Jeff McMahon in conversation with Aine Phillips
27-5-07 Tompkins Sq Park, East Village

BIOGRAPHY:
www.jeffmcmahonprojects.net
Jeff McMahon's live work blending text with movement and media has been presented throughout the world. He has performed at Performance Space 122, Dance Theatre Workshop, The Kitchen, PS 1, LACE, Cleveland Performance Art Festival, Jacob's Pillow, Highways, Centre for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe, Dance Works (Toronto), and numerous other venues in the U.S. Canada, and Europe. Jeff McMahon received an MFA at the School of the Arts, Columbia University in 1998. He teaches performance at Arizona State University.

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

Jeff - I moved here in 1979 and got involved with PS122 (Performance Space 122, East Village) I had dropped out of Reed College after two years in theatre and studied movement and improvisation in Seattle and San Francisco. I was interested in postmodern, non representational, non narrative movement. At first my work borrowed from or adapted other people's histories, but I was the vehicle. My interest lay in how one's own story came out through the telling of other people's stories, and/or by taking on an historical character or incident. The watershed came when I go mugged here (in Tompkins Square Park) something cataclysmic happened to me, my sense of self was radically threatened, and I made a Beckett like piece (I had seen NOT I and was very influenced by that). I made my own version expressing a denial of the first person 'this didn't happen to me but to someone else…' performing a heightened version of who I was, or wanted to be. I have used other's stories and through speaking them, aspects of myself come out, I go further, emotively and expressively, than if I were being strictly autobiographical.

In my most autobiographical piece 'City of God' (influenced only partially by St. Augustine) 1993 Dance Theater Workshop I look back on my life and try to explain it using my somewhat unscholarly take on Augustine's examination of what one has learnt, what the questing individual has gone through. My work is more about the autobiography of my thought process, my sensibility rather than 'I lived here…this happened…'

I don't do overtly identity based work. I am a gay, white, middle class man but I'm not exploring this in a deliberate way. But of course it's embedded in the work. It allows perhaps the privilege to examine the "other." I create pastiche where I speak with the voice of others (pedophiles, fascists, and torturers in my current work FAILURE TO THRIVE). But of course a lot is, in some mysterious way, about another possible "me" an extreme, perhaps opposite, version of me. I use my work to access the uglier sides, the creepier sides of human thought and behavior. My work is most interesting when some strange voices come out of me – the out of control egotist, the fascist, the torturer. I don't use vocalizations, trance or shamanistic voice like Karen Finley, but there are similarities in that there's a switch that is thrown, accessing someone other than my usual self. It's more of a persona, since it doesn't necessarily have the full back-story and logic of a "character."

Áine - So do you find these dark voices in your own identity?

Jeff - Well it's not like Anna Deveare Smith who studies and interviews people (like in LA or Crown Heights Brooklyn after unrest and riots in those communities) and cut/pastes their words, gestures, mannerisms and re-performs them. I am not that technical or focused on documentary/journalistic accuracy. I am a committed liberal, but bigoted, homophobic, gynophobic, racist shit comes out of me and I think through language where we access all sorts of multiplicities in ourselves. I am interested in accessing and addressing evil buried within us, although I am not evil myself. Maybe it's about acknowledging the inherent dramatic quality of extreme characters.

I think of my writing, at its best, as like what a lyricist (songwriter) does. It is an economical, minimal form, although many times it's also maximalist, an onslaught, an excess. I like a romantic tone that is also ironic, although I really try to monitor the irony these days, since its power has waned. My writing is very literate and words are fascinating and rich to me. I try to speak in an elevated language that's not quotidian.

Áine - Hence your interest in representing your process of thinking (as an act of autobiography). The other, women artists I have met here in NY are trying to represent the interior, emotional and lived experience. I wonder if it is a difference in gender as the women artists are looking to the experiential, feeling and what sense to make of the things that happened in life.

Jeff - I have read that Pina Bausch, when she is working with dancers on a new piece, says 'I'm not interested in what you are doing but why'. I am more interested in asking that question – why am I, for instance, talking about or as a soldier, a murdered kid, a cop, a pedophile, or a fascist – than about telling details of my life?
In 'City of God', I was viewing my life from a distance, I was talking about having survived. Everyone suffers, I have suffered, but I want to view my life with at least some objectivity and this is my position in the work. It examines the oscillation between subjectivity and attempted objectivity.

Áine - Without mirrors held up to who we are, without deconstruction, we can fall under things. The usefulness of art and autobiographical performance is that holding up of mirrors.

Jeff - I don't know if it's a mirror, if it is it's a very refracted mirror. I mimic but twist everything. Any autobiography in my work is slightly twisted.

Áine - From the personal to the political, we find a way to make subjective experience accessible to others. In your work you look at critical, wider issues and do you find a way to insert the personal into that?

Jeff - First looking at the way I am talking, the way I am thinking reveals a lot about who I am.
If I talk about America now and what we are into, it's anxiety drugs, anti depression drugs and botox, it's all about relax, relax so we can shop more. These are the things I obsess about, my engagement with the world which says a lot about me.

Áine - Narcissism and self absorption are dangers of autobiographical work, how do you get around these pitfalls?

Jeff - The way to do it is to comment on it as you are practicing it. Within postmodern performance, you can reveal the structure, you can take all the stuff that's supposed to be hidden and put it on the outside. You can question your authority as you are practicing it. You can take all your doubts, questioning, narcissistic entwinements and make them an interesting part of the work. It's partially irony, but a more emotionally engaged form. There's a certain interrogation, playing with ways of presenting yourself.

Áine - The notion of play, it is a sharing, we play with each other.

Jeff - Acknowledging the audience, it's a dialogue. But on the performers terms.

Áine - Do you move out of the script framework and dialogue with the audience?

Jeff - Not really, dialogue is a back and forth flow and it takes a lot of sensitivity if you are trying to keep the structure and get the message across. And since much of my work has been only partially memorized, a lot of that live dialogue is actually internal; what line do I say now? But if you're really playing, that's when it works. Being open to the live moment, anything can happen. If I am only interested in telling my story and I don't also incorporate the moment then it's like there's no point in it being live, in being performed. A lot of the power in my work comes through the interplay of speech and movement and its liveness

Áine - We share together, there is a relationship in that moment of the performance. Seeking to play is central to performance, we also have it in sport, sex etc, but in performance we can do it with an intellectual engagement also.

Jeff - The work is most interesting to me when there is a multiplicity of sources and references. I put them into me and then I perform them out! Everything comes out of my perspective. I'm not convinced that in all theatre it is the story that makes us listen. It is the way it is told with words and intonation. Form does trump content often in live work, because you can't reread the live event, you don't have time to analyze the narrative. You are experiencing the telling as much as the story itself through the teller/author. Like Freud's theories regarding dreams; as soon as you start to remember your dream you begin to change it. It is in the struggle to find a way of explaining something the explainer is revealed,