Photo by Keira Heu-Jwyn Chang
Hometown: Oakland, CA
Current city: Brooklyn, NY
Age: 42
College and degree: BFA CalArts (California Institute of the Arts)
Website: kateweare.com
How you pay the bills: choreographer and artistic director of Kate Weare Company, company touring, outside company commissions, teaching and student commissions, awards and fellowships
All of the dance hats you wear: choreographer, artistic director, dancer, administrator, manager, fundraiser, teacher, mentor, mother, wife, daughter
Non-dance work you have done in the past: State-licensed massage therapist in CA and NY, administrative assistant, gallery assistant, artist assistant
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Describe your dance life in your….
20s: My dance life in my 20s was fraught with internal conflict from the get-go. I wanted to make my own work, I’d always known it, but I didn’t have the courage to declare myself yet. I danced for choreographers I admired, but I was always thinking about ideas independently and problem solving on my own in their rehearsals - a distancing mechanism I was totally unaware of.
It wasn’t until well into my 20s that I started to make my own work in public, beyond what I’d made in college. As soon as I did my criticalness toward other artists began to disintegrate as I experienced how humbling making a dance in the real world actually is. But when I began making my own work things really took off for me artistically. I was no longer a choreographer masquerading as a dancer, and that was a good thing.
To me, dancing and choreographing are equally creative acts but they draw on different impulses and serve different needs internally. While dancing, an artist is alive inside a structure with an immediate, listen-to-the-moment kind of quicksilver tuning in and “rightness.” The most brilliant dancers, in my experience, practice this discipline of listening-in-the-moment both in the studio and onstage.
Choreographing exists in a different timeframe altogether: slow, diffuse, methodical, unfolding, obscure and unclear – for a long time it’s not about “landing” but about searching. The gratification of feeling something is “right” lives much farther away and sometimes never arrives at all. Building a structure for the creative act of the dancer to live in is like trying to make your way endlessly in the dark. You have to love not knowing.
30s: My late 20s/early 30s were an intensely creative, ambitious, wonderful time in my life. I moved to New York City and spent the first 2 years getting on my feet. I went to night school at The Swedish Institute for massage and I worked day jobs, the most illuminating of which was as administrative assistant for the Stephen Petronio Company (a great education!). I spent every free hour in studios making movement, practicing what I think of as a kind of “monkdom” – being alone exploring my physicality, being afraid and trying everything, daring myself to be foolish, frightened, even shameful. Most of that work has never been seen, but it was crucial to the development of my voice.
Eventually, I started asking people to dance with me and I formed a company, before I knew what that really meant. I’ll always treasure the earliest years of Kate Weare Company in their intensity, fervor, pleasure and connectedness. I worked with amazing dancers/friends, and they challenged me as I challenged them. Our company gained recognition quickly and opportunities opened up within a few years. Yet those early years were also plagued for me with insecurity and worry, a truly insane amount of administrative work, and a constant, hard-edged guilt that I couldn’t properly pay the people who worked with me.
In the latter half of my 30s, we morphed from an upstart grass-roots ensemble into a professional touring company almost beneath my own awareness. It’s a peculiar phenomenon as a dance company’s internal culture adjusts to this kind of rapid external growth. The company learned how to function smoothly on the road in a range of theaters, performing for a wide variety of audiences all across the country. I learned how to balance repertory against new creation cycles, and how to mesh teaching, showcasing and cultivation into my professional life along with a growing demand to create commissions on other companies. My company members also gained in reputation and became sought after by other choreographers.
So much of this was really great and some of it was hard. I felt the pull keenly during these years between my own internal needs as an artist – the slow rhythm of my choreographic research – and the external needs of my company to keep on moving, achieving, thriving, growing and performing. My first company manager coming onto the scene relieved some of this tension; her arrival was a great gift to me as an artist.
Leslie Kraus and Kate Weare; photo by Christopher Duggan
40s: I’m a few years into my 40s and everything has shifted again. I’m now mother to a vivacious two year-old girl. I make my work as avidly as ever, yet I do feel differently as an artist. My horizon line is farther away and I apprehend my work from a cooler, more knowing place than before. Some of this may be because I don’t perform in it as much as I used to or dance during the development process as much. Or perhaps my work is shifting in content as my life shifts, and I’m not yet aware of what that means. The thing that’s consistent is I’m still a maker-in-the-dark. My dances form in front of me so slowly that I can’t see how or why for ages. This unfolding keeps me hooked to movement in all its glorious ambiguity and pre-conscious power.
Jacquelyn Elder; photo by Keira Heu-Jwyn Chang
Can you write a little about your work as artistic director of your own company? What is a typical day’s schedule (or a typical week)? How do you balance the artistic side of the job and the business side of the job?
My weekly schedule varies depending on the number of gigs I’m balancing at one time, between making new work for my company, rehearsing touring rep, creating outside commissions, teaching, actively touring, or various fundraising activities. The only two totally constant activities are being in the studio and managing administrative work alongside my executive director. Administration is a huge part of being a choreographer, in my experience, and never ceases to feel like Atlas carrying the boulder up the hill. Balancing the artistic and business poles did not come naturally to me. I’ve had to work hard at it and I’ve made a lot of mistakes. But one thing I routinely re-assess is whether the company is serving me as an artist, or I am serving it. The balance must be right or the whole thing is wrong.
Typically, we wake up around 6:30am, get my daughter ready for daycare, sometimes I can get in an hour or so of email/admin work, I head to rehearsal, rehearse for 4 hours (I wish it were more!) and if I’m not teaching or going to another rehearsal, I’ll do an errand or two and head home for another hour of admin/communication before I pick up my daughter from daycare. I feed her dinner along with my husband, bathe her and put her to bed around 6:30pm. Typically my artist husband and I both work another couple hours before we crash around 10:00pm. I think about my dances a lot when I’m falling asleep or in my dreams.
Photo by Keira Heu-Jwyn Chang
Will you be performing in any of your work in the coming year?
No, but my movement sensibility is present in every molecule of my work whether I’m in it or not. Plus I have phenomenal dancers working with me right now.
What is on the calendar for 2015?
We celebrate our company’s 10th Anniversary Concert at BAM Fisher from February 19-22, 2015, with the world premiere of Unstruck Sound and excerpts from our repertory spanning the last decade.* I’m excited to have guest artists from ODC/Dance in San Francisco and The Juilliard School Dance Division performing my work in addition to my own company members, and we’re all excited to toast to 10 years during an Opening Night Benefit after the show. This season marks my company’s return to BAM since our last performance in 2013, when I was named the inaugural Artist-in-Residence and we debuted in Next Wave Festival with our evening-length work, Dark Lark.
I’m currently a Guggenheim Fellow and in a Creative Residency with The Joyce Theater. I’m grateful for their support in developing new work, which will premiere at The Joyce in 2016. This coming year you will also find us on tour throughout the country thanks to a New England Foundation for the Arts National Dance Project Touring Award, and finally, I have 3 to 4 project commissions slated for other companies in 2015-16.
Leslie Kraus; photo by Keira Heu-Jwyn Chang
What do you look for in a dancer? How do you find dancers?
Finding the right dancers is not easy. I’ve tried various methods over the years, but recently I’ve been asking dancers who interest me into workshops to watch them in process over a short intensive period. This level of interaction is helpful to discerning whether we might be a good match from both sides. It’s just as important that a dancer is genuinely interested in me and my work as it is that I’m interested in them.
My works tunes into individuality, so I’m looking for highly articulate dancers who can speak through their bodies about their experience and sense of self. For this reason I’m often attracted to mature dancers, but youth has its special qualities too. For my work a high level of technical capacity is important, but technique can feel vastly different in dancers. The last thing I want is a group of dancers who all move alike. I ask for a lot of intellectual and emotional engagement from dancers in my process and onstage, not to mention intimacy, as I explore a great deal of partnering. My work is not for the shy of heart.
What are 3 pieces of advice you want to give to aspiring choreographers?
1. Hold very close to your chest the earliest reasons you danced or cared about dancing. Don’t worry about articulating them out loud - just hold onto them. It’s your source and must be protected.
2. You’ll need a lot of help along the way from everyone around you: lovers, dancers, collaborators, mentors, peers, funders, curators, administrators, fans, family, believers, audience members. Listen earnestly to these people when they support you, slough them off when they don’t. And remember, no one cares about your own work like you do.
3. If you begin to have success you’ll likely experience being characterized from the outside in. This is a mental trap. Try to stay attuned to your own instincts about who you are and your own agenda about what you need as an artist. Opportunities can be pathways or blockages depending on whether or not they support your growth, so saying no can be as important as saying yes.
How do you receive feedback about your work? Do you have a mentor?
I’m willing to listen earnestly to absolutely anyone who sees my work and cares enough to let me know. Everyone has a unique perspective that may be of use to me, and I tend to believe that audience members are innately intelligent about what they experience. My artist parents have always been among my best critics, along with my very smart husband.
For feedback during the development of my work, however, I’m very choosy about who I invite into my studio. The process is vulnerable and never gets less so! I ask choreographers, dancers or other artists whose work or minds I admire. I’ve been fortunate to have marvelous input over the years from dance artists who have serious experience to offer me such as: Gwen Welliver, Frank Shawl, Risa Steinberg, Phyllis Lamhut, Gus Solomons, David Gordon and most recently, David White. I care about the ongoing conversation in movement that is passed down through lineage, so I need to be in contact with movers that came before me as well as those that are coming after.
Julian de Leon, Nicole Diaz, and Kate Weare; photo by Travis Magee
What is your relationship with technology? How do dance and tech intersect for you – whether in your actual artwork or with making your work happen (arts administration, marketing, etc)?
Honestly, I haven’t figured out a way to make it all feel artistically useful to me, though film has always intrigued me and I dabble in it periodically.
Non-dance activities important to you:
Far too much to even list. I know there is so much life beyond dance, yet dancing has always felt like life-blood to me. Sometimes I feel curious or a bit sad about all the marvelous things and people I’m missing out on because of my all-consuming love of dance.
Can you talk about a recent show (or two) that really inspired you?
While we were on tour recently I saw a show of the visual artist William Kentridge’s films, prints and machine-sculptures at ICA in Boston. His work moves me so much on a choreographic level - he understands how the body is speaking.
I loved Monica Bill Barnes and Ira Glass’s show at New York Town Hall a few months ago. It was witty, homey and soulful and brilliantly told through movement and language all banged up against each other.
Advice to young dancers about moving to NYC:
Chew it all up and then spit it all out again. New York, in all its marvelous intensity, can cut your teeth as an artist and help you to define and refine yourself. But ultimately you’re the one who shapes your life as an artist through your values, your actions, your relationships, your priorities. Where you live is just not the point. How you live is what matters.
*Click here to view a video celebrating the past 10 year's of Kate Weare Company.
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