Time Well Spent Together, Carnations, & Making Friends with your Demons: An Interview with Laura Taler
Karanfil/Carnation, 2021 photo: Fangliang Xu
When I was assigned to write about Romanian-born, Ottawa-based artist Laura Taler’s upcoming show Karanfil/Carnation, part of the NAC’s #DanceForth series, I was terrified. Not only do I know next to nothing about dance, everything I read about or watched by Taler was so intimidatingly good that I worried that my writing couldn’t possibly do her justice. Luckily, Laura is as gifted with words as she is with performance, choreography, editing, singing, photography, and dance (was that list long enough to impress you?). I came out of our interview feeling more curious, fascinated, and excited than ever to see Karanfil/Carnation which will be presented from September 7th-12th.
I had the pleasure of chatting with Taler to discuss this free livestream, choreographed and performed by Taler herself. In Karanfil/Carnation, she takes us through her exploration of the artist as subject and allows us to peer into her world of creativity, performance, and making the public private by (literally) taking us backstage at the NAC. Like most of Taler’s performance work, Karanfil/Carnation blurs the lines between dance, song, film, and storytelling while offering a personal reflection on memory, nostalgia, trauma, language, identity, and migration. She hands artists and art-lovers alike a beautiful and thoughtful piece, which is much needed in times such as these.
Karanfil/Carnation, 2021 photo: Fangliang Xu
What is the significance of the title of your upcoming NAC performance, Karanfil/Carnation?
The title comes from a song I sing. The word carnation comes up repeatedly. For some reason, I have an odd relationship with the carnation as a flower. Since I think my love of flowers comes from my mother, I called her to ask if she could shed any light on this. I tell the story of this conversation in the show.
When we last spoke, you told me you feel a strong impulse to create and share parts of yourself in your work. What do you hope the audience takes away from your upcoming performance?
There is so much doubt that comes with being an artist. On the good days it is tempered by joy and fun, the generosity and camaraderie of collaborators, and these superb aha! moments when you figure out how a piece of the puzzle fits. With each project I try to produce a shift in my understanding of something, and sharing this with an audience, well, I suppose there is the hope that it will be a satisfying experience for everyone. Time well-spent together.
In Karanfil/Carnation, part of the performance is in reaction to a photograph of famous polish ballerina Bronislava Nijinska taken by Man Ray, in which she dons unflattering and rather scary makeup. Why did you pick this piece to react to? Do you see yourself at all in Nijinska’s approach to performance?
I don’t remember when or where I first saw that image, but it was the image that led me to Nijinska. It is both frightening and powerful. She was a prolific and successful choreographer and performer but so much less known than her famous brother. When I read that she played a pioneering role in introducing modern forms with minimal narrative into a more traditional dance vocabulary, I was smitten, not to mention her unease with traditional femininity. I have been looking at female artists from the early part of the 20th Century, Claude Cahun, Maya Deren, Nijinska, all these powerful women who made groundbreaking work. More than anything that image tells me to go make friends with my demons. The image I chose to react to was one photographed by Man Ray in 1922.
Karanfil/Carnation, 2021 photo: Fangliang Xu
Much of your work explores migration and its relationship to memory, anxiety, language, and identity. How do these themes find their way into this work?
Well, that would be giving it all away!
Whatever I do, those themes seep in. They are, of course, a big part of who I am and how I relate to the world. But it’s not something I try to push through the work, it’s just what emerges when I get grounded. And it’s reflected in the choices I make around music, text, appearance, costume… everything really. For example, I think there are five different languages being sung in the work. But when I think about the themes in my work, I tend to think more about time, distance and proximity, and how all these relate to the body. I always say my work is about how the body carries the past, without being oppressed by it. But that weight is hopefully tempered by the lightness of possibility and a playfulness with cinematic craft.
You spoke to me about how you only began to use and explore your voice around 2010. In 2013, you even made a completely sound-based piece dedicated to spoken instructions and storytelling. How do you view this departure from pure dance? Can you explain the relationship between language and dance in Karanfil/Carnation, as well as your artistic practice in general?
There is no such thing as “pure” dance. I probably started dancing because I felt more comfortable communicating through gestures and facial expressions rather than with words. I moved through several languages as a child. I was born in Romania, where I went to German kindergarten; moved to Italy, where I went to Hebrew school; and then landed in Canada, where I learned French and English. I often didn't understand what people around me were actually saying, so I had to rely on my ability to read gestures and facial expressions. I have also been consistently curious about how to negate narrative. Language is often about telling a story, but what if the story you have is not a traditional narrative, but more of a shift from one emotional state to another? I am digging into language a bit these days and dipping a toe into narrative structures, to see where these will lead me. I do think the fact that many people still introduce me as a dancer is somewhat comical. Most of my career has been spent making films. But it is true that I am always the first one on the dance floor.
In the last five years or so, your hair length changes from one performance to the next. What significance do you give your hair and wigs, in terms of identity, characters, movement, etc.?
My return to performance after a near twenty-year hiatus was partly practical. So many artistic choices are practical. I was creating a work that explored my namesake in a German novel I stumbled upon online. This book started with a character named Laura Taler being murdered. I thought I might do a Sophie Callesque video work where I was following myself around Berlin, my family and I were living there at the time. The other Laura Taler needed to look a bit different than me so the first thing I did was buy a wig. Most simply, the wig began as a device that gave me enough distance to explore some things about myself that were difficult to explore as myself. It’s also amusing to be so thoroughly transformed with such little effort. “Here, put this on. Wow! You look different!”
Karanfil/Carnation, 2021 photo: Fangliang Xu
Something you said last time we spoke resonated with me, although you said it humorously. You told me you rarely end up making works without your “little feminist underlying current” showing. How would you say this current weaves its way into your practice?
I like to make jokes but my intention is not to belittle feminism. I don’t weave it into my practice — because it is my practice. It’s what I read, whom I read, the people I work with, the references I choose. Hopefully the way I work.
You mentioned being nervous and excited about your upcoming livestream show because you’ve had to let go of control, compared to your usual edited, cinematic pieces. Is this a challenge you would have set for yourself if it weren’t for the pandemic?
This show is really an opportunity for me to put some things into practice that I’ve been thinking about for a while. A further honing and integration of a number of threads in my practice. So much of my work begins as a response to something and then grows into something I could not have anticipated. This process is akin to being both a leader and a follower in an improvised dance. I propose something to the material and then I follow, allowing enough space and time to listen to what the next step might be, rather than pushing the work into a predirected form.
When the NAC asked me if there was anything I was working on, I responded by thinking about what compels me about that building. And my answer was to think about the backstage area, that space where performers are getting ready to go onstage. So many incredible people have prepared backstage with their sweat and nervous energy, before they emerge in front of an audience to share something of themselves. What is this desire to make the private public? That’s one of the questions I am trying to confront for myself. The pandemic means that the NAC as a building is operating very differently. This allowed Cathy Levy and Tina Legari from NAC Dance to extend this performance invitation to me. It also means I can be exploring these questions in spaces I would not have access to otherwise. It’s true that this is going to be a very different experience for me as a performer — I normally work with a team to film myself performing, but then I get to sit in the edit room and edit myself so I look really good. I won’t be able to do that here, and I am trying to find that place of ease where that can be liberating.
The pandemic has also led me to gather the creative team locally. This is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time but I am quite loyal to the collaborators who have stuck with me over the years. I’ve worked with costume designer Tracey Glas since 1990. And cinematographer Marcus Elliot since 1996. You can see I’m quite proud of that. They are superb. But this show needed to be local. It has been a fantastic opportunity to work closer to home and to start collaborations with a team of artists who live nearby. Artist Marisa Gallemit on costumes, cinematographer Wassim Nohra, musicians Turkwaz, Anaïs Cardot and Expanda Fuzz, photographer Christine Fitzgerald assisted by Greg Zenha, stills photographer Fangliang Xu, rehearsal director Yvonne Coutts, production manager Rachel Weldon, and the fabulous team at the NAC. Keep an eye on my Instagram account for short profiles on each of these artists in the upcoming weeks.
Is there anything else you would like to share about your practice, your upcoming shows, or other projects?
I don’t think I could do this show if I hadn’t created THREE SONGS over the last five years. This video installation was filmed in Germany and my grandmother’s house in Romania,. In Germany, the filming locations include a forest, and Berlin’s historic ‘Theatre Im Delphi’ and ‘Gipsformerei’ — the former, a historic silent movie theatre; and the latter one of the world’s largest plaster cast replica workshops. I sing three songs in three different languages. It’s the work that grew out of that first wig! It was set to open in May of last year but has been postponed to September 2022, due to you-know-what. The Carleton University Art Gallery has been an incredible partner.
I really look forward to sharing THREE SONGS with an audience, and now wonder what the experience will be like since Karanfil/Carnation will be seen before THREE SONGS. It’s all a magical stew that gets adapted according to circumstance…I am not a good recipe follower, but I am always happy to make you something yummy from what I can find in my midst.
Karanfil/Carnation, 2021 photo: Fangliang Xu
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During our sunny Thursday morning Zoom call, Taler shared many gems that I frantically scribbled down. What sticks with me most is her question, “What is the desire we have as artists to make the private public?” She describes art as a container or vessel to make the human experience shareable. To have a discussion with her about such issues as loss, alienation, diaspora, and fear, while (virtually) sharing coffee, smiles, and laughter perfectly sums up Taler’s desire to craft emotional experiences through which she can relate to her audience.
Karanfil/Carnation, part of the NAC’s #DanceForth series, will grace our screens from September 7th-12th.
THREE SONGS, from which Karanfil/Carnation was inspired, is set to open at the Carleton University Art Gallery in September 2022. Hopefully by then, I will have met Taler without the interference of a screen.