Judith Howard
Interviewed August 29, 2015 | Written and photographed by Ilya Natarius
Toxic beauty — this is the theme of the afternoon that Judith Howard and I meet up for our interview at a quarry in north Minneapolis. The contrasting images of industry and grace are intriguing to hear about as well as witness in person. The place that drives Judith’s work breaks many stereotypes that most individuals would have about what drives a dancer to create. I bring this up, verbalizing the idea that one would associate a dancer’s work with grace, beauty, and flowing choreography that comes with a traditional dance piece, but Judith upholds that while her source for her work might be very different, the core ideas are still there. Though it maintains the grace associated with a dance performance, Judith’s work also incorporates ideas that come from a wide variety of influences.
During our conversation, it becomes clear that Judith can draw from a great many things in her life as a starting point for a new piece. This is the reason we meet at a quarry — Judith is in awe at the chaos and the otherworldly feeling one gets when there. Indeed, I comment several times that the scenery is something I would expect to see in photographs from the Mars rover. There are spherical structures scattered around the area that look like they once served a purpose as collectors of some kind, perhaps of grain or sand; piles of broken up cement and other debris that look like they came from a mixture of different places; and a flat, sandy valley in between the collectors and debris piles. The collectors are covered in a mixture of sandstone and other rock. Together, they create layers of different colors as a result of the weathering they’ve taken over many years — something Judith points out as one of the main reasons we’re there.
As we walk around the area, Judith comments on every aspect of the place, explaining how she sees motion, chaos, and beauty all tied together in the same spot, creating a place where she can conjure up a great many ideas. As Judith talks about her past influences for creating dance pieces, I begin to notice that the quarry is a place that incorporates all of these concepts. It’s a blend of abstraction, stark contrast, and unexpected grace that she often called upon as separate sources for her prior work — a meeting point for all of her ideas. From all of these different places Judith has always been able to come up with dances that move, inspire, and challenge her audience, the way that the quarry moves, challenges, and inspires Judith’s own ideas, creating a direct translation of emotion from the source to the viewer. Experiencing the quarry and talking with Judith about her various influences is an exercise in translating origins, both verbally and physically.
Judith is a dancer and choreographer as well as an associate professor of dance at Carleton College. Judith has been passionate about movement, dance, performance, and theater ever since she was three years old — something she knows because her mother told her later in life, but also because she believes it’s always been her calling. Judith earned a bachelor of arts from the University of Maryland as well as a master of fine arts in performance and choreography from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and has been at Carleton since 2007. Originally, Judith began her career as a solo dancer, but later on established an improvisational dance company called The Flying Sisters Theater with her friend and colleague Cindy Stevens. Over the years, Judith’s work switched from solely performing to choreographing dances with others. However, Judith says that she’s still a soloist as well as an improv dancer at heart — something she is trying to incorporate more in recent pieces.
Judith’s approach to piecing together a dance or a performance is very rooted in emotional response and reaction. “I’ve always been interested in issues,” Judith says. “For a five-year period I created pieces about war. Not directly, but my emotional response to them. I’m currently in a climate change period. I go from an emotional state and work it out from there. Once I made a dance that was just based on a somatic feeling and the color blue. It’s hard to say where the impulse is going to come from next.” As a result of this kind of creation process, Judith’s overall style is not rooted in something that is as structured as ballet or traditional dance. Judith describes her style as modern dance, noting that she focuses on a variety of movements in order to communicate a message with her performances.
Focusing on an overall image instead of specific dancing technique, Judith’s work is often very abstract, letting viewers take away their own opinions of the piece. “I’m not into telling people what to think with my work. I like to present it in the birth of the reader, so the reader can create from what I put out,” Judith says. “For an artist’s statement, I like to flirt with coming to the surface of the message, but I don’t like being literal with my work.” Judith elaborates: “Do I want to do a dance about a farmer who died? No, I do not. Do I want to do a dance about climate change? No, I do not, but those things filter through a feeling state, and I work from that feeling state and let it ring bells as I go along.”
Judith’s desire to remain abstract in her work’s intent is clear when viewing one of her rehearsals. Many of the cues given during rehearsal have to do with how the overall dance is structured and what sort of image is being presented to the viewer. There are also emotional cues for the dancers. Despite being very big picture-driven, Judith’s notes are still detail-oriented, making sure that the emotional response comes across to the viewer the way that she intends it to. However, Judith does allow spontaneity into the dancers’ performance, giving the finished product a genuine feeling and adding authenticity into the show that could not be achieved with something structured and traditional.
It was because of the abstract nature of how Judith creates and the number of different influences in her work that led her to find the quarry as an important place in her creation process. The quarry on its own serves as an intersection for many different ideas and feelings of hers, making it an embodiment of the types of things that Judith finds so moving. “I feel this space works in me. The first time I saw this place it engraved itself in my visual archive. Partially, there’s an elegance to it, partially there’s a roughness to it. This space is perfect that way — it outdoes me in that way,”
Judith says. Her work, being rooted in emotion, stems from this very reaction when she begins creating. Many of the physical traits of the quarry work together to create one cohesive emotional response that drove Judith there. “The beauty of the forms, the elegance of the shapes, the destruction of the concrete pieces and shapes — this space gives me the feeling of the end of time in a way, or [it’s] timeless. This place has exquisite decay, toxic elegance. I love the sense of destruction here. It’s surreal and horrible and beautiful at the same time,” she says. Judith first came across the space through her son and his fiancé at the time, who had done a photoshoot in the area. Judith had seen the resulting photographs and was drawn to the area and eventually used it for a shoot of her own with a few dancers for promotional images of a show.
With her work so deeply rooted in emotional response, when asked about whether or not she would consider changing her artistic format, Judith responds with a desire to try installation art. “I often wish I was more of an installation artist, because as this place has shown us, we experience things when we move through spaces. Spaces stimulate me. A dance is pretty distant while a space is pretty intimate,” she says.
Judith’s connection to spaces, and how she responds to them and uses them in her work, may not be something that is obvious to the viewer without having prior knowledge of her discovery process. But without the presence of places such as the quarry, it’s clear that Judith’s work would be different — it would have a bit less toxic beauty.
