Conversation with Cristian Nae, (for I’m Lost Without Your Rhythm catalogue), 2009

Cristian Nae: The concept of community is often linked to your artistic practice. I think of ‘community’ as fundamentally an open, fragile,incomplete, and temporary social phenomenon - existentially groundless. What does it mean for you?

Johanna Billing: The word has so many different meanings: geographically and ecologically, or in terms of activities, identities or shared values or interests. I wouldn’t know how to pick one simple way to describe it. I have to say though, that I actually rarely work with pre-existing communities or groups in society. On the contrary, the people that take part often come from various different places, groups, belief systems, ideas, or backgrounds. The films are not attempts to portray certain groups or communities, but rather situations made up of a collective of temporarily joined individuals. It is the differences between them that I am interested in, and the fact that normally they would not be in this specific made-up situation.

What makes you choose or propose a specific, particular setting for an action?

Often, it is an intuitive process that has its starting point in dreams, memories or feelings I may have been puzzled by. So, in a sense, it can be a very psychological process in which things get triggered or emphasised by meeting certain people or being in a specific surrounding. Many times it is about tracing something back, trying to find out the reason why some situations, images and thoughts get stuck in my head and are difficult to pin down with words and understand on a more conscious level.

Does your chosen situation or context start as a theme, or is it the result of an intuitive process?

In the beginning, there is seldom one specific theme. The contexts of the films are the result of a process where I am trying to deal with situations I find myself in more accidentally. Of course I make a lot of choices on the way all the time but I don’t sit at home making the script and choosing a location. The location triggers the idea to begin with, and the more I work on something, the more it expands and becomes multilayered.

Are these performative processes you frame a sort of laboratory for living in a common situation? Could they be extended allegorically to the conceptual, contextual relations of everyday existence, which one could see as the message of your works? A laboratory where individuals are discovering themselves when confronted by a specific, collective task?

Yes, I guess you could describe it like that, and it is certainly about process and finding something on the way. However, while many of the projects have almost a catalyst function that way, I try to avoid using words like laboratory, as I am always very concerned that the projects are never about using people to conduct experiments. Instead, the set up is improvised and experimental, and the participants are very much a part of controlling the output and the result.

Sometimes you work as director, choreographer, and producer of a collective performance. What is the importance of involving a group of people in producing the work?

The works themselves are never about the community or the group as a theme, I am much more interested in documenting the individual. But somehow, working with several people at the same time actually makes it easier to get close to that. The groups are somehow representative of some kind of backdrop, a society that is centered around the individual. Interestingly enough though, my experience is that just by showing a group making something together, no matter if it is a way of organising or just about being, often this becomes a focus for people because it seems quite a powerful and odd looking image or constellation itself in today’s society, which has become so individualistic.

Music plays a major part in your video works. Why do you emphasise it as a specific artistic language, especially in relation to the visual one?

Early on I started out working with staged situations, mostly using photography as a medium. But when it came to portraying atmospheres, which was what I was mostly after, I realised that working with sound was one of the most efficient tools to use. Although it is not always treated as such in visual art, to me video actually consists of half video, half sound. It has become natural for me to treat everyday, atmospheric sound – the soundscape – and music equally. I have also been working with music parallel to art since I was a teenager, doing everything from organising concerts to writing about and producing music. So I would say many of my reasons for working with music come from the experiences I have from being such an intense listener to it. And I believe that if you can activate the ‘listening’ more in the viewer while they look at the film, you can get closer to an intimate communication, as we sometimes deal with and interpret the things we see and hear on different levels. This is especially interesting to explore in exhibitions where the focus is on ‘seeing’.

What does dialogue mean for you? In your films, it is mostly based on silence, or non-verbal elements like singing or dancing. These bodily actions suggest a complex and tacitly choreographed background.

I think the way the films lack dialogue and are about people expressing things in a non-verbal way is often the result of documenting people who are busy doing something, or even just thinking. There is a kind of concentration that comes out of just being present in the situation. And in that situation I guess I am putting a lot of focus on the small details, gestures, and movements that can become quite physical. And the fact that the films try to deal with things we cannot put words to can – more than other types of film genres – make their set up resemble a choreography of sorts. So, to work more directly and hands on with movement and choreography now is very challenging. I would say it is a lot about rhythm. And even if these films without dialogue or music are quite silent, they are still quite rhythmical, creating a physical dimension that in the end makes them as musical as my films with more conventional musical soundtracks.

You often produce a ‘participative’ situation in a very specific way. In your latest work, you involved a group of dancers as well as a ‘spectator’ element – the gaze of the public. How do you regard this participative element?

My experience is that it can actually sometimes be a bit confusing to talk too much about them being ‘participatory’ projects, as there are often certain expectations about what the outcome should be for people taking part. Personally I can relate my work to a more traditional way of working with filmmaking, when you have a kind of unquestionable collaboration with people that take part in front of the camera. There is a natural collaboration going on, and often filmmakers also work with non-actors. So this way of working with other people is not something that I feel I need to put a specific focus on. As I also work a lot with improvisation and with situations that people are new to, there can be quite an intimate atmosphere going on, and normally in my work, these recording situations – even though they are often of performative character - are very private. Alongside this, I have worked with one-off live events. This time I was interested in bringing these two, sometimes separate, ways of working together – bringing in an audience and their view from the beginning. At the same time I wanted to make something that could be treated as two separate occasions and a film that did not necessarily have to end up as a documentation of an event.

What about dancing? What did you look for in the choreography workshop that was the starting point for your new film?

It might come down to the curiosity I have for the ways we select and sort out our experiences in different fields. What we consciously regard as an intellectual activity verbal or physical – and what can be expressed and how. Often I think I am after a way of communicating – sometimes perhaps with oneself – that we have lost contact with. To go after a more physical way of expressing things could be a way to get closer to these kinds of things that are lying a bit hidden within us.

Does this work have any sort of contextual significance to Iasi or to the present day social situation in Romania?

 I had a lot of starting points based on observations I made during my visit to Iasi, but I am still in the middle of the process of making the work, so it is difficult to know yet what meaning some of the things will have. I knew I wanted to explore something more hands on in choreography, and also that I wanted to collaborate again with the choreographer Anna Vnuk with whom I worked ten years ago, in one of my first films which was a dance video. When first coming to Iasi I was curious about the local scene in contemporary dance. Not only did it hardly exist just then, considering Iasi is such a vibrant student city with so much cultural heritage, but there were few opportunities for people to enter this field, unless you started out as a classical ballet student at five years old. Somehow this conservative way of looking at contemporary dance became an important starting point –particularly the view of who could have access to these things. And for me, working together with this group of students (some coming from one of the few existing dance schools for amateurs as well as a group of acting students), this became an interesting place to explore ideas about what contemporary choreography could be or mean for people today. And perhaps this does not have to be specifically only about Iasi, but also about a general approach to these questions.

Who is the individual ‘I’, in the title of I’m Lost Without Your Rhythm and what type of loss do you have in mind?

The title comes from a phrase in the refrain of the song My Heart originally written and performed by the Swedish drum and vocal duo ‘Wildbirds and Peacedrums’. I was listening to it while planning the project, and even though the lyrics are quite simple, it still took me a while to understand that the ‘you’ when Mariam Wallentin, the vocalist, sings I’m Lost Without Your Rhythm refers to her own heart and its beating. At the same time her co-musicians on the drums include her husband who she is, in the song and in other ways, also dependent on. So for me, it is both about the ‘I’, and about something inside us that we need to be in contact with. Secondly, we are dependent on the people around us. The song was an inspiration, particularly in the way this group based its music on similar rhythmical instruments that the live musicians in the workshop used – such as various percussion instruments and a marimba. Later on, it became interesting the way the lyrics connected to the activities that go on. The whole sentence is actually ‘don’t run, I am lost without your rhythm’. There is a lot of running and a continuous increasing of tempo going on in the film. This has, of course, many meanings. While making the film, the financial crisis was becoming more and more real. I was reading about how in a situation of crisis the natural thing for humans to do is to run; and how people on different levels in society from big companies to individuals – were continuously encouraged from all kinds of directions to keep on running as a solution to their problems. But it is not something we do only temporarily. More and more, we are turning, or using this the bodily habit of handling a crisis, into a situation where the fast speed tempo suddenly becomes the normal, everyday pace. With this rhythm one could eventually find oneself in a constant crisis. So this became another aspect of movement that was interesting to think about in relation to the choreography of the ‘everyday’.

The choreography included various simple tasks for people to relate to. Was there any particular reason for choosing or proposing them?

We wanted to work with very basic movements, not so much dance-related but everyday activities. The project avoided choreographic traditions and instead tried to make something that would challenge pre-existing ideas about what contemporary choreography is. By doing this, we realised we couldn’t avoid crossing other people’s paths in history, choreographers such as Trisha Brown or Yvonne Rainer, who also examined the very basics of everyday movement. I had one of the scenes planned, the collective typewriting session (on 1970s and 1980s typewriters) that gradually moves from writing to rhythm in the way the drums are eventually taking over and the participants develop a more physical activity. This was also an attempt to try to work with something that would not represent something other than what it was, almost on a physical level. These typewriters turned out to have quite a specific resonance in Romania, as during the 1980s the government regulated who could own a typewriter, which had to be registered by the police. Perhaps this was one of the reasons I could hardly find any machines from this period, and instead had to bring a couple of them over from Sweden. This background ended up becoming interesting as one of the themes in the project has been to deal with the question of who can have access to certain things in life and culture.

What is the relationship between movement and narration in your film? How does your video editing relate back to the movements of the dancers, the multiple cameras involved in recording, and the resulting multiple points of view?

Before starting the project I was thinking a lot about what happens when choreography is filmed. It immediately becomes another, or even several other choreographies, depending on the angles and the cameras. This was also something that Anna was aware of. We decided to start by creating something that was totally fragmented to begin with. Something that can be treated as just bits and pieces to pick and build something new from. So, in a way, a final choreography has never existed – not even in the live event. All exercises were made as fragments. People had to create something themselves from what they saw when they came and went during the three days. In the editing process, I treat all the material as new movements from which I am creating another choreography, based on Anna’s original and the preparations around it. Although the attempt was not to create a document of the live performance, but instead something more abstract, the film actually does have a similarity to what was actually happening, as the event itself was constructed as various almost isolated situations.

Is there anything you think might also be lost from the ‘live’ experience of the workshop to its representation on video?

Oh, everything is lost I think. The live event was altogether a totally different thing. But that was also somehow the whole point. The presence and tension when people from outside entered the room, breaking into the semi private sphere of the big hallway we used as our ‘stage’ not normally used for these things, was and can never be represented. Also very little of the live musical soundtrack could be used in the film for several technical and editing reasons. For this new structure, as the film in itself is, I decided to instead make another soundtrack, going back to the inspiration of the ‘Wildbirds and Peacedrums’ song again, making a cover version with several vocals and percussion instruments.

Rehearsal itself seems to be a recurrent artistic motif of yours; why is this?

This project might look like a rehearsal but I was interested in the fact that we actually did not rehearse. The event was a learning situation, a performance for a live event for an audience. Since it did not lead up to anything else than what it was, there is not a before or an after, only a present. This could be the very definition of improvisation which was perhaps the core of the whole project. I guess I am fascinated by the potential in these open-ended situations: the challenge of something remaining unfinished or unresolved.