Hometown: Worcester, MA
Current city: Brooklyn, NY
Age: 37
Attended an arts high school? I went to Walnut Hill in Natick, MA, which is an arts high school. I was a visual art major and only started dancing in college (with the exception of some PE ballet classes my senior year…)
College and degree: Pomona College (Claremont, CA) - BA
Graduate school and degree: Hollins University/American Dance Festival (VA and NC) - MFA, late twenties…
How you pay the bills: I teach, choreograph and perform.
All of the dance hats you wear: Teacher, Choreographer, Performer, Dramaturg, Administrator…
Non-dance work you do or have done in the past: Personal Trainer
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The first five years after college:
I spent a year as a post-graduate student/extra-set-of-hands at Hollins University during the 2000-2001 academic year. I needed more time to be in a setting where I could focus on dance exclusively - and Hollins (under the guidance of Donna Faye Burchfield) was the perfect place. This was Hollins before the MFA program - but it was already an intense incubator for new ways of thinking about dance. At the time, I had no idea how lucky I was to have been at Hollins during a moment of radical growth and change (I was there with a group of extraordinary women who have been transforming the art form, among them: Ann Liv Young, Katy Pyle, Sara Procopio, Isabel Lewis, Emily Wexler, and of course, Donna Faye herself…) I joined the newly established Shen Wei Dance Arts Company in the Spring of 2001. Shen Wei knew of me through my time as a student at the American Dance Festival. Work with Shen Wei was all-consuming from the very beginning. He had very little money but tremendous vision and ambition… He molded a group of 12 young dancers (most of us fresh out of our undergraduate training) into a company capable of executing his demanding, uncompromising choreography. It was not easy, but we were devoted. In the early years of the company we all had to have other jobs. I would often get up at 5AM to train clients at a gym in Manhattan then rush to company class at 10AM, rehearse until 5PM, then head back to the gym to train more clients. At about the two year mark, we were touring so much that I had to give up most of my personal training work.
The next ten years:
After five and a half years of dancing for Shen Wei I was ready for a change. In 2006, I received a Dorot Fellowship for a year of independent study in Israel. As a fellow, I was an instructor at a performing arts college, taught movement to adults with developmental disabilities, did Jewish text study connected to issues of the body and sexuality, and began collaborative projects with two Israeli theater directors (Basmat Hazan and Ofer Amram). I studied Gaga, a movement technique by Ohad Naharin, that was profoundly restorative in its rejection of the rigidity of much dance training, emphasizing the expansion of each body’s unique physical capacity. This technique became an inspiration for my teaching. After my fellowship year ended, I spent much of the following year dancing in the Inbal Pinto and Avshalom Pollack Dance Company.
After returning to the United States, I was fortunate to earn a spot in Deborah Hay’s 2009 Solo Commissioning Project. Studying with Deborah Hay, a legendary postmodern choreographer, transformed the way I engage with the world. I learned to pay attention more acutely to the interplay between my senses and the environment, “inviting being seen from every cell in my body…” I learned that communication in performance is not just accomplished through what my body is doing but through how I bring my attention into relationship with time, space and other bodies.
My teaching shifted profoundly after studying Gaga and working with Deborah Hay. No longer content to teach technique solely as a means to uncover the body’s physical capacity, I began to focus on how to train bodies toward unfixing habits of perception, presence and physical limitation.
Between 2009 and 2010, I made an evening length solo and worked with two NYC based choreographers who further changed how I thought about dance and performance. These two are the brilliant Faye Driscoll and Netta Yerushalmy. Netta challenged me to reimagine the limits of structure and abstraction in dance, and Faye guided and cajoled and provoked me to reimagine the limits of my sense of self.
Now:
I teach a lot… at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, at the new Brooklyn Studios for Dance, at the American Dance Festival, and as a guest artist at Peridance Center in NYC and in places like the Salt Dance Fest in Utah and Texas A+M University. I make solo work; I work collaboratively with 3 different choreographers: Mark Haim, Jumatatu Poe and Katie Swords. (Mark and I just premiered our first duet at the American Dance Festival this past summer, Jumatatu and I premiere our evening length duet at Gibney Dance Center in NYC next week, and Katie and I premiere our duet at the end of October 2015 at the Museum of Art and Design in NYC. I love the duet form… I love learning how different I am (can be) depending on the relationship I form with each artist I work with.) I work for Faye Driscoll as a dramaturg/artistic advisor. I write about dance in Israel. I let my life as a teacher and my life as a dance-maker/performer bleed into one another. My teaching is a form of art-making; my work as a performer and choreographer is a way to put into practice what I am trying to activate through my pedagogy.
Faye Driscoll and Jesse Zaritt in Driscoll's You're Me. Photo: Paula Court
Major influences:
Donna Faye Burchfield - her radical pedagogy… her faith in dance’s capacity to transform lives, her tireless efforts to serve her students.
Deborah Hay - her radical philosophy of performance practice. “My whole body at once my teacher…”
My parents - my mother Shoshanah Zaritt who has seemingly endless energy and capacity for radical generosity, my father Edward Zaritt who writes every day - who taught me by example that meaning making (creating art) can and should be an act of radical care (radical contemplation) for the self, that the value of any art practice does not have to depend on external validation.
Some thoughts on teaching:
In my teaching, I try to critically examine the historical terms of what constitutes dance technique, restrictive definitions of choreography, assumptions around the value of conventional western physical virtuosity, and the model of master teacher/novice student. In every single teaching context I find myself in, I wrestle with how to both honor and transform the art form of dance. I come up against the limits of my own capacity - not just as a dancer/choreographer/scholar - but as a communicator, and more importantly, as an agent of change – as an individual committed to transformative feminist pedagogy. I have to acknowledge that I come from a social position of extraordinary privilege as a white, middle class male. When I stand as a teacher in a room full of students, the terms of my identity are present. My ability to counter the easy slide back toward a dominant model of dance education that reinforces hierarchies of class, race, ability, gender, sexuality, age and location is constantly challenged, not only by my own lack of awareness, but also by my (often misplaced) perception of the expectations of both the students in the room and the institution that I am teaching within.
I do strongly believe that dance is a field where transformative ways-of-being-in-the-world can be deeply and effectively practiced/tested in the body. It is for this reason that my pedagogy must be committed to activating multiple ways for individuals to "deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world." (Richard Shaull)
The research into how dance can support transformative action is inside the way my classes are structured. "What if...?" is a guiding question for every class (thank you Deborah Hay…) In each learning space I facilitate, I try to create a sense of not-knowing together. I try to ask questions without one single correct answer.
You have worked at the American Dance Festival. What was this experience like? Advice to young dancers on attending one of the iconic dance festivals here in the US - ADF, Bates, or Jacob’s Pillow….
If you can find a way to get to one of the major dance festivals, I highly encourage it. The connections I made as a student at ADF in 1998 and 2000 continue to be vitally present in my life. Almost all of the original company members of Shen Wei met him at ADF in 2000; many of my closest friends, mentors, collaborators and employers are people I have met at ADF. I have seen so many of my students at ADF build lives and companies together since I began teaching there in 2008. The benefit of being in such an intense community of like-minded young artists, teachers and choreographers extends far beyond the 6 weeks of the festival itself…
What is your focus as a performer right now?
Here are a few ideas I’m working with in my teaching and performance practices:
- Imagination is real. My mind is my body - what I think and see in my mind is manifested in my physicality. I need the power of my imagination to unlock the potential for my body to transform. If you can’t imagine it, you can’t have it (Carl Jung, Samuel Delany, and others)
- My body is a field of limitless possibility.
- No big deal. (I heard it first from Deborah Hay.) No big deal does not mean I stop caring. It means I keep moving even if I am confused, I am failing, I am tired, I am uncertain, I am overwhelmed. No big deal reminds me that physical and artistic understanding takes time. This learning requires me to trust my body and its deep resources of knowledge, even if I can’t rationally identify what it is that I am attempting.
- What if space is my most intimate and consistent partner in life: the ground/gravity supports me unconditionally; the atmosphere around me sustains my life - my breathing, my circulation. What if this is love? What if I let go of perceiving myself in isolation and instead allow myself to always be in a state of profound relationship? How can I practice being in love (being in love with the body of space)? How can I tune my body to both give and receive love in/to space as I move?
- In as much as I become aware of how space supports me unconditionally, I must also identify the forces moving through space that seek to undermine my availability - forces like the oppressive application of the social constructs of gender and race, forces of judgement, capitalist objectification, sorrow and greed (and many others). Sometimes the hands of space will move me with love, sometimes the hands of space will manipulate my body in ways that distort my agency, sometimes both will happen at once. (I will be in the body of space in simultaneous love and conflict.)
- I have options: My whole-body-at-once-in-movement can collaborate, resist, yield or innovate. My movement will never wholly set me free from forces that shape the spaces of my life, but I can and will practice seeking instances of freedom - moments of release and creative transcendence, opportunities to discover ways of being imaginatively and physically beyond coercive forces of domination. (Recommended reading: I Want to be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom by Danielle Goldman)
- We are not neutral vessels.
- What is freedom? What can my body teach me about freedom of movement? Am I free to move?
Faye Driscoll and Jesse Zaritt in Faye Driscoll's NOT...NOT (part 1): IF YOU PRETEND YOU ARE DROWNING I'LL PRETEND I AM SAVING YOU. Chicago Dancing Festival's MCA MOVES Wednesday, August 24, 2011 | Museum of Contemporary Art Photo Credit: Cheryl Mann Photography
Final thoughts - hope/belief/love of the profession:
I believe that dance matters. In this world where the body is the primary site in which the tensions between conflict, hope, and transformation are played out – I find boundless value in the effort to create meaning through moving bodies.
Articulate, critical, restless bodies are necessary right now.
Embodiment that shifts perception - even on a small scale - is essential to our ethical evolution.
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