Isabella Mireles Vik. Photo: Alberto Careaga
Isabella Mireles Vik is an artist based in Houston, Texas. In the conversation that follows, Vik discusses her performance at the 2024 Texas Biennial; her belief in the communal nature of dance; language and its problematic relationship to movement-based artistic practice; and her approach to pedagogy as the artistic director of the movement ensemble Aufheben.
Max Tolleson (MT): You recently debuted a performance called Human Resource: Corporeal Experiences in Professionalism at the Texas Biennial. Could you discuss the ideas behind the performance and, for those who might have missed it, describe some of its components?
Isabella Mireles Vik (IMV): Human Resource, or HR, was heavily inspired by this idea of emotional regression and what happens whenever we continuously put ourselves in positions where we cannot express ourselves, and I thought the perfect way to showcase that was through the idea of an office and corporate professionalism. I wanted to take this idea and run with what happens if we don’t have ethics or professionalism or cultural etiquette in the way of our expression. I had thought about what happens whenever you get a phone call at work that could be very desperate, or it could be an emergency phone call, or it could be a phone call from a friend that you haven’t spoken to in a long time. It doesn’t always have to be so dramatic. I think that there are more nuanced and triggering phone calls than just emergencies. I thought about what would happen if we could have a normal human reaction rather than subject ourselves to having to continue to work, cutting off our very human need to be expressive and emotional.
The piece started off as one concept which was structural improvisation, and these dancers or performers would have a reaction to these different phone calls, but in real time. I worked with a sound artist named Jamie Hernandez who took all of these voice messages and recordings that I had created with friends, that people had given me and that the movement artists involved had given me. Jamie went ahead and took some field recordings as well as those voice messages and compiled them together. We worked together on composition, and this resulted in a really beautiful, atmospheric section of the piece that is very monumental to the whole thing because I think without that section in particular, the piece wouldn’t make sense. As this phone call is happening, the movement artists involved are having reactions to the different things that they’re hearing. And it’s beautiful because not everyone’s going to hear the same thing and everyone’s going to recognize a different voice that’s special to them or significant to them. There are also voicemails that are in Spanish, which are not going to be relevant for people that don’t understand what’s happening. I heavily curated the voicemails to evoke different reactions from states of emergency to a longing or yearning. How do we express ourselves in real time? That’s the underlying fact of all my pieces, getting everyone to voluntarily give themselves to the reaction and to the performance.
Aufheben Ensemble, “Human Resource: Corporeal Experiences in Professionalism,” 2024, Texas Biennial, Blaffer Art Museum/Dudley Recital Hall, University of Houston. Photo: Sol Diaz-Peña
MT: I’ve noticed that you sometimes discuss your work within the context of dance but other times performance or movement art. Can you talk about how and why you make a distinction between these lineages and how your own practice has developed in response to them?
IMV: I think depending on who I’m addressing, I have to choose between the category of dancer, movement artist, or performance artist but really I feel as though I’m a body artist or a body performance artist, and the reason why is because my body is my medium and I just happen to be someone who’s very disciplined in the practice of different forms of dance. I feel like dance has teetered on the edge of performance art, versus very dynamic and well-choreographed dance, kind of wanting to go a little bit back and forth over this line, and it’s very hard to do both because there’s not a lot of wiggle room. I feel like the dance world has kind of become stagnant, and in some ways has regurgitated the same concepts and the same kind of movement for maybe twenty years. And I say this as someone that is an audience member, not just an artist. I also find that we’re very dance illiterate in Texas. And because of that, having to resort to saying dancer is very common, but movement artist is a much more accessible term for people. Take someone like Anne Imhof, who choreographed a movement piece at Palais de Tokyo where she basically had a mob of young people who had come out of this fountain and continued walking towards the gallery, into the space. She’s choreographing movement, but it’s not dance, necessarily. I like to pressure people to think really hard about what they believe dance may be.
I think dance is something that is so, so, so primitive. It’s something that’s so archaic and it’s one of the only forms of art that we know before we know how to pick up a pen and paper. When we’re babies we’re getting up and we’re falling back down. Our first dance is with the floor. When we’re walking, we’re learning how to move. We know how to get excited as babies do when they hear music, and so on. Singing might be the next thing. Dance is something that is also communal too, and in movement that is very, very important. And so going back to why I say movement artist or why I’m a body performer, it’s because I think it’s very limiting to say that I just make dance for a stage. I want to show: How do we create movement that is in a gallery space or impractical space? How do we initiate movement with an audience, potentially? How is it that movement is much more powerful than just sitting and watching a choreographed piece?
Aufheben Ensemble at the 2024 Texas Biennial. Photo: Jay Tovar
MT: Could you describe some of the difficulties or frustrations you face when it comes to making and presenting your work? Are there certain changes you’d like to see in how body artists like yourself are or are not supported?
IMV: Logistically, the number of places where I can show work is very limited, and so trying to carve spaces out for myself has been one of the best ways that I can present work. Studios are very expensive. Rentals are very expensive. Being able to have a home base, to be able to create and generate work is expensive. The lack of having that space therein, lies the lack of having people to be in the space with you, and it’s very isolating. When there’s a lack of community, true community within dance and within the arts, you don’t have much at all. And again, movement is meant to be done with other people. Because of the cost of rentals, because of the cost of theaters, the cost of spaces, that’s a big factor in what makes it difficult to be a movement artist. I’ve done work in warehouses where I created a stage, and that itself can be pretty significant in regards to cost. I think that if people can start to imagine movement outside of theaters, also not just on film, I think that would be incredible. What are the limitations that we give ourselves by saying that movement can only be presented on film? I think that we’ve gotten too lost in phones. I’m very, very much not wanting to do that, not wanting to create dance film or things for Instagram because then it takes people away, out of this experience of actually being able to have a thought process of watching performance; they’re not going to be able to experience that if they’re not in that setting.
I think the second big thing, besides the obvious logistics, is the language. Presenting myself to people and telling them what I do is very difficult because I believe that people want to put me in certain holes; they want to pigeon-hole me into certain places within the arts. If I’m doing something for a gallery space, it’s like, “Oh, that’s great. Well, what is your plan? How do you want to activate the space? And what do you want to do?” And I’m like, “I can do a duration improvisation piece here, and here is X, Y, and Z of what I need.” But then it’s confusing because they look at my other work and are like, “Well, you do all these other things,” and it’s like, “Well, what do you want? Do I have free range? Or do you want something specific?” I don’t think people are understanding of how to digest my work in the first place.
Aufheben Ensemble, “Cuidado No God,” 2024. Photo: Julien C.
MT: You’re the artistic director of a movement ensemble called Aufheben. Could you describe the purpose of this ensemble?
IMV: The ensemble was created as a way for me to work with multiple bodies and multiple artists. I’d already worked with different artists, musicians, and other movement artists, and I was getting really tired of doing things in solos or duos, and so I created the ensemble as a conduit for everything that I’ve been learning and training in on my own, solo, the past three-ish years. The ensemble is project based, and it’s really made for not just the purpose of having a group of people to work with and to create these beautiful narrations and pictures, but to teach the artists and the movement artists that are involved how to be autonomous. In dance, there’s this blind obedience that we have to our choreographers, to our artistic directors, and to the companies, and we’re taught that from a very young age. I want to teach others that we have a choice in what we do with our bodies. We have a choice to say no. You have a choice to say no to me especially, and I’m building that autonomy, allowing them to build their intuition with movement. This is why I focus on improvisation; that is a skill that you should learn in order to be able to make choices on your own, instead of me guiding you or directing you. And in that way when they choose to have their autonomy and they figure out how to stylistically approach movement within their own bodies, they can also choose to collectively come in and take care of one another in the group. It’s about understanding how you become autonomous and then fractal back into the group, as well as allowing someone else to take the lead and going back and forth. Although I’m the artistic director and I oversee the group, what I’m really doing is almost like a social experiment in a way, trying to build in people the ability to have autonomy and choosing to want community, choosing to want to engage and protect one another, or hold one another quite physically in movement.
Isabella Mireles Vik, Bloodletting and Needle Study #10, 2024. Photo: Alberto Careaga
MT: What’s next for Isabella Vik?
IMV: I’m having an audition for a new generation for the ensemble, and I’m also trying to start a monthly improvisation showcase for movement artists or people that are interested in showing research or work within movement or interested in movement in general. The project that I want to start will probably be a year-long project; it will be with six dancers this time, and there’s going to be a focus on the mother archetype. I’m someone that speaks three languages. I come from two very different countries. My mom is from Mexico, my dad is from Norway, and I grew up not having to choose what culture I want to be a part of. I grew up very much embedded in both. And so there’s this connection to my mother, who I had, I would say, an interesting relationship with all my life, this connection with the matriarchs of my family on both sides, this connection to my mother land, my mother tongue. I want to present this idea of the mother archetype in as many things as possible, beyond just this new age divine femininity, and having a discussion with the performers and artists involved is very important to me and allowing them to be able to present what the mother means to them.
And then I would like to present a body of work that explores my body modification process, which is piercing myself, and presenting different works through photography, video, and live performance that are durational, that show my body practice, as I call it, which would be using my body in ways that are not typical to movement. I’ve been really interested in working with barbed wire recently. I’ve always had an interest in self-flagellation. That to me is the basis of a lot of my work, this pushing of limits within my own body.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
