Beth Gill: The Elusive "Why"

Beth Gill

Performance of Electric Midwife at The Chocolate Factory
(photo by Steven Schreiber)

Beth Gill: The Elusive “Why”

by Komal Thakkar

Bessie Award-winning choreographer Beth Gill came to dance at age 3 when, after sitting through an entire PBS broadcast featuring Baryshnikov, she informed her parents of her desire to take ballet class. She would go on to study ballet under Rose-Marie Menes--formerly of the Ballet Russe--at the Westchester Ballet Center in Yorktown Heights, New York and make her first dance when she was just thirteen.

“Rose-Marie was a traditionalist,” says Gill. “She was extremely proud of her own lineage inside the ballet world, but she also created an environment where we were exposed to other kinds of dance. I studied Bharatanatyam, tap and jazz in her school.”

Tami Horowitz, a dancer trained in Limon, introduced Gill to modern dance at age ten through her Limon-based classes for young students at the Westchester school. Gill credits Horowitz for integrating creative movement exercises into her classes.

In love with the idea of dancing and choreographing in New York City, Gill applied to college programs in dance. Each one rejected or waitlisted her, including the brand new Fordham/Ailey BFA program. But Gill insisted on attending Fordham, and they accepted her a few months later.

“[Ailey] was a hard fit for me. I was grateful to have a place to go, and I wanted to attach to those pure dance forms they were teaching, but in a way I was invisible,” she says. “At Westchester Ballet Center, I formed an identity of making things, but there weren’t many outlets for that at Ailey. I transferred to NYU.”

Gill’s experience at NYU proved to be formative.

“I was surrounded by a group of people who were, in our own small context, trying to be experimental, or radical,” she says. Although she doesn’t feel like they were making anything extraordinary, she certainly recalls their excitement at the time.

Reflecting on her adolescent years, she explains her fascination with avant-garde culture. 

“I tended to be much more safe in my own expression, but I was attracted to people and art that seemed to be living outside of the mainstream.”

After graduating from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, she felt a deep concern about continuing in the world of dance and choreography. It was what she had always done. Nevertheless, Gill seized the opportunity to make a work for the Movement Research Improvisation Festival, a small step that propelled her in a decisive and lasting direction.

Eight years after graduating from NYU, Gill received a 2011 Bessie Award for Outstanding Emerging Choreographer, and the first ever Juried Bessie Award. The jury panel, comprised of noted choreographers Elizabeth Streb, Ralph Lemon and David Gordon, stated that Gill’s work, Electric Midwife, “demonstrated rigor in its process and challenged its audience’s perceptions.” The panel commended her consideration of the specific ways an audience views a dance.

Scene from Electric Midwife
(photo by Beth Gill)

Electric Midwife consists of three duets mirroring each other with a movement vocabulary of rounded arms, lunges, slow turns, and simple poses. Phrases of movement interrupted by long pauses eventually transition into longer smoothed out, continually moving phrases. The duets symmetrically weave through each other at changing tempos and in various planes throughout the space. The dancers exhibit control and a lack of affectation. They have cultivated mature skills through years of performing.

Gill originally created this work for The Chocolate Factory, a performance venue in Long Island City with a narrow and short space. Electric Midwife frames that unusual space so that one’s focus becomes evenly split.

Roslyn Sulcas writes in The New York Times, “The sense of three-dimensionality is heightened, as is our sense of the space itself, its depth and width, its rough walls and its windows at the back, looking like large eyes. Even the women’s casual outfits--leggings and loose tops in orange, green, blue, red, black and gray--form blocks of color that are reminiscent of Mondrian paintings.”

Sulcas concludes by asking, “Which is the left brain, which the right? Are the movements in fact identical, or are they permeated by the tiny individual differences that each human body produces? Which side is real, which side the mirror?”

Scene from Electric Midwife
(photo by Beth Gill)

Some of the work’s spatial relationships and patterns can get lost in transplant to other venues, but this helps Gill think about her work differently for each setting. In a large black box theater in London, the work can take on an unexpected theatricality. The walls of the stage space are gray, and the floor is black with white Marley in the center. The resulting visual intersection of white, gray and black color fields and the audience on a steep rake far away from the dancers create a viewing situation where the audience looks in on the piece as opposed to being within the piece.

Gill expresses concern over the possibility that her audiences most relate to a possible gimmick in her work, focusing and responding solely on the symmetry of the piece. Dance performs a vanishing act, this choreographer believes; that’s part of its challenge--and its appeal.

“Putting your experience into language after seeing a show is very difficult,” Gill says. “So often, I feel like this medium is evasive to language.”

“What it provides you as a maker is the two-fold ability to become completely obsessed with how to construct a work and also the ability to see it as a transient form. You’re moving through it, and it is moving through your life. The ephemerality of the medium is one of the most beautiful, tragic and powerful elements that I experience.”

While showing Electric Midwife in London, Gill met a man who described himself as a professor of perception, an expert in peripheral vision. At that moment, she felt as though she had made this work specifically for him.

Gill's meeting with this man created an opportunity for her to speak with someone who possessed concrete, scientific knowledge of the process of sight and observation, which Gill does not.

“When you’re seeing peripherally, your gaze is receding,” she tells me. “It’s as if your eyes withdraw into your head. When you look into a narrow space, your gaze is more honed in to a specific point, and your eyes are right at the surface of your head. Thinking about how I physically see work makes me more conscious of my body.

“I am fixated on notions of space and perception and different forms of materiality affecting our experience of space.”

Gardening is her other favorite passion. She reveals that her fantasy job would be in landscape architecture. Gill recalls meeting an artist deeply engaged in architecture who told her that she often feels as though she is a choreographer stuck in another field.

This question raises a similar one for Gill. “Am I only exploring these notions through choreography because I’ve been a dancer since I was young?” Yet Gill remains engaged with the art of dance.

In an interview with Christine Jowers of The Dance Enthusiast, Gill, once again, queried her own motives.

“At the onset of every new work is a familiar battle to reconnect with why I keep making dances. The only way this continues to be a relevant language, medium and identity for me is if I am questioning its necessity at every juncture.”

Has she ever found the answer?

“At this point in my life, my perceptual experience of the world is deeply integrated in my physical being and the sense that I have of my body. The information I take in funnels through physical receptors, so it’s hard to imagine being in a different mode.”

As she continues to question, perhaps, one day, the way she answers herself and the content of that answer will change. Until that day arrives, Gill is very much what she has always been: a maker of dance.

See the trailer for Beth Gill's Electric Midwife here.

BIO

Beth Gill is a New York based artist, who makes contemporary dance and performance in New York City. She has accumulated a body of work that critically examines issues relating to the fields of contemporary dance and performance studies, through an ongoing exploration of aesthetics and perception. Gill is a 2012 Foundation for Contemporary Art Fellowship recipient, a New York City Center Choreography Fellow for 2012-2013 and an inaugural member of The Hatchery Project (2012-2015). In 2011 she was awarded two New York State Dance and Performance “Bessie” Awards for Outstanding Emerging Choreographer and the Juried Award: "for the choreographer exhibiting some of the most interesting and exciting ideas happening in dance in New York City today." She is a graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and has been a guest artist at Barnard College, Eugene Lang College the New School for Liberal Arts, Arizona State University and the New York State Summer School of the Arts. She is currently developing New Work for the Desert, which will be premiere at New York Live Arts March 19th-22nd 2014.

Monica Bill Barnes: Awkward Singularity

Monica Bill Barnes
(photo by David Wilson Barnes)

Monica Bill Barnes: Awkward Singularity

by Komal Thakkar

Seeing a performance by Monica Bill Barnes & Company, you might be surprised by how much you laugh. When I saw Barnes & Company perform Luster, Mostly Fanfare, and Everything is getting better all the time at the Kennedy Center in May, I certainly did, enjoying her enthusiasm and the athleticism of her muscular body flying through space.

Barnes comes to dance by way of training in theater at the University of California in San Diego, where she also studied philosophy with an emphasis in ethics. After graduating, Barnes applied to law school but rethought her choices. Shifting gears, she moved to New York City, attending a summer dance program at the Alvin Ailey School. The routine, she found, was not for her. She wanted to make her own work.

“Philosophy asked me to articulate my understanding of ideas,” says Barnes. “Choreography is articulating your ideas through your movement, and what you’re judged on is your ability to be specific and communicative in expressing those ideas.”

Specificity and attention to detail, essential components of a successful work, are two factors that compel Barnes to the process of making dance. She deeply admires Bill Irwin, an American actor trained in dance and clowning, for the physical specificity in his work. Ira Glass, the creator and host of NPR’s This American Life, her current collaborator, exemplifies nuanced, detail-oriented practice in work that bears his unmistakable radio personality.

“Specificity and attention to detail help you clarify what kind of performer you are trying to be and help you become a distinctive artist,” she believes.

Barnes (front) in Parade
(photo by Steven Schreiber

How can she “step outside” of a piece and view it with a critical eye while actually dancing in it? Barnes explains the necessity this way: she doesn’t understand herself as an artist without having the opportunity to perform.

She recalls the horror she felt as she viewed one of her pieces from the audience.

“I recognized that if I were in it, I would have felt it reaching a standstill in its natural and logical progression while we were rehearsing it in the studio. When I was watching it in the rehearsal process, I was taken by the distinctive, powerful performers. There’s a transformation that happens when you shift a dance from the studio to the stage and put it under lights in a formal setting. It’s not that I think I’m a great performer. I understand the work from inside out.” 

from Parade
(photo by Steven Schreiber)

Working humor into a dance can prove to be even more challenging. While Barnes doesn’t usually aim for humor, it does occur--frequently--when it’s unintended. The awkwardness and tragedy of the human condition interest her more.

So many dance artists deal with grace and beauty, she says, that she does not feel the need to contribute more of that type of work.

“I’m less interested in seeing photographs of iconic figures and beauty than I am of seeing photos of real people. You can get confused between one beautiful person and another. There is a distinctive, identifiable singularity that is specific to an awkward individual.”

“Most of the time the audience laughs is when something has gone wrong onstage,” says Barnes. “I never feel like the audience is laughing at us though. I feel like a lot of the laughter comes from empathy. My hope is that laughter serves as a response to us in these moments of awkwardness and humiliation that which they can relate to on a very personal level--a shared experience.”

Mostly Fanfare, set to songs performed by Nina Simone, deals with the struggles of showmanship and resilience. Barnes and her dancers wear large white feather headdresses reminiscent of a vaudeville act and incorporate large, sweeping movement and circus-like stunts in which they balance chairs in their mouths.

In Anna Bass’s solo, the dancer stacks large brown packing boxes on top of one another and then attempts to lift this tower of boxes. Clearly, the odds are stacked against her. Suddenly, boxes pelt her from the wings as the determined dancer struggles to carry on.

“When Anna gets hit with a box, she usually gets a laugh,” says Barnes. In this moment, she recognizes the humbling experience of being a performer, attempting beauty, failing miserably and somehow recovering.

Bass recalls surprise at the audience’s laughter during Mostly Fanfare's premiere. What’s funny in one city, Barnes says, might not work that way in another. To their amazement, one audience let out a collective groan when the boxes hit Bass.

Luster, an autobiographical duet, highlights Barnes’ long-standing onstage partnership with Bass, celebrating ten years of sacrifice, triumphs, and endurance. It opens with a film showing how much they travel and prepare, the less-than-glamorous, exhausting details of packing, unpacking, performing and repeating the process over and over again. At one point, Barnes and Bass, dressed in running shoes and sequined dresses, literally run in circles. For Bass, Luster is a virtual archive of their decade-long experiences in making dance.

“When we show up to a theater,” she says, “we put the set together and preset the props with the help of the production staff. We’re very hands on, and the piece reflects that about us.”

Barnes connected with Ira Glass after he attended a performance during her 2011 run at The Joyce Theater. He wrote her an email, and they began regularly conversing about their work. She admires how he uses radio in unique, innovative ways. “That’s what I aspire to do with dance,” she says.

Together, they created a performance for This American Life Live! before a live theater audience including Glass’s usual narration of stories and segments where Barnes and Bass would dance. Delighted by the project’s success, they next created a full-length show called Three Acts, Two Dancers, One Radio Host, which they are currently touring.

“Language forces the audience to think about the movement in a different way,” Barnes says. Without language, choreography and music are the only ways that the audience can discern meaning.

“The challenge in this collaboration is to ensure that movement doesn’t become illustrative of language and that language doesn’t become descriptive of the movement.” 

Glass and Barnes continually rework their respective contributions to assure that neither movement nor language dominates. Their collaboration, like a performer’s career, is a continuous dialogue, a constantly evolving learning process.

*****

Trailer for Monica Bill Barnes & Company's October 2012 season

NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts

MC'ed by Ira Glass

BIO

Monica Bill Barnes is a New York City based choreographer and performer. Born and raised in Berkeley, California, Barnes moved to New York in 1995 after receiving her B.A. in Philosophy and Theater from the University of California at San Diego. Before she decided to become a choreographer Barnes studied on scholarship at the Alvin Ailey School, was a member of the high school debate team, played volleyball and wrote bad plays. Since pursuing choreography as a livelihood, she has created thirteen evening-length dance works, numerous site-specific events and multiple cabaret numbers for her company, Monica Bill Barnes & Company. Favorite New York performance venues include The Joyce Theater, Danspace Project at St. Mark's Church, Symphony Space, NYU Skirball Center and Dixon Place. Lincoln Center Institute invited Barnes to tour two of her shows, This ain’t no Rodeo! (2003-2005) and Suddenly Summer Somewhere (2009-2010) throughout the tri-state school system as part of their Repertory Season. Barnes has been an invited Guest Artist at the American Dance Festival, Bates Dance Festival, North Carolina School of The Arts, Vassar College, Virginia Commonwealth University, Connecticut College, The College At Brockport, Florida State University, James Madison University, University of Michigan, Emory University, Steps on Broadway, Peridance and Dance New Amsterdam. In addition to stage works, she has created several site-specific works and theater productions, including From my Mother’s Tongue (Dancing in the Streets), Game Face (SITELINES Festival), Limelight (Philadelphia Live Arts Festival) and several new works for The San Diego Dance Theater’s Trolley Dances. Recent projects include commissions for Parsons Dance (Love, oh Love) and The Juilliard School (The way it feels). Barnes was thrilled to be a part of This American Life Live! on May 10, 2012 alongside her favorite radio show host Ira Glass and other fabulous guests.