Photo: Robbie Sweeny

Dance as Event: An Interview with Lauren Simpson about DANCE EXHIBIT

By Jill Randall

Last week I got to sit down with choreographer Lauren Simpson about her 5-night run of DANCE EXHIBIT at the Minnesota Street Project in San Francisco from May 9-18, 2019. Read Lauren’s full artist profile on Life as a Modern Dancer here.

What are 5 words or phrases to describe DANCE EXHIBIT?

Objects

Agency

Labor

Seen/unseen

Women

What is the role of beauty? Is beauty of relevance to this work?

I think about beauty in the context of this space — as in a visual arts, white cube space. The ways choreographers tend to understand  and make beauty is between bodies. A black box lends itself to this. The focus is around action between people in the center of the theater space. Here I am in a white box meant for art work to live on walls, plinths, and surfaces. So for me when I an working in dance in the white cube, it became no surprise the beauty seemed to arise from the bodies in relationship to the walls, edges, and surfaces as much as they relate to each other.

Can you talk more about the site-specific nature of the project?

Primarily, I have not been thinking of this work as a site-specific work. It has a thematic thread connected to ideas not inherent to the space (labor, women, the role of objects and materials in our lives), and they are themes I’ve explored in theaters and elsewhere. Nonetheless there were things to consider which a site-specific choreographer would also need to — natural lights (there are skylights and large glass doors), physical features of the space (most prominently, 12 huge I-beams bisecting the center of the performance space), and flow of the audience.

Please share a little about each dancer. What do you love and appreciate about each collaborator?

Lydia Clinton: I love her professionalism and heart. She brings both with equal force.

Marlie Couto: I am very grateful for her confidence in herself and in me.

Arletta Anderson: I love her clarity of being. It goes beyond her as a dancer.

Cauveri Madabushi Suresh: I love that Cauveri  is freshly out of academia and still in an intellectual headspace of theory and questioning and scholarship.

Virginia Broyles: I love her humor and levity. She is fast — fast to learn, fast to make.

Dance as event. Talk me through the night.

The show begins with the option to purchase drinks and snacks from the adjacent restaurant, Besharam. You can carry these treats around with you as you view art we commissioned from Dana Hemenway and Brion Nuda Rosch. There’s a soft start around 7:45pm which includes a sound installation and the dancers reorganizing the space. 8pm marks the start of the performance. At 8:40pm the post-show speaker begins. There are many points of entry to the event, from food to visual art to dance to talks.

On vulnerability, risk taking, and the audience:

Something distinctive to this show is the speaker series.I have asked five people from the arts community to offer talks from various lenses. Since I am not entirely sure how the talks will unfold, it’s quite an improvisational part of the evening for me. It feels somewhat risky in that these lenses can really shape the way the audience thinks and feels about the work. I asked them to follow a three part format: Tell us who you are and what is your research/area of interest. Two, how is that topic present in or related to DANCE EXHIBIT? Three, they are free to ask the artists and audience questions connected to their topic.

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DANCE EXHIBIT with Lauren Simpson Dance

Minnesota Street Project

1275 Minnesota Street in the Dogpatch neighborhood of SF

Please arrive at 7:30pm

 

Show dates and post-show speaker schedule:

Thursday, May 9 Marie Tollon, Writer in Residence, ODC Theater

Topic: Lingering between the inanimate and animate: What are the ways dance and visual arts cross pollinate?

 

Friday, May 10 Sarah Hotchkiss, Artist and Visual arts editor, KQED

Topic: The performativity of things

 

Thursday, May 16 Karl Evangelista, Composer

Topic: Abstraction and Activism – An Improviser's View Into the Politics of Art

 

Friday, May 17 Claudia LaRocco, Writer and Editor, SFMOMA Open Space

Topic: There is a way in which the translator must love failure

 

Saturday, May 18 Gerald Casel, Choreographer

Topic:  Race and Abstraction

 

Ticket link: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/dance-exhibit-tickets-56688790699

More about the show: https://www.laurensimpsondance.com/upcoming-performances

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