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[0:00] Leah Walsh: Hi, and welcome to The Compass, the podcast documenting the struggles of life as an artist.

[0:05] Leah Walsh: I'm Leah Walsh. My guest today is Catie Cuan.

[0:09] Leah Walsh: She is a dancer and choreographer whose work heavily intersects with technology and robotics.

[0:15] Leah Walsh: She's currently in a mechanical engineering PhD program at Stanford.

[0:19] Leah Walsh: And you can check out her work at catiecuan.com, C-A-T-I-E-C-U-A-N.

[0:25] Leah Walsh: Catie and I met years ago through some Juilliard friends, including her long-term partner Cameron, who was a few years after me in the drama division.

[0:33] Leah Walsh: They were based in New York for many years and then recently relocated to the West Coast for her to go back to school.

[0:39] Leah Walsh: I've wanted to interview her for a long time because I find it so inspiring the way that she's applying her artistry in unexpected ways and carving her own path.

[0:48] Leah Walsh: I hope you enjoy the 142nd episode of The Compass.

[1:09] Catie Cuan: For me, the dark side needs a definition because I think there's a dark side and then there's like a suboptimal side.

[1:25] Catie Cuan: Which maybe those two are a little bit different. For me, I associate the dark side with no flow and being constrained, having no freedom and independence.

[1:40] Catie Cuan: Whether that is self-imposed or it's the boundaries that have been put in place around me. That's what I associate with the dark side.

[1:50] Catie Cuan: So I think of the dark side as a place of no flow, constraint, lack of freedom, and I try not to go there ever.

[2:01] Catie Cuan: And I think what makes that happen, or what causes darkness in my practice is if I'm feeling so overwhelmed or overworked that I have to narrow the scope of what I'm thinking about, or like narrow my own activities, and I start to feel like I'm under the cement weight, and that's when I feel a lack of freedom and independence.

[2:35] Catie Cuan: What do I try to do not to go there? Um, the opposite of constraint and weight is movement.

[2:42] Catie Cuan: And so if I'm dancing or I'm forcing myself to dance, whether it's in improv class or my living room or ballet or rehearsal, um, then I could never be in the dark side.

[2:58] Catie Cuan: So I think something that I try to remember and internalize is if I'm feeling like I might be going into the dark side, the number one antidote to that is to move, to dance and do what I love, and it's a resource that never expires.

[3:20] Catie Cuan: That feeling of gratification and freedom and independence that I get from dancing, it hasn't become less even as I've gotten older or danced in new places, it's never gone away.

[3:34] Leah Walsh: That's wonderful. And it's something you have, I mean, it's your own body, it's something that you have with you at all times.

[3:41] Leah Walsh: Do you ever feel like you get to a place where you can't tap into that, where you're just feeling so lethargic or so burdened that it's really hard to start moving?

[3:56] Leah Walsh: Even though you know it's gonna help you.

[4:00] Catie Cuan: Yeah, I think certainly like when I have to start over in a new community like moving out to California after such a long time in New York City, you're feeling like where can I move or where can I dance that is safe or that will welcome me, and so that can be a bit of an obstacle into that movement place even when I know it's gonna help is like, well, who's gonna be there and what are the politics around that dance class or does it have any outcome?

[4:32] Catie Cuan: Is it gonna be a class that I like? What will the other dancers be like? And even starting with something small like I'm just gonna show up for myself and dance in the morning for five minutes maybe is sometimes enough to realize that it's worth it and I don't need to feel intimidated maybe or like I can't dance or that that is so blocked that it's unavailable to me.

[4:58] Leah Walsh: Right. So after getting moving, is there anything else that you pull out when you're feeling like especially, I was interested in what you said about like when you feel like you have to narrow the scope of your activities or of your goals because there's just too much on your plate.

[5:15] Leah Walsh: What do you do in those kinds of situations?

[5:20] Catie Cuan: Yeah, I think like our attention and our time is the most valuable thing that we can have right now in 2019.

[5:27] Catie Cuan: There's so many things that compete for our attention, whether it's our cell phone or you know the emails we haven't responded to, or the people we haven't spoken with, the opportunities that we aren't pursuing, it's like there's so much that's competing for your attention, kind of around the clock that when I can't distribute that, and when I can't take it fully and like expand it as far as I want to, it's that's what that narrowing is that I'm referring to.

[5:53] Catie Cuan: It's like, okay, now I need to only pick one thing.

[5:57] Catie Cuan: Which is scary because you wonder, I mean, Aziz Ansari has this great bit that he does where he says, I wanted to go out for tacos with my friend.

[6:06] Catie Cuan: And once we decided we were going for tacos, it was like I had to look up the hundred best taco places in New York.

[6:12] Catie Cuan: And Crofts referenced which ones were within me and my friend of a certain distance and would take credit card and were under 20, and it's like this constant awareness of what you're not doing, um, such that you have to focus your attention so closely.

[6:28] Catie Cuan: And I think, you know, it's a necessary evil at times.

[6:32] Catie Cuan: You have to be able to get your work done. If you have a project, you need to be able to finish it.

[6:37] Catie Cuan: But I feel so constrained and overwhelmed if it's like I can't also be looking at the full range of what's possible.

[6:45] Catie Cuan: Um, so it's that back and forth, it's definitely a flexion and extension that I feel when it comes to like abrupt and narrowing of my focus.

[6:56] Leah Walsh: Yeah. Um, so you're in grad school right now.

[7:02] Leah Walsh: Can you tell me a little bit just so the listeners know, like what you're studying?

[7:09] Catie Cuan: I'm in, I'm just about to start the second year of my PhD at Stanford, and all of your PhD.

[7:16] Catie Cuan: I didn't even know that.

[7:16] Catie Cuan: That's great.

[7:18] Catie Cuan: Yes, so my department is mechanical engineering.

[7:22] Catie Cuan: And I spend a lot of time like straddling some different aspects of mechanical engineering, whether it's dance or robotics or design, and I take classes sort of all throughout the campus.

[7:38] Catie Cuan: So I take technique classes in theater arts and performance studies, as well as kind of like theoretical models about movement and trying to really expand like the communities that I'm a part of on campus, because only doing engineering is tough for me again.

[7:58] Catie Cuan: The narrowing, narrowing of the focus.

[8:01] Catie Cuan: Um, so I started, uh, we'll start my second year in September, and that was after living in New York for six and a half years, where I was mostly a dancer and choreographer, but working with technology in my pieces and my live performances and installation works.

[8:20] Catie Cuan: So this feels, being in grad school feels very much like an extension of my previous research, but now I'm a part of a gigantic institution which also has expectations about what that research should look like.

[8:35] Catie Cuan: So it has been a new chapter for me.

[8:40] Leah Walsh: Yeah, academia has its own rules in a way.

[8:44] Leah Walsh: I feel like they have a different language that you have to learn about, yeah, how they want things communicated.

[8:51] Catie Cuan: Right, and what quote unquote output is, which is one of my favorite words.

[8:56] Catie Cuan: When you're a dancer, for example, an output could be a performance piece, it could be a methodology or a way of structuring improvisation, it could be new techniques that you're developing about how to move or think or talk about moving, it could be a new class that you're teaching, right?

[9:18] Catie Cuan: On the academic side, output is completely different.

[9:22] Catie Cuan: It's things like publications, journals, conference papers, like peer-reviewed bits of writing, experiments, experimental structures, the results from those experiments, the software that you use to make them, any innovations that come with the designs about machines that you're creating, and so it's the actual form is completely different, and making that form palatable or legible to the audience in question is a huge major shift in my mindset and also in how I spend my time, really.

[9:57] Leah Walsh: Well, I have so many questions about that, but I don't want to, I feel like I want to go back first just to like get a picture about where you come from and how you wound up where you are now.

[10:10] Leah Walsh: Where did you grow up?

[10:12] Catie Cuan: I grew up in Berkeley, California.

[10:14] Leah Walsh: And did you start dancing at a very young age?

[10:18] Catie Cuan: I did for sure.

[10:19] Catie Cuan: I started dancing, I think when I was three.

[10:22] Catie Cuan: My dad is Cuban, so there's a joke in our family that if you don't know how to dance, you're not really using.

[10:30] Catie Cuan: Um, magic which may or may not be true.

[10:34] Catie Cuan: Um, so certainly socially, you know, when you grow up with that family that's always moving at parties, um, but I took technique class from a really young age, but even in maybe elementary and middle school, sort of convinced myself I could never have a career as a professional artist.

[10:55] Catie Cuan: I had two very competing interests.

[10:58] Catie Cuan: One was the fact that I loved to be a great student, and I felt like there was this external representation that you don't get to do everything you want.

[11:08] Catie Cuan: It's like you're either a dancer or you're a student, which turned out not to be true at all.

[11:13] Catie Cuan: But I think some of the most brilliant people I know are dancers and artists, and so it's just that you, for whatever reason I was associating through movies and society that you can't be a great student and also be a great dancer.

[11:28] Leah Walsh: It's amazing how we pick up on those things at such a young age, those like stereotypes.

[11:33] Catie Cuan: Oh, completely.

[11:34] Catie Cuan: And for I'm trying to imagine like what are the films that really did that to me.

[11:41] Catie Cuan: I mean, some of even like Center Stage where they move away at a young age and she's deciding between going to college or being a professional dancer, as if the two could never happen at a point in Tampa.

[11:54] Catie Cuan: Um, but I grew up dancing for most of my life and then also played volleyball and did track and field, kind of loved to be super athletic and went to school in the Bay Area, went to UC Berkeley.

[12:07] Catie Cuan: I did my undergrad in econ and dance.

[12:12] Catie Cuan: So not engineering, which I have since been reminded of many times. But you did end up in you did end up at least double majoring in dance.

[12:23] Catie Cuan: So I didn't actually major in dance. It was my minor. Okay. But you know, I took the dance community at UC Berkeley was an incredibly small one, and most of those faculty were completely influential in my life, as probably everyone feels when they're going through their first rounds of technique classes. But yeah, I graduated from UC Berkeley, moved to New York City with a pretty hardcore job in consulting. Um I had spent a couple of summers in my undergrad interning at Google and always had this great interest in kind of consumer technology, and I grew up in the Silicon Valley in the 90s, which was you know the huge tech boom.

[13:07] Leah Walsh: Yeah.

[13:08] Catie Cuan: So it was very pervasive in my community that a lot of young people were interested in careers in tech.

[13:15] Leah Walsh: What do your parents do? Are they creative?

[13:17] Catie Cuan: My dad is a cinematographer and a photographer, so a very highly creative person, and moved to the US from Cuba after having worked for many years in Cuba and Paris, you know, pursuing his artwork. And my mom worked in finance her whole life, um, most of her professional life really, and also worked at the university for a time. So they are they are very different in terms of their backgrounds. My stepdad is a lawyer, so I guess my dad is sort of the token artist of my upbringing, but my mother's very creative. She plays music, plays the piano and sings. Um but I think for me, at least in my mind, I kind of had this idea from them too that because they these immigrant family upbringings, they were really unenthusiastic about the idea of me trying to be a professional artist because that seemed less reliable.

Um and for them they felt like they'd worked so hard to come from very humble beginnings and get these major professional degrees that oh my gosh, my kid's gonna run off to New York and try to do something quirky and creative. How will she ever survive? Um I think that's a major immigrant mentality that they were all grappling with because after I got to the city, I had just come off of a summer at the American Dance Festival. I had some significant mentors in my life, like uh Jerry Hooligan, who runs the American Dance Festival, and Hentai Yap, who's was a professional dancer for Bill T and a number of other companies, they were sort of telling me like if you're gonna pursue this as a career, you have to do it now. And you owe yourself the opportunity to try this and see how it goes.

[15:09] Catie Cuan: So moving to New York, I had these like two very competing interests of well, I want to make my parents really proud and happy and do a great job at this highly desirable consulting gig, but I know that in heart I want to be creative and dance full-time and at least see if it's possible. Um ultimately that side won. And I also one thing that changed about moving to New York was meeting a ton of young artists who were pursuing their craft full time. My best friend, one of my best friends from high school, Annie Hart was a cellist at Juilliard, and you know, by I through Annie, I met my now many years long partner, Cameron, and Cameron was pursuing his full-time acting career, and then I met people like Dylan, who was pursuing her full-time acting and production career, and Lillia and Aaron, and just this very long list of people who were making their art their full-time job, and getting some visibility about how to do that, you know, where to find artistic community and how to rent studios and how to get a booking for a show, like all of that was completely foreign to me before I met this coterie of young artists who were making it happen.

And I think if I hadn't had that, I probably would have stuck with what my parents wanted from me because in many ways that was more visible. I mean, it's you can't be what you can't see. That path was more obvious.

[16:56] Leah Walsh: Did you ever um because another thing we talk about on the podcast is kind of the commerce side of being an artist and how we piece that part of it together? Was there a time in those early days when you had that first consulting gig, which I'm sure had a pretty nice paycheck for someone right out of college. Like, did you did you question whether you really wanted to let go of that?

[17:24] Catie Cuan: Completely. Yeah. I mean, we were living, I moved to New York with two roommates, and we had a gorgeous apartment in Williamsburg, and we're sort of living this like right out of college, swanky New York existence. And then on the weekends, I was dancing at Dance New Amsterdam, which is a studio in downtown that actually no longer exists. But I was dancing at Dance New Amsterdam and putting together my first piece, which I showed at the tank. And so I was using all of my free time on my artistic career. And then of course it becomes clear that one is kind of bankrolling the other, right? Like I couldn't have rented all that studio space and paid my dancers and everything had I not had this consulting job.

Um, and part of me thought that would have been a completely sustainable existence, that dance would be my fun weekend thing, um, and I would just continue to work full-time during the week. But I felt really like there would be some opportunities for me to work full-time later in my life if I was so lucky, and that this opportunity to dance was only going to happen once. So I didn't run the calculus I probably could have of what that would what impact that would have, but you know, I think the other thing I learned from being around so many young artists was sort of the hustles that you can take on in order to be able to make your artistic career financially viable. And I was really lucky because I came out of college with a set of skills, you know, basically doing digital marketing and web design with that set of skills that I could kind of do from anywhere and do part time and supplement and buy whatever I was doing in my dance career.

So it wound up being this like parallel path. Um but I think it's such an important topic because sometimes you look to the people who you really admire, whether they're only a few years older than you in the dance world or decades older, and they have what seem to be these completely funded, successful dance companies or dance careers, or like how did that happen for them? And it's a different model for every person, whether they're getting grant support from NGOs, or whether they have some family members who are really helping get their company off the ground. You know, it's all we're not transparent about it enough.

[19:59] Leah Walsh: Yeah, I know a lot of my dancer friends have recently they make it a priority to share their rate information with other dancers, with other freelancers, so that they can watch each other's backs, you know, so that nobody's like undercutting, lowballing the whole community and lowering the pay rate for everybody and that sort of thing. I think it's so important.

[20:25] Catie Cuan: Especially since dancers don't necessarily have a union the way that um actors do, right?

[20:31] Leah Walsh: Right.

[20:32] Catie Cuan: So I did wind up joining AGMA, um, which is the American Guild of Musical Artists, because I did a few operas both in New York and Chicago, and it was really you know, you could only take those jobs if you were an AGMA dancer, and they provided a lot of benefits and retirement, and hourly wages were fixed and negotiated, and those were great jobs to have, and I think made you realize wow, you know, we as a community need to step up and be giving people these jobs that are respectable in the way that they that are worthy of the work that people are bringing to the table.

[21:06] Leah Walsh: Yeah. So you're in New York and you were freelancing with your side hustles and building building your own dances and all of that. Were you always incorporating technology into your work as soon as you started choreographing? Or is that how did that come to combine those two interests?

[21:27] Catie Cuan: Yeah, it felt for me like I was living in these totally different worlds. I mean, one where which maybe everyone feels that way. I think to a certain extent. But if I was living in this world of digital design and working with a lot of new tools all the time and constantly picking up new skills, whether it was, you know, the next Adobe InDesign or figuring out how to use WordPress more effectively or whatever, but and then it's living in my dance world, and I felt like they there was a lot in common for me, say mental model point of view, the way that I was organizing or thinking about my work. And right around this time, like the Apple Watch was coming out, and many more high-fidelity like motion capture sensors that are fairly inexpensive were coming out.

So you probably saw the Microsoft Connect for the Xbox, and they were releasing you know versions one and two, and the Apple Watch basically has these has a tilt sensor inside of it and ways of detecting your emotion and checking accelerations between uh your arm to be able to tell how fast you're running. So we had these widely available, fairly low cost sensors that were telling you something about the body. And one of my mentors, a guy named Sidney Skybetter, who has taught at Brown and Harvard and did his MFA and undergrad at NYU in choreography, he was sort of picking up on this trend and saying, we have technology that is very literally intersecting with the body in order to describe the body in ways that we haven't necessarily before.

I mean, in really high expensive mocap studios, you're using, you know, I think it's VICOM or um Opti-Track for movies and stuff, they've been doing that for a long time, but not necessarily in your home to be able to capture catalog and track the body's motion. And so Sydney was reaching out to me and saying, you know, I think it's really interesting because choreographers who are curious or want to include some tech-based mocap in their pieces, you know, it's democratizing now, it's becoming really widely available. And at that time I was really interested in VR, not so much using it, but talking about it and describing the history of virtual reality, because it turns out that like in the 50s and 60s, you could actually watch movies in something called the Sensorama, where you're sitting inside of this chair and a little wind in your face, and you could smell what it smelled like to be in the dirt and grass.

So it was trying to give you like a multi-sensory experience of watching a film. And I was really looking at pieces like that and just curious about the whole space. And Sydney said, Look, I'm putting together a conference at Brown, it's gonna be a really small group of people, and we're gonna hash out an ethics-based discussion about technology and the body.

[24:26] Catie Cuan: Do you want to come? I was like, Yeah, absolutely. Um so I went to that, and a woman named Amy LeVier's, who wound up inviting me to be the artist in residence at the lab that she runs, which is the Robotics Automation and Dance Lab at the University of Illinois, Habana Champaign. And she said, why don't you come here for a month? You can teach movement class. So I taught choreography improvisation. I will not call it technique, it was not a technique talk. But I taught movement class to the you know eight or twelve full-time engineering students in her lab. I taught that every morning. That's awesome. And then in the yeah, it was a pretty trippy experience. I hadn't worked with one group of students like that for such a consistent duration.

Uh I mean it was four days a week for a month, so I guess along the lines of what someone maybe who's teaching in a more institutionalized space, that's probably like an entry-level class for them. But for me, it was a really dense period of courses. Um I taught movement class to her students, and then in the afternoon I would make work with the robots in the lab. So figure out how to use them if I wanted to create dance or theater or installation work with these robots, and by the end of that time period, kind of had a little bit of an outline, not an outline, certainly a draft of the pieces that I wound up performing and collaborating on with Amy and her students, you know, for the next I would say year and a half. Um I just think that's amazing that that place existed.

[26:07] Catie Cuan: Yeah, Amy herself is a dancer, um, and she studied dance for many years and founded this lab, and they had worked with many other movement practitioners. And Amy's also a Certified Movement Analyst, a CMA, the Lavon Barton EF program. She'd collaborated with many different movement artists over the years through different iterations of her lab and had taught these sort of summer workshops to some of her students. But this was the first instance where she had invited an artist in residence to come and be a part of a lab. And we actually wrote about that a fair amount, you know, before and then right when I got there because it did seem like an unexpected thing. Certainly there are spaces that have a lot of interdisciplinary work between art and technology, whether it's MPAC, RPI, NYU, the MIT Media Lab.

Um, but I think this was certainly very unique in that she was part of an engineering program and inviting an artist to be engrossed in a lab for a year. And there were a lot of risks involved, and uh certainly felt intimidated for me personally at first. You know, what can I offer? What expertise do I have? What can I bring that will be beneficial? Um, and it turns out that a lot of robotics is really similar to the gun's at least, I mean, again, one of those things where I can't separate the way that I think about them. I mean, robots, you have to plan a path for them to be able to move and to do so effectively and efficiently, that absolutely requires an awareness of movement. You need robots to interact with the space around them.

That is certainly something that dancers and choreographers are very aware of. Is what is this body in space doing? What does it look like? How does it how is it perceived by the other people that are there? Um, and just being able to translate motion across, I mean, I've worked with a robot arm this summer in my graduate study, and we call the end effectors sort of the end of the robot, and thinking about if I wanted that end effector to get somewhere, how would I move all of the other joints in the robot in order to create that outcome? Um again feels sort of like a dance task.

[28:27] Leah Walsh: Yeah. Totally.

[28:28] Catie Cuan: But I'm and also like how beneficial. I'm curious, like how open the engineering students were to the classes and stuff, because I I think it's so um so beneficial to have those those things overlapping. I've seen with my my older brother is an engineer, an aerospace engineer, and he and I like grew up doing Shakespeare together, and then at college, like he went towards engineering, like like my dad and like my grandpa, he like went down that path and I continued doing theater, but I I still see it in his career today. He's like the person in his lab who can really communicate ideas and speak in front of crowds and like communicate um what they're trying to do in a way that people can understand, and so I'm sure having those classes probably opened up for their minds to a different way of thinking about their own work.

[29:21] Catie Cuan: I think I mean the students themselves seem to be quite self-selecting, you know, wanting to join a lab that was experimental in that way. They had a prior to be quite open to new experiences and new things, and also it was a community really that Amy was cultivating of trying to show to her students that you can be open, you can have this totally different form of training, and it will be additive to your engineering background.

[29:50] Leah Walsh: Yeah.

[29:50] Catie Cuan: And I also think because I had gone and done my undergrad at a place like Berkeley, which is super high scholastic pursuit of scholastic excellence. I felt like it I could communicate or speak in a way that would make sense maybe to people whose interests were different than me, but where we could relate um on other levels. So but it was a challenge of how do we structure these classes? What is too much, what is too little. Um, and to hear you talk about your brother's experience. I mean, one of the most interesting parts of being in grad school now is that it is a huge component of your work to write and speak about what you've done. And those are inherently creative tasks, right? I mean, it is an inherently creative thing to sit and formulate what was a completely abstract idea into a written, composed sensible thought, and to pass that on to someone who can see it as knowledge and intake it. I mean, that is a creative what and you have to learn how to do that. That is that is a skill.

[31:03] Leah Walsh: Right, exactly right.

[31:05] Catie Cuan: And I think that type of composition, I mean, any type of composition, whether it's dance or screenwriting or research paper writing, I mean, is a form of creation, right? So then, like, what are the rules around what are the bounds or expectations around that type of creation?

[31:23] Leah Walsh: Yeah, and I can all like already in our conversation, just picking up on like the vocabulary words you use to describe like I'm I can just hear that you articulate your ideas so often, probably around what you're doing and what you're interested in, and you've definitely like found a way to communicate it to others, and I'm just like learn, I'm just picking up on the things where I'm like, oh this is these are words that I don't normally use in my section of the world right now, but they're coming from they're coming from your cross sections and your your new environment.

[31:57] Catie Cuan: Oh totally, and it's a challenge. I mean I find coming and reconnecting with a lot of my dance friends and well not even reconnecting but maintaining our constant relationships, it's like we are speaking, the language is evolving all the time, right? Like it doesn't stay fixed. When you talk about movement, it it's every single class or interaction or piece that you see, it's like a new perspective, a new vantage that's being layered on top. And so I feel like the vocabulary in any field shifts constantly, and so you have to make sure that you're staying current with what that vocabulary is. Um I mean in the academic community you have a very long tradition of remarking or make paying reference to the earlier vocabulary and it's adding your vocabulary or your work, your research on top of it.

Um there's a tradition around doing that, whereas maybe in dance it's a little more fluid. You don't have people sort of constantly referring back to vocabularies, but they exist, they're there, they're part of the techniques that you're learning.

[33:05] Leah Walsh: So what what are you really excited about now? Like you're about to head into the new school year, your second year of this program. Um do you feel like it's giving you a framework and the work you get to do within the academic year is exciting and freeing, or do you find that you're still like searching for the free time to to do your extra side projects on the side?

[33:33] Catie Cuan: It's a good question. I when I started here, I was so underwater and so challenged intellectually that I felt very little space to be creative or to be free, even though I was actually still performing, you know, a piece that I worked on last summer during a residency, a robotics residency that I had at a place called Thought Works Arts. Um I was still performing that piece all throughout the fall and like even some of the spring and going flying back to New York on the weekend, you know, to to do a show or something like that. Um, but when I first started at Stanford, I was so overwhelmed intellectually that it was like where. Right. Where and when, you know, I'm like, I am trying to get my homework in.

How will I possibly have space or time or creativity? Um and then I also think like the creativity happens a little bit when you're not expecting it. You know, I took another class in the winter in spring around like mechatronics and sensors, and actually got a huge amount of inspiration from both of those because I was thinking about how we have these brand new flexible body-based sensors that could be used, and they were describing them in many different kinds of like medical applications. And I was thinking, well, that would be a really cool idea for a dance. It's like if you have a sensor which can tell not only someone's displacement, but you can map that sensor to voltage, for example, you turn lights on with your body.

And then if I'm turning lights on with my body and I don't need to be attached to anything, what if I could turn the lights on on the stage with just my body, right? So there's like trying to take something which exists in one world, pulling it out and putting it in another. That that really started to happen for me maybe around winter and spring. So coming into this next year, what I'm really excited about is I have a community at Stanford now. I have an advisor who I'm totally nuts about. And uh a new lab that I'm joining, and I have a number of people I've met at Stanford where we're becoming this community, and we've just given like a name and a title to a new organization. We're the Critical Practice Unit, CPU, which is sort of a play on the computer CPU, like central processing unit.

Um, and the goal is to be able to allow internal and external artists to show artwork and then to have discussions about it, but not to be tied only to theater to have participants from any community on campus, and I'm really excited about being a part of that and like starting it.

[36:27] Catie Cuan: It actually is a reference back to a group at Stanford that got founded 20 years ago called IMG, the Interaction Media Group, and it was a group of students who were creating artwork, showing it to each other, inviting external artists. So I think like founding my own artistic community here is something I'm super excited about. Yeah, and then I mean, Stanford is, it's interestingly situated, right? Like we're in Palo Alto. Um, it's not a major artistic hub. So I'm thinking about, you know, what are we in relation to? We're in relation, yes, to Silicon Valley, but also to like San Francisco, Los Angeles, this rich California place, and I mean California's been grappling a lot with climate. Um, it had drought for a very long period of time.

So, like what there's a huge change in the population here. You know, California is one of the first states where we don't have a majority white population in the United States. It's a much more mixed race place. So, you know, I'm thinking about like what are the histories, politics, environmental influences of being in this place, which are very different than being in a city like New York, and how can I reflect that both in my artwork and in my research? So I'm excited to do more to feel more present, unless I think my first year I was really mourning the loss of New York, and this year is trying to embrace what other influences can exist.

[38:01] Leah Walsh: That's so exciting. I'm excited to hear about how that goes. Um, thank you. We don't have to talk about this if you don't want to, but I was wondering since your partner Cameron is also an artist, an actor, and a musician, how you guys have negotiated being in a relationship as two artists and supporting each other and now dealing with long distance and all of that.

[38:36] Catie Cuan: Yes, for me personally, I mean, we've been together, we met seven years ago, and we've been together for six and three quarters, I'd say, just about seven. So I associate kind of every aspect of my post-collegiate life with Cameron. Um, I am incredibly admiring of his gifts and talents as an artist, and I think admiring, not only admiring, but committed to his success, you know, both personally, you know, meditatively from a wellness and mental health point of view, and also from his artistry and feeling like he is in his harmony and existing in the frequencies that he wants for his artistic work. I mean, I'm just completely invested in that, and certainly feel the same way that he is for me.

We've collaborated together on projects, you know, whether it's short films or we read each other's work, you know, he's written a number of scripts and he'll send me demos before he records his songs. So we have an aspect of our artistic exchange that is very functional, you know, kind of like reading drafts, looking at drafts, providing feedback, you know, being a strategic sounding board about oh, I want to record or mix with this person. What do you think about and what's the timing and how should I work that out? So there's like an aspect of it that I think is quite functional when you're in a relationship where you're both sort of hustling with your artwork, and then I think above that, much farther above that, is the fact that when is trying to hold space and room for this infinite creative spirit that he has and allowing that to proliferate in completely intangible ways, you know, whether that's by loving someone or making them laugh or enjoying a great meal, like the fostering of that creative spirit that has nothing to do with the quote-unquote functioning of the artwork, I think happens completely naturally, right?

It's the fostering of that creative spirit that makes you fall in love with someone or makes you feel that they take you to a higher space, and you can't always say how or why, but it happens, and I think that is something which is like the core of maybe why it always feels like life is new together, why it feels like it all is inexplicable yet completely sensical, um, and being long distance is extremely difficult, right? There are like there are very tangible burdens that come with that, like before we're splitting laundry and dishes, now we don't. Now we're both doing that, right? So again, like taking it back to the functional, yeah, and then it's also that inexplicable I keep using this higher idea, but like the air and the clouds that are floating above, which is when you come home and you want to light a candle and just sit with someone and feel their air, right?

So that is the challenge too that exists, and Cameron and I, you know, what's so fascinating about these careers is like we will have these periods of absolute, it's like the rocket has taken off, and nothing is stopping the progress, right? I think that's very much how I felt my last year in New York from my artistic career point of view. It was like I was showing at places I'd always wanted to be showing and speaking with people I'd always wanted to meet, and it was like every section of the track kept being laid out and the train kept moving forward, right? And so you'll have these moments where that happens, or these periods maybe they last your whole life, maybe they don't. And I've seen that happen for Cameron too, where he's it's every single audition, every room he's walking into, every person he meets, it's like there is no boundary to his acceleration.

And then other times it changes, and you're like, why? And then you're like, what have I ever done? When can I get a yes again? Or you ask yourself, like, am I different? You know, have I changed? Is this about me? When really, and maybe it is, I don't know. I don't know the answer. And I wonder for you, I mean, you've spoken with so many people now who have probably described these periods of utter expansion and then total questioning of like, who am I? I mean, and how do people handle it? Or what do they do? Do they just embrace that crazy up down or I think to? To a certain extent, I think there is something about realizing like, oh what I've done this, this has happened to me before, and it always ends.

You know, I always come out of it and just remembering that the next time it happens. But then it's also it's that balance between yes, thinking positively and taking care of yourself and oh it's gonna change, and then also acknowledging how messed up the industry is and that there aren't any promises and that you know, like there's that balance between being realistic and being positive, and so it's it's an interesting walk. You know what I mean?

[44:34] Catie Cuan: Totally. Yeah. And I think it's hard to compartmentalize that and to say like, okay, this is just about my work, because I mean there's that whole notion that your life is your art, right? And if your art isn't going in the direction that you want, does that mean that your whole life isn't? It's so personal when you're making your art, yeah, from your soul and your body and your brain and your flesh, you know. I don't know, I guess, uh yeah, but that's something that you know comes when you try to when we decide to do this as a career and we're trying to make money from it. So that's what it's really, uh through all these interviews I'm trying to figure out, but I don't think I've come to an answer yet.

It's like when we when we decide we want to make a living from our artwork is when it matters to us, uh, you know, whether other people quote unquote accept it or give us the financial reward that we want in exchange for it, or whether we're, you know, making it solely for its own worth, you know.

[45:40] Leah Walsh: Yeah, I mean, we have a good friend of ours who's at a general down in LA. Um, she's a singer-songwriter, and we've talked a lot about this because I have these two very close friends who are musicians in Los Angeles, and one is very much trying to write the next Katy Perry hit, and his whole practice is around tapping into that specific type of success. And then another good very close friend of mine who's a singer-songwriter, and she's like, I don't care if I make a dollar from my music. You know, I have no desire to be a business person with my music, but I have to make music because it's how I live and how I want to wake up every day and how I want to spend my time. So I think and I'm sure they both grapple with like, is this real music, quote unquote?

If no one's paying me for it, or if no one is telling me that it's new and good, am I being successful? And I think one of the reasons I decided, I mean, I decided to go to grad school for a number of reasons. One was I felt like I wanted a new set of tools, I wanted a new set of skills so that I can make different kinds of work. I mean, something that is so real is to move from being in a sort of like economically disempowered community, truly that's what it is, like the dance community. If you if you aren't honest a little bit about that, I mean it's you're not speaking the truth, and then moving into an engineering community where there's sort of this expectation that like my skills are valued and people care about them and they are adding something to the world.

I mean, it's a completely different mindset, and one that I can't even endure because I've had so many years of like trying to rationalize that the work that I do is important or it will provide some positive impact on the world. So it's a completely weird, weird mental space to be. I mean, and that's something that's really exciting. It if since you found a way to intercept those two things, I'm so curious to see like what you decide to do after you have your degree, where hopefully like you'll be able to have that expectation and your creative path, you know.

[48:07] Catie Cuan: Well, I think one interesting thing now, and this is maybe a little of what Sydney was describing to me very early on, and then I'm picking up on even more and more is like because we're now having a lot of like body-based sensory experiences or ways of interacting with the world, you know. For example, in five or six years, we might not have remote controls, right? To use our television, you could just stand in front of a TV and swipe in between different apps on your iPhone in free space, you know, moving your hand back and forth, you might not even need to be able to click buttons to do it.

[48:40] Catie Cuan: Uh, we already have Alexa that and Siri that you can speak to, like, you don't have to touch any type of interface in order to do that. So if in some years down the line future, you have all of these things that you can control just using your body, not using keyboards or remote controls or whatever, having gestures and movements that are legible to those things, that's a choreographic problem. Yeah, so a lot of dancers have this strange expertise over X number of years about being able to describe and create embodied experience. So will that become the most highly coveted technical skill? Maybe, yeah, I don't know. Um, and I think it just makes for an interesting set of questions about what is a quote unquote skill and what communities care about that.

[49:39] Leah Walsh: Yeah totally, we've been talking for a while and there's a couple short questions at the end that I always ask, but is there anything that we have not touched on that you really wanted to talk about? I mean, I'm curious about place, like having now spoken with, I mean, I know you know Lori Walter Hudson and one of my close mentors, Claire Click, and like people who have kind of taken themselves out of the New York space or the LA space and how they grapple or handle that. I think is the challenge or like something I think a lot about of like, yeah geography can really affect that.

[50:22] Catie Cuan: Yeah.

[50:23] Leah Walsh: But I'm glad that you're attempting to engage with where you are and not necessarily make it something else but figure out the strengths that it has. I think that's great.

[50:39] Catie Cuan: Yeah, and I wonder about like what is the relevance of this work if it happens in a place that isn't a major artistic hub, right? Um, I think about that a lot. And I think another thing that I feel challenged by or curious about is like now that my day to day is to go to class, run experiments, synthesize results, publish papers, get ready for talks, you know, work with other researchers, find collaborators, that sort of thing. Like what is the functional day to day doing to change the work that gets made? You know, does it mean that I have more time or less time to devote to my artwork? Is it all my, can I just call it all my artwork, right? Can I say that everything I've ever made which has some stamp on it that wasn't made before that I'm a part of?

Um, do I get to call that my artwork? And I think also in 2019, where we live in the slash universe, you know, I'm a DJ slash Uber driver slash, I mean, these are not my splashes, but I'm imagining that they belong to someone. Um, what is the threshold for getting to be one or the other? And I don't, I think about that all the time because some of those titles actually have expertise associated with them, right? To call yourself a dancer took me a really long time to be able to say that I was that to people because I really associated the word with like a certain measure of training and eliteness and scholarship and professionalism and being paid to do your work. But does everyone get to call themselves a dancer who puts up a YouTube video, right? So like that's, and then it does it not matter because you're fighting over something that's so not precious anyway.

[52:34] Leah Walsh: Right.

[52:36] Catie Cuan: And people call me an engineer now, and I'm like, I'm not an engineer. I mean, I'm here in an engineering program. I'm not a very, I'm not a very good engineer. I am learning to be better at something that I am not currently good at. And I don't think I would ever call myself that to people.

[52:54] Leah Walsh: Right.

[52:55] Catie Cuan: So I'm, and because we're in this slash world where you need to be able to survive, like at what point do you get to, oh one title over the other is a confusing, heart wrenching question for me.

[53:10] Leah Walsh: No, that is interesting. I struggle with that right now, especially because I'm in, because of my choices to like for us to have a family, I'm in kind of a dormant period in my acting work. So I'm not auditioning, I'm taking a very conscious break to have this day job so that we could have the maternity leave, so we could have the baby, and like, and I don't, I don't necessarily identify as an artist while I'm at my day job. If I'm not currently, if I'm not currently acting, like what does that mean? And I, I know in my, it's one of those things where you have to tell yourself, you know, like that doesn't take away from who I am or what I am or the years I've devoted to training and making and creating, you know.

But in this world where like people are constantly putting out content and you have to be like visible and in the news and what are you working on and what are you working on? It's like, it's, it would be easy. I can see myself if I let myself go there, I could easily be like, am I an actor? Am I an artist? If I'm not.

[54:15] Catie Cuan: Exactly.

[54:22] Leah Walsh: All right. So the last two questions that I always ask are if you do find yourself going to that dark place or that uninspired place. Are there any tangible things that you go back to again and again? I know obviously we talked about just moving, but any books that you reread, music you listen to, places you go that you know can kind of take you out of it.

[54:48] Catie Cuan: Take a shower.

[54:50] Leah Walsh: Yes, take a shower.

[54:53] Catie Cuan: That's mild too.

[54:54] Leah Walsh: Water of any kind.

[54:56] Catie Cuan: Water of any kind. Um, take a shower. I mean, there's certain records that I could listen to in any dark place, and they would be transformative. I think like, I mean, it's kind of a cliche one, but kind of blue by Miles Davis, a day of the week. Going to ice cream, I think what's really important is to have people in your life who remind you who you are.

[55:22] Leah Walsh: Yes.

[55:23] Catie Cuan: And I have an incredibly fantastic group of humans like that who I could call on at any point who would give you the pep talk that you need. I think in terms of dark side prevention, I mean I have a mantra that I say every morning that I wrote on New Year's Day, and I write a new one every year, and I say it out loud every morning to myself. And that's the energy that I try to open the day with. I also mean Twila has a beautiful one about light, light a candle and then blow it out and sort of just feel the vibration in the room would be different. And I think another tried and true one is we tend to be at this very horizontal plane all the time, whether we're walking or standing or cell phoneing. Physically, we're at this horizontal plane. And if you can't shake that dark place, but you go outside and look up and look down, I think it will give you a literal new point of view.

[56:29] Leah Walsh: Those are all great.

[56:31] Catie Cuan: Um, and then the final question is have you seen anything lately of any art form that you want to recommend?

[56:38] Leah Walsh: Ooh, good question.

[56:40] Catie Cuan: Well, I'm biased that Cameron is gonna put out a new record that doesn't sound like anything you've ever heard or experienced. So when that becomes a thing, I will yell it from the hills bar and watch it the title and where it is.

[56:58] Leah Walsh: Okay.

[56:59] Catie Cuan: Um, other great things I've seen lately, which I want to recommend. I, we went to a couple shows and we were in New York, but one was this new show called Wives at Playwrights Horizons, which I think sort of like blew up the whole idea of a play. You have these four different eras, and then at the end they kind of transcend space-time and all the characters weave together, and I would highly recommend that to anyone who's in New York City.

[57:27] Leah Walsh: Great.

[57:29] Catie Cuan: And I think gosh, one more thing I really want to recommend. I mean, we all have plenty of content we could watch these days, but years and years on HBO was a BBC show. Okay. Was a beauty produced, and it starts in 2020, but the bulk of it takes place in 2025, and it's about three generations of a modern British family, and it's so close to our era that it feels a little creepy, but it's just far enough where you start to blur truth versus fiction. And I recently sat down with a researcher at Apple, his name is G. Rod Lophut. We met in Pittsburgh, and he was saying, you know, my work, I'm interested in creating stuff that sits in this three to seven year time horizon. I don't want to make something that will exist in a year, and I don't want to make something for 200 years from now.

I want to make something in this weird three to seven year intervals. And he's a product designer and researcher. And I sort of think that's what years and years did, and I also think that's an interesting void to be a part of, right? Is it's not like what's gonna happen in 12 months from now, but like how can I make an impact in a certain horizon that is real but not so far off that it loses focus. And so I'm, I want to recommend that three to seven year time period.

[59:06] Leah Walsh: I love that. That's a really interesting way to think of what you're making or what you're trying to do.

[59:12] Catie Cuan: Right.

[59:13] Leah Walsh: So I want to just recommend that as a period in time.

[59:16] Catie Cuan: I love it.

[59:18] Leah Walsh: Yeah. Well, Catie, thank you so so much. This was delightful. I'm so glad we had the chance to talk with you. I really appreciate you reaching out.

[59:39] Catie Cuan: Thank you for listening to the Compass Podcast.

[59:42] Leah Walsh: If you find these conversations valuable to your life as an artist and would like to support the ongoing production of The Compass, please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com slash The Compass Podcast. Pledges start at as little as one dollar a month. You'll get access to bonus content, and anything you can give would be greatly appreciated.

[1:00:01] Leah Walsh: Also, if you have a moment, please rate or review in iTunes. Every little bit helps other listeners to find the podcast.

[1:00:21] Leah Walsh: See you next time.