Artistic Director Jamila Glass and the Los Angeles Contemporary Dance Company (LACDC) will premiere four new works at the Glorya Kaufman Performing Arts Center on October 25 and 26, 2024 at 7:30 pm following a hiatus from producing and a yearlong incubation period. The program, titled where the water is warm, features works by choreographers Mario Glez, Myles Lavallee, Spenser Theberge, and Jamila Glass. The press release states that these works “explore how inner lives and thoughts affect our behavior”. Tickets are on sale HERE:
LACDC was co-founded in 2005 by Kate Hutter Mason and Michelle Jolly who met in an arts management class at the University of Southern California. In just a few years, LACDC has become one of Los Angeles’ leading dance companies. This title held until 2020 when the Covid pandemic brought the world to its knees and people everywhere began an internal investigation and sometimes a reassessment of their lives. The company was no different in asking similar questions of itself. LACDC’s last concert was in 2022 just prior to “a planned pause from outward-facing activities and productions in early 2023” per LACDC’s announcement at the start of 2023. When LACDC announced that it was going on a hiatus, there were a lot of questions circulating throughout the LA dance community: What was going on? Was the company folding? Given the sensitivity of the subjects at hand, the company was navigating these questions internally before bringing their findings to the public. I contacted Hutter Mason over a year ago to see if she would agree to an interview to discuss what was happening within LACDC, but she said that they were not ready to do that and that she would get back to me when the time was right. Recently I reached out again and she responded, “I’m ready to talk” and we met on Zoom for the interview. We first discussed LACDC’s reasoning for the ten year tenure of the artistic directorship.
Kate Hutter Mason – Photo courtesy of the artist.
From its inception, Hutter Mason and Jolly agreed that each artistic director of LACDC could only serve a maximum tenure of ten years. The first AD was Hutter Mason (2005-2015) followed by Genevieve Carson (2015-2020) and then Jamila Glass (2021-present). “The reasoning for that was to have a premeditated way of making sure our leadership was offering a perspective that felt contemporary – something that continues to be responsive to the times, to the trends, and to be amplified in the culture.” As she pointed out, the company was purposefully not named the Kate Hutter Dance Company. The co-founders truly wanted LACDC to be a repertory company that represented the city of Los Angeles and Hutter Mason wanted a way to honor that exchange of leadership, power, and artistic imprint. The nature of this change in leadership felt very grounded in how we serve the ever-changing interests of our population and artistic voices within it,” she explained. “It was very important to me.”
Hutter Mason went to the east coast for graduate school to, as she put it, soak up and study the traditions of modern dance and contemporary dance companies in New York. She had a great deal of respect for those traditions but felt that the energy and vitality of Los Angeles was more in tune with “the quick and dynamic nature of changing the art form as opposed to embedding it.” It was her way of saying that she not only embraced change but that she expected it. Other leaders in the dance community expressed that having a set tenure for leadership since its founding seemed like a bold idea especially since the company was just beginning. Luckily for all, the company has lasted way past that first ten year period and the transitions from one artistic director to another have been successful.
Jamila Glass – Photo by Rick Proctor.
Jamila Glass became artistic director in 2021 which was a year that, due to the pandemic, everyone was still questioning the future. To some, it felt like a kind of purgatory being stuck in between the past and what was to be. During the pandemic, many dance companies moved to film and streaming to keep their companies alive and to maintain the dancers on contract who were interested in continuing to work with the company. For LACDC, once the pandemic abetted, they questioned what was the path forward. For Hutter Mason, that period had a very special challenge. Not only was LACDC coping with the effects of Covid, but she was also developing Stomping Ground L.A., a new and incredible dance studio and performance space that is also a home for LACDC. “I was sitting in both spaces, quite literally, looking at the whole ecosystem of the arts,” she said. “I kept asking myself ‘What are we addressing now? How are we responding to the needs of the artists, the public, etc?’ It was a very introspective time and I think that a lot of people came out of the pandemic saying ‘I desire something different.”
Emerging from the isolation was, of course, different for everyone. For Hutter Mason it was the desire to move, to play, and to reorient with the imagination more than it was to go make work. “I need to commune. I need to feel and sense other people more than I need to prove something or produce,” she said. “For me, I felt like the compass had swung towards what I think has always been my innate draw towards this art form – to explore and create in the community of others.” She expressed how some people emerged from the pandemic with a definite plan of how to move forward while others knew that they wanted a change but were unsure of exactly what that meant. This left LACDC in a state of uncertainty. Hutter Mason knew that when the company got back together they were going to be in the same environment and yet, still be wrestling with the need for change and figuring out how to navigate toward that goal.
Los Angeles Contemporary Dance Company in rehearsal for their The Unseen Hours – First Look series – Photo by Anna Tse.
LACDC was at a high point in the company’s career after finishing a concert in early 2020 just before the world closed down. The question then was how do they get back to that momentum when the pandemic had made this a very different world. There was an attempt to maintain working by keeping the dancers on payroll and keeping projects going virtually. During 2021, the company was striving to get back to producing live events in the same way as before and they thought that things were headed in the right direction. But in 2022, Hutter Mason and the leadership noted that things did not feel settled into a new rhythm. After 15 years with the company as a dancer, Glass had been the artistic director for a year and the company’s Executive Director, Napoleon Gladney had been with the company since Carson’s directorship and throughout the transition. Additionally, the majority of the dancers had been with the company for five to ten years. To Hutter Mason, it felt like a fatigue of the entire system after 15 plus years going nonstop even through the pandemic. The way that the company functioned holistically was not working and people were responding differently. “I can’t pinpoint what the Achilles heel was but something had to give,” she said.
A performance was cancelled in 2022 to give the company time to work through these challenges. A consultant was brought in as a neutral third party to listen to the dancers, the leadership, and the Board of Directors to see where everyone was coming from, what their desires were, and to see if they could or could not meet everyone’s needs. While this was taking place, the company completed a residency with choreographer and 2024 Princess Grace Award Winner, Roderick George, to create Dancing In Snow, which they performed at The Odyssey Theatre in West Los Angeles and at ODC in San Francisco that same year. Hutter Mason felt very proud of that work and considered it a major production in LACDC’s history, even with the challenges they were experiencing. It was after this production that the LACDC Board of Directors announced that a planned pause was necessary to go over and reflect on what the consultant had brought back to them. They hoped that this would take approximately three months, but indeed it took closer to 7 months. This felt like a long time in comparison to how the company was used to working, but Hutter Mason began to ask herself “what is the pace of contemplation, healing, rebuilding, and change, and how is this different or the same as making art? What is the expected pace of our company to produce or provide results?” She knew that she could not stand in the way of the necessary work that needed to be done to consider the company’s path forward simply because of the pressure to not stop from the outside. “It felt like it went against habit or the usual behaviors of the company, but that’s exactly what we needed to disrupt,” she said.
Los Angeles Contemporary Dance Company in rehearsal for their The Unseen Hours – First Look series – Photo by Anna Tse.
Following two years of producing films, intensives on Zoom and in person, and a few live performances, LACDC made the choice to go on hiatus in 2023. From the outside, it felt sudden and unexplained even though there were a few announcements from the company along the way. The first came in January of 2023 where they announced that the company was taking a scheduled pause. Another in February stated that the company was working on rewriting its mission statement, terms of engagement and communal agreements, company structure, programming, and working on a wage analysis. In the spring, a third announcement updated the public on the progress being made on the goals they set in their previous message. In the summer of 2023, LACDC publicized its new mission and shared it was getting closer to settling on all the other re-organizational items. You can read that announcement HERE. Hutter Mason stressed that what was released during the company’s hiatus was keeping their audience informed while maintaining the privacy of the individuals within the company. “What we were attending to during the hiatus was looking at the why and how we exist as an organization, and how that is serving not only internally, but externally,” she said. “Coming out of Covid, each of us reasonably had very personal agendas and needs, and we were allowing those needs to interweave with how we were moving forward as a company.”
Hutter Mason knew that taking the hiatus was not a popular choice and not an easy decision, but the company needed to consider its mission, wages, programming, and most importantly, what is the value of this company to others? “For our conversations during the hiatus, I was very pointed about our mission, how we serve, who we are serving, and the future orientation of this organization and not the specifics of each stakeholder or the desires of trying to make everyone happy,” Hutter Mason explained. “We had to look at the universal picture instead of individual interests.” Via these discussions, Hutter Mason resolved her belief that LACDC is a cultural organization committed to serving LA. She wants LACDC to still be in the research development space and not one that drives toward performance, towards product, or one that rushes towards the shiny object. “That calls for a lot of vulnerability and a lot of patience,” she said. “If we’re staying in a creative space, we need to have openness to questioning, listening to new ideas, inviting in contrasting perspectives, and for everyone to hold space for others.
Los Angeles Contemporary Dance Company in rehearsal for their The Unseen Hours – First Look series – Photo by Anna Tse.
The Board of Directors held group and individual discussions with the leadership and artists who had been working with the company, and ultimately it was an individual consideration and decision as to whether or not they would return to working with LACDC. “We wanted each artist to consider their orientation to the company, if our mission was aligned with their values, and what they wanted to be doing personally and artistically.” In the end, a majority of the artists did not return. Hutter Mason added that “No one was at fault or made the wrong decision. It was clear that we were on different paths with different interests for ourselves and the future of the company. I am still cheering each of them on as they continue in their careers, and grateful for the many contributions they made during their time with LACDC. They are an important part of the fabric of this company and our history as an organization, and I look forward to celebrating our 20th anniversary together next year.”
In August of 2023, seven artists were selected during a 3-day audition process to work with the company. The artists were made aware of the company’s new mission and tenets before attending the audition. In the fall of that year, LACDC engaged four choreographers in creative residencies which extended into the Spring of 2024. The residencies for each choreographer were longer and more intensive than how they had been scheduled in the past. With the help of foundation, state and county grants, the company was able to create a pliable timeline and budget. “With that time, we could expose ourselves to new relationships with artists and consider how we need to breathe in a new process,” Hutter Mason stated, “and how we need to get to know each other.” The rehearsal schedule was extended so that prior to the work beginning, there was time each rehearsal for the artists to sit down and orientate with one another as a whole. This process allowed a space for them to connect personally before jumping into the creative work. This also led to the company curating an open rehearsal series called The Unseen Hours – First Look with feedback from the audience followed by conversations with the artists. Hutter Mason said ”We could be clearer about our intentions to work in an experimental environment, to desire rehearsing without knowing when the production might be, to develop work, and ask what we can do together. As we found, we wanted to focus on discovery over mastery.” She was clear that this is a method that hopefully works for LACDC and that she is not stating that it is the only or best method of working. “We wanted to make sure that artists were attracted to this and didn’t feel like they had to suddenly fit into a process that went against their interests,” Hutter Mason added.
Los Angeles Contemporary Dance Company in rehearsal for their The Unseen Hours – First Look series – Photo by Anna Tse.
The transition following Covid has not been without hard lessons and deep emotions. Hutter Mason has watched artists who had worked with LACDC for a long time move on. “But with transition comes new people with new perspectives, considerations, and personal approaches to dance. They will now leave their impressions on the company.” LACDC is excited that they are about to have their first show after this extended incubation period and are aware of the focus it takes after such a long hiatus from producing. “I think what is interesting and a first is that the artists we’ve engaged for this year – this will be the first time that I get to see them perform on stage,” Hutter Mason said. “And how, in a lovely way, I’ve gotten to know them and their inner workings through this year-long investment in the studio.” It has been a challenging but inspiring process for LACDC, and the coming performances in October will offer the public a moment to see what this incubation period has led to as a creative imprint. “If anything could have come out of Covid and come out of this time of contemplation and consternation,” Hutter Mason said, “is that we’re willing to ask questions and we’re willing to stop, if necessary. We’re willing to do the thing that is unpopular because we determined that the risk of continuing ‘as is’ was greater than taking the time to figure out how to change and realign to our reasons for existing.”
Next year Los Angeles Contemporary Dance Company will celebrate its 20th year.
For more information about LACDC and to purchase tickets to their October 25-26, 2024 performance at the Glorya Kaufman Performing Arts Center, please visit their website. The concert, where the water is warm, will feature choreography by Mario Glez, Myles Lavallee, Spenser Theberge, and Jamila Glass.
The Glorya Kaufman Performing Arts Center is locate at 3200 Motor Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90034, to visit their website, click HERE.
Written by Jeff Slayton for LA Dance Chronicle.
Featured image: Los Angeles Contemporary Dance Company in rehearsal for their The Unseen Hours – First Look series – Photo by Anna Tse.
