with Erika Mitsuhashi on Privilege
Erika Mitsuhashi in Privilege Photo: Daria Mikhaylyuk
SM How did you come to connect the working process of Privilege with Carlo Rovelli’s writings?
EM Early on in rehearsal, Jennifer planted the proposition that we are doing research. She spoke of what we were doing as a certain kind of researching that is sometimes equated to scientific inquiry. At the time it made sense, but it didn't really resonate until, as I read Rovelli’s Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, I started seeing parallels with certain areas of physics. Rovelli speaks of intuition, imagination and desire as motivators for research practices. I can’t help but feel this aligns with the pursuit of dancemaking. I’d been working that way for a long time without putting it into that understanding.
““Physics opens windows through which we see far into the distance. What we see does not cease to astonish us. We realize that we are full of prejudices and that our intuitive image of the world is partial, parochial, inadequate.””
Erika Mitsuhashi in Privilege Photo: David Cooper
After that, sediment began floating down to the bottom of the glass. I was thinking about the honing of our perception and our bodies in the way Jennifer invites us to work, the methodical, quite detailed approach – as if uncovering inherent body intelligence, and how, as artists/movers, we relate to rhythm.
There’s a constant feedback loop. Jennifer has a breadth of knowledge concerning different systems in the body. She comes with a thesis - an inkling of what system to inhabit, tune to - in order to move with a certain kind of quality, find the velocity to engage with the rhythmic demands of the music, and so on. We all take time to work at testing the system. We show each other, talk about it, and Jennifer takes time to see if the thesis was fulfilled. She is always open to being refuted.
“..The beauty of the scientific enterprise is that we are in touch with the unknown, what we don’t know, and we try to make steps into it. So, that’s a strength of science, that it works out of beauty, out of intuition, out of imagination, but it has a very solid way, then, of checking. And which also means that some — many beautiful ideas turn out to be wrong.”
SM Jennifer tackles impossibilities as a means to get at what she’s working toward.
EM In things that feel impossible there’s a certain area of thinking where big cultural and scientific shifts happen. Once we thought the earth was flat. By pushing through various thresholds of impossibility, we kind of make it to the other side. So I feel that the positive side of impossibility is expanding possibilities.
Mitsuhashi / Privilege Photos: David Cooper
SM Some collaborators relish this, for others it’s less accessible.
EM Yes, it’s key to find those with an affinity for “we’ll just test it out, fingers crossed, keep trying and then we’ll assess.” I have a mixed relationship to possibility. It could be totally impossible, but when I propose it, I begin to feel like maybe it’s possible. I resonate and sympathize with the motivation for tackling impossible things. I always give it a shot.
“Here in the vanguard, beyond the borders of knowledge, science becomes even more beautiful. Incandescent in the forage of nascent ideas, of intuitions, of attempts, of roads taken then abandoned, of enthusiasms. And the effort to imagine what has not yet been imagined. ”
SM Tell me about working via ZOOM – you did weeks of this very different work model last spring, and again recently.
EM In this recent short phase on ZOOM we found a way to work just with the detailed elements: the score, working note-by-(musical) note. ZOOM is excellent for that type of work. And in the March-May quarantine period we were assigned homework and given time to work on it; this way of working felt completely wonderful. Well, with the caveat of living in a very small apartment and navigating the spatial relationships of it. But when I could, I rented the Golden Saucer space and that helped me adjust.
“When we think about time, for instance, we think time is the same for everybody. And we know it’s not true. Time passes a little bit faster in the mountain and a little bit slower near the sea; the more high you go, the more time passes fast. So it’s relative to how we move, where we are, and so on. I think that, in the fundamental equation of the world as we have understood so far, we can forget about time. They’re not about how things evolve in time. It is about relations between — within variables. I think, that, more or less, we can understand.”
EM It was different, but we learned a lot on ZOOM. It’s a different communication tool. It does shift cellular response, and understanding things with kinaesthetic awareness, a little. The question is where performance lives inside this. It brings up really big questions about scale.
Can a performance be a performance just for the people inside of the piece? Recently Alexa Mardon and I did a short film during the brief relaxation of restrictions. We got a site with tons of space, and gathered many performers. We were all starved for performance. And we were performing for each other, inside the (choreographic) scores. We can enjoy this. Eventually, we can also share it with the world.
SM What does that mean for Zoom work?
EM Zoom feels like a little performance…pay attention to one square. We discovered how to work with the medium; letting it be a gaze to be choreographed, working with framing, distance, proximity. We found that these can re-contextualize the moment. Slowly, as you begin to think of it (the ZOOM model) as an equal companion, rather than a hard medium or barrier, you’re able to soften your interaction with it. We just got better with practice. When the feelings and the alchemy were OK, there were definitely some breakthroughs. On COVID Fatigue days, everything was difficult. I found in all this a new way of communicating that I want to normalize.
We’re all thinking differently. About the work we’re doing - and about things in our lives now.
“A handful of types of elementary particles, which vibrate and fluctuate constantly between existence and non-existence and swarm in space, even when it seems that nothing is there, combine together to infinity like the letters of a cosmic alphabet to tell the immense history of galaxies, of the innumerable stars, of sunlight, of mountain, woods, and fields of grain, of the smiling faces of the young at parties, and of the night sky studded with stars.”
Carlo Rovelli
is a professor of physics at Aix-Marseille University, where he is director of the quantum gravity group in the Center for Theoretical Physics. He is also director of the Samy Maroun Research Center for Time, Space, and the Quantum. His books include Seven Brief Lessons on Physics and, most recently, The Order of Time.
Erika Mitsuhashi
is a dance and performance artist living and working on the unceded, ancestral, and occupied, traditional lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), and Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) Nations of the Coast Salish peoples, known as Vancouver, British Columbia. She studied at Simon Fraser University School for the Contemporary Arts receiving a BFA (hons) in dance. She has had the pleasure of interpreting the work of independent dance artists including Justine A. Chambers, Ziyian Kwan (Dumb Instrument Dance), Sasha Kleinplatz (Wants&Needs Danse), Rob Kitsos, Vanessa Goodman (Action at a Distance) and Judith Garay (Dancers Dancing) in festivals and platforms such as Vancouver International Dance Festival, Dancing on the Edge Festival, The Interplay Project, Re-FUSE presented by the Vancouver Art Gallery and PuSh International Performing Arts Festival 2020. As an emerging choreographer, her practice is based in dance and performance but spans visual art, theatre and new media. She uses the body as a site for experimental investigation of concepts such as “in-betweenness”, intimacy, materiality of the body/space, pseudo-science, personal histories and DIY performance tactics. Her work and collaborative projects have been presented locally and internationally by PAUL Studios Berlin, Powell Street Festival, Toronto Love-In’s PS:We are All Here series, Surrey Art Gallery’s InFlux, Kinetic Studio’s Open Studio Series, Shooting Gallery Performance Series, New Works’s 2018/19 Season Launch and La Serre's OFFTA festival of live art. She engages with three diverse collaborative projects: Mardon + Mitsuhashi, Farouche collective and Erika Mitsuhashi & Francesca Frewer.