I live in between these places, emotionally
You can read a Swedish translation of the text here.
I first met Elizabeth Ward at the festival ImPulsTanz in 2012. I vaguely remember being part of a conversation in which she said she had been living in a suitcase for years. Whenever I met her again after that, in different places around Europe, I kept thinking about her statement – what it meant for her to live in a suitcase and how she got to that state of being. With this project, I finally got a chance to ask her about that and about other things that concern travelling and work. These are some of the answers she gave me.
Elizabeth Ward:
I had stopped flying in the mid-nineties because it was so polluting. I’m in my forties now, but I grew up with discussions about transportation, justice and environmental sustainability in Elementary School. I grew up in a part of the US that had been countryside, in the South outside Atlanta. In the eighties, when my parents moved there, the whole metro area had 300,000 people. Now it has five million. It was a kind of urban development that could make a thirteen-year old go: “This is really bad.” You could just watch the way they were ploughing down forest and building these sprawling, stretching suburbs.
Where my parents live, there are no buses. This is a legacy from a white supremacist legislator in the sixties, and a community that wanted to keep areas segregated even if the federal government told them they couldn’t. So, their way of doing that was through transportation.
I remember a teacher said – with pride – that Atlanta hoped to be the LA of the South East: the same kind of vast urban landscape where you have to have a car to move. Then, on the news you heard about the smog in LA and the traffic jams. All these people feeling entitled to developing a city in this way, having these huge cars… I somehow connected flying to it. I’ve forgotten the exact comparison, but I read something, like, every time a jet plane goes off it’s the equivalent of travelling by car from San Francisco to Buenos Aires. So, I started to always take the bus or train.
The ironic thing is that I fly all the time now. It changed around 2002. I was living on the West Coast. I really liked my life, but I felt flying was a necessary evil if wanted to work with dance on a deeper level. People would come back from Europe saying things like, “You know, artists there, they don’t even have a second job!” Because of this, I knew that I would move, first to New York and then to Europe. Which is funny, because I hadn’t even been to Europe. So, this whole thing is about more than travelling for me, it’s about immigrating.
When I moved to New York, me and the choreographer DD Dorvillier did a bunch of projects together. She had funding, good funding for being in the US. But she didn’t have the type of funding where she could rent a studio every day for four weeks and hire me for rehearsing all that time, so that I could cover my rent. She did have enough money that she could fly me to France. I could sublet my room, and we could work for a week or two, and I could get some amount of money that felt good, but it didn’t have to cover my rent. So, the two of us were living in New York City, but rehearsing at PAF (Performing Arts Forum) in St Erme. Some others from the New York dance field were doing similar things. You had to get creative to make working conditions if you lived there. One thing that could mean was leaving.
That thing about living in a suitcase is true. I was in Vienna performing in 2008 when I found out that my roommates and I had been evicted from our apartment in Brooklyn. We didn’t live in a rent-controlled building, and we were basically pushed out because the area was becoming more gentrified. That summer, the family above us moved out, and two NYU students moved in. They paid double, and the landlords realised they could get that. We were six people in our flat, but that raise was still too much for us.
I just never got an apartment in New York again after that. And I didn’t have a base for at least four years. I crossed the ocean fairly often to get a stamp in my visa so that I could continue to be a tourist in Europe. If I needed a place to go in between projects, I’d go to PAF. And I was always carrying stuff around. There’s this balance between having all you need and not having anything so that you don’t have to carry it. I was always feeling like I failed in both directions.
I’m a nomadic-minded person. I moved a few times in my childhood, and also as a kid I was travelling a lot to see family. There’s something about moving that I just enjoy. I like how your understanding of things can shift when you realise that in different parts of the world, people do it differently. Simple things, like you don’t have to have a shower curtain.
What I don’t like so much with travelling is living somewhere, creating a community, and then letting it all go, leaving for somewhere else and restarting it all again. When it comes to friendships, some stay with me but the majority just disappear. Not for lack of care, it’s just impossible. I get to meet so many people. That’s great, but when I’m always on the move it can get to a point where it’s oversaturated, like during the years in the suitcase. It’s a social sprawl, where sometimes I don’t even remember people later. For example, I ran into someone who was asking me a bunch of questions and I was trying really hard to place her, and she was like, “Oh, we cooked that dinner together at PAF!” That rang a bell but it felt really not cool to not remember.
At one point, I was invited to a two-year project with a guarantee of money in Austria. That allowed me to finally get an artist visa, and it really changed my travelling patterns. I got a base in Vienna, didn’t have to carry stuff around, and stopped going to PAF. It just didn’t make sense to go there when I had a desk and a bed of my own.
I have continued travelling quite a bit, though. This year to Sweden, Belgium, Brussels, Romania, USA… I’m very happy for the international work. But something funny is that when I lived in a suitcase, I would have tried to find a place to stay in, for example Sweden, in between rehearsals. You know, a month or two: a short-time apartment or staying on someone’s couch. But now, the cost of living is too high compared to going back to Vienna. And I don’t want to stay on someone else’s couch now. It just makes more sense to come back in between. This weekend, I was away for just three days to work. So, in a way I travel more back and forth now than before.
At first, I didn’t find airports relaxing. The closed environment is draining. It’s stressful to go through security. And flying dries out my skin. I’m neurotic about it, always drinking a lot of water. If I’m flying long distance, I always have an aisle seat so that I can chug water and pee as much as I want without having to disturb someone. I always have a moisturiser with me. For a while I had as a ritual to go to the duty free and look for the most expensive, fancy French moisturiser and put it on before boarding.
Then ten years ago, I met a meditation teacher who told me airports are great places to practise because you encounter so many people that you don’t have any relationship to. Something is also intrinsically anxiety-producing in going through security and being taken up into the air and all this stuff. So, airports have become an interesting place to work on anxiety for me. They’re also interesting because they are this transit place, always kind of the same, wherever you go. Airports have their own culture. People go to sleep on the floor, take off their shoes. I saw a woman with a trolley full of suitcases that she couldn’t fit in through the bathroom door. So, she just let it outside, with her phone on top, in the main hallway. It’s like because she went through security, she had this idea that she was safe. Or like, people brushing their teeth in the common bathroom. These are things that you’re probably not going to see the same people do in a restaurant or in a public place.
Just the other day, I had a conversation about transportation and the environment with a friend who works at TanzQuartier in Vienna. She said programmers are starting to politically discuss the practice of just going wherever to see the opening of a show. And another friend told me she turned down the opportunity to go and play in Russia because she was thinking of flying and what it means. And now you are asking me about it. Five years ago, that wouldn’t even be a question. But the last couple of months, people have started talking about it. And it’s funny, because these things were always in the back of my mind. It’s interesting to be confronted with it now. It doesn’t feel so strong anymore. If I were invited to Russia to perform, I would probably say yes, even though I’ve been there before: for the pleasure of touring, showing my work to a new audience, getting out of my bubble.
You know, to take that step to do what I wanted when I was younger, I had to let the worry recede. Nowadays, I feel I have to travel by plane. Also to the US, still. I don’t want to just cut things with friends and family. I feel I live in between these places, emotionally.
It’s not about hanging on to everyone or everything. Now, when I go back to New York, for example, I contact less and less people. If you’re filling your schedule, you’re not leaving it open to what is coming up in that moment. And sometimes when I go back to a place, I’m too exhausted to open up past stories. This wouldn't happen with a best friend, but sometimes even if I like someone and think I want to meet that person again, I realise that I don't even let them know when I’m in their city. I still wish them well, but it can feel exhausting to open all those stories again.
It’s interesting what friendships stay, how they’re maintained. Of my old friends I’m mostly in touch with a friend from Portland who now lives in Italy. With some friendships, it also doesn’t matter how long it takes. I met a friend that I hadn’t seen in fifteen years. It felt like no time had passed. It’s sometimes a question of how one can reach out to each other, what technique is accessible. One friend from Paraguay I didn’t see in ten years. She kept on reaching out occasionally, but I didn’t hear from her in a year. Then suddenly, she sent me a photo of her farm via Whatsapp. Now she does that every week or two. That way of being social, via photos, is fairly new, I think.
Our way of touring is also fairly new. An older idea of a tour would be that you have five cities lined up and you do things one city at the time. But the last years, if you get a show you get it whenever. And then you just pop back and forth. That’s the way Ryanair and other low-price companies have influenced the contemporary dance scene. It made this kind of popping around possible. The flight is so cheap that it stays the option. We try to maximise everything. I like to travel by train, though, if I can afford the ticket and have the time. Most of the time when I travel for work, I don’t have that time.
We don’t know what the future will look like. But I think we can never go back. We can only go somewhere where we haven’t been before.
