Artists Reach Out: Ivy Baldwin

Dear friends,

Welcome to Artists Reach Out: reflections in a time of isolation. I dreamed this series of interviews out of grief for my work both as a documenting arts writer and curator of live performance. In this time of social distancing, we are called to responsibly do all we can to safeguard ourselves and our neighbors. It is, literally, a matter of life and death.

But there's no distancing around what we still can share with one another--our experiences, thoughts, wisdom, humor, hearts and spirit. In some ways, there are more opportunities to do so as we pull back from everyday busyness out in the world and have time to honor the call of our inner lives.

So, let me introduce you to some artists I find interesting. I'm glad they're part of our beautiful community, and I'm eager to engage with them again (or for the first time) in years to come.

--Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody

Ivy Baldwin

Ivy Baldwin
(photos: Laura Bianchi, Courtesy of
The Bogliasco Foundation)

Ivy Baldwin is a choreographer, performer, educator, and founder of Ivy Baldwin Dance (est. 1999). Commissions include BAM (Next Wave Festival), Philip Johnson Glass House, The Joyce Theater (Joyce Unleashed), Abrons Arts Center, The Chocolate Factory, Dance Theater Workshop, New York Live Arts, and Manitoga. Baldwin’s work, Keen [No. 2], was nominated for a 2018 “Bessie” for Outstanding Visual Design. Baldwin has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, Bogliasco Foundation, Jerome Foundation, NYFA Build, FCA Emergency Grant, Tell Foundation, TMU, MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and Marble House Project; residencies at Gibney (DiP), MASS MoCA, Mount Tremper Arts, LMCC, and American Dance Institute (ADI); and been an AIR with BAM, Movement Research, Abrons Arts Center, Center for Performance Research, ArtistNe(s)t (Romania), and currently, 92Y. Baldwin’s work has also been presented by Tanz im August Festival/Danceoff! (Germany), Dans Contemporan International Festival (Romania), Dance Center Columbia College (IL), REDCAT (CA), Irvine Barclay Theater (CA), ADI (MD), The Painted Bride (PA), Lincoln Center Out of Doors/Danceoff!, Symphony Space, 92Y, New Museum, Danspace Project, P.S. 122, and La MaMa, E.T.C. Baldwin teaches around the U.S., including The New School Eugene Lang and currently, Bard College.

Ivy Baldwin Dance in Keen [No. 2]
L to R: Kay Ottinger, Heather Olson,
Marýa Wethers and Anna Adams Stark
(photo: Maria Baranova)

Do you have a current or planned project whose progress is affected by the pandemic?

Yes, a few. Currently, I should be mid-DiP residency at Gibney making a new work for and with performers Katie Dean, Kayvon Pourazar and Saúl Ulerio, and composer Justin Jones. My plan was (is!) to also perform in this new work. I should also be completing my year-long 92Y Harkness Artist-in-Residence position—rehearsing at the Y, meeting with my fellow awesome AIRs, having showings, etc., through May.

Finally, I was choreographing a new dance for students at Bard College this semester that would have been performed in their spring concert, but of course classes have moved online and performances cancelled. The Bard Dance Department did not think it made sense to move this performance class online, so my relationship with these wonderful students has been cut quite short.

Briefly, tell me about how you got involved in the arts and in your particular practice.

I’ve been dancing, performing, making dances and theater since I can remember. There honestly hasn’t ever been anything else I wanted to do with my life. I come from a family of artists, and I grew up taking ballet, tap and jazz at the local studio and performing in all the old classic musicals and plays, alongside my mom, at the local college.

I always made my own strange dances in the woods of North Florida where I grew up and knew there was something else out there for me other than ballet or musical theater. I went on to North Carolina School of the Arts for undergrad, majoring in modern dance, and then moved to New York City immediately after and attended NYU Tisch School of the Arts where I received my MFA in dance. In December 1999, with the help of my friend Danielle Dugas, I rented the Cunningham Studio for one weekend, and Ivy Baldwin Dance was born.

In a more specific way, what are you practicing?

My normal practice involves spending an incredible amount of time not actually moving, but applying for things—project grants, general administrative funding, company residencies, artist-in-residence positions, teaching opportunities. I spend a lot of time working on budgets and emailing presenters, staying in touch. I do all of this so that I can do the thing I love most, which is being in a dance studio with artists making new work (and paying them as much as I can to be there).

Ironically, over the last ten years an important part of my creative practice and identity as an artist has been to go to places like the MacDowell Colony and Bogliasco Foundation each year and spend one month or so on a solo residency outside of NYC. This time alone does not feel like that!

Otherwise, I’m literally currently practicing Cunningham Technique thanks to free daily classes offered from the Merce Trust on Instagram Live. I don’t yet feel inspired to work on my own movement, but I do want to move and dance, and this is giving me some structure, a challenge, and a sense of community. It also taps into my long ago history as a young dancer, which is somehow comforting right now.

And what are you envisioning?

The day I can get back in a dance studio with Katie, Kayvon and Saúl without fear of touching each other.

I’m also simply envisioning each day as they come and trying to navigate them with patience—towards myself, my partner, my parents Zooming from Florida.

How does your practice and your visioning align with what you most care about?

I care most about being in a room together with other artists—experimenting, making, laughing, discussing, and then sharing these works with people who appreciate contemporary art.

I also care deeply about taking care of the artists I work with as best I can. I consider them my family. I’m fortunate that although these immediate opportunities have been cancelled, I’m still receiving fees so I can pay artists for the abrupt loss of work. That said, I don’t yet know how I will pay them to reschedule the work in the future, which worries me.

How does your practice function within the world we have now?

At the moment, I’m honestly just letting the absence of these precious opportunities be felt. I think it’s important to really feel what it’s like to miss being together, to appreciate that and sit with it. My world doesn't translate online easily, I’m not sure I want it to, so we’ll see. Depending on how long this goes on, I think I’ll be more interested in finding completely new outlets for expression than trying to fit my previous work and practices into these new online models overnight.

Briefly share one self-care tip that has special meaning to you now.

I think taking care of the other person (and our two senior pets) I’m quarantined with is how I’m taking care of myself at the moment. I get up every morning and make coffee and then I bring my husband his. I’ve been doing this for years, but somehow at this moment in time this familiar ritual of care grounds me and brings me joy.

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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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World premiere: Ivy Baldwin Dance presents "Keen [No. 2]"

Choreographer Ivy Baldwin performs in Keen [No. 2],
a new work for her ensemble, Ivy Baldwin Dance, at Abrons Arts Center.
Set design is by Wade Kavanaugh and Stephen B. Nguyen.
(photo: Maria Baranova)

Eleanor Smith (left) and Katie Workum
perform a duet in Keen [No. 2].

Below, an ensemble scene
(photos: Maria Baranova)

Grief is a force that seizes the body from within and works its way--by covert pathways and on its own timetable--throughout and through. Although humans have devised various rites for directing and honoring its expression, there's no controlling its urges and its dimensions. As such, grief has much to teach the conscious mind that humbly attends to it.

In Keen [No. 2]--in world premiere at the Abrons Arts Center, co-commissioned with The Chocolate Factory Theater and The Joyce Theater as part of Joyce Unleashed--Ivy Baldwin and her dancers dwell within a space of grief. They boldly ask us to pay attention to so much--in Katie Workum's opening solo, in front of that gorgeous, wow-inducing set by Wade Kavanaugh and Stephen B. Nguyen, a surprising, sometimes halting, even awkward exploration with no interest in pleasing our eyes; in the ensemble's lengthy passages of repetition, often numbingly even in tone; or the same ensemble indulging itself in excesses of release and of obvious uses of imagery and theatrical space, all of it given unconditional permission.

Among other things, I thought of valkyries and angels in flight. I thought of Isadora Duncan, that passionate force of nature, and her grief at the sudden death of her two young children. And I thought of furious tantrums in response to the unexplained, the unfair, the unbearable. It's significant that the dancing sometimes evokes the animal world in shapes, moves, rhythms, sounds, herd-like and unguarded behaviors. Grief connects us to our bodies in ways that can make us remember our basic animal selves and force us to let go of constructed, functional personas. Who better to demonstrate this for us than a chorus of dancers, artists who study the many intricate, wild truths their bodies hold?

Lawrence P. Cassella--who, in 2015, succumbed to a rare immune system disorder after brief illness--was a member of Ivy Baldwin Dance from 2003 to the end of his life. Keen [No. 2] is dedicated to this beloved member of our dance community and informed by Baldwin's experience of losing and grieving him. I watched it with a flow of questions: Is Workum, the work's initial soloist, testing the remaining abilities of a body she no longer trusts? Or could she be testing the powers of a new "body" beyond physical form--rotating her wrists to see if she can lift a leg, twining her hands to generate a new set of fingers? When dancers duet, their bodies coming into sync, can we know who is lost and who is mourning? Or is that interconnection, that blurring of distinction, that temporary inability to let go, regain and shelter in one's own, separate energy and identity, at the very heart of grief? Might it be, for dancers, even harder than for the rest of us to let the physical bodies of their loved ones and colleagues go?

Like the process of grief itself, Keen [No. 2] makes no appeal to what a viewer might want or accept. It is unreasonable and unruly in nature, but it is true to its own purpose and logic, presented with admirable conviction by Baldwin, Eleanor Smith and Katie Workum with Katie Dean, Dia Dearstyne, Heather Olson, Kay Ottinger, Marýa Wethers (June 1-4), Tara Willis (June 8-11), Tara Sheena and Anna Adams Stark.

Sound design: Justin Jones
Lighting design: Chloe Z. Brown
Costumes: Mindy Nelson

Keen [No. 2] continues through June 11 with performances Thursday-Saturday at 8pm and Sundays at 2pm. For information, click here. For ticketing, click here.

Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand Street (near Pitt Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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