Meeting Kristopher K.Q. Pourzal and Heather Kravas, our guest artists in Spring Studio Series, was overwhelmingly fresh and stimulating. The following text was transcribed from a live interview.
Nhi Cao: What were you concerned with when you first began to make work? How or why have your concerns changed as you’ve developed as a maker?
Kristopher K.Q. Pourzal: I have to start by saying that before I was a performance maker, I was training to be a classical musician, a flutist. And I was feeling stifled by always playing music written by other people because that’s the tradition and training. So when I first started making performances, it was because I was really craving to make something that was wholly mine. Initially, for me, making solo performances, which is what I started to do and continue to do, was an exploration of my physical body, of my voice, of my power, of my agency, of my failures, of my relations to an audience, of my relation to a theatre space, and all of those issues and curiosities continue now in my work-making. I think, in terms of the second part of your question, the thing that has shifted pretty profoundly, maybe in the last two years, is that my interests have zoomed out. Rather than staying so focused on my own capabilities as they relate to my own body, I’ve become more interested in thinking about how I am shaped by, and affected by, and a product of systems of power, and the dynamics and structures of which I am a part, in this country and this culture and this society, with its own codes and rules. In a way, to me it feels like a really unoriginal trajectory; I think it’s almost inevitable that the interest starts very close into myself and then over time, greater awareness emerges of how I’m not operating in a bubble or a vacuum. I am only a socialized being.
Heather Kravas: I think when I first started making work, I had a desire to start making work but didn’t know how to do it, and at the time I felt it was important for me to cultivate a language and even a style, so I really tried to develop those things, something that I considered my own. And I no longer have those concerns at all, like I’m not interested in what my own style might be, or style at all, I’m much more interested in structural decisions or like how things organized rather than what the specifics are. For example, when I started making work I didn’t really know even what I like and I cultivated that just by watching so many things but also making so many things and realized certain things that I was interested in like repetition, something that I utilize in my work quite a lot. One of the blessings of repetition is that there can be a great dynamic range with not so much actual material, so my early preoccupation with movement generation is obliterated because I don’t need to generate endless material. It’s like something can be reduced.