Miguel Gutierrez is a Bessie-winning dancer and choreographer whose most recent show Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People: Last Meadow enjoyed a critically acclaimed East Coast premiere at Dance Theater Workshop (DTW) in the Fall and returns to Abrons Arts Center for three performances beginning January 8 as part of American Realness: A Festival or Contemporary Performance. Gutierrez conceived, choreographed and performs in the piece along with long-time collaborator Michelle Boulé and Tarek Halaby. Recently he sat down at a cafe in the East Village to talk with independent curator and producer Earl Dax. Highlights of their conversation follow.

Portraits of Miguel and Last Meadow photographed for EVB by Ves Pitts

Earl Dax: The three dancer/performers in Last Meadow inhabit a cinematic world inspired by the three films of James Dean: Rebel Without a Cause, East of Eden and Giant. You’ve said that you were drawn to Dean, in part, because of the hyper-conscious awareness the actor had of his own iconography and how he intentionally played with it. Can you elaborate?

Miguel Gutierrez: I had all these ideas of working with misrepresentation… the idea of dance as an esoteric language being its strength rather than it’s curse (which is often what it’s cited as), and I was also intrigued by the way that people create mythologies around identity and nationhood. Then I went to borrow a friend’s copy of East of Eden, and it was a two disc set. The movie was missing, so I just watched the special features. They had all these wardrobe tests that were like these silent movies, and I really got sucked into that and fascinated by James Dean in all that. I kind of just went with it and watched all those movies. It seemed like an interesting thing to follow. He only made three movies. There’s three of us. The three movies are love triangles. This idea that he’s like a perpetual child. This idea that he’s this moment between a certain kind of acting and another kind of acting. This way in which he’s queer in his own kind of weird way. Super slouchy and feminine in a way. All these things were evocative of a certain interpretation I had thought about.

ED: You dropped out of Brown University, moved to San Francisco and got involved with Queer Nation for a year before dancing with Joe Goode. What impact does your activist background have on your work?

MG: I think that doing all that activist stuff was really extraordinary because it instantly gave me this relationship to the idea of the body as potentially dangerous and also filled with feeling and expression and also agency. I think that whenever you’ve spent any time of your life doing work for something that’s about being on that “fringe,” and then when you realize that being put on the fringe is just a, it’s just a power dynamic that society enacts upon you. You see how everything about everything becomes questioned. To say that I work in this weird experimental form of contemporary dance… Yeah, sure, maybe some people think it’s weird, but for me I think Stomp is weird or I think Shrek, the Musical is disappointing. Or for that matter ballet, something that is often considered the avatar, the paragon of what dance is supposed to be, and I look at it and think those poor women, they’re so skinny and why do they have to be in those strange heterosexual relationships onstage? The politic is infused in so many ways, and in my own work where I feel like the politic is imbued into the body because it’s a very ferocious body. It’s a very hyper-present body. It’s a body that’s turbulent. It’s a body that both has a lot of belief and has a lot of doubt. It’s a body that’s very semaphoric and obvious at times and then it’s also a body that deals with these subtle, almost non-action actions. That to me is a total expression of politics.

ED: Given your medium is dance, it’s not surprising to find you discussing your work in terms of “the body,” yet it’s a topic that seems more central to the discussion of contemporary dance. Certainly it’s a topic that many of the other performers in American Realness are dealing with.

MG: I think that the bodies in the work that I do are unavoidable, and there’s a kind of forcefulness about that unavoidability which is a total extension of being a protest body. I think it’s a little more nuanced now, and I’m a little more… I’m not interested in creating divisions in the way that I think… There was a moment with my experience with protest “I’m on this side. You’re on that side.” I don’t want that. That’s not my interest anymore, and I think that’s why art-making is a cool place to be because it’s that weird in between or extra-rational place where things can be multiple and multiple things can be true. Unfortunately, I think when you’re doing activist stuff you kind of have to believe one thing because it’s the only way to get things done, and it’s effective. And there’s a right time for that, but I’m way too doubtful all the time and skeptical to live in that way of being.

ED: Certainly there’s a lot of questioning in your work. In Last Meadow you’re exploring - among other things - iconography, heroism, myth-making, and you’ve talked about these things in relation to your work at a dancer and choreographer. What’s the relationship here?

MG: I don’t know that I subscribe to this hero worship thing, and that’s a doubt that infuses the work that I make. That’s the thing that I think about as I make work and as I continue to make work transitioning from a person who’s not known to a person who is more known. I don’t want to fall prey to believing my own myths, but it’s hard because part of the equation of longevity in this field is the ability to be branded as something. “That’s the person that does this thing,” and everyone can say it, and it’s cool, and it’s this thing. Well what if you’re not that? What if you’re someone who makes something different each time or is unsure? [gasps] Oh, that’s so scary! I think that’s one of the gifts that I got from working with John Jaspers. He is a skeptical artist. He’s not enamored of his own ideas - almost to a fault. I thought that was really powerful, and actually an incredible gift to witness. Here’s this person who’s not sure. We have these myths of the artist being, like, “It’s this way!” Instead of it being the person pulling their hair out going, “I don’t know. Maybe this sucks.” I’m often really inspired by those kinds of people which are not the ones that history books get written about.

ED: American Realness tackles this head on with a mission to draw attention to choreographers who are making work outside of the primary traditions of American dance and performance. The festival website quotes Michael Kaiser’s “Why I Worry About Modern Dance?”

MG: Did you read that piece? It was like “Where are the Merce Cunninghams? Where are the Martha Grahams…” bemoaning the death of modernist mommies and daddies, and I’m just like, “Dude!?! Open your fucking eyes!” There are artists everywhere making work in all kinds of ways. I adore Merce Cunningham, God bless his heart, but he was not a beloved artist everywhere. I saw him perform at ADF, and people walked out because the music was too fucking loud. So where are the presenters who are willing to present work that people aren’t going to like? Like if you want to sit here and bemoan the death of modern dance, well, you know what, take a fucking risk! Cunningham Company, they drove around in a van for ten fucking years. The man did not spring from the head of Medusa crowned the modernist master. These mythologies are so powerful they’re difficult to break.