After 30 Years, Robert Moses Still Believes in San Francisco’s Creative Potential

When Robert Moses founded the dance company KIN in San Francisco in 1995, he sought to create art inspiring social change — with pieces exploring contemporary issues of class, gender and race.

Now celebrating its 30th anniversary, Robert Moses’ KIN finds itself looking back for inspiration. Moses’ new work “The Kennings,” which premieres Friday, draws, in part, from “A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City,” a memoir published anonymously that chronicles Berlin’s fall to the Russian army in 1945. Moses, a skilled multi-hyphenate, combines dance with music and theater to poetically bridge the old world – and whatever this new world has in store.

During a recent rehearsal for “The Kennings,” Moses talked with KQED’s Brian Watt about the show, its message to audiences and San Francisco’s enduring creative spirit.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Brian Watt: Tell us more about “The Kennings.”

Robert Moses: The idea of that work is that a “Kenning” is sort of the bringing together of two unlikely things to create a new meaning. The conceit is that these actions, and the readings that we find in these works, are left over from a time when artists had forgotten who they were or had betrayed their charge of honesty and trust and then were put into camps, for lack of a better term. It’s a journey through what was found and what’s sort of left over after you betray your charge as an artist.

There was a section where there was a lot of finger-pointing. It looked like accusations, or almost other-ing, and it kept changing who was being pointed at. What are you trying to convey?

It’s always someone else. It’s not me, it’s always you. “It’s me, it’s me.” That’s a refrain that comes up in the work. That finger that gets pointed is about in some ways wanting that attention, that wanting to be seen in what you will do for it, but then what happens when all of that turns around, and the kind of attention you’re getting is not the kind of attention that you want. Or in the way that you want it.

Are you creating this work based on the societal and political moment that we’re in?

Artists are fascist. And again, in this moment, if you’re going to hold me down and tell me that I’d have to give you a dictionary definition of fascism, it’s too slippery to do that.

The idea that you can be in control, the idea that your idea is your motivation, your needs, your desires, the end for you is what we should all be moving towards. In my mind, those are fascist things. So, in a weird way, the artists have a lot in common with fascists.

There’s a portion of the writing, and not sure everything’s gonna get in, where I’m talking about Picasso, Leni Riefenstahl and P. Diddy, and that those impulses are the same impulses that we’re seeing in our government. Picasso, in a way, was a thief. [Riefenstahl] was a propagandist. [Diddy] is a rapist.

You also write the texts and compose sounds. Have you always worked this way?

No, it’s only been in the last 25 years or so that I’ve done this. When I was coming up, if you were a dancer, then that’s what you did. And then you let everybody else do everything else. That fell away from me because I felt like I needed the voice to be more personal. I had to reconsider how it is that my life might get onto a page. And after that gets onto a page, where someone’s life as I see their life might get onto a page, and then how I might breathe life into that and get that onto stage and then how I might get what’s in this body onto that body — which is always a challenge because we all translate in different ways.

I always say that dance is lyric, but it’s not literary. Not in the same way that words are. And it doesn’t communicate in the same way that music does. So we can’t expect it to communicate in the same way.

Why did you name your company KIN?

We’ve always sort of been a pluralistic amalgam of so many kinds of people. It was never going to be the Robert Moses Dance Company or something like that. It’s idea of the family of man, of humanity, of all of us. That allows me the breadth and the wherewithal to create from any direction that I might want to, or I might be able to. But there’s also “ken,” which means the understanding that this is how I understand the world in this moment, and it’s not the same understanding always at any one time.

• Watch an episode of KQED ‘Spark’ featuring Robert Moses here.

What has being based in San Francisco meant to you and your work over the past 30 years?

I don’t think that I could have had a happier home anywhere than San Francisco. When I got here, I thought, “This is the weirdest fucking city I’ve ever seen in my entire life, and I am completely at home here.”

The arts community has been that way all of this time. Now we have gone through different evolutions, and things are changing again. But the important thing is that the spirit of the art world, of creators here, is one of, ideally, of acceptance, even when it gets a little tight around what’s proper to create about.

It still fights to make sure that there’s breath left in that weird little guy or gal, who comes into town and wants to do something that they don’t understand themselves, and nobody where they came from has seen. But you get here and people go, “Oh all right. Cool!” It will always be a creative city, because there’s something about the city that loves the earth that grows fruit that doesn’t come up anywhere else.

Robert Moses’ “The Kennings” premieres Friday, March 14, at Z Space in San Francisco. Details here.