Lessons from Kay Clark: Seeking Answers to Today’s Questions in RDT’s Archive (Part 1)
PART 1: ON CHOREOGRAPHY
By: Kara Komarnitsky
As an emerging freelance artist in Salt Lake, I find myself with a lot of questions and not many answers. Over the last two years, I’ve performed for companies throughout the valley, produced my own work, choreographed on student companies, traveled for artist residencies, and taught every age and style of dance that I know. I’ve found spaces to pursue my wildest dreams and community that celebrates my risk-taking tendencies. I’ve also worked in ticket offices, spent hours writing emails, designed marketing materials, and taught myself entirely new skillsets – including how to be an archivist for RDT – to make ends meet. I’ve sluggishly choreographed new works on little sleep or inspiration, taught using months-old lesson plans because I didn’t have the time to develop something new, and finished performance runs feeling dissatisfied as I immediately rushed on to the next project. Pursuing art in this world has proved anything but a linear journey.
Amidst all the successes and detours, I find myself wondering: how do we do this thing? How do we economically support ourselves and still have time – and more importantly, creative energy – to pursue our artistic interests? How do we make meaningful and impactful art when the only way to get paid for it is to be on a grant timeline that doesn’t care about how long your artistic process needs? How do we engage more audiences so that we’re not just echoing the same ideas around an insular artist community? How do emerging artists research new work without any funds or space while also honoring the labor of our collaborators? How do we stay true to our voice, potentially critiquing or challenging the standing artistic preferences of our society, while still creating something that people will attend?
These questions are not new for dance artists. Recently, as I was organizing materials donated from the family of RDT alumnus, Kay Clark, I came across one of Kay’s personal journals and I suddenly saw my own questions and thoughts reflected back at me from a page written before I was born. Kay Clark was one of the founding members of RDT and performed with the company for seventeen years. Beginning in 1978 Kay served as co-Artistic Coordinator alongside Linda C. Smith until she left the company in 1983. As a dancer, teacher, choreographer, and director, Kay was instrumental in the development of RDT and the success of the “bold experiment” to establish a modern dance repertory company in the United States under an artistic democracy. She created work independently through a project company called 1-2-3 Dance, alongside Linda C. Smith and Ruth Jean Post, that performed from 1977-1981. She also moved through institutional spaces, receiving her MFA in Modern Dance at the University of Utah and eventually teaching at Mills College in California. Kay did not take one track through the dance world and turned a critical eye towards every space that she encountered. The more that I read her notes, the more I resonated with her pragmatic and passionate perspective. Kay cared about making art that was meaningful for the artists and the audiences, creating working spaces that were efficient and growth-oriented, and cultivating relationships that supported rich artistic development. She understood that artmaking is a community effort and that it takes more than creative skill or passion to craft a dance that is original, interesting, and that gets seen. Her thoughts on all aspects of professional dance work have offered me insights and inspiration for navigating my own path through the industry.
ON CHOREOGRAPHY
Choreography gigs come in many different shapes and sizes. Sometimes I have several months, sometimes I am given a week, or sometimes I have five hours to set new work. The conditions which I am given to create how dependent I am on aesthetic style, choreographic tools, and how much risk I can take to try something new. In a world that emphasizes the importance of the product, how do we slow down, analyze, edit, and develop our craft rather than just churning out the same dance over and over? Kay’s notes reflect on the importance of time for the development of content and the difficulty of editing one’s own work. She emphasizes the humility that it takes to “prune” your work and I admire her commitment to the difficult search for meaning at all points in the process.”
Content is hard to come by… or is it harder to keep out? Development is agonizingly hard to come by, you can’t come by it at all, you must grow it yourself, and time must be permitted to have its way. A work which develops, which grows rather than simply getting longer or bigger is a rare thing – most works just hang around. Pruning does not come easily to the easily enchanted or the egotistical. Pruning does not matter to most people until they run our of fruit or flowers. To prune you must evaluate, select, and be brave. There are many excuses for not pruning. But here is no way out.
Kay also offers herself many sources for inspiration, reminding me that keeping an open eye on the world is necessary to develop resources for solving creative problems. We often silo our idea of what art is into a few specific fields or methods and we forget the ways that most human activities are inherently creative somehow.
When you need help with your work and can’t seem to find it, don’t necessarily look in your own field. Look for something great somewhere – a museum, a book, nature, a croissant. Things have developed that are great. Feed on them. Digest them. Even analyze them – though that will only help you if a particular aspect of them is useful to your problem.
Kay also maintained openness in her relationship with audiences. In her notes, she recognizes that most audiences do not have a trained eye for how to interpret movement, but that they also all have the potential to learn how to see dance if we give them enough information to keep them engaged over time. The belief that dance shouldn’t be explained leaves so many people behind who would otherwise enjoy a dance performance. Kay offers that designing the music, costumes, lighting, and program notes can help guide an audience to see what the movement has to say.
If you want to be successful in choreography remember that most people are tuned in more to the music, the costumes, the bodies, the program notes, the atmosphere, and athletic skill than the “dancing.” Try not to be bitter. Manipulate a couple of those elements to your advantage so that in being daring you won’t be a total flop. If you can keep people around long enough to see choreography, they will begin to see even the dancing.
If you don’t care about being successful but just want to create or express something, do it in a small space in front of a few “real people.” If you want to really communicate with them, make sure you and the dancers know what you’re doing. You can even explain things to the audience they need to know unless it truly is a work of great mystery or power.
We can’t complain that dance audiences have been declining for decades if we do nothing as artists to cultivate those audiences within our community. In her notes, I see Kay really considering the responsibility she holds as a choreographer to bring audiences along and keep meaning accessible. As a good friend of mine recently said, who is also a freelance dancer, “Who taught us that we shouldn’t hold the audience’s hand? Holding hands seems like a nice way to move forward together.”
Kara Komarnitsky
Archivist
Kara Komarnitsky grew up in the Salt Lake Valley and recently graduated summa cum laude with a BFA in Dance from the Ohio State University (OSU) with minors in Environmental Science and Business. Her primary training is in modern, ballet, and contemporary techniques, and she has performed with Myraid Dance Company and the Interdisciplinary Arts Collective. Her choreography approaches the complexity of human interconnection with the planet and her work has won awards from the Midwest Climate Summit and OSU Denman Research Forum. Kara also teaches at South Valley Creative Dance and Simple Yoga Fitness and is passionate about bringing people together around movement, wellness, and the environment.