Making Peace (and Finding My Own) with the De-Intensification of Britney Spears

Throughout the years generally agreed upon as her “prime,” one way in which Britney Spears remained such a thrilling performer was dancing ahead of the beat. This accomplished two things, really. It presented Britney as prepared and unstoppable, the choreography engrained in her body and spirit to the point that performing it was effortless. She was insatiable, relentlessly seeking the thrill of the next move. But the more you watch Britney perform at this speed, the more you realize there’s something deeper being going on here. Take the dance break in “Me Against The Music” as performed on Saturday Night Live. The effect makes Britney look like she is flying through space and time, while her dancers remain firmly grounded in Studio 8H, Eastern Standard. They are joining her on that stage because the public has years of visual training instructing them that a couple layers of humans do, in fact, belong behind our star.

But they also, purposefully or not, act to highlight just how capable Britney is of doing the whole thing on her own. Being in front of her dancers, too, means Britney’s satisfied facial expressions can only be linked to her knowing she’s killing it; she cannot see the full picture they’ve created as a team. It’s striking she never once makes eye contact with any of them – even when she turns around, so do they. This lack of human connection with those mere inches from her is a theme in Britney’s work as a performer. Perhaps its for the best; when she does attempt to engage with her dancers directly, she ends their lives with the movement of her hips, finds herself more interested in her cameras than her grinding partner, or, is blindfolded. The most intimately engaged I’ve seen Britney with a dance partner was when she dance-battled herself.

As a queer person whose formative years took place squarely within the Bible Belt, I too know a little bit about dance-battling myself in the mirror. I have a feeling most queer people do, actually; evidence suggests I am far from the first or last gay kid to privately turn themselves into a star, and exist within that fantasy world throughout each lackluster day, the fantasy becoming its clearest and most vivid whilst completely alone. That’s what I find most miraculous about those videos of young queer kids slaying their favorite pop routines; they accidentally reveal the grueling rehearsal schedules within the secret, private lives of the child performers. How much time do you think Robert E. Jeffrey spent in front of his mirror to get Madonna’s “Vogue” down pat? And as a fellow student of the material, I can personally vouch for Brendan Jordan that Gaga’s “A-R-T-P-O-P” hand choreo is no small feat to master.

The tour in which Britney dance-battled herself was the Dream Within a Dream Tour, and it is over the course of this two-year outing she and Justin Timberlake famously uncoupled. This is to say the tour started off dark and just got darker. By the second leg, she had replaced a cute, expository introduction to the battle song (“Who is this chick? I think she wants to battle me. Huh? Whew!”) for something pointedly anti-male (“This is a song for ALL my girls”), indicating a harsh shift in perspective: no matter the girl, and no matter the boy, the girl’s gonna get screwed. While on the surface, this seems to be Britney dealing with young straight love gone awry, I always took it to mean much more. This proclamation felt more anti-humankind than just merely boys. One thing that astounded me about the Dream Within a Dream Tour was its through line of superhero independence. On top of dance-battling her evil twin, Britney is kidnapped (honestly, an exhausting amount of times), endures a thunderstorm, and plays a girl trapped in a music box, never to find her true love (during her three most overtly romantic songs). In fact, Britney never once achieves romantic satisfaction – even when the mood shifts in favor of passion, it’s her dancers getting it on, Britney watching longingly. By the time Britney finishes the show, one can’t help but breathe a sigh of relief – not just because it’s an exhausting technical feat, but because it’s a miracle whatever character Britney is playing survived this whole plight on her own (her dancers certainly never helped; they were too busy kidnapping her). Whether she had to break through a large net, bungee off the edge of a flying cliff, or endure a loneliness her narrator – Jon Voight, by the way – makes a point to describe as both insufferable and eternal – Britney always escaped to safety, and she did it, each time, without any help. It was a 90-minute concept performance about the ineptitude of anyone else to make you happy – or, really do anything but annoy or traumatize you. The New York Times review of the show was titled “Exchanging Her Halo for a Cloak of Darkness.” So, listen, I swear – I wasn’t alone on this one, you guys.

But so what if I was? That’s kind of the idea Britney was throwing into the ether in 2002 – being alone was not the end of the world; in fact, it was noble. It made you invincible – faster than those behind you, hyper-alert, firing off on all cylinders, blasting toward the ultimate destination of career dominance. This was a conclusion I had been forced to come up with on my own, as someone who did not see himself in any romantic relationships I’d been exposed to, both in my personal life and through pop culture. But now, I had a mascot for it – and she was the most famous human in the world. If our country’s most beloved icon didn’t need anyone, neither did I. This is convenient for a queer kid who certainly wouldn’t have anyone for a while – and at the time, thought maybe ever. “One day I will be as powerful as the most insane images the outer limits of my imagination can conjure. If anyone has a problem with me, it simply won’t matter in a few years, because I will be universally adored – a type of adoration more important than any type of personal or, ew, …intimate one.” Sixteen years later, I find myself wondering if those feelings have served their purpose, and are supposed to go away.

When Britney danced ahead of the song’s beat for a small measurement of time akin to that of her ex-boyfriend’s wardrobe malfunction, the results were thrilling. When she let herself get even faster, though, it could deliver the opposite effect: our Queen was ready to wrap this sucker up, and get backstage to a warm bowl of cheese grits. She didn’t care that no matter how fast she rushed through her marks, there’s only so much wiggle room with which a show largely set to a track can bend. It was as if, for ninety minutes, she was trapped in structure she was faster than, better than, and, ultimately, over.

Regardless of her motivations for dancing at warp-speed, Britney spent years setting a precedent. Which is one of the many reasons why her 2007 VMA performance was so confounding; lagging just wasn’t Britney’s thing and here she was. This performance acted as a catalyst to a near-decade-long process of a fan re-standardization of our expectations for Britney’s live shows. While her music remained truly exciting, tours supporting the new goods were met with confusion online. YouTube clips from the Circus and Femme Fatale tours became message board deliberations between two groups. In one corner, you had the upset fans wishing Britney would come out and slay one more time for old time’s sake. In the other, understanding fans citing a variety of reasons she couldn’t – or didn’t have to, given what she’d already given us.

I was always a member of the former camp. Even as things started looking positive for Britney, with a stable Vegas residency that allowed her more time with her children and created a structure within which she could seemingly retrieve a good chunk of the pep in her step, I wasn’t seeing it. When the opposing camp would bring up that perhaps – just perhaps – Britney was happier now – with a stable home life, less grueling schedule, and easier performance style leaning harder on “fun” than “culture-shifting,” my brain could not compute an equation that rendered a lack of gravitas and a disinterest in striving toward mass public adoration – with happiness. Britney is a god and she should be performing like her god counterparts, not becoming a niche act for the nostalgic. For many years, I allowed myself no joy in the de-intensification of Britney Spears. It was my pop cultural torture chamber, watching someone I loved so much trade in owning the cultural zeitgeist with every shake of her pelvis or soda endorsement - for something nearing closer, day by day, to personal fulfillment. Even as her other fans celebrated her new personal successes – and tried as they may to invite me on board their ship – I saw no benefits in the trade-off and pouted at the dock.

As recently as August of 2016, Britney seemed to be sticking to a life of independence akin to the dystopian single-girl vision from Dream Within a Dream. Appearing on Carpool Karaoke with James Cordon, Britney was asked “What are you looking for in a guy?” She responds curtly, “I think I might not ever go to men again. I may never do the men thing anymore, or get married, I’m just done with men.” A shocked Cordon gets her to backtrack a bit – but not by much. “I might French kiss someone,” she admits, but then, as if catching herself straying from a hard-fought resolution, doubles back down, “But I’m not going to marry anyone, no. I don’t believe in marriage anymore.” Britney’s romantic receptors were still firmly in the OFF position, but something new was beginning: she was developing an interest in connecting with others – any interested parties, really - more intimately. Britney’s world had been shrouded in secrecy for years; then, all of the sudden, her Instagram became an intense – yet playful and funny – vision board of her psyche. The idea that personal fulfillment could be valuable - not in spite of its seeming lack of relevance to a consumer, but because of it – became an idea her Instagram account presented with gusto. It has inspired a weekly podcast, Britney’s Gram, where comedians Barbara and Tess analyze Brit’s posts with the scrutiny of Justin Timberlake watching his ex kiss Madonna. Showing off personal growth for Britney as a person first and foremost – any gains in her career falling to the wayside – became an interesting development when I could see it first-hand. I was here for it. Furthermore, the idea that an interest in self-care – as opposed to an obsession with career-excellence – could lead to new creative discoveries and possibilities is not something I’d even considered until seeing Britney take up painting. Or watched her pull out two non-singles from five albums ago during her big career retrospective at the 2016 Billboard Music Awards, simply because she wanted to. Or seen her – live vocals and all – cover a 1991 Bonnie Rait song on her Vegas stage, because she’d just learned – in 2017 – that people thought she lip-synced. These decisions are simply too random not to be her own, and in the same way that they lost all their sense(s), they also became as thrilling to watch as dancing ahead of the beat. And at the end of the day, perhaps the most intriguing new idea I’m processing from 2018ney is that all this self-care and opening oneself up to new possibilities – could, whether you like it or not, bring someone special into your life. It might even do so quickly – for instance, less than two years after you told James Cordon on national TV you were done with special someones. (To be fair, I guess it is possible Britney and her boyfriend are only French kissing…)

Growing up queer and closeted, you spent a lot of time alone – but you also spend a lot of time testing the boundaries of opening up to others, and being subsequently disappointed by your decision to do so. Sometimes, loved ones abandon you at an age so young you don’t realize what even happened until much later. You get used to this and you take care of yourself. Until it becomes exhausting, and you join a large club of young souls who’ve given up. Intimate human relationships based on truth and openness seem so impossible that the hope of them happening one day cannot build up the muscle to take on the facts of their impossibility. Your relationship with your family and friends is actually not your own, but that of them and your invented self – someone shy on personal details, obsessed with personal accomplishments, and uninterested in romantic possibilities. And they like this person, and this person is a performance you’ve perfected to the point you’re flying through space and time effortlessly when you embody them, so it feels fine to let it go on as long as need be. But what does it look like when you realize you have been trapped in structure you are faster than, better than, and, ultimately, over? And then: how do you break out of it, and let someone – a special someone – in?

Recently I found myself asking my friends what the point of a romantic relationship was. This type of provocation is not new between me and my straight buddies – I spent many a closeted teenage year insisting they were lesser than I for craving companionship, proving they were but half a human whereas I was (obviously) whole. But this recent conversation felt different; I was genuinely curious as to their answer. I had lost track of what the allure was in the first place, and was confounded anyone even tried when they could have those hours shared with another – nervous first dates, attending partners’ shows, “enjoying” lazy Sunday mornings watching Netflix in bed – back to themselves. When my friends helped me understand that relationships were more about self-nourishment in-the-now than any grand scheme for the world or one’s success in it – their answer felt useless. What’s the point of nourishing the self, if the self is but a temporary endurance test spiraling toward a future dream? A dream that might take everything in you to get even a tenth of? A dream that can’t afford distractions; one that can’t afford being thrown off by anybody? Besides, past attempts at intimacy have only left you knocked down.

But what I think I can gather from watching Britney living right now in 2018 is that sometimes it may be worth trying again. To connect with others; to reckon with how that is bettering yourself. And perhaps that “distraction” – that relationship with someone special – is not a distraction at all. But rather, a little dream within your dream. Especially if your head is on a little straighter than the first time you gave it a go. 

Besides, maybe this instinct to break free from loneliness is always there. There’s a reason both little Robert and Brendan gave the world a glimpse of their private mirror routines when cameras were rolling, and they finally had a chance to shine. There’s a reason I performed my routines in front of my bedroom window for my bully who lived a couple houses down. Would he be so moved by my performance he’d stop making fun of me? Probably not. Would he be so allured by sick (Darrin’s) dance grooves that he might fall in love with me, securing my first boyfriend/bully hybrid?… I knew I wouldn’t know if I didn’t try! You see, there’s a lot of greatness to be shared in these elaborate worlds a queer brain weaves since childhood. And in the words of the Queen – on her most recent album, in fact – “Nobody should be alone if they don’t have to be.”

Michael Doshier is a New York based writer, musician, and performer. As a writer, he's contributed to The Talkhouse, Things Created By People, and Viacom's Logo Movie House. As a musician, he's traveled internationally as Johnny Darlin, performing multimedia cabarets with his keytar, most recently at the 2018 Prague Fringe Festival. He co-hosts the weekly podcast Queers on Queens, and his next EP "Way With Words" is due out Summer 2018. Catch his performance of "Songs About Boys" at the Queerly Festival in New York City this June 23rd and 26th


"I'm a person, not a robot." - an interview with Erika Boudreau-Barbee

Erika Boudreau-Barbee started her training as a child in Oregon. After graduating with a BFA in Dance from the Tisch School of the Arts in 2013, Erika went on to produce new works in Germany and Spain, as well as performing in Ensemble Dance. For this interview, Thomas Baldwin sat down with Erika to talk about her residencies in Germany and Spain, the work that came out of them, and her artistic process.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Thomas Baldwin: So you studied at NYU for three years. Did you go to Berlin that summer?

Erika Boudreau-Barbee: In Summer 2013 I went to India. Not for art, just to go. I backpacked around Nepal and India for five weeks with my friend Jay, who graduated with me. We both said, "Let's go!" That was life changing. There was never another time in my life where I felt so many things at the same time. After that, I came back for a week to pick up a suitcase and then I went to Germany. It was quick! I was in Germany for three months.

Thomas: What do you think you got out of your trip to India? Anything that really stuck with you?

Erika: Things still resonate. We spent two weeks in the north and two weeks in the south and we joined up with a group, so we weren't all by ourselves.

Thomas: That's good. [laughs]

Erika: It definitely was. [laughs] Our guide was fantastic. He took us to tiny, tiny villages where you've never seen such poverty, and they've never seen white people. I think in Germany it influenced my work. It didn't later in Spain because India was so far removed at that point. Many of my thoughts were about poverty and about the women and color. You have to be incredibly present to travel through India. There is no way to be there and not be present. You would just disappear. In that respect it came through in my work, Start Over, with the paint that I did at the gallery in Berlin. Originally that idea was in born in New York, but then I went to India and it changed entirely.

Thomas: Those influences weren't obvious for me.

Erika: Right. Most of my work is like that. The things that go into making the final product are not are removed from the final product. Many of the phrases for I Bit the Dust were from poetry I had written and didn't relate at all to my concept. But then you manipulate them and you make it work with your idea. It's sort of strange. Then, of course, there are pieces that I do where I have an object, such as the work with the wooden frame [Dear Jayne]. There's an analogy of body frame and wood frame. That's it.

Thomas: Oh really? My interpretation was coming from an art historical background. What exactly was the audio track on Dear Jayne?

Erika: The audio was a YouTube video that I stripped and cut apart. Then, I added in a bunch of sounds of tools not original to the video.

Thomas: What was the video about?

Erika: It was about constructing a wooden frame. I just made it more destructive. I wanted to destroy the structure of the frame, of me and the frame.

Thomas: To me it looked more like canvas stretchers than a traditional frame. So I was looking at it sculpturally or painterly.

Erika: And I think that goes with it. I was comparing myself to a frame. I was trying to find ways I could fit in it to make a photo or to make a sculpture. It's very similar.

Thomas: I have very few reference points of dance, but it reminded me a lot of Yvonne Rainer and the work she did at Judson Memorial Church. She was dating Robert Morris at the time and a lot of the works they did at the time involved the dancers interacting with Morris's sculptures, which had human-proportioned dimensions. And the frame in your work is about a man's height. Especially later where you're stretched out on the floor, it looked painful.

Erika: [laughs] It was!

Thomas: That was serious commitment. It reminded me of Pollock's paintings and the idea of horizontal gesture as action. Did that influence you at all?

Erika: No, but I've actually used [Pollock] as a reference with another composer before. We had a couple composers we were working with on a project, and we asked them to make the music like a Pollock painting. He looked at me and was like, "What does that mean?"

Thomas: What did you like about living and working in Berlin?

Erika: It was strange because it was the first time I was out of school and I was like, "Whoa, I have to do this all myself!" I liked the opportunity that they gave. It was a lot of space and I created a lot of work there. I screwed around with film; I did whatever I felt like; I painted a lot; made some dance work, of course. The city itself is very free. But I don't speak German at all, so the people I talked to were people all our age. People would get frustrated at me if I didn't speak German, which was all the time. I liked the freedom and I got to travel. I went to Hamburg and I went to Dresden. I like Germany in general. The landscape is beautiful.

Thomas: How did you get connected to the residency?

Erika: I found it online and I applied. It was a lot smaller than the residency in Berlin. In Berlin there were about 12 people at a time, but this one had only five.

Thomas: Only five?

Erika: Well, when I got there, there were seven, because two were couples. When I left there were three. We were in a tiny beautiful house in the middle of nowhere.

Thomas: What was the institution that sponsored you?

Erika: There's a couple that runs the residency. The wife is from New York and her husband went to grad school at NYU, and he's from this small town in Spain, with only 3,500 people.

Thomas: That's it? Wow.

Erika: I think there were more people in my high school. But they moved back and they thought, hey, let's run a residency program here. I made a lot of friends with farmers. I would go out and help them in the fields. No one spoke English. Some of the kids, maybe 12 years old, could speak a little English, because they were learning it in school, but I met the English teacher at the school and she didn’t speak English! My Spanish got pretty good. I would talk to those farmers for hours. The couple took half of a convent. Half is still active and the other half is for studio space. That's where I did Posting and that's where I did From the top - the one where I'm hanging like Jesus.

Thomas: Did the nuns know about that?

Erika: No, it was a closed convent. They didn't come out to see. I liked the convent. It was a very peaceful place to work, unlike Berlin. You would go to the convent late at night and it would be just stars and silence. You could hear crickets. It was a little creepy. I was there for two months and I made a ton of work, because what else are you going to do?

Thomas: I was going to say it sounds like a good place to go and get shit done.

Erika: Exactly. You wake up and say, "What am I going to do today? I've got nothing to do except make art and drink wine."

Thomas: What should we talk about first regarding this residency? Do you want to talk about Posting?

Erika: Posting was just fun. I like to play on objects. This one was the only one I recorded. I just climbed up the ladder. The only goal that I had was to make a different shape each time.

Thomas: This one made me think - going back to Modernism – about Minimalist seriality and methodical process. You would go up on one post and then go up on the next post and so on.

Erika: I wanted it to be very patterned. It was just a task, and I make a lot of “just task” work.

Thomas: I noticed that in I Bit the Dust. There were movements in it that were task oriented. There was a part where you walked mid-stage and then walked back and forward, without any choreographed steps, and placing the clay?

Erika: Mineral dust. I work with a lot of unsafe materials. [laughs]

Thomas: When you threw it all down in the center and that cloud came up, I was so worried. I thought, "How much of this is she inhaling? Does she stop in the middle and hack up dust?"

Erika: I would rehearse with a mask on, but I didn't want to wear one in the show. For some reason, I want to perform this in a space here in NYC and make the audience wear masks. I think that sounds fun.

Thomas: You could probably find a warehouse in Bushwick to do it in. I'm sure.

Erika: It's fun to talk with you, because you have so much other knowledge. When I talk to some of my other friends they say "oh that's cool," but they can't articulate. You actually know art.

Thomas: But you realize that I've actually shied away from speaking formalistically about dance, because I have no understanding of formal content in dance. That's why if we talk about Tolerance, well, it's completely different from your other work.

Erika: It's concept-based. It didn't start out that way.

Thomas: People were so polite in the video, braking their cars. They probably saw the video camera.

Erika: There were people in the house next door and they said they wanted some beer, too. This idea came about late at night at the convent. I wanted to do things they don't like there. I would fill up a glass of wine and take off an article of clothing, and fill up a glass of wine and take off an article of clothing.

Thomas: You were intentionally antagonistic?

Erika: Yeah. [laughs] For some reason that idea is how Tolerance started. I know it seems far from that point, but I would change one thing about it and another thing would change, and it would switch and grow and it became this, which is much clearer and direct. It had a point. My friend in the video, Juan, was an intern at the residency. He was a nice guy. We sat there for two hours, which went by very quickly. My original idea was that we would just sit and not speak, but the more beers you drink… we would start cracking up, which was incredibly inappropriate. I wanted to continue it as a series. I just did it with my friend at Union Square Park during the protests regarding the Eric Garner decision. It only lasted an hour, because there were so many tweets coming in. We couldn’t do it anymore, we ran out of beer! It was fun, but it's harder to do here since we have laws that you are not allowed to drink in a park. We hid our drink in a McDonald's cup. You can look at it so many different ways. Some of my friends who saw Tolerance were totally disgusted by it, which was perfectly fine and acceptable. The other half got it.

Thomas: One thing I wasn't sure you thought of was the relationship of news consumption and alcohol consumption. The German word rausch means drunk or intoxicated, but it also means inability to take everything in, to be overwhelmed. I thought there might be a relation between the amount of information coming in and the inability to process it and the feeling of being intoxicated. Being overfull of alcohol or devastating information. I liked how simple it was and I thought it sent a good message.

Erika: That's all it needed. It didn't need anything else, but that.

Thomas: How many did you drink in two hours?

Erika: Five, I think.

Thomas: That's not so bad

Erika: You would think, except we were chugging it. For the first half-hour we had only one, and then the tweets started coming in. The timing was not right. When we did the one in Union Square, we had five in an hour; they were coming in that quickly.

Thomas: You've got to pick your topics more carefully!

Erika: Well, that's the news part of it. It's the top story of social media at the time of intolerance. So when it switches, then I'll do another one. This one was overwhelming, so I had to do it.

Thomas: Chronologically after that, did you do I Bit the Dust or From the top?

Erika: I Bit the Dust. I worked on these at the same time, because I had to paint the backdrop for From the top. It took some time so I would go work and dance and then I'd go paint a little.


Thomas: You were suspending yourself by your arms and your waist, and the noose around your neck was just for show?

Erika: There was no noose around my neck. It's around my shoulders. That would be really intense. When I rigged it the first time, I was just hanging by my shoulders and my wrists. The guy who ran the program said, "No, we're putting a harness on you," which was funny, because the harness was tied to the same rope. It didn't make it any more safe. It made it more comfortable, so I didn't mind. I was only up there for a couple of minutes and I got the worst cuts.

Thomas: Who threw the balloons at you? Random passersby or people in the program?

Erika: People that came to the event.

Thomas: Did you choose wine for the balloons because of the convent or a connection to the Eucharist?

Erika: I chose wine because of the blood of Christ, and black balloons for sin and death. Everything was symbolic. This was the piece I proposed and was accepted into the program for. The other stuff I did for fun.

Thomas: You’re pretty high up there. That is not a low wall!

Erika: I'm about five feet up.

Thomas: What were you trying to convey? Did you feel that you were successful?

Erika: Well, I thought it was successful for an experiment. I didn't know how people were going to react; I don't know what people are thinking. The balloons were supposed to pop when they hit the rock wall, but they didn't. When I tested it I filled it with water, but when I filled it with wine, I blew up the balloon a little. I threw it against a tree and it popped fine. When it came time for the show, they wouldn't pop. I loved that, though! It made it another game. I like irony in my work, and you can find some in all my work. Kids came and were throwing them as hard as they can. My sister came and she ripped her balloon with her teeth and then threw it at me. All the other people caught on and followed, but the kids kept trying to get their balloons to pop on the wall. I think it was successful, because it was unpredictable. I think it went better than I expected. You can see here what I was anchored to.

Thomas: A burning barrel full of rocks?

Erika: [laughs] I was thinking, "How am I going to do this?" We tied a rope around an iron rod, put the rod in the barrel and threw rocks and sand in the barrel. The rope that held my arm was supported by just a nail. What was cool was that people saw the rigging as they walked in. They probably didn't realize what it was as they came in, but when they left they probably saw it and thought, "That girl is psycho!"

Thomas: And there was a ladder to get you up and down?

Erika: Yeah. I climbed the ladder, tied myself up and in and someone came and removed the ladder.

Thomas: That's intense. When you were up there did you talk or were you silent?

Erika: I was silent, until a kid hit me in the face. I laughed a little, which was fine. That was the weird thing. The more I do performances, I learn that it is ok to react. In performance, it's part of the work. In dance you cannot react. You fall on your butt, you get up and start dancing again. I much prefer performance for that, because I'm a person, not a robot. I was just letting it happen.

Thomas: How do you think From the top relates to I Bit the Dust? Do you think they relate?

Erika: In my mind they were totally separate, but I do find a lot of similarities between them. I find more similarities between the piece I did in Berlin [Residual] and I Bit the Dust. They are both very primitive. So is Sun Salutation. I was thinking, "Let's go back. Man is made from dust." Most of the material for I Bit the Dust came from an improv. I spent a lot of time doing improv, and I would record my improvs. I would look back and think, "That moment worked. That moment could be expanded upon. What are you doing?" [laughs] Usually I would keep those. And I also added lots of task-based movement. The tasks in the improv were very sense-based. That’s where putting the dust on my face and smelling it came from. I did not lick it, because it is mineral dust. Most of the improv work would be the in-between stuff that's more dance-like.

Thomas: There's a dance move in there that looks like breaking character.

Erika: Those are the only parts that really came with sound. I would play the chorus of Queen's “Another One Bites The Dust.” For the soundtrack I used Cliff Martinez.

Thomas: Like the Drive soundtrack?

Erika: I used everything of his but the Drive soundtrack. It's too well-known now. Some of his earlier works are really wonderful. I stripped his tracks, added sound to some of them, and put the Queen chorus into it.

Thomas: I thought your dance looked like pop when Queen came on.

Erika: I was grooving! It's a switch, because it's a dramatic shift in music. It was the only time I was in sync with the music.

Thomas: I thought that, when the piece reached its climax, your movements became more in rhythm with the music. Especially with that mousey step where your hands are in front and you’re making many little steps on your tiptoes. That one point seemed in rhythm. Were you introducing that step earlier in the piece to set up a motif that would make sense later on in the piece?

Erika: With most of the movements I create them separately. I put them together and I practice and I see where the happy accidents are. I see what worked well, what I’ll keep, what I’ll switch. At the end where there is a climax and it is more light-hearted, that should all come together. I like when my work is contradictory and it doesn't make sense when I'm doing it and they merge later on. I'll do several movements where movements won’t make sense the first four times you see it, but the fifth time it does. Or that time where it makes sense will be in the middle sometimes. Generally speaking, movements are created before their order is determined. I record and look back and figure out the order afterwards.

Thomas: Especially towards the beginning of I Bit the Dust, where you had the windmill movement of your arms and your hands, it reminded me a lot of Merce Cunningham. The Brooklyn Museum has a video from the early 80's of him dancing in front of a green screen, a new technology at that time. He's doing a fairly stationary dance with a lot of those small hand movements, while the green screen behind him shows the ocean, the road. To us it looks dated to us, but it must've been innovative at the time.

Erika: He did a lot of work with chance, which I appreciate, but at the same time I don't. I like chance and I improv frequently.

Thomas: But it seems that chance is not a part of your choreography.

Erika: I find that I make better work when I make the decisions. I think people need to know that a work was made using chance in order to appreciate its role in the choreography. I saw a piece by him at BAM recently and one piece was all chance. The piece, the costumes, the set, all decided by chance. But what if you made a choice? Would it have been better? I have a weird relationship with chance. When I did Sun Salutation I didn't plan where I went. I didn't have a solid plan. So I guess chance goes both ways. But I make choices, and sometimes those choices take months to make. I Bit the Dust took a few weeks to make. I did it in August.

Thomas: Where are you in this piece?

Erika: I'm in an empty room at the convent. I don't know what it was used for in the past, but the roof is beautiful, all wood. There is a lot of space to perform there. When I showed it at our show, I had I Bit the Dust playing on a small TV in that room, but I blasted the music so that it was overwhelming when you approached it. The piece that I submitted for my upcoming second residency in Berlin will be crated similarly to I Bit the Dust, where the music will not correspond with the movement. I'm using a lot of text, such as projecting text on my body... I keep a journal and I write and record my influences. The ideas spark at random. Some manifest quickly and some take some time to be sure that they're something that I want to be seen.

You can find more of Erika Boudrea-Barbee's work on her website.