Culturebot caught up with playwright Eliza Clark and asked her Five Questions. Eliza’s play EDGEWISE, directed by Trip Cullman, will be given its world-premiere in a co-production by the Off-Broadway companies Page 73 and The Play Company, with previews set to begin November 9 and opening night set for November 17 at the Walkerspace (46 Walker St.) in Tribeca.

1. Where did you grow up and how did you end up where you are now?

I grew up in Darien, CT. I moved to New York City right after college and then moved to Los Angeles about a year ago to write for the AMC show, “Rubicon.” I’m loving being back in New York for EDGEWISE, especially in November. November in LA is weird. It’s not okay for it to get dark at 4:30 pm if it’s going to be eighty degrees during the day.

2. Which performance, song, play, movie, painting or other work of art had the biggest influence on you and why?

There have been so many. I watched the INDIANA JONES movies religiously as a kid. I think I’ve seen each of them nine hundred times, including TEMPLE OF DOOM. JD Salinger’s FRANNY AND ZOOEY and the accompanying books about the Glass family have influenced how I write about young people and how I acted as a young person. But probably the show that had the biggest influence on me is LES MISERABLES. It was the second play I ever saw (the first was THE SECRET GARDEN), and theater hit me hard on that first viewing. I was obsessed immediately. I was a child actor for a little while and got to do Les Mis on the national tour and in NYC. So this show shaped my love of theater in every way – I love the way that story is told, epically and with music. I loved traveling around the northeast in a bus with a bunch of weirdo theater people to do this crazy show every night. I loved getting a black eye painted on my face every night (on the tour I even got to do it myself!). I loved seeing so many people come together to make all of this magic happen. Though I played Young Cosette, I was the understudy for Gavroche and got to play the role twice on Broadway. I cannot even describe how cool it felt to die on stage. The show made me fall in love with on-stage violence, high stakes, and musicals. Les Mis made me crazy for theater and I will see it every single time I am ever presented with an opportunity.

3. What skill, talent or attribute do you most wish you had and why?

I really want to be in a band. When I was about twelve, I got my first guitar and instead of learning how to actually play it, I immediately began writing highly moralistic/emo songs about teen pregnancy and homelessness. I was not a cool child. I wish I had learned how to play that guitar for real and I wish my singing voice sounded better on cool indie music than it does on say, Silent Night. I have the kind of singing voice that sounds better in a chorus. But I would love to be a really talented musician. I would even settle for being one of those people who stands up to sing karaoke and makes the whole place shut up. I’ve always been jealous of those people. Karaoke sharks.

4. What do you do to make a living? Describe a normal day.

Well, I used to be a nanny/college essay editor, but in the last year I’ve been lucky enough to be writing for a living. I’ve been writing for RUBICON for the last year and so a typical day was going into an office to make up stories with some of my favorite writers in the universe. It’s a pretty great day really. And then the last couple weeks has been going into a rehearsal room to watch these ridiculously amazing actors and the supremely talented Trip Cullman bring my play to life. While Rubicon is on hiatus, I am working on a pilot and trying to get into a bunch of the writing work I’ve been putting off. Those days include a lot of hair pulling and gratuitous eating.

5. Have you ever had to make a choice between work and art? What did you choose, why, and what was the outcome?

I have been very lucky to not have to make that choice yet. I’m surrounded by a lot of really supportive people, especially my parents, who have encouraged me to do whatever I have to to make it happen (and have helped to pick me up in times when I needed it). I hope that art will be my work forever and ever.

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1. What is it about the wilderness that prompted this work? Or was there something else?
It is hard to remember now what prompted the work. I had been playing with the word “wilderness” for a while. I had written it down on a piece of paper and had it tacked up on a board. I thought it might make a good name for a piece and thought I was mostly in love with just the sound of the “w” and the “ld”. At around the same time, I was watching a lot of Kurosawa–and was especially struck by Ikuru–and I had come across this film by Reygadas called “Japon.” And the connection for me in both films was this theme of men coming to the end of their lives and how in preparing for that crossing they completely rearrange their relationship to their own lives, their own actions/work, selves. And so, I was thinking about boundaries and crossings and transformation–and that began to be attached to this word I had tacked up on my board. I had also just finished premiering a piece at DTW called “Center of Sleep” that took place within an immersive sound and set installation, and I was really curious about creating a situation in which the performance environment was not only unfamiliar for the audience but was also, in important ways, unknown to the performers. To create a meeting ground… where the performers had to “read” the audience to make their way through the piece. These themes of crossings/boundaries/unknown situations seemed really pertinent to me about the essence of live performance–the audience walking into an unknown situation, the spaces between performer and audience, performer and space, audience and space, etc–and Wilderness became a way of talking about this in a formal, structural way.

2. What excites you most about making interactive work? I read the DTW blog about the Coffee and Conversation talk which suggests to audience members to let the notion of the ‘fourth wall’ go.  For “Wilderness,” were you intentionally removing the ‘fourth wall’ or were you thinking in different terms? I don’t think of the work in those terms: interactive or fourth wall. The Fourth Wall for me is a theatrical term that I don’t feel I have a relationship with right now–mainly b/c “fourth wall” is flat and square and picture-based, and I have been dealing in relationships. I think my questions very early on when I made Cartography in 2002 at The Old American Can Factory were about proximity. I wanted the audience to be close to the material. I wanted to change the physical relationship to the performer. So we played with great distance and with close proximity. And later it became a question about perspective, a freedom to relocate and reframe. To be active in how as an audience member you structure your experience by where your attention takes you. Not just by what you notice in the space but how physically close you place yourself and how you engage with it with your own presence and how that alters everything in the room for the performers and the other audience members. I wanted to create a situation, a scenario and to be clear about what that was.

3. What are essential aspects of a successful collaboration for you? For me, collaborations have been about discovering people and then finding a language. I tend to work with people b/c there is something in their approach or their way of thinking and making that I am attracted to or find infuriating or I am curious about. I like being challenged and I am often most curious about my negative reactions. My process tends to be to pile everything on, be pretty accepting of all input and then go about severely weeding. So, I suppose I need to work with people who are not too precious about what they make and who can talk about it incessantly. For me, it is all about the editing process and I am slow at it b/c I really like to consider every aspect of it. I think that can get exhausting but that is how my mind works. I never want to say “no” right away. I am interested in the possibilities I have not considered until I am absolutely convinced of a choice.

4. You went through a kind of, for want of a better word, “identity” change not too long ago. Or your work did. Or your working name did. What prompted a canary torsi? Is there something about new media and/or new mediums that serve you better? There were a few things that prompted a canary torsi… I was having a very visceral reaction to what I felt was a pull to institutionalize: to have a 501 (c) 3–to have a company. I didn’t want a company. I so wanted to divest myself from all of that baggage on the work. I love the people I work with and I didn’t want to be their boss. I had called the group Yanira Castro + Company for years out of laziness. It seemed like that is what you did and I was young. I was at a point where it just made no sense to me anymore…I had a real aversion to it… so I decided for a name change. Only to get on the other side and feel: what the fuck! A name! The responsibility of finding the “right” name was clearly impossible… so like a good post-Judsonite… I took to the roll of the dice. And hence the name. I wanted it to be absurd b/c it felt like a ridiculous situation. But like all experiments, it came to have meaning: The Canary was a popular dance style in the 16th Century (http://www.streetswing.com/histmain/z3cnery1.htm) and one of the meanings of “torsi” is a “truncated or unfinished thing.” It was completely chance but also fortuitous… a canary torsi… an incomplete social dance.

About new media or mediums… it wasn’t so much that they serve better but that I had an interest in them, and I was interested in how encapsulated performances are in time and space and I wanted to find a way for the work to seep out of those boundaries a little bit. The fictional Twitter feeds of two lovers for Dark Horse/Black Forest served as a way to access the piece outside of the performance space and time and to have a relationship to it prior to coming into the work. It also meant that someone anywhere could have a lense into it. With Wilderness, we wanted to create a video game to accompany it. We ran out of time and sources, but I am dedicated to the idea of creating alternate worlds for a work that can be differently accessed.

5. How has your view of yourself as an artist changed in the past 10 years? 20? When I started making work I was young… right out of college… and I think my attitude was to try as many things as I could. So, I dabbled and made many 10/15/20 minute dances as experiments in a style or form. I can say that now looking back, but at the time… I was just responding to what I was seeing. It wasn’t a conscious “education”, but in hindsight… that is how you go about honing a craft. Because I was not really trained as a dancer and I was not very interested in dancing for anyone… I was just fascinated by how dances worked. I feel like my first 8 years in NYC was 101. And then at a certain point, I got bored and I think that was when I started asking better questions. And in many ways, that is when I feel I really started making my own work–in 2002 with Cartography. The work, after that, was not so much a reaction to what I was seeing but to my own questions. With time, those questions get more and more specific and personal. I am sure there will be a time when I am bored of my own questions as well and I don’t know what the next thing will be after that… what propels after that. But I trust that is the nature of making work for an extended period of time…constant relocation.

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Keely Garfield is in the midst of her latest “eruption” (as Claudia LaRocco calls it) at Duo Multicultural Arts Center (DMAC) this weekend. “Twin Pines” runs tonight and tomorrow at 8pm. For those wary of modern-day hallucinogens, Keely serves up a good, chemical-free, inducement of altered states.

I remember doing a 10-day Vipassana meditation many years ago and actually had the entire treatment for a violent HK style action movie done in my head half way through my time there. So what was it about the jackhammer in your mind during your retreat that prompted this latest investigation? Hmm…um…well…where was I? Er…god.  Here.  Ok.  And then, the dropping into the space between my ears, between I hate him and I love her.  Between long, long ago and the very far away distant distance.  What would it look like to make a dance that looked like the contents of my head?  The stage suddenly overcrowded with rundown runamuck random riots and then belligerently boring bits. A gestalt and a quietude.  What would happen if I met the buddha on this road? Would I kill her?  And then it was irresistible.  I had to know what an actual moving meditation would look like, feel like, sound like and where it would take me that was different from where I had been before.  Wake up!

I recall seeing you on 4^th St. soon after reading a FB post about you hauling a tree stump up many stairs this past June. How did working at DMAC impact the work you made? Twin Pines happens on all three floors of DMAC.  To be clear.  “Stump” is performed in the third floor studio and “Flesh” occurs on stage. In between, “Mulch Milch,” a film created by myself and Brandin Steffensen after the tornado that brought trees down outside our house in Brooklyn blocking the front door, plays on the second floor at intermission.  During my extended residency at DMAC, there was construction going on.  Jackhammers, literally, accompanied our every move.  Dust rained through the cracks in the ceiling.  One day I thought it would be wonderful to have a tree in the piece. When I went down into the street they were piling up stumps of a tree that was being cut down and hauled out of the marble cemetery.  One by one, I carried 7 of those stumps up five flights of stairs.  All the time chanting to myself, ” I have no body, I have no mind, I am just the breath of life…”  My heart nearly burst through my chest and then I realized that even though I now had my tree, I had no guarantee that they would make the piece any better.  Today, when I went to buy cat food – there is a phantom cat in the work given voice to eventually as part of the soundtrack by Sasha the resident DMAC cat – the guy asked me if I wanted a free box of tissues and he handed me a box with a picture of twin pine trees on it. DMAC is a channel, a place in between worlds; It’s very special.

You’ve got a great crew with you once again. What does collaboration mean to you? Choreography is an inherently collaborative art, collective act.  Choreography is simply a vehicle for dancing.  Omagbitse, Brandin, Anthony and I dance together.  Matthew sings his dance.  We are all alive at the same moment.  In many ancient mythologies the “whole man” consisted of: a natural body.. a spiritual body.. a heart…. a double… a soul… a shadow.. an intangible ethereal casing or spirit, a form and a name. Now, that’s collaboration!

What is yoga to you? Listening. Compassion in action.  The pause at the bottom of the breath out, and the miracle of the breath in. Barely there and beautiful. Also, I work as an integrative yoga therapist with people dealing with cancer and witnessing people drop into themselves through this practice is inspiring and makes making dances for me more valiant, more real, more imperative.

How have you changed as an artist in the past 10 years? 20? You’re kidding right?  Well…I used to be very interested in choreography with a capital C. You know, making things with a beginning, middle and end, space and time etc.  Now I am much more interested in dancing with a capital D and I like things that are too long, lopsided, heavy handed and barely there.  I used to spend a lot of time thinking about dances, now I want more time to read…

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Patricia Hoffbauer is at Danspace Project this week on a shared program with The Adventure, in the culminating event of Trajal Harrell’s Platform “certain difficulties, certain joy.”

What prompted this latest piece?

I wanted to go back to the studio and make work. I hadn’t done that for a while!

What kind of environments did you need to establish to develop this work?

I really wanted time to work and research ideas and texts, visual and written, that dealt with the idea of “paradise is elsewhere.”  I started out working with this idea of the “ethnographic other” so prevalent in early representations of the Americas. I wanted to see how I could develop another perspective than the one George and I created with The Architecture of Seeing. I was teaching at Princeton last year and was able to get research funds to do exactly that.

Is there a specific take on academia that you employed?

I have always lived vicariously through academic friends discussing ideas that somehow applied to making dances and then years ago when I started developing this course “bodies in cultural landscape” that I have adapted to the seminar course I teach at Hunter.  I realized that I was engaged by teaching in a similar way to how I am engaged when I perform. But the idea of “lecturing” was always a kind of complicated question for me. As a dancer we are usually not educated in the dialectics of ideas, at least not in dance departments, as a lot of the time is dedicated to the accomplishment of technical control and physical virtuosity. But when I realized I could actually have lots of discussing and have that be the main drive informing the students’ work, I was sold. The physical practice became more intertwined with the philosophical kinesthetics of the mind…and this is all without becoming overly theoretical.  The movement is clearly coming out of each student’s experience. Clearly the work is for the classroom for now, not the street, the gallery or the stage, but I have learned so much in the last 10 years with my teaching of these more theoretical texts. So yes, long answer short- I took this idea of a performative lecture that is at the center of this piece from my years of teaching.

Is there something about cultural difference that excites you or challenges you?

I don’t even know exactly what that is anymore.Yes, I have mostly made work about difference, being different, existing in a different environment than the one I grew up in but the funny thing is the more I deal with difference the more it becomes the same.  I like to learn about my bias with sameness and challenge that too. But now, for example, the thought of moving to a place where most people would have similar origin’s to mine, is just nauseating.  I miss NY when I am away, the way in which my life here covers so many different territories, from teaching movement in a pre-k class with my little one to preparing my classes to being a dancer with Yvonne to making work with my co-horts to taking the kids to watch a silly animation movie on a Friday evening…

What do you think about passion?

That is so funny you ask. Yvonne Rainer does this most brilliant lecture about “Passion” now when we go on tour.  It’s called “Where is the Passion?” and no one is better than her to talk about what’s up with PASSION….but I would always bring it up to her because when I show Trio A, at Hunter and elsewhere, some students ask me “Where is the passion???” They get totally freaked out that Trio A expresses passion differently than say, Ailey’s “Cry, ” not that they only understand that kind of “passion” but that they are mostly only exposed to a very specific kind of “Passion.” But I was so happy last semester when at Hunter one student said that the passion in Trio A was clearly expressed in the fact that this dancer on the tape (Rainer herself) was constantly shifting focal points and that to him expressed a kind of insecure confidence in a passionate pursuit… Yes…passion, maybe that is now what Trajal is calling “certain joys” in his curatorial title for the Platform Series that Para-dice is a part of.  Joy is passionate, I am invested in finding joy as in laughter and irony..a deeper kind of joy..It would be great if the idea of  “passion” was stretched to include more than only certain prescribed states of mind and body.

What is the value of collaboration?

I cannot create anything in isolation. The basics of everything I do is collaboration. I collaborated with Peggy Gould to create this duet in Para-dice for her and I during a year plus. I might have some clear idea about something but I always need to know if its working with the other people too and how else we could do that same idea. I just made a piece for the NYU 2nd Ave Dance Company and I had a great time collaborating with the dancers. I remember when I was in that company during my senior year at NYU more than 2 decades ago and the choreographers that came to work with us were very clear that we were not worth a dialogue, an exchange with, and they “set” some piece “on” us.  I learned nothing from that experience…just a kind of strange humiliation.  But this time at NYU I really was so into working with the dancers and getting to know who they were. I could only do that if I was interested in collaborating with them.

What is different about you as an artist now versus 10 years ago? 20?<

I am much much older..hahahahh! I have worked through every injury and I know my body better now. I know how to be more economical and I am not as provoked by things around me…although i can still work on that for the rest of my life.  I can concentrate quicker, I know how I feel quicker and I can better articulate what is going on around and inside of me quicker. I am still interested in similar projects, I am still wondering how to mold different languages into a convoluted whole.  I remember when I auditioned for Fresh Tracks in 1986 and David White left this message on my machine saying how messy and disorganized the work was and that yes, the panel was taking the piece but only if I was willing to clean it up…yes, I am still interested in creating chaotic work that doesn’t feel artificial and superficial.

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I asked Brian Rogers, the Artistic Director of The Chocolate Factory, and choreographer Ivy Baldwin, whose “Here Rests Peggy” opened there yesterday (and runs through next week) a few questions about their relationship to the venue.

To Brian:

What does an artist like Ivy offer the field? Ivy (in my view) is one of the few young dance artists who (a) is sincere and smart and is really trying to push the boundaries of something and (b) is making full on physical dance pieces. She is out of step with a lot of the work that’s happening now and for me, that’s totally inspiring.
How does time at The Chocolate Factory help her do that? I really love watching artists grapple with and respond to the weird quirks and challenges and charms of the space. It’s kind of impossible to work here without asking hard questions about architecture and space and how it relates to you artistically. Ivy is collaborating with an amazing visual artist named Anna Schuleit – and I don’t want to speak for them, but I think it’s been really helpful for them to have these two weeks in the space. Just speaking generally, when we give artists the keys and invite them to make themselves at home, you really see the difference in the work.

To Ivy:

What has the Choco Fac residency offered you that enhanced your creative process?An abundance of time and space! It is a very unique opportunity to rehearse and finish a new work in the space that it will be performed. We have been rehearsing in the theater almost daily since October 4. The Chocolate Factory feels like Here Rests Peggy’s real home, not just a place we’ve show up to perform in. The residency has also made so many other things possible that would not have been easily accomplished otherwise. The most obvious is the 10 x 23 foot wall I had built in the space that is now a painting by artist Anna Schuleit.

What was your research/working process like for this work? I’m especially interested in sharing a little about how your time in Italy influenced your work. Again, it is all about having time and space to think and work. The Bogliasco Fellowship in Italy allowed for exactly that. While there, not only did I have my own dance studio to work in, I also had the opportunity to see numerous museums, including Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery in Venice. The title is taken from the simple inscription on Peggy Guggenheim’s grave, which is nestled in the gallery’s sculpture garden. Also, Anna Schuleit’s painting studio was adjacent to mine and it was during this time that we began talking of working together. Many months later when I began working with my cast here in NYC, I started by teaching them the solo I had made for myself in Italy. But, because I work very collaboratively with my dancers the piece has traveled a long way from these initial inspirations. The work now includes their imaginations, interpretations and life experiences as well.

How do you tend to work with collaborators? Each relationship is very different but all have been a real joint effort. Lots of discussions!  Justin Jones, my sound designer, lives in Minneapolis. Our process is unique in that we collaborate long distance. Through electronic back and forth and a few visits by Justin to NYC, we work together to fine tune the music to the dancing.  My collaboration with artist Anna Schuleit has included me visiting her studio in NH and her traveling to NYC to see rehearsals. A final decision regarding what the set for Peggy would look like did not happen until we started our residency at the C.F. and discovered that we could build a giant wall. It was an exciting process of influencing and inspiring each other as we both finished our pieces during the residency.

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David Thomson appears in Ralph Lemon’s “How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere” at BAM this week. The work’s development was detailed here on Culturebot.

You’re about half way through the tour and just got back from San Francisco yesterday. How are you doing? Well, it’s a grueling work, what I call an ice-bag piece.  The work is such an intense physical journey that by the end of each performance, you are very spent.  You are at a place of exhaustion and you find yourself crying and don’t know why.  Your defenses are so worn down; it’s like peeling an onion.  The piece has a confessional and memorial aspect to it.  This is really like life.  It is art, but it’s also living.  The Q&A sessions have been fascinating. There was a woman at The Krannert Center who said she’s seen a lot of dance and wanted to leave, but stayed to the end and got it. As much as it is art, it has this human quality to it that honors life.

How was this working process with Ralph? It is very collaborative in that much of the movement vocabulary is unique to each of us.  It is developed via a number of processes, with discrete structures inside it that the audience might not actually see. You might see commonality and not know what the structure is.  This work developed out of Ralph’s last work.  It’s a progression from the last work, which had much more narrative, but, this is one is about reduction.  There is purity or essentialness that is on offer. During the process of building we worked on re-patterning our bodies and agreeing on the process and form. We each have individual source material and journeys throughout the piece, but we also share key words that were used in the building process.  We didn’t have a lot of time in development. It was about 12 weeks over 2.5 years, separated over large gaps of 6 months in between. We would have to relearn material, re-develop stamina.  Each time it was another mountain to climb.

What else makes Ralph’s work important to you? There are several components to the work aside from our performance of it.  Ralph has been presenting the other creative art work and source material that is related to what happens on stage.  This time, there is “Meditation” at The Kitchen on Oct 17 and the other aspects of “House.” I think it is important to understand that the identity of an artist is not simply tied to the live performance.  Our work is not simply what happens on the stage; we’re limiting the art form thinking that way.  We should be expanding the dialogue and Ralph does that.  But, while he is a very special artist, he’s not alone – Trisha and Merce toured their ‘other’ art work.  Given technology and our multidisciplinary capabilities there can be more support for multifaceted manifestations of an artists vision.  What I love about Ralph is that he gives space for people to enter the work from different angles.  So, at BAM he’s selling the text from his monologue and that gives the audience something to hold onto.  The text becomes an artifact, and artifacts become important. Call it artifact, call it product, it memento – it holds value and can serve as a source of income. It opens up more possibilities.

What do you plan to do with your upcoming Studio Series Residency at DTW? Before Studio Series, I’m doing Sarah Maxfield’s “One Shot” internet video relay on the 24^th of October.  For me, the DTW residency is just about play and time and a chance to just invite people into the process.  I’m waiting to see what I’m developing once I’m in the studio. I don’t want to become a choreographer, this creative time is simply another route for exploration and not the first step in my choreographic career.  I’ve collaborated with many choreographers, I’m not interested in pursuing that career. It’s antithetical to my desires.

How have you changed as a dancer over the years? Well, 20 years ago I was working with Trisha. I remember coming here to NY and saying “Wow” when I met people who had danced with Merce in the 60s.  It doesn’t feel as long ago as it sounds.  One of the beauties of this piece with Ralph is that it is helping me to understand to let go of judgment.  I’m trying to not look for outside approval, which I think is an inherent struggle – whether you get a good review or dealing with what people say afterwards. I approach this piece with a certain amount of fear because it is so physically difficult, but also I can now say “This may be the last time you ever get to dance, so Live.”  I think it takes a lot of strength to do what you want to do. I think especially in this community, knowing how many eyes are on you and dealing with your own personal judgments. I’m re-examining my fears and the recurring idea of retiring.  But, if I didn’t get such interesting projects, I probably wouldn’t do it.  I’ll say I’m done, but then, Ralph calls and I think: “Wow, this is crazy. And now, here we are.”

Popularity: 1% [?]

Picture by Deborah Satter

Name: Tina Satter
Title/Occupation:  Writer/Director
Organization/Company: Half Straddle
URL: www.halfstraddle.com

1. Where did you grow up and how did you end up where you are now? I grew up in a very small town in New Hampshire called Hopkinton. I went to college in Maine and then moved to Portland, Oregon for a while where I became involved in theater and performance, and then went to grad school at Reed College where I started writing plays and directing them. New York was this abstract yearning under everything and I eventually moved here several years ago. After living here a year like a strange spinster haunting cultural events, I discovered Mac Wellman’s program at Brooklyn college and applied, which led me to meet amazing people, get quite inspired and really start making and showing my own work.

2. Which performance, song, play, movie, painting or other work of art had the biggest influence on you and why? The Nutcracker in Boston was my first, major event when I was six or seven that absolutely captivated me with the magic and precision of performance and seems to still be some kind of influence. My sister Deborah is a visual artist who makes really great stuff so her work and contemporary artists we both love are always in my mind. Studying Fornes at Reed and seeing Wooster Group’s House/Lights the first year I lived here were pretty big touchstones.

3. What skill, talent or attribute do you most wish you had and why? If I have something big to say when I’m walking, I stop walking and it’s been getting on people’s nerves lately. So, I guess it means I need to be more patient with things – if I can’t walk and talk I can tell my awesome idea to someone a little bit later.

4. What do you do to make a living? Describe a normal day. I work a day job as a copywriter at a digital media company in Union Square so I spend part of each weekday there. Rest of time is spent writing, planning, hustling or rehearsing for upcoming Half Straddle shows and working on plays and video pieces. Several nights a week, most weeks, I end up seeing some kind of performance thing on purpose, or by mistake.

5. Have you ever had to make a choice between work and art? What did you choose, why, and what was the outcome? Yes. I am still making that choice. Feel lucky overall to work a day job with great people who understand and support my art, but feel I could be a little more productive and less stressed if I did not have the office atmosphere regularly. But, some hilarious stuff happens there (and they have copiers, staples and computers which are also kind useful for my art, you know)—and it feels really amazing when I get to walk out of there into the freedom of my own time and then I’m excited to make stuff.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Photo by Kevin Kauer.

Name: Michael Rioux

Occupation: dancer/choreographer

Website: www.michaelrioux.com

1. Where did you grow up and how did you end up where you are now?

I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. St. Charles, it’s about an hour and fifteen minutes west of the city. In junior high I had to do a report on a career choice in my English class, and I picked choreographer because there was a lot of dance in music videos at that time. Paula Abdul, Janet Jackson, Michael Jackson, and somehow I got it in my head that I wanted to choreograph for music videos. So I did a report on a choreographer, and I read somewhere that most boys didn’t start dancing until later in life at around age 13. And I said, “Hey, I’m 13!,” and I went home and said, “Mom, I want to take dance classes.”

From that point on, I danced. I was offered a job at River North in Chicago right out of high school, and took that, and danced in Chicago for years. Then about five years ago I got really bored doing the same thing with the same people, and just needed to leave. So I picked Seattle because I had some friends there.

2. Which performance, song, play, movie, painting or other work of art had the biggest influence on you and why?

I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I have this vague recollection of seeing a Jackson Pollock painting when I was four, and it just blowing my mind apart. For some reason, it just made sense, and I think that was my first exposure to anything artistic.

3. What skill, talent or attribute do you most wish you had and why?

I wish I could sing. I wish I could play a musical instrument.

4. What do you do to make a living? Describe a normal day.

At the moment I work for a small construction firm. Now we’re adding a second story to a house. Before that I was working at an art gallery. I’ve done any number of things. I taught dance for a while. Worked in some warehouses.

5. Have you ever had to make a choice between work and art? What did you choose, why, and what was the outcome?

It’s never really ever been a choice, it’s always been art. I’ve been lucky enough that its only been very recently, since moving to Seattle, that I haven’t been able to support myself just through doing art, including the teaching. Through a combination of my performing and my teaching, I was always able to support myself. It’s only since moving to Seattle that I’ve had to supplement it with a job.

As a dancer, Michael Rioux has performed with most of Seattle’s top dance companies over the past year, including Salt Horse Performance, Scott/Powell, and lingo dance. At Portland, Oregon’s TBA Festival this year, he and collaborator Monica Mata Gilliam were invited to perform in the 22nd edition of Ten Tiny Dances.

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Name: Nellie Rainwater
Title/Occupation: Choreographer, Dancer, Teacher
URL (s): www.rainwaterdances.org

1. Where did you grow up and how did you end up where you are now?

I grew up in Rhode Island.  I sort of made a circuitous route to New York after going to college in Minnesota, and then living in Korea, and Washington, D.C. for a few years. When I finished undergrad, I did not expect to be dancing in my professional life, but once I found out that life was pretty unbearable without dance, I decided I needed to weave dance back into my life and make it all work somehow.  I ended up dancing for a few modern dance companies in DC, and I moved to NYC for grad school at Tisch School of the Arts/NYU in 2008.  In May, I finished my M.F.A. in Dance and started Rainwater Dances.

2. Which performance, song, play, movie, painting or other work of art had the biggest influence on you and why?

It’s hard to choose one thing!  Well, I double-majored in Dance and English in college, and one of my favorite books from then and now is Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill.  I first read it in a creative writing class, and I think one of the things about it that really stuck a chord with me was the rawness of the characters and the brutal honesty of her stories.  I am also fascinated by gender roles, and I love how she explores those dynamics without compromising what is true.  She does a wonderful job of balancing really complex characters and situations with such sweet, simple and direct language.  I love those paradoxes.  The biggest lesson I get from reading her work is to follow my instincts, even the weird ones — even when it’s easier to resist and do something safe.  I try to go to those quirky places, because that specificity and detail is what makes the work original.  I’m still learning and digging, but I think that being true to the peculiarity of my own voice actually allows people to connect with the art I create on a deeper level.  I hope so anyway!

3. What skill, talent or attribute do you most wish you had and why?

I am a huge introvert, but I love performing, which I know is a bit ironic.  Also, in terms of choreography, most of the time I try really hard to let my work stand for itself.  I feel as though each dance piece should be like a poem that exists in a space beyond words.  I like a certain amount of ambivalence in my dances and for that reason I don’t always enjoy talking about my work, and I’m really not very good at it!  I can be very bumbling and roundabout when trying to describe a dance, even when the piece comes from an idea that I have put a great deal of thought into.  I’m so focused on expression through movement that it can be difficult  for me to translate dance into conversation.  So for that reason, I have often wished for the ability to be at ease as a public speaker.  It would be so much easier if I could just articulate myself in an intelligible way without shyness getting in the way.  It’s something I’m working on.

4. What do you do to make a living? Describe a normal day.

Right now I make a living through teaching yoga and doing arts administrative work.  A typical day includes giving myself a yoga class in the morning, working in the office, and rehearsing with my dancers or teaching a yoga class in the evening.  After being in school for two years, I forgot how hard it is to work in an office for extended periods of time.  Movement is so important for all our bodies and minds!  Especially for dancers though, it is so easy for us to get depressed if we’re not dancing.  You just have to keep moving no matter what.

5. Have you ever had to make a choice between work and art? What did you choose, why, and what was the outcome?

When I was living in D.C.,  I had just started an administrative job when I got a dance gig with Meisha Bosma, a choreographer who was doing a show with a live symphony orchestra.  I felt really badly because I think it was literally during my first week of work that I had to ask my manager at the office if I could drastically reduce my hours.  Ultimately, though, I knew I had to choose the art.  And the office ended up being understandable and flexible, which I was also very grateful for.

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Name: Belinda McKeon
Occupation: Writer
URL: www.belindamckeon.com

1. Where did you grow up and how did you end up where you are now?

I grew up on a small farm in Co. Longford in the Irish midlands. I moved to Dublin to go to university, and after that, I began to work as a freelance journalist in the city. Visting New York in 2004 made me realize that I wanted to live there for a while – I loved the city from the first day I experienced it – and we moved there in 2005. We live in Brooklyn. But we go back to Ireland often. The two places don’t seem that far apart.

2. Which performance, song, play, movie, painting or other work of art had the biggest influence on you and why?

I was lucky enough to discover the fiction of the Irish writer John McGahern when I was a teenager, and it taught me lessons – lessons I’m still learning – about language and care and rhythm – and restraint, most of all about restraint. His novel Amongst Women will probably always be my tuning fork (to use another notion I learned from him). There have been – so far – many other influences, many of them gleaned during the years I went to the theatre almost nightly as part of my work as an arts writer with the Irish Times: for example, companies like Druid and Rough Magic, and their visionary productions of classic and modern plays. I admire the paintings of Hughie O’Donoghue, in all their richness and their sorrow, and similarly, the photographs of Willie Doherty. Tacita Dean’s short film on the poet Michael Hamburger is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. I love the opening scene of Silent Light by Carlos Reygadas. And recently, I was struck by the quiet beauty of two very different collections of images: the rediscovered, century-old color photographs of Russia by Prokudin-Gorsky, and Denny Renshaw’s shots of the BQE, which makes a racket just blocks from my door.

3. What skill, talent or attribute do you most wish you had and why?

I’m not very patient. I want to get everything done now. I’d like to be able to take things slowly and enjoy the way there.

4. What do you do to make a living? Describe a normal day.

To make a living, I write, some of which is journalism, and I curate arts events, including two poetry festivals, one in Dublin, one in New York. A typical day involves me telling myself I’m not going to check email first thing, I’m going to write instead, and then I usually go ahead and check email anyway. Because a lot of my work is still connected to Ireland, the time difference can sometimes make mornings a bit of a rush; by the time I get to my desk, the working day is halfway through in Ireland, and deadlines don’t change just because of time zones. Then in the afternoon, I write for a few hours. At the moment, I’m working on the edits of my first novel and doing embryonic work on a second one. At this stage, because I really don’t trust myself not to fall into the email/google rabbithole, I’m back to writing longhand again. I have a good room in which to work at home, but if I can get myself out and into the New York Public Library on 42nd Street, all the better. I like the atmosphere in the Rose Reading Room a lot. Or maybe it’s the smell of wood polish I like. Maybe they’re the same thing.

5. Have you ever had to make a choice between work and art? What did you choose, why, and what was the outcome?

See above. Email sometimes wins. But seriously, I have been very lucky. I get to write for most of the day. I know that’s not something to take for granted.

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Graham & Frost, Irish writer Belinda McKeon’s eviscerating drama of three men who clash at a corner restaurant in Italian Williamsburg, will be playing Thursday, September 16 – Sunday, October 3, 2010.

Part of the 1st Irish Theatre Festival, Graham & Frost reflects the festival’s mission of sharing the work of Ireland’s prominent artists with New York audiences. Award-winning writer Belinda McKeon, a celebrated figure on the Irish arts scene, is currently under commission with the Abbey Theatre. Her first novel, Solace, is due out in the US and UK in 2011.

[Photo by Miles Lowry]

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