On “Turning”: A Conversation with Antony Hegarty and Charles Atlas

Published in Blend (Netherlands), Andy Warhol special issue, November 2007.

It has been almost a year since Antony Hegarty and Charles Atlas toured Europe with their collaborative project entitled “Turning.” It’s a meditative piece on transformation that features thirteen “beauties” placed individually on a rotating turntable, a live video feed mixed by Atlas and a musical performance by Antony and the Johnsons. As Antony sings, a single beauty stands still on stage, moved by the turning pedestal. Behind the band and Antony, their faces are projected onto a giant screen, filmed by two cameras with a delay, so that as they turn away from one camera, we always see the front of their faces. Atlas layers images on the spot, creating a mesmerizing live portrait with Antony’s haunting voice and lyrics forming the psychological soundtrack. Think Warhol’s screen tests, but on a larger, more public and more spiritually dense scale. But whereas one senses an emotional detachment between Warhol and his subjects, after hearing Antony describe the almost psychic bond he felt between himself and his models – all female, but with diverse, unique experiences with their gender identity – you realize that “Turning” moves well beyond the simple relationship of object and objectifier. It is far more complicated, and when you get down to it, holistic, than that. The performers and the audience are watching each other, the camera, Antony, all reacting to and interacting with each other in a way that comes, well, full circle.

Atlas, a filmmaker and video artist whose oeuvre ranges from collaborations with choreographers and performers, to live installations like “Turning” edited and mixed on the spot, to documentaries such as “Merce Cunningham: A Lifetime of Dance” (Atlas was the filmmaker-in-residence with the dance company for 10 years) and “The Legend of Leigh Bowery.” He met Antony in the early ‘90s when Antony had just moved to New York and was performing shows as part of the Blacklips collective at Pyramid, a small club in the East Village, and they’re currently at work on a film about “Turning” that combines footage of the show as well as a documentary about the tour, which they plan to release on DVD.

When I meet Hegarty at Atlas’ studio-slash-home in lower Manhattan, they are animatedly discussing feng shui. Atlas – he goes by Charlie – has apparently taken Antony’s advice on the subject and incorporated feng shui elements into the place, like a special plant in one corner and a crystal in another. “Does it work?” I ask. “Of course!” Antony exclaims. We then go back to Charlie’s editing suite to view a rough cut of one of the songs to be included on the film, which Antony is seeing for the first time. As we sit in the darkness, Antony is mesmerized, and the conversation turns quite serious. “I now know what I need to do, how I need to mix the music,” he says to Charlie as we sit down to discuss “Turning” from the very beginning, starting with how Antony and Charlie came to be friends.

Renata Espinosa: What was the motivation to work with one another?

Charles Atlas: I usually work with friends, with people I like, and I was friends with Antony before…and I became friends after having seen him, so I was already kind of a fan. This was like years ago.

RE: Where did you see him?

CA: At a benefit..for something..uh, I can’t remember. A benefit at like…some…I think you were doing “The Star Spangled Banner…”

Anthony Hegarty: I can’t believe you saw that…

CA: With Johanna [Constantine], and [Psychotic] Eve…[laughs]

AH: [Laughs] Did they actually sing “The Star Spangled Banner”?

CA: Yes, it was fantastic. [laughs]

AH: The whole group came, though. We did a parade.

CA: Well, I only saw the show on stage.

AH: It was at that club Life or something.

CA: It was some club I never really went to. That was such a long time ago, 1992.

RE: [to Antony] You moved here around then?

Antony: When I was 19.

CA: I’ve been around a long time. [laughs]

RE: So you saw him, and you became friends after that.

CA: Yeah. And then I would go to the shows. He put on shows, you know, as Blacklips, in the early days.

RE: Were you ever filming him at that point?

CA: No. In the Eighties, I used to go out with my camera to clubs and film stuff, which I have tons of stuff that I haven’t even looked at – I’m afraid to play it – but, um, you know, it got to be like, I didn’t want to work when I went out to watch things. And I wasn’t working when I was doing it in the Eighties, but I was sort of drunk, and, one of the main sounds on the soundtrack is me laughing, [mimics] “uh-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha”…

[Everyone laughs.]

RE: [to Antony] So where were some of the places you were performing at that time?

AH: At Pyramid Club, on Avenue A.

RE: And the show changed every week?

AH: Yeah, it was a collective, so someone different in the group would put on a show and we’d all pitch in. It was a diabolical, haphazard process.

RE: And when did you stop doing that and into more of your own show – what you’re doing now?

AH: For quite a few years, I’d been turning all musical ideas into a sort of performance arty type of thing, you know, as plays or tableaux, and at some point, in 1997, I decided I was just going to focus on the music for a while. And I shifted over, and I got a band together, as opposed to performing with a cassette with pre-recorded music that I put together on keyboards and stuff. I think one of the reasons I did the plays was to create some context for me to pop out and do a song. What kind of came full circle I think, especially with the “Turning” piece, for me, was that it came back to some of the…well, a lot of the visual and performance ideas that I cared about the most.

CA: It was great, you know, bringing that theatrical context back into the music.

AH: I’d gotten to a point in the mid- to late-Nineties where it was like, just put someone on the stage and just look at them. Especially with Dr. Julia [Yasuda]. Julia was kind of like our muse and during the early concerts she would introduce us. And she’s actually in this piece [“Turning”].

RE: And she would just be on stage, standing there?

CA: She was sort of the introductory presence to all of the early shows, and it was just her. I mean, she said a few things, but it was really a presentation of her unique quality that was the main thing.

AH: For instance, in “Miracle Now,” her role in the play was to just sit there and be watched for the duration of the song. Weirdly, for me, it was like the precursor to this. There’s sort of connection to that to just to sit and watch Julia transform, in stillness.

RE: She was literally transforming on stage?

CA: No, no, she was just being. [laughs]

AH: You know when you watch something, you just stare at something for a while, it’s like you’re on acid. You start seeing the colors in different ways, you see the space around a person. Especially in a theater, with light. When you put someone on a stage on a pedestal or in a tableaux, you can just watch it unfold, in stillness. It’s just a really nice thing. When we’re in pedestrian mode, we don’t really spend time looking at anything. We just spend the amount of time we’re allowed to look. But when you put it on the stage, you can really observe it. We have a different kind of permission. And we can step out of pedestrian time and absorb things in a different way. And I think I loved that, I loved spending time with people…being present.

RE: It’s a very different kind of portrait than something that is flat, two-dimensional. It’s really in three dimensions…

AH: You get time, too. I remember in Blacklips we did a staging of Warhol portraits….how long were the portraits, like 15 minutes?

CA: They were different lengths, weren’t they?

AH: I think we did 15 minutes where we put four people on stage and they kept still. And everyone was like, “This is crap,” but that was at the point where I was really separating from the mother ship, [puts on director-type voice], “Okay, now, it’s 3am, and you’re all going to sit on the stage for 15 minutes!” And we did it, but I remember we all felt like we were on acid by the end of it.

CA: Who were the four people?

AH: It was Ebony Jet, Hattie [Hathaway]…I can’t remember the other two people.

CA: Were you and Johanna in it?

AH: I wasn’t in it, I was just watching. I was just in heaven! I was like, “I cannot believe we are just sitting still.” And you know, no one in the audience knew what to expect. By the fifth minute, people were like, “NOOOOOO!” I mean, they had no idea how long it was going to last, but it was so magical! That was the Candy Darling night. Four people dressed as Candy Darling.

CA: Oh really!

AH: Sitting still for 15 minutes.

CA: Oh, fantastic.

AH: 15 minutes of fame.

RE: All side by side? And seated?

AH: Seated, still.

RE: Woooow.

Antony: That was like, a favorite.

RE: And then just…silence.

Antony: Silence. Just to see what would happen. I mean, obviously nothing was going to happen, but…

CA: [laughs] To see whether the audience was going to riot or not!

RE: It is funny to see, what is a person’s tolerance for being still. Particularly in New York City.

CA: Well, in the Seventies, I have to say, there was a lot more of that kind of longer stuff. When I watch things now from the Seventies, even the things that I did, and I knew I did it on purpose, to make it long, now it’s a little hard to watch. People were really into this long piece. A different time frame. That changed in the Eighties.

RE: Well, yeah, I mean, just look at Warhol…watching a person sleep for six hours. [laughs].

CA: Well, no one ever really watched that. [laughs]. I think those events were really more social events. It was an object and people got together around it. Maybe in the later days, they treated it more like a film.

RE: So then, “Turning,” when did you really start developing that?

AH: We did it all in ‘94. Charlie had done a portrait of my best friend Johanna, turning, in a gallery.

CA: Yeah, I did stuff on turntables, you know, since about ‘89. And Johanna was one of my people that I used as models, and I started doing a lot of turning portraits of her, only one of which I ever finished and made a piece out of.

RE: And it was always the concept that they would stand still and you would shoot them?

CA: It was basically a head shot, no more. For me, it was about time, because of the 24 seconds to make a complete turn. So I was doing things where I was mixing the time. With Johanna’s piece I split up the screen, with different things playing at different speeds that caught up with each other around the full circle. This [“Turning”] was really a development of that, because of the liveness and the different kinds of technology that I could use.

RE: Who are the beauties…the 14?

AH: Thirteen. They’re all friends, really. With a couple of exceptions, but almost everyone is someone I know and admire. People that I like to look at who are just very authentic. Very, very specific, beautiful people. All different women from New York.

CA: Besides being themselves, the song seemed to relate when we were figuring out who was doing which song.

RE: How did it work during the show? How did they come onto stage?

CA: They sat in the front, watching the show, and then they came in after the audience was seated in a procession and sat down and then one went on the stage. It was just continual change between songs.

AH: It was almost like we created a circle. There’s the audience, then they were in the audience, and then the band. The structure of the piece is very circular. It’s sort of insular, and then it kind of expands to open to the audience, to particpate and to observe. But the dynamic, emotionally, it has a very internal metabolism to it. Or rhythm to it. It’s very much the idea of putting the models in the audience, because it was for us.

RE: You’re also watching them.

AH: We were there watching each other. There’s a strong sense of relationship between each other, in the piece, that kind of binds it together. And in that way, it’s very different, from like, a fashion show or something.

CA: The first time we did it, it was at St. Ann’s and it was a whole different scale, and more intimate. But as we performed it for a much larger audience, we had to expand the scale, so the image became huge, and if they had any relationship it was with the camera, which was like, two feet away. So, it was this contained thing, a very intimate view, but in a very public way, that they didn’t participate in really.

RE: They weren’t really out in front…

CA: They weren’t performing out into the audience. I mean, they were obviously the perfomers and they were on stage and they knew people were watching. But, they weren’t selling it.

RE: Was ever a sense of self-consciousness? All the people who did it, were they all performers, or were some of them just non-performers who were just put up on the stage and everyone was just forced to look at them?

AH: A lot of them were not performers. I’d give them suggestions before we’d go on each night, something to focus on. And then they’d develop their own set of things that they would focus on. I’d tend to suggest that they’d sort of cast their gaze or their thoughts internally and think about something. The first time we did it, we’d give them a point of focus that’s sort of internal and then of course they would see each other on the video screen, so they became very aware of how things looked.

CA: So we’d have to battle that a little bit. [laughs]

RE: [to Antony] So as you were performing and singing, what was your relationship to them.?

AH: We’d both observe the song that we were doing at the same time, so I think that really cast a certain feel over each small role. My thing was to be like a piece of glass, where people could see through me, so really, often I focused on my sense of each of them. The less people were focused on themselves the more it could kind of be…luminous. The way I direct the musicians, like, they just disappear into someone else. Be invisible. Be a shadow behind shadows. Imagine that someone else’s voice is coming out of your mouth. There’s a form, but it ended up feeling like a kind of mystical form, or like a magic form, where everyone’s just giving off enough where it starts to really glow and have life of its own.

RE: Where there’s all these different, smaller parts of this bigger thing.

AH: And you just have to give it up, like everyone did. Everyone just starts to loose themselves in it.

RE: No individual egos.

AH: It’s not so much the ego, just the self-consciousness. There’s a certain kind of awkward grounding to being very self-conscious or very aware of yourself. I think it’s more magic to watch something that almost isn’t aware of itself. Kind of like watching a cat, or something. Like watching an animal.

RE: It’s a totally different level of consciousness, almost like being unconscious.

AH: Just dream that you’re someone else, and then you forget who you are.

CA: Well, I couldn’t do that at all…

AH: Well, you had a very different experience.

CA: Every night was very nervewracking for me. I haven’t been a longtime performer, I’ve usually been behind the scenes.

AH: Well, you couldn’t do that at all, you had to do a lot.

CA: The music was really in me, because I knew the music well, and I count on the fact that there’s something about it, even what I consider fucked up, that still works. Sometimes I wasn’t that happy, but I realized it worked okay for the audience.

RE: So you were mixing in live feeds…were there multiple cameras?

CA: There were two cameras. Partly, the things that made it work for me was because I put an image in delay, so when I was getting their back, I was also getting a front from the delay. I always had access to some version of the face, so that was the kind of key concept for me, why turning was a good way to do an on stage portrait.

RE: It’s interesting, because when you turn away, you are always turning away from the spotlight.

CA: Yes, well some of the girls, learned to do the minimal turn…like they would stay…stay…stay…and then turn. [laughs] I mean, certain ones would keep the gaze. They were a little more conscious of those things.

RE: Was there ever any feeling of narcissism?

CA: Well, Joie [Polaroid] in particular was so good at that. [laughs]. She knew how to be on the pedestal.

RE: Was it them projecting themselves, or was it the audience objectifying them?

CA: It didn’t feel like that, really. There were multiple things to experience and to feel, yet it all came into one thing. It’s not like when you see it on the film, where you have to choose…I mean, I have to make a choice for you, as to what you’re looking at on the film.

RE: Antony, where was your head in the beginning of the tour, versus the end?

AH: I was a little bit overwhelmed, because I felt very responsible for all the models, so I was kind of herding them and directing them every night. There were a lot of things that had to be considered, just making sure everyone was okay. I was a little bit split in terms of my focus.

CA: It was very ambitious, and I don’t know if we really realized how ambitious it was to do it.

AH: It’s like being surrounded by all your favorite people…and also….[laughs]…

RE: It’s work, as well!

AH: I had to be outside a bit and in the center at the same time, so it was really overwhelming. And then also we were making this film, and as it went on, I became really obsessed with interviewing everyone for it. Towards the end of the tour in Portugal we sort of washed up in this really beautiful castle on top of the hill, and it was really kind of an oasis, and I spent those last days interviewing everyone for an hour each. Charlie was completely preoccupied as well.

CA: I was at the theater from morning until night.

AH: There was the technical aspects of the space and then setting up the technical aspects of the film. We both had our hands full. And while that was happening, there was the incredible theater of the group! Outside, and off the stage.

CA: But in the end, it was so memorable. No matter how…fraught it got, it was just a pleasure, in the end. It was that kind of experience that you hoped to have.

RE: There was a real group spirit. When you interviewed them, what was their feeling of being a part of the project?

AH: One of the things I was trying to get to the bottom of was, what is this piece about? I think that’s why I was interviewing people, because I didn’t dare say what it was about. I came to realize that it wasn’t really about any one thing, it was about the sum of everyone’s thoughts and experiences. You couldn’t say that it was about anything less than that. What we brought to it, ultimately, was the form, and the context. But then, it was so incredibly personal and completely unspoken. It was really magic! [laughs]. When I was interviewing them, I would just say, “Well, what’s it about for you?” And we just got into some really heavy talking about that. And so for each person it was different. They had a very specific thing that they were bringing. There was also a very strong sense of community on that tour. People were very bonded. And it was also quite wild. [Antony and Charles laugh]. They were out there. There was a lot of…

CA: On the one hand, they had to be there and be present, and on the other hand, it wasn’t like they had to do a dance or anything like that, and be really in shape. They just had to come be themselves.

AH: With 13 bombshells, as well, what do you think is going to happen? [laughs] Late night chaos!

RE: Was the number of girls significant? I was just thinking of Warhol’s “13 Most Beautiful Women” or “13 Most Beautiful Boys.”

AH: I never thought of that, 13 just seemed like a good number. Also, you’ve got keep the show under an hour. That’s the new rule.

RE: What is going on in the audience during the show? Are people very quiet?

CA: Incredibly quiet. So attentive.

AH: There’s something about magnifying, too. The images were so big that it really captured people, it really brought people in to the feeling that they were right next to something even if they were in a quite big room. We were worried that it wouldn’t translate into a bigger audience. And I didn’t want to focus on being watched, to be honest. I learned that lesson the first time through. After the first couple of shows, I was really struggling with that, how to participate in the visual presentation. I was used to being the visual focus, but really, I have to do that thing I said, where I just completely disappear.

RE: It’s almost like you’re the musical accompaniment to a silent film.

AH: Yeah. Sometimes I would imagine that my face was their face. I’d just try to do a thing where I’d morph into the person.

RE: And you’re also watching them?

AH: Well, no, I couldn’t see them. So I just tried to be present for them. It really wasn’t about me. The first time at St. Ann’s, it was very emotional and very personal. There was something very testimonial for me about being in the show. I really was drawing a lot on my own personal story. This time, I hardly thought about myself in presenting the songs. I really, really thought about the group. If something came up for me emotionally, it was just unconscious.

RE: It’s a much different experience, then, as you’re performing the songs, which come out of such a personal experience, but then the songs, they shift in meaning.

AH: Well, what’s happened since the first show is that I’ve toured the world. Before, I was really a New York performer. Between the first show and this show, I’d had all this success and my relationship to the audience had totally changed. And yet, this experience performing really grounded me in my commitment to where I came from. This is really where I come from.

RE: When you say it’s where you come from, you mean, on an emotional level?

AH: Emotionally, aesthetically, experientially, in every way. That’s my community, that’s where I come from. These are the things that I care about and these are the images that I care about, bottom line. After the first show, I said if I had to be somewhere for eternity, which is a thought that horrifies me, I would like to be watching the “Turning” show. That would comfort me.