The beginning

Laura: Let’s talk about your dance career. It seems like you’ve been having a very prolific dance career after the 2000s and onwards. What kind of past experiences shaped this transition?

Trajal: I was a gymnast when I was a kid from ages eight to twelve and then I started doing theater. And I think the biggest thing was when I was in junior high school I did something called ‘History Day’ competitions. And these competitions – one category in the competition was called ‘Group Performance’ – and that’s why every year I would make a performance with people about a historical event or a theme and we would go and compete in these history competitions. I won first place in Georgia six years in a row and I think this really informed my work. And then, when I was in college at Yale, I was doing theater and then a theater director came and he taught us a movement technique and it brought me back to my body. I had forgotten that I had been this kind of movement specialist as a young kid. I was in love with gymnastics and that really brought me back to dancing. And after that experience I started not wanting to talk on stage, I only wanted to move, and so I slowly, slowly, slowly started moving away from acting and towards dancing.

 

L: It seems like you’re bringing back that sort of voice from the theatrical experience.

T: In 2011 I started to sing on stage and talk on stage. Probably because I really felt that I didn’t want to depend on the things that I’ve learned from theatre. I really wanted to start to understand what was choreography and what was dance. And so I felt like I had to limit this theatrical vocabulary and understanding. 

Being a choreographer

L: I feel like it’s worth not only talking about you as a dancer but you as a choreographer. How do you choose your dancers or like how can someone become a member of your team?

T: Well, in the beginning it was really through friends and people I met. We didn’t have so much money in the beginning, and we didn’t have support. I used to be really against auditions. But actually I learned that the great thing about auditions is that it opens up the field of people you can meet. Anyone can come to an audition, and people who don’t know you or know someone who knows you. So, in fact, it becomes more democratic. The responsibility is on me to make that audition as generous and as non-competitive and I try to make it a safe place for people to show their talents. Of course, we know that when I hold an audition there are a number of jobs and I can’t give everyone the job or invite them for the project. But I try to make it an experience where it’s not just about competition but it’s about learning, sharing together, sharing ideas, so I try to make it more of a workshop type of atmosphere. But lately I’ve been doing auditions.

L: For O Medea you held auditions for the team?

T: I held auditions for another piece, because O Medea is part of a trilogy. There are three pieces that eventually will make a trilogy, and O Medea is the last one. I held auditions for the first part of the trilogy and I basically took people for O Medea from either people I worked with before or people who I’ve met in that first audition.

On butoh

L: In The Return of La Argentina, you mix postmodern voguing style with butoh and specifically with Kazuo Ohno and Hijikata’s signature work, Admiring La Argentina. It’s not that I want you to talk about it but to observe this kind of chain you’re making. A chain of archiving, you know. Because Kazuo Ohno was archiving La Argentina then you’re archiving Kazuo Ohno’s work. How do you feel about this?

T: Well I began to think of it as that: I am voguing Kazuo Ohno voguing La Argentina and I am voguing Hijikata voguing Antonia Mercé because La Argentina’s real name was Antonia Mercé. So I really started to think about voguing as an operation. You know, like what does it mean to vogue Kazuo Ohno? And of course, as you know, that piece is based on archiving. So there’s this structure, the performativity, but I’m doing that through a kind of voguing procedure.It’s a really difficult piece for me. I don’t rehearse it. Either you’re archiving or you don’t. It’s not like you can pretend to. But I think it’s a very good piece for me because it takes me somewhere and I think it was the first pieces that eventually started to change me as a dancer. I think I became a dancer with The Return of La Argentina. This kind of interfacing with Ohno really changed me.

 

The creative process

L: How do you manage your schedule during the day? How do you combine or separate your creative process from everyday life? I feel this is a struggle for many artists no matter of their field.

T: It’s not something that is very systematic. I have to have a space in my house where I work, a little studio in my house. I also need to not work in the house. But I tend to try to be inspired by things in the world. I’m always listening to music wherever I go, I’m looking at people. I wish I went out dancing more because I used to do it twenty years ago, I used to go out dancing a lot. And that was very good for me. I don’t really have a formula for it. I know that for me, at this point of my life, because I spend a lot of time touring – which means I’m a lot of the time not at home – is very important to also have a personal life.

 

You can get the full transcript of the video here.

by Laura Stratulat and Stalina Huberchenko
January 15, 2019