Interview with Ingrid Nachstern<\/strong><\/h4>\n <\/p>\n
Ingrid Nachstern is an Irish screendance maker that certainly knows how to break the fourth wall. Strongly based on violence and, especially, gender violence phenomenon and specific cases. Her work is not only dance for the camera but also a place for poetry. Through very stylized texts, she creates rhythmic atmospheres in which words say much more than what they just mean.<\/p>\n
Nachstern has been granted several awards, including Best Shorts (Recognition Award) California and the Silver Screen Award (Nevada International Film Festival, 2015) for her first film; two IndieFEST Awards (2016) and the Audience Award (Brooklyn Film Festival, 2016) for her second piece. Her third film, recently screened at the Brooklyn Film Festival (2018), has been granted recognition at the IndieFEST in California and was a Remi Winner at the 51st Annual Worldfest-Houston International Film Festival in 2018.<\/p>\n
Your first film was in the beginning a piece for the stage, right?<\/strong><\/p>\nRight. Table Manners\/Stopping at Red Lights (2014) was at first a 30-minute dance piece in 2013, along with my second film, Freedom-to go! (2015). In these cases, particularly the first one\u2014because I had never made a film before\u2014I wasn\u2019t quite sure if it would work. I was scared of losing the essence of the dance piece, but I could rely on (Luca) Trufarelli, my cinematographer. He is very expert in his field and also he is good artistically. He is very sympathetic to my way of thinking and we get on really well. So Shoe Horn\/Office (2018) was the first film I made that hasn\u2019t been a live dance work. For this third piece I started thinking in shots in my head.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/loie.com.ar\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/1-600x337.jpg\")
<\/a>Ingrid Nachstern in Table Manners\/Stopping at Red Lights (2014), her first film. Ph: Ingrid Nachstern-Luca Truffarelli.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nSo, it was the first one you didn\u2019t have to, let\u2019s say, translate to a different language. What does this new way of working require from you? What does screendance provide for you as an artist and what does it ask in return?<\/strong><\/p>\nIn a dance piece you are giving people various options of what to look at, whereas in a film you are just giving them one option, you are presenting one aspect. I think this suits my work better, because I have to be very specific, and I have to pare down to the absolute minimum, both to get my point across and not to bore my audience. They might like it or not (this is beyond my control) but if the audience is bored then I would feel that I had failed. In films, I can do my choreography and, hopefully, produce striking images for the audience. I can incorporate music and have dialogue and running text. I\u2019m doing more of that now. Up to making Table Manners I had made fourteen dance works and I had never put in any text, it was purely dance. That was the first time, and then Freedom-to-go!, and later in Shoe Horn\/Office, text became like a running commentary through it.<\/p>\n
How do words come into place during your creative process? Do you write and then choreograph, does it happen all together, does the idea come first?<\/strong><\/p>\nIn Table Manners the idea came first and then the text came before the dance. For Freedom-to-go! again, I think the text came first. The original idea was about immigration to the States. There\u2019s a section in which Michael (Cooney) says \u201cstairgo, stairgo, stairgo\u201d, and that was an amalgam of \u201cstay or go\u201d, something I heard in a restaurant in Canada while I was ordering my meal, and at first, I couldn’t understand it. My husband and I had just arrived that week for what could have been an indefinite stay. While making this piece, I had a two-month period in which I sat at my table for a few hours every day and I felt I was really just a vessel for all this text and information, I felt it just came from somewhere else.<\/p>\n
It works in a rhythmic way, like poetry, which also has this effect of \u201ccoming from somewhere else\u201d, maybe because it\u2019s not only what it means literally, but also this other criterion of rhythm that constitutes it. In fact, in your first film there are three languages\u2014Spanish, English and German. Both Spanish and German are used in a repetitive way, with phrases that rhyme, have similar structures or are pronounced several times, so even if you don\u2019t speak these languages, as a viewer, you can focus on the sound of it, the cadenza. How did these foreign words enter the piece?<\/strong><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/loie.com.ar\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/2-600x336.jpg\")
<\/a>Lucia Kickham in Table Manners\/Stopping at Red Lights (2014). Ph: Ingrid Nachstern-Luca Truffarelli.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nI used to be a translator and I adore languages. In the opening scene of Table Manners, \u201c\u00bfd\u00f3nde est\u00e1 el equipaje?\u201d really means \u201cwhere is the baggage?\u201d but doesn\u2019t mean anything. I just love the sound of it and it brings a kind of surreal nonsense to the whole piece. And then I was trying to play on words in German about Kunst, which is the word for \u201cart\u201d.<\/p>\n
Your work tends to get more provocative throughout the years. Shoe Horn\/Office, your most recent piece, is especially pungent, but with hindsight the three of them speak very directly to the audience. Do you deliberately go for this effect? Do you choose your topics with this in mind?<\/strong><\/p>\nI only work with topics that appeal to me. In Table Manners I was thinking about social norms after this guy in the north of England went on a rampage driving through various villages and killing people on the way, while stopping at red lights. Freedom-to-go! expanded from the topic of immigration to a commentary on the USA covering such things as pornography, child beauty pageants, the Iraq war. And the starting point for Shoe Horn was reading about this guy from Stanford University who had allegedly raped a girl on campus while she was comatose. He was imprisoned for six months, and his father said \u201cOh, what a pity, he won\u2019t be able to eat steak\u201d and also thought that the sentence was a bit harsh for \u201ca little bit of action\u201d. It was after that phrase, how he dismissed what his son did to this girl as a little nothing, that I started doing this rap based on what he had said. And the other strand came because I was reading about a woman who was working for a London city firm and was sent home for refusing to wear high heels. As a feminist, that got to me and got me thinking about the practice of Chinese binding feet, corsets\u2026 so it was all that, growing through that.<\/p>\n
How do you find equilibrium to be direct regarding such striking topics and at the same time not become repellent, not to drive your audience away?<\/strong><\/p>\nI agree that Shoe Horn\/Office is a little more graphic, but I always want to stay on the right side of it not being vulgar. I want to make the point without absolutely crossing the line, because then it becomes something else. It\u2019s like when my dancer (Millie Daniel-Dempsey) is in a body suit in the end, she\u2019s like a dog being taken for a walk. And I said to my stage manager at the time: \u201cI need a nude body suit but through which you don\u2019t see anything, except you know it\u2019s a woman. I don\u2019t want to be graphic, I don\u2019t want to make it into a pornographic film\u201d. I think the films do make for uncomfortable viewing, but not so uncomfortable that you have to look away. I\u2019m very careful not to sensationalize, I need to keep the viewer with me.<\/p>\n
Where are you going from here?<\/strong><\/p>\nI\u2019m planning my fourth film, which I started last September when I was in London, and it\u2019s going to be about cosmetic surgery. It\u2019s going to be slightly more graphic than the last one, but again, in a controlled way. I think the present generation of kids, who are now around fourteen or fifteen years old, are bombarded with how every single part of their body is wrong, and there\u2019s a remedy for everything. I didn\u2019t have those pressures when I was growing up. In the present generation you have very young children suffering from anxiety disorders, because they think they are too fat, or their boobs aren\u2019t pert enough, or their bottom\u2026 whatever. All the celebrity culture promotes this craziness, everybody looking at their backside instead of being glad of just being alive!<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/loie.com.ar\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/3-600x338.jpg\")
<\/a>Millie Daniel-Dempsey in Shoe Horn\/Office (2018). Ph: Ingrid Nachstern-Luca Truffarelli.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nPhoto: Michael Cooney, Ingrid Nachstern and Lucia Kickham in Freedom-to-go! (2016), Nachstern\u2019s second film (cinematography by Luca Truffarelli).<\/p>\n
<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cI only work with topics that appeal to me\u201d Interview …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":163,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-160","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entrevistas","ediciones-loie-02","autores-maria-jose-rubin"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/loie.com.ar\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/loie.com.ar\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/loie.com.ar\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/loie.com.ar\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/loie.com.ar\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=160"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/loie.com.ar\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1953,"href":"https:\/\/loie.com.ar\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160\/revisions\/1953"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/loie.com.ar\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/163"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/loie.com.ar\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=160"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/loie.com.ar\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=160"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/loie.com.ar\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Right. Table Manners\/Stopping at Red Lights (2014) was at first a 30-minute dance piece in 2013, along with my second film, Freedom-to go! (2015). In these cases, particularly the first one\u2014because I had never made a film before\u2014I wasn\u2019t quite sure if it would work. I was scared of losing the essence of the dance piece, but I could rely on (Luca) Trufarelli, my cinematographer. He is very expert in his field and also he is good artistically. He is very sympathetic to my way of thinking and we get on really well. So Shoe Horn\/Office (2018) was the first film I made that hasn\u2019t been a live dance work. For this third piece I started thinking in shots in my head.<\/p>\n So, it was the first one you didn\u2019t have to, let\u2019s say, translate to a different language. What does this new way of working require from you? What does screendance provide for you as an artist and what does it ask in return?<\/strong><\/p>\n In a dance piece you are giving people various options of what to look at, whereas in a film you are just giving them one option, you are presenting one aspect. I think this suits my work better, because I have to be very specific, and I have to pare down to the absolute minimum, both to get my point across and not to bore my audience. They might like it or not (this is beyond my control) but if the audience is bored then I would feel that I had failed. In films, I can do my choreography and, hopefully, produce striking images for the audience. I can incorporate music and have dialogue and running text. I\u2019m doing more of that now. Up to making Table Manners I had made fourteen dance works and I had never put in any text, it was purely dance. That was the first time, and then Freedom-to-go!, and later in Shoe Horn\/Office, text became like a running commentary through it.<\/p>\n How do words come into place during your creative process? Do you write and then choreograph, does it happen all together, does the idea come first?<\/strong><\/p>\n In Table Manners the idea came first and then the text came before the dance. For Freedom-to-go! again, I think the text came first. The original idea was about immigration to the States. There\u2019s a section in which Michael (Cooney) says \u201cstairgo, stairgo, stairgo\u201d, and that was an amalgam of \u201cstay or go\u201d, something I heard in a restaurant in Canada while I was ordering my meal, and at first, I couldn’t understand it. My husband and I had just arrived that week for what could have been an indefinite stay. While making this piece, I had a two-month period in which I sat at my table for a few hours every day and I felt I was really just a vessel for all this text and information, I felt it just came from somewhere else.<\/p>\n It works in a rhythmic way, like poetry, which also has this effect of \u201ccoming from somewhere else\u201d, maybe because it\u2019s not only what it means literally, but also this other criterion of rhythm that constitutes it. In fact, in your first film there are three languages\u2014Spanish, English and German. Both Spanish and German are used in a repetitive way, with phrases that rhyme, have similar structures or are pronounced several times, so even if you don\u2019t speak these languages, as a viewer, you can focus on the sound of it, the cadenza. How did these foreign words enter the piece?<\/strong><\/p>\n I used to be a translator and I adore languages. In the opening scene of Table Manners, \u201c\u00bfd\u00f3nde est\u00e1 el equipaje?\u201d really means \u201cwhere is the baggage?\u201d but doesn\u2019t mean anything. I just love the sound of it and it brings a kind of surreal nonsense to the whole piece. And then I was trying to play on words in German about Kunst, which is the word for \u201cart\u201d.<\/p>\n Your work tends to get more provocative throughout the years. Shoe Horn\/Office, your most recent piece, is especially pungent, but with hindsight the three of them speak very directly to the audience. Do you deliberately go for this effect? Do you choose your topics with this in mind?<\/strong><\/p>\n I only work with topics that appeal to me. In Table Manners I was thinking about social norms after this guy in the north of England went on a rampage driving through various villages and killing people on the way, while stopping at red lights. Freedom-to-go! expanded from the topic of immigration to a commentary on the USA covering such things as pornography, child beauty pageants, the Iraq war. And the starting point for Shoe Horn was reading about this guy from Stanford University who had allegedly raped a girl on campus while she was comatose. He was imprisoned for six months, and his father said \u201cOh, what a pity, he won\u2019t be able to eat steak\u201d and also thought that the sentence was a bit harsh for \u201ca little bit of action\u201d. It was after that phrase, how he dismissed what his son did to this girl as a little nothing, that I started doing this rap based on what he had said. And the other strand came because I was reading about a woman who was working for a London city firm and was sent home for refusing to wear high heels. As a feminist, that got to me and got me thinking about the practice of Chinese binding feet, corsets\u2026 so it was all that, growing through that.<\/p>\n How do you find equilibrium to be direct regarding such striking topics and at the same time not become repellent, not to drive your audience away?<\/strong><\/p>\n I agree that Shoe Horn\/Office is a little more graphic, but I always want to stay on the right side of it not being vulgar. I want to make the point without absolutely crossing the line, because then it becomes something else. It\u2019s like when my dancer (Millie Daniel-Dempsey) is in a body suit in the end, she\u2019s like a dog being taken for a walk. And I said to my stage manager at the time: \u201cI need a nude body suit but through which you don\u2019t see anything, except you know it\u2019s a woman. I don\u2019t want to be graphic, I don\u2019t want to make it into a pornographic film\u201d. I think the films do make for uncomfortable viewing, but not so uncomfortable that you have to look away. I\u2019m very careful not to sensationalize, I need to keep the viewer with me.<\/p>\n Where are you going from here?<\/strong><\/p>\n I\u2019m planning my fourth film, which I started last September when I was in London, and it\u2019s going to be about cosmetic surgery. It\u2019s going to be slightly more graphic than the last one, but again, in a controlled way. I think the present generation of kids, who are now around fourteen or fifteen years old, are bombarded with how every single part of their body is wrong, and there\u2019s a remedy for everything. I didn\u2019t have those pressures when I was growing up. In the present generation you have very young children suffering from anxiety disorders, because they think they are too fat, or their boobs aren\u2019t pert enough, or their bottom\u2026 whatever. All the celebrity culture promotes this craziness, everybody looking at their backside instead of being glad of just being alive!<\/p>\n Photo: Michael Cooney, Ingrid Nachstern and Lucia Kickham in Freedom-to-go! (2016), Nachstern\u2019s second film (cinematography by Luca Truffarelli).<\/p>\n <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cI only work with topics that appeal to me\u201d Interview …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":163,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-160","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entrevistas","ediciones-loie-02","autores-maria-jose-rubin"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/loie.com.ar\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/loie.com.ar\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/loie.com.ar\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/loie.com.ar\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/loie.com.ar\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=160"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/loie.com.ar\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1953,"href":"https:\/\/loie.com.ar\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160\/revisions\/1953"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/loie.com.ar\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/163"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/loie.com.ar\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=160"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/loie.com.ar\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=160"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/loie.com.ar\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/loie.com.ar\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/1.jpg\")
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