Katherine Ferrier is a multimedia artist who is one of the co-founders of The Architects. The Architects are part of the Dance Improvisation Festival happening at Links Hall, the Dance Center at Columbia College, and other locations in Chicago. Recently I spoke with Katherine about her influences and ongoing projects. 

DG: How did you first get interested in the arts?

KF: I’ve been making things my whole life. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t either making something, or thinking about making something. I learned to read at an early age, and would tear through any book I could get my hands on.  We had bookshelves lined with National Geographic, which I would read cover to cover.  Looking back, these were my first windows to the wider world, my first glimpses of the range of human endeavors. From an early age I was hungry to learn, to know.  Making, studying and being surrounded by art is my mode of learning.

DG: What is an early memory you have of doing something in the arts?

KF: I used to make up what I came to understand years later must have been some form of spoken word poetry when I was 5, riding in the “way back” of the family station wagon. I wish I could remember some of those early works.  I’m sure they were among my best.

DG: Who are some of your influences?

KF: There are so many artists, composers, makers and writers whose work has touched me, changed me, opened up new windows of possibility in my thinking and approach. Penny Campbell and Peter Schmitz were early mentors in dance and improvisation, as were Susan Sgorbati and Terry Creach. It goes without saying that I continue to be influenced and inspired by my primary collaborators and chosen family, Pamela Vail, Jennifer Kayle, Lisa Gonzales and Kathy Couch (designer) of the Architects.

DG: Who are some visual artists who have inspired your work?

KF: I take great inspiration from Knox Martin, an abstract expressionist painter in New York (who taught me, among many other things, that each passage in a painting should have at least seven different compositional roles or functions, in order to create an experience of infinite connectedness) as well as the works of deKooning, Matisse, Bourgeois, and O’Keefe.

DG: Who are some of your writing influences?

KF: Mary Oliver, Gertrude Stein, e.e.cummings, Rumi, Hafiz and the ecstatic Persian poets, among others.

DG: Who would you say are some of your musical influences?

KF: My list of musical influences is long, but surely includes Bill Dixon, Cecil Taylor, Miles Davis, Arthur Brooks, John Cage, Robert Ashley, Gordon Mumma, as well as many of the contemporary indie soinger songwriters who are doing such interesting things with abstract narratives in combination with melody. 

DG: What are some interesting things that you like about working in dance and movement? 

KF: It is when I am dancing, and completely immersed in the moving and making, especially in an ensemble situation that I feel most alive, most connected to the world around and within me.  It is my favorite mode of being, actually. My favorite way to be with other people.  My favorite way to experience being alive.

I love experiencing the emergence of forms, in my body, in my making and in my ensemble work.  I love how meaning emerges, how form and content become equal partners in an even exchange.

DG: I see you have done a lot of work in other disciplines, including the recent “word / bird” exhibition. What are some things that you find interesting about working in different disciplines? Do you find that thinking across disciplines helps you to formulate different ways of approaching your art?

KF: I am fascinated with forms.  I am also fascinated with content, and meaning and how these come to be perceived, shaped, communicated, and held, both in the individual and the wider collective of humanity.  The ways this happens in say... improvisation, versus quiltmaking versus collage work versus the written word is an endless source of amazing information.

DG: How did you and your co-founders first come up with the underlying concepts for The Architects?

KF: The four of us met as undergraduates at Middlebury College in Vermont, where we first encountered improvisation as students of Penny Campbell. Our work and our philosophies are part of a rich lineage of dance and music collaborators dating back to the work of Judith Dunn (who came out of Cunningham and the Judson Church Movement) and Bill Dixon (an early pioneer of avant garde or Free Jazz). From this lineage we began to work with improvisation as a performance form, and began cultivating relationships with musicians based on a model of pure democracy: where all voices are equal, and each member of the ensemble carries equal responsibility for the shaping of each piece.

DG: Given those influences, how did you and the other members of The Architects begin to develop your process?

KF: As we came into our own as artists, composers, choreographers and teachers, we began to develop our own approaches to improvisation, performance and pedagogy. This led, for example, to developing our signature approach to vocal work and improvised poetic text. Some things we value: a radical commitment to and ongoing study of spontaneous ensemble composition, expanding the range of what we can pay attention to in any given moment, limiting the known variables before we create work together, celebrating multiple perspectives and embracing complexity as a partner in composing.

DG: How would you summarize some main ways by which The Architects has evolved over the past two decades?

KF: I think our work has deepened through the twenty+ years of our collaboration, because we have each devoted ourselves to a rigorous practice of paying attention.  We often talk about this work being research, and how delightful and fruitful it is that as practitioners, we are simultaneously the researchers and the research itself.  As we have each grown, so have our interests and fascinations, and all that finds its way into our research.  Our collective interests include: quilt-making, poetry, quantum physics and consciousness studies, neuroscience, architecture, puppetry, sculpture and spoken word.  Everything we encounter eventually finds its way into the work, in one way or another.

DG: What are some things that you and The Architects like about collaborating with other artists (musicians, etc.)? 

KF: We learn from every encounter.  We seek out different perspectives knowing they will open windows and doors of our perceptions and possibilities.  We value complexity as an important part of our approach and aesthetic.  We also value the beautiful alchemy of collaboration and synthesis of a wide range of ideas.

DG: How did you first start working with Arthur Brooks? What are some things you like about his sensibility?

KF: Arthur is a dear friend and long time collaborator with our mentor, Penny Campbell.  As undergraduates we had the great fortune to work with him and see him perform many times, as he was a frequent guest in the dance program.

It is not an exaggeration to say that I learned as much about composition from working Arthur and Michael Chorney (a member of Ensemble V and the Director of Music for the Dance Program at Middlebury) as I ever did from any of my dance studies.  Arthur is a master, in the truest widest sense of the word. His presence elevates the consciousness of those around him; when I work with him, I immediately feel a calm patience enter the room, and I know I am in the presence of a deep, permeating and palpable intelligence, that allows the work to  take root and transcend, and creates the space for each artist present to do their best, clearest work. This is rare, and I treasure every chance I have to work with him.

DG: Would you like to describe some things that will be part of The Arthur Brooks Ensemble V / The Architects workshop on Friday?

KF: We teach using the same principles and tenets as when we improvise.  We teach using a unique collaborative style where each voice is heard, multiple perspectives are embraced and investigated and we intentionally ask participants to pay attention to more than they can currently pay attention to, so that they can pay attention to more.  We will guide participants through a process of warming up from the inside out, first tuning deeply into their solo selves, before branching into full group awareness and engagement, attending equally to warming up both the physical and the poetic body.  The musicians will partner us in this process as they practice alongside us with the same rigor and commitment to nurturing forms as they emerge.  We will work our way together towards full ensemble composition.

DG: What are you all planning for your performance on Friday night? I see that it will involve improvisation, but will there be any preparations leading up to that and/or guiding principles?

KF: Here is what we know about the performance on Friday: we know there are four of us dancing and five musicians, and one lighting designer.  We know we will work for about 45 minutes. And we know what we will be wearing.  Typically those are the only predetermined elements of our performances.  We do not decide anything else beforehand.  We have been preparing for this our entire lives.  I say this without a shred of sarcasm, because it’s true.  I often talk about improvisation as being a practice, a life practice and a life-long practice.  When we rehearse, we are not planning what we will do, instead we are engaging in ways to hone and sharpen our attentional muscles, so that when we step into the unknown, the moment of performance, we can meet the moment with all the skills and concerns of the virtuoso choreographer or composer.  In fact, we often talk about our work as being “choreography without an eraser.”

DG: What other ongoing projects have you been working on?

KF: I curate and produce a festival of contemporary dance and performance called Cultivate.  I created the festival last year as a response to the artistic loneliness I often feel as an independent artist living in northern New Hampshire. I invite emerging and established dance makers and musicians to come share their work and engage the community in a lively discourse about the relevance and necessity of art making in a world that often seems so chaotic and confusing.

My solo practice right now is a body of work I am calling “somantics” (somatics +semantics) that brings together my two primary modes of making: movement and words.  One form feeds, deepens and illuminates the other form. 
Recently I’ve been playing with collapsing the space between these different modes and finding the kinesthetic and aesthetic delight in moving while writing, writing while moving. Sometimes it feels like lab work, or labor.  Sometimes it feels performative. Mostly, for now, it hovers in that provocative realm of what, to me, seems curious, unknown and necessary.
I also travel and teach as a solo artist, offering workshops in improvisation, writing dance-making and creating personal performance. And I have been working on a collection of essays about improvisation that I publish on my blog Reports from the Field (www.reportsfromthefield.wordpress.com).  Some of my writing has been recently published in Contact Quarterly (www.contactquarterly.com) and Kinebago (www.kinebago.com).

     The Architects are leading a workshop at the Dance Center at Columbia College (10:00 a.m.-2:00 p.m. on Friday, June 17). They are also part of the "Collaborations...from Scratch" performance event at the Dance Center at Columbia College (8:00 p.m. on June 17).