Devising How to Fight

Jennifer Torrence: A quick question: do you think the word "devised" as a description of our process in making How to Fight holds water?

Carolyn Chen: “Devising” seems like a very useful term, though not being in theatre, I don’t know exactly what that word means to people coming from that world. We did play some open-form games, especially toward the beginning of the process, and I think the nature of the spoken material was very much shaped by how we each individually parsed this large bulk of material loosely relating to the them of fighting, and then a few personal anecdotes that seemed to balance the more expository sections. Especially for these speaking parts, there is no set script, and it seems true to the work to not require certain kinds of phrasing – what seems central is to communicate these ideas as clearly as possible in words that sound like our individual voices. If I did end up making a score, these would have to be set out in bullet points and not complete sentences – and the personal anecdotes would have to be completely individual to whomever was performing.

J: Absolutely. Can you say more about how you reflect on our process in making How to Fight? Specifically I am referencing our attempt to work together as composer-performer and performer-composer.

C: We started with a very short project description and the general idea of fighting. I had been interested in the idea of investigating conflict, and we’d had a bit of email exchange on the topic. I had some background in taichi and was very excited about learning aikido when we were discussing themes – I maybe proposed the subject in part because these were movement practices and routes to movement that I felt it would be possible to work through, since we’re not coming from a dance background. Also, I thought you’d have a very valuable performance energy to complement this idea.

We met and over the course of two weeks, found a movement vocabulary that was mostly derived from martial arts exercises and that would fit our bodies and the size of the space that we’d have. Then I drafted an order of events in terms of lighting and movement, and found some relevant topics to talk about in accompaniment. At every stage, we edited and polished the materials together, especially in reasoning out overall structure. The details of the spoken material we each worked out individually. I gave you pages and pages of google-search results to sort and cull, but you really worked out what was more interesting to present and how to say it. There were a lot of choreographic details like stage placement, or, for example, how we repeated the jo kata in progressive increments, which emerged through running through the material, talking through it together, and feeling out how things could be made clearer and more vivid.

In terms of physical materials, it was all a little bit contingent and even improvisational. Before we got to The Hambidge Center Residency where we developed the piece, we went on a shopping trip and bought flashlights and a toilet brush and we also borrowed a broom from your family. I was thinking of finding something to practice with for the jo kata and other martial arts movements. The broom was free and the toilet brush was a good deal financially, which was sort of irresistible. But I think in the end these objects have a lot of bearing on the character of the work as a whole. This was also the case with the particular small percussion instruments that you brought, for example the chimes that illuminate the tai chi cloud hands, and the little castanet and small wooden shaker instrument for the marco polo introduction. All these are so integral to how things sound and the feeling of these sections, however they were simply the objects we had available to us. Not only their aquisition but also how we used these objects within the piece came through an improvisational, contingent process, for example how the toilet brush segues from a "weapon" into a grooming tool, which was an idea that developed while working through the materials and stuck.

J: Would you say the process we took was integral to the outcome of the piece?

C: Yes, the process does seem integral. I do think it would have been impossible to make something with so much integrated movement without having this time together.

I’m not coming from a theater background, but I do think the spirit of the piece as a whole is something that requires a certain degree of openness, and tailoring to the performers’ (our) individual bodies and voices. I think that had we not had this time constraint of a performance at the end of two weeks, if we had the luxury of a much longer period, things might have been even more improvisational and role-crossing. This is one thing that distinguishes our process from a more typical theater or dance process – the regularity with which we’re used to notating and much shorter rehearsal periods in new music. Given the circumstances, I think we were really just problem-solving and trying to do the best we could with the resources we had – so there were moments like the spoken texts where it made sense not to write down, or to simply work it out through doing it. But there were also moments, the song-writing, for example, that fit into a more traditional composing-then-rehearsing model, though with the added luxury of having our voices there to instantly try things out. And there was the responsiveness of getting to rehearse the first song before the other two were written, with the result that the other two were much simpler in construction since I realized we had such limited time to actually learn the music.

J: Do you think that, hypothetically, if you had been left to your own devises you could have come pretty close to what the resulting piece ended up being? I suppose what I am questioning here is if or how much my presence in the process shifted things for you?

C: For those particular elements that we worked out separately (the songs, the parts where I was talking, that first draft of the overall movement/lighting structure), it might be possible to say, yes, they would have turned out something like the way they did. And I think overall, our aesthetic sensibilities are pretty compatible, so that I never felt like there was any substantive conflict in that way. But in the larger picture, I would never have attempted a project like this had we not been able to have the time to work things out together. I wouldn’t have tried to thematize things in such a direct way – to actually talk about such personal things. I wouldn’t have written out movement tasks for myself. I wouldn’t have allowed things to develop in a direction that was so personal, where I’m actually just telling stories about my life. Maybe this is a little counter-intuitive, but I think I wouldn’t have gotten so personally involved, bodily or narratively, had we not been working together so closely.

It’s just so rare to have this much time to work with someone, and with this much trust. It was easier to leave things more open, to take wider leaps, and to redistribute the labor because of the friendship and trust.

There wasn’t a lot of time to consciously think about the process because of the time constraint of two weeks, but this was certainly the first time I’ve come into a project with this little written material in preparation. Part of this is the trust in knowing your work as an artist. Part of it also may be the nature of the material: the physical material we were starting with is derived from dance warm-ups, or contact improve or martial arts exercises, which were all built up over years of collected experience from many different classes/teachers/sources. None of that would have made more sense or have greater clarity in written form, so it made sense to come into the room and see how easy it would be to incorporate them into a piece simply by doing, for example how they could connect to one another and how they might relate philosophically to the ideas we were discussing more broadly. There was certainly a lot of thinking through moving: realizing something will or won’t work by moving through it, and finding the connection to the last thing from the physical memory of having just done it a few minutes ago, feeling out the quality of energy in the room, feeling where the overall structure is, etc. Also, the degree of directness in speaking and storytelling was overall unprecedented for me personally, and both are still things that excite me about the project. I think both are also less ordinary from a new music standpoint, but very ordinary from a theatrical standpoint; so part of what is interesting lies in the way the medium is configured, too.

Documenting over two days was also an interesting process, and the most elaborate video shoot/ recording I’ve done, in part because of technical equipment available, and in part because of the length of the material and the importance of the visual content. Because of the nature of the piece, all these decisions about camera angle and the composition of the frame, where the microphone goes – decisions we totally made collaboratively (and also all the editing, which we haven’t done yet!). in the end, I think will have a great effect on how most of the people who have any contact with the piece will experience it. I think documenting a piece like this would probably matter more to the overall sense of the “work”, if you wanted to talk about that, much more than a score would. So that’s an interesting layer, too. 

February, 2017.