 Bob Holman, poet, proprietor of the Bowery Poetry Club, visiting professor at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts and Columbia's Graduate School of the Arts. You're visiting professor, you're adjunct, or are you just a bop in? It's a visiting professorship. Somehow they've acquired a new line for me. Cool. It's not a ten-year track, but it pays better than being an adjunct. That's... And it comes with the beautiful title of visiting professorship. I just dropped in. Teach one course a semester, one course at NYU in the fall, and one course at Columbia in the spring. Which courses are the intro, are they again? No, they're both graduate courses. The one at Columbia is called Exploding Text, and that is a course in poetry performance. It's the only cross-genre course at the School of the Arts offers, showing you exactly how conservative the Columbia Grant School is. But students come, they collaborate on projects with each other across disciplines using texts, using as texts poems. Often poems by contemporary writers who are considered difficult, on-the-page, experimental type of poets. Showing, you know, the idea being that there's no such thing as a stage poem or a page poem. That all it needs is the imagination of the visionary to work with the poet now that we have these things called cameras, these technological advances. The poets don't necessarily have to learn to use that somebody else's job, like yours. The course I'm teaching at NYU is called Art in the Public Sphere. And it's a course about the utility of cultural organizations on the Lower East Side from the 1860s to 2060s, right in the midst of the transition. And we're having our performance over at the Bowery Poetry Club in two hours. And the club, of course, is, in its own way, a kind of anchor in the whirlwind of the current gentrification. Is it the final death knell to the transient neighborhood of the Lower East Side as everything becomes theme park of itself? Or are we simply watching another cycle? Luckily, my students have figured it all out, and we'll be performing it on stage soon. Tell me what the answer is at the end of the day. Okay, I will. I'll call you. I think you'll have to be there. You'll probably have other work to do. How late do you think you guys are going to stay here? Any idea? To be out by 3.30 or 4. Oh, beautiful. Okay. Oh, sure. How long have you been a poet or considered yourself a poet? In the third grade, I saw that I was sick when they did poems. And when I came back, they were up on the wall, and I was really upset that they had started at such a juvenile level with the work. So I wrote my poem. It must have been February flu season. I wrote my poem, The George Washington Followed Indian Trails. Even then, I was a politically correct nine-year-old. And it took it up to the teachers. You said, oh, Robert, this is such a lovely poem. Where did you copy it from? So I was hooked. So I guess nine. Did you start reading their sophisticated poetry in a precocious time? Yes. I was a real reader. My mother was a great teacher. And that mystery of how one goes from the voice of your mother or whoever is your lullabyer into reading yourself. How you connect through the written word, through the printed word is something that still is inspiring and mysterious to me. So I owe it all to mom. When did you jump from writing mostly? I mean, you're very performance-oriented, so you don't always write just for the page. I do always write for the page, which is to say if you write, it's for the page. There's no way to write. What are you writing on a page? Now you can write on a screen, which gives with digital technology, at least in opening into saying, well, I'm not writing for the page. I'm writing for the pixelization of the light implants or whatever. I'm not thinking about how to perform it as I'm doing it, as I'm writing, but while I am performing, I am thinking about whether these words are working or where can they lead me to. So in a sense, when I'm performing I continue to write, although in that situation I'm not writing. In the air, right? So the words get all messed up when you start to integrate orality and literature and text, because we are such textual beasts right now that the idea of when hip hoppers do their poems, they say, I'm going to read for you, even though the poem is not in their hands on a piece of paper, and in some cases may never have been in their hands. It was something that was completely created. Selena Glenn does that. Somebody's at the door. Do you want to do that? So you want to give me back on track or you want me to go back into it? No, I think it can segues where I want to be here. Good. So yeah, you were saying that even hip hoppers, they say they're reading even if they're performing it without a paper in front of them. And so what do you consider your particular form of poetry if you have a label for it? Well, of course, here I am in the academy, which is why we need labels. We also need labels because there are just so many more people now. We have to figure out things for everybody to do. We need labels because the horrific triumph of capitalism knows that to sell something, it has to have its specific and sexy name so that people are going to want to buy it. Right now, spoken word has the lead in what I do. Even those words like spoken word or poetry performance are, as my teacher Walter Ong says, retro names. That is to say, it's the renaming of the original according to what we currently see as this entity. His example was a horse is an automobile without wheels. And so when we start talking about performance poetry, we're talking about what originally was poetry, filtered through the lens of hundreds of years and only hundreds of years of text to the point where a spoken word is something extraordinary and a text is considered the poem. And for poems not in these books, we then rename the original orature as oral literature. I love all the conflicts because then you get to talk about poetry, which is the next best thing to talking poetry. And that makes me jump a little. We'll probably go back and forth. I was going to go, oh, how did you get introduced to deaf poetry and all that, but I'm going to go back to that later. You're talking about this in oral and performance and all that. How does sign language poetry from your experience that it relate to everything you're telling me about the oral thing going back to what it was before and then print took over? Can you relate your whole experience of... Are we okay with that, Peter? I could turn it off. I also need to at some point, Mary, I forgot to print out my ASL poem. I don't know if I've done it for you, but I have a poem called something like If I Had All the Money. You signed it? I don't sign it. You could sign it. I'd love somebody in an oval. But it's about ASL, so I'd like to do that. I have always, from the second I saw Peter and Kenny, and that was my first taste of ASL poetry. I knew this was part of the scene, part of what's going on now to reclaim poetry's musicality and origins so that it can have a utility in a world that is anti-poetic, where poetry has become the property of a few small book publishers and where poems are generally written for other practitioners. Where poetry, this is when I was coming up, poetry was generally thought of as something that somebody was going to teach you and it was going to be boring and you were going to have to memorize it, and it really was an antiquity. Now poems are vital in the language of youth and the whole hip-hop culture that is so one of the most important movements globally is based on poets, speaking words. So it's an amazing, it's been a great ride in the midst of a really terrifying destruction of our country and the takeover of corporations across the globe. About the poetic economy is still standing up, he said, sitting down and the poetic or gift economy, so that's what Peter is doing up there. He's giving it away, he's giving it away to everybody and everybody is very happily receiving it and not only that but they're giving it back and that's the poetic economy as opposed to $25 for a ticket to the 92nd Street Y or please give money to your local poetry organization so that they can fund the same thing they were funding 50 years ago, you know, whatever. It's a new thing and that's what it felt to me, a new thing. And the more you think about it, the more the magnificent ironies that poetry insists on are fiscalized by the work that the ASL poets are doing, starting with the fact that the best example we have of a poetry in the oral tradition, oral tradition being that which is not written down, the essential poetry that is oral is ASL poetry which cannot be written down and therefore is only oral and yet it's for people who don't speak. So again you find the language foundering upon itself and watching Peter's ability to transmute sign into dance, mime, theater, song is to watch all of the specifications of arts into these different genres to wash away and to see that what art is, is communication of godly sort. Communication that is in this case whole body communication and that's another thing that ASL does that none of the other poetries can touch. You know, with a poet in the oral tradition like the griots in West Africa, the jelly poets, it's very clear that the poem cannot be separated from the event. The anthropologists always have a hard time figuring out when the poem begins but the poem begins when the griots got the chorus tuned up and says, come on in here, we're going to get started. Let's go bring everybody in and the first words are come on in here, we're going to get started. Because as the people come in and the poet sees who the audience is, the way that that poem is going to be laid out this time becomes clearer to the historian, artist, keeper of tradition who is the griot in the oral traditions. So it's a spontaneity of working with the artist. They have something possibly planned or they have a waiter going to go I think I'm drawing a kind of comparison between the in the hearing world, how in the oral tradition the full event is the poem. You can stretch it even into saying that a slam could be the form of a poetry slam where judges are picked out of the audience, the rituals that go along with the slam, that the judges hold up the numbers, that the audience booze the numbers. All of these, this kind of interaction is part of the frame for the poem. You're not there. One of the reasons why poetry slams work is that you don't go to hear the poet. You go to see the slam, to participate in it. You know you're going to hear ten different poets. Who are they? You probably know. As opposed to let's go hear John Ashbury read his latest Pulitzer Prize when it worked. That's one thing. Let's go to the poetry slam that's not the one thing. It's like going to see Rocky Horror Picture Show. There's a framework that's different every time because of who the audience is. Rocky Horror Picture Show definitely is a kind of orality, the costume in this. But of course in that case, at least so far as I know, they're not making up the words. They're using the words that are already in the film to bring the film back to life. And talking about how film interacts, hello, with orality, with poetry is a whole other question. Did you get that? Well, it would stop at the moment. Can you watch Peter and Kenny? I have a couple questions actually. First of all, in terms of what Kenny says, his words, which he sort of considers queuing. He's not an interpreter and a representative, so he's an interpreter. His goal is to give us few words and sound effects as possible so that the hearing audience can kind of really focus on Peter. Maybe pick up, start to see the signs, not necessarily learn them so they can produce themselves, but start to learn it as they go so that Kenny can voice less and less. Do you feel that his words are, do you wish there were more, do you wish there were less? Is it like a little voice in your ear that kind of gives you a little bit and helps you along? What's that experience like for you? Kenny and Peter are working in a zone all to themselves. No one else that I see has been willing to live with each other for 20 years and figure out what the heck a poem is when it's crossing over between ASL and English. There is no greater educational experience for a hearing person to learn what sign is than by watching flying words. These are both consummate artists who through their play are inventively finding out the core of what this language thing is all about. And because of their playfulness both in creativity and also in their interaction with the audience, they keep everybody's interest right there. Makes it difficult maybe for an academic study or even a documentary about, but it certainly is to me the way to push the information out to the largest possible audience. And I think that what you see in the publication of this recent book, Dirksen and Heidi's book, what's it called? The Body Poetic. The Body Poetic. I think you see in the Body Poetic the way that the ASL Academy is much more open to all forms of the poetics in that community than the hearing community is. That Dirksen is there handing out accolades to Kenny and Peter's show, that there is, and that's part of ASL, there's no distinction being made between high and low. Is it because there aren't enough people to have that? Or is it because there is inherent in using a whole body language and giving yourself away so totally? Is it a given that we're all in this together? There's just so much to eat up in this. That's a good point. I want to get back to Kenny. Kenny's work has evolved extraordinarily over the years and he does do a lot more. He is more willing now to be on the side and to drop the cues, as it said, into the ears of the hearing audience. I think of it in terms of the way that Edwin Denby used to write his criticism, to my mind the greatest dance critic that we've ever seen and a poet. Denby would never have a judgmental phrase in any of his criticism. He would simply allow you to see the placement of the dancer's feet and body in such a way that if it were awkward and not working, you'd say, well, that's too bad, put it in something else. Or if it was sheer elegance beauty, then you would say, ah, after seeing it through these words. And so Kenny does not tell you what to see. He's there in it, putting a word in the place of it could be the sign or it could be the movement or it could be the whole gestalt that Peter is at that point. Likewise, his ability to take the noises that Peter does make, the deaf noises that he makes and let them evolve into sound effects through his work is another way of giving us a way into the deaf experience. I think that the intro that Flying Words does at times where they give you a brief example of what rhymes are in ASL poetry, what cinematic techniques are being used in ASL poetry that are the same as, say, metaphor or synecdoche in hearing poetry is a wonderful, maybe that's just because I have in my old age become an academic, but I like it when that does happen. I think their little tidbits of intro help bring people along a long ways. And that's Kenny's, also part of Kenny's genius in doing this. So while now it's more than ever Peter out front, although when there is a duet, it is never anything less than bravura anymore. And you're never seeing anything but the four handed beast when they're hard at working the duets. I think it is a much, you know, that the performances really has continued to evolve and it continues to be, as always at the highest point it's ever been. It just pushes itself through play. And now through the whole energy of the trains having gone so far, you know, the chug-chug puff-puff of on we go that it's taken on this extraordinary life. Have you seen other deaf poets? I was at, you know, I was at the big conference down at Gallaudet. And I was at the conference in Rochester in the late 80s. That was, or was it the early 90s? You came to the Deaf Lit Conference in 1991. So, you know, so I've seen, you know, that's where I really spent, I guess, three days in the midst of a deaf world without really knowing. I knew Kenny and Peter, but none of those ones I do now. And really got to experience, I think, the real deal before there was a real deal. Do you remember, I know that you were also at the gel house. There was a bridge festival. That was the first time I met Kenny and Peter. That's when you first met them. And there were other deaf poets there, too. And I don't know if you saw them or not. I just wonder if you have a basis, a comparison, or you remember enough about anybody else you saw to be able to. Well, I'll tell you this. I can't remember names now, you know, that's the thing. But I do, there was a, the guy whose name begins with B and who was the great progenitor. Bernard Brad? Robert Panera? Patrick Gravel? An older general? Maybe it was Patrick Gravel. Yeah, older. Baldhead? Don't remember? Yes. Yeah. Yeah, that was Gravel? Probably. Yeah. So, and then, of course, I remember people at the one in Guyadette, the great big guy who did the walk through the graveyard piece. You know, do you remember his name? I think if you threw names that gave me hints, I could give you some capsule descriptions. There's the woman who's worked a lot with film, whose work I've seen quite a bit of. But, you know, in my world, you know, ASL poetry is, you know, one of many, many kinds of morality that I'm working with that I'm not so familiar because that world is more enclosed than the others. And I'm hoping that this book will open things up. But there's nobody who opens it up or who has taken on, you know, that risk of, it's risky what Peter and King are doing to bring it this far to the hearing audience. On the other hand, when I, you know, last night's crowd was primarily deaf and they were having the time of their life and the people who were hearing weren't far behind in having the time of their life. So, the risk really is worth it. What wants to happen now is that these poems can open up in other directions and with other poets. Yeah, there were some college-slang kids that went right before them. I stayed, I was there at 6 to watch the slang. It was incredible. And there were three guys that just blew me right out of my seat and I asked them to stay. And I said, if I, you know, if you didn't have to pay to get in, could you stay and I'll interview you afterwards. And you don't even have to like it. I just want to know what you think. And because you guys work so much with imagery and metaphor and incredible stuff with words, if you've never seen this kind of thing, I'd really like your take on it. And they really loved it too and it was great to get their comments afterwards. Well, Memoriam, that's why you're produced. That's why you get to be the producer. That is a brilliant idea. And of course, the idea that the, you know, the hip-hop slam before the ASL Flying Words event could be more than just, you know, touching elbows as you come and go but could stick around and see. That's why the Bowery Poetry Club is there. And it was last night that I realized that in my next project, which is to work with a documentary unveiling the poetries of endangered languages as a sense of political urgency to see languages, which to me are simply forms of consciousness as much part of the ecology of endangered plants and animals begins to get at what this language of ASL is all about. And of course, it is an endangered language as well. I'm wondering if the cochlear implants are going to have an impact in the actual population of those using sign. It'd be interesting to try to keep track of the numbers. Right now, it's wonderful just to keep track of the art as much as you can. Did a few videos, which is the closest you can come to a book with ASL, with Kenny and Peter. We did, for WNYC's Poetry Spots, we did the one about the doggy. What's his name? Charlie. Charlie, the Vietnam bombsmith sniffing tunnel dog. Amazing piece. And then we did, for our very first foray into PBS, us being Josh Blum, my partner on these TV shows with me, we had, and Mark Palington, the director, had Peter doing, you have ordered me to speak, which he did solo in that show. And then of course, Peter was the last word in the United States of Poetry, the big award-winning PBS series. That was such a battle there. I mean, Peter wrote a 15-minute poem to be included in USOP, and it was the entire United States, as told in ASL, through every poet and iconic caricature, Pekas Bill and his old girlfriends are interacting. It's just a wonderful, wonderful piece, and he did it all in one take, which still exists on tape, as the hero take it was called. And we ended up being able to use 20 seconds. The very end, the very last word is given over to ASL, and it was only through, I mean, this was a cutthroat battle amongst us, but I was not going to do the show if we weren't going to get ASL into it. Likewise, when I was a judge over into the Zebra Poetry Festival in Berlin, which is the biggest poetry video festival in the world, and there are five judges, and one of the pieces was a really simple heads, it's just straightforward, one camera, one take shot of a deaf poet in German sign language, doing a poem and getting so, the director calls out something to her that clearly has nothing to do with what's going on, and she can't really tell what he's saying anyway. And she just rushes past the camera, and that's the end of it, up against some really highly produced numbers and some historical pieces that were fantastic. But again, there was a feeling I had that there is a, if you don't give a, if you don't give voice to deaf poetry when you're working on films, if you don't acknowledge that this is the medium that you've got if you're deaf, then you're missing part of what film and poetry is. So, and it turned out that I had an ally which rarely happens on these judging things, and he, like me, agreed that there was such a political exigency in letting this piece be one of the winners that we both, unbeknownst to each other, gave it our number one votes, and if it got two out of five votes, it was automatically going to be one of the three winners. So this piece, the other two pieces were extremely slickly produced and wonderful, evocative music, the whole nine yards pieces, and here's this raw little one-take documentary of an ASL poet. But it's step-by-step to bring awareness of what it means to have the, in a world where you're trying to get people to listen, what it means that you can't hear. And if you start from that point, how poetry, it doesn't cut the poetry out. In fact, it makes it all the more necessary. What about the translation process? Like when you came to Rochester, I know I interpreted for you at least once and maybe twice. One time when I was out here with Jamie, I remember. And I don't remember how much time we had to work before with my translations of what I was going to sign for you. But either with me or with other people that you've worked with, what's it like for you to work with interpreters when you've had that experience? Well, first, Mary, I'd like to say that your translations get better the later the night is and the more alcohol it's consumed. That it just becomes so organic, the translations. And last night's party, and that was the first time Pat Russell had ever sat in with a deaf conversation. But your ability to keep the two of us afloat in this world of sign was just, you know, it was totally terrific. And yet Pat was so worn out at the end of an hour. You know, the energy that you have when you're deaf, the energy you have to give yourself a way to communicate is the best exercise on the planet. Full body exercise. Beyond Pilates. I work with deaf translators the same way I work with all translators in performance, which is that the more you can have interaction with the translator, then the more you can break down the artificiality of the formal poem and allow the event itself to take over. So that's the very first time that I had a signing translator was at the Bridge Festival. It was that guy named Bob, and I brought him a question mark jacket to wear as I was at that point panic DJ and wore a question mark jacket, which is why I think that writers in books, man. Jocularity. Okay. I was wearing a question mark jacket and I brought an extra one for the signing translator and his name was Bob, too. Jocularity gave me the gig because he knew that I wouldn't just stand there on the stage and I didn't. As a matter of fact, I taught a few moves to Bob so we were actually doing a little bit of dance as I was giving my poem through the mic and he was giving it through his body and signs. So it's a wonderful treat. For hearing audience seeing sign for the first time it's always so devastatingly other and exotic to have these signs and this kind of emotion coming at you. It's more dramatic than Shakespeare. If Shakespeare is behind them, this is more dramatic the person in the oval which is something that has to really be worked with thought through and thought through as well. And one of the great things that Peter and Kenny have been able to do and make fun of which is always eases you up because there ain't no answers to it. Something is lost in translation. What are the funniest things? I wonder what that is. But something is also gained. I remember working with you that one of the things I would worry about when I was interpreting for a poet is that their words might be beautiful and it's great stuff and I can come up with some really great translations but I never want to be the center of it because the point is even though the deaf people get the information, I want actually hoping that the hearing poet is interesting enough and moves enough or has enough charisma that the deaf people and also the hearing people who like to watch sign aren't all focused on me. One of the great things about working with you is you're very interesting to watch so I knew that I wouldn't be stealing. You're certainly not somebody who'd have to worry about my stealing your stage time which is always a worry because people do say, oh it's so much more fun to watch the interpreter. I like the poetry but it brings it alive with the interpreter. There was no competition because you're very dynamic. I disagree with you and I would like to allow signers to do whatever they want to do which is what I do when I translate from the Urdu or the Chinese and though I do know some Chinese I don't know any Urdu and yet I've translated a lot from those languages and when I do I take it the only way I know how to take it which is through me. Now maybe if I were a translator first and a poet second I'd think differently but I don't know it's hard for me to think differently I'm already thinking differently but I wish that the signers would go full tilt boogie all the time. Why not be this way? Who cares? You know, maybe the poet says oh, thank goodness they're watching somebody that's moving and interesting. I don't care what that is or wow maybe I should do something a little bit more here to get attention focused on me a little bit. To me it's a it's a false issue that ASL carries in it the seeds of all of this the magnet, you know the energy of performance of the spoken word. So what do you want to do? Hide that because you happen to have a poet who doesn't know anything about it why don't you let them learn about it and why don't you give your audience the best experience the deaf audience the best experience they can and so I it's not academically correct I'm sure you want to do that let the artist be in the spotlight but to me the artist isn't what's in the spotlight it's the poem that's in the spotlight and a poem isn't written until somebody hears it if you're deaf you're not going to hear it anyway so the poem isn't written and even though it's an ASL poem isn't ever written okay so there is no poem unless there's somebody else there to see it and you know so it's all up to you the translator I don't think anybody holds back but it's always a worry that we the ones there were let me just please translators signers go worry about something else now we've worried too much about that can you you're hitting everything which is great oh I'm I'm wondering about it's nebulous term I'm not sure even I totally understand it the idea of beat beat poetry beat influence what is the beat type stuff and that term has been liberally and enthusiastically embraced by Peter and Debbie Branny who was a deaf poet also and a couple other people as well we're sort of like it seems like the beats had a big influence on us and now in Ginsburg and Corso and Lukowski because it's so much imagery and if you could riff on that a little bit beat poetry and your own stuff beat stuff what you see in ASL yeah the what Ginsburg and the beats did in US was to free poetry promote push it off into the worlds of of of bohemian the bohemians what the beat poets did was to free the word from the confines of the academic traditions and and open it up both to the worlds of bohemia and to the event of the poetry read you know think of it I mean Ginsburg's great poem is howl there you have it you can hear it you know what I see the deaf poets doing what what Peter takes from it is that spirits of loving rebellion you know that and just as it was Ginsburg fighting for gay rights fighting against the war in Vietnam so do the ASL poets in their very life fight for the existence of the deaf community of a minority whose voice isn't being heard the the playfulness and beat the playfulness of Peter at the picking up of the you know the five day old beard in a beret accoutrements is also just a way of relaxing into a poem I don't think that the imagery that the deaf poets use is really what the beats do I see it I see it more similar to the observation of William Carlos Williams of course who was a great teacher to to Ginsburg but you know he had very short lines that were very descriptive and acute and that's what it seems to me that most that is common among ASL poets is that by having the image be transmuted into a sign that they're focusing on these certain objects which then take on a rhyme and quote literary life of their own all of this being much different from the long-lined wildness of Ginsburg and Corsa I'm concerned about your time it's slide two and hit on just about everything I want to ask them if there's anything else you'd be looking for I want to read the poem action okay this is if I were to throw my money if I were to throw all my money into anything I'd throw my money into the deaf community if I were to throw all my money anywhere I'd throw it into ASL because the future of the species is immune to all the preaching and the silence of these moments is best spoken to by the quietude of far by few oh in the silence you hear the heart drum you hear the ear pull air towards hair but in the gesture of the measure of the pasture you are for sure it will lead you past the pasture to the gate where you will hear so take my money take my tongue take my breath and see it fly listen to the deaf community listen to the poetry the word a meaning coming up for air walk together to the Riverside all talk sign by sign the bodies speaking now hush listen with ecstatic eyes that's great can I have that can you sign it I'll sign it but I don't know how to sign did I walk into that or what did I just say here take me universe and mock me that's great it went well last night I thought it was a lot of fun okay she's perking perking are we ready so I need your name first please and what you do my name is stepha and I'm a dancer and how long have you been a dancer I have been dancing oh goodness for over 30 years I might have been dancing as a little girl but I didn't know I was dancing but I think I was how did you get involved in the whole deaf thing through dance I I had just graduated and got my masters and dance I was applying for jobs all over the country and sent them all out all over and rejections were coming back and thinking oh well I don't know where this is all going to end up and then I got a phone call from NTID the national technical institute for the deaf and they said they wanted to interview me and I was like wow okay it's happening and so they flew me out and I was interviewed and I was interviewed by Patrick Grable and members of the theater department and that was my first moments into the world of the deaf and the beginning of friendships that have lasted a lifetime did you pick up something right away take classes no I had no knowledge of something at all very little experience in deaf culture however when I went to high school there was an old Victorian building across the highway and you could see it from our high school and it was St. Joseph's school for the deaf and periodically we would go over there and do things so it was something that is sort of a vague memory but it came back to me that I did have that experience in high school no when I fell into NTID I fell into a new world so how did you pick up sign as you were teaching deaf students what was it like that was scary I mean you could imagine I was placed into a situation where in three months I would be actually shorter than that I arrived in July and by September I would have deaf students in front of me and I had a wonderful deaf teacher you all remember Sam Sam Holcomb I believe he was my first deaf teacher and he was wonderful and he just made learning real but my true teachers were people like Peter Cook and Kenny Lerner Debu Annie and Patrick Raebel I learned from friends they taught me something that you don't learn in a book and you don't learn in a classroom they taught me that the goal was communicating and reaching out to another human being and I arrived at sign language with that that's my initiation into sign language to be creative and expressive and to communicate and to do everything you can to get your point across because it's another person and you're reaching out to them that's the point and I'm grateful for that what year was that 1984 1984 one of the things that a lot of people have mentioned is that you're the improv classes that you did at your loft and other things that were more formal excuse me and really had a big impact on their work so there's a few questions I want to ask related to that and one is you have these deaf people in front of you and you're teaching them dance and you're learning sign and I imagine that you really saw the movement of sign as quite a compelling thing there's so many movements that are dance like and whatever so you wouldn't mind talking a little bit about just what that whole thing you're learning sign at the same time you're teaching the deaf and you're teaching them movement which they already move but they're learning a different way of movement just riff on that whole thing I fell in love with sign language I just fell in love with it I remember thinking to myself that for the first time in my life I realized just how the movement can be when I experienced sign language I didn't know ASL from sign exact English or sign English or any of the varieties of languages I saw movement and I was more than compelled I was in love with it and anyone who would come up to me and use sign language they were giving me a gift and I was totally I embraced it wholeheartedly to this day I love sign language I tell people it's one of the most beautiful languages in the world Did you find that you choreographed differently for deaf students you were working with than hearing people that you'd work with people was there anything about just the nature of signing or that they were deaf that made you incorporate different sorts of movements into your work I don't think I actually changed how I work with them I think what happened was like you added to the recipe a very particular spice very particular herbs what the language was bringing to my work was more of it gave it richer it made it richer gave it an essence of flavors I had never tried before so in that sense sign language did influence me but as far as working with individuals who were deaf or hard of hearing I just came from my own authentic source and I just hoped that when I was working with them I was able to communicate what I thought I could get from them what I could reach in and pull out and if sign language would help me get that then I was hungry to learn the language in order to get to that so it was not so much that oh I gotta learn sign language I better learn it quickly it was more like whoa how do I get that individual person to come to this place that I know about and that I really want them to get there how do I let them know that I trust me enough that I can take them there and these wonderful people students and colleagues and friends they let me do it they showed me the way and I think that's why it worked did you go to any of the performances that were happening around that time like there was the cellar first there were some deaf jam things happening at some parties that Peter and Dennis Webster and some other folks were doing and they did more public sort of things were you part of that scene or did you go to any of that stuff is Jazz Berry's part of that scene that was a little bit later I think I arrived like in the Jazz Berry era we'd all go and get food and just go watch our friends express and be artists it was interesting when I was at NTID I had students and then I had friends and sometimes I would approach my friends even though they were my students my friends because I understood their creativity and I respected the level of their creativity and I really wanted them to to know that I was meeting them on equal ground what they knew and what they were offering me I had hoped that I would reciprocate through my dance and through the artistry that I have been passionate about what was the surprise was that my passion was increased by their passion and those two worlds met so yeah, that's what happened back there in Rochester, New York Rochester was amazing it was like the nexus of it Peter and Debbie specifically have said that the movement sort of things that you work with them with a dance really affected their work and I wonder when you watch like the DVD and other things you might remember from that time can you look at their stuff and go oh, I I can see how I have this a little bit of influence don't have to worry about being eccentric or anything about saying it, but you can maybe have you noticed any sort of movements or any sort of ways that they work that would show that you had a little bit of an indelible stamp on it well you know, Marion, something did occur by my lack of knowledge of sign language and by my sort of innocence I would bring my full body expression to it and they would show me an exact sign and say, oh no, this is how you sign it and be like, oh, now I know but then when I'd go and use it to communicate to them I would add something about me and my movement and I always called it a kind of poetic license and so I'd be talking to them about movement and not only be adding my own physicality to it but I would be adding a concept of time and space and and it's true in poetry too that there's there's a place between the words and a place between the movement and that's the place I always want to go to creatively and that's the space that continues to intrigue me till this day and when I'm using movement it's just a part of my body I just carry it and so when I bring it to the language to an exact word sometimes I stretch it I let it be more fluid I create a word, I mold it, I sculpt it and I think they would respond to that and they weren't correcting me they weren't saying, oh by the way you're in a frame and you should work within the frame or oh, you're not supposed to spin when you say that word you know what I mean so they let me bring my my gift to the language and I found later when I left Rochester and came to New York that I was around people that were looking at sign language from a more exact format and I realized how much poetic license I had taken and how much they let me bring myself to the language and that I think made the choreography cross both worlds it was not only a dance world it was not only a world of poetry which by the way I view all dances poetry I try to find the poetry in absolutely everything and I believe it is in absolutely everything so yeah, I'm not sure if I exactly answered your question in a roundabout way so when I looked at like Missing Children that Debbie and Kenny wrote together and I think that was on the DVD and she has a lot of dance sort of movements in that as well as some cinematic techniques some slow motion and some other things and I don't know if I have an interview with her she does talk about having some dance background but the bulk of her dance influence was you and I see her movement and she's got this this won't be on the tape but I haven't seen a lot of your work yet because I have to find the tapes that people will give the dance to me of that time period and then maybe I'll see it I'm hoping to cut things because I think we'll see some influences and if I can find those little performances too I can watch that if you go yep, that was a little thing that I used to do or that's the thing that I kind of was trying to get my students to do more of yeah, I think I gave them the license to use their whole body not that I had to tell Peter and Debbie to use their whole body or Dennis Webster or any of them what I did was I said that's beautiful that's awesome and what if and then I'd show them the what if and particularly when they worked in my art in my choreography, I would ask them to go a little bit beyond what perceived boundaries were in the movement and perceived boundaries in the language so we could take it to another place and I think that's when it worked most for me and continues in a choreographic sense to work for, I use a lot of gesture and I think that when you carry language that is trying to communicate something with your gesture and you also have a dance background a formal dance background and you're passionate about all these things when you get the final culmination of all that it's a new thing it's a fresh and new thing and it's very precious and I think that if you take that to your poetry the sky's the limit true did you use the work like I'm thinking cinematic techniques the things that are strong elements in ASL poetry did you were any of those sorts of things incorporated into your dance or choreography slow motion or cinematic things or angles anything like that through my dance background of course slow motion is just as far as the technology of using any of the genres technologies I didn't have that knowledge I came into NTID a dancer a young girl who wrote poetry and read lots of poetry I was an English major in college and one of my dreams was to be a poet and the beauty of dance was that it is poetry and I continue to see dancing as a form of poetry when it comes from a deep and authentic place so it's not that you mirror someone else's work or you try to be a part of a particular timely or event it's when something deep inside you is coming out and it's coming out in a truth and at that point the language the movement is one did you incorporate signs into the gesture now but at this time when you were learning did you put actual signs in the dances themselves so were the linguistics of the signs something that you were was it how the sign looked that would match the movement or were you looking at the meaning of the sign to reflect the movement or the meaning of the sign the answer is yes I remember doing some work with Debbie Renny and we were doing a piece called what we know of gifts and Debbie is such an intuitive mover and just a brilliant mind to her own right and here I had this incredible tool to work with, human being but nonetheless she was mine and I would bring the sign language to the movement and then I would do permutations on that so if you have a gift you can offer that gift to someone there's something between the someone and yourself that the language is going through that passage and that's when the gift is like you can work with a small motion or you can take it from something not quite an exact but there's a giving a sharing and expressing and you go past the point in between and it's that middle place that space that's the infinite and that's what I think poetry goes to and what dance goes to and it's like you have a word here and a word here and again it's that space in between and you use everything you know your whole physicality your whole mental, your whole spiritual your whole intuitive you take everything you put in that space and that's the hotspot, that's the lava that's the place where things happen and so when I communicated something it gives I keep trying to go into that place I could really get into the fact that they were using sign language in a poetic license kind of way what I did realize I was picking up sign language from them they were my teachers And so perhaps I was teaching movement, I was using a great deal of discipline, a great deal of technique. I mean, I was exposing them to the nuts and bolts of dance, not only from my passionate side, but also from my master teachers. I come from a legacy of powerful people, dancers who knew their stuff, and they were extraordinarily generous with their knowledge, and it was all given to me. And now they were behind me, and I had these young people in front of me. So I was definitely sharing something to them. But what they were sharing back was this whole beautiful world of spontaneous movement language. And, you know, it was just very rich, and I made a lot of mistakes. And the coffee's ready. You keep going, they'll get the coffee. What were your teacher's names, if you'd like to mention, if you want to honor some of your teachers? Oh, goodness gracious. I had so many of them, and I'm going to hesitate because I'd hate to leave one out. But I will say that my journey in dance started in an improv class in New York City, and it was with a teacher named Norma Dula. And she was a pretty powerful lady, a very, very creative, an artist. And she saw something in me that I didn't see, and she kept me at it. And when she got a job at the University of New Mexico, that was my journey to dance in a serious way. Up until that point, I was still planning on writing for the New York Times. And writing. I was keeping journals regularly and just going to poetry readings and living a world of literature and the art and the poems. Dance came in, and I fell deeply in love with dance. Did you... You are teaching dance now to kids, to deaf kids. And I'm wondering, what do you see in your dance that's influencing them? Like, how are you working with them? Are you working with them in a different way than the college students that you used to work with? And why teach deaf kids? Why are you doing this? Well, I think the question should be why not? You know, why teach anyone? I believe if you have a gift, you should share it. You don't know where your path is, where you're going to end up. I had no idea when I was getting my master's at Mills College that I would end up in Rochester, New York teaching at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf. I do know that when I arrived and began to be a part of it, I realized I was quite comfortable. So it sort of tells you that you arrived. You know that we don't know what's in front of us, but when we get there, there's a feeling of having arrived. And again, I will say that these friends and colleagues treated me that way, as if you've arrived. You know, welcome into the family. And that was wonderful, really wonderful. With children, it's interesting, when I was teaching college age young people, they were telling me about their horror stories and their dreams and hopes when they were children. And I kept thinking, goodness gracious, we have to go back to the young deaf children and change what I'm hearing so that they can grow up with a more personal sense of safety, a more righteous sense of I am present in this culture. I am here and not knock, you know, I'm here and I'm going to make a difference. We need to get those young children to grow up and become the kind of talents, like a Peter Koch, like a Devin Rennie, like a Patrick Grable. And when suddenly I arrived in Brooklyn, New York, and I was in that position, I did a little, you know, I looked back and realized I had thought that to myself that we need to make that difference. So I told myself that I would try to make that difference on one to one, on each of these students. I would try to become what I was hoping would exist. Have I been successful? I don't know. I do know that several of my students came to the reading last night and they were totally involved. And one of my students, Amanda, came up and he said he's going to try. You know, he's going to try to get involved more with performing and poetry and writing. And I looked at him and I said, you have the sensitive heart for that. You have the soul, the spirit. Don't stop. Do that. So, you know, they say if you reach one person. So, I don't have to answer your question, per se, but it's not that I changed my teaching because they were children and deaf children. It's that I had to bring everything I knew from my NTID experience and the experience that these individuals so graciously gave me. I had to bring that all back to the next generation and that I happened to have been the transfer point. You know, I'm like the catalyst and I'll keep trying. Do you see... I don't know if anyone has that. I think about signs and dance with the kids and everything. That's tangential. That's basically what I need unless there's anything else you'd like to address. Anything more? I think that you should ask her a few things. One, that you should ask her what she remembers from jazz music. That's an idea. Doesn't me, Debbie and Steph are working together, you know? Just, what was that? And Dorothy, the whole thing with Dorothy, remember that? What's the name of that piece, Steph? The one you took to New York. Oh, Place Settings? Yeah. Place Settings. That was really, I mean... Yeah, I mean, this is the only place you can go with this. Man, feel free to, I mean, Kenny, you're right. The time is limited, but I just think that jazz varies and when we came to New York, Sydney, I think that was really special. What's the time thing that you told me about Pulse, the piece that I keep asking you about? What is that? No, no, no, no, no. The other one. Punctuary Delivery, that one. Oh, okay. Yeah, that was performed, that was a collaboration with my husband, David Furze, and Cat Ashworth, videographer, and Jim, I wanted Jim DeNiro music. There was quite a few individuals involved in that. In Punctuary Delivery? Not, no, in Punctuary Delivery. Oh, okay. Dennis Webster. Oh, Dennis Webster was in that? That was just you, Dennis. Yeah, in Performing Cat. And we, that was first performed at NTID, and then later we performed at the Pyramid Arts Center in Rochester. We were never able to take it to New York City, but it was on cable, so some people perhaps have seen it on cable. Yeah. And then during that same period, Dave and I would sort of do chill-down time, you know, it was interesting. We were dancing all day and dancing all night, and one of the things we would do to sort of just hang out and chill is go to each other's homes and continue to be creative while maniacs, and just, you know, again, the sky's the limit in terms of how we played together and created together. And then in a more formal way, they told us about these poetry readings that would be in downtown Rochester, which was at a restaurant, and it was called Jazz Berries, and it had great food, and people would go there and we'd just chill-down. And then afterwards there would be these readings, and Dave and I would go there and these wonderful friends and poets, deaf poets would do their thing. And I'd just sit back and be in 7th Heaven because there it was, you know. And I would watch their art and their passion. That was very inspiring. Did you ever go to any of the readings that were hearing people with interpretive performances that were rehearsed, like heavy-duty translated interpretive performance of hearing poets as well, the painted rope series that Jim Cohen had going, anything like that? My experience might have been through Jim Cohen, maybe hearing some of his poetry through him. The truth was, I was so involved in that circle that I was in that I didn't have enough opportunities to explore there was writers in books, I think, in Rochester, there was a place called Writers in Books. I didn't get a chance. There was always a little tap on my shoulder saying, that's there, that's there. But I was so involved in the circle that I was in, so I didn't get an opportunity to explore that. Perhaps that's another passage in my life. It was enough to do exactly what I was doing. What about your improv group? I did want to ask you about it. Well, I got into dance through improv. That's what I thought dance was, was improvisation and just letting your whole being express. And so I brought that into the community and people would be like, oh, I've never danced before. So when I first did improv, I never danced before. So come on. And so Dave and I had a loft in downtown Rochester. I think it was on St. Paul's. And we had, on Friday nights, open improv. And it was, people were coming in from every direction, death, hearing, artists, technicians, writers, musicians, videographers. We were a wild group of creative people. It was rich. It was fun and passionate and friendships, deep friendships evolved out of that. You know, you work with someone at such a level, you can't help but bond with them. Yeah, is that rich bonding that happens? And so that was the gift of the era. Cool. And is that from the improv group? It was one of the many... We had many branches. So the improv groups in the loft was one aspect of it. We had the choreographic projects that we all did. One was place settings that Kenny Lerner and Debbie Rennie were involved in and David Fritz. And we took that to New York City to dance theater workshop in a wonderful, wonderful time performing that in New York City. With my own works, I'll let someone else talk about its success, but a real joy to work on, a real joy to work on. And it's an evolutionary piece because I did it years ago when I was a graduate student with a colleague at that time, a dancer who, her name is Susan Gallagher, and she also had worked with the deaf. And her experience in place settings was then replaced by Debbie Rennie years later. And it was about a couple in their aging process from young love to the ties that bond in your early years and then your middle years and then in your older years where you begin new ties and you separate the old ties and add new ones and you do permutations on your relationship until old age and then the passing and the separateness of that journey. And I must say that Debbie was exquisite. And what she brought to that piece was a very exact and full understanding of aging. She was able through her mind, through her skills as a poet, through her skills as an actress, she was able to age before our very eyes that when she portrayed someone in their 80s, she was in her young 20s. It took my breath away and it will always last in my memory that she was able to transform her body and do the movement. And it was real. She made it real. It's a gift that she had and that we had, I had the pleasure to work with. It was David and his wild abandonment. He just complimented it and he's a running theme. He did it when Susan Gallagher was his partner. He did it when various other people were his partner and when Debbie was his partner, they had great chemistry. Wouldn't you say so, Kenny? Awesome, awesome, awesome chemistry. Is there any document in this? There may be a document. I'm not sure it still exists. I'd have to search it out. Let's see if we can find it. Ah, chocolate. Yeah, so that chemistry worked real well. The thing I have to say is through the entire process, I found the chemistry of the individuals involved was always perfection. Really, really fine, really fine stuff. So I've been a lucky woman. I have one question for you. Way back when I was... This is about me, so if you turn off your camera. Kenny, we don't have time. If it relates fine. I just want to know because of the future. You said we were talking about Peter and me and Debbie because we were living together and you compared me with someone from a long time ago who are at Z. And I was not aware of that time period. Do you remember? Was it a professional individual? Or a person who was working with other people like I was? I made a comparison between you. You don't remember? I don't remember, I'm sorry to say that. It was just curious if you could find it. Yeah, I'm sure you were. I was just curious. David, do you have a memory of anything? I'll think about it. We'll give it some thought. I think I just want to say one more thing. If I may. Stop it. Thank you. One second. It's great that at this point in my life that I still have access to those friendships and the bonds that we created and that the artistry, the personal effort and passions of each individual is continuing. That each of us are bringing to our lives the length of that. That it wasn't a short lived moment in time that's gone but that it has an evolution and that it's continuing to grow and prosper. And I think that seeing the work of like Peter Kirk and Kenny Lerner and seeing how it's developed and how it's growing and the place that they are now, that's real special and poignant and I'm so, so happy to see that it's continued. I'm really glad for it. I'm just going to scan and make sure I'm going to look at how I've ever looked at anything that we've got and covered basically. I'll find a little paper that I have. Thank you. You met all three of them. I just want to make sure I've got this. You met Peter, you met Debbie, you met Kenny, you met Patrick all through the dance department. You haven't met them any place else before. You met them as your entree into that world. They were some of the first ones. Yeah, a Petri dish was NTID. Yeah, we all sort of like dropped in. Well, Patrick was there, he was faculty there and you know, Patrick, Patrick is so expressive. So, I mean, I'm in awe of his artistry and I really hope I get to see him sometime in the future. Patrick's fingers, they just like reached out, you know? He used that time and space with his hands in a way I've never seen anyone do it. He would express something and use the language and his fingers would just like lengthen and then the essence of his poet was running through his fingers and he was just a total physical being with his poetry. And then he was my colleague. You know, I'd seen him every day and was like, hey Patrick, how are you? What's up? You know, and he'd teach me and they all teach me so. Yeah, the Petri dish was NTID for me. Beautiful. Thank you. You're most great. There's so much in here. There's a lot of great little pearls there. I appreciate that. I'm involved.