Talking Dance: On the Record with Kate Weare
Though she was a very young child, choreographer Kate Weare remembers vividly the power of the sea near Cornwall, England, filling her with the knowledge of a physical power within and igniting a desire that would eventually draw her to a more physical art than the visual art of her parents: dance.
“I remember being near the sea. I was very young, 3 or 4 maybe, and I had a very powerful experience of the physical sensation of the force of the sea coming toward me, and also the awareness that power was inside of me. I think that was my first moment when I realized that movement seemed to be some sort of origin to me,” Weare says.
Weare found ballet too restricting; she couldn’t bear it because she had to tie her hair back tightly. “I had a feeling that was trapping the movement. If you couldn’t feel your hair moving, somehow it didn’t seem right to me.”
Her mother then took her to a dance class taught in the Isadora Duncan style, but that felt too gentle. She knew what she wanted, but she didn’t know where to find it until her search took her to Kung Fu— by age 5. She says, “Those forms are very grounded, and they sort of work a lot with centrifugal force and gravity as allies, and they had a really profound effect on the way I think about movement.”
Fast forward about 30 years, and Weare says the martial arts still have a strong influence on her work, and making dance is still a physical process. But there is more to it as well.
In the San Francisco Bay area in her early teens she found a dance mentor central to her development as a young dancer, Midge Kretchmer. “I think early on in my life I was using dance to channel my energy. But Midge helped me marry it to my mind, and that was a very important growth process to me as a teenager, because I understood dance could be an expressive form, the way my parents used visual mediums.”
You don’t need to talk to Weare long before she will tell you that the artistic process from inspiration to performance is a journey of exploration, engaging both physical and intellectual capacities.
Q and A on Weare’s thoughts about artistic process:
Q: Can you find common themes when you look back over your work?
A: I do sense common themes for sure. I sense them because the same sets of feelings and issues come up for me again and again. But I do think that it is necessarily really difficult as an artist to be able see your work from the outside in any clear way. From the inside I think that I am very fascinated by relationships, and I always have been— specifically the subtleties in relationships and how we gauge our safety through negotiating power and vulnerability.
Q: Can you talk a little about the sources of your inspiration?
A: I draw on many forces. But none of this is very deliberate or conscious in my mind. I think I draw on many forces because I am an associative thinker, and that is partly what helps me form work. I feel like I have this long dialogue that is sort of in the dark with the piece for a long time before I understand what it is I am pursuing. I wait for the material to speak back to me. I do a lot of waiting and exploring and doing foolish things and doing things that don’t make sense before it takes shape. I draw on language a lot. I am very fascinated by language and poetry, and I always have been. I write in a journal. I don’t necessarily write in a way that makes much sense or that I would ever show anyone; I write to provoke my own mind.
Q: Can you give readers some reflection about your inspiration for “Bridge of Sighs” presented at Jacob’s Pillow?
A: The title came first. I wasn’t necessarily thinking the Venetian Bridge of Sighs. I first came upon the phrase “bridge of sighs” because a friend of mine who was reading a book about the slaughterhouses in Chicago told me about how the workers named the passage toward the slaughterhouses the Bridge of Sighs because it was such an uncomfortable feeling to pass [there]… That struck me as such a potent phrase. Then I started to investigate it, and to look into the history of the Venetian Bridge of Sighs, which is so interesting. It was in fact the place if you were sent to prison you had to pass over, and you could wave one last time to your family through the window. It has this very dark past, and yet it is a beautiful thing.
Q: Do you build a piece primarily in a physical sense by stepping or moving through sections or in an intellectual sense through visions in your mind of a visual you want to portray?
A: For me it is definitely the former.
Q: Once you have the idea, how do begin to move the process from your head to the dance floor? For instance, do you always begin at the beginning?
A: I don’t know where I begin a dance. I just begin by moving. There are many avenues of exploration layered behind the final product that are never seen, and disappear along the way. The way the piece starts to fit itself together is sometimes very mysterious. It is funny. There is always this painful point in the process where I have to look [at what I have]. A deadline is starting to approach, and I have to start to make commitments and narrow down my options. It is the most painful thing for me to actually put it in an order… The reason it is painful? It takes an enormous amount of faith. It is a commitment, and you really have to put aside all your fears and your doubts to begin to let the piece speak about its own form. I always dread that moment.
Q: How important is an exchange of ideas between choreographer and dancers?
A: My relationship to my dancers is absolutely pivotal in my work because I work very much with individuals. My dancers are highly skilled and can execute, but that is the least of their duties in my rehearsals because they need to bring all their focus, all their personalities and all their intellectual capacities to the material. They are very influential… They are so fundamental to the nature of the work and the way it actually turns out. I also feel very strongly that I have a dialogue going on with them in the process. They are speaking back to me. I will set something on them. They will dance it and show me something that I didn’t think of, or know about that material. Then I will reshape it slightly and speak back to them about what I think might be there, or what I am hoping might be there. And this is happening through movement, not through language.
Q: Is it essential for an artist to have an audience?
A: Completely essential, yes. Although, there are many fabulous kinds of transformations and things that happen in rehearsal process that I often wish audiences were privy to because it is such a fascinating process to make a dance, the truth is, once you put it on stage in front of an audience, it comes alive in a way that is just totally different. Often as a choreographer, I don’t really understand what it is that I have made, or what it is I am even speaking about until I feel it.
I think an audience is essential because dance is essentially about communication. All art forms are essentially that: an attempt to communicate. If you don’t have the other end of that equation—the people who you are trying to communicate with present—you are not actually in the act.
I see that my own career and the life of all artists, including my dancers and my collaborators, is an arc of development. And I see us all in process, and I think that I am still learning how to reckon with my own feelings about how an audience reacts to my work and how much I need their approval or don’t need their approval. I remember someone once telling me that Laurence Olivier had a practice of going backstage before he performed and cursing the audience before the performance. This is the way he dealt with his fear of exposure. I think that this is something all artists have to deal with, and the truth is, as a performer you can feel when an audience is there and present and paying attention. And you can feel when they are disengaged; you don’t even have to see their faces or hear them mumbling or see them falling asleep. You can just feel the energy when it is present.
So one interesting question I have asked myself is, “When I stop dancing, how am I going to feel that anymore?” Can you feel it sitting in the audience being freaked out about your own work? I am not sure it is possible.
Q: Do you ever look back at earlier work and find yourself surprised or affected in a new way?
A: …I look back with a real sense of, not pride, but sort of a respect for how hungry I was, because I think that fire is what makes an artist struggle through all the difficulties of this life. If you don’t have that fire under your butt, you are just not going to continue.
Q: What is the most exciting thing you are looking forward to in the next few months?
A: The most exciting thing, by far, is to be able to make something new.
Read more about Kate Weare Company, about her ideas concerning process and more about her work including, “Bridge of Sighs” on the Web: kateweare.com/company.html