a lot of work in women studies and feminist theory. Trying to expose different histories that had been forgotten, different possibilities, different to what usually is foregrounded, has been a big part of many people’s work, academic work and cultural work. “The Romeo” is my contribution to that. Dance was not given the same importance as theatre, for example, or certainly not the same as literature. But dance is an important part of culture and society and if we study dance, it has something to say about who we are and who we have been, about the linear and/or non-linear march of so-called “human civilisation.” We propose in “The Romeo” that dance has as much to say as any of those other things, it is in the fabric of the dances too. It is a big notion. And it is also a performative notion. That is the scary part about it, you have to perform this notion, it is not just something that you can say. I mean, I can say it to you in this interview but that has no meaning. It has to be palpable to the people, at the performances. They have to feel it, they have to sense it.

KD: What is the space for dance beyond the stage, beyond performative dance?

TH: Oh, there are so many different spaces. What I do is specific, it is a specific synthesis of performance in which there is a relationship between what we see, what we do, what its meanings are, what its relationships to history are, what its relationships to aesthetics are. It is a non-static field of references, that some people participate in and others do not, and that is okay. I don’t hierarchize it. We can present possibilities because we understand that culture and art can have a place within the conversation of power.

KD: You’re not only the choreographer of “The Romeo” but you’re also on stage. How would you describe the position that you hold on stage? And the relationship that you enter with the other dancers and the space?

TH: From the very beginning of the piece, one understands who I am. I do not try to hide; I make myself visible. I say I am Trajal Harrell so one knows that I am the choreographer and that I have a power in the piece. You see that I instigate things, that I decorate things. I want to give notice that my hand is there, that it is an artwork by me. Taking that role, I try to generate certain sensitivities for my performative place and with the performers. Part of it is just practical because I want to see the piece, I need to take notes, so I need a position where I could be on stage and at the same time see the piece. It is just a poor strategy of my work I have to say, because I want to be able to see the pieces. And at the same time, I want to perform myself as a dancer, therefore I have to find these strategies. But performative wise I try to affect the sensitivity of the piece. And I myself try to be sensitive to how it is moving every night.

KD: Your time at Schauspielhaus Zürich and with it the time of the Schauspielhaus Zürich Dance Ensemble is coming to an end, because the two artistic directors who hired you have been given notice to leave and you with them. What will happen for you and the Dance Ensemble after the coming season, in which you will do your last work at the Schauspielhaus?

TH: Good question. I hope that we figure out a way to continue to have a home in Zurich because we have developed a fan base there and it would be a pity to lose that. Five years in the making is the longest I have had besides New York. So, although our relationship with the Schauspielhaus will end, I hope that our relationship with Zurich does not. At this point moving with the company to another city would be like starting over and that would not make sense. Also, many of the dancers feel like Zurich is their home now and I am trying to be sensitive to that. But at the same time, I have never been one to have one home – so we’re open to possibilities.

KD: To conclude: what are you looking forward to most on the evening of 18 July 2023?

TH: I will just try to be present. It is arguably one of the most important performative moments of my career but I just keep coming to work every day and will come to work on that day; though it will be a bit special. I hope that there is magic in the air; I hope that the stars align and we all have a very special night that we will always remember. That is what I hope.