Assistant Director Sally Owen interviews Kate Weare What excites you re. your work? I love it most of all when my work creates the right structure for "flow," for the state when a performer loses self-consciousness and just lives inside the experience of the movement. I think this requires a special alchemy within the dancer of being very well-prepared as well as feeling committed to the material in an honest and immediate way. My work in general asks for authenticity from dancers - for action from the heart and gut - and when I see a performer digging into my movement material with courage, a willingness to be seen in their flawed complexity, I'm very excited and touched by it. I also happen to adore rhythms, visceral movements, stillness, elemental energy, architecture, recurring patterns and surprises. What has most influenced the work you have produced? Lay Me Down Safe is an exploration of the vulnerability that we feel with desire and the various ways we naturally react to that vulnerability, often through restriction, defensiveness and fear. Early in the studio process at SDT, I think that I was picking up on or enjoying the sensuality of the dancers, their intensity as young artists who feel passionately about the world and who make a practice of channelling their feelings through their bodies. I may have also been projecting the sensuality into the room because this is one of the facets of dance and of dancers that most intrigues me. I think our instincts toward connection, toward touching another and being accepted, is a powerful under-pinning of dance as an art form, and a razor-sharp lens into what it feel like to be human. This is our human version of swimming upstream - we are compelled to connect with each other despite all odds. East coast v. west coast, is there a difference in dance culture? Yes, but one would be hard-pressed to sum it up easily, although as a California native who relocated to New York a decade ago I've lived that contrast. I think we come to reflect the environment we live in, we absorb and are absorbed by our surroundings, and the East and West coast have very different temperatures. When I go back to California now I am keenly aware of how short my fuse has become from living in New York, how quickly I get annoyed or feel I'm wasting time, how long it takes me to unwind, slow down and notice again how beautiful California is, and how much nature puts my city-driven anxiety into its proper, petty perspective. New Yorkers are very driven, ambitious, tunnel-visioned, tough on themselves and this lifestyle is reflected in their artwork. Californians have more breadth and room for experimentation and exploration along with a much lower threshold for professional consequences. It doesn't always produce stronger work, in my opinion, but it does allow artists to grow and fail and pioneer and veer away from what's been proven, rather like a laboratory. I have great respect for the freedom the West can offer, but the rigor and intensity of the East drew me like a siren and sharpened my artistic teeth enormously.
How did you feel about working with new dancers? Did you feel that this changed very much how you worked and what you produced? I loved working with the SDT dancers! Whenever you work with new dancers, especially ones as skilful and generous as these ones, it shines a sort of cleansing light on your assumptions and what you take for granted artistically. My time in the studio with the SDT dancers brought up some important questions for me about my artistic impulses, why they're like this or that, if I still believe these things, if they are relevant in this context, etc. Ultimately, of course, the work Lay Me Down Safe reflects a meeting ground between me and these dancers, between our beliefs and prior experiences, what we learned from each other, and whether we built a dialogue in the studio with enough inherent trust to create something special out of nothing. I think we did :-)