The Most Together We’ve Ever Been: An Interview

In between rehearsing for the new show she’s working on and running over to Tangente to work on the set design for the show she’s presenting this week in Montreal, Toronto choreographer Ame Henderson takes a bit of time to sit down with me at Cheval Blanc. It’s the second time I’ll get to see her working with Croatian dancer Matija Ferlin after they presented /Dance/Songs/ at this year’s Festival TransAmériques, though this time their working relationship has changed. For The Most Together We’ve Ever Been, they appropriately share equally the roles of choreographer and dancer.

“Matija and I had worked on several projects together and we’d kind of come to this point where I think we were really curious about what it would mean to make something together, not as performer and choreographer, but as performer and performer, and choreographer and choreographer,” Henderson tells me. “So we basically started with that idea, which to extend that idea just a little bit, for me, means to try to meet some other way than we normally meet. And so we set up a context where we could work on it. We didn’t have anything more than that, that we wanted to try to work in another way, that we were going to both perform, that we were going to make this duet, that it was going to be called The Most Together We’ve Ever Been…”

So what is it that makes her want to keep working with Ferlin? “A lot of my practice has to do with thinking a commitment to a relationship and seeing where that can go. So of course there’s the initial sparks of why someone’s interesting, but then it’s how that deepens in time and turns into things you didn’t even expect, which I think [Matija and I] could both say about this project is that it’s something we probably wouldn’t have said we were going to do a few years ago…”

When I ask her about how The Most Together came to be, her answer reflects the playfulness that transpires in the short excerpt I’ve seen of the show: “It was just a very innocent, in some ways, kind of process. [Matija and I] totally trust each other. We totally trust that we can start with nothing.” Which probably proved necessary for this project given that The Most Together is a series of beginnings. “It has a rhythmic structure that requires a renewal in the gaze, in their perception as an audience member. Dealing with duration, questions about what action is, what change is… We’re just asking people to go with us on a trip. I’m interested in a theatre that asks all of us to be tenacious, that we don’t have to be participatory, but we have to somehow think that something can happen, as small or big as that might be.”

Of course, as the duo repeatedly goes back to a new beginning, the audience is quickly in on the joke, so to speak. Not that it is even possible to actually begin anew. As Henderson explains, “You can’t actually restart because you’re always in relationship to what came before. But I am curious about what it means to refresh the gaze or to give oneself permission as an audience member to take a break from something.”

With these constant repetitions, it’s not surprising to see humour emerging from the show’s theatricality. But, from what I’ve seen, it’s also a quality that comes across in the movement. “We flirt a lot with humour, with what is the humour that arises not from trying to be funny, but actually from being so true to something and set something up that puts us in an absurd relationship with the task.” That kind of tension feeds Henderson’s work. “I think there’s a kind of opening, that we hover on that line of if it’s funny or not. Even for [Matija and me]. We don’t even know if it’s funny. And in that hovering, it opens this interesting space for perception… But what’s funny about what we’re doing is that we just set ourselves up to deal with walking onto a stage and meeting an audience, and everything about it is tentative, and in that kind of not-quite-sureness there’s a lot of hilarity.”

While the anti-climactic structure of the work might demand a certain tenacity from the audience, the humour is sure to work its charm. “For me it’s about a gentle provocation. This is what we think we know about this… How can this be something else? How can this be elsewhere or other? But it’s only a little bit of an extension. It’s not a break. It’s not violent. It’s about stretching, stretching outside in a way that you can still hold on to what it is that you understand as being code while reaching for a potential. And I think it’s that tension that’s really vital and also not alienating. And I think that’s where I try to situate all the projects that I do, understanding that all that we work inside, all the structures that we know are constructions that are upheld by our behaviours and beliefs. But everything can always be otherwise if we want it to be or if we imagine it. It’s just about imagination. It’s about allowing an imagined possibility to maybe even not be manifest, not come to form, but kind of hover in the air. And that’s just as exciting to me as seeing something completely break.”

You can catch The Most Together We’ve Ever Been at Tangente beginning today, October 29, until Sunday, November 1. Tickets are 17$, 14$ for students. For more information, visit www.tangente.qc.ca or call 514.525.1500.