Welcome to ODC’s new podcast, DANCE CAST
Welcome to Dance Cast! Dance Cast is a podcast dedicated to critical conversations around all genres of dance. It’s for dance insiders, dance lovers, and the dance curious. ODC Writer in Residence Sima Belmar (that’s me) talks with choreographers, dancers, educators, designers, presenters, bodyworkers, journalists and scholars about dance theories and practices of yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
Listen to the episode here, and check out our latest episode below. 👇
The ODC Dance Stories blog will now be hosting Dance Cast transcripts. So now you can feast your eyes as well as your ears on Dance Cast.
S01 E01 Transcript
00:00:00 Sima Belmar
I heard the Ding Dong where is she though? Oh can I? Oh here we go.
00:00:03 KT Nelson
I see her.
00:00:04 Sima Belmar
Oh, you do. I don’t see her.
00:00:07 KT Nelson
Yeah, she’s got a photo.
00:00:09 Sima Belmar
I don’t even see…
00:00:09 KT Nelson
Brenda’s hiding. She’s probably having a glass of wine.
00:00:14 Sima Belmar
[Giggles]
[Music]
00:00:14 Sima Belmar
Hi folks, I’m Sima Belmar, writer in residence at ODC. And this is Dance Cast. Dance Cast is a podcast dedicated to critical conversations around all genres of dance. It’s for dance insiders, dance lovers, and the dance curious. I talk with choreographers, dancers, educators, designers, presenters, bodyworkers, journalists and scholars about dance theories and practices of yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
00:00:43 Sima Belmar
For this, our inaugural podcast, I’m joined by ODC founders Brenda Way, Kimi Okada and KT Nelson. They talk about the institution’s early days in Oberlin, OH, and how the company theater and school are responding to the COVID-19 pandemic.
00:01:02 Sima Belmar
This episode was recorded on December 11th, 2020. It’s now 2021. 2021 is the 50th anniversary of ODC. Huge milestone. So I wanted to get some quick background before we get into the interview. Brenda Way founded ODC at Oberlin College in Ohio as a multi arts collective with 16 members. The collective became ODC when it moved to San Francisco in 1976. It was Oberlin Dance Collective, then Oberlin Dance Company, then ODC. And over the course of a decade, ODC shifted to a leadership of three: Artistic Director Way, Associate Choreographer Kimi Okada, and the artist formerly known as Co-Artistic Director, KT Nelson. She will explain that transition in the interview. From its humble beginnings in a one room studio on Mississippi Street, in Potrero Hill, to its current Mission District Campus, which comprises two buildings that has a company, a theater, and a school, and serves 2000 artists and students a week (in non pandemic times, that is) ODC’s impact on the global dancescape cannot be underestimated.
00:02:16 Sima Belmar
For folks not in the know, ODC, Brenda, you founded it. That’s how the history goes and what does that mean? What does ODC stand for?
00:02:30 Brenda Way
Well, it stands for Oberlin Dance Company. It started as Oberlin Dance Collective, and that was why it started. The concept of collective. I was, I was honestly employed at Oberlin College with a pension plan, and dreams of tenure. And I had come from New York, and there were, I thought, at Oberlin, enormously fresh and interesting young talents. They were not formed by trend, they were formed by interest and appetite. And I thought, “I think this would make a great group!” And also we were quite, quite different, one from the other. These were students, basically. Students and one faculty member who I had hired. Anyway, I thought it would be a really terrific thing to get together and really make work. I wasn’t thinking of a long term company, I thought it was a summer. So I had a friend on Martha’s Vineyard, we went to Martha’s Vineyard. We all lived in tents, we built a dance floor outside in the dunes, we brought pots and pans, we figured out how to cook. And that was the beginning of the company. And we had, we had singers and writers, and musicians. It was a group of many different techniques.
00:03:43 Kimi Okada
Visual artists.
00:03:44 Brenda Way
Visual Artists, yeah.
00:03:45 Brenda Way
We thought, really, it was an opportunity for us to invent something that was different, that was ours, so that’s how it started. And when we went back to Oberlin in the fall, not everybody came back, because some people actually graduated, imagine that, but we carried on. And the next winter term, which was a month in every year that Oberlin let everybody do projects, we took off and we toured. People came back from where they had moved to or were working and that was, really, we were on our way. And I just want to say something about what the idea of…this was right in the thick of the 60s enthusiasms. We really wanted to have different voices. We wanted to be unexpected. We wanted to mix media, to the extent that it was interesting to us. To break the rules to break the rules of composition, and expectation. That was a big point. One of the ways we did that, as a collective, was we would each be the designer of our own work. And everyone else would would work on our behalf. And then we would switch. So that we had very many different approaches to making art. It was basically a wonderful cross section of methodologies. And I think we all were inspired by that. That there was no specific way to do it, so we were free to try whatever we wanted. And after a couple of years I’m, I’m speeding forward…
00:05:12 Sima Belmar
Ha ha.
00:05:14 Brenda Way
My sabbatical was coming up, and we had been going out on tour in the summers and winter terms, and I thought we should give it a shot, for my year of sabbatical anyway, to be a full time Company in a city. I I loved Oberlin, it was terrific. 10 people live there. It’s a little limited as an audience, but it was a great place, it’s like a Hermitage. It’s a great place to figure out what your beliefs are, but then it was time to proselytize.
So we got in the school bus, which did not have flowers on it, I just want to say that, but it did have Helvetica Dance written across the front. Very nice, very tasteful. I threw my three kids in there and Kmi and we took as many costumes as we thought was moral, and headed West.
00:06:03 Sima Belmar
Amazing. So, but, you called it Oberlin Dance Collective from the beginning, and not Oberlin Arts Collective or Oberlin Interdisciplinary…
00:06:12 Brenda Way
Well, you know what, one of our agendas was to redefine dance. Why does dance have to be throwing your arms around? Why can’t dance just be sitting? Well, you know now you look back on it, that was what was happening at the time. The redefinition of dance, and the inclusion of many, many different artistic perspectives. And that was important to us too. We had philosophical goals, and they had to do with breaking up leadership models and breaking up definition models.
00:06:39 Sima Belmar
Yes. And at the same time you came from a dance background, so it made sense for that to be the category that you wanted to…
00:06:46 Brenda Way
Yeah. That we were breaking open. We also had many talks about how dance was conceived in the more limited way. When you think of the forms you know, literature was all over the place. The beginning was at the end, the end never came, music was broken open. It was in boxcar form, not ABA, or C, or D. And we thought dance could use a little kick in the ass.
00:07:09 KT Nelson
Actually, I think Dance was, is sort of the most infant art forms as far as its development. You know music, and writing music, and performing it, and experimenting with it, happened much earlier than it did with dance.
00:07:26 Brenda Way
Yeah with dance, I basically with almost there at the beginning, I mean when you look back on it.
00:07:31 KT Nelson
But what I was going to say is I think dance always used other art forms to help it innovate and transform. Because they’re a little more established in how to experiment.
00:07:43 Sima Belmar
Are you talking, KT, in terms of Western dance in particular?
00:07:47 KT Nelson
I am, I’m so sorry I am talking in terms of Western dance, yes.
00:07:51 Brenda Way
It may be true for others too. I mean, you know drumming and so on.
00:07:55 KT Nelson
…they’re getting a little more married. But Western European dances and music and theater has been much more separated, at least for the last few 100 years. So yeah.
00:08:07 Sima Belmar
Yeah, there’s a really great book called…What’s it called? I think it’s called Ballet and Opera in the age of Giselle. It’s a really good book about how intertwined dance, music, and text was up until more recently than we think.
00:08:26 KT Nelson
Yes.
00:08:28 Sima Belmar
And then, separated out in these kind of — well, it’s all artificial — artificial ways, and then somehow we’ve forgotten. Like Modernism came in to sort of erase our memory about the ways those forms were interacting in Europe.
00:08:43 Brenda Way
And one of the things we talked a lot about was a much more pluralist approach, both aesthetically and organizationally.
00:08:51 Sima Belmar
Well, that’s the other thing I wanted to hear about and I’ll bring Kimi in a minute in terms of some of the chronology, but that, that I think some people might assume that a dance collective creates work collectively, in terms of all creative voices coming in at the same time. But you’ve all made it clear to me in the past that, like you just said Brenda, that projects had like a lead. There was somebody, it was somebody’s vision, that then everybody came together to manifest, and then somebody else would do that right?
00:09:27 Kimi Okada
We were all directors of our own pieces, so we had a director, or the artist, or the choreographer of that piece. We had the artistic control of that and then the rest of the collective members became the vessels for, or the performers for each of those people. So we all share the same level of vulnerability in some ways about “we perform for you, but we know that we’re going to have our chance to be a director.” We understand it created a lot of, I think, empathy in terms of understanding what it’s like to be a director, and what it’s like to be a performer. So we shared in that process that really was pretty egalitarian at the beginning. And, and because we were dancers and writers and painters, we were asked to do lots of different kinds of things.
00:10:15 Brenda Way
Should we sing the song from Doug Skinner?
00:10:19 Kimi Okada
[sings] Everytime I come to town…
00:10:23 Kimi Okada
Yes, we had to sing, we painted. We had prop. We did, you know wild things.
00:10:29 Brenda Way
Yeah, it was playground. I mean it really, it wasn’t…we didn’t think in terms of “will this survive. Will we be successful?” We really thought in terms of exploring the forms.
00:10:40 Sima Belmar
Yeah, and this is a conversation I’ve been having with artists recently. Well, I’ve been having this conversation for years with dance artists about. There was never any kind of…what am I trying to say? The idea…
00:10:51 Brenda Way
Expectation?
00:10:53 Sima Belmar
Sorry?
00:10:53 Brenda Way
Expectation.
00:10:53 Sima Belmar
Well, the idea that you would go into a dance career to like make a bunch of money, you know, or be productive…just didn’t make any sense. And now we live in a society where you can’t live on little tiny bits of money the way you used to be able to live. Just a cell phone bill alone is prohibitive, and so you know it’s…
00:11:15 KT Nelson
Yeah, I think it was a privileged time in that sense because…
00:11:21 Brenda Way
Our first rent was $200 a month, let me just sum it up. For two studios.
00:11:26 KT Nelson
And I paid $45.00 a month for my housing. You could, you know try things out. In Berlin after the wall came down was like, everything was so cheap and tons of activity happened.
00:11:41 Sima Belmar
Right.
00:11:42 Brenda Way
When we got here, I divvied up my sabbatical pay among us, and it was a very small amount, but it was enough to get going.
00:11:49 Sima Belmar
Right, when you came to San Francisco in 1976, right. And so let me just back up for a second. So, Kimi, you were a student at Oberlin and a student of Brenda’s. And that’s how you came to be part of this story.
00:12:01 Kimi Okada
Correct. I was a sophomore when Brenda came as a replacement for a dance teacher who was going on sabbatical. And so I met Brenda when I was 19 and a sophomore in college at Oberlin.
00:12:18 Sima Belmar
Amazing. And you had a background in dance as well.
00:12:22 Kimi Okada
Yes, I, I have studied contemporary dance, I studied ballet when I was a child and then I went to a school that had an amazing dance program. And so I started taking modern dance in 9th grade and dabbling in choreography and doing all kinds of things. I went to Oberlin because it felt like a great place to be a dancer, and also to be…My father also went to Oberlin, I’m a second generation Oberlin graduate, and I was the first dance major at Oberlin in the Theater Arts Department.
00:12:54 Sima Belmar
Whoa, that’s amazing. Trailblazing again!
00:13:01 Sima Belmar
And then and then KT, you met Kimi.
00:13:06 KT Nelson
I did. I met Kimi in San Francisco.
00:13:08 Sima Belmar
It’s like even just doing this interview on Zoom where it already looks like the Brady Bunch, it makes like this story really fit. It’s like [sings] and then one day came Kimi to Oberlin…yeah, OK…
00:13:20 KT Nelson
OK, so I grew up in Los Angeles and went to a secondary school there. I was supposed to go to Sarah Lawrence College, and instead of going, I took a year’s break. It was a very progressive art, college prep, kind of school. And I actually had a ton of music training there. And I just remember thinking, well, I gotta see if these ideas are true. Like everything I’ve been reading and stuff, so I thought I wanted to actually live in the world and see if I wanted to dance.
Actually, Bella Lewitzsky had been there, so I took when I was twelve I took her comp class and thought “ooh I want to do this.” So that was always lingering in my head. So I graduated high school and came to San Francisco to try dancing. And that’s where I ran into Kimi. And here’s what’s really funny, I ran into her first at Aikido. Because I was taking Aikido because my mother wouldn’t let me go into downtown Los Angeles unless I had a self defense class. And my self defense class ended up being Aikido. So, I met Kimi, which, what is it, a block from where the ODC buildings are now, in 1970?
00:14:31 Kimi Okada
South Van Ness at 18th was the studio. The Dojo. That was where the San Francisco Aikido was, the Dojo.
00:14:38 KT Nelson
Yeah, and then we also found each other at Margie’s studio on Bryant St.
00:14:44 Sima Belmar
Margie Jenkins, Margaret Jenkins.
00:14:45 KT Nelson
Yes, yes yes. And then Kimi and I were talking on the public bus, and she said “what are you doing?” And I said, “I don’t know. I’m supposed to go to Sarah Lawrence, but my best friend went.” And she said you’re going to hate it. [Laughter] And I wanted to go back to college, and Kimi said “well why don’t you try Oberlin?” And that was my fate.
00:15:05 Sima Belmar
I mean, this is really a story. If there are any seniors in high school or junior’s listening to this right now, see what a gap year can do for you? Just take a gap year and your whole life trajectory can change. Yeah. Amazing, OK so go ahead KT.
00:15:22 KT Nelson
And I just want to say one thing about Oberlin, that really, I found at that particular moment in my life. It was the, I don’t know, there is something about learning, and labor, and working. Just, there is a straightforwardness, like it was intellectual and very, believed in doing things. And I think that that is also true in this collective. ODC.
00:15:42 Brenda Way
Or, you know, I want to say that one of the things that I felt, coming out of the New York dance scene. It was not the downtown scene particularly, but I felt that dancers were too, were a little bit entitled. That I am a dancer, artist, and that I thought we should all know how to do it all ourselves. That if we really wanted to make work, we should be able to set up this circumstance in which we can make the work. So that that was very much, I think from the women’s movement in New York. Take charge of the means of your own production.
00:16:12 KT Nelson
And I also think Oberlin had those values.
00:16:15 Brenda Way
Well it did. I mean it was consistent…
00:16:12 KT Nelson
It was the first university or college to allow women, indigenous people. The Underground Railroad went through there, so it had a rich history of that same set of values.
00:16:27 Brenda Way
Yeah, it wasn’t that accident that I ended up there.
00:16:30 KT Nelson
Yeah.
00:16:32 Sima Belmar
Right. And so you, you are all here by 1976, and you know, the four of us have had several conversations, so you know, I don’t want to skip over too much because I I’m filling in the gaps as we talk, and trying to figure out you know what do we need to…Hang on a second. My husband is literally sawing…OK, he’s done sawing. Now he’s gonna be, so he’s going to be sawing again. It’s just a construction site here all the time. [Laughter] Oh my gosh. But, so, just so people understand, once you’re set up in San Francisco, this collective system starts to breakdown, right? In part because of just people leaving the collective…
00:17:22 Brenda Way
Well, actually it wasn’t because people left. It was really two things. One: it took us a full day to organize the rest of the week, as each of us was talking about doing our own work and so on. So that was very inefficient. However, we kind of hung in there with this philosophic fundamental thing going on. But then when we were evicted, and we ended up finding a place to buy, and we did. It was clear that we were going to spend a lot of time building this space, raising money for this space, starting basically, starting an institution. I mean we didn’t think that that way in those times. But there were, a majority of the people who were involved were not interested in that. They wanted to make their work, understandably. And so, so what happened was the people who were interested in digging in and putting down roots stayed. And so that was, that was a real turning point in the number of people and who was in the company.
00:18:22 Kimi Okada
And we’re talking really doing everything. I mean like jackhammering in plumbing lines into the building, and laying the floors, and putting wiring in, and construction, and also doing grant writing, and trying to go to paint stores to get donations and…
00:18:40 Brenda Way
And I don’t think we could spell “permit” at the time. But I may be mistaken.
00:18:44 Sima Belmar
[Laughter]
00:18:47 KT Nelson
I, I, I do think that there was a model about how to be an artist, which is to be an artist. Not to make it context. I think this is the major breaking down point of how people saw their lives. And I was like, I distinctly remember thinking, “oh no, I want this. I want a life.” That was the way I put it. And I will create it. I wanted the community, that was just clear to me. And I was just curious, for Brenda, I think this was just your nature. You make families. You bring people together. It’s your nature.
00:19:22 Brenda Way
For me it was about making it an art family.
00:19:26 KT Nelson
Yeah. And Kimi, I’m just curious for you, you remember that moment and…
00:19:33 Kimi Okada
I think it was totally about having a family. It was about having a dance family. About having, about sharing everything was exciting and fun and meaningful, and it was the creation of a context that I think I was hungry for.
00:19:53 Brenda Way
You know, I also had three kids. So, the idea of not having to be on all the time, giving over to other people and I could follow them, it would, it would give me more space to be a Mom. I’m not sure it turned out that way, but that was the idea. That it gave you breadth to have that life that KT was talking about. And that really mattered. When I thought of “should I go East or should I go West?” I’m sitting in Oberlin, right. And I thought “no, I’d like a life and it and it’s going to be in the West.”
00:20:24 KT Nelson
Interesting when I say life I was not thinking in my home life, though. I meant art not as a career but art as a life. Which to me was the distinction I was making.
00:20:35 Brenda Way
And my feeling was that the artistic impetus comes from the life, and it’s diverse. It’s connected to what you’re saying, just…
00:20:43 KT Nelson
Yeah, yeah, it’s just different.
00:20:46 Brenda Way
Yeah. I had three kids, so it would make sense that I would, you know, you came to that part later. But to me, you know, that was a lot of the source of wanting to be a dance artist, was coming from watching the children. I mean there were lots of impulses that came from a domestic source for me.
00:21:06 Sima Belmar
Right, and it just seems like you know that, that it might be commonly thought that by setting up a dance life in a dance family that somehow that dilutes the artistic vision or prevents there from being an artistic ego that gets to have its way. And this is a totally patriarchal thing that I’m saying, it’s like there’s a way…
00:21:30 Brenda Way
And it’s totally true, and it’s a big part of why I wanted to go West. To break down what the, well that pluralism is the same thing, you know to breakdown the great artists living in magnificent isolation. I mean, you know we have strong myth around artistic excellence. And as I was saying, the women’s movement was part of breaking that all down for me.
00:21:56 Sima Belmar
Let’s take a short dance break. You can take this moment to stretch or shimmy. And we’ll be right back.
[Musical Interlude]
00:22:48 Sima Belmar
I want, you know, again, imagine someone hasn’t, just has no idea what is ODC dance the company. I mean, we know people don’t even know what kind of institution it is in the sense that it’s a theater, and a school, and a company.
00:23:08 Brenda Way
And a Healthy Dancer’s Clinic.
00:23:09 Sima Belmar
And a Healthy Dancer’s Clinic.
00:23:08 KT Nelson
Yeah, I was gonna say a wellness clinic, a fitness center, and a broadcasting center. I mean it..
00:23:13 Brenda Way
And a Cafe. It’s a life.
00:23:17 Sima Belmar
It is. It’s a whole, it’s a, you call it a campus sometimes. It’s a world. It’s certainly a micro world there in San Francisco and has a lot of reach. And I think that, in the year or so that I’ve been the writer in residence, I have really felt the unbelievable number of things that are going on at ODC…choreography, performance, the theater. Of course the pandemic is partly due to this, sometimes I forget how primary that is for the three of you. Or has been. You know, Kimi, you’re the director of this school, so that’s taken over your life to a degree, a large degree.
00:24:04 Kimi Okada
It has, though I still do continue to choreograph, and you know, the art part is hugely important to me still, but yes, I am the director of the school.
00:24:13 Sima Belmar
Yeah, and like, so, the three of you keep making work. Although KT things are changing, shifting for you. Do you want to talk a little bit? I mean, we’re all, yeah, what’s going on?
00:24:22 KT Nelson
No can I just say one thing, back that back to I think one of ODC’s identities is I remember as a young dance company and touring and we would be asked to teach a master class and we’d say we’d like to teach composition. “Oh would you please teach technique?” For us, I think this is one of our identifying characteristics. I think how you make something, and what choices you are in making something, and how we do that together, is much more to the point about who we are then what our steps are, you know, and if we have a technique. So it is the world of art we happen to move. And we have to be in real time.
00:25:05 Kimi Okada
Which, Sima, directly relates to what I was saying about the school and how we’ve pivoted to the online classes, and the importance of the creative aspect versus the technical and how hard it is to teach technique. But really one of the silver linings about our online classes has been the ability to teach creative problem solving to our young people in a way that has proved to be really meaningful and goes right back to our roots of how we identified ourselves as…
00:25:37 Brenda Way
I want to add something to that. If you have a group of people who have not been similarly trained, and what you’re interested in is how interesting they all are, your process is going to be not to try to hammer them into your original idea, but to discover what in their life and capacity touches on the questions that you’re asking. So from the very beginning we’ve, we’ve used problem solving to get to know who we’re working with and how, how their lives and capacities can help elucidate what the questions are that we’re asking. So it’s been about bringing that out of the individuals for the last 50 years.
00:26:18 Sima Belmar
Yeah, and this, but two things I know I was asking KT…
00:26:21 Brenda Way
Only two?
00:26:23 Sima Belmar
Yeah only two, haha.
00:26:26 Sima Belmar
One is that the pandemic, right, has obviously it’s, so it’s like you can’t even speak to it anymore, it’s thrown over everything. I mean, there’s not one corner of the world, or corner of thinking or behaving or practicing that hasn’t been affected by it in some way. But in terms of the dance world, especially, in particular, the concert dance world, because I’m trying to write about this right now, like dancing, is thriving more than ever. There is more dancing going on than there’s probably ever been, and everybody is recording it or doing it outside. Or, it’s just endless. But the model that you have all been working in has been deeply affected.
00:27:07 Brenda Way
Decimated.
00:27:09 Sima Belmar
Yes. And so, and yet at the same time I’m noticing, and this goes back to what Kimi and I we’re talking about offline before you all showed up, and that she was just speaking to now. That not only, yes, a silver lining that online dance classes, since technique classes don’t work so well online, for those of you who don’t know about technique class, you’ll just have to take our word for it. It doesn’t work that well online. That there’s opportunity to do more creative, improvisational, and choreographic and compositional work. And what Brenda just said was it brings you back to the beginning of the collective, that being central to what you were interested in. So one of the beautiful things about this pandemic, as long as it goes away, I don’t know if we’re going to feel this way if it doesn’t ever go away, is that it has allowed folks to stop for a minute and remember what mattered, and then as we go forward to consider well, “what do we want to go forward with?” So, KT what you were saying about people wanting you to teach master classes and having them be about technique. I mean part of why I think people expected that of ODC is because at least since I’ve been watching the company, which is since the early 90s, but certainly I’m sure before that, the dancers are highly technically trained. So it doesn’t look like a situation like the one you’re describing, Brenda, necessarily where it’s like, “oh, we’re drawing from different skills and different backgrounds and different things” because everyone is coming in, at least since I’ve been seeing the company, at a very high level of a kind of conventional, you know, concert dance, ballet, trained, modern dance trained technique, so and then you’re working with those dancers the way you work with them. The way you’ve just described. But you see what I’m saying that there’s a way that people might look at ODC Company, and think, oh, look at all that technical training when they come teach us, they’re going to teach us that. Like how to do those unbelievable things that they do with their bodies. Because the creative process is not always known, right?
00:29:18 KT Nelson
Yeah, but I also think it was a leftover from modernism where we’re talking about Merce, Martha, Paul Taylor. They had styles and they taught them. And so that habit got into our culture about teach what you do, which meant that kind of technique. So I think it’s also just a carryover from a different era.
00:29:43 Sima Belmar
Yeah, that makes sense.
00:29:43 KT Nelson
Because we really are postmodernists, but that requirement to teach a master class was a kind of a modern point of view.
00:29:53 Sima Belmar
Right and we can go on and on defining modernism and postmodernism dance, oh my God. You close your doors March 13th or so of this year, well, if you’re listening it was last year, but it was like 5 minutes ago. And everything suddenly changes. George Floyd is murdered. Many people are murdered. Breonna Taylor. There’s a whole sort of, just, in the dance world, in the world, but I can speak to the dance world, a real stopping and attempt at reckoning. What’s changed, or I should say it’s almost like, it’s almost impossible to say exactly what’s changed, but what has changed in your thinking about what ODC is meant to be and what each of your roles are meant to be as you move out of this pandemic, when you’re moving back into the studio in some way? What’re you carrying from the past? What kind of new information do you have? That’s a terrible question, but I think you know what I’m after.
00:30:56 KT Nelson
The question is: given the pandemic, and all that’s happened in this last year, how do you see moving forward?
00:31:03 Sima Belmar
Yeah, that that’s very succinct and much better stated.
00:31:09 Brenda Way
How do I see moving forward? Is that the question? With grit. I think moving forward really has to do with being present every day and not holding your breath and hoping it will all come out the way it started. I mean, I think we just have to be, you know, we’re talking about how can we listen better. I mean I’m talking about in general in life, but I think in terms of the art form we’re going to have to be responsive to what’s possible and follow our nose. I mean, you know I always used to say to dancers when I was mentoring them, “the main thing I want you to remember is to stay in the room.” And I feel like right now: stay in the room.
00:31:53 Sima Belmar
The zoom room.
00:31:54 Brenda Way
What have I let go? How about the entire dance company? I’ve let that go. I’ve let the expectation that I’m going to spend half of every day working on work. On choreography. But my garden looks great.
00:32:10 Sima Belmar
Kimi and KT, I know KT, you have some real, some real concrete answer to that question.
00:32:17 KT Nelson
No I, I don’t, I don’t. [Laughter]
00:32:19 Sima Belmar
Well, but you’ve made, but there’s been a concrete shift.
00:32:21 KT Nelson
I mean yes, yes yeah.
00:32:22 Sima Belmar
And I know those, I know that the shift that you’ve made, based on conversation we had before, wasin your mind before. So if you could just speak to that though a little bit.
00:32:30 KT Nelson
Well, you know one of the things I’ve really been thinking about. I don’t know when I did this piece, Blink Of An Eye, but I remember saying when we were doing some part of it somewhere was like, I just feel that we, the rules of engagement for society are going to change. We have globalization, we have technology and the digital world we’re taking off, and we have climate change. There’s just no way the world is going to stay the same. You know, and that was a very imperfect piece, but that’s what I was trying to explore. Like where, what’s going to happen, so you know, when I think this when this pandemic showed up, I wanted to step back, step out. No, I did want, I had real questions about whether I want to keep choreographing. This is another sort of force or theme in what’s going on, but, I just like, is there, what’s the best way to change? Some people change by surviving and being in it and adapting. And I felt like I wanted to step out and just see what else could happen. Now, I would say one of the main motivators was that I was getting more and more nervous as a choreographer. About what people thought about my work. I don’t know why. I don’t know if it was biological. I don’t know if it was because I could feel a whole new generation. This is intellectually, I felt like things are moving fast. When the pandemic hit I felt like the future was just sucking us forward, you know. But even before then things were moving fast and I just felt like the contemporary person, the younger person, matters now. That is sort of where I don’t think it, I have a lot of knowledge about how to do things, but I, you know, you are born in your time. And you have instincts about how to do that, and I feel like our younger people are going to have instincts about how to, and they need our support, but they have instincts about how to move forward. Just like when we were young, we had instincts how to move forward. So that’s sort of where I’ve placed myself. Yeah, but you know one’s a personal thing. What am I making? I love making things. I wasn’t sure about that I do, but I hate worrying about what people think.
00:35:01 Sima Belmar
And, so what, I know that you’ve changed your like official role, right? From what to what?
00:35:05 KT Nelson
I’m now called an ODC fellow, and I am on the board. And one of the things that allows me to do is I can still support some of the programs like that around the rabbit. I fundraise for it, you know, so there’s a nice thing there. I think I will carry institutional knowledge as things move forward. What did we do back then? You know that’s going to be less and less useful as things do move forward. And I don’t know. As Brenda says, there is not a dance company right now, which is my main connection to my past work there. But I, I am there if anything is needed. That’s so like, I think next fall and supposed to do something with Colorado Springs, which is making a dance on some students and that’s part of a tour, and I’ll do the making the dance on the students part. You know, more of the outreach stuff so, so it’s not like I’ve disappeared. But I’m not in a leadership role anymore.
00:36:18 Sima Belmar
Yeah, it reminds me of what Hope Mohr said in an interview recently about what it means for an organization, dance organization, to start to move away from the vision of its founders or for the founders themselves to step back, make space for something new. Kimi?
00:36:40 Kimi Okada
I think I would have to agree with Brenda that moving forward, because our futures are so uncertain, knowing what what the world is going to look like, that it stay in the room. I mean, I think that we have to, to me, I hold on to what is the driving force behind everything that I have done. And I think it’s the belief in the power of art. And what it means, and how we can offer that to our community. And I feel a huge responsibility to the next generation, running the school in in our youth and teen program. Preserving that deep belief and trying to communicate that, and offer places of engagement. And what that is actually going to be and how that’s going to happen. I don’t really know in the future, because what’s happening with live performance, what’s happening to our school, and being in a studio together. I don’t really know, but I feel adeep responsibility to somehow keep that passion alive. And through, through exposure through being able to show things, to be able to create connection to not only each other, but to find deep within each person the ability to be creative and expressive and to be able to share that whether, whether you become an artist or not. So I guess looking forward, I feel as a school director, and a leader in that way, a huge responsibility to the next generation for what we actually believed, have believed in for the last 50 years and and. And how do we do that? I’m not really sure. I mean, we have we have deep roots and we’ve created many things, but exactly how that’s going to shape with what’s happened in the world, I, I don’t really know.
00:38:49 Brenda Way
You know one thing, I think, now that I can hear you, that was nice Kimi, one thing that I think as I see everybody going to a dance with their thumbs alone, I think that keeping certain things alive as options is part of what I’m committed to. I mean, I think the cross generational conversation is very important. I think that one of the things that our culture hasn’t gotten very well, is integrating cross generational perspective. Unlike some other countries that really have that dialogue going on all the time. So I, I feel like I appreciated the limited extent to which I had access to people who’ve been around trying and doing stuff for a long time, but I think I feel very energized and excited about being in conversation with young people who are trying to make things. And helping them see what we went through, if there’s any wisdom to be gained there, or helping them find how to do it in this new landscape. For one thing, trying to keep this organization floating means we’re not operating in the past. We’re definitely operating on right now. What people are interested in, and so I’m interacting all the time with people who are in the philanthropy world who are trying to figure out how to keep a lively culture going. And I think I have a role to play to speak to those people about what I’m seeing and, and the up and coming generations that are struggling. We had it a lot easier. We got to town and we could get in a place for $200. Now we really have become the defacto philanthropists, making it possible for another generation to move into their own imagination.
00:40:36 Sima Belmar
Amazing, OK, as you were talking I was also thinking we still need, the podcast could also be something where you know one at a time, we have single interviews, but it’s just we watch a piece together offline and then we discuss it. You know what I mean? Like all the sudden I was like we just need to be talking about dances since we can’t be doing them. We just need to be talking about dances. You know?
00:40:58 Brenda Way
I, I agree, I think. But you know, I, I did think that talking about Kimi’s bubble wrap piece, and the and the tightrope piece. I mean, there are things that were emblematic of the period, but also emblematic of a spirit that I think that actually, that I think has re emerged in a way. In a way, I feel that we’ve done a loop. And that instead of feeling distant, I think from a lot of what’s going on, I feel that I recognize some central, some seminal spirit of it. Inclusion, not alienating being in public when you’re performing not on a stage, which I, although I have say I love the stage, but these things are back in a way that influenced me heavily in the beginning.
00:41:48 KT Nelson
Yeah, but I also think there’s some really different things.
00:41:52 Brenda Way
Of course.
00:41:54 KT Nelson
And that’s where we get to learn.
00:42:00 Brenda Way
Yeah, well, absolutely we learned the first time around. And we’re still learning.
00:42:03 KT Nelson
Yeah, ’cause you know it’s like, one of the things that I am…I think that capitalism has really put a, you know the dance form, like everything has survived through capitalism and I don’t know how that’s going to break down our society, I have no idea, but it’s, you know, I think a lot of our relationships to our audience, maybe even to our dancers are transactional, not, I mean not where they were when we first started, and so I think that there’s a lot of relational things that are going to change. I’m very interested in changing our relationship to our audience. I think that other traditions have some much more insight on how to do that than Western European art. So I just think, yes, there’s the general rational thing. Yes, there is holding and supporting people, which I think is huge right now. But I also think it’s allowing other stuff to come in that has not has not been allowed to have real voice.
00:43:20 Brenda Way
I think there, there always is a louder voice and a quiet voice, and I think it’s up to the people who’ve been, been heard more to make room for people who’ve been heard less. But I do think that, that there’s also a lot that one has learned over the years that could be useful. You don’t need to recreate the wheel.
00:43:44 KT Nelson
I totally agree, yeah. Yeah, but a lot of it actually is not about making art. It’s a lot of people things.
00:43:51 Sima Belmar
Yeah, but it goes back to the, to the tenacity of the idea that the artist is independent and the artist works alone or that you know, the dancer is paint, you know on the artist palette, that sort of stuff which you know that’s just really holds on. Anyway, I could talk to you all forever. That’s always been the case. That will always be the case.
00:44:14 Sima Belmar
Thank you so much. I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Brenda Way, KT Nelson, and Kimi Okada.
00:44:22 Sima Belmar
Now it’s time for the ODC calendar, otherwise known as the 5,6,7,8.
00:44:27 Brenday Way
9,10,11,12. What can I say?
00:44:30 Sima Belmar
Dancers cannot count past 8! This is a myth we must sustain. And you just counted to 12.
[Music Interlude]
00:44:44 Sima Belmar
Join us on February 12th for Drinks & a Dance featuring a virtual screening of KT Nelson’s Dead Reckoning. In this work, Nelson explores our relationship to nature, how tiny we are in its magnitude, how vulnerable to its changes. Prior to the screening, guests will be joined by atmospheric scientist Mike Mills for a lively discussion about climate change.
Also, passes for ODC Theater’s Summer Festival are now on sale. Two weeks of virtual events will feature repertory, premieres, and in process work created specifically for a digital experience. Celebrate a historic cohort of artists originally scheduled to appear in 2020’s festival, joined by present and emerging creatives of today and tomorrow. June 3rd to the 12th. You can find more information on these events and reserve your tickets at odc.dance/calendar.
[Music Interlude]
00:45:41 Sima Belmar
Today’s guests were Brenda Way, KT Nelson and Kimi Okada. Show notes are available at odc.dance/stories. Dance Cast is produced through ODC by me, Sima Belmar, Sophie Leininger, and Chloë Zimberg. Special thanks to Farah Yasmeen Shaikh, Jack Beuttler, Kellee McQuinn, Kellen Lopes, and Meegan Hertensteiner who consulted on and assisted in its development and creation. Until next time, dance on everybody.
[Music Outro]
