How Nourishment Feeds the Senses While Tackling Big Questions (Q&A)

by Kathryn Yu
Kathryn Yu
•
January 23, 2019
•
6 min read

An interview with creator and choreographer Gwendolyn Gussman

Originally from Denver, the NYC-based creator Gwendolyn Gussman created her own interdisciplinary company working under the title Nourishment in 2015. The company aims to bring together artists across mediums to create immersive, site-specific performances; each one asks big questions about the human condition like “What does it feel like to fall in love?” and “What does it feel like to grow up?” And each Nourishment experience blends together elements of dance, theatre, live music, visual arts, art installation, and, of course, food and drinks.

We asked Gwendolyn about the latest chapter in Nourishment, Why Believe?, over the magic of the Internet.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

No Proscenium (NP): Tell us a little bit about yourself and your background in immersive arts.

Gwendolyn Gussman (GG): I was born and raised in Denver, CO and grew up dancing, singing, playing the harp, piano, and doing a bit of acting. I graduated from Denver School of the Arts while dancing at Cleo Parker Robinson for many years. I moved to NYC to attend NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts as a dance major. Over the years my dreams had narrowed into being in a dance company out of school, and lo and behold, I was invited to join Shen Wei Dance Arts my final year at Tisch. SWDA is known for their large-scale, visually-oriented and cinematic contemporary dance works. I learned a lot from my experience with SWDA and when I left the company I was inspired to creatively delve deeper into what making art meant for me.

I began dancing with some amazing project-based companies, but still found myself feeling like something was missing in my creative life. This is how Gwendolyn&Guests/Nourishment was born. I yearned to collaborate with close friends and colleagues — an array of passionate and boundary-pushing artists in disciplines other than just dance. My background is not so much in immersive arts, but in the nature of realizing that so much of the dance I’ve performed, choreographed, and witnessed over the years has been in site-specific locations and navigating audiences in new ways.

With the creation of Nourishment, I’ve been drawn to creating and collaborating in a truly interdisciplinary way to create intimate, immersive, and multi-sensory work. That being said, the work still leans heavily on each collaborator excelling in their own discipline but being open enough to explore each other’s as well.

NP: In a nutshell, what is this project about?

GG: Our new Nourishment show (Why Believe?), similar to my mission for each Nourishment show, is about creating a performance that allows for each audience member to have a psychologically rich experience. Nourishment offers a space where honesty, vulnerability, and play, are essential both for the cast and the audience.

Why Believe? specifically examines feelings surrounding religion, control, structure, doubt, faith, spirituality and the concept of soul. It explores what it means to believe in something, what it feels like to lose faith, and ponders why the act of believing even matters at all.

NP: Why did you create this experience? What inspires you?

GG: At this point in time (as well as many other times in our world’s history), beliefs often feel like they do more dividing than bringing us together. We’ve created Why Believe? to bring people together to question the nature of belief itself, hopefully investigating their own beliefs. At first, only grazing surface level, but as the experience progresses, delving into ideas and feelings much deeper, which are paradoxically individual and incredibly universal.

For each Nourishment production, I am inspired by a myriad of sources both artistic and mundane such as novels, poetry, sculpture, nature, people I watch on the street and subway, interactions I witness, etc. Over the course of this particular process, I’ve been inspired by Tom Robbins “Skinny Legs and All,” work by Anne Lamott, and Murakami as well as ancient languages, cultural ideas of death and afterlife, and extremely sensory and tactile movement and sound practice.

NP: How are food and drink incorporated into the experience?

GG: There are three small snacks as well as two alcoholic beverages woven throughout the performance. Each food and drink is thoughtfully curated to add another layer of intention,narration, and sensory experience to the piece at large. For the first time in our Nourishment history, the audience will not be directly served every single food. For instance, the show’s content investigates variables like choice and personal agency in our beliefs juxtaposed with the notion that we are born into belief systems beyond our control.

While the audience is ingesting (so to speak) the content, they too, will be asked to interact in new ways with the set to discover, search for, or uncover their food.

NP: How is the audience incorporated into the work? What kind of choices can each participant make?

GG: This is a tough question as I’ve found our Nourishment shows to be most successful when there is an element of mystery going in… I will tell you that the audience is very intimate to the performers, so while they will not be asked to step in, they will be active participants of the show, moving around at times to different spaces, answering a question with a written reply, etc.

NP: How are you designing around audience agency, consent and safety?

GG: The audience has full agency, as they are simply guided into new spaces in the performance venue to watch different scenes. We are committed to keeping a safe space in physical, emotional, and mental ways. We never push an audience member to do something they don’t feel comfortable with… although narrative content is different story — it is through our movement, storytelling, music, and projections that we push the audiences notions of belief.

NP: What has the audience response been like so far to the previous chapters of Nourishment?

GG: It’s been great! I think because we craft each Nourishment with multiple layers, there is a good amount of nuance to how the audience feels by the end of the production. By centering each chapter of Nourishment on a universal question, then throughout the show investigating and turning the question on it’s head, I’ve noticed a big shift from the energy of the audience in the beginning of the show to the end. The cast has been extremely open in each production, and I notice that audience members follow suit.

We’ve gotten praise about the authenticity of each performance and I’ve had audience members come up to me at the end with tears in their eyes, sometimes laughing and sharing stories of their own revelations or what the show brought up for them, as well as audience members who are somewhat shaken by the level of vulnerability. For me, this is exactly what I hope for as I want you to feel.

NP: Who is the ideal audience member for the show?

GG: Anyone, any age (well over 13 I’d say), who is curious, interested in the arts, psychology, philosophy, humanity, and open to having a different sort of performance experience.

NP: What do you hope participants take away from the experience?

GG: I hope that they leave feeling different than when they arrived. I hope they are able to explore and question their own notions about belief. I hope they sense that we are doing our best to create a space of inquiry, where they are allowed to be whoever they are, while also sensing community and a larger sense of belonging.