Choosing the unbeaten path is never the easier option. Though, should you take the leap, you end up finding yourself in good company. Kimmie Dobbs and Enoch Chan are artists who nudge you towards that leap. In 2007 they formed Deviated Theatre, where "depart from the norm" is not only the motto but also an invitation.
Dance Place recently talked with the duo about art, dance and working with the one you love.
As the country struggles to right its economic downturn and stimulus money begins to be doled out to different sectors, bubbling to the surface of conversation is the importance of the arts. What’s your take on the debate? How necessary are the arts to our way of life?
Kimmie: To paraphrase Bruce Springsteen recently on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, ‘in times like these people turn to the storytellers.’ The arts are so integral to humanity, originate from a very deep place within a person, and reach across languages, and barriers, and transcend society and culture, and connect to a place deep inside another. The need for expression, and reflection, is so fundamental to the human experience and is more evident in times like these as people try to make sense of their experiences. Art is so essential, and in fact spiritual, that many artists would choose their art over wealth. I think the country is tired of this dichotomy, and there are many who realize that everything in this world takes some amount of money to be sustained. I think as a country, we are ready to see artists flourish… and not just the select few. We are tired of the select few.
Being full-time artists you offer a unique view. Are you feeling any particular pressures or strains being a working artist in this current economic climate?
E: Yes, definitely… I feel the strains that anyone in our society feels. How am I going to pay my bills? How am I going to put food on the table? How am I going to survive this next month? I think we as artists are especially vulnerable since the income for our basic needs is dependent on the expendable income of others. What most of us make is barely a living wage to begin with, but now to have that be reduced even further? I know that I have found myself not wanting to get out of bed some mornings to face another day of trying to scratch my way through…
But all I know is that it’s my calling, it’s what feeds my soul, it burns at me… who am I to argue?
K: Interestingly, I spend most of my time right now teaching Pilates and Gyrotonic Lessons. I am looking for ways to transition into the world of art. Enoch and I would like to make our company sustainable and to provide opportunities for others to be sustained. I would also like to do whatever I can to be behind Enoch’s photographic work. Having started Deviated Theatre with Enoch in Winter 2007, and knowing how enlivening the work is, as well as how severely talented Enoch is… I don’t see any other choice.
Deviated Theatre melds the worlds of theater and dance. Do you actually see these two things as being two entities or does one very simply lead to the other?
K: I view theatre as being all encompassing. I like to think of how Bruce Lee described Kung-Fu: You study technique so that you can let go of the technique. At first, the various dance and theatre techniques and disciplines can be distilled and learned very separately. At some point they all meld together to become a giant pool of options for expression. Dance just happens to be my strongest voice—my strongest option. But I know that Enoch and I are open to various options. For example, we put aerial dance in our last show because it seemed very fitting for the character, even though neither of us had ever worked with aerial dance before. Who knows, there could be singing, or puppetry next show. Any modality we choose (ballet, or stage combat, or aerial dance) we are going to exploit its expressive/communicative properties, rather than only its spectacle. But the common ground between Enoch, as a theatre director, and I, as a choreographer, is expressive movement. This seems to be the foundation for much of our work.
E: I don’t see art and theatre as very different or far from one another… I think that in our society we like to categorize and label everything so that we can feel safe by knowing exactly what we are going to experience. This has been done to dance and theatre and much of the art we see. This is one style or type, that is another… I truly believe that all art flows and should flow freely into one another. It speaks to a basic part of who we are as human beings…
When the earliest peoples felt the need to express their view of the world on the caves of their homes did they worry if it was neoclassical or baroque? When we first began to dance and sing the stories of our fears, our inspirations, our gods, did the others of our tribe stop us to ask if it was going to be a comedy, tragedy or musical theatre?
This is our art, it is our need to tell a story, to express our inner life, to scream a primal scream that somehow rings true to the basic thread that ties us all together as one humanity. To take an audience on a ride with us, and hopefully let them catch a hint of the darkness and the light that is hidden in their true selves.
You’ll be premiering Lore at Dance Place. What inspired this piece?
E: It’s kind of hard to nail down… We wanted to speak a little about subcultures at first, the ideas of what they were and are… We knew we wanted to have a queen, and some kind of really contagious disease and those who had it were put into some type of dungeon… Then I started to draw some inspiration from old Arthurian Legends and brought in a magical talisman, its allure and the price it exacts. Also the idea that resonates in many older myths about the link between the health of a land and its ruler’s health or validity… Before we knew it there was this shell of a story with these characters that somehow spoke to what needed to be revealed to tell their story fully. It’s funny how it works… It’s a little like sculpting… you start with these ideas and before you know it the stone is telling you how it wants to be carved… so you just kinda just use the chisel and set it free.
K: A show and a story go through so many evolutions before arriving as a completed piece! There is so much that inspired this show. I do know that we were originally intrigued by the idea of subculture. Also, we like to choose striking images that stick with people for a long time after the show, so we knew we wanted to have a dungeon scene. We also were very drawn to the idea of the connectedness of a community and so we developed the story to show the shared responsibility of each of the characters for the state of the town. It is based on the concept that sometimes we make choices by NOT making choices. This story is therefore also about the theme of knowing, versus not knowing. Our actions will always have an impact on others, but once we learn a certain piece of information we can’t UN-learn it and we must make actions accordingly. All in all this story is about shifting perspective—it is a shift in perspective that dooms the town and then in fact saves the town. LORE also makes a point that once you start acting on a more conscious level, not all things can be restored, and we must find a place of acceptance within ourselves on actions from the past, and a way to move forward.
You two are artistic collaborators, you’re also married. What’s it like creating works with the one you love?
K: It’s awesome. I both admire Enoch as an artist, and love him, and so I both respect what he says because I know he is a great artist, and I owe it to him personally to listen carefully. I can be pretty stubborn sometimes, and artists are known for being very protective over what they create, so this partnership has helped me to learn to make distinctions between what is actually working for a piece and what I just feel really emotionally attached to. All writers (choreographers) need an editor—a fresh outside eye.
E: Creating works with the one I love is both the most treasured gift I have and my greatest curse. I think it has to be otherwise I’m not sure I would be doing it right. Art needs tension, it needs the fire and the passion of conflict to set it free. Kimmie and I will get heated about our ideas and what we want artistically all the time. But I think it is from these disagreements that we get our best work. What is most important is that we don’t let our artistic differences mar and intrude on the love and respect for each other. Art needs that too.
Why dance? What first drew you to dance, and what keeps you there?
E: I don’t know that it’s just dance… I think that right now dance, or what I want dance to be for me, has more of all the elements of art than any other discipline, but as I said before I think there is a natural blending that happens within all the arts… paint on canvas has its sense of kinetic energy as much as movers onstage create static compositional lines.
But I guess there is a purity to communicating to others with bodies. We all have them to one extent or another, we all know how it feels to move in them. In this world where there is so much squabble, and noise, and worthless verbal and visual information thrown at us , it is nice to let go of all that and just truly see each other and talk to each other with all that we were given when we were born and all that will be left just before we die. Our bodies, skin, bones, sinews, flesh…
K: Movement turns me on… meaning, enlivens me… and this is one of the few things that I know is true.
The audiences for dance—even amongst the most well-known of companies—can be small (particularly when compared to theater audiences). Why do you think that is? And what can be done to excite people into seeing live dance?
K: I think when people are not versed in a specific technique, they do not always know how to appreciate it. Theater speaks to audiences and draws them in. It gives them a context. People like to know where they are. Blending theater into dance (and vice-versa) gives audiences who are new to dance (or theatre) a doorway in, through something that is familiar. Enoch and I were having a discussion the other day about how we like to make people a little bit uncomfortable with our material. I knew I was fascinated by the idea that I get enjoyment out of pushing buttons and boundaries. Enoch said, ‘you have to make people a little bit uncomfortable to be able to touch them’. I think once you touch someone in a powerful enough way, they will seek it out again and again.
E: I am always surprised how hard it is to get people to see dance and why people don’t go to watch dance more… I think there are many different factors at work, here are just a couple.
One is this constant labeling and relabeling of art and its forms. We have given everything names and rules… and so many people only feel comfortable going to watch the smallest niche of the art form that they think they will like. So let’s stop labeling everything in hopes of getting that little niche. Just call it a performance and let people enjoy the discovery.
When it comes to why theatre gets more audiences the truth is that theatre is easier for an audience. I don’t say that to take anything away from theatre, it is the background I come from. But language is easy. If I tell an audience that my uncle killed my father and married my mother they get it. Easy. I don’t have to work much but more importantly the audience doesn’t have to work much. It is literally spelled out for them. We are all used to communicating with speech and language, how many people pay as much attention to physical communication? It takes a lot of work, both as an artist and as an audience to share a concept with just movement. But I don’t think it is impossible, it just takes a little more work and actually trying to make sure our vocabulary of movement is getting across.
Finally, I wonder if we haven’t overly academized the form. I think we sometimes create work for other choreographers, or for grant boards, or for some elite board of dance historians. To make it worse we have built this great excuse for ourselves when an audience doesn’t understand our work, “ there is nothing to get, it is just dance for dance’s sake or art for art’s sake.” I know that the process of creating the work is what draws us to art and some of us just like to move, but I feel that the purpose of any art form is expression. This immediately intimates an audience and in order for that act of expression to be successful the audience must have some inkling of what is meant to express. I am not saying we should spoon feed our audiences, most like a challenge, but we have to keep them in mind when we create our work… if we truly try to speak to them and touch them with our work I know they will keep coming back for more.
Any advice for aspiring dancers or choreographers?
K: I would tell newer choreographers what I learning in a writing seminar at NYU: First just barf everything out onto the page. Put everything out there, including first instincts. Editing is a secondary and separate process. If you try to edit along the way you’ll stop yourself from ever writing anything at all. To aspiring dancers, I would say pay attention to what really turns you on (enlivens you) because that is what will carry you through. Let yourself accept the full experience—the aches, the joy, the losses, the euphoria, the frustration, the calm—because dance for sure will bring all of this and you must find a way to keep dance in your life if that is what is true for you.
E: I don’t know that I have much to say to them, I often feel that I am still an aspiring choreographer/artist at the very beginning of my journey. Maybe just a few of the things I have learned. Don’t ask for an opportunity, create one for yourself. If you want to create work, find the people and do it. Have fun, make mistakes, play, choose your life or life might choose a path for you that you might not like… If those all sound like fortune cookies I apologize, it’s my Chinese heritage sneaking up on me.
Maybe the key to it all is one final thought I learned recently from my wife, Kimmie… live life as if you have no fear.
-s. love
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