Ellis Wood will be performing her evening-length solo “Mom” at NYU/Tisch this Friday at 7:30. I’ve known Ellis since we both performed solos for DTW’s Fresh Tracks back in 1995 and have seen early versions of this solo, which won last year’s DanceNow (NYC) Challenge. We spoke last month prior to (and then, just following) a performance of the work at Symphony Space.

Thanks for rescheduling due to my field trip chaperone duty conflict. I appreciated your comment about how it was appropriate to the subject matter, after all.

It was funny. A writer from the New Yorker was coming to rehearsal and called saying he’d lost childcare and was hoping he could bring his 5 month-old given the nature of my show.

It’s hard to do get things done with kids. I know that is just one aspect of “Mom”-ness, but the logistical, energy reserve, physical tolls are substantial. You can’t really know the full weight until you are in it. I often feel that the idolization of young, new voices (and bodies) in dance can create a focus in our field that ignores the realities for maturing artists – family responsibilities, aging, health care, etc. I remember the days of your Gender Project. Things felt very urgent and frustrating then. I now wonder whether things are truly different or if I simply am. Is it any easier to ‘make it’ in dance as a female artist or have we just altered our priorities enough that those other issues are still present, but mean less now?

Everything you are saying, I feel like I’m saying every day. You mentioned The Gender Project, I feel like in those days I fought a lot harder. Now, my energy is spent elsewhere – even though I notice what you are saying. I don’t fight through it. It has been different, to be in the dance world not fighting. I’m more interested in accepting what is and making my own path through, so that I feel fulfilled and happy and comfortable with what I’m able to put out there. This piece is not the biggest production that I’ve ever put on. Looking at it from the outside it seems not big in scale, but I’ve never been so nervous, insecure, proud and excited all at the same time. And, I can kind of remember this feeling from that first solo I did on that Fresh Tracks we were both in – in 1995. I remember needing the shift from dancing in other people’s companies to making my own way. I had this feeling of total rawness – and I feel that again 15/16 years later. I think finding Fran Kirmser, a development director I started working with 4/5 years ago, helped me shift to this moment. I felt lost in the dance world about what my next step was. She guided me toward finding what makes me happy. It keeps me honest. Well I’m certainly not going to do it if I’m miserable and just doing what other people think I should be doing. If this piece weren’t called “MOM” I wouldn’t have made it through. I can’t tell you how many times I couldn’t go to a rehearsal, with space paid for. I had one 6-week stretch where some kid in my family was sick and I couldn’t rehearse. And, the only way I could go back in was to say: “hey, this is what it means to be a mom.” I used to rehearse everyday for 4 hours a day. I used to be in a certain kind of shape and didn’t have 3 c-sections. I used to hold myself to such rules and I can’t do that any more. When I started back after my third child, if I went to rehearsal and created something new and my body didn’t hurt – it was such victory. I can’t believe I put this thing together. Anyone without a child knows getting a work up is a huge accomplishment and anyone who can do it with a child is amazing.

And, to do an evening-length solo that you told me (after performing part of it at the Fresh Tracks Gala at DTW) could only be done in a one-off situation.

I’ve actually built up to it be something I could do as a 2 or 3 night performance run. But, the build has been so slow. After my last kid (who is 2.5), it was difficult to do a second position plie. It’s taken me 2.5 years to be able to feel like I can do this piece and get through and not hurt myself and do it a few times in a row. I didn’t think I could pull myself together to do a solo. Funny enough it was my mom and Fran who were actually the ones saying: “Well, you could.” And I said no and that went on for a long time before they started to point out that I already was. A couple years ago I went back onstage and it was hard and it was a slow build. Then Robin Staff at DanceNow sent me that application for the Fall Festival and I thought, “I’m just going to do this!” It got me back and I am forever grateful. I needed something somewhere to make me do it. And, it felt so good. DTW was where I did my first solo.

I love that you came back with a solo called “MOM” and that it won DanceNow’s challenge.  That seemed like a validating moment, saying maybe we are growing up and maybe opening to realities that valuable working artists can also be active parents. It seems to me that you are fighting by example now. It reminds me of a central theme in Joan Acocella’s “28 Artists and 2 Saints” book. How she said that female artists experience significant gaps or ends to their creative lives because the domestic burdens of caring for other human beings (young or old) fell most often on them. I don’t think that has changed that substantially, but I’d like to think more of us are managing to maintain both rich personal and creative lives.

Sometimes there’s that gap and sometimes there’s a departure. There’s a certain kind of push that I don’t want to do have anything to do with, the push from ten years ago. That’s kind of what Fran guided me away from, and why I did this piece. The reality is that my kids have to go to school and eat and considerations include finances, time, energy, how do I split my life and all those things. I do the bulk of scheduling and doctor’s and dentists and I have to be available if somebody’s sick and how does dance work around this. I had these two incredible women who were mothers who gave me a vote of confidence and I needed that. Also, the video artist Robyn Tomlin, who is a single mother, stepped in – and the project really started coming together. I’d love to say that I was all confident moving forward, but I needed some votes of confidence. My mother, pregnant 5 times in 4 years and losing 2 of them while dancing with Martha Graham, knew what she was talking about too. While in the middle of dancing in Martha’s company, she suffered all those changes to her body. God knows that was insanely difficult, but Martha was always clear that she could come back after having the kids.

So, how does this all make its way into the work? Or does it?

It’s about 45 minutes and there are different sections and each represents a different time and vibe in a mother’s life. There are two sections that are the most intense or poignant for me. About half way in, there is a section with an elastic band. Most everything before that leads up to getting pregnant. The band represents an umbilical cord and most everything after represents life after kids. What I do during that section is intricate enough that it’s all I can concentrate on – which is different from my usual looking out at the audience and playing with expressivity. It’s all I can do to get through this section and it feels very real. Sometimes you’re doing the world out there and it’s crazy and then there are moments – pregnant, giving birth, with the kids – where you’re tangled and caught and also maneuvering through it with great intricacy and I know this is Freudian but I’m really attached to this section. Also the last section is special to me because it is the first one I made.

How did the piece go? What was it like to perform this work?

Better than I had imagined. Doing it just made me want to do it more. Something about doing it for the first time meant that I could live in it in a very real way. I couldn’t fake much because it was so raw – I felt like I was living in the moment. My kids, husband and my sister and my own mom were there and I love that. Dancing is a place where I can actually be something other than a wife and mother at this point– so it means a lot to me for them to see that part of me as well. There are certain things – even about motherhood – that I only express on stage. How funny that a stage seems like such a safe place for me to express some things I don’t quite know how to express in my life.  Anyway, I am going to keep working on the piece and will continue to do it for a while. Thanks for asking.

Popularity: 4% [?]

(l to r) Penny Dannenberg (seated), Jamie Graham, Rebecca Woll, Moses Kaplan, Alex Schell, Maggie Ronan, Jessica Thomas, Betty Williams (obscured) Photo by Eric Bandiero

Stretch.  And be smart about it.

Translate into Latin  (Tendo, Quod operor is purpureus?), and that might become a motto for NYU Tisch School of the Arts Dance Program.

Over the past several months I have encountered Department Chair Cherylyn Lavagnino, and faculty member Jaclynn Villamil with graduate students in tow both at DIA Beacon for the dress rehearsal of the Trisha Brown Dance Company‘s performances there in February, and at Danspace St. Mark’s.  Granted, the latter happens to be just up Second Avenue from the Department’s home at 6^th St.  But wouldn’t that be a smart stretch?

Last Friday, those two along with faculty project facilitator Jim Sutton could be found in the first and second rows of La Mama Annex around the corner on E. 4^th St.  And some of the graduate students, along with a number of newly minted BFA’s  and MFA’s could be found on the stage. There, in the evening’s most intriguing and compelling spectacle four of them found themselves fully integrated into Naomi Goldberg Haas’ “Uprooting,” a piece that incorporates three generations of performers to suggest passages both physical and metaphysical.

at rear: (l to r) Moses Kaplan, Jamie Graham, Maggie Ronan, Jackie Ferrara. front: Penny Dannenberg, Ani Javian Photo by Eric Bandiero

Goldberg Haas has been directing her Dances For A Variable Population since 2005, with professional company members ranging in age from 25 to 81.  The seamless addition of NYU dancers Moses Kaplan, Maggie Ronan, Alex Schell and Jessica Thomas highlights one of the choreography’s strengths.  Set to several propulsive folk-inspired recordings by the Polish combo Warsaw Village Band, “Uprooting” manages to find and challenge each of its 13 performers at or near the limit of her/his technical and expressive potential, and to transcend this challenge by suggesting the existential humanity of yearning, striving, transformation, and reflection from youth to age and memory back to immediate experience.

(l to r) M. Lindsay Smith, Jackie Ferrara Photo by Eric Bandiero

The performances of senior members Penny Dannenberg, Jackie Ferrara, Judith Chazen Walsh and Betty Williams, while remarkable in their own right, create a frame of dimension and depth for those of their youthful collaborators.  Their regard of the youngsters manages to encompass a mixture of dispassionate assessment with intimations of mentoring, longing, and sassy competitiveness and even one-upmanship that leavens the poignancy of both the music and the dancing with pith and wit.  In one exquisitely simple and memorable moment Dannenberg and Geraldine Bartlett slowly sit down back to back to share one of the folding chairs that has been brought on to the stage.  Their mirror images present in such a way as to leave open the question, expertly poised, of who might be a reflection of whom.

Add to this interplay the lusty way in which Goldberg Haas’ young professionals Jamie Graham, Ani Javian, M. Lindsay Smith and Rebecca Woll bite into the music and movement as if to both throw down a challenge and lead the way among their younger and older counterparts, and you have a work that begins to transform the creative potential energy of Dances For A Variable Population into a power to move and inspire its audience as much as its own members.

In this, rehearsal director Smith, of the high-arched and articulate feet and whip-smart torso, and the equally fiery Graham set the tone as firsts among equals.  With any luck, this cross-generational ensemble, including its new-found Tisch quartet, will manage to hold together long enough to re-present an outdoor version of this work at the end of September in cooperation with Hudson Guild Fulton Senior Center along the High Line Park in Chelsea.

(l to r): Ani Javian, M. Lindsay Smith, Jamie Graham, Rebecca Woll. Photo by Eric Bandiero

One can only wish as much for Selina Chau’s “The New York Exchange.” This witty, cheeky, extremely well crafted send up of everything from dance style pretensions to kung fu movies features fine performances by Monica Barbaro as a wayward ballet princess, Austin J. Diaz and Gierre J. Godley, as various NY dance, street and martial arts types, and Mandarin Wu as the archetypal femme fatale with the fan.

Mandarin Wu (with fan) Gierre J. Godley, and Monica Barbaro photo by Tony Dougherty

Chau displays a sharp eye and a supple mind for theatrical type and form, fable, kitsch, and the way pop culture co-opts all of the above. Set to an ingenious score by Kyle Olson that mashes up his own “New York Exchange” with passages from Adolphe Adams’ score for Giselle and Romani and Bellini’s “Costa Diva” from Norma, interrupted by Chinese text passages written by Chau and comically delivered by co-writer Wu, the work sets up and then undermines expectations in a way that satisfyingly compliments that of Goldberg Haas. Like the latter dance maker, Chau has keen sense of theatrical and, especially in her case, comic timing and the delicacy of gesture that allows us the comfort of recognition just as she twists to tickle and subvert our prejudice.

Such rare gifts more than justify Tisch’s repeated presence in the annual LaMama Moves Festival.  When you’ve got it, why not go the extra mile — or two blocks – beyond your building and perhaps your comfort zone to flaunt it?

More of DJ McDonald’s commentary can be found at City of Glass.

Popularity: 2% [?]