M: On that note: the idea of the cocktail party -- your invitation says please be on time, but then the audience shows up and there’s an hour of, you could say, no performance.

B: 45 minutes. We tried to make it between 40 and 50. There might have been one night it was an hour.

M: Well, I remember sitting there thinking, "OK, this thing is going to start soon, and I better get ready for it," and then I had this conversation and that conversation and suddenly it’s just a party, and the performance recedes and you almost forget that it’s going to happen, and Nicola’s doing great, running around, taking care of everyone…

B: You have a drink, you start to relax, you have a conversation with someone you haven’t talked to before….

figure 6

photo by stephen garrett dewyer, 2015

M: Yeah, and then the performance starts. And afterward, I’m reflecting on it and it’s like, "Oh wait, so the cocktail party is an integral part of the performance —"

B: Oh, absolutely.

M: Because you said to be on time! And then it becomes this whole other thing, this party, where I found myself talking to one person I really liked and then another person I didn't like as much, and then I'm thinking: this is what it’s like to be at a party. It’s really wonderful and really terrible and you wish you could leave to get away from this person and you wish you could spend time with that person, but she’s engaged in a conversation with that other person. And then I’m thinking about this Virginia Woolf thing, of the sort of self alone versus the self in a social situation, thinking about this whole experience, like: what is a party? What are these sort of highs and lows that you go through, very quietly, very privately, throughout this experience? And then I was thinking about Nicola because the second night I came, I had written in my notes, "Nicola works so hard, she tends to all, so selfless." She really was a consummate hostess.

B: The last two nights she worked really hard.

M: And I could see it. I thought I could see her getting frustrated at the end. I sensed that she was getting a little tired of being a hostess in that last night cause there were a lot of people here and it was getting a little out of control and she seemed to be at the end of her rope, maybe. And I thought that was a really interesting dimension that arose from the experience of giving a party, I guess, over and over again.

B: For two weeks straight. Absolutely, I think we were both pretty exhausted by that Sunday night performance. And that’s true, the party element is super important, it really is. First, it had a lot to do with timing the light, the sunset. Some nights it was overcast and some nights it wasn’t and it would change and we were trying to work with that. But, nonetheless, I do want people to get to this particular place, because especially for dance, there is this expectation of “OK, I’m going to see something. Give it to me. Perform. Dance. Dance for me.” And it's not that I’m not going to do that -- I’ll, you know, serve -- but I do really want to have that time where those expectations start to fall away.

M: Why?

B: I think that it allows for a different engagement with the work. I’m not sure I knew what that different engagement would be, but I felt like it would be more nuanced and varied and interesting. Also it would relax the audience, in a way, by creating an erosion of the initial expectation, the preoccupation with, “What is this? What's it going to be?” that would allow the audience to just be there, to just be in the room. So, for the whole first section, I come in very discreetly, and half the audience just keeps talking and doesn’t even know that I’m there. And there's that slow music (not the entrance music, but the music with the talking, which is actually a woman reciting recipes, which I loved. You can barely tell but it’s so Martha Rosler, so Semiotics of the Kitchen, and I just love that because that’s one of my interlocutors: who are the people who do work in the house?). But that first section, very slow, sculptural, is also to give the audience the chance to get used to looking at me. That’s it. Just get used to looking at me and being in the room with me. The piece isn’t 10 minutes, it’s 35 minutes or 40 minutes, so we're going to spend some time together. That becomes a way of transforming the space and transitioning from the party to, “OK, now we’re entering something else, something different — this is the performance happening.”

figure 7

photo by stephen garrett dewyer, 2015

M: I feel like in a few other, or maybe just one other, piece I’ve seen of yours,Royce, with MGM Grand [the touring dance trio that Bell co-founded in 2005], there was a little party element, which was like, at a certain point in the performance, you all said, “Here, have some potato chips and beer,” which was really great and memorable. And I feel like this cocktail party is a version of that, a much more amplified version, a much more fully realized version.

B: Definitely! The social element was something that came to the fore with MGM and the tours (fig. 8). Every time we'd be in a different space with a different collection of people with different expectations. And there’s no backstage; we're just there. So, ultimately, it’s an event that people are gathering for that we can turn into an evening. Even for the first few tours, a big part of our show was having a speech that would always be the first thing, to signify that the performance was starting, shifting it from the party or the gathering. We’d have a speech to explain ourselves: "Hi, we’re MGM, this is what we’re doing, this is how many performances we’ve done, this is where we’ve been, now go over there," that sort of thing. To help, to guide the audience.

figure 8

MGM Grand performing. Photo by the artist.

That was also Nicola’s role, to help the audience, to guide them into the space, to make them feel comfortable, sit them down, organize them before I come out, let them feel like, “OK, I’m in the right place." Because there is a way in which, if it’s not a conventional performance situation, it is nice for the audience to be guided, to know where they can be and that sort of thing. I don’t necessarily want people to feel that "audience participation" has to happen. That’s something that puts people on edge. I’m not so interested in that. But I think, again, there are two poles: between the complicit audience members who can’t move out of their chair and who all have to face the same direction or be manipulated to see one thing, and the other extent, which is, you’re maybe going to have to do something with this person or there is actually no differentiation between the audience and the performer. But what about all that spectrum? What about all those shades? There’s a lot there. That’s a whole other aspect of the work.