INTERVIEW: New dance work connects animal world with human world
Photo: The Degenerate Art Ensemble will perform at this year’s Performance Mix Festival from the New Dance Alliance. Photo courtesy of Bruce Clayton Tom / Provided by press rep with permission.
New Dance Alliance’s Performance Mix Festival is about to celebrate its 35th anniversary with a special set of performances, June 10-13. This year’s iteration will take place at Movement Research at 122 Community Center, 150 First Ave. in Manhattan.
One of the presenters at this year’s fest is the Seattle-based dance company Degenerate Art Ensemble, according to an official press release. Their contribution will celebrate NDA’s anniversary and also explore the connections (and disconnections) between humans and the natural word. Audience members can expect intricate movement, sculptural costumes, video projections and live music. The creative team consists of director/dancer Haruko Crow Nishimura, composer/musician Joshua Kohl and video artist Leo Mayberry. Wyly Astley provides the costume design.
Recently Hollywood Soapbox exchanged emails with Kohl and Nishimura. Questions and answers have been slightly edited for style.
What can audience members expect from your work at this year’s Performance Mix Festival from New Dance Alliance?
KOHL and NISHIMURA: We have created a new installation performance that celebrates new beginnings, people coming together, and sharing the wonder and joy of being together in one space. This summer we are all celebrating a kind of spring after a long period of isolation and anxiety. The performance intertwines imagery of plant and human worlds, and intertwines the sounds of animals and humans. It is a seed of new life rising up from this small courtyard — infusing this unassuming space with new life and energy.
We are also celebrating New Dance Alliance’s 35th anniversary — such a profound accomplishment to thrive and adapt through decades of challenges, showing us that performance will somehow always be there because people need it, and there are bold folks like NDA who are willing to fight through difficulties like what we are currently facing.
How would you define animism, and how do dancers bring this concept to life?
KOHL and NISHIMURA: There is nothing in our universe that is not subject to constant change and interaction. We are mostly under the illusion that there are static, unchanging and lifeless things around us, when in fact all is moving, changing and part of a larger symphony. The word anima means breath, spirit, life. In our work, we have always paid great attention to the spaces we work in, the people we work with, the elements that we are surrounded by.
Places have a life of their own, and we always try to let the space speak. Places, beings and things all have a distinct spiritual essence — rocks, sculptures, weather systems and even words. The floor of the courtyard where we are performing is filled with a deep layer of loose stones. The dancer will have to discover how to converse with them — how the feet’s movements and the body’s balance is affected, rather than fighting against the natural forces. Our approach to animist thinking is to look to the “other” (whether it be a thing, a place, a being) from the perspective of what we have in common and how we can discover harmony rather than to focus on what separates us or what are our differences.
Throughout the development process of this piece, has your view on how your own lives connect to the natural world changed?
KOHL and NISHIMURA: From the time we started talking about this new work, we have been more and more aware of looking closely at the basic processes and actions of our daily lives, how we are present with the animals in our home, how we relate to the land and soil we live on, paying attention to the food we eat and the types of food production we support. We have even been making our own clothes to understand the intimate work of the hands and the labor that goes into in everyday things. We have been practicing listening to nature intuitively, paying attention to our ancestral energies, messages, patterns.
In this time, when many prejudices are coming to the surface, our perspectives obviously need to be broken down. We need to evaluate how we relate to things that we don’t understand — breaking our assumptions, observing and pausing our habitual naming and categorization of things, attempting to experience things first hand. We have also been reevaluating whether our own practices are in alignment with what we believe to be positive in the world. This includes what materials we use and how they are sourced, but also how we relate to each other, our hosts, our audience and our collaborators.
How do you two collaborate and work together on a piece? What’s the day-to-day process look like?
KOHL: Crow will go out on her own and find a way to connect with a new idea experientially in the beginning — exploring ideas, spaces and materials. She will play with these raw materials and ideas and begin to create a vocabulary, sometimes a narrative, sometimes a series of images. She will bounce them off of me, and I will often bounce back some ideas, sounds, potential contexts. Once there is an emerging direction, we will bring these materials to our collaborators (like in this case Leo Mayberry our video artist and Wyly Astley our costumer) to bounce the ideas off of them. And then it is key to our process to take on opportunities (like the Performance Mix) to share the work in progress with an audience, which will inform us as to how the piece will develop.
Do you hope that this piece will expand and become part of the company’s repertory one day?
KOHL and NISHIMURA: Yes. This is the first seed of our next large scale work that will unfold over the next two years or so.
How challenging is the piece from the dancers’ perspective?
NISHIMURA: In my culture and perhaps in all cultures, dance was once used as a ceremonial way to connect people to the source of their souls and to each other. In our fast-paced modern society, dance can often become quite disconnected. So the biggest challenge for me is to try to re-find that connection in my movement.
That begins with my connection to the space, to the time we are living in, to our hosts, to the audience. Leading up to the performance, the challenge is how to hone this connection on a daily basis. There is also the challenge of dancing at a site-specific location on a surface that we have only seen in photographs (we are coming from Seattle for this event), in a space we have only imagined through digital references. And on top of all of that, it is our first live performance in almost a year and a half, so there is a psychological hurdle to jump over as well. But we are well aware of the specialness of performing at this unique moment in history and that we will be sharing something profoundly personal and intimate with others after such a strange and isolating year.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Degenerate Art Ensemble will perform at New Dance Alliance’s Performance Mix Festival, June 10-13. Click here for more information and tickets.
