What is dance to you?

Dance is an exercise in extreme vulnerability. It’s a form that allows you to put yourself directly or indirectly in a position to be observed. And being observed, being noticed, means also being open to judgement, to agreement, to trust, or really to any reaction an observer might have.

Like most art forms- dance is something that, once it’s put into the world, removes your agency in how it is received by another.

How did you decide to become a dancer?

Believe it or not, I started dancing because of a dare. In college, a woman who lived in my dorm saw me dancing in my room and suggested I should sign up for a class in the dance program. The thought had really never occurred to me. And when she saw me hesitate to say yes, she dared me to do it.

So for me, it’s not so much that I decided to become a dancer, it’s more that I listened to something that someone else saw in me.

Who is one local and one international choreographer who inspires you and why? 

I think the definition of local and international has some layers to it for me as an immigrant because I need to consider what constitutes local and that centers on where I consider home. But if I think of this question in terms of right now, I’m able to identify which makers are here in the vicinity versus those who are separated from me by distance and time. The people who come to mind are Ana Lessing Menjibar and the artists of the Situationist International.

Ana Lessing Menjibar is a Berlin-based choreographer and maker. Her work has always impressed me with its ability to question and blend technical training and multiple disciplines with family and cultural histories. She uses the body as a site of interface and builds a creative language that invites the observer in to explore the nuances of that with her.
 
The Situationist International weren’t choreographers as we might think of dancemakers today. But, in Paris of the 1950s, their exploration and portrayal of public space created such wonderful countermaps of the everyday that had a lasting effect on how we might permit ourselves to engage with the world around us. 

How do you position yourself in these post-present times?

I think I need a more solid understanding of what truly makes it the post present.

I stay focused on constant observation of the present and I allow it to mix with a growing understanding of the past to even begin to hypothesize about what could come next. 

My studies in time theory would have me wanting to comment on the subjectivity of time. But as a thinking body, I can only inhabit the now, and I’m not sure I know how to operate with a sense of the present being behind me in any way. 

Do you have a question for yourself?

I constantly focus on how best to describe the differences between space and place. For me, space being just location and place being location with meaning. But in addition to this, I look at how a body can affect the differences that exist between these two categories, space and place.

I’ve used objects to form and to find connections to place. But lately I’ve started to give some thought to how places can link to objects and, ultimately, how places link to bodies.

What is choreography to you?

In my research, I focus quite a lot on cartography. I understand choreography being not so different from making a map. Historically, cartography was made up of two partner disciplines — one of which was chorography (this was spelled without the e) and this was a way to describe place with meaning.

When I think now of choreography in its modern form, as a dancemaking form, it becomes a tool of observation and navigation that I can apply to various spaces, often public spaces. I can use choreography to apply meaning to or derive meaning from location, and, by crafting meaning onto space, it becomes a process of placemaking.

What role does geography play in your artistic practice? 

The works I make are site-sensitive in the sense that they are not tied to place in a way that they cannot be removed. They’re affected by the place that they are performed or they’re affected by the place they’re created, but they’re not inextricably tied to that location.

Instead, I create structures and ways of working/ways of observing that I can then take into public space and I can treat public space like a studio. I do that to uncover details about location. But then these locations, these impressions of the locations are brought back into the traditional studio or into a non-traditional performance space and that’s done to build a performative map of place.

These tools are things I can put in my suitcase and take with me to other locations.  And so geography in my work, this idea of description of place, it sits in the body – so whether that be creating work in the general area where I live or whether that be taking my work to create in a place where I have my cultural and family roots (like Armenia), I’m able to dig into that location and explore that geography using those tools and to stay very connected to the geography through the body…to use the body to understand the geography of my immediate surroundings in combination with where I’ve been before.