Hometown: Born in Hollywood, raised in NYC and Killingworth, CT
Current city: Zayante, CA
Websites: tandybeal.com, starstuffproductions.com, and my co-conspirator in all things, composer Jon Scoville: albertsbicycle.com
How you pay the bills: teaching, choreographing, stage directing, artistic directing, grant writing
All of the dance hats you wear: Oh dear… where does this list end… most of you know how to be a one woman band… I once met the head of the NY Public Library and she said she always hired dancers when she could… I asked why, since literary skills may not be on some dancers’ list of skills—she said because dancers know how to do things efficiently, under budget, on time and competently…they know there are 20 people cued up for the same job so they simply are great at any challenge…That sums us all up, doesn’t it?!
Non-dance work you have done in the past: Tour manager for Asian arts groups, ghost –writing, directing circus, voice overs, walked dogs in Central Park, topless dancing, professional interviewer, took exams for an army sergeant who froze taking tests (my job was to get him up to the next rank of master sergeant—and I did—and in the process learned a great deal about riot control and M-16s etc), modeling, and of course waiting on tables—and as we all know, being an artistic director is more about administration than simply the art part!
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Describe your dance life in your….
20s: You think you are getting old faster than you can believe...omg…
30s
40s: Prime dancing. You have something to “talk" about in your work.
50s
60s: You know you are getting old faster than you can believe!..omg…
Rich, varied, adventurous, curious, too full, wonderful, stressful…Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride every step of the way!
Can you describe your most recent project, “HereAfterHere: a Self-Guided Tour of Eternity?" What was the inspiration for the piece, and the process of making it?
Well, isn’t all art about either love or death? The two stunning miracles we cannot fathom with words, try as we might.
So why this subject? The Bible, the Qur’an, the Bhagavad Gita, Dante, Blake, Milton, Swedenborg—even The New Yorker cartoonists— all celebrate the human capacity to imagine a place where no living person has ever gone. If there is an afterlife, where is it located? Why is it so exclusionary? Why is it for eternity? And what’s the price of admission? Taking a great leap of fascination, if not of faith, we imagine the inevitable mystery, presenting varied points of view about what we collectively think happens after our last breath.
I think I have always been drawn to mystery…even gardening is really about mystery, no matter how much you know about soils and fertilizers! But this…? Well we really have so little to go on, yet whole religions and cultures believe they know… I loved the research. I loved interviewing 500+ people. I loved the puzzle of constructing ways to keep the same subject but keep changing the channel… as Arnie Mindell describes the dreaming process… when the topic gets too hot, we “seem” to change the dream, however the subject remains, even as it is shaped in new images.
I think my creative work springs from a sense of the great mystery of being here on this strange planet and the desire to communicate about this with a wide range of the community in celebration and/or in wonder.
As my life ripens and the transitory nature of it all becomes more evident and more real, my work has progressed accordingly and leads me to HereAfterHere. An earlier work, NightLife dealt with insomnia and the questions we really only ask in the middle of the night, in the heart of darkness. A Wing and a Prayer is about the slow, sometimes funny and sometimes painful, decline of the body. Much of the material for these productions came from my own experiences with the last months and minutes with friends and family. Moments not morbid, tragic nor conventionally religious, but rather filled with joy, astonishment, humor, sorrow, awe, love and silence. Connecting these varied emotions into a kinetic mosaic is the challenge.
For me, art-making is a series of answers to questions. Each note of music, each step of a dance is an answer to the question raised by the previous note, the preceding step. And, in turn, each new discovery poses more questions. My productions braid the serious with the humorous as a way of coming at the big questions from different directions: questions of Why? Why here? Why now? Braiding dance with language, visual/media elements and circus, enlarges the possibilities of transformation on stage and collectively they create a larger trajectory for my choreography and thus a wider range of answers.
This subject is “up” especially for the large aging generation— and it is important to consider it before it becomes a crisis. Although "everybody’s doing it," we rarely discuss it, until it is right in front of us. Dying is last on our to-do list - and often left off the list. New imagery and stories are needed to help re-envision this startling finality. Death is the last taboo in our culture—we can talk about sex and money, but not death. We worry that if we bring it up, we might bring it on! So, without using a specific theological lens, this concert, with its extensive outreach, opens a community dialogue about death.
What is on your plate/on your calendar for the next year’s time as a dancer, choreographer, teacher, and director?
Our show with significant community outreach ‘HereAfterHere’ opened in Santa Clara March 28-30, and then I think it will go to Portland next year, as well as Florida. We have fully “bloomed” our arts education program, that we started years ago. This year with our new ArtSmart, we are getting to 10,000 kids and teachers. I may direct an opera and will stage direct work with Bobby McFerrin. Will return to Salt Lake where Ririe-Woodbury just opened a new work of mine which repeats next January. Working with singers SoVoSó on Song Circus. Teaching the tiny amount I have at UC Santa Cruz. It will be 40 years that we have managed to create things with our company…so this will be a celebration year.
Resources and resourcefulness being a choreographer….how do you stretch dollars, prioritize, and budget?
Perhaps this is an innate skill dancers develop early on! I think we are constantly figuring out how to make something out of nothing—which basically underpins every art endeavor anyway!
What are 3 pieces of advice you want to give to aspiring choreographers?
Keep people around you who have light hearts. Go out and look at the stars and remember what a miraculous event we are all in, even if you didn’t get the grant! Figure out a way to earn that does not suck your life away—because being a starving artist is really not productive, and neither is a job that has you working 24/7 with no payback but $. And yes, #4, cultivate many loves—your cat, your friends, books, gardening, languages… you will need solace at times, and having refined and different loves is a great help! And don’t gossip. Everyone is doing her or his best, even when you can’t see or fathom it!
On hardships, sacrifices, and setbacks:
Yikes where does one start?? ...war stories, dime a dozen! Every injury gives you a puzzle piece for a new or next step in your life—rarely do we take time to rest and injury asks you to do that… so I do think once you get through the immediacy of an event, it will offer surprising gifts… Money? When I was Artistic Director for the Pickle Family Circus a manager suddenly announced we were $350,000 in the hole and he was leaving… it took years to pay it all back –and thank heavens it was the 90s when corporations still had a ton of money to put on events…Jon gave me Shackleton’s story, Endurance, about being lost in Antarctica for 2 years… now that put everything into perspective and eventually…and like Shackleton, we found our way out.
One piece of financial advice you would pass onto young dancers (related to paying the bills, financing a production, paying dancers, saving for retirement, etc):
20-20 hindsight is an amazing thing! Here goes: Figure it all out very carefully BEFORE you start, because the avalanche of pressing questions starts once the hands-on work begins and you don’t want to have to keep considering absolutely everything.
Current passions and curiosities:
Laughter, books, gardening, cooking, WW2 (I’m drawn to stories of life lived during that period when the best and worst of human nature was brought into high relief), empathy and how it gets developed. Repeat.
How would you describe the modern dance scene in Santa Cruz?
Small but determined!
Final advice to young dancers:
As Jon said to me when I was 17, “Discipline is remembered ideals." I put that on my door at eye level when I might waiver about going to yet one more class… and never forgot it… Having ideals is what drives you if you want to stay fascinated and in love with it all!
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What a vibrant, creative interview and life! What to do after HereAfterHere about what people now and throughout the centuries think happens after life? What about the sensuality of life now and throughout the ages?!
Posted by: Ann Tares | 04/15/2014 at 07:21 PM