Hometown: Claremont, CA
Current city: Urbana, IL and New York, NY
Age: 54
College and degree: Sarah Lawrence College, BA
Website: www.ilandart.org
How you pay the bills: University professor, grant support
All of the dance hats you wear: Choreographer, improvisor, professor, teacher, curator, mentor, performer
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Describe your dance life in your….
20s:
I moved to NYC and started working with Pooh Kaye. She was making the films Sticks on the Move and House of Floating Paper. I worked on them my first summer out of college. We shot the film on the old piers on the Hudson River (now gone). Working there for hours everyday, to create just a few seconds of film, taught me about the kind of time and space required for creative endeavors. I met Yvonne Meier at that time, was introduced to Skinner Releasing and was actively attending Open Movement at PS 122.
30s:
I was making my own work and dancing with a lot of other people in NYC. I initiated improvisation performance opportunities through Hot House at PS 122 and Dive-in at Danspace Project. I was very involved in the activism around the AIDS epidemic and was an active member of the Lesbian Avengers. I was performing a lot in many of the small clubs in downtown NYC - Darinka, 8BC, The Wah Wah Hut. Dancing a lot at the Clit Club.
40s:
The direction of my work shifted when I began the BIRD BRAIN Project (2000- 2006) – a navigational dance project that followed gray whales, ospreys and ducks and geese. This was a multi-year project that continues to deeply influence my work. After this project I founded iLAND - interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art Nature and Dance and have continued to use dance as a mode of kinesthetically researching the built and natural environment.
photo © Andy Kuno for the New York Times
50s:
I started working on Live Dancing Archive and thinking about the ways in which dance itself is an archival system for the dynamic and indeterminate nature of ecological systems. This project included a digital archive and a video component. I got a job at the University of Illinois and moved to the Midwest.
What are you exploring in your artistic work over the next year?
I am working on new project – In Tow. This is a collaborative project that poses questions about the nature of experimentation across generations, disciplines, aesthetics and geographies. It is a collaborative project with new collaborators from the Midwest and longstanding collaborators from NYC. I am also working on new choreographic material that revisits early choreographic strategies from the 80s and 90s and weds them with my current choreographic practice.
Can you also describe iLand for young dancers new to your work?
iLAND is dance organization devoted to supporting dance as a research tool for collaboration and understanding urban ecologies. We have a residency program, a workshop program and an annual symposium.
Are you performing in your work in the next year?
Yes, I’ll be doing something at Jack in NYC November 5-7. In Tow will be presented at Vermont Performance Lab and Danspace Project in 2016.
What do you look for in a dancer? How do you find dancers for your projects?
It is a very intuitive process. I get a sense of whether or not someone is interested in working with me. I have an openended process so I look for dancers who enjoy that. I think I am drawn to complicated people whose physicality strikes me as unusual.
Advice to young dancers about teaching, learning how to teach, and the role teaching will play in their dance careers:
I taught early childhood dance for 30 years at Children’s Liberation and the Borough of Manhattan Community College. Teaching is always inspiring. In my experience you can’t teach for everyone, so being clear about what is particular about your own practice and constantly moving it forward is essential.
Can you talk about splitting your time between Illinois, New York, and Vermont? What does this provide for you and your work?
This is a challenge. It isn’t easy, but being away from NYC gives me a bigger perspective. I am understanding something about the aesthetics and values of the US from being in the Midwest that I might not otherwise have had the opportunity to see.
Last performances you saw that really inspired you:
-DD Dorvillier’s Catalog of Steps at Danspace Project
-Okwui Okpokwasili's Bronx Gothic on Governor’s Island
Photo: Ian Douglas
Three questions for young choreographers to consider:
- How are notions of the body changing in relationship to virtual space?
- What does it mean to take risks at this particular moment in time?
- What can a body do that it couldn’t do before?
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