The University Project is the first in a series of ‘research projects” in which we will accrue and amass various materials and approaches to a broad and relevant topic. Please feel free to participate and comment to keep the conversation alive.

From Guest Editor, Maura Donohue:

I remember sitting in the audience—a student about to graduate from Smith College—listening to Donald Byrd and fellow Tufts University grad, composer Mio Morales, explaining that his work, titled “Drastic Cuts,” was referencing the reduction of funding for the arts he saw happening in America.[4] Soon after my entrance into the community as part of the spring ‘95 Fresh Tracks program at DTW, I watched Ralph Lemon disband his company. I was told that things looked bleak. But, like many young artists coming in with nothing, I had nothing to lose. It didn’t seem like bad odds. I’d hit the fringes and thrive, avoid the pitfalls of the 80s and champion thrift and ingenuity. Flash forward ten years: I’m doing a residency in Hong Kong with two children in tow.[5] Their father has to carry them (the four-month old strapped to the front and the two-year old packed on the back) to the Academy of Performing Arts so that I can nurse in between classes and rehearsals. Great anecdotes, exhausting times—I knew I could no longer parse projects and pennies together with my experimental theater husband while trying to feed two kids.

I ran for academia. It’s a familiar story. We get older; the romantic notions of the starving artist diminish.  We seek stability and a way to stay in the field we love.[6] I went back for the MFA, managed to get full-time, tenure-track work here in NYC. For me, it all feels—to borrow a Hebrew word—Bashert, destiny revealed. I see my path ahead built through seemingly unrelated efforts from the years behind. Apparently academia is a good place for over achieving rebellious nerds.[7] As it turns out, it can be a really good place for many artists. You know—the working artist, the practicing professional, the independent artist, the people whose work we like to be in and to see around town—those capital “A” Artists. It’s also a pretty good place for well-known ex-dancers of the well-known “big dance companies”. And, it’s a good place for many more artists who work hard to educate on the campus and still manage to make work in the other real world that exists beyond NYC.[8]

It’s nice to get paid. It’s nice to get paid regularly, with benefits, and to have access to studios and computers and video cameras and maybe sometimes a theater and technical support.[9] It can be very not-nice if one is dealing with unsupportive administration, cantankerous peers, ignorant masses of know-it-all-but-seen-nothing undergraduates, having to go to work at a regular time, sitting in meetings, scrambling for money and justifying why the arts matter. But let’s face it: we need college. What’s our history without Bennington College in the 1930s with Martha, Hanya, Doris and Charles—without Martha, no Merce; without Cunningham, no Cage; without Cage, no Robert Ellis Dunn; without Dunn, no Judson Church; no Judson Church, no Grand Union. Without all of that, where would we be? Still twirling exotic fabrics and shiny tassels in the name of art?

The field is changing, the country is changing, the world is changing dramatically. Perhaps now it’s easier to be a poor artist, after the glamour of high finance has worn thin. Maybe it’s worse. If our presenting organizations don’t weather this crisis, how many important works and artists will we lose?[10] Or maybe the next seminal works need the new landscape in order for the field to grow. New York City teaches a kind of social Darwinism with fierce intent. There is attrition and contraction all around. Artists working in the service or temp industry feel it, artists working at arts organizations feel it, artists trying to make art feel it. But, when I speak to the heads of these college programs and to some of the highly respected artists now imbedded in academia, I hear overwhelming optimism. Everyone has plans: many are rethinking their curriculums, their hiring, their expectations and alliances. As an entire generation of founding faculty retire, a new guard is chipping away at the staunch mountain of academia. There is an abundance of hope in the following interviews with many ideas of how to serve students, artists, and the field, many plans for keeping pace and creating systems with mutually beneficial returns.

I’m very grateful for a couple heated, fleeting debates during DTW Artist Committee meetings. They sparked my desire to continue moving the conversation further. For me, it’s all about the conversation, which is why I’m also so deeply grateful that Critical Correspondence embarked on The University Project and let me jump in and bang at the threshold spaces of art world/school world and real world/campus world. Borders are being crossed, categories cracked—it’s no longer an either/or option. Every conversation I’ve had for this project so far has taught me a multitude about the generosity of spirit, ingenuity of planning, and wealth of possibility that lives inside the pairings of academia and art-makers.

There aren’t any formulas or easy answers, but my hope is that college and university departments can read these interviews and develop an arsenal of information that they can return to their Chairs, Deans, Provosts and Presidents to show how other schools make it work. I hope this project offers the same thing for artists. That those entering academic situations will arrive armed with more information about what is possible for them, or that those pondering the MFA can think about where they will be best served. I hope too that artistic and academic institutions can find something in here to help them build stronger alliances in a challenging landscape. But, most of all, I hope that we are adding more voices to the conversation already in progress.

Thank you to everyone who has (and who will) take the time to talk.

Download a PDF of this Conversation

___________________________________________________

November 1st, 2015

Jeff Friedman: You asked a really important question about the field, since it is the broad spectrum that defines, to some degree, what we can do, what we should do for dance in higher education. What I would say about dance and the academy is that dance is still trying, still struggling, to define itself on its own terms. It is important to say that embodied practices in the academy are still generally considered suspect. The history of dance and the academy is that the discipline of dance comes in through physical education, then turns into a sub-program of theater, and then eventually dance becomes its own department. That dance has an embodied practice is essential and also, to whatever degree, that practice has been feminized in our culture. There are many problems with dance being legitimized. Doing it on our terms is really important.

I think the next step in that process is not only to continually legitimize and honor our embodied practice in the academy but also to legitimize the theoretical and methodological ways in which that practice can be further articulated. There are theories of embodiment and there are methods of knowing that come out of that mix.

How do we credential people in that mix of theory and practice, and how are we constrained by the existing framework of higher education to accomplish that goal? What we have are many MFA degree programs and Ph.D programs in various configurations in the U.S., Europe, the U.K. and one in New Zealand.

Will Rawls: What’s the one in New Zealand?

Jeff: The University of Auckland. I spent some time there with the Head of Dance named Ralph Buck. He’s great; he’s a wonderful guy. And what’s interesting about Auckland is that their program has always had a practice-theory connection. They don’t focus on creating virtuosic dancers as much as they focus on creating practice-based movement projects that are academically informed. So even their undergraduate work is like that, so it is relatively consistent within the BA degree,  through MA, all the way through the Ph.D degree programs.

Will: So Auckland is requiring, encouraging and facilitating dance students to develop dance as practice as their primary academic achievement.

Jeff: New Zealand is isolated enough that it was able to construct that approach on its own without having any necessarily problematic regulation or accreditation issues. In the UK there are Ph.D programs in dance which do allow practice and theory to mix. Practice as research is a coming thing these days. However, I have been at conferences at which individuals have said, “I was promised that a practice-as-research dissertation in a Ph.D program would be accepted. I made the work—the performance work—and all they wanted to look at was my written work.” And this was a betrayal, to some degree, of that promise. The problems have to do with the fact that there was no precedent for evaluating a practice-as-research doctoral project in dance. What I will say though is that, in the United States at least, there is a very interesting degree called the DMA, for example, the Doctor of Musical Arts at Rutgers and other universities. I’m occasionally present for several of those final reviews for the doctoral students. They have to “sing the lieder”—in other words, they have to have a very good practice—but they also have to have access to the theoretical and methodological frameworks around that practice. So, when you perform your lieder, you’re going be asked questions like “What are you doing with the glottal stops in your voice?”, as well as, “What are you doing with the Germanic relationship to Romanticism in regards to opera?” In other words, to know the practice as it relates to the theory. I think this is a wonderful opportunity.

Will: Are there other kind of exigencies around a contemporary representation of those things?

Jeff: Oh, you could do it about anything, really. It’s related to praxis—theory and practice integrated together. The DMA is a praxis degree. I like it very much; it’s one of the terminal degrees you can get in music. But we don’t have that degree right now in dance; we have Ph.D programs at University of California-Riverside, UCLA, and Ohio State; I think those are the three, if I can remember correctly.

Will: This next question comes from my folklore about you, but were you one of the first Ph.Ds in dance in the U.S.?

Jeff Friedman, choreographer and performer, in Muscle Memory (San Francisco, 1994). Photo by Steven Savage

Jeff: University of California at Riverside was considered the first Ph.D in Dance History and Theory. It started in 1993 as a doctoral program and there was one student at the time. I remember that the first graduate of the program graduated the year before I entered. I was the only one of my group of 8 to graduate in six years in 2003. So, it was one of the earlier Ph.D degree programs in Dance History and Theory. There are faculty there who have Ph.Ds but they had to do them in American Studies, they had to do them in History, they had to do them in other disciplines. They managed to create the groundwork for generating a faculty that could handle a Ph.D degree specific to dance. So I don’t want to say I’m one of the first people with a Ph.D in dance; there were others who were specialists from other disciplines. Our second generation is now sort of sprinkled throughout the United States and abroad in Canada, the U.K. and Europe.

Will: if I were to be pursuing a Ph.D in Dance through anthropology, through biomechanics, or something like that, are there things about those kinds of approaches to dance knowledge that hinder a relationship to embodied practice or aesthetics?

Jeff: Those people who went in through other disciplines had to struggle with advisors who were not necessarily dance-savvy people. Their advisors were historians of great renown, and others may have been biomechanics scholars who were great scientists but they didn’t have the dance element. So, in a way, those doctoral students had to invent dance discourse by themselves, to whatever degree someone might have been willing to support it. That was the challenge for them.

I’ll back up and say that a Ph.D in dance studies is always interdisciplinary and a student is probably going to be working with literary studies or anthropology or biomechanics or some other discipline in relationship to embodied practice. This means that theories are going to be emerging from other discourses. Say, for example in the late 1990s, when I was taking courses and was required to read anthropologist Clifford Geertz, we were asked to read it by putting the word dance into places where people were talking about music, or people were talking about visual arts—there was always a kind of replacement project happening there. That’s challenging because that means you’re inserting something that is then having an enduring effect inside the text, that will then change what the text can do. To some degree, we didn’t know what it would do, so that was experimental. I would say now we do have people who are recognized as self-creating dance theory from inside the practice. One of the things that is valuable about that is that there is an embodied experience that is now foundational to people working in theory. For example, if you’re going to be talking about phenomenology, how we experience ourselves as an embodied practitioner is highly informed by what we can do in phenomenology. The great phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty was not a dancer—so, what is it then, that we, as dancers, add to the theoretical discourse?

Will: Just taking this a little bit further, how do you guide your MFAs in order to put language into their practice? Are there specific questions that you’re still looking for?

Jeff: The new MFA in Dance degree at Rutgers is the degree that we can have as a terminal degree in dance. The MFA is generally considered a practice-based terminal degree, so there’s a bifurcation there, between the MFA and the theoretically-based Ph.D. The Rutgers MFA, as I’m constructing it right now, is more of a DMA model, more of a praxis—integrated practice and theory—degree. So, with that frame in mind, one of the things I’ve done is to construct praxis-based coursework that is experienced simultaneously by the students. They’re called Praxis of Dance or “POD” courses, where you may have a dance philosophy and aesthetics course that I will teach but at the same time you will be working with improvisational strategies taught by another faculty member. We co-create the course. In a three-hour block you might start with contact improvisation to have the felt experience phenomenologically. There is a trope in phenomenology: when your hand touches your other hand, you feel your hand touching the other hand but you also feel your other hand being touched. So, to have experiences that are viscerally about body first is important. For our students who are not necessarily academics, they’re working their way into it—they start with the practice and then to encounter the theory of phenomenology in a way where, “Wait a second, I have a little key, because I just experienced that physically.” And then we have an experience-based ground from which we can trace the reading or discussion. Or if we’re going to talk about theorists Deleuze and Guattari, and the question of “lines of flight”—that ideas are not arboreal in the sense of the “tree model” of knowledge in which every idea, everything is emerging from this one branch and then we’re branching out again but you can always trace it back to the original trunk. This is very Western perspective on information culture, and we’ve accepted it. But if you think differently, from Deleuze’s perspective, you can have a completely other thought on a line of flight, outside of the arboreal system, and I think, in dance, we do this innately. For example, you might also practice Bill Forsythe’s improvisation technologies. So when you’re “knotting,” all of a sudden you’re in the midst of this knotting procedure which then lends itself to other improvisational technologies into which you can then sidle off, and start doing another practice, and so on. And that’s something that Forsythe related to Deleuze’s “line of flight” theory, in particular. These courses are constructed to help stimulate each other and not privilege reading/writing/word languaging over the movement practice, but instead allowing them to be co-present with each other, and co-informing each other.

Will: And these are taking place in dance studios or lectures?

Jeff: All of our dance studios are smart classrooms, so there’s ways to have projection there, to use a Smart Board. In each classroom, there are ways to sit, ways to read and write, and ways to practice movement. Luckily.

We have a really prescient chair of our department, Julia M. Ritter, who insisted on having these classrooms equipped that way for the undergraduate degree. If they’re going to be doing Anatomy and Physiology—locating where your greater trochanter is in your body—you can be in a studio where you can have your yoga mat, use the Smart Board for a diagram reference, and where you can also actually see the trochanter physically with a skeleton in front of you. I wish I could teach my history classes there, so I could make people dance in history class all the time. But I do usually ask for a particular room that has a little extra space so we can move the chairs.

Will: So what kinds of things do people dance in your history class?

Jeff: Last semester we had a student from India in our BFA program and we studied the practices of Indian classical dance, so she got up and showed us six mudras and the students tried it. Or, they have to do a very short version of Trisha Brown’s Locus [1975], with the spatial cues of the cube aligned with the different numbers and the alphabet. They had to spell something out. So they experienced the analytic post-modern method that Brown was doing, and then relating that to what they know about this amazing movement sensibility. Or they do a little bit of a Baroque dance to understand how it is deeply invested in the etiquette of the court. Who does the first curtsy, who does the second bow, what’s the costume doing to your movement while wearing a whalebone corset. And they have to turn sideways to get their hip panniers in though the door. All the control of the body and what that means for in the political court of Louis XIV. We dance maybe four or five times in the semester, over fifteen weeks.

Will: Do you find that their physicality is becoming more amplified to coexist with their linguistic vocabulary?

Jeff: I would say yes and no. When we do Yvonne Rainer’s “No Manifesto,” I always have the students volunteer to read it. Whoever wants to read it has to stand up on their chair. Because that’s the only way you can give a manifesto, is to be on a soap box. So they experience that physicality of setting themselves up and then their voices always get loud and they start just yelling, “No, No, No.”

Or, when I say “semiotic theory,” their eyes glaze over. But when they actually have performed a work of Merce Cunninghan’s, where the signifier and the signified are unlocked, they raise their hands and say “Ooh, ooh, ooh; I know what that means because I physically did it.” So, at the level of amplification within a curriculum, we’ll have developed that depth of practice informing theory from having Gaga technique classes or having set a Cunningham work; all of that experience in the studio has a way that feeds itself back into the academic part of the curriculum.

Will: So, how is the MFA degree structured, within the 26 months?

Jeff: Going back to your first question about what the field is doing now. The field, at least in the U.S., has been developing graduate MFA terminal degrees in dance  moving in the direction of low-residency and we have several low-residency programs already, at Hollins University, Jacksonville State University, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. There’s a new one in Northern Colorado. So, for me, the question is what is the role of a low-residency graduate degree program, how does it serve the field? I think that the idea was that these students are working professionals who have had careers as artists and they’re thinking about going back to graduate school to credential themselves to move into higher education. Not necessarily to give up the practice of making and the practice of performing but to add a pedagogical element. There are several of us at Rutgers who are practitioners working on the faculty. So, I guess the question has to be, is a graduate program that is low-residency a credential that allows people to say, “Well, now you’ve done that. Now you can work as faculty of higher education.” Is it sufficient to credential one’s self in a low-residency mode?

I think there’s actually a lot of stuff going on in the blogosphere now about why do we even have graduate programs in dance. How can we promise people the jobs? Because you may spend some significant money for a degree in order to do that but that job may not be there in sufficient numbers to give you that chance. This is a question people have been asking.

My answer to that question is, if some low-residency programs are focused on purely credentialing people, moving them through very quickly, I would ask if this experience was necessarily transformative. Can we really justify the outcome of such an education with a faculty position in higher education? Are they sufficiently prepared? Have they been transformed in some way through graduate study, in order to do the work of a faculty member? So, this is the hard question. And I think that there’s lots of variables there and I think these programs have thought about it. I think some achieve it, some less so. And I thought to myself, what would be a way I would acknowledge working professionals from the field (for our purposes at Rutgers, the means people who are at least five years out from an undergraduate degree)? How can I configure an MFA degree program that both acknowledges professional field experience, while also configuring a transformative graduate school experience? That’s the challenge.

To this end, the MFA in Dance degree structure is organized to be flexible, recognizing that working artists continue their existing careers. We’ve structured coursework over 1.5 years, beginning in the Winter of 2017, continuing through the spring semester and then a 6-week summer session. After summer break, we then continue through the Fall and Spring 2017-2018 academic year, with an additional 6-week summer session. Notably, during weekly coursework, most students will have at least 1.5-2 days off to work in the field.

By the end of 1.5 years, we recommend that all MFA students complete their required and elective coursework and advance to candidacy. Then, MFA candidates have the option for thesis work in- or out-of-residence. So, candidates can be working in New York or Philly or Singapore, for that matter, if they are cultivating an entirely screened dance project. While continuing supervision from their thesis advisor during the next academic year, all candidates will ideally complete their thesis research in the form of a movement-based performance event, in a variety of genres including screen dance. While most theses will be produced at Rutgers-New Brunswick, the faculty is willing to travel within a 50 mile radius to see thesis works produced or exhibited in New York City, Philadelphia or throughout New Jersey.

Will: After five years out of school, I’d assume most people who go to masters programs have weeded out certain academic interests and want to go back to focus on something specific. But, when you’re five years out of undergrad and people are coming back in, are those people transformable, as you say? This is also maybe a question that relates to one’s authorial voice as an artist versus your authorial voice as a dancer, and one’s voice as a student. How do these transformations occur, at what levels?

Jeff: What I’m hoping for is that five years minimum out of undergrad means they’ve consolidated some kind of creative and performance practice. My hope is that they then have another question that they’re asking themselves. I was at a panel and one woman was really interested in costume design, but not just as a designer, but as a practitioner of dance; how do those interact? So I asked her about her experiences of looking at Oskar Schlemmer’s work in the Bauhaus. She said, “Let me look at that.” I said, “Well, there’s a world: what does the costume do for your creative practice?”

Will: Walter Dundervill is someone I would think about.

Jeff: Oh yes, exactly, this guy’s whole environment is an extension of his body through costume/set/props/accessories. It’s amazing. So, I want people to be asking another question. I don’t want them to be asking how can I be a better dancer and a better maker, or how can I make more dances because I have the support of a studio that I don’t have to pay for. That’s not enough to be transformed in graduate school. I want people to have other questions. And the question for me that is the most interesting right now is about interdisciplinarity—how do other disciplines engage movement practice in some way? Someone might come to me and say, “I want to look at robotics in the engineering school and its relationship to dance movement.” Okay, let’s see if that can happen. Or, “I want to look at cinema as a way of enhancing my practice.” Or “I want to look at women and gender studies as a way of enhancing my practice”. Or Latino politics. I want those questions to be bubbling up for people, and they don’t have the answers necessarily now, which is fine, but what I want to do is bring them into an MFA degree program that gives them a chance to explore that question, have a base that allows them to have a conversation between Latino political theory and dance theory. And be able to practice it in the studio.

It’s also important for me that we have to have creatively literate global citizens in dance. We can’t just recreate our own historical practices. You know, what is happening in postmodern Māori dance in Auckland where my friend Cat Ruka is performing these amazing works. Why would she put her bare foot on a portrait of the prime minister of New Zealand? Because there’s a lot going on there in terms of what that means in Māori value systems, about what they call pakeha value systems—European value systems—how is hat foot position is a political move but in an embodied form. I want people to have that global perspective because, if they could become truly global citizens, they can go to Auckland, they can go to Europe, they can be conversant. So it’s not just recreating our own value systems elsewhere. So, there’s that interdisciplinary part, there’s the global part, and then the third part, which for me is really important, was a deficit in my own training, which was pedagogy.

Catherine Moana Te Rangitanika Ruka Gwynne, choreographer and performer, Playing Savage (Rutgers University, 2010)

We’re very lucky in that we have a Master’s Degree in Dance Education, in which our BFA students are getting a five year degree—BFA-EdM, Master’s of Education in Dance, an excellent program run by a faculty member with a doctoral degree focusing on critical pedagogy—the ways in which global pedagogy has changed to student-centered and social justice-oriented learning. This program already exists at Rutgers at the graduate level. Why not just borrow some of those courses and support dance pedagogy training?

Will: Now, how easy was it to get other departments at Rutgers and schools outside to come to the table and participate. What was the convincing you had to do?

Jeff: The Dance Education degree is located in our department, but, regarding interdisciplinary practice, it’s a matter of going to the other arts programs and saying what courses are you okay about enrolling our dance students. Maybe there’ll be one or two MFA dance students in your puppetry course in theater, or one or two students in your electronic music course, or one or two students in whatever it is. So far all I’ve heard pretty much is yes. So, then the question is, does the student have enough chops to go into that course, or is there an introductory course you belong in first? We also have a list of what we call “Special Topics” courses within the dance faculty—vernacular dance, street dance, screen dance. We have Keith Thompson, [a performer with Liz Lerman’s Dance Exchange and a choreographer in his own right] and community-based dance. I do documentary-based dance, which is engaged with oral history work. Our chair is getting her Ph.D in immersive dance at Texas Woman’s University. We have two specialists in videography/screen dance and we have someone who just came onto our faculty who is a specialist in devising installation projects with lighting design.

Will: And then, 26 months later, you leave and you enter this dance field. I always talk about “the dance field” in quotations, because there are networks within it but, depending on who you talk to, it can be described totally differently, as much as choreography could be described differently by each person who practices it. Could you define the field vis-a-vis your role in it?

Jeff: I brought a little quote with me. It’s from a dance that I made in 1984, which is called Topophilia; “topophilia” is a word that was coined by a Chinese geographer named Yi-Fu Tuan. He defines topophilia as the affective bond between people and place. And, as you know, my first undergraduate degree was in architecture. So my lens about spatiality and dance structures has always been very much through that architectural lens. I really wanted to make a work that started to look at dance through the lens of this relationship between people and place, and I found this wonderful artist named Will Insley and I’m just going to quote him:

Though trained as an architect, I realized that whatever it was I was looking for, I would never find it in the practice of architecture. It was necessary for me to first renounce architecture and subsequently renounce art in the normally accepted and separate definitions of both terms, in order for me to actively set my intuitive compass to that precise location arrived at through thinking as an architect and acting as an artist.

He was a visual artist who made these amazing two-dimensional drawings and three-dimensional models of utopian/dystopian cities. I just was always very struck by someone who was thinking already that there’s a lens that frames his practice in some way. He was saying, “It’s not one or the other, it’s this intuitive ‘location between’ that I need to find,” and that’s really what I would love for my students to be able to find in the new MFA: whatever that lens would be for them, that they renounce the binary and do a both-and thing, where they find that place over 26 months. Then you have had a transformational experience resulting in a new point of view, and then you go into the field with that point of view, not just: “I’m a really good dancer, I’m a really good maker,” but rather, “I have a transformed point of view about those practices. And that I have a drive towards questions that are arriving as a result of that point of view. There’s a friction between my practice and perspective that creates questions.” If you’re going into higher education, you have to be able to generate questions, because research is part of that world. And bless the higher education world, they have now actually acknowledged creative research as equal to what we would call scholarship—and again that’s an either/or—because both are creative and both are scholarly.

For the new MFA program, they’re going to be reading and writing and they’re going to actually create a performance event of some sort from a variety of genres, and those two things, writing and performance have to be inextricably connected. I’ve been on four or five faculty search committees and that’s what you’re looking for in a new faculty member. Someone who has a trajectory, not someone who’s just sitting there saying “I’m good at what I do.” That’s great and even fundamental, but it’s not enough. You actually have to have a research trajectory. And so, to me, that is what the dance field of higher education needs, combined with global literacy and critical pedagogy—not only do I have a question but it’s globalized, it’s not limited to our own value system. And, when teaching, the diversity of your student body should be acknowledged. When I teach five lectures on Africanist Aesthetics, that means something to everybody in the room, but it also means something in particular to the African American kids in my room. We have kids from Korea, and kids from New Zealand and kids from India, and kids from Nigeria in our program. They have to be seen. And these are opportunities for our students in New Jersey is to broaden their experience.

Will: How do these students who come from Korea and India, presumably from widely varied socioeconomic backgrounds, just like the other students coming to Rutgers from around the U.S., how do you guys account for or facilitate that difference? I’m curious here about the socioeconomic and cultural factors in an embodied practice, i.e., access to certain concepts about movement?

Jeff: Our first undergraduate academic course is called Introduction to Dance Studies and I reconfigured from a Dance Appreciation course that just wasn’t cutting it. And I thought, Oh no, they have to actually look at discourses of race, ethnicity, mixed-ability, gender, sexuality, socioeconomic/class position, those issues, in addition to costume design and sound design and all that. We start with that materiality of the dance experience, but then we relate how sound design relates to ethnicity. So they watch “The Stack-Up” from Alvin Ailey’s company repertory and they say, “Wait a second, I think I hear Latino rhythms inside this African-American aesthetic.” So then they develop a new concept of cultural hybridity. But, among many things, what we’re also seeing in “The Stack-Up” is street culture in uptown Harlem, and a lot dancers performing roles of people hanging out on the street because maybe their homes aren’t in such great shape. There’s class difference embedded in “The Stack-Up.” At first it looks like, “Okay, you’re mad at me because you’re trying to get my girl,” but then look at the costumes, look at their jewelry; there are all these clues cleverly given that say there’s class difference in here as well.

Will: Is there financial support for MFA students or will there be?

Jeff: There has to be, there has to be. Right now, it’s very clear that if we have this strong pedagogy sequence, we have to have graduate student practitioners who are actually working in the classroom with strong supervision. This is critical pedagogy working: how can we improve it, what are your course goals, go back to that, what are your assessments? So there will be a sufficient number of adjunct teaching positions available in our program where we will be able to place many of, if not all of our MFA students, so they’re applying pedagogy as they’re doing their MFA coursework. Their coursework happens over 18 months where there’s essentially three semesters, plus a winter session and two summer sessions—they could be teaching five different sessions across the entire 18 months. In addition, scholarships are available every year based on what the Dean of the School provides for us.

Will: Workstudy?

Jeff: No, adjuncts are unionized, actually. So, the adjuncts, our PTLs—part-time lecturers—actually have a significant amount of control around what it is that they get in terms of pay, work conditions and all of that.

So graduate students will have that work and then, separate from that compensation for teaching, there would be additional scholarship money at different rates. People coming from out of state have out-of-state tuition, and we have to think about, if we really want the student, what can we provide for them to make it doable? New Jersey is not that far away from New York and you might decide you want to do the program and move to Jersey City a year in advance; that may be a smart thing to do. To become a Jersey resident, I think there’s a requirement you have to have 12-months of utility bills proving that you’re living there already. I think your driver’s license has to change. And, if they don’t do it for the first year, they can do it for the second year. So, all those variables factor in to the affordability of the program.

Will: Was there a break-through moment for you? Why this all started?

Jeff: I was hired in 2003 at Rutgers to create an MFA degree. I came in with a Ph.D, degree the first Ph.D faculty in the department, and I was seen as someone who potentially could provide an “overview perspective.”  But, in fact, I was very happy that the MFA was delayed because getting tenure is really important and that takes six years. So, my first six years were spent focusing on getting tenured. Then we had to build the critical mass of our own faculty to a minimum of ten full-time educators, in order to really develop the infrastructure for this MFA, to support each student who needs their own advisor for their thesis research. So it took a long time long to do that, and I’m actually really glad it did.

Will: This is sort of getting off topic of the MFA for a little bit, but this question often comes up for me about how to navigate representation and embodiment in choreography. As a reader of dance performance can you speak to this?

Jeff: People at a certain point said, “Wait a second, our modern dance pioneers are dying, Martha Graham just died,’ what are we going to do about that? Can we reconstruct these works so that then we have an archive to keep alive? We must generate the best notation systems possible; we must generate the practices of reconstruction so that it’s really accurate; how can it be extra accurate?”

And then it became a question of, is that even doable? Is it even a responsible thing to put a lot of this work into that model? People started saying, “Well, no there’s a whole set of other worlds, not reconstruction, but restaging. And there’s many other “re-” words that had to do with it: not restaging, but re-enactment. This is what interests me most right now, “reenactment.” Reenactment is saying, here was a work of dance. We don’t have it anymore, it was ephemeral, it was temporal. Those embodied practitioners had those historically-informed bodies, at those times. We can reenact the work, while acknowledging that the gap between what we will do and what they did has some interesting critical questions coming up,. Let’s acknowledge the reality of this temporal disruption and ask about what’s inside that disruption that we want to look at. And, to me, this is fascinating, because then you have a practice that is contemporary, but related to the past, but in a critical way. So it’s not just restaging it just because you can, it’s actually interrogating the gap in between.

I’ll give you an example: I work as an advisor with a choreographer from Germany named Paula Rosolen, and she took my oral history workshop, like you did years ago. Born in Argentina originally, she went back to interview a cohort of people around a woman named Renata Schotellius, a very important modern dancer in Buenos Aires. Renata was a Jewish woman who left Germany before WWII and made a significant contribution to dance in Argentina. The dance community has created this perspective on Renata that she brought European modern dance to South America. What Paula found out when she did the interviews is that none of that is really very true at all. Renata was much more entrepreneurial: she came to Boston, she taught at the Boston Conservatory; she brought back American modern and post-modern dance to Buenos Aires. So, what Paula made was an oral history-based (or documentary) performance about Renata, in which the whole dance was about the gap between what we would call the official “archive” and what we would call the “embodied repertoire,” the embodied reality. We know that the body always exceeds what the archive can provide. How can you create a performance work that has a critical perspective on this problem around Argentina, which is a country that’s had heavy immigration from Germany, Italy, and other folks in Europe, and therefore they purport themselves as being the most European country in Latin America. Why would they do that? Is there something about race in there? Is there something about class in there? I think so. And it’s a deep question and those concerns are elevated in this particular archival mythology about Renata and her so-called Europeanizing of Argentinean modern dance.

So Paula made her dance, beginning with a soloist who comes out to stand behind a period dress that’s flattened onto a piece of cardboard. It’s obviously from the forties or thirties and the dress hanging right at the level of the audience and that’s how you see it. It’s flat. But you also see the soloist stand behind it and she tries to make it three-dimensional: the head is trying to be inside the collar that never actually ever fits; her arms are struggling to fit into the cardboard sleeves. There’s always a gap between the repertoire of the body and the dress, as an archival document. Paula found this and other choreographic devices that are artistically pointing at this problem that has to do with Argentinean nationalism, that has to do with racism toward existing indigenous populations, generating a kind of South American exceptionalism. And, to me, that kind of representation, that kind of performed reenactment, points to “the gap between”—can the embodied self ever be representational of whatever the referent is? The distance between the body and its referent is a critical thing. What can you do with a critical thing? Point at it, interrogate it. And then you develop a question about the gap, and say this is what my embodied work can do with that gap.

____________________________________________________

Jeff Friedman, Ph.D, is the Graduate Director of a new MFA in Dance degree at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University, in New Brunswick New Jersey. Jeff earned his B.Arch from the University of Oregon and a Ph.D in Dance History and Theory from the University of California-Riverside. He holds CLMA (Laban) certification from the University of Utah’s Integrated Movement Systems program. His research in oral history theory, method and practice as they relate to embodied practices includes an archival collection of oral histories with dance community members with HIV-AIDS and other life-threatening illnesses; book chapters and journal articles for publications in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Spain, Germany, Korea, Australia and New Zealand; and a series of documentary-based choreographies derived from oral history interviews. Jeff conducts oral history workshops on embodied practices in the U.S. and internationally.

The Salon invitation:

Dance and Publish Salon, photo by Movement Research

What do readers want from a dance publication?:

– a filter

– a newsletter

– contextualization as a RESOURCE

– an opinion, a review

– a community

– an art project

– a trade magazine

– a history

– an archive

– advertising space for own work

– a platform

– content sharing with network

– research hub

– collection of different writings on dance by artists, academics, producers, curators

Dance and Publish Salon, photo by Movement Research

For Critical Correspondence, there are easier ways to embed our content in other sites. Journal, in theory, has more cumbersome circulation.

Next phase of research for CC: soliciting visitors from other sites, entering university curricula?

Both MR Performance Journal / Critical Correspondence: these publications are major a RESOURCE. Few other examples of them in the field. How do we collaborate with other publications in the field and circulate discussions and artist’s ideas more widely?Movement Research Performance Journal is oldest print publications experimental dance in the country. How to situate it better as a resource?

 

 

Dance and Publish Salon, photo by Movement Research

Academic researchers (PhD’s, professors, art historians) use CC and MRPJ as primary source of artists discussing their own work. CC and MRPJ contribute to the scholarship with wide-reaching impact. How do we track this impact? How do we solicit further interviews and content from these academic users?

Approach to content—When covering a story or an artist or object of inquiry what about using a 2nd and 3rd degree distance from the ‘object’ or site of inquiry? i.e. Two artists talking about two other artists, or another project altogether. Deflect, reflect. Herko dialogue model (See Critical Correspondence’s Herko Dialogues series from December 2014)

Online platform vs. Online content

– the platform, as a structure, feels like its own object. It brings up questions ofcontemporaneity, how does this object persist in time/age/endure?

 

– the immediacy of online publication, addresses urgency or quick back-and-forth discussion/arguing/gossip. Gawker/HyperAllergic examples. Bomb magazine.

How do we navigate questions of insularity within dance? Contemporary dance often accused of being too insular – and accusation that comes from inside as well as outside the field. What do we gain from becoming more accessible, either through different circulation strategies or different content?

Is accessibility defines in terms of content, popularity in Google search, digital versus print modalities? Who are the voices that dictate our discussions?

As we work on capturing and synthesizing our own history, are we reading or publishing enough of what younger dancers and dance makers have to say and write? What about diversity of voices? What is the primary demographic of Movement Research? Who do we want our readers to be?

Dance and Publish Salon, photo by Movement Research

 

Print publication takes time, delay for publication can take weeks, years. But, the print object is held in the hand, returned to again and again, whereas digital content is meant to be buried everyday by new postings and requires advanced searches to locate.

 

Dance and Publish Salon, photo by Movement Research

– Kimberly Bartosik

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Event, photo: Patrick André

Kimberly Bartosik: So, Robert. I would like this conversation to focus on what is happening in Angers under your leadership and invite you into a cross-continent conversation about the project of sustaining artistic legacies as well as contemporary performance practice, and providing a place for that. I really want to hear what is going on for you. So, first I want to talk about the idea of legacy. I know that there have been many myths around Merce’s desire, or not, for an extended legacy plan beyond the company’s final tour. I’m curious how your tenure in Angers is part of that. How did you end up there, and what were you hoping to establish?

Robert Swinston: Because of the finalization of the legacy project, which provided for the closing of the Cunningham Dance Foundation, the only entity remaining would be the Merce Cunningham Trust (MCT), whose mandate is to preserve and maintain Merce’s work through licensing projects and education. It’s just that I had a unique opportunity to apply for the position in Angers at the end of January 2012.

Kimberly: Was that the same year that the company ended?

Robert: The company had their last performance just before on December 31, 2011. I found out shortly after that there was an open call for Artistic Director at the CNDC in Angers. I applied for the job, but my focus at that time was still Merce’s work, his legacy and MCT’s transition from Westbeth to City Center. In February 2012, while I was making the adaption of Four Walls Doubletoss Interludes, I started to work with Claire Rousier to design a three-year project for the CNDC.

Kimberly: Can you tell us who Claire Rousier is and how you knew her?

Robert: Claire is the CNDC’s Deputy Director. She was a dancer and she worked for about 10 years at the CND Paris (Centre National de la Danse) and oversaw the publication of many, many books on dance. She also worked as a consultant, and through a mutual friend, I met her. We started to work on this project while I was employed by the Merce Cunningham Trust. I went to Angers after our presentation of Four Walls Doubletoss Interludes at the Barishnikov Arts Center. We waited until July to receive the confirmation of the nomination from the Ministry of Culture and Communication (MCC). Then Claire and I began to work in earnest to develop more specifically our idea for the pedagogical program for the school of the CNDC. We’ve tried to build a diverse educational program at the CNDC for our students. The diploma they receive after the two-year program is given by the MCC. We want to provide a fine understanding of the various techniques of modern dance as well as foundations of the contemporary dance and at the same time emphasize an approach that is practical, creative and theoretical.

Kimberly: Ok. Great. I want to go back to stuff going on at the school—

Robert: Let me explain that for all Centre Chorégraphique Nationaux (CCN), the first priority of the artistic project is to create new choreographic work. The second is to enable other choreographers and artists to work in our studios and for some artists, to offer them residencies. The third function is our service to the public.  The CNDC has two additional responsibilities. We administer an École National Superior and we also have theaters that we program dance in. This is a big service and there’s a wide net to cast.

Kimberly: How many theaters? You said theaters, plural.

Robert: Well, we have two theaters at the Quai, a 400-seat theater with the audience on a rake and a 900-seat theater with an enormous stage. We also have a very large studio that’s the same size as the stage and that is fitted with lighting equipment, so that technical work such as lighting can be done during the act of creation. We also have three other, smaller studios in the building and we have two other buildings with studios (nine in all). We have apartments so artists can be in residence and focus only on their work. An important part of the CNDC’s function is to help artists. We’re trying to work very much with artists in our region as well as with artists throughout France. There are some international artists also, but most are French artists or artists from the area. This is something we’ve tried to develop. It’s a significant part of our work and it brings me a lot of happiness, to tell you the truth.

Kimberly: That’s beautiful.

Robert: We have so much we’re allowed to give to people, and coming from America, we just don’t have this opportunity.

Kimberly: I know. I completely connect to what you’re saying. The ability to have resources to share is an incredible gift.

Robert: It is incredible. It makes every project interesting.

Kimberly: Yeah, it is a gift, and the students and people know that. It doesn’t matter if you’re from here or there; we understand that.

Robert: It’s also the way in France, the way culture is integrated with performing and visual arts. The arts and culture are knit together. In the US arts and culture seem separate, and we just don’t think about them the same way.

Kimberly: Right.

Robert: A big part of my project is also the idea of legacy, which the French call patrimony, one’s heritage, basically. The idea is that while you continue to reflect on your history, you find ways to bring new life to it, or create new life out of it. Personally, I have no need to divorce myself from my past, but doing so is part of the nature of a rite of passage. Artists, in a way, must come to terms with their past in order to make something new. I have realized that in the creation of my own work, I need to find my own voice. For our school I’m trying to find a way to introduce our common heritage within a curriculum that will give our students the opportunity to learn Cunningham, but also Nikolais, Limon, Trisha Brown and Forsythe. This year our students have ateliers focusing on the work of Martha Graham, Ohad Naharin, Kathrine Dunham and Germaine Acogny. In November Stephan Brinkmann and Malou Airaudo came to Angers from the Folkwang Universität Essen while I taught their students in Essen. In January the students learned historic solos, and created their own. They have just completed a stage learning repertory of Anna Teresa de Keersmaeker, and in April they will begin to work with Jean-Claude Gallotta. So our formation began with studies to build a foundation in American modern dance and will conclude with studies focusing on European contemporary dance. My 4-week workshop was followed by a two week period guided by Cedric Andrieux with the aim to use the Cunningham work as a springboard to create something new out of their experience. My workshop was somewhat strict as I was introducing the students to the Cunningham Technique and was assembling an Event for them. Afterward, Cedric came in and he worked with the students creatively, allowing them to adapt what they were learning, so that in a short time, there they making something new. This is the basic idea to combine patrimony and creation. We don’t have the intention to form the students to become a certain kind of dancer, but instead, would prefer them to discover the roots of their heritage so they have the tools to develop their individuality and their ability to perform.

Kimberly: Let me just interject—Cedric Andrieux was a member of the Cunningham Company and also performed, and is probably still touring, a solo in Jerome Bel’s work.  Can you speak more about the school? It’s very important. I know that Angers has probably the most extensive resources in terms of its education program.

Robert: Well, it’s an old school, was began under the direction of Alwin Nikolais in 1978 who was succeeded by Viola Farber from 1981 to 1983. Yes, the CNDC had an American heritage at its inception, which possibly helped me secure the position.

Kimberly: Okay. Well, we’ll get back to that. I’m really curious about this idea of legacy and how we understand it differently here and there. And the idea of patrimony. So, it’s not surprising, but also somewhat distressing, that this “home” where you’ve been able to find a to place support Cunningham’s legacy isn’t in the US. What do you think about the displacement of this cultural artifact, and if its existence outside of the country somehow alters the nature of the thing itself. Is it surprising that it’s France?

Robert: That’s a good question but I think in terms of the Legacy of Merce Cunningham in New York, we did the best we could, considering the situation and the responsibility that we had. It’s certainly a fact that the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (MCDC) was financed to a large part by money from grants and money that was earned with the support of theaters and their programming of productions of Merce’s creations. It became apparent that without Merce’s new work, MCDC would have difficulty to maintain the standard it had established. That was a realistic way to look at it.

Kimberly: Right, and that’s a cultural artifact in itself. I’m thinking about what is possible in our country, and its really interesting to me that now that Forsythe has disbanded his company, there is a whole center—a university of performance—that’s being created for him in California, which is amazing, right? That makes me very happy that some great artist from our country is being given that, while he’s alive, while he’s still with us. So I don’t know that much about the end of Merce’s legacy tour—if there was planning to try to find a space in the US—and if that would just be impossible.

Robert: I was involved in that, and I made an effort. It’s really complicated because after Merce died, the Cunningham Dance Foundation (CDF) signed a contract with Westbeth to remain there throughout preparations for the Legacy Tour. The contract lasted until a certain date, and then CDF asked Westbeth if they could have a rider on the contract, so that it could be extended, in the case we could find a practical means to continue. This was refused. When I was trying to drum up interest to carry the studio forward, I spoke to the management of Westbeth repeatedly, but they wouldn’t offer us a contract.

Kimberly: That’s amazing.

Robert: I think that they were looking for somebody else with more money.

Kimberly: That’s supposed to be a home for artists.

Robert: New York real estate is very expensive. The 11th floor at Westbeth is very large and cost something like $14,000 a month. My fellow MC Trustee, Patricia Lent, who is our licensing director, worked on a dossier to create a Merce Cunningham Center and we investigated different ideas, whether it would be at Westbeth or somewhere else. However, at that time, without any kind of reinforcement from Westbeth, I finally gave upon that idea.

Kimberly: I don’t blame you at all.

Robert: To maintain Westbeth, I reached out to Carla Maxwell of the Limon company and to Diane Madden of the Trisha Brown company to investigate the possibility to share the space, but that was not practical since we all work at the same time every day. I also invited Marta Renzi from Dance Films Association to come look at the 11^th floor as a possible studio for filming dance. When MCT found office space in City Center, we made arrangements with Pam Tanowitz to rent space on a daily basis for classes and for rehearsals there. This was the most feasible way to approach the transition. Moving to City Center was within MCT’s financial means and we were able to offer our classes and workshops to the public there. City Center is also close to our hearts because we performed there annually from the late 1970’s into the 1990’s. It made more sense to have an office and studio in the same location, and we have a wonderful relationship with them. I love City Center.

Kimberly: I actually want to talk more later about the Trust at City Center because I’m really excited by it. But to go back to what’s possible there—at the CNDC– I’m curious how your goals have aligned or not with the realities of being there, and the process of navigating an intensely bureaucratic system that has no connection with how we understand arts institutions in the US. Can you give us a glimpse of what you hoped to do and what’s actually possible?

Robert: The administration of culture in France is complex. The CNDC is totally funded by the state government, by the town of Angers and by the region Pays de la Loire. We have a responsibility to them and to the public. It is a wonderful gift and there is a great deal that is possible within our guidelines, and it is more than I could have ever imagined. When the time came for me to start my creative work, I auditioned and took 8 dancers.

Kimberly: Did people come just from your community or from other places?

Robert: From all over France.

Kimberly: So have they moved to Angers permanently?

Robert: No, we are not a permanent company. The dancers are “intermittents.”

Kimberly: Oh I know all about that, I was there this summer during the intermittent crisis.

Robert: When the dancers aren’t here in Angers working with me, they go on unemployment, or they find other work.

Kimberly: I see. So how often do you get to work with them?

Robert: Well, I worked with them for three months the first time.

Kimberly: That’s significant.

Robert: The first rehearsal period was 12 weeks. I made three works that were performed at the end of January 2014: a 45 minute Cunningham Event with the Jackie Matisse décor, a reconstructed Four Walls Doubletoss Interludes and my first creation, Toujours Fidèle, in which I danced with two of the dancers. In March I choreographed Shadowplay for our 20 students. Then, in June, Vicky Shick and I made a duet, a work-in-progress, called Old Bags/Nut Cases. In November I made a program especially for young audiences, which included a stage adaption of Cunningham’s film dance, Deli Commedia, and I choreographed La Boîte à Joujoux to the Debussy score. I did all this in about 16 months.

Kimberly: That’s quite impressive, yeah.

Robert: When we come to New York for the Joyce season, I will present a different, longer Event. I’ve changed it and extended its length to 70 minutes.

Kimberly: Okay, so lets jump forward because there’s one question that I have. You’re coming to New York. This is your inaugural season with this company, with your new identity which is a mixed identity of course—part your very powerful identity with Cunningham, but also you are creating a new phase of your artistic life which creates another identity as a maker of your own work. I wanted to see your work when you came to New York. What was behind the choice to present a Cunningham event?

Robert: The work of Merce Cunningham is my heritage. I work with his technique and it is important that I train the dancers to do his work, because it informs them, challenges them and inspires them. I would be content to present my own work too, but I believe it is necessary to share my experience with the Cunningham work first. The dancers all have different backgrounds and training, so I try to develop a common vocabulary for them. The excerpts of Merce’s dances that are being presented at the Joyce were all created prior to Merce’s work with the computer in 1991. I find that the earlier work offers these dancers a better chance to integrate themselves in the technique and also allows them to find and be themselves. Merce’s work is not easy, since most dancers aren’t used to standing still on one leg so long.

Kimberly: Yes, I know. It’s profound, it really is.

Robert: It is. It takes time to develop.

Kimberly: These projects you talk about that you’ve created yourself, that you can say are really your work—did you have thoughts of sharing those with New York audiences or did you really want to stick to presenting Merce’s work and not conflate those ideas?

Robert: I am proud to present Merce’s work in New York now. As I said before, my most recent program was made for children. La Boîte à Joujoux is 35 minutes and Deli Commedia Variation is 16 minutes, so it is good program length for the young public. I have a desire to communicate, and I wanted to find a way to make a work that people would want to see and that would bring them enjoyment. I was hoping to create some magic with this work. At the CNDC our rehearsals are often open to the public, and I have a great deal of pleasure having groups of children coming into the studio to watch the last part of our class, and then to present a short dance for them. The kids get a kick out of it—they laugh and giggle. I have a daughter, and I wanted to make something especially for children. I didn’t have the need to make more Cunningham work after making the Event and Four Walls Doubletoss Interludes. However, this September I will present a program only of Cunningham’s work, and will reconstruct Place and How to Pass, Kick, Fall and Run. Then in 2016 I will make a program in collaboration with the Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire.

Kimberly: Oh, great!

Robert: I will choreograph to the music of a French composer named Henri Dutilleux, who happened to be born in Angers in 1916, so we will celebrate his centennial.

Kimberly: Well, I hope at some point while you’re there we, in the states, get to see your work. I think that’s exciting.

Robert: I hope so too! I have sent the Vimeo of Deli Commedia and La Boîte à Joujoux to programmers. I worked with two visual artists, Jean-Pierre Logerais and François-Xavier Alexandre, here in Angers to design the décor for La Boîte. It’s a toy box that opens up like a Rubik’s cube, and every side has a different image, but together they create four scenes. It is a beautiful décor, and I was really happy about the work as a whole.

Kimberly: Good. I hope we get to see it.

Robert: I’ll send you a Vimeo, you can watch it with your child!

Kimberly: Okay! She sees a lot of dance. Lets go back and connect to something you said earlier, about the fact that being in a place that has supported Americans has helped you. But this is sort of a complicated question. There’s a history in France of US artists and choreographers directing choreographic centers there: Viola Farber, Alwin Nikolais, Karole Armitage, but I think you’re the first American in quite some time, which is very interesting. How are you being embraced? What are the challenges, the successes—what is your navigation of the system?

Robert: I think, in terms of the heritage of the CNDC in Angers, the fact that two American artists were its first directors, shows that there is an openness here. But, as a matter of fact, there are quite a few Americans living here.

Kimberly: It’s an interesting moment in dance history because we are dealing with the notion of legacy on so many different levels with many prolific artists. In terms of legacy, there are also living artists we are considering—say Forsythe or Trisha Brown. I’m wondering if there is a connection between this sort of global thinking about legacy, and your appointment there, which goes beyond your lineage with Merce. Is there something larger that we’re all sort of contemplating which has to do with value for history?

Robert: I am not sure. I have been a teacher for many years, and I believe the Cunningham work offers a strong, yet neutral base for a dancers’ training. Beyond that there is also his rich history, his philosophy, and the way he worked in collaboration with other artists. But I also see a great value in other choreographers’ work and believe in sponsoring a diverse approach to education. Of course, Cunningham’s contribution is significant, but our students are introduced to many other ways to move. I’ve taught our students over the course of their time here, and I’m glad that they now know the exercises and that they’re starting to be able to apply their physicality in their dancing. It’s not the simplest technique.

Kimberly: You’re right about that.

Robert: I am grateful to pass on to the next generation this part of my heritage, as well as to inform the students of our shared history. More importantly, I urge them that they find that simplicity that resides in their body. The CNDC is the only school in France with the name Contemporaine in its title and this is symbolic. We don’t offer ballet here for the students’ daily training, but instead offer it as an adjunct discipline along with somatic work.

Kimberly: Yes, talk about that more.

Robert: Well, training in America is much more homogenous on the university level. The ballet and the modern dance techniques are taught together. In France, there is a division between ballet, classic and neoclassic, and the dance contemporaine. I felt an obligation to develop this principal and provide a diverse approach. Not just to bring Cunningham’s work here, and not to align ourselves with a conservatory approach. Instead, I wanted to try something different and to enable the development of a contemporary dancer with an understanding of modern and contemporary dance forms, so that we might learn from the artists who preceded us as well as from the artists who are with us now. In the Solo Project we’ve been collaborating with the CNSMD (Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse) Paris with their department of Labanotation and reconstructing old, masters’ solos, to give our students a sense of their history and a sense of entitlement for their future. There have been many developments in contemporary dance and our students have learned to adapt very quickly to change.

Kimberly:  This word “contemporary” can mean so many different things. I’m here in North Carolina, teaching at a competition dance school, where, if I say the word contemporary, it means something very particular. You’re contemporary or lyrical. I just haven’t quite grasped these different notions. Can you talk about your interest in, or who you are interested in, in Europe—who you feel is truly working in a contemporary vein—post Forsythe, post Judson, post Jerome Bel. Are there artists you’ve encountered that you’re interested in either as educators or creators?

Robert: A lot of teaching artists are invited here. Alberto del Saz, who is the co-director of Nikolais-Louis Foundation for Dance, is an excellent teacher and transmitter of the work. The same is true with Kathleen Fisher from Trisha Brown, who directed an excellent transmission of Set, Reset / Reset for our students. There’s also the very strong work that Cedric Andrieux created here. I have had the opportunity, because of our exchange with Folkwang Universität Essen, to go to Essen and teach there for two weeks, and to introduce the Cunningham work, which was a new experience for them. I’m learning all the time. Last year I went to Senegal and taught at the École des Sables for Germaine Acogny. I was introducing African dancers to modern dance. I was learning African dance too, and it was absolutely wonderful and fantastic. Since I’ve come to live and work at the CNDC in Angers, I’ve had these opportunities and these experiences have awakened me to many new ideas.

Kimberly: So, do you see the idea of “contemporary” being intricately connected to 20th century dance history? Because these are all icons of modern and post modern dance, and I feel like we’re trying to classify the current—the next—movement or moment. We don’t have a name for it, post-Judson or post-post-modern or something. There’s a lot of thinking around these ideas.

Robert: I’ve been asked this question before here in France. I have to say that contemporary dance for me is the dance of today. Everybody brings their definition of dance with them, with different baggage and with different dreams. I think that in France there is a philosophical and conceptual point that they believe very sincerely in their definition of the Danse Contemporaine. I had an eclectic background before I joined MCDC. In the making of La Boîte à Joujoux I was influenced by all sorts of different ideas that came to me from my early experiences as a dancer in musicals, ballet, opera and modern dance.

Kimberly: I think we are in a moment where ideas about virtuosity and ideas of the body and form are being thrown around in really interesting ways, at least here. I think we’re sort of past the notion that to be a contemporary practitioner you’re not allowed to use form or not allowed to make something that could potentially seem virtuosic. It’s a long complicated conversation.

Robert: The last dance I saw that I liked was Empty Moves by Angelin Preljocaj. Have you seen that?

There is rich vocabulary and it is well crafted. The long quartet is accompanied by a recording of John Cage in performance in Italy, reciting his mesostics based on Walt Whitman writing. Throughout Cage’s performance the audience is getting angrier and angrier until finally they are actually screaming at John Cage and he just continues as if nothing is happening.

Kimberly: I did see Empty Moves. It was at ADF this summer. Yeah and the ADF audience, they went crazy for it. It was amazing, but it’s a hard piece, a long piece. When I saw it I had just got gotten off the plane, very tired, and I wasn’t really prepared but I was really excited. I remember dancing at ADF with Merce and people not being excited at all, not that our work was parallel in any way but just the challenge of the work, the idea of presenting challenging work. They’ve changed. Anyway lets move away from that conversation and go to my experience with what’s happening with the Trust in New York right now, and how it’s connecting to what you’re doing. Like you said, City Center has become a training place for people to learn Merce’s technique, and beyond that, there is a Fellowship program that the Trust has created to look at works from all different generations and offer students not just class but access to repertory. I’ve been seeing as many of these fellowship presentations as I can because the first one I saw, I fell in love with Merce’s work in a different way. Seeing it up close in a studio with no production value. Seeing it on bodies that were not necessarily totally perfect in the work, but were really trying. So you saw the beauty of the effort of the body, the rigor, the honesty of that rigor, and being so close to it and being able to admire structure in a different way. When I saw Variations V, I was blown away. It was so radical. I didn’t get to do work like this, when I was a Cunningham dancer, and we didn’t get to see work like that in America. So there are pieces that are being brought out of the fabric of his repertory that our public hasn’t been privy to. The program seems unencumbered by organizational weight. It doesn’t seem to take a lot of money and resources, yet its providing this amazing way—not of keeping history alive, because I think that is a failed project– but allowing it to be vibrant and dynamic. In our American way, it’s making something out of nothing. I’d love for you to talk about how your work in Angers connects with this.

Robert: Well, the MCT established the Fellowship Program before we moved to City Center. We had auditions at Westbeth in March 2012 for students who would be chosen for the free workshops. I was working for the Trust as Director of Choreography and fellow Trustee, Trevor Carlson conceived of the idea. During that summer, I mentored five Fellows, Susanna Hayman-Chafee, Rashaun Mitchell, Susan Quinn, Sandra Neels and Andrea Weber in their reconstruction processes. It was their job to reconstruct the dances, and my job to help them if and when they needed it. Since I was moving to France, we then tried to conceive of the Fellowships in a different way, so we could offer Fellowships and they could be guided by other mentors. The MCT has continued to expand the Fellowships and they’ve developed the program very well, affording many young dancers the chance to learn Merce’s work and preparing more capable stagers to transmit the Cunningham legacy.

Kimberly: Yeah, and it feels like such an uncomplicated way to share information.

Robert: In today’s world, dancers don’t have a lot of money. They need a job and that sometimes interrupts their growth. They often have schedules that are inconsistent. Why not make it easier for them to come to class? Why make it too expensive? Why not give them a workshop that gives them free classes? Then we can all go on the journey together. They are appreciative, they learn and they improve.

The MCT has resources, thanks to Merce’s benevolence, and this is one way we can share his work in a positive manner. All of these Fellowship projects are very important for both Fellows and students to insure the continuation of Merce’s legacy.

Kimberly: Lets see, I have one other thing to ask.

Robert: It was kind of radical for me to leave NY after 42 years, a leap into the unknown.

Kimberly: I think it’s great! Were you surprised when you made it past the first cut for the position?

Robert: No, but I really learned how to develop the patience to go through the bumpy process that it became. Between Claire Rousier and I, and our team at the CNDC, I think we’ve made good decisions and we’re finally seeing some positive results and that has reduced opposition and engendered support. I feel that we have developed a good working relationship with the town of Angers as well as with the administrators of culture in the Ministry. The CNDC is an important part of Angers’ history and culture. I only hope we can arrive at a place where people in America can pronounce it correctly.

Kimberly: Angers? (laughter)

Robert: Well, it’s spelled like Angers. So you need a soft “j” sound for the “g”.

Kimberly: Well, don’t hold your breath for that! Let me give you one last question to round things up: What fears, joys, curiosities—I’m sure there are many mixed emotions—do you have about “coming home” for this New York City season in this dramatically new role, especially to the Joyce where you and I have danced many times together? Can you say a few lines about that?

Robert: First of all, I’m very happy I can return to New York and show what I’ve been doing. I wish to put an end to the perception of some, who think that Merce didn’t want his work seen after his death. In response, I try to explain that it was not his intention that his work not be danced. He always said that if people want to do it, it would make him happy.

Kimberly: That’s what I thought. I thought it was a little bit more ambiguous. Not so black and white.

Robert: With Merce, things could often be ambiguous. But he said this directly to me one day. If people want to dance his work, he would be pleased. The MCT has been sharing his work ever since he passed away and they have expanded its visibility in the US and abroad in universities and in professional dance companies. It seems to me to have been a very good reason for the Compagnie CNDC-Angers to have accepted the Joyce’s invitation to come to New York and show what we have been making. I have been given a wonderful gift to be able to direct the CNDC and its school in Angers, and to be given a budget that has allowed me to create a company. Also, the kindness of the Merce Cunningham Trust has allowed us to dance Merce Cunningham’s work while I direct the program here. I believe that the CNDC’s contemporary dancers can transmit the work effectively, not only the technical parts, but also the humanity of it. This is what I’m interested to convey. The dancers are very passionate, and in fact, sometimes they get so hot, I have to try to cool them down.

Kimberly: (laughter) How do you do that?

Robert: Cool…cool…cool.  They are enthusiastic and very emotional.

Kimberly: Well, Merce’s work is very emotional!

Robert: No, but the thing is—

Kimberly: It’s through the body, emotion through the body.

Robert: You have to deal with it.

Kimberly: Are you nervous to come present this project at the Joyce?

Robert: Of course I’m nervous.

Kimberly: It’s exciting.

Robert: I’m presenting things that you haven’t seen. We’re dancing a section from Variations V from 1965.

Kimberly: That is such a great piece.

Robert: And also dancing excerpts from Squaregame, Points in Space, Rebus and Fractions. That’s the longer event. The shorter event for the children and their families includes Deli Commedia, Changing Steps, Numbers, Four Lifts and Scramble.

Kimberly: Well I look forward to seeing it! For me, the Fellowship project also dispels some myths that…well…I think that all sorts or types of dancers can inhabit Merce’s work, and while some might be more technically capable than others, or have had more training, there’s something so much about the will behind the work and the integrity of the rigor that, when that is so present, that is what keeps it alive. Not that the person can do the absolute perfect relevé and hold it for fifty-nine counts, but that there is this attempt that we all endured and that constant reflection on the possibility of failure. Then, the desire to not fail, and that charge that’s created from that.

Robert: Yes, that’s a big issue.

Kimberly: Its profound, that’s where you have that, “fleeting moment where you feel alive,” I think. So seeing that effort, that desire—has been quite beautiful. On all these different types of bodies and personalities. It’s great.

Robert: It requires courage. You don’t develop confidence unless you have the courage first. Then, when you make it through the hazards, you become more confident and the courage you showed can be repeated.

Kimberly: Right!

Robert: And then the next day you might have to start over again because you might not feel the same.

Kimberly: That’s true. The next day is the next day.

Robert: I try to instruct the dancers to have a positive attitude about what they are doing, especially when they experience difficulty and struggle. I advise them to say to themselves, “Here I am, and yes, I can do it” and to simply try it again and again. Merce was such a powerful presence, but he instilled a willingness in each of us to venture to go beyond what we thought we were capable of. His presence, or his gaze or the sound of his voice often could set off different, sometimes contrary feelings in all of us, in our consciences. Part of the challenge and, yet, beauty of this process was that it required all of us, as dancers and individuals, to believe in ourselves no matter how many times we failed in our attempts. Ultimately, we realized that it was our responsibility, and that we must dance for our own pleasure and self-esteem and not only for him. This was never easy, because we always wanted to please him very much and to receive his affirmation. Our generation must find a new way to communicate this important lesson in different ways. We have to.

Kimberly: Right, it’s a different world.  I just want to say thank you so much.

Robert Swinston graduated from the Juilliard School with a BFA in Dance.

His experiences as a dancer began with the Martha Graham Apprentice Group. He performed with the companies of Kazuko Hirabayashi and José Limón, before joining Merce Cunningham Dance Company (MCDC) in 1980. In 1992, he became Assistant to the Choreographer.

After Cunningham’s death in 2009 Robert became Director of Choreography and maintained the company’s repertoire during the Legacy Tour (2010-2011). During this period he assembled 25 Events for MCDC, concluding with the final performances at the Park Avenue Armory Events.

While Director of Choreography for the Merce Cunningham Trust (2012) Swinston created Four Walls / Doubletoss Interludes, an adaptation of John Cage’s Four Walls (1944) and Cunningham’s Doubletoss (1993) for Baryshnikov Arts Center.

In January 2013, he became Artistic Director of the Centre national de danse contemporaine (CNDC) in Angers, France. For Compagnie CNDC d’Angers he created: the Cunningham Event, decor by Jackie Matisse with guest musicians ; Four Walls Doubletoss Interludes; Deli Commedia Variation (adaptation of Cunningham/Caplan Video Dance) and Debussy’s La Boîte à Joujoux for young audiences.

He has staged Cunningham works for companies such as the White Oak Dance Project, Rambert Dance Company, New York City Ballet, and the Paris Opera. In 2003, Robert Swinston was awarded a  « Bessie » for the reconstruction and performance in How to Pass, Kick, Fall and Run (1965).

Bessie Award-winning performer Kimberly Bartosik creates viscerally provocative choreographic projects that are built upon the development of a virtuosic movement language, rigorous conceptual explorations, and the creation of highly theatricalized environments. Her work, which is deeply informed by literature and cinema, involves complex plays on space, time, and audience perspective, dramatically illuminating the ephemeral nature of performance. Bartosik’s work has been commissioned and presented by New York Live Arts, Dance Theater Workshop, The Chocolate Factory Theatre (2016), Abrons Art Center (2015); The Yard (2015), Danspace Project, French Institute Alliance Francaise’s Crossing the Line Festival, Festival Rencontres Chorégraphique Internationales de Seine-Saint Denis (France), Mouvement sur la Ville (France),Artdanthe Festival (France), BEAT Festival, The Kitchen, La Mama, Mount Tremper Arts, Barnard College, University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Arizona State University, Purchase College Conservatory of Dance, and Movement Research at Judson Church. In 2005 she founded the organization daela, to facilitate the development of her artistic work.

Bartosik has received support for her choreographic work from the Jerome Foundation; Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation through USArtists International; New York Foundation for the Arts through Building Up Infrastructure Levels for Dance (BUILD); MAP Fund; American Dance Abroad; New Music USA through Live Music for Dance; and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Grants to Artists (nomination only). Bartosik is a 2010 and 2012 FUSED grantee (French-US Exchange in Dance), a program of the New England Foundation for the Arts in partnership with The Cultural Services of the French Embassy and the French American Cultural Exchange. She is a 2015 Merce Cunningham Fellow. Bartosik’s current project, Ecsteriority4(Parts 1&2), will premiere at The Chocolate Factory in 2016. Ecsteriority4 (Part2) will premiere at Abrons Arts Center in May 2015 as part of Laurie Uprichard’s Traveloogues series and will be presented at The Yard in June.

She has been in creative residence at Centre Chorégraphique National de Franche-Comté à Belfort, France (FUSED); New York Live Arts as a Studio Series artist, Governor’s Island through Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Swing Space Program; Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University; Mouvements sur la Ville (France); Joyce Soho Artist Residency Program; La Guardia Performing Arts Center; Jacob’s Pillow; Kaatsbaan International Dance Center; Mount Tremper Arts; White Oak Plantation; and Movement Research.

Bartosik received her BFA from North Carolina School of the Arts, and MA in 20th Century Art and Art Criticism from The Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Research of the New School University. She was a member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company for 9 years, where she created over 19 original roles and toured extensively around the world. She performed in the 2011 restaging of Robert Ashley’s 1967 opera, That Morning Thing, at The Kitchen (NYC) as part of Performa. She was a guest artist/faculty at University of North Carolina School for the Arts (2013), Arizona State University’s Hergberger Institute for Design and the Arts (2014), Purchase College (2014) and Colorado College (2014). www.daela.org

In this interview, Sally walks me through her take on New York’s downtown art scene from the late 60s on, the distinctions she draws between criticism and reviews, her priorities as a dance educator and, most passionately, her advocacy of the extra-official dance forms and venues that she sees as the sites of some of the greatest vitality of the form.

—Abigail Levine

Abigail Levine: It is April 8^th, 2014. I’ m here with Sally Sommer at her home on 10^th street. Sally, would you introduce yourself?

Sally Sommer: I’m Sally Sommer. I first came to New York in the 50s. But the first real  visit (a couple of months) was in 1961, and I have lived here since 1967. I’ve been involved in dance since I was 7 years old. I was raised in Arizona on a small ranch and I had a mother with artistic longings.

Abigail: And after you came to New York in the late 60s, what was your involvement with dance?

Sally: Let me put it this way: the second day I was in town, I was at a party with all of the Judson people, with Trisha and Steve and David and Yvonne, maybe at Yvonne’s loft? I immediately jumped into that scene because I knew Steve Paxton since I was a kid in Tucson, Arizona.

Download a PDF of this Conversation

_____________________________________________________________________________

Abigail: Briefly, if it’s possible, can you describe the feeling of that scene that you walked into? That sort of New York world?

Sally: It was thrilling. I thought that they were fascinating, really smart, with a certain kind of humor that was very much in vogue at that point. You know, the wry smile. No gut laugh — but they were funny, and the parties were a good time. Nobody got smashed and boring. It was more about people getting together and having a good time. Also they were a talkative, not people who were silent. And, to see them in action? In a casual situation?  Absolutely perfect. I thought, “This is it, I’ve found it.”  It was like my second day, so it was fabulous.

Abigail: And were you performing with them?

Sally: I did some performances with Steve, State, Satisfying Lover; my husband, Bill, did Steve’s first IV blood transfusion piece…

Abigail: Paxton’s IV piece [Intravenous Lecture], what was that piece?

Sally: It was made during the height of the Vietnam War so it had all sorts of overlaid meaning on it that was powerful. Steve talked and very slowly walked with an IV tree hung with saline solution drip-bag.  Bill walked with him, in his regular doctor’s coat from the hospital and very slowly fed the saline solution into Steve’s arm. They had talked about letting a certain amount of blood slippage into the tube. The dance was also done in protest because NYU (I think) would not allow nudity in a performance that Steve was going to do:  No nudity?  How about blood?  It had tremendous significance.  It was resurrected and redone by Stephen Petronio recently at the Joyce Theater. It’s a testament to what the dance was, what the dance meant, and what the dance can always mean as it goes through time and accrues different sorts of sensibilities. Petronio is very different than Paxton. Paxton is very matter of fact, very logical.  Petronio was much more emotional in his talking and movement and hooked it to AIDS, something of interest to him — and something of great significance when you think blood and transfusions. So, the dance is like a sponge in absorbing whatever significances.

By then I was a trained dance historian and I was writing criticism. I use the word criticism and not just review because we had length [in our publishing allowances.]

Abigail: We’ll get back to that in a second. …And you started writing criticism?

Sally: I wrote my first… I was not wiring criticism. I was doing a lot of copyediting.

Abigail: You came from Tulane having done…

Sally: I had started my doctorate at Tulane. Then I spent two and a half years in Italy.  It was the height of the Vietnam War and Bill was going to be drafted because he was a doctor. He was actually forewarned by his draft board because it was a teeny-tiny little regional draft board, and he received a phone call. I remember he joined the Air Force about an hour later because the Air Force was better for doctors than any of the other services. After our service in Italy we came directly to New York City because he got a psychiatric residency here. I remember riding in on the bus from JFK and thinking, “What the fuck are we doing here? Let’s go back to Brindisi!” Thank god for Steve.  Thank god for immediately getting in a scene where I was comfortable.

I was doing a lot of freelance work in publishing, but not writing. I was copyediting, really correcting other people’s writing, which is a great way to learn how to write. I decided to have a child and then did have a child. But immediately decided I needed to go back and get a doctorate because I didn’t see my life being reduced to changing diapers and taking care of an infant.  So I had this wonderfully balanced life: on one side Performance Studies; on the other side a screaming, very difficult little infant.  She became an adorable baby — but was a tough young infant.

Abigail: So you did your doctorate at what would become Performance Studies at NYU?

Sally: Yeah.

Abigail: Then you started writing for The Drama Review?

Sally: I was not writing reviews. I was writing for The Drama Review and it was very different, very phenomenological, because, at that time, structuralism was really the modus operandi of Michael Kirby who was my chief advisor/professor and also the editor of The Drama Review at the time.  Then I was asked to write for the Village Voice by Burt Supree. So, for me it was like falling off a log, but I realize that that is not the case for most people now. For me, it was really easy. I’d get invited to do something for The Drama Review, do more, and was invited to write for the Voice.

Just before I started writing for the Voice I was writing for four Brooklyn papers that were syndicated. My first meeting (I had written a piece on Cunningham I think) I walked in the office with this editor who was about two years older than me.  I remember he pulled out a red pencil, two cups from his bottom file drawer and a bottle of scotch.  He poured a shot for himself and a shot for me and said: “Now I’m going to teach you how to write for a newspaper.” It was fantastic! Because he just ripped it to shreds. That’s where I really learned to do how to do journalism instead of writing for a journal. There’s a huge difference.

Abigail: What is required to write for a newspaper? Or to write about dance for a newspaper?

Sally: For one thing, it has to be very interesting.  You’ve got the grab the reader in the first two sentences and if you don’t you’re dead — particularly if you’re writing for Brooklyn audiences in the 1970s.  It had to have a kind of vivacity that journal writing, I dare say, never has. The intention and the readership is 100% different. [With a newspaper] you’re writing for people who will never see the dance, and will perhaps read the review just because it’s in front of them. Maybe 1% of the people who read your review actually have seen the dance, or, maybe want to see the dance.  The rest of them are just cold readers. The fewest number of readers are the dance readers.

Abigail: So what were you interested in giving to a reader who is not going to see the work?

Sally: Well, in that first piece that got shredded I was giving them context, I was giving them history, I was giving them blow-by-blow important sequencing, which signifies the deeper meanings of the dance. That’s fine for a journal. But it’s not fine for a journalist. I had to learn how to write quickly, get right to the point and make the thing come alive. That’s very different than talking about dance. There’s discussions about dance that happen with great pleasure among other people who know a lot about dance — and nothing is more fun. But, for people who know absolutely nothing about dance?  That kind of discussion is utterly boring.  It’s like me listening to a detailed discussion about football. I hate it.

Abigail: Was this the approach that carried over into the Voice writing?

Sally: No.

Abigail: So what was your mandate or what were you able to do there?

Sally: I was first and foremost a dance reviewer, one of a kind of stable of steady free-lancers. If I had the space I would do what context I could. It depended entirely on space. When I had 1800-2000 words (that meant I had a long story), I could really get into something. But when you’re writing 250-300 words, 750, 800, sometimes even 1200, you don’t have much time to do anything. Once again, you have to remember who your readership is. The Voice had more dance aficionados reading it than the four Brooklyn newspapers but many of the same principles applied. And Burt [Supree] who was the editor, was extremely skilled and taught me a lot.  If you couldn’t say it in one or two good sentences it got cut — and he did the same cuts to himself. It doesn’t take a lot of space to be smart. It doesn’t take a lot of space to make some cogent sorts of observations and comments.  I always compare it to haiku. It’s very, very different than…

Abigail: So you were sort of…you were creating the dance for people who were not going to see the dance.

Sally: No, not just that. You do some of that of course.  But mainly what you’re doing is you’re trying to create an interesting piece that will bring people into the dance.  You choose those dance points, physical descriptions or talk about “meaning” something strong that will lure people, get them interested in reading more and seeing more. You stay away from the kind of dance details that you and I would talk about or what I would talk about with my friends. The way critics, or I should say reviewers talk among themselves and what they write are two distinct expressions.

Abigail: Who were some of the people you reviewed?

Sally: Oh my god.

Abigail: Some that you recall or that were…

Sally: Oh, I reviewed Trisha [Brown], I reviewed David [Gordon], I reviewed Cunningham, I reviewed Paxton, I reviewed everybody, ballet, tap. I reviewed people who were a flash in the pan, dead and gone.

Abigail: What years were you at the Voice?

Sally: I wrote at the Voice from… maybe it was 1974, until right after Burt died. And after Burt died, the Voice changed radically, because it had a new owner.  You write because it’s a pleasure.  When you’re writing with a good editor, I can’t tell you what joy it is, it’s an entirely other creative process. There is the creative process of writing a piece and another creative process of editing the piece. It’s absolutely delicious.  But when he was no longer there…

Abigail: And is this when you started teaching fulltime?

Sally: Yes, I had been teaching almost always — not full-time — but almost always. I started out as a grad TA of course, and I immediately started teaching performance studies right after I graduated. I taught a class called something like “African-American Rhythm Tap.” But really, I was doing African American performance because it took a very long time for tap to define itself, to distinguish itself and separate itself from what I would call a larger gestalt of certain African-American social dance performance.

Abigail: So tell me a little bit about your scholarship and what I recall was, certainly as soon as I got interested in dance, you said go out on the streets, go to the clubs, that’s where interesting things are happening. It’s not happening in the studio, it’s not happening in the proscenium stage, so you did that as fieldwork… Tell me a little but about the focus of your scholarship.

Post-screening conversation with the cast of Check Your Body at the Door at the premier, Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center, 2012.

Sally: I was interested in the post-modern scene and in tap. Bill grew up in a family that had him doing tap dancing, acrobatic, ballroom from the time he was really young. He an act with his brother, called “The Sommer Brothers.” His parents wanted him to be a doctor and Fred Astaire. He was a good tap dancer and he did become a doctor.   He’s the one who introduced me to what I would call “real” tap done by the great African-American tap masters. He told me I didn’t know anything tap. When I first saw and heard “rhythm tap,” or “jazz tap,” what I call African-American tap, it blew my mind, turned my world around.

I was not interested in what was happening at New York City Ballet.  And being a silly snob that way I subsequently missed some really brilliant performances. I feel like an asshole for having missed them now. But you know, you’re young, you’re arrogant. I also regularly took classes twice a week at Cunningham because I loved Cunningham technique.  So did Bill; so did your mother [Abigail’s mother, Helen Levine].

I started going to clubs in New York City in the 1970s because I wanted to see what was going on. Also, any time I got bored with what was going on onstage— you know a lot of the post-modern stuff was not happening onstage thank god, it was in display windows, lofts, and on the street. I always found those performances more interesting that anything that was on the stage.  Anyway, I always escaped to the clubs in order to refresh myself and in order to get in touch with what was going on (a lot of the dancers were there by the way). I always find it interesting that they don’t remember it, or they don’t talk about it; I don’t know which it is.  I’ve always found the vibrancy of dance to be happening on the street and in the clubs.  That does not mean that I love concert dance any the less; it just means that I have a much broader palette from which I choose to watch stuff. You know, as far as I’m concerned, there’s good dance and there’s bad dance. I don’t give a fuck where it happens or who’s doing it.

Abigail: And you started filming some…

Sally: Well I remember I wrote my first really serious piece about club dancing in 1976. I was really writing about — it wasn’t even called hip hop, it was sort of pre-hip hop forms, it was dance that was happening.  I was writing a piece about roller skate dancing, because roller skating was very big then.  Inside the circular track there would be dancing.  Walking into those places was like walking into the Garden of Eden. The unwritten rule was as long as you were inside you were safe, nobody was going to rip you off.  Of course I was always by myself, I should add. I went less as a participant and more as an observer. I was an early urban ethnographer, and I didn’t even know what that was, in reality, although we used the term in PS classes. I had had one undergrad class in anthropology. When you go by yourself, you threaten no one and no one threatens you. You’re not there as a tourist. I remember they wanted me at PS to teach a class, I was supposed to teach a class and take all these people to the clubs with me and they were offering me a lot of money to do that as a summer class. I said “No,” because I was not going to embarrass myself or the dancers at the club by having all these students come in, as a group, staring at them. There is a thing about respect: if you’re going to become a part of a community, and my intention was always to become a little part of that community, you go faithfully all the time through the years.  I don’t think I announced, “Oh I’m going to be a part of that community” — it just was in my heart.  You do that by being unobtrusive, by being yourself, by not coming with a whole pack of people. I like to slip and slide through crowds like a water moccasin. I think that gives freedom. I like to ask anybody anything. If you’re by yourself and you strike up a conversation with somebody … I never had anybody say no to me, I never once had anybody get angry at me or pissed off. I think it has to do with the one on one, which is “I’m me and you’re you” and we’re just talking.

Abigail: So where did this project evolve to, or these trips?

Sally: Well, I started writing about social dancing. I was always interested in social dance. Even as a kid I was an avid social dancer. It always seemed strange to me that there was this kind of division between what happened onstage and what didn’t happen onstage, between what people studied as being bona fide and what people didn’t study because it somehow wasn’t bona fide. It never made any sense to my viewing and my practices. So I began writing about the social dance scene. There were publishers at that time who would call and say “Oh we want a book on roller skating.” I thought, “Well not from me, you can get it from someone else but not from me,” because I didn’t want to get involved in sort of…what they now would call commodification. I didn’t want to. That is not what it was for me and somehow it felt not pure.  When I was there at the clubs it felt fine to write an article. I never ever tried to hide that.  In ‘76 I wrote my first big piece on social dance then kept writing more about social dancing. Then in 1981, I was teaching at the School of Visual Arts as an adjunct. At SVA I taught a class on social dance. Social dance and tap are related because they cycle information between them quickly. All of the great popular dance styles came out of the black community, moved to the white community and moved from the nation out to the world. That’s been the way it streamed. That’s the way it’s still streaming. That’s the way it’s going to stream until I’m dead. I was at SVA and one of my students was Archie Burnett. Those classes were great! I would probably have 96% black and Latino kids, 4% white kids; but the classes I would teach on post-modern dance, or Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, would be exactly the opposite: 96% white kids, 4% black and Latino. So, anyway, I was in front of all these students looking at me and I said: “I know what you guys are thinking. You’re thinking what am I, white woman, doing up here talking to you about your dance forms?”  I told them, “Because I follow the kind of dance that interests me. That’s the reason I’m doing it.  And I’m the professor and you’re not, which is the other reason I’m doing it.” Then I put on James Brown. Well James Brown, man, that’s when Archie started screaming, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard Archie scream, but he’s got this huge, basso profundo voice, “Oh no! You didn’t do that!” and the class was off and running.   Archie asked, “So you go to clubs?” and “Which clubs do you go to?” I told him and he said “Uh uh, you gotta go to the Loft with me” and I said “OK.” So I met him at the Loft and it was a turned-my-life-around experience, because the Loft was absolutely astonishing.

Abigail: Where was the Loft?

Sally: The Loft, at that point, was on Prince Street in Soho, which was still pretty wild and wooly. It had three floors; of course, if you want to see the best underground dancing you go to the deepest and most underground place, which means the basement. So I headed for the basement and sure enough, there were all these geniuses dancing away. I knew when I saw that dancing, I knew. I said to Archie, “You know we really should film this,” and he said, “Yeah,” and that’s the way it began.

Abigail: What’s it?

Sally: It evolved into a film that I finally released in 2012 called Check your Body at the Door, which is about underground House dancing in the 1990s. I didn’t get the money together to begin shooting until 1992.

Abigail: And who filmed for you?

Sally: It was filmed first by Michael Schwartz and Mark Robinson of Character Generators then it was filmed and directed by Charlie Atlas.  It was edited into its final rough-cut by Charlie.  The producers were me, and Archie, and Bobby Tsumagari.  When it came to finalizing I put Al [Alessandra] Larsen on as another producer because she did so much work. Finalizing the film is a big bitch, particularly when you have all kinds of footage from as early 1992. I had 35 mm film, 16 mm film, and a lot of footage from some of the first video cameras ever made. They were huge! Like 35mm and you had to use with a harness and everything cost $1500: to rent a camera was $1500, to rent a sound man, $1500; to rent a studio $1500; to rent the editor $1500, an Avid editing room. I would get these grants for $50,000 and they were gone in two weeks because everything was so expensive. Now, what I love is that you just go out and shoot.  It’s fabulous.

Abigail: And that project is now touring around to festivals and universities.

Sally: Around the world. I just got a query from Japan. It’s been subtitled into nine languages, and it’s going to be subtitled into two more, Korean and Mandarin.

Abigail: And while all this was going on, I know you taught at Duke for some years.

Sally: When I was in New York, I was at the School of Visual Arts for a couple of years and NYU for a year, adjuncting at both places. Then I was at CCNY MFA Dance full-time for 3 years (the program closed), then I was at Duke full-time for 11 years, then I went to FSU [Florida State University]. I got to FSU just as they got money, facilities and all of that stuff.

Abigail: And you’ve designed a program called FSU in NYC. Will you give a brief rundown of what that…describe the program.

Sally: I developed the program the first summer I was at Florida State University in 2002.  At regional universities the students are crippled by lack of exposure. They don’t have experience of a lot of things — people jammed together in a small space, which I think is important, because there is a frisson, an energy; different kinds of art going on all the time; a huge street scene; a huge dance scene, any kind of dance you choose.  They needed exposure. I began “FSU in NYC” with the purpose of bringing the student into New York City, not for a cute little visit of three weeks, but for a semester. They had to find their own housing, it’s tough, it’s rough; they have to take my classes about the relationship between city and dance, very New York specific. The students carry a full 12-credit load and take three to four dance classes per week at studios of their choice, plus a 10-hour voluntary internship.  One purpose is to teach them how to survive in New York, not because New York is the be-all and end-all, but simply because if you survive in NY, you can survive most any place.

Each person possesses a ton of flexibility.  Here you can learn about that in yourself. I was tired of dancers coming to New York and getting depressed and leaving, feeling personally miserable, not being able to handle the pressures of trying to dance and find your niche in the city.  I run a heavy academic class with research papers, readings, the whole thing. But I try to structure the academic component alongside the practical component, both historically and contemporarily, so they see how they mesh together.  It’s not just learning in a vacuum. I’m also very practical in the ways that I teach, and what I’m interested in teaching. The program has been in existence for 14 years.  The student internships embed them in the working, admin side of the community, in the trenches. They learn how the dance world actually functions in terms of spaces, classes, people, money and no money. I thought what they were learning at the university was out of date.

Abigail: That makes sense. How so?

Sally: They’re taught that if you just learn really strong technique, learn to get that leg up there and keep form on your pirouette, to be responsible and diligent, then you do an audition, and guess what?  You’ll get in a company and your life is set.  First, somebody is always going to dance your ass off.  Forget about being the best technician. Next, what’s technique anyway?  How does it serve the kind of dancing going on? They’re “narrowed” in terms of what they can work within.  Still I do not want to smash down traditional technique. I think any dancer should learn how to move their bodies well. Even if your performance is walking down the street, or you’re dropping pieces of silverware you still, I think, should know how to move. I appreciate that.  Then they thought/think [because of how they are taught, it is a deep down dream] there are actually dance companies able to pay them for 48 weeks out of the year. They thought somebody would make beautiful pieces for them and they would tour. It doesn’t exist! I teach them that they must learn how to make a dance on $3.38 (a favorite figures because it’s dumb). Anyway, you have to be able to make a performance, any place, anytime, with no money — and also understand that you dance because you would be miserable if you didn’t dance. You’d go crazy if you didn’t dance.  ‘Fess up that’s why you do it. You’re not going to make money, you’re probably never going to become famous. So just scoot that out. That is a dream and can remain the dream. Dance because you must.  If you don’t have the drive to dance then I suggest that you try something else you feel you must do.  I haven’t made any money in the dance world. I’ve made money in the academic world, but not in the dance world. I’ve made money not writing about dance so much as writing about other stuff having to do with popular culture. But I wouldn’t leave the dance world for anything! That’s where I live. This is about survival — but in a very special way. It’s about learning how not to be afraid, learning how to learn.

Abigail: Is there anything else you would like to add?

Sally: Why did you want to do this interview?

Abigail: Ahh…

Sally: I think it all started because you were saying, “Ooh you’ve gotta have context [for a dance review].” And I said “Ooh, if you’re a reviewer you ain’t got no space to do context.”

Abigail: OK, well those are two different things. I wanted to do the interview because I think you have a very particular lens on the last number of decades of dance life that resists a lot of the myopia and amnesia of a lot how people talk about New York dance over the last decades including it not all happening at Judson Church, or on the stages.

Sally: You know how many people came to those famous performances? On a lucky night, there were 35 people in the audience. I’m probably the only living soul who saw every single performance done by Grand Union in that two-week or three-week extravaganza of every-night performances of Grand Union at the Dance Gallery on 14^th St.  Yeah, a hefty audience was 35 sometimes up to 50 or 75. But sometimes it was way below that.  That “important” post-modern dance was not popular. Nobody at the time had any idea that they were causing a revolution. They had a lot of ego but they were unassuming; those qualities can go together.

Abigail: What prompted the interview, perhaps, was there’s been in my circle in the dance world a lot of anger directed at mainstream, print-based criticism, journalistic criticism, and also…

Sally: Oh listen, that was there was in my generation too. Anna Kisselgoff was the pits. And before … I remember Bill writing a really angry letter to Clive Barnes in defense of Yvonne Rainer. We were busy attacking everybody too, it’s not new, it’s very old, and, following in a very wonderful tradition.

Abigail: And so just to get a sense of what the desires were for writing about dance, and the parameters, and mandates and just trying to suss out a little bit more. Because there have been a lot of artists saying that there have been these reviews- and you’ve made the distinction between review and criticism – and that they should be a conversation with the artists to further the form. That has been repeated…

Sally: …I think that it’s exactly what you just described, “the conversation with the artist to further the form.”  I don’t think that’s a review.

So yeah, I think there is a huge difference between a review, a piece of criticism, and an interview in Time Out; there’s a huge difference in publications, and in what those publications can and should cover. Alistair, for example, is writing for a very particular audience and they tell him what audience he’s writing for. They are detailed in their demographic readership.  They write towards that readership. The Times distribution is huge online, and tiny print distribution. I like printed newspapers. It’s one of the things I like about Movement Research Performance Journal is that its big piece of newspaper that you can hold in your hands. You turn the pages. I’m of that generation, that’s what I like. I don’t like reading online. I like to see everything that’s pictured alongside  an article, the ads, other articles.

Abigail: Does that happen in print?

Sally: You mean, does the conversation with artists happen to further the form? It happens, for example, in Critical Correspondence; it happens at Movement Research panels and in their Journal, it happens in online blogs and discussions on Culturebot, and online reviews. In those venues you can have those kinds of conversations. I think that’s appropriate. This is also the future of writing about dance, and ranges from the stupid to the splendid. There needs to be all different kinds of dance writing.  Depending on who’s doing the interviewing and who’s doing the answering, I’m fascinated. But do I look for that in a newspaper? Never!

Abigail: Do you value what shows up in newspaper?

Sally: I probably read fewer reviews than any other person I know.

Abigail: Of any art form? Or dance in particular?

Sally: I would say…what reviews do I read? I’ll scan Friday, I’ll scan Sunday, and… if I’m going to go see something, sometimes I’ll go look it up. Most often I don’t because I want to go in and just see it and see what I respond to. When there’s a big brouhaha going on, of course I go back and read all the reviews and all the comments. Yeah. I follow it like interesting reading. I don’t follow it in order to stay informed about what’s going on. I stay informed about what’s going on by going out as much as possible and seeing as much as I can, and a wide variety of stuff, although I must admit I haven’t been uptown in ages, meaning I haven’t seen Paul Taylor, I haven’t seen NYCB, I haven’t seen…

Abigail: Are you still going to clubs?

Sally: No I don’t go to clubs anymore. I’m too old. I get tired. Even when I was going to clubs and I was older, I waited until I got the phone call, generally around 4 in the morning. The best dancing at clubs always happens between 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 in the morning. That’s when the serious dancers are left and the tourists have gone. That’s when they’re so loose and they’re into it. Those are your prime watching times. I think that’s worldwide, not particular to New York. I follow serious dancers at the clubs. I’m not interested in unserious dancers, and I don’t like people who scope and go there to be scoped. That’s not the purpose of a club for me. The purpose is to get out and dance.  You don’t hit the zone until you’ve been at it for quite a number of hours.

Because I’m on the Bessie’s committee I see a shitload of stuff, a minimum of three performances a week, sometimes more. I think there is too much “context” emphasis.  If it works for them (the dance-makers) as a conversation, a discussion and dialogue, they think it’ll work onstage. But there’s an enormous gap between the talk and the walk – to stretch a metaphor. If it is not in the structure then it doesn’t exist for the viewer. Basically dance is a visual moving form, and a performance because it is done for other people.

Where dance is performed, who the dance is performed for, and who’s doing it, is going to have to shift. You guys should have whole underground system of “round robin” in people’s living rooms and basements and street corners and parks and roofs and everything else. 90% of dances are not going to get onstage. Forget it.  The way it exists now, audiences are small and tiny and specialized.  Everything has shifted radically to small audiences, small dances.

I see a lot of lazy dance-makers out there, A LOT of lazy dance-makers. They think, “We’re just going to do improv, just go out there and be ourselves, talk about ourselves and our lives as we move around, and it’s going to be great.” It isn’t.  Basically that stuff is really uninteresting for everybody except their lovers. Some of the really well-funded, well-known artists who are getting residencies all over, and money, just fuck off.  They kinda “We’re going to hang out and perform”. Good improvisation, by people who know how to do it well, is thrilling.  But rare.  Mostly there’s just a lot of you know… somehow “process”.  The reason they make the “god of process” is because they don’t know how to structure. I want them to do both.

Abigail: Should we keep recording this?

Sally: No.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

A dance historian, dance critic, and academic, Sally Sommer is a recognized expert on dance in American popular culture. As associate professor of the practice of dance at Duke University, she taught courses in history of modern and current practices in dance, history of African-American dance, and dance criticism. Since 2001 she has been a full professor at Florida State University, teaching in the master’s program in dance. As a dance critic and performance journalist, she writes regularly for periodicals in this country, and for ten years was a special New York correspondent Parisian Le Monde. As a historian, she was dance editor for the Encyclopedia of African-American History and Culture (Macmillan, 1996), a commentator and consultant on dance for NPR radio; for PBS/WNET Television, she was consultant and writer for programs on social dance, tap dance, dance in music videos, and contemporary club dance. In 2012, Sommer (producer) released the documentary Check Your Body at the Door, an exhaustive 25-year collaborative documentary film about New York City’s underground club dancers and dancing during the 1990s, preserving the voguing style of such dancers as Willy Ninja and great House stylists, Archie Burnett, Ejoe Wilson, Marjory Smarth, “Bravo” LaFortune, Brian Green and Barbara Tucker.

Abigail Levine is a dance and performance artist from New York. Her works have been shown in theaters, galleries, and diverse public spaces in the US, Cuba, Venezuela, Mexico, Brazil, Canada and Taiwan, at venues including the Movement Research Festival, Center for Performance Research, Mount Tremper Arts Festival, Art in Odd Places, Dixon Place, The Kennedy Center, Prisma Forum (Mexico City), Teatro O Lugar & SESC São Paulo (Brazil), Festival of Dance in Urban Landscapes (Havana), and the Taipei Fringe Festival. Abigail has performed most recently with Marina Abramovic, Carolee Schneemann, PopeL., Clarinda Mac Low, and Mark Dendy. She has published essays and articles in Memory: Documents of Contemporary Art (MIT Press), Women & Performance (Routledge), e-misférica, Movement Research Performance Journal, and TDR. She holds a BA in English and Dance from Wesleyan University and a Masters in Dance and Performance Studies from New York University. Abigail is a 2013-14 editor at Critical Correspondence.

Jan Erkert, Head of the Department of Dance at the University of Illinois, spoke with Maura Donohue, former editor of Critical Correspondence’s University Project and Assistant Professor at Hunter College/CUNY, about recent pedagogical shifts in the curriculum at the University of Illinois, where they have begun applying the idea of “community as curriculum”.

Download a PDF of this conversation

_________________________________________________________________________________________

Interview Date: February 5, 2014

Erkert: I wanted to share some of the changes and experiments we’ve been working on after having read the recent Critical Correspondence interviews with ASU faculty Karen Schupp and Simon Dove. I have really valued the ways they have shifted our thinking about dance curriculum and feel their conversations have been instrumental to fueling our conversations.  I came to Illinois eight years ago and at that time we also had an influx of new faculty – Jennifer Monson, Tere O’Connor and Kirstie Simson. They joined a very vibrant group of faculty – Sara Hook, (see my interview with her in 2009), Cynthia Oliver, Linda Lehovec, Renee Wadleigh, John Toenjes, Becky Nettl-Fiol, Philip Johnston . Together we have been wrestling with how to shape a dance curriculum for the 21^st century.   Sara Hook as MFA Director  and Linda Lehovec as BFA Director led us through a process that allowed us to experiment with curricular changes and continually assess how these changes were working.  I’ve also been serving as a National Association of Schools of Dance (NASD) On-Site Visitor for accreditation and have been looking at a many dance programs across the country. Traveling and seeing what’s happening elsewhere has provided me a larger perspective.

Donohue: What are the changes you’re seeing?

Erkert: Dance in Higher Education has been moving beyond the somewhat generic programs of the 1950s.  Most dance curriculums were highly influenced by ideas coming from Margaret H’Doubler, Hanya Holm and other similar philosophical constructs at that time. There was a standard blueprint for dance curriculum that did not change much over the first fifty years. Today, each program is starting to shape unique curriculums custom made for their own communities. It’s not one size fits all anymore. There are different points of view and different approaches.

Donohue: Are there specific examples of this?

Erkert: I’ve been following Simon’s work at ASU and his emphasis on designing curriculums for the creative artist.  I think they boldly struck  down the traditional pillars of modern dance and ballet as the base for technique. We’re discussing this at Illinois as well but since we are in a small town with little access to faculty with expertise in various forms, we have to take a more strategic, long term approach. I imagine 20 years from now things will be more pluralistic and more multidimensional across the entire country, but it will take time.

Donohue: What are some of the curriculum shifts you’ve been working on?

Erkert: I think curriculums for the new millennium will have to respond to our ever-changing world where the Internet moves fast, multiple theoretical lenses challenge the canon of knowledge, and community shapes knowledge. We are clearly moving away from the metaphor of the vertical tree of learning and in desperate need of a horizontal image to guide us.  I became interested in the Rhizomatic Education theory proposed by French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The image of a Rhizome shifts our thinking to a horizontal model where there’s no fixed center. Twenty-first century learning is about multiple entry and exit points and a map that is always changing. David Cormier, who writes from the perspective of technology, posits the “community as curriculum”.   This really struck me, because at Illinois we have an extraordinary faculty who were not able to teach what they loved, because they had to teach the curriculum.

So, we’ve been wondering, how can our community be the curriculum?   If our faculty were to become the curriculum we realized we would have to let go of several operating beliefs.  We had to let go of our perceived responsibility to teach a cannon of information (students must know Martha Graham, Isadora Duncan, etc.) which begs the question: who decides on the cannon anyway? We had to let go of the idea of sequencing—the idea that there is a linear and logical path in the acquisition of knowledge or creativity—and we had to agree that we couldn’t teach everything, it’s way too big.

Donohue: We’re definitely negotiating with that relationship to cannon as a public, NYC college. How important is the cannon to our students’ lives and experiences in the world?  There’s only so much time in a semester, if we focus on something that’s been marginalized something else has to go.

Erkert: Right, so for us “something else has to go” was our attachment to sequencing, cannon and content. We went about a process we called “sliding”—we agreed that every change was experimental and incremental and that all would have a voice in assessment and development.  So we’ve been “sliding” into new curriculum instead of jumping.  This process of incremental experimentation allowed us to assess the real impact on students, and it allowed us to get their input.    It was messy, chaotic, and confusing, but I think ultimately good in retrospect.  What if we let go of the idea of sequencing in the creative courses?  We agreed that all students would take Choreographic Process I as an introduction, but rather than taking CP 2, 3, and 4, we changed the rules so the students had to have three additional Choreographic Process II courses.  This way, students could select an area of interest.   Rather than a faculty member having to “teach Level 2” and wrestle with what comes second in Choreography pedagogy, the faculty member teaches their area of choreographic interests. So Rene Wadleigh could teach dance for camera or Tere O’Connor could teach choreographic structures.  In this way, the community became the curriculum.  The faculty member does not have to teach “Theme & Variation” because that has been chosen as a CPII concept.  In this approach, the faculty member can bring their research into the classroom, and the students can choose which course fits their interests.  For those with a technology interest, they can take John Toenjes’ Choreographic Process class that explores interactive technology.  This has been very successful for both faculty and students, allowing faculty and student research to be at the forefront of the learning.

Donohue: Where did it not work?

Erkert: We have tried various experiments in technique, which have not been as successful.  We questioned the idea of leveling technique. At one point we discussed not having any levels, but most faculty argued that students do “progress” and having levels is advantageous to deepening their skills. So we tried to enhance student agency by letting students decide which level they would enroll in. All entering students would have Technique 1 and get some basic skills, but at the Intermediate/Advanced level, we allowed students to choose.  We wanted them to make the choice about studying with a particular teacher.   Most students didn’t do well with making this decision, they simply put themselves in the more advanced class, or stayed with their friends.   It was very frustrating because they didn’t make the hard choice for themselves.  Many students reported back that they didn’t like NOT having a “goal.”    Sometimes the students need to deal with the hard reality of not being ready and we also had safety concerns in classes too advanced for their skills.  So we recently reinstated level placement.  However, this led to another experiment in technique.  We are creating intensive blocks five days a week with one teacher for five weeks—there are three teachers in a term and they range in approaches to physical practice from improvisation to African to hip hop.   This seems to be working better for our community and increasing their physical capacities.  It’s a constant conversation!

Donohue: Right, we’ve had conversations each semester when we get to placements about who is teaching any given level, which defines more than the level number. So, how do you work around the breadth versus depth question in your curriculum?

Erkert: If you let go of some curricular pillars like sequencing, cannon, and content, you have to find something else to create the architecture for the curriculum.  So we’ve established five learning domains: context (contextualize student experiences whether in technique, anatomy, history, or theory—what surrounds the work in the world?), inquiry (the ability to ask the right questions is critical to the classroom), reflection (accessing the internal body, the internal thought, being able to know self), student agency (taking ownership of one’s learning) and synthesis (great thinkers/artists understand how to put things together in unusual ways.  The ability to synthesize is core to becoming an artist). These five domains have become the core to the curriculum and where we look to for depth.  Breadth is a bit more random, driven by student choice and the various opportunities that come about each year.

Donohue: Those make so much sense. Inquiry and reflection feel really important in the development of agency.

Erkert: We also are focusing on Project-based/Collaborative learning. It’s so big in elementary education.

Donohue: Exactly, it’s the basis of my children’s schooling, but it seems to die out later.

Erkert: Yes, we have been trying to bring back the basic concepts of project-based work, which is based in Dewey philosophy, into our curriculum.  For instance, Jennifer Monson led a Choreographic Process II class with the idea of creating a work as a collaborative team.  This was performed in one of our concerts.  While this might just look like a repertory class, we ask the choreographers to be very transparent and collaborative about creative choices, so students are learning by working along with the teacher.   Last Semester, Tere O’Conner’s class created a piece together – not so much for the end goal of performing in a concert, but more for the experience of making together and experiencing the choreographic questions as they were revealing themselves in the process.

Donohue: That’s a model I’d love to see more of; it’s experiential learning, teaching by doing. I love our guest artists, but dropping in to set Rep in 6 weeks, often on students unknown to you, doesn’t set up the students for a deep connection to the artist or the idea of process.

Erkert: Right, several years ago Sahar Azimi, a guest artist from Israel, came in for a whole semester. Students created a piece with him in a Choreographic Process class during spring semester and then performed it in the fall. This gave them time to deepen their relationship to the work and own the work after Sahar left.

We are now wrestling with the idea of interdisciplinarity and what that means:  Students want double majors, the university wants us to collaborate, but we are all so immersed in our heavy curriculum that there is no space for students to seek out learning in other fields. We’re working on developing a new BA in response to this issue (right now we only have a BFA & MFA).  The traditional BA (again from the 50s) is thought of as a liberal arts training and the BFA as the development of professional skills for the field. In programs with BAs and BFAs this creates a two tiered program—the BFA is the advanced degree for dancers with higher level skills (generally technical skills) and the BA is the default for students who can’t make it into the BFA.  We are proposing a flip of this system by auditioning everyone into the program at the BFA level, as we do now.  The BA will be a “choice” degree for those students who want to pursue a dual major, or a focused area of interest.   So, rather than creating a two-tiered community, we will open the curriculum up to more interdisciplinary study for those who choose this path.  The proposal is at the University curriculum committee right now and there are already questions about how this is not typical.

Donohue: And, what about your MFA?

Erkert: MFA Director, Sara Hook, led the MFA committee members – Tere O’Connor, Cynthia Oliver, Jennifer Monson, and Renee Wadleigh through a curricular review of our MFA.  Most MFA programs tend to be bigger BFA programs—the same thing, but more advanced. We wanted to centralize the MFA around the learning domain of Synthesis. Our graduate students have been in the field and are coming back after or in the midst of professional careers, so we wanted to work from their questions versus us teaching them a subject.  The core of the curriculum revolves around what we call the POD, also known as Synthesis.  The POD is always taught collaboratively by at least two teachers, generally with expertise in different subjects such as theory and choreographic process, or pedagogy and physical practice.  We plan on trying different fields in the future, such as Landscape Architecture and Choreography, etc.

Most artists are working in a multiplicity of actions—teaching, performing, and creating— and they’re constantly synthesizing ideas as they work.  With companies folding and the choreographic master-model diminishing in the face of collaborative relationships, we wanted to create a classroom space that better modeled these changing realities. The Synthesis course asks students to come to the class with their questions and faculty and students will explore them together. If the particular semester has a faculty expert in choreographic process and theory, the faculty members might suggest books for joint reading.  The students and faculty read, make work, discuss and critique. So, inquiry and synthesis are embedded in their work.   This model also helped us promote the idea that every subject is worthy of more than one point of view.  Dance faculties are often small, and it is important that students understand that there are multiple viewpoints to any one subject.

Donohue: How do you negotiate workloads with collaborative courses?

Erkert: It was actually fairly simple. Two teachers are assigned the course which meets four days a week.  For instance, Cynthia Oliver, who taught theory two days a week, and Tere O’Conner, who taught Choreographic Process two days a week, joined forces. This appears to be twice the work, but it actually allowed them to be more fluid with the course.  The students could meet for three weeks on their own, followed by an intensive three weeks with the faculty.

One of our concerns is creating faculty leave time for research.  This model provides flexibility of scheduling and hopefully enhances their abilities to conduct research outside the university.   Of course, there have been many challenges as well.  The teachers have to work out ideas in front of the students – who talks, who leads?  This not knowing moved teachers out of their comfort zones. We also learned that some faculty are better at collaborative teaching situations than others, so we are learning where/when it works and where/when it doesn’t.   The students reported back  that while they valued this new model, they also missed the discrete courses.  So, now, one semester is Synthesis and one semester we offer discrete courses – Theory, Choreographic Process, etc.  It seems to be our process—to push the limits and then re-balance and pull back a bit.

Donohue: Are there other logistical concerns?

Erkert: The looseness of the structure was a bit overwhelming at first, so faculty looked toward the learning domains and the program objectives to provide structure.  We decided the objectives of courses would be the same as the objectives for the program: students must be able to write, talk, make, perform, and synthesize ideas. This was concrete and provided some obvious outcomes.  An unexpected outcome has been explosions of collaborative projects between students and faculty. Students are using faculty as dancers, and vice versa.  Several Faculty and graduate students presented a concert together at La Mama Moves in NYC. Last summer, the graduate students went to Colombia where they presented an evening length work.  Because they had been in the POD, they very quickly created a very dynamic piece together.

Last year, the faculty created an evening length work for our annual concert. Instead of the usual five dance repertory show, every faculty would participate in creating an evening-length work on a group of students.  Inspired by Tere O’Conner’s idea about “wrecking a dance”, we agreed that each choreographer would come in for one week and add to, expand, wreck, or rearrange the work of the previous artist. It was messy and chaotic but in the end we created an hour-length work that was very exciting.  The ownership of the students in the work was incredible—it was their work.  Had we not tried these other experiments, we would have never been able to do this. The designers were at a loss at first because they are used to responding to a text, dance, or one person’s aesthetic sensibilities, but his process gave them freedom and they produced some fabulous work.

Donohue: This has been so heartening to hear about your experiments. It’s a wonderful example of curriculum as creative process and a program that’s bursting with innovative approaches and modeled values through practice. It’s very much a thinking person’s dance program. Responsive to the shifting field, but not reactionary.

Erkert: It has been a slow and evolving process, so it has been hard to articulate the changes until now. I think many more shifts will come as we settle into some of our curricular changes and receive feedback from our students. Again, the credit goes to the whole faculty—it’s been a collective process of thought.

 Jan Erkert is the Head of the Department of Dance at University of Illinois.  As Artistic Director of Jan Erkert & Dancers from 1979 – 2000, she created over 70 works, which toured nationally and internationally.  Ms. Erkert and company have been honored with numerous awards including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Ruth Page Awards for choreography and performance.  She has received a Fulbright Scholar Award and is currently serving on the Fulbright Review Panel. She authored Harnessing the Wind: The Art of Teaching Modern Dance, which was published in 2003 and she has been a master teacher at universities and colleges throughout the United States, Mexico, Europe and Asia.  As a professor of dance at Columbia College Chicago from 1990-2006, she garnered many awards including the 1999 Excellence in Teaching Award, and a nominee for the U.S. Professor of the Year sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation.  She currently serves on the Commission for Accreditation for National Association for Schools of Dance, and serves as on on-site visitor for accreditation. 

Maura Nguyen Donohue is a NYC-based choreographer/performer, writer, and educator. Since 1994, she has shown her work in NY at Dance Theater Workshop (now NYLA), PS122, Danspace Project, La Mama, Chen Dance Center, BRIC, and other venues. With her troupe InMixedCompany, she toured works extensively across the US and to Canada, Europe and Asia. She was guest editor for Critical Correspondence’s University Project in 08-09, writes for Culturebot, serves on the Artist Advisory Board for Movement Research and the NY Dance and Performance (Bessies) Awards Committee, has taught at Smith, Mt. Holyoke, Hampshire, and Queens College and is an Assistant Professor at Hunter College/CUNY. She’s the mother of 2.

Delighted by the prospect that members of NDEO and many others would discuss the jagged disparity between higher ed dance curricula and the professional dance field, I jumped on this opportunity to interview both Simon and Karen as a contribution to CC’s University Project (read my conversation with Karen Schupp here). This interview explicates Simon’s keynote speech about the evolution of contemporary art practice, creativity in the classroom, and the importance of including socially engaged practice in curricula. Simon Dove spoke with Levi Gonzalez in 2009.  Their interview can be read here.

Interview Date: June 3, 2013

Download a PDF of this conversation

Alyssa Gersony: Dance 2050 in 2013 was a follow up symposium held at the end of May at SUNY Brockport to continue the conversations that started at the first Dance 2050 which was held in May of last year at Temple University in Philadelphia. The title of this meeting was Projecting Forward: Cultivating Leadership in Dance. Can you tell us about the topics of conversation that were taking place at the conference, why you were there and what you were asked to speak about?

Simon Dove: This whole initiative was set up by the National Dance Education Organization’s (NDEO) sponsored research unit which is at Temple. NDEO is overseeing it on an administrative level, but it seems to be the initiative now of a number of independent higher education dance people who really want to engage, not only in conversation, but in action that can seed change and development in dance curricular thinking across the country.

There were about 50 people who are ‘blind selected’ based on a vision statement they send in, so there was a wide range of people there — from those who had just been appointed to positions in an academic institution to people who had been leading a school or department for years, and everything in between. It wasn’t that this symposium was targeted at specific people in specific positions of power, it was really a national trawl for those interested in thinking about and articulating how they saw the future of dance education.

I knew of the 2012 conference at Temple because two Arizona State University faculty attended, Karen Schupp and Cynthia Roses-Thema. Their report on the conference suggested that the thinking that ASU had undertaken and the curricular changes we had put in place by then were years ahead of where anyone else seemed to be. As an initiative I had spent five years deeply involved in, I thought I could help move the thinking forward within this national group around the kind of leadership that I thought was necessary. What are the questions we need to ask ourselves in leadership positions? This question isn’t directed solely at school directors, but to anyone who is in a teaching position where they can influence curricular thinking..

Alyssa: Can we go into the details of the first day? What did you talk about?

Simon: I began by framing the changing cultural dynamics of the U.S. especially in relationship to the data available on audiences for dance. The National Endowment for the Arts published in 2008 The Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, which is a misleading title because it’s actually about audiences attending the arts, and ‘participation’ as we know, is much more than just being an audience member.

The NEA reported that in 2008 the total dance audience in the U.S. was 18.3 million people — only 8.1% of the adult population of the U.S. So, whatever you are doing in dance you are potentially drawing on 8.1% of the population around you. There has been a significant and continuous decline since 1992, when they did their first survey assessing that the dance audience was 11.8%. In 2002, it dropped to 10.2%. While this is a small number, it means that people who don’t go to dance, which is what I’m also interested in, has gone up from 88.2% of the population, to 91.9% of the population. In other words dance was always marginal, but it’s becoming increasingly marginalized in terms of American cultural attendance.

But, we also have to account for the way artists are changing their practice. In a sense, this may be reflected in these figures because what a lot of artists are doing now is work in socially engaged contexts, or working on developing new platforms for the work (the internet, IPad apps, interactive programs). In other words, artists are working with current technologies as different media for disseminating their work and also to engage people in a different way. They are working in all kinds of spaces, not just theaters, which is what the NEA figures are really counting — attendance in theaters. Artists are also working in a more transdisciplinary way, so a dance artist may be involved in a project that somebody might call a film or call theater, so they also get somewhat lost in the data. Artists are also working in completely non-arts settings, health care settings or judicial settings or educational settings. In other words, dance is out there, and dance artists are working, but they are increasingly missed by those NEA figures with their narrow definitions of practice and participation.

ASU School of Dance, photo – ASU School of Dance

Dance ‘as we know it’ is in decline, and dance ‘as we don’t know it’ — in other words, new forms, new practices, new ways of thinking about what dance might be — is on the rise. Yet the NEA figures don’t in any way recognize that, but it is critical that we do. We need to look at the way artists are working because they are increasingly working independently, not in companies. They employ this huge range of skills that is not just about virtuosic dancing anymore, it’s about creative thinking and practice, it’s about having a very evolved sense of pedagogy, and an individual approach to teaching. It’s about strategic thinking and planning. There are also all the leadership issues that are involved in self-determined art projects where you are not only making you own work and leading a process, but you are also advocating for it, and engaging all different kinds of people and motivating them throughout.

Leadership is an important practice for today’s artists, interpersonal communication, managing your own admin — as an artist you need to be competent in writing grants, running budgets, keeping the books, and all the processes that are about showing that you can account for the money and funding you have received, then you have evaluation and reflection. There is a broad range of skills that artists now need.

There is also the cultural context of the population in the U.S to consider. Looking just beyond this magic 2050 date — 2051 according to the U.S. Census Bureau is when the population of the U.S. goes over 400 million. By 2051 it’s 401 million. At the moment, in 2012 it is 298 million. So that is a huge growth in just thirty-three years. And in those thirty-three years the cultural frameworks are going to change enormously. By 2024 they project the peak of the non-Hispanic white population after which the numbers will continue to increase, but as a percentage in the population, the non-Hispanic whites will diminish and by 2060 1 in 3 people will be of Hispanic origin. At the moment it is only 1 in 6 people. By 2060 the notion of minority completely shifts, because what are currently termed as ‘cultural minorities’ make up 37% of the U.S. population, yet by 2060 it will be 57%. So then the only minority will be the white, non-Hispanic population. In other words, cultural diversity isn’t something that we need to be working towards achieving, it’s a reality in the world in which we exist. If we don’t actively address it, in all we do, we are actually denying the reality of the diversity in which we live. It is the reality in which artists will be functioning and our educational programs need to engage with that reality. This is actually an extraordinary opportunity for dance because the art form has the most potential to develop a really integrated curriculum that could really engage with that broad range of skills I talked about earlier, but also engage with the real cultural diversity of the country. This is not a U.S.-specific bubble, the U.S. is becoming increasingly diverse, more truly reflecting the actual diversity of the world – a context for which educational programs also need to prepare their students. In education we need to recognise the latent potential of each individual’s dance – that emerges from a deep sense of who and what they are in the world, with the power to profoundly engage and interact with others. This would foster a true multiplicity of practice that not only reflects the individuals dancing but the diversity of the world in which we live. The challenge to the educational institution is to truly nurture this individual creative practice, and not impose narrow forms and structures that have become the established norms of dance.

Dance can lead the way for how the arts should evolve in higher education by demonstrating the impact of an inclusive curriculum; a curriculum that is centered on creativity as opposed to a virtuosic training — it should be interdisciplinary by design. The program really needs to engage with the world around it. It needs to be socially aware and connect not only with it’s local community, but with the broader U.S. and global community too. Institutions should not think of themselves as defining the vocational trajectory of each student, but rather empowering students to evolve their own movement forms and their own practice. In other words, become their own advocates for what they are best at doing, which is being their own artists, and not seeking to impose a format upon them. Fostering reflection, the ability to evolve thinking about what you’ve done and to apply that experience to new situations, creating new knowledge, is one of the most important skills students need. And, that experience could really foster new thinking and new practices and new art forms — the dance that ‘we don’t yet know.’

Many people at the conference were asking, “So how do we do that?” I talked about ASU’s model, which we called the ‘learning lens’. It is not a recipe for a curriculum, but rather a set of principles and it had been our way of visualizing the new curriculum with creativity at the center, informing and being informed by four key principles: context, humanity, reflection and leadership. This offers a framework through which to examine all curricular models. Each curriculum and institution ideally should be different, informed by their context. Not only are they different when they are formed, but they continue to evolve, and we shouldn’t all feel like we are creating the same kind of curriculum. If every school offers a slightly different approach, then you start to produce a diversity of practice and a wide range of artistic practices.

We need to develop questions rather than just give answers; knowing why, not just how; understanding the reasons and the context for things, not just how something is done because someone once said it should be; mindfulness, not just reflex; a very conscious understanding of why you are making the kind of choices you are making, not just because that’s what you think it should be, or that’s how it has been done in the past. Programs should encourage each student to evolve their own personal journey rather than the path well trod. In a way it’s a very anti-conventional, anti-orthodox notion to propose that programs encourage each student to evolve their own practice as opposed to producing hundreds of students who all move or dance in the same way. Yet nurturing individual responsibility, giving each student not only the tools to develop themselves, but to understand that they are self-reliant and that they can make choices that have consequences and can have an incredibly powerful impact on their career and their work.

Our approach at ASU also needed us to question much of the language of dance education. We needed terminology that was much more open and wasn’t rooted in one specific practice, culture or aesthetic. For instance, the whole notion of movement as a ‘technique’ as opposed to movement as a practice, and the idea of creative practice as opposed to choreography or composition. They are all elements that you deal with, but the approach needs to be broadened, so we needed new terminology that enabled students to make their own meaning and bring their own sensibility to these terms. I advocated strongly for the need to broaden the range of movement practices that schools are offering and to get away from the idea that certain forms need to be mandatory. Classical ballet does not need to be mandatory. For some people it’s absolutely the right thing to do, and for others it is completely wrong. We should enable students to make informed choices about what it is they are exploring without imposing a specific way of moving or a specific way of articulating the body.

I also said that we have to discontinue this idea of specialisms especially in the undergrad level where in the second year you decide if you are going to be a dancer, maker, teacher, or write about it. All that does is diminish each student’s possibility for what they want to do, what they want to be and what they could offer the field. At ASU, we needed to bring all the humanities and movement classes together because they had different catalogue numbers. I don’t know if it was like that when you were there, but they had different prefixes and numbers. The idea apparently was that if you were in a classroom you were doing something that was humanities and if you were in a studio then you were doing something that was more physical education. I said movement is about developing knowledge, just as is studying humanities subjects. We needed to as a dance school to advocate the value of knowledge that is also developed in a kinetic way, with and through the body.

At ASU we had to completely invent what a creative practice course was, and get away from old notions of choreography and composition, and be much more inclusive. We worked on cultivating personal reflection and group experiences, where there could be shared senses of personal journeys that everyone else could benefit from. Also, pedagogy was critical for everyone, not just those who wanted to become teachers. Teaching, or leading a group process, is something all artists are involved in increasingly given the evolving social practice.

Socially engaged practice was important for everyone. It was critical to decentralize the theatre as a venue, so that it was not seen as the only site for which artists are making work. The students needed to critically engage the idea of making work in the theater just as much as they did any other location. The specificity of it needed to be thoroughly interrogated.

So, after talking about the ideas of the learning lens, I talked about how we built the curriculum at ASU and then proposed ways for attendees of the symposium to move forward if they want to take on a leadership role in evolving their curriculums. My first suggestion was to engage artists and communities and not just talk amongst themselves — to get a sense of how the art form is evolving and how artists can work with communities. In other words, understand the evolving professional context, before you start turning out students to enter it. There were alot of principles that could easily be applied to their own program, but they could each come up with different answers. What surprised me was the range of people there and that very few program directors or school directors were in attendance –the very people who are, in a sense, in control really need to be properly and appropriately engaged with all this thinking.

Each Institutional context needs a different approach because of its history, the people, what they want to do and what the skill base is. I talked about valuing the faculty resources that you have, and building on it, as opposed to thinking that everyone is going to be a problem and they won’t want to change. It simply wasn’t the case at ASU.

Then I said, “Choose your battles”. Changing all of this within the framework of all higher education institutions is just too enormous. Let us identify those who really want to lead and focus support on those that do. If ten programs change across the country that would be a fabulous catalyst – we do not need to try to get every program to change at the same time.

Alyssa: So then came day two. Karen Schupp [Associate Professor at ASU] was also there. She was there to give more of a practical, day to day, operations based, what-happened-at-ASU, and how did you actually apply that curriculum?

Simon Dove, photo – Jacqueline Chambord

Simon: Exactly. The main questions were essentially practical ones. The first was, “How do you go about doing this when you already have an overloaded faculty trying to just deliver the curriculum as it is”? So I made it clear how we went about it: setting up a two-hour slot once a week with a cross section of faculty dreaming about what the ideal students who left the institution would be like. What skills would they have, what experiences would they have? We didn’t think about practicalities at all at first. Then we started to feed that thinking into the faculty retreats that were extended, but they are in the calendar (we have one at the end of each semester). We used them as full day retreats to then explore these ideas with the full faculty team. We also brought a former dancer who was in the college of education as a curriculum specialist into our curriculum development group, which was helpful in terms of being able to project the implications of certain decisions. He was a great sounding board for what we were thinking.

Karen was very clear that not only were we thinking about changing the curriculum while teaching it; once we starting rolling it out, we started actually teaching three different curriculums. There were already two different catalogues running simultaneously, and then we were introducing a third. The one we introduced of course was also built around modules. We split the semester — why does a semester need to be fifteen weeks? It just happens to become established like that. We initially taught five-week modules, with three modules per semester. After year one though we changed that to seven-and-a-half week modules because it was just too fast of a turnaround for students to deal with. Then the whole of ASU took on 7.5 week modules the following year. They never thanked us, but they stole our idea!

Curriculum change was not a simple process because we had to change all the catalogue numbers for every course, and that had to be taken through all the admin layers of the university and had an impact too on the community colleges that were running parallel programs that were supposed to be able to feed into our program. Of course, our program was changing so much it didn’t look anything like the programs they were doing, so we had to find equivalencies of what they were offering that could fulfill some of our criteria and look at core competencies and the expected outcomes of those courses for each module.

It was a huge administrative process, but one that I felt personally we couldn’t skip because we had a principle that dance was an equivalent body of learning, a way of exploring the world, a form of knowledge that we needed to give equal weight to. We couldn’t diminish it with this sort of physical education idea, which is where it came from.

Attendees were curious about how students and parents understand what it is that they are getting into. We had to completely change the ‘audition’ process into an interview, which enabled students to bring their own personal movement practice as opposed to being taken through a specific form-based class process. They also had a creative practice experience, and so they could get a sense of how we were teaching and what we were looking at. I’ve had hundreds of conversations with parents. They understand that the passion their son or daughter has for dance may actually be realizable within this new model, where they also perhaps had a fear that the old model would only support a small percentage of those who graduate to really live the life that they were imagining with that art form. Parents really understood that this approach offered a greater range of possibilities and options. I think the students also changed. I don’t know if it was your experience while you were there, but as the program began to be better known, the students who were coming were also much more engaged with the world. We felt that as the program evolved year after year, the students who were applying to the program were not just physically skilled in a diverse range of movement practices, from Ballet to Urban forms, we had people with different kinds of skills, and they were more of socially and culturally aware of the world around them.

Karen also talked about the range of movement practices that are now available. At ASU we went from two that were obligatory to five that were options. She then talked about the research that she’s done in regards to interviewing third and fourth year students about the choices they’ve made, and what motivated the choice, and what happened after they had been exploring these two forms. They talked much more about being able to understand principals better because they could apply them to the different forms. They talked about feeling more empowered because it valued who and what they were, as opposed to imposing something on them. The other big finding was that they felt that they were able to evolve a much more personal approach and that it was being encouraged. We were not trying to impose a specific way of moving. This developed their idea of self responsibility and self development of their own personal practice.

I think that there is a growing body of people across the country and certainly from this conference who feel that it’s not only necessary to change, but it’s time to change now. Both the curriculum and the way we think about dance in higher education needs to change.

The difficulties facing change are perceived to be that there will be resistance to change from senior faculty, or that in some places there is just one or two people running an entire program. They really don’t have the headspace to be thinking big structures and practicalities. Having some kind of national body that can both bring experience together, share approaches, and share thinking would be really valuable, and provide a critical momentum for change. The conference planned to change their agenda on day two into developing practical approaches. We are waiting to see what was distilled from day two, and what they are proposing.

Karen and I also feel we need to look at how we can help advocate for change on a national level rather than just looking at each school individually. How can we help assemble principles or questions that each institution can apply to their own program, and by doing so evolve and develop their own new curricular thinking.

Alyssa: As a kind of standardization? Or…

Simon: No, quite the opposite actually; there is a whole set of assumptions built into most dance programs that are now running around the country – about ways of moving, about why people are moving, about what they are moving for, about what they going to do. All of those need to be interrogated and to just have a set of questions is often quite helpful; “Why is this semester fifteen weeks long”? Proposing questions, ensuring everything is examined – and I guess offering some alternative models – could well be helpful in catalyzing change more quickly. It is essential that change happens, not just for the next generation of students, but for the vibrant and healthy evolution of the art form too. The very future existence of dance depends on it.

Simon Dove is an independent curator and educator, and currently a co-curator of Crossing the Line, the annual trans-disciplinary fall festival in New York City. He was Professor of Practice and Director of the School of Dance at Arizona State University from 2007 to 2012. His past international projects have included work with the Amsterdam Choreography Master’s program (Netherlands), Rachid Ouramdane (France), the Guardians of Doubt (UK), Philadelphia Live Arts Festival (USA), The Arab Dance Platform, (Lebanon), Attakalari (India), and TseKH (Russia).

Simon was Curator and Artistic Director of Springdance, the international festival of new developments in dance and performance in the Netherlands from 2000 to 2007. Prior to that he ran one of the first National Dance Agencies in the U.K, the Yorkshire Dance Centre in Leeds, was the founder and Artistic Director of Vivarta – the first contemporary South Asian performance festival in the U.K., contributed to national dance policy development with the Arts Council of Great Britain, and programmed an innovative arts centre in London. He has written articles for the Performance and South Asian press, devised and presented a series for BBC Radio 3 on Dance and Music, and extensively mentored students and professional artists from many countries in developing their creative practices.

Alyssa Gersony graduated from the School of Dance at ASU in 2012. She currently works in Brooklyn as a dance artist and job developer for people with disabilities. She is an intern with the Movement Research Critical Correspondence team, and pursuing her Master’s studies in Vision Rehabilitation and Orientation & Mobility.

Download a PDF of this conversation

Interview Date: June 5, 2013

Alyssa Gersony: Can you give a brief history of how you found yourself as a professor working at Arizona State University?

Karen Schupp: I was a graduate student at ASU and then I left to work with Victoria Marks. While I was gone, a visiting position opened up, which I applied for. While I had the visiting position, a more permanent position called “Senior Lecturer” opened up, which I applied for a got. Then after I worked in that position for while, an assistant professorship became open, and I applied for that and got it. That’s the short version. I wanted to be an assistant professor at ASU because of the curricular changes we were making — I’ve witnessed multiple curricular revisions, but the one that we are still involved in was and is exciting to me, and that’s why I wanted to be here.

Alyssa: I spoke with Simon Dove about this year’s Dance 2050, but before we talk about that, I’d like to ask you about the first Dance 2050, which was titled The Future of Dance in Higher Education. It happened at Temple in May 2012, and I was hoping you could tell me about your role in that meeting and then a quick idea of what went on there.

Karen: In 2012 I was a participant just like everybody else, and this year I was a participant, but I also helped Simon frame the discussion about what curricular changes could happen now to help postsecondary dance programs prepare for the future. Last year’s Dance 2050 revolved around four themes: “diversity and globalization”, “learning in the new world”, “leadership for dance”, and “dance in a digital world”.

There were four separate themes and of course they are all interconnected, but last year we really tried to address them individually.

This year’s symposium focused solely on leadership in higher education, which even though is more specific, is still quite broad.

Alyssa: I’m curious, after looking at the roster of who was there, it seemed like there was a diversity of Universities represented. Was it a similar kind of diversity this year?

Karen: I would say so. As a participant it seemed like there was a younger generation present this year, which I think is important because even though I am relatively young within academe, you know, I hope to be retired by 2050. So, it’s people that are younger than me that will really take this forward. In terms of setting a sustainable groundwork, it was good to see graduate students and young faculty members in attendance.

Alyssa: I’d like to hear what you focused on when you spoke with Simon about the practical implementation and application of the ASU curriculum, and then maybe some of the concerns and questions that came up in response to that.

Karen: One the thing I addressed was what our students do with the information they’ve gained through the curriculum, since I’m actually completing a research project about that. It’s a new curricular model and approach, so a big question is: when students have the freedom select the dance practices they are study, what do they actually do with that information? Student learning becomes a little more difficult to measure when they have more options, because there are more outcomes. I was curious to see what our students were learning.

Three themes emerged from that research:

• the students feel much more empowered in their education because they are allowed to shift according to their needs and interests
• they are more challenged creatively and their problem solving abilities seem to widen because they are working with peers who have different dance interests and study diverse dance practices, which in some way also encourages better communication and collaboration skills because they can’t assume that everybody just knows what they’re doing and what they’re saying
• it led them to find, from their perception, a more personal and unique movement voice, and I would say related to that, they seem to have a deeper somatic understanding because they have to take a lot of responsibility for their own dance learning.

I think people are like, “Well, your curriculum sounds great…” but they don’t really have anything to measure it against. So, I wanted it to be really clear that our students are still learning a great deal about dance and about themselves even though they are each going about it in unique ways.

Symposium participants had a lot of questions related to the curriculum’s implementation because that’s when you get into resources and faculty workload, so I talked a lot about how my personal pedagogy evolved to facilitate the content of the curriculum. I think it was a reassuring for participants to hear how I went about it. You always have to balance the theory and the practicalities. You can really want to do something, but until you can really figure out the steps to get to that, you feel like your hands are tied. So, on day two of the symposium, participants asked Simon and I a lot of practical questions, but that reflects their willingness to embrace a new way of thinking about postsecondary dance curriculums.

Karen Schupp in “Western Door/Power Trail”, photo by Ken Howie

Alyssa: Were you there for the full symposium?

Karen: Yeah I was there for the whole thing.

Alyssa: I’d like to get more into your pedagogy a little bit. One of things that we are interested in this particular “University Project” is to learn about different pedagogical approaches to addressing the intersections of dance history, technique, contemporary dance discourse and theory in the classroom.

Karen: It’s a good challenge, is how you have to think of it. One of the things that I’ve said in a couple of different places — both in larger group discussions and in the session I had with Simon — is that in order to make a curricular change, you have to honestly assess your values and be aware of how that shows up in your language and your practice.

Sometimes when you are revising or assessing something that you’ve done for a long time, you realize there are so many built in assumptions about what you are doing. You can have the best intentions to change your methods, practice, or curriculum, but you don’t because you’ve never looked back. You have to ask yourself “what am I doing consistently and why am I doing that consistently? Is it because it’s a habit or is it something I value?”

When it comes to teaching, I am always looking at what I actually did and why I did it. What I found in the new curriculum was that I had to question what I value, and what I value is physical expression. There is something very interesting and special about the physical experience of dancing, but I also value students as independent thinkers and movers and people. I also really value the fact that dance is so much larger than just physicality, though it is an important part.

The curricular switch actually gave me permission to go deeper into things I was already interested in in the classroom. For example, in my classes we now include contextual knowledge. Not in a lot of depth, admittedly, but just as a way to help students think about how different innovators in the practice or different periods in the development of the technique are still represented in what we do in class today. So usually we will look at someone, watch some videos and read an article, and then I’ll give some sort of creative prompt related to it. In a level one class it might just be about what parts of class make you think of this person and why? And then as we go through class I might ask students to kind of just exaggerate those elements so that it becomes really apparent that what we are doing came from somewhere, even if it’s questioning where we came from.

This semester when I was teaching “Contemporary Ballet,” I structured all of the context assignments around defining contemporary ballet, so students could get to their own assumptions about what ballet is while also relating their definitions to different innovators. When we watched something like Nederlands Dans Theater and they would say, “This is contemporary ballet to me because I see this, this and this… .” And then I would ask them, “Okay, well are you doing that in your own practice of contemporary ballet?”

“No.”

“Okay, then that’s your task for today.”

I’ve also started to incorporate a lot of in-class reflection and self-assessment. The ability to be aware of what you are doing is very important and sometimes that is lost in dance because dance happens so quickly. So I’ve actually, at times, reduced the amount of verbal and tactile feedback that I give in order to make time for students to , say, draw a picture about something, respond to a question I might ask, or name two things that are working, two things that are not working, so that students can develop their own plan for advancement, which I think is is very important in contemporary dance today. It helps students learn to be adaptable, while staying true to themselves.

I’m also trying to maintain physicality both from a safety perspective, but also because I feel, for college students especially at the beginning of their college experience, that’s what draws them to dance. So if you are not feeding that, you are not able to get to some of the other things. That’s it in a nutshell.

Alyssa: Yeah, and because I was your student for four years I can definitely say that some of those reflective tasks have led me to be more independent as a dancer taking a technique class. I’m also interested in how you address other needs you think your students might need when they leave. How do you prepare them for a professional career in dance?

Karen: Leadership and collaboration are super important. Again, that’s why it’s beneficial for me to step back a little bit. In class we take turns leading parts of class — it’s both a chance for students to demonstrate their understanding of what they’ve learned, but it also immediately situates them in a leadership position within dance. Collaboration and creativity have become a part of all of my classes, including technique classes, and it goes beyond improvisation and choreography.

But there is also a lot of choice-making in terms of how students are assessed. It gets back to this idea of self-responsibility. What I am focused on now is incorporating creativity and leadership into everything that I do because that should help students develop the abilities to relate to each other, to initiate and follow through on an idea, and to think about how their movement training or technical training relates to something much larger.

Alyssa: Who are the students at ASU, who are the faculty? Can you contextualize the economic and racial makeup of the ASU dance program?

Karen Schupp, Photo by Yu-Chen Wu

Karen: Yeah that is difficult to talk about directly because I don’t have any sort of concrete data about the demographics of our students. But I do think from purely observing (so this is just completely my perception) that our student body has become much more diverse since we’ve expanded the curriculum beyond modern and ballet. I think that is because the new curricular model embraces and promotes this idea of individual voices and it makes room for people from diverse backgrounds. We have students from very formal and intense training backgrounds and students were exposed to dance through community centers and socially engaged dance practices.

So in terms of diversity, anyway you define it, our program has become more diverse. I would say overall our students are very smart, but I realize that I’m biased because I work with them. They challenge me as much as I challenge them.

The faculty I think is pretty diverse too, both in terms of what we are interested in, but also in the length of time we’ve been affiliated with ASU dance. It’s great to have people who have been on faculty for over twenty years and people who just joined this year. It helps things to feel like they are evolving instead of being stagnant or instead of just fracturing and going in a completely different direction.

Alyssa: Simon also said that when he was at ASU, the students that were coming into the undergraduate program were looking for this kind of curriculum — it wasn’t a surprise to them that they would have the choice to either study ballet, urban movement practices, postmodern contemporary dance or somatic practices. Have you noticed an increase in applicants? Are there more students looking to get their M.F.A at ASU or undergraduates?

Karen: That again is something that would be difficult for me to measure.

Alyssa: What about the currency of the Master’s degrees? Can you talk about need to have an M.F.A. in order to be teaching in higher education? How do you see the shift in economy impacting jobs in dance and the need for degrees, or the presence of midcareer choreographers in institutions?

Karen: Well I think the M.F.A. has long been the standard requirement to teach in higher education. To my knowledge that’s been the standard for at least fifteen years, if not longer. That doesn’t mean that there are not exceptions. I would say that 90% of our graduate students have the goal of teaching at a university or college at some point; although, that may not be the only reason they come to graduate school, it is a recurring reason why people come. I haven’t seen that change as a result of the curricular shift. I think it’s been that way for a while.

One concern I have is for us to move past modern and ballet, meaning the type of M.F.A.s we offer, not just ASU, but as a field. Most M.F.A. programs are still oriented toward expertise in modern dance, which means people who are most eligible to teach in a University teach modern dance and other related areas so that’s something we need to think about.

Alyssa: Was that a topic of conversation at Dance 2050 at all?

Karen: Not directly, but it was something brought up.

Alyssa: Anything you can share?

Karen: Not too much because the goals of dance programs are so diverse. The Dance 2050 participants from departments with a M.F.A. program were in the minority. I think it’s something we need to think about as a group of dance educators.

The economic climate is going to be what it is — the dance world responds to it just like everything else does. I think what we’ve learned over the past ten years is that everybody has to be adaptable and everybody has to be comfortable with change because things just change.

One of the things I’m most proud of is that we are both explicitly and implicitly helping students develop skills to be individual thinkers, and to think very widely about what could be done with dance, and more specifically about what they can do with dance or what they can learn from dance. It’s those lifetime learning skills in relationship to dance that will allow people to navigate changing economies and situations. So that is something that I would like to see be a theme within postsecondary dance curriculums.

I am by no means devaluing the desire to perform and choreograph, because again that is something that is important to me. You have to have that, but then think wider. You have to be able to be adaptable: how can you be true to what you value about dance, but then find multiple ways to apply that so that you stay engaged in dance? So that you can sustain a career and profession in dance, widely defined, until you don’t want to do that anymore.

Alyssa: Do you see a lot of students who leave ASU go into dance as a profession, and if not, what do you see from them or hear about the paths they’ve chosen?

Karen: It changes from year group to year group. And it’s also difficult to assess because the group that just graduated is the first group to do the whole curriculum, and they only graduated like three or four weeks ago, so I’m kind of unable to answer that. I know that they have big plans and that their plans are also very specific to who they are as individuals, which is good to see because that sets them up for more success. Most of our students who graduate with a B.F.A. in Dance Education and wanted to start teaching right away, are able to do that. That’s a different framework.

Alyssa: And the M.F.A. students?

Karen: A lot of them end up piecing together adjunct work before they can find something more permanent. At the same time, I’m finding that a lot of M.F.A. students like the adjunct experience because it allows them to pursue other things. Sometimes they don’t realize they are interested in all these other things until they leave school, especially those students who come directly from undergraduate to graduate school. I think, because they’ve never had any time outside of the academic setting, they feel like they are still learning if they are working part-time as an adjunct but then also engaging in all these other projects.

The higher education market — there aren’t that many jobs, so that’s hard. Most of the students who stay in contact with me are teaching something in a University, somewhere, even if it isn’t their full-time thing.

Karen Schupp’s creative work ranges from self-portraiture, to interdisciplinary dances, to conceptual works for non-dancers. Recent performances include the Guangdong Modern Dance Festival, WestFest, Harvest Contemporary Chicago Dance Festival, and the Attakkalari India Biennial. Karen’s scholarly research focuses on effective pedagogical practices for first-year dance majors and reimaging the purpose and format of dance technique and composition courses. This has been published in the Journal of Dance Education (JODE), Theatre, Dance and Performance Training Journal, and the Brooklyn Rail. Karen is also the Assistant Editor of JODE. Currently, Karen is creating a multidisciplinary work about her experiences as a competition jazz dancer in the 1980s and 1990s and writing an introductory textbook for first year dance majors. Karen is Assistant Professor of Pedagogy and Creative Practice in the Arizona State University School of Film, Dance and Theatre. For more information, please visit www.karenschupp.org.

Alyssa Gersony graduated from the School of Dance at ASU in 2012. She currently works in Brooklyn as a dance artist and job developer for people with disabilities. She is an intern with the Movement Research Critical Correspondence team, and pursuing her Master’s studies in Vision Rehabilitation and Orientation & Mobility.

Download a PDF of the conversation here

Interview Date: May 4, 2013

Liana Conyers: I entered a three year program in the dance department of the University of Oregon as an MFA candidate and graduate teaching fellow in 2009. I knew immediately that I was part of less than one percent of people of color on that campus. In my first year, a faculty member stated, without fully knowing my background in dance, that because I’m a black woman, I would have a leg up on him in the field. Without seeing any of my work, he told me I make “black art,” inferring based on his assumptions about me, that he wouldn’t respect the type of work I would make. Navigating this sort of stigma (for lack of a better word) ended up becoming a focus for me during the rest of my time in the program, though I originally applied to study improvisation. Students and faculty constantly made the assumption that because I’m black, I grew up with and perform a very specific aesthetic. Yes, I talk about my experience and my autobiography in my work, but I have a more global approach.  I don’t feel like my art or anyone’s art should be defined by someone else.

That same year, I was assigned to teach the highest level hip-hop class even though other graduate students had more experience, and had been teaching and studying hip hop for years. I am not a hip-hop dancer. I do a little bit of house and some other things, but I didn’t understand why I was given that class when there were others who were more qualified to teach it. When I approached the department chair about my reservations, she insisted I could do it; threatening to cancel the class when I offered to switch with another more experienced student who had been teaching hip-hop there for years. I was given the ultimatum to either teach the class or cause it to be canceled, so I went ahead with the class because I needed the funding I received from teaching.  In that class, I had to sit down on several occasions with students (the majority of whom were white) to discuss their behavior — all of the sudden they would put on a persona, like, “we’re doing hip-hop now.” One student said the N-word in class, and I had to explain to everyone that just because they are in a hip-hop class, does not mean that word is suddenly okay to use. It’s disrespecting me, it’s disrespecting hip-hop culture, it disrespecting all people of color.

Another professor repeatedly touched my hair, even after I told him not to because it makes me uncomfortable.  I wore my afro all the time; when I am sweating and dancing, it’s easier to have the afro without the twist, or whatever the case may be. This professor justified his actions by saying that I had hair similar to his wife’s, and so, continued to do it. Students would even try to touch my hair and I would say, “Don’t do that. This is my body.” You don’t put your hands on someone else. That can make you very irritated when someone is  not respecting your boundaries.

Another professor liberally threw around the N-word in one of my first-year seminar classes, while discussing a new production on campus.  The university theatre department was rehearsing for Uncle Tom’s Cabin in.  In the middle of our dance seminar he said to me, “Oh well, you can put your hair in cornrows, so how about you go audition for this play.” That was highly offensive.  And, being a dance MFA, why would I go audition for a play while I’m trying to get my degree? So, I went to the Bias Response Team (they did have that setup on campus). They addressed these issues and others with faculty members; however, this just caused everyone to avoided me. I received the stigma of “angry black woman”. I think that is something that is thrown around for black women in general, but there is nothing wrong with being a passionate individual and standing up for yourself; that does not mean you are an irate, angry person all the time.

This all happened my first year, so that by my second year I was completely depressed. I felt down on myself all the time. I went through periods of being angry and periods of blaming myself, thinking this was my fault. “I chose this university and I’m enduring these experiences. What am I doing wrong?” I developed a rash all over my body, I was constantly sick, and there wasn’t a month I didn’t lose my voice, or need to take a sick day, when that has never been the case in my life.

In 2011, I was in my last year of the program. I initially contacted Brenda Dixon Gottschild for advice on how to apply her interview practices to my thesis; however, in the process of my final year I encountered several more instances of racism, which led me to reach out to her in other ways as well.

For instance, the most blatant example took place in a meeting with my thesis advisor, when he asserted that my work is considered “uppity, nigger work.” I did not know how to process that information or handle it. The pain and the outright racism that I was experiencing was overwhelming.  After contacting Brenda, she formed a network of support for me that included Halifu Osumare, Thomas DeFrantz, and Sharon Wray.  They formed a circle of scholarly support as well a network of friendship, encouraging and helping me through those last few months of my graduate program. All along, there was tension with the department chair who initially said she was there to help me. But, it became very clear that in my last two years, there was little support and that, according to her (and other faculty comments confirm this) I had done something to her. I was supposed to be a part of this community and look up to her. According to another faculty member, I owed her something.

A’Keitha Carey photo by Krys Quero

A’Keitha Carey: I met Brenda in 2010 at a conference in London and then again in 2011 in Jamaica. Through those two encounters I started to build a relationship with her, and she would send me different job postings. At some point I felt comfortable with this legend, essentially. As I had my own difficult encounters within academia, I honestly did not know what to do or who else to turn to.

I was previously employed as Assistant Professor of Dance at SUNY Potsdam for two years. When it came time to begin the process for reappointment to my position, I became aware that there were deep issues within my department, particularly with one colleague who wrote authored my reappointment letter. Reappointment, for those who are unfamiliar, refers to the peer review process for academics that are on a tenure track. This process varies per institution. At SUNY Potsdam, after my first year I had to produce a folder/file that included all of the work that I had done since my hire date, like a formalized progress report. This folder/file is reviewed by your reappointment committee; comments, critiques and suggestions are made, and the Chair makes a recommendation for reappointment or not. This information is then forwarded to the Dean, who forwards their recommendation to the Provost/President. The reappointment process can be every year or every other year until the recommendation for tenure. So, this report is absolutely crucial to one’s career as it not only secures one’s position for the subsequent years, but it can also be used as evidence to support claims of incompetence, insubordination or otherwise. It serves as documented proof. This is why I found it imperative to address the false statements and allegations in the document because it could potentially ruin my academic career.

As I read the reappointment letter, I realized, this was the same individual, who in a previous informal conversation told me I was arrogant, rude, and that I had no problems  with self-promotion and all these issues pertaining to my time away. As a new faculty member this was my first full time position. I really didn’t know how to handle or address the way his personal issues with me could seriously affect my career.

As time progressed,I had many escalating issues with this particular colleague, and no support. During a meeting with my reappointment committee, I decided to address the letter he wrote. They all just sat there as I went through each point. No one said anything. I felt like I was on trial. After presenting my case, this particular colleague realized he made a huge error in writing my report, and admitted to using the document to “vent.” I thought the chair of the reappointment committee would have said something in response to his admission, but there was just silence.

Problems with this colleague ensued.  He used his power and authority to make me feel inferior, he questioned my technique, he interfered in my relationship with my students by telling them I wasn’t really teaching a particular technique, he complained about my music being too loud — this office bullying (in my opinion) continued throughout the end of the year.  In a meeting with the chair, I sought advice on how to deal with what felt like an unhealthy environment, even suggesting that I could move my office. She denied this request and inferred that because he was a highly respected senior faculty member with many awards, she was not going to reprimand him. In essence, she let me know that his position would supersede and override my complaints. After meeting with the provost, and again presenting my case, the chair finally allowed me to move my office; however, it then became clear that the chair now had issues with me — perhaps she felt threatened that I went to the provost or that I undermined her authority.

At this point, I was physically getting very ill and had to go on sick leave in April. I was hospitalized several times, and transported to the hospital in Vermont, where they could not treat me. Finally they determined I had some rare disease called Vasculitis. I’ve never been sick like that a day in my life. But now, in the midst of this turmoil at work, I had a rash all over my body and my internal organs were shutting down. II was literally dying. Every time I went back to the doctor I was two pounds lighter. I lost twenty pounds overall. My doctor refused to let me go back to work, faxing a medical report to Human Resources.  I didn’t hear anything from them for two weeks later, when they informed me that they made an appointment for me to see a new medical physician in Syracuse, New York on September 11th. It was mandatory that I show up.

I found this action by the institution offensive because it seemed as though the institution was somehow questioning the reality and validity of both me and my physicians claims concerning my illness. I was following the advice of my physician who refused to clear me to go back to work because he was concerned with my work environment and how it drastically affected my health. He told me he thought I was going to die. How could he send me back there?

The fact that weeks would pass before I got responses to emails concerning various issues from both the then chair of Theater and Dance and HR, further frustrated the situation since (a) it was a time sensitive issue to me, concerning my well being and a career I worked very hard for, and (b) my condition naturally would change over time as a result of treatment and being in a less stressful environment. By the time I was required to see their physician, my physical appearance was improving, so one might conclude that there was no apparent physical issue. My health concerns at this point were mostly psychological and emotional. It was not clear in the letter that HR sent me if the physician was assessing my mental or physical health. Honestly, I was in no psychological position to be questioned by “their” physician. Also, the letter had no specific information concerning where I was going for this medical exam. It was quite confusing and unclear and I was not comfortable going by myself.  And, to insist someone engage in any activity that would include travels to NY on September 11 is insensitive. This truly was the biggest association to my psychological stress. I felt that I was being set up. If I had not shown up for the medical exam, I believe that I would have been fired for insubordination.

Psychologically and physically, I knew this could not continue and I made a decision to stop: I tried to regain control of my life and my situation by moving forward with a resignation. It seemed like the only way to regain my power and my agency. Essentially that’s what I did. Nothing happened. I went through all of the particular courses of action, affirmative action, EEOC, the Dean, the Provost. Nothing happened. I left without any justice. That’s my story.

Liana: As part of the coalition, we have an email network where people’s stories are shared. Individuals — from undergraduate students to faculty members up for tenure — talk about what’s happening within their department. The stories are baffling. I know of at least three individuals who ended up resigning and leaving their programs because they could not deal physically or psychologically with the abuse of their superiors who are often white. Students wonder why there aren’t more African American faculty in their departments.  These countless stories are part of the answer to that question.  There is a big divide and I think it is something that needs to be discussed and addressed.

I’m sorry that you had to go through this, that any of us have to go through this. You would think that with the type of hierarchy that is put in place — as far as having EEOC, affirmative action, the Dean, the Provost — something would be done.

A’Keitha: As I sent my letter of resignation, I knew that the institution needed to be exposed. I sent a mass email out to all of the faculty and administrators, including Brenda and different organizations across the country with the hope that someone would look at it. Brenda immediately jumped on it, which was such a relief after dealing with the situation from April to September, when I resigned with no reprieve to course of action — nothing. She connected me with a support system and within that small window the opportunity for healing began for me. But, this cannot continue to happen. We as women in academia should not continue to endure what we have to endure for our own safety and sanity and that of our students as well. The students where I now teach at TWU have truly engaged with me and informed me of the relevance and importance of having a faculty of color in the department. It is essential, not only for us, but for them, because they are our future. If we are not there then they are not encouraged to aspire for those positions.

When we entered into these institutions, there were certain expectations of us and we shattered those and therefore became the problem. We were punished for that. They thought I would fall in line with their expectations and assumptions of me, but is that what diversity is about? I tried to have this conversation with them. It’s not about a person of color coming in and going along with what you are already doing.  Doesn’t diversity require the engagement of a process wherein certain hierarchies, distributions of power, and existing structures, ideologies, environments, pedagogies, and ways of being are collectively questioned and transformed to accommodate and support all people? Why are we being punished for doing just that? I think that is what happened with your chair.

Liana: Right, and I think we’ve confronted a very limited view of blackness. If you don’t fit that mold or the assumptions based around that, it becomes a problem. I don’t come from the Alvin Ailey aesthetic. So if that’s what you were expecting, then you shouldn’t have accepted me. You knew I came from an  pedagogy based around improvisation. Here’s what I do, here’s what type of impact I want to have on this community, here’s what I want to get from this institution and that not what’s happening. You know that I don’t teach hip-hop, so why are you giving me hip-hop? I can understand wanting me to grow, but didn’t you give me ballet…

So, the coalition was formed by Brenda because many scholars and students were reaching out to her for support, and she finally said enough is enough, it’s time to make this network happen. She partnered with Lela Aisha Jones and Saroya Corbett to start the network, and the email went out to as many individuals as possible to form this coalition and provide support. Recently at the International Association of Black in Dance conference you and I shared a panel called “Troubling the Waters: Systemic Racism in Higher Education” with Brenda, James Frazier, and Charles Anderson, where we all discussed our situations with systemic racism. It was especially fitting for it to be at IABD (International Association of Blacks in Dance) because there were a large number of individuals coming to celebrate Black Dance. Those in attendance to our panel, just to name a few, were Onye Ozuzu, Jaamil Kosoko, Saroya Corbett, and several other scholars from around the nation. It was usefult to hear other people stories, to discuss how we can give each other support, and how we can keep this going for the next generation of dance scholars of color.

A’Keitha: A lot of us are in such isolated situations, hundreds of miles away from any other person in color in higher education. The panel allowed us to see that there are others, even those who are administrators. It gave us the opportunity to hear other scholars sharing their stories — many of which are unfortunately so common that all you have to do is insert your name. It is the same thing happening everywhere; our stories are intersecting and related, almost as if it were a formula. Five or ten years from now, I don’t want a student or a faculty younger than myself coming to me with the same problems that I (and many of us) are dealing with now. We need to get tenure so that we can be in the decision-making conversation that supports other faculty and students of color. This has to stop.

Liana:It has to stop. I love the fact that you are saying you want to stay in higher education and provide your knowledge and support to individuals. The shame of it is that there are so many people who don’t want to go into higher education. They are over it because they feel it is a broken system and that there is no mending.

A’Keitha: You have to fight and resist from within. The amount of information that I have within me and the passion and the drive that I have needs to be in higher education. In order for me to make a change, to see curriculum change, to see other techniques fit into core technique components, I need to be there to say, “This is what we need to be doing, these things are equal, and that hierarchy needs to be shattered.” The only way for that to happen is to have our strength and our voices working within higher education. bell hooks talks about patience, having that patience to continue to fight and to love. It’s not easy, but when I look out and see the transformation and the impact that I’ve made on those students of color at TWU, that is what inspires me to stay and fight this battle. Coming into this institution as a woman of color, I’ve witnessed my presence in this role affect other female students of color: they become interested in the Africanist aesthetic and they’re mobilized to find their voices within their own bodies. That is important, since they do not often get that chance within current academic dance programs where that identity that has been removed. It needs to be reintroduced into higher education because students of color need to identify with themselves.

Liana:  I completely agree. When you were talking about patience, it made me think of the issues of psychological health and self care that arise when confronting this sort of adversity.

A’Keitha: What are the coping mechanisms? — this is definitely a conversation within our community. We are still struggling to get psychological help and therapy, but it is essential. After I left New York, I ended up in another situation by myself and with no support system. I ended up going to see a psychologist on campus and it was helpful for the brief time that I was there to find my strength again. I also sought out other opportunities to connect with other scholars and peers through public events, community organizations, and church. And, I found other ways to release the stress physically so that I didn’t just internalize it.

I felt like I had no one to talk to and it just ate away at me, which brings on depression, and then you just close yourself off from everyone. You are not the same person. I found it very important to find a life outside of academia. It cannot be your soul [sole] priority.  There are those that have been in these departments for twenty and thirty years — it’s their life! They feel as though they own everything in the department, in the building, the curriculum, everything that they’ve developed; there is an ownership that is placed on these things. So when you would like to see change happen, it’s like you are attacking them. It’s a personal thing for a lot of people. Overall, I think it is essential that you have a life outside of the academy. You have to for your own sanity.

Liana Conyers Photo by Bryce Leonard

Liana: That boundary between inside and outside the academy is tricky. There were numerous times when I just got out of a meeting where someone just said something highly inappropriate to me and racist, when a student approaches me crying because they were called the N word in town. What I found is that you are not only looking after yourself and your care, but also these younger individuals. When you give them advice to, say, do fun activities outside of school or talk to their friends, those also have to apply to you as well.

A’Keitha: For me, therapy was the last resort — mind you I had been severely ill, I thought I was going to die, I left my job and relocated.  Therapy was the very last thing that I did. I wonder if things would have been different if I had started earlier. I don’t know. But, it needs to happen. We shouldn’t be afraid to talk openly about these things that are happening to us and we shouldn’t feel ashamed either. We are silent either because there is no one to talk to or we are afraid of saying the wrong thing in these complex, confusing, stressful situations where our careers and livelihoods are on the line.  For example, my colleague would, in the same meeting, use his position of power and authority to attack me, while calling himself my “mentor.” He most certainly was not my mentor. He did not behave as one and I did not see him as one. A mentor would not do what he did to me. How is that a mentor/mentee relationship? It sounds more like oppressor/oppressed, colonizer/colonized dynamic to me. It was a situation in which power and control was wielded through language that did not accurately reflect the reality of the situation or our relationship.  How do you speak to that?

Liana: Exactly. The same thing was said to me. Those faculty members have caused me anguish. I had to change my focus because of things that people were saying and doing.  I was on my own in terms of the research it required — most of the faculty had not read the literature I was reading for my thesis, though they made very blanket statements about the scholars. For instance, I was told that Brenda is militant. If you ever meet Brenda, she is not at all. Radical thinking? Yes. It’s considered radical thinking because it’s not fitting in that paradigm of the oppressor. But militant, I think not!

A’Keitha: Returning to your question about the roles or stereotypes of women of color who speak up: The radical is key. That’s such a great observation and contradiction. Brenda is not, but she is not going to allow you to present information that is false. That’s where her works come in.

Liana: What do you think are the roles of stereotypes given to women of color who speak up? Do you have a running list?

A’Keitha: The first two that this colleague assigned to me were: “arrogant” and “rude”. “Bitch” is on that list as well, though I’ve not been directly called one. “Militant.” On the other end of the spectrum, I was raised in the Caribbean, and I’m kind of old school, so I call all my teachers “Professor so and so”. I have my students call me Professor Carey. In every situation that I’ve been in, it has been problematic for the student to make that adjustment. I was doing that before I encountered scholarship on academic racism, which basically advises women of color going into higher education to demand and claim respect in these sorts of ways. “Professor” is going to let those students know that we’re not friends, I’m not your mammy, I’m not your caretaker, I am your professor, and you will acknowledge and respect me for that.

That’s one of the main reasons that I do that, particularly because I am of color and I am female and I’m younger than a lot of other professors there. I don’t want those lines, those boundaries of respect to be broken. Yes, I am here for you, and I’m going to help you, but know what those boundaries are. For me that gives me a certain level of comfort knowing that as soon as a walk into this classroom, you have an automatic respect for me because you are addressing me as professor so and so. I just read of a similar instance on Crunk Feminist blog. I think maybe that is where the old idea of “bitch” comes in because I demand a certain level of respect and militant because I am very passionate about the work that I’m doing. You are in the classroom, and we’re going to work, and I’m going to teach you and I’m going to train you the best of my ability.

That is an aggressive way of working. All of my professors and teachers taught me in that manner, so that is how I present my information now, and if that’s termed militant, then I guess I am. But I don’t perceive that as a negative, for me. So when I read that in my evaluation, I kind of knew where that was coming from, but yes, “arrogant, rude militant and bitch”.

Liana: For some reason proactive teaching or progressive teaching get’s construed as aggressive, when women of color are in positions of leadership and authority. When those words are used, I think back on different experiences I’ve had where I’ve seen behavior from other professors that was never considered negative or aggressive, though it absolutely could have been.

A’Keitha: Right, it’s seems acceptable for other genders and racial identifications.

Liana:  You also brought up the flipside, which is the role of caretaker we are often assigned. As a graduate student, I taught many of my peers, so that was already a weird line to navigate. Everyone just called me Liana, until a student started calling me “Mama Liana.” It spread like wildfire. I had to sit people down and say, “Do you recognize the significance of what you are doing? You can never call me that again”. I am the only black person here and the population is 99.999 percent white. I’m not your caregiver. I’m not your mammy.

A’Keitha:  How much can you take? How much of this can I take? Who wants to be thinking about these things, when they are just trying to do the job they love and are passionate about? The challenge is becoming tendured [tenured], so we can be in positions to make decisions and really deal with these issues, but as you were saying, people have left. So, that is the challenge.

Liana: And even with tenure, nothing is being done to correct the behavior in what I perceive as an unsafe environment. With tenure, you are asking someone to spend their life at an institution with most likely those same individuals. We know that faculty are protected by tenure, so why would you want to be in that environment when you can leave? I know so many people that have changed careers. It’s sad because that light, and their potential to reach and inspire other students that need to see choreographers and dancers of color in that role has diminished because they can’t handle it, and there is something gravely wrong with that. I also wonder as far as change, when a department comes up for review, when there are outside individuals reviewing, that’s something I find interesting — the network that’s already been developed for that department chair or faculty members — we are a small community, so most likely those people are your friends who have worked with you for 10+ years, so are those individuals from the same generation looking at how to really overhaul or add to an environment for the students’ experience?

A’Keitha: Definitely, it’s not for everyone. It’s a huge commitment and often times a sacrifice in which you have to figure out the balance and prioritize. I think health should not be sacrificed for anything of course. That’s kind of how you have to approach it.

Liana: This gets at the way institutional politics support and uphold racist acts and beliefs — the culture or environment that is already in place.  I’ve been told, time and again, when discussing these issues with faculty members, “Well this is just the environment, this is just what’s here, and you can deal with it for three years, and then you’ll be out and gone”.  Basically, they’re saying, “This is the environment, deal with it.”  Yes, but, how about we change this environment? Why don’t we put a committee together or some type of think tank to really investigate this kind of oppressive environment and start to work toward creating a more inclusive environment? That’s one thing that Onye Ozuzu brought up in the conversation at the IABD panel. She has visited other universities to address, as an outsider, the kind of environment an institution is upholding. Based on what she observes, she gives them information on ways to change certain behaviors, power dynamics, language, etc. She can say, “Okay, well this is a racist environment, and its something that’s not conducive to any person of color, because here’s what’s been said since I’ve been here, here is the culture that I’ve noticed”. I think that people do not want to do the work as far as addressing those really embedded issues with racism.

Liana Conyers photo by Bryce Leonard

A’Keitha: There’s a lot of looking the other way, and with that comes this rate of resentment. It’s a toxic environment; I support everything you said. How about we address these issues and fix them so it’s not an oppressive environment, because the thing is, it’s not just faculty of color that is being oppressed, it’s the students as well. The same white supremacist ideology and theories and pedagogy affects everyone who is not white. This is a huge problem and it’s not contained, it’s happening across the country, so why are we not dealing with these things? Why are we not addressing them? Why isn’t anything happening? I’m sure people are talking about it, but how do we put these ideas into a practice that is effective, because, as Brenda has pointed out, these are things scholars from generations before us have dealt with that are being re-addressed, revisited, and re-represented in different fashion in 2013.

I’m baffled, and it makes me think about are the specific ways it manifests in dance programs, curriculums, and pedagogy? It is screaming eurocentricity! Why is this still current and accurate? Is there nothing else it can stand next to?  Is there no room for the presence of bodies and practices that have been continually left out of these narratives and histories? I just had a conversation about my interest in developing or changing curricula, and one of the faculty was very adamant, “but we can’t CHANGE anything.” Why? Why can’t we look at what is already there and supplement or add to it? To say that a  curriculum cannot change or shift is problematic. And these are people who have been doing the same thing for 20 or 30 years, these are the people we have to fight. They have done it that way and feel there is nothing else that can substitute, match, or is on par with what has been established as curriculum.

This topic “deconstructing curriculum in higher education dance programs” is the crux of my research. What I find problematic is that most (not all) dance programs only include ballet and modern (and depending on the institution, jazz) as core curriculum training techniques. If African or non-western dance forms and techniques are included at all in the curriculum, they are either only offered for a semester, or are only required for 1-2 semesters for completion of coursework/degree and are not credited with the same amount of hours as ballet/modern. The dance history and historical courses are another case altogether with the same or similar concerns. The systemic occlusion of people of color in dance curriculum is pervasive. I have encountered similar reasonings across the board concerning why curriculum has not changed: it’s too difficult. Is this really a justification? I will accept that reasoning as part of the problems but there other factors that contribute to upholding the status quo, for instance, priority and importance. My observations and discussions with students show that there is a major disconnect with students of color in programs that do not reflect who they are (individually, culturally, historically, and socially). The running theme for students of color is identity and disidentification. I am concerned with the double consciousness that students undergo in these types of environments. Change is a big issue for a lot of people, but you have to want to move forward and be progressive because it’s the students who are suffering.

Liana: There’s this very vertical hierarchy set in place which is why I like Liz Lerman’s book Hiking the Horizontal. Everything’s on a horizontal plane, an even playing field. It’s all valid, it should all be part of the experience and a few universities are trying to move towards that horizontal system because that’s what works best in my opinion. Why would a student go into debt for a four-year degree in dance when they can go to a dance studio or community center and get hiphop, jazz, african, tap for a lesser price. What are you actually teaching me in this program if you have such a limited view of what’s considered technique or what’s going to help me become a professional dancer or choreographer? And that’s the key — the definition of technique has been prescribed for only two things. Somehow, it’s understood that when you’re speaking about technique, you’re speaking about only ballet or modern, and nothing else. But every system of movement has a technique; going to the garbage, that’s a technique, that’s a system of organized movement that prepares you to do a task. We need to have that conversation for it to be impacted or impactful inside of higher education dance programs.

A’Keitha: That’s an excellent point. Who is coming in and doing these reviews? The people who are coming in have the same mindset about what is deemed important or what is technique. A shift needs to happen; does it start at the ground level, does it start up? I don’t know, I don’t have the answers to those questions, but we can’t continue. In a new millennium, are we going to still be having the same discussion? We can’t do that. I refuse to do that.

Liana: I hear you. The time is now to change, period. The more that people speak out, the more that individuals like yourself and CDFM-ers continue to work in higher education, the change will come.

A’Keitha: I’m still holding on to the bell hook. I hope that within my lifetime I see significant change occur. I see the transformation of the students — not only their bodies and their minds — but in their spirits, when they have the opportunity to engage in another type of movement (males and females). One gentleman told me that to be able to move his hips and release he felt liberated.

Liana: That’s a beautiful thing.

A’Keitha: Mind you, he’s getting ready to walk into a ballet company environment. These things are not separate. The diverse array of techniques and movement practices — they work together, and they should! That’s where we need to have that conversation. We all need to be working together. My movement vocabulary is informed by each one of these things, by ballet, modern, movement from the African diaspora, fitness, somatic elements — they all find a way to resonate in the body.

A’Keitha Carey is currently a doctoral candidate at Texas Woman’s University and the originator of the fusion dance form CaribFunk. A’Keitha is a national and international educator; her scholarship addresses identity, womanism, Caribbean popular culture, sensuality, racism, oppression, female strength and agency. The “hip wine” (the circular rotation of the hip) serves as the conduit to achieve liberation and emancipation, imparting Afro-Caribbean sensibility in a Eurocentric structure (higher education) . Using the technique CaribFunk, she hopes to decolonize current dance curriculum in higher education.

Liana Conyers, M.F.A, has performed and taught movement classes in GA, VT, OR, TX, PA, and NY. Liana’s scholarly research includes investigating autobiography and identity in dance composition. She is a member of the Coalition for Diasporan Scholars Moving and was a panelist at the IABD 2013 conference “Systemic Racism in Higher Education.”

You may also like:

The Coalition for Diasporan Scholars Moving, part 1 – Brenda Dixon Gottschild in conversation with Jaamil Olawale Kosoko

Download a PDF of this conversation

Date of Conversation: Tuesday, March 12, 2013, Philadelphia, PA

Jaamil Olawale Kosoko: I have the honor and pleasure of sitting with one of the premier scholars of dance. Brenda Dixon Gottschild is a cultural critic, a scholar, and author of four esteemed books: Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts; Waltzing in the Dark: African American Vaudeville and Race Politics in the Swing Era; The Black Dancing Body – A Geography From Coon to Cool; and her most recent book Joan Myers Brown & The Audacious Hope of the Black Ballerina: A Biohistory of American Performance. Brenda, it is such an honor, such a pleasure to be sitting with you. Thank you so much for allowing me and us into your home.

Brenda Dixon Gottschild: It’s my pleasure, Jaamil. I honor and respect the work that you are doing.

Jaamil: I know you foremost as a writer and cultural critic, and what I enjoy most about your work is how you use dance as a vehicle to measure society, and the pulse of society, what is happening in contemporary times. This is very much the course of thought in Digging the Africanist Presence. What led you specifically into this direction with your scholarship?

Brenda: I somehow feel like I’ve been on this road all my life. Early readings before I was even in graduate school — my first husband passed me books when we used to scour the bookstores in New York; things like Lawrence Levine’s Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom, and of course Janheinz Jahn’s Muntu: African Culture and the Western World and his marvelous Through African Doors were out then. Those books introduced me to a world of diasporan expression and accomplishment that I had never dreamed of, that I had never been introduced to in all of my schooling, which at that point was undergraduate. I think that kind of stirred up an interest. At that point I was a performer in New York. I danced with various and sundry dance groups — usually the only person of color — like Mary Anthony, or Edith Stephen, or these “under the radar” companies.

Jaamil: Really, Mary Anthony was under the radar? I guess at that time…

Brenda: Under the radar in the sense that she wasn’t the Martha Graham Company or Paul Taylor. I wasn’t in that stellar league of modern dance. I gravitated to avant garde theatre, the experimental theater of the sixties. I studied at the Herbert Berghof (HB) Studio from ’69 – ’72, first with the incredible William Hickey, and later when I was pregnant, with the great and wonderful Uta Hagen. Students in Hickey’s class were “shocked” to see a black woman taking on white southern gentility when I spent a whole summer working in class as Blanche duBois on scenes from A Streetcar Named Desire.  Only Bill and I weren’t phased.  I was also a member of the pioneering group of the Open Theatre that created, for instance, The Serpent and Terminal. With them I had the opportunity to take some workshops with Grotowski himself.

Certain racial things happened, however, which made me understand that even though I hadn’t really deeply experienced racism in New York , I was somehow still separate from this basically white, modern dance and experimental theatre world in which I had lived so comfortably. In 1969/1970 I was on a long tour in Western Europe with the Open Theatre. We had started dedicating each show to the Black Panthers by saying, “Fred Hampton was killed in his bed in Chicago, Bobby Seale is on the move across the country, Heuy Neuton is this… da da da da da. We dedicate this performance to the Black Panthers.” Well, I am the only black person in the group. Muriel Miguel is Native American, she’s in the group, and everyone else is white. At some point, maybe half the group rebelled and said, “Why are we dedicating this to them?” Also, we were scheduled to perform in Algeria. A third of the group, if not more, were Jewish and they didn’t want to go to Algeria, so all of these tensions began to erupt in the group. Upshot was, I was not asked to come back.

I left the group and my first husband and I began teaching at Bennington College. While I was there I directed a very singular production of Sonia Sanchez’s SISTER SON/JI; a one act play of a black woman talking about her revolutionary life. The Attica Prison riot happened while we were at Bennington, so this was like 1971, 1972. Esty (my first husband) and I felt like this could not happen without some kind of response, so we did one of those moratorium days at Bennington. Bennington never had any kind of political thing like this before. [Laughs] We worked on white guilt, inviting up artists from New York like Willie Kgositsile, a poet, and other black artists, musicians, dancers, and what have you. We had money from all of the departments at Bennington to bring them in . . . and then I did not get rehired.

Jaamil: How long were you at Bennington?

Brenda: Just one year, ’71 until ’72,  and by the end of that year I was pregnant. So then, how did I get into all of this? This is why I say that I feel like I’ve been in it all my life. To make a long story a little bit short, after leaving Bennington in ’72 I become a parent to my wonderful daughter in 1973, I separate from that husband, I go back to graduate school at NYU just to keep my head together and to keep some sanity after a very difficult separation. I am introduced to Performance Studies, which was still the drama department at NYU. Richard Schechner was there and people like Brooks McNamara who studied vaudeville and minstrelsy, white minstrelsy, largely.

It made me understand that the things in my background that I had inklings of with Muntu and Lawrence Levine years before could actually become a course of study for me, and that I could contribute something to that course of study that any — excuse me — but any person who was not a diasporan person could not contribute. I had something different than them; not more than, but different than Lawrence (who became a dear friend of mine during a Rockefeller Bellagio Residency grant I received to complete the minstrelsy chapter of my first book in 1995), different than Janheinz Jahn, or Schechner or McNamara, or anybody else to contribute. I could contribute to it also from an embodied presence. There was nobody dancing doing that. There was nobody African American doing all of the things that I was as a black female dancer/scholar.

Jaamil: And this department was largely white and largely male, I imagine.

Brenda: Definitely. You mean Performance Studies at NYU? At that point it was. This was before people like Marcia Siegel joined the faculty. I got my doctorate before they were there.

Jaamil: Had you experienced cultural bias being in this course of study that may have not easily been understood by your peers as it was by you?

Brenda: Richard Schechner was my mentor and guide. He was just open for it all. He was the one who was looking at Mecca and Maya (the Hindu concept) and trips to India and Arab lands as anthropological theatre. He was the person who influenced me, and was my dissertation advisor. People had thought Brooks should be because he does popular entertainment, but I knew that Brooks would never get behind me doing the kind of political dissertation that I did. Of course, Richard was fine with that.

Jaamil: So was this early dissertation the beginnings of Digging?

Brenda: No, actually it was what became the second book, Waltzing in the Dark. My dissertation was on this wonderful ballroom dance team, Norton and Margot. They are on the cover of Waltzing in the Dark. That’s really why I went back to graduate school.

I was doing one of those SEEK programs at Hunter College where I was a tutor when I was still doing my masters program and had very little money. A theater friend said they were looking for tutors at Hunter College, one of whom was John Felder, who always had an interest in African American endeavor and history.

John introduced me to Harriet Johnson, an independent cultural historian who had a black theater collection in the Chelsea Hotel where she lived. She curated an exhibition that was going on in the basement of the Metropolitan Museum on Green Pastures and the touring company of Green Pastures during the depression, with costumes and ephemera — this was like 1975, ’76. Margot Webb was on one of the panels they had with some of the performers discussed in Marshall Stern’s Jazz Dance like Ulysses S. Thompson (a legendary early vaudeville dancer) who was still alive. When Margot began to speak I felt this incredible déjà  vu — she too had wanted to be a ballet dancer, at some point she lived around the corner from where I grew up in Harlem — so, we immediately bonded. I spoke to her after and asked her, “Can I write an article on you?” At that point I was writing for a now defunct black magazine called Encore American and World Wide News.  That’s how I used to get all my tickets to performances. I wrote an article on Margot for that, and that was why I wanted to go back to graduate school, because I wanted to write a book about her.

I was in a master’s program at NYU; my master’s thesis was on Bertolt Brecht and my interests were there as well. Then I knew I wanted to get a doctorate, because I wanted to write a book about Margot Webb and that became my dissertation. The world was not ready for a dissertation like that to be published in 1981, even though Richard Schechner praised it to the heights. He felt like it was really a wonderful dissertation. What happened was that unlike many of the graduates from there, my dissertation didn’t get immediately published.

I got onto a totally different track with Digging, and that happened largely because of the culture wars. I was writing criticism by then for Dance Magazine and I was seeing ballet as well as modern dance and sensing that everyone adored Balanchine. But sensing also, again, with my always looking for the black in the white, that there was something else going on there.

Jaamil: Certainly.

Brenda: And what is it that makes him? He is the Americanizer of ballet. What’s so American about this?  That line of questioning…

Of course, there was all of this other stuff going on during the culture wars from say the late 80s through the mid 90s, and I’m starting to get involved in American studies. I start going to American studies conferences, not dance conferences, where people knew nothing about this kind of stuff. But when you went to American studies, every panel of the hundreds of panels would somehow be talking about African influences in da da da. It was through American studies that I encountered the use of this term “Africanist” — I think it was used by [Joseph E.] Holloway. He had done an anthology about Africanist presences in American life. And then, of course, Toni Morrison’s incredible work on literature: Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.

I had role models, if you will, in American studies to support what I wanted to do in an embodied way in the dance world. I really feel like I kind of siphoned that information into my work, which then was disseminated in the dance world, despite of a lot of resistance I had from the white establishment in the dance world. It’s out there now.

Jaamil: And thank god it is out there.

Brenda: Who would have known?

Jaamil: So we fast forward to the 90s and the aftermath of the culture wars, and you have been teaching at Temple University, and you meet your love. You begin a process of creating work that leads you into some really tough questions. Themes of identity and gender and so I guess we can say his name?

Brenda: Yes, Hellmut Fricke-Gottschild. Brenda and Hellmut. [Shows picture]

Jaamil: Wow, that’s a wonderful poster.

Brenda: It’s from Middlebury, probably in ’03 or ’04. This was on the cover of the Arts & Entertainment section of The Inquirer,  July of ’03, “Couples Working Together.” We toured with this piece, Tongue Smell Color and again –American studies — I was on the International Committee of the National American Studies Association in ’98 or something. In all of the exchanges we were having, one committee member said, “I like your interventions, I’d like for you to do something at the upcoming American Studies Association conference.” I told Hellmut and we decided that we would work on something together, instead of me being a talking head. So, for the ASA of 1999, in Montreal, we did the first version of Tongue Smell Color. (Just to backtrack a little bit, we had been working together before that. We did a big piece in Philly in 1996 called Frogs, which had nothing to do with the kind of issues we were dealing with in Tongue Smell Color, but Hellmut and I had indeed been working together for quite a while. The immediate predecessor to Tongue Smell Color was a piece we did in Germany called Stick it Out. We were being provocateur at that point, so you can imagine Stick it Out had many different layers and meanings.)

So, as I said, we performed Tongue Smell Color in 1999 at the ASA conference. Various people came including Holly Hughes, who was performing there; Shelley Fisher Fishkin, another very wonderful American studies friend of mine who wrote an incredible book called Was Huck Black? exploring Africanist influences in Mark Twain’s writing; Susan Foster was there; Tommy DeFrantz . . .. Hellmut, with his wonderful nose for creating the right atmosphere to move forward (he was the artistic director of his own dance company, Zero Moving Dance Company), put together a beautiful PR packet with blurbs from people who had seen it like Tommy, Holly and others. His friend, Beatrice Schiller, did this photograph. [Shows image] We toured that piece from 2000 to 2008, when Hellmut said he didn’t want to do it anymore.

Audiences were hungry to have someplace to vent, embrace, enter and air out feeling around race, nationality, gender, memory, guilt — those are the types of issues that came up. Frequently, following the piece (which is about an hour) we would open it up by asking people: “Can you please extend the performance beyond what you saw into your own life?” in other words, “Enter it where we left off.” Then people would begin to say, “Well when you did that, it took me back to this,” or, “I grew up in Virginia, and until I was five this little black girl was my best friend, and then my grandma said you can’t be friends with her anymore because you can’t wash it off.” Crazy comments came from the audience in various and sundry places where we performed. The conversations after the performance often would go on as long as the performance itself.

We performed Tongue Smell Color for the last time at the end of a really nice residency Tommy deFrantz got me a couple days every week at MIT for the whole month of February in ’08. For the final performance, Hellmut and I decided that we were going to do it in a different form; we would do a retrospective of it. We showed videos of various performances of it while he and I then talked about it and did some of it live. He’s so creative, always coming up with incredible new ways to present the material. After that he was really…

Jaamil:  I’m done! [Laughter]

Brenda: I’m telling you, the appetite. There seems to be, again, a new interest, in the age of Obama, in talking about race. I can see, again, that it’s not about how little or how much progress we’ve made. The real deal is, it’s never over. We need to continue to talk about this all the time. That’s what I feel like people don’t realize.

Jaamil: I agree whole-heartedly.

Brenda: People think it’s over. I spoke to somebody at DanceUSA who said that many of their members say: “We’ve been doing this for twenty-five years, why do we need to have a race sensitivity session at the conference on this now?” Because this is America. Condoleezza Rice said years ago that racism is America’s birth defect. Coming from Condy Rice, you know, I think she’s right. There is always the need for this.

Jaamil: It is my personal belief, and please feel free to interject, that it is a conversation — the act of the discussion is what influences and evokes the healing process.

Brenda: Right, and over and over. We can’t say, for instance, “Why do we have these same questions about sexuality now?” Every generation has to go through it again.

Jaamil: You’ve been doing this work for half a century.

Brenda: Yes, I’m seventy years old.

Jaamil: These are issues that are cyclical; each generation has to combat them essentially.

Brenda: Combat and come back.  I don’t feel it’s bad that we have to come back. You pointed out to me this very recent article in The Inquirer about being white in Philly, which allowed me to show you that in 1995, Philadelphia Magazine  had a whole spread on the issue of race. [Shows magazine] And, incredible, The New York Times (this is in 2000) had done a series for a whole summer, pre Obama. [Gestures at a copy] And, I love this cover of a Hassidic man and a woman wearing dreadlocks in The New Yorker; 1993, culture wars time. [Picks up the issue] We are always at war, culturally.

Jaamil: Being in an inter-racial partnership, and a creative partnership as well, what have you and Hellmut learned from each other as a result of that companionship?

Brenda: One of the things is what we’ve learned from the world, and particularly with these performances, what we’ve learned from audiences — again, in terms of the need to have a safe comfort zone for discussing things. Also, what we have learned from each other is in many ways, I think I said it in The Black Dancing Body or in the new book, that most of the time I forget that Hellmut is white. One of the things that we’ve learned, of course, is that love conquers all.

It’s not that we are the same, we certainly disagree. One of the things, and I don’t think people understand this so I will be careful how I say it: anyone who is white still carries racism that needs to be dealt with. It is foolhardy to assume it’s over even when you are in an interethnic relationship. Hellmut is smart enough to not assume that. He knows what he is working out. I know probably some people who hear this will be upset. Well, then are only white people racist? It has to do with power. Even though every white person doesn’t have power in the sense of systemic and structural racism, these things of course can only be carried out by individuals; in that sense it is that white people have to deal with racism. It’s not that black people have racism, though we may have lots of other things. An excellent book that deals with that subject is a book called Seeing White by Jean Halley, Amy Eshleman and Ramya Mahadevan Vijaya. They so clearly show why this is true.

Jaamil: This brings to mind the movie Django Unchained that recently surfaced over the holidays, which is a really interesting depiction of stylized slavery and racism. What I did see in there though was how the black body was engineered to hate itself, as was portrayed through the two lead characters, the slave and the freedman, Sam Jackson and Jamie Foxx. So with the power that Steven [Head House Slave played by Samuel L. Jackson] had,  he was able to provoke this fear in the plantation. The only reason I bring that up is to bring up a racism that is embedded in black people that is a learned, systemic racism of self-hatred, essentially meant to break that community.

Brenda: Absolutely, which I think though, is very different from systemic racism and white racism. For instance, I get so annoyed when people say, “Well, you know, slavery wasn’t invented by white Americans, there were blacks who put each other in slavery in Africa.” Yes, so!? We know that, Orlando Patterson already talked about all of that. We know that slavery has existed as long as prostitution and rape. All of those things have existed throughout all cultures, but there’s a very different heritage of it in America.

Jaamil: To change gears a little bit. I want to think about your current life as a Buddhist; how that has affected your writing and your overall take and how you approach mankind.

Brenda: Humankind.

Jaamil: Thank you for that correction.

Brenda: I would be lying if I were to say that I am a Buddhist. I can’t truly follow any particular calling. And of all my many old friends who are Buddhist — Lanny Harrision, Meredith Monk, etc. — will not admit that Buddhism is a religion. But, it does have its rituals, its altars. You put up Rinpoche or whoever on your altar. To me, that is a religion.

The improviser that I am — just as I improvised a new stratagem for embodied dance research — I think I have improvised, from Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism, my own particular way of acknowledging my guardian angels. I’ve certainly taken from Buddhism, and I love Pema Chodron. I’m not in that sense a practicing Buddhist. I’ve taken some things, like when I do the Lojong  teachings or Tonglen, I devise my own way of doing it, which isn’t even how Pema would say you are supposed to do them. I find, though, that I am certainly grounded by sitting, but even when I do a sitting (now they call it mindfulness meditation)  I have my own fashion in which I’ve figured out how to do that.

I still am very influenced by Christianity. I am involved now in the Episcopal Diocese Antiracist Committee here in Philly. I’m involved in the Episcopal Church as I was in New York because the Episcopalians that I know on the east coast are very involved in issues of social justice. I used to go the Episcopal Church in the West Village when I lived in Westbeth, St. Luke’s.  Again, that was a church that was really committed to change and this one here, not far from where I live, St. Martin’s, we just had a reading group on Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow. I am working with them on various and sundry things. And of course there was liberation theology as well, that also attracted me to a certain level of Christianity. So, yes, I would say, certainly the idea of the 17th Karmapa, and who could not be enthralled by and revere the Dalai Lama. So their presence certainly affects me. I have my prayer flags all over the house.

Jaamil: Does your affiliation with this anti-racism committee play a role at all in spawning the idea for the Coalition of Diasporan Scholars Moving?

Brenda: No, actually, if I may, I’d like to address this Coalition of Diasporan Scholars Moving. Maybe early 2011 a friend at a university that I will leave unnamed, let me know about some obviously ethnocentric or biased incidents that were being thrown at her by her chairperson, which were obfuscating her movement forward, just on merit review, even before tenure. I went back and forth trying to give her ideas, then in the fall of 2011 Liana Conyers, out of the blue, emails me. I can’t remember how she got my email address, but somebody suggested that she contact me with some blatantly biased, discriminatory practices that were happening almost to prevent her from getting her MFA completed.

I at that point sent out an SOS to senior scholars that I knew who might be able to help her. Halifu Osumare at UC Davis, Tommy deFrantz who was just moving to Duke, Yvonne Daniel who had been a professor at Smith and is a dear friend of mine; we all began to give Liana ideas. It turned out we were able to give her not only practical support, but spiritual support. And then, this past fall, 2012, I get this SOS from A’Keitha Carey who had left her job at SUNY Potsdam for obviously (I’m sorry) racist reasons. At that point I felt I couldn’t keep doing this by myself, or just sending out these SOSs. This should not be happening in the new millennium, post-Obama, post-whatever, although we see what crap is happening in Washington now, and do not doubt that is because we have a black president.

In any case, that is why I started the Coalition for Diasporan Scholars Moving. An immediate onslaught of feedback came in. I sent every dance scholar in academia whom I could think of a notice saying these are the things that have happened.  Also, around the same time I realized that the International Association of Blacks in Dance was going to be giving it’s 25th anniversary conference, so I sent a note to Denise Saunders the chair of IABD, asking if I could do a panel there with some of these people speaking to see what we can garner. Out of that came the Coalition for Diasporan Scholars Moving. We have two lawyers on board. It’s not like we are going to go out and prosecute anyone, because of course we are really working against the system.

Jaamil: The institution…

Brenda: The institutional racism — and there you can use the word systemic racism, institutional racism. But, of course, that plays out in individuals. It plays out in some individual chairperson who is giving you grief because you, as this new scholar, are so attractive to the young students who are looking for that kind of wonderful expressive energy and talent and research that you are bringing to the table. Just as I brought a kind of research to the table, these young dance scholars are bringing a new kind of understanding of what it means to dance and to have a company and to write as well. It’s very scary for those people in power.

Jaamil: I know you have the mission, and I was wondering if you would mind just reading it aloud for us.

Brenda: I would love to. So, we had a wonderful panel at the IABD conference and the bullets in the mission statement were prepared by Lela Aisha Jones and Deneane Richburg. I put together the entire thing with the manifesto, so here it goes.

Manifesto and mission statement of the Coalition for Diasporan Scholars Moving:

As movement researchers and performing scholars of the African Diaspora, we have all experienced some form of either outright discrimination or subversive, exclusionary tactics by the academic community. CDSM is our response to millennial-style racism in our supposed post-racist era. Like those involved in the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-20th century, we are resolved to be proactive. Our fledgling organization is creating a database, disseminating our Mission Statement, and gathering resources (including legal counsel). We welcome new members from across the Diaspora as we extend our base.  A voluntary, non-profit coalition of concerned dancer/scholars, we do not collect dues or elect officers. We are a service organization, ready to “trouble the waters” in order to embrace our future fully and fairly.

• To offer strategic advice for Diasporan scholars and movement artists in academic settings

• To maintain a database for networking and announcements

• To configure an organized process of pairing mentors and mentees in times of growth and crisis

• To serve as an accessible hub for national/international collaboration and partnering for efficient processes of sharing resources and social capital

• To serve as a medium through which members can share experiences and advice, discuss best practices, and offer support.

We can be reached at cdsm@iabdassociation.org.

Thank you.

Jaamil: That is a very clear vision. I personally applaud you inaugurating this coalition, for taking the initiative, for seeing a need, and attempting to really fill that gap, that void, and create a space for young scholars to essentially have an outlet and to create community; to bridge those who are in these esteemed positions of power and those of us who are not, but struggling to get there. Thank you. It’s so needed.

Brenda: There is a little bit of mentoring going on right now. It’s a service organization that kind of exists under the radar. But a couple of people have been set up, and again, I don’t want to name names, but a couple of people who are having real issues with their chairs or universities have been set up with senior scholars who are at least giving them moral support. The lawyers on board really told us that the most we could do is mentoring, networking, and moral support , but lawsuits against the university, that’s unlikely.

Jaamil: In closing I want to ask you, in the grandeur of your seventieth year, what may you say is your truth at this moment, and how do you share that truth and offer it to a younger generation of future scholars, and cultural critics and crusaders?

Brenda: That’s a heavy one, and a mouthful. Interesting how you said it: what is your truth? I mean I wouldn’t have put it that way. What I have had to do, whatever it’s worth to other people, is to function as though I had nothing to lose. There are so many people that I see that need help. I mean indeed, the many people who never get an education and are out in the street and all of that, so why should I mince my steps?

My message would largely be, please move as though you have nothing to lose. Move from your gut and from your heart (and your head is someplace in there). You need to choose what you feel is your integrity, somehow things will fall into place. Putting one foot in front of the other, that’s another thing. I never had a master plan. I didn’t ever think that I was going to be what I call myself now: an anti-racist cultural worker using dance as a lens. I guess also being open to improvisation. And then, of course, my Buddhist sense of being mindful of the present and being present to the present. The present is a present, it’s a gift, and we don’t know how much longer we have.

Jaamil: Move from your center, move from your gut. It’s sort one of the elemental instructions that we are given in Dance 101, Modern 101.

Brenda: And in Yoga, always working on your core.

Jaamil: Exactly, strengthening your core. What a wonderful final idea. Thank you for this moment, it has been such a pleasure, such a gift Brenda.

Brenda: Thank you.

Brenda Dixon Gottschild is the author of Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts; Waltzing in the Dark: African American Vaudeville and Race Politics in the Swing Era—winner of the 2001 Congress on Research in Dance Award for Outstanding Scholarly Dance Publication); and The Black Dancing Body – A Geography from Coon to Cool—winner of the 2004 de la Torre Bueno prize for scholarly excellence in dance publication). Her most recent book, titled Joan Myers Brown and The Audacious Hope of the Black Ballerina-A Biohistory of Performance and Race, was published in January, 2012. She is Professor Emerita of dance studies at Temple University and a former consultant and writer for Dance Magazine, and she performs movement theater works with her husband, choreographer Hellmut Gottschild.

Jaamil Olawale Kosoko is a performance curator, producer, poet, choreographer, and performance artist. He is a 2012 Live Arts Brewery Fellow as a part of the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival, a 2011 Fellow at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and an inaugural graduate member of the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance (ICPP) at Wesleyan University. Kosoko has created original roles in the performance works of visual artist Nick Cave, Pig Iron Theatre Company, Keely Garfield Dance, Miguel Gutierrez and The Powerful People, Headlong Dance Theater, as well as anonymous bodies (a performance company he co-directs with Kate Watson-Wallace). He has sat on numerous funding and curatorial panels including the National Endowment for the Arts, New Dance Alliance, MAP Fund, Movement Research at Judson Church, and the Philadelphia Cultural Fund among others. For more information, visit: www.philadiction.org

You may also like:

Nora Chipaumire in conversation with Jaamil Kosoko