Jodi Melnick
Today we share ideas and stories from four artists who have written for the blog during the past half year. Click on any name to read an artist's full profile.
As I have always felt since the beginning of my dancing career – I believe in the profound expression and importance of the body, especially as I am getting older.
My 50s: Choreographing and performing in my own work, making work for others, and teaching. Taking a little time off, paying attention to my personal life, and went on my first vacation! (That actually started in my late 40s.) Still exploring the collaborative relationship with artists.
I do something everyday: 1-1.5 hours of yoga and/or my own warm-up before rehearsal. I teach by example, so I am always moving. If it is warm enough outside, I also run for about a half hour a couple times a week.
Jo Kreiter (San Francisco, CA)
In my 50s, which have just begun, I want to take the model of community informed site work I have been cultivating these last 20 years to places that are not my own city. This is an ambitious goal but I am up for the challenge. We’ll see how it goes.
Current movement practices and care for the body:
Weekly dance technique, yoga and light aerial training. Occasional contract improv, climbing at the gym, and Pilates. I spend a lot of time raising my son, so my own training has taken a bit of a back seat to what it used to be. But I really like to be warmed up for my own rehearsals, first because I jump in and out of sections to show something or develop something so it is a strategy for injury prevention, and second because I think I am a better choreographer when I lead with my body.
How do you balance artistry with administration/logistics?
I try to dance or do something in the physical realm every day, to keep myself in balance. I am a much better administrator when my body is happy. I try to outsource the tasks I am not good at, or that make me incredibly irritable. After 20 years, I am now, for the first time, about to hire a paid staff person. I am really wanting a partner to help me grow the business of Flyaway. This is a new desire for me, and thankfully the funding community here in SF has come through to make it so.
Please tell us about your most current project. Are you performing?
I am creating Chromatic, a collaboration with visual artist Suzanne Bocanegra and percussionist/composer Jason Treuting. We are co-creators and co-directors of the work, and we also perform in it. The work centers around Joseph Albers’s book Interaction of Color. This foundational text of minimalist painting and color theory serves as a kind of script to structure our explorations of color as a subject and experience.
Perception is a key theme of the book, and we make visual, sound and movement experiments that provoke close examinations of one thing in proximity to another. Do these juxtapositions shift or heighten our perceptions?
What keeps you passionate about making dances after all this time?
I continue to make dances because when I stop, I begin to miss it. I am very at home in the studio with dancers – that might even be one of my definitions of home. I feel relieved of self-consciousness and my attention is fully engaged. It's also just a hell of a lot of fun.
Please pose three questions for choreographers to consider:
This is hard. I feel like I start from scratch each time I enter a new project… but here goes…questions in clusters. I write these as reminders to myself — and recognize that they are true until they are not.
Spend a lot of time coming up with questions that compel or promote a movement language that is specific to the work. What are the physical signatures that arise, and how do they support your ideas? Pay rapturous and exhaustive attention to details, including costumes, sound, sets and lights. Choose your collaborators well.
How do you attend to and support the unfamiliar or unexpected? Or more importantly, how do you subvert expectations? Be willing to tackle provocative or difficult material, but be cautious of trying to be provocative, (or absurd or funny). The more unusual the content, the more finely constructed the form should be.
What can you do to enter into the act of making dance with greater sensitivity to and appetite for the unfathomable? Be willing to get dirty – to turn over rocks and look into the shadows.
Final thoughts – Hope/belief/love of the profession:
I’m all in with this dance/performance endeavor. Even as I continue to build on my skills as a teacher and choreographer, I still have big, tormenting questions about what matters and why. I love seeing the work of my peers and feel the most monumental sense of gratitude when I see my students making smart, provocative, enervating, radiantly rebellious work. I still haven’t made the dance I long to make…. Maybe just little shreds or moments of truth and liability…. Whatever that is. I love how dance makes me feel about the world, even in the midst of unaccountable cruelty. I love how dance changes what is available to us and teaches us how to watch things. I love touch and close and caring proximity to other people that happens in the rehearsal space or class. And I love how this physical inquisitiveness is unique to us.
————
Related posts:
The Choreographic Moment: Ideas from Jo Kreiter
Mitchell Rose's Film "Exquisite Corps"
Dancers in their 50s:
Peter DiMuro, Jennifer Monson, Keith Johnson, and Randee Paufve
Shelley Senter, Mike Barber, Valerie Gutwirth, Tina Fehlandt, and Eddie Martinez
—————————-
Life as a Modern Dancer 
Leave a comment