Part XI: Nile Harris 

Nile Harris

Hometown: Miami, FL          

Current Town: Brooklyn, NY

Tell me about Him and Him and Him and Him:

‘Him and Him and Him and Him’ is a theatre work I was commissioned to make by Dixon Place as a part of their annual Hot! Festival featuring LGBTQ artist working in the in-between space of theatre, dance and performance.

Tell me about your process and concept of this show.

Simply put, ‘Him and Him…’ is a show about my ever-changing and constantly perplexing relationship to men: my non-existent ex-boyfriends, lovers, friends, father, father figures, uncles, and persons that have challenged me throughout my life. It’s a study of the strange spark between men, that invisible competition that makes us fight each other or makes us fuck. That paradoxical thing that makes a son have to defy his father to become a man. And somewhere in the mix of all of that, there’s a sprinkle of a fictional story about a married white man who falls in love with me (or maybe I fall in love with him? I could never tell) and his wife who follows her husband on his late night search for gay sex.

            The process of making this show was all about collaging and arranging then re-arranging images, tableaus, movement, and text. I often never start with a script, but my shows often reveal themselves to me in images, spatial relationships, simple movement systems, and sound and then the rehearsal process is about generating choreography and text through movement improvisations that I facilitate with the cast and then setting those improvisations into a series that eventually tells a story, or suggests a feeling, or satellites around a theme.

How would you define your job description for this piece?

Haha, that’s a very hard question for me! I’ve recently been trying to embrace the legitimacy of the multi-hyphenated artist so I will say on this project I was a director-choreographer-writer-sound designer-performer. It’s 2017, we should have a term that encompasses all of that! I struggle with the label “performance artist”.

What else are you currently busy with?

I’m currently in residence at the Watermill Center working with theatre director Robert Wilson.

Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a Director and/or as a person.

When I was 15, I was in a playwriting class at my highschool and I began to find it far more interesting to write long pages of stage directions that suggested images than attempting to write naturalistic dialogue. My teacher would silently scold me (perhaps it was just in my head) when he asked if I needed any actors to read my work that day in class and I would gently say no, and then proceed to stand in front of the class and read off my stage directions for twenty minutes. Shortly after that I realized that writing was not for me.

If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?

As Treplev says in Anton Chekov’s ‘The Seagull”, I think I will just say, “We need new forms!”

Who are or were your theatrical Heroes?

I find myself inspired by artists working outside of theatre more often than not, so here’s a list of multidisciplinary artists that I admire: Suzan-Lori Parks, James Baldwin, William Pope.L, Tarrell McCranney, Branden Jacob-Jenkins, Hilton Als, Robert O’Hara, Juliana Huxtable and Sidra Bell to name a few.

What kind of theater excites you?

I love theatre that has an extreme, polished visual style, but at the same time can hold dangerous, rough performances. The perfect balance between high art and heart, that I’m still searching for.

What do you know now, that you wish you knew when you were just starting out? 

The first stumble through is always terrible, just get through it and keep going!

Plugs, please:

Instagram: @nileharris