Walker Art Center presents
Trajal Harrell
The Köln Concert
Tuesday–Wednesday, November 7 & 8, 2023
8:00 pm
McGuire Theater
The Köln Concert
Music by KEITH JARRETT and JONI MITCHELL
By TRAJAL HARRELL / SCHAUSPIELHAUS ZÜRICH DANCE ENSEMBLE
Direction, Choreography, Set, Soundtrack, and Costumes
TRAJAL HARRELL
Performers
NEW KYD, MARIA FERREIRA SILVA, TRAJAL HARRELL, THIBAULT LAC, NOJAN BODAS MAIR, SONGHAY TOLDON, ONDREJ VIDLAR
Lighting
SYLVAIN RUSA
Dramaturgy
KATINKA DEECKE
Music use by arrangement with ECM Records
Program
Draped in black, Harrell and six dancers release their energy on stage in response to Keith Jarrett’s best-selling jazz piano recording, The Köln Concert. This personal and entrancing work set to Jarrett’s soul-baring, gospel-fused improvisations is introduced by four songs of intimate vulnerability from Joni Mitchell’s masterpiece Blue. Together, the music and dancing synthesize Harrell’s influences, ranging from voguing and post-modern dance to ancient Greek mythology and Japanese Butoh dance.
As soon as you hear the music, you just know that it was written for you.
“Your” music also brings you closer to your dancing. You’re searching for your dance when you’re a choreographer and all of a sudden you hear this music and it opens up a whole world.
- Trajal Harrell
Learn More
The following is an excerpt of an interview with Trajal Harrell by Philip Bither, the McGuire Director and Senior Curator of Performing Arts, in advance of Harrell's North American tour with the Schauspielhaus Zürich Dance Ensemble this fall.
PB
I wanted to ask if you could talk about your earliest memories of hearing the recording of The Köln Concert by Keith Jarrett, and also the beautiful four songs you’ve drawn from Joni Mitchell’s Blue, which opens up the program, and what your personal relationship is with that music.
TH
The first time I heard The Köln Concert was at Tower Records, on one of those CD players in the store where you could listen to music. I just didn’t know music like that existed, and I remember being so overwhelmed with something I couldn’t describe; it was like joy, melancholy, and I wanted to cry. I wanted to scream. I was just so happy because I didn’t know that existed, and it was something like coming home somehow. I understood this music so viscerally, and I knew it was a mix of something that I had never heard before.
I kept listening to it and knew I wanted to make a dance to this, but there was no way I was ready. There was no way. I held onto it for a long time, and it just became one of my very, very special pieces that I just kept listening to throughout life.
In Zürich, it was the second season, and we were bringing a lot of my pieces back—Antigone Sr., Maggie the Cat—a lot of them were going to come to Zürich, but then Covid hit. Since during Covid everything had to be socially distant, they asked me to make all those pieces socially distant, which I didn’t feel I could do because I didn’t want people to see not the actual live, in-person pieces. They countered by asking me to make a new piece. I thought, “Okay. Well, I’ll have the dancers sit on a piano stool. Each will have their own piano stool. They’ll be socially distant.”
At a certain point, it popped in my head: “Piano, piano, piano stool. Oh, okay. Maybe it’s time to think about The Köln Concert.” I told the dramaturge, “I’m thinking about The Köln Concert, but I cannot commit to it yet. I need to listen to it. I need to think about it.” I really didn’t feel I was ready. I just knew something was not right, to put on The Köln Concert and dance.
Then one afternoon I was sitting alone at home listing to Joni Mitchell, and I said, “Oh, wow.” I could feel the connection between Joni and Keith Jarrett, how they’re both influenced by the blues. I thought, “What if I don’t put on The Köln Concert and just press play? What if we frame The Köln Concert as a concert, and Joni Mitchell opens for Keith Jarrett?” Then I felt that I could do it and we could tackle it.
It came out of love, a lot of serendipity, and time alone during Covid. It was also knowing that The Köln Concert is something very big, and I wanted to respect it. The best way to respect it was not to try to match it, but to try to frame my admiration and love for it.
PB
There was a lot of stress and struggle when Keith Jarrett’s The Köln Concert was first performed in 1975. Then I think about Joni Mitchell’s emotional duress during writing Blue. They both surmounted obstacles, and I wondered if Covid was a parallel for you. You seemed to have surmounted and made a beautiful work.
TH
The show is about survival. That, despite the suffering, I’m still here. I’m still walking. I’m still trying to dance. I’m still trying to move through life.
This is always an aspect of my work. I’m a tragedian. I work a lot with tragedy, so I didn’t need Covid to give me that. Right now, I don’t have a perspective on it yet. I think it’s going to take a number of years before we can really look at it or really examine it.
For me, dance has so much been about strength—these strong, powerful bodies. I’m trying to show weak bodies. What does it mean to be weak? That’s what’s very important to me, and that’s what I’ve been investigating. Whether you call it fragility or vulnerability, it’s a weakness, and the work is giving space to that.
We’re always told to be strong, and I wanted to say, “But sometimes I’m weak, and I just need to be okay that I’m weak.” For me, that’s very important to show on stage, because I think it hasn’t always been there.
PB
That is beautiful. When I saw your piece, I hadn’t listened to the record for a number of years, and I forgot how it seems to be drenched in the music and history of American Black church.
TH
You hit the nail on the head. There’s the blues, gospel—it’s all there. In American studies, we know that these things are part of the American culture. This is in Leroi Jones’ (Amiri Baraka) Blues People.
It’s the Americanization of the blues and the blues influence in America. It’s a back-and-forth conversation. It certainly is not the only way.
PB
When we last talked on camera seven years ago, you mentioned that as an artist gets older, it is important that they get better and go deeper. How do you see that going forward for yourself, and are there any inspirations from history or from other cultural elements that you’re drawn to that you expect will influence your future work?
TH
It goes back to a person getting more opportunities, but even with those opportunities it doesn’t get easier. The performing doesn’t get easier, and I want to be a better performer. I want to be able to give more. I feel like I give 200 percent, but I feel like, to really master this, you have to give 500 percent. How do you get up there?
This might take a little bit of time yet, but I do feel like my current period of research into butoh will end. Previously, I did ten years of the research into early postmodern dance and the voguing dance tradition. After that I began my current period looking at butoh in early modern dance. I think I have about two or three more years in that and then I will change periods. I’m not quite sure what I will do, but I will make another change in the work. Maybe it’ll be the last period of my work. I don’t know, but I can feel that I need and want to make a change.
Full Interview Here: The Power of Weakness: Trajal Harrell in Conversation with Philip Bither (walkerart.org)
Accessibility notes
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About the Artist
The American choreographer TRAJAL HARRELL gained global recognition with his series of works Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church and is now a regular guest on the international dance and visual arts circuit. The unique style of Trajal Harrell’s works is a result not just of the unusual way in which he combines dance languages that might seem very distant from each other, such as voguing, postmodern dance and butoh, but also and above all of the fragility and humour that pervade all his work. Aesthetically, his pieces are always an homage to the people standing on stage. He clothes them in carefully selected fabrics, draws major inspiration from developments in haute couture (which he sometimes uses on stage directly), and his highly personal style of movement turns his performers into unusual and autonomous beings. He also performs in most of his pieces himself. In recent years, his work has not just been increasingly adopted in the visual arts world; he has also directed a succession of powerful pieces for the theatre. These include for example his reworking of Sophocles’ Antigone, the free adaptation he developed of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and with Maggie The Cat, a new look on Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
Trajal Harrell has been leading a dance company at the Schauspielhaus Zürich since 2019, the Schauspielhaus Zürich Dance Ensemble. Harrell brought New Kyd, Frances Chiaverini, Seyda Harjo Grahn, Perle Palombe, Songhay Toldon and Ondrej Vidlar to Zürich, where they have been permanent ensemble members since 2019.
The Schauspielhaus Zürich Dance Ensemble regularly tours internationally; since fall 2021, it has been a guest in Rome, Brussels and Leipzig, with further stops in Paris, New York, Berlin, Vienna, Amsterdam, Venice and many more.
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