Tere O'Connor on Rivulets

Transcript

My name is Tere O'Connor and I'm a choreographer. I have a dance company based in New York City for the last 40 years. I'm also a professor at the University of Illinois, in the graduate program. I split my time between New York and Illinois.

The way I would describe Rivulets is, a dance that engages complexity as an organizing principle. And the word "rivulets" to me suggests various streams inside of one larger flow, and so, for most of my work I've used unison. I've really done research into how to extract meaning from unison, and in this one I wanted to plug in non-unison, and kind of look for metaphors to see what's the difference between those two things, why does it produce the responses it does in audiences, and how can I place a value system around non-unison movement that doesn't fall into the default setting of being called chaos?

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And so each dancer is doing really different movement to start—different streams of movement, you could say. And then those have been brought together in the choreography, and then manipulated and cut, and blah blah blah.

The way this work builds on my previous work is that, I basically look to fundamental elements of the form of dance, locate them, and then expand them back out into some meaning arena. Like, unison, non-unison, rhythm—all the very basic things. I try to move away from their conventional use and look at them down another, alternative route.

This funding from the Wex has been very crucial as the United States is really bereft of dance funding and it's really harder and harder to find money for the kind of exploratory dance that I engage in. So, since I don't use a text or a preexisting idea to make my work, we are actually exploring. So this money afforded us time to locate things, to have these amazing performers and pay them for an extended period of time so that I can make something that has the kind of depth and breadth that I'm looking for when I question dance as a form.

What I'm excited about? Because I have taught here and we've performed here before and I know a lot of faculty here, and Lane has supported me before in other contexts. So that's a lot of connection right there. And it's really hard to tour your work now, too, because of money in the United States, so just to be able to do it again is really rich. I mean, we work very long hours on these dances and, as I said earlier to you, they're complicated, and difficult, and very virtuosic in a way that isn't necessarily on display, but internally there's a lot going on for them, so it's a lot of exactitude and emotionality at the same time.