Photo: Megan Mayer
This project derives from interviews with local choreographer/dancers over 60. I am interested in questions of what accomplishment, failure, struggle, and “making it,” might mean as accumulated over time through the day-to-day life of an artist. Each of this series of interviews is edited from a longer conversation in which I asked them about their beginnings, high and low points of their careers so far, and where they are now. I am interested in how their lives shape and describe the life we inhabit, how their knowledge and experience might inform us, and the way familiar landmarks of humanity emerge from the geography of age. While I find each interview compelling, I am also intrigued by how together they begin to elicit a complex map of the structures and systems that define our ideas of success, failure, and work, but also our private goals, and our individual desires.
What do you call a beginning? Beginning of professional work? Or beginning of knowing that you were connected to dance in some way? Anyway, I love my beginnings as a child. I always begged for dance lessons and never got them. I didn’t know any better, but when I look back I realize I had an improvisational practice as a kid. I lived in Hawaii and I would go down to the beach almost every evening, when the sun was setting, and I would just move and dance and perform. I know it’s kind of cliché, but the ocean and the beach and the movement.
That was also kind of a fierce time for me. I was doing fierce physical acts like jumping off our roof into the sand. We’d just had a tidal wave which moved our house off its foundations, so I don’t know, my response was to jump off the roof because I was always showing off for my sister and I said “There’s sand down there, I can do this.” Oh my god. I think it hurt my back, but okay. And that’s also the era that I lit a whole sugar cane field on fire, fire trucks coming, me wanting to commit suicide as a young person, not really, but I didn’t know what to do with that outrage that was happening.
Anyway, so that was, you know, I consider all of that my physical training and roots of what you need as an artist, as a provocateur, as a, you know, “What are we here for?” So the “What for?” started early. My mom says I said when I was three or four that I wanted to be a choreographer and that word probably came out on the television set or something. But I think I always had a movement practice. I think kids do. I mean, I wasn’t special that way, I think kids just do. “Everyone starts dancing,” I like to say, “and I just kept going.” I thought I was going to be an actor because I tried out for plays and I liked to perform. I was dramatic. I did finally get lessons because I personally found a place when I was in Junior High. Miss Shirley’s Dance Studio was right down from Junior High and I used to walk home. My parents didn’t check it out.
We didn’t have a lot of guidance going on. Both my parents were artists, in the military. My dad was in the military. He was a conductor, a trumpet player. My mom was an artist. She actually got a scholarship to MCAD years ago, she was from Minneapolis, but she never pursued that. She went to war instead. So, you know, there was an artist milieu in the air even though there were a lot of, you know, it was the alcoholic, my dad was an alcoholic but he was my next… So Miss Shirley’s Dance School in Junior High. Tap dancing. I had no ballet but they put me on point after a few ballet classes. I didn’t resist or complain, and we went to the Steel Pier in New Jersey, in Atlantic City, and performed! And I thought I was in heaven. Sequins, feathers, performance with a big audience. I was like, “Yeah, Miss Shirley’s!” And Miss Shirley had a tall red beehive, and if anybody remembers Erin Thompson and Nic Lincoln performing with these tall red wigs, The Lounge Twins Die and Go To Heaven. I didn’t realize until after we did that, “Oh that’s Miss Shirley!” So Miss Shirley: very impressive, very questionable lady…of the night, probably. But that was my training. And then that stopped. I was in plays and I did characters. I liked speeches. I liked to make speeches, although I was very shy and not that confident. My dad was a big part of my training because he would conduct (and this is all part of my mythology) in the living room with his shirt off. Big symphonies and operas with no sound, and I would be watching his back form the corner. I realized years later that was part of my training. When I got to college and actually did some formal dance major training my teachers tried to get me off of my axial spot because I was always staying in one spot and moving. I went, “Why? Oh, my Dad: That’s what conducting is!” I was always doing shows in the neighborhood, like many of us. I liked doing parades. In Hawai’i I did a couple of parades with my friends, things on wheels, and costumes.
That was a pretty serious time of art-making for me, Hawai’i, and it’s still a pivotal influence. The ocean is why I took to Hawkins technique later in college because Hawkins was all about going out to come in, going out to come in. It was very Tai Chi that way. I was really a part of the ocean. My inclination toward fabric feels like it’s part of the ocean: silk, water, fabric. I did very risky things, like I would lay in the street in Hawai’i, when we moved onto the base. We weren’t on the base until later. I feel like we were very lucky not to get military housing because they had to put us in the boondocks which was on the Pacific ocean with hardly anything around, with neighbors who were Filipino, Japanese, and Chinese, a very mixed neighborhood and friends, maybe only one white family besides us. That was influential as well. My friend Martha — I’m going back and forth in my history — very pivotal influences in Hawai’i. Everybody knows this who knows me. The thing that impressed me for the rest of my life was that she put on every single piece of clothing that she owned at one time. She put it on her body. She had everything she owned on her body and the recognition of that, the artist in me I think recognized that as a very incredible performance. I think it showed up later. I did a piece called “Ophelia” where I took off layers. I had many layers on and took them off throughout the piece. So Martha, she doesn’t know what a great influence she was on me.
My parents were artists, my sister was a visual artist, my brother, you know, we were all dabbling in something, but dance doesn’t get recognized. If you write or if you paint, if you show up as a young artist, as a young person who has some “talent” — how do you recognize that in a body that isn’t “ballet trained” or the training doesn’t show up. So I feel very lucky that I didn’t get any training, because then I didn’t know what dance was. I thought everything was cool. We danced to the stripper in gym class. I played basketball, I ran track, I played softball, I danced in my room and basement like many of us do. I had a pretty broad definition, but also a looking for how things were supposed to go, because I knew I didn’t have any real background. These are all kind of the beginnings.
Acting, I wanted to do musical comedy, but they always wanted me to be an ingenue because of my voice and the look I guess, but I ended up doing really interesting characters instead, like a witch or something. They always discussed my movement so I’d go, “yeah, they really got that I’m a mover.” There wasn’t any dance like we know dance, like experimental dance, or trying things out through movement. It was mostly in the acting field that you found that kind of thing, that exploring. I went to Towson. It was Towson College first. And I went there because I had a boyfriend at Johns Hopkins, was going to go to Johns Hopkins, ended up not going there, but I ended up going to Towson. I went into acting classes and thought I would do that and teaching but at Towson I took a PE class that was dance. “Take your shoes off.” Oh my god! Take your shoes off! Back to Hawai’i, right? I went to school barefoot in Hawai’i. So ‘take your shoes off’ was like a homebase for me. I didn’t know there was Modern Dance. I didn’t know about that. That there was this kind of dance where you dance barefoot, you know don’t wear tap shoes or ballet shoes. She was a Graham-based person — I didn’t know anything about anything — but: your homework: Go home and make a dance about anger. Okay! We’re here! I’m here! I worked on that thing all night and brought it in. That was the beginning of college dance. She did have some technique. I transferred pretty soon afterward to the University of Maryland. And tried to go into acting, but it was a huge cattle call. You got lost there. There were hundreds of people.
So then I went to dance. That’s where I ended up. That was great. They thought I could do no wrong. I got into composition classes. Making dances, that’s what I did all my life. I didn’t have any rules. I learned a couple of rules there that were helpful, that’s really good. They would bring the other teachers in to see my work. I didn’t know that I was getting recognition, I mean nobody said, “Hey, you ought to continue this or do this.” I just did it. I think that’s what we do. An artist gets obsessed. I think obsession is a really good quality in an artist. Or it’s just there because you get obsessed. I slept in the closet so many times at my school in the dance studio because I was working on stuff, just working on stuff. I was in heaven, really, to make dances. The technique classes were okay. This was in the early seventies and I was very cocky and somewhat political, not in a really focused way. For instance, I wouldn’t take ballet because of my political sense that it was hierarchical and colonial and it just felt very exclusive. And even in the Limón class I would stop when it was time to do the barre. But my teachers just accepted this. In me. So that was cool. I had a couple of teachers that were total permission, which is how I grew up. My parents weren’t– we didn’t have a lot of rules and we wandered in Hawai’i. And when we moved back to the states we wandered everywhere.
In a way I can see, as a parent, I wished I’d had more modeling of boundaries and line-settings and so forth, but I think my kids are going to make it. And they’re so incredible, they’re very creative. I think that is why we do art. I have to always question when I teach at Carleton — I teach in the Dance Program, I teach Choreography and History and other things — but I always have to go, “Why? What are we doing this for? What’s happening? What’s in the world? Why are we doing this?” And you know I really feel like I have to justify, too, why I keep doing it. And for me, it’s, you know, you keep the faucet on, you have to keep the creative faucet on, otherwise we all shut down. So it’s also a service, to keep your own faucet alive and on. Whether that’s just be in process, be in creative process, whatever that means, but recognize that and go for that, that’s how I feel. So that’s what I think I’m about for my students. Why do they come and take a choreography class when they’re chemistry majors and statistics majors? You know, why are we here? I know you have to get an arts practice graduation requirement but, No, you’re here for other reasons. I’m telling you, you are here because everyone needs to keep the faucet on. And they do.
I was in Hawai’i from preschool to about fourth grade, so not that long, but really intense. Intense. My dad when we moved to the base, my dad was a band master. He was a conductor of the military band there and they would march and I would follow them. In almost every piece I do, or improvisation, a march will show up. It was amazing. Yeah, I think my Dad had a big influence on me even though he did translate a lot of shame to us because of his alcoholism and we had a kind of dysfunction going on, but a lot of love, a lot of “talent,” artistic presence in the house. My Mom was an incredible improviser in life. She was so fun and so funny and so, yeah. She kind of saved the day, but the rules… didn’t have so many rules. Anyway, we left Washington, D.C., when I was four-ish and we left Hawai’i when I was 9-10-ish, in there. So it was kind of a shock coming back, yeah it was a shock. We came back to Maryland. My Dad was going to have a job leading the Naval School of Music, even though he was Army. So he was going to lead the Naval School of Music and he was going to teach there.
Interesting that he was an administrator, a teacher, and a musician. And I am a dancer, and way too much admin work, and a teacher. So I see a lot of parallels with my Dad. I recently, maybe five years ago, I got his, he started writing a book on conducting. It was a draft and I started reading it. He and I had some similar ideas about, oh gosh I’m not remembering what the concept was, but it was so awesome to read him. And he’s a big romanticist. The ideals! I’m a little less sentimental and romantic, I think, although I have big ideals. So we went to Washington, D.C., to Maryland, because my Dad had a job in the military and that’s where we entered Junior High and Miss Shirley’s and plays in High School, not dance.
I was a pom-pom girl. A pom-pom girl is not a cheerleader, but you do these pathways on the field, and you have pom-poms. You do patterns on the field and you march, one-legged march, and you have boots on. Oh my god it was so, I loved it. So that was fun. And college, when I became a dance major that was it.
In the summers I studied with the Erick Hawkins and Company with Erick Hawkins himself and his soloists and his partner Lucia Dlugoszewski who’s a composer who wrote his music. I took Composition from her and it was amazing. Intensives with the Hawkins company for two summers and an intensive with Twyla Tharp for one summer. I proposed to my college Dance Chair that I go to New York and study and work with Twyla, and she said “No!” [mock shock] I couldn’t believe it! This was such a good idea! Don’t you want us to expand…? Anyway, she said no.
Twyla was a big influence. I was in her piece The One Hundreds, but what I loved was going to her rehearsals. I don’t think many people did, but I peaked in and sat in on all her rehearsals. She was working on The Fugue with Rose Marie Wright and Sarah Rudner and it was all about structure. It was just an amazing piece and I watched her make that, even though I had no idea what structure was, and I still don’t, I’m still exploring what structure is. So she was very influential. She loved my clothes. I had unusual garments that I got from the countryside thrift stores. She would say, “Where did you get that?” And I would say, “I got it for ten cents.” I didn’t give them to her. Well, she was a lot smaller than I was. I remember writing her, I don’t know, I did some kind of writing for her. She was very, she was a cold angel…Oh, that’s a word that they apply to Balanchine’s dancers, and she admired him, but she was a taskmaster, a tyrant, at that time. She was barely above my age at the time, maybe ten years. She worked us so hard and we loved it. We were popping salt pills on the sidelines and we worked for hours. She would make us go through the Tens, forward, backwards, inside out. It was very challenging, very wonderful.
So I worked with her and Hawkins was amazing, more amazing than I think people realize. So when I started teaching when I was in college, I started teaching Hawkins technique. Now granted, I had hardly had any technique in my life, but I really took to that and I taught it. I taught it in a church basement and I taught it on campus. I would have 40 people, it was a free university, and 40 people moving them across, over curve, under curve, and just like, I don’t know why I have had this urge to teach because I feel like I’m always in resistance. There’s some tension between doing your work and teaching. They’re very different things. So when I went to Carleton, there was this tension, trying to hang on. I feel like I was more trying to hang on to the art part of me than getting in and focusing on my teaching.
So I had taught at Macalester part-time for a number of years, but mostly my work was taking up space and doing my work. It was hard to be a full-time college person. I’m not complaining, although I feel like that, if you want to talk about highs and lows, I feel like for a number of years I had a real struggle with administrative institutional work, teaching, which is a whole different thing, and becoming a better teacher takes as much time and focus as being an artist. And then the art part, which was what I valued most, you can see from my very early years. That’s what I’m made of. That’s what I felt I was made of. I feel like I’m going to cry right now because that is the fight I’m having right now. You know, I haven’t made work in probably four years, but I’m not really sad about that. I just wonder about it. It’s funny, I haven’t felt emotional about that.
But I keep the faucet going. You know, I have an improvisational practice, which I do here on my own, and then I have a group, “Jam It,” which is an improvisation collective with Erin Thompson and Maureen Koelsch and Thern Anderson. Anne Mosey was in on the beginning. It happened around the lunch table, she said, “Does anybody want to improvise?” I said, “I do! Yes.” So we just went, “Well, let’s do it.” Instead of waiting for the right person, time, whatever. We do that on a regular basis, which is really great. So improvisation has become really important, especially within my aging body. I don’t take class well because I can’t fit into everybody’s…I don’t like classes where you have to fit in to what somebody’s doing. Not that it isn’t lovely and beautiful, and not that I haven’t taught that in years past. In fact, I taught that Saturday class for about 20 years that Erin and Becky and Thern are now teaching. They took that over. So that started as, “Oh, I’m going to try teaching Hawkins again.” That started a number of years ago because I wanted to try it out. I was charging five dollars a class because I felt like I was learning again how to teach. I asked Keith Hennessy that question because I saw he was getting into academia. I said, “How do you do that as an artist? What is your…” And he’s the one that gave me that word, “tension.” He said, “Just hold the tension.” And I knew exactly what he meant. “It is a tension and you just hold it. There’s no resolving it.” You choose to stay or not stay. That’s my addition because there were so many times when I went, “Mm mmm, can’t do this.” Yet it’s also a blessing. My joke is I got old enough to get a full-time job. So I have that and I did a lot of work while I was there. That was cool.
Photo: Megan Mayer
I got a couple of grants while I was there to pay dancers. That was great. I really liked when I was making work up here [in the Twin Cities] and then I would take all of those dancers with me to Carleton and they either taught the students the roles or they danced with my students in performance. Because I was holding the question of how can I bring my two things together? That was one way that I did that: bringing artists down with my work and putting the work on students. Or starting the work on my students, which I also did. They were incredible. I would start work on them and then bring it to people up here and then bring it back and then expand it. So there was a reciprocity in my work between the students and here.
But being Chair took more and more and more time. I wasn’t always Chair, but I figured I’ve been Chair for half the time I’ve been at Carleton, which is 16, 17 years. Chair of Theater and Dance. I’m also Director of Dance. Most people from Theater when they’re Chair, they have someone else taking care of Dance, which is a big thing in itself. But when I’m Chair of Theater and Dance, I have the Dance program and the Theater side. Thank goodness I have some good theater colleagues that help a lot, I mean, can take over. But it’s been a lot and I’ve gotten older and more tired and less patient with standing at the computer and writing reports. Although if I can get behind something, I will really work on it. I’m not giving up yet, but I’m thinking about how I’m not going to be Chair next year. We’ll see how that works. We finally have a tenured Theater person who can take over. The Chair is supposed to rotate every three years. But I ain’t going back to that. No. Now maybe I can concentrate on the dance part of things for a little while. So what happens when you’re not making work, you know, and you’re a creator? I just thought, “Oh, I’m shutting down. This is ending. That’s over.” You know, I tried. I tried leaving dance before and I’m going to say the art part of you just, you know, You are It. It is You. It will find its way through, you know, like a plant getting rerouted somewhere else.
I applied for this fellowship at Carleton. They have these fellowships where faculty get chosen, that you have to apply for. And they have a cohort that meets for a year, and every other week you talk about your work. Then you have to present your work to each other and everybody gets to comment on it. And they always have a theme. This last year it was “Categories of Knowing.” I went, “Oh my God, I have to apply for that. Because there’s not going to be a body person. What do we know? What do we bring?” I feel sort of obligated, and that I have something to bring. So I applied and I got it. I was very surprised, but the application was good. In my application, I proposed that I would look deeply at how to articulate different approaches to somatic work in dance. I had a list of artists all ready to go. I looked at that and I thought, “Well, I have to do this.” And when it was my turn to present, that was the due date.
So the zine, which I call “Matter,” is a result of that fellowship. It’s not a money fellowship, although I am paying a small amount of money to each person that I engage. The idea was to have different people who have different approaches to their work that are rooted deeply in a somatic process, because that’s what I do. A lot of my work, even though it’s theatrical or comes out, you know, in form, it starts with a very deep root in a somatic and improvisational process, which I have pretty much done all my life because I’ve had to in response to my family, my alcoholic family, some mental health issues. So I’ve turned to movement. Being alone and moving in the woods or on the beach or, you know, in the bedroom, in the basement, as a practice that was just fortunately there, that I, as a human with body intelligence, which we all have, I went for. Something in me knew enough to go for that. So that is what this project comes out of: a deep experience with that myself. When I got my hip surgery I used a process called Movement Fundamentals and had an incredible healing moment where heat soared through my body and a primal cry came out. It was a healing. It was a healing moment. But that’s only part of this project.
So I was thinking about people like Rosy Simas, who I had come in once and do a process with my students on skin when she was very much exploring from skin and her deep listening process, which she has. So she had come in, actually Sam [Aros-Mitchell] represented her once and did that process. So she was on the list. Leila Awadallah was on the list with her “Body Watani.” A lot of people were on my list. When Leila came back from Palestine, and I saw her at a performance, I went, she’s back. I don’t know when she’s going to go again. She’s on the list. And I need to do this.
Oh, and she had a workshop. I had pictured people coming to my home, us moving through something, a small group of invited people, moving through something, then sitting and talking, and then recording words, or people writing. But what happened instead was it took this form, which was, Leila had a workshop I took on Body Watani. I told her about the project and I asked her if I could interview her. So it took the form of an interview, which wasn’t my initial plan. So I did interview her. And I did put that zine together, which was really the first time I’d ever done a zine. I talked to Kristin Van Loon. “How do you do your zines? Because I love them.” So I went to her house one day and had a tutorial. And I bought a special stapler. That’s the most fun, is I got this incredible stapler that does a perfect job of a long zine, two staples, in just the right place. So that’s a joy and a thrill. But the zine, I really like it. And I really like the interview. And I really honor and thank Leila for that participation. It was fresh from her return from Palestine and her return into her work and her activism. I think it’s interesting because my lens was the somatic lens. Where did this originate? What’s the beginning of this process? How did you form it? And what is it? Can you describe it to me? So it’s like articulating these processes and what comes up and out from them. And she did just a beautiful job in that. So this is the first in a series called “Matter.” So that’s kind of a creative outlet. It’s a lot slower than moving around in a space, pushing materials. But I like materials.
In this house that we’re sitting in was a series of party performances with April Sellers. She lived with me for about three years. And while she was here, we were both going through breakups, both with people with the same name. So we named this the “House of Transition and Permission.” I was graduating from grad school and I wanted to have a party. So that’s what started it. So we have a party and we have to perform. Yes, of course we do. We have to perform. And then April, who claims that I inspired her naked period with the nude piece I did, was in a nude era of her work. And so of course, it was nudity. So all of our house parties, you know, over a couple of years were all nude pieces and they were all in some part of the house. So the first one was in there [points to living room] covered with bubble wrap. We also named ourselves Fur and Bubbles because when we were talking about what to do, [April said] “I want it to be tactile.” And I said, “You mean like fur?” She said, “Yes.” I said, “You mean like bubbles?” She said, “Yes, fur and bubbles.” So I became Fur. She’s Bubbles. We had a bubble machine. We had fur blankets held in front of us. And we did this piece for the crowd who came for my graduation party. And that started the whole thing. And the next piece we did was “Sap Rising,” which was out in the backyard in the dirt. There was a dirt plot. We had flower shops save their rose petals. So we had bags of them. So we made a bed of roses, actual roses and had rose petals strewn out on the sidewalks. And I mean a whole bed. People could lay in it. Oh my God. And we had, we made an ice phallus and we made chocolate covered strawberries. And we had pink paper flowers covering the floor. Yeah. And I think, was that the chocolate fountain? I don’t know. Anyway, we did “Sap Rising” in the backyard. That was pivotal. We did “Starry Night” based on Van Gogh’s painting “Starry Night.” And we had helium, half-helium balloons, sort of like Cunningham did for his piece, “Rainforest,” with Andy Warhol’s balloons. So we did that and we had a projection. We did it on the roof. We danced on the roof in the backyard. Then our next one was “House of Big Love” where we reprised everything. It was about all religions and all love. And we did a Kama Sutra piece on the front porch with deer masks, nude. And we always had musicians. We had Naomi Joy doing our music, sitting in the attic window, hanging out the attic window, playing violin. So those were awesome. Awesome. And we always had a DJ, Morgan [Thorson] DJ’d once. And we had a couple other DJs. So they went on all night and we would find out later what happened. That was a high point, that era.
My sister and I had an artistic relationship growing up. We played dress-up. We, you know, acted out a lot together. And I noticed that I’ve had some really good collaborations, duo collaborations. One was Cindy Stevens. Cynthia Stevens. We had a company actually. We started a company called the Flying Sisters Theater. We did a lot of work together. Our impetus was that we were going to have an improvisational company and do improvisation, but we made work as well. Gretchen Pick was one of our dancers, a pickup dancer. We did a lot of work for six years and she wrote a lot of grants, which we got. And I was living in Frogtown Family Lofts. I had a studio there. It’s where Jinza lives right now. That was my, I was president of that whole co-op and I was in on the building of that studio, and getting the right kind of floor in there. We did a lot of our work there at that studio. My kids were watching, watching us make work. That was also a high point. Before that I was doing a lot of solo work on my own and I was a kind of a pickup dancer for other people. So I did a lot of rep, a lot of rep work. And before that I took a hiatus from dance. I’m going backwards in time.
When I left college, I joined a religious order and I was in that for five or six years. So I was away from the world for a long time. It was semi-monastic. I think it’s the kind of tug that a lot of people have between what am I doing for the world and I’m doing art and what is that doing for the, you know, I had a little bit of that tug, but I think it was mostly equal tug to do both, to be of service, to have a deep spirituality going on, and to do art. So everywhere I went I would get some kind of dance thing going and actually I took dance classes and danced while I was in that order. But when I got out, you know, it was like, “Wow, what’s happened to the world?” My landmark is that when I went in there were no such things as unitards. I was a dance person. Basically, I went from college to taking Liz Lerman’s job at Sandy Spring Friends School where she taught, and then after that I went into the order. So I taught for a year after college. I got back into dance because I made a solo to audition for Choreographers’ Evening here. I went shopping with Colleen Callahan to a dancewear store.
And I went, “What is this?”
“That’s a unitard.”
“Oh my god.”
It was pearlescent white. It was shiny, synthetic white. I tried it on and I went, “This is it.” Because my piece was about shells, it was called “Shells.” Hawaii, right? So there’s a deep connection in the body as shell, as inside of shell, as shell shapes, as you know spirals, as whatever. So to me that was the mother of pearl, that was the inside of a shell. So it was perfect. So I wore that and a pearl necklace. I auditioned, I got in. Michael Engel, who has passed, was the curator. So I did this solo and that’s what got me back into dance here.
I have three children and somehow I always try to get them involved somehow. They’re very different thinkers. My son was a punk rocker. I used his music in my dance “Ophelia.” It was really great, great music. I love his music. Right now he’s married, he has a kid. He works and I think he still plays, but not as much. My oldest daughter is in school now for sculpture and mechanical engineering. She used to make environments. She had a little company that made environments at First Avenue. She ran raves when she was in high school and I performed at them. And Concrete Farm, if you remember them, they performed at one of her raves. So, you know, always trying to cross over with my kids. My daughter, Hannah, made a sculpture for a performance at Bedlam, an ice sculpture that melted during the whole performance and dripped and put out candles that were below. It was so beautiful. My daughter, Alice, is studying acting. She did go to school for dance and journalism, but she’s more of an actor.
During the pandemic, she lived with me and I am telling you it saved my life. We would do incredible shows together. We played the characters from Grey Gardens together. I was the older one and she was younger. And then we made a puppet show for my grandson. She is so funny. We just laughed so hard all the way through the pandemic and made things, made things. I made little films. I took workshops and I made little films based. I made a film based on Twin Peaks. It was all portraiture, all just portraiture. Anyway, my kids are amazing, very creative, and have their own struggles coming out of the tradition of no guidelines, a permissiveness. But they’re doing really well and they work really hard. They know how to work. They always have a job. They know the value of working hard. So they’re always having a job and doing a little art on the side. And my grandson’s cool. Who knows where he’s going to go.
I think all of my low points, I was a loner for so many years, all of my low points come out of relationships. Never have a relationship! No, I won’t say that to anybody because they’re important. They’ve taught me. They’re the rock tumblers of life. They polish up your rough edges and you have to learn things. So: relationships, kids. If there’s a hard moment with kids, that’s like the biggest, that’s so hard. It’s hard. Relationship is hard. Making work is hard, hard as shit. And it brings up all your vulnerabilities. So maybe those are all in the same category, relationship and making work. And teaching, you know, but I think making work is harder than teaching in a way. No, they’re both hard. Nevermind. I’m not going to compare. They’re all hard. I’m trying to get away from the low points because I feel like all the struggles I’ve had go right into work. My kids are in my work, they’re in my work. My sorrow is in my work. All of those things are motivators for my work. They inspire me. My relationship with them inspires me. I’ve always had people in my work that I’m in relationship with somehow or another.
So what are you going to do? What are you going to do? I think just in the past couple of years I’ve declared myself not a loner anymore. I’ve thought, “Why do I keep calling myself a loner?” Because I do like the fertility in my alone practice, but I’ve decided what you say is what you get. So I’ve decided, you know, that’s maybe not the healthiest thing. I’m going to try this other thing out. I’m going to call myself a person who can be social and who likes to be with people. I really do. It kind of perks me up and I love people. The pandemic kind of emphasized that lonership. And that felt comfortable, less scary. So there’s fear. So maybe I’m coming out of that and redesigning things, redesigning things. Yeah. But what I like a lot is just moving. Just moving. Let’s move. Let’s just move.
I’m seeing a lot of great work now. I’m really thinking about the big picture of dance because I have a kind of scope. I’ve lived through some postmodern turning points in our dance history. I’ve lived through the 90s Eurocrash and urgency, and out of the 80s the AIDS urgency of “We don’t have any time,” living through the 2000s, you know, undoing everything and everything’s dance again, and, you know, theory is now entering the picture and conceptualism and, you know, and now looking at how noticing, “Oh, people are really coming back into some structural proposals. There’s structure happening.” I know that I’m attracted to structure and there’s a minimalism happening in certain places as well. And a fleshiness, a body-ness. I mean, Taja’s show the other night at Red Eye and then watching Candy Box. I’m really getting this sense of the flesh of the body is just really present. And, you know, we always see our own movie. So I’m seeing that, but I’m also trying to calibrate that with the progression across time because the pendulum swings. “Where’s the pendulum now?” You know, “What am I attracted to?”
My own pendulum was “I’ll make something that’s character-driven or dramatic.” And someone would have said to me, “Oh, you’re so dramatic.” And I’ll go, “Oh my God, I’m not supposed to be dramatic because the dance world is not that. No, I want to be different. So I’m going to do something more abstract.” And then my magnet always goes, “Errrr!” And I can’t help myself and I can’t control it. There’s no controlling anything. There’s no controlling anything. So today I thought, “What if I just gave into that and went completely into the dramatic?” I think it would be new territory, but what would happen? I remember April said to me once, “You’re so literal.” And I felt that was such an insult. I felt insulted. I went, “Ah!” And so I think I made a dance after that that tried to be not very literal. But I’m full of images. Imagery is kind of where I live and breathe.
I am going to make something and I don’t know if it’s going to be a movement piece or what. So we turned our house into installations. We had installations. Like I covered that room in fabric and made a tent. And that mirror mosaic you see is from Starry Night. We found this plexiglass and we had someone cut it up in the basement of Ace Hardware. “Just cut it up,” we said, “into pieces.” And we had a crew, April’s friends, I think, and April put that up there. So we always turned the house into some kind of installation. So I like working with stuff, too.
Keep the faucet going. I think that’s my whole thing because people get invested in Product. And Product’s important. Product is so delicious and so pleasurable. For me, I love to go see a performance. You put something in a frame and you have a date and a time, 7:30, we all sit down and you do something. But that’s not really finished. That’s in process. But because we have framed it, it’s a Product. It’s kind of fun to go and see something held in time as a Product. So Product is really fun and I get invested in Product also. But be in a process, be in a process. That’s what I’m teaching right now. I’m just having the most fun I’ve ever had in teaching a class, I think, because I’ve actually arrived at the place where I think the students can actually learn something.
I grew up never having discussions with my parents, or never being asked questions about what are you doing? What do you think about this? How do you think about this? Never encouraged, right? So I just thought you had to learn everything on your own. We didn’t learn how to tell time. I thought somehow magically it was going to come to me if I stared at the clock. Also playing piano. We never got lessons. We had a piano. If I sat at the piano, if I stayed there, something would happen and I would learn how to do it.
Well, then Mr. Freyvogel in college in music said, “Take four notes off the piano and mess with them.”
“Oh my God! I can play the piano.”
He went, “Go find something that makes sound and bring it to class.”
“Oh my God!”
“A tub of water, you know, or the pipes in the studio bathroom.”
“Oh my God!”
So he was a John Cage student. He worked with John Cage.
Oh my God, my students just made…. So we’re learning postmodern dance history, but we look at Yvonne Rainer. We’re looking at her “No Manifesto.” And then we read an article Activating Whiteness: Racializing the Ordinary in US American Postmodern Dance on with a deep analysis of [Trisha Brown’s] “Locus” and Yvonne Rainer’s “Trio A” and the absence of people of color during that time. Because we’re studying that time and the structures of that time. I myself have gone when I taught history, “Where? What happened? Written out of history? What’s going on?” So then I give my students a counter article. They’ve read the “No Manifesto” and they’re looking at “Locus” as a white, you know, anyway.
So I say, “Okay, now reading this article and looking at this manifesto, write a counter manifesto. Write a manifesto for our time that counters that reference. We know what Yvonne Rainer wrote. Now, write a counter manifesto.” They wrote the most incredible things. They are the people of our time. They wrote incredible manifestos. Then I had them use Trisha Brown’s “Locus” structure to make a piece.
I said, “Pick a couple words out of your manifesto and make the piece, you know, put the letters at the right place in the cube.”
One of my black students in her manifesto said, “”No white cube.”
“No white cube!” I shouted out in class one day.
So they made these pieces, little solos. And then yesterday I was like, “Yeah, let’s do these. Let’s show these pieces.” I said, “Why don’t we read our manifestos while they’re performing?”
Oh my God. The class understood what was happening. I was beside myself. They understood what I said, recuperating history. And they nodded. They understood what that meant.
That’s the joy I’m having right now. It’s consciousness raising. You know, I always thought “I can’t teach, I can’t teach anybody anything.” But now I’m thinking, without being didactic, as a student, I would want some principles. I would want something. I mean, I studied composition and we were still doing the Louis Horst approach to composition based on his book: Modern Dance Forms. My comp teacher used this as a guide and one assignment I did was a Pavanne which I titled de-throned. For theme and variation I pushed against the classical form and instead used a tape loop by Steve Reich (which was new at the time). And I remember that to this day. It gives you something to work against, or something to work with. I’m always questioning, because of my upbringing, “Who needs rules? Just make it up, find it out, find it out yourself!” But not everybody learns that way. Darn. So it’s been a lifelong effort to figure out “How do you teach?” How do you teach without imposing a belief system? Or maybe you share that belief system.
I do get more personal than I used to get. I showed them a picture of a piece. I never used to share my work, unless it was the company and I was making work. I just kind of want to stand back, be on the sidelines. But they’re amazing. They’re amazing. And only one of them is a dance person. Most of them haven’t danced. They’re sports people or, you know, all disciplines.
It’s a beginning choreography class based on sports and games, and sourcing those things. We did a soccer game. The soccer coach has been with me now for three years. We play soccer. We go do soccer drills. And then they create a dance from the movement. It’s already in their bodies. Because that’s what they’ve done before. So they’re awesome. Then we make duets out of those. It’s incredible. I love that class. That’s my favorite class. It’s one I designed when I first came to Carleton. I started with six people and now, the cap on a class is 20, and now they’re like 21 this year and they’ve been 26. It’s like a rite of passage for seniors sometimes. They go take that class for their arts practice [requirement].
But don’t make me sound like I’m a great teacher. I’m not. I struggle with teaching. I struggle with it. That’s why I’m so happy right now because it’s all kind of working. Although we had a bad class the other day, you know, when you’re teaching and something’s not working. And then I had to go, “Well Judith, what’s good about this? What’s different? You expected something, but what’s really happening? Okay? Slow down.” I still didn’t like it, but I went, “Okay, okay.” I should have gone,“That one didn’t work today. That didn’t work.” But we just went on. I try not to be too, you know, overt about disappointment because I mean really anything’s acceptable. Because then once you learn something and you have a platform, then you go from there. So yeah, anyway, thanks for listening.
Interview conducted April 2024
One Skewed Vision 