Kathy Rose (New York) in email conversation with Áine Phillips
June 2007

BIOGRAPHY:
www.krose.com
Receiving her education in Film and animation during the 1970's, Kathy Rose moved into dance and live performance with film in the 80's. Awards include seven National Endowment for the Arts, a Gold Hugo from the Chicago International Film Festival in 1974, First Prize Ottawa Animation Festival in 1978. The artist received an Independent Filmmaker Production grant from the American Film Institute in 1976 as well as two grants from the New York State Council on the Arts in Film. Fellowships also include two Choreography Fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

In 1990 she was honored by the California Institute for the Arts as a Distinguished Alumni and the Silver Star Outstanding Alumni Award from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where she teaches. She was Visiting Lecturer in Animation at Harvard University for 1978/79

Archives of her work are in the Dance Collection of the New York Public Library of the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, she was recently featured in Women Artists (Abbeville Press) by Nancy Heller and PRINT Magazine 1994. Her work with performance and film has been broadcast by Swiss, Austrian, German, Brazilian, and Japanese television, as well as the BBC.

Since 1982 she has performed extensively in the U.S. Japan and Europe Selected performances include Cineprobe at the Museum of Modern Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, Baltimore Art Museum, Hirschorn Museum at the Smithsonian Institution. The Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, Helsinki Festival, the Posthof in Linz/Austria, Szene Wien/Vienna, "Gestes" Festival/Brussels, Festival Bois de la Batie/Geneva, Eis Fabrik/Hannover, Dance Umbrella in Boston, Harvard University, etc.

CONVERSATION:
Áine - How did you start working with autobiographical performance?

Kathy - I have an exquisite self portrait in pencil that I did when I was 10. I consider it the best thing I have ever done. In college my thesis film was a series of portraits of friends (called “Portraits”). The last portrait was a self portrait which included flashbacks to the others, making a statement about our view of others involving projections of the self.
When I began working with animation, I made a film called “Women” which consisted of portraits of female friends, real and imaginary, the last being myself as the artist, joining the others in my drawing pad at the end.
A film I did when I was 28,”Pencil Booklings” involved rotoscoping myself, to represent my physical reality, as I drew animated characters who interacted with me, symbolizing my imagination and creativity.
After this film I worked in live performance with film,(beginning in 1983) touching on the autobiographical again in my works of the past 10 years. One example is a duet for myself live with my film self in Syncopations.(1987) Starting in the 90’s I also created a template figure with empty eyes - an artistic alter ego (I am an admirer of Duchamp’s Rrose Selavy) which I have used in all the pieces since ‘Kleopat’Ra”(1999) to now. This figure I arrived at was the result of the evolution of the Kleopat’Ra character within the piece. She had staring eyes, like an Egyptian sculpture. At one point her eyes dripped off her body onto the floor, which left her with empty eyes, symbolizing her readiness to enter the world of the beyond. “Kleopat’Ra” and “She” were derived from the experience of my mother’s death - semi-autobiographical in the expression of a psychic experience.
The current works, “The Inn of Floating Imagery”, and “Life in the Web” are directly drawn from my person, sometimes showing the artist outside the imaginary enclosure, and the relationship once again of creator to creation.

Áine - When we deal with autobiography in our work we have to find techniques, devices that
allow us to filter the lived experience. It has to go through a frame.
What are the methods you use to filter, or reinterpret life in a new way?

Kathy - I am basically working with fantasy and poetic non-narrative. The use of video along with animation and compositing allow me to reformat reality into another view.

Áine - What do you think about using poetic forms? In my own work, I try and take real physical experience and make it poetic through images both visual and through Are you taking elements from your real experience and abstracting them or creating 'visual metaphors'?

Kathy - It all deals with the fantasy and inner world anyway in my work, so the vocabulary is not that far a stretch. I use certain symbols repeatedly in a given work, such as water in “Queen of the Fluids”, and “Vocabulary of the Veils”- flight in “the Inn of Floating Imagery”, and puppetry/dolls have been a constant in a lot of the work, allowing me to have a representative for the self.

Áine - How do you think of yourself in the performance, are you everyday Kathy or are you someone different, an other identity?

Kathy - I am probably a symbol for a part of myself - a caretaker to carry out and portray the vision. The ego experience of the performance is not that interesting for me - it is all about being able to draw the image and bring it into existence. So I am really the vehicle of this.

Áine - How do you create the image of yourself in performance, are your performances 'self portraits'?

Kathy - My face and body have transformed over the years. I am building on what I have and dramatizing it. For example, I have large hands with long expressive fingers so sometimes I wear gold extensions to a few fingers. It has a Balinese connotation but also adds to the expressiveness. I sometimes also draw a bit of linear sculpting on my hands, collarbone and face, with a sumi brush to accentuate my angularity.

The most recent work has images of me also as the artist, and in these I go the opposite way, looking as everyday as I can, so there are two very opposite creatures - the fantasy performative me, and the ordinary creator.

Áine - How do you take personal material and present it so that it becomes universal. In the words of feminist Carol Hansch, "from the personal to the political"?

Kathy - I generally don’t think about what will relate or apply to others. The most cosmic/universal piece I feel I have done, at least in a purposeful way, is “Kleopat’Ra”, where I was designing it to give viewers the same powerful existential feeling I had when I witnessed my mother’s death. I used the figure of a fictional (not historically factual) Kleopat’ra - also identifying her as an Egyptian shabti ceremonial figure. This figure was meant to be an object which stood in for the audience, in the same way the shabti figures were put into Egyptian graves to symbolize some part of the person’s life. The piece was a blending of Egyptian and Japanese culture. Objects in Egyptian culture were held to be more meaningful and symbolic than in our culture.
As for the subsequent pieces and their relevance to others, I can only hope.

Áine - What are the challenges of making autobiographical work? For example, autobiography implicates others (a problem I face), are there any other issues for you?

Kathy - I think this has been a natural form for me for most of my life. Probably because I am a pretty self-involved Scorpio.

Áine - What is the function, the purpose of performance for you and what are its challenges? My use of performance is primarily to allow the vision I have for a particuliar piece to exist in dimensional reality.

Kathy - The difficulty is having to solve the technical challenges, bringing something into reality is not always as easy as what is imagined. And for people to really see it, they have to be there at the performance. It is very hard to convey the experience through video documentation.
I began working with video by itself in recent years so that I also have pieces that are being viewed in their true form. I can see and judge them directly (almost impossible for me in life performance in my particuliar genre of performance with projections), and the entire work can be sent to others and seen exactly as it should be.

Áine - What is your relationship with the audience?

Kathy - The audience is usually somewhat transfixed by my work in a silent way so that I do not have a relationship with them which is that outwardly palpable for me.

Áine - What is the difference between live performance and performance to video, for you?

Kathy - There are a lot of differences between the two - chiefly the timing. In live performance we can usually do things of longer duration since the experience of having a live presence adds another level to the audience and their involvement. I find myself having quicker editing in video by itself and I am enjoying the level of clarity in the images, and ability to see closeups and details. But there is an undeniable richness in the live experience. At present I find I would like to create a performative video for itself, then if possible, adapt it as a live performance as well.