Late Interview with Meg Stuart

Meg Stuart

Meg: You know I kind of… I’ve been making work since ‘91 and I’m kind of… you have to make me write better… I’m proud of having made important work in the contemporary dance world for the last 15 years… oh wait what?

I want to talk about what I did today. I feel like I was metabolising all the impressions I had from Singapore and here, and like media and video art but I’m bringing discourse back to the body. I was just as I walk around as of course I’m absorbing all the impressions and of course Keng Sen said the ritual of forgetting and I think there’ something about not only we’re here but the exchange that we have as artists the space that we share the intimacy of our exchange.

[quoting from her performance in Superintense] Where am I hello I am from here. I used to be here and I want to go there.

And all of these things. Brian said things about contamination and artistic promiscuity, and I think this is something we hadn’t spoken about, we didn’t make a piece together, and there was a moment of free, fair exchange and I started to think, where’s here? I started to think, where is here? All the computers and space - because you have to make a presentation, how much space as an artist, how do I define myself as an artist, how much do I take from myself - you have to always think of your priorities, what’s important to you, and in Vietnam - I love to work with contradictions and things are not black and white, things are gooey, things you can see it from all sides - there’ a very high intense transmission, I think almost superintense, and I can’t bear it when I’m the hotel relaxing; I try to calm down, I don’t feel good about that but today I wanted to buy a shirt but I wanted to negotiate and I turned around the corner and I got lost and they kept on saying what do you want what do you want madam and I think it’s wonderful we were making this artistic exchange and it had no value to it and all these crowds are coming up and if I were to go onstage with Choy [referring to Ka Fai, who is videoing this speech] or something - the fact that I’m talking to you, I’m talking like this, but I’m talking to Choy, I wouldn’t - your space affects mine, you get what I’m saying?

And I wanted to express my pleasure - there I can work on this big stage, but I can go through a process.

Ka Fai: Actually somewhere along your presentation, everything started to make sense to me. But in the idle point your sense and our moments started to make sense - that became interesting.

Meg: But improv is not about being in the emotion, about - when you work with musicians, they have samples and material before, and in any great project everything is improv, you blur the boundaries and an eloquent speaker, they say something, before they make it immediate it becomes of that moment, it’s truth at that point and I think in a way a photographer, just to absorb that process.

[Referring to Mark and Luigi’s survey on the cardinal directions] The fact that they said I had to look at the questionnaire about North, South - of course that made the question, where am I? Who am I? All those issues create the work, all those dialogues create the work. It’s a pity we don’t go on one more week. And this issue of censorship was very strong for me; the fact that these people can’t speak what they want to, speak and it’s also about language, I speak another language… yeah, blah blah blah blah blah…

YS: That was intense.

Meg: (laughs like crazy)