 So, welcome everybody back here to the Modney Segal Theater Center at the Graduate Center. Clearly we had a one-hour break since our workshop and one hour in New York City is a very long time. This is a half-time, but we will check their mails, go on, do the other things, but also we felt it is most significant to our participants at the workshop. So, we're going to have this talk tonight here at the Segal Center which is being recorded and live-streamed and will also serve as an archival event and it's our great honor to have Michael Kling here with us. And as it reads in our brochure, he's a choreographer and artist and is considered one of Europe's most notable thinkers in contemporary dance and choreography. He has been commissioned by leading institutions including Ballet-Frankfort, Martha Graham Dance Company, the new museum, Irish Museum of Modern Art, the Hallward's Gallery and other places. As the artistic director and CEO of DAGDA, he developed an extended socio-political engaged choreography referred to as a social choreography. It's a very significant, we think also groundbreaking concept and we are thrilled to have you here with us. It encompasses interdisciplinary thinking, writing, curation and centrally choreography that works equally at home in performing and fine arts. He was awarded a PhD from Edinburgh College in Arts in 2009 and in 2017 Michael took up a position of Associate Professor of Practice and Dance at Duke University and so it's a great honor to have you here. I also participated in the Blackboard Choreography piece which he once also did here in New York and with us here is Corey who's a PhD student at the program. It was actually Corey who came to me and said, this work is so significant we should do everything possible to get Michael here and we might have done it anyway to others but still it happened also because of you and this is also significant for us. The Siegel Center bridges academia and professional theater, international and American theater and the idea of a dramaturgy dance, it becomes more and more central. The dance dramaturgy or the dramaturgical ideas for contemporary choreography are central we think to what is really groundbreaking avant-garde theater ensemble work done by companies like a Castellucci or Fabre or many many others and so it is a really significant event to have Michael here with us. So this will be a conversation mostly between Corey and Michael. Michael will also give a bit of talk, he prepared some thoughts on it. We have a microphone on because it is also live streamed and we welcome our viewers from around the great partner to do that it will also be later on in our archive. So thank you all also who were here for participating and maybe we will start right away. So Michael, we said it is the first New York iteration but you said that something a workshop happened before and I am going to give you my mic. So tell us how was it today? What did you not see? It was really amazing. I didn't see it. How many people of you were actually part of this now? Only three people were. A bit close to the mic. So 70%. So sorry for speaking to you through a microphone but that is Frank said it is for the recording purposes otherwise we would just sit around in the circle and chat. I didn't see it. So why don't you want to be in the room and tell us a bit about the work? Well Parliament started probably around 2012 or 11 my first thoughts around creating this work and I moved to Greece at that time during the height of the economic crisis and you really felt like that society was a wound was breaking open and it became very fragile the social fabric as it still is but at that point it was like this breaking open of the wound which was very strange to witness and be part of it as well in some way and I was kind of trying to think how to respond to that. I met myself in a lot of protests that you saw on television with being tear gassed and without really knowing because I don't speak Greek what's going on just to kind of get a sense of the situation and I thought what can be done and I felt like there was so much finger pointing like everybody in Greece knew who to blame like the lawyers blamed the judges, the politicians, the politicians blamed Europe and if you would make a diagram it was just one big blame game and what I thought is the whole perception of our own self being in the world is so wrong and it's so problematic and we just ignore that we have no way no understanding of being sustainably in the world as Shisek says we have no way of imagining the end of capitalism like what comes after there's no way of imagining these things because we don't experience other forms and we're so baked out of this system we've been so growing, it's our system, it's what we have collectively created and now individually we hate it but we have no idea and no vision of how to get out of it because the thinking that is available to us is from this certain goes through that modality that created the system and I've always been interested in systems I mean my PhD is this kind of cybernetic systems theory philosophy of systems theory, system theory, meeting, choreography and then I started just by T, I told a lot around that time guest professor at various different universities and I just tried out different scores and over about three years I honed them in and got them more and more precise and then did one work, not this work, on a rooftop on a Greek island which was parliament, the first time there was really parliament on a roof top and there's a video, there's a really beautiful video documentation of this as well and after that I put it in the Pinaki Museum which is one of the major museums in Athens for two weeks and then it started to have a life until the first time and then here in New York I did it as a private thing for the Mastergram Company and it was videoed off by a gigant couple who's like a fantastic documentary filmmaker, British filmmaker very highly esteemed, but we never had the money to actually edit it so it just lies in a hard disk in my drawer and then it went to the National Museum when I went to Duke I brought it kind of as my introduction to Duke to bring as many different professors and students to the table to experience that and so it ran for a week at the National Museum which was very satisfactory I think like in the sense of arriving and getting into serious discussions with a lot of different faculty from different fields of knowledge and introducing this kind of thinking in a different way What's the video that's playing behind us now? This is not Parliament, but I really like it and I don't show it very often because it can't access it usually and I actually thought what should I show and this is a good work to show, it's called Jerusalem and it's again a choreography for Greece it's called choreography for Greece as well as a subtitle and it's really made for the Athens Festival it was commissioned by the Athens Festival where I worked with 18 I think predominantly non-dancers that were curated from all over they were really carefully curated in terms of we wanted a very diverse population in terms of socioeconomic background that reflected Greece in some way and then put them towards an ecstatic kind of situation and design or choreograph provide a ritual to really flatten social structure and it was surprisingly successful in the sense that it turned into this kind of strange love fest like everybody who took part kind of fell in love with each other and it was this complete diverse body of people and could observe them as an audience member falling in love and it just didn't matter who and what the identities just were very raised in front of you it was very powerful to watch the audience was really in tears it's just an emotional strange thing and also it was totally porous so audience members could join this situation there was no defined clear cut instructions and kids would join people with special needs would join some people with special needs were also officially in the cast and it was similar to Parliament the whole thing was three days of rehearsals and then three days of performances so a very very fast process and it wouldn't work if it's a slow process like this particular work needs this unfamiliarity with each other it needs this awkwardness, it needs this strangeness still and this freshness, it does something so it can't be faster, it can't be slower other work, I worked very long periods of time and it was produced right after Parliament there's a strange invisible link between these two works and I always think maybe that because they're both done in Greece at a certain particular time so they have to have something in common I wonder, could you talk about social choreography more broadly I don't know if that is something I mean when I first met you and first got to know your work, that was the first time that I encountered social choreography as an idea and I remember the conversations we had then it was a couple of years ago, three years ago so you were struggling still with what social choreography is or could be, maybe a direct quote I'm still struggling, I mean if I get like two hours to talk about social choreography it's a lot easier than if I get like two minutes to figure out what it is but I equally think that speaks to the beauty that is still an emerging field that we haven't found the language fully for it that we are still grappling, that we have a lot of prototypes and actually a lot of work that we have already realized not just from pieces in terms of artwork but actually in institutional interventions and institutional work in building up kind of semi-utopian institutions and running them over years but what did, how do I even start what I think social choreography is it recognizes the fact that A we are deeply embodied and most of our life is happening on an unconscious level and that our way we understand our embodiment like how we make conscious our embodiment and the maps we draw out of that, of our environment directly determines the institutions and the nations and the interactions we build and this is recursively informing itself so the institutions then inform our understanding of embodiment and how we think ourselves into the world and as part of this kind of social choreographic drive we feel like that we are just absolutely skewed in our understanding of us living in the context, end of our context of how we live in our context and the maps we draw out of it so what I'm trying to do is this intervention and different people who, it's not just me who works in social choreography so I mentioned Steve Falk who is a big figure in social choreography in that sense but I work very much on the level of embodiment and I'm interested in going to this darkness which probably is like a kind of psychedelic embodiment where you, and psychedelic in the sense of the word means revealing the mind so where you almost thunderstruck of you taking out of your normal social understanding of the situation and you're dipped into a psychedelic situation where you're not where it's dark but it's also pretty sane and I've heard that a lot in parliament like I was just sitting there for two hours rocking and I said, oh I'm sorry and they were like, no, no, this is, I've never felt sane in my whole life so you have this strange thing that actually what we think of mental illness everything is becoming kind of questioned again and breaks open that way and there is a darkness at the edge of consciousness that needs to be interrogated and I think it brings out a different way of relating a different way of listening again and a different way of thinking of ourselves within ecological structures within an ecology to understand our own belonging within it rather than thinking ourselves out of it and behave as if we are not part of this so that's my, I find that's my role like I create this kind of very strange methodologies like technologies and I see them as technologies like I don't see them this work as artwork I of course do because I have a career as an artist but in a way I also don't like I'm super happy communities take it up this work to do their work and to really, like in ancient Greece you had to go to the theatre as a good citizen this was part of citizen education it wasn't optional you had to go weekly to the theatre and I like this notion of thinking this is an act of citizenship to do parliaments to engage yourself in these kind of situations it should be an active part of citizenship yeah, so that's mine and Steve would work very much on an institutional level I just want to add that like he just goes and gets institutions to dance and gets them into a psychedelic state of panic and that's his role The Baker's Union in Frankfurt, right? Yeah, well it's an ungrateful role but he really goes into institutions and it's not institutional critique at all like it's not institutional critique in terms of he doesn't make art at all he works in the social services but he goes there and connects almost where people create blind spots and he erases blind spots and he connects every institution with everything else like a child would in a childlike manner and it creates amazing synergies but also the institutions can't carry it like they're overwhelmed they're like panicking they're losing their identity and it's always a struggle but it's a life-giving struggle because it bursts something and the institution doesn't even know they do social choreography at the end but they're proud of that baby that they first Have you read Emergent Strategy or do you know Emergent Strategy? No, but... I've just been... because I read it for the first time pretty recently and have been thinking about it a lot in the context of social choreography and both of these sort of levels the level that you're talking about the level of embodiment that you work on and the institutional level that Steve works on it's actually a book that's really big in activist circles right now the author's name is Adrienne Marie Brown but the argument is that in order to really create large level change we need to embody that change and enact the vision we want to see at even the smallest micro level in one-to-one relationships and then within smaller... within activist organizations and then sort of scaling up from there but it's also very explicitly taking an ecological and sort of systems-based metaphor as the impetus for doing it It makes complete sense my early work, even before when I go right back when I was still working in Contemporary Ballet I was really concerned with modeling emergence like modeling, using mathematical models of how to model emergence behavior amongst different agents I just gone away from a more kind of western view in a traditional scientific view maybe of modeling things and go more into an experiential lived embodied view and approach which suits me a lot better and I feel more comfortable in that Something you were saying before brought up a question for me that I always have about this kind of work which is how should it be critiqued or how should it be written about or how would you like to see it written about or evaluate it is a bad term We just talked about this that actually Parliament has never been written about even though it's been two exhibitions in prominent museums it's been around it's been video installations in museums the video played in different museums and there are a thousand people who did it roughly but the writing seems difficult it seems like where do you even start and it cannot be critiqued I wouldn't care for a traditional critique so it's something that writes out of itself I guess and you have to put it within the framework of ideas I think as you say with these emerging strategies if it sits within the framework of ideas to kind of illustrate then I think that would make sense I just want to point out most of you of course were here but how truly radical this idea of a social choreography is like Brecht and his Derstich who was the first to say we can do theatre without audience he said workers should play with the factory owners and switch roles and you don't need anybody watching it it's an experience it should at Michael said it should change your life it should change your view and he did today of course it's an instruction based art he had instructions we could type them up I think or give out people could happen anywhere, even without you anywhere in the world in a safe space so it's an art form that doesn't have the central godlike figure anymore there's not a writer, there's not the choreographer there's no director there's decentralization which is a radical thing and we have seen it of course in contemporary theatre look at the work of a Robert Wilson you know were light and sound and movement and text and costumes sculptures equally distributed nothing is worth more or less but already their text is no longer in the centre of it ballet and movement of course it never really was but there was always the vision of the genius artist of a Balanchine or Joan Robbins of a Mark Morris Mark says no I won't even have to be in the room I can go out so he says it's more important for me that there's this interaction social choreography between people that's more significant than my realization as a great choreographer which you of course are or could do so it's a radical radical reinterpretation of what dance is about choreography is about it's a democratization there could be professional great dancers of the company the grand company but also someone who walks in from the street and they have something to say they experience an atmosphere what you talk about so there's something which is very hard to communicate or write about or to do because normally as a spectator you're supposed to be in a seat and applaud billion people who are experts in what they're doing here you are asked to be in the room and participate however you want to do something or nothing it's up to you it is a model why theater or dance is interesting because it's a model for something it stands for something symbolically but also for real happens on the stage it happens in a room it can happen in the real world and that kind of symbolic representation of a vision for a 21st century you know work of art is I think it's very very strong and of course it's easy you look at it you don't really see it if you look at the surface to reinforce it is truly a radical rethinking and asking you know in the name of a Joseph Boyce and others or minimalists who said who cares I don't want to be a Michelangelo manipulating bronze I would like to see the surface of the metal I would just see what's there that's more significant than me as a master artist manipulating material and so I think it's an attempt to you know grapple this and as you say we are still in the dark a little bit trying to to find out what it is but Brecht said new theatre needs to be done when we have new times new times need new forms of theatre this is a very serious I mean there is also a social choreography you know the book called social choreography from 2005 by Andrew Ewitt which came out he's a comparative literature professor and it came out very parallel to us like we never heard of Andrew Ewitt before and I even when I saw it I was like trying to read through it it was far too tense like gave up on it left it in the corner for a couple of years and then when I picked it up it's actually dealing with this what we are talking about and dealing with that very thoroughly but discuss it in a completely different way very theoretical and but he has this great definition of it that choreography is always the rehearsal of utopian nevertheless real social situations because you're embodied in that situation you're actually rehearsing it whatever you rehearse whether to march like an army whether you find new ways of you know you never that close to people you never all over people so you're rehearsing a kind of new way of being in the world with other people that you just do so yes it's sort of utopian but it's also real and so and I feel that rather than just having that as a side note on choreography I feel like this is a pretty important realization and it should become much more the center of choreography in my view especially in my practice like this notion of how do we bring that because that is can really go to work in the world these strategies these new rehearsals of utopian social structures where we can actually plan for a new kind of imagination where we can cultivate a new kind of imagination as you said we can't imagine this what comes next so we have to find ways to get our awareness to expand upon the imagination there's something really really deeply different to me about this work than a lot of the participatory quote-unquote participatory artwork that I see and theater work that I see yeah and I don't know I'm curious what you think about about participatory work in general because there's something being inside of this feels I go to see a lot of participatory stuff I'm personally deeply I'm very awkward in participatory thing I hate it like I can't do it I can't deal with it like it freaks me out and I'm probably shy or introvert about this kind of thing and whenever somebody wants to come and touch me it's like really or wants to drag me on stage it's just nothing like that I like that's also why I created this structure in a way to facilitate for my own that doesn't mean that you don't want to be part you know that you don't want to partake it just means that the methodologies of partaking are not refined enough to cater for your need or to your need and so in a way I love doing parliament like I absolutely love it because you're just doing it in your own time you're not forced you don't even feel like it's participatory it's like it's a wrong term for it because you're in it you're not participating you're it it's a kind of it just feels different than traditional participatory work and I don't, I think there's brilliant participatory work out there absolutely I don't ditch that but it's just not for me like I'm kind of phrasing up I'm going like oh please not me don't pick me do we have some audience questions maybe or do you have something you want to share still from the talk? I'm just saying that this is the very first parliament that happened on the island of Idra without cars it's an island where you can only walk and there are donkeys and your legs and this is on a rooftop in the harbour and there's actually Steve we were talking about so he really walks the walk the blue t-shirt but the other participants are mostly gathered not all but mostly from the local café just beforehand and we said do you want to go into parliament and I had a brilliant filmmaker with me who's my wife luckily and and so we just set it up within the whole thing within 30 minutes and we ask somebody if we can use their rooftop and just ran it and it worked pretty well I don't know if it's not playing this one was like a whole sunset probably two and a half hours I saw the first time but it is worth noting that now parliaments are usually 6 to 10 hours and that's how you should think about it they are long how many people participate parliament sessions between I think this was very small it was only 8, 9, 10 people and then you have usually 20, 30 40 that's usually it I haven't done it with more than 40 at one session 35 was probably the biggest do you participate yeah, yeah a lot I love it it's like a drug it's sort of like Alice it feels like not that I don't I don't ad hocate anything but it does feel like an induced experience of some sort and that's very mysterious I mean that should alone be a discovery this wasn't even the planned discovery but it's sort of a discovery that something is shutting off and something else is becoming more to the fore that we are constantly actually operating in so what we termed mammalian wisdom Steve actually who's done the trimaturgy for parliament he teams it as kind of a mammalian wisdom and I think it's a quite interesting term there's something else coming from the sense of a male in mammals it makes you feel like a mammal and also if you look at it from the outside in parliament very often we end up grooming, wooing playing sleeping and it's sort of very basic it's not getting very complicated like nobody's reflecting on max that's what I feel like in parliament you just don't care about stuff it becomes just different you have a different kind of if your consciousness is zooming in and expanding into other areas that are very mammalian without saying going backwards I think that's the wrong way to describe it because that's what we are and if you some people love dogs like I do they go into kind of dog behavior and you will see that in the way you relate to the dogs and even in dog packs how they organize themselves and who's not leading who's smelling whom and from what side they approach each other and what a bite means and what different levels of biting like embodied kind of reactions it totally organizes the whole pack and I think we are very similar without noticing it without recognizing that that our organization is so so choreographed but on an evolutionary level let's give you a microphone so we can hear you made me think wow this is intense so I was doing it and now that you're talking about it I guess I take a chance and voice out a little bit of my experience of it at some point I was thinking a lot about a text that Donna Harroway wrote and she's writing the name of the text is Orientation Matters and at some point she's talking about how she really enjoys going to the zoo to see how humans talk about the animals because she feels that when humans are talking about the animals she's actually getting to know those humans better and so I was thinking of this text and when as I was inside I was like oh but wait because at some point I started looking as animals kind of thing but then I was like oh way I am an animal too so I came like yeah anyways I just wanted to share my psychological experience it has something of like a zoo thing parliament has something of a zoo it reminds you of a a zoo I feel always like if I mean it I look like I mean a zoo it's also strange and yet so fascinating let's have a microphone Juan is do you always tell that story about Henry James and that's always there exactly the same way and the second one is a different question but I'm a theater director so I always think about like watchability like watching other people and how strange that is like just how and in the theater you have people over here looking at people over there who often are in the dark and it's just like what I found really interesting or what felt like what allowed for people to do things they may not have done was that we spent a lot of time first trying to just watch each other and observe each other and you frame it so well that that's part of what's happening is that I felt like when people like got close to people it was turned in some way because we were training ourselves or undoing a lot of things about it's okay to see other people and to be seen and I think that articulation of observing yourself, observe other people and it just made me think about like and then it becomes really great to be able to watch everybody in this free way and then you're like oh just the sort of the way people carry themselves I suddenly felt comfortable just kind of like being seen and I'm just curious did any of this come out of you as a choreographer like wanting to feel like there was a performance quality that you couldn't accomplish that's an interesting question because I just felt like everybody was like ultimately really watchable and everything they did was yeah I think my work also if it's not parliament I'm working with a mixture between very professional dancers and non-dancers and I always try to get them to that state where it becomes endlessly watchable like I could just watch them for hours and end just moving because they're so in thought and so in I think with parliament I kind of aimed initially I remember now because when you ask that question that I realized when I analyzed photographs of performance or even public spaces it's very hard to get a space a photograph where people don't face in one direction or in a purposeful direction or don't surround themselves by one organizing principle like somebody pointing everybody looks and I wanted this I thought you know but when they talk when Michael Hart talks about the multitude or this kind of we need to find the more complex way of organizing ourselves you know with more interesting kind of narratives going on rather than this always central still proscenium art kind of thinking even if we go out it seems to be so prevalent in our being that I literally couldn't find a photograph that represented parliament before I did parliament at all like where I just saw different people facing different directions doing different things and I found that bizarre that I couldn't find that at all that was a strange thing and after I did parliament after I did this one my wife sent me a clip which is also very fascinating a super 8 clip on YouTube which didn't have any description of it and it was like a parliament it was amazing but it was obviously from the 60s and I was like damn these performance artists in the 60s they did it all you know and then basically it was in Greek all the description so I said what is that and it turns out that this was a footage that was a big scandal in Greece in the 80s when they discovered that a mental asylum was just left on its own devices on an island but it put all the mentally ill people and left them to rot and this was the courtyard filmed off secretly and I didn't know that I just saw that some performance artists discovered parliament and that's also super interesting I couldn't believe that the way people behaved this being sitting next to each other walking aimlessly this organization where it's not connected it's actually what we regard as mental illness or if that's permanent if you cannot negotiate your social coding that's when it stops being sane I thought what you were saying just before we came in here about about the parliament as embossing parliament on dancers and then putting another score on top of that was really interesting it's a different way of looking at the kind of training that you would have to have in order to have a particular performance style sort of what you're talking about and I also hadn't realized that that was because I didn't really know parliament but the piece that we were talking about I didn't know until today that there was this layering of of experiences it was using parliament almost as an experiential dream and then on top of it I built another structure that you could refer to and that was more directional and maybe purpose driven in a strange way that was for the Mather Graham Company and it was a work that I re-titled into State of the Union since actually and again it lies unedited in some draw but it was great it was great and there's no proof so what are your influences what do you feel influenced your work, your thinking I think my biggest influence in thinking is Gregory Bateson who's an anthropologist and sort of the founder of System Theory one of the kind of intellectual godfathers of the counter culture in the 60s also he had a very wide research into ecology that encompassed alcoholism that encompassed dolphins amazing breath of research an important research it was one of the founding or godfathers of System Therapy for example and because he understood systems and he thought about systems very deeply and he didn't think that it was limited to any one organism or any one species but he thought it was the way the living interacts with the non-living or whatever the non-living is that there is actually processes at play and interplay so this notion, the pattern that connects much before relational art was a thing and he wrote three books or four books on the theme and they are just super influential so he's the most important thinker you've never heard of, that's his catchphrase like I'm a fan like I'm a deep fan and for example 10,000 plateaus took the notion of plateaus from Gregory Bateson so he's very influential amongst a kind of intellectual writers but he's not known so that would be my major influence otherwise I would, from within the arts I would say voice is probably an influence, a strong influence foresight was my mentor and I sort of acknowledged that that I was at times I wasn't it was a super interesting time because he employed me as a choreographer when I was in Frankfurt, as a guest choreographer for Bali Frankfurt when I was 26 but I was employed as a guest choreographer so it was very strange, I worked as a full choreographer, I couldn't fathom it even but I was also allowed to actually observe the whole process and be part of that family and understand what thoroughness means I think like this absolutely obsession with your art form and that's what I learned there I think those, yeah I would say these are my influences they're probably a lot more Any other thoughts or comments or statements maybe actually because I thought in my preparation I had this great quote and I just thought I should read it out because if I can access this because the sum never works it just doesn't work my thumb scanner does not want to work and this one is I like that because it sort of refers to parliaments a bit different but it's written by a student of mine that I've just been teaching at Duke she's an anthropology major so never really danced before and there's this in the beginning I always say in the very beginning first class as I say the theme is that your task is to dance so afterwards you can say I have dance and then I leave the room and that's the first introduction there's always the first introduction and so they're freaking out what that could possibly mean and how do I possibly do that and what am I doing here and so she writes in her reflections she says this was still the beginning of the semester and I was anxious for other class members to observe my untrained dance moves I was quick to assume that having a background in classical or institutional dance training made you more qualified as a dancer this goes back to the issue of socialization for those first 20 minutes I cautiously moved around I wanted to make an escape and allow myself to fall freely into thought but something was restraining me now thinking back on it I know it is the rule of order but back then I believed it to be the spectator's gaze and I thought this is a great thing like when she's 19 so you you have somebody you know you think in this situation yeah it's the others you know that's why you can't move but actually to recognize that this is and we've worked on that of course as well but that it's a rule of order I think that this is the way she puts it the rule of order and that's a there's and I googled that that is not really a term there's something that's called the special rule of order and that's how parliaments are ordered which is also interesting but the way that we are ordered as human beings you know this deep way of ordering the parliament I mean it takes in average and I don't know how it was today I didn't see anything it takes about usually 20 to 25 minutes before anybody lifts their arm above their shoulders that doesn't make any sense but it does that nobody lifts their arm up it's a socially agreed socially negotiated situation when it's okay when it's non-threatening and so on and you have that rule of order and that's what Badiou calls the state of the situation he refers it much more to the state you know reproducing their politics but I think it goes much much deeper it's everything it's not just evolutionary it's the whole kind of shebang of living and its history that is placed in us and this rule of order is like how do you deal with that rule of order and how do you subvert it so I think you know I would like to name that discussion about the rule of order thanks to Michelle coming up with that and I think we are almost at night so this is fading out here well maybe then we have come to the end of the evening and you're gonna be around here maybe have additional questions I just want to point out one thing I want you all to also keep it in mind like the great American artist Menray was a landscape painter he started out in Ridgewood, New Jersey and I once went to an exhibition I couldn't believe there most gorgeous paintings but Menray at this time said I can't represent contemporary world the invention of the cars the airplane, the gramophone the movies it's no longer possible to just be a landscape painter and he moved away to solarization all his abstract paintings I think in the way Michael's work you might not know Ballet, Frankfurt or Forsythe they were a major force in the international ballet they were the greatest, most innovative forceful dance company you could see in Germany and I saw them, they were shocking what this guy did so Michael worked with them and he said I'm in the downtown loft and we experiment some things it is a conscious decision by a working artist by a working choreographer to say if I do choreography if I do dance if I engage in this socially engaged art I've been called it it's a decision as an artist as a way of thinking and also as a comment what we all have to do with him in his mind is the most significant most important most urgent way to engage and I think it's a great great undertaking and it will maybe take some time you know artists often anticipate a future you know as Ron Sier said and because you're closer to that we are not there yet but I think it's really a most fascinating interesting way to think new about things thank you for coming here flying over Sherrod and for you all to participate also stay till 9.30 on a cold December day in New York so thank you all for coming and maybe it's the last thing what are your future projects are you working on something we should know I'm working no the two big projects that I was working on just collapsed over the summer what were the projects one was a big social choreographic project with American Ballet Theatre and one was a big exhibition for three months at the National Museum in North Carolina and both just didn't happen for different ways I actually walked away from ABT but that's okay I feel like it's okay I have loads of challenges in terms of creating a new MFA program at Duke which is super interesting and also developing like we're just launching for next in spring a working group around social choreography at Duke at the Humanities Lab as part of Michael Hart's social movement lab which hopefully will grow into its own lab next year so there is some real and that's super exciting for me like I can do all these kind of technologies we can just try them out I'm not so worried about museum representation at the moment like I feel like whatever will come well great that it would Duke on the map in that dance world so congratulations again thank you all for coming