What does a love affair with the soul look, sound, or feel like? How can an industry obsessed with highly technical and virtuosic young bodies genuinely embrace those that are different? How can an individual human being navigate the internal path as one transitions from one of these extremes to another? What is the physical manifestation of responding to these questions?
Choreographer and dance artist Renée Donovan, collaborating with other choreographers and dancers, grapples with these questions in relation to music and the audience in her upcoming dance theater show, Dear Body, Love Me, premiering at Stomping Ground L.A. on Sept. 12 and 13.
Ms. Donovan and I sat down to discuss the project, her process and collaborators, and what she hopes that people will leave the theater thinking and feeling.
‘Dear Body/Love Me’ – Bella Halek, Lydia McDonald, Steph Mizrahi, Elsie Neilson, Ariel Scott, and Renée Donovan – Photo by Joe Duarte.
This project started for me with music. I was listening to a lot of R and B and a lot of love songs, and I was thinking about my own relationship to my body as a dancer and just as an embodied human.
Instead of being sung from one lover to another, I was playing with the experience of hearing them sung from the self to the self, and specifically from the soul to the body.
I was thinking of being at the end or towards the end of your life, or at the end of an embodied experience. What does that breakup feel like? When I’m at the end of my life, am I going to look back at myself now in my 30s and think, Oh, I should have loved myself better, with more tenderness. Because it’s going to end. Whether you are injured or experiencing chronic illness or experiencing Parkinson’s, or if you’re an 18 year old dancer dancing the Black Swan variation, it’s going to end.
Ms. Donovan comes at these questions naturally. Her dance career has not been linear. Her undergraduate studies were in human biology. She taught high school and worked with Dance For PD in Berkeley. She returned to ballet class without the specific intention of returning to the career but found a welcoming and diverse community of dancers in Ido Tadmor’s open classes.
Promo Ad for ‘Dear Body/Love Me’ – Photo by Joe Duarte.
Ido is basically the reason I got back into dance. When I started taking his class, I had kind of relegated dance to just a passion project, not something I was going to pursue as a career. Both his coaching and the community that he’s fostered inspired me to blow up my life and my stable job (with health insurance!) and start working at a restaurant so that I had time to be at Ido’s every morning. I’m so glad I did, because I’ve met the most wonderful people in his class, and I love being around him. I love his pedagogy. He’s a very clear technical instructor, but he also emphasizes that at the end of the day, this is dance. It has to be joyful. There’s no place for fear in dance. He has created this space that’s really hard to find. He has a devoted community, people of all ages, people of all levels; from absolute beginners to professional dancers who come every day, three times a week, once a week. We know each other’s names, we know the nicknames that he calls us by, and we know what’s going on in each other’s lives. It feels like something of a different time.
I met all of the choreographers who are working on this project through Ido.
‘Dear Body/Love Me’ – Bella Halek, Lydia McDonald, Steph Mizrahi, Elsie Neilson, Ariel Scott, and Renée Donovan – Photo by Joe Duarte.
Ms. Donovan invited several choreographers to join her in process. Bella Halek, Lydia McDonald, Steph Mizrahi, Elsie Neilson, and Ariel Scott joined in ongoing collaborative discussions and production. The choreographers were all asked to write about their relationships with their bodies. When asked “What does your soul want to say to your body?” the overwhelming theme was regret for the demand, a need to apologize.
The theme in everyone’s answers was, “I’m sorry.” These are people whose bodies can do whatever they command them to do. Yet without exception, each choreographer stopped and said, “Whoa. We really have to pause and apologize for being such demanding lovers of our bodies.” And we’re kind of laughing about it too, because we were like, Oh God, if this is the tenor of the conversation in a group of professional movers, how do you convince an audience to be good to their own bodies, because you only get one.
From these initial conversations, Ms. Donovan allowed the choreographers to choose music and they continued with deeper conversations, as a group and individually. Some choreographers came up with the conversation as a duet (identified as body and soul), some as a trio (identified as mind, body, and soul), and a few solos. The dancers involved range in age from young professionals to dancers in their 60s to the extraordinary Natalie Carroll, who is 86. While there are not differently abled dancers in the final performance, some were involved in the process and in the development of choreography and themes. Ms. Donovan also brought in lessons and themes from her Parkinson’s dancers and her life outside of the dance studio.
‘Dear Body/Love Me’ – Bella Halek, Lydia McDonald, Steph Mizrahi, Elsie Neilson, Ariel Scott, and Renée Donovan – Photo by Joe Duarte.
When I was on my hiatus from dancing, I was a high school English teacher. I think maybe the other population, besides dancers, that I could point to as being inordinately hard on themselves and their bodies, are teenage girls. The image-saturated culture we live in and the belief that your body is this raw material, that if you have enough discipline or control or wealth, you can change to turn into some idea of the perfect algorithmic aesthetic object is pervasive. But this is the only body you get. Stop looking at it as just this crude material that you can shape to someone else’s aesthetic image. Revel in it.
The lessons adapted from her Parkinson’s dancers are the most poignant.
The people I’ve been around who have the attitude of just reveling in the bodies they have are the dancers I’ve worked with with Parkinson’s. From my vantage point, that looks like a much harder embodied experience to be having, or perhaps a much less fun experience. But I’ve had conversations where I’ve thought, wow, you are relishing the time you have left [before the degenerative disease gets worse.] I love being around elders, and I love especially being around dancers with Parkinson’s, because you see people who, despite, or maybe because of, this detour away from how they thought their body was going to feel, have decided to pick up dance.
Ms. Donovan hopes that this project opens the door to others and to a new relationship with her own body and its inevitable decline.
Renée Donovan – Photo by Joe Duarte.
I was working with a dancer who used to dance for Complexions and then got a bunch of chronic illness diagnoses, and her career got totally derailed, and she’s gotten back into dance, but it’s pretty touch and go. She and I were working on a solo for her, and she started to feel burnt out rehearsing the solo. The irony of all ironies would be if I pushed her to burn herself out trying to dance in this show about being in a love affair with one’s body, so we scrapped that, but it’s a line of inquiry I’m really interested in pursuing.
She mentioned a film, using different mediums and modalities to continue a conversation that may no longer be possible on stage, but still needs to happen.
We closed with her goals for the project.
I would like to create a live dance experience where people can actually see themselves and see their own experience of embodiment. I mean, it’s an embodied art form. Our whole thing is the body. I would love it if people left this show and didn’t feel this “us or them” thing. Rather than, oh, those are the dancers, and I’m the audience, they instead felt like “I’m going to go home and move my body. I’m going to think about my relationship with my body.” Because what is the experience that unites everyone in this room? We’re conscious, living in a body that’s going to die.
For more information, check out the show’s Instagram and click here for tickets and more information.
Written by Nancy Dobbs Owen for LA Dance Chronicle.
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