In part 1 of this several-part series, we explore how some artists and thought leaders position the role and influence of governmental programs and political figures on the arts, as well as how artists excavate politics and socio-political content for creative inspiration. Drawing from the work of Liz Lerman and Mark Dendy, we explore how some artists make such work. We also experience a conversation between political commentator Rachel Maddow and Pillow Scholar Suzanne Carbonneau as they discuss the role of government, and government funding, in the arts.
[Music begins, composed by J.S. Bach, performed by Jess Meeker]
NORTON OWEN: Welcome to PillowVoices, a production of Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival with content from the Pillow Archives. I’m Norton Owen, the Pillow’s Director of Preservation, and it’s my pleasure to introduce Pillow Scholar Jennifer Edwards who is the also the director/producer of PillowVoices. She will be your host for this look at intersections between politics and art as presented here at the Pillow.
JENNIFER EDWARDS: I’ll admit that I have a bias, as a choreographer, writer, curator and dance enthusiast. And that bias leans hard toward the political, toward artists who make work in response to the aspects of the social, cultural, and systemic constraints and conditions that shape our lives. When exploring the Pillow Archives for this episode of PillowVoices, I chose to follow that impulse and share artists and specific pieces that are explicitly inspired by politics and social movements. As it turns out, this is a rich vein of inquiry and so this will be part one of a several-episode series.
What I am most fascinated by is how these artists shape their work - how they take a single focus, a happening, a tragedy, a political figure and then use it as a fulcrum from which to pivot and a foundation from which to build an entire piece of art. They create something that is complex, structured and abstract enough to hold our attention and engage us on multiple levels.
Mark Dendy is just such a choreographer. He, with his collaborator Stephen Donovan, has been making socially conscious work since 2008. I would argue that Dendy has always had a tendency to make work that, even though often autobiographical, was consistently layered with social commentary. In the archives, I located some great clips of Mark talking about what caught his attention and then lead to his piece, Elvis Everywhere.
We begin with an introduction by Jacob’s Pillow Executive and Artistic Director, Pamela Tatge. This was recorded while the company was in residence in January of 2017, developing several sections of the work. We then hear from Mark Dendy himself as he talks about his process and the initial spark for what would become a years-long journey for him and his collaborators.
PAMELA TATGE: I connected with Mark and he sent me an email in the summer of last year, around August. And the first sentence when I said what would you like to work on at the Pillow was, ‘I want to make a work that scrutinizes our fascination/obsession with celebrity to the point where a reality star could become the presidential nominee of a major party.’ And the rest is history.
MARK DENDY: About, I guess, four years ago, I was researching war for a war piece and I wanted to find Donald Rumsfeld’s ‘known unknown’ quote. So I went on the internet and I found an interview with him on C-Span where he related meeting Elvis Presley backstage in Vegas. And because it was Rumsfeld telling it, and he was telling it from the standpoint of being in the Nixon administration at the time, it just, I thought it was gold if it could be done the right way.
After I finished the war piece of which this was a part, I thought my next thing, I want to make an Elvis Presley piece. And I came upon this quote by John Oliver, I’m gonna bastardize, quote it to you, it’s not the, the exact quote but, he said, ‘Elvis Presley is America. The most vibrant, young, talented nation on Earth with un, with endless possibilities. But now you’re in your Vegas years and you’re in a white jumpsuit and you’re wheezing your way through ‘Love me Tender’ and you might pass out on the toilet and die and you might not.’ So this, this quote was like ‘ugh.’ Then it started to wash over me and I started listening to his music. And came up with a way to parallel what was going on politically then. Because he had a relationship with Nixon and he went, he went to Washington, flew to Washington, and holed up in a hotel until Nixon would see him. And they had a private audience together in which he convinced Nixon to make him an honorary deputy of the drug war, or something like that. So, it’s like, it’s a great, that’s a sidebar. So, we’re gonna, we have lots of video. Stephen’s gonna do video and close ups, and we’re following old Elvis, who Stephen plays, on the video up here and we also used a lot of news headlines. Without getting too cryp, without getting, we want to keep it cryptic and nonlinear narrative, but we don’t, and we don’t want it to be, like, newsreel narrative, but we are going to use some of that. And we’re, and Elvis had a TV room where he had six TVs all, all six channels at the time, and they were always on and he loved to watch TV. So we’re going to have a section where we show Nixon resigning, Love, American Style, Sesame Street, 70s commercials, all on six different screens and they’ll come up at different times, and that, that’s going to be a section too.
JENNIFER EDWARDS: I love the window these clips provide into how this artist works - he pulls on strings of historical artifacts and shares how other people have framed the life of Elvis as it applies to America and our own mythology. A few months later in this process, the company was back at the Pillow, this time to premiere the work in August 2017. Here is Scholar in Residence Brian Schaefer moderating a post-show talk with Mark Dendy and Stephen Donovan. We begin with a question from the audience and then circle back to a question about why these collaborators made a shift toward more overtly political work.
BRIAN SCHAEFER: The question, just to repeat real quick, the question is about the disproportionate amount of time that we were, kind of, looking at, or exploring Elvis’s military service, seeing the footage of him. And then I think the Rumsfeld solo also adds to that sense of really exploring his, his military service. And so why is that an aspect of his career that you really wanted to dive into?
MARK DENDY: I found it fascinating that he was used as military propaganda to both recruit American soldiers and it was actually, Rumsfeld got it wrong, being the compulsive liar that he is, there wasn’t a draft at the time that Elvis went in. That came much later. He tells a great story but he gets his facts messed up. It’s like, why would he go back in the dressing room after the show when Sammy’s getting dressed, it makes no sense. He’s just telling a good story. But anyway, it fascinated me the whole thing about military propaganda and using Elvis to recruit people, as well as using him as a piece of psychological warfare against the East Germans because they, one interesting fact was, the East German girls were just torn apart by this arrival of Elvis and they were all starting to dance like Elvis, and the East Germans outlawed the Elvis dances and had only partnering dances. And they made up dances that were then teachable and the only dances that you could do in clubs and you couldn't do independent singular dances on the floor, freeform anymore. So, it was, there was this big large thing going on around dance that I found and I was also just very intrigued about the, the use of, of military, of Elvis’s military propaganda. Colonel Parker kind of selling him into it and seeing it as an advantage for his career that if he got him enlisted, then he would be able to legitimize him as All-American. And when he came back he would be an All-American boy, instead of, you know, this low-life renegade, pelvic monster. So he came back from the army a very different media personality, you know, his welcome back was a guest slot on the Frank Sinatra Show where he did a duet with Frank Sinatra. So it was, you know, he came back a totally different performer and that fascinated me. How the military could be used to transform a career into something that was American-ly legitimate.
BRIAN SCHAEFER: And also it was like the peak of his career when it happened. It was just, like, super famous and then goes off into the army…
MARK DENDY: The peak of his career so far. At that point.
BRIAN SCHAEFER: Yeah. I mean, his career changes, yeah, but that was his youth, that was the beginning and it was just…
MARK DENDY: He made his first movie, I think, in ‘56, ‘Love Me Tender’ and the Army was in ‘60.
BRIAN SCHAEFER: When we usually think of Elvis we don’t often think of him kind of in encounters with Donald Rumsfeld, we don’t think of him kind of necessarily sharing, you know, visiting the Oval Office with Nixon, but that’s a very big part of this piece. And you clearly wanted to put a political context on this, which is something that you do in a lot of your work. And as Pamela noted before the show, this is something that the two of you, kind of going back to 2008, when you started really ramping up your collaboration, was a goal of yours. And so, I wonder if you could kind of talk about, you know, what was it about that time? What happened in 2008 that kind of made you really want to make that shift in your work, to kind of move away from the type of personal works that you had been focusing on and looking at broader political issues and weaving that into the work. Still having fun, you know, and still giving us, like, a good time, but making a really strong political statement as well. So, for the two of you, what were those conversations like and how did that evolve?
MARK DENDY: Well we met, on, on Taboo, and so...
STEPHEN DONOVAN: 2003.
MARK DENDY: 2003, and we’re doing a, a Broadway musical which was in some ways my story, because it was the Boy George, Leigh Bowery story so I certainly had identification with it, but it was bigger than me. And everything up until that point had been about me and my experience. And I kind of realized at that point, and through working with Stephen, that there were only so many pieces you can make about yourself, you know, before you get bored and probably the audience gets bored. And there was so much autobiographical work, and so much work around gender and gender exploration, but also my relationship to who were my icons. And so, we just decided we were inspired politically by what was going on and this trend we saw in the country of, you know, this kind of horrific right, I was a, a Rachel Maddow fan before it was fashionable. So, you know, to say I saw this coming, I saw it coming but I, but I, I, once I knew it was inevitable I was like, ‘oh, yes this piece is going to be great because of it,’ it was like ‘oh no.’ You know, but, I don’t know, what do you want to say about that Stephen? A political...
STEPHEN DONOVAN: I think we both worked in commercial theater and we got burned by it and we needed to get serious again. And I think it was, Mark wanted to go back to the dance world that he started in, and I wanted to help him get back there. Because I think Mark’s a genius artist.
MARK DENDY: I wanted my autonomy back.
STEPHEN DONOVAN: He wanted his autonomy and I wanted, I wanted his voice heard. And yeah, I think it was just about, go back to basics and get serious and, but entertain. I think that’s the biggest thing about us, we want to entertain you. We want you to have fun, but we want you to think at the same time. And I think just getting older as well, you, you have a different perspective on things, you know? And that’s part of it.
JENNIFER EDWARDS: Dendy masterfully blends the humanistic with the political. He gives us a focal point - in this case ‘The King’ - Elvis Presley - a man who was manipulated by society and the government, a recognizable and flawed icon as well as ‘Elvis,’ the brand that was used to manipulate people around the world. While some artists, like Dendy, share relatable, people-driven explorations, others use their work to bring systems, data, and governmental initiatives to light.
Dendy alluded to a Donald Rumsfeld quote in an earlier excerpt - one that drove him to conduct further research and eventually led to Elvis Everywhere. That quote is also a great segue into the work of our next artist and so I’ll share it now. In a US Defense Department briefing on February 2002, Rumsfeld famously said, “There are known knowns, things we know that we know; and there are known unknowns, things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns, things we do not know we don't know.”
Liz Lerman is an artist who has dedicated a good part of her career to making visible the often invisible or the unnoticed forces that impact our lives. She researches and collects data, often related to governmental programs and local, national and international policies to then bring them to life in the words and bodies of her dancers. Let’s listen to a few excepts of a piece titled 9 Short Dances about the Defense Budget and Other Military Matters, which Lerman shared on the Pillow’s Inside/Out Stage in July 1986.
LIZ LERMAN: This is a piece called ‘9 Short Dances About the Defense Budget and Other Military Matters.’ In this dance, I, I took about six months off from my job as artistic director of the Dance Exchange and essentially researched issues around the defense budget. I was pretty ignorant before I started. That’s also the phase that we’ve been in here at the Pillow with our new piece and that’s, so just be aware that there is this sort of research period.
The next dance has a quiz in it. You may be aware that in educational circles there is quite a controversy over whether the arts help you learn better. Well, in this dance which is about weapons systems, you’ll be able to find out. Now, the first one we’re going to do is bombs. Not nuclear bombs, but the other kind they have been developing since 1960, which are far more compact and slender than the old style bombs. They’ve been doing a lot of research into filler, and have made the Nole, which is more explosive than TNT. They’ve also been working on precision and accuracy, they’ve made the TRD, or Tail Return Device. This attaches to any old bomb. Here’s what happens: the pilot flies in low, he lets go of the bomb, the TRD slows its descent and the pilot gets away.
So how’d you do? Well, we’ll try another one. This is the LAW or Light Anti-tank Weapon, now they look a lot like the bazookas in the old World War II movies, except that these are disposable. They are small in diameter, they open out about this far, they are made out of a lightweight material and they attach to your thigh. They have a little extra handle though if you want it. Now you put it up on your shoulder, you flip the sight, shoot it, break it over your leg, toss it, and walk away.
(singing) *ba dum, ba um, bam, ba dum, um bam, ba dum, um bam, da, da, da, da da, um, ba da, ba da, um, da, da, da, da da.*
Now that was easier right? Let’s do one more. This is the F15-Eagle. Our most sophisticated aircraft. It has four air to air sparrow missiles, three external fuel tanks, two internal fuel pouches extend its already incredible range. It has broken eight world records from low to high and is the most maneuverable airplane we have ever built. Now the heart of its fire control system is a Hughes radar, which itself has a range of 100 miles. It is able to identify, detect, and latch onto enemy missiles. In fact, in army tests, 46 out of 47 times it intercepted simulated phantoms. It has an amazing radar screen, enemy missile sights appear with a circle around them. If a missile is launched, it blinks. Airplanes look just like airplanes. Anti-Aircraft appear with the letter ‘A.’ Unidentified threats, the letter ‘U,’ immediate threats a diamond. If a diamond appears, the whole system generates energy, which jams the ICS, or Internal Countermeasure System. This is able to drown and distort enemy-guidance signals. Now all of this is just a little bit expensive. So, what the Pentagon does when it wants to lower costs, is raise production, which necessitates selling overseas. In fact, you might remember it was the F15-Eagle we sold to Saudi Arabia. And it did save the American taxpayers a little bit of money.
Now, for your quiz. I’d like to make it just a little bit more difficult by mixing up the symbols and adding two feelings. One, the awe and wonder I feel at the ability of the human mind to create such incredible systems. And two, well, that’s your quiz.
JENNIFER EDWARDS: Lerman then goes on to talk about a new work that she was developing called ATOMIC PRIESTS. Here she shares both an initiative that the US government was working toward and how she proposed to address it, with dance.
LIZ LERMAN: Its working title is ATOMIC PRIESTS and it has to do with the picture on the back of your programs. You might want to take that out. To reinforce what I said at the beginning, we are in a collecting phase, by this I mean, I am not trying to structure a whole dance. In fact, I’ve given myself a year to make this piece and this is the first two weeks of our rehearsal. So we’re collecting, we’re looking what might possibly work. And what we're going to show you tonight are a series of collections, they do not go together yet. ATOMIC PRIESTS is the story of the Department of Energy report recently published which says that we are sure we know how to bury our toxic waste, we’re pretty sure we know where to bury it. Here’s our problem. It takes 10,000 years to detoxify. That’s the equivalent of 8,000 BC. We’re, we are not sure that the next 300 generations of people, which equals 10,000 years, will understand our symbols. If we warn them to stay away from the dumps because we don’t want them digging, or as the report refers to it, ‘we don’t want human interference,’ how are we gonna make sure that they understand us, since they probably won't be speaking English? What the Department of Energy has proposed is a series of pictures, symbols, and even myths, that we create a series of myths that would keep people away from the sites through superstition. And that only people called ‘Atomic Priests’ would know what was really buried there. The priests being geologists, archaeologists, radiation experts, and other self-selected people. Our desire was to present a dance which would give the information not with me at the microphone, but through the dance, and then have a series of myths that we could show the Department of Energy, and encourage them to choose one that they think might work for 10,000 years. That's what we're gonna start showing you. Now this pictograph that you have in your program is actually one of their suggestions for the kinds of things that we would leave around for our future descendants. And, and the first thing we're gonna do is show you a dance from it. In this case, unlike the words which set the symbols up, we’re counting on the pictures that set up symbols that we might agree upon. So, these are the first five pictures.
The Department of Energy doesn’t know we’re doing this yet, but we’ve made other dances and frequently the government knows what we’re up to. I did a piece about David Stockman’s article in the Atlantic Monthly, if you remember that. And we invited him to come see it and he was very charming about the whole thing. So I don’t know what, I don’t know what they’ll do about this. But you see, we're taking them seriously. I mean, we're really doing what they're saying. And I think maybe it will be helpful then to see what it is they’re thinking about. I hope so.
JENNIFER EDWARDS: As you can see these two artists take a very different approach to consciousness-raising, political art. Dendy weaves a narrative that focuses squarely on the intersection of politics and society. Lerman on the other hand centers policy and government and humanizes systems through her art.
Earlier, Mark Dendy mentioned being a fan of Rachel Maddow and actually she was the featured guest of a 2010 Pillow Talk titled Art and Democracy. Maddow began her talk with a statement that included the intersection of war and political movements with the trajectory of Ted Shawn’s career and his founding and development of the Pillow. In the context of where art and politics intersect, however, I wanted to highlight the following conversation that Maddow had with Scholar in Residence Suzanne Carbonneau. I’ll leave you here as they discuss the politics of government funding as well as the ethical and cultural value of the arts as it reflects on the health and vitality of a nation. I was particularly moved when listening to the role of the arts as outlined in the original charter for the NEA as being, “a mirror for society so that it may become aware of its shortcomings.” In other words, in its founding documents, the National Endowment for the Arts recognizes the functional importance of political art.
SUZANNE CARBONNEAU: It’s amazing to be having a discussion about the arts, talking about them as something that is important, as Rachel was bringing up, for who we are as a people. We don’t, we usually talk about that only in economic terms. And it has occurred to me in this economic crisis that we’re in, that, it seems to me that part of what's happened here is in the ‘80s, when people began turning against the arts as they have been now on a, on, in the public sphere, that is using the arts as a kind of punching bag in the culture wars, that one of the things that we lost was our ethical way. And losing our ethical way seems to me to have led us into this crisis, the military crisis that Rachel talks about, but also the economic crisis where people can game the system. Where they’re only interested in their own benefit and not what they’re doing to other people. And it seems to me that not having the arts is one of, one of the problems that leads us there. I’m wondering if you, what you think about…
RACHEL MADDOW: Yeah, I, I, I think that art is, has a million functions and some of them aren’t functional at all, but one of the ways that they kind of interact with politics and I really think, sort of, national greatness, is that they can be a way to exalt certain things about our way of life, the way we are, and the way we act. They can also be a way to, to bring about accountability for things that the artist judges. And I think that’s why the crisis about NEA funded art in the ‘80s unfolded the way it did is because it was artists who had, were politically minded who were using their art as a form of holding people accountable who really didn’t want to be held accountable by these upstart artists. And so they quashed and demonized art for their own purposes, but also tried to demonize the whole idea that art would be that anyway. You’d hear these arguments made by people against funding the NEA Four saying, ‘why aren’t we funding, you know, the Norman Rockwells of the world? Why aren’t we funding other art that I find to hold me less accountable because I don’t understand it? How dare we fund these people that make me feel bad, or that make me feel less than, less than cosseted about my own country?’ And that’s a way of trying to discipline the art world so it stops, so it stops playing this very important role in keeping us, keeping us, keeping us sort of on the straight and narrow in terms of our ethics, I think that’s right.
SUZANNE CARBONNEAU: And, and in the, actually in the founding legislation for the NEA in 1965, it reads in part, ‘one of the artists’ and humanists’ great values to society is the mirror of self-examination so that society can become aware of its shortcomings as well as its strengths.’ No wonder they’re in trouble, right?
RACHEL MADDOW: Right, as long as, as long as the people whose shortcomings are being pointed out don’t get to decide who gets funding to do art. That seems like a bug in the system.
SUZANNE CARBONNEAU: But of course, of course one of the things that was happening with these, those attacks on the NEA, it was obviously part of larger culture wars that were going on with the attacks on universities, and public intellectuals, and PBS and NPR. But there was an agenda too, this was at a time when AIDS was really in crisis, there was no effective treatment at that time, and it was being treated by the government as a moral crisis rather than a, as a health crisis. And I think those things are actually related. I think this was also an attack on people who are gay who are represented disproportionally in the arts. And so, all of that sort of converged, I think.
RACHEL MADDOW: And I think you've, you've seen this, this happens over time. The, the critique that art is made by degenerates, and that anybody who is, who chooses to primarily define themselves as, as an artist is not, a) not productive towards society, but b) is themselves morally suspect, lacks, or even some sort of source, potential source of infection. So I think you saw that happen around the time of AIDS art and gay art being demonized by, in, in, in the Reagan era. And it all, it all became very explicit, but it’s not, it didn’t just happen then. That's a specific way that artists have been, have been demonized in time. And I, I think that there’s a great speech to be made, and I certainly didn't just make it, but I think there's a great speech to be made. I think there’s, you know, great bumper stickers to be written, I think there is, there’s a little patriotic chest pounding that could be done about what value arts are to a country, not in terms of their propaganda, but in terms of as, in terms of the arts as a sign of our national greatness. That a great country nurtures great artists. And that a great country is measured, the greatness of a country is measured in part by its freedom. And artistic freedom is one of the measures by which a country shows its greatness. And it implies a sort of confidence and a willingness to take, thank you, a sort of, a sort of confidence and resilience. It’s always seemed to me like the most important type of strength is to be able to take a punch, not necessarily to be able to deliver the strongest punch, but to be able, to be able to endure and stay up and keep doing what it was that you were going to be doing. And not being so nudgy, and thin-skinned, and terrified about the way that artists judge people, and judge societies, and hold people accountable is a, is a form of national strength that fell apart, and has repeatedly fallen apart whenever we get censorious. And I think it should be really exalted as one of the things to be proud of as an American when we get it right.
SUZANNE CARBONNEAU: Don’t you think that there’s some idea that’s been floating around since Reagan, that hap, the pursuit of happiness is defined only in economic terms. And so artists come along and suggest that actually there are other ways to define happiness, that there are other ways to want to be part of America and that’s also what makes them suspect?
RACHEL MADDOW: There’s also great art about money and about, even about the pursuit of money. I mean, yeah, I think that, again, we get, we get into territory that I think is uncomfortable. We get into territory that is about whether or not in government support for art you’re asking government to choose the content of art that it supports for its prop, for propaganda purposes. And to not only discriminate against art that it finds challenging, but also to promote art that it finds supports its own political agenda. So yes we need, we need, we need policy that, we need policy that is shaped around support for the arts being important for the country, or the state, or the locality, but we also need a little church and state wall there because artistic freedom can’t be, can’t be anything but protected. You can’t promote artistic freedom, you have to create a fence around artists that allows them to have that freedom.
SUZANNE CARBONNEAU: And in policy terms, how, how would you do that?
RACHEL MADDOW: Well, I think that you have to isolate decisions about content from the people who are controlling the money.
SUZANNE CARBONNEAU: The, the response of the arts world to those attacks have been to start to make the case of the arts as an, as an economic engine. You know, that the arts contributes so many billions of dollars to the economy and to taxes and, and they revive inner cities, and so forth and so on. And the whole idea of, of that the arts do something other than economics has been left out. Do you think the economic, and I, and actually Rocco Landesman, the new NEA chair, was interviewed, the interview appeared in the New York Times today, and he was also talking about the arts as an economic engine. Is that something you think that that’s the way to go or do you think there’s another way to go?
RACHEL MADDOW: I think that’s sort of a, that’s sort of a front parlor argument, you sort of make that with people that you don’t think can absorb larger arguments. You know, it's sort of the condescending argument about arts. It's almost like arts is junior sports, people buy tickets, they sit in rows, they watch, people who have talent and practice do things. You know, we could have stadiums! It's true that arts can be an economic engine. It's also true that if arts were not an economic engine we would have as much of a national interest in promoting them. Because, right, so I think that as, as you said in your first question, in your first remarks I think that arts are necessary food for a national soul and for the ethical fundament on which you build not only your values, but your politics. And without art you’re starving yourself ethically and morally and we need that. So even if it costs money and doesn't make money, and it does happen to make money sometimes, so make that argument to, you know, to the more simple among us, but don't, I don't think that we should talk ourselves into the idea that that is the best reason to support the arts.
[Music begins, composed and performed by Jess Meeker]
NORTON OWEN:That’s it for this episode of PillowVoices. Thank you for joining us today. On behalf of Jacob's Pillow, we look forward to sharing more dance with you through the films, essays, and podcasts at danceinteractive.jacobspillow.org, and of course through live experiences during our festival and throughout the year. Special thanks to the National Endowment for the Arts for helping launch this podcast series. Please subscribe to PillowVoices wherever you get your podcasts and visit us again soon, either online or onsite.