Oberfelder looks back to move forward

InfiniteBody Q&A

 

Dancer-choreographer Jody Oberfelder (Jody Oberfelder Dance Projects) talks about her upcoming retrospective season at Abrons Arts Center, March 11-13.

 

EYA: For HEADS or TALES--your upcoming program at Abrons--you've planned an imaginative retrospective of your dances and dance films. This season, we've observed some major anniversaries and retrospectives--Urban Bush Women (25 years) and Trisha Brown Dance Company (40 years), for instance. Great companies celebrating survival through especially tough times: "Wow! We're still here!" When you review your career, what does it teach you about your powers of survival as an artist?

 

JO: I consider the idea of a retrospective not as this nostalgic thing but more forward thinking. HEADS or TALES considers questions such as: What have I put into the world and what’s been my own voice?  How did some pieces succeed and others seem tame or like treading water?

 

I’m a survivor in the sense that I keep going while I try to be resilient in getting past the “struggling artist” paradigm. I enjoy going to the studio and making work. There is always the opportunity to find out what is new for you, and how to reframe your work differently or better. I’m realizing that everything you do as an artist is provoked by what you’re thinking, what you’re going through, and each piece is a prototype for the next.

 

EYA: Instead of simply re-running your repertory pieces, you're reworking them. What led you to that particular approach and how are you implementing it?

 

JO: I usually don’t like straight-up repertory concerts. I feel like I’m reading a history book. I’ve arranged bits of my favorite pieces into a kind of narrative. I’ve shaved down everything so it reads like a map. I am playfully questioning the transitory nature of performance and its essence as a metaphor for life. Every movement has within it many inherent stories that can be ‘read’ uniquely by different people. In this piece, I’m trying to make sense of it all. The little stories that make up your life—and your art, not necessarily in that order.

 

EYA: What have you been learning about your work and yourself--past and present--as you revisit your early pieces?

 

JO: There is part of me that feels like I’ve been making the same piece over and over, just saying it in different ways with different processes, different dancers, sometimes movingly, inducing tears and laughter. Those are the gems amid the trash bin of pieces I can barely look at because they were clunkers.

You have to go though the shit to get to the good stuff. Perhaps these less-than-perfect pieces fertilize the ones that are keepers. Once the post-performance afterglow/depression has passed, I love the blank slate. Each piece is its own entity.

 

I wonder if each choreographer has her own genetic code. The seeds of what you made previously, even though your next piece may be miles apart in idea or temperament, were propagated by what you did last.

 

When I revisited Head First--my solo, first performed at PS 122--I realized that it was who I am: feisty, physical, powerful, expressive.  I think I tried on other styles, tried to clean up my act and make well crafted phrase-y stuff for a while. That was not me. It has been magnificent to own up to what is me—at least the sense of the me who is enduring, relishing the effort of life: the drama, the comedy.

 

EYA: Has your work process changed or evolved in significant ways? What inspires you today?

 

JO: I feel I trust my process more now. I have a messy imagination, a messy process, and I’m realizing I’m good at it. I’m okay with fishing around now because I can articulate what I’m fishing for. I am noodling around in the service of a seed of an idea and getting better at following the right threads, so that it means something to me and, I hope, the viewer.

 

I’m inspired by life: the little happenings and big pictures. I don’t want to get cynical or stuck in my ways. I hope to continue to develop new perspectives and a keep a sense of wonder born of curiosity. I want to be rigorous in my choices. I want capture the rollercoaster nature of life and be freewheeling in my artistry. 

I'm okay with being a storyteller of sorts.  I like that our medium is human beings. I’m inspired by pieces you feel in your gut.

 

EYA: What has changed for you over time?

Getting commissions for opera or theater is new, and it’s pretty fun to have a story to hang your hat on. Lush music helps too.

 

When I got the Dido and Aeneas commission from Orchestra of St. Luke’s, it was like biting the bullet in the storytelling challenge of re-interpreting and re-contextualizing. I’d always skirted around the idea of people being "characters" or being epic in their proportions.

 

I like creating out of nothing, but creating out of something is good too.  Dance is all about capturing energy, moving it around, moving bodies to move people.

 

EYA: It's fun to think of Rock Me Mama performed again by the original cast with their grown-up (teenaged) babies! Tell us about that piece and how it fits into the scheme of your evening.

 

JO: For me, having kids was an identity issue, as well as a feminist issue, and so became an artistic issue. Beginning with my own body transforming into a rounded, weighted dancer, the shape shifting of pregnancy crept into my dance-making, I knew I had to make art out of the body and art out of my life.  The choreography resulted in a 16mm film, Duet, shot by Ben Speth very simply with three light sources in one take when I was eight months pregnant--naked, raw, and sculptural--to a sound score of fetal heartbeats. I performed live dancing in front of that film when huge with my second child.

 

A few years later I choreographed Mother Other with my five-year-old daughter and another mom I liked to hang with and her daughter. It was a glorified play date to Beatles’s music. I showed this in a comp class—at this point wondering what the hell I was doing--to the delight of my teacher Martha Myers.  She encouraged me to keep going, to make work that is my own. Next was Expectant Tango, a dance for eight pregnant women in red dresses.

Life was clearly becoming a resource--a subject via my body and the lives of like-minded women transformed.  Life as I knew it had changed so why wouldn’t this rock my process?  After this series, I went back to making straight dances. In hindsight, I think this period of "genre" pieces brought me closer to making subsequent dances more real.

 

Rock Me Mama was first a song written around a kitchen table with a fellow mom, Tine Kindermann, who sings with me on the track. I kept my eyes open for pregnant dancer/women about to pop. The first person I reached out to was Denise Roberts Hurlin. I had no idea who she was, or that she had danced with Paul Taylor for years and was the head of Dancers Responding to AIDS (DRA). We were just standing next to each other backstage at the Joyce, waiting to greet a fellow colleague. I think I put an ad in The Village Voice too. We set up rehearsals: Bring your babies and we rock out. No baby sitter needed.

This new version is comprised of alumni from three separate casts. A few of the teens have refused to dance with their moms or have a science fair that trumps a modern dance concert.

 

The piece will follow the X Cheerleader birth cheer. I'll show a clip of the pregnant film, a bit of Expectant Tango, followed by brief out-takes of the cast of Rock Me Mama, kind of like an MTV Behind the Music montage: “Where are they now?”

The moms and teens will do a version of the piece, expressing their teen-independence, with a special moment for Denise’s "baby"--Cate Hurlin--who now dances with American Ballet Theater and was Clara in the Radio City Music Hall Christmas Spectacular, followed by a new cast of five moms and their babies—all in eight minutes.

 

EYA: You're revisiting your early dance films, and also launching a new film project online. Tell us about this new series and where we can find it.

 

JO: We decided to release a series of trailers—we're calling them webisodes--to get people interested in our live performance at Abrons. Using an '80s film with me running around in a crash helmet in Frankfurt as a catalyst, we organized a crew of "extras"--16 dancers and two skateboarders who happened to be onsite and joined in--to be part of the "crash helmet brigade." It was pouring rain for our shoot on a dreary December day, but luckily our location was the skate park under the Manhattan Bridge. So we had cover. Our camera person (Sam Heesen) zoomed around on roller-blades the whole time and really captured the essence of this free-wheeling dance  (Webisode  #1).

 

Films are very satisfying to create. They last. And somehow they are easier to control. I love the editing process in film. No hard feelings like in the studio: We’re cutting that section we worked on for two weeks! 

I love the way film can bring the focus close up to detail, directing the eye; we can do that in dance and I’m trying to approach choreography cinematically as it is dance is also a MOTION PICTURE. Real people in real time sweating—an expressive medium codified in a physical language.

 

The beauty of dance--and all performance--is that you have to show up. You can't phone it in. You have to be at the event. Live is experiential. Dance is experiential. You can’t climb into the bodies onstage. But great dancers will let you into what they are experiencing—the moment to moment ideas/feelings served by technique. That’s our "close up." Like good acting, you forget it’s an actor playing a character. In dance, when it’s really happening you forget they did a lot of pliés in order to soar.

I hope people will come. It’s a lush show: sensuous and rowdy. 

And I want to add a thank you to the dancers and collaborators I've worked with over the years for leading me to new places.#