Simon Dove Page 1 of 7 Movement Research Critical Correspondence

Critical Correspondence Interview 9.16.09 Simon Dove in conversation with Levi Gonzalez Levi Gonzalez: What is your actual title at Arizona State? Simon Dove: I am Director of the School of Dance in the Herberger Institute of Design and the Arts at Arizona State University. Levi: It’s very complicated. Simon: It’s simply to do with the restructuring. Architecture and Design have now joined what used to be the College of the Arts, so they created an Institute. It was driven by the economic crisis. Bringing the two colleges together has brought about a net savings of two million dollars for the University. But the bonus of course is that there is now a real desire to catalyze thinking and to catalyze relationships across the different schools. So, the President of the University, now the Dean of the Institute, is asking all of us as Directors of the Schools to look at what could be generative between us. So we have been talking to Architecture, Music, the School of Art to build some kind of connection between their programs and that of dance. This conversation is repositioning their ideas about what dance is and where it can connect with them on a practice level, on an intellectual level. It’s been great for me, we’ve moved from being a department to a fully established School of Dance. Which means I am a Director, not a Chair, which is great. I don’t like being furniture. Levi: What is the structural difference between being a School and being a Department? Simon: It just means that you’re, in a sense, more self- contained. Within academia, it’s a higher position because you’re a self-governing entity, as opposed to being a sort of annex to a college or whatever the other structure is. So, now you’re a School with your own infrastructure and usually within less lean times it also brings resourcing and endowed chair positions or scholarship. In this case it doesn’t. I am operating on 5% less money than I started with two years ago. But that just means that we have to think more creatively how we’re doing what we’re doing. So, shall I give you a sense of the curriculum? I come from a presenting background, but in the broadest sense my whole career has been this mediator between artist and audiences. How do you find the optimum way in which to connect an artist's work with the most optimum public in the right context? That is in a sense what I have always been doing. At Springdance I tried to re- orientate the festival to be much more focused on new thinking in dance and new developments in the art form than it used to be. It had become a little bit of a platform of everything that was currently going on. So I really pushed it, given there were other presenting structures in the Netherlands. There was a space for something much more specific. But of course when you are presenting an artist that is unknown who is creating work that is often confronting established conventions of presentation, you need to find ways in which you can engage an audience and help them find ways in which they can connect with the work. That’s what I primarily saw as my function. Great show, but if it doesn’t connect with people, what’s the point? So not putting on all this stuff and hoping an audience would turn up, but really engaging in a very active scrutiny of the means of presenting and the means of engaging an audience. That’s, in a sense, the ‘frame- way’ I bring to higher education, which I see as training a new generation of artists and looking at the way artists’ engage both with audience and, I would say, by extension, society. I think higher education has a responsibility to ensure that what it is producing are students who have an understanding of both the complexity and the competencies they need in order to function in that environment. In other words I feel we have to move away from modes of production or making Simon Dove Page 1 of 7 Movement Research dance from 20 or 30 years ago to enabling someone to find their way as an artist and find their own practice because I think the future of dance is not to be determined by higher education. What we should be doing is enabling students to thrive and survive in an increasingly complex scenario in which dance is evolving rapidly and they need to be able to find a way both to contribute to that but also to find their place in that. Most people aspire to a very specific kind of practice and often don’t make it. There is a sort of peak. For instance, as a student I want to, I don’t know, join the Alvin Ailey Company. Well the number of people that achieve that is an incredibly small percentage of those who aspire. It’s important that people are trained to produce that, but I am interested in there being a multiplicity of peaks of achievement not necessarily defined by existing company structures or existing patterns of work. I guess some will join structures or companies or follow some existing models and others will define new ones and I think that can only contribute to the breadth of practice, the breadth of the field, the richness of the field, and also to the growth of the art form. I am interested in dance having a much more significant part to play in our cultural lives. It shouldn’t be seen as a marginal activity practiced by a few for a small inner circle. I am really not interested in that. I realize part of that internal reflection is important for an art form to re-evaluate itself and to grow. But as a contemporary cultural practice, dance can play and be seen to be playing a much more significant role. I think the potential of dance far outweighs what anyone at the moment gives it credit for. So, that’s my big agenda underneath it all. I come to academia, not to praise it, but with a sense that we are not different; we are not separate from the practice and the art form. It’s for sure a different world; it has its own infrastructure, its own way of being, but it will only be to its detriment if it does not connect to the practice. It needs to be intrinsically connected to current thinking in the world of dance and the practice of dance and not spend time creating it’s own internalized frameworks of what it thinks dance training should be. Levi: It also seems like the University system has an opportunity to provide resources to professional artists in a potentially mutually beneficial relationship. A lot of these models we talk about are disappearing or getting more exclusive because resources are less. A lot of artists coming out of academia or just entering into the art world are having to invent their own models. In NYC at least, there is starting to become a dearth of affordable rehearsal spaces, affordable living spaces, the time to think and develop your work. And these are all things that Universities have access to. I've been noticing this trend of Universities starting to open up these spaces, to some degree, to professional artists who can then have a direct interaction with the students. It seems like the division between academia and the professional art world is starting to blur a little bit. And one thing I am interested in is this new position, I guess it starts this academic year? Simon: It’s started already. August first. Clinical Professor in Creative Practice. Levi: I am wondering if you can talk about the new position at ASU and how its structured and where it came from? Simon: We need to back up slightly. I went to ASU with a very clear and explicit desire to change the entire curriculum. I explained that what we were doing would not produce artists who could function in the way that dance was evolving. It’s a process given the administrative systems and all the regulatory mechanisms within a University. It’s taken us two years, but it has been a process that has involved the entire school faculty in really rethinking what it is we have as a resource, which is the competencies, the skills within the faculty and what we wanted our students to leave our program with. So having gone through that process we have restructured the curriculum so it revolves entirely around the idea of creative practice. Creative practice becomes the center and your movement practice - what you are learning to do in terms of movement - feeds into your creative practice. So there is a four year BFA structure and a three year MFA structure with creative practice being the kind of crucible or central element with this whole sense of leadership, context and humanity being part of what forms this creative practice. We are still teaching people to move and we are still teaching people about the body. We are still asking students to go to sociology or engineering, or philosophy or psychology to contextualize Simon Dove Page 2 of 7 Movement Research the other kinds of ‘knowledges’ that they want, but we are asking them to synthesize that and to build for themselves a clearer sense of who they might be as a creative artist and to understand the relationship of the artist to society in a much more engaged and dynamic relationship.

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