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. So in a way we are asking more of students because we are asking them to constantly be processing the information and to imagine themselves as makers, as creative beings, constantly. We are not saying just learn this form for a while and see what it does for you. We are asking them to process the physical information they are getting in a dance class, the kinesthetic and… I suppose the knowledge system they are getting from an embodied practice and how that can relate to their perceptions, their conceptions of the world around them. We are trying to create a curriculum that will produce an engaged human being who uses dance as their medium for engagement. Of course, we’re limited by resources and even the physical structure of our facilities, but more and more final projects are taking place off campus, in community settings, on the web - frameworks other than the university studio theatre where traditionally everything used to happen, with intense production and a level of homogeneity which I felt was killing individual creative spirit.

So, when we had a position that came open last year, I thought it was essential in terms of the language of the position that we don’t call it a Professor of Choreography, that we think of it as something broader than that. And we avoided the words around choreography given that that has a very specific meaning especially within dance academia, this idea of writing in space or bodies in time and space, laying out movement in time. And I felt we’re now subjecting those terms to such scrutiny and inquiry that we need to have a different kind of language in which we talk about this position. The reason we called it a Clinical Professor was really so that it could be a practicing artist and not necessarily someone with the terminal degree, as a possibility. We decided to give the position to Eileen Standley. She’s American, but has been in Amsterdam for the last 22 years, but also working a lot as an artist, working with video and electronic media as well as with dance and improvisation. But the following year the position will be given to Thomas Lehman, who’s an independent maker based in Berlin. The idea of it being a rolling one-year appointment was very appealing because it means we will have constantly a fresh input of people, but it becomes a possibility for an artist to take nine months out of their working life in the field and spend nine months with us. So it starts to become a possibility to attract artists who would normally have a very full schedule of activity.

Levi: Artists who are actively engaged in their creative practice…

Simon: Exactly. And that’s really what we want to bring to bear on the curriculum. The other thing we did was, I had one open position, and the budget for another one-year salary. I turned that into what is called an artist-faculty position. We use the one salary in five week chunks and we bring the artist into ASU to do what a faculty would do, which is to do some teaching and some research and to talk with students and the faculty about what is going on. It means we can bring people both from the US and abroad through the year, so there is always someone there working on their practice, interacting with students, opening their process. I mean each one is different and I am desperate that we don’t establish a model, so that each time an artist comes it’s the result of a dialogue about what they want and what we want. Often when you have artist in residence in a University setting its making a piece on the students.

Levi: Right.

Simon: And I have tried to get away from all those models where students just see artists as people who make work on them. Sometimes the artists are just sitting, looking at student work and commenting on it. Sarah Michelson spent five weeks with us really trying to explore ideas for her own practice, but most of the time she was watching graduate choreography and giving them very detailed and intense feedback and they loved it, it was fantastic. So, to have another perspective, an artist perspective, both for the students and the faculty is really nourishing. It is really essential.

Simon Dove Page 3 of 7 Movement Research Levi: So, that structure is basically reinvented each time a new artist comes in?

Simon: Yeah. Last year we had nine artists who came in and one of them made a piece for students for the final show. That was Moya Michael, who is based in Brussels, who works with Anna Teresa. Others taught, did research. Maria Hassabi came and basically spent three weeks in the studio. She said students are welcome to come and see, but they actually did a formal presentation in Dance Matters, our open forum. It’s a slot in our curriculum every Thursday lunchtime when the whole school comes together. She presented the work and we had a discussion with her about her process and what the work was and how people were reading it, which gave her feedback about the new work.

Levi: So, it’s not an imposed definition on how artist can interact with it.

Simon: No. Sometimes we, for instance, need someone who could do a high level modern technique class, so I asked John Jasperse, who was there to think about the ideas for his next project. He spent most of his time meeting people and chatting with them about his ideas to do with truth and falsehood, which was informing his new piece. So, he was happy to do the class three times a week, but he did it as John Jasperse, as an artist, and that for me is important that they are always there on their own terms.

Levi: It seems that just by example you are already starting to give the students a sense of - when you talked earlier about the models of peaks - the multiplicity of peaks, the multiplicity of approaches to creative practice.

Simon: Well, the fact that they are all working on projects differently and they all got to their positions by completely different routes is such an important message by implication for students to understand. Because a lot of them feel there is a very specific career ladder, there’s a very specific route to the Alvin Ailey Company. And I don’t know if it ever existed to be honest, but there is a myth that it did, and many still think that that’s it, that there is a need to achieve a certain level of physical competency and virtuosity and simply by the power of your physical ability you’ll be there. I think we have to question how long repertory companies will survive as a structure, as a mode of maintaining dance culture and producing dance product, you know. I know most of the people running companies also want someone who can contribute to a process, can lead an education session, can be part of an outreach program. The notion of the single virtuosic dancer getting the key jobs doesn’t exist any more. And communicating that - I can say it, but for students to engage with artists who can tell their own stories, it’s far more compelling than any kind of dry summary of perception or experience.

Levi: I do sometimes hear from, I don’t want to generalize, but often an older generation of dance artist that that there is this sort of fear that we’re going to lose the physical rigor or practice of moving, of dancing. I wonder how you would address that concern?

Simon: Well for me, the issue is that we are not changing every curriculum in every University. We’ve changed ours in a way that we feel addresses the evolving edge in dance practice and I feel the only way we are going to advance in both the form and the way a broader public engages with the form is to really start to push those boundaries. I know there are many other programs that are much more interested in developing a very consolidated movement technique but not at all interested in evolving the language of dance and not at all interested in evolving the audience for dance, that are not even interested in the way the art form will evolve. So, none of these things will replace the old traditions. There are still kids starting ballet classes when they are three or four. You know, I have been inundated with these horrendous costume brochures every week. I heard recently that families can invest up to 3,000 dollars in presenting one student in a dance competition because they need five outfits. So what we’re doing is part of a huge diversity of practice, but I feel some of us need to be addressing the evolution of the form and we need to

Simon Dove Page 4 of 7 Movement Research really be cognizant of that fact that dance has got a relatively short history, but the patterns of dance making so far have not endeared it in depth to a general public. It’s still seen to be a marginal practice. It’s still seen to be something that is more decorative than important and it seems to be something that is additional to and not a vital part of contemporary culture. My concern is that if we don’t address the real issue, which is about how can people understand what embodied knowledge is and explore the world in an embodied way, we're going to be even more marginal and the possibilities and resources will be even more eroded. That’s why my curriculum is trying to address the real future and development of the practice. I am not saying this is what everyone should do, because I value the diversity of practice but I feel we need to address this area.

Levi: You talked a little bit about the 'rigidness' of academia as a structure. It’s a slow moving structure with a lot of bureaucracy. Obviously there must have been some interest at ASU to create some kind of change like this in the curriculum and I'm interested in how you found each other, you coming from Springdance.

Simon: Well, ASU found me. They used a professional recruitment company based in Boston to find someone who would be interested in taking on the challenge of what ASU had set for itself. The new President, Michael Crow, tried to frame what he called the ‘New American University’ which was to do with understanding the context in which you function. How do you address the needs of those people and what does that society need? And how does what you are doing there relate to the global need? So, he’s interested in trying to build this relationship with what he’s calling 'access', which is finding ways to engage and include people and 'excellence', which is taking everyone to their highest level of achievement. And he says some universities pride themselves on the people they exclude and he says the challenge of the New American University is how we can include people. Traditionally SAT scores are directly related to the relative economic prosperity of where you live. So, trying to deal with all those old metrics and re- imagine what a University can be. And if you look at the way dance is evolving, dance artists really are investigating what physical intelligence is, how that can be manifested in performance, how that can engage with a public. They are questioning all the old frames of the theatre, the audience, the static public, the onlooker, the voyeur, and finding all kinds of other strategies to engage with embodied knowledge in a different way. So, I could present that very centrally to the ambitions of the New American University. The Dean was very supportive of my position. I was very explicit about why I was interested because of course if they weren’t interested than I was certainly not interested in going there. He was interested in how we could try to create a very different model for dance education, which was based on really connecting the practice of dance to the broader population. So for instance everyone does two semesters of pedagogy which is really about understanding how to teach, not because we think they are all going to be teachers, but it gives you an understanding of how to lead a process, where you need to move people towards a kind of shared objective. Everyone has engagement with community practice so that they will study the theory of community dance, but they will also have an internship or an apprenticeship along side a project that we are doing in downtown Phoenix. So we are just trying to give people a breadth and understanding of what dance can do, what the possibilities are. My criticism of dance education was that it was focused on purely the movement of the body and not about contextualizing that for the individual or for the general public. I felt we really needed to re- look at what an education in dance was. And this was an opportunity to try it out. I am working very much with the faculty that were already there and everyone is fully engaged with it, although everyone is working doubly hard because we are having to deliver the old catalogue as well as the new curriculum which they know will change every year because that is the point of it. It’s a dynamic syllabus that will evolve. They team-teach often, they have to pre-argue and develop and discuss and debate their courses with their colleagues. Sometimes artists are involved in that process. It’s a lot more work for everybody but we feel the net result is that everyone is more stimulated, everyone is more aware of the connections between theory, context and practice, which often we weren’t. We tended to teach in these islands before and we hoped the students would get in the boat and find the connection, know the way. And those that were great did. But

Simon Dove Page 5 of 7 Movement Research many didn’t. So, it’s a lot of work but for something we all believe is going to produce a much more rounded and engaged dance artist as a result of it. So, I am saying a lot of the same things.

Levi: No, it’s great. You are articulating many of the things I've been feeling about dance and its relevance.

Simon: To me, it’s very obvious. Everyone says, oh it’s avant-garde or experimental. I've got very animated about not using that word because this is not an experiment, we know exactly what we are doing and why we are doing it, just in the way a traditional or classical practice knows what they are doing and why they are doing it.

Levi: And I think the idea of embodied knowledge or practice as a kind of knowledge-gathering is not valued in the same way in the University system or in the culture at large as say, a scientific experiments that have concrete, or quantifiable results. So much of contemporary dance practice is about exploding open definitions in a way.

Simon: We had a little retreat of the school leaders, the Directors of the Schools and the Museum with the Dean last week and we had 7 minutes to give a little presentation and the Dean asked us about the national context in which we operate. The notions of what dance is is so narrowly defined by popular media, and by the exposure to established practice. So instead of doing a lot of text about what my peer institutions were - you know, what their relevant budgets were and what kind of scholarships they could do - I just had a series of images and my first one was Jeanine Mason, who won the fifth edition of So You Think You Can Dance. There she was in her kind of asymmetrically cut floaty costume with the flowers because she’d won and I said this is the context in which we are operating in. So I started with that frame and then I actually showed images from these dance costume catalogues, and then I had a whole bunch of images from DV8 who are working with people with learning disabilities. There so many areas of dance practice that are completely hidden and are totally under everyones radar that I think we need to do all we can to challenge and confront all those narrow notions of dance practice, almost to the point of saying dance as a term is no longer useful, it defines too broad an area of practice. People say, 'do you like music?' and your first question is well, what kind of music? When you say 'do you like dance?', people don’t say, do you mean ballet, contemporary, post-modern, independent…?

Levi: I’ve talked a lot about this idea that a lot of work that I am involved with has less to do with something that gets performed at City Center, than it does with a visual art show in a gallery somewhere in Chinatown. The aesthetic dialogue that is happening is actually not medium specific, but interest specific, and issue specific, that when we go to this umbrella idea of dance and the notion of holding to the dance community, it actually closes us off to the opportunity of making connections to broader fields of ideas and practices.

Simon: And I don’t believe there is a dance audience anymore. I think there used to be because there were two kinds of dance. There was ballet and there was modern and everyone kind of built their nucleus and camps around that. But now I try and talk about the context of each art work in a very open way because it can be as much driven by the ideas in the work as it is by the form and the practice.

Levi: Do you have an ideal image of what dance can become, more relevant to the culture right now? Or more specifically how can it fill a need, open up a space?

Simon: Well, I think for me the need is obvious, that human beings seem to be yearning for a physical way to engage with the world. We’ve built all these frameworks that remove that from us - the built environment we are in, the forms of transport and not to mention all the media where we can be plugged into all kinds of things wherever we want to be. But I think we are so focused on the rational way of mediating the world. What’s been great about this weekend [of Crossing

Simon Dove Page 6 of 7 Movement Research The Line Festival] is that people are really interested in food, in taste, in that kind of sensual experience. And that’s why we opened with Le Bal in the park, because everyone dances. There was genuine euphoria there achieved through the physical act of moving, and moving together, it wasn’t just something you do alone in your bedroom. You are part of a group process and that’s clearly something that can be valuable to a blue chip firm when they are trying to develop their management team, it can be invaluable in a community setting, it can be really critical in building a cohesive structure in a school where people are still trying to form themselves. So, I think moving together, dancing together, experiencing the world through your body is something that can inform every single individual and contribute to a greater awareness of the environment in which you are placing yourself. You know, I’d like a really plush seat, but maybe in this space it might be nice if we were sitting on the floor. So, it’s just to do with an awareness of what is appropriate and using not just your rational mind, but all the sensual possibilities of the body to engage with any question, any concern, any inquiry in the world, I feel would make the solution much more appropriate, much more diverse and much more interesting. So that’s probably being too philosophical, but…

Levi: No.

Simon: I think we need to do it everywhere.

Levi: That’s very inspiring.

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