Hometown: Round Lake, Illinois
Current city: Boston, Massachusetts
Age: 54
College and degree: Drake University, BFA Theatre
Graduate school and degree: Connecticut College, MFA in Dance; grad at 24
Websites: publicdisplaysofmotion.com
How you pay the bills: administrate: currently ED of The Dance Complex; still freelance; worked full-time as admin/performer/choreographer for 15 years with Liz Lerman Dance Exchange
All of the dance hats you wear: administrator, choreographer, teacher, facilitator for corporate workshops, dance whisperer, consultant, producer, curator, mentor, entrepreneur, theatre staging, panelist, etc.
Non-dance work you have done in the past: sold shoes, maitre d’, bad waiter, worked in a medical factory making plastic lungs and kidney dialyzers, bartender, cater waiter, faux finish painter
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Describe your dance life in your….
20s:
I started dance late - in my teens at college - so I still felt that my twenties were about maturing as a dancer…even though I got my master’s at 24, I felt like I didn’t really know what I was doing til my late 20s, early 30s….
The spirit of my 20s in dance: ALL was possible; we were young, relatively fearless…and the fact that I lacked technique was secondary to the fact that I had great passion for dance….
I also moved to Boston the first time: with a core group of friends from Connecticut College, we followed Gerri Houlihan to form the Boston Dance Project.
In my late teens/early twenties, I had the great fortune to spend 5 summers at the American Dance Festival. I was so eager to go, that I applied so early each year that I was #1 when they assigned cattle call numbers (in order of received apps) I think most of those years. Two of those summers I was on staff.
The eye opening experience of seeing international modern/post modern dance – as this was a big focus for Charles and Stephanie Reinhart (directors of ADF at the time) - allowed me to understand that, even with my starting late, there was a place for me somewhere in this world of dance. The examples of how movement communicated something were so wide, so varied – from early performances of Martha Clarke’s Crowsnest to post-classical Indian dancers experimenting with classic forms.
I met Martha Myers and Gerri Houlihan there - two great influences – not to mention got to study several summers with Daniel Nagrin, Betty Jones and other great folks. Being an intern and on staff allowed me to see the admin side of things early on - helped me join Gerri in Boston for the Boston Dance Project.
I also danced for a rep company during this time - Concert Dance Company - where I danced in an array of artist works and got to create roles in most of these - Bebe Miller, Charles Moulton, Wendy Perron, Lucinda Childs. I was 28 when I joined this company and really felt I gained so much specific understanding of not only being a performer but also a slice of understanding choreographic process through working with multiple artists in a very finite time period. I think this kind of exposure is more common place in dance departments around the country for younger dancers, but I feel that having this experience in my late 20s was a plus. I was mature enough to grasp concept, choreographic form, as well as movement quality.
30s:
In my late twenties/early thirties, the dance scene in Boston imploded: financially it was a bad time in the country - and things collapsed. Concert Dance folded; many stalwarts had closed shop (Gerri moved back to NY then further south; Susan Rose moved to California). So, what do I do? Start a company! There were all of these wonderful dancers who lacked a choreographer - and in that era in Boston, we were not working as collaboratively - the Dance Collective was a great example of that – but primarily you formed a company as your means to make work. How naïve! I still had no budget to speak of – poured all of my extra money made from teaching into it. Even then I felt that I could choreograph more commercially (benefits, musical theatre) but also aligned myself with charities and other non profits - AIDS Action Committee and Community Servings (hot meals to AIDS patients) as primary connections, and often partnered with them for performances with subject matter concerts that helped me develop an audience.
The work I was making was about being a gay man in a time of AIDS, about bridging gay and straight issues - so the partnerships were organic and helped create a notoriety and simpatico for my work among the arts community and the gay community. It was community engagement before I understood what that meant.
I also spoke on stage - not done too often in those days in Boston - and think that helped me establish a unique artistic voice. I received my first big grant from what was then the Artists’ Foundation - by submitting a very simple solo that included text from a letter from my father. I still remind Ralph Lemon, who was on that deciding panel to award me $10,000 that he is a major reason I am doing what I am doing.
The spirit of dance in my 30s pre Liz Lerman: I began to feel a bubble around what I was doing, felt like I had gotten some notoriety in Boston, but didn’t know how to get BETTER at what I did….it’s almost as if I was too busy dancing to get better at it - and too busy choreographing to get better at it. I received that Artists’ Foundation grant around this time and used it to travel between NY and Boston to try to gain more knowledge of both the craft and the business.
For my 30s and 40s I will go straight to the Liz questions.....Can you talk about your years with Liz Lerman? How did you first meet her? Talk about the many roles you held within the company…what did you love most about her work?
I met Liz when I was 33 – on July 4 - which I think is significant....Independence Day! And I danced/worked with the company for 15 years.
The company model was one that you did multiple things…dance AND….xxxxx.
That the definition of company member was not an elite stage presence but everything. Part of this was economics: it’s nearly impossible to exist unless everyone multi tasks. But I also think it was key/core to the philosophy of the Dance Exchange: engage in all aspects of the work - admin, art making, taking out the trash - and you will make better art, be better artists. Hierarchy was as flat as possible - although it was clear that Liz was Liz: as much as she tried to “flatten” down, the demands of a group needing leadership and the field and marketplace of dance wanting her voice and vision up front were present.
I always saw the model of the company as a circular cone shaped slinky: Liz flattening down to be part of the circle – or spiraling up to be the point at the top of the cone. Others of us rose and flattened, too, as the projects became more diverse and more singular to our artistic interests. I think this rising and falling allowed everyone a break- including Liz - to be able to recharge, rethink, reflect in your under the radar moments – and then charge out when spiraling to the leadership position of any given project.
I danced throughout the fifteen years but slowed on my big physical work toward the last 4 or 5 years. This coincided with my becoming first Associate Artistic Director and then Artistic Director. I think, too, that there was less time for me in the recharge, rethink, reflect mode during the last few years and believe I began to burn out.
While there were many projects that I loved - the first biggy being the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard Project. I cherished the general idea of making dances that meant something to more than other dancers. And also the fact that, while we were dancers/artistic collaborators, we also took seriously the creative role of being engaged in arts literacy, advocacy, education not only for the community in the work but for those who might become part of our audiences.
I loved the creative “lab," the value on discovery, on curiosity…it became the invigorating aspect of those who studied in workshops with us that drew us a steady stream of dancers and dance makers of all ages.
I left the company in 2008; the company and Liz were going through transitions, as I was myself. It was not a personally happy time for me, with the death of my mother as well as the questioning of my role in relationship to dance and in relationship to the over-arc of the Dance Exchange. I did not want to be perceived as “Liz Lite” – but after so many years with the company it was hard to know what was separate in my own voice from the “brand” of Liz Lerman Dance Exchange.
Do you still perform?
After leaving Liz, I also stopped choreographing big projects for a while - after 15 years and in production mode for many of those years pretty much non-stop, I needed a break. And, just plain economics, there was no longer a machine of funding to support that kind of big scale work. It also takes a well-honed team to create in-depth projects that we did at LLDX, developing them over several years. I also had to pay the rent. I danced in a few things and made a few smaller dances. I began my “Drosselmeier” phases (a one year stint in my 20s doesn’t count) - doing several seasons with Washington Ballet and now with Jose Mateo Ballet Theatre.
More recently I have begun to work on larger projects, redefining “community” for me and freelancing at colleges – Michigan State and Boston Conservatory. And I have begun an umbrella company for all of my work - choreographing, teaching, advocacy, literacy, facilitation, “dance whispering”- called PDM: Public Displays of Motion. I have a few projects that will include myself as a performer - including a new work based on creativity/craziness this year while in residence at the Boston Center for the Arts.
I also feel that I’ve extended a major gift of the years with Liz into my current work at the Dance Complex and in running the business side of my arts life: everything I need to know about business are things I learned dancing: leading/following, taking turns, supporting the goal backstage, onstage, collaborating, shining center stage from time to time. Being creative in business is no different than being creative in making dance happen.
This has value, this dance life. It is likely the majority of us will not make large sums of money - but lack of money should never be mistaken for lacking in value. I often feel it necessary – for whatever functional or dysfunctional motivations! - to return to the bridging role I felt necessary in my early lgbt and AIDS-related work. But this time the bridge is between audiences and potential audiences to dance and the work itself. Sometimes this is about translating my own work, but often it is about connecting people to the larger body of performance and connecting dots for them as to how and why it can have value in the poetic and practical aspects of their lives. The bridging is also among members of the dance community itself- asking what I ask of myself: where is the portal “in” for someone experiencing my dances? Am I opaque with my work as a protective measure for fear of really communicating something someone might “get?"
As a choreographer, when did you know it was time to take the leap and form a company?
It has been a constant dialogue between making dances and dancing dances: I think I was drawn to making dances as equally as wanting to dance. I made that first company in my late 20s because there was a void in the Boston dance scene when the economy fell and folks scattered and ran. As I created PDM in my late 40s, I had to and have to ask, “Does the world need another dance company? Is this a viable model for me, for the field, for this day and age, for Boston?”
I guess I feel more fluid with models now than I ever did before – having seen the machine that it takes to run a company. LLDX was at one point the 15th largest grossing modern dance company in the country, 52 weeks, with a 1.2 million dollar budget - and keep it present in the “field" (meaning keeping it sexy enough that presenters want to buy you for “x” weeks a year) - I don’t think that the model is all there is.
Idea to idea, project to project, purpose to purpose… why not make dance make sense for the time we live in, the place we are- and yes, that means emotionally as well as geographically.
What do you look for in a dancer?
Humanity. Technique is in there - or maybe techniques - but human, humane is more important for me. We also are in an age where many can execute movement - but are we encouraging ourselves to really say something, communicate with movement?
Resources and resourcefulness being a choreographer….how do you stretch dollars, prioritize, and budget?
This goes along with fluid models: multiple uses of movement materials, developing work in workshop mode, re-packaging for the stage, site- and doing so, hopefully, with authenticity.
What are 3 pieces of advice you want to give to aspiring choreographers?
Understand that form and content are related: don’t rely on movement fads, or even worse, rely on what movement you execute well solely.
Learn from all - old, young, even the pompous and especially the humble around you. Translate the information to make it make sense for you.
No goal is worth your soul: be good to yourself and others. The karma will come back to you.
What is the role of teaching in your career?
I taught before I could dance; it is and was the way I teach myself.
More often, I see myself as facilitator of information: some of it I have, but especially as I get older, I facilitate the information in the room so we learn from each other.
You have done arts administration throughout your career as well? How did you learn the skills?
Out of necessity. No one else was going to do it for me…so you learn. Passion for getting your work seen gives you a drive to administer - even when unskilled. Arts administration training programs were not prevalent in the early days- and I don’t know that I would have gone that route.
Current passions and curiosities:
Passion is a strong word: if I took everything at the same passionate speed I did 20 years ago, I’d really burn out…. so I try to work on “simmer”- keep it bubbling, catalyze those around me as much as possible. This may be a result of getting back up to speed post my Dance Exchange days and a mode of self-protection.
I do have a passion for seeing how the administering of a place like the Dance Complex- with all its multiple intentions to dance expressed in the variety of people who work, study, create and teach here - is in itself a creative act.
Artistically: The fusion/evolution of different genres and dance forms, reconstructing with a post modern sensibility the combinations of multiple dance genres - my recent “Future Preludes” is an example (10 genres go artistic speed dating and borrow from each other; then create new preludes to Rachmaninoff, informed by the speed dating process).
What is on your plate/on your calendar for the next year’s time?
The Boston Center for the Arts residency begins in May and think I will take a full week of that to do an open workshop to explore this idea of artistic lab. The content of the actual artistic work - the creative or crazy - is based on individuals who were thought to be both genius and out of their minds. Nijinsky was the conceptual first of these, but I hope to explore others, both current Boston residents and other historically.
There is a role for me within this work I think- as Nijinsky in his institutionalized later years possibly. I also have a few “characters” I am working on - the Man With a Body Made for Radio is one; another is “My Brushes With Dance Greatness as a Traveling Dance Brush Salesman” (working title).
I also wish to build on some great steam we got at the Dance Complex with our Winter Wonder Dance Festival, and look at creating little pop-up festivals to learn and perform. We also are creating a new studio space at the Complex in a store front- so very exciting expansions.
How would you describe the modern dance scene in Boston?
Boston’s done pretty well for itself considering that there is very little dedicated funding for dance. It’s a smart town, smart audiences.
I think Boston finds itself in the same situation many other cities find themselves in regarding the eco-system of dance: there is little means for a public to differentiate between established, matured voices and younger voices when going to see dance. I see it primarily marketing, branding problems on the one hand and a lack of capacity on the other. We have no unified way to organize a public’s perception of the many facets of dance available for them to partake of, so inevitably people go to support only their friends’ works, or go to something once and get disappointed because it wasn’t what they thought it would be. Capacity wise, choreographers are spread so thin getting the work up (sometimes hastily, most times under produced) that they do not have time to engage, advocate and educate their audiences as to what they are seeing, experiencing.
But it would be great to see us break a cycle - money couldn’t hurt (meaning funding) but money is not the only answer. It goes back to value.
Final advice to young dancers:
It is a daunting time to dance - but that is always true. It is an exciting time to dance- and that is always true as well.
This next generation is on the cusp of discovering a few things (standing on the shoulders of those who preceded them, as we stood on the shoulders of those who preceded us!): technique will be recognized as multiple techniques - and not just about bigger and more = better. Movement will again become a vehicle for multi-depth communication not just “feat." The idea that dance will be brought “home” so that everyday people will see and understand the movement in their daily lives as choreography, as another language, as a way to health, to clarity spiritually will be this next generation's “extra job” or “paying work." My generation waited tables; the next generation did data entry. The future dancers will integrate health, spirituality, and entrepreneurship and will, after much reflection and translation, help establish society’s ongoing and deepening value associated with movement and dance as necessary as air to breath.
I guess that’s less a bunch of advice - and more of a charge for the future!
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