B: And this decision to draw the line -- it came from a sculptural idea that I had (well, pictorial but also really sculptural, I mean, it’s three-dimensional), that once I steamed up the windows, I would draw the horizon line. And so I’m drawing the horizon, which all the sudden turns the window from a panorama of the outside into a picture. It turns it into a painting, ultimately, and toward this whole history of the picturesque, which is also what these frames around the windows are doing. It is participating in the history of the pictorial. That’s something I wanted to bring up, how, with the frostiness, you can’t look out, and all the sudden it becomes about the insular space. It was very much about this architectural mapping but also this participation in the history of painting and a sculptural way of speaking to that. I deal with dance and choreography, but I’m also very interested in the visual art context.

figure 11

photo by Norman McDonald, 2015

Then I got over to this corner of the room and the first time, there was somebody sitting there, and I realized it was very... in certain parts of the world, you can never touch somebody on the top of the head. The top of the head is a... it’s an intensified zone.

Dance intensifies its own zones and different dances do it differently. Belly dance intensifies the center and the torso, ballet does it in the legs and the feet, modern dance, I guess you’d say it’s the pelvis for Graham, the solar plexus for Isadora. For Trisha Brown, it would be constantly shifting to different parts of the body. So, with the ways in which that demarcation or intensification of the zones of the body is dancerly and formal, I was wondering: what is the association with the top of the head?

And I immediately think of Thailand, and Ajna chakra, the crown, the third eye, and it does bring into question the benediction or the ritualistic aspect. I know that people are religious in Detroit, and I was raised atheist. Certainly I feel like a spiritual person, but I don’t have a background in the ways these rituals are practiced in Christianity, specifically. This was something that was brought up by a number of people, the way I was in conversation with that. Also, the fire pit, and the elements: the water, the plant, the snow, or whatever. That was neat. It was so interesting to me that there became this other way that people were starting to map that out. And that absolutely made sense to me. I mean, being from northern California, what I'm familiar with is "auras," so I’m having these moments of negotiating this range of, I guess, the volume of people’s auras as I’m passing over them, over their heads, but still tracing that horizon line, too. It’s not necessarily just about them, it’s about the symmetry of the space, the 360. At the same time, it became, "What am I doing, what am I looking at, what’s my intention?" I didn’t want to look at people directly, but I did want to give them love. That was the thing I had to be the most present with. I had to give you love. Thank you for coming. The whole thing is this indexing of hospitality, first with Nicola and then me at the end: the warmth of coming into the home. That was something I really wanted to do but, again, I felt like I had to allow for a certain kind of space because I’m not going to just stare. I don’t want to be confrontational, so it’s about looking but not looking. I was really watching my hand and sort of peripherally looking at the space it was tracing, and I don’t feel like it was aggressive for anybody. I had one person who was a little bit like, “OK, OK,” but I don't think it was aggressive in a way that was problematic. It’s the end, too, they have about four and a half minutes where they watch me walk around. They know it’s happening so there’s nothing surprising. It’s very methodical, so they can prepare.

M: About that gesture, too, I was thinking about Abigail Levine's piece Lines, Danced (fig. 12) that you hosted at Trinosophes in 2013, where the dancers just drew lines on paper, moving back and forth, over and over again. [Levine's forthcoming related work, Choreographing LeWitt, will appear as part of the Make Music New York festival in Summer 2015.]

B: Nice. I love that.

figure 12

Lines, Danced at Trinosophes. Photo by Adam Brown, 2013

M: Yeah, and the relationship of that work to yours reminds me of the distinction between a minimalist composer, say Philip Glass, and someone like John Adams, who uses Glass-like textures as part of a more expressive, more varied work. In this equation, you tracing the lines at the end of the piece is this sort of post-minimalist appropriation of or homage to the Levine work, which is this very strict, very formalist piece. Your piece sort of incorporates that element as one part of a much more varied soup, and I appreciated that. I don’t know if that was conscious at all, if you were thinking about that work.

B: That’s neat. Yeah, certain artists really do work with that relationship between dance and drawing, Trisha [Brown] being one of them. Absolutely, Abby [Levine], Tony Orrico is another visual artist and dancer I’m thinking of.

M: And the Levine work is so glacial, so remote. I found it very beautiful, I was engaged by it for a long time, but it’s the kind of work that doesn’t care as much if you’re watching —

B: More durational, in a sense.

M: Certainly, and very different from your work, which is warmer, but I appreciated the reference to it, the relationship between them.

B: Yeah, absolutely, and I think that gesture of tracing the horizon line is also in conversation with the different theories or histories of notation, in terms of the body inscribing space as a way of also keeping track of where the body has been, marking it. In some ways it becomes a document, maybe, more than a score. That’s a difference too.

M: Did you wash the windows after the performances?

B: No, no, I didn’t. I had people bring that up, and I really made a choice not to, that was very important to me, to have that moment where the steam comes and you realize, "Oh, this happens every night. This is part of the daily ritual." That’s also what it means to be in the domestic: to have the repetition of acts, of habits. That’s a domesticated experience, of the senses, the bodies, the rhythms, all of that. I like that it started to accumulate….

figure 13

photo by Norman McDonald, 2015