Repeating a question over and over can yield a new answer each time; it is in repetition that we might learn something more deeply and feel it more wholly. For composer and percussionist Sarah Hennies and dancer and writer Jerron Herman, this exploration of repetition spans scale, from slowing down to feel the contraction of a muscle or playing a note until it seems to evolve, to remounting a performance over years or returning to a learned ritual from childhood. Each iteration brings new discovery, new insight, new answers, and new questions. In the following conversation, Hennies and Herman discuss their impulse towards learning through feeling, exploring ecstatic movement, translating the mundane into art, and evading making the work that one is expected to make.

Allie Linn: Many of your works, Sarah, like Clock Dies (2021), incorporate repetition and cyclical loops, and Jerron, you have similarly explored the unfolding of iterated gestures and movement in works like Lax (2023). What does this repetition open up for each of you?

Sarah Hennies: That’s a big question. I think basically everything that I’ve made since the Psalms (2009) has been repetition-based. In college, I was around the composer Herbert Brün, who was really influential on me. He was this terrifying old German man who was a high modernist and brilliant but also just believed that repetition should never occur in music. He was super dogmatic about it, and I spent a lot of time thinking I needed to write music in a certain way. 

Then I made those pieces, and it really stirred something in me. Through repetition, you can really feel like you're on the inside of something by doing something over and over again. That, I feel like, is something that I've been preoccupied with for a really long time.

The more I looked into repetition as the thing that governs or underlies our lives, the more I kept finding deeper and deeper examples that everything is repetitive, down to synapses and neurons. Breathing and blinking and walking are repetitive, and it's this weird twentieth century mindset that art isn't supposed to be repetitive, even though it's the thing that we're all engaging with all the time, down to the most basic biological functions.

Jerron Herman: I would totally agree. Ritual breeds a kind of familiarity or necessary catharsis, and repetition is such a beautiful gesture toward embodiment. Literally, you get to feel it as you do it more, and the muscling of the event really seeps in. We have so many layers to us toward sensing, from the most external to the deeper containers that take time to be touched.

So time in and time with gets us deeper into the ritual or space. In my works, repetition has been a way of increasing literacy of a disabled embodiment, so more time with that thing allows you to understand the thing and its other contours. We can repeat a word or we can stay in the world of a word, like lax or relaxation, and figure out how it adjusts and changes and makes meaning the longer you're with it. I've been finding it really exciting to give the audience or the witness time to understand their change and variability within this one container.

Sarah: One of my favorite things I've ever written is called The Reinvention of Romance (2020). The opening twenty minutes of this piece is just repeating one note over and over again. The notes change, but it's just these slow pulses, and it only changes once every four minutes or so. After we made the recording of that piece, one of the things that was amazing to me was that in the cello, almost immediately, within the first thirty seconds, I started to hear one thing as at least two things. I don't know how other people hear it, but it almost sounds like the pitch that you're hearing and the sound of the bow on the strings separate. It's like two people playing.

That's something that's really interesting to me through repetition — the way that things literally open up, perceptually and physically. I am not a dancer, but through playing repetitive percussion music, your body changes in a really direct way, on a small scale. If you do one thing for ten minutes, you're literally a different person than you were when it started, and the way that you hear has totally changed, even if the work that you're hearing or looking at hasn't changed at all. That feeling of moving, but staying in the same place at the same time, continues to be really, really exciting.

Jerron: Yeah, I love that. Do you have a relationship to the ecstatic in your music, Sarah?

Sarah: Yeah. It's not something I think about directly, but I feel like it's such an important experience to just witness something that makes you go, "Wow." A completely non-intellectual response to something that goes beyond trying to receive meaning into some other zone is definitely something I really care about. You could call it being transported or immersed — just being totally inside something.

Jerron: Yeah.

Sarah: What about you?

Jerron: Oh, definitely. I come from a Pentecostal background, so the relationship to movement and a body that can be transported was ritualized in a weekly way. When I came to dance, and even when I'm experiencing media that elicits iterations or kernels of my upbringing, it always brings me to this foundational place. Transportation is a great word because as we're gearing toward synthesis or understanding around large ideas, I get really excited about this idea that we could just be a body or just be an experience. Experience is a foundational layer to all the intellectual or introspective or aesthetic work that you do.

Sarah: Yeah. It's not something I'm thinking about in my work, but as a pretty hardcore atheist also brought up in a southern religious environment, the idea of a non-religious spirituality... the word “spirituality” is so loaded, so I hesitate to use that word, but you made me think of this documentary, Desolation Center, that I show to a lot of my classes about these people in LA that had a show out in the desert in the 80s. They rented some school buses and their headliner was Einstürzende Neubauten, and this is out in the middle of the desert in California running off a generator. Even with just this grainy video footage, you're just like, "Oh my God." And they're talking to these people in the present day who were there, and there's this gay couple in the film who were both there, and this guy is speaking as a completely hardcore lifelong atheist, saying that it was a religious experience and that everyone that witnessed this performance was just profoundly changed by it. There are all these people in the documentary talking about it, and it’s really amazing to me that you could access what I understand some people get out of God through some other way.

Jerron: God without the face. 

Sarah: Yeah, exactly. I was asked to provide program notes a couple days ago for a string quartet called Borrowed Light, which is based on a Shaker thing. I was in the middle of typing that the Shakers have this conception of God that involves inner light, and that's so interesting to me, and I was like, "Oh, this is going to come off like I'm a religious composer." So I reworded it. But the Quaker idea of God is really interesting to me because it's just sort of like, "Well, God is whatever is inside of you." I wouldn't want to couch anything in terms of God, but I just think that's part of my interest in an ecstatic experience. It's just this thing where you're filled with something.

Jerron: Be careful. All the churches are going to ask for stuff. [laughs]

Sarah: I think I'm safe. I think I'll be okay. [laughs]

Allie: How does writing play into each of your practices? Alongside these more embodied approaches, it feels like there’s also a very cerebral aspect.

Jerron: I disciplined-hopped, so I started out as a writer and found a lot of depth in it because there was historical misunderstanding around performing as a disabled person. I just wanted to be a part of the arts, so I thought I could be in the background of it. But it became very forefronted for me. I took writing for drama, for theater, and poetry. How the transfer works for me is this deep analysis of context. I love a one-room play, and the presence of environment creating meaning and interesting interactions. Those were the things I took from writing as I became a choreographer. 

My process was based in wordplay. I started off with my own diagnosis, hemiplegia cerebral palsy. Hemiplegia, I found, had connotations with hemisphere and land and place and movement, so I started to talk about inner light. My interiority expanded, which is a funny oxymoron. I found so much information across my body that I wanted to showcase, so care for my left side or the practice of a typical PT routine or an OT routine became choreographic based off of their limited or limiting connotations. Words float in my work as a way to ground what the piece is about.

Sarah: What you're saying is really interesting about taking these practical things and translating them into art. I made a piece a long time ago, shortly before I came out and had this personal awakening and transitioned, that was highly repetitive. I gave myself this very physical percussion thing to play, and it was in this installation that my friend Sean O’Neill made of electronics. At the time, I was thinking about how for fifteen years, I did office jobs, and for seven of those, I had a data entry job where I was just entering phone bills.

At some point, it dawned on me that even though I really hated the job, it shared qualities with all of this music that I liked and made, doing the same thing over and over again. The way that this piece came about was thinking about this really unpleasant, boring activity. The only reason I was doing it was that I had to do it for money.

Translating that into music was really powerful. Being able to take these challenges and find shared qualities among something that you're just doing because of some challenge versus you're doing because it's the work that you're interested in. I always feel like there's a reason that we choose to do things as artists and that they're often a lot more related to the other parts of our identity than people think that they are. As a teacher, I'll harp on this a lot, where if some student makes something, and if I ask, "Well, why'd you do that?" usually they'll say, "Well, it sounds cool." And I ask, "Well, why does it sound cool?" 

It's almost always this reflection on who they are, whether they know it or not, but it's really interesting to me when people can engage that really directly because I feel like it's something that's just happening anyway. Of course your art is an expression of who you are — that's the whole thing — but I'm really interested in how people's artistic choices are influenced in these subconscious ways.

Jerron: And then it can evolve. The first piece is always autobiographical, and then you need to have somewhere else to go.

Sarah: Right. 

Jerron: And also not to only draw from a revisionist well. I love it, but I also don't always need to make things from a place of redoing what happened or reinvesting in a legacy. Those things are important, but I'm also curious about what the implications are of us thinking about something in a different way. Often, the motivation is from a different place than, "I'm going to get you." I had to come to that realization that I am more than retaliation. I'm more than just combative, or I'm a novel entity, therefore I have to fight. A work can be about sitting by the pool. Things that aren't often in the imaginary of this context. A part of what I have to do is also create new images and create stronger images. I imagine the images have to go from being a high school bully or bullied middle schooler to a person in a condo and driving a Jag. 

Sarah: Yeah. I feel like there's some real defiance in choosing to make art about sitting by the pool as a marginalized person when there's some expectation that you make a certain kind of work. I was really struck by the reviews of the Whitney Biennial, where it was the whole spectrum of, "Why didn't you make the art that I wanted you to?"

Jerron: Yes.

Sarah: One review said that it wasn't political enough. One review said that it was too obviously political. You would never be saying this about a different community of artists. It didn't upset me, but it was so funny to see both of those perspectives. None of the big art critics were just like, "This is awesome," which it was. It just was great.

Jerron: There was no analysis on the actual work. It was about, "Why didn't they…?"

Allie: Sarah, you’ve talked about Contralto, your 2017 composition exploring transfeminine voice training, as representing, in retrospect, a culmination of years of previous works of yours. Eight years later, as it continues to tour, what is it like to return to this work? Does it also function as a milestone for works you’ve made since?

Sarah: From a professional perspective, it was a big turning point, because that was the moment that I was able to quit the day jobs that I was doing. It wasn’t entirely due to Contralto, but it was a big part. Regardless of anything else I have to say about that piece, it was one of the things that made it possible for me to actually be an artist all the time, which was what I had been trying to do my whole life. 

I'm sort of of two minds: my impulse is to say that if you had told me when I was younger that this piece would be the one, I would've said you're crazy. At the same time, while I was making it — I still get choked up talking about it — there was a moment when I was editing after I had shot all the interviews, and I was watching something that somebody was saying, and I was just like, "Oh, this is something. I can't believe it." It just was such a moment where I was like, "I'm doing something here." 

The way that it was a culmination of all these things is that it had dawned on me post-transition that most of the things that I was doing as a musician were related pretty directly to my gender or some outlying thing related to this one thing, whether it was physical labor, meditativeness, ecstaticness. I realized it was all feeding into the same thing, and it made sense to me musically that I would be able to take all of these disparate pieces from the last ten years or so and then it all just worked perfectly in this one piece because it's under the umbrella of the thing that made all that music happen.

And so I have a funny relationship to that piece now because I knew I was making something that was good, but I certainly did not expect to be showing it twenty-five times in a year and a half. It was amazing, and I'm still really proud and grateful that that happened, but it was really intense, personally, and very challenging in a lot of ways that I hadn't anticipated.

Jerron: Thank you so much, Sarah, because I just want to reflect on the fact that when you make something to put out into the world and you're really proud of it, and it also affords you a great deal of eyes and passion about your artistry, you can still also have fatigue and want other things for it. I think that allowance for multiple emotions really is important because as an artist, I've been working steadily by commission, and that has often meant that my artistry is always tied to economics in a certain way. Interest is built and wrapped in money. The purity of how I made when I was younger is different. Why I do something or when I do something — is it toward development of a piece?

My recent piece Vitruvian (2022) did seem to synthesize a lot of my own thinking, too, and really bring together all of my ideas. That toured in a way that I didn't expect and introduced me to a lot of different communities. But also, it's funny, the return: it's how repetition deepened for me when it showed because of the audiences. And that's what has prepared me for audience interaction and installation work now, because I would perform for houses that knew me with Vitruvian. I did it in the Bay for my family and friends, and I didn't know how much that would affect me, because I've performed mostly for strangers, and then this Vitruvian has been about family, which was really exciting. So even thinking about sunsetting it, you're like, "Oh, do I? What does that mean?" Vitruvian was my first calling card toward, "Hey, I'm a soloist in this world." It performed for the industry, but it seemed to sidestep the expectations.

Allie: I would love to hear a bit how you approach creating works for specific sites and how that influences the work that you're composing or choreographing.

Sarah: I just got told two days ago that I'm playing a concert in “a giant sunken basketball court in Toronto." Which looks amazing, but it's just my duo is doing a little tour; I haven't done that much really site-specific work. There was one from 2016 for this place in Buffalo called Silo City, which is exactly what it sounds like. I haven't been there in a long time, and apparently now there's a coffee shop and it's a destination, but at the time, it was just this completely bombed out defunct conglomeration of silos. And the silo that I was playing in, I wrote a piece for percussionists, had some kind of crazy decay time of ninety seconds or something. So I wrote this percussion music that would sound dumb in a regular space, but because the space was so reverberant, I had to write really, really simple things, and then the result of it was really amazing.

Jerron: Space has allowed me to exercise chaos, exercise my comfort with chaos, and especially because what I try to engender in atypical spaces or museum rotundas or full-on rooftops is how to disrupt etiquette and how to disrupt the formalism of a space for our purposes for the two hours or the thirty minutes that we're there. I think an example of lawlessness or abandonment through embodiment and the space. I definitely know how it feels. I mean, literally dancing next to a reinvention of an Egyptian temple, just animating something inanimate or being in conversation with something static, being the dynamic variable really is a worthwhile image because it does narrate how we ought to be unfixed. We can be unfixed. Space is really exciting for me because it generates this egalitarian experience. We can get wild and we can get weird, and I just love the provocation of being variable in often understood spaces that are mostly static.

Allie: Are there any projects on the horizon you’re excited about?

Sarah: In August, my friends inti figgis-vizueta and Andrew Yee and I are doing a little composition residency at Bard, just totally DIY. We were and are very exhausted by the lack of representation and support of any kind for trans people, and especially trans women. I hope the college will support it, but it remains to be seen. No money is exchanging hands in either direction, and we're just inviting three composers to come hang out with us for a week. It feels really good because it's one of those things where if we don't do it, no one will, and we're three people of more means than a lot of trans people, especially younger trans people in the arts. Even just the responses that we’ve gotten so far for something that we barely advertised at all was really exciting. I've just been thinking about the political climate and questioning what we are going to do. Because we can't change any of this, and it's just to create insular little communities with each other. Which is so funny because that used to sound like such a line where it's like, "Of course that's true." But now it actually is necessary in a really direct way.

Jerron: Oh my gosh, entirely. Fugitivity and not being clocked by the panopticon, the eye, is really important. That comes through smaller and more intentional modes. I'm premiering an opera May 22–25, 2025 called Sensorium Ex for the Common Senses Festival in Omaha with composer Paola Prestini and librettist Brenda Shaughnessy, and co-directing with Jay Scheib. We’re formal but the relationships that we're breeding and building feel like the stuff that scrappy new artists do or even from the yesteryear, before technological advances. There's just this deep association and love for the work and for the building of it that feels very natural and sidesteps the industrial complex. That's given me a lot of joy and a lot of purpose, and that's leading into the cohorts and the enclaves that you join and become a part of, because they are family.

I’m also a part of a small consortium called INTERIM, which is me and two other disabled artists named Molly Joyce and Christopher Unpezverde Nuñez and helmed by a lovely producer and person named Candice Feldman. Interim is an incubator for where we are deployed to each other in various ways, and that constancy is joyful; to support and to be supported, some advantages when you don't have something necessarily you need. I was just on a call with Molly and I'm supporting her exhibition; she wrote a letter for me; and then Christopher and I are going to get dinner. Candace and I are always in conversation.

The scale at which we support each other or do things with each other through this consortium, its being, I think that's really giving me joy. The presence of people, the presence of your sphere and who you can affect and be affected by is the most important thing. And that's given me joy.


This conversation was recorded via Zoom in February 2025. It has been lightly edited for length and clarity.