Critical Correspondence

Elsewhere: Daniel McCusker in conversation with Ana Isabel Keilson and Kinebago’s Sara Smith

Critical Correspondence is pleased to share with you an excerpt of a conversation from Kinebago, a new magazine created to foster the documentation and contemplation of dance and movement-based practices in New England.  Here, Boston-based choreographer Daniel McCusker talks with Kinebago founder Sara Smith and his former student, the New York-based choreographer and scholar Ana Isabel Keilson. For the complete interview and more discourse on dance in New England, please visit Kinebago.

Kinebago: So Danny, you were saying before that you’re taking a sort of sabbatical from making. Is this something official, or something that you just fell into?

Daniel McCusker: Well, it was intentional, if that makes it “official.” I’ve been in New England close to 25 years, shocking!

Kinebago: There should be a cake!

Daniel: And there aren’t a lot of opportunities here, but yet somehow I’ve been incredibly active for the whole time. And for the past few years I’ve been getting into trying to make some performing opportunities for other people, which I remain committed to doing. But I really felt like I needed a year. I needed to pause for awhile and really think about what’s not satisfying and how to change it. Just for myself. And I’m not anywhere, there’s nothing to announce, but one of the things that I’m interested in is doing more of this presenting activity. And I’m investigating different ways to do it and maybe initiating some partnerships. So I’m spending time on that this year. And I’m in the studio less than I would normally be, but still I’m in the studio 5 or 6 days a week. And it’s a little bizarre because I’m making material to do nothing with, but that’s fine. There just came a point for me where I felt like I was just doing the same thing. Not in terms of my work, but the situation that conditions my work [here in Boston] is the same, so it’s hard to make what you do look different if all the elements around you are the same. So I’ve been really thinking about this—what do I embrace, and what do I try to do that’s new? So that’s what I’m in the midst of. I mean Ana might feel the same thing is true in New York…

Ana Isabel Keilson: Yeah, I do. Well, it’s different because at least here there is the promise of some kind of institutional support, whether or not it actually exists, where that doesn’t seem to be as true in Boston. But…I’ve been frustrated for any number of the same reasons things that most people are frustrated with about the New York dance community. And I think that part of my solution to that is finding alternative places and ways to go about showing my work and engaging with different communities. But it does seem that outside of New York, that dance in New England is so different, and there isn’t as much out there as there should be. And you can only self-produce so much before that gets exhausting.

Daniel: Presenting is part of my creative life…I’m fashioning programs that I feel like support the kinds of work that I’m interested in seeing and doing.

Kinebago: How long have you been doing that?

Daniel: Well, I’ve been doing it officially for like four years, but since I started being in the higher education mode…I taught at Holy Cross and then I taught here…so in small ways I’ve been doing it in both campuses, bringing people who are local—broadly defined “local” — have New England connections to both of those places. I’ve been teaching in higher education for 15 years. And when I lived in Maine we had a presenting series at Ram Island, and it got to be smaller over the years, but once it got to be smaller we actually started to produce things that were more in line with the kind of work that we were making. So, you know, that was pretty long…25 years.

Kinebago: And also, having been part of one of the shows that you curated here, I feel like one of the things that you are fashioning is community. And I felt for instance that at the “ThisThat” show I was part of I met and connected with other choreographers—actually including Ana—who I wouldn’t have necessarily seen otherwise. And in the sort of backstage studio environment we got to know each other in a different kind of way.

Daniel: Right. I never even thought about the backstage studio environment, that’s so funny. But yeah, I think it’s community.… I mean the thing that’s interesting is it’s kind of my community.

Kinebago: Right. But I think in that way…I mean, one of the things I like about seeing you as someone who builds community, is that it seems to come from this place of you being interested in the art that you’re seeing, and then you invite those people whose art you’re interested in [to come] together and then that creates it…. Like, you don’t come from this angle of, “I really want to create community” and then let’s see what happens. In this model, the art may be of varying levels, or it might be something interesting to you or not. But actually you come from this place of like, “Let’s see if we can put together something that is artistically sound,” and that this also can create community.

Ana: I was going to say, I feel like that’s something I’ve also inherited from you, or learned from you. In a lot of the projects that I’ve been doing or trying to do or seeking out…you know, with ‘the zine’ or “CLASSCLASSCLASS,” or thinking, who are other interesting artists whose work I want to see more of together, that my work can also kind of be a part of. Rather than being like, “well, let’s just make community and then see what happens.”

Daniel: “Let’s have a potluck, and then let’s see what happens after that.”

Ana: Right. I think there’s a lot of false pretense about what “community” is, especially in the art world, and especially in the dance world, so…. I think this is something that I’ve learned from you… Like, if it’s not interesting, it’s only going to get you so far. The experience of watching, or the experience of learning from something…it doesn’t have to be something that you like aesthetically, but it still has to be interesting and engaging. And how do you facilitate performance and exchange in a way that’s meaningful, that sort of gains momentum and doesn’t just sort of disappear into the ether?

Daniel: I also think that’s partly driven by outside forces. You know, it’s a way to get funding. I mean it’s something that I’m always fascinated by: we’re bringing in Choreographer X to lead a community building experience in a community that they’re not part of, that they’re not going to stay in. And you know, maybe something will get left behind, maybe it will…a seed will be sown. I think that’s the idea always behind it, but there’s something about it that’s also sort of preposterous. I mean, you know, the choreographer is there—it’s a job, it’s a gig, it’s an opportunity.…There’s two ways in which you can get funding: one is to do educational programs and the other is to build community. God forbid you should fund an artist because you want them to make a dance. You know, because they might fail.

Kinebago: Right.

Ana: I don’t know if this has changed over time, but what you were saying about Alfredo Corvino saying you know, people are going to learn when they’re ready to learn. I think, and maybe this is sort of wandering into sort of like a social critique or something, but it feels like a lot of people in society kind of need to be hand held…led into learning. And there’s not the idea that you can watch something, you can see a Trisha Brown concert, even if you’ve never seen dance before and you’ve never seen anything like it before, and learn a lot from it. Even if it’s not some kind of workshop with members of the Trisha Brown company who are doing some kind of community-based learning lab. That actually just seeing dance and being an audience member or being a performer or you know, seeing good art, is an educating experience in and of itself. And somehow our sense of that seems like it’s gotten lost in the sort of funding for education as like all the funding for the arts…

Kinebago: Yeah, I mean I think there’s something about this good impulse—the original idea that you should try to make arts more accessible to people who don’t have ways in, can sometimes get corrupted into this thing where the only valuable way to get people to approach art is by breaking it down for them before they can just approach it on their own first.

Daniel: Yeah, I think the original impulse is good, but I also think that how it’s played out often betrays any trust in the value of the artwork on its own. And it also betrays any belief in the idea that people can rise to the occasion. And there’s something about that…I mean, I’ve always been interested in the idea…let’s give people more credit. Let’s give them credit for being smart, having curiosity, whatever words you want to use there. But I feel like there’s not any trust in that actually, and on an institutional level there’s a lot of distrust of that.

Ana: So much of seeing dance is also making a choice as a viewer about what you’re seeing and how you’re seeing it, and I think that the more you see then you’re able to kind of, as a receiver, put those things together too. So when you present a palette of dances, I think we’re also able to kind of receive them in that way. But that doesn’t happen unless you experience it, unless you actually get an opportunity to see these dances…again, it’s not a structure that necessarily has to be given to you.

Daniel: Right.

Kinebago: And also I think, Danny, in some of the shows you do you bring in visual artists…and you present them like a dance. Like, okay so now in this slot on the program we’re going to watch a projection of an art piece.

Daniel: Right.

Kinebago: And I do think for viewers that that is a different model of allowing them to sort of reframe how they’re looking at dance without holding their hand, but because people are more used to looking at visual images…

Daniel: Oh alright…

Kinebago: They look at television, they look at movies, they go to museums more than they go to dance performances for sure. And then to see art in that context, I think it makes the art feel more like performance, and it makes the performance feel more like art. [In the ThisThat show] I felt like those pieces really framed the dance performance for audience members, that they could see that.

Daniel: That’s interesting. I mean, of course I’m choosing those things because I feel like they have resonance with the dance pieces. The first time I saw the Rick Fox video it was a dance to me. It was so much like a dance the way there would be a big image and then suddenly it would zoom in on a little detail. I mean to me that’s choreography. So to me it was just so obviously related that I didn’t even think about it really.

Kinebago: But I also think it made it obvious to audience members who might have seen his work in isolation and thought, “Oh, that’s animation,” and seen a dance and thought, “that’s a dance.” But in this show, it was animation as a dance and dance as animation and art.

Daniel: Well, that’s interesting. I mean I love dance, but I also feel like dance is informed by lots of things. We’re not just you know…where it’s not just informed by “we’re in the studio doing steps.” If we’re making dances, we’re also reading books, we’re listening to music, we’re seeing people walk down the street. It’s all informing us. And I feel like it’s all part of the same process. This is a little digression, but you asked me this question about how long have I been doing some presenting activity, and I was like, “Well…blah, blah,” and I explained all that. But you know one of the things that I didn’t say which is somehow related to this conversation is you know, I’ve never been [only] a presenter, a dance company, a teacher, a…there’s a wider range of activity. It’s not just about one thing, or at least it’s not for me. I think it’s a wider range of activity for all of us.