After almost a decade since Heaven, their Walker-commissioned collaborative investigation of perfection and spirituality, Morgan Thorson and Alan Sparhawk have come together again to create Public Love, an intimate act of resistance against an encroaching physical power. Thorson and Sparhawk have a close and fruitful artistic relationship that brings the best out of both artists; they put each other in places of both inspiration and challenge in order to truly uncover the intricacies of what the other is doing. Fresh off a critically acclaimed album release with his Duluth-based band Low, Sparhawk will be embracing the pervasive powers of low frequencies to physically interact with the large list of dance-collaborators as well as Thorson’s open yet precise method of choreography. We sat down and tried to expand on some of the themes that will be present in the show, including questions of power, agency over one’s own body, and where dance meets music on the map of modern art.
Landon Kuhlmann (LK)
This new collaboration, Public Love, seems to be just as much about touch and the touching of separate bodies as it is about movement and the space that movement takes up. With that notion of touch, concerning the composition of the piece, you’re drawing out the power of reciprocal touch in a way that feels almost like a subtle act of resistance. Was that an idea that was awakened by our current climate of division and toxic masculinity, or has this been a collection of longstanding themes that you’ve been waiting and wanting to explore?
Morgan Thorson (MT)
So, Public Love definitely is a response to the difficult times that we’re in. To that end, I think the first thematic focus was power. Alan and I, even early on, talked about this monolithic sense of power creatively and how that could expand to generate sustained acts of creativity but also encompass unknown areas of interest. In the unknown areas of interest, we came upon tenderness. Tenderness as a manifest of power. And also tactility, tactility is an act of love: touching someone is an act of love, but it’s also a way of interconnecting bodies. Because as you touch, you are being touched.
I feel like that’s a really nice parallel to how dance and music work together—specifically, as Alan was interested in researching these low frequencies, and how tactile and textured the space becomes, not only aurally and sonically, but actually, physically. It actually transcends the container of the body, and you can feel it in deep, deep ways within the core of your body. Maybe even in a deeper spiritual way. We’re magnetic creatures, and frequencies affect how we resonate in spaces. But I feel like we started with this idea of Public Love, and part of Public Love is just having the courage to be simple and specific in your research.
Alan Sparhawk (AS)
When Morgan first came to me with the first fragments of this, she was talking about power, the power that an individual can exude, the power that is influenced over us. And immediately she said it was combined with this idea of… I guess I’ll say intimacy. The touching, the texture. It’s interesting because there’s both; it goes hand in hand with this conflict of power. A lot of times we use this language that power is exerted from far away.
Immediately, the thing I started thinking about was when is it close, when is it touching you, when is it right inside you, and when is it far away? What is the difference between the power that something far away exerts, and how does it do that? Is it tricking a figure into believing that it is within them or that’s part of them or that’s everywhere? Is it everywhere, or is it coming from a specific place?
Different frequencies are directional. Low frequencies are not directional, but just everywhere. Higher frequencies are directional, and they’re very specific. The movement of the body against cloth. The unwrapping of something that is tactile, that is moveable but also has its own noise, its own sound, its own reaction to movement. Morgan has always worked with blurring the lines between the dance and the generation of sound.
There’s something about low frequencies; it’s closer to the physicality. My hope is to actually have them be physical a little bit more, physical touch. There’s something about the low end that becomes very intimate. If you’re in a room with it happening, it penetrates into your body, so to speak. I guess I keep coming back to this word intimate. What is this power? It could feel like an outside power, or it could feel one with you, sometimes.
MT
The other layer to this is that I wanted to undermine the hierarchies that exist in choreography, specifically. Dance, historically—I’m talking about white, concert dance—has a method in which the choreographer has the most power, designating what we do, and then everybody learns it and is taught by the choreographer. In this project, all of the dancers are co-creators. They’ve developed their own material, largely.
I sit outside, and I’m creating frames for people so that their eyes are drawn around the choreographic field to different moments and different events in the field. I’m really relying on the ensemble to tell me about the nature of the interior of the dance and trying to focus that as the epicenter, the moving epicenter of the trajectory of this work, instead of choreographing for an outside eye.
AS
It’s been interesting. I’ve tried to reflect that with the sound interaction.
LK
Is one of the mediums—the choreography and the music as separate things—more reactive to the other? Or has the goal been to create this symbiosis where they run parallel and are constantly building off of each other?
AS
Well, usually music is very loose and conceptual. A lot of times I feel like the music is the most moveable and both the last and the most in-the-moment thing. There are certainly sections where I’m particularly like, this needs to happen, and there’s some spots in the piece where there are some cues, there are some moments where, OK, I know this sound needs to happen here or maybe there’s some silence here.
I’m really inspired with how loose and up in the air Morgan keeps things. As detailed as the piece is, and as detailed as each section and each concept and idea is, it’s still very liquid and very in the air, very open to the moment. The dancer has options in the moment. I guess I like to keep it that way. I’ve found I get a lot of inspiration out of just seeing the dancers work through stuff, work through ideas. I’m usually not terribly hung up on: OK, it’s gotta be this way, it’s gotta be that way.
I think it’s loose, and the dancers know at least some of the world that I’m going to be in and some of the things that are gonna happen. But the most satisfying things, with this and then with past work with Morgan, have been the things that are surprises, the moments where something unexpected happens and the dancers were just so in tune and so immersed in the full concept that a new moment would happen. Whether it was just timing or a feeling, sometimes the unexpected thing will happen to something that you’ve rehearsed a thousand times, and suddenly the light is on.
MT
There is a section in the dance that was developed based on the music/dance relationship in our very first residency. It’s not a terribly long section, but I just want to say that, right away, the low-frequency environment generated a lot of physical response from the dancers. We’ve gone in a lot of different directions since that time and really fine-tuned our research points. It, too, is a sort of fluid section that occurs within the show, and it mirrors Alan’s method for generating and playing sound during the show. There’s a really direct relationship, and in some ways, it also is opposite. It does appear to be very regimented in time and space.
It is both ways. And there’s been this other element, this sculptural element that came in, took its own life. This massive overtaking of the space that happens in the piece. When we first started, I had no idea that would be there. And it’s there, and it’s really spectacular. It’s kind of metaphorically my favorite moment in the show, and everybody gets taken over by it. It could be read on so many different levels what’s going on.
LK
Alan, are we going to be seeing you doing any movement in this performance?
AS
Yeah. So far I’m part of the visual field, and there’s definitely some interaction. I’m always envious, of course, of the dancers. There’s something so inspiring about their tone and the primal experiences of movement, and the discipline that they have is so inspiring to me. But, yeah, I try not to stick out too bad.
MT
It’s really great, because also in this show—talking about displacing power or reimagining power—there’s a lot of mundane activity, actually. There’s some very task-based activity that getsforegrounded in a very pronounced way, as if to suggest that all these actions are choreography. It doesn’t have to be rarefied, what we call virtuosic dance material, to be choreography. We have lots of different kinds of trainings represented on stage. Alan’s training is as a runner and a guitar player and a band member; he has a lot of stamina.
LK
I was watching the interview you did in 2010 about your first collaboration, Heaven. In the discussion you got into this notion of perfection, whether that be personal or religious perfection. Would you say that Public Love is so different from Heaven because it is now investigating, like you said, openness and interconnectedness and togetherness? Do you see that as a different investigation, or is that somehow related?
MT
I think Heaven was more about the skeptic in me. I was needing a different kind of medium to channel my own belief systems, in existence on this planet, but in other dimensions. I would say now, no, we are dealing with this temporal space right now, and we cannot fuck around anymore. Our planet is dying; we’re killing each other in the most horrendous ways. I have close friends that are dealing with intense racism on a daily basis. Also, I live in a neighborhood where I see trafficked individuals all the time. Our culture is super sick. I think Heaven was literally a spiritual situation, and this is more on the ground, like no, Heaven is right now, and if we don’t fix this, we’re going to lose. We’re going to lose. We are losing already.
AS
This is very much your body, your heart, the connections with each other. It’s much more immediate and much more real—and visceral. Maybe more primal. Heaven was more us trying to reach beyond the animal, reach above humanness. This is more embracing the reality of the primal need to the primal desire, the primal connection.
LK
It feels like as close as just nine years ago, when Heaven was made, that there was more room for artists to explore more things. But now it seems as though there’s so much less space because we’re reacting to this closing in, this violence, and this power and these terrible things. It reminds me, Alan, at the Low record release show, someone in the crowd asked you, “Hey, is this album a response to the Trump administration?” And your answer was something along the lines of: who isn’t responding to this climate right now? What artist is not doing this, because it’s so hard to avoid it? Is that what this piece has come from, this kind of claustrophobic feeling?
MT
I would say yes. Choreography can be really brutal in some ways, because dancers are asked over and over to do the same thing, over and over, and sometimes doing something beyond their skill set. In this situation, I’m making a proposition. Dancers are working it out. And we talked about, right away, consent and refusal. We all don’t have to agree and, actually, people can refuse to do things. Which is not really how it works in the studio for dancers. Usually, the dancers do whatever they can to please the choreographer, and we’re trying to get away from that. That’s the #MeToo movement. People got sucked into situations where people abused other people’s willingness to be around them.
LK
That’s so interesting to me, this idea that not only are all these themes present in the performance itself that the audience will experience, but those are present in the construction of the performance as well, this idea of consent and the dancers doing what they want to and what they maybe don’t want to.
MT
From this research, I realized I get to talk about touch. I get to talk about how people touch one another, and if people want to say no, and they don’t want to be touched, because dance obviously involves touch, and you have to say yes to all kinds of touch, often, and it’s not always comfortable. When I was working in Hawaii last month, I was with 15-year-old girls, and I was like: “Look, we’re going to figure out how to touch each other, because actually we’re the only ones who are going to take care of each other. You really need to know how to touch one another in a way that is comforting and intimate and can protect one another. Because that’s what we have to do now.” So it’s in there, it’s definitely in there. It’s awesome to be able to teach that.
LK
I’m really interested in how this piece took shape around, if it did take shape around, the space it’s being performed in, the McGuire Theater, whether it be the darkness or the way that the audience sort of hugs the stage. I know you had some residencies here and spent some time in there. Was it shaped around the space, and if so, in what ways?
MT
Right away we talked about it. Alan brought up, in the very beginning, proximity, the audience, and their position within the notion of proximity. One of the propositions that we’ve worked with is that the audience is close. They’re very close, even though they may not be. What does that mean, what are the implications of that, in creating the overall composition, in the scenario that they are distant? Can we also invite their gaze to be tactile and touching the work? So it’s not just them sitting back in their chair and letting it happen to them. Can their gaze be an interactive element in the creation of the work? In that way, I feel like from a dance standpoint, we’ve addressed the McGuire.
AS
It’s a great space there. It’s very, very intense sound.
MT
There’s no hierarchy to the aural experience, because the aural experience from any location is going to be shaped towards that area. Certainly in this show there are seats where, at one moment, you’re going to be able to see some things that other people can’t see, and in another moment you’re not going to be able to see something, but you’re going to see sort of an angled view into what would conventionally be off stage.
AS
I remember we talked early on about trying to blur the lines of the border: where’s the stage, where’s the performance, where’s even, you know, an end?The idea that hopefully that would then blur the lines between what is the space of the audience? Where is the audience? Also low-end frequencies are not directional, they just kind of go everywhere. You could feel those frequencies surrounding you, even though they might be coming from a different place.
LK
Alan, I’m curious. Where is the sound going to be coming from? Are we going to be experiencing a mixture of live sound and pre-recorded things being remixed and played? Or is it all going to be live?
AS
It’s live. I’m generating the sound there. The set-up I have is such that it needs tending. It’s like I’m kind of stirring and stewing. I’m adding and slowly subtracting, pushing and pulling things. It’s definitely in the moment: I have to be there. It’s not that there’s a lot of specific cues or that I’m playing to the dancers, but it has to be being made at the same time.
There’s an element there that for me is really vital. It’s vital to be there, creating at the same time. I think there’s a psychology to the dance. To be a dancer, my hunch is there’s a different perception in your mind when you’re playing to something that’s already set, and you know how it’s going to go. It’s going to go like this and this and this and end here. As opposed to someone who is there, actually in the moment, also on the stage, also at this very moment in the linear trajectory, reacting—or at the very least, in the same moment performing or creating. Maybe it’s a selfish thing, I feel like I draw an energy of the dancers.
LK
To what degree is improvisation or spontaneity involved in choreography? I guess that answer is going to be different, because your process is so different with allowing the dancers to do what they want.
MT
I think that there are different layers of spontaneity within the piece. Certainly there’s improvisation initially—that is, scored dancing, to develop an idea or to develop a strand of material in time. And then we go through a process of gifting. I would generate material, and then I would dance it. Then you could make comments about it and draw out what you think are the essential qualities of the strand of material that I danced for you. So there’s a spontaneity in that dialogue, and I think that resonates throughout the piece. For example, there’s also moments in the show that are supposed to feel incredibly spontaneous and look spontaneous, but they may be highly orchestrated.
AS
I love that a lot of your material, the most strictly choreographed stuff, sometimes comes off looking very random, but there’s no way it could have happened unless you had it very strictly choreographed.
MT
Partially that’s borne out of the process, and I’m like, whoa, that material reads as very thin, it could fall apart any moment. And then it goes through the process that we’ve talked about. There’s certainly material that is actually scored and not set material. I struggle with using the word improvisation with dance. Conventionally, people think, “Oh no, it’s not set. They’re just getting out there and doing whatever they want.” And I hate that. Because we’ve worked our asses off to be in this moment. We’re setting up parameters to be in a stream of creativity. It’s not whatever we want. It’s not freedom.
AS
Oh, yeah. It’s the difference between someone just making vocal sounds that don’t mean anything, that are completely spontaneous. It’s the difference between that and then someone learning the language and going, OK, now I’m going to freely speak. You’re still using that language; that’s the vehicle for the improvisation to ride on. In my observation, the way you work, if there’s any improvised moments, they’re deeply rooted in a lot of control and choreography, if you want to call it that.
LK
Generally speaking, what sort of things have you learned from working with one another that you’re going to take back to your own process, to your own practice and medium?
AS
I’m always inspired by Morgan, the way she includes the dancers. It’s different each time with different projects. She’s very particular about the place of the dancer, what their interaction is, how the creative process involves them. What is their presence? To me, there’s always a very inspiring interaction she begins with the dancers. I feel that influences me. I’ve always relied on collaborating with people. That always changes, depending on where you are in your life, where your perspectives are, what you’re trying to get done.
I really have grown, I think, from the examples, seeing Morgan and the way she involves her dancers. The discipline that goes into it, the time spent. This last record we just did took a long time. We’d work, we’d step away from it for a while, think about it, conceptualize, rethink, sometimes in despair. We’d go back to it again and keep working. Dance takes a long time. That, to me, has really been revealing—and pretty vital to us being able to do what we’ve done the last couple of years.
I’m really inspired by the dancers. I feel like whenever I’m around them for more than a day or two, I feel like I’m so much more in tune with movement, body. I look at things, and I see things differently around me, even just inanimate objects. People moving. It really opens my eyes in a really beautiful way. And then just the individual dancers, too. They’re all really inspiring characters.
MT
I get two different kinds of messages from Alan. One is simplicity. Where are you starting from, where is it going, and can you stick with that for a while Another thing he always says is, “Yeah, I can bring out my guitar, but…” That’s gonna be a thing. So then I’m reminded, even though I love the guitar and I push back sometimes, I’m like, yeah, the guitar comes with a lot of trappings. A lot of trappings about masculinity, a lot of trappings about a three-minute pop song. There are layers of convention that I’m reminded of musically, and also just in terms of performance.
The third thing that comes to mind was structure. Sometimes, he says things that I already know, but it’s nice to know. He’s like, “If you repeat this again, people are going go oh, yeah, now the next time that green light goes on, then I know they’re going to stand in a line.” You start linking things, and help the audience create a sort of expectation and then undermine it. I love undermining the expectation from the get-go, and I think Alan does, too.
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