by SIMA BELMAR IN PRACTICE: HOLDING WAIT WITH JO KREITER
ON A RAINY AFTERNOON in March, I met with Jo Kreiter, choreographer, artist-activist, and artistic director of Flyaway Productions, in a rehearsal space at Project Artaud, behind the Joe Goode Annex on Alabama Street in San Francisco. The cold, concrete space seemed ill-suited to dancers, but aerial artist Kreiter assured me, “It’s perfect for someone like me who’s not working on the ground.” This was good news since not only was the floor made of joint-crushing material, it was almost entirely taken up by an enormous set, designed by Kreiter’s long-time collaborator Sean Riley: a 20-foot in diameter black clock face with a 20-foot scaffold rising from the center and three high metal chairs bolted to its surface. This set will be the focal point and moving surface of Kreiter’s latest project The Wait Room , which premieres in an empty lot near the Federal Building in San Francisco, one of the few remaining in a city overrun with construction. The Wait Room , the first work in a tril- ogy of large-scale public art performances, addresses secondary incarceration, the emo- tional and economic toll that having loved ones in prison takes on women. Though Kre- iter has made many works that address social issues close to heart, this is her first work driven by an intimate connection. Jo Kreiter: This dance, The Wait Room , is the first in a trilogy of pieces that is part of a national wave of effort to end mass incar- ceration. So there is artist as activist intention behind its making. I think a lot of people don’t understand the phrase, ‘Gender justice means ending mass incarceration.’ Primarily incarcer- ated in this country are men, though the fast- est rising category of people being incarcerated is women, primarily black women. But I am focusing the piece on women with incarcer- ated loved ones because [hands me a copy of a 2018 publication by Essie Justice Group ] the prison system expects women to do its dirty work and to mop up. By that I mean, it costs to be in prison: you have to pay for shoes, toothpaste, phone calls, money on your books (your books is your account in prison) if you want to be able to buy anything. So it’s women on the outside who have to hold that. I asked one of the women that we [Kreiter and composer Pamela Z] interviewed whose son is incarcerated, “What does it mean to be a black woman engaged with the prison system?” She said, “I feel like I’ve been financially raped.” That’s part of gender justice. SB: So the process began with interviewing women with incarcerated loved ones. And you had your personal experience… JK: …I had my story and then I connected up with Essie Justice Group and they’re part- nering with us on the project. They facilitated our connection to a number of women that we interviewed whose stories are becoming the basis of the project. I’ve worked with oral histories often in the last twenty years, but the difference this time is that the story is also very much my own. SB: And did it take time to arrive at the will- ingness to make a piece about something so close to you? JK: Yeah, I didn’t envision that I would do this ever. I mean, even before my husband was incarcerated I was fully aware of the prison industrial complex and the growing num- bers, so it’s not like the issue came at me from nowhere. I saw Keith Hennessey’s piece that he did about prisons, it was in the early 90s I think, right when the prison industrial com- plex was really beginning to burgeon. He was so ahead of his time with that. So it’s not that I wasn’t aware of the issue but coming into an Sima Belmar: What would you like people to know about this piece?
awareness of how much it is a feminist issue is really what sent me over the edge into being willing to be public. And then I found out about Essie, and because they have a Healing to Advocacy Model, because they recognize the pain and trauma that prison brings to families as well as the reality that the best people to advo- cate for its end are the people impacted by it, made it easier for me because now there was this container. The other thing that made this possible is my husband came home. That stabilized my life a whole lot. Even though he’s on a long- term probation so he’s still incarcerated statis- tically, I was no longer a single parent raising a child and running a dance company. That opened up some emotional space to allow for the process. When I had a sit-down conversa- tion with Gina Clayton who founded Essie Justice Group, she said, “You have to be care- ful about how much you’re willing to say.” That’s been the hardest learning curve. JK: There are a few things that happen depending on who’s interviewing you. Ques- tions can be really invasive, questions can be based in a lot of ignorance, and then other questions are just fine questions but they push you into the emotional instability that is inherently a part of having a family mem- ber in prison. So those are the three things I’ve encountered in talking to funders, pre- senters, universities… SB: What did she mean by that?
Flyaway Productions / photos by RJ Muna
JK: Yeah, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to reconcile accountability with the need to abolish mass incarceration. Espe- cially with the #MeToo movement, there’s a deep desire for accountability for long-term misogyny acted out in rape and sexual abuse. That’s the subject of the third piece in the tril- ogy—restorative justice and really looking at this crux between accountability for vio- lence against women and the realization that criminalization doesn’t actually curb violence. The second piece convenes Black and Jewish voices to do two things, to explore our shared history of race and capture, and to ask how can Jewish voices amplify the call for an end to mass incarceration.
time but there are options on top of that. You get what’s called “good time,” and then there are other options that affect time. And every stage of option was filled with trauma. SB: I’m really interested in this chairs con- versation, the side-by-side seating. Did you get any information about the rationale for that choice? JK: There’s no plan. I think you can fit more people that way. That might have been the architect’s rationale. I don’t know. JK: It depended on who was on duty. The corrections officers are inconsistent in how they enforce the rules and what kind of atti- tude they have. There were times when I could stand up or my son could come sit on the floor. There were times when that wasn’t allowed. There’s a little more flexibility with children because they’re just so squirmy. And at times not. SB: Did you have conversations with your husband about the way incarceration affected the choreography of his body, and if so, is that coming into the work? JK: This project is not about my husband in any way, shape or form. It’s about proximity. It’s about being asked to be in collusion with a system that’s simultaneously bringing you down and that’s a very uncomfortable place. JK: I designed a series of questions for the interviews and they have become the frame of the piece, negotiated by some logistical issues around what has to follow what in terms of the set design. The set has a pathway where it starts in stillness and gets activated and ani- mated with motion and physics, so there’s a certain physics logic that we had to go with that determined some of the ordering of the questions. But the questions really deter- mined the arc of the piece. And more than the questions, the answers determined the arc of the piece. Like there were things that I didn’t realize I was going to make into a section until I heard the answers. One of those things is about the criminalization of the black body. All the black women that I interviewed spoke about that in terms of their own lived experience in proximity to prison. And I would say that when you go to prison as a visitor, they treat you like you’re in prison. I have had my own experience of being subject to harsh and dehumanizing control in the six hours that I was there. For example, you have to keep two feet on the ground when you sit in the chair. Things like that add up for the SB: Could you turn in your seat? Could you put your arms around each other? SB: So what’s the practice in the room with the dancers?
SB: …journalists? Did any journalists ask invasive or ignorant questions?
SB: Tell me more about this set.
JK: No. Well, one of them asked something that I just deflected and said, That’s not some- thing I’m going to answer for you.
JK: We’re trying to conjure a room, the wait room. Chairs were the primary symbol for me of the quagmire that prison is because when
I went to visit my husband in the second prison he was in, you had to sit side by side and there were three of us. You couldn’t move. You couldn’t stand up. So it was very hard to talk to each other. SB: So it wasn’t across a table or through plexi- glass with telephones the way you see in movies. JK: No. It was just really uncomfortable. I’d get yelled at for folding my legs up and doing what dancers do when we sit. All the dancers were like, “I would never make it! I never sit in a chair nor- mally.” So chairs were the focus but so is instabil-
SB: I can feel the desire in myself, in an embodied way, wanting to go down the path of the personal…
ity. And so the set that you see—it’s actually at rest at the moment, it’s charging—has a motor in it, so it rises and tilts and coins.
JK: …voyeurism.
SB: Coins?
SB: Yeah, like a nearly tabloid, sensation- alist version that says, yes, this is a larger social issue, but I want to know your story.
JK: You know, like when you spin a coin and it does this [ gestures the wobble when a spin- ning coin begins to lose its momentum ]. So we got the metaphor of instability inside the engineering and design. SB: The word coining evokes keening for, like a ritual term of mourning. And the clock face? JK: Waiting. The brutality of waiting. Some- times it is interminable. Some of the women we interviewed have loved ones dealing with a life sentence. I don’t know what that’s like. My husband served a relatively short time but it was always up in the air. There’s a plea deal, so there’s a range. And then the judge sets a
JK: Yep.
SB: And certainly journalists love those kinds of heart-wrenching stories. And at the same time, I’m thinking about what sorts of folks, maybe even in your own experience, are resis- tant to the project because they focus on indi- vidual crimes rather than the system. It brings me back to the 1988 Bush-Duka- kis debate when Dukakis was asked whether he would still oppose the death penalty if his wife were raped and murdered.
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