Dreaming/Preparing/Dancing: 3 Days until “death pod/kid subjunctive” at CounterPulse
By Jill Randall, with Christy Funsch and Nol Simonse
Christy Funsch, Nol Simonse, and Jim Cave premiere new works at CounterPulse in San Francisco, September 8-10. The other day, I got to catch up with longtime colleagues Christy Funsch and Nol Simonse via a virtual dialogue (i.e. email threads and Google Docs). Read further to peek in through the window on the work.
Purchase your tickets for the upcoming performances here.
Jill Randall (JR): Thank you for sharing your press release and a short video of you two talking about time and your current works.
Listening to you two in dialogue, I am thinking of a few word pairs that play out thematically and choreographically. These concepts are fun to consider in light of both of your works. Can you each share what comes to mind with these ideas?
Settled/unsettled:
Christy: I was settled but now I am unsettled. I think I feel unsettled because of the version of settled I was in. I think these two states are relative, and I have worked hard to be okay being unsettled. If I consider my work as an ongoing practice, I relieve myself of the pressure to make a perfect piece, or even to make a finished piece. Sometimes I think being settled is a fiction, because there is no such thing as stillness.
Nol: Oh, I would love to feel “settled”! But as a choreographer, I don’t know if that’s possible. “Settled” feels like some version of “finished”- and I don’t know if anything ever really feels finished – I’m trying to be ok in an unsettled, unfinished state, which is the forever present.
Formal/informal:
Christy: The lively interplay of these constructs has been the subtextual content of my work for the past ten years! I’m in love with them both and want to coax them to live together in the worlds of each piece I make. I feel tender towards formalism, because like “settled,” I think it might be a fiction. It’s definitely oppressive. Informal is the child of me dancing on and with the vacuum cleaner; it’s the foundation of how dance has always been my meaning-making.
Nol: I also feel tender towards formalism. There is something comforting about the curtains, the suspension of disbelief, knowing what to expect and how to experience it – feeling comfortable with the container. Informality is unexpected, and has a tinge of excitement.
Present/future:
Christy: Things are not okay right now. Things might be okay, or at least better. I am not living in the present, sorry California, I am remaking the past when I remember it, and I am conjuring the future as per my desire. In the words of fiction writer Jean Chen Ho: “To live in the subjunctive is a manner of seeing the past not as a fixed story but as one that the present continuously acts upon. The present is what determines the past, not the other way around. I can write it any way I choose, at my own pace. That’s another thing about the subjunctive: There’s always enough time there. All the time you could want, and need.”
Nol: I’m trying hard to be present, and make good choices. Probably not succeeding, though.
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JR: What are 5 words or phrases to describe your latest work?
Nol: Death, friendship, comforting, ritual, dream
Christy: Broken; efforted; anchoring; building; terrifying (this is how I feel about the piece more than the piece)
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JR: When was the choreographic moment for you? Why did you want to make this piece?
Nol: Jim, Eli, and I were talking in a cemetery. The conversation was deep, rich, funny, honest, educational, and real. I thought, “I’m an idiot – I should’ve been recording this.” And then I thought, “I wish I could put this on stage.”
Christy: Each choreographic adventure drops me off where I need to be to start the next one. Kid subjunctive arose from what I refer to as the “residue of unfulfilled desires” that are in the wake of every piece I make–in this case it was last year’s 12-hour EPOCH. EPOCH was so much about “sitting in it–”it” being the present. Kid (referring to playful curiosity) subjunctive (referring to imagined, desire-projected futures) is my attempt at moving towards possible ways of being. Ways of determining what we want and asking for it. Ways of negotiating our projections with the people around us holding us accountable.
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JR: “The performance is now,” Nol shares in your recorded conversation. So much is up for discussion at this time about performance, engagement, audience, collaborators, agency, and decisionmaking. How do each of you define “performance?”
Christy: I have framed my dance-making history as a way to grapple with the question of what is performance and what it can do. The work I am most engaged with as a viewer challenges me to expand my perception. The construct of “performance” is ongoing content in my work. Sometimes oppressively so, in that I pull people along to swim in the complexity of ideas without always fully holding and honoring their desire(s) and personhood(s). I try to name, as early as I can, what I think I am up to in each project, in order to give collaborators an out if their interests do not align. Yes, the creative act and all of the decision-making it requires is an oppressive assertion of “I am.” I try to own the politics and values inherent in all of my choices and ask for assistance with this from my audience. I hungrily invite this! I also ask for receptivity from the viewer. I’m not interested in coddling or fictions or happily-ever-after. That isn’t what I think the function of art, of performance is. For me, and I write this with full ownership of my bias, performance should not numb but expand perception.
Nol: Anything can be a performance really. Watching some birds at Lake Merritt can be a performance. For me, a key ingredient is exploration – as an artist – did you explore something? An idea, a method, a feeling? And do you want to show people that exploration? (Or what you’ve learned, or how you’ve changed.) That’s something I like to see in a performance.
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Life as a Modern Dancer 
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