Episode One: Andros Zins-Browne and Prem Krishnamurthy
þ thorns þ
Andros and Prem speak about important teachers in their lives, processes of collaboration, and hosting as part of their practices in both design and choreography.
This episode is a conversation between Andros Zins-Browne and Prem Krishnamurthy in a studio in New York City. Andros’s work consists of live and hybrid environments at the intersection between installation, performance and conceptual dance and Prem runs an artist-organised group called the Department of Transformation, which looks at art as an agent of transformation. The conversation explores important teachers in their lives, processes of collaboration and hosting as part of their practices in design and choreography.
Find out more about Andros and Prem on our People page.
To the Glossary, Andros donates Symbioembodiment 
This series is produced and edited by Hester Cant.
The series is co-curated by Emma McCormick-Goodhart and Martin Hargreaves, with concept and direction by Martin Hargreaves and Izzy Galbraith.
Transcript:
Introduction Starts.
Martin:
Hello, and welcome to the first series of 
Every time we invite people to collaborate with us, we also invite them to donate to the glossary. You'll hear each guest on the podcast propose and describe their donated word or phrase. There is a full transcript available for this episode on our website, together with any relevant links to resources mentioned.
In this episode, we are going to hear a conversation between Prem Krishnamurthy and Andros Zins-Browne, recorded in a studio in New York City. Prem runs an artist organised group called the Department of Transformation, which looks at art as an agent of transformation. His work manifests itself in books, exhibitions, images, performances, publications, systems, talks, texts, and workshops. Andros’s work consists of live and hybrid environments, at the intersection between installation, performance, and conceptual dance. His performances work on twisting the embodied and the virtual, until these distinct terms begin to lose their borders.
In this episode, you'll hear Prem and Andros speak about important teachers in their lives, processes of collaboration, and hosting as part of their practices in both design and choreography.
We ask each of our contributors to supply us with sounds, to create transitions within the episode, and to give us a sense of their place or their work. In and amongst the conversation between Andros and Prem, you will hear sounds of a vocal exercise that Andros led as part of the recording session they did together in the studio.
Introduction Ends. Conversation Starts.
Andros:
So what do you want to talk about?
Prem:
Hmm. Well, okay, I'm just looking at my notes from our last conversation.
Andros:
So you introduced this interesting exercise where we would take a moment and write whichever words came to our mind.
Prem:
I guess I often think about protocols, ways to level, or ways to change how people interact, and so I introduced the exercise of each of us taking a minute and writing down as many words as we could, keywords for this podcast and series, and then we shared them back to each other, one per person, back and forth. I sometimes do this also in a different way with a larger group of people, where again, there's some time limit. Everybody writes down all the things they want to and then you go around in rounds, one person giving one thing from their list until you've exhausted all of people's lists.
Andros:
Are there any of the words on your list that you feel like you'd like to expand on? Or any of the words from my list that you feel like asking about or maybe expanding on yourself?
Prem:
It may just be my baseline insecurity, but I found all of your words a lot more interesting than my words. Maybe that's, well, let's call it curiosity for how other people think. I guess I'm curious about all of your words. I'm gonna start with Symbioembodiment
Andros:
Mhmm.
Prem:
Do you want to say something about that? And how that came to you? Is it a term you've used before?
Andros:
No, I have to thank you for giving me the opportunity to invent a word.
Prem:
Haha. Neologisms! New language!
Andros:
I really - Haha. I really couldn't have come up with it otherwise, so I appreciate that. How did it come up? I've been thinking. I-I like the word autopoiesis a lot, I use it a lot in different ways. Donna Haraway, in something that I was reading recently, was calling it symbopoiesis, I think, I might be butchering the pronunciation of it, but, something where it was combining symbiosis, so this kind of collaboration between species, with the poiesis. And so, a kind of, how we bring about becoming, together, in ways that respect our differences in some sense, like in a symbiotic relationship there's not an assimilation, there's not a collapse of difference, but there's a trade and there's an exchange and there's a becoming with.
And so, yeah, when you prompted me to think about words, I was thinking about how can we think about embodiment as embodying with. I think embodiment tends to be something which is considered to be about autonomy, and it can be a little lonely there. So I tend to think about my own body as very porous to the bodies around me. And, for instance, it's one of the reasons I've always kind of rejected the idea of unitary technique, like Cunningham has Cunningham technique. For me, that never made sense, actually.
Yeah, I've been trying to think about what are the ways that we can engage in forms of embodiment, that admit others into that. And where we actually embody more fully by letting other bodies in, calling other bodies in. And if that can be a two way street, then wonderful.
Transition sound starts
Andros: and these exhales can start to include any kind of sound or sounding with them.
Transition sound ends
Prem:
I think the idea of embodying with, I love how the preposition with becomes so important, this relational part of it, and the idea that we grow with each other.
I remember when I was reading Richard Sennett's Together a bunch of years ago, he speaks to, what's his name, Erikson, the sociologist. And all of these studies that show how children first develop collectively, their sense of consciousness emerges through their collective identity, and that helps them to develop an individual identity. But that, it's almost the opposite of what I see as a stereotypically American view, which is that you start from becoming a strong individual and then maybe later things evolve, instead of going the opposite direction.
Andros:
Exactly. Yeah, I mean, I think if I'm gonna give significance to this word that is exactly a few days old, one of the things that I think it offers is the idea that that exchange is part of the growth. It's not like once you've arrived, you then are open for business, so to speak. But rather that, that openness is part of the development and the becoming.
Prem:
It feels like that's what all learning is. All learning. You can of course learn from yourself, but actually, even, I think, for myself, when I'm learning through my own activities, it's about, I put something into, even my own world, like I write something down, I make a prototype, I test out something, then I look at that thing and I say, oh okay, how am I going to change it next time around? So even there, my learning is from something outside of myself, something that I've put there, and so whether it's learning from other people, whether it's learning from other objects, or other ideas, all of them, that all of the things that help you grow, are actually external to yourself.
Andros:
Yeah. I mean, we were talking a bit before about different models of, of pedagogy. And I also can think about that parallel to certain notions of choreography. And I think what comes up for me is the knowledge, whether that is in an educational context, or, in a dance movement context, or whatever context, is this knowledge considered an object. And for me like, one of the things, you know, having done a lot of learning dance moves, you know, where learning is transmitted as a “this is how it is now you do it”, which has been generative for many, many things and nurturing, I would say in a lot of ways, but also something which ultimately I found I had to reject or at least not perpetuate in my own practice, in the sense that I don't work with dancers by showing them a set of movements. Why not? That's how dance was done for a very long time. It's a very kind of evident way of working with dance. What does it mean to not work with it that way? For me, it has to do with wanting to consider that this knowledge, this learning, what is learned, isn't an object, is something which can only, if it ever approaches an object, can only become an object through what we might make of it together. It doesn't arrive, it doesn't arrive here already made and I think that has a lot of pedagogical extensions.
That's something I've seen in a lot of the projects that you're doing, and get very inspired by this kind of participatory aspect of, yes this is an educational situation, but we're going to do this together. We're going to learn this together. I don't come with the object of knowledge to transmit to you.
Prem:
Well, it's interesting because you said knowledge is not an object and there's this quote by Stanley Eveling that I really love. It is, “a thing is just a slow event”.
Andros:
Hmm.
Prem:
Which for me is interesting because it allows me to think about objects over time and breaks down the illusion of anything being an object. It instead sees it as a temporal event. So even there, I mean, I'm not trying to just wantonly disagree, but maybe knowledge is an object if we think of an object as a slow event-.
Andros:
-A slow event. Mhmm.
Prem:
I'm curious, on the question of pedagogy, I did want to ask, who were your significant teachers? You mentioned how a lot of the dance that you learned was through this idea of a unitary technique, the idea that there's one way to do it. But yeah, who were your most significant teachers?
Andros:
Yeah, I mean let's say a lot of my most important dance teachers didn't teach dance, basically. But because I did dance, what they taught me, applied to dance. So I would say Moshe Feldenkreis has been an important teacher to me, I never met the man personally, but his methodology opened up another way for me to think about choreography.
I think about all the jazz musicians I grew up around, Ornette Coleman is a huge-
Prem:
-did you grow up around Ornette?
Andros:
I knew him. I mean he was, he was around, he was a friend of my dad's.
Prem:
That slightly blows my mind.
Andros:
And so, just completely other considerations of, how to think about composition, how to think about improvisation, how to think about listening. And all of those things, I think filtered into how I could consider dance.
Prem:
I just realised that my entire access to art came from playing jazz.
Andros:
Oh!
Prem:
I only figured out what contemporary, or, modern art was, when I was 16 or 17 and I'd already been playing for much longer than that.
Andros:
So interesting! So you were a musician first?
Prem:
Yes. I think I was a musician and a writer before I had any access to visual art.
Andros:
That's kind of fascinating for me because I've known you professionally as “Prem, the designer”. And, graphic design somehow figured into the nomenclature of your job, and then when I would see the things that you were doing, I was like, okay there's obviously a lot of considered design going into some of the books and the materials that are happening. But actually, this kind of feeling that it was very sort of, like, contrary to my notions of what design are however, you know, layman's those might be. But, it also sort of seems to, like, make some sense to me when you tell me that you were coming from music and writing, then via art.
How did that affect your considerations of what design could be and how it could operate?
Prem:
Well, my path to design came through writing. It was because I was interested in the word and I became interested in typography, and graphic design also seemed like a reasonable practical compromise to wanting to study art, at a certain point, and growing up in an immigrant family where just the idea of art was unthinkable. So, at least graphic design seemed like something I could make a living doing.
Andros:
A job.
Prem:
It was a job. Unfortunately, it's not like in the British context, where everybody who became a graphic designer of a certain generation wanted to be Peter Saville, and you had these kind of, you had these models for graphic designers being cool. But, if you had asked me when I was in my early 20s what I did, I would have said to you, “oh, I'm a performance artist moonlighting as a graphic designer”.
Most of the work I was doing back then, as being, either performative in a way that was very explicit and clear to people. I gave these guided tours of people's personal spaces, that were very literary, they were structured almost like a, like I was really thinking a lot about Georges Perec and Oulipo at that time, but also thinking about models for ethnography and how you could use the guided tour as a format. But I was also doing things, like interviewing East German graphic designers in these long form, 12 hour interviews about their homes and studios before and after 1989, and I never said it out loud, but I saw those long form interviews themselves as a kind of private performance because they were structured for me. I mean, they had a way that I was trying to ask questions and was trying to discover something. So, for me, that was a performance that was individual and then, with two people, but it never became a public thing.
And then at some point, I think I got more ambitious about being a graphic designer. I think I'm bad at moonlighting at things and so I was like, well, if I'm going to be a graphic designer, then let's be an ambitious graphic designer and try to do things that change up how people are working with graphic design. And maybe that was always a useful position for me, that when I moved to New York in the early 2000s and was working as a graphic designer and started my own design studio, I always brought to it this sense of not belonging to the discipline. I would never say that I was a graphic designer when people asked me, I think that position of being on the outside of design and trying to think about how designing itself can be performative, and how you can imbue even a static object like a book with a sense of performance, was intrinsic to how I thought about it. And now it's reversed, because now, I do lots of things that, to other people, aren't obviously graphic design. They're no longer, I'm no longer making books in the same way, I'm working, making a visual identity for an organisation, or a poster, or a website. But, I might make an event series, and I think about that as being designed. I could also call it curating, I could call it organising, and sometimes I do, but the structure of design and the way of thinking helps me to order it.
Andros:
Right. But to someone like myself, who has very little relationship to graphic design, I don't consider myself a designer in any sense, what seems antithetical in an interesting way, or maybe contradictory, is that my understanding of design, certainly graphic design, is creating something which is then formulated, and how it's formulated or formalised, is how it is delivered.
So, it's an object or maybe a slow event, if you want to call it that. But, it arrives to us looking how it looks, and will look, right? And obviously performance implies a different type of temporality, but also, a kind of, much more messy and certainly more difficult to reproduce or to finalise and so, I'm so curious about, as someone who tends to try to find a good contradiction, I'm always, like, looking for these contradictions that I can try to solve in some way, or to at least say, well, what if these two things exchanged each other's properties? What if these two things lent each other their bodies in some way, right? Or became together?
And so that, that feels like, if I just try to hold for a second, graphic design and performance, that feels like a kind of contradiction that my brain doesn't find how to solve that, in any evident way whatsoever, and yet, it seems like that's, more or less, what you're working on, right? I mean, from my perspective, that seems to be the crux there.
Prem:
It's fascinating because we may be projecting onto each other's “disciplines” in quotation marks, similar things, because, I didn't think about performance as being locked down, but I think I thought about dance, as being locked down. I never had a lot of access to dance as a form, and I just realised that the only dance I knew growing up was classical Indian dance, like Bharatanatyam and Kathak and other things, which are highly formalised and highly ritualised and very much about appearance and perfection within an established canon. And so, the way that you say, you thought about graphic design as being something that's formulated and delivered, I thought, at that point in time in my life, that dance was a thing that was completely controlled.
Andros: Beautiful.
Transition sound start
Andros: We're going to try to keep the length of the inhale, length of the exhale sound more or less even. *breaths and tones*
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Andros:
I was talking with someone recently about, there's a choreographer named Tere O'Connor, who, I never spoke with him about this, but, I heard that he used to do this thing that he called “break the piece”, where he would be in a process making a work, and then he would give the process over to another artist, and would leave for a period of time, and would come back and see what had happened.
To go back a bit to this word of, symbioembodiment
So, how do I operate, as an artist who wants to have a career and make a living and do interesting things and so on, as we all do, without contributing to this ideology of individuality? And so, I love the example that you're giving, as some kind of prototype of that, and I invite thinking about all the ways that we can do that, which sort of imply these forms of co-authorship, and which admit the kind of idea that that's what we're anyway doing, right? So, why are we trying to call it otherwise?
Prem: What I love about the example of Tere O'Connor's “break the piece” is that, it's about multiple systems overlapping or succeeding each other, there's a kind of juxtaposition that happens. It's not “Oh, well I'll take my system, and then we'll look at your system, and then we'll have a conversation, and we'll come to a happy consensus about these systems”, it acknowledges that there is a human, who starts that process with their system, and then somebody else introduces something else. It has a kind of conflict or a dissonance, or again, at least a juxtaposition of difference, where each of those parts is still legible.
The point you made about the machine for the ideology of individuality and art being that, I think that's completely true, resonates so strongly with me in terms of how the market sees the art market, sees individual creators, and the idea of a studio, the idea that you could have 30 people, 50 people working, under the brand of a single artist's name. And I'm really interested in people like Asad Raza, who is our common friend, and how he seems to have a very porous notion of an artist, where, it is his name that shows up on things, but it also involves lots of other people, and he doesn't control all the pieces of it, and he leaves a lot of that visible in the final piece, or the final process.
But, it also makes me think of my own process, and how, for many years, I had this hesitation about showing up and making things that have my name on them, because I feared that that was too much about me. And I think, more recently, I've come to a position where I think it's okay for part of a thing to be authored by Prem Krishnamurthy, and, it's clear that's a set of systems that are emerging out of a dialogue with other people and historical references and other precedents, but, it is a thing that I've created in this moment, and because I've created that structure, I can then open it up to make space for other people to do their thing. It can become a container, and for me, that's maybe a more productive or generative way to think about collaboration, because, oftentimes collaboration, especially as a buzzword in business or design or other things, is this false notion of consensus and everybody coming to a single solution instead of structures that allow for difference.
Andros:
Yeah, I mean for me, I think a name implies a certain economy with it, and what does one do with that economy, right? I think, our friend Asad, is a great example, and one of the things I've always admired about Asad is, not only as an artist, but also as a curator, this kind of notion of “being a host”, which means that he's often doing things which, it's not a solo show, it's not a group show, but it's something where it's both/and, neither/nor, and it's hosting. It's really, I think of it as, as hosting, and I think about hosting as an interesting curatorial practice and an interesting artistic practice. How do you invite others? How do you create the context to invite others in, to do? And so, that feels for me like an important methodology that I try to develop in what I'm doing, which is a different notion than how do I create the moves, the best moves, to teach the people to do, you know.
Transition sound start
Andros: -and we can start to converge and diverge the sounds that we make, so finding ways to overlap, and then, turn away off into any directions we want *long yawn sounds*
Transition sound end
Prem:
I think in our first conversation about this, you quoted William Forsythe.
Andros:
As far as I remember, what Forsythe said was in an after-talk, and someone said something to the extent of “what is choreography?”. And indeed he said, if I remember correctly, he said “my job as a choreographer is to create the context for the dancers to do their work.” And that stuck with me, because then, what does it mean to create that context? What do you need to create the context? And how does that shift from creating and controlling the actual material that might play out in that context?
Prem:
This idea of hosting, then seems really connected with the idea of choreography in that way. You literally have a group of people who are performing in something and they, it's both an authorial act and also a curatorial act in some way.
Andros:
And ideally something that also can go both ways. What Forsythe said there, I think is brilliant, and has been very instructive for me. But, I also think about, well how can we extend that idea? How can we co-create the context, even? Right? How can that become a two way street?
When I talked about jazz musicians that I feel like influence me and what I do with dance and performance, one of those people is another family friend, named Butch Morris. And I think even one of the words that came up from your prompt, right, was conduction. And, Butch Morris was this downtown, New York jazz composer and conductor and improviser who, basically invented a technique for conducting ensembles that would improvise. So, instead of conducting in the Western classical way, he kind of derived this system of gestures that he would use, to instruct the musicians to then improvise their own material, but, to help coordinate them in the ensemble. So, that notion of composition, and the way that he worked with composition, or conceived composition, I think was very instructive for me, but then has also kind of led to, my also thinking about like, well couldn't that also be a two way? Like, could the ensemble also conduct the conductor, in some way? Right? And there you could think, you could put in designer or choreographer, or whoever this person is who is in charge of the responsibility of the project, whose name is going at the top of the project, right?
Prem:
Well, I think, when you put it that way, for me it seems like it's always been a two way street, right? I mean, like, maybe it's a spectrum where, kind of, Western classical music and the idea of conducting feels very top heavy, where the conductor exerts a lot of control downward. I'm not sure if that's true, but that seems like the impression, and then you have other things that are very, you know, kind of bottom up, where they seem more developed by the people organically who are part of it, but it's always a two way street. It's just a question of which way it goes and how much that's acknowledged, because even in an artist studio, I'm sure that, I know the people who are working there influence what happens, but their names don't appear on it.
Andros:
Right.
Prem:
But it makes me think of somebody like adrienne maree brown’s idea of “emergent strategy”, and just emergence itself, and the acknowledgement that we have to look at how systems develop through small interactions at a micro scale, and then how that changes the macro scale of a thing, and then vice versa, it kind of goes back and forth.
I mean, myself, in thinking about design, I used to sometimes very intentionally switch, literally, scales of things. I would move from trying to think about a large scale conceptual system, you know, the motivation of something like an identity project or a book, and how it's sequenced, its narrative, and then switch scales to the micro typography, like actually looking at how you're setting letters and words, and somehow I found that really productive as a toggle in my brain between these scales, because then you don't get fixed in one form.
Andros:
Right. Really interesting. But you know, I think it also begs this question, which I feel like we're circling around, so, how to host, and maybe along with that would be like, how to design the systems of hosting. We were talking about, kind of, these more or less structured interactions, and the way that less structured interactions tend to fall into habitual hierarchies. The loudest person is the one who speaks the most, and so on.
And so, this kind of openness, or what might seem open, actually can become repressive or constrictive, and so for me, that's where these kinds of design, or maybe choreographic
Prem:
How does that play itself out in your own choreographic
Andros:
I mean, differently with each piece, and that's been utterly important for me, that I don't come to each project with a methodology, but approach each project as a search for a methodology. But there is an ethic, I guess it could be called, or an approach that's developing and which I feel like I carry into these interactions with other artists. I can say that the last project that I did, which was this playing out questions of care and violence, and whether, and how those two things could be coextensive: Where's care violence? Where's violence care? What is care without carefulness? What is violence without harm? These were questions that we had, and there was a very literal push and pull between me and the main dancer Lee that I was working with.
And so, I had some of these ideas, I had a very simple method that I brought in, that it started from just saying yes and no, physically, so, acquiescing and resisting. And then, trying to play out what is it to say “yes” and “no”, at the same time. What is saying “yes” in one part and “no” in another? How can our “nos” together become a “yes”? So, our resistance into each other, and we're talking physically here, did not become a kind of stalemate. And so, in this case, I came with some interests and some, more or less, political motivations for where this was coming from, but how it would play out, and how it did play out, was only possible through Lee's contribution and what she brought into the situation. That was a very literally tactile, literally physical way of co developing this, through lots of, kind of, issuing and disagreeing with.
I kind of generally freak out, at the beginning, because I'm like, what's a dance piece? How does one make a dance piece? I've been doing this for, like, a decent amount of time, and yet I'm like, how is it po-? I still have no idea how to… you know? And I actually, I feel like the freak out doesn't freak me out anymore, and that's the only… like if you want to talk about some kind of improvement, that I feel like I can track, is that now I'm a little bit more like, “yeah, I have no idea how to make this”. I feel “okay, I have these interests, but what does that mean? Like, what are we doing with that?” And then finding that, that's actually a generative space, it can be a generative space if I can, and this is where these questions come into play, if I can design the scenarios where the artists that I'm working with can interact with those questions, and we can co author something.
Prem:
I like that you said “design the scenarios”, because now I think maybe you should call yourself a designer, and I should call myself a choreographer.
Andros:
*laughs* Let's do it.
Prem:
And then we just switch roles.
Andros:
Absolutely.
Transition sounds starts
*vocal exercises and breathwork*
Transition sounds end
Prem:
Coming back to the initial thing you said about embodying with, I love this with. My impression is that, it sounds like in your process, you're both responding to a project, a situation, your collaborators, in very direct ways where you're learning with them, learning from them, through them. And it also seems like you're often doing that with other artworks, with other artists, installations, or sculptures, or contexts in which you are then creating a work that is embodying with them. Can you talk about how that's developed in your work?
Andros:
Yeah, because I think it developed the way that a lot of things tend to, which is more or less accidentally, and then afterwards you start to think there might have been a reason for that accident. I spoke before about my ambivalences around the kind of singular
But there was something about this experience of ‘the premiere’, where everyone descends on this moment to experience this thing which is supposed to have arrived into some form of finished ness, and then to have that sense of failure, which was like, “Oh wow, I really don't want to be making things that have that quality to them. I don't want to be making things that have that objectivity to them, and then invite judgement in that way”, and also suggest some kind of design in the classic sense that I was thinking about it before, that kind of finitude. So I then took that work and said, I want to remix it. Actually, I want to unmake it. And that became a piece that actually Asad invited me to do, had commissioned called Already Unmade. And the idea there was, okay, I'm going to take these finished pieces that I've made in my career and I'm going to unmake them. But also, unmaking them them itself could become a kind of repertory and I don't want to do that. So I'm going to rehearse the unmaking of them and I'm going to perform the rehearsals. And people can come in and that's what I'm going to be working on, right? And in between also telling some kind of stories and jokes and songs that had to do more or less with teleology and progress and different notions that were floating around in the space.
And then I started to be interested in like, well, how can I do that with other artworks? So there were two Simone Forti. works. There was a Jerome Bel work. My old friend and professor Tony Cokes invited me to to do some things and I thought like, Well, uh, is this still a remix? He makes video work, not performance. And I thought, actually, other works in other medium
Prem:
Yeah, it sounds like an asynchronous dialogue. This thing exists and then it gives you a starting point to do something and then ostensibly somebody else sees that and it starts another reaction. I also really like this idea of taking something that you made that might be in one frame of failure and then using that to create something else. I used to think about curating in a similar way where I thought, well, every exhibition is a rehearsal for the next exhibition, instead of taking it as a finished experience, thinking of it as something that's generative for the next step.
Transition sounds start
Andros: So, interchanging, leading, following, converging, diverging, and as we do that, if there are any songs, or melodies, or or parts of songs or lines that come to mind, those can come in as well.
*vocal exercises and breathwork*
Transition sounds end
Prem:
The question of failure is also really interesting to me because I remember a recent experience where I had created a kind of two hour participatory, experimental talk show situation. And I think you came at the very end when there was karaoke. It had a lot of different pieces to it, it had a kind of conversation, it had a moment of mindfulness, it had Naoko Wasugi doing some gong work, it had a lot of… it had some journaling, it had small group conversations. One thing that happened was that after about 30 minutes or so, there were certain people in the back who just started to leave. And when I was younger, I used to be really concerned with people having a good time. I really wanted people to really engage and have a meaningful experience and, and in that moment, it was great because I thought “well, okay It's just not what they want to do”, I'm glad that they knew what they wanted and what they didn't and it was a wonderful shedding of the fear of not being liked, the fear of not being seen, the fear of not being understood. And I think that's a relatively new experience for me of the last years, but I think it was super instructive for me.
Andros:
I love that. I mean, also as someone who did come super late, I had the opposite experience, right? Didn't leave, but I arrived towards what was the end. And it was one of those situations where I didn't feel like I had missed anything. Not only because that just didn't seem like the type of situa… it wasn't like a narrative where you walk into the end of the movie, but to use an overused word, the vibe in the room was so specific. The tone and the atmosphere that had been created felt so Clear for me to just fit into and I've, I showed that I think more or less by, speaking of failure, participating in karaoke.
Prem:
Karaoke is never failure! Like that, that was the thing. You got in there, you were all in. I think karaoke is purely about love.
Andros:
Whitney Houston, whose song I butchered, might disagree with you in this case, but luckily she's not here too, I guess, so I might get away with calling it love.
Prem:
*laughs* No, I really, well, I, I, I appreciate what you're saying about the vibe in the room. Also, just as an aside, earlier this year at a party, somebody from Australia, um, this was in Berlin, said, we need to stop using the, instead of saying vibe, vibe is so overused. We should start saying wibe.
Andros:
Oh yeah, the wibe.
Prem:
So, so from now on, we should really be talking about, you know, the wibes in the room were so good. You're right that there's something about creating a space where you don't catch the whole thing, but it, it's a kind of culture. For me, part of that is a culture that is less about being on a stage in a particular way. I mean, it's how I approach karaoke too. Whenever I try to host some sort of karaoke, which, which I do every time I do a public event, I try to encourage people to get involved in karaoke. And I always say to people, I think there's a misconception that to be good at karaoke, you have to get on stage and sing Whitney Houston perfectly. You have to be the person in front of everybody else with a microphone. But I believe that, also, you can be great at karaoke by cheering other people on. You can be great at karaoke by sitting quietly in the corner and simply sending your energy out into the room. Because if you didn't have all those people, you just have a person singing alone in their bathroom. And so I like to ask people “what's, not what's a song that you'd like to sing, but what's a song that you like to hear sung?”
Andros:
I love it. And I think it's a very simple but important formulation which contributed to the atmosphere or the wibe in the space that actually let me. Feel like it wasn't about my ability or inability to sing the song. And I think in the end, it became a kind of death metal rendition, if I remember correctly. And it felt like that was completely admissible in that space. Like it, and it, even the lyrics felt like they were a kind of score that could be adhered to or not. And indeed, that you were kind of providing in a in a simple accessible way, a place for everyone to perform or participate by listening.
Prem:
What you just said makes me think, the way in which you might be in dialogue with existing artworks, maybe that's a kind of karaoke. Because, that artwork is almost like a backing track. It's a kind of starting point, but your performance is overlaid on it. It takes it at a starting point, and it tests out different ways to respond to it, respond on top of it, respond with it.
Andros: I love that. It's about a kind of response which doesn't need to honour or prop up the original. There's nothing perfect about the original. There's nothing that we're trying to approach about the original. But this is a response and that response might not resemble formally whatsoever.
Transition sounds start
Love me better, ain't me better, ain't nobody. Ain't nobody, ain't nobody, ain't nobody.
Transition sounds end
Andros:
We talk about these kind of like roles of art making. There is another mythology which is like the mythology of originality and the mythology that the artist is there to make new. And I'm always kind of like, yes and I, there are a lot of things that I, are new and original, that I love and appreciate and, but also we can make tangential responses. We can make responses that forget what they're responding to.
Prem:
Well, I mean, when you said that with your remixes, they don't need to honour the original. I thought immediately both of a, of a kind of irreverence that, yeah, an irreverence, a kind of lightness about how they relate to their original, though the flip side, and I think that for me is embedded in it, is that even irreverence acknowledges that the thing exists and there's a more typical relation to it or a more assumed relation of honouring it. And it also requires a kind of listening. It does require a deep understanding of the thing in order to have even an irreverent, in my language, or a remix response of it, and that I think is, it's a dynamic where you can both listen to somebody else and also either actively or implicitly challenge that thing.
Andros:
Yeah, I mean that, that makes me think that, maybe a better way to articulate what I said is to think that the way that you honour something isn't necessarily evident in the output, right, it it can be honoured like you're saying in the in the input in the way that you've listened Independent from whether that is present, visible, sensible or so on and in what we consider the response
Andros and Prem (in transition):
That was amazing. That was a lot of fun. I could do that for a very long time. Let's do it. Let's do it. I think this is now that we're both in New York, it is time. That was wild.
Martin: Thank you Andros and Prem for this conversation.
For the transcript of this episode and for resources mentioned in their conversation, go to rosechoreographicschool.com. The link for this page will also be in the podcast episode description, wherever you're listening right now. In the next episode, our guests are Mette Edvardson and Chrysa Parkinson.
If you'd like to give us any feedback, drop us an email on info@rosechoreographicschool.com
This podcast series is a Rose Choreographic School production. It's hosted by me, Martin Hargreaves, produced and edited by Hester Cant, and the assistant producer is Izzy Galbraith. Thank you for listening. Goodbye.
Bibliography:
Books:
Eveling (cited in Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 2004, p. 59) "an object is a slow event"
Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.
Sennett, R. (2013). Together the rituals, pleasures and politics of cooperation. London Penguin Books.
People:
adrienne maree brown
Asad Raza
Butch Morris
Erik Erikson
George Perec
Jerome Bel
Merce Cunningham
Moshe Feldenkrais
Naoco Wowsugi
Ornette Coleman
Simone Forti
Tere O’Connor
Tony Cokes
Projects and other resources:
Andros Zins-Browne – Danspace Project
Already Unmade | Lafayette Anticipations
Bharatanatyam
Kathak