M: I did notice that there were two instances where you touched audience members, one on the shoe, one on the shoulder. And then at the end, this tracing of the space: it's architectural, but it also felt like a benediction or something, like a blessing of the audience, absolution, I don’t know -- but it felt ritualistic. And then, again, I didn’t think about this the first night, but the second night, I realized that, if the audience members could take their eyes off of you, that gesture was also inviting them to look at everyone in the room, to see the whole assembled group.

figure 9

photo by Norman McDonald, 2015

B: Yes. That’s great. I love that.

M: Yeah, like acknowledging the crowd. It reminded me of this accident that happened once when I saw the Merce Cunningham company in Ann Arbor. I think it was the farewell legacy tour, so whenever that was, 2010, 2011. I forget what piece it was, but this thing happened that I later learned was an accident, but that was so great. It was so appropriate. All the house lights came up in the middle of the piece. And everybody in the audience, like, looked around at each other in confusion, and it was so brilliant! All of a sudden, we're not looking at the dancers anymore, we’re looking at each other, we’re experiencing this moment together. And then just a few moments later, the lights went down again and I wondered, was that intentional? Because I thought that would totally be something that Merce would do. And then I emailed University Musical Society the next day and asked if it was an accident and they wrote back and said, yes, it was an accident and we’re so sorry, and I thought, "No way, it was the best part of the performance!"

B: I love that. I’m totally going to steal that. You know, it became a very intuitive decision to go over people’s heads. This relationship, this proximity -- that's something that I've done with MGM and also in other things not with MGM. It's almost dancing with the audience. That was what we did at the end of Nut [a 2011 touring dance performed in Detroit at MOCAD], we came very close and it was about this very proximal space with the audience’s bodies, and moving amongst, and receding into the back space.

And again, with the moving over the heads, I only just decided to do it the day before. The tracing of the windows, that was one of the first images that came to me. But then figuring out how to fulfill that and transition out of the space, because I knew it was the ending, came much later.

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photo by stephen garrett dewyer, 2015

There’s a woman in the Bay Area, Gretchen Till, who wrote about some of the early MGM stuff. She’s an architect and city planner and theorist and also very much involved with performance, both in New York and the Bay Area, and she would come to multiple performances, and one of the things she brought up — she talked about how we turn the audience into another architecture, a sort of supple or mobile architecture, so it becomes less about this interaction between people, which it is, but also how the audience is in some ways a mass body that produces a demarcation in space, which I felt makes a lot of sense.