The following is a transcription of a conversation between Jeanette Bisschops, David Lindsay, and Michele Rizzo coinciding with the New York debut of HIGHER xtn. at MoMA PS1.

Edited for clarity by Toniann Fernandez.
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DAVID LINDSAY: Jeanette, do you want to start things off?

JEANETTE BISSCHOPS: Sure. So– Michele, David and I really wanted to talk to you after seeing your performance at PS1. Which was, for me, the… I don't know how many times I've seen it now. I think at least in three different locations. For David, it was the first time. I am very curious how you look back on that experience, Michele, of performing HIGHER xtn. at MoMA PS1.

MICHELE RIZZO: It was great. First of all, because it was the first time after a long time that we performed with more than five people. We were eight. And I think the last time we performed with a group of eight was at Stedelijk Museum for their Jubilee in 2022. So, that was special, because I think having a larger group of people is always more playful. I love to interact with different performers and prepare with them.

I was obviously very stressed about it, but in a good way. I felt this responsibility. For some of the performers it was the first time in New York. So it was a bit like… you know, trying to manage their needs to explore and at the same time, keep them responsible. The night before the performance we went partying. I had to keep them a little bit on the leash somehow, which is not something I like to do, but I felt like it was necessary to keep the focus. But generally speaking, based on how we have approached the work so far, I know we can always pull it off, because we don't get tired of doing it. Every performance gives us more information.

DL: That's really interesting to hear because before this first time experiencing the piece I had seen the videos on the internet from the first Stedelijk performance, and I was just immediately obsessed. I have the score. I ripped it off of YouTube and I have it on my phone and I was listening to it over and over again. So I approached the performance at PS1 with some trepidation because I was like, “have I built this up too much? Is it going to be a letdown?”, and much to my surprise and delight, it was beyond. It was quite an emotional experience. I think part of that came from the size of the audience, and then the quality of the sound in the space and how embodied you all were in the performance. It was just such a delight. I was on the edge of tears. I'm happy to hear that it doesn't feel like something that's tiring to do, or something that you get sick of, because that definitely came through. Performing is obviously something very enjoyable for you all.

MR: Certainly it changes over time and it did change over the years, in the sense that, this material is really engraved into our bones right now, in our body memory. It's entirely automatic. I think this is what my interest was at the beginning of its conception somehow.

The idea of working with this, on an almost psychological, neurological level, is what you could describe as an autotelic experience. Somehow the experience produced a sort of an automatism. The work expresses itself in a way that doesn't require any more reflection.

We do not need to structure the action in terms of thought-action. It's very much like one melted body mind exercise. It becomes effortless. I think in this way, the performance stays consistent and becomes more palpable for us, as performers. But then of course our bodies are changing, we are all getting older. So sometimes maybe you feel tired from it, but at the same time, you don’t. The only thing that is necessary is stamina, perhaps. But the combination of steps are studied so that there is an economy of energy. Sometimes we wonder how long we are going to continue performing this, if there will be more chances. I always feel like each performance is the last performance, and then it never is.

JB: David’s emotional response is interesting to me. For me, too, it was very emotional watching the performance at MoMA PS1. It was my first time seeing it and not being in the role of producer or curator. And so many things stood out to me. One, that it was the same group that you worked with at the Stedelijk. Yes, everyone has aged, but watching you and everyone dancing, you made it your own.

It became something more than a choreography. It has grown. It was the second time you've shown the piece in the US, but this is the first museum performance in the US. And it's always a surprise how a performance or a dance piece lands with an American audience as compared to a European one. It really stood out to me that everyone had this very similar response to the work.

MR: I certainly didn't feel a difference in the way it was perceived. Obviously, I am not experiencing how American audiences perceive dance works, but I didn't feel surprised by the response of the audience in any way. It was very fulfilling, as it usually is.

I'm actually curious to ask both of you about emotionality. You said you were on the edge of tears, David. That is incredible for me to hear. I get goosebumps. I myself get emotional when I hear this from you. I always wonder– what is it exactly that performance provokes or awakens? Could you elaborate on that?

DL: I think it's this special combination of everything feeling so fully actualized. Each of the dancers, as you're saying, have fully embodied the step, but past the point where it's this rigid thing. And then there is the score, which is so charismatic and seductive. The merger of those two components, where the body and sound so perfectly align is something that I have experienced in raves where there's the chaotic mass of a bunch of bodies and then there are moments where everything syncs up. It's like when two waves meet and they amplify each other instead of canceling each other out. We don't need to theorize it necessarily, but that's part of how I think about it. It is this synesthetic experience where one plus one equals 11. All the constituent elements are put together, and then they exceed their own individuality. Because the choreography is not too rigid, they have their own space to just perform in this everyday erotic way, to be in their bodies, and that feels amazing to watch and to witness. The poet Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves has a great line in one of her poems. She said, “goosebumps is a good sign.” That is, I think, how I would answer that question.

MR: If you ask me how it feels from within, some of it is a mystery. It becomes something so uncanny. When I perform, there is something about it that is cleansing. Performing has this power to erase thoughts. Of course, there is this under layer of awareness, which is necessary to maintain as a performer, but sometimes from the moment we enter the space until we go out, time warps. Something is extremely suspended. The performance feels akin to meditation, which has a very positive effect on the body.

In New York, I was going through an insane moment, personally. I had some rather pressing issues back home. It was a very intense time. But then the show is the thing that I enjoy the most. I'm always looking forward to doing it. I'm happy to do it and I love it. It feels like looking forward to the weekend.

JB: And at the PS1 performance, you could see the joy and the connection between all of you. That also touches on what you've been able to do with this piece. It is like the experience you'd have if you went dancing somewhere. It feels like an intimate moment between all of you. Everyone, yes, is in their own zone, but everyone is together.

MR: There is this line that was part of my concept when I developed some texts about the piece: “Communication is the practice that compensates for the fact that we can never be each other.” Certainly you could substitute “communication” with so many words, like love for example, but I substituted communication with dance. It became “dance is the name of the practice that compensates for the fact that we can never be each other.” And I think it's perfect. I think it's really what we do in that context or in the context of the rave and the context of a dance which is performed in a group. And so it's actually a way to describe simply dancing together. It’s togetherness in motion. And, of course, this can be experienced on different levels. Dancing in the rave can be a practice that is very meticulous and has a therapeutic quality, but it also has that effect at the end, right? It does compensate for the ultimate annoying reality that we cannot experience being one another from within. But somehow connecting on a kinesthetic level with someone else, when you are also using external elements to connect to space and time, whether it's music, whether it's a pattern of movement or an awareness of space… it does the job. There is some sort of cooperative agency. Whether this is ignited by action or by movement, that is when we manage to become one organism, one entity, a collective entity. And that is extremely liberating as a human being. And I think that is the experience felt by the viewer.

DL: That's so beautiful. That really resonates with me. What was so emotional about the performance is that it begins from a place of individuality or separateness and then accelerates into what feels like a peak where we're all connected. It does feel, I mean, love is the right word. It feels like we're connected in this grand spiritual or mystical way. In 2020 during lockdown, I became curious about other plagues. I was reading on the internet and I came across the Dancing Plague of 1518. I became super obsessed with it. And in some ways I feel the Dancing Plague of 1518 shares a kinship with HIGHER xtn., or with raving generally. They share a moment of collective exhaustion.

In 1518, there had been a couple of waves of the bubonic plague. There were a few peasant uprisings that were brutally suppressed and the church was in a moment of high corruption. I imagine people thinking, “we've tried everything else. Let's try dancing.” And I imagine them finding this moment of relief from this abject horror of existence in medieval Europe. And then not wanting to exit that place of relief feels like HIGHER xtn. The performance taps into a collective dance experience. You're familiar with the Dancing Plague?

MR: Yes, I became familiar with it after I had made the work. And it became a reference for some other works that I made afterward. I was fascinated by it. It isn't entirely clear what initiated the dancing plague. Whether it was a crop intoxication, a secret way of subverting the rules, or constructing the belief that the irrepressible impulse to dance was a disease, it was rather genius, I’d say.

DL: I read that initially, the powers that be decided to just throw a party and the dancing happened in public. They thought it would eventually run its course. But then it grew bigger, and bigger, and it didn't stop. So they switched strategies.

JB: It's funny, when I was back in Amsterdam, I saw in the newspaper that it was one hundred years ago that it became legal to dance in public in Amsterdam. It’s so Calvinistic. They really felt that dancing would be a hotbed for criminal activities and sex. But I feel something similar in New York. People do not gather to dance unless it's in a club. I wonder what you've learned from this experience over the last few years, because when we worked together, it was your first experience showing your work in a museum. Now it has been nearly a decade. How is that informing the way that you think about your work now and your future work?

MR: In a way, I feel responses to the work over the last decade at times made me feel almost stuck. I struggle a lot with creating work following a creative methodology that is more similar to what I studied in school, or a traditional way of creating a show, which is creating movement material in the studio, responding to certain questions, or being inspired by certain practices of certain languages. It became very difficult for me to go back to those methodologies because I didn't feel that they were as fulfilling as what I had experienced in the process of HIGHER xtn. and this particular way of dancing in front of an audience. In HIGHER xtn., there is no intention of representing how dance works in rave culture or how a party functions. It doesn't aim to represent any of that. When I presented the work for the first time, I always had to clarify that I wasn’t there to represent the club. I'm not a clubbing expert. I used to go clubbing a lot when I created the work, certainly much more than I do now, but, it was never my intention to represent the experience of clubbing. I always felt that would be extremely pretentious, because the experience of clubbing is so personal. And, at the end of the day, it evolves over time.

So what is HIGHER? I think it's probably just a response to a dialogue between my personal experience of dancing in raves or clubs and my understanding of dance as a creative tool and as a form, as an artistic language. It's a combination of those elements. When I brought them together in the studio, they produced this extremely simple structure. HIGHER is extremely simple. It's a phrase that repeats over and over. It's performed in unison. It’s performed to this amazing soundtrack that Lorenzo Senni made for the performance, which is pointillistic, and goes hand in hand with the steps. There is no counterpoint. Certainly there are small, offbeat moments, which are necessary for us to keep engaged. The way I perceive myself as a performer when I'm dancing is that I'm entirely free from the fear of being misunderstood, because I'm not representing anything. It's an experience that is extremely fulfilling. It gives freedom, of being in the moment. And I think that is something that in later works I've had to work hard to recreate without repeating myself. I started to work on an even more simple, extremely direct, stripped down version of the practice. Clearly HIGHER had some references to shuffle, as well as to the Dutch ‘konijnendans’ which was what I saw in the Netherlands when I was partying back in the days. In later works, I approached the practice in a more abstract way. I stripped down the movement patterns to only steps, very pedestrian phrases, performed in unison. HIGHER could be considered an alphabet that I'm using in later works to create more complex sentences, conceptually speaking. So it all sort of acts like a language.

DL: I love that idea of HIGHER as this alphabet. I'm primarily a poet, so I'm like, ok, great. I can't wait to see the language, the sentences, the poems that come out of all of this.

JB: I'm thinking about the ephemerality of performance. I think what makes your performance, the piece, the dance, and the choreography special, is that it has a similar effect in all of the different places where you perform. But it's tricky. Every performance has a very unique energy, and often the energy is not there. That's why performance is so hard. You're navigating the space, your work, and the audience, and you really need everything to come together. And then when it works, it works. And then it's magical, and people want more, but every work is different. Every work has a different energy.

MR: HIGHER was actually my second work. And even though it clearly launched my career fully, I would be lying if I said I never suffered from it as well. I did struggle when I made new work after HIGHER and it wasn't received with such enthusiasm, or the new work was watched through the lens of HIGHER. It is an internal struggle that I carry with me, but I think I have matured. I'm now extremely grateful to this work because of the response I still get from the audience now. As I said, I get very emotional from it. And I recognize how special it is as a work. I also stopped worrying about the success of later works.

Obviously, you want to be successful, but at the same time, it's important to be– and yeah it sounds very cringe– but to be true to yourself. If I hadn’t done HIGHER, my current research wouldn’t be there. I feel the sentences that I'm building with “the alphabet of HIGHER” speak a language which is more poetic and less universal. HIGHER, because of its simplicity, touches so many different people with so many different backgrounds and understandings of dance as an experience. I mean, there are people who love HIGHER, who have never entered a club in their life. And there are people who are very experienced clubbers and are extremely positive when they see it. So, maybe the new works I make now are a little bit more poetic or more complex in a way. I don't expect them to touch as many people. I always think that the work is out there to be seen by the people that can see it. Not everybody can see your work, and that's fine. And if I made work to be seen by everybody, I wouldn't make art anymore. I would make something else. Does it sound very cringe, all this?

DL: Cringe is liberating.

Jeanette, I want to circle back to something you said earlier, that it was only one hundred years ago that it became legal to dance in public in the Netherlands. In New York, obviously the Puritan colonizers of New York were the craziest ones. They were kicked out of Europe for being too uptight. The first ones were Dutch, so it makes sense. The law you were talking about in New York, though, has been repealed. They were called cabaret laws, where you needed to have a cabaret license to provide live entertainment, (e.g. dancing, music, or singing) to patrons while also serving food or drinks. In practice is was used as a pretense for harassing and discriminating against queer people and all the communities of those groups. That law was repealed in 2017, I think. But culturally, there is a memory of it. And maybe that was part of the emotional response to get to witness this collective dance that generations ago was illegal in some instances. It was quite dangerous. So to experience it is a healing moment.

JB: Talking about aging, that's been on my mind. I'm aging too.

MR: Me too. We're all aging.

JB: I just hit my 40th. I'm like, you're in the middle of your life. And I'm seeing people around me who are making work about aging. And I think it's a very interesting thing, especially when the body is such a visible aspect of the work. The body is always an important aspect in any type of art, even if you're painting.

What has been your experience performing this piece? How has aging affected that? When you were making this work a decade ago, you were still going out a lot and dancing. Different things inform you while you're aging. Aging– has it been on your mind?

MR: I don't know, I don't want to think about myself getting old. I love this very romantic idea of working with my friends, and in HIGHER xtn., that was really the case. I started this project with my now ex-boyfriend and one of my best friends in Amsterdam.

In new productions, I love to work with dancers that I don't know so much. If I do auditions, I tend to choose the people in which I see potential, or that display some qualities that interest me. I love to choose people with an edge that I don't understand or I can't quite figure out. Putting them together into this system, the rehearsal, this very defined moment of time space, is like putting them into a pot where you put the ingredients to cook. And then they activate their potential in order to survive within that context. In the rehearsal there is a small society created. I love to facilitate and observe that. I love to see relationships unfolding through a compositional structure which is very strict, as a form of resistance or survival.

DL: I really love what you're saying about looking for dancers who have some sort of edge of their own that feels interesting to you. With HIGHER xtn. and some of your other works, the everyday-ness of the performers works to ground everything in this social space. And maybe the thing that you're speaking to is the choreography of everyday life where we each have a certain way of waving our hands, of stepping in a certain way, or, you know, when we're preoccupied with a thought and we're crossing the street, we each have our own choreography. There's a line from one of my poems that says, “Having short hair puts me in an erotic relationship with the wind.” To me it feels like “the wind” or these everyday moments are quite present in HIGHER. That to me is maybe how that enters in these choreographic or casting choices where you look for people who are present in their body in a unique way.

MR: Yeah. I love that idea of everyday choreography. When I step out in the street, I put my headphones in and I feel like I'm in a movie. I've been thinking about if there is a way to give value to it, and also maybe artistic value to a performance which is performed for yourself. What is a performance that is not performed for anyone else but yourself? This is also what I meant with an autotelic experience. Something is performed and it's as well perceived by the audience as it is by whoever is actualizing that practice. And this we do a lot in HIGHER. One of the tasks when I was sharing the work with the performers is consciously trying to erase everyone else from your perception. So even though you have people around, I want the dancers to alienate themselves and try to be present to their dance. I want them to dance for themselves.

It’s like when you are singing in the shower for yourself. In that kind of performance, somehow, you start to shift the perception of yourself and the potential that you experience in yourself. I think we all are capable of amazing performances. If I put my mom on a stage, she would freak out. But, if I film my mom from a distance with an invisible eye, I would be amazed by her performance. This is something that is extremely fascinating for me. I am fascinated by the idea of erasing the body of the performer tout court. What is left is only the gaze and the rest of the world.

DL: This idea of the gaze– I'm linking that back to earlier in the conversation when we were talking about this moment where individual dancers or performers are dancing separately, and then there's this moment of synchronicity. I’ve experienced this moment at raves. At a rave, there's no one necessarily witnessing this personal moment, but in HIGHER, the audience can see those moments. It functions in both ways. You get this performance that is for the performers, this auto-erotic experience, but then also the audience gets to be the witness as well.

MR: Looking back at the process of creating HIGHER, we tried to erase the idea of an external eye. I always said to my performers, “If there is someone watching you dancing, imagine that someone is only the music.” Hopefully we transmit this to the audience. I think that from the outside, watching something without carrying the feeling of watching is liberating.

DL: I love the idea of the music bearing witness because it's a totally non-judgmental entity. There is a loss of self-consciousness. I grew up in a small town, and the level of self awareness, or feeling overly perceived in a negative sense was quite intense. And then I got to New York, and everyone just has too much going on. It just takes too much time or effort to pay attention to others. It was a liberating experience to come to New York and lose that self-consciousness.

MR: In the performance it's an attempt because in reality, it's an impossible task. I cannot say that I’m there. After HIGHER, I did a solo in which I precisely aimed to erase self consciousness. I thought I would be protected by the fact that you can only achieve this partially because you are on stage, and you have to manage so many things. You have an overall sense of responsibility because it's your job, it's your work.

Once it actually happened. I lost track of everything on stage and I stopped feeling my legs. I felt like I was floating on stage and it was the most terrifying experience. I had a full on panic attack on stage, terrifying.

Then again, I looked at HIGHER and the way we use the gaze, and I realised how there I unconsciously devised it in a way that is more sensible and protective. We are looking down to the floor for a long time. We really try to concentrate on our own dance and we try to actively practice the dance for ourselves. Just imagine you're an individual in this room, even though there are hundreds of people in it. I always try to describe the quality of the gaze with an analogy–it's as if you are watching outside the window from your room. You are very conscious of your environment. You are in your place, in your space, but with your gaze, you manage to touch upon the person sitting at the bar on the other side of the street, or a person passing by. Somehow it is important to try to keep both those awarenesses, because you need them in order to be present in a way that is both collective and intimate at the same time.

DL: I love that so much. Jeanette, did you want to talk a little bit about the mechanics of the Stedelijk and how it was acquired by the museum and how that all played out?

JB: I was working at the Stedelijk when there was a biennial, the Municipal Art Acquisitions. This is the city of Amsterdam’s way of making it possible for the Stedelijk to acquire works of artists who are Dutch or based in the Netherlands. Michele responded to that open call, and suggested an adaptation of the work that he made for the theater setting for the museum.

What can I say from my end about that? For me, it was a really special experience. I remember the decisions we spoke about, the decisions that Michele was making at the museum. I remember you'd been rehearsing for a couple of weeks, Michele, with dancers you already knew, but also with students. I remember coming into the museum at night because we could only rehearse at night. We could experience the galleries in such a different way with all these bodies. We saw the decisions that had to be made within the building. Some decisions were made practically, and then some became organic. At first, we staged the performance in the first gallery. You needed a ticket to get in. It was quite small. We started with three dancers, and then it grew to 14. So we had to move the dance, the work, because we staged it every weekend for four weeks. People were responding to it so much that people were returning to see the performance every weekend or every time it was staged, and then more and more people were coming in, and we had to move the location to the lobby to make sure that people could see it and that the entrance to the museum wasn't blocked. There were too many people showing up to see it.

And then it became free, which was really beautiful. The lobby of the museum is free to enter. And the museum has big windows around it. So you could see the performance even if you were just passing by. In this way, I say the performance grew organically. It became a community performance. The community grew. The fact that David learned about the piece via Instagram is evidence of that. That was something new. Suddenly it was blowing up. I remember after every performance Michele's phone was blowing up. People were sharing the performance and responding to it. They were sending messages, Instagram stories. Now I see what a response a performance can have, but at that time, we didn't even consider that it was a possibility that it could travel that much online. And it was really special to hear how truly it touched people.

Then there was the acquisition. I was only there when it was acquired, I had to leave the museum after that. But I have been speaking to Michele about this and to Karen Archey, the curator involved with acquiring the work. And obviously, that's a whole different conversation. Acquiring dance is very complex for a museum. And I even think this was the first dance piece that the Stedelijk has acquired. I think, Michele, you are still also kind of working out the last details of that acquisition.

It's also about these aspects of– what happens when I, as the artist, age? What happens when I die? How is the work going to evolve? When a museum acquires ephemeral work–a website, a sound piece, whatever the conversation is around, the question is– what if the artist dies? Or what if the platform that makes the work possible dies? If the software dies, does the work die? It's a funny thing to be talking about, but if Michele was to die, you can also decide to have the work die with the artist. Like, that was that. And I think some artists choose to do that. And then if you don't, then you really need to talk about a lot of details if the work is to live on, when the artist is no longer there, because a dance work, again, really hinges not just on the choreography, but on the details. Who dances it? What are they wearing? What is the setting? How are you going to install the speakers? How is the audience supposed to experience it? How often can it be staged? All of these details need to be discussed. And while you're discussing it, even more details come up. I think that's why it has also taken a very long time. There is really not a lot of precedence in this type of acquisition.

MR: It seems like there are so many, ephemeral, idiosyncratic details that make HIGHER so specific. How do you even communicate or articulate them?

There are several ways. I'm producing documents which are either written or multimedia traces of the performance. It's not the most pleasurable for me, I'd say. I'm creating a video documentation of the work for conservation purposes. And that is freaking me out, to be honest, because it is a physical object at the end of the day. That piece of documentation becomes the reference object. And it's so partial, because it's one out of maybe 50 iterations or more. I tend to not stress about documentation. I’m not so attached to the idea of capturing the work in that way, though sometimes I regret it. It's the same as when I talked about the performers that I'm choosing, you know. I like to think the same way about the work itself. There is something mysterious about it in the eyes of the viewers, even in a distant future. There is a part of me that wants to leave only some traces of this work when I'm not there anymore. I want it to be mysterious, not finished somehow, not complete. Because at the end of the day, I think this is also the way I perceive this work.

I said before, the performance is a structure. It's something that develops over time. People age, performers age, we do it always in slightly different ways even when you look at it now compared to five years ago. And, at the end of the day, this process of contemplation by the audience is actually part of the work as well. So, I don't know how I could control that. How can I control how future audiences will perceive this work? There's no way to control it. So, I'm entirely curious about what's going to be in 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years, if there is ever someone that wants to reenact this work. The way it happens, it will be out of my control anyway. And I don't want to feel that control. I think control makes me feel very stuck. So I think I tend to resist that control, rigor, or care, extra care, you know. I like to imagine it will decay, somehow. I don't know. It's fine that it's going to decay and transform.

I do think there is something kind of inherent to HIGHER that pushes against an overly articulated, overly precise documentation though. To be honest, it looks like shit in documentation, this piece [laughs]. I mean, it looks nice maybe in Instagram stories because there is this aspect of capturing those moments of awe. We do that with social media. We take the phone when we feel like something is happening, or right after that moment when we feel that impulse to share. But in pictures, we look like fools or zombies. We never look really good, we look super tired and we have crazy eyes and posture. It rarely looks elegant, if at all. And that is because the work itself, the core of it, is not necessarily visual. Now we're just talking about the work, and I think those documents are actually way more interesting, you know, from a conservation perspective.

DL: Jeanette, do you have any closing thoughts or anything that you want to say before we...

JB: Well, I feel like we could keep talking for hours. It's been such a pleasure.

I can never tire from talking about your work, Michele. Thank you. Thank you. And also just for the work existing in the world. It's been a real inspiration, and to experience it and to witness it has been incredible.

MR: Thank you.

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