Choreographer Rosie Herrera at ADF: The Independent Interview

[The video to the left is of Leony Garcia and Rudy Goblin in another section of the same duet, in the original production of Various Stages.]

To put these people in two roles that were completely unlike who they were as people—that took time, a lot of time. We were working and working, trying to get them out of their natural body states and into different states.
In the end I was really quite happy with it, for there was that balance, and that energy: a nice balance and strong energy.

Coming to ADF and restaging the work on other people was hell. The process of auditioning in general is just a really foreign process to me. I never work like that, it’s difficult for me.

Yet there were a number of sequences last summer where the dancers had taken on another character’s movement and life; internalized it, made it theirs, and brought something meaningful out as a result. There was this interesting fusion that was happening.

Whenever you do recreate a piece, you must allow for flexibility, so the work can become a reflection of the person who’s doing it then. You can’t be too rigid. What’s important, and what’s going to get the audience to have an experience, is if the person on stage is having that experience. What’s important is getting [the dancers] there.

Then there was what I call the hospice sequence. Someone was terminally ill, and another person was providing that person with very tender care. It was moving, and honest.
It’s also another part of the human experience that the overwhelming majority of us, as artists, as people, tend to shy away from. It’s another place that no one ever takes us in live performance.
I think it was very important.

That section was inspired by a very dear and close friend of mine, Bridget Baker, who lost her lover of 37 years. I was with her through her grieving process. And of all the things she got mad about in her range of emotions, was that when he passed away, she wasn’t there to prepare him. She wasn’t there to feed him. She wasn’t there to dress him. She wasn’t there to comb his hair.

And I thought that was so powerful; and after all these attachments that we have in life as people, and how much we define ourselves by our relationships—even after he was gone, the thing that she missed the most, and wanted the most, was still to be the one to take care of him. That’s what she resented, losing that opportunity. I think that’s a really selfless and beautiful thing.

Also it meant working with [company member] Geraldine, who lost her mother very young, and started working in drag, really, as means of reconnecting with her. That was the only way I could help her go through that process.

We’ve talked about water and drowning, and there are a number of places I can go with that as a frame. Ophelia, Hamlet’s girlfriend, throws herself into the river, and slowly sinks beneath the surface. Or that marvelous verse, in Shakespeare again, from The Tempest:

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.

Many of us recognize the concept of ocean as transformative or transfiguring.
But before I go in that direction, I have to note a couple of things. In the movie sequence at the end, you have the people on what I’ll call a lifeboat—all by itself, on an empty expanse of water.
By the end, nobody’s on it. Everyone’s in the water. And no one’s on the surface anymore.
There are darker elements in several other sequences in the work.

I don’t know if you’ve read Primo Levy’s Survival in Auschwitz.

No, I haven’t.

In the work, Levy describes his experiences in the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. He divided the prisoners he found himself among into two groups. He called them the saved and the drowned.
He said that if the prisoners could salvage one thing—a talisman, a physical practice or even a memory from the lives they’d led before prison, they were a lot more likely to survive than those who didn’t. He concluded that simply being able to keep one thing from the disappeared world somehow meant they’d be able to possibly reassemble that world, someday.
Those who couldn’t, he called the drowned. He wrote of them losing their grip on their own physical condition, their companions, their situation and ultimately, their lives.

Ms. Herrera, I started by asking you the question, “Who’s drowning?”
I rarely ask questions I already have an answer for. But in this case, coming into the conversation, I had a provisional response to that one that I’d like to share with you.

Please, go ahead.

I think, potentially, we all are.

There are so many things: jobs, relationships—

—society—

—yes, what society does and does not do with however you identify, however you show up on this planet. There are so many things that so easily…swallow us up.

I think your story about Primo Levy was very beautiful and very poignant. I think that if you can recognize that you’re drowning, then you can survive.
In the final stage of physically drowning, your body goes into complete relaxation; after you’ve swallowed water, after you’ve choked, your body completely relaxes.
I think that when you can recognize that, whatever symbolically drowning might mean to you—it could just be being overwhelmed—then it’s much easier to move forward.
If in this piece, water comes to symbolize emotion, I think there are definitely points in all of our lives where all of us are drowning in our own emotions.

But water has the power to be very healing as well. Which kind of segues us into the new piece, which is about grieving.

At some point, you actually believed you were working on a different piece for the ADF premiere.

I started creating a work, Dining Alone, about solitude and aging. It’s another piece out of years of dreaming in my head, for a long time.
To a certain extent, all of my work is collaborative. I’m open to what the dancers have to say, movement-wise, and what they contribute; in some sense I’m always collaborative. But 90 percent of the time I’m getting very clear direction, I know exactly what I want and how I want it. I decided in the new work that I wanted to be more collaborative—which is a lot more difficult than it seems, but very rewarding as well.
We started working with this piece. And I kept feeling it’s the wrong time, in the wrong place; I felt like everybody I was working with was not in a Dining Alone state of mind.
I had this other piece, Pity Party, which was always in the back of my mind. And I would keep coming up with ideas and then I’d realize, “Oh, that’s not this piece, that’s Pity Party, let me put that aside.”
Eventually, I just gave in and said, “You know what? We’re feeling Pity Party; we’re in a Pity Party state. That’s what the dancers are saying to me with their bodies, so that’s what we’re going to do.”
This whole time I thought I was responding to the dancers. (laughs)

It wasn’t until two weeks ago that I realized I was the one who was grieving. And that’s why it took so long for me to figure it out.
I love that I created this piece, and I’m glad that I continued to work, because that was my way of grieving. I just didn’t know it.
That’s how we began creating Pity Party.

When did you start working with your dancers on this?

January, 2010.

And when did the realization kick in — it’s not Dining Alone you’re working on, it’s Pity Party?

In April.

All right; that’s significant. And two weeks ago, you realize you’re actually making a piece about your own grieving.
I hear you clearly. And I want to be careful and respectful here, Ms. Herrera.

What do you want to tell me about your grieving?

I can tell you it took a really long time to figure it out.

My dream, since I was very young, was that I always wanted to dance for Pina Bausch. I had always felt this pull between being a dancer and wanting to be a choreographer and director. And it was just very ironic that when I go to ADF—it’s a huge deal for a young choreographer, who’s swept off her feet and flown to ADF for the summer—that Pina Bausch passes away. The anniversary of her death was last Tuesday (June 30).
Obviously, I didn’t know Pina Bausch personally. I don’t have a relationship with her. But she’s left so much inspiration for me in her work. So much.
And that had been Leony’s dream as well. He had just graduated from college, and we were both set to go to Germany; her ballet mistress had invited us to come take class with her company.
I was in the ADF dormitory, with Rudy, after rehearsal one day. And Leony comes in and tells us that Pina’s passed away. Of course it was a total shock to me; it was a shock to everyone.
But it wasn’t until I was washing dishes that I lost it.

It’s the perfect example. We both lost it: Leony was eating chicken nuggets, dipping them into sauce and just sobbing. I was washing the dishes, and we were both crying like babies—but we didn’t stop what we were doing. I didn’t stop doing the dishes, and Leony didn’t stop eating his nuggets.
And poor Rudy. He’s a b-boy; he barely knows who Pina is. He was trying to pat my shoulder, hug Leony, and run in between.
It was just the absurdity of the moment. How much we strive to hold on to something, no matter what it is—washing dishes, eating nuggets—against the loss of a dream: something you’ve aspired to your whole life and then, one day, it’s gone.
Pity Party came out of that idea—this celebration of weakness.
I use the structures and symbols of parties and celebrations—music, pinatas, balloons—to juxtapose against the weight and the heaviness of grieving. Then I try to celebrate our weaknesses—as dancers, as people, as technicians—and run with that.

Luckily I was working when it happened, and I had to continue to work. I just never expected that I’d have such a strong emotional response to someone’s passing who I didn’t even know, I’d never spoken to or had a relationship with.
But I did. I did.

It wasn’t until two weeks ago that I figured out that I was grieving. And that I am grieving, you know? Sometimes the body is so much wiser than the mind. It’ll tell you what you need to know. You’ve just got to shut up and listen.

I go to a couple of places, in my memory, when I hear you talking about this.
In a small town, funerals are such an invocation of community—all the folkways, all the things people do when a family loses somebody.
When you talk about pairing celebration up with weakness, first off, everybody brings food. Either they cook, or they go to Kentucky Fried Chicken. All of the tables and countertops in the home of the bereaved are just filled—and it’s really, really good food.
People are sitting around, eating, talking about the person who died, remembering jokes and cool things about them. Everyone’s doing that, to varying degrees: they’re eating, laughing—and crying—all within a very, very short amount of time, as they’re remembering the person who died.
The emotional valences are like a wind vane, or a dial—they’re just spinning, freely. And maybe that’s exactly what they need to do: such a broad range of emotions, put so closely, side by side, with one another.

They’re all on the verge of becoming the next emotion. What you’re saying about the dial is exactly right; it’s like the wind is spinning.
My tradition of grieving, being Cuban and growing up in a Catholic household, is a little bit different. It’s ten days long. You have the viewing, where people go to see the body, in a funeral home. There’s a ceremony at funeral home, and then there’s the burial.
And coming from my very dramatic family, at all of the funerals, there’s always an episode. Somebody always throws themselves on the body…

…I’ve seen that in funerals in my family…

…but I think it’s important that whatever self-pity you have over your grieving process—you have to let yourself feel that, and then you let it go. Let yourself cry and whinge and feel sorry for yourself for a good five minutes. Then you can move on. Because to deny yourself that is very unnatural, very unhealthy.

In Cuban American culture we have this thing called “compromiso.” You try to escape it your whole life. It’s that—well, if you’re Cuban and Catholic—that ingrained guilt that’s always in your heart and the back of your mind. You can be as independent as you want to, but you’re always carrying that information with you.

I don’t think any one religious tradition has cornered the market on that. Guilt was a definite part of the ultra-fundamentalism in this strange place I come from. Tell me about it: Yes, you do fight against these things. Even when you realize it was being hardwired into you from very early on, it has a way of sneaking up on you.

I mean, with all of our—I guess, conditioning—it’s still such a surprise.
I went to another funeral this year for a beautiful, dear friend of mine, Jennylin Duanny. She was an amazing artist, performer, person and mother. She was a cornerstone of theater in Miami; a pioneer, and one of the most beloved women in Miami. I honor her by showing her work; that’s the best you can do.
I found myself at her funeral, performing all these rituals that I didn’t even know I knew. Prayers, genuflecting, kneeling and standing—and I didn’t even know that I remembered how to do this.
But your body remembers.

Elaine Scarry says what is learned in the body is learned well.

Grief does have the potential to unite people. Grief is contagious, but at the same time, so is pity. And that’s a dangerous slope.
But there’s a beautiful sense of community in loss and in grieving. It’s intuitive knowledge that we all have, to protect each other and to be there for each other when there’s a loss.
I’m not going to get into politics and death. But I try to play with the idea of community and grieving in Pity Party as well

But I have to say, the process of commissioning is very stressful.

Go on.

Like I say, it takes me years, so having a time restraint is really nerve-wracking.
You try to keep yourself, be as real with yourself and honest with yourself about your process and doing what you need to do. And there’s no better organization in the world besides ADF to work with. They’re so understanding, so supportive; it’s perfectly ideal for the circumstance.
But there’s always going to be that part of you that wants to succeed, to be successful; that wants to be well-received; that wants to be interesting.
And you really have to let it go, and just do your work. That’s a process in and of itself.
It’s my first huge commission, and it’s been quite a learning experience.
I’m not remotely in the place where I feel like [Pity Party] is done. I don’t think it’s done. But we’re on our way.
Although I don’t feel that the piece is where I would love it to be for a performance yet, I have learned so much in such a short amount of time. That information is invaluable.

The pieces, Dining Alone, Various Stages of Drowning, and Pity Party, are part of a trilogy of works. They’re to be performed together; they’re just not all created, just yet. But they all relate to each other; one thing leads to the next.

The term “pity party” is pejorative. We say it when we want to say, “Stop feeling sorry for yourself. Man up.” It’s the kind of thing you say to someone when you’re trying to get them to stop.

But in this piece, it’s just the opposite; it’s an encouragement.
Feeling bad for yourself? Throw a party.
As I said earlier, it’s about celebrating your weakness. Part of that is embracing it, exploring it and moving on. I think you have to allow yourself—you have to—those five minutes of self-pity, because that’s natural. Then you move on.

This year has been a very difficult year for our world, for the Earth. There’s been so much loss, so much death and so much negativity in the past year.
And there’s been so much talk and debate about what to do—about the oil spill, about the health care crisis, about Haiti, about the recession. It’s so important to have these conversations.

But I also feel that chaos is important. And loss and death are important for evolution.

In this time of great loss and difficulty in our world—what better way is there to move on than to throw a party? Let’s just have a party—eat our chicken nuggets, cry—and just let it go and move on.

There’s an old saying: That which we resist, persists.
And, again, I have to observe, this is yet another place you’re taking us where we tend to not want to spend a lot of time. Who likes to say they’re weak? It’s one of the last things we care to admit.
As for grief, it’s strenuous; the body is actually doing very, very hard work. It’s intense labor—and it’s pretty punishing, in that one is not excused from it; you have to do the work.

Plus there’s so much—too much—mystification involved with grief. We say it’s very private, but I think our culture tends to create the conditions under which it is. Many times I think those conditions have more to do with convenience and fears of contagion, perhaps, than consolation or healing.
When we say we don’t want to impose ourselves on people in grief, it usually winds up being a much better deal for us than it is for them.

It’s uncomfortable being in that place with someone. In general, I think we all avoid situations when it’s not the right thing to do. There are times when there’s a great loss; when there’s nothing you can say, and nothing you can do.
All you can do is be with that person. And that’s a hard thing to do.

A local theater company did a show a few weeks ago called God’s Ear. It’s a vexing play, and I think its script is problematic on a couple of levels, but one of the things it gets at, though, is how little the language and the words do, when you’re in a place of grief. Proximity and physical presence go places language can’t in those circumstances.
I’m cognizant that there are a number of ways of grieving. But I’ve often thought that stoicism is next to denial; I haven’t always thought the versions of it I’ve seen were very helpful.
So I’m in sympathy with what I hear you saying; actually, you do have to get grief out.
Because if you don’t get it out, guess what?
It stays.

And it turns into something else. I just imagine it as an image of wind, and how the emotional dial sometime spins. If you don’t let it spin, I imagine it turning into a huge tornado inside. If you don’t allow yourself to go through the process of grieving, throw that pity party, you deny yourself the opportunity to celebrate—and learn—from someone’s life.

The dial gets rusted. You get frozen, or stuck. You can’t go forward.

And that’s how you drown.