Part One: The Pre-Company Stage
By Lauren Simpson and Jenny Stulberg of Simpson/Stulberg Collaborations
Around ten years ago, we each had the goal of starting a dance company, but that was long before we knew each other and had the wherewithal to take action steps to make it a reality. A whole set of experiences and factors, most of which we realize were out of our control, needed to align before we could consider being entrepreneurs in addition to artists.
We both moved to the Bay Area in the summer of 2014, and soon afterward we met in Christine Cali’s weekend workshop. A month later there was an opening in RAW Dance’s CONCEPT Series 16, so we collaborated on a short duet, which we also performed. From there we made several more dances, gradually beginning to recognize that our shared life experiences were adding up to something. In hindsight, we can identify more or less five main factors that added up to the emergence of our small dance company. They are collaboration, art making, time, community, and getting pushed off a ledge.
Collaboration- We are well-matched collaborators, but we don’t share the same strengths, which is to our benefit. Lauren does most of the grant writing and organization; Jenny does the videoing, documenting, and public relations. In the studio, Lauren is mostly concerned with a certain kinetic logic, compositional rules, and conceptual arc; Jenny is more instinctual and quicker to break the rules. What we share is an ambition for making dance a central part of our lives. We are in our early 30s, an age when we notice many of our colleagues (understandably) dropping out of the field. For better or worse, we have chosen to stay in it. We share a conviction to not waste our time or anyone else’s, to make the best work we can within our constraints, and to take our work seriously and professionally.
Art making- At this point in our careers we’ve made enough dances to hopefully have gotten the really bad ones out (also known as graduate school), though we are confident there will be future bad ones because the standards for what we do are constantly rising. We’ve also seen enough work to determine where we fit in the larger context, to be influenced by great dance makers and yet avoid imitation. The first dance we made was called Still Life for Two. We studied the composition and qualities of a 19th century masterwork still life painting and then based our choreographic approach on these elements. We enjoyed this process so much, we did it three more times and now we are in the midst of creating Still Life No. 4. Working with still life paintings has been a choreographically rich territory for us, as it has shaped our movement vocabulary in distinct ways. Taking this approach repeatedly (working in a series) forces us to deepen and refine what we’re doing. We no longer feel an obligation to make a categorically different dance every time because we have found a research topic that both focuses our aesthetic and allows for growth with each attempt. It’s not that each Still Life Dance gets better (No.2 has never felt fully satisfying nor finished to us), but each time feels worth the repeated investigation because we are motivated to make the next one. Like Ira Glass famously says, “It’s only by going through a volume of work that... your work will be as good as your ambitions.”
Time- We had both moved to San Francisco with a little savings and part-time work, and therefore had the extra bandwidth to spend quality, un-rushed time in the studio - a luxury we couldn’t afford in our twenties when we worked several jobs and hustled between performance gigs. Over the past year we didn’t once think about making a company; we only thought about making a dance. We did showcases, shared bills, got commissions, and whatever else we needed to do to avoid putting energy into production and administration. Time and space to work on the artwork is crucial, and it's a phase we anticipate going back to over and over again.
A Community- A few key people and programs in the Bay Area went out on a limb for us - hiring us, selecting our application, or writing letters of recommendation. Through these folks we have made other artist friends who want us to succeed. These people are crucial.
The Ledge- A few things happened at once - we received some grants to create an evening length work, Lauren got pregnant, and then we started hiring dancers and other collaborators. It turns out when you start hiring a crew of artists, you need to raise money, and in order to raise money it’s helpful to be fiscally sponsored by a non-profit entity. Once you are sponsored you can launch a fundraising campaign and apply for larger grants. Once you’ve done all of those things, you turn around to discover you have de facto started a dance company. Consciously avoiding all the hard work (administration) that goes into making the rest of the hard work (the dance), we were blissfully in the pre-company stage, until we weren’t. It was the ledge off of which we needed to get pushed.
To purchase tickets to our upcoming show March 31, April 1, and April 2, 2016 at ODC Theater in San Francisco, click here.
Find out more at: www.stilllifedances.com
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Related posts:
Blog Series: Building a Dance Company
Artist Profile #113: Joan Woodbury (Salt Lake City, UT)
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