![]() So, I’m constantly caught between figuring out what to ask them to do, seeing what they can do, and then adapting to what their capabilities are.” At the same time, I can’t make my students feel bad about not being able to do something. I have certain standards that I want to meet. “I find a certain tension between what I’d like to see artistically and the experience I want my students to have,” Quinn said. Quinn meets that challenge by balancing the artistic needs of the work, professional needs of the practice, and psychophysical needs of her dancers who have Parkinson’s disease. I am inspired by the movement of work and regular life, by the movement expertise people develop through a lifetime of embodied practice.”Ĭommunity-based work is often criticized for lacking rigor or for making aesthetic compromises that hurt the art. “The movement that inspires me is not typically happening in the dance studio. ![]() “You can make great work with trash trucks and bucket trucks,” she explained. But I firmly hold onto the word ‘dance.’ I want to expand what people think of as dance and performance.” Orr finds bottomless capacity in defining her work as dance. She was my mentor, along with Deborah Hay, so I consider myself a community-based artist. Orr acknowledges her contemporary/modern dance lineage. (pictured here) a chance to showcase their expertise and talent.Photo: Amitava Sarkar From 2007-09, she collaborated with Austin’s Sanitation Department employees to create “The Trash Project.” With more than 2,000 people in attendance, the performance educated Austinites about the work of trash collection and gave employees like Ivory Jackson, Jr. In so doing, the line between abstract postmodern dance and socially engaged creative practice blurs.Īllison Orr’s choreography begins with the movement of everyday work. They bring a dance mindset to bear on everyday activity and the everyday human body with its specialized knowledge culled from years of habituated movement as a result of work practices, disease, and aging. They each challenge the arbitrary division between capital-D Dance and dance embedded in specific communities. And Quinn, also in New York, teaches and makes dances for people with Parkinson’s disease, including folks who use walkers and wheelchairs in communities from Manhattan to Japan.Īll three artists are trained dancers who have moved away from the conventional trappings of Western concert dance to explore and revel in the endless possibilities of human and non-human movement. Collaborating mostly with working class communities, Austin-based Orr has made dances with sanitation workers, urban forestry technicians, baseball players, gondoliers in swimming pools, roller rinks, and campus kitchens. Goldberg Haas teaches at community centers and creates multigenerational, site-specific performances with professional and community dancers in New York City. Each of these artistic directors - of Dances for a Variable Population, Forklift Danceworks, and PD Movement Lab, respectively - sees dancers in every body and dances in every place. These qualities - along with pathos, precision, and purpose - are embodied in the choreographic works of Naomi Goldberg Haas, Allison Orr, and Pamela Quinn.
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