Dancers' Group
Amplify, Strengthen & Unify
The Ballet Lover
by Barbara L. Baer
Paris, 1970s: the orchestra plays the first ominous note of Swan Lake. In the audience sits Geneva, an American journalist and ballet lover, waiting for the heart-stopping beauty and seduction of the romantic duet to start, but instead she witnesses Rudolf Nureyev failing to catch his Russian partner Natalia Makarova, allowing her to fall with a crash upon the stage.
It was unexpectedly and on foreign land that Byb Bibene encountered a nkisi nkondi for the first time. During a visit at the Musée du quai Branly in Paris, where he was on tour in 2006, the Bay Area-based choreographer was taken by the power of a wooden sacred statue, which he learned was a nkisi nkondi (nkisi is loosely translated as ‘medicine’, nkondi as ‘hunter’) and originated from his native land, the Congo. He had never seen nor heard about it back home.
Carved in wood, minkisi (plural of nkisi) were found in the kingdom of Kongo, which was located in West central Africa, in what is now known as northern Angola, Cabinda, the Republic of the Congo, the western portion of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the southern part of Gabon. The kingdom was mostly an independent state from the 14th to the 19th century, until it was broken apart by colonial Portugal, France and Belgium. Independence was reinstated in the 1960s, although by that time, years of foreign domination had caused devastating damages throughout the Congolese culture, politics and economics.
In pre-colonial time, minkisi were power figures activated by a nganga or healer at the request of an individual, a family or a community to help with public or private matters such as sealing a contract, resolving a conflict, curing a disease or casting off evil spirits. The nganga would activate the nkisi by placing spiritually charged substances inside its hollows, thereby calling the divine spirits to inhabit it and offer their guidance. Minkisi came in various shapes, mainly anthropomorphic or zoomorphic figures, but also vessels or shells. The nkisi nkondi stands out among other minkisi, as one in which the nganga would insert and leave a sharp object – nail, blade, shard – for each request made to the spirits.
Deemed as superstitious ‘fetishes’ by Christian missionaries, minkisi were for the most part destroyed during colonial times. Those that were spared were looted and later reappeared in private collections and museums, primarily in Western Europe and the United States. In addition, by imposing their language and education onto the native populations, colonists systematically eradicated traces of indigenous practices. This is why Bibene, although born and raised in the Republic of the Congo, never knew about minkisi.
An economist by trade – he holds a BA in finance – Bibene only started to pursue dance as a formal study in college: “In Congo dance and music are part of everyday life. I grew up surrounded by traditional ethnic dances, social dances like rumba or ndombolo, as well as American hip-hop. But it was not until I went to college that dance and acting became a big part of my life,” Bibene shared. He started a company in Brazzaville, the country’s capital, and in 2005 it was selected to compete in a dance competition in Paris. He won two prizes and began to travel frequently, mostly in Europe and the United States, where he relocated in 2009.
Encountering the nkisi nkondi in Paris fostered Bibene’s insatiable curiosity and planted the seed for his new work Nkisi Nkondi: Sacred Kongo Sculpture, presented at ODC Theater in May, followed by performances at the Museum of the African Diaspora in June: “I became obsessed and started researching. It took me to revisiting the history and spirituality of my country before colonization.” Bibene began developing the piece two years ago, as part of his thesis for his MFA in Dance at Saint Mary’s College. It started as a duet with Congolese dancer Chris Babingui, before morphing into a quintet. The piece now includes twelve dancers, and live music by Colombian flutist Adriana Rueda as well as music by Bayaka Pygmies and composers Henry Torgue and Serge Houpin.
Featuring text and videos about the creative process and the history of minkisi, the piece recreates some of the dances that might have been used in the process of calling for the divine spirits to inhabit the body of the nkisi nkondi. “I don’t know if there was a specific dance used by the nganga when performing the ritual, but I deducted so because ceremonies always involve dance, music, chanting or clapping. I don’t think that a small matter such as two people sealing a contract with the help of a nganga included dancing, but a larger matter involving the whole community might certainly have,” Bibene commented.
In Nkisi Nkondi, Bibene is not only drawing from the ethnic dances of his country but also from the photos of the minkisi that he came across during his research: “I’m creating from what the minkisi are telling us, from the power emanating from them. In the studio I may ask dancers to choose two of the minkisi’s positions and activate them.” For Bibene this work is an excavation into a cultural heritage that was taken away by colonial powers. “We are remembering history and honoring the spirit of the minkisi. With this piece I’m creating something that is my own internal ritual, connecting with my people’s history, which I didn’t know growing up. There are still a lot of things that I need to learn.”
This process of excavation raises ongoing questions: “What would have happened if people had held on to their beliefs and their healing practices? What if people didn’t embrace Christianity? The people whose heritage minkisi are a part of don’t even know about their existence. Considering that I had to pay a museum entrance fee in Paris to see a nkisi for the first time in my life, what is the economy of this cultural heritage? Do we bring back the statues to where they belong or do we ask for compensation?” Bibene asks. A firm believer that the key to Africa’s advancement rests in the acknowledgment of its indigenous knowledge, author Chika Ezeanya-Esiobu advocates for the return of stolen art to Africa, as a first step in restoring a sense of identity to communities whose traditional practices and history have been partly erased: “It is very important to understand that while Africa’s artwork resident in museums across Europe and America hold mostly aesthetic value in the hands of their current owners, the value it holds for Africans are completely the opposite. Africa’s artifacts hold the collective history and memory of several communities that make up the continent. It represents Africa’s pride in her past, the absence of which has robbed the continent of a clear understanding of its present situation and the will to chart a veritable path to her future,” she stated in an interview with the Danish newspaper Kristeligt Dagblad.
Bibene hopes that his piece encourages audiences to delve into their own history: “I want the audience to realize how important it is to know one’s history. A lot of issues we face in our society come from the fact that people have abandoned practices that were demonized by settlers – different forms of healing or documenting history, for example. I am also hoping to encourage my brothers and sisters in the African American community to connect with their roots.” My conversation with Bibene about Nkisi Nkondi inevitably brings me to consider the colonial history of my own native country. As a white woman originally from France, whose ancestors, and the generations following, if not directly responsible for colonizing Bibene’s land, undisputedly benefited from it, I am confronted with these implications and my own position in regards to the aftermaths of France’s colonial past.
After a two-year hiatus from his bi-annual trips home to complete his MFA, Bibene will return to the Republic of the Congo this summer. He is building a cultural center on the coast, in Pointe-Noire, and continues to oversee the Rue Dance street festival that he co-created in Brazzaville, which is held every two years with international guest artists who come teach and perform. While bridging cultural dialogue through artistic exchange, Bibene hopes to keep on unearthing parts of his people’s heritage and returning them to his community. “For me encountering the nkisi nkondi was the start of a personal revolution, similar to a rebirth. My research and this work have taken me closer to my culture in a way I couldn’t imagine. I started questioning everything, each aspect of my life. It is hard to trace our history, I am only discovering components of it little by little. It will certainly be a lifelong project.”
The only thing more powerful than private funds is public will. When YBCA describes its mission as generating culture that moves people, the bet that we are making is that we can activate how art influences the public imagination, and that we can design a process whereby highly dynamic inquiry spawns culture. The Transform Festival is artistically a concentrated slate of global performance works presented in the heart of San Francisco, but civically, Transform is a curated opportunity for our community to refine, reframe, and respond to the erosion of our country’s moral infrastructure.
A pre-dawn tweeter most likely can’t sleep, and a man who can’t sleep, can’t dream.
You’ll forgive me if I glance over history to presidents past…I am newly awakened to the significance of two presidential acts. The first is a speech, offered by JFK in May of 1961 in which he announced the goal of landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade. Kennedy reminds us that the future is made of stumbles, hubris, and innovators who are humble enough to pursue it. He asks us to apply un-invented systems of science WHILE inside the swirl of social tumult. He asks us to dream, together, in public.
In 1965, Kennedy’s caustic and controversial successor, Lyndon B. Johnson instituted the National Endowment for the Arts. The NEA was ratified into lawful existence via Congressional Act, a portion of which reads:
“The arts and the humanities belong to all the people of the United States…
Democracy demands wisdom and vision in its citizens. It must therefore foster and support a form of education and access to the arts and the humanities, designed to make people of all backgrounds and wherever located, masters of their technology and not its unthinking servants.”
YBCA is an arts center in service of free thinkers and earnest leaders. About 20 months ago, an immigrant architect named Teddy Cruz addressed us at the YBCA100 Summit. At the time of his talk, we were 5 days away from the 2016 Presidential election, and I remember that the air outside tasted like stale hope. Inside our Forum though, I found myself electrified and sharply determined in response to one of Teddy’s questions to us that day. He centered us in the thought that public space is where beliefs are physicalized and constructed. He observed with us that we are stuck in a civic pattern where top-down resources rarely interfaced with bottom-up agency. And then he pleadingly asked us …“Where is our public imagination?”
I can’t rightly say if any of the artists in this Spring’s Transform Festival are unequivocally answering that question with their art, but I CAN say that art almost ALWAYS answers that question best. Even as Kennedy invoked a collaborative path to the impossible, he presided over an era of nuclear brinksmanship. Even as Johnson endowed the arts with federal resources, he amplified the country’s military scale in Viet Nam. Artists are the leaders among us, generally more driven by mission than market, whose job is to codify inspired thought for public consumption. Their ideas intersect with our political world, but they design experiences that ask us to imagine ourselves conjoined in the politics and physics of a creative moment. We imagine ourselves at the synaptic second of inspiration, or inside the bubble of digital love, or at the specific frequency of a Black woman rocking out on her guitar, or as collectively vulnerable, but still a collective.
The Transform Festival doesn’t uniquely honor or highlight any particular demographic or genre of performance. Curatorially we are as provoked by dance as by theater or music. The dominant frames for our festival choices are a rabid curiosity and a complicated sense of beauty. We don’t seek to program ‘for’ a demographic, but in solidarity with a psychographic that shares our sense of urgency, inquiry, and aspiration of social equity. As such, you’ll find DJ’s making symphonies to soundtrack climate change in the Arctic, and playwrights deconstructing liquor store culture in the Tenderloin. We’ll feature a dance company like Capacitor that’s celebrating 20 years of making work in the Bay Area, and Okwui Okpokwasili, who has visited us with Ralph Lemon and Nora Chipaumire, but has never come to YBCA as the artistic director of her own project.
Transform reflects an ethic of activating artists in our midst in a different way. We lean on questions to organize intentional communities rather than objects to magnetically lure audiences. We center relationships built on shared inquiry to re-imagine how an arts center can function as an activist citizen in its own community.
The Transform Festival was not dreamt into the air by a sitting president, but by a soaring question… “Where is our public imagination?” How might we envision Kennedy’s moonshot speech if his aim was not space, but education, or public health, or equity. If Kennedy’s “moon” was actually immigration, what would be the role of art in getting us there?
It is indeed #sad that our elected officials aren’t asking us these questions. What kind of person proposes military parades and the abolition of the federal art economy in the same week? How does the public respond to a kind of weaponized neurosis in executive form? At this festival, through the lens of provocative artists, let’s imagine that the beautiful city is not a bubble. As we take our seats, we remember that views don’t make a revolution, bodies do. As the lights dim to signal a creatively pitched reality, we might find our minds racing in the dark like a night under the shadow of a new moon.
If you are like me, you want artists who have an individual voice and the expertise to articulate it cogently. Some develop gradually; in others a special spark asks for attention from the minute you encounter it. Jo Kreiter is one of them. Maybe you first noticed her as a member of Zaccho Dance Theatre as a moving speck sitting on the numeral nine of the Ferry Building’s Clock Tower. It happened in Joanna Haigood’s 1995 Noon, which had the performers also rappel some two hundred vertigo-inducing feet to the ground. Two years later, Kreiter’s own dancers were hanging off windowsills and fire escapes in Sparrow Alley to live music by Pamela Z. They surprised both passers-by and residents.
A Political Science Major at Duke University, Kreiter came to San Francisco without any dance training. It was the city’s long activist tradition that attracted her. She stayed, and it became a good decision for her and the local dance community. By now Kreiter has some twenty-three choreographies to her credit, the vast majority of them are what she calls “aerial” or “apparatus-based” dance. Her budgets have grown; her accolades and grants are numerous.
Still, she has had a few setbacks. Some odder than others.
For her 20th anniversary concert in 2016, she created Grace and Delia Are Gone about violence against women. The music was based on murder ballads, many of them from 19th century folk traditions. The National Endowment for the Arts denied the grant proposal because as the panelists apparently said that these women should have gone to local shelters.
Right now Kreiter is hard at work on her largest site-specific project yet. Tender (n.) A Person Who Takes Charge (June 7-16) will be performed outside the Cadillac Hotel at 388 Eddy Street in one of San Francisco’s poorest neighborhoods.
Yet Kreiter is restless.
She easily acknowledges that her site-specific works have allowed her to engage in her two passions: social activism from a feminist perspective and dance. She is also aware that her outdoor installations greatly limit their touring potential. “I would like not to be known as a regional artist,” she muses in her kitchen in the Portola District before a meeting with long-time set designer Sean Riley. She would like Flyaway Productions to really take flight. “For instance,” she says, “it would be so nice if somebody, let’s say in Tennessee, had heard about what we do and called to explain that they had a certain situation, and would we like to come.”
Yet she already has come a long way. In 1990, still performing with Zaccho, she became a member of ODC’s first Pilot Project that encourages young choreographers to develop their potential. “I really didn’t know what I wanted to do,” she recalls but she does remember the supportive environment and that she wanted to make a “piece about wildness and that it was OK to be wild.”
Early on she also received much support by what she calls San Francisco’s “Senior Women Artists”: Haigood, Margaret Jenkins and Brenda Way. “I remember one day Brenda called me up and said she had heard about me; let’s have lunch.” And they did. “I wouldn’t be here without them,” Kreiter modestly acknowledges.
Her trapeze work with Terry Sendgraff and performing with Haigood had given her a framework of what she might do. She likes objects, any object, small, huge, round, pointed, fixed, floating. Kreiter embraces them because she sees possibilities. “My creativity is very naked without an object, “she admits. The simple act of walking vertically up a pole, for instance, exhilarated her. The gravitational pull became horizontal, and the vertical became the place on being grounded.
In addition to choreographing for her own group, for the last twelve years Kreiter has given summer workshops, “GIRLFLY” for underserved teenage girls. “They are body-focused,” she explains, “we address the body has a site of disempowerment and how they can change that.” She might not quite use that language, but the girls already have lots of stories to share about what it means to be male or female.
Looking for performers, Kreiter soon learned that traditional women’s dance training left them woefully shortchanged in upper body strength. That offended her feminist sensibility. To this day Flyaway is an all woman company. Her choreography is risk-based and demands upper-body strength, it is also dance-based, and many dancers already have acrobatic tendencies. Current company member Sonsherée Giles, for instance, is one of them. Experience has taught Kreiter that training dancers in her discipline is easier than training aerialists for dance. Laura Elaine Ellis, a “mature” dancer as she calls herself, wanted to broaden her skill set even as she was, as she says “attracted to the stories [Jo] she seeks to tell through her aerial dancing and apparatus.” As for her Flyaway training? “I am still working on strengthening and developing my aerial skills.”
What about someone with fear of heights?
“Not for me,” Kreiter laughs.
As she has moved her creative energy to the Tenderloin, the subject matter has become increasingly dire.” For Tender she is working with immigrant Vietnamese people, the Tenderloin Museum and local Vietnamese community leaders. She will also include an employment component for local residents.
None of her works offer easy answers much as we would like them. But at the very least the stories about homelessness, about being ignored as women, about being exploited in the work force makes you (almost) believe that art and politics can have a symbiotic relationship. To see these dancers embrace the moment, and the sheer effort of their work instills hope even in a relatively straightforward work such as the 2003 How to be a Citizen. She had researched the decades old history of social protests along Market Street. She built a ramp on the lower part of the street on which the dancers struggled, climbed, slid and fell. But the ramp bent upwards as the women reached the end. A simple image perhaps, but potent and even hopeful.
Kreiter opts to work in the Tenderloin because “this is ground zero for income inequality in this City and this country. We don’t take care of the neediest people in our society, and they are there on the streets everyday.”
Not that it’s always easy. For example, rehearsing for the 2015 Needles to Thread meant working in an alley that functions as a public latrine. Yet even difficult can yield moments of beauty. A conversation with a resident about the work gave Kreiter feedback: “this is me.”
On a very hectic recent day as garbage was thrown around and a refrigerator kicked down the street, the neighborhood appeared to be a cauldron of fighting and screaming. Then dancers, in costumes for Tender, made their way to a photo shoot on a fire escape. All of a sudden, Kreiter remembers, “there was this moment of incredible calm and beauty even among all the chaos and pervasive trauma of an invasive street culture.”
Over the years Kreiter has developed a clear structural approach to each work. A year before the premiere, she starts collecting oral histories. For Tender, which looks at the experience of Vietnamese immigrants, she is working with seven dancers, drag artist Honey Maloney, the Asian Art and the Tenderloin museums, community and health organizations.
These stories will provide the work’s conceptual frame work. The material then gets divided into sections—four of them in the current piece. Then comes the music. For Tender the choreographer works for the first time with Emmy-winning composer Vân-Ánh Võ who also plays the zither, which functions prominently in Vietnamese culture.
If she knows and already is comfortable with a composer, the music’s creation can be very smooth. Pamela Z, who has worked with Kreiter since the 1996 Sparrows Alley, appreciates how very early in the process “Kreiter knows how the sections of the piece will be divided – with very precise durations, particular moods, tempi, and subject matter.” So Z often composes the score on her own. She finds it fascinating that somehow the different elements smoothly fit together.
The dance making comes at the very end of the process because the performers cannot command the site-specific space for long enough to realize the choreography. “My ideal,” Kreiter says somewhat dreamily, “is to create a work a hundred percent on location because the piece would have more longevity and, hopefully, engage the local residents more extensively.
Looking into the future, she repeats that, “I would really like to be invited rather than imposing myself.” To help the process along, she is designing a self-sustaining circular set for next year’s premiere that can be taken on the road.
Kreiter currently is a Rauschenberg Artist as Activist (2017-2019). This fellowship allows her to create—unusually—a very personal work. Waiting Room examines the love of women living with an incarcerated loved one. She knows whereof she is talking. “I am one of them,” she says. “My husband was incarcerated for six years.”
This July, the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival will return to the War Memorial Opera House for its 40th anniversary as the largest, longest-running, and most comprehensive world dance and music event of its kind in the US.
“[The Opera House] is a magnificent setting to celebrate the awe-inspiring Bay Area artists who are sustaining the world’s cultural traditions, shining as a powerful beacon for the power and beauty of diverse cultural inclusion,” said Festival Executive Director Julie Mushet. “It’s deeply gratifying to celebrate four decades of presenting these inspiring artists to ever-growing audiences, from the Festival’s modest beginnings in community centers to the grandest stage in San Francisco.”
One of the highlights of this year’s Festival is the performance by Chuna McIntyre and the Nunamta Yup’ik Eskimo Singers and Dancers, who will present a dance that will be seen for the first time in over 200 years, in regalia that has taken nearly four decades to create.
Additionally, the Festival has announced a trio of new Co-Artistic Directors: Patrick Makuakane, Latanya d. Tigner, and Mahealani Uchiyama, as Carlos Carvajal and CK Ladzekpo become Artistic Directors Emeritus after 12 seasons as Co-Artistic Directors.
Makuakane is founder, Artistic Director, and Kumu Hula of San Francisco’s renowned Na Lei Hulu i ka Wekiu Hawaiian dance company; Tigner is a dancer and choreographer at Oakland’s venerated Dimensions Dance Theater, directs Dimensions’ youth company, and serves on the dance faculty of UC Berkeley; Uchiyama is founder and Artistic Director of the Center for International Dance in Berkeley, Kumu Hula of Halau Ka Ua Tuahine, and is an award-winning choreographer and composer.
AERODANCE – Indian Folkloric (Gujarat)
AguaClara Flamenco – Spanish Flamenco
Ananya Tirumala – South Indian Kuchipudi
Antara Asthaayi Dance – North Indian Kathak
Arenas Dance Company – Afro-Cuban
Bolivia Corazón de América – Bolivian Folkloric (Tarabuco and Potosí)
Caminos Flamencos – Spanish Flamenco
Charya Burt Cambodian Dance – Cambodian Classical
Chinyakare Ensemble – Zimbabwean Traditional
Chitresh Das Youth Company – North Indian Kathak
De Rompe y Raja Cultural Association – Afro-Peruvian
Ensambles Ballet Folklórico de San Francisco – Mexican Folkloric (Tabasqueño)
Hermanos Herrera – Mexican Folkloric
Kim Shuck ‡ – Poet Laureate of San Francisco
Leung’s White Crane Lion & Dragon Dance Association – Chinese Dragon Dance
Los Danzantes de Aztlán, Fresno State – Mexican Folkloric (Huapangos)
Mussel Rock Cloggers – Appalachian Clogging
Nimely Pan African Dance Company – Liberian Folkloric
Nunamta Yup’ik Eskimo Singers and Dancers – Alaskan Yup’ik Eskimo
OngDance Company – Korean Traditional and Contemporary
Parangal Dance Company – Philippine Folkloric (Meranao)
Te Pura O Te Rahura’a – Tahitian ??te’a and ?Aparima
Vinic-Kay (La Gente y El Canto) – Mexican Folkloric
Ye Feng – Chinese Contemporary
The Festival’s Malonga Casquelourd Lifetime Achievement Award for excellence in ethnic dance and music will be presented to four artists who have had extraordinary impact on the field:
The internet threatens to ruin every radio voice for me. Terry Gross, Marco Werman, Ray Suarez, Rose Aguilar—none of them looks like they’re supposed to! But then again, when I think about what faces I expect to match these voices, I can only see vaguely gendered avatars in silhouette. In other words, I expect no sort of face at all, so any face would be surprising and somehow wrong.
Same thing with bylines. Here it’s the literary voice that meets with a shadow image, looking like no one and everyone at the same time. Take Claudia La Rocco for example. Many a theater usher experienced cognitive dissonance when the curly-haired, bright-eyed, twenty-something sought to take the seat with her name on it: “I would routinely sit in seats reserved for The Times and ushers would say, ‘No, that’s reserved for Claudia La Rocco.’ I think they expected a 60-year-old. I don’t know if that was because I was writing like a 60-year-old or if The Times just ages a gal. I think it might be the latter. I hope it’s the latter.”
La Rocco, now 40, and neither looking nor writing like a 60-year-old (but with 60 being the new 40, who’s to say?), became the Editor-in-Chief of SFMOMA’s online and live interdisciplinary platform Open Space in 2016. From January through April of this year, Open Space organized Limited Edition, a performance programming/arts writing collaboration between CounterPulse, The Lab, ODC Theater, Performance at SFMOMA, and Z Space. The program encapsulates La Rocco’s commitment to understanding all art practice—whether Palestinian Dabke or a Keith Hennessey/Gerald Casel collaboration on Ocean Beach—as community-based. Community members make performances and community members witness performances—why shouldn’t community members write about them as well? “We’re just trying to get more smart context around contemporary performance and to look a bit at the ecosystem of these spaces.”
La Rocco and I spoke over coffee at Alchemy in Oakland. I wanted to know the whole story of how she became a dance writer. And I got it. And it’s great. And all you need to know is:
If you get hired to write about, say, biotech for a tech publication, don’t be afraid to ask if you can write a book review column instead (yes, she did that, and they let her)
Writers learn on the job, so forgive them their trespasses, i.e. being dicks in their early reviews (how gratifying to learn that I am not the only critic “horrified” to look back at old reviews)
Even New York Times dance critics can feel like frauds
La Rocco is an accidental dance critic, who began writing about dance for the Arts Desk at the Associated Press. While at AP, she wrote for various arts publication including Art on Paper and Art News, mostly about visual art and books: “Dance wasn’t in my experience. My best friend growing up was a committed ballet dancer and I saw her perform a few times. But mostly I played tennis. I read books.” Her first foray into dance writing was to cover Baryshnikov in Eliot Feld’s work at the Joyce: “It was terrifying. I went with a very good friend of mine who is a dancer, Kathryn Enright; she was my security blanket. It was a good deal: she would get free tickets and I would get somebody to be like, you can do this.”
La Rocco says she got her start because of a lack of value and literacy around dance: “You can say well here’s a smart young kid who has no experience, we’ll throw her in, whereas you wouldn’t say, you don’t know about politics, but hey you’re twenty, let’s have you be the political correspondent.” This lack of cultural literacy around dance also allowed her to get to know and own her personal tastes: “At first I was going to the more traditional houses: City Center, Lincoln Center, The Joyce, the usual circuit. I just thought I don’t like dance, or I must not understand it because if I understood it I would like these shows. Then I stumbled into DTW one night, and that was a game changer. I started writing more and more about ‘weird’ stuff that to me didn’t seem weird. It seemed smart and layered and akin to how I think about the world.”
La Rocco became a stringer for The New York Times in 2005, where she wrote about dance until 2013, leaving the newspaper for good two years later: “I stopped writing for The Times about dance because at that point I had been doing it for 10 years as a daily critic, in that treadmill of you see 5-7 shows a week, you write about 2-5 shows a week. I began to feel like I was overly intimate with and exhausted by the form of the 300- to 900-word overnight review. And I just didn’t think I could say something else within that form about Sleeping Beauty or about Revelations. If you’re a Times critic you have to survey the field and it’s no good to walk into something and be bored. It’s not good for the readers, it’s not good for the writers, it’s certainly not good for the art form.”
But burnout was only half the story. La Rocco is a poet and a performer, who in 2008 founded The Performance Club as a “real-time and web-based” space for “criticism that is also, or at least aspires to be, art”. Interviews and conversations with dance artists led to friendships and artistic collaborations, which led to an ever-expanding list of artists she could no longer “feel comfortable writing with honesty about in The Times from the position of The Times and its conflict of interest policy”: “In many ways in our culture we value intimacy: If you don’t know it how can you write about it? If you don’t know this person, if you can’t empathize with her, how can you put yourself in her shoes? But journalism really wants this separation. So when we think about daily journalism faltering as a vehicle for criticism, perhaps a silver lining is that we can finally abandon this idea of the critic as objective, thumbs up thumbs down, non-implicated witness.”
From what I’ve seen, Open Space with La Rocco at the helm initiates from this question of intimacy in relation to performance criticism, and it is this always questioning, ever experimental approach that reveals criticism, history, reporting, and documentation as aesthetic practices in their own right. Asked to describe her writing and editorial practices, La Rocco says she tries to follow in the footsteps of exemplars of the poet-critic tradition like Frank O’Hara, and Bill Berkson, who wrote “as a way of marking one’s consciousness through time”; radical, political experimenters like Jill Johnston; dance artists like Simone Forti, “whose movement and writing and drawing and speaking improvisations are all mixed up”; and editors like Artforum’s David Velasco, “who has that magical blend of structure, sensitivity, and intelligence, who pushes me to experiment but also tells me ‘Hey, you think you’re being experimental but you’re actually writing self-centered drivel that I can’t understand.’ Not that he would ever say it that meanly. But I can send something that I think might be a mess and I trust him to save me from myself or to say, ‘This works.’ He’s a collaborator in the best way.”
La Rocco met her partner, Oakland-based musician Phillip Greenlief, in 2013 at a residency at Headlands Center for the Arts, where she assembled her book, The Best Most Useless Dress (Badlands 2014). An “embedded writer” position with the Hatchery Project, a partnership between Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography at Florida State University, Vermont Performance Lab, The Chocolate Factory, and Philadelphia’s RED Arts Project, supported by major grants from the Mellon Foundation and the NEA, enabled La Rocco to leave The Times against the advice of “several colleagues who told me I was an idiot.” Free from daily journalism’s grind, “restless and itchy,” she moved to the Bay Area, and took the position at Open Space.
As Editor-in-Chief at Open Space, La Rocco isn’t writing as much criticism as she used to. Rather, she is out “identifying the people that I think should write.” Along with Managing Editor and poet Gordon Faylor, and in line with the vision of Open Space founder Suzanne Stein (another poet), La Rocco seeks to produce an artist-centric publication with strong voices that represent aesthetic, geographic, and sociocultural diversity. This is not hard to come by in the Bay Area, but locating diversity of political viewpoint presents a challenge: “The public discourse is so hardened right now. We don’t know how to have good disagreements in public. I’m trying to figure out how to have contrarian viewpoints not for the sake of them but to find smart gray areas. I’m really interested in Open Space being a balance of art, art criticism, and arts reporting. And I want it to be a place where people can really play with different types of writing, where they can take a risk on something that could be a total failure.”
This sort of rigorous openness means you’ll find criticism, performance, poetry, and all manner of digitally supported cultural production at Open Space, all subject to La Rocco and Faylor’s deft editorial eyes. And you will find dance there too: “I’ve always thought of criticism as a triangle between a work of art, an individual experience, and the surrounding culture. It would drive me crazy when people would say, ‘Balanchine works are timeless’ No, they’re not. He created in a very particular time. If a work of art is timeless and its creator a genius and everybody should just bow down before it, then by that logic if the art work isn’t ‘succeeding’ in any one moment, it has to be the fault of the people performing it or the people perceiving it. It can’t be that a thing that was created 70 years ago might no longer be legible in a contemporary context. Performance has to move. So does the writing and thinking that seeks to converse with it.”
To write dancing from a position of intimacy with dancers and with critical distance from the form is a delicate, difficult, and delicious balance to strike. When I awkwardly told Claudia that I would be interested writing for Open Space, she said, “No awkwardness. Everything in life is hopelessly intertwined.”
