Transcript of Edited Interview with Edan Gorlicki

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Christine:

Could you give me a brief sense of your identity as an artist and a dancer? How would you describe what you do?

 

Edan:

I think, as an anarchist, I don't like the term, "identity". How do I label and narrow myself down to who I am and what I do? What I can say, as a biography, is that I have had a career as a performer, as a professional dancer, who was trained in Western classical techniques of ballet and contemporary dance. I was raised in the Israeli dance world and Israeli dance language. Israeli contemporary dance is more rooted in animalistic and instinctual qualities. Dancing as a form of survival, you could say. That's been my experience as a person living in that type of body, with that type of upbringing, that type of training. I'm also a choreographer now. I no longer dance and perform professionally. I shifted my career into choreography, which means I work with performance artists in the studio to develop projects of different forms. My goal or main interest is to use movement as my main tool to best communicate something that I find valuable for my community as audience. When it comes to identity, it's undeniable that my perspective in my work is as a queer migrant. I'm always a foreigner in my working world. 

 

Christine:

When we're carefully attending to our sensations and our inner experiences and our large and small movements, what do you think might be going on there? And how is attention influencing those experiences, as a mover, as a choreographer, or as perceived by the audience? What direction is the gaze? Is the gaze in, or is it out? And I don't know if you could put those things together in terms of the way that you're gazing as you answer the question about careful attention.

 

Edan:

My experience in the last three years focused around working specifically on the experiences of trauma in the body. If I narrow it down and talk specifically about that chapter, I think that attention to moving while dedicating attention to movement, has been the key to unlocking the movement language I was looking for to communicate in this project.

I found myself wearing three sets of glasses at all times. And those three kept changing. Sometimes, I wore just one. Sometimes I wore two at a time. Sometimes three. I think I could answer differently to the topic of attending to our sensations from the points of view of those three gazes; being a mover myself - practicing attending to my own sensations while I move within my own body as a person, guiding another person in that process, and helping them to perform the act of attention. And then being the viewer, watching them attending to their sensations. The one thing in common is that it was almost like we were developing a technique that helped us master high-performance ability. Now, when I attend to myself while moving, it's as similar to the programmed state that is embedded in my body from my training in ballet. I've done plies and relevés a million times, to the point that now (even though I haven't professionally danced in more than a decade) if I were to do a plie and a relevé, my technique is automated. I can unlock that quickly, and my body knows how to apply my gestures to the technique I've previously mastered.

So, what happened in this project was that we asked ourselves; how can we master this in the form of a technique where we don't have to try so hard to pay careful attention anymore? It becomes almost an automated form of performance where we are naturally and automatically attending to our sensations in order to perform.

 

Christine:

So, you're training attention?

 

Edan:

Yes, training forms of attention for different moments; studying what types of attention are necessary for when and how much, within the context of our performance. In this project I think that my dancers and I have mastered a performative state where fairly quickly we can attend to our bodily processes. We can attend to them in a way that allows us to apply them to the situation we’re in. 

This could even be just while I'm walking, while I'm sitting in my chair, while I'm talking to you. And it can also be while I'm in the studio looking for what my body wants to say, with curiosity, or just as well on a stage in front of an audience where I want to say, or share, something publicly.

 

Christine:

So, there's this training of attention that can go out in a lot of different directions in terms of how it gets applied in the world or what gets attended to, or even how you're applying your attention.

 

Edan:

I think it's not always about applying attention to produce movement. It's also important to attend to what is already going on, what is already there that is asking for that attention, if it is truly asking for it at all. It's not only the act of attending to something because we have a wish to tap into it, but rather keeping our attentive abilities open to continuously being available to notice what is asking for attention, when, and where in the body.

 

Christine:

Sometimes, when I've written about this, I've talked about it as the muscle; that attention is like a muscle and it needs exercise.

 

Edan:

Yes once you've trained that muscle, it becomes a technique that you can rely on. It becomes a trust entity. You can trust that you have the tools, the knowledge, the expertise to attend and in which way, when and how.

 

Christine:

You've internalized it?

Edan:

I would say so. Beyond internalized, also familiarized and even gotten comfortable with it. 

 

Christine:

One distinction that could be made is when we're immersed in an experience, and when we're thinking about or reflecting on that experience. Could you comment on how your work holds that difference and possibly uses those two states in different ways?

 

Edan:

What is the difference between ‘doing something’, versus ‘thinking about doing something’? For example, ‘going on a vacation’ versus ‘thinking about going on a vacation’. The difference is sensory. It involves thinking about something, so attending to something from the point of view of thinking about it. That is one form of attention, almost a preparatory form of attention. 

Immersive attention (which I really appreciated and liked the term, "immersive attention") is opening up the senses. It's opening up and including all the senses to gather the collective experience of everything involved. The immersive experience, from the point of view of a performer, is like method-acting – fully becoming a character. Only, the character you're asked to play is yourself. So, you need to somehow go on this vacation. You need to literally do the going part. If you don’t, you can talk about the idea of going on vacation, you can describe the imagination you have of the vacation, you can share to the point where the audience can immerse themselves in that idea. But it is only the idea that they are immersing themselves in. But if you actually go on that vacation yourself, transport yourself, become that character, that person on that vacation, the audience are able to go along with you on that vacation, in a more enriched way.

One of my dancers, Charlie, described this very well. She said "When you get a character that you have to portray, you have to find the version of yourself in that character and live it." So, you are not the character anymore, you are the version of yourself that identifies with that character. Immersive experience and attention, in the same way, while moving, is a bit like that. It's like finding the version of myself today that is inviting and triggering the movement of today.

 

Christine:

That speaks to your uncomfortability with the word ‘identity,’ because you're really talking about immersion in direct experience as a kind of fluid state that then influences others to also have an immersive experience.

 

Edan:

Correct. I think that was my goal with this project. Can we get the audience to that state? In RE-COVER, the second part of my three-part project, we wanted the audience to go on the journey with the dancer, not following the dancer. So, the dancer is not the storyteller, the dancer is writing the story at that moment. The audience is the witness of the writing of the story. To perform that writing of the story, the dancer can find out through attention, what is the story my body wants to tell or write today?

 

Christine:

And would you say that the audience is reading the story, or that they are writing a story as they witness, they're writing their own story as they witness?

 

Edan:

Both. For example, when you're reading a good book, you are creating pictures and images based on what is written. You are also filling in some of the gaps that the writing doesn’t provide with your own imagination. When you read a certain novel, you have the feeling like you've been there, like you've done that. It's something you can identify with well. But then, when you speak to somebody else who's read the same book and you start to talk about the way they envisioned the car, the road, the person, the character, you find that you saw it differently, even though you both read the same script. I think that happens in our performances as well; the audience is reading, but is reading it in their own way, at the same time that it is actually being written.

Christine: 

 My mind is going off into how we're all writing and reading at the same time. We're in this constant reading of experience and writing experience.

 

Edan:

That's what immersive attention and movement attention really is. It's constantly asking the body, ‘what now’? And then, ‘what's next’? Which is what we do when we tell stories, we say something and then it follows up with what comes next. And that also includes the importance of time and the dedication of time. To take the time to question what's the story right now? Where is it in my body? How does it want to be told? Is it asking for attention? Yes? Then dedicating attention. Then, what is it wanting to say today? And at the same time, my witness, the viewer, witnessing what the body is wanting to say and creating on top of that, their image of what it might mean.

 

Christine:

Do you think you could say that attention is a kind of catalyst?

Edan:

Yes. But also, a portal or channel. I think of tuning a radio to a channel. You have to sensitively go a little at a time, until you are sure you got it at the right mark.

 

Christine:

I've used that metaphor myself to talk about coherency, because you've got all these radio waves, but as you turn the dial, the waves come into and out of coherency.

 

Edan:

And going back to the previous question, the technique is in the automatic readiness in the practice of tuning again and again.

 

Christine:

That capacity to be a good tuner.

 

Edan:

That's the training.

 

Christine:

Is it possible that when we attend consciously to our ongoing experience, that we access information or resources that weren't accessible before? What would that look like in your work?

 

Edan:

From my experience, it has to do with the motive. What is bringing me to this? It is a learning process of recognizing why I'm doing what I'm doing and where that might be coming from, and what within me is causing me to do and experience it in this way. So, the act of learning while doing. The information and the resources that we access were not accessibly noticeable before. But by the act of doing, we are consciously and actively opening up windows and doors for new things to enter and get incorporated. That is the learning.

 

Christine:

And it sounds like you're saying you open up specific windows because of your motivations.

 

Edan:

Correct. The attention is recognizing the motive of the moment, and then recognizing where is the window and how can I open it from there, at that finely tuned moment, that can offer me something new. It also has to do with time and the experience of time. The experience of time shifts. The key in this question is the ongoing part. To me, the key is in the ongoing part of the experience. At every moment, there can be a new revealed direction or sensation or movement or stop. At any given moment, something new could occur. New resources. New information can get revealed. 

Attending consciously is the effort to be present. Within my work as a choreographer, this is also my tool for manipulating the sense of time in the viewer of the performance. It is a way of guiding them into their own sense of presence. By patiently performing this act of attending, listening, recognizing potentials for where something might be lurking, asking for more attention, the audience as viewers open up as well. And then I, as the performer, actively dedicate that time, as I'm doing it, inviting the viewer as well to be just as patient, just as attentive and present within themselves. It takes time. 

It's also about the fact that even though this ‘thing’ is happening now, it's not a given; it might change at any moment. It's like saying; you're nodding your head now, but now your attention is on the way you're blinking. And now, the attention is on the way you're smiling. And now, the attention is on how you're leaning back into your chair. And that is all the act of attention and being present. But time is the thing that keeps changing. So, time is the ability to witness where the new information is, to notice where the next line in the story is. It's being continuously available for the ‘what's next’? 

 

Christine:

It feels like you're actually illuminating that sense of what ‘ongoing’ means.

 

Edan:

Yes, the key is in the description of ongoing. It's continuous. It's fluid. It's ever-evolving. It's transformative. Once it's happened, it's already gone.

 

Christine:

It feels like it takes us back to identity and how you might be saying that identity is flowing, rather than sitting down and staying in place.

 

Edan:

I think you've just uncovered why I like to use fog in my performances. For me, it's very important that everything is kept in the vague gray space. It should never be presented as defined as this or that.

Christine:

So, this brings up the idea of what creativity is and how conscious moving can be an agent of creativity. What kind of embodied creativities might you be looking for in your work? And what are the practices that support creativity? 

 

Edan:

Creativity is also a muscle that needs activation and training. It also needs the right conditions, the right environments. It can't be forced. I think that's where I relate to bodily practices. You can push, you can force your body, but it's always going to reject and retract. You have to learn, what are the necessary environments? What is necessary to organize so that you have the space and possibility for creativity to flow? And that might change as you go along, or it might not show up, even though you've created the ultimate condition. Its’ also possible that it happens in the exact moment where you think the conditions are the worst. But essentially, it's about, again, windows. It's about attending to the ‘what do I need to do so that I invite creativity with open arms as much as possible here and now’?

Body attention, while moving, is doing the same thing, is inviting, it’s creating an inviting environment with as open arms as possible for movement to arrive, for stories to be told, for information to get discovered. And then, yes, I would definitely say that's a tool. That would be one of the tools I would include into creating my environments. When I create, when I step into the studio and I want creativity to arrive today - because we have planned from 2:00 to 6:00 to be creative - so when I try to create the conditions as much as possible, an important factor for me is to help the bodies I'm working with be as available as possible for their own creativity as well. I guess my problem with the question is the looking for part. I think if I look for them, then I'm forcing them. I have to trust that they're there somewhere and want to come out. And I need to create, as much as possible, the safe space and environment for them to feel free and fly.

 

Christine:

It strikes me that you're describing a process that's very close to how people describe meditation. You sit down on the cushion. You establish your posture. You make things quiet. You create this environment that invites awakeness to occur. It might not necessarily happen or show up. Or, it might even show up when you're buying a vegetable in the grocery store. But that mindfulness that they talk about in meditation, it just strikes me as kindred.

 

Edan:

You touched on an interesting analogy with the vegetables, because it's a bit like cooking, right? Cooking is a very creative act. But you still need the utensils. You need the ingredients to be there. You need the kitchen. You need the space. You might even need the kitchen to be cleared and clean before you even start. Once you start, you might follow a specific recipe that tells you precisely how to do it. But then, as you're going along you suddenly go, "I think this needs more salt." And you taste a little bit and you confirm that, and you put more salt in than what's written in the recipe. And then, you can be more creative, "I think I'm going to add this ingredient that was not planned, but I see it and it's right here, and it's an opportunity I'm going to try."

And then, you get into this flow. I think we talked a lot about flow in our dialogues in the past. And flow, I think, is the transcendent space where creativity has taken over, where you lose your sense of time. I was talking about time as something that we use with attention, that you are patiently taking the time and acknowledging that you are taking the time. And flow is that space you enter into where you don't even need to do that actively anymore. You have entered into that experience where time can last forever, can go fast, can be slow, who knows? Which is a bit like meditation, sometimes.

 

Christine:

Once we immerse ourselves in ongoing experience, how can that transition into making something of it later, something like art or learning or feeling and acting differently in daily life?

 

Edan:

I really appreciate that question. For me, it's a state of awareness. Like the technique I was talking about earlier, you can't really undo it. It's like knowing another language that not everybody knows. What the performer creatively makes or creates is like a poem in that unspoken language. So, they're writing a poem in a language that nobody else speaks. Only they do. The art, then, as the choreographer, is in the translating, which can be done in many ways. It is important for me to understand the inner processes of the performer. I need to really get to know them. The performer is experiencing and delivering and, at the same time, knowing what the audience needs in order to activate their own imagination. And when I find those two things, and I know how to create the environment for those things to take place, it's not important that they understand what the poem means. It is only important that they feel invited, with a similar tension, into the inner world that the performer is experiencing. What the viewer can do is enter into the creative zone or flow that the performer is in to see the poem being created. They don't understand the poem, necessarily. They might not know what it means or what it might be saying to the performer. The performer is discovering that themselves as well. What they can do is relate and enter into that world where they can as well write their own poetry. My job is, again, ‘what is the environment necessary for that link to happen’? What's the music? What's the lighting? Is there fog? What's the color of the floor? How is the seat that the audience is sitting in positioned in? Where is the performer? Are they close? Are they far? All of those things.

 

Christine:

The choreographer is not only aware of how movement feels, but also how it appears to others. How do you think that an audience, people who are witnessing the conscious moving of dancers on a stage, is being influenced? And how much do you shape your dances so that certain movement responses might be provoked in the audience? 

 

Edan:

Now we focus on the role of choreographer; the designer of space and time. I see it as a spectrum or scale between designed or fabricated movement to authentic movement that is out of my control. My work is in framing how much I control or decide on things, and how much space I give for unplanned authenticity, and when is the right time or not the right time for that. 

I have a goal with this performance. In the context of that goal, what do I want to say? Do I need the performer to be there themselves? Or, do I need them to be something else? They need to understand how much of what goes in where and when and for how long. It's again like tuning the radio. It depends which work we're talking about. In some pieces, like RE-COVER, we radically decided that we should live through the whole performance experience in a complete live discovery mode. RE-COVER is a five-hour performance that exists only in that radical state. It's in the unknown. The performance itself is the act of discovering as it goes along. It requires the performers to be in a hyper state of attention in their experience at every moment of the performance. The goal I had with this decision was to create the opportunity for empathy to thrive. The purpose of the performance was for the audience to consciously experience empathy. I wanted the audience to fall in love with these performers, to relate and resonate with them as human beings with all their glory and faults, pride, and shame. Performing hyper-attention was the key practice for inviting a viewer into the performer's world, to truly get to know them inside and out. This whole practice became the tool, the thing that we needed to master, in order to achieve that goal. And that is the most radical thing I have ever witnessed performers do, was being that vulnerable. And this practice was the tool to achieve vulnerability in a performative context.

 

Christine:

So, how is conscious moving similar or different in the studio, as you choreograph and as you perform in a public venue?

 

Edan:

This is interesting. I actually understood it only recently after we started performing. But there's a layer of imposter syndrome that the performer has to recognize. And this is not a negative. By acknowledging that they might be “acting” the imposter syndrome can also function as an armor. A form of protection as a tool for being more honest. They had to bravely tell themselves, "I recognize that there's some sort of insecurity there. I am pretending. But me pretending is also a version of myself. Me acting, me playing a role, and recognizing that I'm playing a role is a skill I own and is also a version of myself." It's not lying. They shouldn’t be scared of that. When the goal of the performance is to be authentic, it is not to deny the performer in you, it is to embrace it. We've practiced embracing (bodily) everything that came to us. We have to also embrace what comes to us psychologically in regards to fears, insecurities, in order to truly be present. It’s the act of saying it's okay. This is also part of the daily practice, embracing that we are entering today a certain part of us into the room more than another.

 

Christine:

In psychotherapy, we talk about everything that you experience is usable, can be made usable. It's all you.

 

Edan:

I think that’s where I've linked the therapeutic methods that we've learned in this process as tools for choreographic practices and creating the environments for creativity to flow. That's part of when I said, ‘what environment do we need to create’? Well, we need to create an environment where people feel honest with themselves, even if they are pretending today. It's invited. It's necessary. And therefore, creating safe spaces, going back to therapy, understanding what safe spaces are and what is needed for each person for their version of a safe space.

 

Christine:

In your work, what are the essential ingredients of using conscious movement effectively?

 

Edan:

Insist on taking time. Patience, care, persistence, open communication, and communication of experience in all forms of language. Being open to the idea that words are not necessarily the only way to communicate or explain yourself. Maybe, today it's drawing. Maybe, it's singing. Maybe, it's music. Maybe, today it's dancing and moving. But somehow being open to the diverse mediums. We might get there quicker if we allow those different forms into the space to be possible.

 

Edan:

One of my dancers, Alfonso, is now studying graphic design. When we were working on these pieces, language was hard for him. He's also insecure in talking, which is fine. He's a phenomenal mover and performer. That's where he shines. But when we're talking about performing authenticity and performing your true self today, he really struggled with explaining his process in words to us. He often ended up going to the whiteboard and started drawing things, explaining his sensations through graphic illustration so that we can understand a bit more what he's experiencing. We embrace that.