Eleanor Smith (BFA ’06) and collaborator Molly Lieber have been choreographing and performing intimate dances together for more than a decade. Their latest works, which incorporate nudity and verbal storytelling, confront the audience’s gaze and the objectification of women. For Lieber and Smith, introducing speech into their performances has given them tighter control over the messages that they want their dances to convey.
The New York Times interviewed both dancers about their latest piece “Body Comes Apart,” which debuted at New York Live Arts in early March.
Over the years, they’ve worked on ways of representing [their] relationship physically, ways of supporting each other’s bodies so that neither is passive, neither dominant. By 2015, when their work “Rude World” had its premiere, they had perfected a technique for rolling together on the floor as a single organism.
But something else was happening, too. As they improvised together in the studio, the discoveries were not just physical. “Improvising with deep trust,” Ms. Smith said, “you open up freedom and space for each other, so things come up that wouldn’t normally — personal histories, including personal trauma.”
They found that their method had created a new context, one that was not hers or hers but theirs. And when their experience of trauma entered into this context, they could feel it physically and intensely but also achieve distance from it and look at it as artists together.
“You can take it and put it back together and mix it up and all of a sudden it makes sense in a new way,” Ms. Lieber said.
Read the full article at the NY Times.
Lead image: Molly Lieber (L) and Eleanor Smith (R) during a performance. Photo by Julieta Cervantes for The New York Times
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