With shows that bring together discipline and freedom and dancers showing differing grades of stillness, one Cyprus-born dancer has taken the world by storm. THEO PANAYIDES speaks to a woman who says it is important to be angry.
Maria Hassabi stands silently in the Point Centre for Contemporary Art in Nicosia, a few hours before the opening of her first-ever solo exhibition in Cyprus (the exhibition runs till October 31). A ground-floor room is hosting a screening of clips, shown on a loop, from her recent performative works Staging and Staging: Solo #2 – but the video playback is having some technical problems, so she stands in a corner of the room watching patiently as the techies try to make sense of it.
Suddenly she raises her arms to heaven, as if embarking on a yoga exercise, then, in the same flowing, unostentatious move, bends over, placing her hands on the floor – then continues the move, having now stretched her calf muscles, by crouching down low, just a couple of inches from the floor, and holding that pose, hunkered down comfortably and watching the men work. A dancer’s move.
Maria is indeed a dancer, and choreographer – and I don’t know enough about the field to describe her as the most prominent Cypriot (or Cypriot-born) choreographer, but she’s certainly up there. Based in New York since the mid-90s, she’s won a Bessie (the NYC dance world’s equivalent of the Oscars), a Herb Alpert Award and a Guggenheim fellowship – an award that comes with a cash prize, which she used to finance her short film The Ladies – and has also, over the past decade, become something of a brand-name in the dance world, her ‘brand’ having to do with slowness and stillness. “Maria Hassabi’s performers writhe in… in-between states, their movements protracted, their purposes unclear. Slack, they loll in doorways; slope down stairs; bodies pile upon on curled bodies,” wrote Harry Thorne in a recent interview in Frieze magazine.
I actually know Maria personally; I knew her family well (though mostly her two older brothers) when we were both children. I mention this both in the interests of full disclosure, and to explain – or suggest – how this interview came about, because she’s generally press-shy. Some artists like nothing better than to chat companionably (and often pretentiously) about their work, others just do it. Maria’s a doer – and, I suspect, a seriously intense one. Does she ever lose her temper? “Yes. Always, since I was a kid,” she replies, shooting me a meaningful glance. (I don’t actually recall her as being especially hot-tempered; I guess children aren’t very good at gauging the personality of other children.) So she’s not the type to hold back? “No, never have been.”
What makes her angry about the world?
“Many things,” she shrugs, not really wanting to get into it. “I used to think that anger drove me.” She pauses, noting my startled expression: “I think it’s important to be angry,” she says firmly. “Without harming other people, of course, but to – feel an edge.”
There’s an edge to Maria, no question. Her face is striking, rather hawkish, with a certain nervous tension – though the smile, when it comes, is overwhelming – and bags under her eyes; she’s one of those people who don’t sleep much, maybe five hours or so (plus an occasional power-nap). She speaks with a mainland-Greek accent, having spent more time in Athens than Cyprus in recent years, and its rather snappish rhythm adds to her edge. She smokes but doesn’t want to talk about it, not because it’s a bad habit for a dancer (though it obviously is) but because the new-fangled ‘heat sticks’ she smokes are produced by a well-known tobacco giant, and “I don’t want to support [them] more than I already do”. Her frequent anger, she explains, is “connected to ideology”, and I’m guessing there are any number of Causes about which she’s passionate – but she doesn’t really want to talk about politics, either. She has an exhibition coming up in a few hours.
There’s an edge to her work as well – which seems counter-intuitive when it’s so becalmed, the dancers (usually including herself) enacting gradations of stillness rather than actual motion. Slow, however, doesn’t mean placid. The exhibition at Point is different, being “a collage of materials” without actual performers – but most of her works, especially in the past few years, have been ‘live installations’ hosted in large, crowded venues like MoMA in New York or the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the work unfolding throughout the opening hours of the institution with the dancers moving (slowly) through public areas packed with visitors. The dance doesn’t take place onstage, before an attentive audience safely ensconced in their seats; the dancers are exposed, unshielded, unable to defend themselves from audience intrusions – and not just exposed, but objectified too. “Ms Hassabi has asked at least one viewer to step away from her,” reported the New York Times when Maria’s award-winning Plastic was staged at MoMA in 2015; “But you’re art!” retorted the intruder.
There’s an edge in another sense too. Slowness and stillness are disturbing in themselves, messing with our sense of lifelike rhythm. Take The Ladies, the short film Maria made with her Guggenheim money: this was a kind of social experiment, with various women hired to walk around the streets of New York “all dressed in black, with black sunglasses and bright lipstick” – usually bright-red or bright-orange – and not just to walk, but to walk “in a slower rhythm than anybody else”. (The Malaysian director Tsai Ming-liang has done something similar in his ‘Walker’ series, only with a Buddhist monk instead of Goth-looking women.) A hidden camera recorded the reactions of passers-by, many of which ranged from puzzlement to outright hostility; one man even slapped one of the ladies, though it doesn’t appear in the final cut. ‘Is it because stillness reminds us of death?’ I wonder. Do we cherish movement as a proof of being alive? Does she use that subtext in her work? “No,” replies Maria slyly. “But I like what you’re talking about.”
For her, it’s more about the clash between precision and imprecision, discipline and freedom. “The works I make are very precise,” she explains. “The dancers count the whole time, everything’s choreographed to the bone” – yet, even beyond the inevitable disruption caused by human nature, which of course is the beauty of live performance (“You think you’re counting ‘five’, but maybe it’s ‘four’. Or you might sneeze, or your muscles start trembling at a moment you didn’t expect”), there’s also the fact that what Maria seeks to capture is itself imprecise. When movements are quick, the viewer sees one pose, one image, followed by another – but when they’re slow they create an “in-between place”, a point where one image is starting to morph into the next, a point where the choreography is exposed instead of guiding the eye like it usually does.
So is that the point? “Everything is the point,” she replies with a sigh. “The duration is the point, you know?… For me, I was always interested in having more time to look. It was a desire from when I would watch things – especially in performance, I’d go and see shows and I’d be like: ‘Stop moving, I want to look at you! I want to have more time to see’”.
Where does it come from, this impulse? Maybe a rebellion, seeking the freedom conferred by images – you can gaze at an image all day – against what she calls the “dictatorship-like” aspect of dance (though, as so often with creative tension, she has something of the same dictatorial aspect in her own process). One thing’s for sure, it’s not because she’s slow-moving by temperament. “The art is a construction,” notes Maria. “My life – I’m very fast in my life. I do a million things, I’m a very stressed person”. The moment our interview is over, she gets up and rushes to the railing at the edge of the room – we’ve been sitting on the floor in the first-floor exhibition space at Point, letting the techies get on with it downstairs – having spotted “an imperfection”: the railing’s been covered with pink tape but a bit of white was showing through a gap in the tape, which she now fixes busily. She’s pretty driven.
She’s always been driven. This is all she ever wanted to do, maybe not dance per se (“I wasn’t doing ballet ever since I was a baby, and all that stuff”) but certainly performance, self-expression. She was born in November 1973 and went to CalArts, the California Institute of the Arts, in 1990, having finished high school at 16. She must’ve been the youngest person there, I marvel. “There was one more,” she replies. “Who’s dead now,” she adds with disconcerting bluntness. (That edge again!) She had no technique or portfolio, but she sent a video and they must’ve seen something of her presence, her passion. (“I was lucky, I think,” notes Maria modestly.) She went straight to New York after graduation, started showing her work seriously in 2001 – around the time of 9/11; she witnessed the second tower coming down from her Chinatown rooftop – then, around 2007, she began working with duration and found herself becoming a brand-name. She doesn’t really think of her work as an oeuvre, “I just know it’s a body of work because of the way that, when my name comes up, everybody talks about slowness and stillness, so I’m like ‘Oh, I’m that person’. You know, there’s a name. I’m an established artist.”
Plastic also won her the Bessie in 2016, for Outstanding Production. Was she surprised to win?
“I should’ve gotten it so many years ago,” she shrugs, briefly spiky again. “I was nominated so many times, and I never got it – so I couldn’t care less anymore about them. I hated all of them!”
She’s chuckling as she says it, not entirely serious – but there is a serious side to the affair, in that Maria wasn’t even at the awards ceremony in New York: her father had just passed away, and she was in Cyprus for the funeral. There’s a touch of that in our conversation, the muffled subject of time going by – and not just because stillness, as already mentioned, carries echoes of mortality. Maybe it’s because we remind each other of long-gone childhood days. Maybe it’s because growing older has such inescapable consequences for a dancer – though Maria insists she doesn’t think about that, nor does she worry about her body breaking down. (“When it does, it does.”) Maybe it’s because of her lifestyle too, and the fact that, in her mid-40s, she’s living such an in-between, unsettled life.
“The last few years, I’ve been a nomad,” she admits. New York is her base, but she’s only there about three months of the year; the rest of the time she’s travelling, usually from museum to museum, setting up her live installations in city after city. She’s not single, her partner accompanying her on most of her travels, and she also spends time with family in Greece and Cyprus (“Every time I come to Cyprus, I’m very touched… Everything means something, you know?”) – but it’s still the kind of lifestyle that creates a certain stress, especially in a person who, by her own admission, is so stressed anyway.
Does she wish she were more relaxed?
“I get things done, so – I dunno, it works,” she replies briskly. “I mean, losing your temper I don’t think is good for anyone. Stress, it would be nice if it was less. But I do like that I’m fast-paced and can get a lot of things done, yes.”
In the end, what holds Maria Hassabi together may be the exact same thing that tends to pull her apart: her work, with its constant strains and challenges, and joys and triumphs. The details of her life are banal, like everyone else’s: she’s not much for sweets, avoids pasta, and unwinds by watching TV shows (she’s just finished Ozark). But “the thing I’m most perplexed by is that – I remember less and less, you know?” she admits, almost with a sense of wonder. Friends reminisce, and she draws a blank. The past grows fuzzy; the now is everything.
“And it has to do with age, of course – but also, I’m so occupied with my work and my lifestyle that everything else falls apart, in a way. Not in a bad sense, but there’s not enough space in here” – she indicates her head – “to hold everything”. We hug, after all these years, and I leave her to do what she does best: fix the pink tape on the railing, and try to figure out what those techies are doing.
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