THE SHIFT: Sarah Bild and Susanna Hood talk with Jennifer Mascall
Jennifer Mascall, Sarah Bild and Susanna Hood spent an evening together at the close of the Bild/Hood Shift Residency.
Jennifer
The Shift is a fantastic opportunity for me to hang out with people that come from other somatic practices. And to be in the class and to have conversations, it’s just refreshing. So I welcome both of you.
Susanna
Thank you
Sarah
Thank you
Jennifer
So I want to hear everything - about your path, about how you got to where you're going now, and how you work towards performance. Why don't we begin by you two talking together about how you met, how your practices intersect, and what’s common and what’s not common, amongst the two of you?
Susanna
We met in 2006. I remember that specifically because Ruth (Zaporah, source of Action Theatre) was on my radar, I’d been sort of clocking her orbit. Actually, just earlier that year in Berlin, I’d run into someone who'd been working with her for a long time. I was living in Toronto, and I had this moment between projects, where she was coming to Montreal. I was free to go and take her workshop. And that's where I met Sarah.
Sarah
I had discovered Ruth three years before that. I was emerging from a lull. I had two toddlers at home and I’d taken a step back from dancing, and I just felt I had to meet this woman. I wanted to improvise.
Jennifer
Why? What had you heard of her?
Sarah
I had heard that she was working on presence and improvisation. I had so many questions about what it is we do with live performance, and why dance, and why anything. I was in a bit of an identity crisis around dance. Meeting her.. it's not that it answered many questions, but I just felt like, “oh, I can work with these questions now.”
What struck me so much about her work was that I was getting to use my voice, both vocally and with words, something I’d never been encouraged to do in my dance training. And I very quickly began to try to produce Ruth. I wanted Ruth to come up to Montreal, and that year I partnered with 303 to bring her. And Susanna and I met. We’d kind of clicked in improv together already.
Susanna
I think I wasn't quite sure what I was going to encounter with Ruth, but I was intrigued. I was already making work, doing a lot of improvising. One of my main collaborators at the time, for 12 years, was an improvising musician named Alain Perara. Together, we built a lot of work; we had a performance improvisation practice and the work that we were building together. In the end, we made four large stage works. Encountering Ruth was kind of in the middle of that time. So I was working already a lot with voice and text and really building all the material out of improvising, even though it would then become quite written.
And I just had a gut feeling basically that she had something that was interesting, that might offer me something. In fact I remember the feeling of “oh, OK! This is part of my tribe.” I even remember the exercise we were doing, something about the eyes and sort of pressing presence in through the eyes and moving out. And there was a kind of a feeling that has become very familiar, of a way that we can kind of meld together, Sarah and I, in a certain part of the way that we were, and that, I think, became foundational to how we continued working.
After that workshop, I was still living in Toronto, but I was being invited to Montreal more and more frequently to work, to teach. And I had a real drive to want to keep practising this work. Sarah had set up kind of a practice group of a few people in Montreal, though sometimes it was often just she and I.
Sarah
We were the diehards!
Susanna
So I’d come to Montreal and we’d get studio space and we would practice.
Sarah
And something we recognized in each other is that we're both pretty good students - we like to practice hard, and we're rigorous and some of the Action Theatre practice is built on pretty clear guidelines and rules; and so we were very good at reminding each other of the rules and playing those rules. And, of course, now everything we're trying to do now is to forget those rules and just improvise and blow free, I mean, if we can. But it's interesting that we also share the same language, the same kind of understanding of what it is we're working on. Very much through that practice, but then also through a lot of what you've shown me through us, and stuff like that, as well.
Jennifer
But before you met Ruth, what led you to improvisation?
Susanna:
Right at the beginning of my career I was dancing in a repertory company, Toronto Dance Theatre, and I suffered a pretty major back injury, coinciding with the moment when I was planning on leaving the company anyway, but it opened a big empty space in my life. One of the first things that I encountered coming out of that – I don’t even know why - was about Joan Skinner in Seattle. My friend Jessica Runge was also going to go and we went out to Seattle, a year after that injury, when I was functional.
Basically, my first encounter with that work, and that's also where I met Stephanie Skura who then became my main Skinner teacher. She was not my first improvisation and composition teacher, but she was highly influential, in part about the way we were approaching anything to do with process. Creative process and composition was very much through improvisation. It was a place that I flourished; My experience was that in conjunction with the releasing work, I was moving pain-free for the first time in over a year. You can't argue with that! If all of a sudden I can dance freely and I'm not in pain, there’s something good happening. Stephanie often talks about that work as being made of the same stuff as creative process, so you're practicing being creative alongside of practicing technique.
Jennifer
When you say it is of the same stuff, what is “it”?
Susanna
The pedagogy of the releasing work that Joan developed and and then working with all the imagery that she developed for it, I would say. That's a very good question. What is it? It's such a complex thing that she built. It's like a poem. And the way that it works - those images, and the way into a somatic experience… I still find it hard to point at one central thing, because the work is so much like a web and that web itself is creative process. I don’t know if I’ve really answered your question.
Pause
Jennifer
I used to love it with Steve Paxton when he’d say “Why don’t we have a conversation?” We’d schedule it, we’d all sit down to talk about it. It was like rehearsing.
Tell me about the school.
Sarah
I teach composition there, for over almost 17 years now. And I trained at that school…
Jennifer
Oh, really!
Sarah
…and Linda (Rabin) got me in, early on. Teaching composition, I bring a lot of Action Theatre stuff, which is great. I love it. It's my way of staying in communication with the young folk. And then I'm always working with the questions I have. Even though my relationship to choreography has changed so much, I always find the compositional tools absolutely essential and important to develop. So that's always really fun. It’s doing really well, the school.
Jennifer
And does Linda still teach there?
Sarah
She teaches. She created what they call creative research, and is gradually training another person to take over. She’s ready to start winding down at the school.
Jennifer
I'm interested in hearing from either of you, but provoked by you, Susanna – what are images? How would you describe what an image is? And how would you talk to someone who might not know what it was, about how to find it?
Susanna
The use of imagery in Joan Skinner’s work is quite particular. I think at the time that she was building that work, it was fairly radical, and a new approach, in that (much like the rest of that practice) it's about the process of the image as opposed to its goal. So as opposed to “Here is a form” that we're trying to fit ourselves into or accomplish, her take on imagery(and that’s why I use the notion of poetry) she talked about metaphor as something that was an energy that could touch you. The work creates the condition, which is often to go into a slightly, let's say, subconscious state, and this is where suppleness comes in as well, a kind of softening of the mind - to be able to merge with the image and be touched by it, and ultimately be moved by it.
There are many progressions in that work, but a very core progression is to go from: I move it. It moves me. It moves.
And the imagery that she created - a lot of it is actual descriptive language - much of it comes from the natural world – she was living in a West Coast rainforest world. She herself would say “it's not actually about the image. It's about what's underneath the image. It's about an energy. It's about a state.”
She was experimenting. Oftentimes she developed a lot of that imagery, I think, through time spent just between waking and sleeping, either falling asleep or waking in the morning and having particular somatic experiences that weren't necessarily those images. But the images were her attempt to create an experience for her students, a bridge for them to have that physical kinaesthetic experience she’d had.
Jennifer
I see. So did she make a syllabus of images that people…
Susanna
Yes, and the work, the pedagogy, is incredibly complex. In a formal Skinner Releasing or Open Source Forms class, there are different types of activities. Some are in what we’d call waking states (like what we did this morning - the suppleness, the supple shift of weight, that's a more waking state). Some move more into sort of unconscious, subconscious realm, and just as you were talking about earlier, part of the reason for that is that it allows people to kind of go under their own radar, get underneath the first surface level. I mean, she wasn’t necessarily building an improvising pedagogy, although one is improvising, in the material. One’s working it. But it’s an amazing set up for improvisation, because it gets us underneath. So much of our identity can be locked in how we perceive our physical form, how we hold ourselves. The work is really designed to get underneath. Because of this it is an amazing set up for improvisation. The work is also very much designed to be experienced and not so much analyzed - until much later, after you've really gone through a whole sort of peeling process - so that your analytic, cognitive mind doesn't override what your body is wise enough to be picking up on its own. The images in that work are getting at anatomy in an experiential, poetic way – they refer to anatomy but they're kind of wild anatomy.
Sarah
But if I can just expand on this idea of image – because I think there are so many different ways of using image, and it's so interesting to hear this curriculum of images is very clear. I've experienced some of them. I would say, though, that in improvisation in general, one can follow one’s own imagery at every moment, if you are an improviser who works with images because not everybody does. Not everyone has a visual image, I've come to understand. Some people really work much more with sound or with rhythm or something more sensate. But you could call those things images, too, right? You could call them a kind of an experience of something you conjure in the moment. And how do you choose to follow that from one moment to the next? I know that that's very much what Ruth suggests we do. She never will impose an image. She will just encourage us to stay open to our own imagery as it unfolds in time.
Jennifer
So how does what you just described, Sarah, how does finding your own imagery in an improvisation relate to the syllabus of imagery in the Skinner work? When you are improvising, do you suddenly realize, okay, I'm now in the tree image of the Skinner Release but I have these other things going on that are other images along with it.
How do they come together?
Susanna
Personally, there are few images that I find - maybe places that can allow me to access a kind of availability in myself - but I actually don't when I'm improvising in performance, or in an improvisatory practice with another artist of whatever sort, it's very rare, actually, that I'm conjuring those images.
I know how they're useful for me to prepare myself, I know how they're useful to me in what I would call my personal practice. But (and this refers a little bit to your earlier question, what drew me to improvisation) I met Stephanie, she was an enormous influence, she also was already developing her own improvisational language. That influenced me at the same time, I was beginning to explore with somebody like Milan and discovering my own particular interests in improvisation. I was just hungry for it. That's also the time when I met and studied with people like Peter Bingham and Lisa Nelson. So for me, all of those things are part of what's in my pores. But I think my real job, when I'm in a moment of improvisation, is trying to use all those tools to listen and be as present as possible.
For instance, something that came into the first exercise that we did today - just the practice of shifting awareness as an ongoing running thing that is going on. That’s not an image, I don't even think of as a tool. It's something that I've absorbed and it becomes how I navigate an improvisation.
Jennifer:
How you navigate your life!
Susanna
Yeah, yeah! Sometimes, if I find myself in a moment of a bit of a loss, I don’t know what to do now – there might be something in me that might be a starting seed in me, a kind of cue, from any of those images. But I don't think I really bring any of them into my performance practice, because it's more important for me to be listening to what's actually occurring.
Jennifer
Sarah, is there a way you prepare for an improvised performance?
Sarah
Yeah, I find I’m always doing different things. I sometimes feel I'm not very disciplined in developing a particular way; there seems to be the right way for that day. It definitely has to do with being warmed up in the body, and then there's something about dropping in, being available. What does that mean? I do a softening thing that I discovered relatively late in life when I was starting to become aware of what my body couldn't do anymore. I’d realized I was working from a lot of tension during most of my dancer life, initiating everything from a muscular place. I was very interested in what that would be if I didn't have to muscle everything. And so I do a little of something I call the smudge, which is about trying to blur the edges.
It helps me be part of the atmosphere surrounding me, it just has a very opening quality - I'm feeling it already right now - just kind of an opening to the space and the moment and in all directions, back space.. the skin… It's an intimate space that surrounds me, and it feels vibrational. I have to work on that. I have to focus on being ready in that way. Then you’re kind of ready.. and then you realize you're never ready…
Susanna
Or you're always ready -
Sarah
Or you’re always ready. And then you just hope you're amazing, or your partner suggests something really great and you go there!
Sarah:
But it gets me thinking about a question you asked earlier - are there different approaches or different reasons to improvise?
Jennifer
Do you think everybody's aspiring to the same thing?
Sarah
I don't, actually.
Jennifer
I think not, too.
Sarah
I would say that some improvisation is purely experiential. It's really about what you're feeling and the trip you're following, with or without partners. It could be a great tool to open up other ways of moving or movement ideas, but it’s not necessarily performative, and it’s not necessarily about communicating to someone else. It's more about your own being with yourself.
What really drew me to Action Theatre was that it was absolutely about expressing something; it was about performing and communicating.
That’s something that Susanna and I share this interest and this on-going practice of having to test improvisation in performance. That is a really particular thing. Not everybody improvises to perform.
Jennifer
And not everybody will improvise in performance.
Sarah
No, exactly. And that it actually has to be something that you practice. You actually must improvise in front of people. You have to practice the performing of it. And so, every time, it feels like this really delicious risk for me, because of that unknown quality.
I come from a time of choreographing everything. I chose every movement. I directed people in space. I tried to create worlds with the right lights and the right costumes and the right colours. And that was my art for a long time. And that's less interesting to me now.
Jennifer
And so when you make pieces are they scores, now?
Sarah:
I don't really make pieces on other people anymore. I really perform myself now. Improvisation.
Jennifer
Ohh. Interesting!
Sarah
Yeah, I kind of said goodbye to that in an odd way. I don't know if forever, but -
Susanna
Can I say something that I also see in what you’re making now? This is so great, knowing each other for so long. I didn't really know you at the time you're describing, but I have known you for a long time, and I watched you on a certain kind of turn in the work that you’re making. To me, there’s something about context. You choose situations, contexts, places, and you respond to those places. Like if there's a score, it's the place. Or at least that's how I’m perceiving it.
Sarah:
Yes.
Jennifer:
The location.
Sarah:
The location. Yes. My most recent project is called La Douleur in French, The Weight of Place. I choose specific places that have either historical significance or just are of interest and I choose to perform in them. But it's always improvisation.
Jennifer
That reminds me of reading that the walls contain the thoughts of the people that were there. Prisons, have the thoughts of those people, churches have the thoughts of those people, that this gets absorbed into the stone. Sylvie Tourangeau, a performance artist I work with who is quite an icon in Quebec, she talks about le deja la, what is already there. You enter a space and what does it already hold? That could be of the land, of the architecture, it could be the stone… It's not that I'm telling those stories, I don’t even go in there thinking that. It's just working with what is it doing to me, to my body, really, in that moment? And that's what I seek to share.
Susanna
I wanted to say something else about different goals for improvising. An articulation I feel I've absorbed very much from my work with musicians became even clearer at the point when my work became more and more about being a musician myself, working with not just improvising musicians, but improvising jazz musicians – that there’s also a distinction between form-making or form-animating. I find I've learned a lot from finding myself more in a band context, a situation that I'm finding in myself in more and more over the past 14 years or so, to the point now where I’ve started my own small ensemble. I'm dealing with written musical material that we all need to animate. And I'm animating that musical material both physically and vocally, as well as singing the lyric, and interacting with the other instrumentalists.
There can also be other situations where - either with other movers or other soundmakers - we’re form-making, where that's not referential to a pre-existing form, but generating from scratch, which I think is something that we're generally doing. But this aspect of form-animating is also really juicy, and trying and..
Jennifer
How does it relate to interpretation, form-animating?
Susanna
For instance, if I'm working with a song, when I’m singing the lyric, yes, of course. I also feel like improvisation is happening on all sorts of different levels and some to some degree, interpreting something is also a very contained form of improvising. We have choices that we make right within materials that are more or less set. So when I'm singing the lyric, then I would consider myself interpreting that and playing within that very tight structure. But then there's a whole in a general sort of jazz context, there's the written material, and then there's what you do in response to that, to get you back to singing the written material. That point in the middle, to me that's animating the form. It's in direct relationship to - and I mean, this is something that exists maybe in a more codified way in in, let's say, occidental music structures, at least where there are ways of responding to melody, harmony, rhythm, referring to them, playing with them, taking them apart all the way to the point where you might open way up, and not confine yourself to, let's say, the harmonic structures of something. But all the same, you know that what you're doing is in relation. It's had this jumping off point and that the experience that you have in, Even, let's say, really way out there, improvisation is something that then you're bringing back in, funneling back in. Like the way one plays an in-head and an out-head of a song can be drastically different. Maybe over time this changes, but so far, I could never play the in-head the way I end up playing the out-head because I've had to take this whole journey to get there. It does something to me physically, emotionally. My body has been vibrating with the song and the ideas and the other sounds, and I arrive somewhere else by the time I revisit the written material.
That kind of structure I find really fascinating. I feel like there's a whole world that I could dig into more there, in terms of making some more direct translation to what that could mean in a context that's not dealing with, say, notated music, dealing more with movement.
And I know lots of people who are doing that kind of research. I'll just throw this out there because something you said earlier stuck with me - earlier, like, why music? Why are you working with music? I feel now, if I were to name myself something, I'm a musician and I'm making music but I'm using my human body to do so.
Jennifer
I wondered that. Yes.
Susanna
So I am tending to think about what I'm doing. No matter how anybody else would perceive it, I'm tending to think of it more and more as music.
Jennifer:
And what what's your relationship?
Sarah
That's so interesting. I mean, I used to create pieces either on existing music or I would hire composers and have composers create. In all directions I did, I find that my generating a movement, even without any sound on, is always kind of led by a musical type of phrasing.
Jennifer
Regardless of if there’s sound.
Sarah
I've sometimes used sound as a backdrop to things. But what I like about improvisation, and especially this practice that has liberated my voice a bit, is that we can create our own soundtrack. Through vocalization, through words, using words as sound. Sound as a physical action is super interesting, remembering that vocalizing is also a muscle. We tend to go to another place in our mind when we speak understandable words, a more logical or grammatical place. The challenge is to try to stay poetic with words, to stay just as musical with words as we would be with sounds.
Jennifer:
I have a question about agency. That the music, - not the vocals, not your physical construction of sound - but music made by an instrument that is not a body and that may be notated, enters you and your body has taken it before you can make a choice. And I question the relinquishing of that in a context of trying to go in and find what’s there, and let it come out.
Speaker4: If I'm understanding what you're saying, it's that classical connection of just moving to music -
Jennifer
Well it actually that it happens. You've done this before you made...
Sarah
A decision. It's almost a bypassing of the choice. That's what you mean about agency?
Jennifer
Yes. I'm not talking about a cortical decision. But in an improvisation, it’s just immediate. But if the music wasn’t there, that move would come from you within, in some way, possibly.
Sarah
And then maybe it would attach itself to sound, you know, with or without sound. Yeah. I mean, I think all the possibilities are there.
Susanna
I mean, it's interesting. This is also a conversation I have had with some other musicians. I wonder sometimes if it's also a very particular movement practitioner type of concern with like, is this mine? Is it coming from me? Because it's our bodies that are speaking. I've had a similar conversation and and the response I get back is “Is that a problem?” Is being changed, by what you are in relationship to, a problem?
I think we do have doses of agency and non-agency all the time. I think, too, that one can practice, kind of beefing up different types of awareness in response.
Near the beginning of my researching and improvisation, I was working with this musician, Nilan Perera. Part of the reason we started working together was that we both were not interested in the conventional accompanying roles of either party. So how can we shift that up? And we spent the better part of a year or two before we ever did anything out in public where we just did things to try and disrupt that between us. Just the practice of that, the same way that you were talking about today. Sometimes it's just great to say “I'm just going to go for contrast” because it's hard and it's not impossible. To sort of like spark it up a little bit.
Jennifer
Make it more dynamic.
Susanna
So that then that's just a little bit readily available to me, when I'm letting myself fall into flow? It increases my palette of colors that I can play with, in a more or less conscious way.
Sarah
And I'd add that this is some of what we're working on now in, in our improvisation performance. As Susanna mentioned earlier, we do have this affinity we can easily fall back into, an ease, a melding. We sense each other easily. That’s often taken the form of either merging, joining something - creating an image together. And then having to either pull that apart and do something completely different.
Now we're trying to find other ways of more subtly coexisting in different registers. It doesn't have to be one or the other. We don't have to accompany or reject each other, there can be this more subtle middle ground. And I find that it's kind of the edge on that. That's a challenge to me right now.
Susanna:
I mean, this is an interesting moment for us to come together and perform this this weekend; there was a period of time where we were meeting a lot and we were performing fairly regularly together. that coincided for a time when we were both very much involved in the Action Theater work. The roots of that vocabulary were very strong in both of us. I've been doing less of that work now, and things like the pandemic happened. As a survival strategy, we were lucky over the course of the pandemic because we have a studio we could go to and be in proximity with each other, be in our own bubble and move.
But what we were drawn to at that time and seemed really necessary was more being in sort of solo witness roles. I've had a couple of different important authentic movement partners in my past, and we were working with that structure and adapting it a little. But to actually come back together and be in the space, improvising together from now, things about us that are different feel more different now because we've had a gap. It's a really interesting and disarming moment to come back together.
Jennifer
Well I’m glad I get to see it…knowing what you were before.
Susanna:
And what we all know is there's no going back.
Jennifer
Let's finish by having you talk about somatic practice. What do you think that is? What do you think the place of it is? Do you think it's what you're doing? What role is it playing in 2022 in dance now, if at all? And how did it get to the role it is now, if it even has one?
Sarah
I feel like all of our nervous systems, especially now, have a strong need to to connect with what is homeostasis in one way or another. Just for sanity in ourselves, in our relations with each other. I feel we're in a time - this is always been the case - but there seems to be something really shimmery at the moment of “how do I be this human in this body in relation to this other human in that body who might be very different than me, but. But we are still humans that need to cohabitate in this world”.
I think there's a lot in the somatic practices that that bring us in touch. And like I said earlier, I think there's lots of ways that that knowledge has been sort of implicitly imparted to younger generations, because of the lineage of what different generations of people experience in different parts of their training. So even if they're naming it or not, they have been imprinted. I mean, this is an incredible thing about physical practice. Like we get imprinted with stuff, and then we make an imprint, whether we recognize it or name it explicitly, or not.
Jennifer
And the imprint that is passed on may be the exact imprint that from a lineage or it may be a mutation.
Sarah
I think a really interesting thing about that generation Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, Emily Conrad, Joan Skinner, Anna Halprin is that they were women in a time when they were also still fighting to be taken seriously. They were going deep into something that was not so interesting necessarily to the artmaking world and they're either gone already or close to leaving.
In relation to mutating, very interesting things that have occurred, for instance, in Skinner Release work. Part of the reason Stephanie split off from the Skinner Releasing network and started Open Source Forms was that from her perspective, having worked with Joan at a time when the pedagogy wasn't even quite set, it was still developing; it was still creative. What she started to see was something becoming very codified and she felt that was far from the initial vision. I watched her struggle with how to take something and be able to continue to speak to the important essences, but also allow it to continue to evolve. So I just say that in relation to when you talk about something being mute, like mutating. Yeah.
Jennifer
It becomes tricky. There’s a pattern that seems to be going on of this thing that could be considered amorphous but is really quite specific, then becoming patented. And becoming a practitioner or a teacher of that thing at that time – how does that allow for it to do the thing which initiated it, which is the discovery?
Susanna
And also for it to be responding contemporarily. What do people need now? What is contemporary art now, and what does it need from somatic work? What training does it need? How do we readapt that? Are there things that are kind of universal? I don't know. It’s a very interesting question.
Sarah:
The crucial thing about these practices that they are bodies of work, curricula, yet by their very nature, they need to stay responsive to changes. They should stay responsive to the individuality of the teacher's body, the teacher's relationship to her own body, and then to awaken each participant's relationship to their own unique body. I find that's what's key about these things. They have to stay alive. They have to stay supple.
I would say that there's a need to move away from rigid codes – from the rigidity of our dance training from the past, of creating codified language, recognizable lines. I hope it's about fostering individuality and individual relationship to space. I hope it becomes essential training inside any movement training, or any performance training, really.
It’s kind of crucial. Otherwise, you're just pasting things on top of the body, right? Instead of kind of going into your own experience.
Jennifer
But it needs to partner with the development of an artist.
Sarah:
Well, I think this is where we come back to that notion of building your own relationship to the images, to the words you're hearing from your teacher. How does that speak to your own physical experience? Because that's what we're working with when we create, right?
Jennifer:
I see the teachers, the people being trained, and the artists. And I see they have different entry points to material. Anyway, it's pretty clear we could talk for a long time, and I want to thank you for doing this.
Susanna:
Yeah, thanks Jennifer, it’s been such an interesting conversation.
I mean, I also want to know way more about your own experience with somatic practice.
Sarah
And BMC.
Jennifer
Me too! I wonder what do I know? Do I know anything?
Susanna
It clearly remains a curiosity for you and something that you're developing.
Jennifer
Oh yes but that’s not now…let’s all go to bed!
Thank you all.
Photography by Frédérique Ménard-Aubin