By Matt McDermott

This interview was carried out in relation to RTG Dance's fall performance of Once Removed: Peripeteia. In it Rachel Thorne Germond discusses her approach to making a tragic dance, the challenges of working with music and video, plus her influences. Enjoy how Rachel demystifies dance. Her discussion of her creative process as a dancer and choreographer offers insight into the practices of contempoary dance.

What was it like collaborating with Michael Zerang on this dance?

Rachel Thorne Germond: Michael's music provided a context for the musical score that I created (which was made up of prerecorded music) and for the dance to unfold within. We worked on it together: the blending of the two scores; we went to the Experimental Sound Studio and recorded some of Michael's music there and they engineered the score for us.

While some of Michael’s music was recorded live at the sound studio, some of it he had composed and recorded at his home studio. Actually, when I first started making the dance I had spoken with him about my ideas for the dance, wanting to make a dance about tragedy and to effect catharsis, and he played me these wild piano improvisations that he had recorded, and something sparked in me. I wasn't sure how I would make a dance to them. They were so dense and there was no recognizable beat or meter … but somehow they embodied the sort of crazy wild emotion, pain, grief … a sort of metaphor for the state of heightened emotion that I was looking for. So these pieces really inspired some of the first parts of the dance that were developed. There are five of these piano pieces interspersed throughout the score. I call them "episodes" within the dance, sort of the play within the play.

Anyhow, back to the Experimental Sound Studio. We loaded everything into the computer: all of my musical scores, which included pop songs and classical music that we had been rehearsing with and dancing to during the process of making the dance, plus all of Michael's music, and then we put it all together like a big puzzle, overlapping parts of it. The dance is an hour long and corresponds to the score we created. The score itself tells a story if you listen to it, in how all the pieces are juxtaposed. The dance tells a story in the same way, through juxtaposition of its parts, as does the video and the progression of visual elements presented by Pate Conaway's costumes. When you put the dance, music, video, costumes/sets and lights all together they tell the same story in different ways, but the music holds a strong reign in directing the viewer’s interpretation of the mood and emotions of each part of the dance.

Was it interesting to collaborate at a distance – with Michael often on tour?

RTG: Well, he went to the first showings at Link's Hall and then I showed him a video of the second work-in-progress showing we did. We would discuss the piece; he knew my ideas about how I was approaching tragedy in this dance. We would talk about some parts of my dance, especially concerning the structuring of it, and he would give me feedback. Then he would go on tour again and then I would show him my next crop of stuff and he would give me a little more music. We couldn't figure out exactly how it was all going to work as a score until a couple of months ago. I don't work with composers a lot; it's hard for me to give up that control over the score of the piece. I usually make my own sound scores.

That's important to your choreography, to be in control of the music?

RTG: Yes, I feel that it is. I often create the dances around the scores that I make.

What does "Peripeteia" from the piece's title mean?

RTG: In reference to classical Greek tragedy, it means: "Reversal of Fortune." And, well, I was recently told by a person fluent in contemporary Greek that it has come to mean "an Adventure," which presents another aspect, which I like, for the dance is an adventure of sorts! In deciding to make a piece about tragedy, the first thing I did was to research ancient Greek tragedy. I was really interested to find out that the first form of theater was tragedy and then comedy was developed later on.

Also I was interested to find that tragedy actually came out of these Dionysian rituals that were dances. That was very interesting to me as a choreographer interested in making a tragic dance, something which I had found daunting to embark upon at first. I had thought of tragedy, with the exception of Martha Graham's adaptations of ancient Greek myths like Oedipus, to be primarily a theater form and very difficult to translate into dance, especially the sort of non-literal, non-narrative, postmodern sort of dances that I make. I was piqued by this information about the first tragedies being dances and encouraged to continue with my project of making a tragic dance. After I found out about these early Dionysian dances I felt like I was on the right track.

Photography by Brad Taylor

Next, I read Aristotle's Poetics, in which he describes the structure and elements of a Perfect Tragedy. I also went to see a production of the Oresteia by a local theater company and watched a lot of films and movies, read books, looked at real life stories as depicted in newspapers, on TV. I looked at all the elements contained in a classical tragedy and thought about how I would go about making a dance that would contain all those elements … and whether or not I wanted to use all the elements of Aristotelian classical Greek tragedy. One of the elements, plot, ended up falling by the wayside; I couldn't find one specific narrative to which I felt attached enough to want to tell. Instead I focused on the structure and form of tragedy, including related but disparate content. And actually, I later I found that, as per Aristotle's definition of plot, I had actually still fulfilled this aspect, in that a plot is described as "imitation of an action" and certainly we had plenty of "actions" being imitated in the dance!

So, you weren't interested in addressing contemporary concerns?

RTG: No, I was. Through the video I was able to reference contemporary tragedies more specifically, including some riot footage from the 1960's, some footage of the 9/11 tragedy, Hurricane Katrina, and also some projections of images from a tragedy that I had read about in the Chicago area in the newspaper.

I worked with video artist Mason Dixon. We sat down together after the dance was 99% done - the structure was all there - the music had been composed - and then we figured out what sorts of images should go where. I had split the dance up into sections and we just went through section by section and decided what sorts of imagery would work well for each section and how it could help to create the dramatic arc or journey of the work. The video artist was "vj"-ing live for each performance (which is like "dj"-ing). By that I mean he is a "Video Jocky" - he mixes imagery live during the performance and was at every performance projecting images from a pool of related imagery that we had discussed.

Photography by Brad Taylor

I like using video in my work because I find that some specific details and information (also narrative) that you want the audience to understand is difficult to communicate through pure dance. But in this piece, I wasn't really looking to convey an actual narrative or plot, although at first I thought I might do that. As I worked on the piece I realized that that is not something that I was interested in doing at that time. I was more interested in exploring the visceral aspect of tragedy: in creating catharsis, in invoking the emotions of pity and fear, all those things that Aristotle laid out in his Poetics.

Do you frequently include video in your work?

Yes, I have been doing that more and more. I make a lot of work which references outside sources, quoting and parodying these sources. When I work with pop culture icons, and I'm referencing their movement style, I like to have video of the source material [them] I'm working from so people will understand what I am parodying. Sometimes it is obvious, an Elvis hip swivel for example. Sometimes it’s not so obvious, like the dance the Marilyn [Monroe] does under the tree in the Misfits, which I deconstructed, reconstructed and performed in the solo Splendor Twice: Gender Splendor.

Photography by Michelle Alba

Can you talk more about the relationship of the title of your recent group work Once Removed: Peripeteia?

RTG: As I mentioned before, the word "peripeteia" means a reversal of circumstances or turning point. Along with it comes the epiphany moment when the character realizes that he has become a victim in his own web of his character. There is a place in the dance where this happens, where the whole dynamic of the piece shifts from building up energy towards a climax, to the denouement, the downfall, the entrapment.

In this dance I address this denouement with a solo (for myself) which shows the protagonist trapped in their circumstance. I use a rope to help convey the feeling of being trapped by my character’s destiny and video projection of a tragic event that occurred here in Chicago that was a headline last fall, about a woman who killed herself and her two children by setting them on fire, to escape a difficult family situation that must have seemed impossible to her in order for her to see the only way out as self destruction.

This story moved me, perplexed me and I tried to work with the general theme of feeling trapped by one’s destiny and convey that on stage. Not only trapped, but trapped in a situation being witnessed by others. This I tried to emphasize by having the three chorus dancers come out of the closets at Links Hall (which are located in the stage space where the show was presented) during my solo and watch me, then taking flash photographs of me as I danced, using disposable instamatic cameras, finally closing in around me in a circle as I did a headstand. I really felt trapped by the end of that solo. For this solo I used a Shostakovitch piece that was composed for a movie version of Hamlet, and then it is overlapped with some eerie music that Michael Zerang made (using back scratchers on the surface of a drum!) that added to the strange dark atmosphere. The music reminds me of a dying animal that has been trapped. It is very dark.

Besides this specific instance, there are other places and ways in the dance in which the themes of Reversal of Fortune and the idea of something being Once Removed.

A lot of what I've done making the dance is examine and attempt to redefine in movement terms the terms and elements of Greek tragedy. "Reversal of circumstances" or "turning point" could be interpreted in a lot of different ways as a choreographer. One could interpret these terms structurally in many different ways.

In crafting the dance, you could interpret the idea of "reversal or turning point" in an abstract way by following the climax of the dance (the apex of Freytag's triangle) by retrograding all of the movement of the first half of the dance. To retrograde would mean taking all of the movement everyone made going forward and then reversing it all on their bodies and in space. That could be considered a reversal of sorts. Twyla Tharp used to do this sort of thing a lot. This is not what I did in this dance, but just an example of how you could interpret the structure and form of tragedy as laid out by Aristotle in many different ways if you look at it more abstractly like that, just at its essential level of components. And if you look at it that way it frees you up from all of the loaded aspects of narrative and the strong emotional arc that drives a tragic work.

Photography by Brad Taylor

The other part of the title, Once Removed (as in “the child of one's first cousin is one's first cousin once removed” or I was also thinking of the idea that once you are removed from the tragic event how you recall the event) refers to that, to taking yourself out of the emotion and narrative and looking at the structural elements so that you can make sense of everything. There is a structure and form to a good tragedy, not just heart wrenching content and actually the structure and form, according to Aristotle, are what bring the viewer to experience a purging of emotions as the dance unfolds.

I looked for terms that I could translate easily to movement. In researching the structure of a classical tragedy, I found a description of the narrative arc that seemed like it would translate well into movement. This was a chart analyzing the arc of the narrative called Freytag’s Triangle. For example, in the beginning of a tragedy, the Effects are stressed and the Causes are downplayed; in the middle of a Tragedy, the Effects and Causes are both heightened; and then at the conclusion, the Causes are stressed and the Effects are downplayed. You could look at that in terms of Action (Causes) and Reaction (Effects), which is something easily translated to movement in that if you do one movement, it causes this movement to happen, etc. I ended up using Freytag’s triangle to help create the structure, or map (you could also call it a score like in music) of the dance when I was trying to figure out how to put all of its disparate movement sections together to create a coherent whole (unity being another of Aristotle’s necessary elements for a classical tragedy to work effectively).

This is how I was thinking about things some of the time in terms of generating movement, mostly in terms of how to structure all of the movement that had been developed. Some of the other dance movement came out of more theatrical motivational-driven improvisations by the dancers and myself, often using text from newspaper articles and tragic stories or personal experiences of the dancers.

Photography by Brad Taylor

How do you see yourself as an artist?

RTG: I am a contemporary dance artist who combines aspects of dance, theater and visual arts. I am interested in metaphor and paradox. The primary medium that I use is the human body, the human form, and I am interested in presenting people, real people, on stage, rather than dancers who are more perfect representations or symbols of people, or dancers who are supposed to represent abstract formal concerns. That's all there in the work, but first and foremost I consider myself to be an artist that uses living, moving people who happen to have a very highly developed kinesthetic ability and knowledge of their own bodies, as her medium of expression.

In terms of influence, I've been highly influenced by the work that I was exposed to in my early years of training in New York, the work that was being created around me by my peers as I was learning how to dance and make dances, the work of my teachers. That includes work by Tere O'Connor, Roseanne Spradlin, Barbara Mahler, Anna Sokolow, Twyla Tharp, Elizabeth Streb, David Parker, David Alan Harris, Fiona Marcotty, Pedro Alejandro, my dancer and collaborator Tasha Taylor and many, many others. Intellectually, I am most drawn to postmodernism: especially Trisha Brown's work, Merce Cunningham's work, the work of the Judson Church choreographers like Yvonne Rainer, but sometimes I find it all to be a bit dry. I loved the work that Margie Jenkins brought here last Fall to Columbia College – rooted in Cunningham technique, but emotional. I love Pina Bausch, Susanna Linke, Rosas and a lot of the "Physical Theater" type of work that comes out of Europe.

Also, because of the art training I had, I was always interested in the work of visual artists because I had a knowledge of the history. I was interested in the work of artists like Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg (especially his Combines from the 1960s: they are so raw and visceral like dances, you can almost smell them) and his collaborations with Trisha and Merce. I was always interested in people who pull from real life. The idea of working with chance procedures and the work of artists that conceptually related to what I was interesting in conveying onstage seemed to come out of my knowledge of visual arts. This may also be because both of my parents were painters and I was brought up around a lot of artists. My father was a professor at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) when I was growing up. I went to college thinking I would be a visual artist before I found the medium of dance and choreography to express myself.

For more information on Rachel's dance company, visit the RTG Dance Web site or RTG Dance MySpace page.