Site Lines:
Matthew Barney on Staging the American Myth

Vic Brooks
Let’s begin with the site in relation to your description of violence as “living in the American landscape and its histories.”

Matthew Barney
TACTICAL parallax has developed into an opportunity to synthesize different narratives from my past work into a single project. This military structure on the cattle ranch is doing a lot of that work—it’s creating a synthesis in itself. The two projects that I’m pulling from most significantly are SECONDARY and Redoubt and there’s a crossover with McCabe Ranch in terms of the history of use and architecture: it’s a place where soldiers were trained for tactical and athletic movement. It’s also set in alpine conditions, much in the way that Redoubt was staged at high altitude and in deep snow, which was one of the physical conditions that dictated the movement vocabulary in that piece. 

VB
And in terms of how the project of the American West has shaped your thinking, what histories of image-making and spectatorship, whether in the art historical or entertainment realms, have influenced your approach?

MB
I think one of the things that started to occur to me while I was producing SECONDARY was how there’s a similarity between that moment in the 1970s where long telephoto lenses started to be used in sports to bring the interior life of the player closer to the viewer at home watching on television, and a moment in American Western painting in the late nineteenth century with Frederic Remington where the same thing happens. Before that, you have a much wider view that’s within the canon of Northern Romantic landscape painting from Europe. Remington brought the protagonist in the picture closer and into a more frontal format, just like what happened later with the long lens in football. Watching football before that technology was more like a proscenium experience. You would see the two sides of the game in a kind of profile view as if watching it from the upper deck of the stadium. The viewing conditions really changed with the longer lenses.

VB
You’ve previously mentioned to me that the language of Broadway, or the revue, will also enter the frame in this new performance, as a way to connect Redoubt’s tactical view of the hunt with the sports spectatorship of SECONDARY. And you’re bringing an entirely new character to TACTICAL parallax, performed by Okwui Okpokwasili, which acts as another strand of connective tissue between the two worlds.

MB
The site is part of the synthesis in this piece with the sense of place and the specific use of that structure. In its previous state as a drill hall and its current state as a barn, there are choreographies that we’re pulling from the two previous works and modifying to create intersections between characters that don’t necessarily belong together. The character Stella Wolf that Okwui is performing is also a kind of synthesizer. And to speak really generally about the structure of the project, there’s something to do with the revue or variety show that this piece is grappling with. In the Western setting, one of the models that we’ve been thinking about and looking at are the Buffalo Bill shows, which is a kind of vaudeville form. And I’m interested in triangulating the relationship between the athletic narrative of SECONDARY and the Western narrative in Redoubt with the American stage register with this new character. I do believe there’s a relationship between those three American forms of theater and those three kinds of mythological spaces.

You already pointed to my thinking about the way that violence lives in the vocabulary of American football, and the vocabulary and reality of Americans, and the history of the West. I would say that in a more abstract way it also lives on the American stage, and that there’s an explicitness or a kind of frontal attack that you have on Broadway that, to me, feels very specifically American. Even if we’re talking about really abstract connections that could be made between these three spaces, I’m interested in thinking about that.

VB
Of course, the dramaturgical arc of the Broadway theatrical tradition also tends to be structured around a conflict or a rupture. But you’ve always avoided the primacy of the single emotional climax; rather, your performances and films unfold durationally, and often dwell in the repetition of practice, rehearsal, or training.

MB
I’ve always been interested in capturing the potential energy at that moment in the preparation of something before it’s being performed. The subject of the story is withholding that moment or resisting that moment of stepping into the arena or onto the field of play as a way of maximizing potential energy. The practice or training space is endlessly fascinating to me in all of its specific behavior. It’s the movement that’s specific to any given athlete, the kind of internal narratives that are happening within the minds of the individuals inhabiting that space. The way that you have to create a kind of conversation between yourself and your body in training to move past development plateaus or to move past whatever psychological boundary there is, in and of itself, becomes very narrative.

VB
To that end, could you talk about your casting process and working with dancers and performers from different disciplines, training, and movement languages?

MB
Over the years, I’ve definitely worked with a lot of performers who come from different movement backgrounds, but SECONDARY was a much more collaborative space. It came out of workshopping, with the different performers bringing their own vocabulary into those sessions, and then combining that with the fact that each position in football has a different movement vocabulary. It’s a layering of many histories, including the histories of each of those performers. And SECONDARY was a much deeper engagement than I’ve had before with contemporary dance movement and practice and approach. With the character Stella Wolf, I think there’s a kind of vocal and physical quality to that Broadway vocabulary that both my main collaborators, the composer Jonathan Bepler and movement director David Thompson, have talked about in different ways. It felt like Okwui could really bring all of those qualities to the performance.

VB
In terms of music, you and Jonathan Bepler always work in tandem on the development of a project and he doesn’t score a “soundtrack” for you in the traditional way. Jonathan described his approach to TACTICAL parallax as scoring a series of modules for the different groupings of musicians, which allows for an iterative and responsive rehearsal process in relation to the time and actions of the performance in the moment as they unfold…

MB
Yes, from the start we talk about the narrative and about what’s happening musically on a purely sonic level, but there’s also a way in which we both embrace the possibility of these two things working against each other as much as in support of one another. I think that we’re both really resistant to the kind of soundtrack-to-action approach where one discipline is supporting another in a traditional way. And so often you have one thing working against the other, which is a little bit unusual and requires a lot of trust.

VB
It’s an approach to working that seems to reflect the specific collision of characters and worlds of this new performance. Your collaborative method also reminds me a bit of the duet between dancers David Thompson and Rafael Xavier as they articulate your Zone Tool prop—how its elements can come together in moments of perfect balance to bear its own weight, but also how it can fall apart.

MB
Yes, the Zone Tool is a plastic tubular structure that has articulating arms. The arms can be balanced up on their sides in different ways. But its form is inspired by a defensive strategy in football where a person isn’t defending a person by running with them, they’re defending a zone or an area of the field. This became popular in the ’70s around the time of this incident with Darryl Stingley and Jack Tatum. In making SECONDARY, I became interested in thinking about the diagram of that play, both as a movement map for what would eventually be the choreography, but also the way that the field was divided strategically. And so the structure comes from the so-called “zone defense” that was used in that moment.

VB
I’d love to end with another key image or motif from TACTICAL parallax, the wolf, which carries over from Redoubt and is channeled through both Okwui’s character and the team of huskies that bring the Zone Tool onto the field. As it happens, wolves were just reintroduced in Colorado this year, which echoes a formative experience for you growing up in Idaho…

MB
They started talking about reintroducing wolves in the ’80s. I was a student in Idaho then, but the release of the first wolves wasn’t until the ’90s, so I had already left the state. But yes, it’s an interesting coincidence that they’ve just done this in Colorado and we already had a couple of conversations during the site scouting that we’ve done in and around Aspen about that dynamic. The way that dynamic and argument plays out seems to be the same, whether it’s in Europe or in America. It’s always the same set of questions.

VB
It’s the conflict, I suppose, between ranchers and those who raise animals and conservation or rewilding approaches. Going back to our first point about how violence is rendered into or onto the American landscape, how have these two positions shaped your thinking both for Redoubt and TACTICAL parallax?

MB
In a place like Idaho, if you’re going to have a conversation about releasing the apex predator into the landscape, you’re also automatically going to have a conversation about killing it. It just goes hand in hand. That’s a hunting culture. This sort of management of the numbers is always part of the discussion.