Trajal Harrell interview: I want people to believe in impossibilities

Experimental choreographer Trajal Harrell is New York’s best-kept secret — now his ‘performance exhibition’ is coming to London, he tells Lyndsey Winship
Dance master: Trajal Harrell at the Barbican
Daniel Hambury
Lyndsey Winship12 July 2017

When Trajal Harrell was eight he started going to a gymnastics class in his small town in southern Georgia. His grandfather would pick him up afterwards. Gymnastics ran from 2pm-3pm but Harrell told his grandfather that it ended at 4pm, because that way he got to watch the girls’ ballet class that went on afterwards.

“I was mesmerised,” says Harrell. “It wasn’t so much the movement as the ritual, the formality of it that I really loved watching. I understood that in my town, boys did not take ballet, and I understood that I didn’t tell my grandfather I wanted to watch it. It wasn’t even that I wanted to do what they were doing, but I loved watching the construction of movement. I look back on that and think this must have been the beginning seeds of wanting to be a choreographer.”

It was more than a decade before Harrell finally took a dance class (he was known in his family as “the one who couldn’t dance”) but he did go on to become a choreographer.

He has built a following in New York’s downtown scene and across Europe for his work, most notably Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church, a series of performances where the worlds of vogueing and postmodern dance collide as Harrell imagines what would have happened if a vogueing drag queen in Sixties Harlem had turned up at the Judson Church, the experimental mecca of NYC dance at the time.

Mesmerising: Caen Amour
Orpheas Emirzas

Harrell is New York’s best-kept secret. He is established enough there to have been granted a two-year residency at MoMA, but his work has been little seen in London. That, however, is being rectified with a major “performance exhibition” that offers a retrospective of his work so far, dating back to 1999.

When we meet at the Barbican, where he’s about to begin work in the Gallery, Harrell, 44, has just flown in from Athens, where he lives much of the time (he estimates about 70 per cent of his work is now in Europe, with the rest of his time split between Georgia and New York). He’s warm, voluble, switched on and spooling through complex ideas.

It’s clear that his background is academic. A straight A student, Harrell went to Yale University to major in American studies, with a concentration on “creative processes”. He always had an interest in theatre. In the seventh grade (Year 8) his teacher invited him to take part in the annual History Day Competition, for which he wrote and directed a group performance and won first prize in the state for six years on the trot.

At college he was acting and directing but increasingly interested in movement rather than words, making “music video-esque scenes”, he says. “A friend said to me, ‘I think you may be trying to be a choreographer’.”

Postmodern: Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church
Ian Douglas

The fact that Harrell’s work spans both high-cultural theory and pop-cultural flashpoints, such as music videos, catwalks and Harlem drag balls, is what makes it so interesting. He isn’t making fusions of forms. He doesn’t necessarily learn the dance styles — like the boy watching the ballet class from the doorway, he approaches them as an outsider — it’s more about comparing the ideas underneath: “The idea of ‘realness’ in vogueing in relation to the postmodern idea of ‘authenticity’.”

In the Barbican show, called Hoochie Koochie, visitors will be able to choose from three or four things to watch at any time, with 14 works on rotation and a cast of 15 dancers, and with the boundaries between stage and backstage blurred.

The title refers to the hoochie coochie dance style that’s referenced in his latest work, Caen Amour. Hoochie coochie goes back to the turn of the last century, a western take on the dances brought over from the Middle East (think belly dancing), but over the subsequent decades it became an all-purpose term for exotic dancing.

Harrell came across it in childhood. “Every year in my small town there would be a fair, my father would take me. There would be a Ferris wheel, and there would also be a hoochie coochie show. At a certain point, my father would send me away with friends and cotton candy (candy floss) and as the years passed I started to realise: ‘He’s going to watch naked ladies dance!’ We never talked about it ever. But this is my first understanding of dance as a live spectacle.”

Where to see dance in London

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Harrell never saw the hoochie coochie show himself so, like much of his work, it’s an exercise in imagination, and about exploring the questions of exoticism, colonialism, sexism, racism that crop up along the way.

But he did do some research. “One guy I talked to went to a hoochie coochie show in Ohio,” says Harrell. “He said they went into the tent, the woman comes on, she puts on the phonograph, takes off her clothes and she just stands there and looks at them, no smile, nothing. “It’s easy to see strip shows as women being objects of the male gaze, but to me this was a woman who’s not stupid,” says Harrell. “She’s playing with the idea of object versus subject. Who’s the object here? Just like today. I know many dancers who supplement their income by working in stripping. And they bring some of their art into this. I assume it was no different in 1912. I think the hoochie coochie show is part of the history of modern dance.”

As with all of Harrell’s work, there’s lots to think about. In the Barbican show, as well as vogueing and hoochie coochie, he delves into the Japanese dance form butoh, classical Greek theatre and the early-modern dance pioneer Loie Fuller. There are many layers of fiction and reality, history and imagined histories to explore.

Ultimately, he says, “I want people to believe in impossibilities. There are so many things we have to solve in this world and if we stop believing in the impossible, it’s over. Art is one of those things that can push us towards the impossible. I think at its core my work is always trying to encourage people there. It’s like me wanting to be a choreographer. I somehow believed in the impossible.”

And from those first glimpses of a ballet class to the international stage, that belief has turned into something undeniably real.

Hoochie Koochie is at the Barbican Gallery, EC2 (020 7638 4141, barbican.org.uk) July 20-August 13