Katy Pyle discusses the research, process and ideas behind Fruitlands, Katie Workum’s performance at the Chocolate Factory Theater April 18-21 2012. “As a choreographer, I seek to create something new, something free if you will, but how do I direct and apply rules, subjecting my dancers to my orders, and keep a feeling of freedom? I do not think that I have solved this question.”
Interview Date: April 9, 2012
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Katy Pyle: Here we are, at our computers, doing a cyber-interview. I think this is an exciting new aspect of technology, and I’m excited to talk to you about your piece Fruitlands, which will premiere at the Chocolate Factory. I feel like Fruitlands harkens back to a time without technology, pre-technology, or maybe just an older kind of technology, I wonder if you have a specific relationship to modern life’s pace, and whether your exploring that in this piece?
Katie Workum: This piece does have a very candle-lit feel, but it was something that I did not consciously set out to explore. As I sit here typing away, I do make good use to modern tech stuff, but it does not, and has never, really gripped me. I think that it is a great tool for communication, dissemination of information and creation, but my mind operates at a much slower and rustic pace. I also love the touch and feel of things: bodies, fabrics, real musical instruments… This all comes out in Fruitlands, I think…
Katy: Yes, indeed. There is a slower kind of time, and the reality of the amazing fabrics for the costumes! I wonder also if you could talk about how Authentic Movement [AM] has informed this process? Both in regards to this sense of time and real bodies, and also in how it informed the making of movement? Did it change the way you see things? Or make things?
Katie: After doing a weeklong workshop with DD Dorvillier this summer, my whole value system of making dances changed. Thanks DD! She started everyday with AM, something that I used to do all the time, but really lost along the way. My number one goal as I started making the piece was to do AM as much as possible: To stir the pot, to include the dancers’ realities, to let in some real time states, to get to a non-linear place, and to de-agendaize my process. In the beginning, I set some material that came up, so that informed the piece, but later as we went on, I think that the AM helped me access as a viewer a truer picture of my dancers as people with deep internal lives. This is inspiring and helped me know what to ask for from them. I also think it helps the dancers access an openness and a calmness to later apply to more constucted improvs. It was a space, time, and interpersonal unifier.
Katy: I agree! As one of your dancers, I think it’s really helped me to be in the room, to trust everyone, and arrive in the process. It’s been really fun. You’ve talked in rehearsals about Louisa May Alcott, and her father, and the intentional community they were involved in. Can you talk about that here? And how your ideas about them and their lives converge with this process?
Katie: OK, big question… So it began with casting 4 women, this led me to thinking about Little Women, led to Louisa May Alcott, led me to her father Bronson, a founder of the Transcendental Movement. And it is fascinating! So part of the thinking was very romantic, relying on intuition over rationalism, nature over city, god is in the natural world… Among Bronson’s many achievements was to form a commune called “Fruitlands” in the Massachusetts countryside. They were going to live off the land, and free themselves of the oppressions of the modern society. But it was a bust. First of all, no one wanted to join.
So he dragged his wife and his 4 daughters to this house mid-June, there he forced them into back-breaking work just to stay alive. He refused to use farm animals, eat any animal protein, including eggs and milk, no cotton, no wool (came from sheep), men and women had to eat separately… Totally idealistic, but totally unlivable and he became more and more stringent and rules based as the year wore on. He is doing this to his own family! This irony is very interesting. As a choreographer, I seek to create something new, something free if you will, but how do I direct and apply rules, subjecting my dancers to my orders, and keep a feeling of freedom? I do not think that I have solved this question. My need for control has narrowed my work previously, and I relate to Bronson’s struggle. Louisa was a child at this time and I think that it affected her in a way that shows in her work. In Little Women, the sisters are not self-reliant and recognize that real need and real care is fundamental. This is a feminine outlook to me, and one that I have tried to use as an answer to the question of control.
Katy :Can you talk more about this “feminine outlook”? And how it enters your thinking in the process? Is it conscious or just more intuitive? Or both?
Katie: Well, I think largely it is intuitive, but I will try to find the words…As a relatively new mom, and expecting a second child, I am newly confronted with what it is to be a woman. My gender has never been so apparent and in the past I have really been unwilling to come to terms with my femaleness. But what I find is I have a new strength. It is in my ability to bear the enormous weight of keeping someone alive, thriving and growing. I give myself all out, I can feel it leaving me and entering my child and this is her real nourishment, not just philosophies and ideas. So, in my research, I kept thinking about all the women behind the scenes, like Louisa on the commune and her mother, the true backbone of the family, keeping a community alive. This is very real and grounded to me, more than an essay on Walden Pond. I like working with my “Little Women.” I like the feeling of quiet strength in the room, the enormous care and compassion. Not to say that this is all that is there, or only reserved for women. There is an aggression in the piece as well and I think that it comes as a reaction to all the above.
Katy: How did growing up in New England and playing sports affect your aesthetic sensibilities?
Katie: I grew up in the land of all Thoreau, Emerson and Alcott. I performed as one of the daughters in a weird evening tableau in the Alcott house and was scolded for not being “Jo” enough. I took class trips to Walden Pond etc… So, all this history was around me and while I gave it little thought then, it must have stuck somewhere as I return to it. I think that the relative hardness of the place appeals to me. While I grew up, in the sort of suburbs of Boston, we had no neighbors, our house was old and creaky with no locks and terrified me all night long. This is the New England that I go back to.
And there I did do a lot of sports. And no dance. In the team sports, I think that it provided me with an outlet for aggression that I can relate to in dance somehow. Performing is by nature aggressive by commanding a viewer to sit and watch. I was very competitive and hard on myself, I did sports that freaked me out completely , like ski-jumping just to get ahead in some league or another. Looking back, I was crazy! But this toughness and bareness has permeated my aesthetic as well. The sports were my first dance training. In this piece the women do a lot of running. They run and run, I remember that feeling, just letting it out and going for broke.
Katy: Do you see a through line between this piece and previous pieces? And even going back to your curatorial creations with Terry Dean for DanceOff? What are the connections across time for you between your varied creative projects?
Katie: I made a conscious decision to break away from older pieces in process and product. I was happy with my last show, Herkimer Diamonds, but felt that I had battened down the hatches a bit and created something very organized. In this piece [Fruitlands] I have tried to consider making it as a reflection of my actual thinking: heaping, piling and not immediately readable. DANCEOFF! and “Lisa Leanne and Terry Dean put on a Danceshow” was my first dance home. There I met many of my mentors and learned about the dance world. It was a very fun place and time, and to me, we all made stuff for the joy of it. For me it was like, “Hey wanna make a piece with lots of gum that we shove in each others mouths? That would be funny!” To a small but important extent this mode has stuck with me. I love to make dances that are readable and touchable enough that the audience will feel something and be intimately engaged. This is from that era. From then to now, I have done many things and worked with all types of people, music stuff, acting, straight dancing. I have piled up all sorts of information and I do believe I use it. I still do the classic David Neumann heel swivel in improvs! Having no formal training in dance, I think that through working with lots of people and forms, I kinda created my own major in performance. I can feel this making my dances.
