Putting together a piece of cogent choreography shouldn’t be that hard. After all, the raw material at your disposal has a head, a torso and four limbs, just like yourself. The beauty and bane of dance is that it gets created on the living human beings standing in front of you—you may have an idea, perhaps a piece of music to work with, but there is no script, no score, that can back you up or elaborate on what you see in front of you.
Worse, there is no (or at least very little) history of the art form that you can consult. Composers have hundreds of compositions that they can embrace or reject. So do playwrights or painters. As a dancer, you are on your own. Even with the technology that has become available in the past 50 years, not much of the choreographic past has survived. History, of course, can be a burden. But with historic awareness, at least you know what you want to get rid of.
Dancers are still primarily trained to perform; they receive little formal education on how to make dances. Therefore, being a choreographer, particularly a young one, can be a lonely experience. To ameliorate that isolation, Margaret Jenkins, artistic director of the San Francisco–based Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, created a forum called CHIME, which stands for Choreographers in Mentorship Exchange. Launched in 2004 to serve the Bay Area dance community, CHIME offers a year’s support for a self-selected pair of choreographers in a mentorship relationship. Six years later, Jenkins built on its successes by adding CHIME Across Borders, which matches up senior mentors from across the nation with three dance-makers of his or her choosing. Both programs now extend throughout Southern California and might expand to other metropolitan areas.
“In theatre, there is a long history of dramaturgy, and of someone coming in and creating a context of what is being investigated,” observes Jenkins. “In dance, for many reasons, we have not created a community of people who are in constant dialogue about the craft of making work.”
Mentoring, of course, is as old as Plato sitting at the feet of Socrates, or Titian inviting acolytes into his Venetian studio. In law and business, it is a must for anybody hoping to advance professionally. And it appears that in the arts, mentoring has recently sprouted like weeds in spring. (See AT, “One on One, Face to Face,” Jan. ’06.) The majority of such arts-mentoring efforts, however, are designed to demonstrate how “the system” works in order to bolster careers.
Jenkins has set fairly porous parameters for CHIME, but there is one restriction: Participants may not use their time together for institution-building—activities such as fundraising, or working on hiring practices or board-of-directors issues. “I don’t care if they talk about these on their own,” she says, “but CHIME is about making work.” It is a program created by an artist for artists.
CHIME choreographers receive small stipends and have free access to the Lab, Jenkins’s 3,800-square foot studio, located above a South of Market carpet store. How they want to structure their time is up to them, though quarterly meetings—not open to the public, but highly prized for their insider insights—and an end-of-year public showing of work is required.
Last April, Maurya Kerr and Alex Ketley met at the Lab for some intensive studio time. Having danced with Alonzo King LINES Ballet, both artists have strong ballet backgrounds but choreograph from a broader perspective. They also have watched and appreciated each other’s work for some time, with Kerr having the benefit of Ketley’s more experienced eyes. They see CHIME as a way to continue their informal conversations and focus on specific issues.
Kerr creates primarily from texts, while Ketley’s approach is more visceral. “I am happy where I am,” Kerr explains, “but I also want to have other options.” On this evening in the studio, they talk about the temptation, when standing in front of a group of dancers, to please the performers by making use of what they can do well. In order to embrace risk, Ketley says, he improvises for an hour before every rehearsal, letting the body take him where it will. Kerr watches him do so for a while, interjecting questions about physical motivation. Then they both start moving in different parts of the studio to the same music. “How did it feel?” he asks her at the end. “Awkward,” she replies.
At the 2011 CHIME showcase, another pair, Kim Epifano and Antoine Hunter (who is deaf), presents what looked like an almost finished solo for Hunter about “putting people in a box.” Sara Shelton Mann and Benjamin Levy have explored ways of making contact—physical, emotional, intellectual—and at one point in their duet she sends him reeling without having touched him. Michelle Fletcher, mentored by Jill Togawa, has drawn a map of a section of Golden Gate Park for a landscape installation in which audiences would encounter any number of movementdefined relationships.
As CHIME expanded to Southern California, where applicants come from a broader pool of dance genres and are reimbursed for studio rentals of their choice, Jenkins discerned that choreographers in and around Los Angeles seemed even more isolated than those in the Bay Area: “There are artists here who have worked for 20 years who have never talked with each other, in some cases have never seen each other’s work.” For one such artist, choreographer and UCLA faculty member Victoria Marks, the mentoring experience has allowed her to more deeply investigate her own role inside the university, where she teaches both undergraduates and graduates.
Watching how her mentee Mira Kingsley “followed through on an idea and also stepped away from things when they weren’t working” invigorated Marks’s thinking about her own choreographic processes. “Mira has a very focused Buddhist practice,” Marks notes, “which she teaches through movement. I went to see her teach, and I could see what she was grappling with while trying to create coherence between her spiritual, artistic and movement practices.”
Entering into a mentorship relationship allowed another pair, artist/scholar Doran George and mid-career, time-based installation artist Julie Tolentino, an opportunity to challenge each other on equal footing and question the hierarchical concept of mentor/mentee. At the end of their year, George performed a text to “publicly ritualize and formalize the intimacy of our work together.”
When nationally known choreographers were brought into the mix for CHIME Across Borders, New Yorkers David Gordon and Ralph Lemon stepped up to the plate; Elizabeth Streb is this year’s mentor; Tere O’Connor will come in 2013. These choreographers have agreed to serve, Jenkins believes, because they hope it will invigorate their own creativity. For her part, Jenkins (who studied in New York before founding her West Coast company in 1973) relishes being “in an ongoing dialogue with the people who have been a profound influence on me.” Even though attitudes have greatly changed, she believes that the West Coast too often is still seen as “No Coast.” “I wanted not only to keep learning from them,” she says, “but I also wanted them to learn about what is happening out here.”
After the David Gordon residency, one of Jenkins’s own dancers sent her an e-mail saying, “Imagine my life if I hadn’t had this experience!” Another longtime company member, Ryan T. Smith, co-artistic director with Wendy Rein of RAWdance, found the process of interacting with so many different personalities revelatory. “I feel more strongly that I know what I like, and stand by it more firmly,” he avows.
Watching these senior mentor/artists at work has been fascinating for Jenkins. “David told them what movies they should see because he wanted to talk about them—he’s a ‘what if’ kind of guy who always asks questions,” she says of Gordon. Two years later, Deborah Slater, like Gordon an experienced maker of dance theatre, still lives off the experience. “I knew that David was one of the few people from whom I would accept criticism. He is one of my heroes. I also knew he would disrupt my processes, and I believe in that. He made me do things I didn’t want to do. It was both horrible and wonderful.”
“Ralph Lemon,” Jenkins says, “had the dancers moving all the time. He might give them an hour for a problem; Elizabeth Streb had them back in 10 minutes. She also gave them worksheets and talked about Kant, Deleuze and Wittgenstein.”
The CHIME model clearly is adaptable to different dance ecologies. If it is to continue, Jenkins observes, she has to rethink the concept for different geographic regions and reach out for continued funding. She’s adamant about one thing: “I want to make new work.”
Rita Felciano is a recipient of American Theatre’s Bay Area Commissioning Fund, supported by a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. She has been the the San Francisco Bay Guardian’s dance critic since 1988.
