An Interview with Christian Burns
“Our physical effort to capture and give form to our thoughts and our fleeting perceptions is the base level of the creative act.”
“A dancer is in the profession of living one’s life in front of people and among people. To me that is the ultimate function of dance: to help others feel themselves by means of acting as a surrogate channel for experience.”
These quotes were taken from Christian Burns’ book, Motion and Process, knowing not knowing: ideas on dance, Vol. I 2006-08. Burns is a Bay Area based dancer, choreographer, and teacher and is currently the artistic director of burns-work. Burns is also an incredible improviser. I caught up with him to learn more about his book, his views on improvisation, and what’s next for him.
Emmaly Wiederholt: What is your book about?
Christian Burns: It’s an edited collection of writings, musings, photographs and drawings from my blog. The book covers some important periods in my development. I am now inside of a new surge in work and I felt it was a good idea to put my previous output into a more refined form. I almost feel this book is closer to being a dance piece that happens on pages. With the new freedom of self-publishing to print as well as ebook form for ipads and iphones, I feel this might open some new creative doors in delivering my dance ideas to my audience in a more tangible and accessible form.
EW: What is your process like when you create work, particularly when you create an improvised piece?
CB: When I create a piece through improvisation I generally have a sense of what I want to learn from the work. I always start with questions about topics that are important to me and determine how improvising might illuminate those topics. Sometimes I will start with a question that has no literal answer, but comes from a philosophical location. For example my last work asked, “What does gratitude look like?” I never intended to portray gratitude in a literal way; I wanted to pursue an expression of the energy of gratitude. For this work the dancing became tinted by this inquiry.
When I feel clear I am going to pursue an improvised work I begin a training program based on some of those initial questions. The training becomes the ‘practice’ and the practice trains the mind and the body to align. The hope is to refine an ability to observe (physical/emotional, immediate surroundings, imagination) and then respond to those observations. Only through observation can the performer orient themself within the situation and begin to make choices. In this sense improvisation reflects real-life (we perceive what is happening and we respond accordingly) and the practice becomes the choreography. I refer to the literal translation of the word choreography of ‘dance writing’ – the performer has to author, edit and enact their dancing spontaneously.
There exists a popular assumption that rehearsing an improvised piece is an oxymoron. Since improvisation suggests spontaneous expression, the question is argued, ‘Wouldn’t spontaneity cease to exist if it were rehearsed?’ Everything we know about how to think or behave we have learned and therefore rehearsed. Improvisation is not about creating something that didn’t previously exist; it’s about a way of expressing ideas. To make a parallel, I could say it’s due to my thirty-eight years of practicing the English language that I am able to spontaneously form complex concepts into language out of thoughts or physical perceptions. I can express spontaneously while utilizing my experience from rehearsing how to read and write English. This might sound like a cliché, but the truth of the matter is that we are in a state of spontaneous expression every waking moment of our lives. So to me, creating with improvisation is very natural.
This process of making an improvised piece takes an enormous amount of patience and persistence. You have to keep practicing and developing how to become a more and more effective choreographer, editor and dancer all in one package. The improvised process can be very challenging because it requires one to confront a lot of barriers within oneself. But that’s what it’s about. That’s precisely what can be so beautiful about it, as well as dangerous. You create the language, context, intention and even aspirations of the piece and then have to sit back and let the dancers (or yourself) find their way through. To me there is literally no more satisfying way of working – to see a dance actually occur in front of your eyes, knowing that they are creating on a tissue of support, is a powerful thing to see.
EW: How do you determine when to set movement versus when to improvise?
CB: First I will be faced with very mundane practical/logistic constraints: how much time is available and how experienced are the dancers. The more time and experience equals the more possibility for improvisation. An improvisational approach takes up many hours of a process because the dancer has to not just learn new vocabulary, but a whole new way of thinking – thinking like a compose. Ultimately the dancer who is being trained to improvise is really being trained to choreograph as well. If I know I have a very short amount of time to make a piece, I will likely come in with a lot of set material and make a traditionally constructed piece of choreography.
For me improvising offers the greatest challenge; how can I make a dance that has no steps? (I know it’s a paradox but it really is how I feel about it.) It is the most difficult dance form to do well and therefore the most dangerous. It’s also the closest thing you can get to diminishing the gap between the real-life-self and the art-self. There is nothing more satisfying than to see the moments in a piece where true synergy is happening with the dancers in the moment and knowing my own finger prints are not in it. It’s just the performer’s pure experience that finds form through movement.
It’s also a philosophical issue; I need to know that people are acting freely with a sense of self-determination. Not the illusion of it, or the representation of it, but actually it. I can’t really explain yet why that is so powerfully important to me, but it’s my primary requirement. (It goes without saying that I have endless appreciation and admiration for anybody who takes on making or performing set material, as I have done that a fair amount of my own career and know its joys first hand.)
I still from time to time make pieces that are completely set and get great satisfaction from it, so it’s not as though I am speaking in fundamentalist terms regarding improvisation. I don’t have a political agenda around it, but I have big lingering philosophical questions having to do with the nature of being alive, and how we choose to express the mystery of what it means to be alive. I think it’s very scary to face the fact that there is so little we really have control of, and instead of focusing on forcing external control onto an art work, improvisation allows me to practice a self-control that comes from a different intention. Improvisation reminds us that the one thing we all have complete command over is our own actions, that through experience the dancer becomes clearer, more defined, articulate, complex and unbridled. So to me improvisation is an issue of living in a certain way.
EW: What’s on the horizon for you choreographically?
CB: I have begun work on a new collaboration with pianist Donald White (piece is currently untitled). We are creating a piece which will have a short version ready by this summer and a more full length version by year’s end. It is currently being developed, and one thing I can confirm is that I will be dancing and Donald will be playing (piano works by J.S.Bach). Performance dates are still undetermined.
I am planning on bringing two amazing improvisers from the UK to join me for a improvisation project that will be presented for the 2013 San Francisco International Arts Festival.
I have a much farther reaching project collaborating with a sound artist Eli Nelson and painter/sculpture Scott Reilly on an installation that investigates the physical barriers and intersections between our physical bodies (our flesh) and the physical world around us (Points of Articulation, working concept title).
Photo by Andrea Basile
Click to learn more about burns:work or to order a copy of Burns’ book.