Created and planned by the Trans Media Institute and Arzid Modern Dance Company as part of a performance series on “Work, Women, and Culture,” Interview sketches female dancers’ work, lives, and serious reflections on the self through the body. Translating one-to-one interviews into bodily fragments, the work uses camera angles and video to capture how the dancers’ bodies change through their own interviews. As events from their individual lives become scenes onstage, the messages of nine dancers who continue to tell their stories meet the audience. Beginning with the question of whether women can reflect and speak as human beings beyond the identity assigned to them as “women,” the work explores the lives of women in today’s world.

“Are you happy now?”

This single question made people in Paris cry, laugh, become angry, and reflect. In 1960, anthropologist and documentary filmmaker Jean Rouch held a microphone up to passersby and asked them this question, reconstructing the lives of Parisians at the time (Chronicle of a Summer, 1960). Interviewer and interviewee face one another, ask questions, and answer them. This simple structure releases stories of great complexity and intimacy. We conceived this performance to unfold these many-layered stories through interviews and to show the lives they reveal through the dancers’ whole bodies.