There is an obsession with process that I don’t share. I want the surprise: I don’t need to know how the magic trick works. If the audience has already watched the magician practice sawing a woman in half, it’s not going to be overly impressed when he does it again during the show, unless he’s suddenly doing it lengthwise.
I am not interested in works in progress. Finish it, then I’ll buy a ticket. Art isn’t reality TV or a director’s cut with three unexpurgated hours of bloopers. I don’t want to catch people with their pants down. I don’t want to know the awful secrets that happened backstage. I only want to see, in conjuring terms, the prestige.
THIS IS HOW IT WORKS. You decide what you want to do: play the piano or sing. You practice alone, learn how to do it well alone, get good at it. Then you play for an audience: “Here’s something I prepared earlier.” And you do it as well as you can.
And then it’s over.
When the curtain goes up, the audience sees something it’s never seen before and, particularly with dance, something it’ll never see again. I don’t show a piece until I’m ready to pinch it off, and sometimes that isn’t until the very last minute.
I was once choreographing for a ballet company in a many-windowed studio. A window to the outside world is one thing, but a window through which people can observe is another. You feel like you’re in some kind of a Louis Quatorze petting zoo, an attraction for the aristocracy—board members accustomed to the access, the kind of people who call the dancers “boys” and “girls.” It’s creepy. I’m notorious for covering these windows, because if someone’s watching, it’s automatically a performance it shouldn’t have to be—the dancers need to feel safe to explore—and rehearsals can be boring, a dull process about which none of the participants, least of all me, should feel self-conscious. I may work on eight bars for a week or eighteen bars for five minutes. I might keep some of it or none of it. I might joke around, and somehow only that bit stays, purely because it was funny. These aren’t interesting secrets.
My rehearsals are closed.
THIS IS A MEMOIR, not a cookbook—I can’t tell you the recipe exactly—but here’s what I can tell you about my process.
I always start with a piece of music that I love, or at least admire, and can bear to listen to hundreds of times. It’s very rare that this is music that was specifically composed to be danced to—a lot of that isn’t very interesting—and I gravitate toward music on a scale I can take on tour, because I won’t use recorded music. I work with living musicians. I listen to the music and study the score in depth so that when rehearsals begin, I arrive with some ideas, perhaps a key movement (that I’ll then develop as I make up the dance) or a rule or constraint that I’ll impose upon my choreography, something to kick-start me. But I never work alone in the studio. I make up everything in the room with and on the dancers.
My dances are worked out in advance, practiced relentlessly. They aspire to the highest level of accomplishment and excellence. I believe that each piece should have a structure answerable only to itself; the language I create for a particular dance has to resolve itself in that dance. It’s a complete thought. There will be no sequel.
A question I am often asked is “Do you choreograph every move or is everything entirely improvised?” as though those are the only two possibilities and mutually exclusive. Well, it’s neither one nor the other—though more the former—but the point is that everybody is improvising all the time they’re performing, no matter what they’re playing, however fiendish the Bach toccata, and regardless of the fact that they know exactly what they’re doing. In rehearsal, I might say, “I want this to look like the ocean: Go!” or “Something that reminds me of skeletons!” It’s not only “right, left, right, kick,” though there’s plenty of that. It’s not only dictatorial; it’s participatory (and I’m the boss). Improvisation doesn’t equal freedom; it usually equals chaos. If improvisation is so liberating, why does it always look exactly the same? As indistinct as the rinse water for an artist’s brush.
And don’t forget the contribution of the designers—décor, lighting, costumes. I give them the music I’m planning to confront; they listen to it and come up with their own ideas. The final say may be mine, but I’m no lighting designer. I work with people I trust.
The dancers contribute by dancing, not by improvising. Very few actors are playwrights; very few opera singers are composers. They’re different jobs. Though dancing and choreography are related, relatively few dancers are interested in the composition of a dance. I found myself interested from the very beginning. And the dancers I choose for my company have to be interested too. Not just so they’ll hear music the same way I do; they have to know everything that’s going on, what everybody else is doing, so they grasp the architecture of the dance, in the same way that I wish each player in a string quartet had all four parts in front of him.
The management of emotion is an essential part of any performer’s bag of tricks. I was once bumped from a plane in Tokyo and forced to spend the night in a hotel in a mall on the outskirts of the city, where an electronics shop had a display of a thousand TVs. On every one was the same image: a geisha crying into a handkerchief. I watched transfixed for a long while. I couldn’t believe how touching it was. The camera pulled out from the close-up, and I realized that the crying geisha was in fact a puppet, a chunk of wood manipulated by a seventy-five-year-old man (and his two assistants). I have never forgotten it—Bunraku, a form of Japanese puppetry that dates back to the beginning of the seventeenth century. It was the expertise of that puppet master granting a soul to an inanimate object that had so profoundly moved me, not the fact that I had witnessed a human experiencing deep emotion. That is how art works.
When it comes to emotion, mastery—and not indulgence—is everything. I once said in an interview, “I’m not interested in self-expression but in expressiveness.” Geoffrey Hill, the great English poet, later said that this “put perfectly what [he’d] been trying to say gropingly and inadequately for years. The idea that you write to express yourself seems to me revolting. The idea that you write to glorify or to make glorious the art of expressiveness seems to me spot on.” I never want to see someone pour it all out. I want to see only what they let me see.
LIVE PERFORMANCE HAS FASCINATED me ever since, at the age of four, I stood amazed on the curb as a band marched by at the Seattle Seafair parade. The startling physical fact, the vibration, of the bass drum hitting me in the stomach was a revelation. Loud, but not just loud. It was present, inside me. I was the resonator. And it felt like I was being told something important, something essential that I didn’t yet understand.
It was the same thing that Janet Baker told me years later at Carnegie Hall. As she stood in recital, in ravishing voice, singing song after song in languages I didn’t understand, I knew her only essential message could be translated as “I love you, I love you, I love each one of you individually.” All present felt she was speaking to, and making eye contact with, them only. That is the bravery and honesty of getting out in front of people and performing, the fact and mystery of live performance.
As a teenager I would go on Sundays to compline, the last evening service before bed, at St. Mark’s Cathedral in Seattle, the “music church.” This experience, still available, is one of the greatest Seattle has to offer. It was the first time I ever heard countertenors, the first time I heard plainchant. Sitting in the back in the dark, high on pot, bathing in the glorious music, alone—with others. That was the crucial thing: crowded, jammed up beside one another, and yet utterly private. Alone with my own thoughts and feelings, and the music we all shared.
And I recognized an inherent contradiction in that live performance: others felt alone too. There was a commonality in feeling alone; Bach felt alone. And I became more myself, and I felt less alone.
THE LIVE ASPECT OF PERFORMANCE is what appeals: the dancers, the musicians, the audience—all living beings in the same room. People might say they’ve watched a dance on YouTube, and they have. But they haven’t. It isn’t live. All the technological advances in the world—the 3-D glasses, the virtual reality, whatever comes next—aren’t going to help that. We already live in 3-D.
When a performance is over, it’s over. It can’t be done that way again and it can’t be preserved. And with regard to dance, no notation system can perfectly preserve the moves. It’s the dancers who teach other dancers—the oral tradition. You’ll never have that same meal again. “I cooked all day long to make the food I served you this evening, and you finished it in a second!” I love that feeling. Gone forever. Maybe the Etch A Sketch is the most appropriate device for recording dance. You write it down, shake it, and it’s gone forever, a love letter in the sand.
I DON’T LIKE TO GIVE TALKS before a show. I don’t need program notes to prove I did the homework, what I read, what it all means. William Forsythe, a master choreographer and a great guy, makes up a dance and writes ten pages of program notes about Schopenhauer, telos, and other Greek rhetorical terms. That works for him. Jiří Kylián, the director of Nederlands Dans Theater, is another example: page after page of program notes about the underpinning theory, how he came to that conclusion, and what it therefore all means. (Actually, he came to a rehearsal of mine at Les Grands Ballets Canadiens and commented, “You’re so brave to do something that simple.” I’d say that was an insult.) Of course, Maurice Béjart, the choreographer I replaced as the director of dance at the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels, wrote the longest program notes ever. The show would be a pastiche of recorded music—some Piaf songs, a Piazzola tango, and then one movement of Beethoven’s Ninth—and he’d write about its relevance to dance history and contemporary society. My reaction to the verbiage is always “And how was the dance?”
The dance is all I want people to see. If it’s not in the dance, it’s not there. If the audience doesn’t see it, it doesn’t matter. No one wants to be told what he or she is meant to understand. Art shouldn’t need translation. If the artist has to explain things, then he or she may be working in the wrong form. I’m happy to talk about everything, and I will, but I won’t explain in advance.
The truth may be simpler than people want to hear, and sometimes I feel cornered, as though I have to defend myself and my work. For example, I don’t ever want to say more about the music than the fact that I like it, that I am able to listen to it many times and have it remain interesting. I realize that’s not very helpful, but the irony is that it’s an unhelpful truth. People seriously ask, “What is it about the story of Romeo and Juliet that brought you to it?” A question like that isn’t asked because anyone thinks it’s terribly interesting; it’s asked because it’s acceptably bland. I’m a “difficult artist.” People don’t want to set me off. All that particular question really amounts to is “Will you start talking, please?” The question is really “Why did you choose this over that?” I made a judgment, the same as “I go to the restaurant where I like the food better.”
“So many people have choreographed this. Why again?”
Because I like it.
“What do you want the audience to get?”
Home safely.
At a press conference when I took that job in Belgium, on being asked my philosophy of dance, I answered, “I make it up and you watch it.” It was looked upon as a snub or a provocation, but it’s how I feel. It’s the truth, though it’s perceived as an evasion. You try not to lie, but you have to lie: both. I’m not the President of Dance itself, or a dance critic, or a musicologist; I’m me. I’m not making art to promote anything, to sell an idea, or to get something done. I’m not an accomplisher. I’m an artist. There aren’t many of us. Every painter I know is crazy, never leaves his house, and doesn’t want anybody to see his work; I know composers who can’t leave their rooms or their computers, have regular nervous breakdowns, and are three years late with every commission.
I do at least function.
I’m sixty-two, in case I haven’t mentioned that yet, and I am done dancing: my dancing days are gone. I make up dances, and I don’t really have to do anything except satisfy that need. Though I still work constantly, I have time to look back, to see where I fit in, if I ever did. I sleep more nowadays, I waste more time, but I don’t panic about learning the things that I have to do next, because I’m comfortable doing what I do.
My place is now in the studio. There isn’t even a lot for me to do when I’m on tour with my company, unless I’m conducting. I teach class; I watch rehearsals, fix things, and give notes—not my favorite thing to do, because I don’t like to get in the way or bother the dancers with too many notes—but I’m there because it’s good for publicity and I love watching a good show.
I take a bow.
AND YOU’RE READING THIS: my memoir. I now find myself less reluctant to share secrets, happier to let people in on what goes into making up a dance, the workings of my company, my choreographic imagination, and the way these are all aspects of who I am.
Perhaps this relaxation is due to my age, perhaps simply to the urge to set it down right. But if you’re going to read about me, you might as well read me.