Critical Correspondence

University Project: Victoria Marks, Professor of Choreography and Performance at UCLA

in conversation with Alejandra Martorell

Interview: 04.30.09

Victoria Marks is a Professor of choreography in the Department of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA where she has been teaching since 1995. Marks creates dances for the stage, for film and in community settings. Marks’ recent work has considered the politics of citizenship, as well as the representation of both virtuosity and disability. These themes are part of her ongoing commitment to locating dance-making within the sphere of political meaning.

Victoria: I came in 1995 when the department of World Arts and Cultures was first inaugurated. It was a department that was ready to be built up from nothing. It had, in a sense, done away with its own history as a dance department. The charge was to create a program that, among other things, looked at dance across culture or dance as an expression of culture. Our job was to create pedagogies that allowed us to do that. Part of the mission was to undo the hierarchy of American dance departments, where generally modern dance and ballet are the most important things, followed by jazz at a secondary level, in a sort of vertical line—the rest of the world is relatively irrelevant. I’m speaking specifically about where we were in 1995. The job was to depose that vertical model, and create a horizontal picture of dance as an expressive modality across culture, and to look at it as both high art/low art, community expression, spontaneous/choreographed, in the club as in the theater and across cultures.

We are a department that has dance scholars, choreographers, ethnographers and, for want of a better word, cultural anthropologists, with an interest in looking at dance as an expression of culture, cross-culturally, inter-culturally. Dance is looked at most often from an interdisciplinary perspective—the choreographer looks at dance also through the lenses provided by dance studies.

Alejandra: Whom does the program serve?

Victoria: We have an undergraduate and a graduate program, with an MFA and a PhD. I think we are training different populations differently. For our undergraduates, we are definitely not a place for training. We are not a public university version of a conservatory, but a liberal arts program. While a few of our undergraduates go and become dancers, many of them go out and become educators through dance or activists of the arts. Of our MFAs, I would say we get a number of mature, returning choreographers, and others who have not had a big track record professionally. Right now I think almost all of them have aspirations to support themselves in some way through teaching. That doesn’t mean that they see themselves as educators. I think instead it points towards the shift where artists can find support in the universities.

Alejandra: Can you talk a little bit about the PhD program?

Victoria: The name of the program is Culture and Performance. We have a number of dance scholars including Susan Foster here. They are pursuing new knowledge through dance, but their medium is writing, whereas the MFA choreographers’ medium is their work.

Alejandra: Do the MFAs and PhDs interact with each other? This search for new knowledge through dance, does it incorporate practice? Do you think that the notion of practice as research that we’ve been talking about is on the horizon in the programs?

Victoria: I think that’s already in place. Almost all of our MFAs take the PhD core courses. The choreographers are getting a deep understanding of the scholars’ discussion, and they turn that into their practice. On the other side, I taught the graduate choreography class last quarter and I had two of the PhD candidates in that class. I think there continues to be crossover. And as faculty, we actively encourage it. I think that’s what makes it very stimulating here – the conversation across and between.

Alejandra: Can you talk about your own journey going to a tenure position and the continuation of your work from that position?

Victoria: When I left New York in 1992, I went to England for a job at a conservatory. It was my first experience teaching. As a choreographer I had taught master classes, but not the kind of sustained relationship with a group of students where you can’t pull out your best tricks, but you actually have to start thinking bigger than yourself. I stayed in London for three years, but I didn’t want to be away from the country. When UCLA contacted me, I was interested because of, quite simply, getting older in the field and wanting to figure out a way to create some kind of stability and still be able to produce my artwork. Even back in the 80s and early 90s, I didn’t think that the dance company was the right model for me. The continuous productivity as well as the instability and uncertainty—the sense that you’re always making your next piece or you’re always writing the grant for the piece beyond the piece you’re working on, that didn’t make sense to me. So, a university seemed like a really good answer in a lot of ways. I wanted to feel useful. I thought it was very important that I didn’t feel driven by a passion that could be solipsistic in some way—all about me only. I wanted to be part of a community, actively. I wanted to reduce uncertainty. And I wanted to work creatively with the rhythm that I have, which isn’t in continuous production.

Alejandra: How has it worked?

Victoria: It has a lot of great things about it and a lot of challenges. I feel very nourished intellectually. Sometimes challenged to be able to balance the responsibilities of teaching and so on with making art, but I’m pretty much a bulldog about it. I carve out that time. The other thing that the university allowed me to do that I didn’t even think of till I got here was to have a family.

Alejandra: From the perspective of your artistic work, I would imagine working in academia has had many effects. You’ve talked about your rhythm of production and how that is a good match. What things, if any, has the university made possible for you or areas that it has exposed you to?

Victoria: I think what has been the most stimulating about being here is the engagement with dance scholars and seeing dancing through the eyes of my colleagues, not all of who get it at all. I actually appreciate that balance.

Alejandra: What don’t they get?

Victoria: Some don’t get what dancing is about, just like the university doesn’t get embodied learning yet. People in the humanities and in the arts are understanding it more, but in general it’s a very transgressive idea about learning. Not everyone has the same understanding about dancing and new knowledge.

One thing that has been cool recently is I was asked to be part of a disability studies minor that moves across campus. I’m positioned with all these colleagues across campus who take an interest in disabilities. That has become a very exciting place to think through the different perspectives we bring to understanding these ideas.

Alejandra: Focusing on the MFA program, how is it preparing these artists for work, being in society, ‘making it’?

Victoria: What excites me the most about the MFAs is that they get a sense that they have a lot of important work to do. What jobs are there for them is a different question. But they do feel that they are important players in their communities, they feel a sense of purpose about the body and what each of them wants to say with the dances they make. I think that comes from a program that is not teaching craft, but thinking about the ideas that are at work in dances.

Alejandra: Are there fieldworks or programs in the MFA that put this connection to the world in practice?

Victoria: Definitely, most of the PhD candidates do fieldwork. For the MFAs, one of the things we encourage them to do for their thesis work is to not necessarily think about making a piece for our beautiful theater, but to think about constructing other ways of presenting performance in the community, other places in the country. It feels like that’s a much more constructive way to think about how we carve out our futures and how we serve as artists. Plus we do a lot of one-on-one work with each student, for example with their thesis committee, on thinking about what the next steps are going to be once they leave here—a lot of time is spent talking about that. And there are courses about art in the real world that are also about helping people take the next steps in a very pragmatic way. We have a course like that for undergrads too.

Alejandra: Can institutions, like universities, play a role in bringing the arts to a community that may be underserved otherwise? How do you see the relationship between the program and the dance scene in LA?

Victoria: We move through waves of more and less active commitment to the city of LA—the sense that the university should be not an ivory tower, but a porous place that encourages and supports artists throughout LA. One program we’ve had for some years is Hothouse, where local artists apply to get three weeks of daily space, four hours a day, in our studios when they are mostly empty.

Alejandra: That’s great!

Victoria: Especially in LA because we don’t have that many dance studios. What people think of as dance studios are used by the film or television industry and they cost a fortune. The whole non-profit ethos doesn’t really exist here. The only requirement for the artists to participate in Hothouse, which serves six to eight choreographers, is that they all eat a meal together every Friday. And on the very last day, they show what they’ve been working on. Part of it is to give artists space, but part of it is to create community because in a city like LA having conversations, meeting at the theater, et cetera, doesn’t happen enough.

Alejandra: But this happens when most of the students are not in campus, so it serves as a satellite community-building project that may or may not interact with the student body?

Victoria: This year my innovation in the program is to create a student repertory company. A lot of choreographers can’t pay their dancers to work with them in these three weeks, so I’m trying to engineer a little performing group that will get the opportunity to work with the choreographers in the studio during Hothouse. The other thing that we did this year is we scheduled our Hothouse right up against the beginning of our school year. We’re going to ask two or three of the choreographers to stay an extra day and show their work in our first week of school. And we’ve had other things where we have informal showings of work, but we’re not doing that right now. We’re talking about this right at the time when we’re receiving gigantic budget cuts from the state of California, so everyone is contracting. Where we’ve had a budget for a presentation or public lecture that we no longer have, we are moving towards a barter system.

Alejandra: Do you have a residence company?

Victoria: No, I wish. Every year now for about four years, we’ve been using one of our endowed chair monies to bring Rennie Harris for a quarter. This year he’s making a piece and I imagine, like he did a couple of years ago, the piece becomes a sketch for a larger project. He is someone we keep a relationship with. We are very eager to develop more of those kinds of projects—bringing artists for a quarter or even a couple of weeks. We have a center associated with our department—the Center for Intercultural Performance, run by Judy Mitoma—and she raised money to bring three Israeli choreographers, who made projects with the students. Right now we have some Indonesian artists visiting us, who performed an evening of work and who are also working with our students. Our interests move somewhat differently than other universities because we’re looking at dance not mono-culturally.

Alejandra: Maybe more in terms of the undergrads, but also the MFAs, how does the program go about this goal of looking at knowledge intra-culturally?

Victoria: I liked reading that Marjorie Garble article you sent me. I think that the university is really in a good position to play a different role than the conservatory, but nonetheless really engage with dance. We have an undergraduate seminar course where the commitment is to teach through embodied learning. Our students view dances or performances, they read essays, they write papers and they dance. They don’t dance as in training; they dance as in dancing ideas. I taught a course called choreographing disability last year and, recently, Dan Froot taught a course on the NEA four where they not only studied the culture wars of that period, but they re-performed work of those artists, made their own work, and thought about “decency” and public issues that enter into performance. I think that they are not necessarily training to dance or getting a technique—although we are increasing our requirements to be in the studio in a movement practice—but they are taking these ideas, looking at the ways other artists have handled those ideas, and trying it themselves. I think the university can do that, and that’s where it gets really exciting.