Building Community through Repertory

STUDENTS AND PROFESSIONALS Dance TOGETHER | Spring 2021

In the spring of 2021, the Dance Center reconfigured a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to shift from presenting the Trisha Brown Dance Company and Ronald K. Brown/EVIDENCE to instead have both companies set repertory on a group of students and Chicago dancers via Zoom. 

For many years, classes at the Dance Center were for Columbia students, but local dancers were also able to drop in and take class. This arrangement was beneficial for the students, who were able to participate in classes with professionals, and also provided an opportunity for the professionals to take low-cost, high-quality technique class. This workshop was intended to get back to that format, with a mix of professionals and students, and a range of ages.

For this opportunity, there was an application, designed to be as quick and painless as possible for the dancers applying, and a selection panel made up of Dance Center staff and one external artist. Linda-Denise Fisher-Harrell, at that time not yet named Artistic Director of Hubbard Street, served as the external artist reviewer for the Ronald K. Brown workshop, and Kristina Fluty, dance faculty at DePaul University, was the external artist reviewer and participant in the Trisha Brown Dance Company workshop. As a small way of trying to help address the lack of paid artistic work for dancers during the pandemic, we compensated the local dancers for their time in the workshop. There were 13 undergraduate students in the class and eight community dancers in each of the workshop modules.

The Trisha Brown Dance Company workshop module consisted of eight sessions; company member Leah Ives led classes and workshops remotely via Zoom based on the technique and repertory of Trisha Brown’s Glacial Decoy, art historian Susan Rosenberg gave a lecture about Brown’s life and legacy, and we closed the module with a panel discussion with Associate Artistic Director Carolyn Lucas and company alumni Lisa Kraus and Education Director Stacy Spence. Participants were given viewing and reading assignments to augment the embodied workshop experiences.

The module with Ronald K. Brown/EVIDENCE included six classes with Ronald K. Brown, assisted by Arcell Cabuag, Associate Artistic Director, and a panel discussion with Ronald K. Brown, and Annique Roberts, Rehearsal Director. The classes focused on Four Corners, originally commissioned for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in 2014.

As a final component, each student interviewed a professional Chicago-based dancer as part of the COVID-19 Dance Worker Narratives Project organized by the New York Public Library. I have often wanted to include this kind of interview in previous classes, but have been hesitant to do so without compensating freelance dance artists for their time. The grant from the NEA allowed for payment to the dancers for participating in the workshops and we included this interview with a student as part of the letter of agreement.

As the instructor/facilitator for the experience, I was fascinated by the different approaches to teaching repertory material remotely and loved seeing our students, faculty, and community members learning and exploring together, even in a virtual space. Here at the end of the semester, I’m looking forward to a return to in-person studio work in the fall and also hope to create more spaces where professionals and students can be in dialogue and exploration together. The students wrote reflection papers after each module and gave permission to share the small excerpts below to give a sense of the workshops.

—Ellen Chenoweth

Hanna Swartz

Glacial Decoy​ marked an artist stepping out of gallery spaces and vertical performance art, into the proscenium. Throughout this experience I haven't been able to put my finger on why that timeline felt so important. I'm realizing it may be the confinement she probably felt and the adaptation she had to find in making this piece. Taking a big open world of creation and making it fit into a box... sure does sound familiar.

Not only the shortcomings of describing dance, but also resonating with me from this time with Brown's material, is the impermanence of our work as dancemakers. No two runs of the same choreography will ever look the exact same. It felt, unexpectedly, like an ancestral experience to embody this work while watching how it lived decades ago on different bodies. I didn't realize this fear I've felt in our shift to a virtual dance world, that things would be lost. I was scared that we'd lost something as performing artists, despite everyone's promises of adapting and moving forward. We are adapting and moving forward, but I didn't expect that kind of peace to come by learning Trisha Brown's material from salvaged footage.  

There are strange gifts in this new world, and this was absolutely one of them!

Nicola Elder

Feeling in Metaphors : My Body in the Movement:

Almost catching the 74 bus.

Watching it whisp by me in a fleeting moment and
deciding to walk instead.

Coming home after a long day,

casting my bags down the hallway,

and flopping naturally onto the loveseat.

Tossing on an oversized sweatshirt.

Effortless, relaxed,

and a little bit familiar.

Making my favorite meal,

no need for measuring cups,

the instructions are already in my body.

Falling into bed with my eyes half-shut,

mindlessly confident

in my mattress’s capability

to catch me

every time.

Audrey Hartnett

There was something so bittersweet about feeling my body move freely for the first time during the Trisha Brown Repertory workshop. At first there was a sort of elation that I could feel the difference in quality, but then I realized that I had only been moving with a held body for as long as I can remember. While control can be a valuable tool in dance, there is just as much virtue in finding freedom in the body, I feel that oftentimes technique classes only emphasize the former. I have found that my movement and personal experiences are deeply intertwined, which urged me to find the connections between my held body and the means by which I am reserved and confined in my daily life. From biting my tongue to hiding my body, I have held on tightly to strict social cues to avoid inconveniencing anyone. It felt so gratifying to let go, even if for a short hour at a time, moving with the layers of expectation stripped away.

Maria Elena Ricci

Caught up in Brown’s unexpected attention to details made me notice my own expectations which, consciously or not, shaped my approach to the workshop series. Brown’s extreme dedication to “getting it right”, paired with the constant showing of a big smile, was somehow in contradiction with the movement language offered, which, on the contrary, felt and looked uncontrived, free of specificity and so-called technique. Once in the process of learning, I experienced how inaccurate that perception was. Was the perception caused by the dancers who perform so flawlessly that audiences are unable to perceive the challenge posed by the choreography? That is likely. But we might want to check ourselves and see if the reason is rather a deeper one, one that has to do with the casting of African Diaspora forms of dance as technique free. 

Nic Steffensen

Learning from Ronald K. Brown was a true privilege. I was inspired by his animation that was so evident over Zoom. Brown’s teaching style radiated devotion and intensity; one could tell that he was a perfectionist, but that made this process all the more compelling. He was bound to the movement that he created, and I appreciated his effort in ensuring that each person comprehended the choreography down to the last detail. His precision was comforting; occasionally choreographers will ask that their dancers interpret the movement in their own way, however, Brown was very specific in what he wanted and how he wanted it to be performed. In a way, his process was very grounding in itself; direct and clear, it left little to no room for guessing. At a time when everything feels so chaotic, it was refreshing to have a little clarity, a routine if you will. For that, I am very appreciative.

Kenny Alexandria Ward

Already a self-appointed Zoom veteran, I had no expectations but many assumptions of how the next few weeks with Ron Brown would go: the idea of a facing would be held loosely, choreography was generously open to interpretation as per the demands of one's space, and that any performance through Zoom would be an attempt at best. These seemed to be the general, softly spoken rules of online dance, and, like a force, Ron Brown disrupted my complacency to skate by. In our first week, I was surprised by how attentive and spacious he intended for the workshop to be, willing to give individual corrections to multiple people and elaborate on those corrections until he feels comfortable with their understanding.