Dance Cast S01 E14: Wrapping Season One, Looking Forward to Season Two
Listen to the episode here and check out our latest episode below👇
Transcript
00:00:00 Johnnie Cruise Mercer
I mean my body was already exhausted pre-pandemic, to be honest, like, I’m pretending like it wasn’t but it was. It was.
00:00:05 Benedict Nguyen
All the appropriations that happened under the wave of “postmodern art,” people don’t talk about that.
00:00:12 Latanya d. Tigner
That’s when I understood who I was. I was a dancer.
00:00:16 Noah Wang
I was definitely one of those people who was just thrown into this crazy, crazy world of dance film out of pure necessity.
00:00:23 Raissa Simpson
I don’t know if there’s a BIPOC sanctuary in San Francisco, but I’m going to make one.
00:00:29 Lucia Capezzuto
There’s different, actually, there’s different types of whoa, which is crazy.
Sima Belmar
Whoa.
Lucia Capezzuto
Whoa.
00:00:34 Robert Moses
The essential issue is what carries forward that is of worth.
00:00:39 Christy Funsch
Growth is the deepening. It’s not acquisition.
00:00:43 Antoine Hunter/Purple Fire Crow
I call my show Deaf Louder. I mean really it was meant to say, love ourselves louder.
00:00:49 Dana Iova-Koga
Being able to get your leg up to here, whatever.
00:00:51 Ann Carlson
Wait, can you say that? Wait, can you say that Wait can you say that?
Chloë Zimberg
The new byline for ODC theater, let’s manifest unicorns.
00:00:58 Brenda Way
Ha ha. How do I see moving forward? Is that the question? With grit.
00:01:03 Sima Belmar
Welcome to Dance Cast, the podcast that nerds out about dance to learn more about the world.
00:01:07 Sima Belmar
Eh? What do you think of that as a tagline?
00:01:10 Sima Belmar
Or would you prefer one of these?
00:01:12 Sima Belmar
Welcome to Dance Cast, the podcast that would rather be dancing.
00:01:15 Sima Belmar
Welcome to Dance Cast, the podcast that dances with itself.
00:01:19 Sima Belmar
Welcome to Dance Cast, the podcast that believes you should be dancing.
00:01:22 Sima Belmar
Welcome to Dance Cast, the podcast that believes everyone is a dancing queen.
00:01:26 Sima Belmar
Welcome to Dance Cast, the podcast that does not believe one needs to shut up in order to dance.
00:01:33 Sima Belmar
Welcome to Dance Cast, the podcast that believes it is indeed dancing, even if you’re just dancing in the dark.
00:01:38 Sima Belmar
Welcome to Dance Cast, the podcast that believes that nothing matters when we’re dancing.
00:01:43 Sima Belmar
Welcome to Dance Cast, the podcast that says no parking on the dance floor.
00:01:47 Sima Belmar
Welcome to Dance Cast, the podcast that wants to be your private dancer.
00:01:51 Sima Belmar
Too many choices?
00:01:52 Sima Belmar
Well, before you decide, the ODC calendar.
00:01:57 Sima Belmar
’Tis the season for giving presents.
00:02:01 Sima Belmar
My younger daughter wrote a letter to Santa saying that she knows that Christmas isn’t all about presents. Then she proceeded to ask for a bunch of presents. But why not, this year, give the gift of movement?
00:02:12 Sima Belmar
Gift cards are now available at odc.dance/giftcard.
00:02:16 Sima Belmar
ODC Theater’s 2022 Season features new performances by Bay Area artists and serves as a foothold for touring artists from around the globe. The Theater’s 2022 Season accompanies ODC’s 50+ anniversary celebrations, looking back while making bold new plans for a sustainable future. Learn more at odc.dance/theater.
Finally, Celebrate five decades of virtuosic, exuberant, and fearless dance in 2022! Dance Downtown, celebrating ODC’s 50+ anniversary, features two seminal works by Brenda Way, and world premieres by guest choreographers Amy Seiwert and Dexandro Montalvo, March 31 — April 10. Tickets go on sale January 20th.
00:03:00 Sima Belmar
So here we are. The final episode of Dance Cast in 2021.
00:03:06 Sima Belmar
At the opening of the show, you heard various voices from the 2021 Dance Cast interviews.
00:03:16 Sima Belmar
I invite you to go back and listen to those interviews if you missed any, or if you want to listen again.
00:03:23 Sima Belmar
They were very rich.
00:03:25 Sima Belmar
They were very complex.
00:03:27 Sima Belmar
And I learned so much from all the folks that I spoke with. Allow me to talk a second about me.
00:03:33 Sima Belmar
I’m not sure how much I revealed about my background.
00:03:37 Sima Belmar
I mean, I certainly talk a lot in every interview I conduct. But I’ve been a dance insider for over 40 years.
00:03:43 Sima Belmar
I started taking dance classes when I was four and a half years old at that studio above the pizzeria in Brooklyn, NY.
00:03:49 Sima Belmar
I talk about it all the time.
00:03:50 Sima Belmar
Blanche Curtis School of Dance.
00:03:51 Sima Belmar
I found out this week that my mom went there when she was a kid and that was the reason she put me into that studio.
00:03:58 Sima Belmar
I still have so many questions and season 2 of Dane Cast is going to search for answers.
00:04:03 Sima Belmar
I’m going to have conversations with dance insiders and outsiders, and we’re going to try to bust all those binaries, street/stage, traditional/contemporary, theory/practice. We’re going to explore concepts such as virtuosity, abstraction, expression. And we’re going to consider practices like technique, training, and transmission.
00:04:20 Sima Belmar
Dance is everywhere, and I know not everybody loves the idea that everyone is a dancer because, mainly because of, you know, professional boundary maintenance.
00:04:31 Sima Belmar
There are people who devote their lives to careers in dance, and they work very hard, and so sometimes when someone says well, anybody could be a dancer, anybody could be an artist, it’s offensive. But I think when I say that everyone is a dancer, I just mean that we all are movers.
00:04:48 Sima Belmar
And no matter what our limitations are as movers, movement is life.
00:04:53 Sima Belmar
There’s movement in stillness. And also dance is literally everywhere you look.
00:04:59 Sima Belmar
Choreography is everywhere you look.
00:05:01 Sima Belmar
Dance is social, technical, artistic, expressive, creative, improvised, choreographed.
00:05:05 Sima Belmar
It takes place in theaters, on the street, in the kitchen, on the rooftops, in the fields, on the beach. I mean, it is everywhere and iis a bummer that it isn’t valued more, understood more discussed more.
00:05:16 Sima Belmar
I think we can get pretty insular.
00:05:18 Sima Belmar
We can get pretty insular as a dance community. I’m speaking largely about the Bay Area dance community, where I feel like I grew up as a dancer and a dance thinker despite having started in New York City.
00:05:30 Sima Belmar
And so we’re hoping to branch out a little bit, open up the discourse.
00:05:34 Sima Belmar
I think that we’re looking at dance as a window onto the world in its omnipresence, in its ubiquity and everydayness. Training a dance lens on the world helps us see bodily expression outside of dance.
00:05:47 Sima Belmar
The podcast will talk about hot button issues or issues that seem like hot button issues that are really just old issues recycled again and again and again over the last 100 years.
00:05:58 Sima Belmar
For example, a couple of articles came out back to back about whether or not dance criticism is dying.
00:06:06 Sima Belmar
It appears that it has been dying since it started.
00:06:09 Sima Belmar
I look forward to deconstructing/shredding dance writing that is coming out in publications that I respect like The New Yorker and the New York Times.
00:06:18 Sima Belmar
I get angry regularly.
00:06:20 Sima Belmar
I’m always trying to figure out what makes dance special in its medium specificity, because often when I talk about dance, people are like, well, that’s true for performance, that’s true for theater, that’s true for visual art, that’s true for everyday life and I’m like well it can’t be! It can’t all be the same.
00:06:34 Sima Belmar
They can be related and there could be a lot of overlap but there’s always something that falls outside the Venn diagram. And I really invite folks to get in touch with me.
00:06:43 Sima Belmar
You can write to me at sima@odc.dance, especially if you want to join me to talk about a particular topic, or if you have a dance story to tell, or if you want to tell me your desert Island dances.
00:06:55 Sima Belmar
Which pieces of choreography would you take with you to your desert island?
00:07:01 Sima Belmar
Dance Cast started in January of 2021. I was hired as the writer in residence at ODC at the end of 2019.
00:07:10 Sima Belmar
ODC and I were really excited to work on an audio platform for dance, which you know for a visual kinesthetic art form, sometimes challenging to put words to the moves, to the choreographies, to the experience of dancing.
00:07:24 Sima Belmar
But I think talking about dance is super important.
00:07:27 Sima Belmar
I think it’s important for the art form, and I think it’s important for folks who don’t even realize how interested they are in dance. What greater gift to humankind than the gift of movement. So I’m excited for 2022 to be a space to really nerd out and Dance Cast is going to take a different route.
00:07:45 Sima Belmar
We’re going to begin releasing new episodes in March and they are going to run the gamut. In 2022 we’re going to be going down a more thematic path. We’re going to be talking with folks, some of whom are super dance insiders, some of whom are super dance outsiders, about a variety of dance related topics. We’re going to be talking about things like dance and digital archives, dance and musical theater, dance and funding, pedagogy, dance commercials, the relationship of dance to talk to gesture, dance reality television, dance non-reality television– what do you call that, regular television?
00:08:26 Sima Belmar
Dance Cast is going to go to the movies, big Hollywood movies, but also dance movies made by dancers, little tiny films, cute shorts, things like that.
00:08:36 Sima Belmar
Dancers wearing cute shorts in little tiny films.
00:08:39 Sima Belmar
We’re going to talk about dance books because dancers also write books.
00:08:43 Sima Belmar
We’re going to go out into the field.
00:08:45 Sima Belmar
We’re going to have folks tell dance related stories.
00:08:48 Sima Belmar
Anybody who really wants to talk to me about dance related stuff. You don’t have to be an expert because in a way we’re all experts.
00:08:54 Sima Belmar
There’s a sweet podcast on dance and film.
00:08:57 Sima Belmar
It’s called Pop, Lock, and Watch It: A dance movie podcast.
00:09:02 Sima Belmar
And it’s just two brothers who love dance movies.
00:09:06 Sima Belmar
They don’t identify as dancers.
00:09:07 Sima Belmar
They only have a few episodes but they talk about Breakin’, Step Up, Footloose, You Got Served, Dirty Dancing, Stomp the Yard, Save the Last Dance.
00:09:14 Sima Belmar
It’s sweet but there’s not a lot of folks out there talking about dance movies, so we’re going to talk about dance movies, which I am totally obsessed with.
00:09:22 Sima Belmar
So to close, I’m going to read something I wrote in 2007 when I was applying to the doctoral program in performance studies at UC Berkeley in the Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies, where I eventually got my PhD in 2015. So this was the personal essay I wrote as part of the application requirements, which was then published on Jill Randall’s extraordinary blog Life as a Modern Dancer. I’m reading it here just to see how it feels to audio storytell a dance story and to give folks an idea of what kind of stories they could tell here on Dance Cast for season two, 2022.
00:10:06 Sima Belmar
Lots of twos. I was born on February 2nd, so next year, my birthday, 02022022
00:10:14 Sima Belmar
I like it.
00:10:14 Sima Belmar
OK here we go.
I was raised to believe that a smart person did not become a dancer. My secular, Jewish family regarded dancing as both physical labor and divertissement, two things for which my grandfather did not kill himself working. He did not pull himself up by his own bootstraps from his (bootless) Moldovan, Jewish-ghetto childhood just so I could jump around mindlessly in a tutu.
If a smart person had to become a dancer, she had to “make it,” either on Broadway or with the New York City Ballet. Since I had hung up my toe shoes about forty-five minutes after my first lesson on pointe, and my mother had convinced me I couldn’t carry a tune (not true!), I was without hope. Dancing would have to remain a hobby.
Writing, however, got the seal of approval. It would serve well as the climax to the all-purpose “I’d-like-you-to-meet-my-son/daughter-the-_______” ammunition deployed at competitors on special occasions, such as weddings, Bar Mitzvahs, and upon chance meetings on the sidewalk on Kings Highway, Brooklyn. Beginning with my first diary, a blue book with Wonder Woman stickers slapped at odd angles on the front and back covers, writing has been a pleasure, a solace, and a challenge. I wrote papers for school, poems for my mother, and notes to myself. And I wrote (and read) as a means of appeasing the ghost of that near-legendary grandfather — a man who died when I was five, leaving me with a guitar, dozens of blank racing forms, several dolls from his world travels, and fuzzy memories of Florida beaches, heavily-accented English and late-night stops at the refrigerator for cold chicken.
With dancing kept at a safe distance from writing, vibrating on the sidelines as an extracurricular activity, I devoted my academic studies to my family history. My grandfather was a business man: textiles. To emulate him, I joined my high school’s Academy of Finance program and spent a summer working on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, marvelling at the way a floor trader could swallow an entire hot dog in one gulp on his way to buy or sell. I thought my grandfather spoke Russian, so I became a Russian major in college. When I found out he never spoke Russian (only Yiddish) I went to Oxford to study Yiddish with a great, woolly bear of a man named Dov Ber Kerler. Sitting in the St. Giles café, we would speak the language of The Old Country over bacon and baked beans (more treyf, please!). My grandfather’s secular and cultural Jewishness became my great obsession. I read every holocaust narrative, watched every Woody Allen movie, and reflected on the hours spent as a child in the homes of my orthodox neighbors, babysitting their innumerable children while trying to keep the silverware straight.
After studying Russian over seven weeks of endless sunlight during a St. Petersburg summer, I began the doctoral program in Russian Literature at Stanford. There, I laid my grandfather’s specter to rest. Under the direction of Gregory Freidin, I wrote my master’s thesis on the Formalist critics while taking dance classes on campus with Bay Area choreographer Robert Moses, and at the Shawl-Anderson Dance Center in Berkeley with Joan Lazarus, Cathleen McCarthy, Gail Chodera, and Randee Paufve. These four women changed the course of my life. Their approach to dance was as much intellectual as physical, and after a year under their tutelage, I left Stanford to write — about dance.
I started writing reviews for The Oakland Tribune and after a short time, found a home at the San Francisco Bay Guardian. My editors at the Guardian, particularly Johnny Ray Huston and J. H. Tompkins, supported my efforts to advocate for dance as much as chronicle dance events, to write for an audience of both dancers and choreographers, and to maintain personal and artistic relationships with the women and men I wrote about.
As I wrote about dancing, I observed how my writing was informing my dancing, and vice-versa. I encouraged dialogue between local choreographers and critics. My love of dance, a passion that had started with ballet when I was four years old in a one-room studio above a pizzeria in Brooklyn, exploded. I had found a way to pay homage to my grandfather, honor my own desires, and explore what I knew to be true: the mind and the body live and work together, an arrangement that may not always work best for romantic partners, but is simply how human beings are built.
Despite my ever-increasing appreciation of dance as practice, art form, and cultural text, something pushed me to learn more. Though I never wanted to be a choreographer, preferring the role of student and performer, I decided to pursue an MFA in order to bolster my understanding of the creative process behind the art of choreography. I studied composition and improvisation, and worked with lighting, set, and costume designers. My fellow students and I spent countless hours discussing and debating diverse dance styles, the sociocultural import of live performance, and the best way to heal a sore hamstring by opening night.
What I missed in a fine art program was the reading and discussion of scholarly texts. Glimpses were given: an unexplored essay here and there about dance and architecture, dance and the colonized body, dance and the Derridean trace. Though the education I received in the MFA program greatly enhanced my studio teaching, my “performance” in the lecture hall felt in need of supplementation. It isn’t always easy to convince students that dancing is something worth thinking about; that, for example, one’s beloved Sleeping Beauty can be analyzed and defamiliarized or that Ronald K. Brown’s use of dance forms from various African nations, New York gay clubs, and American black churches informs the use of space in his contemporary concert choreography. Such an effort requires a specialized language and an understanding of contemporary critical theory in addition to a knowledge of dance history and techniques.
So, by the end of my MFA, I had arrived at a crossroads. I knew I had more studying to do, but I had a different, unfulfilled desire nipping at my heels. As my dancing, writing self rumbled down the highway, another part of me chugged beside it along a service road: a Jewish girl’s love of Italy. With moderate effort, I could construct an explanation for this love from my childhood — some amalgam of having eaten pizza every day between 1982 and 1987, the story of my parents’ honeymoon on the Amalfi coast, and having gone to the prom with a Sicilian boy named Vito. I grew up in Brooklyn, where mainly because of some shared physical and cultural traits, Jews and Italians were often lumped together, mostly by Jews. But while we all may have been overfed duirng ear-shattering dinner conversations, I never saw groups of Jewish boys in Chams de Baron shirts and Sergio Valente jeans dancing together on sidewalks to the sound of house music blaring from boom boxes placed on the hoods of Cadillacs and Lincolns (with fuzzy dice hanging from rear-view mirrors) parked under the elevated train tracks along 86th street in Bensonhurst. The Italian girls leaned against the cars snapping gum and teasing their hair. The Italian boys danced. A fascination with Italy that grew out of girlhood crushes morphed into a will to immerse myself in Italian society.
Three-and-a-half years after packing up my California life, I find myself a stay-at-home-mom in Naples. My daughter and I are rarely at home, spending our days wandering the streets and parks of Naples, and visiting with Neapolitan friends. It doesn’t take long to recognize Naples as living theater, a locus of ample opportunity to observe and reflect upon expressive practice. Gesture, posture, and facial expressions take precedence over words in daily communication. It did not take long for a movement-related research idea to emerge, the first inklings of my desire to conduct an ethnographic case study of a Neapolitan dance company.
Dancing calms my mind. Yet it also makes me think: about why more people don’t dance, why dance programs and staff writers are always the first to go, how the principles of diverse techniques inform quotidian existence, how dancing marks us as human beings. Contemporary dance is my core interest, perhaps because I have a profound aversion to “gear.” All you need for a contemporary dance class is a pair of old sweats and your bare feet. You don’t even have to have feet. Contemporary dance is open to every living, breathing individual.
Had I known that dance could be as much as an intellectual pursuit as a physical one, things might have gone differently. But then, I would not have found myself where I am today: a 36-year-old woman with a passion for dance, a desire to bridge the yawning chasm that still lies between bodily practices and scholarly pursuits in American culture, and a conviction of her unique fitness for a career in performance studies.
00:17:31 Sima Belmar
Looking back at that, I find lots of it dated, not only the fact that it’s a 14-year-old document and I am now 50, but just terms that I use and things that I say that I wouldn’t use now and that I wouldn’t say now. But that’s just an idea of a storytelling, a writing that could be cool to hear about on this podcast. Anyway.
00:17:53 Sima Belmar
Also, if you have dance jokes that would be cool.
00:17:56 Sima Belmar
So, listeners, thanks for sticking with us throughout 2021, a completely bonkers year followed on the heels of another bonkers year and another and another.
00:18:06 Sima Belmar
I’m not sure when it wasn’t bonkers. I really look forward to sharing all kinds of nerdy dance thoughts with you in 2022.
Dance Cast is produced through ODC by me, Sima Belmar, Sophie Leininger, and Chloë Zimberg.
00:18:14 Sima Belmar
Show notes are available at odc.dance/stories, where you can also find a transcript of this podcast. Until next time, dance on.
