Chance was responsible for introducing me to Susannah Yugler’s plays. I have never understood the myriad visions of “New York City” that others speak of, until stumbling one day into Susannah’s world: its originality and specificity have haunted me ever since. Shimmering with dark grit and gaunt humor, Susannah’s work is a comforting anchor amidst the brutal and numbing conditions of living in New York. 

I had the chance to catch Susannah’s last three shows, all performed in alternative spaces. Each show ran only a couple of nights, leaving me enthralled by the energy and bravado captured in their sparing necessity. She produces her strange, disembodied dance-theater on a shoestring budget – something everyone seems desperate to avoid in this city – operating within an economy of exchange and collaboration. Yet the work, with its peculiar qualities, far exceeds the limits of its means.

Her last play, The Company, first performed at Worthless Studios in Bushwick and then at Sara’s in Chinatown, incorporated striking text that she had written, and stars Nick Alselmo, Joel Dean, Aimee Grumbach, Ellie Quiring, and Laila Rosen. I have been wondering about the making of The Company ever since, uncertain how to even label the work formally.

Anticipating her upcoming play, CASSANDRA, and pestered by my wondering, I decided to consult Susannah directly with my questions…

Antoine Catala: Can you tell us about the plot for The Company? How did it come about?

Susannah Yugler: The Company is about a group of artists struggling to stay relevant and survive in a financially precarious situation (the world, or field, is precarious in general). I was thinking a lot about financial precarity for performance artists, and how it’s always been that way in my lifetime, but wanted to consider a period of time where it may not have been as grim, i.e. prior to 1990. There was a lot of research I did about the NEA and funding cuts to individual artists due to censorship and political values, and I wanted to look at the ways that decision has had massive consequences for performance-based artists today. Financial stability is just not a reality for performance artists in the U.S. and it’s a very frightening thing to live with. The plot itself is about acts of betrayal, desperation and resentment that come out of that fear. 

Antoine Catala: In The Company the dialogues are pre-recorded and beam on speakers into the room. In your plays (The Company and No Exit), the actors mime the recorded voices. How did the pre-recorded voices come about? What do they do for you?

Susannah Yugler: While I was living in Germany I had the privilege of meeting theater director, Susanne Kennedy. Susanne primarily uses voice-over in her work and we met when she recorded my voice for her play Women in Trouble at the Volksbühne in Berlin. Voice-over and pantomime is by no means new to theater but Susanne’s work was the first time I was really moved by that method. It was kind of Brechtian in a totally different way. No Exit was my first work where I was trying to mimic that approach, but with zero budget and within my own area of expertise which is dance and choreography. With both No Exit and The Company, I wanted the movement and gestures of the characters to express a second narrative, or complicate the verbal narrative of the play. I think a lot about the subtext of what we say, and the contrast between what people say–the difference between what they mean and what they feel. That’s where voice-over is significant in my own work: I can use it to show what a character is thinking, and play with gesture, dance, and movement in a narrative and conceptual way that complicates performance and representation.

Antoine Catala: Yes, I noticed you alternate between group scenes, dancing scenes, monologues and duets seamlessly in The Company, to add to those dissensions between voice and movement. I was particularly touched by the quality of your writing. Did you source some of the materials or did you write everything yourself?

Susannah Yugler: The Company is my first original work, but like No Exit, there is some collaging of existing texts and source materials. There is a monologue that is woven through The Company taken from William Hazlitt’s On the Pleasure of Hating. Earlier versions of the script talk about that citation as “the work” that “The Company” is making. It’s a play that the central character, Lewis, is trying to pitch to his colleagues based on Hazlitt’s writing, but it’s a bit too bitter for them. What The Pleasure of Hating describes is man’s impulse to conjure prejudice and cruelty. We can see it in macro instances such as war and genocide, but Hazlitt boils it down to unrelenting resentments between friends, which is the narrative that unravels in the play. So that monologue is a bit of a mirror or metacommentary. In No Exit there is one scene that is played verbatim from Sartre’s original, and the rest of the work is a very loose adaptation of the original. There is also a monologue in No Exit which was a spam email I received in German and put through Google translate. I love finding auto-generated texts that reflect that stilted quality of the voice-over and pantomime.

I also have several notes on my phone of things I overhear on the train or texts I receive. There’s a bit of realism to the language I use. I think many writers work this way. Both plays have a few “inserts” of unscripted dialogue between me and voice actors as well. The theater director and playwright Brooke O’Harra was a mentor of mine and reader of the script while I wrote it in grad school, as was writer and translator, Oded Even Or.

Antoine Catala: I love those inserts, they bring the play back to reality and then go back into fiction. I love those tensions. How do you work? Does the voice come first?

Susannah Yugler: No Exit was made during the pandemic when I had a lot of time at home and made the work with friends I either lived with or who lived nearby. I worked in a familiar way where I could “devise” choreography through improvised scores and those group rehearsals could inform the editing process of the script. Now having much less time again, I work didactically. I have to complete the script and record the voices first so the dancers have a skeleton to work with. I have to edit and re-edit all of the audio for precise timing between every rehearsal, which is a pain.  I also choreograph what would be considered more formal choreography from my own body and translate it to the dancers. I’m not the kind of artist who can conceive of a score and wing it in performance. I like to use all the time we have and drill things, probably because the nature of my current work–the syncopation of the body and voice relies on precision and timing.

Antoine Catala: In your plays, you’ve enlisted the same collaborators, Lawn Mall for the music or Lauren Glading as a performer or a stylist for instance. What is your “recruiting” process? I am here implicitly curious about the social-economic condition of making your work that you talked about earlier. As you mentioned, dance or theater doesn’t pay, especially in New York. How does pursuing what you do in turn influence your output?

Susannah Yugler: Lawn and Lauren were some of my first friends when I moved to New York in 2018. I’ve been very lucky to have had both of them supporting and encouraging my work by collaborating with me in various capacities over the years. We also lived together. I adapted No Exit while the three of us were quarantined together in Spring 2020 and I made them do a drunk table read with me one night during lockdown because it felt pertinent. I have a bad habit of not separating my work and home life, but it is precisely related to what you’re getting at. There is so little money in dance and performance. I (and I would dare to say maybe all choreographers) can only make the work in large part due to the generosity of friends and collaborators. There is a certain trust that dancers and collaborators (and in this case, friends) put in the director to make something they are proud to be a part of, for little to no money. With The Company I started casting a wider net beyond my closest friends and roommates to include people I’ve never worked with before: Aimee, Laila, Nick and Joel. The first three came to an audition and Joel I kind of cornered after line dancing and asked if he’d be interested in the play. Ellie and I have known each other for a long time now and have performed together previously. The Company was also the first script where I had the characters created before the cast assembled which was very different from writing a role for a particular dancer or friend.  

While it is humbling to have friends who say they’d work with me for free, I try to pay the dancers and collaborators as much as I can. Even if we agree it’s “for free.” 

I read that Merce Cunningham couldn’t pay his company in the first few years, but would make them dinner, or pay for food and gas on the way to Black Mountain College. I try to emulate that tradition, and have always found a spirit of reciprocity among artists and dancers. As romantic as that sounds however, it’s just not enough. Professional dancers deserve a living wage for their hyper specific skill set and knowledge base. I wish the art world would do better by dancers and performance artists by taking them more seriously, rather than auxiliary. I also work with people who are not professional dancers who have a source of income which is not their performance work. I pay my cast members the same either way, which (on the one occasion I’ve received a grant) aspires to be hourly. There aren’t really enough grants out there to make the work I want to make regularly, or pay people the rate I want to pay them. Admission sales only cover a fraction of personnel and labor costs, and since I make performance, it’s not like I have an object to sell. Those are the social-economic conditions of my work. There isn’t enough money to make it. 

The tone of anxiety in my work can in one way be traced to that. That’s also connected to the dissonance I draw out in my work, separating the fiction of performance from the reality, the romantic notion of dancers vs. the ugly reality is that it is a competitive field with meager rewards and no financial support. People get vicious and scared in those conditions. In that way, too, I need the encouragement of my friends and collaborators. They make me feel less cynical by making something together, and that becomes the reward. It’s cyclical.

Antoine Catala: You tend to gravitate towards a sense of unease and despair. You portray an ambient malaise, things are unraveling. I have been struck by your keen sense of psychology. Talking about rehearsing drunk, it made me wonder if parts of The Company are autobiographical?

Susannah Yugler: The Company is not autobiographical but I certainly am drawing from my life, as I do with every work I’ve made so far. I definitely work to depict ambient malaise… it feels generational but also timeless and personal. I live with a sense that things are on the brink of collapse. Being from the West Coast, my childhood home (my only potential of inheritance) is constantly surrounded by encroaching wildfires and earthquakes. It’s literally hovering over a ravine. We can talk about global collapse, but I think everyone is dealing with this on a personal level as well, it’s inextricable.  A lot of my work is looking at moments (either historical or personal) when things fell apart and attempting to understand failure. Sometimes I mistrust the way we tend to narrativize personal and political failures, and with The Company I think I’m kind of doing a paranoid re-reading of certain events in personal and political history. The Company often refers back to the 2008 financial crisis and the NEA Four as some watershed moments that have had long lasting financial impacts on my generation of artists specifically. Those are two events I could point to as reasons for the financial precarity and perpetual instability for performance artists today, and therefore could be reasons for the ugly behaviors of the characters and the “dire” or competitive circumstances they find themselves in. I also write characters who are deeply flawed and I guess pretty unlikeable. A huge part of the process for me is introspection and a bit of self-effacement. Sometimes this results in a proxy character for myself (and in The Company, there is). It’s not in a guilt-ridden way–it’s how I can bring more depth to the narrative. 

Antoine Catala: That’s true, I love that most, if not all, of the characters in your plays are deeply flawed. For context, could you tell us more about the NEA, the funding cuts and this historical moment in general? 

Susannah Yugler: The moment referred to in my play was a lawsuit in 1990 between The National Endowment for the Arts and four performance artists, Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, John Fleck, and Tim Miller (known as the NEA Four). The artists sued the NEA after the endowment rescinded their grants on the basis of profanity and obscenity. The court ruled in favor of the artists and restored their funding, however, under continued pressure by Congress, the NEA stopped funding individual performance-based artists ever since. Last year, while I was finishing the script for The Company, I had a rare and unusual opportunity to interview the former chairman of the NEA who vetoed their grants, John Frohnmayer, who was a figure of public scrutiny in the media (from the right and the left).

When I was in undergrad, a theater professor told the class to look up the NEA Four “because that case changed the course of history for all of you” and I guess that stuck with me. As mentioned, I think about financial precarity and the extreme pressure of that, of never being financially soluble as a performance-based artist in New York on your craft alone. 

Antoine Catala: How did you choose the title?

Susannah Yugler: The Company refers to a company like a business, a hierarchy, but also the technical name for an organized group of dance or theater artists. I really wanted to play with the slipperiness of those worlds and a latent fear I have about the hyper-professionalization of the artist.

Antoine Catala: In regards to “the artist,” the presence of the body is critical to the appreciation of your work. Yet the voice-overs sit outside of the bodies. The disembodiment is palpable. So is the anxiety around self and seduction. Do you think about those themes when you make your work?

Susannah Yugler: Yeah… I used to be very interested in the inherent goal of performance and dance being seduction. But as a dancer and in life, I’ve always been extremely frustrated by the inevitability of projection. An audience projects onto a dancer and we project onto each other all the time. It’s where misunderstanding and judgment occurs. I think that anxiety around self and seduction you’re identifying comes from that feeling. I try to investigate that anxiety by separating the body from the voice, and the character from the performer. I’m interested in viewers having this experience where they are pulled into the dramatic narrative and simultaneously reminded it is theater, fiction, performance. It’s an exaggeration of the way we exhaustively perform ourselves. That is an interesting split or cognitive dissonance I am working with that has grown out of an earlier impulse to interrogate the simplicity of seduction that occurs in watching dance. 

Antoine Catala: More on the aural presence of your pieces: how important is music for you? Your use of music and sound brings a cinematic quality to the work, yet it manages to stay much rawer than cinema. As such, your work sits at the crossroads, between dance, theater and cinema. How would you describe what you create? Does the genre have a name?

Susannah Yugler: I always feel like I choreograph with a cinematic framework in mind. Cinematic conventions are exciting to me, maybe because they’re problematic if you trade in postmodern dance. I think the “rawness” is just in the fact that it is live, that the timing and tone of everything resembles life more closely than cinema. I guess that’s something I try to cultivate in my work too, I try to heighten the awareness of the vulnerability of performance and the stakes of liveness. And I struggle to categorize my performance work. Right now, I consider the work I am making to be plays, although I’ve had conversations with people about calling them ballets, since pantomime and narrative are some foundational elements in ballet, and I think it’s an interesting proposal thematically and formally. I hope to defy the categories of my work being strictly dance or theater or cinema, and hope it could exist in any of these contexts. 

Music is hugely important to my work but I am by no means an expert. That’s where Lawn has really supported my work, they’ve made scores and sonic worlds for me and endured endless notes. They have a very particular sonic world of their own that has bled into my work over the years. I’ve also used a number of pop songs to lend to the cinematic quality you’ve noted, but I think the aural presence that I feel most attune to is the way that the voices are edited. Lawn and I will separately chip away at the timing of lines and even the annoying inhales and exhales in editing. I try to pay very close attention to the rhythm of the script.

Antoine Catala: The miming In The Company induced a feeling of intense pleasure in me. Because of the miming, the play became an illustrated, over-exaggerated version of itself. One sits at once inside and outside of the play, like one stands in one’s life. 

I brought my friend Tim Simonds to the first representation of the play at Worthless Studios (an apt name if there is one). He was wondering what influences you in terms of movement. There are certain almost half gestures that are like a fear of being still that seems topical he said, that he associated with the Sims “pending” body. Is this something you think about?

Susannah Yugler: Yes! The Sims has been a reference for me for a while now. I take my movement inspiration from all sorts of places… digital culture is certainly a reference and I think a “fear of being still” is extremely relevant to the psychological space of my work, that feels both personal and cultural. In rehearsal I get really excited finding things for the dancers to do while their character isn’t speaking or central. It’s where a lot of great comedic moments come from. I also think of people “waiting” for their turn to speak. Narcissism is a big feature of my work. And of course I collaborate with the dancers to create movement. Some of the gestures and moments have to be improvised for a sense of realism, I’m interested in each person’s personal way of moving (outside of their character) seeping in at times. Other gestures are extremely choreographed, precise, and particular to my own body. 

Antoine Catala: In The Company, the props are invisible. The actors hold invisible coffee mugs for instance. How did you decide on that?

Susannah Yugler: Good catch. I obsessed over this for a long time. 

I did a table read of an early draft of The Company in grad school with some classmates and used actual props for that, but as I began rehearsing with the original cast of dancers I felt like adding props would complicate things aesthetically. It played into my aesthetic priorities to create a sparse room that felt like a void, sculpted almost entirely by gesture and movement. I was much more interested in watching a dancer or an actor pantomime sipping coffee and try to remember where they put it down last, or watch something disappear if someone forgot to “put the cup down.” 

Thematically, my plays have been sort of “drawing room” plays; they take place in a single room, and I’ve been interested in creating a sense of claustrophobia with those parameters, to illustrate that the characters don’t develop, that they are both psychologically and physically stuck. It feels like the sparse set and lack of props aided that dimension of the work.

Antoine Catala: Could you cite some of your influences?

Susannah Yugler: My influences are all over the place… Susanne Kennedy (and my friends who introduced me to her work, Max Pitegoff and Calla Henkel), Brecht, Ralph Lemon, Lucinda Childs, Robert Wilson, The Wooster Group, Jerome Robbins, Pina Bausch, Robert O’Harra, Annie Baker, David Lynch, Fassbinder, Bergman.

Antoine Catala: Where do you want to bring your work? What does the future hold for you?

Susannah Yugler: Generally I am interested in saying yes to making work in all sorts of places if there’s even a small budget and enough time available to rehearse and present it. I enjoy working with the blank space that galleries and museums offer, but also work very traditionally and need the technical support that theaters offer. The conventions of theater-going are also so different from going to a gallery opening, so in that regard I guess I'm interested in turning art spaces into theater spaces when I show my work. I would love the opportunity to set work on a ballet company sometime, to work on an opera, and I think you touched on something earlier with cinema too. In the distant future, I really want to make a feature length film, or try collaborating more with narrative film makers in general. These are lofty ambitions. 

More short term, I’m working on two new plays currently and would love to be programmed into a festival in coming years. CASSANDRA is going to be a bit of a departure from my recent work stylistically. It’s an adaptation of a Greek tragedy, but its central themes are not dissimilar to those in The Company. Lastly, I want to have my own dance - theater company. It's completely impractical, but it’s a dream.