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I think for Nixon in China Pete Sellars rounded everybody up. That's my memory. I don't know,
it was a very long time ago. So I had met Peter at Purchase, at the Pepsico Festival,
and he was doing his operas. And we met, he saw my work, I saw his. His first proposal
was that we collaborate on something big. Pajama Game is what he proposed, which we
haven't done. It's not a bad idea. But not long after that he approached me with the
idea of choreographing the version of the Red Detachment of Women for Nixon in China,
and I did. So the music was basically pretty much done, and of course the way John works,
in a midi recording synthesized. And so I worked from that.In the second opera, the
Death of Klinghoffer, that I worked on with John and with Peter, the choruses were specifically
intended by Alice Goodman the librettist to be choreographed by me. And John wrote these
big choruses that are interspersed throughout the piece. They're on a very grand and very
wonderful sort of chorale scale. And my-- I agreed to choreograph these pieces knowing
that there was -- the set was very complicated, and to me dangerous. And I said that my company
would perform in this piece but they would never go up on the set, they would only be
on the floor. And I also said to Peter Sellars, when we were talking about rehearsing this,
we did this in Brussels, I said, "Well, you know, well I'll do this, but I really --
I don't want there to be any guns and any wheelchairs. And when I showed up on the first
day of rehearsal there was a table loaded with guns and like five or six wheelchairs.
I said, "Well, I'm not so sure about that." So John, I believe, agreed with me, and we
ended up with some shrouded guns, one wheelchair. The dancers were only on the floor. The music
was written for these choruses that were explicitly to be danced by my company. The music was
very dense and thrilling and some of it quite complicated and very fast. And, you know,
the dancers -- dancers learn music very, very rapidly and so it's, in a certain way, they
know the music, they know it rhythmically, usually sooner and better than the musicians
do. So that can be frustrating to other musicians. But the music was written specifically to
be danced by my specific company, and that was a -- that's what made it work out very
well. Peter Sellars, in directing this work and many others, uses a form of gestural communication
that he calls the Peter Sellars School of Dance. And very often people mistake my work
for his when we work together, which is fine because we mean it to be a whole. So Peter
and I respond to John's music, I think, in a similar way, it -- the way that it is rhythmically
expressive and the way that he sets text to music and the way that the orchestra's pretty
much always churning, you know, away underneath whatever's happening dramatically and vocally.
There's a huge excitement that happens even in the slowest stillest parts of John's operas.
The last piece I did to music of John's was his Son of Chamber Symphony that I choreographed
as a dance for San Francisco Ballet called Joy Ride. And he was sending me the music,
again, on a midi recording, which is both edifying and frustrating because, you know,
it doesn't sound like the instruments and it also is exactly how it's written, and no
one will every play it that perfectly. So I was getting the music in installments from
John. I would get a midi recording, a tape, then I would get manuscript, and then I would
get, you know, sort of the true copy having been notated cleanly. And so I was working
on the piece with the dancers in the studio who are counting like crazy. There's, you
know, it's always really tricky. John emailed me asking if the music was undanceable and
I responded, "Of course it's undanceable and that's why it's interesting to work on." Most
music that's written for dancing specifically is incredibly predictable and dull, so in
my whole life I -- and my career as a choreographer and as a dancer, I avoid dance music because
there's no surprise to any of it. So in fact, you know, occasionally John will throw in
a bar of 1/8 or something. I say, "Can't that just be a comma or something?" you know. But
it's the way he thinks and it's the way the music -- why the music turns out the way it
does, with all of-- what sounds like it's going along fine and then you find yourself
a little bit caught somehow, the extra step at the bottom of the flight of stairs that
you're not predicting, that's what -- that's one tiny facet of his music that makes it
stimulating and interesting and exciting to make up dances to and to dance to.My working
relationship with John usually goes something like, I haven't seen him for years and I meet
him back stage someplace and he says, "How come you never choreograph any of my music?"
and then I say, "I've choreographed these things and I'm working on this right now."
So I love his music to listen to, I love the orchestra writing, I'm thrilled and puzzled
sometimes by the vocal writing. And it's full of an incredible sort of surge, you know,
sort of-- well here's the word, it's actually swing. So -- and of course no music works
unless it swings and John's music has still within it the skeleton of big band music as
well as the Bach cantatas, as well as all of modern music and world music as it's called,
and history. And it's alive and now. And someone asked me when I was choreographing Joy Ride
to the Son of Chamber Symphony why I was just doing this piece now. The answer was, "He
hasn't even finished it yet." So, you know, the wonderful thing is it's exactly now, and
he's alive and writing wonderful music and one can't resist it. Well in the first days
of Nixon in China, which we worked on in Houston, Texas, we were all of course younger than
we are now. You know, John is super old and I'm kind of old and the dancers who are in
it are now old. Everybody's older now. Everybody who wrote about it, who reviewed it, who performed
it, who designed it, you know, the incredible set designs by Adrianne Lobel, the incredible
lighting by James F. Ingalls, the incredible singers, all of them, and, you know, Peter,
John, and I, and Alice Goodman working together for the first time in a -- given the opportunity
to do a big and important opera about a recent event was a miracle, you know. It was an amazing
experience. We were all making it up as we went along. And we were smart and courageous
and I think we still are.Another thing about John that pleases me so much is that he became
very devoted to the music of Lou Harrison, who was a very good friend of mine, and whose
music I've choreographed many, many times over the years. And one time when John was
asking me why I choreographed so much of Lou Harrison's music I said that, "Partly because
when I was working he -- I commissioned a piece from Lou, and when he wrote it I thought
something was little bit weird with it and I sent some of it back and asked him to reappraoch
it. And the miracle is he then did. So, you know, that was a kind of a collaborate, I
don't know, not a lesson, but a tip, you know, that it really -- it takes a whole bunch of
people to make something like this happen, and everyone's an expert and we're meant to
be.