Dr. Christoph Gaiser (CG): How would both of you describe yourselves before you met Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui? And how did you change as a dancer after you started working with him?

Daisy Philips (DP): When I came to Europe at the age of 18 (…) I was really excited to discover the ways in which people were combining disciplines and schools of thought about movement and dance in Europe in ways that in America, well, it still felt very segregated. (…) When I started working with Larbi, and this is linked also to my background in gymnastics, I was thrilled to discover that he wanted to use all these things I had always sort of tried to hide within a dance context, like acrobatic skills, doing the splits, doing a bridge (…). Larbi wanted to find everything that was strange or unusual about the people he was working with, and he had none of these boundaries, or a hierarchy of what might be cool or what might be kitsch - he just wanted to use it all.

James O’Hara (JOH): I would say that I was a very curious dancer, almost a bit of a dance geek, as I was rather obsessive with watching as many things as I could or reading books about dance history and different dance lineages. But the main thing that I would probably talk about is that in seeing Larbi’s movement and meeting Larbi there was a sense of recognition. (…) And then the other thing is that, through working with Larbi, collaboration was always very important. And so I had the great privilege of connecting with so many different artists and humans that were really different to me in heritage, in upbringing, in dance background, in life background. And so through all those different exchanges in the environment that we worked in, immense growth happened.
 

CG: James, Faun opens with your solo, it‘s dark around you, we do not know where the action is set, we are confronted with pure physicality. How are you introducing yourself through movement to the audience ? What are we supposed to know or think about you ?

JOH: At that point before the world is introduced, the landing in the space is simply qualities. Not just physical, but qualities of being, letting the scene be set with a tone. The faun is clearly relaxed, is at ease, is at peace or carefree, the faun is playful, I’d say. Hopefully that kind of sets up the scene before we land into a physical or geographical world. As for what comes next, the meeting clearly shifts his approach, his energy, his fascination, but it also in some ways shifts the landscape, because the tone of the environment shifts. You can feel that through the lighting and through the backdrop. By really simplifying the opening, the audience is invited to lean in, to kind of simplify their senses into one thing that being sensing or listening into the body.
 

CG: Daisy, your character makes the first appearance in the piece, we do see trees, obviously we are in the woods. Can you tell us a little more about the habitat? And what can you tell us about the past and present of that creature? Is it a Dryad, a nymph of the woods ?

DH: While we were creating Faun, we were very inspired by the original version with Nijinsky. But we were also very inspired by Ovid‘s Metamorphoses, and by all sorts of mythologies about creatures that are partially human and partially animal, partially human and partially divine, partially human and partially plant… we were interested in the metamorphosis, the transition between different makeups of being. And something that was important to Larbi, in contrast to the original ballet, was to have an equality not just between man and woman, but an equal weight between these two opposing energies, that come together over the course of the work. It’s energies that can be called male and female, naïve and wise, inexperienced and experienced… self-absorbed (in the most innocent way) or hyperaware and connected to one’s environment (…) One of these dyads is also animal and vegetal. The sort of youthful more male energy is linked to the animal world, to Fauna, whereas the more ancient, wise feminine energy is linked to the plant world, to something very deeply rooted. So yes, the female character can in a way be looked at as a Dryad, but also as something which speaks to more global ideas or mythologies. We are in a forest, not in any particular place in the world. Something I always say to the women when I am teaching, because it’s something I very much had in my mind always when performing: Though we see the man first, this is the woman‘s habitat, and she has been living for thousands of years. She is deeply rooted in the forest, absolutely knows the texture of the moss under every rock, every insect, every turn of the light through the leaves through the day, this is a place that is absolutely her dominion.
 

CG: Nijinski is being celebrated as one of the greatest male dancers in ballet history. 75 years after his death, the dance world is still obsessed with him, not only because of his technique, but also because of his artistic vision and because of something Kevin Kopelson has called « The queer afterlife ». James, when creating Faun, did you watch the reconstructed choreography from 1912 for preparation?

JOH: Yes I do remember watching as many versions of Le faune as we could find. Of course Nijinski was the first and foremost that we were looking at. Not necessarily to reference, but just but to see what the catalyst was and what the re-imagining could be. I remember when I was 14 or 15, I learnt Le spectre de la rose, the beautiful solo. So thinking back of it now, you know, as a teenager in the late 1990s early 2000s in Australia I wasn’t necessarily connected to this sense of queer identity. But now if I think back to how that solo made me feel being able to expose and to approach my body in these multiple ways, whether that be effeminate alongside a masculine with a virtuosity that was soft or rounded or fluid. I remember feeling quite excited by learning these possibilities. (…) and now when I do reflect on it, there are also qualities that are really present in the solo of Faun, that we created with Larbi, this blurriness of not only human/animal hybrid, but also gender as well. There’s a softness to the Faun, there’s a fluidity, a gentleness and there’s an innocence.(…)
 

CG : Daisy, it feels pretty natural to me, that with your first solo, the music changes from the Debussy, western sound that we heard for James’s appearance to the more global sound that Nitin Sawhney composed. Was that the original idea to contrast the two creatures we are seeing on stage with two different styles of music?

DP: While Larbi may have had already in his head this possibility to add different musical voices, the first idea was only to use the Debussy. I remember well the very first rehearsal with the three of us. Larbi wanted to, in a very fresh way, put on the music and see what came out us, in terms of improvisation. It was in 2009, so my memory may be tainted with age, but I really have this image of us running around, feeling very trapped in this classical music and these classical ballet clichés that the drama of the music brought up - parts that seemed to be very romantic, parts that seem like “now the evil one comes in… now there is the conflict… now there is the resolution”. We felt a bit trapped. Because both of us had done ballet growing up, had heard western classical music our whole lives, we felt sort of trapped in the hegemony of the kinds of images that this music brought up for us. As I remember, during that very first rehearsal Larbi called his friend Nitin Sawhney, this amazing composer in London, and asked whether he could create some interventions. And I remember this happening so spontaneously that, as I say, maybe Larbi already had this possibility in mind. We all felt that it would be helpful to have something to break us out of the clichés that had been implanted in our minds relating to this kind of music. So Nitin‘s voice was brought in very much to sort of break open more ancient possibilities, more rich, luscious, not-so-Western possibilities in terms of our movement and the dramaturgy of the work.
 

CG: Nijinski’s original choreography was pretty explicit, especially in view of the male sexuality. What would you say: we as human beings, as spectators are looking at two creatures not like us, that are not human beings. Are terms such as innocence or desire applicable to what is going on between these creatures?

JOH: Those words (…) are inherent throughout the meeting, throughout the journey of these two characters.. We acknowledge how explicit the original work was at the time. Being in a very different time, hundred years later, our social and cultural relationship to explicit things has shifted, our relationship to sex, whether that be in film, music or literature, or any kind of art form. There was no sense that we needed to be explicit or radical or create shock but to deepen our exploration of those sorts of qualities, of arousal or of intimacy particularly our first interaction such as these two characters are having. There is for sure an innocence in that kind of exploration that these two characters go through, particularly for the faun. I have the sense that the nymph is somewhat much more experienced in this. At least for the faun every single interaction, touch, approach is an electric thing for this being (…) Though they are not necessarily human, there is humanity deep in every part of the interaction between the two creatures. There is a possibility for the audience to deeply recognize these sensations or interactions.
 

CG: What images given by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui during the process helped you guys create the shapes and movements that we do see on stage ?

DP: I remember the very first image that we worked on when constructing the actual partnering material: Larbi had this idea of a snake winding its way up a tree. During the process of searching for the movement, experimenting with the contact between us, that idea changed into two trees whose roots and branches have wound around each other, so that you can’t really tell where one ends and the other begins. Actually James and I are very similar in terms of our height, our weight, our physical makeup, so we really played with the idea of intertwining our bodies, such that it can be hard to tell from the outside but also from the inside in terms of the weight sharing, whose body is whose. In this partnering you are never entirely standing on your own legs, you are using the other person’s body as an extension of your own.
 

CG: You guys performed the piece many times on stage. How did the piece evolve ? What changes were being made in the course of all these performances and stagings you did?

DP: As Larbi wanted the movement to come from us, we also felt very free to adapt and change as we became more at home within it. We felt very much the trust of Larbi - he knew that, since the piece came from us, any small changes we made would absolute keep the spirit of the work and just make it richer. (…) In a very technical sense, at a certain point I added some movements to my solo because I found, as I was more comfortable in it, I did it faster and I had more time. In the partnering, some things had been very free in the beginning- in a way, more about our intentions and the imagery we had in mind as we were performing it, and I would say that we started to find our systems in the partnering as the work matured. We figured out, by playing together as we went, what was more likely to work in terms of giving each other weight, or the ways we held on to each other, or the opposing forces that we would offer each other’s bodies. It was also beginning to teach the work that encouraged us to codify or to have clear methods of performing this partnering, which clarified the way that we performed it as well.

JOH: What I found so beautiful in the process of living so long with the work, is the deepening of the ability to connect to the meaning of the work. (…) As much as you fall into the work, when its fresh, there is still a need to kind of stay aware of doing things as we planned, but as time went on and we got to  know the work inside out, and settled into it, the mind and nervous system and the body can really let go of that because it so familiar, so it allows you to free up space to go deeper into the spirit of the work. (…) One other thing I have to talk about is the relationship Daisy and I have and have had. We were in Geneva together as students and we became great friends (…). It’s a really special thing to dance alongside someone you know very deeply as a human as well. As we moved through life, we were able to tap into this connection where we perform this genuine deep love that we have for each other, and that was able to be celebrated in parts of the work where we dancing either alongside each other or entangled with each other.(…) If I am performing with someone who has not done it before, there is a sense of Caretaker, or wanting to hold them a little differently, whereas if you are really deeply knowing the work, you can kind of surrender. (...) The structure of the work has not changed, but what has changed is the knowing of the work, the understanding of the work from inside and out, that’s clarified or deepened or crystallised. It has also been incredibly special to pass the work on to other couples that go through this exploration, one of my favourite things is hearing how affected the others get when they perform the work.

Interview by Dr. Christoph Gaiser.