PillowVoices: Dance Through Time

Trisha Brown: Choreographer and Visual Artist

Episode Summary

Jennifer Edwards hosts this episode focused on Trisha Brown, one of the most celebrated choreographers to emerge from Judson Dance Theater and the postmodern era. Brown is in conversation with Deborah Jowitt, the influential choreographer, scholar, dance critic, and educator. We also hear from art historian and Brown specialist Susan Rosenberg.

Episode Notes

Jennifer Edwards hosts this episode focused on Trisha Brown, one of the most celebrated choreographers to emerge from Judson Dance Theater and the postmodern era. Brown is in conversation with Deborah Jowitt, the influential choreographer, scholar, dance critic, and educator. We also hear from art historian and Brown specialist Susan Rosenberg.

Essay on Trisha  Brown: https://danceinteractive.jacobspillow.org/themes-essays/women-in-dance/trisha-brown/
 

Episode Transcription

[Music begins, composed by J.S. Bach, performed by Jess Meeker]

NORTON OWEN: Welcome to PillowVoices, a production of Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, with content from the Pillow Archives. I’m Norton Owen, the Pillow’s Director of Preservation, and it’s my pleasure to introduce Pillow Scholar Jennifer Edwards, who is also the director and producer of PillowVoices. She will be your host for this brief snap-shot of one of the twentieth century's great dance artists, Trisha Brown, much of it, in Brown’s own words. 

TRISHA BROWN: The accumulation—one, one-two, one-two-three, one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four-five—got me the position, I was described as an intellectual, and, for, for counting, and…. [Brown and the audience laugh]. 

JENNIFER EDWARDS: I thought it appropriate to begin with Trisha Brown herself, speaking at the Pillow in 2003. 

We will spend much time listening to Brown, in conversation with Deborah Jowitt, herself an artist, dance scholar, and former dance critic for The Village Voice. However, I was struck by what’s possible when we can move through time and add in views of a second scholar, Susan Rosenberg, who spoke on Brown’s work in 2017 at the Pillow. I especially appreciate the jovial nature of Jowitt and Brown’s exchanges, coupled with the historical expertise offered by both Jowitt and Rosenberg.

But before turning to the conversation between Jowitt and Brown, I’d like to share Norton Owen’s introduction of Brown during that same 2003 Pillow Talk titled, “Trisha Brown: Dance and Art.” And I think it’s important to note, that while Brown’s voice and exuberance are vibrant and alive in these recordings, she died on March 18, 2017. Her legacy lives on in the Trisha Brown Dance Company, in dancers who study and perform her choreography, and in her visual art works which continue to tour museums around the world. 

NORTON OWEN: Trisha is one of the foremost choreographers to emerge from the postmodern era. As she first came to public notice when she began showing her work with the Judson Dance Theater, and in the 1960s. Founding her own company in 1970, Brown has had a prominent career in dance, and more recently in opera and classical music. She joined with two new collaborators, visual artists, Terry Winters and composer Dave Douglas to create a trilogy, one part of which was commissioned by and premiered at Jacob's Pillow. Trisha Brown is the first woman choreographer to receive the coveted MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and has been awarded many other honors, including five fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, two Guggenheim fellowships, she was a 1994 recipient of the Samuel Scripps American Dance Festival Award, and served on the National Council of the Arts from ‘94 to ‘97. In 99, Brown received the New York State Governor's Arts Award. Most recently, Trisha Brown was honored with the 2003 National Medal of Arts.

JENNIFER EDWARDS: As a woman, and particularly a woman who creates, well, many types of things, I wanted to highlight this clip. Here Jowitt reads an excerpt from an essay written by Brown and then the two discuss why, even after much success, Brown continues to feel as though she was still an apprentice of her craft. 

DEBORAH JOWITT: She’d walked out of her studio to improvise Orfeo’s speech to Caronte in the monumental Aria, Possente spirto. This was when she was working on the choreography for the opera, “L’Orfeo”. I had sorted out my identity. I was both or Orfeo, asking for permission to enter Hades, and the words he sang. I was primed with music, text, poetry systems, literature. I was the faithful shepherd Guarini’s Il pastor fido. The spirit was with me. And most of all, I could also arpeggiate my body in the clear place of a compositional mind that does operate on its own. When Trisha is busy with a handful of other aesthetic concerns, I knew at that moment, the long haul of my apprenticeship in choreography was over. And in the first essay, in this book, Hendel Taicher [Brown: Teicher]. Teicher. Sorry. I’m really bad with this today. Okay, this [a couple of phrases exchanged unrelated to discussion]. Hendel Teicher was as astonished as, as I am. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about why after being a choreographer of enormous expertise for so long, why you felt suddenly that that had been an apprenticeship, that you were working your way towards something that you had arrived at?

TRISHA BROWN: Well, it sounds strange to me, when you questioned me about it, why I had thought that. But I think it's primarily being a woman choreographer that I never, I always thought that if I didn't get it right, each time I choreographed, they would throw me away. I don't know whose “they.” But the critics would write with acerbic assessment of my work, in the negative zone, and so I always didn't allow myself to trust myself, I think, basically. There was just a point when I realized I knew how to make Trisha Brown choreography. And I just asked myself at that point, is this, is this what you want to keep on doing or is there something else you, you haven't thought to do? And that's when the, an early experience in Carmen with Lina Wertmüller as, dir-director at the San Carlo Opera House in Naples, which was a really kind of life changing experience, where I was a choreographer, she was the director, came back to say, well, let's, let's get back into opera, but you, you direct [Jowitt: Mm-hmm]. That was a very big step for me to take.

JENNIFER EDWARDS: Perhaps it was Brown’s early days at Judson Dance Theater or perhaps it is related more to her larger worldview, but she was known for using venues and space in parallel to her movement. In other words, similar to how John Cage and Merce Cunningham believed that sound and movement can co-exist without one bending to the other, Brown used music, movement and the spatial components in venues as independent operators. In this clip, Jowitt and Brown speak to this recurring theme in her work. 

DEBORAH JOWITT: One of the things that interest has always fascinated me about your work is your, your use of space. First non-traditional spaces. And then non-traditional use of proscenium spaces, spaces. And so maybe we could talk a little bit about, about that. It, it seems to me that part of it has to do with wishing the audience to see the space differently. For instance, your early experiments with gravity, the walking on the walls, the what how did you, what, what was it you were trying to shake up in terms of our perception?

TRISHA BROWN: Well, your perspective on gravity, or the audience's perspective on gravity. It was as simple as that [Jowitt: Mm-hmm. So, you as you see them walking on the wall, you're, you're seeing them as if from overhead or…]. Yes. As if you're looking down from a building of, of people walking on the sidewalk. They're walking at, at a right angle to the wall, on the wall. And that was at the Whitney Museum. And there were six of us doing that. And they were going, we're going back and forth. One long wall, one, not so long, but plenty long wall, so that they had to turn the corner and they could stop and stand or run and catch up with someone or jump away from the wall, if they had achieved that in rehearsal.

DEBORAH JOWITT: It was it was very strange to be a spectator because you knew where your own center of gravity was. In your butt the way it usually is when you're sitting in a chair [Brown laughs]. But when you looked out there and saw somebody's head coming toward you as that person walked along the wall, you began to feel a little bit as if maybe you were wrong [Jowitt and Brown laugh]. Yes, it should be doing something. But I was, I again, I learned quite a few things from reading this book, and your comments on your work, and I was interested to read when you, when you wrote about I think it was Astral Convertible. How you suddenly looked at the proscenium space from the Royal Opera House in London. Could, could you explain this? [Brown: Sadler’s Wells]. Sadler-Sadler’s Wells, and how, how that, how, how, how taking into account the traditional audience view from the balcony the, so on, changed how she would use the space in that dance? [Brown: Mm-hmm]. So…

TRISHA BROWN: Yeah. Sadler's Wells was extreme, in my experience. It has an almost vertical balcony structure that goes way up high. And the highest point is probably, you know, the cheap seats where all our young English choreographers were sitting. And I went up to check it out because Set and Reset has an object that has hangs down in this space, so we always have to go to the top to see what, what they're seeing, and whether they're seeing the dancers behind it. And it looked, aside for, well, what I saw was at the dance, I saw the dancer, the tops of the dancers heads on the floor, and not the backdrop at all. It was such a fuss about who you're collaborating with what, is only on paper for the people, it's only on the program is they don't see it. So, then I thought, well, I should make a dance, a floor dance, for the kids in the upper balcony, top balcony. And which, I made this wonderful filigree that, that gets in the way and sets people up, and changes the typography, etcetera, etcetera. Powering up out off of the floor with 5x5 power that no dancer really loves to do, and using it in the reverse going back down in the floor. So, there were entries and exits on a vertical level to the people on the orchestra. Because they don't, they can't really see the floor that well [Jowitt: particularly the front rows]. Yeah, it's, it’s dangerous to do a lot of floor work. Because you don't know kind of, how it’s going to be, and in what who's going to, who in the orchestra is going to be able to see it. So, I made a dance for both constituents. Those who will always see the floor and those who like to see the backdrop and the dancers in the traditional way. And so those two choreographies had to be very carefully wedded, so that no one stepped on anyone, etcetera.

DEBORAH JOWITT: So, the people in the top balcony and the bottom had simultaneously good views of something [Brown: Yeah]. Right. I also liked the idea of making a dance that doesn't actually fit the stage. In Glacial Decoy, you deliberately made a dance that was too big for the stage [Brown: Mm-hmm]. And that seemed quite apparent as one watched it, which was very thrilling [Brown: Mm-hmm]. Of course, it also had thrilling decor by Robert Rauschenberg. And this book is as much about well, not as much but a great deal about her very powerful, creative artists who work with her. But could you explain about that, that structure because that's a very interesting, transgressive idea about the proscenium. 

TRISHA BROWN: Mm-hmm. Well, I think, perhaps a choreographer who has access to a proscenium arch might not necessarily gotten involved in this idea. But I, we were, I was not [Jowitt: This was 79]. So, so when making a work for the proscenium arch, was very much in my mind. I put five dancers in the space. And when the, equal distance from each other. For the most part of the dance, you only see four of them, and it slides back and forth. So, when this goes over here, this person…I can't do that [Brown and audience laughs]. Where’s my, where are my finger exercises? [Jowitt: This person, this person goes away]. Yeah, it's, when you go this way, this person goes away. Deep. Behind the proscenium arch. Deep [Brown and audience laughs]. Anyway, and so, but what, what the, the dance wasn't made really to do. it was made to do that. I made the dance, and then I forced it to slide back and forth behind the proscenium. And it had, you know, it, it suggested infinity. That was interesting for me to do.

JENNIFER EDWARDS: I’d like to bring in the voice of Susan Rosenberg who is an art historian and the author of Trisha Brown: Choreography as Visual Art. She was a part of a 2017 Pillow Talk, titled “Trisha Brown’s Legacy,” facilitated by Pillow Scholar, Maura Keefe. Here Rosenberg speaks to Brown’s work in galleries and museums, long before the current trend of bringing performative work into museum spaces. 

SUSAN ROSENBERG: ​​I knew that Trisha, because I’d followed her work, even though I didn't see any of those early gallery performances or museum performances. She was bringing some, occasionally works from the 70s onto the stage. So, I was familiar with this body of work that was dance in silence, that was very conceptual. That was very much about the body's movements, and about an organic and movement language based on the body's mechanical logic. And the purity of movement was what Trisha wrote about and discussed. And so, when I was a curator, I thought, you know, Trisha left, basically working in the art spaces in 1978-79. Let's bring her back. What would she do now. And this was actually before museums were really thinking about bringing performance into the museums. This was 1998. Actually, when I, she had a drawing show in New York, and I was introduced to her at her studio to study some of her drawings. And then I had this idea to ask her to come back, come back, come back, we want to see you in the museum again [laughter]. This is where your roots are. And Trisha, of course, was working on so many projects at that time [laughter]. She was simultaneous, I mean, the late 90s, were probably the busiest period of her career. She had multiple commissions to work on choreographies with contemporary composers and artists, she was directing operas. She was, the company was, you know, touring, she was still dancing and touring with the company. And so, it took her some time to come up with, with the project, which I don't need to go into really, but it was an improvisational project that involved drawing performance and exhibition in one event. I think that what most interested me about, and still interests me about that Trisha’s history in the art world context is that museums are, you know, dedicated to the notion that art can live forever, and that art is our cultural heritage. And it needs to be preserved. And I've always believed that Trisha, owing to her proximity to the visual art world of the 60s and 70s, and the ideas of the art world that informed her own choreographed thinking, that she also held out this notion that it's just a myth that dance disappears. Actually, dance lasts forever. And that by, you know, participating in the culture of museums, that means that her place has a place in that particular history, which has a history of museums, exhibitions, art and performance in museums. And so, there's a place where memory is preserved in a very specific way that's different from the theater.

JENNIFER EDWARDS: We’ll stay with Rosenberg for just a bit longer as she shares her take on how Brown translated her way of moving to dancers while also honoring the dancers’ own unique style of interpreting movement. 

SUSAN ROSENBERG: This is an idea that that is embedded in Trisha’s work from the very beginning with a piece called Roof Piece that she first did in 1971, and then in 1973. And then again, in numerous works of Glacial Decoy, Trisha is very unusual in her beliefs about how movement gets transmitted from one body to another, which is that she always accepted that there was imperfect, fidelity, that there was never perfect fidelity from one body to the next. That each body was going to put its own imprint on the movement forms that she created. This is an idea that she explored in very conceptual dances. And then it became a technique that she called throwing, where she would improvise, and throw the movement and the dancers could catch it as best that they could see, and corporeally absorb what she was doing. And so, this kind of,I'd say latitude in freedom that she gave to individual dancers to be themselves on the stage, not to have to rigidly model against an ideal, is kind of a principle of Trisha is work.

JENNIFER EDWARDS: Tying these themes together, both how Brown translated her movement to dancers and into her own visual work, let’s go back to the conversation between Deborah Jowitt and Trisha Brown. 

DEBORAH JOWITT: I remember when you began to choreograph, when you, when your movement began to become less pedestrian, and more complex, we all said, “No dancers are ever going to be able to do that, anything like Trisha.” And in fact, the dancers that you've cultivated over the years, they don't move exactly like you, they move like themselves, but they have the same physical equipment that is the same physical adroitness in manipulating movement, that is. they can go forward and backward in a phrase, they can go upside down, they can improvise new variations for your approval. And so, they bring something to your company, and how, how do you work with them in a, in a, as you're creating a piece? 

TRISHA BROWN: Well, I've it's been the gamut, [Jowitt: Mm-hmm] you know. I've completely made the phrases all on my own without them knowing anything about it, and they're called back into rehearsal, and I teach them point blank, everything. And in a couple of occasions, I, I have been improvising movement, really. And I still am [Jowitt: Mm-hmm], all along the way. With the exception, the new piece we're working on now [Jowitt: Mm-hmm], on which I asked three of them to get together and one take care of the legs, and second one, take care of the torso, and the third one take care of the head [Brown and audience laughs]. And then we just laminated them together again, there. So that was something that needed to be farmed out to two other people. I couldn't get the, the antagonism [Jowitt: Mm-hmm] of three voices making something for one body [Jowitt: Mm-hmm] that they got. But and also in El Trilogy, we were running out of time. And I remember saying to them, “You got to help me. Take that phrase and rhythmize it,” whatever that meant [laughter]. And they go and then come back and show it to me. And it was like yes or no, or half of it or whatever. Those are really the only two occasions. 

DEBORAH JOWITT: And some of the early days I think they followed in, was there was a phrase in Lineup maybe where they were responding to verbal, a verbal structure you gave them in their own way. I mean, it seems to me you always if there is improvisation, unless it's in the early phases, you always use it strictly structured, so it has its, it has its limits. But I, you know, I've been, I have I had the pleasure of watching you in two different circumstances of, of working on a piece. In one of which I think it was Twelve Ton Rose. Trisha is in front of the company, and she's going [makes a sound]. I, I have no idea whether it was choreographed or improvised, but she's going [makes the same sound]. She's doing this stuff. And, and everybody's behind her sort of going, “uh-huh, uh-huh.” And then she stops and she turns around says, “What did I do?” And then they do it. And it seemed to me at that point, you chose somebody who seemed to be doing what you thought looked like what you hoped you might be doing?

TRISHA BROWN: Well, that's really, my job basically, is to find a way to get what I have in my mind to register on somebody's body [Jowitt: Hmm]. And so, I use every technique I can come up with, and sometimes I have to rift through a lot of them [Jowitt: Mm-hmm] to get to what I want. But that's, that's, that's a step in a process towards finding something, something new and interesting. 

DEBORAH JOWITT: Was very exhilarating. And, and I also had the pleasure of sitting in a theater at, I think it was Angers and Trisha was very lucky in Europe to be able to work in a theater, rehearse in a theater, which is very uncommon here, with her dancers, all of whom knew a whole barrage of maybe five or six phrases that they could manipulate and dance and she's sitting out there with a mic saying you know, you come in on phrase one, except they all had nice names. You come in [laughs], funny names. You come in on one, you know. Could you please enter as he's in the middle of one, could you come in doing two? And could you try when two is halfway through her thing, come, come in with the middle of three, and then join whatever one is at that point. And, you know, the dancers are doing this. And I'm sitting there quite amazed. And then when Trisha gets stuck, though, which happens, the dancers are able to say, after a long pause, you know, what if I tried number four here, you know [Brown: True, yeah], so, it seemed to me that their intelligence about the material is very [Brown: Right] helpful [Brown: Right]. And I was thinking about a Stephen Petronio, who's standing there [Brown: Hi Stevie]. He was in your company for a number, from 1979 to 1980-something, quite a long time. 

STEPHEN PETRONIO: ‘86. 

DEBORAH JOWITT: 86. So it seems to me that he was the first man in your company [Brown: Mm-hmm], and he brought something to the company that was distinctive or [laughter] beside gender [laughter]. Can you talk a little bit about that, particularly about Stephen, but any other sort of feeling about what dancers bring as they come in?

TRISHA BROWN: I don't know exactly what you brought right in the beginning, Stephen. I don't, I don't remember, I don't have a story that marks that moment. But Stephen is, is, he's a darling man [laughter]. And he has very good energy in the workplace. And I still do a few things. One is he taught me that if things are really going bad, really getting sour, you just go like this [laughter]. And it works [laughter]. And one time he asked me for a solo, that's always a mark of respect for me, I think when, when a dancer comes to me and asked for a solo, this was during Set Reset. And I was going through a phase of stopping my career. I thought one had to stop dancing when they got to be 37, or something, I don't know. Anyway, I was living out the stereotype at that moment, and was stiff after rehearsal in the day. And I thought well, but I'm going to do this with Stephen. So, and he came and I was having to, and I thought, well, this would be good research. But when I can't move at all. And so, I was going, I, I was verbally telling him what to do. And so, I got him off his, off, I'm catching off his expectations of what he, he thought I was going to ask him to do. And he did some very remarkable, you have to call them triple entendres with a body, you know, like, it's just like, counter, count, subtle counter maneuvers. And it was beautiful, just beautiful. In that time, we just, I don't think we quite had video equipment at that time, maybe came two weeks later or something. But anyway, we didn't have a record of it was just the two of us working at night. And so, he came back, we couldn't get it, we like we did it, you did what I asked you to do, or manifested something magnificent after, out of my instructions were and then, then you couldn't repeat it. So, you went home. And we've tried and we trying, kind of tomorrow. And when you came back in the next day, you said you'd talked to a friend and the friend said if you did it once, you can do it twice. And that, I say that to my dancers all the time now [laughter]. It's a little dictum [laughter]. And Stephen is rubber man, he has got ---sssss four snakes as appendages. And they [laughter] [Jowitt: And they are called…]. I'm sorry, he brings this out in me, and, and, and so he's just like, you know, so I'm trying to, I actually have a strict side to myself and an elusive side to myself. And so, I had wanted this. Stephen was always sort of like that, in progress Trisha. And then when I saw your work for the first time I saw this. I thought holy moly. Tortured me, so [laughter]. Anyway. 

DEBORAH JOWITT: Well, it's very, it's very interesting to watch the bloodlines of movement in, in modern dance because of course, it's always been one of the high aspirations of modern dance not to move like the person you, you worked with, you started with. Martha Graham did not want to move like with Ruth St. Denis. She called, you know, she made unhappy references to decadent Orientalism. And, and, and some, of, of course, they're always disciples who imitate their masters, that's, that's a given. But of all the people that came out of that generation of Martha Graham like Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, they did not want to move exactly like their mentor. Alwin Nikolai did not want to move like Hanya Holm, who was his teacher. But of course they took from, from them so but it's very interesting to see because there are very few true innovators. And I think of Trisha, as one of the, one of the true innovators of movement in this progression these decades of the, of the of the 20th century and on. Because before Trisha began to move, the way she began to move, nobody began to move. Nobody moved like that. And, of course, I can see, even though Stephen Petronio has very different concerns in his choreography, and his movement, his, his movement, I still I don't think he would move the way he moved if he hadn't danced with Trisha. He’s, he’s saying, no, he wouldn’t. Absolutely not. So there, there are discoveries that are made that are passed on to, to new generations, who refine them and personalize them [Brown: Mm-hmm]. But it seems to me your movement came from [Brown: heaven] [laughter]. Heaven, heaven. I mean, maybe you've spoken about ideas about Ideokinesis theories about the body that were very different from the presentational you know, upfront Western body of, of ballet or even traditional modern dance so that you hit, like you had a whole new slinky language there.

TRISHA BROWN: See that S-word gets…every time [Jowitt: Yes]. Well, yes, naturally, my body moves like that. Once I was playing ping pong with a young nephew, very young nephew, and he, he, we used to call it putting English on the ball or something. I don't know what that meant. But he, all of a sudden, I saw this kid moving, just the way I do [laughter] across the table. So it's, I inherited how I move and special to the strands came in. But I want to say about leaving the company, Stephen going out into the world. He can't discard the pathways had been carved in his body by reiterating my work over and over again for eight years, six years Petronio: Seven]/ Seven years. He, he can't, it's not like a coat you can take off put down and then suddenly be in a new garment yourself. It has to be dismissed, discarded over time as you build up what's your voice into this, into the center position. And I think that it's, I mean, it's just logical [Jowitt: Right]. And I know I went through it myself being in Judson and dancing in everybody else's pieces. I remember once dancing in a piece of Yvonne’s and she has very flat, very square, very powerful feet, which I envy. I have an arch that goes like that. And it, so I have less support and thinner ankles, etc. And there I am, I, I heard my foot hit the floor, like her foot hits the floor. I had gone over into her body, which physically not likely, and then I said to myself, time to go girl [laughter]. Take your feet for yourself [laughter].

DEBORAH JOWITT: We're talking about Yvonne Rainer, one of the leading figures in the Judson Dance Theater.

JENNIFER EDWARDS: We’ll close with a conversation that feels like improvisation sparked by the subject of Brown’s feet. It shifts to her visual art practice and ends with an affirmation of the reciprocal nature of her various collaborations.   

TRISHA BROWN: Before we go in the questions, I'll just say one thing since I've gotten to the subject of my feet, which is in Steve Paxton 's essay about me [Jowitt: And their drawings you made of your feet in here]. Yes, I draw my left foot with my right foot and my right foot with my left foot. My left hand with my right hand and my left hand da-da-da. And yeah, and now I'm making very large drawings. They are ten feet, nine feet by ten and a half feet. They’re just a touch bigger than my body stretched. And I just dropped down into the paper and I do one of my improvisations. And I don't think there's a great dis, difference between, well, yeah, between the gesture on the paper of the artist, or the painter, and the gesture of the dancer, because you are selecting. And the, the thing is that the chalk remains the, the gesture of the dancing person doesn't. And

DEBORAH JOWITT: What do you do? Are you holding chalk with your toes?

TRISHA BROWN: I have chalk, yes, I have chalk, I have pastel, and charcoal, and I do some, some drawing some of the large drawings I do standing up. I need to go into a smaller size paper. But anyway, I'm still doing these. I will do them at the New Museum. This book is about an exhibition that got put together by Hendel Teicher. And it documents my, my choreography, and my work, both as a as a dancer and a visual artist. And the exhibition has rooms set, set up for each of my collaborators. We know, we've said Bob Rauschenberg, Fujiko Nakaya, made a fog sculpture. She's built, built a beautiful fog screen and projecting Opal loop on it. There's been a lot of creativity since 1979, when she did it the first time. And Don Judd, Nancy Graves, and Terry Winters. And so, it's really, it's made concrete what we, people always be asking me, how do you collaborate? Well, I always lie, but anyway [laughter]. This makes concrete because you see it in their artwork, what they've taken from the stage and put into use for themselves and what, in what ways that that flows back into me and how I'm influenced by them.

[Music begins, composed and performed by Jess Meeker]

NORTON OWEN: That’s it for this episode of PillowVoices. Thank you for joining us today. On behalf of Jacob’s Pillow, we look forward to sharing more dance with you through the films, essays, and podcasts at Dance Interactive dot Jacob’s Pillow dot org. And of course, through live experiences during our festival and throughout the year. Special thanks to the National Endowment for the Arts for helping launch this podcast series. Please subscribe to PillowVoices wherever you get your podcasts, and visit us again soon, either online or on site.