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The Norwegian choreographer about his pieces and projects, about the body, dance & movement, Jérôme Bel, culture & colonialism, terrorism and the army. An interview by Jack Hauser and Helmut Ploebst.
corpus: Was it clear from the beginning for you that your solo "We failed to hold this reality in mind" had to be with music?
Sharifi: Yes. Yes. This was the whole idea at the beginning. What makes it interesting is that it is almost like my dancing is European and the music is ethnic; so, not to go for ethnical dance, but to read the music in a way like an European artist would approach it. Anna Teresa De Keersmaeker did this series with Indian music, but of course she approaches music in a very different way. I played the music mainly for dancers in rehearsals and I watched them dancing to it. I asked them what they thought. I went through it also listening to it while I was in a train from Vienna to Zagreb for example. You listen to this kind of music travelling through this kind of nature. I really researched with it. Then slowly the other things came, like the carpet, the backdrop ...
corpus: And the photos shown in the performance?
Sharifi: They came really late, half a year after the premiere. There were two things: some people were discussing the printed magazine coming with the piece - What is the role of this magazine in the piece or outside of the piece? We have done three magazines so far. For the first one we asked different artists to give us text which we could publish, amongst them Thomas Plischke and Raimund Hoghe. The second magazine we did was for a trio which we did in Vienna in 2004: "Hopefully someone will carry out great vengeance on me". The text comes from the dancers and the dramaturges. It was just text, no images ... The new magazine has started have a life of its own. So I have 16 photos from Iran, and then we took out any text about the piece. There is only this, let's say "advertisement" about it. And the other thing is this project with questions about love which we did in Iran.
corpus: But there are quotes inside?
Sharifi: Yes, sentences from Iranian people about love. This became a project by itself. Of course the magazine has nothing to do directly with the piece. I was just playing around with the photos - a friend had given them to me - and I made this video. When I was touring for half a year I felt that a certain virus was needed. A thing which could break the whole thing, which was more clean and somehow one-dimensional. I wanted to break this musically and imagewise. I wanted to give images to "the different", to make it more concrete, asking what could be "the other"? At the same time I still wanted to talk about the city. About something you know, so people could say: "Ah, this could be Mexico City. This could be Buenos Aires."
corpus: Exactly!
Sharifi: Huge masses of blocks and also the greyness of it. Some Iranian people reacted to it. They said - and I understand very well: "This is the way Western people see us, and we are tired of being received that way." Because there are more green places existing, et cetera. But I said I would even make Vienna dark. Because I am not interested in this kind of "happiness". I am searching for beauty in another way. So this critique was interesting. And I understand that they are talking all the time of the image which is presented in the media.
corpus: Well, actually what you are providing is really an "anti-tourism imagery". So it is not about individualising and exoticism of a city; it is more about generalising a city. It could be any city.
Sharifi: Yes, totally. There also was the question about the picture of the baby. Why the baby? At the end I felt there was such a lack of flesh that I needed some vulnerability in a way which for me comes with a baby picture.
corpus: Yes, it is similar to what you said about the city: a baby, too, is a baby everywhere. Also, it is so objective: It is a baby.
Sharifi: And the Panasonic sound of [of What?] comes in the same moment as the baby ... I keep this baby-image as long as possible, because for me something starts moving because of the bass and this picture standing and using the flash at one point. I felt that the face of the baby started to move.
corpus: For me it was as if she had different faces. It was a counterpoint: the colour was like the sun and the Panasonic music was like darkness.
Sharifi: I also tried to dance to this Panasonic music and to show less circular movement, more direct and much more linear. But it really became a show-off. I showed that my body could do this, too, but it totally lost track of it. It was more like this: only 10 minutes of material for the whole piece, and then variations all the time. In a way it is such a classical choreography that it is almost ridiculous. When Jean-Luc [Ducourt] and me had a workshop some time ago, we talked with the students saying: "Don't be afraid to use classical tricks." Otherwise it would definitely be a waste of knowledge, a terrible waste. Also this way of contemporariness, of being new, inventive, it goes too far sometimes.
corpus: If it would have become more detailed movementwise, in a sophisticated way, technical, then there would not have been this kind of focus in it. You really go out and you have some movement formulation, and you stay with it. Like this down with the upper body, with the head and the arms.
Sharifi: Yes, exactly.
corpus: This was the moment for me when I thought: What is this? It was so hurtful, and I thought: No, not this kind of movement now. The interesting thing was that after some time this feeling changed through the repetition.
Sharifi: We played this part a lot, because we did not know how it worked. Sometimes I had 30 seconds of quietness between two songs, then it became really painful. In this piece I really like the appearance and disappearance of something. Like the thing when the head appears and then the song goes away. You hear it a couple of times and the painfulness becomes very close and then it goes away. The same with the breathing. Sometimes it is there because I am tired and sometimes I use it musically. Or when I lay down and come up again. It is the way of looping which also is in the music. I think the difference here to the other times is that usually we really work in detail, really defining every movement. The movement is the basis, as are the length and the combinations. No exact details but telling a lot.
corpus: That's why it has the character of poetry very much.
corpus: Yes, it's not an epic. For me the whole piece in a way was like a lecture. Because the set-up resembles a lecture. You have the laptop and some weird objects. Like a powerbook presentation: There is a beamer, a laptop, there is a mixer and one person who is now telling something. In the beginning I was always waiting that you would start talking. I was so sure - Then there was no talking.
Sharifi: I can understand when you read it that way. Of course this was not in my mind. I mean, not at all in the sense of a lecture. I knew since the last piece that I wanted to stop talking. And if I want to talk, I am not going to talk about the piece. Because I am tired of it.
corpus: Why?
Sharifi: First of all we have a lot of space to talk outside the work, in these after-performance-talks. So why do we have to talk about the work within the work? Which I've always questioned anyway. I've never talked in a work about the work.
corpus: Why is it interesting for you not to allow yourself to talk?
Sharifi: I had a sentence once by Nietzsche, who said: "We are unknown to ourselves. How can we know ourselves if we never look for ourselves." This was there before the video, because I felt I needed to talk so that they can look for themselves. But then I felt that the video was clear, so this must go out. They anyway will see themselves in the images. And also, after many years, it is not about presenting the concept. This is becoming clear, and I am finding some methods about the concept and the result of doing the concept. And that is something I am much more interested in. I think it was like that from the beginning, but now there are more and more methods to deal with it.
corpus: For me, conceptual art is when I see the concept. Because every artist has a concept. But you do not always see the concept in the art. The concept is the base, but then it is about something else.
Sharifi: I mean, if you really look at it, how many people can make conceptual art, I mean conceptual dance? Very, very few. Jérôme [Bel] is the only one for me. He makes it interesting for me to follow and he entertains me. The rest is fooling around with the concept, switching it a bit. Then they argue that it is still in a concept. What happens is that they get fascinated by language and the playfulness of language.
corpus: The Semiotics.
Sharifi: Yes. And this is something we try to avoid. When I did a lab in Vienna at Tanzquartier [February/March 2006] with, among others, Katherina [Zakravsky] and Bojana [Kunst], we talked a lot. At one point, they went so far that they mixed everything: tourism, migration, me moving around starting at one point and ending somewhere else, that was migration, too. And I got pissed because everything became so similar that it didn't matter anymore. A guy moving from Africa to here, he is migrating and I am migrating from Norway to Vienna. And there is no difference. I said: "This is now just talking." Then Irina [Sandomirskaya] said something very interesting: "This is our way of dancing." I said to her: "Nice to hear that." But when you dance what are you doing? I am not moving just because I am a dancer. It is not the first thing that I do: going on the floor and experiencing my body.
corpus: Rolling the stone up the mountain again and again.
Sharifi: Luckily until now, I think I manage to do very different works. The trio "Hopefully someone will carry out great vengeance on me" and the solo "We failed to hold this reality in mind" are not totally different, but they have different formats and they deal with different issues. The piece before - "As if death was your longest sneeze ever" - was in a public space, we were running around in the dark, this kind of thing. And now in an upcoming project the word comes in. It starts with the inspiration of watching theatre pieces in different countries. Watching pieces when they go on tour, so they have to subtitle them. So I said, this is a new way of theatre. What we see, e.g., in Jan Lauwers' "Isabella's room" is different because there is dancing and music ... so there are many layers already used, not only text. But imagine, I have seen Iranian theatre in Zurich with German subtitles. What kind of theatre is this? Because theatre is not just the text, but also the way how the text is said. So the public is pushed to read and react differently. But the pieces were not made to travel like this. They became travelling.
corpus: So it also became another format, because the perception is totally different.
Sharifi: I thought I'd use this right from the beginning. I put text, which is not subtitles, but text in combination with what you see on stage. So as a public you have to read, you have to watch, you have to connect, you have to link, you have to go on. I'm very fresh in reading. I have dyslexia and difficulties to read. I do not get bored. But for instance, I have been reading Nietzsche's "Genealogy of Morals" about fifty times. I don't read from the beginning to the end ... Anyway, after three pages I have so much inspiration! It became very interesting how to put this in a theatre as a place where you can read. This work will not be premiered before the end of 2007. The text is projected and you also have time to read, watch and read again.
corpus: No stress with perception!
Sharifi: Yes. If I let the text be visible for eight minutes and there is some movement happening, some people can deny the movement totally and only read the text. The argument could be based on only reading the text. I can not go into a dialogue on concreteness, because there is no concreteness. There are two layers at the same time. And the way you choose how to deal with these two layers is the performance for the public. And these layers I cannot control. It is how you as a person deal with text and movement and how you like these issues.
corpus: I find it very interesting that you explicitly leave very much to the audience. I would say that in this the demonstrative element gets very much into the foreground, and now you play with the gaze or you even put the performance in the gaze of the audience. There, it dissociates itself from the demonstrative and plays with it in a more poetic way, like opening up a field of perception.
Sharifi: Exactly. Since the beginning I have always been discussing the position of the public. The piece that I called "As if death was your longest sneeze ever" started with banging on a metal plate while we filmed the audience watching this action. And then we went to the next room, which was a café, and we danced in the middle of the audience. After that all my ideas were about using public and positioning public differently. It became a question of how to involve them and what involvement was. The trio "Hopefully someone will carry out great vengeance on me" starts with a different lighting. We lighted the space much more, so that the reflection also reached the audience from the back to the stage. So as an onlooker, you are not in the light, but you know there is something going on. In "We failed to hold this reality in mind" it was more putting the light onto the audience than on the stage. It was like leaving them to be there. Basically there are 50 lamps above the audience and just about 15 or 20 lights on stage.
corpus: Talking about the lights now on the audience - This reminds me that it was interesting for me to compare the projection of light in the audience and the video projection of empty chairs in this piece: the absence of bodies. This kind of an anti-pose, so to say. Therefore I would be interested in how your thoughts developed negotiating the body, its representation and system throughout the development of your work.
Sharifi: Firstly, we never use the word "body" when we work. "Body" for me is very one-dimensional. It stays in its shape. I had this lecture in Germany where I said that I liked much more to talk about flesh, veins, blood and skin. The elements of the body more than the body itself. Because for me it became more and more clear that to be able to understand, I had to deconstruct - and then to construct again. It is almost as if I would say: "I take this wall away and I put it over there. So we can see, this part is missing, but I put it over there. By putting it there, you have to make the link." It is as if the body explodes, it is spread around and all the body parts are recognisable. You start looking for the body parts' functions and it is still clear. You can link them together. But in the moment when it starts to be a body you should stop it, because then it is not so interesting anymore. This is also linked to identity and how identity is built. When we work with body, first of all we always work with the body as image.
corpus: With the image of the performer's body?
Sharifi: I know I weigh 108 kilos and I know how I look. When me and Jean-Luc [Ducourt] worked together he asked me at one point: "What is this about?" And I said to him: "I don't know, but the first 10 minutes for sure will just be about a fat fuck and an old fuck." Because he is 17 years older than me. And the first 10 minutes they will not see anything else. Like somebody wrote, I think it was in Antwerp: "In the beginning he seems like a body guard who keeps people away from the stage." When João Fiadeiro saw me for the first time he said: "What is this guy doing?", because I asked people not to come too close, for I needed space to dance. And then he saw me taking off my jacket and starting to move and then: "Oh, it is him." When we talk about the body, we're talking about our image in a way. How could it be perceived? I mean: Do you have blue or brown eyes? Are they big or small? Are your tits small or bigger? What about your hips ...? When the public has nothing to read, the question is: What do they read? They read this! Especially in these formats we are using. It is totally different in "Isabella's Room" or similar formats. In many performances you see the staging, but here you come and in three minutes you can map the whole space. Then you have the body almost from the snap of the beginning. And we have been using that very actively. For instance, in a duet I did with a girl who is 10 centimetres taller than me. We put her in even higher heels and me in sandals. We stood face to face and this was the opening. To really show the total difference between us. What is her body and my body, the image of them. And then starting to reconstruct them and getting to the flesh. That is very interesting for me. I don't know whether I've managed yet, but I am interested in a body which is transparent and breakable. When the body becomes this, it becomes interesting. But a body as a whole can never become transparent and breakable. You must take it apart in order to really attack, in order to break it down.
corpus: This reminds me of the artist Gordon Matta Clark, who in fact split a house. A house as a body, as a figure. A house is a house. You see it like children draw it. He cut the house, and you see the metal, the cement, the cables, the tiny rooms, the big rooms. You see what it is, what is inside.
Sharifi: And then you can create a system again. You take the body apart. Dance mainly stays in body-shapes and with little movement, very very little movement. For me at least. Once they asked me if I did dance, and I said: "No, I do movement". I am very busy with movement, much more than with dancing. And for me the trio was not a dance piece, in a way, because it had a lot of movement. The same with my solo: It has too much movement to be a dance performance.
corpus: So you are discerning between dance and movement.
Sharifi: Yes, because if there is too much movement, it is not dance. For me you have to go in actively and create movement. It is not "anti-dance". It is not about this discussion about "dance" and "anti-dance". I'm really not busy with it. This discussion - is this dance or not dance or concept! I'm not interested in these positionings at all. We can talk about much better issues. At the end I talk about ways of production and all these things. I don't know how deep this question really goes, how deep they question themselves when they do this, and I haven't seen Jérôme Bel's piece with Pichet Klunchun: But I would like to know how Bel deals with those ethnical things. It is interesting that he chose Klunchun, because ... he is good at what he does. He is so good. He will definitely challenge Jérôme's idea of dance and movement.
corpus: It is a specific approach. Bel does not seem to give much for "correctness". The piece you are talking about, "Pichet Klunchun and myself", is not about political correctness, but you get somebody from a different culture and you accept it as if he were coming from your own culture. And Bel also says frankly: "I don't understand other cultures. I don't even understand mine." All these things are "no-go's" in a way, and he deals with a kind of no-go in this duet very much.
Sharifi: I have heard so many different things about it, so I'd love to see how he deals with it. I mean, he is good at making performances, there is no question about it. I saw Klunchun's solo. And you can say whatever you want to say about ethnic and so, but this guy is physically good. He knows what he's doing and he manages to really conquer the space. He really moves. He can really make the space move. Jérôme can easily go for the cultural. It is a very western pacifistic position to take: "I don't understand any culture, not even my culture". You can also read it in another way. You can say: "Since I have enough money and I have a position, I have all this, so I don't need to know." I could say, of course, that you don't need to know because you can always go there and take. This basically has been your tradition. As a French you always go and you occupy and you take and you say: "I don't care." It is the same thing the British have done. If you talk about colonialism, they don't care about the culture directly. They just wanted to suck it out and go. When people asked me: "Why do you go to Beirut? Why do you have rehearsals there?" I said: "Because I can afford it. So it would be a pity not to use my mobility if I can afford it." When they asked me about the Kosovo: "What did you give them?" I said: "Nothing." I was there to take. I needed an unbalanced political situation. I needed to see how people live in insecurity, and I needed to experience what kind of system they use. That was something I wanted. And I had the money to go there.
corpus: You say when you are able to travel, when you are able to go everywhere, you are just in the position to take? No?!
Sharifi: No. You can exchange of course. But to be honest about taking, it can also give power for instance. You can also say if a foreigner comes to Africa, the first reaction of Africans is: "Over there you are so advanced, so what have you to give me?" But if you say to the African - this is of course very cliché now, but anyway: "I am here for you to give something." If we manage to communicate that this is a poor place and we still have to take something, it is interesting.
corpus: It is a different position than the traditional one: to be missionary, or everybody has to develop cultures; and on the other hand, the exploitation ideology of tourism.
Sharifi: Yes, for me this is very interesting.
corpus: But this brings me back to what you said before: that a body does not interest you if it is fixed, if it is a shape. That you are interested when it becomes breakable and transparent. This is the same for me when I'm travelling. The first reaction is my body. You come from a rich country. This is the first thing I receive. But when you try to break this, then you may not always be able to communicate, but you might also change something.
Sharifi: Yes, this is super interesting. I am also personally busy with the body in a way I don't have a good word for now. I mean terrorism. I mean: terroristic ways of building systems. It is a very strange way of dealing with the body, very strange. We do not know it yet. I mean we know guerrilla work, we know Che Guevara. But what they call Al Qaida - I don't know if it exists or not. I saw this thing which really was linked to the body. It was a sentence in an American movie which was very stupid, but they sometimes had something which came through; it was: "The organisation has a head and if you take the head away, it does not think any more, it just reacts." Then the body parts become alive and they can act without the head on their own. As long as you keep the head alive at least you can have a dialogue. But if you take the head away ... that is such an interesting issue.
corpus: But I have to say that this is also the dream of the army in general. That the army will survive even if the headquarters are destroyed. But the army in itself is a living system.
Sharifi: But the thing is that the army needs discipline, and terrorism has a disciplined body in a totally different way.
corpus: They need discipline just for economical reasons. Exactly. But for war reasons it would be much better if it was a nomadic machine without a head.
Sharifi: Economy also is a way of keeping order. The army has this humanistic thing, which is very funny: "We only destroy what we need to destroy." This is what they say. While in terrorism they discipline you by wanting. They discipline you by saying: This is bad. And why? Because of this and this ... so we attack it. So they have a completely different goal. For me, if I approach the "body" in this sense, it is interesting. Also the value of body. If somebody explodes -. I mean, what is the value of the body? This of course is a very tricky thing to talk about like that, because it is much more serious. It has many layers. But just in a performative sense it is super interesting. When we are working, we also have the method of asking how you could talk about a desystematised body. For instance, that you never do right and left after each other. You just do left left etc. Then we work with body parts - not just to isolate but to have a knowledge of how many body parts do we have. I am not only using my body, but I can stand and do my fingers or my head. We really train like this. Because that is the problem with any dance training that it trains the body to move as a total. Because it is needed, and I understand that in many techniques you need to be whole to move one part. But what if I move one part and I am not a whole? And again to break down the whole. I don't need to be a whole for my arm to move. I can actually be dead and my arm can still move.
corpus: A marionette has just a string here. It is isolating.
Sharifi: If you manage to move the marionette into the head of the doll itself ... I mean, if the marionette has a brain and is not controlled. I can be my own marionette and I can move in an isolated way. That is an interesting concept, because you do not have to be a whole.
corpus: This is of course dangerous.
corpus: You mean because we are talking about a body which is a collective and it can also fall apart?
corpus: Can fall apart, can explode, an isolated thing. It goes to many issues. Also the embryonic, and "Oh, we put this cell out of here and we put it here, we do this here and and ..." But it is absolutely necessary to deal with these things.
corpus: Yes, but as a construction, the body is like this anyway. So many parts of the body we do not have under control. Anyway, it is a self-organising system as we would say. So internally it is not so centralised.
Sharifi: No, it is centralised in a way of functions. We know people can live when the heart is down. The body can go on. It is not there yet in the work, because there are always issues you want to talk about. Are there methods of producing, or are there issues to talk about? And if there are, then how? For instance, I wrote in my application to the government that I like the company to be moveable. I mean easily accessible, so that we can appear and disappear in a sense. That there is a simplicity to it. How to keep it simple is difficult already. This kind of things are also many many ways of movements which are interesting. But again, I do not know how it will materialise. The body can materialise itself in an installation, in magazines and in theatre pieces with only text. So it de-organises. Also the question is that many dancers and many choreographers are still classical in this sense, that they want to reproduce their way of moving in others. Which I have nothing against. But we have to know that this is not moving, it is actually reproduction based on one body. In our work, we never talk like: "Move like me." We talk about moving heavily. What does it mean to move heavily? How can it become even heavier, more based, etc. What does it mean to be a desystematised body? What does it mean if you only work with body parts? I have stopped moving in front of dancers more and more. I start analysing what I do in a system. So that you can work with the system in your body more and more, rather than work in an aesthetical sense. I often have the problem that I can not talk about the issue of a work because the aesthetics are coming in again and again. They get in the way. If you work with different issues, it must be in different ways of moving. But why there are no different ways of moving?
corpus: No way to get over this?
Sharifi: There's an interesting thing starting to happen to me. I wrote in my application to the government about projects which I called "Impossible projects". I gave it to the cultural ministry. We are trying to do this in magazines. They are projects like asking the military to take over the city for two days. People say: "Why?" I said: "I wrote this project in western society. I would not write it like this if I was in Beirut." I would probably write completely different things if I were living in Beirut. But I see that coalition, going to war with Nato, all these things ... We are part of it, but we do not see it at all. Military is totally out. We do not discuss it. It is totally hidden. We only see the presence over there which does not have any materialisation. We do not know what it means. We know it only conceptually. It has no body in a sense. So we should deal with it. But of course the military would never do a project like that because it would completely put them in question. What would happen? People would know that this is a performance, so would they take it seriously? And if you do not take it seriously, what can happen? Because the military is there to act. They are serious. But they would be put in a joking position. Projects like this are art projects, but they do not need art spaces. They need society spaces to be able to exist. So we have to include art. Art has to insert itself in places where there is no place for it. And they are made in a very artistical way of thinking. Then society itself starts to include art.
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