I was sixteen in 2016, when Trump was elected for the first time. I went to the March for Our Lives in Boston. I fastened witty political buttons to my denim jacket. I put “activist” in my internet profiles, right next to “dancer” and “artist.” I’d been online for years, so I knew the importance of declaring my defining interests publicly, and I knew it was important that “activism” was one of them. To be sure, the identity wasn’t all that mattered to me, but lacking it certainly risked social capital. As such, it became imperative to associate myself only with people, activities, and media aligned with the leftist agenda to which I subscribed. If the internet decided to cancel a celebrity, I unfollowed them, I stopped streaming their music, I bleached my online presence of any damning allusions. I withdrew any scaffolding I was contributing to their “platform.” People do and say lots of horrible, evil, dehumanizing, and deplorable things. People are flawed and imperfect and generally upsetting. I know this. And yet, just last week, when my own slip of the tongue caused a miscommunication among friends, no one was more upset—more humiliated—than I. Even as I disentangle myself from the purity politics I learned as a teenager, it is still very painful to say the wrong thing in public.
It is hard and brave to engage with “cancellable” artists, especially in one’s own art making. That’s why I wanted to speak with Hallie Chametzky when I heard about her new evening-length work, The truth is the truth is the truth is the. In her words, it’s a “dance theater work about Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, “genius,” complex historic queers, and repetitive sentences.”
Stein and Toklas were queer American Jews residing in Nazi-occupied France who likely avoided extermination due to both obscurity and the fact that “Gertrude… did work on behalf of France’s Vichy government, which collaborated with the occupying Nazi forces” and “agreed to translate a set of speeches by Marshal Philippe Pétain—a hundred eighty pages of explicitly anti-Semitic tirades—into English” (Emily Greenhouse, The New Yorker). Talk about avoiding saying the wrong thing in public.
Chametzky is a performer, choreographer, writer, archivist, and organizer. We discussed the slipperiness of historical “truth,” the collision of risk and privilege, and whether or not you can actually make dances “about” things. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Hannah Lieberman: In your newsletter, which is how I found out about this project, you wrote,
“The endless slog of grant, residency, and performance applications has brought me no closer to being able to succinctly explain this piece.”
I’m curious about this. You’re working with some complicated material. What do you think about when you’re trying to condense your work into a “description?”
Hallie Chametzky: It’s always funny to me when I hear my newsletter referenced. You know those weird boxes and chairs in your house that are full of random shit? It feels like taking mine and putting them out into the world.
My relationship with grant writing is mixed because I have written grants for other dance artists and companies. As a professional grant writer, you ask, “What do you have to do to get the money?” There’s a lot of ” How do you spin it? How do you make it sound more appealing? How do you put in the keywords?”
You’d think I would be strategic like that in my own grant writing, but frankly, I find it really upsetting and dehumanizing, and also just godless and artless. It’s very unchic. When I’m writing about my own work, I try to be accurate, to say what I mean, and to write the information and the truth. Which is funny because of the title of the piece we’re talking about.
HL: Yes, the title. The truth is the truth is the truth is. I assume it’s alluding to, “rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” How did you land there? What were you working on in this process that led to the idea of “truth?” Was it where you started, or where you ended up?
HC: Yes, it is a reference to “rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” I had an inclination to reference that in the title because it’s the most famous, most quintessentially Gertrude Stein line.
The reason it’s around truth, and the reason I added an extra “is,” is that the piece is contending with the way that “we,” the grand, societal “we,” have this desire for history and biography—“ the record,” as it were—to be the objective, fundamental truth. We get it, we know it, we can learn it, and it can be true.
The book Two Lives by Janet Malcolm inspired me to start working on this piece. Malcolm tears into the form of biography while also writing a biography. She emphasizes and makes it explicit that the writer of a biography is always in the story. Two Lives is contending with the questions “who are these people and what is the truth of their lives?” while acknowledging and accepting that we’re not going to have the “truth.”
HL: You’re a dance artist, but you’re also a writer. What makes you want to make a dance about something?
HC: That’s a really good question. There’s something mercurial and impossible to say [about that]. The internal feeling of, “I want to make a dance about this,” doesn’t come from a place of logic. It comes from an instinct, because there’s not really any reason to make a dance about anything. [Dance is] similar to poetry. If your goal was to make something about something in a very clear way, you wouldn’t write a poem. You’d write a speech, or a book, or an essay. I’ve responded to [Gertrude and Alice’s] story with nothing but questions and curiosities, just the desire to dig and have more, but not necessarily to know. To me, this lent itself to dance because I was comfortable making performance work that doesn’t have to “educate” in the most formal of ways.
As historical figures, Gertrude and Alice resist our contemporary understanding of what it is to be a lot of things that they were. What it is to be Jewish, what it is to be queer, what it is to be women, and what it is to be an artist. They were American Jews who lived in France throughout the entirety of World War I and World War II, and they seem to have gotten through the entire Nazi period unscathed. Emotionally, we can’t really speak to how scathed or unscathed they were, but they remained physically unscathed. They were all of these things, and they were a couple. They met, and then they never left each other’s sides.
So much about them is perplexing and doesn’t fall into our neat historical narratives. I don’t want people walking away feeling like the work was a factual recounting. I want people to be engaging with the slipperiness, to have the same conflict that I do about these two legacies. It made sense to work with a form that resists literal narrative interpretation.
HL: Form and content always come up for me when I talk about dance making. Often, in undergraduate dance studies, you get an assignment: “What are you making the dance about? What is the dance of?” There’s this question of, “What is the dance doing?” Which goes back to our conversation about grant writing. A proposal will ask, “what is your dance doing?” Well, dance doesn’t do a whole lot. You can’t get at what it “does” in any of the ways that we understand success or education or “doing.”
HC: Yeah. This is why I think poetry and dance really speak to each other: they’re both made of the things of everyday life—dance is movement, poetry is words—and they’re trying to make those things unrecognizable or un-pedestrian. Dances are actively not very useful.
HL: Agreed. I’m going to read something else from your pile, your newsletter:
“It’s about what to do with historical figures who don’t fit our Marvel-brained need for heroes and villains. It’s about when queerness and radical art are there but so are fascist sympathies and sexism. It’s about what to do when we can’t go YAS QUEEN about it.”
I thought that was great. I have a lot of questions regarding perfectionism in young leftist politics, especially around the moral character of artists and celebrities. The legacy of these two people gives me—I was thinking about hope, but hope is the wrong word. What makes you not want to go “YAS QUEEN” about Stein and Toklas? What might you exclaim instead?
HC: Well, I hope people will come see the piece in April. Some of what I might exclaim is in there.
You don’t have to dig that deep to find the “problematic” stuff, as they say. If there’s an army of people waving a big red flag about Gertrude, it’s because she is on the record as a supporter of Vichy France. For people who aren’t familiar, there was a period of French history where the government was Nazi-collaborating, and they gave it a different name, which is Vichy France. She was a vocal supporter of [Philippe] Pétain, she even wanted to translate his speeches into English. She wrote to a publisher about wanting to do that. And yet, she was incredibly close with Picasso, who was a famously vocal anti-fascist. So I guess she wasn’t fascist enough to deter him from spending time with her.
Gertrude also came from a fair amount of wealth, allowing her to be an experimental modernist writer without much discomfort. She and Alice had servants and beautiful homes, and they were able to collect beautiful art. People nowadays view their perspective as privileged, which is funny when you think about the fact that they were queer Jews. Maybe it’s not “ha-ha” funny, but they very well could have been exterminated. They were living in a way that was incredibly risky, but with incredible privilege. They were somehow able to say and do things that put other people’s humanity into question. Gertrude wrote some pretty fucked up writing from the perspective of a Black character, in a made-up Black vernacular.
There was also a dynamic where Alice was the “wife.” When they had these brilliant men over to their home to talk about art and literature, and culture, Gertrude would give Alice specific instructions to sit with the wives, and keep them away from her. Other than the fact that they were [both] women, they had a very traditional dynamic. We hear about great artist men, but what about the women who worked behind the scenes to make it possible for them to be great artists. If you’re going to be critical of that when it comes to men, you could be just as critical here, if not more so.
In the leftist world, you’re thinking about purity politics, which is something I think about a lot, because so much of my life right now is occupied with organizing for Palestine. In our impressions of historical figures, and in the way we deal with our comrades, our friends, and our enemies, it is a constant line to walk to determine when is it a time for grace, when it is a time for context and nuance, and when is it a time for a hard line in the sand.
HL: I really like what you said about living in a risky way, but with incredible privilege.
HC: I think the collision of risk and privilege makes people very uncomfortable. Identity politics and intersectionality are important concepts, but they are so easily watered down and instrumentalized for the wrong reasons. Currently, I have found individuals unable to consider Jews as both victims and oppressors. The identity of the victim or the oppressed is not a permanent, immutable quality, but a shifting relationship to the world. Your relationship to the world changes because of what is happening in the world. It’s not a fixed identity.
HL: You’ve been working with two collaborators, Aviya Hernstadt and Aria Roach. What has it been like to bring something so research-heavy into a collaborative space?
HC: They are central to the project. Working with them has made it possible for me to feel excitement about the hard, messy, and unlikeable facets [of these figures] because they’ve been so open to the process. Aviya had a long period of really disliking Gertrude and finding her very unrelatable. Then, we read some posthumously published erotic writings she’d written for Alice, and this humanized her by allowing Aviya to have an experience of her queerness.
Both of them are so smart that they’re willing to not simplify or reduce these two figures.
HL: Working with text, or starting from text, how does that drive movement in your process?
HC: For someone who never shuts up and is always dealing with text and movement, this is actually a really hard question.
In this piece, it was less tricky than usual because it’s about a writer whose writing is so distinctive and identifiably her, and very important to understanding her. I gave myself more leeway to include long,chunks of text.
There’s a section called Miss Furr and Miss Skeene, which is the title of a piece of Gertrude’s from 1923. It’s a story based on friends of theirs who were lesbians. In the piece, I read the whole story, which takes about ten minutes. There’s dancing the whole time—a score where Aria and Aviya have a lot of tasks to do based on what I’m saying. It never happens the same way twice. Because it’s Gertrude Stein, [the writing is] very repetitive, and they have certain movements they need to do with certain words– but no one was going to walk about knowing about Gertrude Stein unless they heard her words. There’s a progression, an arc to how they move. They’re alone, and then they’re partnering, and then they’re alone again, and then they’re partnering again.
I also feel that Gertrude Stein’s writing is dancerly and choreographic. A section in the piece is named after a collection of writings of hers called Composition as Explanation, where she tries to explain her ideas about art. It kept bringing me back to composition class in my undergraduate dance program, where we would talk about the power of repetition. Every time I’ve ever done a feedback showing, if there’s repetition in the work, someone says there needs to be more. Dancers have a tendency to do things to the point of exhaustion, “because then the audience will get it.” Or, we have internal structures with a movement motif that repeats in 10 different ways. You do it on the floor, you do it moving, you do it stationary, you do it slow, you do it fast. We use simple building blocks and shift them around. I think Gertrude’s writing is very similar to all of that kind of process, so it lends itself to [dance].
The main thing people say about Gertrude is that her writing doesn’t make sense. It’s confusing and hard to read. I won’t say that’s not true. It is confusing and hard to read, but it makes a lot more sense if you read it out loud. I find that a lot of it is actually about the shape of it, rather than the meaning. Once you read a whole paragraph or a whole text, if you can see it for its shape and hear it for its rhythms, you get more of the experience of it.
So there is also dancing derived from text, but those [sections] are just for [us] at a certain point, because the audience is never going to see it and know what the text was. There’s no way to translate that. But it gives [a dancer] a different attitude. The material ends up having a quality to it where you can tell people are referencing something, even if you can’t quite tell what it is.
The harder parts are the text that’s devised by us pretending to be Gertrude and Alice. It sounds like they could have said it, but it’s actually stuff we said. That goes back to, what’s the idea of “truth?”
Leave a Reply