Melanie Kloetzel Q&A

By Ado Nkemka

An image of Melanie Kloetzel leaning against a garage door in blue jeans and a green top.

New Works Marketing Coordinator, Ado Nkemka, spoke to interdisciplinary artist Melanie Kloetzel ahead of “field studies/VINES,” a chamber music concert along with a dance performance choreographed by Melanie with her company, kloetzel&co. Purchase tickets here to attend this concert at St. Stephen’s Anglican Church on February 1st 2025. Read this Q&A to learn more about this unique event. This interview was edited for brevity and clarity.

Melanie Kloetzel

Ado: Can you tell me a bit about yourself?

Melanie: I’m a dancer and choreographer. I'm also a professor of dance at the University of Calgary. I grew up in a highly musical family; my sister's a cellist, my brother's a singer-songwriter, my mom is a singer, and I grew up playing violin and singing. Music has been super, super important to me, but I was always a person who was very invested in the body and what the body could express. 

I wonder what makes me particularly interested in music? And why is it that the next person might be more into visual art, painting, or, maybe, some might have a more multi-disciplinary practice? It’s all very interesting to me.

Yeah, absolutely. My practice is also very multi-disciplinary. In addition to a deep connection to music, I’ve had a theater bent in a lot of the works that I do and I'm also invested in immersive performance as well as film. So there’s lots of diversity in terms of my medium, but the framework is always through that lens of the body. I find it fascinating.

In some ways, I think it's because, in a certain way, it's under-discussed. While the body is highly objectified in our culture, there's a lot less discussion around what the body is capable of doing in an expressive way. We think of the body and its capabilities in terms of athletics or fitness or sexual objectification, but not in terms of its expressive value. And yet, we are constantly aware of it. We can't help looking at people's bodies and seeing what they express. We do it all the time, but we just don't talk about it that much - we aren’t trained to analyze bodily expression through verbal language. So I think it's really interesting to focus on that lens of the body and see its potential for communication and expression.

Could you share the impact that kloetzel&co. has had on Calgary audiences?

The company started in New York City in ‘97 and was initially a more traditionalist dance company in a lot of ways. Then, I became much more invested in dance theater as well as in site-specific performance, which is my main area of research. I'm fascinated by how the body interacts with different contexts outside of theater spaces. 

kloetzel&co. has changed a lot since 2007, when I moved the company to Calgary. At first, I was focused on stage-based performance, creating dramatic works that were influenced by literature and Greek tragedies. But more recently, I've been doing a lot more site-specific and issue-based work, focusing on social and environmental issues, whether it's corporate control and surveillance or climate change or decolonization or human and more-than-human rights.

While my work has gotten, perhaps, more direct in its commentary, I’m also very interested in broadening access to the work and fomenting dialog through it. A recent project that I've been creating with Cree artist Sandra Lamouche, for example, takes people on an hour-long immersive journey where they experience the reality of a climate emergency, after which they see the possibility of connecting to the more-than-human world through Indigenous knowledge. Then, afterwards, the audience does a debrief with a clinical psychologist to dig into what came up for them emotionally and how they can process those emotions. I'm interested in how artistic creation can help us dig into both critical issues and our responses to them. 

This is the first time I’m hearing about an artistic performance that ends in a talk with a psychologist. I’ve been thinking about how to better bridge the personal with the broader world, in terms of presenting more tangible solutions in my own artistic practice. It’s cool to hear you talk about what you’re doing.

In Eurocentric cultures, we've really commodified art and art-making. Artwork has become a ‘product’ that is there for buying and selling. Lately I've been learning so much more about how other cultures interact with the arts and how artistic practice itself plays a vital role in the functioning of communities. It offers a basis for ceremony and celebration and knowledge transmission, and it can also offer fodder for communities to consider critical issues; if practiced in a certain way, art can prod us to think, to ponder problematic actions or habits, as well as envision new possible futures.

Image of bodies wearing green and earthy colours spread out on the ground embodying a vining plant.

Where did the idea for VINES come from?

VINES was a project that actually started before COVID when I asked Toronto-based artist Brandy Leary if she wanted to collaborate in a creative process. Since both of us were intrigued by a certain type of site-based performance, we thought, “What would it be like for us to collaborate on a project that considered how the human body could engage with ideas from the plant kingdom? Could we translate some of those ideas into the human body in order to impact urban spaces?” So that's where the project started. 

Due to its initial focus on close proximity and connection between people, COVID really put a wrench in the process and we had to wait a couple of years to get back into it. But when we reentered the process, we began to consider more concertedly how plants can reclaim disused urban spaces, which offered a kind of dystopian imagery to the process. I was thinking a lot about the Anthropocene and – with uncertainty about humanity’s future – how plant populations might be taking over some of these human spaces. 

That's where we were in 2022, but in the past two years, the work has changed a lot. Brandy is now offering only long-distance dramaturgy, and my connection to Indigenous knowledge keepers and artists has been both changing and challenging the work. The residencies the company has been doing have grown more focused on the movement language of climbing plants, really thinking about how to translate that language into the human body. As it grew, the whole project became so much more about empathy and relationality, i.e. relating to a specific type of more-than-human kin, in this case, climbing plants. 

This direction was also really influenced a Métis woman named Hannah Isbister who is part of the project; she generously talked to us about how to make relations with plant kin, how to introduce yourself, for example, and how to ask if the plant is willing to share its knowledge. We began to take this quite seriously, thinking about the vines as knowledge holders and being respectful of their knowledge - a scenario that is rarely taught in Eurocentric cultures. In the process, we found ourselves developing an embodied empathy for vining and climbing plants, we were stunned by their persistence and resilience and how that persistence is made plain through their movement. 

Brandy Leary provides dramaturgical support on VINES, why did you choose Brandy for that role?

I'm also a scholar and researcher, and I wrote an article about Brandy's work. She has a piece called Glaciology, which focuses on getting masses of dancers to enact the movement of a glacier through urban spaces. I thought that was fascinating. So I interviewed her and wrote an article about her work, in which I developed certain ideas around the ‘distilled task’, as I call it. Anyway, through this process, we started to get to know each other. And I thought, “Oh, wouldn’t it be interesting to work with her on this project since both projects were interested in masses of bodies and more-than-human beings!” Glaciers are not the same as plants, obviously, but there was a clear connection for me. So I thought she would be a great person to start the project with. 

We first did a residency in Calgary in 2019, then another residency in Toronto in 2022 and a final one in Calgary in 2022. After another hiatus we jumped back into the project in 2024 through workshops and performances.

How do you feel that VINES and Emilie's work complement each other?

When Rebecca (NWC) mentioned that NWC would be doing Emilie's ‘field studies’, I went and looked it up online, just for fun, and the image on the cover was, for me, an exact image of VINES. It was, quite literally, one of the images that inspired the work, and I thought, “Oh, my God, that's just so weird. How could that happen?” 

I listened to the album, and there’s a wonderfully haunting minimalism to it that I thought could offer space for the audience to be both viewers and listeners in a really clear way, without overwhelming them. Due to both Emilie’s inspirations and her crafting of the pieces, I could easily imagine how an audience could have the space and agency to connect to both live music and live vining bodies simultaneously. 

A few weeks later, I couldn’t resist; I contacted Rebecca and said, “I know you were interested in this other project I was working on, but I have to let you know that Emilie's music and imagery is just haunting me.” Rebecca was willing to dive in, which I was thrilled to hear.

What’s dance theatre, for someone who hasn't seen your work? 

I actually would not call this work dance theatre. I would call it state-based performance. VINES does not rely on text or any kind of dramatic presentation, which is more typical of dance theatre; rather it asks the performers to deeply embody the ‘state’ of being a climbing vine and do that over a long period of time. It means that they have to disengage, on some level, from their typical expectations about how the human body works, how humans interact with what's around them, and the typical time-scale for human movement. Instead they deeply engage with being the vine, with being very clear about what a vine does over time and what it responds to in an environment. And they have to stay in this state for the duration of the work. 

With vines, as you might imagine, you can't really sit there and watch them grow. That is not something that humans can do very well. So asking the performers to slow down to that degree is really, really difficult. Brandy speaks about the challenges of time-based work, about asking humans to adapt to the time frame of a different organism. But this begs the question “Why is it that we just prioritize human experiences of time and not other experiences of time?”

Bodies wearing dark colours embodying a vining plant sprawled across a wooden panel/sign that says “We always think about you.”

What are you most looking forward to when it comes to the February 1st performance?

First, for me, it's a privilege to work with live musicians. Dancers don't get that often enough and it completely changes our experience of movement. So I think that's going to be really interesting for the VINES performers who just went through this process without live music. In fact, when we performed the piece in Contemporary Calgary during a First Thursday opening last year, the audience was extremely loud, walking around the space and through the performance itself all the time; they really engaged directly with the performers, constantly taking photos and appreciating the ability to interact with the vine. I think the NWC experience will be quite different, so I'm really curious what impact that will have on the performers and their sensibilities. 

But I'm also intrigued to see how the audience interaction will play out. For most New Works performances, I believe the audience is seated in one chair, assuming they are there mainly to listen to music. But in this case, the audience will be invited to move around between pieces, to gain other vantage points on the work. This is important to me since VINES is quite atypical for a dance performance. Since it is so slow, it invites a style of meditative engagement. It’s not a ‘spectacle’ in the way that people expect of dance. I mean, it is spectacular to have 20 bodies in the space, but due to the time-scale of the work, I would like for the audience to be able to move around and place their bodies in different relationships to the growing vine, altering their perspective on this more-than-human species. 

But one challenge is trying to figure out, “How do we invite people to move around without taking away from what UltraViolet is also doing with Emilie's piece and without making too much excess noise?” As a minimalist work that needs a certain kind of attention, these are real concerns. So, while I’m interested in the audience's bodies in the space and allowing them to gain multiple perspectives on the experience, I also want to be really respectful of the atmosphere created by Emilie’s music. So, this is a fascinating conversation, and I'm interested to see how it’s going to play out. 

Is there anything that you'd like to share that I haven't given you the chance to share?

The other thing I would mention is that VINES is part of a larger Truth and Reconciliation process. As I said, I've been working with a number of Indigenous knowledge keepers and artists, in particular through TRAction, the climate and social justice art collective that is helping to co-present this. These artists, for example, Sandra Lamouche and Chantal Stormsong Chagnon, as well as Hannah Isbister, have been really generous in sharing their knowledge and they have made me think deeply about what Truth and Reconciliation can mean in different contexts. 

In this case, we are learning what it might mean to develop relationships, respect and reciprocity with other species on this planet. By learning a kind of embodied empathy with our plant kin - a kind of empathy that connects to our emotions as well as our nervous system - I feel like we uncover a different respect and relationality that allows us to move through the world in a different way. 

For me, the VINES process acts as a vital reminder that Truth is also about recognizing our own dismissal of non-human knowledge systems and the fact that such a dismissal has brought us to the brink of climate breakdown. In other words, we have to look at the truth of how we treat kinship organisms and reconcile for our past wrongs. Indigenous people have been talking about this for a long time, asking us to respect all of the species on the planet.

As settlers, we are responsible for living up to the Truth and Reconciliation process, and for me, I feel like artistic processes like these, that explore quite different relationships with our ecosystems, can potentially be a piece of that process.

Get tickets to the February 1st concert here.

Melanie Kloetzel Bio

Melanie Kloetzel is a settler choreographer, performer, scholar, and educator based in Moh’kinstis on the traditional Treaty 7 lands of the Blackfoot Confederacy. She is the artistic director of kloetzel&co., as well as co-artistic director of the art intervention collective TRAction, which produces the Climate Art Web (CAW-WAC). Employing practice-as-research methodologies, Kloetzel has developed events, workshops, films and encounters in theatre spaces, alternative venues, spaces of public assembly, and online environments for kloetzel&co., TRAction, and as a guest artist. Reflections/analysis of her research creation practices have enjoyed publication in edited anthologies and peer reviewed journals such as Dance Research Journal, Contemporary Theatre Review, Choreographic Practices, Performance Research and New Theatre Quarterly, among others. Her anthology with Carolyn Pavlik, Site Dance: Choreographers and the Lure of Alternative Spaces is currently available in hard cover, paperback, and as an eBook from the University Press of Florida, and the recently released co-authored volumes, (Re)Positioning Site Dance: Local Acts, Global Perspectives and Covert: A Handbook, are available through Intellect and Triarchy Press, respectively. Before her current position as Professor of Dance at the University of Calgary, Kloetzel was the Director of the Dance program at Idaho State University from 2004-2007. Kloetzel has performed nationally and internationally with such artists as Ann Carlson, Kim David Arrow, and the Leah Stein Dance Company, and was a member of Race Dance under the direction of Lisa Race from 1995-2000. Kloetzel holds a PhD in Dance Studies from the University of Roehampton, an MFA in Experimental Choreography from the University of California at Riverside, an MA in History from the University of Montana, and a BA from Swarthmore College. She was also a 2003 recipient of the Chancellors Distinguished Fellowship Award from The University of California.