Barnett Cohen
Interview by Amelia Langas
Barnett Cohen is a Brooklyn-based visual artist and choreographer. In their performances, Cohen crafts surreal landscapes with fractured language and punctuated movement, eliciting a turbulent yet reflective environment that speaks to the tumultuous state of the time we find ourselves in. Cohen’s piece anyyywayyy whatever will be staged at Amant Arts on September 26 and 27. Ahead of the performances, Basta spoke with Cohen about movement and language generation, the dichotomy of action and non-action, and the collage of experiences that result in a performance work.
How did you come to make this work, anyyywayyy whatever?
Barnett: Each new performance begins with a score. The scores are hybrids of my writing and accumulated language from my research, personal conversations, and digital encounters. These inputs range from texts and dating app exchanges to speculative fiction and queer theory, all of which are ultimately footnoted in zines that I freely distribute to audiences with each new piece. With anyyywayyy whatever, I wrote the score last June while I was in-residence at Denniston Hill. Then, in October, along with performers Maddie Hopfield and Ray Tsung Jui Tsou, we toured a two-person version of the performance to Performissima, a performance festival at the Centre Wallonie Bruxelles in Paris, then to Kunsthall Trondheim in Norway, and back to New York, where I presented an excerpt at Judson Memorial Church, curated by Juf. Patricia Margarita Hernández, Associate Curator at Amant, with whom I was already in conversation, commissioned an expanded iteration of the performance, with six performers, that premieres at Amant this September.
Could you explain more about the apparatus you've created?
Each performance has its own internal logic. When I started constructing performances, back in Los Angeles before I moved to New York, understanding the interior logic of each piece was conscious and labored. Now, not that my practice is resolved, it never is, but I am more familiar with its structures and expectations. In making anyyywayyy whatever, I keep returning to the image of the performance as an infinite edifice that we keep making and unmaking, building as we go, until the deadline of the performance arrives. We present what we have though what we have is never finished; it's simply a moment in time. A vital part of my practice, which took time to fully understand, is that I am a conduit, a channeler, a medium. At my desk, alone, when I compose the scores, I am channeling the language of others in my own. In the rehearsal room, when I collaborate with the performers who populate my pieces, we collectively summon the range of movement lineages they embody.
Where does your movement language come from?
There was a brief moment in my life where I wanted to be an actor and that time and experience gifted me the tools and language to work with performers now. Even before I started making performance works, I understood what it took to make a piece, the ability to devise a coherent form out of shapelessness. From a movement perspective, I see myself less as a traditional choreographer—whatever implications that title implies—and more as an artist who works with the materials of text, sound, and movement. I see my practice adjacent to sculpture and photography, at the intersection between form and tableau. In the rehearsal room, where this all plays out, a performer will improvise and I will dialogue with their ideas, shaping them, editing them. We also channel movement from a wide range of inputs: modern and post-modern dance, stage combat, video games, quotidian domestic activity, cheerleading, beauty pageants, the rave scene, TikTok. I absolutely love how dance has become a common vernacular. We stitch various phrases or gestures together and explore how the score evokes impulses in the performers themselves, how they intuitively respond to the writing, both physically and vocally. Performers with whom I regularly collaborate know anything they do in the rehearsal room, even while we are on break, might wind up in the work.
A lot of the movement in your pieces feels almost collaged to me, and the language feels that way as well. Where do your words come from?
My writing practice is full-bodied. I am writing all the time, incorporating life into the text. As an example, I fell ill in late April and I have been dealing with a chronic illness since then. It has been a chaotic, strange, and painful experience and, obviously, fodder for the work. Ultimately, these last few months will show up in future writing. My writing practice equally goes hand in hand with my reading practice. When I am not in the thick of production, I read a fair amount each day, ranging from poetry to queer theory to manuscripts my friends send me. A lot of queer theory and queer poets appear in my writing, and I will annotate their incorporation; I see footnotes as a community of thought. There is an accumulative nature to the writing as much as there is a cumulative nature to the choreography.
The scores, which undergird the performances, are about everything and nothing. I am collaging a wide range of experiences in a non-didactic manner. In anyyywayyy whatever, there are references to Gaza, because we are witnessing a genocide and we cannot look away. There are also references to sex, to chronic illness, and debt. Yesterday, Laurel [Atwell, a performer in anyyywayy whatever] was improvising some language to the beat of “5, 6, 7, 8 credit card debt, who gives a fuck?” and that phrase will likely wind up in the piece. In my writing and in the rehearsal room, we are channeling contemporary energies, summoning intimacies as much as violence.
I'm a writer and a dancer, and I love seeing these two mediums combined in your work. Are there certain qualities or effects that you feel choreography manifests that writing maybe doesn't or vice versa?
I think of the line: A punch to the face. You can read or write those words, and you can also feel them. I see this divide between an experience of writing, listening, or reading and an experience of feeling, through the lens of my work as an immigrants' rights activist, which I have been engaged in since 2017. I keep reading think pieces about the emerging fascist state, as if that particular horizon is perpetually further afield, and these editorials stay stuck, for me, in the realm of thought exercises. Once you exit that space, once you get out into the streets, once you start advocating for people, you enter the realm of action, of physicality. When you advocate for someone else, when you demand with your body that the bodies of your neighbors or loved ones not be disappeared by masked men at the behest of an actual and not emerging fascist government, that is when you cross from the space of thought into the space of action. While I do not make performances about my work as an activist, these experiences, of supporting in and liberating people from the for-profit immigration detention complex, contextualizes my practice. For me, this is the distance between text and movement that I keep crossing and uncrossing in my performances.
Were the multiple y’s in the title intentional? The effect of prolonging that word, “anyyywayyy” is super interesting.
I engage the sonic aspect of language that the written word cannot convey. Within that space, there are many tactics of approach, so many ways to say a word.
I feel like people use that phrase, “anyyywayyy whatever,” dismissively. Is it meant to be dismissive?
It references frustration. It evidences the inability to reckon with the enormity of what we are experiencing, the fascism we are experiencing, the genocide we are witnessing, the breakdown of our natural habitats. Sometimes, unfortunately, all there is is “anyway, whatever.” It is a response to the world and our inability, or my inability, to fully grapple with or absorb the multiple crises through which we are living and dying.
How has the piece developed since the two-person iteration last year?
I try to situate my work in the future tense. I think about Samuel Delaney, Octavia Butler, Guy Hocquenghem, Leo Bersani. Writers for whom the future better explicated their present. anyyywayyy whatever was written during a genocide, but before Trump was elected, and it carries more water now, I think. We'll see.