The Walworth Farce has been getting rave reviews on its first North American tour, first in Toronto, then in Columbus, OH, where the Post-Dispatch said “this provocative and ingenious work offers a clever and revealing portrait of how story-telling can become an escape from reality, even a prison … ” We’re expecting more of the same here — and very much looking forward to Walsh’s talk with Guthrie Theater artistic director Joe Dowling this Sunday.

Raimund Hoghe and his company have arrived in Minneapolis and are working with the Walker’s Events and Media Production department to set the stage for their premiere of Boléro Variations this Friday. If you missed Philip Bither’s eloquent and impassioned comments about Hoghe at last week’s performing arts season preview, you might turn to Bither’s colleague, Walter Jaffe, a co-founder of White Bird Dance in Portland, OR, who interviewed Hoghe recently in conjunction with the U.S. premiere of Boléro Variations at Portland’s TBA (Time-Based Art) Festival.

Hoghe and Jaffe cover an array of topics, including Hoghe’s admiration for ice-dancers Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean (whose Olympics performance to Ravel’s Boléro was a key inspiration for Hoghe), and the ways in which great singers are also great dancers (he mentions Callas and Piaf and Peggy Lee, among others). About his process, Hoghe says, “I’m fascinated when I feel that a little movement can tell a big story. If I could express it with words I would do it but I can’t—and therefore I do my work with dancers. Otherwise I still would work as a writer.” Read the full interview here.

Speaking of Hoghe’s work as a writer, well before he created his first dance pieces, Hoghe had developed a journalism career that included celebrity profiles for the German weekly Die Zeit as well as pieces on avant-garde or “fringe” artists—including Ana Mendieta, whose rarely seen films screened here last March. Bringing things full circle, it turns out that Walker director Olga Viso—curator of the retrospective Ana Mendieta: Earth Body, Sculpture and Performance 1972—85, author of the recently published scholarly tome Unseen Mendieta—is an admirer of Hogue’s writing and referenced it in organizing the Mendieta exhibition. No doubt she will be in the audience this weekend, perhaps looking for parallels between the Hoghe’s choreography and Mendieta’s performance pieces, both of which have strong links to ritual.

Julie Voigt writes:

I am one of the lucky ones to have had the extraordinary pleasure of working with Merce and his company over the years. I will never forget his grace, generosity, and strong yet quietly humble presence. I have many fond memories of Merce, but my favorites ones are of some of those unusual small moments that engaged my artistic imagination and gave me a glimpse into this man’s spirit.

There was Fluxarenarama in 1993, where we turned a downtown health club into a performance site to wander through and experience chance performance. The Merce Cunningham Dance Company (MCDC) took on the challenge of performing in the workout area, with their final dance presented on the basketball court.
There was that moment of joy on Merce’s face when he and his company first walked through Art Performs Life: Merce Cunningham/Meredith Monk/Bill T. Jones, a Walker exhibition that recognized the critical contribution he and the other artists made to the history of 20th-century performance.
There was also the 10^th anniversary of the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden in 1998, when MCDC performed a special Event for the Garden on an unusually hot fall day. The company’s shoes were literally melting onto the scorching dance floor, but they continued to dance beautifully across the stage as Merce proudly and calmly looked on.

But my fondest memory was this past September, when we produced Ocean in the Rainbow granite quarry in Waite Park, Minnesota. This site-specific production was by far the largest and most complex performance that any of us have ever done. Not an easy task to take a completely empty rock quarry and turn it into an outdoor performance site for 1000+ people each night. After months of hard work turning this seemingly crazy idea into reality, on the last few days it poured rain on many of the afternoons. All of us were on the edge of our seats, hoping it would stop in time for us to do the performances.

Luckily it did – until the final night, when, toward the end of the performance rain began to fall hard and we had to make the unfortunate call to stop the event. We were all feeling frustrated and very disappointed that the final night was cut short. But Merce just smiled and said to me – in an almost consoling way – that he actually embraced the uniqueness of that evening’s performance and that is was just Mother Nature stepping in to change the ending for him – a chance encounter with forces over and above us all that made that final artistic call.
I loved that moment. Merce told us that this performance experience was one of the highlights of his career. It was one of my personal highlights as well and I’m so very glad to have been a part of it.

Merce Cunningham once said that as long as he was breathing he was dancing. I’ve always thought that this was a remarkable way to live in and experience the world. Of course, the dance and cultural community all mourn the loss of Merce, one of the great choreographers of the last hundred years. Merce reshaped modern and contemporary dance: how it was created, how it looked, how it was experienced. He re-envisioned with some of his closest peers—Cage, Rauschenberg, and Johns to name some of his closest associates—how movement, music, light, and décor could come together to create something wholly new, intentionally unintended, and something that allowed each of the art forms to breathe at its own pace within a larger, more complex organism.

My first experience with Merce was through art history — you can’t take a post-war art course without coming across his innovations, often through the lens of his visual arts peers. However, my first true understanding of his work came a few years later. As a new transplant to New York, I found myself with nothing to do on a Friday night. I came across an announcement for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company season at City Center; out of curiosity I attended. I sat in rapt absorption through the entire show; I had always enjoyed dance, but until that moment I had never experienced it in such a visceral and engaging manner. I returned on Saturday. I returned on Sunday. In those three nights, Merce Cunningham changed my understanding, appreciation, and passion for dance, opening me to a vocabulary about which I was uninformed and which I breathed in wholeheartedly ever since.
While living in New York I never missed a season. From that first performance on, if Merce was in town, wherever I happened to be visiting or living, I was there. I can unequivocally say that I’ve seen more performances by Merce Cunningham (well over a dozen) than by any other single performing artist, and over the past few days I’ve been wrestling with what life will be like now that he’s gone. For nearly 20 years I’ve looked forward to my next experience of the athleticism and magic of his work. I never knew what to expect and relished the anticipation. Would the music be ethereal or intense? Would it be Cage, Tudor, Kosugi, Eno, Bryars, or someone fully unexpected? How would he make his own appearance (I remember the first time I saw his “chair dance,” and also the first time I realized that he would no longer be performing in that way)?

I once had the privilege of sitting at the back of an empty theater, watching him conduct class with his dancers — he was at the barre making subtle movements and directing the dancers, who understood implicitly what he was searching for and more often than not delivered it as intended. (The Company began a series called “Mondays with Merce,” which provided enthusiasts and dancers alike an opportunity to see inside his classes and gain insights into his thinking and working process; they are well worth a look.)

A force of contemporary art and performance has left us and all that’s left for us to do is breathe. Breathe. Breathe.

– Phillip Bahar

• We just uploaded “Merce Cunningham’s Working Process” on the Walker Channel and on YouTube
• The New Yorker has a dance reviews going back to 1976 on its site, including one on the performance of Ocean, which the Walker presented this past year
• The Cunningham Dance Foundation’s Legacy Plan — the Foundation had only recently established “a precedent-setting plan delineating the future of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (MCDC) and ensuring the legacy of Cunningham’s work”
• Interview with Village Voice dance critic Deborah Jowitt

Sherman was kind enough to send some of her thoughts about the Twin Cities dance scene for a story in the July-August issue of Walker magazine; below you can read them in full. John Munger and Carl Flink also shared their insights about the state of dance both locally and nationally: click here for John Munger’s interview; we’ll follow soon with Carl Flink.

“One quality that I feel really defines the dance scene in the Twin Cities is rigor. I think many dance artists here are truly pushing themselves, looking for ways to go deeper into their work and are asking questions about dance as a form in general. There is a desire to find one’s own voice but also to transcend it, or at least to use that voice to say something unexpected in each new project. Maybe the long winters facilitate that kind of concentration — I mean, what else are you going to do all winter? Plus, there have long been some excellent funding sources and fellowships available to Minnesota artists that encourage and make possible considered artistic exploration. Unfortunately, those sources have taken a hit over recent years and dramatically so in the last few months. That’s really a shame because those resources set us apart from other cities and have helped build a creative infrastructure that actually generates hundreds of jobs and millions of dollars in revenue.

Dance artists here are also very aware of what is going on nationally in a way that I don’t see in other cities. The Walker of course enables many local artists to see what’s going on by bringing in national and international artists, but I have many colleagues who fly all over the world to take classes, teach, see shows and so on. There is a real dedication and genuine desire to know what’s going on, to be inspired by other people’s work, and to further one’s own inquiries.

I’ve also been impressed by how artists from different forms of dance take interest in each other’s work. That seems partly due to the smaller size of the TC dance scene compared to New York, where the dance scene is so vast that you could choose one form of dance — ballet, contemporary, modern — and basically see only that all year long. We don’t have that kind of density in the Twin Cities, which is good and bad, but overall I find there is enough dance in general here that you can attend shows year-long, but not so much of one kind that that’s all you see. I almost never see anything but contemporary dance in New York so it’s been nice to branch out in my own viewing.

The Twin Cities could use more venues that present fully-produced work by local artists, venues with a less commercial bent, ones more akin to the Walker. There aren’t quite enough opportunities like this locally and artists who are making new, full-evening pieces every 1-2 years are limited as to where they can perform them — they tend to show at the same theater every time because the options are limited. At the same time, this has made a lot of us seek out touring opportunities, either on a DIY level or gigs that are commissioned and fully supported. That requires a lot more money and administration to make happen, but it means we get to go a lot of great places and meet so many other amazing artists. I think we have a reputation for this now. When I perform in other cities, artists often tell me that they hear great things are happening in Minneapolis or that they have seen some of my colleagues perform in their city or some other town. They have rarely been to Minneapolis themselves so this speaks to how Minneapolitans get around, but it also means we should figure out more ways we can bring them here to show us what they’re doing. But you kind of have to invite them to come in the summer or it’s just too cruel.”

First up is John Munger; we’ll follow with Karen Sherman and Carl Flink.

Munger is a locally based dancer who has, as he says, “been observing the field for 20 years or more, depending on how you look at my job descriptions.” One of those jobs is to create statistical portraits of dance – performers, companies, venues, performances, genres, etc. – both locally and nationally, in his role as director of research and information for Dance USA, a Washington, D.C.-based service organization. Click here for a full bio.

“When my first wife and I were dancing in Colorado and decided to move to a bigger pond, we looked around the country and thought the Twin Cities had a lot of promise. We moved here in 1978. So I’ve been here 31 years and part of the reason I stayed, aside from quality of life and things like that, is because as I’ve been here, the arts and dance communities have fulfilled that promise we saw when we were kids-it’s fulfilled it richly.

My succinct take on the evolution of the dance community here is: During the 1970s, there was an era of a handful of major companies. From about 1980 to 1995 or 1996, there was an era of enormous growth that was based on the efforts of individual choreographers here at home. And for the last 12 yrs or so, that model has grown into larger companies and greater national presence.

There are clearly two major dance centers in America, New York and San Francisco. After those, depending on whom you talk with, about 6 or 8 other cities are named as being among the four most significant, after those centers-including Chicago, the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Seattle, Los Angeles, and greater Washington, D.C.

These cities are not necessarily in competition with each other; rather, they’re all different from each other — we’ve determined this through research. We can quantify ways in which best practices from one community will not translate to another, because these places are genuinely, uniquely different.

And while the Twin Cities are in that group, quite frankly, the hardest message I’ve had to communicate in my 30 years living here is to tell media and the general public that this is one of the key dance communities in the country. It is the most diverse among those secondary those cities, and compact as well-and that is a unique construction.

For example, Seattle has basically 3 categories of dance companies, including a ballet company of major size. We don’t have a $6-million budget flagship ballet company in the Cities, but we do have about 10 categories of dance among our more than 200 companies. There are about 14 companies with budgets over $100,000 (up to $1 million) — including James Sewell Ballet, Ragamala Dance Theater, Shapiro & Smith Dance, Ballet of the Dolls, Zenon Dance Company. There’s also percussive footwork companies, there’s Indian dance. There’s Ethnic Dance Theater. Eastern European/Western Russian dance, classical and contemporary ballet. All these companies have budgets over $100,000.

Not one other city in the country matches our per-capita distribution of companies that size. Chicago actually has about 17 such companies, but their total population is two-and-a-half times our size. We also have more solidly established mid-sized companies in this city, on a per-capita basis, than anywhere else in the U.S. except New York City, which has about 37 mid-sized companies.

That is part of what makes us compact yet varied. We also have variations in age, with highly visible choreographers in their 20s and 30s, 40s, 50s, and even a few in their 60s. We have companies that have been around for 30, 20, and 10 year, as well as those recently formed. We have major mid-level and small upstart organizations working in ballet, in modern, in culturally specific dance, in percussive forms, experimental forms-all of them. We have over 50 nationalities and cultures represented through dance in these cities, and all of this is compressed into a community of about 3.5 million people. If you know where everybody is, you can go see any of them. Whereas in, say, San Francisco, or Brooklyn, those numbers are overwhelming.

This whole picture in the Twin Cities — ages of choreographers, degrees of experience, sizes and duration of companies, dance genres — all of that is richly represented. And that is what brought me here. I’m still here, delighted to be here, it’s a terribly exciting place to be involved with dance.”

This year they set themselves the challenge of finding one streamlined concept that would still show the divergent visions of Sally Rousse, Megan Mayer, Vanessa Voskuil, and Sachiko Nishiuchi (all of whose work was still very much in-progress at the time of the shoot). It involved calling on a sizable group of Walker performing arts fans/volunteers to come to the McGuire Theater for a four-hour shoot one evening; more than a dozen obliged, bringing along their own wardrobe items to boot. The assembled group walked through the each shot, creating a blur of human action as a backdrop to the dancers, who struck stock-still poses.

Volunteers await their cue at one end of the stage. For Sachiko Nishiuchi's image they were asked to dress in colorful garb; for other images they changed into gray.

Here are outtakes from Nishiuchi’s shoot, taken by by performing arts assistant Emily Taylor. You can see Wittig’s final shots with all four choreographers in the July/August issue of Walker magazine, which will land in members’ mailboxes in mid-June (otherwise, pick up a copy at the Walker or at sites all around the Cities).

Posing and draping Sachiko and her partner.

Cameron shoots the procession

= = = NAMI YAMAMOTO = = =

Does the piece you’re performing at the Walker show any influence from or reflection of your home country, and if so, how?

Every piece that I make, I am sure there is some influence from where I am from, but I don’t consciously think about it. It’s more about where I am at in my life, what is happening around me.

I thought about aging and time for this piece. My puppet, Tony, was created thinking of fat skinny old baby. I felt my niece’s growth and my father, getting old are quite similar. One life is blooming and the other is kind of ending, but when I look at a point of their lives they are at the very similar stage. I wanted the puppet to have both old and young quality and I knew the puppet can do that. He can carry past, present and future at the same time.

For this particular piece, I was influenced by Dan Hurlin a lot because he is the one who introduced me to puppetry. I just found that a puppet is a great performer and he will highlight every one of us on the stage as well as himself.

Why did you make the move to New York City?
I came to NY from Matsuyama, Japan because I went to NYU for my Masters’ degreee. My teacher in Japan also encouraged me to go NY. I never intended to move here, I always thought I was here temporarily, but somehow, ended up being here. I am in NY for the last 19 years.

What does New York offer you as a professional dancer/choreographer that you can’t get elsewhere? While some people think that New York’s preeminence as a dance capital is waning, do you find that it’s still a place for risk-taking and experimentation?
Really good collaborators, like my artistic team. I am risk-taking and experimental as an artist. I am sure seeing how other people are taking a risk (from seeing people’s works or talking with my friends) makes me encouraged to go on my way. Maybe that’s part of living NY. Living here and creating works often really pushes people to the edge emotionally, physically, financially, psychologically … I am in it, so usually I am not so aware of it, but when I come back to NY from other places, I can feel that energy.

How much (if any) touring have you done with the piece you’ll be performing at the Walker, and how was it received by audiences outside New York?
We went to Ukraine. It was quite interesting. The way they looked at the show is so different from here. They talked and made comments while they were watching. There were very interesting questions after the show and everyone was very into it. I think it was received really well.

= = = LUCIANA ACHUGAR = = =

Does the piece you’re performing at the Walker show any influence from or reflection of your home country, and if so, how?
It very much does so for me even though if you ask someone from my home country (Uruguay) they might not see it very clearly. It definitely does not use any kind of folkloric form or any specific cultural reference to the southern cone of South America. However, it does have a very specific kind of sensibility that could be perhaps compared to Latin-American literature and/or Spanish cinema (a la Almodóvar) because of its embracing of emotion and drama in an exaggerated and verging on the absurd way that is both a celebration and a mocking of itself.

Most importantly, though, this piece is influenced by the history of where I come from. It reflects the infatuation I’ve had with the political and social idealism of my parents’ generation in Latin America, when and where they were actively working and fighting to create change. Growing up in Latin America with the awareness of always being under the United States’ Government’s big boot made me extremely aware of the power structures present in every different aspect of our society and relationships in general.

In this work I am both celebrating those ideas and exposing their naiveté, and I am exploring the power play inherent within the theater, in terms of the gaze of the audience and how it is not unlike women’s role and the male gaze.

You’ve studied, lived, and performed in California (and elsewhere?) – why did you make the move to NYC?
I also studied, lived and performed in Montevideo, Uruguay. I moved to NYC because I was interested in continuing to study with certain teachers that had come through CalArts (California Institute of the Arts) as guest artists and who had influenced me greatly and made a really lasting impression. Also, because I was fascinated by the Judson era so it seemed like I had to go there to learn more about it from the people that had been there then and were still teaching and making work there.

What does NY offer you as a professional dancer/choreographer that you can’t get elsewhere? While some people think that NY’s preeminence as a dance capital is waning, do you find that it’s still a place for risk-taking and experimentation?
I have been in NY for my whole career after I graduated from College so I can’t say with total knowledge what you can or cannot get elsewhere. However, I believe that the amount of work that is made here and the diversity is so great that it is a great place to become more and more specific about what your own specific aesthetic is and to become more rigorous about your own ideas. The standard seems to be set very high because there are so many choreographers making work here and so many amazing dancers. It is practically impossible to become complacent and lazy about what you’re putting out there.

Also, because it is so expensive to live in NY and because of the level of competition, it takes a lot of commitment and passion to continue on making the work and that feels sometimes like it must give it a certain edge and rigor that seems particular to work from NY.

I do believe still believe that there is a lot of experimentation going on in NY even though a lot of it is happening in more unknown venues, more underground. However, I definitely do not think that NY is the dance capital. I think we have moved away from the model of centers of culture being the places where anything interesting is happening and the peripheries being nowhere lands. That is a really old model that does not apply to how the world is now.

I am still in NY because I have created very special bonds within the dance community here and I have become who I am as an artist through the work I have done collaborating with different artists here. In some ways I feel like I am a local artist that happens to be in NY. Also, being a foreigner in NY allows you to feel like you are as much a part of the making of the city as anyone else and you don’t feel so much like an alien.

How much (if any) touring have you done with the piece you’ll be performing at the Walker, and how was it received by audiences outside of NY?
Unfortunately, I did not do any touring with this piece until now. We were invited to perform it in a Dance Festival in Uruguay but the funding didn’t go through because it was coming from the US Embassy there and when they saw a sample of the work they denied their support since it seemed to them like it was a criticism of the War in Iraq and they were not willing to fund that.

= = = NORA CHIPAUMIRE = = =

You’ve studied, lived, and performed in California (and elsewhere?) – why did you make the move to New York City?
new york is the world cultural center. I am at home in nyc as i am in dakar.

What does New York offer you as a professional dancer/choreographer that you can’t get elsewhere?
While some people think that New York’s preeminence as a dance capital is waning, do you find that it’s still a place for risk-taking and experimentation?

I would get the cultural stimulation in other cities in the usa. In NYC, africa in is the streets, i hear it see it, This access to all people is what keeps NYC on the cutting edge compared to other American cities. A knowing/ theater going audience … another reason to show work in the city. There is an audience for it.

How much (if any) touring have you done with the piece you’ll be performing at the Walker, and how was it received by audiences outside New York?
A great many cities in the USA, Canada, Senegal, Tanzania and Kenya.

I received a touring support suport from the National Dance Project to tour the USA. This piece was also been awarded a BESSIE for its NYC showing. The work has been well received, but it has challenged audiences who have superficial knowledge of Zimbabwe, it has also challenged Africans in Africa, who too have “working knowledge” of Zimbabwe’s history, never mind a female contemporary dancer!!!

Not only do they need to tailor it for the Walker’s stage, but since it’s a world premiere, those final details are innumerable: Does Cynthia throw the record here? Are the slides in the right order? Can the mike stand be steady? Not to mention other, bigger questions.

Fans know Cynthia Hopkins to be quite the spinner of tall tales – but people who haven’t seen the trilogy’s first two installments will get all the back story they need in the second part of the show, which Cynthia and crew were running through here. This final installment promises to bring an extra dimension to the trilogy – not just with all of the intergalactic space travel (yes, there is flying), but with Hopkins laying bare her own true (we presume) story. As she says as one point, it’s all part of “an elaborate plan.”

Above are views from the front and side of the stage. Those roughly door-sized panels are held up with long bungees, to define a smaller, intimate stage. During the first part of the show, they are dropped down,  creating a shiny black void for the outer-space setting.

Below is Jeff Sugg working backstage – sort of. He and Jim Findlay, the design/tech geniuses behind all of Cynthia’s shows, are actually visible for part of the show (when the panels up above are not raised), working their magic behind a shiny clear sheet of plastic. A transparent take on the Wizard of Oz, if you will. At certain junctures, they leave the computers and control boards and come forward as performers, to boot.

Below: This crazed craft project is one of the many ways that Findlay and Sugg mix high- and low-tech. It’s a tiny model of, as Jim says, “the earth 50 million years from now” (or maybe that’s billion), with some new and no doubt highly evolved improvements. Attached to that wood strip in the center is a mini-camera that can do tracking shots over the landscape, which are projected onto a really cool curved screen hanging high over the main stage. If you look for it, I think this might be visible during the show, in back with Jeff and Jim and all their gear.

Overall, there’s an intriguing mix in this show between homespun design and expansive elegance. I’m eager to see how it all comes together on Thursday night.

In the run-up to the April 16 world premiere of The Success of Failure (or, The Failure of Success), Cynthia Hopkins and her team have posted some great videos on YouTube. First, there’s the delightfully corny trailer with its old-fashioned anxiety-provoking lead-in: “The Sun is burning out! The Earth is under attack! And only one suicidally depressed alcoholic can save the Druoc race!”

And on a more serious note, Hopkins sits down to discuss just what she’s after with the latest of her “multimedia music performance extravaganzas” – The Success of Failure is the final piece in her Accidential Nostalgia trilogy. One reference point for the title, she says, is the miracle of human life as being the result of a “vast number of catastrophic failures” that came before in the history of the planet and even the universe.

Hopkins et al arrive in Minneapolis today to work out the last elements of the piece on the McGuire stage; we hope to post some snapshots and notes on their rehearsals here in the coming days.