Dean Moss’ premieres “Nameless Forest” this week and next (Thursday-Saturday, May 19-21 and May 26-28, 8 pm) at The Kitchen. Part rite-of-passage, part meditation on the evolving processes of contemporary performance, it was developed in collaboration with Korean sculptor Sungmyung Chun and features dancers Kacie Chang, Eric Conroe, Aaron Hodges, Pedro Jiménez, DJ McDonald and Sari Nordman. In work also incorporates diary entries from photojournalist Mike Kamber, neon effects from visual artist Gandalf Gavan, an original score by Stephen Vitiello, costumes by Roxana Ramseur, and lighting and technical design by Vincent Vigilante. We spoke briefly last week.

So, you’re loading in this week and premiering the work, but it’s had many showings ASU, MANCC, and recently at Yale. But you’re in the final gathering of everything for it, right? Yes. We had three preview performances at Yale. That was a great out of town showing for a very supportive group of students and public. The Kitchen is the premiere after a week in the space and I’m very excited to have the time to ensure that the technical aspects and performers are working well in the space. So, I’m very excited to be presenting it, hosting it. I feel like I’m sharing something with my audience. It’s as if there is a gift that you’ve worked hard on, that you know is a very nice gift and you’ve gotten this very nice gift for someone you know very well and you are about to present it to them and that’s how that’s how I feel about this work.

What do you mean about the work as a meditation? It is a meditation on the work of my collaborator. The meditation is not only what I think his work means, but also what it is in the space and within the circumstances of its presentation. I start to think about myself in relationship to it, my own experience of it including what’s not in the work and what is tangentially related to the work. One can be thinking of all of these other things. It takes his exhibitions and installations into a whole other realm of experience and that process of moving from one thing to another becomes the work. The rite of passage is a method to experience the work. The work is set up for some fraction of the audience to navigate through it physically and that journey can be seen as a rite-of-passage. The passage is witnessed by the rest of the audience, but the witnessing that the audience does is like watching a ceremony that you may or may not know all the parts to. You are probably coming a way from it with an impression of how difficult this journey is. Whereas the person navigating through it may have a different experience. One primarily of the embrace that their community is giving them, the support that they are being extended. The off stage audience sees one thing and onstage audience sees another. It’s very embracing, very intimate onstage.

You have been constructing carefully considered methods for making the audience experience integral to your work. I was deeply appreciative of it during Kisaeng becomes you. What is it about this careful bringing in that interests you? I’m interested in vulnerability again as I was in Kisaeng. If you want to get at that and at compassion and at these intimate details of someone’s emotional lives, I think it’s important that the participants feel safe and I think having a community that values that enables that.

How did you come to collaborate with Sungmyung Chun? And, how did you work
together? It’s important to see his work. He makes figurative sculptures. They are the size of a child and often have his face on them, an adult head on a child’s body. The figure is often wounded – light scrapes, a little blood. As you go through his exhibition, these wounds seem self-inflicted. You never see that activity, but you have this sense that there’s no one else doing this to the figures. His work is presented not as individual pieces but as whole installations. So you see scenes. He very much likes to think of himself as a storyteller and he uses these stories to explore existential being. I was at the beginning of Kisaeng, walking the streets of Seoul and I came across his gallery. I went in, saw his work and thought it was fantastic and would make a fantastic performance work. I left my name and he speaks little English and I speak no Korean so we had a friend translating and we hit it off. He watched the making of Kisaeng. In 2007, I saw his work, then made Kisaeng and then came back in 2009 to work together with him. It’s taken a long time. Working together was and continues to be relatively easy beyond language where we alway use a translator. The idea is strong and we quickly found that we could be flexible and patient with it’s physical development. Also practically we did a lot of traveling. I have flown Sungmyung and his associate Hyangsuk Choi to the states five times in the past two years. I have gone to Korea twice during the same time. So we put high value on being together in the space and looking at the work. Part of the process was in the selection of the transferable elements of Sungmyung’s work. Asking what was going to make a transfer onto the stage that can be about more than merely animating his characters. With figures on a field, Laylah Ali and I found out right away not to do the big green heads from her pictures. With Kisaeng we wanted to avoid the dancers being seen romantically as traditional artist courtesans. With this piece, the narrative that I conceived was kind of a parallel, not based entirely on the narrative of the original work. We broke down that narrative to disrupt and comment on it. Some early inspiration was taken from the structure of Rashomon. There was some early inspiration taken from the structure of Indonesian hindu rites in Bali. We both wanted the audience onstage and that meant that if the audience is onstage how we incorporate them must be significant. The audience becomes the core of the work. You’re inviting the audience onstage and you’re creating a frame with dancers for bringing the audience in. The work originally developed in a different way. We had a showing at the Kitchen that didn’t work entirely. So, I changed the master narrative or the primary metaphor: the underlying logic of the work. The original metaphor was trying to create community with our onstage audience. That became extremely unclear when we showed it – for me and for many who saw it in process and they were right – how are you going to get from here to there. I was faced with this aesthetic problem – how do you keep what you have onstage in this specialized environment and make a circumstance or framework for community. So there became these questions: What’s the community? What’s the relationship between the performers themselves and this thing they are trying to embody on stage? What is it that artists do in their communities? Why does a community, dance community, artist community – why do they care about individual feelings and the artifact of those feelings? Why does that matter was a big question. So by changing the primary metaphor to a place of initiation – ritual of passage – allows the performers to be the performers. It allows them to take their place within this specialized space and allows us to shepherd our guests and introduce them to this space in a very specific personal way.

You’ve also included several other elements. What fed that? Sumyung’s original images and installations have a pure kind of form and are editorially very straightforward. He’s really cut into his sense of self within a particular world. There’s not a lot of comment on it or distance from him. He has an interesting humor, but the work is a sincere and straightforward interior dialogue. In bringing it onto the stage, I was aware that people in the role of his figures will carry a more complex sense of presence and that there’ll automatically be a commentary. If you are a single visual artist and making work, it can be about yourself but if I take that intimate existential idea and put it on other people it becomes about other voices. So, I wanted those other voices to help form the structure of the work. The performance of Nameless forest is in three parts: the first part is homage to Sumyung’s world. It is the longest section and there’s a kind of journey well depicted. In the 2nd part, the narrative (his internal narrative) is replaced with the photojournalist Mike Kamber’s diary entries. Mike’s been in many conflicted places. (We’re friends from the early 80s when we used to squat buildings together.) He gave me his audio diaries from when he was in Somalia. Using Mikes diary entries as score the performers dance a choreographic variation on the first section. The third section is like a ritual epilogue. It sets up the work in a timeless sort of way and then it asks for a kind of participation from the audience to again fill in the narrative. The audience themselves, their own narratives complete the work.

Popularity: 4% [?]

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% [?]

Irish Modern Dance Theatre artistic director John Scott”s Fall and Recover is currently running at La Mama thru April 9. He and I recently met to talk specifically about his process working with survivors of torture who now live in Ireland. He spoke to Andy last year for a previous Five Questions.

How did you come to this project? You should look up the UN definition of torture. In summary: “Torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted by or at the instigation of a public official on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or confession, punishing him for an act he has committed, or intimidating him or other persons.” It is meant to destroy a person without killing them. I was asked to do some workshops and I’m not a therapist or anything, but the survivors were doing art therapy at the Centre for Care for Survivors of Torture in Dublin and they’d asked for dance. They’d been working in drama and one of them, Kiribu, said it was too close to therapy because you’d talk about yourself and they didn’t feel safe doing it. There’s shame and guilt and trying to comprehend the horror of it all. Kiribu said that in Africa you dance all the time – when you work, when you’re happy, sad, at funerals. Dance is so much a part of their feeling that they wanted to try it and to feel good in their bodies again. They’ve said that the effect of the torture is something like having your shadow in front of you all your life. Sometimes they can’t get out of bed in the morning, they have skin problems, allergies, one of the performers has a severe asthma, so she carries a letter for doctors, and she was a gymnast. They have insomnia and paranoia and there is always the risk of that an event, anything, can be a trigger for a flashback. Laying on a cold floor can trigger a flashback. There’s a piece I hope to bring next year where the dancers stand still for a long time and one of them said “I can’t do that. When it happened to me I had to stand still for hours and I can’t stand still anymore.” So it can be a position or a sound. The composer had a sound in rehearsals that reminded several of them with aerial bombardment. They asked him to take it out and he did. It’s all about listening and respecting each other.

How did you start the process with them? I did my normal dance workshop based on what I learned with Pablo Vela, Meredith Monk, Anna Sokolow, etc. We did these exercises with our names – singing and moving, writing your names in space. I’d say something like run your name across the room and all the Arabic speakers ran to the other side of the room because the script runs the other way and we had instant choreography. I was told to never ask what happened to them. You could ask names and where are you from. So I walked into a room and they looked just like people, you know and I’d been asked if I’d like having a therapist to sit in the workshops. I said no, that was in 2003 and I haven’t needed one yet. Dancers are sensitive and this work requires a heightened sensitivity. People sometimes become aggressive or very quiet. When you’re working with longtime collaborators you know if they’re in a difficult mood, you see it coming. But with these guys it’s very quick. It may have been festering for a week, but suddenly BING! They pull themselves through it though. So I said: “My name is John, I’m a choreographer. I haven’t come a very long distance. But, I know some of you have left your homes and left your countries and I’m sorry for what you have been through. I want you to know I will never ask you what happened. My work is abstract and I don’t use stories. I use symbols and ideas. My dancers bring in ideas and we have fun. You can call me anytime day or night. Say anything you like.” It was two years later when one of them told me that made them feel safe and they knew they could work without giving anything away. Imagine, if a woman was tortured maybe her husband, son, daughter, mother could have been killed and she might feel shame for surviving. Your life is never the same.

Clearly, this project presented very different challenges. How do they manage working on this while recovering from the unspeakable? They also have the issues of a strange country, a strange language, culture/racial hostility and suspicion and then, having your case accepted and receiving refugee status. For every 100 people in Ireland who apply, only 6 to 10 might get that. It can take 2-7 years to go through this process. One guy in our group (who couldn’t come because he doesn’t have status) has been waiting 6 years and he’s 22 years old. He’s covered in beating marks and burns. The other performers told me he would never take his shirt off in the changing room. When he asked me and my manager to help him with his case, I said I can ask an immigration lawyer who can help you, but were you beaten and then he took off his shirt. It was shocking and those scars are 6 years old. He said when he did dance classes and performed, he didn’t have to take his medication. He’s still waiting to hear if he’s going to be deported. You can also apply for Humanitarian Leave to remain and if you can get 5 years out of that, then you can apply for citizenship. He has a file, psychological evaluations, they interview them, but the hearing is alone – basically with retired judges. You have to prove you will be killed if you go home. They can acknowledge the wounds, the medical file, that you will have trouble if you go back. But, if there is not enough evidence to prove that if you go back to your country you will be killed, they can’t grant you status. There’s a powerful book Human Cargo by Elizabeth Morehead. I couldn’t read it all, I’m too close to it, but she talks about what’s happening to refugees around the world especially after 9/11 when the US shut its doors and it all came down to Europe. Different countries in the EU have a lot autonomy and they don’t cooperate, but when it comes to immigration they cooperate very well. There’s an EU organization that deals with border enforcement. They will round up people and stop in a few EU countries. In Ireland, you apply for status and you’re usually living in a hostel. You get breakfast at 8, Lunch at 12, dinner at 5, a dorm room, your medical expenses covered and are given 19 euros a week. So, if they had dance practice til 5, they’d miss their dinner across town. It all could really make you give up. But, I wasn’t aware of any of that when I started.

When did you begin actually making this work with them? In our first exercise, we stood in a circle and were raising arms and they were looking at me and I felt this huge responsibility and great need in the way they were moving. I wanted to cry and I was inspired. Kiribu just kept reaching up and there was this young kid who had a perfect second position. He was a shepherd from Sudan, but he could jump and I thought he was a professional dancer. He’d gone up to the hills one day and some group had sacked the village and his mother and brother were killed. His father gave someone money to get him out and he was brought to Turkey and got on a plane thinking he was going to America and got off in Ireland. The trafficker tricked him. Everyone in the group was very gifted, with technical and beautiful qualities. I kept thinking this is so interesting. We’ll make a little piece in 2003 for the UN’s International Day in Support of Victims of Torture. I kept thinking it would be amazing to make a piece with them, but they’re not used to any kind of rehearsal structure. So, we got a grant to bring in 2 professional dancers and went through a 2-month rehearsal process that was the most enjoyable experience creatively and personally. It was joyous and funny and stressful. We did it at The Project Arts Centre in Dublin, in the small auditorium. Word got out and radio show interviewed me and, suddenly, there was a line around the block. We brought it back 3 times, toured the country. I put it to bed in ’06 and continued working with some of them on a different piece. We toured to Rio, Israel, etc.

I saw your work at La Mama Moves last year. It was highly physical and pretty virtuosic. You brought two professional dancers into this. How does that integration work in your cast? It’s so interesting. My dance dance is often very technical and virtuosic, but this particular group of people have different levels of spiritual and physical virtuosity. It’s a great human palette. In Ireland, the people don’t notice the massive change in our culture. All these people with new skin colors identifying themselves as Irish. We found someone from Eretria, he’s 65 and dancing. He’s incredible. So, we have people of many skills now. We’re working with a retired ballerina. At 71 years old, she’s dancing with us. I’ve started to perform more, even as my body is in decline. We have different bodies different sizes and shapes. We put everyone in this work. There is no disqualificaiton. Everyone who was in a rehearsal could be in it. We never turned a person away, the door was always open. It’s been joyous seeing people grow in confiedence, get married, having kids getting jobs. As one of the dancers described the process as thus: ‘We are fallen. We have come up. When you get the chance to move on, we move on. It is essential that someone has to lift you up – when you get up you can help the next person up.’

For more information, you can listen to John and cast on with Leonard Lopate last week and with the BBC a couple years ago.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Name: Adriano Shaplin
Title/Occupation: Playwright
Organization/Company: The Riot Group

Adriano Shaplin is the writer of Freedom Club (directed by Whit McLaughlin of New Paradise Laboratories) which runs from January 6 – 15 at the Connelly Theater (220 East 4 St.) in NYC. The play officially opens January 6. (Photo by Duska Radosavljevic)

1. Where did you grow up and how did you end up where you are now?

I grew up in Burlington, Vermont in the 80s when Bernie Sanders was the mayor. It was basically a socialist utopia that I did not appreciate because I had nothing to compare it to. My parents were hippies and there was a lot of art-making and music and reading in the house. I got involved in community theatre when I was a teenager and got the opportunity to go to Sarah Lawrence College in New York. I started making performances there with my friends and we called ourselves The Riot Group. We were all, like, 18 when we came up with that name. 14 years later we’re still making work together.

2. Which performance, song, play, movie, painting or other work of art had the biggest influence on you and why?

It is the collision of two works of art that had the biggest influence on me. The first was Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder. My mother read it to us when we were very young and it inaugurated my imagination into America and into art. The other was a water-color portrait of the Ayatollah Khomeni, painted by my father, which hung on the wall next to the dining room table. I think all of my plays have flowed out of the crack between those two works of art.

3. What skill, talent or attribute do you most wish you had and why?

I would like to be able to direct. In the early days of The Riot Group we were all in the shows and there was no director. We didn’t have an outside eye. Later on I stepped outside the cast and tried to direct a couple of my plays and I wasn’t happy with the results. Somehow I just couldn’t understand the plays by sitting in the audience, I felt like I needed to be on stage to understand them. Now I’ve had the opportunity to work closely with some really awesome directors and I have a hankering to try it again and test what I’ve learned from them. I’m becoming more collaborative as a theater artist, less interested in executing my “vision” and more interested in what the people in the room bring to a project.

4. What do you do to make a living? Describe a normal day.

I make a third of my living off of play commissions, a third from adjunct teaching, and a third from wages that come from rehearsal or performance. Technically, according to the 2009 numbers, I live above the poverty line, but just barely.

I have no routine. If I don’t feel like being creative I’ll send some emails. If I don’t feel like sending emails, I’ll write in my notebook. I always have a writing project, but I don’t force myself to be creative. I might go on a long walk or do some drugs. If it was a good day and I got something done, I’ll party with my wife. If it was a bad day I’ll wash it off by partying with my wife. Things will change when we have kids, I presume.

5. Have you ever had to make a choice between work and art? What did you choose, why, and what was the outcome?

The last job I had other than teaching was being a bouncer and I really liked it. I would take bribes all the time from people that wanted to cut in line. Making art to make money can be its own kind of compromise. Sometimes I fantasize about getting a job as a librarian or a full-time teacher so that I could completely insulate my creative work from the need to pay the rent. My work is not commericial at all, but I still wonder “Am I playing it safe just to get by?” In my heart of hearts, I’m an amateur. I do this because I love it and I love playing with my friends. I don’t want to be a professional. I don’t want this to be a job. I know there are a lot of artists out there that would like nothing more than to earn their entire living from making art, but I think they should be careful what they wish for.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Michael Kiley, Meg Foley (photos), Shannon Murphy, Christina Zani, Joshua Delpech-Ramey in Nichole Canuso Dance's "As the Eye of the Seahorse"

Nichole Canuso Dance Company’s As the Eyes of the Seahorse, a collaboration with the band The Mural and the Mint, last night at HERE Arts Center. The show continues Dec. 10 and 11, with shows at 7 p.m. and 11  p.m. (tickets $15/$20). Canuso was kind enough to take a few minutes to answer some questions for Culturebot.

From what I gather, the piece started out as a performance with your husband, Michael Kiley, of The Mural and the Mint, which you’ve developed into the show you’re presenting here. When you’re choreographing for someone else’s music, what’s the relationship between the movement and the music? How do you bring that together and what are you adding through choreography?

I’ve been gathering dancers to perform short dances to the live concerts of The Mural and The Mint for several years now.  But in the past there has been a dance to only one or two songs during the concert.  Eventually we decided to make an evening-length project bringing dance into focus throughout the set: “As the Eyes of the Seahorse” was born.

TM&TM’s music is soulfull, hopefull, full of depth and full of beauty.  There is complexity in the musicianship but a clarity and simplicity in tone.

I try to match these qualities in the choreography.  I’m aiming to create movement that allows the presence and openness of the performers to come forward without overpowering the presence of the band.

One of the things I’ve read is that the piece breaks down the distinction between musician and dancer–musicians will be moving and dancers will be playing instruments, right?

We really perform as an ensemble (musicians and dancers), overlapping in space and following one anothers cues.  The musicians join in the choreography quite a bit and the dancers sing on several songs but there is no instrument swapping.

You both grew up in and remain based in Philadelphia. How is Philadelphia as a place to make art–and dance more specifically?

I grew up in Philadelphia.  Mike moved to Philadelphia as an adult.

It’s the ideal community for the work we are creating.  There is a great deal of support from foundations, audience members and peers for cross disciplinary explorations.  There’s an abundance of exciting hybrid work being created right now and audiences are really ready for it.

How do you try to engage your audience when you’re creating work?

It varies, but I always keep the audience in mind. For a while I was known for creating humorous dances, acknowledging the audience through eye contact during the performance.   As my work shifted tone and direction I remained interested in the exchange between the audience and the performer.  I wanted to explore the range of this interaction.

About four years ago I created a work Wandering Alice as an immersive performance in which 20 audience members at a time were led on a journey through several floors of a building.  A cast of 13 dancers and musicians performed in an around the audience allowing them to be surrounded, to enter the work and to fill in the visual picture of the dance.

TAKES was a performance (performed by myself and Dito VanReigersberg) in the evenings and a gallery by day.  The gallery was an interactive performance for two participants at a time:  aural instructions that led the two participants to create their own duet inside the live-feed video installation we’d created.

What should people know about Nichole Canuso?

Although I guide each process I invite collaborative creation.  I believe in acknowledging the qualities that make each collaborative team unique and try to create space for all the intelligence in the room.  Creating “As the Eyes of the Seahorse” has been a warm and rewarding experience.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Photo by Jerry Bauer

Andrew O’Hagan is the author of internationally acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction, as well as critical essays. His books Be Near Me and The Missing have been adapted for theatrical productions by National Theatre of Scotland. A London-based native of Scotland, O’Hagan shares with Culturebot the process from page to stage, as well as his latest work, The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe, which is released this month in the U.S.

On Tuesday, December 7, he will discuss Maf the Dog with Granta editor John Freeman at the Barnes & Noble located at 86^th Street & Lexington Avenue, NYC.

1. In 2009, your novel BE NEAR ME was adapted for stage by Ian McDiarmid on behalf of National Theatre of Scotland, and directed by the renowned John Tiffany (Black Watch). What did the production achieve artistically beyond the scope of the novel which inspired it?

I had been sent several adaptations of the book, but no-one had got the internal life of this priest in trouble, no-one had found a way to make that echo in the theatre. Then Ian’s script arrived and I was knocked over by its stillness and its courage. His play wasn’t in thrall to the novel — he threw out masses of it — but it made the narrative live in a new way. That’s as much as you can hope for. The actors were thrilling and the way they sang and moved turned the whole BE NEAR ME experience into something entirely new for me, and for the rest of the audience. John Tiffany knows the biggest things one can know in the theatre: how to not take things for granted; how to make a theatrical experience true in its own way. If someone had told me 5 years ago that there could be a plausible production of BE NEAR ME in which the boy Mark sang directly to the audience I would have scoffed.

2. You recently inverted this performance process by having one of the featured actors, Ian McDiarmid, participate in a performance of your new novel, THE LIFE AND OPINIONS OF MAF THE DOG, AND OF HIS FRIEND MARILYN MONROE. What was your goal in having an actor reinterpret your dialogue?

Well, you know, Ian’s just a genius actually. And like all very talented people he works much harder than others. In MAF THE DOG, which is a comic, philosophical book with the kind of characters who are often called larger than life, Ian took people such as Lee Strasberg and Lionel Trilling — real, legendary New York figures — and made them live. And this was just in the context of a live public reading. But Ian was prepared, he was ripe, and ready, and willing, and able. He was operating from intelligence and generosity, just doing it for the writing and for the fun of getting it right. And my God, I swear, you could have put his Lee Strasberg under a spotlight in any theatre in London or New York and he would have held the audience in the palm of his hand. He’s just a smash.

3. It’s my understanding that your nonfiction book, THE MISSING, is in the works or National Theatre of Scotland. Can you tell us more about this project?

Yes, we’ve just completed a series of rehearsal workshops, and the play is scheduled to go on next September. THE MISSING is a book about missing persons and was my first book. The director John Tiffany has wanted to do it for years, but I wasn’t ready, until now, when I saw how it might become a seriously magical piece of work for the stage. Those who know Black Watch will know how brilliant Tiffany can be at staging a large, uncanny, national emotion, and making it universal. He has such a vision for THE MISSING and it’s exciting to see it begin its life on the stage. These people are serious, and seriously funny, and I love working with them.

4. Your acclaimed new novel (MAF THE DOG), which debuts this week in the States, is narrated by a British expat Maltese terrier with an very celebrated American owner, Marilyn Monroe. Where did you start with establishing the voice–and any thoughts on how it would be approached as a performance-based work or film?

The book started when I attended an auction of Marilyn Monroe’s personal belongings at Christie’s in New York. Six little Polaroids of Marilyn’s dog Mafia Honey — given to her by Frank Sinatra — were sold for $222,000 and I thought instantly that the dog would make a brilliant narrator of a modern novel. I went back to the Plaza that night and couldn’t sleep. I could hear Maf speaking about the 20th century: this funny, erudite, cheeky, stylish little dog, and I knew I would have to set out and find his story. It took 10 years off and on. On the film question: well, people became interested in the possibility of a MAF THE DOG film very quickly, because the book was taken up in a lot of territories. Screenwriter Alex Garland turned up first. He wanted to adapt it and had a lovely feel for the dog but studio complications to do with his other projects made it impossible. Then we moved into another phase — during which the British press speculated wildly about big stars playing Marilyn and Frank — and are now waiting to see how it turns out. Film is such a strange world: either nobody knows anything, or people who know everything and they just aren’t telling me. Either way, I’m fine with it. At some point in the future we’ll see Maf’s the dog’s lovely face looking down a camera lense and telling it like it is. I hope he sounds like Ewan McGregor.

5. As an artist who is no doubt sequestered much of the time writing, can you elaborate on experiencing your own work on stage in front of an audience?

Oh, it’s lovely. Just hearing the laughter and feeling the energy in the crowd. There’s nothing like it. I’ve sort of grown into this aspect of my work, too: I didn’t jump in at the first opportunity, but waited until I knew how to do it and how to handle it. Now I’m a giant thespian with a 50-foot scarf. I’m beyond help. I make Truman Capote look like Arnold Shwarzenegger. But despite all this carry-on I always return to the desk and the plain shirt with the sleeves rolled up. I pour a glass of whisky in a room of my own. This is where the action is — in the writing. I only put the pen down when my daughter appears. She’s 7 and is officially the world’s finest person. She thinks her daddy is a dog.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Oliver Butler is best known for his work with The Debate Society with whom he has developed 6 plays over the last 6 years. He is currently working with The Production Company on the World Premiere of Goodbye New York Goodbye Heart, opening on December 2 at Here, written by acclaimed Australian playwright Lally Katz.

Name: Oliver Butler
Title/Occupation: Director

1. Where did you grow up and how did you end up where you are now?

I was born in Washington D.C. My parents were actors, and I think that my father was in a play in D.C. and my mom was there visiting when she went into labor. My Dad said that my Mother was acting in Romeo and Juliet when I was conceived, and he was acting in Hamlet when I was born. But I think that might be a made-up story. I am definitely the son of actors- there are a lot of stories surrounding my creation and childhood and I have trouble knowing whether they are fact or poetic exaggeration. My mother, Pamela Payton-Wright, is still a working actor, a great theater artist who I had the chance to work with on Cape Disappointment.

I grew up in Connectucut, went to a private day school and boarding school (on scholarship), but graduated from a public high school in East Lyme Connecticut. I tried to study french and political science in college, but somehow I ended up in theater. After a summer at Williamstown as an acting apprentice, I started directing back in college. I can’t say that my mother especially wanted me to become a theater artist, knowing how hard the life is. But both my parents have supported the choice, and are excited by the work I am doing.

For the last 7 years I have been making plays with my theater company The Debate Society. Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen are the playwrights, and in working with them on 6 new plays I have had the chance to figure out everything that I currently know about what makes a play good and how to tell a story. Working with them has been like my own private graduate program in theatrical storytelling, and most of what people know of my work is connected to The Debate Society. I am the artist I am today because of this ongoing collaboration.

2. Which performance, song, play, movie, painting or other work of art had the biggest influence on you and why?

About 4 years ago I took a job with Elevator Repair Service, driving their set for Gatz from Orange, Connecticut to Minneapolis in a 24 foot truck. I took the job because it felt like a way to have a paid road trip. Driving a a big-rig half-way across the country also sounded romantic, and it was. At the end of the trip though, I got to see the 7 hour marathon of Gatz and it blew my mind. I guess I am really interested in simple presentations that expand in their complexity over time. That production really creeps up on you, and you get a unique experience in that at the 6th hour of the show, in addition to the brilliant storytelling (Thanks ERS) and the brilliant writing (Thanks Fitzgerald) there is a shared energy in the audience – a feeling that you are actually going to achieve this feat together.

I think about that play a lot, and got to bring my girlfriend to see the latest at The Public.

3. What skill, talent or attribute do you most wish you had and why?

I wish I spoke Spanish. I am working on it. Mostly I try to speak spanish with some of my co-workers at the shop (see next question) to get better. But mostly that involves me ordering coffee or talking about pop singers. My greatest dream in life is to travel, and I have always felt that actually knowing another language intimately is sort of like travelling to the place. Really I’d like to be fluent in like 5 languages, but I am going to focus on just one for while.

4. What do you do to make a living? Describe a normal day.

I am a carpenter who builds rooftop gardens with a company called City Beautiful Carpentry. I get to spend most of my days on beautiful rooftops all over New York City. My best friend also works for the company, so most days I get to spend with him. But the work is hard. Here is my normal day lately.

6AM: Wake up, make coffee, go to work. (In case of today – finish this interview)
7AM: Arrive on rooftop in Soho, do carpentry things
11AM: Take coffee break. Make a phone call to a designer or Lally (playwright for Goodbye New York)
1PM: Eat Hot and Sour soup, or local sandwich for lunch.
4PM: Break for day
5PM: Rush home, shower, change for rehearsal.
6PM: Rehearsal for play in Manhattan
10PM: Designer meet
11PM: Home with girlfriend. Have a beer. Watch ½ of 30 Rock, Fall asleep.
Repeat.

5. Have you ever had to make a choice between work and art? What did you choose, why, and what was the outcome?

I feel like I am making this choice every single day. All day long I am doing my day job to keep the art afloat, or doing a play in spite of it making me poor. My whole life is a compromise between life and art.

Popularity: 4% [?]

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% [?]