We Cover the Waterfront: <\/h1>conversations with VA alumnx, faculty and guests<\/p>\n<\/div>
<\/div><\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\nAlumnx Profile<\/strong>: Kathy Couch (S 10)<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section>\n
<\/div><\/div><\/div>\nFor 17 years, Bessie Award winning designer Kathy Couch<\/a> has been creating visual landscapes for performance and installation. Working in mediums of light and space, Couch has designed in traditional and non-traditional spaces both nationally and internationally. Since 2009, she has been working with the interdisciplinary collaborative a canary torsi<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\nCouch teaches Lighting Design at Amherst College and is a founding member and current president of the Northampton Community Arts\u00a0Trust<\/a> that seeks innovative ways to preserve space for imagination and creativity.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\nWhat draws you to working collaboratively versus a solo practice?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\nKC<\/strong>: I think about that a lot \u2013 there\u2019s a variety of reasons why that is for me. Even in my personal life this notion of the autonomous, separated singular individual is very troubling to me \u2013 I think our sense of individualism is the root of many of our society’s ills. I have been casually researching these ideas for many, many years, just listening to and reading different things.<\/p>\nI once heard an interview with john a. powell<\/a> in which he described the U.S.\u2019s racial issues as\u00a0rooted, obviously, in slavery, but also in the Enlightenment–this moment where the individual got held up as the whole truth of being. This notion of the separation between myself and the other is what allowed something like chattel slavery to occur in our country. Because I could see you as different than myself, I could create a little more distance, and all of a sudden you aren\u2019t even a person. I could treat you differently and even brutally because \u2018you\u2019 no longer had anything to do with \u2018me\u2019.<\/p>\nI was really struck by the way this notion of holding up the importance of the individual has eroded our society’s capacity to take care and to make things together, in consideration of one another. It has allowed us to do a lot of harm to one another and to ignore the welfare of each other. To tend to each other feels like a struggle, an effort. Even to conceive of how to do that feels like something that is no longer \u2018second nature\u2019 to us.<\/p>\n
But I seem to be wired to be drawn to these ideas that something that I make with another will be greater than simply the sum of the parts of those who are contributing. And that, in the working together and in the exchange, we get to places we can never get to alone. At the same time, I struggle with feeling very alone, and grapple with the resistance to give myself fully to another. I bump up against all of that societal training to not rely on other people, to think I have to figure it out on my own. It\u2019s a lifelong quandary for me.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n
KC<\/strong>: You know I really believe in \u2018the unity\u2019, if you will, believe that we are all trying to get back to a place of alignment and connection with each other that is less fraught. But I also just struggle with it a ton, all the time. How do I get taken care of in these relationships? How do I trust that the concern for me is going to be held by the community? How do I hold onto taking care of myself, over taking care of somebody else? How do I negotiate all of that? And so, to me, this choice to almost always have my projects be collaborative in some way, is a choice to be in continual research of these questions.<\/p>\nTrying to understand how we navigate these relationships with each other is always fueled by this deep, deep belief, that something exists outside of all of us, something that we are all contributing to and are tied to–that is the greater thing. I get into trouble all the time about this: I am so disinterested in getting credit, or \u201coh that\u2019s mine, I did that part\u201d. And yet, the lack of recognition for my contribution results in me being denied access to certain conversations or participation because I am not seen as the sole genius who did this or that.<\/p>\n
But I will probably always choose giving up something of myself–to contributing to some whole that I am working on with other people–over insisting on being singled out or individuated.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n
You are resisting through the choices you make about how you are going to work \u2013 resisting that impulse to be the individual with all of its negative connotations. That also has to be hard, the difficulty of losing yourself. <\/strong>The struggle of \u2013 where am I in this, not only with the credit, or the opportunities, but with your selfhood. You redefine what selfhood looks like. Always in relation, rather than not.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\nKC<\/strong>: Yes, I am endlessly grappling with the permanence of self and trying to assert that, and then trying to nail something down and articulate it. When I\u2019m defined as a singular thing, I lose touch with all the other things that are possible, or that I could be, or am being, and all the other ways of being in relationship to other beings.<\/p>\nI really love what you said about selfhood \u2013 a different notion of selfhood. I have definitely thought of collaboration as a form<\/em>, for lack of a better word. Collaboration as a medium, a form that you can practice and study. Not just a mode in which we sometimes do art, but that collaboration is an artform in itself.<\/p>\nIt\u2019s interesting, when I think about individualism and relationalism and interconnectedness, I don\u2019t think I have ever gone so far as to say: no, actually I\u2019m trying to redefine what it means to be a self. But I think that is what I am doing. I\u2019m trying to be a different self than the one that is proposed to me by European, white culture. A self different than an individuated, autonomous being. I think I am trying to insist on a self that cannot be known without also knowing you and you and you. A self that exists only in relationship to everything else.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n
Could you reflect on One Body<\/em>, the text you wrote for Last Audience<\/em> \u2013 and your work with choreographer Yanira Castro and a canary torsi<\/em>? [ed. note \u2013 Last Audience<\/em> received two nominations for the 2020 Bessie Award<\/a>: Outstanding Production and Outstanding Sound Design\/Music Composition for Stephan Moore<\/a>.]<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\nKC<\/strong>: We developed Last Audience<\/i><\/a>\u00a0over the past couple of years and performed it as a live event in October at New York Live Arts<\/a>. We were supposed to perform it this past spring at MCA Chicago<\/a> as part of their performance art programming, but then the pandemic happened. Gratefully, instead of canceling our contract, Tara Aisha Willis<\/a> (of the MCA) was able to work with Yanira Castro <\/a>to procure a commission for us to create a version of Last Audience<\/em> that could be experienced remotely. And so, that\u2019s what we have spent the last 6 months doing–creating a performance manual.<\/p>\nThe live performance was very much about enlisting the audience to be the performers to enact scores that we, as guides, would lead them through. Ultimately, they became the enactors of these scores in the space as a kind of ritual. We initially explored numerous structural ideas and elements from the requiem mass, thus a lot of Catholic notions got woven in, particularly around ideas of judgement and mercy.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n
<\/div>Last Audience: A Performance Manual<\/small><\/div><\/div><\/div>\nKC<\/strong>: In adapting this piece into something that people could experience in their own homes, we decided to take those scores that we initially led the audience through in the live version and rewrite them as a set of performance manuals<\/a>. These are now available to be purchased as a set and enacted in your own home in whatever way you wished. From the outset, the piece has explored questions of agency and resistance. How do we get people to take their agency? Is this even something that you can do?\u00a0 As performers, we were, at times, very confrontational, pushing at the audience somewhat in order to inspire forms of resistance. It was a very complicated piece because people would come out and say: I didn\u2019t feel like you gave me agency. We realized, well, I can\u2019t actually give you agency because if I tell you you have agency, then actually you aren\u2019t an agent. As it has turned out, the manuals took another step towards people having agency (we hope), because they are in their homes and in their communities and they can choose to enact these scores in any way they might imagine.<\/p>\nIn a way, these booklets are quite literally \u2018instruction manuals\u2019, very direct and insistent, but with quite a bit of poetry and openness to them. We hope they set a tone of deliberateness and intentionality, coupled with a freedom to do more of one\u2019s own choosing. Yanira Castro and I rewrote\/adapted the original performance scores and then created the booklets with a team of designers at the MCA. There are five booklets as part of this collection, each representing one of the five sections of the original live performance.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n
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<\/a><\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\nKC<\/strong>: In addition, we had performers who were part of the original creative team write an intention to serve as an introduction for each of the five booklets. I wrote a short essay of intention for the section entitled One Body<\/em>. Each live performance began with one of the scores from One Body<\/em>. They are scores that gather people together in a shared activity or a collective action. It was the only moment in the performance when everyone in the room was being directed through the same set of activities.<\/p>\nI wrote this introduction, this intention for One Body<\/em>, about what is it to become one body and our resistance to doing so. Why do we resist things like instructions to bring us into unison with others or into collective activity with others? See, here I go again with these same questions of self and other\u2026<\/p>\nAs people begin to perform these scores at home, they are invited to contribute still images to a project website.<\/a> These images serve as an index of their performance and become part of an online archive of this project as it happens around the world. Of course, I adore the way that this archive offers evidence of a kind of connectedness and belonging to something beyond our pandemically isolated selves.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n
<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>\nKC<\/strong>: This question of how to feel my connection or my interconnectedness with others while I am isolated, quarantined, in lock down is something that has come up for me during the pandemic, and that I have explored in some other projects during this time. When I can\u2019t be in the physical presence of others, can I lean into this capacity to connect across distance and maybe across time with people? Can I know that they are there?<\/p>\nWe have seen notions of this come up with the uprising and the reckoning that\u2019s going on around white supremacy and anti- black racism. It\u2019s something that we have got to get better at: being able to have shared intention across distance and to be able to act in concert with each other even when we are not in the same place.<\/p>\n
So, how can I trust that there are other people out there who are making things happen or caring about things I care about or sharing my intention enough that I feel like I have company to be able to take the risk, to take action on something that I feel is important and not feel like I\u2019m the sole actor in doing so? I am curious about that \u2013 about our capacity to connect across distance.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n
KC<\/strong>: There are physicists who have measured these things: once you have two electrons vibrating near each other, having this resonant vibration, then even when they move to a great distance from one another, they still react, change, and respond in concert with one another.<\/p>\nIt leads into this other project I have been doing during the pandemic, since April, with a musician friend Batya Sobel. In response to an invitation by my friend Melissa Morris<\/a> and her composition this placement\/displacement<\/em>, we reimagined for this time of the quarantine and distancing — a recently-begun investigation of making sound together. One of our early recordings first appeared on her website.<\/p>\nWe call our project bottle listening<\/em>, <\/em>or sometimes bottles,<\/em> for short. In April, we began a daily practice of making sound with glass bottles \u2013 like blowing into a bottle, clinking them together, etc. We play at a chosen time each day but are sonically separated (she lives a couple of towns over and I am here at my house) so we can\u2019t hear each other when we are playing. We warm up for 15 minutes and do a sort of tuning, taking inspiration from Pauline Oliveros <\/a>and her notions of deep listening. Essentially, we try to tune into one another and try to hear one another across this distance. Then we play. As we play, we record ourselves in our space alone and then I take our recordings and put them together in a single track just to hear the duet that we had made that day.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\t\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t
conversations with VA alumnx, faculty and guests<\/p>\n<\/div>
Alumnx Profile<\/strong>: Kathy Couch (S 10)<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section>\n For 17 years, Bessie Award winning designer Kathy Couch<\/a> has been creating visual landscapes for performance and installation. Working in mediums of light and space, Couch has designed in traditional and non-traditional spaces both nationally and internationally. Since 2009, she has been working with the interdisciplinary collaborative a canary torsi<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n Couch teaches Lighting Design at Amherst College and is a founding member and current president of the Northampton Community Arts\u00a0Trust<\/a> that seeks innovative ways to preserve space for imagination and creativity.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n What draws you to working collaboratively versus a solo practice?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n KC<\/strong>: I think about that a lot \u2013 there\u2019s a variety of reasons why that is for me. Even in my personal life this notion of the autonomous, separated singular individual is very troubling to me \u2013 I think our sense of individualism is the root of many of our society’s ills. I have been casually researching these ideas for many, many years, just listening to and reading different things.<\/p>\n I once heard an interview with john a. powell<\/a> in which he described the U.S.\u2019s racial issues as\u00a0rooted, obviously, in slavery, but also in the Enlightenment–this moment where the individual got held up as the whole truth of being. This notion of the separation between myself and the other is what allowed something like chattel slavery to occur in our country. Because I could see you as different than myself, I could create a little more distance, and all of a sudden you aren\u2019t even a person. I could treat you differently and even brutally because \u2018you\u2019 no longer had anything to do with \u2018me\u2019.<\/p>\n I was really struck by the way this notion of holding up the importance of the individual has eroded our society’s capacity to take care and to make things together, in consideration of one another. It has allowed us to do a lot of harm to one another and to ignore the welfare of each other. To tend to each other feels like a struggle, an effort. Even to conceive of how to do that feels like something that is no longer \u2018second nature\u2019 to us.<\/p>\n But I seem to be wired to be drawn to these ideas that something that I make with another will be greater than simply the sum of the parts of those who are contributing. And that, in the working together and in the exchange, we get to places we can never get to alone. At the same time, I struggle with feeling very alone, and grapple with the resistance to give myself fully to another. I bump up against all of that societal training to not rely on other people, to think I have to figure it out on my own. It\u2019s a lifelong quandary for me.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n KC<\/strong>: You know I really believe in \u2018the unity\u2019, if you will, believe that we are all trying to get back to a place of alignment and connection with each other that is less fraught. But I also just struggle with it a ton, all the time. How do I get taken care of in these relationships? How do I trust that the concern for me is going to be held by the community? How do I hold onto taking care of myself, over taking care of somebody else? How do I negotiate all of that? And so, to me, this choice to almost always have my projects be collaborative in some way, is a choice to be in continual research of these questions.<\/p>\n Trying to understand how we navigate these relationships with each other is always fueled by this deep, deep belief, that something exists outside of all of us, something that we are all contributing to and are tied to–that is the greater thing. I get into trouble all the time about this: I am so disinterested in getting credit, or \u201coh that\u2019s mine, I did that part\u201d. And yet, the lack of recognition for my contribution results in me being denied access to certain conversations or participation because I am not seen as the sole genius who did this or that.<\/p>\n But I will probably always choose giving up something of myself–to contributing to some whole that I am working on with other people–over insisting on being singled out or individuated.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n You are resisting through the choices you make about how you are going to work \u2013 resisting that impulse to be the individual with all of its negative connotations. That also has to be hard, the difficulty of losing yourself. <\/strong>The struggle of \u2013 where am I in this, not only with the credit, or the opportunities, but with your selfhood. You redefine what selfhood looks like. Always in relation, rather than not.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n KC<\/strong>: Yes, I am endlessly grappling with the permanence of self and trying to assert that, and then trying to nail something down and articulate it. When I\u2019m defined as a singular thing, I lose touch with all the other things that are possible, or that I could be, or am being, and all the other ways of being in relationship to other beings.<\/p>\n I really love what you said about selfhood \u2013 a different notion of selfhood. I have definitely thought of collaboration as a form<\/em>, for lack of a better word. Collaboration as a medium, a form that you can practice and study. Not just a mode in which we sometimes do art, but that collaboration is an artform in itself.<\/p>\n It\u2019s interesting, when I think about individualism and relationalism and interconnectedness, I don\u2019t think I have ever gone so far as to say: no, actually I\u2019m trying to redefine what it means to be a self. But I think that is what I am doing. I\u2019m trying to be a different self than the one that is proposed to me by European, white culture. A self different than an individuated, autonomous being. I think I am trying to insist on a self that cannot be known without also knowing you and you and you. A self that exists only in relationship to everything else.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n Could you reflect on One Body<\/em>, the text you wrote for Last Audience<\/em> \u2013 and your work with choreographer Yanira Castro and a canary torsi<\/em>? [ed. note \u2013 Last Audience<\/em> received two nominations for the 2020 Bessie Award<\/a>: Outstanding Production and Outstanding Sound Design\/Music Composition for Stephan Moore<\/a>.]<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n KC<\/strong>: We developed Last Audience<\/i><\/a>\u00a0over the past couple of years and performed it as a live event in October at New York Live Arts<\/a>. We were supposed to perform it this past spring at MCA Chicago<\/a> as part of their performance art programming, but then the pandemic happened. Gratefully, instead of canceling our contract, Tara Aisha Willis<\/a> (of the MCA) was able to work with Yanira Castro <\/a>to procure a commission for us to create a version of Last Audience<\/em> that could be experienced remotely. And so, that\u2019s what we have spent the last 6 months doing–creating a performance manual.<\/p>\n The live performance was very much about enlisting the audience to be the performers to enact scores that we, as guides, would lead them through. Ultimately, they became the enactors of these scores in the space as a kind of ritual. We initially explored numerous structural ideas and elements from the requiem mass, thus a lot of Catholic notions got woven in, particularly around ideas of judgement and mercy.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n KC<\/strong>: In adapting this piece into something that people could experience in their own homes, we decided to take those scores that we initially led the audience through in the live version and rewrite them as a set of performance manuals<\/a>. These are now available to be purchased as a set and enacted in your own home in whatever way you wished. From the outset, the piece has explored questions of agency and resistance. How do we get people to take their agency? Is this even something that you can do?\u00a0 As performers, we were, at times, very confrontational, pushing at the audience somewhat in order to inspire forms of resistance. It was a very complicated piece because people would come out and say: I didn\u2019t feel like you gave me agency. We realized, well, I can\u2019t actually give you agency because if I tell you you have agency, then actually you aren\u2019t an agent. As it has turned out, the manuals took another step towards people having agency (we hope), because they are in their homes and in their communities and they can choose to enact these scores in any way they might imagine.<\/p>\n In a way, these booklets are quite literally \u2018instruction manuals\u2019, very direct and insistent, but with quite a bit of poetry and openness to them. We hope they set a tone of deliberateness and intentionality, coupled with a freedom to do more of one\u2019s own choosing. Yanira Castro and I rewrote\/adapted the original performance scores and then created the booklets with a team of designers at the MCA. There are five booklets as part of this collection, each representing one of the five sections of the original live performance.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n KC<\/strong>: In addition, we had performers who were part of the original creative team write an intention to serve as an introduction for each of the five booklets. I wrote a short essay of intention for the section entitled One Body<\/em>. Each live performance began with one of the scores from One Body<\/em>. They are scores that gather people together in a shared activity or a collective action. It was the only moment in the performance when everyone in the room was being directed through the same set of activities.<\/p>\n I wrote this introduction, this intention for One Body<\/em>, about what is it to become one body and our resistance to doing so. Why do we resist things like instructions to bring us into unison with others or into collective activity with others? See, here I go again with these same questions of self and other\u2026<\/p>\n As people begin to perform these scores at home, they are invited to contribute still images to a project website.<\/a> These images serve as an index of their performance and become part of an online archive of this project as it happens around the world. Of course, I adore the way that this archive offers evidence of a kind of connectedness and belonging to something beyond our pandemically isolated selves.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n KC<\/strong>: This question of how to feel my connection or my interconnectedness with others while I am isolated, quarantined, in lock down is something that has come up for me during the pandemic, and that I have explored in some other projects during this time. When I can\u2019t be in the physical presence of others, can I lean into this capacity to connect across distance and maybe across time with people? Can I know that they are there?<\/p>\n We have seen notions of this come up with the uprising and the reckoning that\u2019s going on around white supremacy and anti- black racism. It\u2019s something that we have got to get better at: being able to have shared intention across distance and to be able to act in concert with each other even when we are not in the same place.<\/p>\n So, how can I trust that there are other people out there who are making things happen or caring about things I care about or sharing my intention enough that I feel like I have company to be able to take the risk, to take action on something that I feel is important and not feel like I\u2019m the sole actor in doing so? I am curious about that \u2013 about our capacity to connect across distance.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n KC<\/strong>: There are physicists who have measured these things: once you have two electrons vibrating near each other, having this resonant vibration, then even when they move to a great distance from one another, they still react, change, and respond in concert with one another.<\/p>\n It leads into this other project I have been doing during the pandemic, since April, with a musician friend Batya Sobel. In response to an invitation by my friend Melissa Morris<\/a> and her composition this placement\/displacement<\/em>, we reimagined for this time of the quarantine and distancing — a recently-begun investigation of making sound together. One of our early recordings first appeared on her website.<\/p>\n We call our project bottle listening<\/em>, <\/em>or sometimes bottles,<\/em> for short. In April, we began a daily practice of making sound with glass bottles \u2013 like blowing into a bottle, clinking them together, etc. We play at a chosen time each day but are sonically separated (she lives a couple of towns over and I am here at my house) so we can\u2019t hear each other when we are playing. We warm up for 15 minutes and do a sort of tuning, taking inspiration from Pauline Oliveros <\/a>and her notions of deep listening. Essentially, we try to tune into one another and try to hear one another across this distance. Then we play. As we play, we record ourselves in our space alone and then I take our recordings and put them together in a single track just to hear the duet that we had made that day.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>Last Audience: A Performance Manual<\/small><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n<\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a><\/div><\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n