How to Fight (2016)

by Carolyn Chen in collaboration with Jennifer Torrence

“One wins who knows when to fight and when not to fight." Sun Tzu

How to Fight (2016) is an assemblage on conflict and its many possibilities for redirection. Navigating the mobile boundary between attack and defense, the work moves fluidly between personal anecdote, martial arts movement, two-part harmony, flashlight choreography, and expository speaking. Individual experiences and approaches to conflict are juxtaposed with strategies for escaping animal attacks, movement exercises from tai chi and aikido, and advice from sages of the Internet and Chinese philosophy.

How to Fight is 50 minutes in length and was created at the Hambidge Center Arts Residency in Georgia, USA in June 2016. How to Fight was made possible thanks to the support of Music Norway, the Norwegian Artistic Research Programme, and the Norwegian Academy of Music.

A dialogue following the creation and world premiere performance of How to Fight, July 2016:

J=Jennifer Torrence

C=Carolyn Chen

J: How to Fight is a work for two performers that addresses conflict from a few angles. Can you say something about this topic, for example, have you worked with it before? Did you have any preconceived goals for yourself in bringing this topic into a musical work?

C: I started taking aikido last fall, and instantly felt like it was exactly what I needed to be learning. I’ve always been terrible at dealing with conflict, and one thing I had reflected on regarding earlier pieces for moving bodies was the absence of contact, or engagement. (In The confusion of stars, people are circling one another silently, responding to each other’s pacing, but always at a distance. In Tragedy, which based on the Orpheus story, the two bodies are separated by a life-death boundary, so they can never speak or move in the same world.) Someone told me my pieces were lonely. So I wanted to try something livelier, with more interaction. I love the spirit of aikido, the idea of blending with and redirecting oppositional force. It’s a martial art, but there’s so much care taken for the body of the person taking the technique. It feels like a strategy with very approachable applications. I wanted to try out a pedestrian version of trying to keep balance in motion, taking into account other people who are not necessarily aligned in tempo or direction. I also wanted to up the personal stakes - to put my own body and a bit of my own story on the line. There’s a moment in The Little Mermaid where the mermaid is singing and the atomized chorus runs at her from all directions, each bodily impact affecting her singing, but not completely stopping it. I wanted to look for a way toward this spirit of continuing a melodic line through unpredictable obstacles - not avoiding or ignoring them, but not surrendering either - somehow continuing the spirit of the intended line, allowing it to respond to interactions with the environment. In guqin lore, there’s a thing about how melodic lines played on soft silk strings stop resounding physically in the air, but continue in the imagination of the attentive listener. The line isn’t only a physical vibration - it lives in the inner ear as well.

On a personal level, the last couple of years I’ve been transitioning out of a lifetime of being a student, and this has been a bountiful source of practice for dealing with conflict.

J: That’s interesting that your work was described as lonely. I suppose that I can see that reading, but I always saw it more as vulnerability. A lot of your recent work has felt very emotional to me. You also take very small objects and give an honoured space to them, a space these small objects may never be granted. I’m thinking of your piece for Dustin Donahue (What We Swallow Turns Around), or your percussion trio Throw my Light. There is a focus on simple gestures that tell complex and nuanced stories. Usually through repetition these small gestures seem to assume a heightened state.

I think there is also a lot of vulnerability in How to Fight, although it is also a piece that is full of fun and laughter for both audience and performers alike. (Happiness is also fragile.) It is worth noting that some of our feedback from the fellows from the Hambidge Center (where we made and showed How to Fight) asked us to delve deeper into personal emotions, which is something we both seemed to struggle with. I similarly have craved for the biographical in musical works, something a la one of my favourite artists, Sophie Calle, and yet this was not as simple as it sounds…

I suppose one truth about a lot of conflict is that the underlying emotion is love, either love between the two in conflict (that there is something at stake is what makes the possibility for conflict), or at least love by one of the participants (love for the other, love for an ideal like democracy, love for the self—here I’m thinking about conflict that is faced for the purpose of survival). This is something that I have been reflecting on, perhaps it is something that you even said to me while we were working, in regards to conflict with (for example) a family member—that those fights, as painful as they are, as layered and historical as they can be, are usually about love and a miscommunication of affection.  I think I came into this project remembering and feeling some of these living conflicts, but it’s difficult to translate it into a piece. Somehow the stakes are too high.

It’s also interesting to note that we met each other in San Diego when we were both going through dramatic change and relationship strife. Heartache was the theme and cold swims in the Pacific Ocean were the medicine. Perhaps it is only natural that we would be drawn to do such a piece together.

In preparation for this project I also began taking some classes in aikido at a local dojo in Oslo. I was also struck by these concepts of momentum (which are present in several practices and philosophies/religions, the idea of impermanence, the momentum of change.) What is so striking about aikido is that momentum is the force that allows the defender to always remain the defender and never resort to attacking the opponent. Rather, the defender simply redirects the force from the attacker to their own advantage. And suddenly the attacker finds themselves pinned face-down on the ground! It reminds me of something a former percussionist and dear friend, Sindre Sætre, once said to me about falling on ice. I had just moved to Norway and winter had set in. I was walking around the city flat footed and terrified of slipping. He told me, “You have to just let yourself fall. If you try to stop it, you will hurt yourself.” This always struck me as a metaphor for so many moments of crisis in life, the necessary falls that life affords us. I asked myself how the ideas of momentum in aikido could translate to an emotional conflict and what kinds of strategies I could think about. I’m still thinking about this...

At the end of our premiere performance, my step-father said that the piece was very “thought provoking”. Perhaps we don’t have enough opportunity to reflect on conflict.

The piece is made of some personal stories, and we have also chosen stories and situations from others in order to go in to conflict. I do think that the way this piece was made and is structured that i could be possible that these that the stories could change, especially the personal ones, as we also change and gain new life experiences. Do you agree?

To move to another topic entirely, what do you think about the fact that we don’t do what we “do” in this piece? This is one of the pieces, if not the first piece, that I have been a part of that feels like two people made it, rather than two musicians/two artists. Is this something you intended? Was forsaking the percussion instruments (almost entirely) and the classic musical divisions of labor critical to the work?

C: On the personal:

I never got to listen much to pop music growing up – when I started driving a car a couple of years into grad school was the first time I had a regular reason to turn on the radio – and that was probably some of the most important music I listened to in the last decade.  I remember, amidst the various ups and downs of the year that we met in San Diego, discovering this kind of intimate relationship with confessional songs on repeated listenings, and being envious of that emotional directness, and its relevance. It’s still something I’m feeling my way around – as someone who started composing in an environment that felt like sort of a modernist sanctuary, it’s territory that seemed clearly marked as off-bounds – I didn’t start from a place of more straightforward expression, but from a context of perturbations and complications. Contemporary Western art music for the concert hall, with its history of absolute music and rationalization, has not exactly evolved as a genre for clearly or directly dealing with feelings. But it feels like my native language – or the context I know best for make things. Maybe that’s part of the desire for simplicity, or vulnerability.

I think you’re right about love – there’s got to be shared stakes in order for there to be conflict – otherwise, differing thoughts could just pass by without needing to argue.

I definitely think the personal stories could change and grow. One of the interesting parts about the process for me was seeing how the stories evolved over repetitions in the rehearsal process. There didn’t seem to be time, and it didn’t seem to make sense, to iron things out in writing first, to sort through wording and emphasis in a slightly more depersonalized idiom. We just worked them out through telling them to each other, and it was interesting to me how they grew from just saying things out loud. I don’t think I was exactly confident about any of the particular instances I speak about – whether they’d be relevant or interesting, or what to say about them – but just talking to you as my friend, as we were walking or doing some other activity, took some of the pressure of the spotlight off, they sort of gradually came into focus.

Part of the appeal of momentum for me is the idea of surrender to a larger force that’s not completely within one’s own control – surfing crashing waves, biking downhill, or that feeling when someone catches your forward propulsion and you fly in a spiral toward the ground. In aikido, letting yourself fall is not just passively allowing things to happen, but actively feeling out the changing trajectory of motion and following it, to take care of yourself and the other person, which is something I’m interested in working on.

J: Yes, that makes perfect sense about why pop music would be so important for you, especially after so many years living in our “modernist sanctuary”. Though, I do think we are going through a transition away from the sanctuary, at least it appears that the old worshipping of purely musical (non-signifying) language is coming to an end in some corners of the globe. There seems to be a renewed interest in the performative within music (coming from Fluxus and the European instrumental theatre waves of the 70’s/80’s) as seen/heard in the music of so many of the big names these days (Simon Steen-Andersen, Jennifer Walshe, Mocrep, Pamplemousse, etc) and certainly there seems to be a greater interest (or tolerance, depending on who you ask) for multi-artists like yourself. How to Fight feels very much a part of this zeitgeist. You have been working this way for years, of course.

Similarly, we find ourselves in a time when the composer-performer is a renewed possibility. It is a very interesting time: it means that the biographical becomes a more organic/natural/available creative recourse (perhaps…). I don’t believe How to Fight would communicate as well if it were written by a 3rd party who “owns” all of the material—that we become merely executors of another’s history/ideas (which is so much of the 20th century western art music performance practice). Even if only some of the material was developed by my personal process in How to Fight (and the other parts being composed or compiled by you), I feel that this material does create a feeling of ownership that I have rarely felt in my artistic practice as a non-composer. It suddenly makes the work performer-specific. It feels that we are the two people on earth that can perform How to Fight. It feels that other performers would need to create their own version, which is interesting too, that is custom designed for their person/body. This performer-specificity is interesting, though definitely impractical. (Geographic problems and also perhaps the performer-specificity is what could keep it from being performed more, becoming known. It still seems the performer’s currency is a trading of works that can be reproduced by others, and a works longevity is based on this trading).

My feeling about the personal stories and evaluating if they are interesting, good, fleshed out, etc, was that if it truly came from our lives, or if it was made of facts and advice that we and the listener could relate to, it would be interesting no matter what. I always enjoyed listening to your personal stories.

It’s funny, thinking of zeitgeists, there is a lot of text in the piece that is purely informational, even TEDtalk-esque. I never really thought of this piece as a lecture, though it does move in and out of that realm--the lecture being another form that is being played with by many in Europe (Shlomowitz, Sarhan, several others). Perhaps this “trend” and our use reflects our current information age, also a rejection of what knowledge is, how it is made, and what authority decides what knowledge/truth is (Wikipedia is interesting in this regard). Perhaps there is a layer about physical contact/the body in the (perhaps disembodied?) information age. Perhaps there is a layer about the mind-body divide and where knowledge is kept. But maybe not!

It does seem that the so-called mind-body duality is something at play in the piece, albeit undiscussed by the two of us: the body engaging physically with duo “fighting”, foot shadowplay, and martial arts movement, the mind engaged at an almost constant informational and emotional level. Even in the screaming duet there is a divide. We shriek in pain or fear, but sit completely still as if meditating. Rarely does the text interact with the movement directly. There is no dialogue in the piece (speaking with each other) and yet there is plenty of “dialoguing” physical contact. One person is rendered “invisible” while moving, while the other is foregrounded when she is speaking. If what I’m saying here is true, it would only be by chance, rather than a concept we ever discussed or agree with…or...?

C: With regards to doing what we do as people rather than musicians/artists – I’m not sure there’s a clear difference. For more musical cultures than not, music is integrated with other forms of expression, and woven organically into a broader social context. I think the view that musicians/artists are not people first would be a minority view. That said, I do hear what you mean about classical divisions of labor.  In terms of our process, I think the beginning of it felt consistent with my compositional training, or my process with more traditional concert projects. It started with finding a movement vocabulary that fit the instruments – in this case, the instruments were our own bodies, so we started with basic exercises from various martial arts traditions and improvised around them, playing with objects to see what worked – what was easy to do, what fit the materials and our ways of moving. Then, there was structuring an order of things around the most significant phrases (especially finding a trajectory with the lighting-specific movements), and then fitting in spoken text, songs, and other finer-grained details around that. The many-tabbed internet search for advice on arguing and playing dead, etc., which came up around the end of the first week, is something that happens a lot – things seem to open out before they come into focus.  With the text, the task was to find interesting information on real-world situations that would cast different colors of light on the movement.

I think the part of the process that felt more particular to this project was the fact that once there was that basic order of events and speaking points, we had more time together to personalize the details – to tell stories in our own words, to cull out the talking points that seemed most personally relevant, to feel out the space and pacing and to tailor our movements to fit them. I think this kind of tailoring is typical in lots of musical traditions – working out a song in a band, or maybe with an opera singer, traditionally. It might be closer to how many choreographers work. But even in a new music context, open scores and performer-specific works are definitely part of the history. And even in situations where we try to cram learning a piece into a couple hours of rehearsal, there are still adjustments, because in the end, the performance is happening through these particular bodies, and it needs to fit what these bodies, in particular, do.

It wasn’t necessarily a predetermined goal to avoid classical instruments, but I think I try to use be economical about materials and use what fits the project best – and in this case, larger traditional instruments didn’t seem useful for exploring the initial focus of the piece. Of course it does thematically relate to our experience as musicians. There’s definitely lots of tension and release, the idea of following momentum and letting go, in the basic technique for both our native instruments, percussion and piano – as well as this idea of a practice – moving toward a form through repetition over a longer duration, where each repeated instance is a meeting with the self in the moment.

Maybe your feeling is that moving and speaking are tasks that don’t require particular musical training. This is true. But I do feel that the arrangement of things – arranging the flow of energy in how light and sound and motion and story fit together, contrasting or aligning in a particular mood – that does feel like exactly what composing is about, or what learning to think about the mechanics of music prepares one to do. Specifically, there are basic materials that are repeated, varied, and developed in ways that are absolutely grounded in my training as a pianist and composer. Take what happens with the jo kata, for instance. It’s laid out through a straightforward accretive process, at first in clearly separated single units that are perceivable as their own frozen moments, and then in longer phrases that incorporate more sound and interaction between the two of us and the objects we hold, and then departing from traditional order in a more improvisational, multidirectional way, while you depart into talking about intimidation, which is a transposition of movement into talk. The development of the motive in this section is foreshadowed in the shadowboxing scene where I sometimes use the light as a jo. And it culminates in the ending where all of the pieces come together and we move finally in uninterrupted unison together. All this is very traditional compositionally, in accord with how we learn about counterpoint or sonatas. This is just one thread. We could also trace out similar paths with what happens with feet, animals, the tai chi step, etc. So the given tasks of talking and rolling around on the ground are not in themselves inherent to musical tradition, but the approach to choosing these tasks to complement one another, to occur at a particular point in the whole, and all the work of shaping these tasks into a performance, is totally informed by my musical training.

(I wrote an about this for Jennifer Walshe’s - Spin Straw (contribution to MusikTexte 149, guest edited by Jennifer Walshe, on “The New Discipline” – maybe this is a repeat.)

I think my stance on this – emphasizing ties to musical tradition rather than departure – is based on a couple of things.

1, I do feel in working that my most substantial training is as a composer in the world of concert music, and this training is what I draw on most immediately to make work. I don’t consciously set out to tear things down. I get that modernism is partially built on rejecting history and making it new, but that’s not what it feels like when I make things – it feels like a conversation with a lot of stuff that exists already, which I think is interesting, and which I’m glad exists so that we can converse with it.

2, You mention composer-performer as a renewed possibility. As a pianist, it’s pretty clear that all the dudes of the big marble heads – the people who made the repertoire that any pianist learns to play – were all playing keyboard themselves, playing and improvising and composing or conducting and moving between these worlds. Of course that’s how the music got made. That’s how most music in the world gets made. The idea of a composing without playing is the historical outlier.

3, This is not exactly about ideals, but I’ve gotten a fair amount of feedback that what I do isn’t music, which I’m not super invested in contesting philosophically beyond what I’ve already said (I trained as a musician and composer, I work with musicians, everything is put together in the way we learn to put music together, it’s actively engaging with musical ideas and musical history, etc.), but practically, categorizing it as outside just seems to mean excluding the work from resources that would support music, which is what I think it is, and at this point, I feel like can use all the help I can get.

One thread that I think expands on my previous work with movement is the idea of practicing these basic exercises – allowing our pedestrian, inexpert movements to be seen without obscuration – without it always being dark, or covered by heaps of trash.

Text:

Yeah, we do go through a lot of information. I took a couple poetry workshops with Rae Armantrout at UCSD. At some point we looked at flarf (poetry mined from odd internet search terms) and that collided, cut-up energy is something that’s stuck. I’ve made a number of texts this way. Sometimes program notes for traditional music, or sometimes texts to be read aloud for pieces. When I was in China, I made “How to assemble a,” a collage of assembly instructions (for a cake, disaster preparedness kit, bicycle, computer, etc.) that’s read by 6-7 people. In high school, I did speech and debate and one of my events was expository speaking, where I’d talk for 10 minutes about some obscure topic (elevators, red, money, flattery) with elaborate, velcro’d visual aids. I also wrote a column for the school paper called “All you need to know about” (pygmy goats or something). I like documentaries. I like finding out about things. I like this mode of listening – listening to information being conveyed is so different from concert listening. It feels depressurized. The relentless, never-ending quantity of it makes a different mood than listening to music that’s trying never to repeat. It’s a nice contrast. I like the everydayness of it.

Interesting that you write that a performer’s currency is a trading of works that can be reproduced by others – almost as if the work itself is a medium of exchange. I’m not sure I entirely agree. What about exclusivity clauses? If a work were instantly reproducible, why hire any particular performer to play it? It seems like it needs to be hard enough, or hard enough to get to, or specific enough to that person, that no one else could do it (yet). (La Monte Young?) But maybe later on, as pieces get passed around, whoever started it might get some credit.

I do think that your sense of ownership is important, of course. But I think it matters for any piece of music, new or Bach or whatever. If the performer hasn’t made their own version of something, I’m not sure why we go. That’s what performing is, right?

A brief description of the collaborative process

How to Fight was created with the goal of making a work for “composing performer” and “performing composer”. It would be the first work in the project that would call for performance by both Torrence and the composer. Due to their differing instrumental disciplines, Chen and Torrence chose performance materials that could be shared more equally, such as movement, singing, and speaking. The piece was created at the Hambidge Center in Georgia, USA, across a two-week residency. Materials were created and gathered collectively across the residency period, and were then structured into the final piece by Chen. The songs are composed by Chen and are notated with traditional music notation. The remainder of the score is text-based instructions.

Performance History

3 July 2016: Eyedrum, Atlanta, Georgia