The Neta Dance Company’s upcoming performance, 2280 Pints! (at DTW, May 25-28; tickets $20/$15), is many things. Sparked from Pulvermacher’s response to an installation at the New Museum and borne out of a summer dance workshop at The University of Florida, the piece is a celebration of the company’s 25^th anniversary and a collaboration between dance students and a professional dance company. The hour long piece is comprised of individual sections developed by company members and workshop participants, which have accumulated over the past year from experimentation with buckets. In the performance, a cast of 20 dancers inhabits a playing space of 57 white, five-gallon buckets. I discussed the work with Neta Pulvermacher, founder of The Neta Dance Company, who has created over 75 works and is founder of The A.W.A.R.D. Show! and Dance Conversations @ The Flea.

How did you become a dancer?
I was born and raised on a kibbutz in Israel, a community based on communist ideals. My parents’ generation was amongst the founders. They themselves are from Germany but they immigrated right before World War II. We would work in our little zoo and feed animals, work the land, learn art, musical instruments, and learn to think. When I was 13 I went to a neighboring kibbutz to take a dance class and that’s when I met a wonderful teacher that I’m still friends with. She taught us to listen and choreograph to music and somehow dance stuck.

Why dance?
In some ways because you don’t speak with words. In my upbringing there were so many declarations of ideals that it was so refreshing to have something with very different rules, language which is not verbal. It made me feel that I could say or express things that are difficult to do with words. With music, the ear recognizes a pattern much faster than the eye. It takes a lot more to recognize a pattern in dance because the language is a lot more complex. Dance works with linguistic principles, but it does not have the same exactitude as music. It’s more like poetry. It affects you without having to go through your submission which is another reason why I love it. You could be extraordinarily intelligent or dumb and it affects you without you needing to understand.

What are the origins of 2280 Pints!?
Last May I traveled with 11 of my students who are college dance majors to Israel for a study abroad program. I am originally from Israel and seeing my home country through their eyes was like experiencing it anew for me. I realized how that vitality and intensity of living- both joy and sorrow- is intensified by the fact that there is always an impending sense of violence in that part of the world. Going there with them for three weeks made me aware all over again about the importance of joy and not in a hokey kind of way.  Coming back home to New York City for a short time, I was going to direct a summer dance intensive in Florida for two weeks. I was tired and I didn’t feel like revisiting anything and not sure what I would work on. I read in the New York Times a review of the Rivane Neuenschwander retrospective at the New Museum and saw a picture of her piece, “Rain Rains.” I had to go see it. I walked into this room and it looked like it was raining buckets but in each of those buckets she drilled a hole, so the bucket dripped into identical buckets underneath. It was both visual rain and the sound of rain drops- very beautiful and whimsical. Then on Saturday I flew to Florida and on Sunday I said, “I don’t know what’s with these buckets, but there’s something.” So I went to Walmart and bought 30 $5 plain white buckets. I spread it on the studio floor and not a minute passed and the ceiling began to leak. There was something wrong with the AC. It was very funny.

How does this piece relate to your previous work?
I always think of my work like I’m a scientist in that there is something I research. Being in the studio and investigating is my job. I deconstruct the thing to its smallest ingredient and set it up in a way where it begins to interact and play.  I let it start to happen and I lift my hands and that’s when I see what it is. Inspiration comes from causing and enabling interactions between people, space, matter, ideas, and feelings. Those interactions are always relational. If I’m trying to understand what we make, it’s about the power of the imagination to see things other than what they are in relationship to other things and make an action in relation to another action or object. I’ve made a lot of dances, but this is not me being smart, cool, hip, I don’t’ give a shit anymore. I just want to make something that is vital and open, without any fear. To release a smile in a person’s face, a real deep body smile is a big deal.

Is your ultimate hope for this piece to convey and inspire joy?
It’s much more than joy. It’s a bucket world. It’s a micro world created with buckets, activated by people and music. It’s not fancy. The fanciness of it comes from your ability as a viewer to go with the idea that the bucket will become anything you want it to be. It’s trying to strip human behavior and show it through buckets. The buckets become human and the dancers become more human because of their relationship to them. The imperfections become accentuated because the buckets are uniform. I wanted to make something that would be generous and open. It’s unapologetically accessible without trying hard to be that. To get to that simplicity is a long journey. Mostly I just want you to be enthralled by the end of it that you would join us in the dance party.

2280 Pints!
Performed by: The Neta Dance Company: Courtney Baron, Robin Brown, Karen Harvey, Colette Krogol-Reeves, Meghan Merrill, Lonnie Poupard, Matthew Reeves, Rebecca Warner; special guests; and students from the University of Florida MOD project – a student ensemble directed by Pulvermacher at the University of Florida, Gainesville.

Wednesday – Saturday, May 25 – 28, 2011 at 7:30pm. Family matinee on Saturday, May 28 at 2pm.  Tickets are $20, or $15 for students, seniors and children.

Tickets are available by calling 212.924.0077 or online at www.dancetheaterworkshop.org/Neta_Dance

Popularity: 3% [?]

After six years presenting their Fall Festival at Dance Theater Workshop, DanceNow will bring the Dancemopolitan Festival from October 19 through 22, 2011 at the soon-to-be renovated Joe’s Pub. Since 2003, DanceNow has been presenting showcase format programs at Joe’s that more recently evolved into their Featured Artist Series (with Nicole Wolcott and Vanessa Walters’ premiering Alley of the Dolls: This is not a sequel this week). The Dancemopolitan 2011 Festival will be presented in a similar, but slightly new format for the newly renovated Pub and the best tiny stage in New York City. I recently spoke with Executive Artistic Director and Producer Robin Staff about the shift.

Your move makes a lot of sense in so many ways. Your dance programming at Joe’s has offered up something very different from the typical dance presentations around the city. What prompted this? It set us apart. With everything that is changing we had to take a good, hard look at ourselves and had to see what do we do best. We took our own challenge and asked ourselves how to do more with less. During our process working with Kyle Abraham for Heartbreaks and Homies he labored over creating something special for that space and with very little money (a $3,000 stipend and DanceNow paying for the production costs). I realized that this was where we should be focusing

Heartbreaks & Homies by Steven Schreiber

our energies and once I ran the numbers versus the cost of staying with what we were doing, I realized we can offer artists more to be at Joe’s. This year, for a 5-minute segment artists will get $300 this year and if an artist has more ideas they could do up to three works. I don’t mean to only talk about the shift in numbers terms. It was a perfect storm in many ways with DTW’s shift to New York Live Arts, we had to figure out if we fit within that new identity. It wasn’t easy to move on from DTW and the opportunity we gave many artists to dance on that stage (that they wouldn’t have otherwise). But, I learned about the renovations during Heartbreaks. They showed me the pictures and it’s going to be so elegant at Joe’s. No more standing room, which was a problem for dance when it gets above 150 with people standing at the bar. Now, it will be able to seat 180 people. The dressing rooms will be great and they’re going to work to give us more rehearsal space for the Featured Artists. We’ll have some access to the Public’s rehearsal spaces. We did it in green room for Fraulein and The Whiz, but now there will be renovations to the space and they’ll be able to work in a proper studio. And, Joe’s has been very generous with letting the featured artists get as much time as possible in the Pub. So, we planned to try and do The Festival in synch with their renovations. They’re going to roll us out with them as DanceNow Joe’s Pub. Our plan will be to go back to the September dates once the renovation has been rolled out.

Nicole Wolcott in Fraulein Maria Photo by Steven Schreiber

Since the beginning, DanceNow (NYC) has thought outside the box and brought new audiences to dance in your own way. You’ve been very successful with your Doug Elkins’ Fraulein Maria, Kyle’s Hearbreak & Homies, David Parker’s Showdown and Nick Leichter’s The Whiz. You’ll have David & The Bang Group back for their newest show Misters & Sisters in June and this week you have Nicole Wolcott and Vanessa Walter’s Alley of the Dolls (This is Not a Sequel) on Thursday and Friday. They’re something like Dancemopolitan staples, aren’t they? Back in 2006, Nicole Wolcott and Nicole Berger did a show Thrash N’ Rock and we always wanted to bring it back and develop it. Nicole has been an artist that I’ve wanted to promote and help for a long time. She’s so talented and I’ve been watching her since she started making work while dancing with Larry Keigwin. And, David… Well, he is so suited to the stage to the cabaret format. Also, in thinking about the shift for the Festival, I wanted to be sure the Pub would embrace us. They pretty much let us do our thing. Back in the Thrash N’ Rock days we were doing Dancemopolitan almost every month and it got to be too much. Then we cut it down to about 3-4 a year.

So you’re strengthening your partnerships. You’ve got other partnerships in the works outside of NYC. This is so valuable for your artists. You’re able to offer more than just one-off shows now. What else do you have in going on? While we’re trying to up the partnership with Joe’s I’m also now curating the tiny dance program at Steelstacks

Showdown Photo by Steven Schreiber

in Pennsylvania and it’s the same thing. It’s a music venue with some dance. That will be DanceNow SteelStacks. With a connection between Joe’s and Steelstacks, we’ll be able to take some things that premiere at Joe’s and take it out to PA and other times I’d like to try things out at Steelstacks and bring it here. Once Joe’s was on board for the switch for our Festival, the next thing was whether our funders would embrace this shift. Most of our money comes in for the Festival and later for the Dancemopolotan Series. NYSCA, Mertz, Jerome – they all said this was fantastic and would be great for our organization. We will continue accommodating an equal sized audience and eventually it could serve more, if it flies and we will be able to present more artists and give each artist more. We have all been begging for another Fraulein or something that could run, as a holiday series, for a couple weeks. In addition to fee, Featured Artists get a residency at Silo (at Kirkland Farm in Pennsylvania) for a couple weeks, and some are on the guest teaching roster at DeSales University and they might get a commission from DeSales to set work on the students. So, we’re shifting into increasing opportunities for artists in multiple venues. We’re thinking about developing new avenues for teaching and developing and maintaining long-term relationships with artists.

You’ve been able to foster new voices and to support some of these long-term relationships. How does this shift enable you to do that better? So, the festival as it was at DTW was always a testing ground for what we might want to put up or grow at Joe’s. It also simply let us see what everybody was up to. So the Aha! moment came when I realized that if we’re looking for work to bring TO Joe’s why didn’t we look at it AT Joe’s. For instance, I’m looking at an artist’s work that she’s done it out of the city in another cabaret space. I have the DVD, but I’d rather see it on the Pub stage. We’re also talking to Monica Bill Barnes about her SnowGlobe piece. She had all this stuff on the cutting board that she wanted to put up at Joe’s so she’ll probably be doing some of that during the festival in the fall she’ll show another segment. So the structure of the festival, because it’s Joe’s and we only get 55 minutes a show, is that we narrowed the time limit down to 5 minutes a work. We need to make sure we can get 10 artists in there and artists are always not working within the time limits. We believe in this editing process. Pieces get so wordy and sometimes work goes on and on and it kills the piece. Less is more is a challenge for someone; to make it say something in short time. We’re keeping the DanceNow Challenge again. We want it to be suitable to the space and the winner will get the $1,000 fee and a Silo residency and Gina Gibney will provide another 20 hours of rehearsal space. Like Ellis Wood, last year’s challenge winner, she’s been working on that for a couple years and she’s been developing it out here into a full-length work.

The Whiz Photo by Steven Schreiber

And, you’re making some changes to your RAW program, which provides newer artists with their first entry into DanceNow. Yes, we did do the Raw events and we’re shifting that to be more of a mentoring project. This is a response to a difficult situation when you’re seeing work that year after year isn’t ready for the stage and the artists continue to come back year after year. How could we help them? We brought several mentor artists, including Hilary Easton in to work with them to develop their work. It was great to sit with them and listen to them and ask them questions. Most of them asked how do I create a network and get more than a couple people they know and love to see their work. So we took a handful of artists from Raw and asked them to send proposals for Joe’s this year, so that we can continue funneling new faces and familiar ones and see work that we’re considering to develop.

There’s one more thing I wanted to say. My Aha! moment after Kyle’s show was pretty similar to the Aha! moment I had when joking around with Doug about doing a modern dance version of The Sound of Music. Sometimes, it’s the whim of an idea – this is crazy fun and maybe we could do this – that proves very fruitful.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Stephen Petronio’s acclaimed work “Underland” has its NY premiere this week (April 5-10) at The Joyce Theater. It was originally created for the Sydney Dance Company and received its world premiere at the Sydney Opera House in 2003. This is Petronio’s first restaging of the work since its premiere. The reconstruction was funded, in part, by the NEA American Masterpieces program.

I’m interested in how the American Masterpiece award allowed you to bring this work to the US. Can you talk a little bit about how you first came to make this piece? Underland was made in Australia. It was exciting to be given exactly what I needed to do what I’m capable of. They asked me what I wanted to do and then worked to make it happen for me. I devised a work with Nick Cave’s music and Tara Subkoff’s fashion and we were able to work with video. I had all the elements that I like to work with. I believe dance should be a conglomeration of things we have in the real world. In America, I often have to choose between set and music, or text and costumes. For this, I was given what I needed to make what I wanted. The Sydney Dance Company was twice as big as my company at the time. I had 8 people and they had 18 and the work went to the Sydney Opera House. I got to make this work and then it doesn’t get seen in America. In other countries, I get to work with some of the biggest and best companies and work on a big scale. In America, my company is small to medium sized. For various reasons, Underland didn’t get seen in NY when Sydney came here in past years. So, when the license came back up from Sydney, I grabbed it and applied to the Modern Masters program and received support to implement this work (and) so NY could see it.

Photo by Sarah Silver

How did you transition Underland into your own company? In Sydney, those dancers are hysterically, well trained and they really pushed me. They have great classical and modern technique. I got to address my interest in their use of the vertical axis and the speed of the feet and they were able to do the spherical exploration of the upper body and limbs that I love. They took it to the nth degree! In taking it back to my company I wondered how it would go and my dancers rose to it. My dancers understand my language better and they give it a different subtext. The main thing about shaving it back has to do with numbers of dancers and not a loss in quality. In Sydney, I had the assignment of making a dance for 18 dancers. Often, I’ll duplicate roles for multiple dancers to expand geometrically. I’ll set 2 dancers against 2 dancers to make a bigger picture. We don’t have understudies in my company. I learned early on that if only one person learns a role and is injured, no one knows it. So it was a simple to cut down from 3 people to on1. I think of it as a lean mean version.

Let’s talk about Nick Cave and your collaborators. How’d you get Nick on board? Sydney. Leigh Small was the ED and she made it happen. They got me by saying what would you want to do and I said if you can get Nick Cave I’ll do anything. And, they did. He allowed me free reign of his catalog and he gave us all sorts of back tracks and under tracks. With Tony [Cohen], his longtime producer, we were able to mix bridges with those source tracks ourselves. We got the guitar lines pulled out from The Weeping Song. Who gets to do that? So, we’d mix bridges leading into and out of these epic songs. Nick’s Australian and he’s very generous and he’s worked with Tony as a producer for a long time. I know his whole family was there in ’03, but I’m not sure if he’s seen it. With Ken Tabachnick, he has worked with me for a long time and he’s been everywhere. He’s the Dean of Arts at SUNY/Purchase and he’s got an eclectic mind and he’s been doing lighting for me for many years. He created the visual design with a triptych of screens for video and we devised the landscape of images that went onto those screens. Ken and Mike Daly created the visual vocabulary that filled the dance. Tara at the time was at the height of her work that involved taking vintage clothes and pulling them apart and putting them back together again. They go from very dark to very light with lots of color in between. It’s gorgeous.

You recently choreographed a musical. This was your first, right? How was that for you? Yes, “Prometheus Bound” for the American Repertory Theater. It premiered already and is running. It was directed by Diane Paulus and Serj Tankian of System of a Down composed the music. Steven Sater wrote it and he’s a genius. Diane is amazing. I got involved because it’s not on a stage. It had a similar lack of proscenium, so it’s immersive like The Donkey Show. The audience has to keep looking around to find out where the performance is and that goes right back to my roots. I’ve taken my company onto the proscenium stage and I’ve been adamant about that. But, it’s exciting to go back to an immersive experience. Steven wrote Prometheus as the first prisoner of conscience – that Zeus has imprisoned him for his beliefs – and the show is partnered with Amnesty International. So, each night they dedicate the show to a different prisoner to make people aware of the cases and to hopefully incite action and remedy something. It’s theater at its best. Plus, I had no experience working in theater. For one thing, Diane was the boss and that was interesting and fun and she’s a great collaborator. It was interesting to not have the last word on everything. My work is not narratively driven, so to watch her mind work that way was revelatory. I’m kind of allergic to that, to making narrative work, and it was great and new for me.

I have to ask you about Hampshire College. As a fellow Five College alumn, you’re a beloved poster favorite up there. How was that for you? I loved Hampshire. It was amazing for me. I went there to study medicine and discovered dance and they gave me a full scholarship and sent me to NY to study for a year. I was an improviser and when I met Steve Paxton, I was so inspired. That exploration of movement language and an improvisational aesthetic was exciting to work with in relation to the more traditional virtuosity of the Sydney dancers. I was interested in the context where you think of the world as a 360degree composition instead of a flat surface. So, merging that 3 dimensional spherical view with the 2-dimensitonality of the proscenium stage is a significant investigation for me.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Choreographer Julian Barnett’s Super Natural is at DNA thru Sunday afternoon.  Jeremy mentions the show in this week’s roundup.

You’ve mentioned that a lot of artists seem stuck or tied to reliving Rainier’s No Manifesto; that many of today’s American artists are struggling with a rejection of form. How does this relate to your work right now? I think my work heavily utilizes form and I’m not resistant to using the body. I think I have a deeper understanding of how to use the body now, than I did before. I like movement and exploring ways to see how movement can come about.  It can come from outside of the body – historical or personal – but it always starts from that seed in the body.  I see my work in phases. I feel like the way that I’ve used movement in the past is different than how I’m using it now. It’s broadened to a really exciting place. I see movement in everything, in stillness. I’m not afraid of, rather, I enjoy the mechanics of the body. I enjoy seeing how the mechanics of momentum can be dissected into 32 categories. How that movement can resonate spatial and conceptual relationships.

How did this artistic broadening happening? It most clearly shifted in the past four years.  One clear thing: I started noticing what I didn’t like. There’s something about a familiarity and there was something that was redundant in the works of others and my own and my own familiar, habitual impulses. It was historical in my own doing and watching.  Really, when I began to work with Wally Cardona, he introduced a landscape of movement philosophies and use of the object that opened up a window into how ‘dance’ can be something from nothing. Dance isn’t something that isn’t familiar to a specific form. It is my deviation from specific forms of my training – hiphop, breaking, ballet, etc.  I started questioning: why do I feel like I want to move this way.  I took that and found a desire to seek a re-definition and  a new definition for my own authentic movement. That made me push a little harder. It takes time to challenge yourself out of the familiar. That effort does cultivate, new ways of moving. There’s this whole, exciting relationship to seeing how I can use the body, not being afraid to use movement. I used to feel alone or not appreciated in wanting to dance.  I mean, the context of my 20s was really vast. It was wide open. It was a time for gaining experience and learning how to perform and taking on these jobs and figuring out a way through this city. I wanted to make work and saw all this work around me and questioned how I fit in. My context was this weird thing where I needed to know which context I was going to be in. I was exploring which one I wanted to be in. It wasn’t until about 4 years ago when I relinquished that context.  It’s interesting, there was this moment when I was 26-years old, at Hubbard St. trying to chose for dancers for my work. I’m looking at headshots and watching barre and they were all amazing dancers, but I remembered thinking that none of them could do what I do. That was a realization when I understood that I naturally gravitate towards personal movement and it takes explaining and not just technique.

How does that effect who you work with now? It’s a long process finding dancers. I do make my work in relationship to where it’s going to be presented and how that’s going to be seen. In Super Natural we had a long audition process/open rehearsal where I found Phina.  We did structured improvisations for 4 hours a day.  I’d ask questions like: How do you divert momentum? How do you stay connected? How do you do this and add performance in relation to something? How do you perform a transcendent solo? How do you perform a solo about love in an unfamiliar way?  I’m looking for people who can make decisions and who share an understanding of the physical, spatial relationships. I’m looking for a specific kind of intelligence that looks for everything.  I want to performer to be able to place those elements in the moment themselves. I’m still figuring that out. I love the people I’m working with right now.  When I go back in January to Holland. I have to make a work on the students there.  I had to figure out: How do I make this relevant to them? Do I hold an audition? Do I have a workshop? Do I choose the students I notice? So, I saw several shows and invited the students who stood out to come to a physical playdate.

So, you’re in a Master’s Program in Dance Unlimited, ArtEZ’s Choreography Program in Arnhem. How did you choose this and get there? I wanted a period of time to stay tethered to NYC, but branch into Europe. The Amsterdam program was interesting and I’d talked with Jeanine (Durning) about it. It had an isolating structure to it. Two people. Independent practice. Rotterdam seemed more technical and I started building a correspondence with Joao (da Silva) at DU. There is a great NY-related history.  In the library, there are great videos of Ishmael Houston-Jones, Meg Stuart, and Yoshiko Chuma.  I applied and got a great feeling. The audition was really a two-day interview. The first day we were surprised and told that we had to teach a class to the 10 other auditionees – 20 minutes, on the spot. It gauged how we communicate? We had one group improvisation and then we got dressed and were interviewed.  After that, there was a individual interview with the entire panel when we talked about ourselves and our work. There was this one moment that triggered a noticeable shift in the room when I talked about how I wanted to come because I wanted to fail. Everyone shifted their butts and cleared their throats and wanted to know “What do you mean by fail?” I  said I wanted to have the luxury to go where I don’t know where I am going.  “What would you need to fail? What are the elements that you need to fail?” I wasn’t sure. I knew I wanted to go beyond my comfort and they kept trying to get more about how I viewed failure. I didn’t know because I think it is something that you aren’t regularly confronted with. I think it is something that you become aware of. I couldn’t anticipate my failure landing points. I could only aim for not-failing and if I did, to have the space to recognize it. Then I got a scholarship and was able to go.

How is graduate study impacting you? It has been fantastic. There’s time to read, write, talk and then apply it into practice, into making and exploring. It’s changing me quite dramatically. It’s changing how I write and through practice becoming a better writer. It’s also opened up a new way that I experience writing. I’m more cognizant of the potential that writing has versus  my previous view of it as a burden. It’s fascinating on from a cultural perspective.  I’ve been asked why did I need to leave New York.  But, I think I’m staying tethered and I have this sensation that I’m bringing it with me. It’s right alongside me there.

Popularity: 3% [?]

The Lar Lubovitch Dance Company will present a one-week season at the Baryshnikov Arts Center (BAC), November 18–21, 2010.  The program features Legend of 10; a revival of his acclaimed North Star; and a new production of the company’s most recent premiere, Coltrane’s Favorite Things.

I’m used to your work being in much larger spaces, though I know you were at DTW a couple years ago. What prompted a season in as intimate a space as BAC?

Actually, if you look at the history of the company, I’ve always worked in a variety of spaces. I enjoy how works look different in different spaces. It gives it all a different gestalt. I wanted to intimacy. I often venture all over the city looking for different spaces to perform. I have a history of creating theaters where none existed. DTW is one I originally turned into a theater.  It was originally a rehearsal studio for the American Theater Lab. I asked the owner, who happened to be Jerome Robbins, if he’d let me use it as a theater for a series of performances and brought in lighting and bleacher seating (that I rented) and that space eventuall turned into Dance Theater Workshop. Jeff Duncan, one of DTW’s founders, saw it as I converted it into a theater and he turned it into DTW. Then, a year later, I converted a scenery storage space in the East Village and that became the La Mama space. When our touring grew and performing in more proscenium spaces became financially necessary, that led to 13-14 years at City Center during the 70s and 80s. But, different venues have always been in my thinking.

You are known for keeping a close choreographic relationship to the music you work with.  For this season, you have Coltrane, Glass and Brahms. Were you thinking about the various musical selections as part of a single program?

I’ve always used a wide range of music in my programs. I’ve done an “all jazz” and an “all Mozart” program. Both times I’ve thought it was a terrible mistake. I know that today it is considered old fashioned to make dances to music, but it is what I’ve always done. I’ve always shown a range of music. The program includes a wide range of years from 1978 to Meadow from 2001, Coltrane from last year, and Legend of 10 to Brahms Piano Quintet, which is quite romantic – lush and poignant.  I do what I do because I’ve found my truth as an artist and it runs to the bone of my integrity and in my 43 year history it’s as truthful as I can be. My relationship to music is a personal expression. I listen to a lot of music. I’m always looking for music. I attend a lot of live music events. Sometimes I come to it by recommendation, but, more often, I am interested in a specific composer and go through their music. It’s much easier online now. I’m focusing on Brahms because I wanted to do a chamber piece and went through many other composers and then ended up back at Brahms. I had developed a work several years ago to Brahms. Balanchine had once claimed that it’s impossible to choreograph to him. Those kind of statements give me an itch that I have to respond to. So, I choreographed A Brahms Symphony in the 80s. This particular Brahms piece provides an emotional range and a constancy of sound that creates a very fluid aural environment and, choreographically, I’ve been creating works with a constancy of motion and this is in that vein. It doesn’t mean constant music; it’s more like a ribbon caught in a wind. The legend in Legend of 10 refers to the codes and symbols by which one reads a map and the company of 10 dancers. For this work, the dancers are cartographers who are mapping the music.

You mentioned your 43 years of working and being truthful to yourself as an artist. When did your truth begin presenting itself?

When I came into the dance world there were a few very extremely distinct voices. Graham, Limon, Balanchine, and then Cunningham.  The idea that an artist had to find their own voice was implanted early on. It’s difficult to say how one arrives at one’s own voice or how one distinguishes one’s truth. I think it comes from being honest about what stimulates your inner eye and shying away from the commentary by others who may not see clearly what it is you are doing and spend more time discussing what you could or should be doing. I don’t think one arrives at a singular place and stays.  It shifts; your truth shifts. After choreographing for some years, I found it illuminating to see the first work I’d ever made. I started at U. Iowa and, even coming to dance so late, I made a dance right away.  Someone made a film of it. I did it to audition for Julliard.  Once I started studying dance, I realized I had to go to New York, and when I found that I had to submit a dance, I made one up.  The filmmaker brought that back and I’d not seen it before.  I saw that I already had a voice and could appreciate that, years later it was still there – even after all the influences of the dance world.

You see a lot of work.  You’re always out seeing dance.  Where do you think dance is now after several decades?

That is a many-layered questioned.  Lifers like me – people who have been doing it for a long time – we have to put on blinders to make it through this path sometimes. I do see a lot of dance, many others don’t.  I think it has grown exponentially in creative directions. There are many more things called dance than there used to be. That is thrilling.  But, it’s also lost its civic direction because the amount of ideas have sent it in so many directions that many people don’t know what dance is. I think dance is in a holding pattern; I don’t think we are at a high point and it’s not quite  a plateau.  There’s a higher plane coming where it will have a larger resonance.  Right now, it feels as though so many people are reaching for difference for it’s own sake. Rather than a forward motion, we’re forgetting our history and re-inventing things. I do see a lot of work and see younger dancers and younger critics getting excited and think “I’ve been there and done that.”  There was a time when new was new and that’s very exciting. When someone does something new and original I want to be in a seat and seeing it. The focus on new takes away from accurate, specific, craft.  We lose our grip if all we focus on is “new-ness” rather than honing in to focus on our work and creative faculties. New will give birth to itself.

This burden of innovation often makes us forget quickly, which makes the NEA’s American Masterpieces: Dance program so interesting. It brings us older works that many of us haven’t ever seen, have no memory of. That’s how North Star came back into circulation, right?

Yes, most of us don’t want to spend time, energy, and money to bring old stuff back. But, there is a value in bringing things back. But, I probably wouldn’t have chosen to bring North Star back. Some one else asks. Some one else is identifying the demand.  But, it’s interesting to see these works in their new context. We try to keep every step the same so that it is the time in which we’re doing it and the dancers who are doing it that are different. These are very different times than late 70s. Counterculture was burgeoning and, it seemed, that thought was changing. We thought societally, that everything was changing.  And now, that is lost.  It’s in a very different light. It’s removed from how unusual the work was, when it was first done. “North Star” was one of the first concert dances to minimal music. Since then, who hasn’t choreographed to Glass or Reich. At the time that was new. Now, it has to be taken at face value. I can’t tell if that’s good or not.  But, we’re keeping it in the company repertory.  The AM grant pays part of the fee to presenters if this dance stays on the program.  So, it stays.  It helps with touring because it supports presenters and helps them get us there. That’s the business of dance.

Popularity: 3% [?]

1. What is it about the wilderness that prompted this work? Or was there something else?
It is hard to remember now what prompted the work. I had been playing with the word “wilderness” for a while. I had written it down on a piece of paper and had it tacked up on a board. I thought it might make a good name for a piece and thought I was mostly in love with just the sound of the “w” and the “ld”. At around the same time, I was watching a lot of Kurosawa–and was especially struck by Ikuru–and I had come across this film by Reygadas called “Japon.” And the connection for me in both films was this theme of men coming to the end of their lives and how in preparing for that crossing they completely rearrange their relationship to their own lives, their own actions/work, selves. And so, I was thinking about boundaries and crossings and transformation–and that began to be attached to this word I had tacked up on my board. I had also just finished premiering a piece at DTW called “Center of Sleep” that took place within an immersive sound and set installation, and I was really curious about creating a situation in which the performance environment was not only unfamiliar for the audience but was also, in important ways, unknown to the performers. To create a meeting ground… where the performers had to “read” the audience to make their way through the piece. These themes of crossings/boundaries/unknown situations seemed really pertinent to me about the essence of live performance–the audience walking into an unknown situation, the spaces between performer and audience, performer and space, audience and space, etc–and Wilderness became a way of talking about this in a formal, structural way.

2. What excites you most about making interactive work? I read the DTW blog about the Coffee and Conversation talk which suggests to audience members to let the notion of the ‘fourth wall’ go.  For “Wilderness,” were you intentionally removing the ‘fourth wall’ or were you thinking in different terms? I don’t think of the work in those terms: interactive or fourth wall. The Fourth Wall for me is a theatrical term that I don’t feel I have a relationship with right now–mainly b/c “fourth wall” is flat and square and picture-based, and I have been dealing in relationships. I think my questions very early on when I made Cartography in 2002 at The Old American Can Factory were about proximity. I wanted the audience to be close to the material. I wanted to change the physical relationship to the performer. So we played with great distance and with close proximity. And later it became a question about perspective, a freedom to relocate and reframe. To be active in how as an audience member you structure your experience by where your attention takes you. Not just by what you notice in the space but how physically close you place yourself and how you engage with it with your own presence and how that alters everything in the room for the performers and the other audience members. I wanted to create a situation, a scenario and to be clear about what that was.

3. What are essential aspects of a successful collaboration for you? For me, collaborations have been about discovering people and then finding a language. I tend to work with people b/c there is something in their approach or their way of thinking and making that I am attracted to or find infuriating or I am curious about. I like being challenged and I am often most curious about my negative reactions. My process tends to be to pile everything on, be pretty accepting of all input and then go about severely weeding. So, I suppose I need to work with people who are not too precious about what they make and who can talk about it incessantly. For me, it is all about the editing process and I am slow at it b/c I really like to consider every aspect of it. I think that can get exhausting but that is how my mind works. I never want to say “no” right away. I am interested in the possibilities I have not considered until I am absolutely convinced of a choice.

4. You went through a kind of, for want of a better word, “identity” change not too long ago. Or your work did. Or your working name did. What prompted a canary torsi? Is there something about new media and/or new mediums that serve you better? There were a few things that prompted a canary torsi… I was having a very visceral reaction to what I felt was a pull to institutionalize: to have a 501 (c) 3–to have a company. I didn’t want a company. I so wanted to divest myself from all of that baggage on the work. I love the people I work with and I didn’t want to be their boss. I had called the group Yanira Castro + Company for years out of laziness. It seemed like that is what you did and I was young. I was at a point where it just made no sense to me anymore…I had a real aversion to it… so I decided for a name change. Only to get on the other side and feel: what the fuck! A name! The responsibility of finding the “right” name was clearly impossible… so like a good post-Judsonite… I took to the roll of the dice. And hence the name. I wanted it to be absurd b/c it felt like a ridiculous situation. But like all experiments, it came to have meaning: The Canary was a popular dance style in the 16th Century (http://www.streetswing.com/histmain/z3cnery1.htm) and one of the meanings of “torsi” is a “truncated or unfinished thing.” It was completely chance but also fortuitous… a canary torsi… an incomplete social dance.

About new media or mediums… it wasn’t so much that they serve better but that I had an interest in them, and I was interested in how encapsulated performances are in time and space and I wanted to find a way for the work to seep out of those boundaries a little bit. The fictional Twitter feeds of two lovers for Dark Horse/Black Forest served as a way to access the piece outside of the performance space and time and to have a relationship to it prior to coming into the work. It also meant that someone anywhere could have a lense into it. With Wilderness, we wanted to create a video game to accompany it. We ran out of time and sources, but I am dedicated to the idea of creating alternate worlds for a work that can be differently accessed.

5. How has your view of yourself as an artist changed in the past 10 years? 20? When I started making work I was young… right out of college… and I think my attitude was to try as many things as I could. So, I dabbled and made many 10/15/20 minute dances as experiments in a style or form. I can say that now looking back, but at the time… I was just responding to what I was seeing. It wasn’t a conscious “education”, but in hindsight… that is how you go about honing a craft. Because I was not really trained as a dancer and I was not very interested in dancing for anyone… I was just fascinated by how dances worked. I feel like my first 8 years in NYC was 101. And then at a certain point, I got bored and I think that was when I started asking better questions. And in many ways, that is when I feel I really started making my own work–in 2002 with Cartography. The work, after that, was not so much a reaction to what I was seeing but to my own questions. With time, those questions get more and more specific and personal. I am sure there will be a time when I am bored of my own questions as well and I don’t know what the next thing will be after that… what propels after that. But I trust that is the nature of making work for an extended period of time…constant relocation.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Keely Garfield is in the midst of her latest “eruption” (as Claudia LaRocco calls it) at Duo Multicultural Arts Center (DMAC) this weekend. “Twin Pines” runs tonight and tomorrow at 8pm. For those wary of modern-day hallucinogens, Keely serves up a good, chemical-free, inducement of altered states.

I remember doing a 10-day Vipassana meditation many years ago and actually had the entire treatment for a violent HK style action movie done in my head half way through my time there. So what was it about the jackhammer in your mind during your retreat that prompted this latest investigation? Hmm…um…well…where was I? Er…god.  Here.  Ok.  And then, the dropping into the space between my ears, between I hate him and I love her.  Between long, long ago and the very far away distant distance.  What would it look like to make a dance that looked like the contents of my head?  The stage suddenly overcrowded with rundown runamuck random riots and then belligerently boring bits. A gestalt and a quietude.  What would happen if I met the buddha on this road? Would I kill her?  And then it was irresistible.  I had to know what an actual moving meditation would look like, feel like, sound like and where it would take me that was different from where I had been before.  Wake up!

I recall seeing you on 4^th St. soon after reading a FB post about you hauling a tree stump up many stairs this past June. How did working at DMAC impact the work you made? Twin Pines happens on all three floors of DMAC.  To be clear.  “Stump” is performed in the third floor studio and “Flesh” occurs on stage. In between, “Mulch Milch,” a film created by myself and Brandin Steffensen after the tornado that brought trees down outside our house in Brooklyn blocking the front door, plays on the second floor at intermission.  During my extended residency at DMAC, there was construction going on.  Jackhammers, literally, accompanied our every move.  Dust rained through the cracks in the ceiling.  One day I thought it would be wonderful to have a tree in the piece. When I went down into the street they were piling up stumps of a tree that was being cut down and hauled out of the marble cemetery.  One by one, I carried 7 of those stumps up five flights of stairs.  All the time chanting to myself, ” I have no body, I have no mind, I am just the breath of life…”  My heart nearly burst through my chest and then I realized that even though I now had my tree, I had no guarantee that they would make the piece any better.  Today, when I went to buy cat food – there is a phantom cat in the work given voice to eventually as part of the soundtrack by Sasha the resident DMAC cat – the guy asked me if I wanted a free box of tissues and he handed me a box with a picture of twin pine trees on it. DMAC is a channel, a place in between worlds; It’s very special.

You’ve got a great crew with you once again. What does collaboration mean to you? Choreography is an inherently collaborative art, collective act.  Choreography is simply a vehicle for dancing.  Omagbitse, Brandin, Anthony and I dance together.  Matthew sings his dance.  We are all alive at the same moment.  In many ancient mythologies the “whole man” consisted of: a natural body.. a spiritual body.. a heart…. a double… a soul… a shadow.. an intangible ethereal casing or spirit, a form and a name. Now, that’s collaboration!

What is yoga to you? Listening. Compassion in action.  The pause at the bottom of the breath out, and the miracle of the breath in. Barely there and beautiful. Also, I work as an integrative yoga therapist with people dealing with cancer and witnessing people drop into themselves through this practice is inspiring and makes making dances for me more valiant, more real, more imperative.

How have you changed as an artist in the past 10 years? 20? You’re kidding right?  Well…I used to be very interested in choreography with a capital C. You know, making things with a beginning, middle and end, space and time etc.  Now I am much more interested in dancing with a capital D and I like things that are too long, lopsided, heavy handed and barely there.  I used to spend a lot of time thinking about dances, now I want more time to read…

Popularity: 2% [?]

Patricia Hoffbauer is at Danspace Project this week on a shared program with The Adventure, in the culminating event of Trajal Harrell’s Platform “certain difficulties, certain joy.”

What prompted this latest piece?

I wanted to go back to the studio and make work. I hadn’t done that for a while!

What kind of environments did you need to establish to develop this work?

I really wanted time to work and research ideas and texts, visual and written, that dealt with the idea of “paradise is elsewhere.”  I started out working with this idea of the “ethnographic other” so prevalent in early representations of the Americas. I wanted to see how I could develop another perspective than the one George and I created with The Architecture of Seeing. I was teaching at Princeton last year and was able to get research funds to do exactly that.

Is there a specific take on academia that you employed?

I have always lived vicariously through academic friends discussing ideas that somehow applied to making dances and then years ago when I started developing this course “bodies in cultural landscape” that I have adapted to the seminar course I teach at Hunter.  I realized that I was engaged by teaching in a similar way to how I am engaged when I perform. But the idea of “lecturing” was always a kind of complicated question for me. As a dancer we are usually not educated in the dialectics of ideas, at least not in dance departments, as a lot of the time is dedicated to the accomplishment of technical control and physical virtuosity. But when I realized I could actually have lots of discussing and have that be the main drive informing the students’ work, I was sold. The physical practice became more intertwined with the philosophical kinesthetics of the mind…and this is all without becoming overly theoretical.  The movement is clearly coming out of each student’s experience. Clearly the work is for the classroom for now, not the street, the gallery or the stage, but I have learned so much in the last 10 years with my teaching of these more theoretical texts. So yes, long answer short- I took this idea of a performative lecture that is at the center of this piece from my years of teaching.

Is there something about cultural difference that excites you or challenges you?

I don’t even know exactly what that is anymore.Yes, I have mostly made work about difference, being different, existing in a different environment than the one I grew up in but the funny thing is the more I deal with difference the more it becomes the same.  I like to learn about my bias with sameness and challenge that too. But now, for example, the thought of moving to a place where most people would have similar origin’s to mine, is just nauseating.  I miss NY when I am away, the way in which my life here covers so many different territories, from teaching movement in a pre-k class with my little one to preparing my classes to being a dancer with Yvonne to making work with my co-horts to taking the kids to watch a silly animation movie on a Friday evening…

What do you think about passion?

That is so funny you ask. Yvonne Rainer does this most brilliant lecture about “Passion” now when we go on tour.  It’s called “Where is the Passion?” and no one is better than her to talk about what’s up with PASSION….but I would always bring it up to her because when I show Trio A, at Hunter and elsewhere, some students ask me “Where is the passion???” They get totally freaked out that Trio A expresses passion differently than say, Ailey’s “Cry, ” not that they only understand that kind of “passion” but that they are mostly only exposed to a very specific kind of “Passion.” But I was so happy last semester when at Hunter one student said that the passion in Trio A was clearly expressed in the fact that this dancer on the tape (Rainer herself) was constantly shifting focal points and that to him expressed a kind of insecure confidence in a passionate pursuit… Yes…passion, maybe that is now what Trajal is calling “certain joys” in his curatorial title for the Platform Series that Para-dice is a part of.  Joy is passionate, I am invested in finding joy as in laughter and irony..a deeper kind of joy..It would be great if the idea of  “passion” was stretched to include more than only certain prescribed states of mind and body.

What is the value of collaboration?

I cannot create anything in isolation. The basics of everything I do is collaboration. I collaborated with Peggy Gould to create this duet in Para-dice for her and I during a year plus. I might have some clear idea about something but I always need to know if its working with the other people too and how else we could do that same idea. I just made a piece for the NYU 2nd Ave Dance Company and I had a great time collaborating with the dancers. I remember when I was in that company during my senior year at NYU more than 2 decades ago and the choreographers that came to work with us were very clear that we were not worth a dialogue, an exchange with, and they “set” some piece “on” us.  I learned nothing from that experience…just a kind of strange humiliation.  But this time at NYU I really was so into working with the dancers and getting to know who they were. I could only do that if I was interested in collaborating with them.

What is different about you as an artist now versus 10 years ago? 20?<

I am much much older..hahahahh! I have worked through every injury and I know my body better now. I know how to be more economical and I am not as provoked by things around me…although i can still work on that for the rest of my life.  I can concentrate quicker, I know how I feel quicker and I can better articulate what is going on around and inside of me quicker. I am still interested in similar projects, I am still wondering how to mold different languages into a convoluted whole.  I remember when I auditioned for Fresh Tracks in 1986 and David White left this message on my machine saying how messy and disorganized the work was and that yes, the panel was taking the piece but only if I was willing to clean it up…yes, I am still interested in creating chaotic work that doesn’t feel artificial and superficial.

Popularity: 2% [?]

I asked Brian Rogers, the Artistic Director of The Chocolate Factory, and choreographer Ivy Baldwin, whose “Here Rests Peggy” opened there yesterday (and runs through next week) a few questions about their relationship to the venue.

To Brian:

What does an artist like Ivy offer the field? Ivy (in my view) is one of the few young dance artists who (a) is sincere and smart and is really trying to push the boundaries of something and (b) is making full on physical dance pieces. She is out of step with a lot of the work that’s happening now and for me, that’s totally inspiring.
How does time at The Chocolate Factory help her do that? I really love watching artists grapple with and respond to the weird quirks and challenges and charms of the space. It’s kind of impossible to work here without asking hard questions about architecture and space and how it relates to you artistically. Ivy is collaborating with an amazing visual artist named Anna Schuleit – and I don’t want to speak for them, but I think it’s been really helpful for them to have these two weeks in the space. Just speaking generally, when we give artists the keys and invite them to make themselves at home, you really see the difference in the work.

To Ivy:

What has the Choco Fac residency offered you that enhanced your creative process?An abundance of time and space! It is a very unique opportunity to rehearse and finish a new work in the space that it will be performed. We have been rehearsing in the theater almost daily since October 4. The Chocolate Factory feels like Here Rests Peggy’s real home, not just a place we’ve show up to perform in. The residency has also made so many other things possible that would not have been easily accomplished otherwise. The most obvious is the 10 x 23 foot wall I had built in the space that is now a painting by artist Anna Schuleit.

What was your research/working process like for this work? I’m especially interested in sharing a little about how your time in Italy influenced your work. Again, it is all about having time and space to think and work. The Bogliasco Fellowship in Italy allowed for exactly that. While there, not only did I have my own dance studio to work in, I also had the opportunity to see numerous museums, including Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery in Venice. The title is taken from the simple inscription on Peggy Guggenheim’s grave, which is nestled in the gallery’s sculpture garden. Also, Anna Schuleit’s painting studio was adjacent to mine and it was during this time that we began talking of working together. Many months later when I began working with my cast here in NYC, I started by teaching them the solo I had made for myself in Italy. But, because I work very collaboratively with my dancers the piece has traveled a long way from these initial inspirations. The work now includes their imaginations, interpretations and life experiences as well.

How do you tend to work with collaborators? Each relationship is very different but all have been a real joint effort. Lots of discussions!  Justin Jones, my sound designer, lives in Minneapolis. Our process is unique in that we collaborate long distance. Through electronic back and forth and a few visits by Justin to NYC, we work together to fine tune the music to the dancing.  My collaboration with artist Anna Schuleit has included me visiting her studio in NH and her traveling to NYC to see rehearsals. A final decision regarding what the set for Peggy would look like did not happen until we started our residency at the C.F. and discovered that we could build a giant wall. It was an exciting process of influencing and inspiring each other as we both finished our pieces during the residency.

Popularity: 1% [?]

David Thomson appears in Ralph Lemon’s “How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere” at BAM this week. The work’s development was detailed here on Culturebot.

You’re about half way through the tour and just got back from San Francisco yesterday. How are you doing? Well, it’s a grueling work, what I call an ice-bag piece.  The work is such an intense physical journey that by the end of each performance, you are very spent.  You are at a place of exhaustion and you find yourself crying and don’t know why.  Your defenses are so worn down; it’s like peeling an onion.  The piece has a confessional and memorial aspect to it.  This is really like life.  It is art, but it’s also living.  The Q&A sessions have been fascinating. There was a woman at The Krannert Center who said she’s seen a lot of dance and wanted to leave, but stayed to the end and got it. As much as it is art, it has this human quality to it that honors life.

How was this working process with Ralph? It is very collaborative in that much of the movement vocabulary is unique to each of us.  It is developed via a number of processes, with discrete structures inside it that the audience might not actually see. You might see commonality and not know what the structure is.  This work developed out of Ralph’s last work.  It’s a progression from the last work, which had much more narrative, but, this is one is about reduction.  There is purity or essentialness that is on offer. During the process of building we worked on re-patterning our bodies and agreeing on the process and form. We each have individual source material and journeys throughout the piece, but we also share key words that were used in the building process.  We didn’t have a lot of time in development. It was about 12 weeks over 2.5 years, separated over large gaps of 6 months in between. We would have to relearn material, re-develop stamina.  Each time it was another mountain to climb.

What else makes Ralph’s work important to you? There are several components to the work aside from our performance of it.  Ralph has been presenting the other creative art work and source material that is related to what happens on stage.  This time, there is “Meditation” at The Kitchen on Oct 17 and the other aspects of “House.” I think it is important to understand that the identity of an artist is not simply tied to the live performance.  Our work is not simply what happens on the stage; we’re limiting the art form thinking that way.  We should be expanding the dialogue and Ralph does that.  But, while he is a very special artist, he’s not alone – Trisha and Merce toured their ‘other’ art work.  Given technology and our multidisciplinary capabilities there can be more support for multifaceted manifestations of an artists vision.  What I love about Ralph is that he gives space for people to enter the work from different angles.  So, at BAM he’s selling the text from his monologue and that gives the audience something to hold onto.  The text becomes an artifact, and artifacts become important. Call it artifact, call it product, it memento – it holds value and can serve as a source of income. It opens up more possibilities.

What do you plan to do with your upcoming Studio Series Residency at DTW? Before Studio Series, I’m doing Sarah Maxfield’s “One Shot” internet video relay on the 24^th of October.  For me, the DTW residency is just about play and time and a chance to just invite people into the process.  I’m waiting to see what I’m developing once I’m in the studio. I don’t want to become a choreographer, this creative time is simply another route for exploration and not the first step in my choreographic career.  I’ve collaborated with many choreographers, I’m not interested in pursuing that career. It’s antithetical to my desires.

How have you changed as a dancer over the years? Well, 20 years ago I was working with Trisha. I remember coming here to NY and saying “Wow” when I met people who had danced with Merce in the 60s.  It doesn’t feel as long ago as it sounds.  One of the beauties of this piece with Ralph is that it is helping me to understand to let go of judgment.  I’m trying to not look for outside approval, which I think is an inherent struggle – whether you get a good review or dealing with what people say afterwards. I approach this piece with a certain amount of fear because it is so physically difficult, but also I can now say “This may be the last time you ever get to dance, so Live.”  I think it takes a lot of strength to do what you want to do. I think especially in this community, knowing how many eyes are on you and dealing with your own personal judgments. I’m re-examining my fears and the recurring idea of retiring.  But, if I didn’t get such interesting projects, I probably wouldn’t do it.  I’ll say I’m done, but then, Ralph calls and I think: “Wow, this is crazy. And now, here we are.”

Popularity: 1% [?]