Looking at Dancers, Buildings, and People in the Street

Anya Liftig, Matthew Mohr, and Clarinda Mac Low in conversation with Andrea Kleine

anspace Project’s Platform series is an annual curatorial meditation on a theme. For 2015, the poet and critic Claudia La Rocco organized the platform DDancers, Buildings, and People in the Streets, named after poet-critic Edwin Denby’s essay and anthology of the same title. Denby is often credited with being one of the first critics to underline the connections between ballet and contemporary (then the Judson era) dance forms. Utilizing the nodal points of dance lineages in New York City — Balanchine ballet, Merce Cunningham, and Judson — and the Denby-infused concept of “critic as connector,” La Rocco assembled a group of twelve dance artists, pairing them up in “Dance Dialogues.” La Rocco was interested in manifesting two ongoing conversations she had been having with Danspace Project director Judy Hussie- Taylor, “one about how poetry and dance intersect, and one about the lack of meaningful engagement between artists from ballet and contemporary dance.” 1 Mirroring La Rocco’s set up, I gathered a triptych of artists to observe and discuss the “Dance Dialogues” and how they reflected on the current environment of dance as they subjectively experience it. I followed the nodal points of the platform premise, but my representative assemblage of participants was more of a bendy architectural tricorne than a crystalline triangle: Anya Liftig is a body-based performance artist who originally trained in Balanchine ballet, Matthew Mohr is a choreographer, Burlesque performer, and former member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and Clarinda Mac Low is an interdisciplinary performance artist with a background in dance; her first performance experiences were with her father, Jackson Mac Low, and other members of New York’s avant-garde art scene of the 1970s. Instead of pairing off, we assembled en masse after the platform was over to discuss our thoughts on March 24, 2015.

All comments in italics are by Andrea Kleine.

KLEINE: As a nodal point, Judson is used as a sort of catch-all for everything quasi- contemporary. But what’s the fourth node? What’s really a contemporary movement? Or are we all so completely diversified that there’s not really one thing holding the contemporary community together?

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00274 by guest on 01 October 2021 MAC LOW: Well, there is one thing — somatic practice. That’s the one downtown thing that has seeped uptown. Ways of using alignment, awareness training, all that stuff. That is the one thing that went in that direction. My main question is, why do we need to have this conversation? We already had this conversation, didn’t we?

LIFTIG: To me, that’s problematic from a curatorial point of view. Why are we talking about things that were written in the 1970s, forty years ago? What are the new things to connect? What are the new things to bring together? That, to me, felt naive. And I guess I would say antiquated too. We’re doing it forty years after the fact, or really we could go back another ten. So now we’ve got a fifty-year-old thing. And we’re still looking at white people, white bodies, dancing and talking about dance in a specific way.

MOHR: There is still something juicy about having people with different dance focuses cross-pollinating, physically cross-pollinating as an action, that felt timely. It felt worthwhile.

MAC LOW: I’m not sure I agree. I feel like that already happened. What are the connections that a critic makes now? Let’s have a new conversation. We’ve had this one. That’s what the conversation of Judson was. It was this conversation.

MOHR: But to have them in a room physicalizing it, not a conversation, not a criti- cal discussion, literally physical ballet people doing that movement, literally Judson somatic stuff doing ballet, to have a body-to-body conversation — that’s an exchange that felt timely and political.

Claudia’s instructions for the “Dance Dialogue” pairings were purposefully minimal. Her instigating question was an unfinished one, “What would happen if . . . ?” This approach released the artists from creating finished products, yet they were presented as formal performances. Claudia’s, and by extension the audience’s, desire to see what happens sets up certain expectations despite her wanting to create a “good space for failure.” 2 The results ranged from pairs who seemed to have a great time working together, to pairs who reluctantly worked together, to pairs who did not work together. I wonder if presenting these exchanges as ticketed performances was inherently problematic. Would they have been better served if they had been presented less formally, as open rehearsals for instance?

KLEINE: I’m curious about the backstage drama that resulted in Emily Coates and Yve Laris Cohen electing not to collaborate. [Week Three, Dance Dialogues: Jillian Peña & Troy Schumacher/Emily Coates & Yve Laris Cohen: Pena & Schumacher jointly choreographed a short work noting their different approaches and pointing out who created which section of the dance, Coates & Laris Cohen created separate works. Coates presented a portion of Incarnations, a collaboration with physicist Sarah Demers; Laris Cohen presented Platform, installing the New York City Ballet’s touring floor inside Danspace]. Or perhaps there was no drama. Maybe Yve said, I want to build this floor

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00274 by guest on 01 October 2021 Emily Coates, Incarnations (Sketches for a Longer Work). © Ian Douglas, courtesy of Danspace Project, NY.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00274 by guest on 01 October 2021 and you can do whatever you want on it. Emily presented a piece that is part of a larger work, presumably conceived in advance without consideration of Claudia’s premise. I thought Jillian Peña was a really interesting person to include as a contemporary choreographer who investigates balletic elements like unison, twinning, replication, and she really does use the choreographic vocabulary of ballet. I find her work conceptually interesting. But her collaboration with Troy Schumacher dissolved into an ownership match.

MOHR: That was like being at Christmas or Hanukkah and watching a marriage fall apart, but without the theatre. There was a lack of showmanship. If you guys are going to disagree, then let’s go to it! Have the balls to fight!

LIFTIG: I wanted to see a diversity of body sizes, a diversity of different bodies. I wanted to see Jen Rosenblit. Or Miguel Gutierrez. To me, one of the biggest changes from the 1970s is the broader inclusivity of what constitutes a dancing body.

KLEINE: There was an underlying feeling that the platform was made for the downtown community to go and look at ballet. And there was this underlying reification of the ballerina and of ballet.

MOHR: I thought it was fetishistic.

MAC LOW: Absolutely. I was taken in an unusual way by the indelible skill the ballerinas have. It’s so seductive. The setting was very intimate and we don’t get to experience ballerinas in that way. That was valuable to me.

MOHR: And they don’t get to be experienced in that way, in such proximity. That is really valuable for them. The second week [In Week Two, Dance Dialogues: Rashaun Mitchell/Sara Mearns & Sterling Hyltin/Jodi Melnick, the four artists all worked together, interweaving snippets of material ranging from structured improvisation to a Balanchine coached solo to unfinished choreographies] was the most successful because I kept flipping between them, seeing their particular flavors and their willingness to play with each other.

MAC LOW: They each had their own virtuosity.

MOHR: The two ballet dancers clearly had a wonderful time interacting with Jodi Melnick because they don’t get to work with a dancing body that old, with a different facility, and of a different mindset. To dance with a woman who is older, who is clearly a viable, practicing performer who has opinions and options, everything that they are focused on as performers, she’s not the antithesis of it, but she is different from it. The whole exchange with Sterling Hyltin coaching Jodi though her version of La Sonnambula was beautifully honest. That group of people wanted to work with each other. They wanted to exchange. They wanted to find some external mechanism where everybody can play. The inclusion of the James Waring text and tossing dice gave them a randomizing structure. It was a way to talk about dance. And that was

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00274 by guest on 01 October 2021 a really smart idea. There was a fascination within that group that felt warm and fuzzy and humorous and appreciative and respectful.

MAC LOW: So it seems like a flawed premise, but not necessarily. Something happened.

MOHR: I think it’s an amazing premise.

KLEINE: I thought the first week of performances Week[ One, Dance Dialogues: Will Rawls & Kaitlyn Gilliland/Adrian Danchig-Waring & Silas Riener] was about sep- arateness and disembodiment. It was a theme I assigned after the fact. Will Rawls and Kaitlyn Gilliland didn’t dance, they sat across from each other at a table and read a script of their text messages and chats. And because they were reading it off a script, they didn’t look at each other for any length of time. Then they did give us a cookie of ballet at the end. Gilliland got out her pointe shoes, briefly, but it was only to give them something else to talk about. At the end, they were on opposite sides of the balcony with the performance space as a gulf.

MOHR: And then right behind it was this conversation that never happened. [Due to a scheduling conflict, Dachig-Waring did not perform. Riener presented a solo piece accompanied by a video of him and Dachig-Waring projected in the background.] So Silas made a statement about Silas because he didn’t have anybody to talk to.

LIFTIG: Looking back at Denby and the poet-critic connecting disparate disciplines, is there a way in which Emily Coates’s piece in Week Three could be read as two different disciplines coming together — the explanation of physics and the connection to movement? What I thought was a connection was when Emily explained the physics of the pirouette and how Balanchine changed it, it made it seem like the dancer-ness of it, the individuality of the ballet dancers who have something so special in the way that their bodies move, it made it seem like they were just these instruments that are technical and that don’t necessarily have some specific presence or genuine paintbrush stroke with the mark of the artist. That they are more technical spinning tops. If you spin a top this way, it goes like this. And if you spin a top that way, it goes like that.

MOHR: That was, subjectively, what it felt like to work for Merce. You were a paintbrush in the service. Your coloring was allowed, but the material itself was so difficult that just executing it was enough. The idea of giving it any sort of larger presence, there was no way you could think about that because you’re going to drop a step. Everyone that I’ve met who worked within the Balanchine idiom, they’re so inun- dated for time that speed is of the essence. And the process of how many pieces they have to do in a single season is enormous. I had to walk around with snippets of fifty years of choreography in my head at all times that are accessed on dice. So my personal choices about expressing me-ness were out the damn window.

MAC LOW: But that’s interesting: the thought process being different because of the movement.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00274 by guest on 01 October 2021 MOHR: It’s the classical music thing of practicing scales as fast as possible so that you have the facility to do them slow. Any score that gets thrown at you, you can hack. Speed for City Ballet people takes precedence because being a dancer there means you have to learn things unbelievably fast and you have to execute.

MAC LOW: But the vocabulary is narrower.

MOHR: That facilitates the speed. The positive values of watching a Balanchine ballet person, their speed, their execution of a very specific thing, we could see that in Week Two because they were allowed to put that into play. The thing that people developed downtown is their own way of being a dancing, performing body that starts with a thought process. You selectively put yourself into this philosophy, or somatic practice, or engage with a political agenda, or conceptual ideas, that informs the work. Part of the facility there is the conceptual flexibility and the comfort of, when improvising, being in front of a group of people watching you do stuff you don’t know. The comfort is not with executing shapes, necessarily. Cunningham is similar to Balanchine, but there’s a comfort level there with the fact that there is no music, there’s no emotional thing, and there’s no front. When those skill-sets get inter-traded — that’s an interesting conversation.

Many contemporary dancers have studied ballet at some point. The common language that exists between dance idioms is the language of ballet, or language that originates from ballet. Are contemporary dancers failed ballet dancers, in some way? As artists working within contemporary forms, do we still think of ballet dancers as better than we are?

LIFTIG: When I think of the question, “Do we think the ballet dancers are better?” and I think about myself, I think there are winners and there are losers. Coming from a history of Balanchine ballet, the winners made it through SAB. The winners got through their apprenticeship. They went through the corps. The Megan Fairchilds and the Sterling Hyltins. Those are the winners whether it was because their technical spinning top-ness was better, or their dedication, or whatever. And then there’s me, who is sort of a loser. The world I live in is more about this super-democratic openness. Everybody can do it. Virtuosity may or may not be part of it. But virtuosity exists on 63rd Street. The position of the world as a loser makes it an underdog. That’s what I feel the energy is. The downtown scene is always trying to legitimize themselves and prove themselves. The feeling of, “I’m a loser, but I’m a winner, too.” Wearing the patch that says, “A for effort.”

I don’t know if some of those things are related to being female and growing up in a space where the female body was looked at as something to be crafted and shaped to look a certain way and do a certain thing. You’re also primarily in a world of women where there’s a competitiveness, where some bodies are able to certain things while other bodies aren’t. And growing up in that is very stark. I’m looking in the mirror at myself five days a week. I don’t know what other profession, or what other form of training, has people look into a mirror for eight hours a week, at least, from the

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00274 by guest on 01 October 2021 time you are nine years old until you are sixteen, as your female body grows and changes and does all these different things. To me that has a lot of connection to the way I view the world I operate in now, and the way I view the ballet dancers. They are the gazelles that won. And I’m the scrappy one saying, “But I’m a smart girl.” It’s the loser position of, “Yes, but I have ideas. I have concepts. I have history on my side. You guys don’t have ideas, necessarily. You look pretty.”

MAC LOW: You also have freedom. This is something that I thought when I turned forty and I had nothing. Everything had gone wrong in my life. I felt a tremendous sense of freedom. I thought, “I failed!” That makes me think of what you’re saying. I had all this possibility, but I was just kind of losing, losing, losing everything. That’s an interesting contrast. What is the contrast between something like ballet which is so refined and rarified and has this skill that is so seductive, between that and what we do? It is freedom. And I think that has a tremendous value. But it’s not one you can put a dollar value on. Whereas you can kind of put a dollar value on being a gazelle, on some level.

LIFTIG: I think about the way it resonates in my life today. The gazelles are similar to my friend who works at Goldman Sachs. The idea of the privilege-on-speed. The privilege of being this certain type that doesn’t need sleep and that conforms in this very, very specific way and because they conform in this very specific way, they make a lot of money and are masters of the universe. And then there is me who is coming from that same education, that same background, but rejecting all of that, and still feeling kind of insecure about it, but having the freedom not to have to wear a Goldman Sachs uniform. I don’t have the tattoo inside my body with a barcode stamped somewhere. I feel like those things are actually quite similar in the sense of the brand identification and conforming to a specific thing.

MOHR: I have a really conflicted history with becoming a gazelle. I thought that I was a loser. I thought that I wasn’t capable of that kind of refinement. I knew gazelles. I liked gazelles. I wasn’t capable of being a gazelle, and I got sucked up into a system that said, “Now you’re a gazelle.” No, I’m not. No, I’m not. The focus on product, the focus on commodifying yourself, turning yourself into paint for this master, and the process that there are winners and there are losers, that absolutely happens. But I didn’t win because I got into the company and I got to do the dances and other people lost. Those people went and developed completely other careers that are their own. With the same training. With the same basis. The amount of psychic damage that I self-inflicted because I chose to be there and participate in it, there were wonderful benefits that I got out of it. The damage was really severe. The damage that Balanchine people put themselves through, the company, the structure of it, is stressful. There’s collateral psychic and physical damage. The collateral damage for downtown is this sort of underling feeling. The illegitimacy, as if Judson is this sad sister charity case, is bullshit. Because having been a gazelle, knowing the cost of the gazelle stuff, it produces wonderful effects. It also has damages to it.

MAC LOW: It reproduces certain hierarchies that we are trying to break.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00274 by guest on 01 October 2021 Top: Will Rawls and Kaitlyn Gilliland, #loveyoumeanit. Bottom: Rashaun Mitchell, Sara Mearns, Jodi Melnick, and Sterling Hyltin, starts and fits, no middles no ends: 8 unfinished dances. © Ian Douglas, courtesy of Danspace Project, NY.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00274 by guest on 01 October 2021 MOHR: Absolutely. Repetitively. But the flip side of that is ownership. The freedom of the choices. The ability to be over 35 and have bodies that are aging. The diversity side of it. It’s not an either/or — that’s a win. That’s a win that should be offered to the gazelles. The Judson rejection of performative aspects, of the fact that making shapes and doing things prettily and actually having an emotional relationship to movement, affects audiences, we don’t need to reject that anymore. That was a historical period. It served a purpose then, it doesn’t serve a purpose now.

This particular conversation feels eerily on-trend. There has been a resurgence of interest in Judson-era artists. Next year, 2016, will mark the fiftieth anniversary of Yvonne Rainer’s iconic work Trio A. Recently, I’ve seen a lot of minimalism in contemporary dance, and a rejection of formal theatrical design aesthetics. Many of the reasons behind this are economic, but it has translated into a trend, or an identifiable aesthetic. Well-funded European productions now incorporate the DIY “look” when they have no financial need to do so. At the other end of the spectrum, New York State Theater at Lincoln Center has been renamed after one of the Koch brothers. Is there something other than aesthetic curiosity that brings us to this particular platform now?

LIFTIG: There is a political aspect to all of this work and to this conversation that seems to be muddled, but I think it’s there. The conversation about class, about privilege, about diversity. I’ve always thought that if I did a Ph.D., this would be an interesting thing to look at. If you see pictures of 1969 Balanchine dancers, Suzanne Farrell, Patricia McBride, and they’re getting ready to do Jewels, you begin to wonder, but there’s this whole other shit that’s happening out in the world. How is that coming in to the dance space? At that time, downtown was very much involved in the politics of what was going on. There is this element of the political with these nodal points, the middle, the upper, and the lower class. Having that conversation could potentially be very rich, but I think in some ways dancers are often very politically averse. They may be liberal or empathize with a certain side, but don’t want to have a conversation about the politics of what they do. At the same time, the politics of gentrification, the politics of uptown/downtown — downtown existed because it was cheap. I don’t think it’s a corollary conversation, I think it’s very much embedded. All of these conversations avoid that. It’s not being as provocative as it could be. It is very provocative information.

The bottom line is that it is political. We had an era where there were robber barons, where there was this elite class and this underclass, we did that in the early 1900s. Then we had the New Deal. It seemed like things were changing. Then we shifted again and went back to the War on Poverty. We’ve had this wrestle between a broader (for lack of a better term), more democratic, or equal playing field in terms of class or economics. And now we’re in a very robber-baron stage again. There’s something about the fact that it has circled back that feels pertinent to this dialogue.

MOHR: It felt timely to me because of the robber-baron disease. Conceptually, yes, it’s a done and gone conversation. But practically it’s not. The people practicing

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00274 by guest on 01 October 2021 ballet were not involved in the Judson stuff. The people that I danced with in the Merce Cunningham Dance Company did not go see ballet at the same time. We are all doing this threatened art form, and I include everything in that. We don’t make anything that you can commodify. We don’t make objects. We are all in this very fragile cultural thing that is not supported in America. It never has been. We are all treading water here. So how about we trade skills that we’ve developed over the past sixty years? This shock that ballet dancers are coming down to see something at Danspace Project, I find remiss on the ballet dancers. To me it’s one big dance community and that should be fostered more.

LIFTIG: In my comparisons of the winners and the losers, aligning City Ballet with Goldman Sachs, obviously that is a surreal way to describe the economics of dance. It should also be mentioned that when we’re talking about City Ballet people who have a steady gig as being comparatively wealthy or having some kind of financial stability, of course that is inherently ridiculous. I think that is part of the downtown scene being self-effacing. If you look at this as a triangle and you’re on the bottom of the triangle, you’re looking up to a mouse who has a piece of cheese that is just a little bit bigger than yours. From where I’m standing, the piece of cheese above me looks more attractive, but actually, there is a gigantic wheel of cheese in the sky. It should be noted that expressing any type of envy or jealousy toward ballet dancers or their relative economic stability is only a reflection of how low on the totem pole experimental dance, performance art, or live art exists.

MOHR: I’ve been the focus of that. At the top, the most I had in salary with no insurance, no nothing, and a body that is quickly melting, was less than I made in a week as a waiter for caterers. That was at the height of my paid part of the pyramid. The fringe benefits of the travel, that’s all amazing and undeniable. It is hierarchi- cal. Ballet is set up to please the aristocracy. Cunningham fits into the aristocratic modern dance classics.

LIFTIG: The liberal aristocracy.

MOHR: The people of the Judson era happened to be around at a time when they could buy their lofts and continue that lifestyle.

MAC LOW: They’re very clear about it now. They talk about that difference.

MOHR: No one is claiming that ballet is not playing at aristocratic, robber-baron economic presentation games. There is this falseness that goes on with the downtown scene that I find worse. The ability to do downtown work now is deeply affected by your economic status. There is a downtown aristocracy and their wealth isn’t involved in Goldman Sachs or the Upper East Side or pearls. It’s real estate in Soho. It’s having had the fortune of landing in a time and place where their performative work could be parlayed into something that is actual wealth. It’s a concentration of resources.

MAC LOW: It is its own elitism.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00274 by guest on 01 October 2021 LIFTIG: It does go back to the fact that people want to be artists. The Brooklyn phenomenon of why people want to have little mustaches tattooed on their fingers and why they want to have artisanal mayonnaise. There is this fetishizing of the artist. In some ways we are also talking about fetishizing Judson, fetishizing these struggling people. Looking at the current economic conditions, what happens to the artists who are struggling when they go back to their shitty hometowns? At what point does the cachet of the New York dance/art/performance world separate from the actual practicing of it? It is still the center. That’s why I’m still here. But at what point does the economics of space make people have to run away?

How do you each interpret the connections between your own personal nodal points? What is your own personal “dance dialogue” and how does it continue to influence you?

LIFTIG: What I take from ballet are a couple of aspects. One is that there is virtuosity, there is presence, there is technique. It is something that can be articulated and honed. It can be something that is more action-based, more mundane, more every- day. It also can be non-verbal, which is definitely something I take from my early dance training. There is a lot that can happen without words. The main thing that I learned, and that I value from Balanchine training, was that there are these other kids out there running around playing soccer, futzing around, but you have a choice. You can decide to live life in aesthetic contemplation. It is an elitist opinion, but you look over there and you say, “That’s all fine and well for people to run around on a soccer field, but I have made a choice to try and find something more meaningful or deeper or something more profound.” And I still feel like that choice, that feeling of otherness, that you sacrifice in your life, whether it’s financially, physically, emotion- ally, you make sacrifices so that you have what Clarinda called freedom. There are different amounts of freedom, but even a ballet dancer still has a certain amount of freedom in that they’ve chosen to live their life in aesthetic contemplation. That is what I take in terms of performance and how I operate within performance. Those things are very important. They’re very precious. They need to be protected, but also fostered and cultivated. But there is a choice and that choice is important and valuable.

MOHR: The connective idea of these disparate nodal points, that’s dead center my aesthetic. Even while I was doing Cunningham, I was doing burlesque. That always made me feel alienated from the dancers that I met who did Cunningham or Bal- anchine because they were focused on one thing and that was pushing themselves through the system to win. And I was sitting there gathering — oh that’s pretty, oh that’s okay, a little burlesque from over here and a little jazz from over there. That was always part of me and the way that I related to dance. It was also part of my failure because I wasn’t focused on the political aspect of making myself into the best hothouse flower possible. I was more interested in participating in all things at all times. I designed the set for a friend’s ballet company and invited all the Cunningham people and they rejected it wholesale and wouldn’t look at any of his experimentations within his palette for what it was. It was just rejected wholesale

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00274 by guest on 01 October 2021 as “not Cunningham” so not interesting. I’ve had that experience a lot. These nodal points are semi-religious in commitment and I find that bullshit. Just like religion, there’s valuable material to be gotten out of Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism. There are wonderful life-affirming bits in all these different philosophies. Having to reject something just to self-define is bullshit. I understand why. You can only focus on one thing. But does your focus need to be negation? That’s why I was excited to see this platform.

MAC LOW: What I think about all the time is frame. Everything that I do has a different frame and I practice within many different disciplines. The things that I bring from my node as a somatic practitioner is the idea of the body in the world. I always want to pay attention to how we physically experience the world. The physical experience is paramount. The physical experience is the religious experience. Where we experience spirit is within our bodies. It’s this joke in Western culture that we think it’s out there. We always experience it somatically. How we relate to the bodies, the performing bodies, that’s the point. For the platform participants to let us into their skill and their bodies, that generosity was really exciting.

NOTES

1. Claudia La Rocco, “To Whom It May Concern,” in Dancers, Buildings and People in the Streets (New York: Danspace Project, 2015), 15. 2. Ibid., 16.

ANDREA KLEINE is a writer and interdisciplinary performance artist with a background in dance. Her performance work, Screening Room, or, The Return of Andrea Kleine (as revealed through a re-enactment of a 1977 televi- sion program about a ‘long and baffling’ film by Yvonne Rainer), premiered at The Chocolate Factory Theater in 2014. She is the author of the novel, Calf, and writes about contemporary dance and performance on her blog, The Dancers Will Win.

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