This week, Arts Editor Rumaan Alam interviewed senior Merrill Truax. This weekend, Truax's performance installation company \twelv\ presents three solo pieces. Truax spoke about the progress of the company, his honors project.
RA: Where did the idea for \twelv\ come from?
MT: When I was in choreography class, I got really involved in the idea of the visual picture. I just assumed that that was how people approached making dance. I discovered that, unfortunately, that's not true. I began to explore the idea of making a company. I had the idea to do it but I didn't think I could get [academic] credit for it. I didn't think I'd have the support. Then I found out I could do an honors project.
RA: Is this an interdisciplinary project? Who's sponsoring it?
MT: It's an art honors project. Nanette Macias and Nusha Martynuk are the two faculty sponsors for our project. They both have worked with me enough to know that I'm fairly independent.
RA: So, as an artist, who or what influences you?
MT: The Japanese post-modern dance movement Buto. It means "the dance of darkness." I take a lot of my theoretical ideas from the form. The theory is the emphasis on the transformation that occurs in performance. That every performer has a physical reality.
RA: Any other influences?
MT: Robert Wilson - he's both a visual artist and theater director. He creates these huge abstract visual performances. He has an emphasis on formal studies. First, I was interested in just the visual picture he created and what he could do with time and space. His attitude toward art has been pretty influential. He doesn't know what his art is about. He has an intuitive approach to it, and leaves that up to the audience and critics. Senior Frank Shea is the person who made me want to choreograph. I saw his piece "Jellyfish" and it made me think: "I can do dance."
RA: Do you think there's a need for a group like \twelv\ at Oberlin?
MT: I think that there's a call for it at Oberlin. There were a couple of failed experiments that I knew about. But mostly this fulfills a need for what I wanted. I wanted to draw in members from all the different arts and to form a collaborative site based performance group.
RA: What is your role in the group?
MT: Last semester, I was artistic director and Tommy Kriegsmann was director. But he's gone now, and I've sort of absorbed his role. Primarily, I oversee all the decisions the company makes. I'm the primary creative force, understanding that it's very much collaborative.
RA: And do you think that \twelv\ has been successful?
MT: We've made a lot of progress. I think we've been truly successful. I only had a vague notion of what it was going to be like. It's been shaped by the people we chose to be in the company and somehow we all created something bigger than all of us.
RA: What did you do last semester?
MT: We had three pieces performed last semester. What we've been aiming to do in general is something different each time, each about space. "Horse" was about the concert space. For Day Without Art, we did a piece in the art museum, which was more about exploring an inherent theme or meaning or mood. And "Lost Child," performed during finals week in Keep, was a lot more pure in its reaction to physical space. We also did a sort of improv unannounced on the landing in Mudd during finals last semester.
RA: And they were all part of your larger ideas?
MT: I think it's important for me as an artist, or any artist creating art to recognize that anything you make exists in a space. It's a lot like the idea of installation; rather than deny it I chose to embrace that idea, to use it as the impetus for creating work. "Horse" was the hardest piece we've done because we didn't have that much time in the actual space.
RA: You have the three pieces going up this weekend. Do you want to be more active this semester?
MT: I want to do ten more pieces before the end of my honors project, including more improv stuff that's unannounced. Last semester we spent a lot of time developing a process by which we can create a piece quickly. We enter a space. I design the movements and we improv and I step back and watch the things that work and don't work as the process moves forward. I'm the person who says, "OK, we're going to change the structure to this." From there we keep on refining more and more until we create the piece.
RA: What does this project mean for you?
MT: One of the things that's most important to me is the question of what's at stake. What are you risking as a performer? What are you risking as a director? What are you risking as an audience member?
RA: What are you risking as a director? Doesn't the performer have more immediately at stake?
MT: What I want the performers in the company to concentrate on is their performance and not on the audience. That's my responsibility as the director. Most of the time the performers have more at stake, but it depends on what the performance entails. But it means more to me than if the audience just hates it or likes it.
RA: And what's going to happen to this next year?
MT: We're still working that out. Even if I didn't do anything to see that it continued, I think the members of the company who will be sticking around next year will see that it continues in some way. I think it's one of the reasons we're documenting things so thoroughly - to leave behind a legacy for anyone who wants to do this kind of thing.