Critical Correspondence

University Project: David Roussève, Full Professor of Choreography, University of California, Los Angeles

in conversation with Maura Donohue

Interview 10.08.09 | Download this interview as PDF

David Roussève is a magna cum laude graduate of Princeton University and a 2004 Guggenheim Fellow. In 1989 he created REALITY, a multi-racial dance/theater company that has toured extensively throughout the US, Europe, and South America, and was commissioned three times by the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival. In 1996, David Roussève joined UCLA’s World Arts and Cultures Department. Currently, he is Full Professor of Choreography and former Department Chair. His newest work Saudade, juxtaposes Portuguese fado music, world dance, postmodern dance, stories of southern African Americans, and projected video imagery. Saudade will be at Danspace Project this week – Thu – Sat 10.22-10.24.

Maura Donohue: I’m grateful that Saudade is coming to Danspace. I was sorry to miss it when it was at Montclair.

David Roussève: Yes, it premiered in early February and we toured six cities including Montclair. This is our first engagement this season. We toured all winter long and spring and took it to the Pillow in August.

Maura: How have you balanced touring and a full-time teaching load?

David: I’ve just started to figure it out and got the University to support the work but it’s been a long time coming. When I first got to UCLA, my company was still in NYC. I arrived at UCLA in 1996 and my company stayed until 2001-02. We had a tremendous amount of work at the time. The school was very good about letting me off but without pay. I’d take the time off and do my own thing. They were very separate then. I’d accrued sabbatical time, so sometimes it was paid once I’d been there long enough. Over the years, I started figuring out ways to get the University to support the work more in very nuts and bolts kind of ways. There are faculty grants we can apply for – up to $10,000 a year if you are working on a project over three to four years. It’s a huge part of the budget. Then, I really started using my composition classes as development workshops. We have a couple courses within our department where, if you can write a strong curriculum, you can investigate your own ideas in projects in your courses. That was instrumental. When we premiered at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center (at the University of Maryland), they were highly supportive and gave us a technical residency a week prior to our premiere week. But, even before that, it’s a highly technical work and, luckily, my department let me use the school’s beautiful theater. So I was able to mount the piece – with film and set – and play around with these interdisciplinary elements. The school also provides studio space, which is phenomenally expensive in LA where the focus on dance is commercial. I like to rehearse in spurts – something like three week residencies, three times a year, eight hours a day, five to six days a week. Christmas break, spring break, and three months in the summer. I knew I could get all the space I needed at the school for that kind of working schedule. It had a huge impact on the piece.

Maura: That notion of in-kind support from university dance programs is essential.

David: When you think about academia, the departmental programs have some resources and the larger University presenter is often the main presenter of dance at many cities. Sometimes you can cobble together whatever you can find in all those different university programs – from both departments and presenters. Departments might lack commissioning money but we do have resources. I chaired our department for a couple years and I wanted to open things up for artists, to find ways to move the department toward allowing us to support artists in more ways. Things like having a salary and health insurance while working on a new piece is a really great thing.

Maura: How did you move that agenda forward as Chair?

David: I find the bureaucracy incredibly difficult to deal with but there were things that were fulfilling. Our department is a mixture of performance and cultural studies/theory and dance practice. I felt, in subtle ways, I was able to push the performance side of things back into focus. There was a cultural shift by having an artist as chair, which brought the validity of performance as research into the mix. We increased student/faculty performances. I brought back into the discussion the importance of having world-class artists in residency in the department. You need a 50% appointment at UCLA to get health insurance – most artists are coming in at 30% and we’d cobble together a 50% load, because I know what it is to be a working artist without benefits. I was able to make those nuts and bolts changes as Chair. I felt that, luckily, it was at a moment when I didn’t want to make large scale, group work. I wrote and directed a dance for camera and made several pieces for other companies, but not for my own company. It would not have been feasible if I’d been trying to make Saudade at that moment. I think having an artist to represent the department was an important statement.

Maura: There is this wonderful opportunity to find ways to support other artists. Did you consciously decide to not make large-scale work before the appointment as chair?

David: I had felt like my large scale group work was fun and fulfilling but it was becoming for me a little formulaic. That was one of the enormous advantages of being in academia. You can create a situation where you keep exploring artistically, but you don’t HAVE to make work to survive. Being in academia is a plus when I can go into the studio to focus on finding new ways of making work. It’s more feasible than when I was on my own. When I didn’t have a salary and studio space to fall back on, I had to keep churning out pieces that sometimes fail because they feel ‘churned out’. But now I can go into the studio making smaller scale work, focus on developing my process, and not worry about surviving. Once I’d made that choice and the opportunity to chair the department came, it seemed like the right time.

Maura: Sometimes the work in academia feels like it takes you away from being able to work enough, but taking you away from the market-driven aspect of making work is so freeing for an artist.

David: It is such a delicate balancing act for life and academia. But there are these huge pluses. It’s inspiring to teach and mentor young artists and to continue making work. So if you can give academia what it needs and feed yourself, your own work can better itself and mature. It’s very hard in the US as a mid-career artist, art making is like being a shark – you have to keep moving forward or you’ll die. I find that within academia you can legitimately move forward because some of the pressures of churning work out which implies not moving forward but simply producing it. Some of those pressures are alleviated.

Maura: How did you make your composition course work for you?

David: At UCLA, we have a Special Topics in Choreography course that I teach along with Dan Froot, Vicki Marks, Lionel Popkin, and Cheng-Chieh Yu, all artists who are all working on adventurous choreography. That course stands for something that is really of the moment in the choreographic world that you really want to explore. I taught one in dance-theater last year and I really want to return the validity of art making to the curriculum. I think for working artists on faculty one of the very strongest things we bring to the table is our development processes. How we make work, right. In Saudade, my cast ended up being former MFA students. In engaging them in the deep development of new work I realized that this is where they are really learning the deeper methods: directly through being involved in a process. I thought how tragic it was that they couldn’t learn that while in school. They were learning creative methods by being inside – by doing and participating in an active process. It’s the strongest thing that I can bring to the curriculum – to engage in a real development process. You have to find the course container for a process like that and I’ve been encouraging us to legitimize creative development process as a course. The students are learning something of value by participating.

Maura: What is the culture of interaction between your undergrads, graduate students and faculty?

David: We’re moving towards more interaction between undergrads and grads. Last year, when I taught a course with composer Robert Een, grads took the course, but they didn’t get credit towards their MFA degree. Our MFA in Dance is choreography based and our PhD in Culture and Performance is an academic degree. Sometimes we like to blur the line between the two. We often have PhD students who are fabulous choreographers who want a PhD either instead of or in addition to an MFA. They’ll take our graduate level comp course sometimes. When I made the dance for camera work Bittersweete one of the people in the cast was a PhD in my graduate level comp class. We have had several MFAs who then go into our MA/PhD program. It’s challenging but fulfilling for me to sit on the PhD committees for some of these artists coming from our MFA program.

Maura: How much composition do your graduates ended up taking?

David: Because the degree is in composition, they are required to take an MFA comp course together every quarter and that comp class serves as their primary avenue for choreography. It is a seven to eight quarter program, and for their first five quarters they are taking intense composition as a group, and every week they are making a new study. We require them to make a lot of work and throw it away to explore different areas of composition. Then there are different composition based courses they can elect to get credit for such as Dance for Camera, Special Topics, etc. And, one of the important aspects of our department is that they have an interaction between composition and theory. They are required to have some interaction with a theoretical component whether it be a PhD seminar or an academic course that feeds the themes that they are working with.

Maura: Do you think this is a product of the times or a product of the PhD program?

David: We want as broad a context as possible for our students. You are choreographing your work in an ever evolving world – from the very beginning we wanted to provide that context that forces or allows them to study academically whatever they’re making their work about. For the past four years Susan Foster has taught the first quarter of graduate level comp. Sometimes they’re going in kicking and screaming. She challenges them right away in a hard core way to be both thinking and doing and they come out happy at the other end. I think what makes the whole thing feasible is an environment of deep mutual respect. No one is intimidated by the knowledge anyone else brings to the table – every one is respectful of different forms of knowledge and different forms of knowing. In academia, there can be so much tension between thinking versus doing and overthinking and overdoing. But, when you have someone like Susan and other dance scholars we’ve recently hired – folks who have so much respect for practice – then the tension is eliminated. But, there has to be a deep respect for choreography as an avenue for human knowledge. And vice versa: A deep respect from choreographers for the field of dance studies.

Maura: So, it’s becoming increasingly apparent that our generation has managed to find academia as a wonderful avenue for survival and growth of our work and the form. But, how are we preparing our students? What landscape are we preparing them for? It’s become my million dollar question.

David: Right. The field is evolving so quickly and our own department is changing so quickly. We’d have our auditions every year and we’d say “Okay, our program is based in the act of making dance. This program works best for working choreographers who would come in and want to further their artistic development.” If someone wanted to get a degree to teach but wasn’t a strong choreographer, or if they’d say “I just want a degree in order to teach”, then we used to think “Oh ,so bogus.” But now everyone needs that degree. So now, if they want to start a dance company, without rethinking the model, we think they’re crazy. But 10 years ago we would have wanted only that person. These days the best choreographers need a degree to teach. We’re looking at our candidates differently because our field has changed. What worries me is this: if everyone wants a degree to teach but the field is shrinking and there are no companies out there, then which field are we training people to join? With each class of six MFAs – maybe maybe maybe there’ll be one position in academia. So it’s troubling. What is the professional world that we are training artists for? If everyone wants a degree to train new artists but it’s not for the thriving company world in America… it’s a small pool ultimately. I don’t have the answers.