Aaron Landsman

interviewed by Katharine Matthias

Katharine Matthias: Perfect City calls each session as “knowledge building among community” on the Abrons Art Center website. What have been your guiding principles for the knowledge building sessions with Perfect City Summer Reading Club?

Aaron Landsman: I started Perfect City four years ago. It's a paid working group of young mostly people in their early, mid 20s, looking at gentrification, and now it's four members, three of whom have been with it since the beginning and me. The goal for Perfect City is that it is a 20-year project and, by year five, I'll transition into an advisor role, so that they will be running the group as a collective, and that is a lot about addressing the social capital of being an older white artist working with younger artists. I didn't intend it to be a long project, but now it is and it's great!

What we came up with early on was guiding principles for the whole group: emotional amnesty, which means there is room for strong intense discussion; aesthetic amnesty, which means no one's idea of art is more important than another's; logistical flexibility; and everyone gets paid.

We set up the reading group so that each person would take one piece of reading. So, Tiffany Zorrilla is doing two chapters of The Power of Place by Delores Hayden. I picked Ideas, Arrangements, Effects: Systems Design and Social Justice by The Design Studio for Social Intervention. And then, Stop Telling Women to Smile by Tatyana Fazlalizadeh and facilitated by Jahmorei Snipes is the next one and Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates and facilitated by Tylor Diaz is the final one.

The goal is that there is logistical flexibility, so you don't have to have done the reading, but we are trying to build a conversation among the four. We started with a macro-systemic look at how ideas lead to arrangements that produce effects, societally. The book is saying that often when we fight against some kind of injustice, we understand the ideas, we fight the effects, but we neglect the arrangements. They are really elegant design principles for social justice. I’d been in an MFA program with Kenny Bailey, who’s one of the authors.

There's a slightly different approach for each one, but the goal is to build a conversation through shared principles and putting out an invitation. We're also inviting people to stay in contact with us because we'd love to build membership, as time and money permit.                                    

KM: You used Zoom for your first knowledge building session. What platforms and technologies are you experimenting with during this reading series?

AL: We're just using Zoom. We’re also using breakout rooms. There's this bulletin board where everyone can post ideas for discussion topics. My guess is that we will continue this reading group past the summer and that if we're still in quarantine, we will get a little more fancy. We've gotten pretty granular about how long a breakout should be and then what purpose it serves. It's very similar to working in school in virtual classrooms, so we haven't done much yet, but there's other contexts where I'm thinking a little bit differently.

KM: What are some of the other contexts where you're thinking differently?

AL: Ralph Peña who runs a theater company called Ma-Yi Theater, and I just happened into a conversation where he was like, “Look, this is going to be going on for a while. We will be in and out of quarantine for a couple of years in terms of theater gathering, so I want to create a platform that gives artists a chance to work.” I think it was in response to the rush to stream that so many theatre artists had. That thing of like “I can do my play in my living room!” So, he's working with LiveLab, and there's a project that I made, years ago in different iterations called Appointment, which is one-on-one performances in offices. In the live version, as an artist, you basically have to make a piece that you can present like clockwork every 12 minutes for an hour or two, with a new audience member rotating through each time, and it's exhausting. But the thing about watching something virtually is we can just ask people to be alone. And so I'm making a version of Appointment with Flako Jimenez, April Mathis, and Erika Chong Shuch. If we want to make a one hour piece, we each make a short piece and then we each perform it four times and each audience member sitting alone feels like it's a performance just for her. I want to play with the idea that you're alone when you're watching Appointment because that's been the most stark thing when I see online performances. My life in my world will sometimes take over when I'm trying to watch an online performance, so I want to acknowledge all that. Another thing that Ralph’s trying to make happen is taking recorded content and editing it into live content.

There's a second project that is much more slow moving for me that I was working on right before quarantine called Night Keeper with a performer named Jess Barbagallo. At one point in the early process, I mentioned that it's kind of drawn from the idea of graphic novels, and he was like, “Are you saying you want me to draw?” and I was like, “No, no, no,” but that was before everything. A couple weeks ago, I was like, “Jess, do you want to draw and do you want to make this a co-authorship?” and he said yes, so we're going to animate something that also is live.

KM: Live performance makers are trying to figure out how to commune with their audience and also create a sense of togetherness. How has that communion with the audience changed in these summer reading club meetings? How is it different from an in-person discussion?

AL: The whole thing for me is about kind of reading affect and body language, which is so much harder. On the flip side, I don't want to gloss over the true diminishment of the field that can happen in virtual form, but there's a thing that if you put yourself on gallery view and you've got 25 people, everyone is the same size. There was just a little equalization that happened, but I think it’s hard not being able to read certain things about how someone is doing. 

There's a kind of self-care component of Perfect City that's emerged, especially because we've been around long enough so that members have been through a lot of formative experiences in four years. There's a certain level, on which you can't reach across on Zoom, so, as a live performance maker, I feel pretty keenly aware of that.

I've been in other contexts creatively over the last three months where it's like, “Oh, we have to set aside part of our process that is so familiar with us, and there's a certain limit to what we can do.” There are certain good things about that, like you could work more conceptually on Zoom as a theater ensemble. But, you can’t have fun, really. I mean, beyond a certain kind of way.

KM: How has community involvement and community building translated onto Zoom? How has your relationship with community building changed since you shifted online? Do you find that you are widening your audience through technology? 

AL: The answer to the last question is yes, and in a very specific way with Perfect City. This thing happened where the women in the group had been doing some sessions with the women who are residents at Henry Street’s Residential Domestic Violence Shelter, and that had been going on for three or four sessions. It started by accident -- like many of our things -- where the women were coming to see a play at Abrons, and some of us took their kids on a walking tour, as a form of childcare. Then we were like, “Oh, since we're working on street harassment, what if we do workshops around mapping for these women?” The Perfect City members, Tiffany Zorrilla and Jahmorei Snipes, are also part of a big, big ethnographic research project that they're getting paid to do, and it focuses on the women at the shelter. 

When quarantine happened, two things went into effect. One was Flako Jimenez, who has a production company called OYE Group - he started transitioning some of his work for kids online, and he also made art supply packets to give out to kids. Tiffany and Jahmorei said, “What if we made virtual workshops, they could do on paper around visioning and mapping,” so we've just made these art supply kits that Henry Street paid for that we gave to the women. Tiffany and Jahmorei are going to work with them by phone and do follow up, or else we're just going to catch up with them when we can finally meet.

We are working with OYE Group on a couple of things now. We're going to give a version of those same kits to kids in Bushwick because he's delivering our packs out there. He hired Tyler to be a music teacher at his kids programming to do musical composition lessons on Zoom, so there's a lot of expansion going on in terms of OYE. We've been talking about making walking tours in conjunction with a performance that Flako was working on already, called Taxilandia. A lot of stuff that was in the works really jelled.

The last thing that has potential, but in no way definite, is we just started applying for funding to continue to work with the women at the shelter. Tiffany said this brilliant thing, which was like “I wish that they could see their maps as like pathways to a viable career.” That's been something on my mind -- I want the working group, even if we just had to fold because we ran out of money, I would like to the working group to feel like there are different career pathways open to them because the whole premise of the group was that kids who grew up in cities don't often get to do urban planning, especially if they're kids of color. So, Tiffany was like, “I would love it if there was an app that we could use where the women could plug their maps into an existing map.” We've also done work around redlining and its impact on current congressional districts. So, we are applying for money to try to make something like that happen, through working with the city to allow the women and the shelter to have a direct line to policymaking around affordable housing and all that is because we had to go online, I think.                                                  

KM: How has the Black Lives Matter movement influenced your conversations and knowledge building sessions at the Perfect City Summer Reading Club?

AL: I think we're just more to the point. The combination of the pandemic and Black Lives Matter made it much more direct, like we're here to work and the work is world building.                                      

I think all the three of the most active working remembers haven't been out at protests, for health reasons, but are involved in more close-knit or private conversation and activism. I think it was surprising for them that Minneapolis was the beginning. I grew up in Minneapolis, like I lived two miles from where George Floyd was killed. My parents live downtown now, but they literally had to post people outside of their building for a couple of nights because cars with no license plates, full of Neo Nazis, were driving around looking for places to torch. You know, I would hear it from other people in Minneapolis, I'd be like, “really?” and my parents were like, yeah, yeah, we saw the cars. They drove by our building. So being able to talk to Perfect City about what a kind of supposedly liberal mostly white Midwestern city goes through, I think, was very helpful for them as New Yorkers.

KM: How have you navigated some of the challenges of being virtual?  What have you discovered and learned through your first virtual knowledge building session this summer? What practical advice do you have for leaders of a Zoom gathering?

AL: One thing would be to have some kind of an icebreaker or warm up. I was doing this master's program at Bennington, and Kenny Bailey was part of it and this amazing dance artist Hillary Clark who would lead little warm ups like how to sit in front of the zoom screen for two hours. I did that, as a teacher, I taught viewpoints.

I'm going to suggest it next time [at the reading] that we do something that gets us in our bodies. Even if it's stupid fun or if there's some either break in the middle or if it’s just putting on a song or attaching a playlist to Zoom chat, but something that gets it makes it more three dimensional for each person.

KM: How did viewpoints and movement translate on to Zoom?

AL: I did it with the grad group and then I did it with my undergrad class that I was teaching and some people would be like, “I'm moving the camera around” and then somebody else walked outside and the challenge of looking at the screen while having your own experience was really rich to explore.

It worked! I thought it worked surprisingly well. I was surprised because there are actually more dimensions to play with on Zoom. One student of mine said, “oh, it's like there's the six viewpoints and then there's me in the part of my world that no one else can see and an understanding of their 15 other people and I can't see anything beyond their screen.” So, there's more control and more mystery at the same time. It was really nice. I recommend it.

KM: What are you most looking forward to with the other reading sessions this summer?

AL: I think with a bigger group, we can break it up a little bit more and have things that are music related. We're going to have guests each time. So, this group called Catcalls NYC is coming. My hope is that we can have breakout moments, and I want it to be a dialogue that is part presentation, part activation. 

KM: You have been using technology for years to create work internationally. For instance, you are working on Language Reversal and are making productions and choreography with collaborators in Serbia. How did you create group choreography together online? What inspired you to do this kind of work online pre-pandemic?

AL: For Language Reversal, they’re collaborators that I've worked with before. They produced a translated version of my play Open House in Serbia in 2013, which got me over there for three weeks. Since then, there had been this thing of wanting to work on something new, and then we actually talked about something like Appointment.

I got a little travel grant in early 2016, and I wanted to spend a week meeting collaborators and figuring out what we're going to make. Then, the election happened and I already made a flight reservation for November 13, so I was like, “I'm coming over and I just want to talk about a toolkit for this time.” I interviewed a bunch of people, I started writing texts, and I've gone over twice since then and we've workshopped text and played with material.

They were supposed to come to the US in the fall of 2018 and then we couldn't get visas, which was directly related to what Trump is doing around artist visas. The Department of Homeland Security is holding up tons and tons of visas for artists, and so all of a sudden it was a month and a half before and the visas were not going to come through.

So, I started working with CultureHub. They sent a technician there and we made a piece where they were performing in Serbia and we were performing here. We just had a semicircle of chairs facing screens and then they had the same, so we were looking at them and their audience and they were looking at us in our audience. Then Johanna, who is my partner, made a duet dance that we could sync up to this Serbian punk band called Boye. It's an all female punk band. I listened to them when I was in Serbia, and then I met them, which was rad. They're all kind of grizzled, and they have 17-year-old kids, they all smoke and they're really awesome and I love their music. So, we made something to Boye’s music that perfomers could dance to in two countries, synced up. We were also working on an idea of more countries so I have collaborators now with connections to Nigeria and Russia.

 Right before the pandemic, the only place we've had money to work with is Serbia, that kind of question is do we wait until we can actually be in person. Are we making material virtually and then we translate that back? So that project is semi-on hold.                 

The goal is still: What is a tool kit for this time?

When I was making the piece for 2018, I had people submit what's in their toolkit for getting through a really difficult time, and it was everything from recipes to philosophies to objects. We are having people do that, wherever we work on the piece. It's still really amorphous and it feels like an essay that’s still being written, but I'm excited about the process.

KM: Have you noticed how the creating a toolkit has impacted your time during this pandemic?

AL: Maybe just in that I'm reaching out immediately was not feeling like I could handle all this on my own or that a nuclear family is the site where you can handle something of these magnitudes. And so I think I definitely have been having weekly calls with friends, making sure that Perfect City still feels like we can meet, and just saying community building in whatever way possible feels that much more satisfying because the responses to the toolkit were so wonderful to read.

Then, the performances at LaMama. We had four performances, so each performance, someone would come and perform or read or show something that was in their toolkit as an ending.

Access the link to Aaron Landsman’s Perfect City Summer Reading Club here.