M: Did you paint the apartment?

B: No, these are the colors it came with. They call these the accent walls and you’re welcome to paint them but you have to paint them back before you leave, so I’ve never painted them. I think it’s nice, this weird kind of beige-y color, which also reminds me of my dad -- well, both of my parents, who really liked Giorgio Armani in the ‘80s. My dad's suits were always Giorgio Armani, and I remember going to a retrospective of his work in the mid '90s or something at the Guggenheim. This was one of the first times I went to New York, I must have been 16, and one of the things I learned at that exhibition was his singular color greige. I just immediately think of American Gigolo, it’s this funny anomaly of this construction of luxury in this decade of decadence. Which is not the decade of this apartment, but the color of these accent walls is not of that decade, it's of the ‘80s/90s. I think that it was something that came later.

M: And then, yeah, about the apartment. Like we’ve been discussing here, there are so many intersections of meaning, so much going on in this work, but there is a fundamental element of the work that is about the apartment, right? And there were all these moments when I felt like you were using your body to make architecture, and then of course there were a lot of moments when the dancing was, whatever else it was about, it was about the contours of this particular space. And I just wonder what that process was like, and how you came to know the space in a dancerly way.

figure 31

photo by Norman McDonald, 2015

B: Well, I’ve been renting this apartment for almost two years. And I initially rented it to make the dance, and so that first summer, probably six months in, I had a probably four to six week rehearsal process (fig. 32) with two other dancers, and we worked somewhat intensively; we probably had three four-hour rehearsals per week. We created material but we didn’t end up performing any of it. That was very much the beginnings of my process with respect to this work.

figure 32

early rehearsals with dancer Chris Woolfolk. Photo by Biba Bell, 2013

M: Did any of that movement end up in the piece?

B: There were moments that spoke to it, but I don’t think that any of the actual choreography ended up in the piece. It was floating around. One of the dancers I was working with came either to the Saturday or the Sunday performance of the last weekend and it was really neat to talk to him about it, because he had been a part of that process.

figure 33

photo by Nicola Kuperus, 2015

I also had two other research periods for this piece, for the solo portion. Well, one will correspond to the group piece, too, but one was very much for the solo. The first was a fellowship I had at Insel Hombroich in Germany, which I call the Marfa of Germany, as it's very much about architecture as sculpture. There are all sorts of phenomenal buildings, but it’s also about the land, the estate, and this kind of walking amongst. Different architects have had very imaginative projects materialized on these grounds because there is a flexibility when you're not dealing with function in a certain way, when you have the liberty to engage the architecture as sculpture. I had a period where I worked there for a week and a half, and then I performed in the Graubner Pavilion (fig. 34), which I think is one of the spaces where the dancers in the documentary Pina danced, because Wuppertal is very close. This is the round building with all the glass, and that’s where I first did the solo version.

figure 34

performing in the Graubner Pavilion, 2013. Photo courtesy of the artist.

M: Was it the same dance that we saw?

B: No, but there are elements: the sobbing came from there, the going down into the splits. And the ecstatic dancing right before the pop song, right before I leave, that all came from there. Although that piece was about 20 minutes long and it was pretty much just that. During that time, I also made a video, which I call “Siza Study,” which is a six minute video of me dropping down into the splits into a sea of flowers, which relates.

figure 35

Siza Study from biba bell

I did two performances in the Graubner Pavilion at the end of my stay, and then a month later, I went out to the Visual Arts Center at the University of Texas in Austin and had a weeklong residency (fig. 37 & 38) where they set up a series of home residencies. The curator there basically curated three different homes where I would work with a group of volunteer dancers/performers, and we would have an eight hour residency in a different house and then at the end, we would do a performance for the people who lived there and whoever they wanted to invite.

M: And these were architecturally significant or interesting homes?

B: Yes, they were all very different. One was very much this very small, sort of labyrinthine Craftsman bungalow. It was the home of a costume designer and a sculptor who worked predominantly with wood and leather and stone, very brown and earthy.

figure 36

Photo courtesy of the artist

The second space we worked in was more of a kind of commune or some sort of cooperative dwelling space that had been imagined by someone who had been an architectural student maybe a decade before. There were these Gaudi-esque buildings in the middle of a bamboo forest with a workshop made of reclaimed windows that went up three stories for one whole face of the building, and weird chandeliers, and found object sculptures all around, and trailers in the bamboo, and everything was kind of overgrown and messy and a little bit derelict and they had sculptures of animals having orgies. The original house that was there was a communal kitchen, and it was very woodsy with lots of different people living there, and sort of felt transient but wasn’t. Then, the third space was this beautiful new home that was designed by an Italian architect who’d been brought in by these monied patrons of the museum and of the University, three stories with jutting out windows and skylights and beautiful decks everywhere. Very much an LA sort of feeling of angles and windows and different planes jutting out, and balconies and vaulted ceilings and all of that.

figure 37

Photo courtesy of the artist

It was totally different, day to day, and I had a different group of people that I was working with, some of which overlapped but some of which didn’t. What we did was kind of in response to the space, so we did very different things. It was basically like a workshop, and then at the end of the week, we had a three hour performance in the Visual Arts Center galleries, which are really quite beautiful, white open spaces, and there are two floors so we could work with the upstairs/downstairs. We shifted the audience and reconfigured the space in three different ways that reflected the three different houses, structured into part 1, part 2, and part 3. It was unlike anything I’d ever done, I ended up having 10-12 people in the final performance. This was in October/November of 2013. It was unbelievable. It really took me outside of myself and pushed me into these other people’s spaces. I also became like a guide for something else to happen that was completely outside of me.

figure 38

It Never Really Happened (Cont.) from biba bell

M: Do you think that experience gave you, like, a toolkit to think about dancing in the home?

B: Yes. And for the three-part series, the triptych, in terms of bringing other people in. Because this was me, it was a solo. I don’t know if I’m going to be in the next one. I don’t think I’m going to perform. So how does that work?

M: That’s another question I had…how envisioned are parts 2 and 3?

B: They’re starting to form themselves. We’ll see logistically what I can pull off and who’ll be available, but yeah, definitely for the second part, I’m not going to be in it. I’d like it to be a duet for two men. And then the figure of the hostess will also shift and maybe be inserted differently. And then the third one will be for maybe five people, I think. I ultimately want to have everybody up and dancing at the end of the whole damn thing.

M: Really?

B: Yeah. We’re all going to do the Hustle. That’s my desire. I gave it away.

M: Wait, literally, the Hustle?

B: Yeah! I mean, it’s Detroit, after all.