Radio III / ᎦᏬᏂᏍᎩ ᏦᎢ: A Conversation in Three | Olivia Wood
December 13, 2022
Radio III / ᎦᏬᏂᏍᎩ ᏦᎢ
In Radio III / ᎦᏬᏂᏍᎩ ᏦᎢ, three dancers face each other in a moving triangle. Their arms extend toward the shape’s center as they shift across the stage. One arm traces the arm of the next, lifts and traces again in unison. Later, in a triangle on the floor, the dancers slip and roll across each other’s bodies, moving through a myriad of shared shapes.
The press statement for the show, performed at MAI in Tiohti:áke/Montreal this fall, described an Indigenous futurist concert set to reimagine minimalist and postmodernist principles in dance and music. What followed was a powerful orchestration centered on the vivid connection and exchange between the performers: Hanako Hoshimi-Caines, Elisa Harkins, and Zoë Poluch.
Minimalism and postmodernism are aesthetic categories not necessarily defined by a certain set of movements or tones. In practice, they describe the spare and the now. They mark the disruption of classical principles with stripped-down motions and staging, contact improvisation, repetition and choreographic accumulation, as well as conceptual constraints and direct address. But, as with the formation of any aesthetic category, the historical context from which postmodern dance emerges and the lines which delineate its principles are far from neutral.
Postmodernism dismantles movement to interrogate its foundations in the body. But the act of casting off tradition is rarely, if ever, a liberatory act for all people. Whose “universality” or supposed neutrality is this? What is left out of it? Who is left out? What has always been left out? Hoshimi-Caines, Harkins, and Poluch take up these questions with generous rigor, working to make visible that which haunts postmodernism and its colonial underpinnings. Their choreographic investment in minimalism is clear and against the wash of universality that ahistorical postmodernism proposes.
The dancers move as one, looking toward the audience, shifting between interplay and distance. The moving triangle of past, present, and future is joined by a constant flow of layered touch, pulsing beats, and the call to Land Back.
—Olivia Wood
Olivia Wood
Radio III / ᎦᏬᏂᏍᎩ ᏦᎢ is a testament to the possibilities latent in the trio form. How did you come to this number?
Elisa Harkins
We actually did a lot of research into the number three! Believe it or not! We asked our friends about their take on the number three. These were artists, curators, and dancers. So here were some of the answers. There are three trimesters in pregnancy. The father, the son, and the holy ghost are a trio. Sure, a problematic and iconic trio, but definitely one of the most famous. Also, I was an animator for a number of years, and when three of the same moving object are on a screen this represents a “group.” I really love that there is a triplet in the piece. That song is actually very tricky. For “Power of Three” the audio will always be different in each venue. The dancers have a very particular way they want it to sound, so we have to doctor it in Ableton to make it sound very visceral. It’s like being in the womb! That takes it back to the pregnancy reference!
Hanako Hoshimi-Caines
I think we came to this number from the ground up, as in it’s what we are, a trio. And from there we went out to discover what powers we were drawing on, entering into and evoking. But also the number three has a certain mystical potency and poetry, and so in a way it called us to attention in ways other numbers wouldn’t. We also self-identify as “a perverse triangle of shifting power.”
Zoë Poluch
My memory fails me these days. The number three was simply something we all had in common, a place to start. Very early on, when Hanako and I had a residency in Stockholm, we reached out to dance makers and doers that we admire, love, and respect with this request: “We elicit your memory and your reservoir of knowing, wondering what comes to mind when you think about the trio form, the three, the triangle, the threesome? It could also be a trio that makes sense to you but does not already exist as a triad in the world.” We interpreted their many, many, many answers into small dance bits that we combined into one long dance phrase.
Olivia
The performance’s expansive minimalism rejects “universalism” or “neutrality” and instead focuses on simultaneity and synthesis. How did these formal concerns shape your collaboration?
Elisa
You wouldn't believe it, but we actually started with drone. I would improvise some minimal drone for the dancers in the beginning. That was my offering. I know that was the opposite of generous on my part. I have no idea what I was thinking. I was imagining a minimal William Basinski piece with beautiful dancers creating the same old universal dance stuff that I broke up with as a teenager. But House music, Disco, its minimalism can be used in the same way. But we don’t associate House or Disco, and definitely not Pop, with the white cube. So we were thinking, it’s not a white cube, the lines on the floor – that’s a wampum belt. And we are weaving that wampum belt.
Radio III / ᎦᏬᏂᏍᎩ ᏦᎢ, performance at MAI, 2022
I don’t want another piece where people consider the shapes to just be meaningful to their lives in some completely abstract way. I have something to say. I am not going to hide my Indigenous body or Indigenous clothing. I am not in the chorus as a nothing or a nobody, which is the role that many dance teachers said that I would be forced into whether dancing for ballet or even on Broadway. They said I would be hidden in the back because I didn’t follow European beauty standards.
Zoë
I think that the concern of simultaneity was a conceptual or theoretical concern at the beginning phase. This later became a formal concern and out of this form emerged a synthesis that we had not really planned or accounted for. In fact, it is in this show run, more than three years after the premiere, that I feel the work turning more into synthesis than ever before.
Hanako
I think Zoë gave a nice concise answer to this. During the process we drew on references from minimalism in art to make our mood board and to situate our choreographic landscape and soundscape. For example, we were inspired by La Monte Young’s Dream house for the “Die, Don’t Die” section. Elements like the repetition and the spatialization of the work evoked the self-referential aspect of minimalism. The subversion or troubling is in the “uncomfortable” and the counter-colonial aspects of the work, such as pointing to the claustrophobia of minimalist art from the Western canon and its purported universalism based on the exclusion of certain (most!) bodies and cultures.
Olivia
In your artist statement you describe Radio III / ᎦᏬᏂᏍᎩ ᏦᎢ as an Indigenous futuristic concert. How do the temporal components of the piece come together? And how do they express your counter-colonial Indigenous futurism?
Elisa
Well, in many ways we go through dance history and then arrive to an Indigenous present, or shall we say future?
Radio III / ᎦᏬᏂᏍᎩ ᏦᎢ, performance at MAI, 2022
Hanako
It was like we moved from concept/theory to person/individual through the piece. I see the piece potentially working within a few time lines. One is linear in which there is some kind of story being told of these three femme persons on some distant planet where settler and Indigenous relations are different, at once evolved out of the oppression/domination relation and yet also with knowledge of that past. But also a myth, a story in which the linear temporality of the story form is speaking to the universal of a certain “out of time.” And then it is also an evolving loop, the end is the beginning but new as well. Right from the beginning of the piece, all the elements – the choreography, pieces of the costume, relations – are also from later parts of the work, so everything is in a sense present all the time but always changing. Maybe like a prophecy? Literally, this is us moving through colonial forms that shaped us – in the past, that continue to – within a larger counter-colonial effort – now and into the future – desire and pulse, all of us moving to Elisa’s music in collaboration.
Zoë
I can speak about the dances that constitute the dancing. They come from, amongst other things, our embodied archive, our gazillion years of dance training. Dancing this work is like tripping out with time travel, a somatic and visceral blast into the past. Then there are things like how the felt sense of time shifts from the beginning to the end of the concert. Those are two very distinct ways of feeling time and attention as an audience.
Olivia
You describe the work as a beautiful and uncomfortable dance performance, as well as a metaphorical peacekeeping agreement between the performers and the audience.
Elisa
For me there is some intentional discomfort that leads into a bit of a joke. At the beginning of the piece we do not look at the audience for quite some time. It’s not until I grab the microphone that I actually look at the audience. It is a dance and performance art reference, which we could continue for the rest of the piece, but instead we are like, Haha! We tricked you! And I don’t think of the Indigenous Futurist concert or the metaphorical peacekeeping agreement as being uncomfortable. Perhaps it is to people who don’t like listening to the Cherokee or Mvskoke languages. But that is not intentional. I can see it happening. I can also see the confrontation of the Land Back message as being uncomfortable.
Zoë
Uncomfortable refers to the feeling of containment or seriousness that the work, in various moments, conjures. But, to be honest, in this show run it doesn’t feel uncomfortable anymore. Ha. It feels weighted, composed, self-evident, mature, no longer uncomfortable. I think it took me these past three years to step into these aforementioned qualities, to really be with them, and thus the discomfort has shifted. Regarding the discomfort of the metaphorical peacekeeping agreement – making peace can be quite uncomfortable. I can only speak for the agreement between us performers when I say that it requires a lot of humility and listening, softness and precision.
Olivia
The music is incredible and visionary. How does the choreography relate to or merge with the music?
Elisa
The choreography for “Cate Owis,” “What You Pawn I Will Redeem,” “Pony,” and “Peyote” come from the work that I did for my solo project, Wampum. Hanako and Zoë then worked on creating the backup dancer choreography. A lot of the moves in this section are repetitive because they take cues from the music. I took a lot of moves from social dance and pop culture for this section of the piece. “Bear Hunting Song” is also from my Wampum piece, but we re-worked it in such a way that I feel it now belongs more to Radio III. For the duets, I made the songs specifically for the piece. The dancers already had phrases and scores they were working with and needed a specific tempo and mood. Thank you for saying the music is incredible and visionary!
Radio III / ᎦᏬᏂᏍᎩ ᏦᎢ, performance at MAI, 2022
Hanako
Elisa is into disco which she calls pop music’s version of minimalism. The use of repetition and pattern were elements we had a common interest in at the get-go but in our different mediums. In relation to this, we talked a lot about foreground and background and wall paper. You could think of the music and dance as weaving in and out of foreground and background with each other, and the backup dancers – settler dancers – that are background, a pattern against which the protagonist – Indigenous futurist pop star – is supported and celebrated. But this support and this sharing of different kinds of visibility shifts throughout the piece.
Olivia
Other striking sounds are in play – slapping, snapping, whistling, and other body noises.
Hanako
We kind of discovered the presence of these sounds as the piece was performed. To be honest we weren’t so aware of the dramaturgical role of such sounds while making the work. But if I let my mind wander, because it has been commented on more than once, I think it’s interesting to think of these sounds as part of the slipping in and out of the codes that we are playing with. It’s all electronic music and even Elisa’s voice has a lot of reverb, so perhaps the bare body speaks to this No Manifesto type of dance that we are pushing up against and which became such a strong reference for an authentic body presence. We try to put the Western canon “next to” in order to deflate it without rejecting it. So maybe in this way the body sounds are bringing tension into the room and that dimension of dance history.
Olivia
Radio III / ᎦᏬᏂᏍᎩ ᏦᎢ is part of a larger work that includes Elisa Harkins’ solo Wampum performance – how do the two relate?
Elisa
I am continually working on the Wampum performance. It will never be complete. It is a music project, but it is also a record of my language journey. When I started the project I was just a beginner. I was self-taught! I am still a beginner at Cherokee, but I am getting better at Mvskoke. I can read, write, and speak. I am working on getting better at listening and understanding. It is all a life-long process. If we get the opportunity to create another piece, the work will likely include more work from the Wampum material.
Olivia
Could you tell me a bit about your artistic backgrounds? How did you begin working together?
Elisa
I am an artist and composer. I studied dance in my youth, but quit and made a very conscious decision to work towards being an artist instead. My mother wanted me to be a dancer and made a lot of sacrifices for my dance training. She would drive two hours to take me to the Tulsa School of Ballet, wait in the parking lot, then drive two hours home. This happened every day of the week, including Saturdays. After high school, I was accepted into The Ailey School in NYC, which was a huge honor, but I hated it and very dramatically quit dance. I fully renounced the art form. Dance and I broke up. I moved to Chicago, got a BA in Interactive Media, and worked in advertising and became a freelance curator. Then life took a huge turn after a brush with death on my bicycle, and I moved to LA and got my MFA in Fine Art, focusing on Performance Art and Electronic Music Composition at California Institute of the Arts. While I was getting my MFA, I met Duane Linklater, the husband of Aleutic choreographer Tanya Lukin-Linklater, and he recommended me to Tanya for two of her performances for camera. This is where I met Hanako. Hanako and I worked on How we mark land and how land marks us, as well as …you are judged to be going against the flow because you are insistent., Part 1. Hanako and I developed a strong friendship, and I really felt like I had met a sibling. I have a deep trust in Hanako and huge respect for her work ethic. Zoë and I met later, through Hanako, with the specific idea of working on this piece. I really had no idea how to make a dance piece. I actually still don’t! I’m just glad I could help in some way. And I’m sure my mom is happy I’m finally on stage again after all the work and money she put into molding me into a dancer. She passed over a year ago from complications from Covid, but she was very proud that I was doing the work she always thought I would do.
Hanako
I’m from a classical dance background but steadily moved through different dance forms while still investigating what I think first peaked my interest in the classical form, something along the lines of the sparkliness of physics, the glee of melting pink ice cream and a sensation of resistance, like walking against a strong wind and then letting go. Elisa has called me the “evil mastermind” of this project, only because I brought us all together. After that it is truly a three-way creation. I loved Elisa’s aesthetic and seeming ease at making art: like the best graphic novels, smart, enticing, fun, image-filled, and full of information, questioning distinctions between simplicity and complexity, high art and pop, between past, present and future. Zoë has a wild range of mind and body, from the nerdiest contemporary dance investigations to the biggest pop stages. She’s been the one to push me to the next level so many times, to ask the right questions, to see the next way and jolt me out of complacency with dance and life in general. We’re all the same height, but sometimes it feels like we’re from different planets, like how we eat is so different! And how we enter into and stick to an artistic process. Much of these similarities and differences were discovered along the way, through thick and thin. I felt there was something powerful to be made between us.
Zoë
Hanako and I knew of each other when I lived in Montréal in the early 2000s. Then when she temporarily moved to Stockholm, which had become my base. We connected and became friends and conspirators. In 2018, we decided to do the rounds of grant applications and pursue a collaboration. At that moment, Hanako had met Elisa in another artistic project and suggested Elisa to make music. It became pretty clear quite early on that Elisa should also perform. We got the grants and started our various constellations of studio research in the various geographical locations: Stockholm, Montréal, Tulsa, and Victoria. Regarding the process of collaboration… that is a much more dynamic and complex question to answer. The terms of the encounter of our respective practices and materials needed to be created. How would we arrive, exchange, decide, develop, etcetera? In retrospect, there are a lot of things we could have done at the beginning of our process to have facilitated this tuning into each other and generating collective material. But the obstacles have also provided an immense window to learn.
Elisa Harkins is a Native American (Cherokee/Muscogee) composer and artist interested in unearthing and retelling Indigenous histories.
Hanako Hoshimi-Caines is a dancer and choreographer based in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. She is engaged with dance, performance-making and philosophy as a way to see, feel and love better.
Zoë Poluch, originally from Canada, is now based in Stockholm moving through different institutions and independent groupings dedicated to dancing and thinking choreography together.
Olivia Wood is a writer and teacher living in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal.
