Hometown: Raleigh, NC
Current city: Ann Arbor, MI
Age: 50s
College and degree: University of North Carolina School of the Arts - BFA
Graduate school and degree: University of Washington - MFA
Website: http://www.chavassedanceandperformance.com/ and ChavasseDance Facebook page
How you pay the bills: Associate Professor - University of Michigan; guest artist and choreographer at various institutions, workshops, summer festivals. Most recently at Wayne State University in the spring of 2015. Faculty at The Beijing Dance Festival in 2013-14. ADF/Henan China in 2013.
All of the dance hats you wear: Dancer, choreographer, improviser, teaching artist, collaborator
-----------
20s: Some back story is necessary here. I danced when I was young, from 4 or 5 to about 14 years. Ballet, tap and jazz in a small studio run by a man named Mr. Leocarter, who dressed in black and taught every class in a three room house empty of furniture. I stopped taking dance classes and shifted my energy and focus to tennis around age 14. I took a year off between high school and college and worked landscaping and construction jobs to make money and then bought a motorcycle and traveled around the U.S. and Mexico with my German Shepherd on the back. I had serious wanderlust, and this trip settled me down enough for college. I didn’t return to dance until my third year in college, where I was studying visual art at Appalachian State University. I took a Graham class to fulfill a P.E. credit and was pulled back into dancing. I had never had a modern class until then and found it fascinating. I transferred to the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, where I was placed in the third year class. My peers had been studying Graham and dance for many years. I was a disaster, and felt like an outsider, a sensation that continues to characterize my place in this field. I even got kicked out of class for “not knowing what I was doing” – I’ll never forget those words. Maybe this is why improvisation is so important to me now. I spent a lot of time in the studio trying to catch up, and in the fast-forward blur of getting my BFA in only two years, I eventually established wonderful connections with some of my peers and learned a lot. After graduation, I danced for Marcia Plevin, a UNCSA faculty member who had a company based in Winston-Salem. My career trajectory was put on hold for a few years when my mother got sick and eventually died. I stayed in NC to be with her and help my dad. However, I always found ways to dance and to continue my studies. Eventually I moved to San Diego and danced with Jean Isaacs and others, to DC where I danced with Maida Withers, Dianne Frank and Debra Riley, and Carla Perlo. And finally to NYC after I was hired by Laura Dean Dancers and Musicians. Looking back, I think I needed the years dancing and performing in CA and DC before moving to NYC.
30s: I danced with Laura Dean Dancers and Musicians until I was in my mid-30s. I then moved back to DC for a year, where I taught at George Washington University, American University and several local studios, including The Dance Place. I started pursuing my dance making interests in earnest and showed my work in festivals and showcases in both DC, NYC and beyond. I also worked with Beth Davis who had a fantastic rehearsal/performance space at The Hall of Mirrors in Glen Echo, just outside of DC. I met Rodger Belman while dancing for Beth, and he and I collaborated on a duet and began a long artistic and personal friendship. I applied for and was accepted into the MFA Dance program at the University of Washington and moved to Seattle, where I was able to work with Wade Madsen, William Whitener, and Pat Graney. I moved back to DC, and then to NC where I was adjunct faculty or a guest artist at UNCSA, UNC-Greensboro, UNC and Duke. This was the beginning of my itinerant years. After leaving NC, I was on faculty at Virginia Commonwealth, Arizona State, and spent six years at Middlebury College where I met and worked with Peter Schmitz. He continues to be an influential mentor and collaborator. I founded ChavasseDance&Performance with my sister Caroline - an actor, performer, writer and video artist - and we created and performed work at Duke University, The Grace Street Theater in Richmond, and The Dance Place in DC.
40s: I left Middlebury and finally landed a tenure track position at the University of Michigan, where I continue to teach today. I received early tenure four years ago. I started working with a core group of collaborators, former students from UNC-Greensboro, Donnell Oakley, Jessica Jolly and David Schmidt, who were making dances in Brooklyn as part of everything smaller. We made several works together and shared concerts of our work at Middlebury and beyond. I continue to work with Jessica and Donnell when we can carve out time in our schedules. And eventually former University of Michigan students, Aidan Feldman, Sarah Konner and Austin Selden, joined ChavasseDance&Performance. We traveled to Italy in 2012. Donnell and Jessica joined me at The Beijing Dance Festival in 2013, and performed in Brooklyn as part of Triskelion Presents last summer.
Can you talk about your time working with Laura Dean? How did you first meet Laura? How long did you work with her? What did you love about the work?
When I made the decision to begin auditioning for NY companies, I didn’t know a lot about Laura Dean’s work and I didn’t see myself as having the kinds of innate skills that could support her very rigorous choreography. After shaking off the constraints of Graham technique (or the way that it manifested in my body), I moved hungrily towards release forms and swoopy, expansive movement found in Lar Lubovitch's and Trisha Brown’s work. I apprenticed for the Lar Lubovitch Dance Company briefly, made a lasting connection with some his dancers (especially Peggy Baker), and auditioned for Trisha Brown before making it through the very long audition and being hired by Laura. Laura was making big changes in her company, going from a core group of six or seven dancers to a large ensemble — 14 dancers I think — in preparation for a collaboration with Steve Reich and a commission and premiere at BAM’s Next Wave Festival. It was an auspicious time to join the company. So – this is how I met Laura.
I found the challenges of learning her choreography, especially the durational unspooling of complex stamping, traveling and spinning stage patterns exhilarating and terrifying. Working to deliver sharp, precise, punctuated forms pushed me into new territory. I loved the rhythmic attention to detail and the earthy weight of her early works. I learned to love spinning and felt transformed by the experience of performing long sustained passages of internally focused and highly concentrated forms. I was with the company about 5 ½ years.
Laura Dean is a compelling and fascinating woman, and I learned a lot about the world from her. In the intervening years, as I’ve shifted into artistic director/choreographer roles, my appreciation of her contributions to dance, and her ability to stay true to her singular vision while maintaining a successful NY based company, has grown. I learned a lot about stamina from her.
deux dogtooth
What is on your calendar for 2016? Are you performing in any of your current projects?
I joined a group of women dance and teaching artists in a project called Sola - Dances by and for Women, in late 2014. Andee Scott, who is on faculty at the University of South Florida, created Sola as a vehicle to support creative research and performance and invited five dancer/choreographers and myself to join her. Throughout 2015 we performed at each other’s home institutions (South Florida, NYU, Texas and Woman’s, Middlebury and Michigan). The project has continued with performances in festivals in Dallas and Sarasota, and upcoming performances in Boston and Uppsala, Sweden. ChavasseDance is riding the momentum of a really successful performance series at Triskelion last year with new collaborations in the works, and pending engagements at Triskelion and Montana in the coming year. I’ll start making a new trio with Sarah Konner and Austin Selden this summer, and I’ll perform a duet, deux dogtooth, with Malcolm Tulip (an actor, director and theater faculty member here at Michigan) in Uppsala. I’ve just begun working on a duet for two Michigan students for a performance at The Detroit Institute of the Arts in April, as part of Dance American Art 1830-1960. I’ll travel to Italy in May and teach at ResExtensa Danza Teatro Danza’s studios in Giovinazzo, where I’ve taught and worked over the past eight summers. I have a new collaboration with Hong Kong/Shanghai based vocalist and dance artist Zhang Peng in the works and hope to travel to Hong Kong in June, pending funding, to begin our process. Zhang Peng and I will meet up in Sweden in late June to continue building the work, with future performance opportunities coming into shape for the coming year. And I’ll travel to Berlin in July to create a work for Tanz Tangente, a contemporary dance company. I don’t seem to be able to consolidate my projects too well. But the travel, and the chance to work well outside my institutional life here in the U.S. is still very appealing to me, and necessary for my creative output. I guess I’m always using my work to ask or imagine what my place in the world might be — a tenuous condition when confronted with so much rough justice. And to try to make sense of the exasperation I feel when I look around and see the clash of orthodoxies and absence of edification that characterizes current public discourse.
Current movement practices and care for the body:
I’ve been incredibly lucky to have had no career threatening injuries so far. But I did tear a meniscus last spring and have had to adjust to that. I’ve made adaptations in the way I teach and perform as I’ve aged, which is an inevitable thing for dancers. As a result, I’ve learned more about what I value as a teaching artist and how to make concepts and prompts clear to my students, without having to model every detail. I have been practicing yoga since 1998, and this continues to be a major part of how I sustain my body and mind. My warm up regimen centers around the material I’m building for class. I try to be conscious of changing up my approaches, employing a mix of styles: floor work, upper body weight support, sometimes barre work, but always a lot of improvising and moving non-stop. I like to move constantly and consistently in both my personal warm up and in the material I give to my students. I want to build heat, juice everything up - thoroughly lubricating the joints. I talk with my students about how we enter the work, the space, and ask them to find their own rituals for making the mental shift necessary to begin. I like to focus on inventive and unanticipated intersections between narrative and abstract forms, and textures. To me, there is not a clear separation between studying technique and composing/improvising.
What is the role of somatics in your dance life? How does it influence your teaching as well as choreography?
My yoga practice, study of improvisation and partnering, some training and practice in Laban fundamentals and study of experiential anatomy combine with my own research and experimentation as a mover to sustain my dancing, performing and teaching life. Returning to the classroom each year feels like an act of radical repositioning. Even as I return to the knowledge, experience and accumulated memories of my teaching and creative practice, I look to ways to restructure the ways I deliver information and search for new methodologies of learning, making, and doing.
The role of teaching in your career….and the interplay between your work as a teaching artist, choreographer, and performer…..
Restlessness and curiosity remain incentives for my practice as an educator, dance maker, performer and improviser. My practice, training, research and embrace of improvisation as a means to crafting choreography and as a performance, has led to radical shifts in my role as a teacher and mentor. Using improvisation in my classes has demanded that I develop new skills as a performer. The study and practice of improvisation has probably been the biggest influence in the ways I define my work as a teaching artist, choreographer and performer. This includes a consideration of language and the linguistic or etymological roots of words and phrases — I think that I’ve been influenced a lot by Peter Schmitz in this way.
Can you share a window into the course you teach called “Social Issues in Dance?”
I created this course while I was at Middlebury and taught it in the Winter Term there. I’ve only taught it as an Independent Study class at Michigan. It grew out of my research and creation of several works that had political underpinnings, particularly a work called Enemies, which I started shortly after revelations of torture and abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad were revealed. I found and then scoured documents from the National Security Archives, in particular a policy paper titled “Prohibition on the Use of Force.” It contained the most beautiful language that described the most disturbing acts, which I adapted for the work. I was interested in opening up a conversation about the ways in which social issues have been addressed, examined, challenged and confronted through the medium of dance. I wanted to know how young dance makers thought about how the body carries history and is burdened and inscribed with meaning. Inviting students to consider issues of gender identity and inequality, war and aggression, civil and racial inequality created a platform for teaching composition while tackling controversial issues. I was guided by my belief that dance has a unique ability to stimulate debate, draw people together and ultimately initiate changes in outlook and perspective.
Please pose three questions for choreographers to consider:
This is hard. I feel like I start from scratch each time I enter a new project… but here goes…questions in clusters. I write these as reminders to myself — and recognize that they are true until they are not.
Spend a lot of time coming up with questions that compel or promote a movement language that is specific to the work. What are the physical signatures that arise, and how do they support your ideas? Pay rapturous and exhaustive attention to details, including costumes, sound, sets and lights. Choose your collaborators well.
How do you attend to and support the unfamiliar or unexpected? Or more importantly, how do you subvert expectations? Be willing to tackle provocative or difficult material, but be cautious of trying to be provocative, (or absurd or funny). The more unusual the content, the more finely constructed the form should be.
What can you do to enter into the act of making dance with greater sensitivity to and appetite for the unfathomable? Be willing to get dirty – to turn over rocks and look into the shadows.
How often do you write about dance? How does the process of writing support your art making and teaching?
I write about my research as a dance maker and artist often in grant proposals and requests for funding. In describing my work and process for an audience that sometimes knows very little about dance, I notice the effort to find clarity helps me refine and think about my work. I appreciate the notion of not making assumptions about what is known or understood. I appreciate the correlation between choosing words and revising text with creating movement and considering how certain actions come to life in juxtaposition or contrast to other actions.
I write mountains of letters of recommendations for students and colleagues, peer reviews and recently wrote an article for The American Education Policy Review called “Cultivating Artistry and Agency in Dancers."
How do you find balance between family and dancing?
I’m single, and I’m a devoted dog owner. I struggle to find balance between work (mostly my obligations as a teacher and faculty member) and a personal life, but a lot of my desires and pursuits are connected to dance and dance making, so there’s a lot of cross pollination between “work and life." I think about my creative output all of the time. I find little charges of inspiration, agitations or confrontations that push me towards compositional resolutions or considerations all of the time.
Final thoughts - Hope/belief/love of the profession:
I’m all in with this dance/performance endeavor. Even as I continue to build on my skills as a teacher and choreographer, I still have big, tormenting questions about what matters and why. I love seeing the work of my peers and feel the most monumental sense of gratitude when I see my students making smart, provocative, enervating, radiantly rebellious work. I still haven’t made the dance I long to make…. Maybe just little shreds or moments of truth and liability…. Whatever that is. I love how dance makes me feel about the world, even in the midst of unaccountable cruelty. I love how dance changes what is available to us and teaches us how to watch things. I love touch and close and caring proximity to other people that happens in the rehearsal space or class. And I love how this physical inquisitiveness is unique to us.
-----------
Related posts:
Masters Programs in the Spotlight: University of Washington
Writing Dancing: With Andrea Olsen
----------------------
Articulate and fun. Love reading this, feeling the underlying passion and whole body intelligence. Thanks Amy!
Posted by: andrea olsen | 03/20/2016 at 02:28 PM