Photo: Paul B. Goode
Hometown: Spring, TX (about 30 miles north of Houston)
Current city: New York City, NY and Barrytown, NY (I split my time between both pretty equally)
Age: 38
Attended an arts high school? Yes, but only for my senior year (North Carolina School of the Arts, as it was called at that time)
College and degree: B.A. in philosophy with a minor in religion from Texas Christian University
Graduate school and degree: M.F.A. in dance from Hollins University, which I just completed this year—so I went to grad school at age 38
How you pay the bills: Director of New York Live Arts/Bard College partnership; Associate Dean of the American Dance Festival...in other words, teaching and developing dance education programs that primarily focus on students in high school and beyond.
All of the dance hats you wear: Program director of dance education programs, teacher, choreographer, dancer (but largely for my own work these days)
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How has your time at a boarding performing arts high school informed your career path?
My year at NCSA was difficult, but important. I went to School of the Arts as a ballet dancer. Previous to that, I had trained at a small studio in Spring, TX. My training there was earnest, but it wasn’t sophisticated. For instance, I hadn’t learned any variations from the major ballets—I didn’t even know what that meant! I also didn’t know what it meant to have technique class—we just had a class called “ballet.” There was only one ballet teacher at my studio and she hadn’t danced in a ballet company, so we were all just doing things the way we did things... we weren’t working according to the training traditions I now know ballet has in place.
It was also an introduction to the larger issues in the ballet world. I was suddenly confronted with all the attitudes and hierarchies that are so much a part of ballet. I remember encountering the disempowering attitude towards women—who were always called “girls,” regardless of age. I was also overwhelmed by how everyone’s worth as a person was summed up by their skill as a dancer. Friendships were formed largely around level—someone in level one wouldn’t befriend someone in level three. These attitudes created a sense that I was solely defined by my skill as a dancer, and that my being female automatically had certain implications about my ability to be taken seriously and have a voice. This was really surprising for me, as I wasn’t entrenched in the ballet world in my youth — it was one of the many things I did that shaped my identity.
That said, I encountered several wonderful teachers and artists at NCSA who were pivotal in my development. Diane Markham taught my modern technique class, and she really took to us. We were (apparently) unusual in our enthusiasm for modern, and she asked to teach our class again in the spring term after having us in the fall. I remember the wry smile that often appeared on her face as she’d watch us tackle whatever she’d given us. I remember modern technique being a class I looked forward to. Her endorsement of our efforts made me feel respected and, in turn, I really enjoyed exploring modern dance.
I was also deeply informed by working with Alonzo King, who came to make a piece for NCSA. No one could believe that I, a newcomer to NCSA with totally mediocre technique, was cast in the piece. I think I fit Alonzo’s aesthetic as a tall, lanky dancer, and he perhaps saw my passion for moving. I honestly didn’t have the technical chops to do the material, although I didn’t think that at the time. I saw his contemporary vocabulary, full of reach and torqued line, and was filled with desire. I saw myself in the movement, even if the movement didn’t really fit me yet. Being part of his creative process and performing that work opened new doors for me about what ballet — and movement —could do. I realized that I didn’t want to make pretty shapes and perfect turns — I wanted to feel motion and emotion when I danced.
Fanchon Cordell, who taught me ballet technique, was also a huge inspiration. I remember her telling us that we just had to work harder, have determination, and practice a lot. In a world that values things completely out of a person’s control (being born with a certain body type, having high arches, having facility) it was a relief to have a teacher who believed that hard work could, indeed, achieve something. It wasn’t all talent and luck. This belief has stayed with me to this day. I believe hard work, resilience, commitment, and passionate intelligence can do a great deal.
Leah Cox in Chapel/Chapter; photo by Paul B. Goode
How did you get into the Bill T. Jones Company – audition, workshop, seen in class?
I got into the Company as a result of a lot of factors coming together. Previous to dancing with Bill, I was dancing in San Diego, CA. I wanted to move to NYC to try dancing there and heard about an audition for Bill’s company. My closest friend, Eric Geiger, said I should audition. I thought he was crazy; I was definitely not a strong enough dancer for Bill’s work! I learned that the audition had already happened, but Eric convinced me to make a video and send it to the Company anyway.
It was a hoot making the video. I took shots of me sitting at my kitchen table, talking about philosophy and what I thought about dance and interspersed those with movement clips. Eric advised me about movement —
“Be sure to do an adagio. Bill loves a good adagio!”
or
“Make a phrase and then invert it. He’ll appreciate it if you know how to invert.”
...and I put those in there. We sent it off, and Eric sent an email to Bill asking him to look at the video when it arrived.
Janet Wong, the Company’s associate artistic director, who was the rehearsal director at that time, saw the video and invited me to rehearsal if ever I was in the city. I flew out to NYC under the guise of “just being in the city” and spent a week rehearsing with the Company. At the end of the week, I felt certain that this was a company that I had to be in, but I had no idea how it would happen; they already had all the dancers they needed. On my last day, Bill asked me if I was serious about moving to New York and if I would be interested in working with him. He said that he’d have to let someone else go to make room for me, but was willing to make that adjustment. Later, I came to learn that the new woman he had hired wasn’t working out and that I had come to rehearsals around the time that they were realizing she wasn’t the right fit. I think that Bill responded to what he saw in me as a person, collaborator, and worker. My technical capacity at that time was nothing to write home about, but I was hungry to engage in serious conversations about making dances, and I liked to work.
Modesty aside, what are your strengths as a performer?
1. I love to move and I want to make that passion for moving available to people beyond me. I like to stir up the forces in my body and in space, and I like making those experiences of motion large enough to affect others.
2. I believe in my power and skill as a performer, even if I am unjustified in that belief. Put another way, I want to move so badly that it becomes an imperative.
3. I believe that the stage, and the particular structure of live performance, is a completely unique creative phenomenon. When I am dancing in a work, I (and all of my fellow performers) hold a specific form of power. We are ultimately in charge of the work. The choreographer has been thoroughly divested of his or her control over the piece, and we assume sole responsibility for the realization of the dance. We performers work together, uninterrupted, to create something only available in that moment. As we create the work, we create and alter our very being, too. I think the weight of this belief about what performance is/does can be felt in my dancing.
If someone wants to watch a video of you performing with the company, which piece do you suggest he/she watches?
I loved dancing in Serenade/The Proposition and think it reflects all that I discuss above. (Jennifer Nugent took over my role in that piece and we sometimes get confused for one another — a happy accident for me!)
Floating the Tongue, a solo based on a tight improvisational score, is a work that I do well.
I have a solo in Blind Date that I’m proud of.
Photo: Ian Douglas
Can you talk about your transition into education? What motivated you to make this transition and how has your role as a teacher evolved?
I was the Company’s first education director. I transitioned out of dancing for the Company to focus full time on forming its education infrastructure. I thought it was criminal that the Company did not have any serious education programs, given the nature of Bill’s work and his stature in the dance world! This move also enabled me to focus on my passion for teaching and education, which has always been part of who I am. I am currently the director of the partnership the Company (now New York Live Arts) has with Bard College. I oversee all the courses we teach there, curate guest faculty and events, and teach up to three courses a semester.
I believe education is a way of life. After decades of engaging as both teacher and learner, I see class as a dynamic situation in which we — both students and teachers — can grow in a communal context. I love the risk and revelation, the doggedness and difficulty, and the possibility and potential that are all part of the classroom’s ethos. I appreciate how dance as a subject poses specifically messy proposals, veering wildly in its focus from enforcing disciplined training to fostering personal development to creating artistic revolutionaries.
I’m increasingly interested in dance’s political status, which I see as being somewhat thrust upon the field by virtue of society’s disembodied and static value system for people. With technological advances enabling people to go everywhere with a minimal amount of personal physical mobility, the dancer becomes a particularly threatening, unpredictable figure with which to reckon: to encounter someone deeply connected to her body, capable of moving it in myriad ways to suit her desires, and to have desires that exist beyond the practical is threatening in a society engaged in demobilizing and corralling people into manageable frameworks and pathways.
This being the case, teaching dance becomes a revolutionary act and requires a complete overhaul. Who are we teaching to move? What is the value system? What are the skills? It seems to me that training dancers to be polite and obedient experts in doing what a choreographer tells them to do is so completely out of the realm of importance now as to be comical. Dance education should focus on teaching everyone to move as a basic part of their skill set as an engaged citizen. To address those that are serious about staying in the dance field, we should focus on enabling them to be visionaries, giving them opportunities and skills to imagine and proliferate dance as a way of reconnecting people with their bodies, their physical creativity, and their corporeal power.
Photo: Grant Halverson © ADF
ADF……What is your role there? If a dancer has never attended, can you share a few reasons why to go to this iconic dance festival?
The American Dance Festival is six and a half weeks of dancing and performances with people from all over the country and the world — it is an essential part of the fabric of American modern dance. It is like dance heaven...or hell! There is that truly transformational moment at the festival when you have passed the novelty point, are in the trenches, don’t yet see the end, and are so destabilized from all of your previous ideas about yourself as a dancer that you don’t know why you ever thought this was heaven! And then you keep going and you get beyond it and you realize that ADF changed you in profound ways.
I first encountered it as a student in college. It shook me to my bones, making me question why I thought I should be a dancer. But it wasn’t threatening, that question; it was invigorating. Asking that question made me figure out what I was doing and why I was doing it. It was the beginning of me taking myself seriously as a dancer, artist, and person. In all honesty, I have always thought that going to ADF as a student was an essential part of any dancer’s training. I think it was presented to me as such and proven to me as such when I went there.
Now, I’m the associate dean of the festival. I work with Gerri Houlihan, the dean, to develop all aspects of the festival’s education programs: the Six Week School, the Three Week School for Young Dancers, the Dance Professionals Workshop, and the Winter Intensives in NYC and California. I love it.
How do you train? What non-dance practices are important to you?
These days, I don’t take class so much. I find that connecting to my body as a source of wisdom and power is more important than the reinforcement of particular steps or techniques. I have a fairly consistent solo moving practice that I engage in two or three times a week: I go into a studio and see what comes up for me as a thinking, feeling body moving. There’s no pressure to make anything or move in any specific way in these sessions, although those impulses might come up and can be entertained when they do. The practice is primarily about allowing my body to voice itself in unregulated ways, for me to cultivate physical wisdom.
In addition to that, I run outside two or three days a week for about 45 minutes to an hour and take indoor cycling (spin) classes about three days a week. I like the different experiences of each of these. Running outside, I connect with nature and the rhythms of the seasons. In spin classes, I connect with the positive group dynamic that makes me feel like I’m part of a community. All in all, I like to be moving/physically active on my own terms for at least an hour a day.
What is your relationship these days with technology – for your artwork, teaching, as a dancer, to connect with the dance world (marketing, connecting, learning, archiving, etc)?
I think technology is overemphasized. The drive for everyone to be connected to their various devices all the time and to have a virtual presence has resulted in a physical estrangement that is almost pathological. I think there’s no getting around having our devices. They are necessary, do a lot of really great things, and can be lots of fun. However, I think we have to ride out this fascination with living through screens and disembodied platforms. A balance between living in virtual/disembodied worlds and the material/embodied world would be nice.
To those ends, I think it’s important to define the terms of your engagement in the virtual world. It’s not necessary to have a website, a Facebook page, a LinkedIn account, a Vimeo page, a YouTube page, etc. It’s necessary that you find a way of connecting to others and making yourself available to others in the digital world in a way that makes sense for the kind of life you want to live. And then you need to communicate your terms to those you want to connect with. For instance, I don’t have a Facebook account and I don’t have a webpage. But I still manage to connect with people and get my work done. People are surprisingly flexible—once they know they can’t reach me on Facebook, they know they have to email me. It’s not a big deal.
I think that dance’s primary asset is that it works with the human body’s lively presence. To those ends, I am mystified by the dance world’s compulsion to utilize screens and virtual worlds to capture the body moving. Don’t get me wrong—I think there is amazing potential in working with computer technology, video, and moving bodies. I just don’t think we MUST engage in this way in order to stay relevant, current, or to advance. Exploring the intersection of the virtual and the corporeal is for those artists and individuals who genuinely connect with what digital technology proposes and want to explore it. Dance is itself a technology for artmaking. We don’t necessarily need to incorporate computer - and screen-based technologies in order to be technological — we already are a technology.
Leah Cox, foreground, in Chapel/Chapter (Bill T. Jones Arnie Zane Company); photo by Paul B. Goode
What shows/pieces really inspired you over the past year?
Faye Driscoll’s Thank You For Coming
William Forsythe’s Sider
Miguel Gutierrez’s Age & Beauty Part 1: Mid-Career Artist Suicide/Note or &:-/
Jennifer Monson’s Live Dancing Archive
Pose 2 questions you would love young dancers to consider.
1. How will you reconceive the possibilities for dance in a way that ensures it has a future that people can participate in as audiences, practitioners, creators, and citizens? In other words, are you training in a manner that assumes that there is a dance world for you to enter and you are its new burden to take care of/give a job to, or are you training in a manner that assumes you are preparing to build the form and create as yet unknown jobs and possibilities for yourself?
2. What are your life values and how is dance an essential platform/way of advancing those values?
Advice to young dancers considering moving to NYC:
Make yourself matter. Maybe NYC is not the place where you will ultimately matter, but it might be the place where you learn how to matter (when you live) somewhere else. Let the city be your campus, and allow yourself to simultaneously be your own teacher and student on that campus, figuring out how it is that things matter to you, people matter to you, and you can matter to yourself in such an over-stimulating environment. Materialize and grow wise in NYC. And then take that wisdom elsewhere and energize the other parts of our country with your vibrant art and passionate intelligence.
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Glad I located this blog, full of insightful articles about dancers and dancing.
Posted by: [email protected] | 06/21/2016 at 01:39 PM