Life, Storytelling, and Activism As Improvisational Practice: An Interview with Debby Kajiyama & José Navarrete of Naka Dance Theater
(This interview took place over Zoom on September 9, 2020)
Hope Mohr:
I want to thank you so much for your time. We are so happy to be talking to you today.
Karla Quintero:
Let’s dive right in. I’d like to start by inviting you to share something about your work and your history of working together.
José Navarrete:
We established NAKA Dance Theater about 20 years ago. We are interested in the intersection between social justice and contemporary art. The more we do, the more the work reveals to us. I think there was a shift when we started working on a project called Revenge of Huitlacoche in which we were dealing with corn and food sovereignty. We spent four months in Oaxaca, Mexico dealing with GMOs, genetically modified organisms. We were looking at the ancestral knowledge of agriculture based on corn and how it has been assaulted by these big corporations like Monsanto. When we did the cabaret sketch Revenge of Huitlacoche, that was a shift for us because we love culture. We love storytelling. That is something that makes us really happy, to meet people by sharing stories.
We did previous work with communities, like the Japanese-American community in San Francisco, dealing with Día de los Muertos, Day of the Dead. Then we worked with the Gay Latino community around Está Noche, a bar at 16th and Mission in San Francisco. We created a dance theater piece that dealt with identity and queer culture. But Revenge of Huitlacoche really brought up social justice. From there, our work started taking shape. We started really looking at our structure. Thinking about how we express ideas through our vernacular and through our vocabulary, which is contemporary art. We are movers. We love contact improvisation and Axis Syllabus. We love somatic material.
Debby Kajiyama:
In our past three and half projects, we've worked with a group of people to highlight their stories. They performed in the works even though some folks had never done a performance before in their lives. I'd say probably since 2012 or 2013 we've been doing work like that.
Karla Quintero:
Are there other aspects or forms of improvisation that currently inspire or influence your practice?
Debby Kajiyama:
I love the question and I love the focus on improvisation because I love improvised dance. Sara Shelton Mann’s class puts me in my happy place. But I feel like the process that we go through as artists, you wouldn't recognize an improvisational dance class in any of our processes. It's improvisation more in terms of just life. Life practice as an improvisational practice. This is one of the things I learned from working ABD/Skywatchers on a project called Race: Stories from the Tenderloin.
I remember right after we had started rehearsing, we had a meeting with the MAP Fund in New York. They brought a bunch of artists together and asked us to talk about one question we had in our work at that time. The question that I had was, "How are we going to make this piece happen?” I wasn’t sure if the performers were going to show up for rehearsals or on the day of the performance. There's a lot happening in that community. They have to tend to things that are much more important than a dance piece. Going into it I felt like I had to change my concept of time. I had to stop thinking that I had so much power, not that I think that I have that much power normally anyway, but I had to relinquish a sense of control. The rehearsals and the performances became indistinguishable from each other. Now I don’t know when I am rehearsing and creating or when I am performing or when I'm just alive.
We used to rehearse individually because we were working on individual stories. We worked with Kim, who's this amazing singer with really intense stories to tell. It would be hard for her to come to rehearsal. I'd call her before I left the East Bay to go to San Francisco and say, "We have rehearsal." Then we'd go. I'd call her when I got there and she'd answer her phone and say, "Okay. I'm coming down." We'd wait 20 minutes and we'd call her again. She'd say, "Yeah. I had a little problem, but I'll be down. Don't worry. I just have to take care of something." We would end up waiting sometimes an hour or an hour and a half for her to come down. Then we'd rehearse and it would be really intense and joyous.
It reminds me of the time we spent in Oaxaca. I was visiting a friend's family and the couple were orthodontists. They were originally from a tiny mountain town in the mountains of Oaxaca. One day they said, "Why don't you come to the town and visit with us?" It was so beautiful there. Once a month they worked as dentists in the tiny town where they were from. Laura, my friend said, "I want to show you the town; let's go for a little walk. Let's go for a little hike." An hour later, after we had visited the market, we came back to the office and there were patients that had been sitting there waiting for their dentist appointment. I was like, "Oh my god. How horrible that they had to wait so long for you!" But they were fine and she was fine and nobody was tripping except me. I was like, "Okay. This is how it is.” This is a long way of saying that I feel like the improvisational practices are more teaching me how to be improvisational than me teaching others how to do improvisation.
Karla Quintero:
So improvisation not as a tool to necessarily generate material for a performance, but improvisation is the process in a sense.
José Navarrete:
Yeah.
Debby Kajiyama:
I think we definitely used improvisation in the process also, but it's a different kind of improvisation. In order to make an environment that's conducive to improvisation, again it comes back to the difference between a rehearsal and everyday life and the performance. I wrote down in my notes, “what is a rehearsal?” It's not renting studio space from 1:00 to 3:00 on a particular day and inviting specific people to go there and having a private space to work on your piece. It's more like going to Mujeres Unidas y Activas, the office, where everybody's walking in and out and you have a table. You've invited a bunch of people, but the people that come might not be those people. Other people will come and you find a connection with them. You notice something that people already feel confident in, or good at, or are interested in, and you follow that connection. They're in a space where they feel comfortable, it's their cultural center, it's their home. I'm there to listen and figure out what's really burning in this person's spirit that they want to tell me? What really excites them?
Right now we're working with Julita, a woman from Guatemala. She's an amazing seamstress and an amazing knitter. She knits and crochets amazing stuff. How can we figure out how to use this kind of work? And so we get online every day and we're talking about her dream. She has this dream of abundance where she's in the countryside and there's tons of chickens and they lay tons of eggs everywhere. We don't want them to get damaged, so we have to go pick them all up. She's telling me the whole dream. Then we asked, do you think you could crochet this scene? And yesterday, she crocheted chickens, and they're beautiful! She's never made a crocheted chicken before and I've never seen a crocheted chicken before. We're probably going to make a film out of her story. Chickens will probably be in the video.
Karla Quintero:
At what point and how do you introduce movement into your work? I saw Race: Stories from the Tenderloin and there was a lot of movement in it. At what point and how did you introduce movement in this process and how did it relate to themes you discussed around improvisation?
José Navarrete:
With Skywatchers, because there were a lot of Gospel singers, we went to Gospel. We were like, let's bring the pandeiro, let's bring the drums, let's bring some songs of the church, let’s start undulating our spine and moving. That was very powerful for them. We created a lot of work through them remembering songs that they were singing in church.
They also brought the song “Iko Iko” from New Orleans that most of them knew, and we ended up using that. We animated the feeling of the song. We would say, let’s look at how this person is moving. Let's try to feel that. Let's try to stay with that for a bit. So we generated movement through particular cultural elements that they knew.
For instance with Mujeres Unidas, all of them are immigrants. They love Latin music like Salsa, Merengue, Sonidera, and we go to that. We started doing research to see what activities they have that are physical. With Monica -- she loves step aerobics, con banco. So we decided to take the class with her and her friends. I think we spent three months trying to learn Step together in her classes. That became part of the show. That was very successful because we stepped aside and said, “Okay, this is what you want to learn. We want to learn that.”
Debby Kajiyama:
That was important because not only was it a movement practice that they were into, but also the teacher was a good friend. We asked her to choreograph a little routine. All of Monica's friends who supported her through this difficult time were all in the class. It felt important. I had never done Zumba before. In addition we added, “What if you lean into me and give me your weight?” “What if five people lift you up into the air?” I feel like then, they were willing to try the “wacky” stuff we wanted to do.
There was also a section in the piece in Race: Stories from the Tenderloin, do you know Kevin O'Connor? He recently finished his PhD at UC Davis. He's an amazing circus trained dancer and also a beautiful improviser. He was one of the key artists in Race and he did a Contact duet with one of the residents, Lee, who had never danced before. [Lee] is a very thin, slight man. I don't have any idea how it happened, but somehow Kevin convinced [Lee] that it would be fine if he lifted him on his shoulder and spun him around. Literally he was flying through the air. Lee told a story about a time when a friend of his invited him to fly an airplane. It was a harrowing story. They were drinking and they went and flew this airplane. The first part of his story told the story of the airplane. We had three young dancers who did a really great job of improvising in the telling of the story. Then Lee would stand up, very naturally, as he would normally do, and correct them. Tell them they had gotten the details wrong. So it became this improvisational story among four people.
We didn't sit down and say, “Let’s think of some movement.” We didn't even go through a process. It was more of trusting, and then lean into me, and [Lee] was so open to it. It was just about listening. That's the only guidance that was given. They just listened to each other and that was all.
José Navarrete:
The work that we do, it's contemporary. Dance can be abstract. One of the things that we have done is we invite people like passerbys or people that are in the building into our rehearsals. We do a show for them, and ask them, “Tell us a little bit about what you think about this?” I think that intention and that attention is really powerful because it offers some kind of trust. We had an amazing conversation with somebody that had not had an experience of contemporary art, and they said, "Oh my God. You make me feel like she was floating into the air." It has to do with the space. How do we contain the space for those conversations to happen?
One thing that also keeps coming in my mind, we did a trio where we were lifting Gizeh [Muñiz]. We were rehearsing in the building of Mujeres Unidas but we were outside and they had their membership meeting. We asked them if they could give us five minutes to show them what we were working on. We went to the meeting and showed them. It was really powerful. They felt emotionally uplifted by what we were doing. "Oh, oh, oh. Oh yeah." They started imagining things through what we were showing to them. It helped us to figure out where we needed to go with our movement vocabulary.
Debby Kajiyama:
In terms of eliciting something physical from people, we work a lot with sculptural set objects. In the Anastasio Project at Eastside Arts Alliance, we used a string sculpture. There are two posts in the middle of the room and then we had some clothesline that we wrapped around it to make a wall. It's two layers of string. I’ll show a section of it. This is Patricia Barajas and Simone Nalls.
Photo credit: Scott Tsuchitani
Simone hadn't performed like this before. We asked her to do some improvisation with the object. At first she was really shy, and was like "I don't know what I'm doing. I can't do it." She said to us, "You have to understand that I am an African-American woman and I cannot look stupid no matter what I do. This is how I live my life. Not being able to make a mistake. I have to be on my game all the time because I'm judged too quickly, too readily."
But we kept working with her to rehearse and offered a narrative of someone who had disappeared at the border that she might be looking for. Eventually she said, “I can do this.” In some ways I feel like it's easier to have an interesting object to play with instead of only moving your body.
Hope Mohr:
That's powerful. In working with community members, how do you invite people into embodiment, especially people who don't have a movement background or people who feel inhibited? Are there other techniques, tactics, or scores that you offer to extend that invitation or to draw people in?
José Navarrete:
We saw this film called After Life, it's a Japanese film.
Hope Mohr:
I love that film.
Karla Quintero:
That's a good one.
José Navarrete:
It takes place in the liminal space between life and death. And the office workers in this place are helping the people who have just died archive the best memory of their life for eternity. It's based on decentralizing yourself. It is not your vision, it's the vision of the people. The people that are telling the story. I don't know if that’s technique or an exercise, but it has been very powerful for us to be able to decentralize ourselves to bring the vision of the community, especially the people that are willing to be with us in the artistic process.
There is a moment in the process when they get so invested. Suddenly, it's not NAKA’s piece. You can tell me your stories and then I provide you some ideas. We have been really lucky because the people we work with match our aesthetics. It’s very fulfilling when we get to that moment when they recognize the work that we do, but they also have agency to fulfill their vision. That has to do a lot with improvisation.
This happens also in terms of writing. Debby is really good at writing stories. She hears something from Kim, writes it down, and then is like, “Kim, this is the story that you said, what do you think?” Kim reads it and says, "Oh yes. Oh no." She starts adjusting based on what we heard from her. That's how we create text. You listen for what they already have.
Debby Kajiyama:
Also we create a container for the process. Usually it will be other dancers or us. If they don't remember what comes next, then there are others in the space that are holding their story carefully. Even if they don't do anything but stand there, we can frame it and make it look like that is what is supposed to happen.
We’ve worked with several people who couldn't even be in the room. They would be too anxious and they would leave. You'd know that they'd kind of want to be there, because they would show up every week. First it would be one minute, then it would be three, and then a little bit longer. But on bad days they couldn't stay at all or they didn't come.
That happened with Silver Sonic, who lives in the Tenderloin and paints himself with silver paint as part of his performative identity. He would always tell these stories about why he couldn't be there. But then José worked with him one on one. At first he was still skeptical. Finally at one point he said, "You know what I want to do? I want you to rig me, fly me up into the air." Do you know the Tenderloin National Forest on Ellis with the huge red gates in front of it? He's like, "I want you to fly me to the top of those red gates and I'm going to play my bass guitar as the opening of this entire piece. And I want a fog machine." All of a sudden he had a vision of how he wanted to tell his story. We said okay and ran and got the fog machine. Kevin is a rigger so he knew how to rig him to fly him up. And that was the opening of the piece. He and José also danced a duet.
José Navarrete:
One of the things that also was very interesting for the connection was I said, "Hey Silver. I want you to paint me like you. I want to be like you." That was very moving for him because he said, "Nobody has ever wanted to be like me." That was a deep connection because I said, "I want to be like you, so you need to paint me. We're going to dance together and you're going to go up and you're going to play your bass.” That was really powerful because in one moment in our process, we thought Silver was not going to come through. We were very skeptical. He's very sensitive. But he managed. He did the whole process and he's still doing a lot of work with Skywatchers.
Karla Quintero:
This is bringing back all these memories from that piece.
You mentioned the Anastasio Project, a project that had a specific political demand. Is it different when you're working on a project where the focus is explicitly political versus a project that is driven by community building and expressing people’s stories?
Debby Kajiyama:
Did you say the Anastasio project was that way for you?
Karla Quintero:
Yes, when I looked at the footage, that's how I interpreted it.
José Navarrete:
The Anastasio Project was a long process. It took us six years to work with the community. It took us a long time. The process of Anastasio went both ways. We were challenged by their political narrative and also they were challenged by us--by our contemporary aesthetic. Can you do your story in a different way? Can it be possible to say your story in a different way? It was like that. It was a mutual conversation and process.
What I remember with Anastasio was Kev Akhidenor, he's an amazing intellectual. He talks for hours about everything. In the rehearsal we were trying to contain him. We would say, you did that, don't do that one more time. We managed to contain his monologue to 20 minutes. But then we couldn't control his performance. We took a leap of faith with him. Audience reaction to Kev’s section was mixed. Scholars and dance makers thought it was too long. But for the community, it was really powerful. They were saying, "Wow. Kev made the piece."
Hope Mohr:
In making socially engaged work, how do you balance your aesthetic desires with your activist desires? Do you feel like those two things line up or sometimes diverge? If they diverge, how do you navigate that tension inside you?
José Navarrete:
It's interesting, this idea of improvisation and open spaces. In the process for Dismantling Tactics, I wanted to use improvisational techniques, but with a sense of agency. I couldn't figure out how to leave the performance open. In the white community, the dance community, and for white audiences, there’s a tendency to talk about improvisation as being open-ended. But that doesn't make any sense to me. For me, as a person of color, I have agency. I have a purpose. Yes, I want to use the devil's tools, but it needs to be in a different way. I always struggle in trying to figure out how open should improvisation be. I am always navigating between improvisation and agency. What is my purpose? There’s always reflection and conflict when we are doing work.
Hope Mohr:
You both work at the intersection of movement and social justice. What do you think movement brings to social justice work that other modes of engagement don't offer? What are the gifts that you've found working on political issues through movement?
José Navarrete:
Redemption. Movement is ephemeral. The body is a vehicle of energy. It doesn’t stay. It’s always moving. It creates magic. It elevates the mind to another state of consciousness. When there is so much pain and historical trauma and when you surrender to the moment, that moment is magical.
Hope Mohr:
I'm filled with gratitude and appreciation for both of you and for the work that you do. Thank you.
Karla Quintero:
Same. It's really nice to hear about your work from your own perspectives and hear about some of your works. I feel really lucky to have been able to get all this context and to be able to include this information as part of our rumination on improvisation and what it contributes to social justice-driven artmaking. Thank you.
José Navarrete & Debby Kajiyama:
Thank you!
Karla Quintero:
Bye. Adiós.
José Navarrete:
Adiós.
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