The piece I am currently working on is called Wolf House and it is a solo for Alison Clancy with original music composed by a good friend of ours Ian Williams and performed live by a man named David Herman on electric guitar. I would describe it as an exploration. It came from the music I was interested in creating a series of pieces where a song is created and used as a text to create the work. This particular song evokes a character for me who is sort of at once a little bit feral and aggressive and at the same time ultimately a friendly presence. We started working with images of a wolf in a confined space and also thinking of it as a wolf/rockstar so you have this dichotomy of a creature and being something that is on display. Being at once something that is extroverted and aggressive and at the same time somewhat out of her element. it’s a character study in an abstract way.
What inspired you to create this piece?
I have been really interested in sound in general lately and this particular composer came to see a dance/now festival show at DTW and what he had to say to me afterwards was that he was curious if dancers were aware of the ambient sound while they were performing because he felt that in a lot of the work the music was this pasted on recorded thing. We started to talk about interesting ways to have sound more involved in the work and we talked about electric guitar as being a very visceral sort of sound and how vibration can shape space. That was the starting point was this interest in having this tactile sense of sound that you can get from having an amplified in a small space.
Where does this piece fit into your overall body of work? Is it more similar or dissimilar to the rest of your work? How?
Well, I’m young, so in general tend to approach each piece really differently, I don’t feel like I’ve found a rhythm of working style yet and so it fits as being another branch of exploration. It does fit a pattern of being interested in solo work and being interested in a theatricality of work. There is a use of set design and props to create a sense of space and also being interested in having the music and the dance and the performance all be fully integrated. In this piece Alison sings so it is not just musician and dancer, she is part of the musical performance as well. In my mind I am interested in knitting that all together. A lot of my work now involves dancers either speaking or singing hopefully in a way that is more about integrating them into the sound score than having them speak a scene. It’s more about sound.
What significant shifts in your work or creative process have you seen over time? Why do you think those shifts occurred?
I had a big shift last summer when I was here because my work up to that point tended to be more about geometry, formal structure and body design . I made a lot of works in which my primary interest was in line and form and while I was here I was collaborating with Regina Gibson the actress and she did a lot of stuff with sound with the dancers and it got me thinking about sound and it got me thinking about intention because she kept asking ‘why? why? why?’. Why are the dancers making these physical choices? What are they trying to accomplish? That was a shift for me. I became more curious about intention, about theatricality, and about decisions within the work. I’m now more interested in people than objects. I think that’s why solo work is so interesting to me right now. It is giving me the opportunity to explore the dancer as a complete person and that’s why the sound and the speaking are becoming more important to me. I think it’s weird that dancers are just bodies so much of the time. Even that we are trained to cover the sound of our feet. I understand why that exists but there is a rawness that I am more interested in now than I was three or four years ago.
Why do you choose to express yourself with dance?
I don’t know the answer to that question. Sometimes I feel like dance performance isn’t the right medium for me. Initially I was attracted to the ephemeral nature of it. Like when you have that experience of writing things and then you go back to read them and it is almost painful. In dance you can make something and walk away from it and it is as if it never happened. As an artistic process for exploration it is really liberating because you don’t leave a trail behind of stuff that you don’t ever want to see again. But now ironically that is one of the things that frustrates me the most about dance performance and that is why I am interested in making dance films. I see the limits of dance performance in terms of being a communicative medium.
In order for a medium to really communicate effectively I’m feeling that there is a certain amount of repetition of exposure. Look at music and the music that is popular and the songs that you love. You love them because you know every word and it becomes a shared experience. When you go to see a dance performance chances are you are only going to see it once and the only way to get a lot out of dance is to train your eye so that you can recognize things and have a context for it. But that requires that you live somewhere where there is dance happening all the time and that you have the money to go see dance performances in order to have that familiarity and I feel like that is why dance doesn’t function as a popular medium the way music and film do. I’m intrigued by making dance films so that people can have that kind of experience where you can go home and watch it over and over again. Like that Vim Vandekeybus film. The more I watch it the more I fall in love with that film and I don’t have that relationship with stage performances because you never see anything more than once. You don’t get that personal repetitive familiarity where you just know every detail and it is so satisfying to see the things that you remember occur. You can re-experience the joy of it. I’m beginning to wonder if dance film is more the place for me for that reason. I love the idea of somebody sitting down on their own and watching something, with the narcissistic idea that they may want to watch it again. Maybe if I make something really good they will! I don’t see that possibility with performance. Though I love live performance and I love to perform. I just feel like that is a limitation of the medium.
What about today's environment feeds your work? What is your favorite things about dancing now? What do you find the most challenging?
I think that there is a trend right now towards collaborating with contemporary musicians and a resurgence of live music especially bands being incorporated into dance performances and that’s really exciting to me. I feel like that is a really smart place for dance to go because I think it is a really natural fit, indie punk rock music and contemporary dance. I get excited by those types of collaborations and the energy that comes with that. I’m also excited about and hoping things like couchsurfing.com and the internet will encourage people to go back to grass roots touring. I see a little bit of that happening and I know a couple of artists that are planning on doing that kind of work in the coming years. I think that is an awesome way to go because for a long time especially in the states we have the attitude that touring is out our reach.
Obviously the biggest challenge is money. It just is. It’s depressing because I was reading articles on line last night that arts funding in Montreal is being cut. You think it’s better other places and it’s really not. I feel that in New York because of the monetary challenges a lot of people making work don’t spend enough time researching. It’s always about banging out a piece for the season and it’s really frustrating. Even the model of needing to have a fully produced season every year, even if you self produce, I feel like it would be more productive to do a show every two years and do more studio showings. Seeing people bankrupt themselves to put on work that hasn’t been fully completed is a viscous cycle and I don’t know how to break out of that.
What is your happiest dance memory?
I really loved when I was 13 or 14 and still at my dolly-dinkle studio and we would put on these giant elaborate recitals. I was kind of at the top of the heap at that point and I would get all of the solo roles. I would feel like such a rock-star and we would be in a 2,000 seat house and tons of people were there, and you would get to be the ballerina doll in your tutu. I don’t think I have ever in my professional career have had that glory sense of being the star. That doesn’t really exist. It was such an unadulterated excitement and feeling of confidence importance. Being in the theater was still really cool. You had your own dressing room. Everything was really new and that was really fun. I loved those giant productions.
What do you do on a daily basis to support your choreography?
I read a lot and I try to expose myself to different ways of organizing information. Most of my ideas of choreographic structures come from looking at the structures of other things be they art forms or philosophical theories. Anything where there is a list or a diagram or a way of organizing ideas I find really inspiring. I try to find essays online that have something to do with structure. I also like to do yoga because it is a physical practice that doesn’t concern itself with approval seeking and I like to remind myself that movement doesn't always have to be about giving myself a pat of the back. Yoga and physical or idea structures are the two things that help me make dance.
If you were interviewing yourself, what would you ask?
One constant obsession of mine right now is do you have to be an asshole to make good work? Do you need to have that level of self focus in order to have an aesthetic that is clear enough to be a real clear artistic statement. I don’t have the answer but I am becoming concerned that you do have to be an asshole to make really good art. In other art forms you have to have that level of focus and drive but you are really only subjecting yourself to it you are sitting in you room painting for hours and throwing things out or going through draft and drafts of writing something. We have the unfortunate reality of subjecting other people to it and so you do have to be that singe minded in the pursuit of your own aesthetic needs and pulling it out of you dancers by whatever means necessary. But what is funny, and what I forget, is that dancers really want to do that. Talking to people after watching the Gallim show people were saying ‘Yes, I want to be pushed to the point that I am physically scared and then to know that I can do it.’ The first time I saw Jan Faber’s show live I was talking to dancers and had the feeling myself that I want to work for somebody who can inspire me to not be afraid to lay underneath a couch while two guys throw it up in the air and if it fell it would crush my pelvis. I have to remember that you are demanding unreasonable things from people, but part of the thrill and satisfaction of being a performer is managing to meet unrealistic expectations. That is what makes it worth it. Otherwise it gets boring the thrill is in pushing those boundaries. I’m afraid to ask people to go there, but when I do they seem to like it. I’ve been doing that with Alison in this new piece asking her to do strange and awkward things.
Please keep in touch by visiting www.dnodances.org or sending an email to dnuskindoder@earthlink.netDorian's latest work can be seen Saturday, July 25, 2009 at 8pm at Mark Beard and Jim Manfredi's church 5 Franklin Street Catskill, NY.
Email artisticstimulus@gmail.com to reserve your seat. There will be a bus from Manhattan that will leave at 5 pm on Saturday, July 25th from the east side of the street at the corner of East 13th Street and University Place near Union Square. The bus will arrive in Catskill in time for the 8 pm show and leave Catskill at 11:30 pm to arrive back in Manhattan at the pick up location at approximately 1:30 am.
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