In slidin’ thru, you bring people together on a basketball court. Could you talk a little about this project and what it means to you?

I’ve been working a lot with line dances. Through talking with some friends and being invited to the Belluard Bollwerk festival in Fribourg, Switzerland, I started to think about what it would mean to do something site-specific. It was a good opportunity to work with line dances and think about our understanding of history and what we take from the past. I found myself listening to a lot of 70s and 80s music, which was a nice entry point to thinking about nostalgia and imagining something that would bring folks together in what feels like divisive times.

You’ve spoken about the idea of “joyful resistance,” which reminds me of Pina Bausch’s phrase “dance, dance, otherwise we are lost.” Do you think dance is a kind of remedy?

Yeah, something like that. It regulates the nervous system somehow. With everything that’s happening right now, I think it’s important to find ways to move forward and replenish and to find moments of joy if you can. The idea of slidin’ thru is bringing folks together and moving together through turbulent times. Of course, it’s not forced—it’s an invitation. But folks who have seen the piece said that they wanted to join in with us. If line dance can become a metaphor or model that helps people, that’s great.

The music you use includes classic hits from the 70s like Marvin Gaye’s “I Want You” or Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Fantasy.” How did you find the line dances? I imagine they weren’t as easy to find as the songs featured in the piece.

Some are pre-existing dances like the Electric Slide and the Bus Stop, which have been passed down from generation to generation. Others we just made up ourselves. It’s a bit like we used a formula to devise our own line dances while paying homage to existing ones. In terms of the music, that has also been passed down. I listened to those songs with my mom in the car, and I’ve got the vinyls in New York for most of the things I play during the piece. The songs are beautiful and they have strong messages as well. It’s easy to get caught up in the beauty of the music, but there are also things being said that are quite profound and speak to our moment.

Both of the shows you’re performing at FTA involve homage. Is that typical of your work?

It’s interesting for me to think about what “words” or language I use to write my choreographies. I try to be really specific about what kind of “words” to use to articulate what I want to say and to give space and recognition to where they come from. I’ve worked for many years with Impilo Mapantsula from South Africa, where they work through pantsula, a dance from Johannesburg. There’s a real sense of legacy and lineage. Especially now, when everything is viral and moving fast and you can watch a tutorial of somebody teaching the Milly Rock who’s from nowhere near Brooklyn, New York. That’s completely fine, but things move fast and where they come from can get lost. For me, it’s important to know what it means to make dances through a specific wording.

How can the past or nostalgia help us face the future?

I think the idea came from a desire to reframe nostalgia. Because there’s a lot of talk around absences, or gaps in history, and it’s important to remember that all that was good perhaps wasn’t good for everyone. I’m really into this idea of flattening past, present, and future, to kind of compress them. I wrote a text about it for another piece which is relevant here: “The future is a much better guide to the present than the past because you have to know the past to understand the present. But if you are to reimagine our present and reimagine our future, we should start by reimagining our past even though thinking historically in the present is the only way to then move forward.” Where does nostalgia fit into that? I don’t know, but it’s there for me, somewhere in that text.

Interview by Karine Denault

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