Shareen DeRyan and Emma Lanier. Photo by Jennifer Perfilio.
A Practice of Unknowing, Breaking Away from Structures and Habits:
An Interview with San Francisco Dance Artist Jennifer Perfilio
By Jill Randall
I got to catch up with Bay Area colleague Jennifer Perfilio the other day on Zoom, to hear about the past year of pandemic life and the hopes and curiosities around her latest artistic endeavor, “As Is.”
Jill Randall (JR): What has the last year been like? What was paused, cancelled, or let go of? And what has percolated and flourished? The before….
Jennifer Perfilio (JP): The dancers that are collaborating on As Is are actually the dancers I was working with a year ago. We began a new project on February 28th – 2020 – and it was, of course, abruptly stopped. This February, when we were improvising in the park, it occurred to me that it had been a year to the day, since we had first come together for that halted project. We took some time to acknowledge that being in space together at that moment was not a simple act, but rather a moment to reflect on resiliency. We took these reflections into our improvisation. We were thinking about where we were a year ago, what each of us had gone through individually over the course of the year, and how we were back again now, as a collective, committed to our process. It was a really special moment.
I think if you were to look at my work over the past year through what you might call a “traditional” artmaking model, in which there is a beginning, followed by a process, and then a culmination/ending, it might look like nothing happened at all, because there were so many beginnings and abrupt endings. The rhythm sometimes felt like start/abrupt stop, start/abrupt stop, etc. I kept trying to look for meaningful connections, for ways to give my original project some direction. The stops were due to a variety of reasons - such as limitations due to COVID protocols, Zoom exhaustion, dancers temporarily moving out of the city, or the real need to find balance between rest and action.
But if you were to look at my year’s work through a different lens, where the process isn’t required to sit “between” the beginnings and endings, you would see a different picture. There was actually a whole lot of rich and deep processing going on. It’s just that it didn’t fall in the middle. It was more like: start/stop/process, start/stop/process. Questions around what we can do as artmakers within these limitations, within these boundaries inspired a lot of starts for me, and even if they couldn’t be realized at the time, they pushed me into the place of process, which really is my favorite place to be anyway. I really enjoyed experiencing process as something that doesn’t have to be in the middle, but can rather be in and around and under and between and through.
The biggest let go workwise, was of the production I had planned to put on in May 2020, shortly after shelter in place began. I felt a loss in not being able to share the work, but also in not being able to grow the many creative collaborations that were a part of the production. There was fear in this for me. And loneliness.
I did ultimately let go altogether of that production. Holding on too tightly to any creative project felt antithetical to the time. There was so much unknown to try to settle into. So much patience and inefficiency to embrace. In my movement practice, I value the experience of “unknowing,” of breaking away from structures, habits, assumptions. So holding space for letting go and undoing felt not only necessary, but nourishing.
JR: Getting to know artist Molly Heller over the years, she has inspired me to think about the imagination. Hope and the imagination. What has kept you hopeful or brought you hope? What has allowed your imagination to keep going?
JP: I think hope can be tricky, like when it is disassociated from reality. It can sometimes look like waiting around for a result that might not be realistic. Or it might prevent us from seeing gifts that are already in our midst. Hope can sometimes be debilitating, and foster inaction.
But there is also the form of hope that drives action. The kind of hope that is behind social movements - hope for change, for a better world. In the pandemic I did see hope playing out in lots of ways. Systems of care were put into place. Food distributions and other types of solidarity care. So many ways to be active and activists. This keeps me hopeful. I found it hard in the height of the pandemic to balance inaction and action. There was so much action to take in so many directions, but at the same time, the world was literally sick, and so rest played an important role.
Molly Heller brought up this idea - of doing a simple act for a neighbor - in her Winter Dance Love Letters improvisation workshop. I really liked that idea. That we can think of the neighbor or the family as larger than we normally do. That care extends to and includes the stranger.
Artistically – my concerns have consistently been around interdependence and shared fragility. So there has been so much for me to think about artistically in regards to collectivity and interdependence, through the pandemic. I appreciate Molly’s simple act for a neighbor as a response to collective responsibility.
In terms of imagination, I think artists create the worlds in which they can imagine living. I believe one of the artist’s roles is to keep hope alive through their artwork - through their sharing of these livable worlds. I think they also hold the role of activists, working to manifest their visions.
JR: I also have been thinking about this quote of artist Paloma McGregor’s from a piece she wrote for Life as a Modern Dancer in March 2016. Do any of these words or phrases resonate with you today?
As I move through this landscape and accumulate markers of what some call success, my hope is to always be emerging. For some, emerging means undeveloped; but for me it means pushing beyond my known, acknowledging with my practice that I am endlessly striving, endlessly curious, endlessly a student of this time and my place in it. That, to me, is what it means to be an artist and to be alive.
- Paloma McGregor
JP: “Emerging from a vault” is a phrase I have been using in my current process, as we have been coming out of quarantine. It feels like an important emergence. We gathered and stored a lot with us during our time in the “vault” and I’m interested in looking at what we will carry forward. In our process towards As Is, we have been curious about what it is we are emerging with. What is essential to keep or to leave behind. How does what we carry out of the vault inform the way we are moving through the world right now?
I am a mother - so the term emerge always makes me think of birth. The baby, emerging as new, as undeveloped. But the baby is in fact emerging from its own already experience, of its 9 months of development. And it emerges to an already formed circle of community. That which greets it.
Emerging - does not come without something already. You are always carrying a before with you. I am interested in that. How can the before act as a guide towards transformation? And of course, I am interested in it at the level of the body.
Emma Lanier and Samuel Melecio-Zambrano. Photo by Jennifer Perfilio.
JR: Tell me more about your current project! Give me the elevator pitch.
JP: Once we were able to gather safely in small groups, and the dancers and I felt comfortable rehearsing outdoors, I began to question what “performance” could look like now. The project, entitled As Is, is born out of the necessity of shutdown studios and theaters, the non issuing of permits for outdoor performances, and not being able to gather larger audiences.
We are considering where we are now as "emergers from a vault" - as collective movers, observers, participants, performers in our urban landscape. What does dance performance look like right now, outside of the digital or filmed realm? Can we be part of the archive, by marking space in real time? It is an experiment in what live performance can look like right now.
Also, my history as a site-specific dancer definitely informs the project.
I have lived in San Francisco for 20 years, and this project feels a little bit like the spirit of a past San Francisco, when I would encounter lots of raw and spontaneous performances happening in outdoor spaces. We are dropping in to the music concourse in Golden Gate Park. We are integrating art into the public space through an improvised score. The score is very much about tuning into what is already there. Tracking sound, allowing influence from others (dancers and civilians), absorbing textures, energetic qualities, movement.
It is a Happening! We may or may not announce the dates and times. I think people who are interested can reach out to me directly if they want to witness. We are certainly there for the passerby, for anyone who is in the park already. We are there as part of the urban landscape and to experiment with social cooperation in a pandemic. Caretaking plays a big role in the project. There is a lot of care within our choices around space and distance.
We will be on site for 6 different dates in April. Some weekend daytimes and some weekdays, after work hours. It is an interdisciplinary project. The dance collaborators are Shareen DeRyan, Emma Lanier, and Samuel Melecio-Zambrano. Clark Buckner is the sound artist. On each date, we have invited one writer/scribe and one photographer to respond creatively, through their own lens, and by following their interests within the context of the happening. We are still in the process of bringing in these collaborators. So far Vanessa Chang and Karla Quintero are responding as scribes; and Amy Jacobson and Kena Frank are photographer respondents.
JR: Are you dancing in it?
JP: I am not. A lot of that has to do with where I am at in my body right now. But a lot of it also has to do with the intention to decenter. The way I am working is more lateral. I am not imposing my movement on the dance artists. They are improvising and following their own interests within a score. They are observers, participants, collective movers in this moment, and they are tuning into the experience of seeing and being seen, to listening, to responding as they go. That is what is interesting. Their spontaneous, embodied moment.
Also there is a lot to hold working on a project like this, outdoors, in a pandemic. I want to be the eyes and ears of safety.
JR: What does spontaneous performance mean to you?
JP: It’s like a little gift, that shows up in space without the passer-by expecting it to be there. It is a performance that can attend to process versus production. To the raw and spontaneous process that we all love to dig into, but that is sometimes lost or hard to hold onto in performance. Because we are not ticketing, or gathering, or asking people to pay, we don’t get caught up in over doing, over thinking, over making; and creative spontaneity comes through. The artists being in space, marking that particular moment “as is” comes through.
It is kind of the “anti-production,” that I want to embrace. It feels appropriate for the time, within pandemic limitations, but also as a statement on how expensive it is for artists to produce in SF. Producing in a theater is a big cost. I really like the idea of popping up, and being a part of the urban landscape. It’s nice also to be able to normalize dance a bit. We are moving alongside all the other people who have brought their work outdoors in the pandemic - people doing fitness, preschool teachers and students, etc.
JR: There is so much to say about the “anti-production!” I love that. I love the normalizing idea, and to name the inequities. But back to the “markers of success” as Paloma shares in that quote...thinking about grants, audience size, budgets, fundraising...
JP: To be honest, this project is being funded through the fundraising I did for the project we did not do last May. There is no overhead this time. It feels good to pay everyone what they need.
I have done so much site work, and I love how it can be democratic - the intersection of art and public space, how it is inclusive of what else is happening around the art. The art is de-centered. It shares the space. What is super interesting to me is that we don’t know who the audience will be. The audience doesn’t know that they will be an audience, until they pass by or until the performance begins in space. In spontaneous performance, you just come upon it, and you choose to watch a little or not. You get taken or not. You are watching both the dance happening and the family picnic. You are very much a part of the happening and you influence, offer feedback to the dancers by being there. I think this project has arisen organically for me and it feels like the right place to be. I am really excited - my first endeavor as director of JPMW in this kind of space. I am curious as to what - to grow and build upon - if I will stay outdoors for a long time. We will see!
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Related links:
Artist Profile: Paloma McGregor
Shelter-in-Place Dance Dictionary: Leah Cox
Shelter-in-Place Dance Dictionary: Jae Neal
Shelter-in-Place Dance Dictionary: Raja Feather Kelly
Shelter-in-Place Dance Dictionary: Colleen Thomas
Shelter-in-Place Dance Dictionary: Christy Funsch
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