Latest / Jersey Arts Podcast / Dancing through the Air: 'Noli Timere' Marks World Premiere at McCarter Theater
Transcript
- 0:03Gina Marie Rodriguez: This is Gina Marie Rodriguez and you're listening to the Jersey Arts Podcast Noli Timere.
- 0:08Gina Marie Rodriguez: Latin for Be Not Afraid and the name of the world premiere presentation from director and choreographer Rebecca Lazier and sculptor Janet Echelman.
- 0:18Gina Marie Rodriguez: The collaboration features eight multidisciplinary performers dancing up to 25 feet in the air with a voluminous, custom-designed Echelman net sculpture Choreographed to an original score by JORANE.
- 0:31Gina Marie Rodriguez: This fusion of contemporary dance, avant-garde circus and sculpture explores the delicate interconnectedness and fragility of our world, offering a profound commentary on navigating our unstable ecosystem through art and advanced engineering.
- 0:46Gina Marie Rodriguez: One peek at Echelman's net sculptures and you can immediately understand the breadth of talent on display.
- 0:52Gina Marie Rodriguez: Known to sculpt at the scale of buildings and city blocks, this will be the first time that Echelman has designed a figure to allow for humans in her net.
- 1:00Gina Marie Rodriguez: Those humans are led by Princeton University professor and choreographer, Rebecca Lazier, who has choreographed more than 80 works presented in six net.
- 1:04Gina Marie Rodriguez: Those humans are led by Princeton University professor and choreographer, Rebecca Lazier, who has choreographed more than 80 works presented in six countries.
- 1:09Gina Marie Rodriguez: She is recognized as an audacious experimenter, creating dances of explosive physical vitality inspired by the thinking and problem-solving that is possible through collaboration, and that seems to be the theme of today's conversation Rebecca, Janet and I discuss the joys and challenges that come from collaboration.
- 1:28Gina Marie Rodriguez: Take a listen to learn more about this impressive new spectacle Noli to Marry.
- 1:31Gina Marie Rodriguez: I'd just like to thank you both so much for being with me today.
- 1:36Gina Marie Rodriguez: I'm super excited to talk to you about this because it is probably one of the more unique performances or productions that I've covered.
- 1:43Gina Marie Rodriguez: So thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.
- 1:46Gina Marie Rodriguez: How are you both?
- 1:48Rebecca Lazier: Terrific, so excited to be here.
- 1:50Rebecca Lazier: We're in the middle of rehearsals and it's been a six-year process of collaboration with my dear Janet and it's a thrill to be coming to the place to share it with the public.
- 2:01Janet Echelman: And I would just mention that Rebecca and I have been collaborating for the last five years, so you can only imagine how anticipated this premiere is for all of us.
- 2:14Gina Marie Rodriguez: I can only imagine when you say it's been a five-year collaboration.
- 2:19Gina Marie Rodriguez: Did you know each other prior to this or did you meet because of this collaboration?
- 2:25Gina Marie Rodriguez: You want to take it, Rebecca yes, yes, thanks, janet.
- 2:30Rebecca Lazier: Um, we met.
- 2:30Rebecca Lazier: We met in 2018 at a conference for the intersection of arts and engineering hosted at Princeton University and Janet was the keynote speaker and I fangirled to her because I thought her work was so extraordinary story and actually one of my pieces that had been collaboration with Professor Naomi Leonard there might be others was also part of the opening offerings and Janet came up to me to talk to me and that was a bit of kismet to sort of what could we do together?
- 3:00Rebecca Lazier: What would it be to have humans in the nets?
- 3:03Janet Echelman: So I fangirled Rebecca as well.
- 3:06Gina Marie Rodriguez: I love it so much.
- 3:07Gina Marie Rodriguez: I'm going to fangirl you both now, because I was looking at I don't know what we want to call it a trailer or a teaser video of this piece, and I mean, as someone who is both afraid of heights and unable to get into and out of a hammock, this is really stunning to me.
- 3:25Gina Marie Rodriguez: I find this piece just awe-inspiring.
- 3:29Gina Marie Rodriguez: Well, I'm sure that we could talk for hours about the societal implications that could be inferred from this piece.
- 3:34Gina Marie Rodriguez: We are short on time, so instead, rebecca, I'd like to ask how do you go about choreographing something that will inherently be different each time it's performed, and what does that experience mean to you?
- 3:48Rebecca Lazier: Great question.
- 3:48Rebecca Lazier: Thank you, Gina.
- 3:49Rebecca Lazier: The essence of this piece is imagine yourself standing on a net where every shift of your weight has a ripple through the whole system.
- 4:00Rebecca Lazier: Right, Even if you're the smallest.
- 4:02Rebecca Lazier: You just move one little key element, the whole thing changes.
- 4:06Rebecca Lazier: And so if someone else is there the moment I shift something, something in them changes, but if they fall I could be tossed out.
- 4:12Rebecca Lazier: So that sense of how our impact, it's an emotional impact, it's a felt impact and it's made visible, it's real.
- 4:20Rebecca Lazier: And so a lot of the choreography is very much about what can we predict and what can we not predict.
- 4:26Rebecca Lazier: So we can predict connection, we can predict how we relate to each other, we can set where we're going to be approximately on a point in space and then from there we have a language of systems of movement, we have a language of seeing, we have a language of responsiveness and cueing and tuning to each other.
- 4:46Rebecca Lazier: But yes, there is this unpredictability too, where if someone just slides a little bit further, it's going to change how someone else gets into the net.
- 4:54Rebecca Lazier: But there's a physical intelligence that the dancers have been gaining with each rehearsal session and, for example, you know we just returned to begin a three-week rehearsal session and the learning curve is so fast because they have so much in their bodies about what it is to learn to be one with this new apparatus, this new way of being in space and in time, and with each other.
- 5:17Gina Marie Rodriguez: It was so fascinating to me and Janet, you had mentioned that it was your idea correct to introduce humans into the space, so to speak.
- 5:28Janet Echelman: Well, I have long imagined humans dancing in my nets or moving in and around and on top of my nets, but until more recently, this has really just been an incredible, eye-opening experience getting to collaborate with Rebecca and the way that she choreographs her dancers in the net.
- 6:06Janet Echelman: My only prior dance experience was a usage where the nets were coming from above touching the heads of dancers, and this is the first time that dancers are actually inside the nets, exploring this sense of precarity which is where the title comes from Like that, when even the ground beneath our feet is no longer stable, the the ground beneath our feet is no longer stable, then I think this is is an experience that I certainly myself have been been experienced, really uh, heightened since the pandemic, uh, and I think all of us in in some way, are feeling a sense of the things that we, the assumptions on which we based our planning, our thinking around, have changed, have shifted and are constantly shifting, and so the way that Rebecca is choreographing with human movement and weight, even having a dancer just stand still in the net, is an incredible feat, uh, to see, uh, the energy and difficulty of just, uh, you know, stasis yes, damn, it was beautiful brilliantly said, absolutely I.
- 7:22Gina Marie Rodriguez: I think I said that before the core strength needed to perform in a net is I mean, you know, if I can't handle a hammock, I have no idea how you can handle something.
- 7:33Gina Marie Rodriguez: 25, 25 feet right, it's 25 feet in the air at the highest.
- 7:38Rebecca Lazier: Well, these artists are incredible.
- 7:40Rebecca Lazier: They're coming from a background that unites them, experience experimental movement and aerial forms, and so they have a comfort level.
- 7:48Rebecca Lazier: They have a deep training and knowledge of those systems, of how to care for themselves at height.
- 7:52Rebecca Lazier: And, you know, we think a lot about risk taking in a way that isn't necessarily about just showing off what you could do at a height, but is about emphasizing that precarity.
- 8:04Rebecca Lazier: Like what is it for us all as an audience to feel on the edge of our seat?
- 8:08Rebecca Lazier: As if the ground is shifting, as Janet so beautifully said, as if the world is about to change.
- 8:14Rebecca Lazier: That edgeness, and then the surrender and the landing and the being together.
- 8:20Rebecca Lazier: And so I think it comes part of the essence of the work to be able to go to these edges where perhaps one might feel like they are in danger, and yet they've got their community there to support them and help them and bring a wholeness to the world.
- 8:41Janet Echelman: And this is very emotional dance, one of the themes.
- 8:47Janet Echelman: You see dancers interact with one another one above the net, where their weight is sinking into the net, and then one hanging beneath them as they touch or grasp one another through this barrier as well.
- 9:04Janet Echelman: So there are so many complexities that are explored throughout the course of the performance.
- 9:13Rebecca Lazier: And I think it's.
- 9:14Rebecca Lazier: To me the emotional ride of it isn't as important to trace as the sculptural ride, if you would, or the arc.
- 9:21Rebecca Lazier: Maybe we would want to say that there is joy, there's flying and there is sorrow and there is care, and how the dramaturgy of the piece maps out through the system, because the nets are suspended on pulleys that can each change, so we can.
- 9:38Rebecca Lazier: The sculpture completely changes the humans, the inhumans change the sculpture, so that interrelation isn't just between dancers but it's between the environment and humans.
- 9:49Gina Marie Rodriguez: Now I'm curious, as I saw the nets a little earlier.
- 9:53Gina Marie Rodriguez: There were multiple in your rehearsal space.
- 9:57Gina Marie Rodriguez: Are there multiple nets?
- 9:58Gina Marie Rodriguez: Am I understanding, or how many of these sculptures exist within this piece?
- 10:04Rebecca Lazier: The sculpture is comprised of two nets that are almost imagined, pockets suspended that move together to create one unified sculpture we call them pillows.
- 10:19Janet Echelman: But so think of it as four layers of a patterned painting that is made.
- 10:29Janet Echelman: There are four soft layers and two of them suspend dancers, but there is a volumetric airspace in between them, and so it.
- 10:40Janet Echelman: And then these layers can be lifted or lowered.
- 10:44Janet Echelman: So the whole sculpture in flux, not only as it changes with each body, as the feet put weight, or their back or buttocks and shoulders are changing the shape of the net, but the net itself also moves throughout the course of the performance.
- 11:04Janet Echelman: But the net itself also moves throughout the course of the performance.
- 11:07Gina Marie Rodriguez: When you mentioned that they were called pillows, somehow my brain jumped from pillow to cloud and I have this vision of performers dancing among the clouds, and I don't know if that was intentional within the design, but it's what sprang to mind as soon as you said pillows.
- 11:27Janet Echelman: I love that interpretation, and there are many.
- 11:32Janet Echelman: I mean, I often think of these as multiple spheres of being.
- 11:37Janet Echelman: You know, there's Dante's Inferno where you have, you know, go from the depths to the heavens.
- 11:43Janet Echelman: So there are multiple layers, and the dancers are also on the ground and the audience, um, is of course in that same space yes, I I mean the ideas of.
- 11:55Rebecca Lazier: I think there's so many layers of imagery that I'll be so curious to hear what audiences say after the performances dancers in the sky, on clouds, as one might suggest, or on the bottom of the earth, or on an ocean, or I think there's environmental images and emotional images and all sorts of ways this piece can be entered.
- 12:16Rebecca Lazier: I think it's going to have interest to many different backgrounds young people, children.
- 12:25Rebecca Lazier: I think between the music and the visual world and the human world coming together, there is this interplay of form that is very exciting to witness.
- 12:38Janet Echelman: Well, I want to underscore something Rebecca said about all ages, that this work is understandable and appeals to a really wide range, from children to every age of adult.
- 12:58Janet Echelman: But we also, on Saturday at 2 pm, have a relaxed performance that is suitable for a neurodiverse audience.
- 13:10Janet Echelman: So I think this is really the most open performance that we have engaged in.
- 13:19Janet Echelman: And Rebecca jump in here.
- 13:21Janet Echelman: Yes, yes.
- 13:23Rebecca Lazier: Janet, thank you so much for remembering mentioning that and also the welcome the welcome to come to a performance, and a relaxed performance where you can come and go, where there's curious about these things to come and witness, and you don't have to be a dance lover or a circus lover to see this show.
- 13:53Rebecca Lazier: It's a, it's a genuine interest in what might happen when.
- 13:59Janet Echelman: I want to mention one thing, which is we have the most incredible dancers.
- 14:03Janet Echelman: Most of them are coming from the dance world and many of them are also trained in circus and have performed with Cirque du Soleil.
- 14:16Janet Echelman: So there's this incredible, robust talent that is on display and I it, you know, very compelling Thank you so much for bringing that up.
- 14:31Gina Marie Rodriguez: I think that's something I wanted to talk about the circus nature of the dance as well.
- 14:37Gina Marie Rodriguez: If someone has seen Cirque du Soleil in the past, will they be expecting something similar, or is it just almost a nod to?
- 14:48Rebecca Lazier: Yeah, I'll take that.
- 14:49Rebecca Lazier: That's an interesting question.
- 14:50Rebecca Lazier: I mean, I, I and the brilliance of Cirque du Soleil's early productions was that integration of music and dance and the ways in which the show flowed between things and the evocations of imagery.
- 15:07Rebecca Lazier: And I think our piece has that right.
- 15:09Rebecca Lazier: It has that similar music is propulsive, the set is constantly changing, the humans in it are doing these daring things.
- 15:18Rebecca Lazier: So I definitely think there's recognizable forms of awe, and yet what I work at choreographically is to keep the human really present.
- 15:31Rebecca Lazier: And so when we talk about circus, it's an incredible field of practices, and the field that we've really specialized in is the aerial form.
- 15:40Rebecca Lazier: And what is that to be in the air?
- 15:43Rebecca Lazier: What is it mean to be above ground?
- 15:45Rebecca Lazier: What does it mean to be between space and flying and landing?
- 15:52Rebecca Lazier: And so that will certainly be familiar to those in the audience, but it's experience in those forms, but also hopefully exciting and eye opening to those who do not have that experience and background.
- 16:05Gina Marie Rodriguez: Rebecca, you mentioned the music and I think that's a good time to bring up your composer.
- 16:10Gina Marie Rodriguez: So this piece was choreographed to an original score by French Canadian composer Joran, and I'd like to know at what point in the process?
- 16:19Gina Marie Rodriguez: This again was a five year process, so at what point was the music introduced and do you know the inspiration behind this particular composition?
- 16:28Gina Marie Rodriguez: I'm very curious as to the process.
- 16:31Rebecca Lazier: Yes, yes, I do.
- 16:32Rebecca Lazier: Joran is an incredible cellist and vocalist and also works with electronics.
- 16:38Rebecca Lazier: She blends classical elements with folk elements uh, very much working at the intersection of forms musically.
- 16:46Rebecca Lazier: And so I was actually introduced to her.
- 16:49Rebecca Lazier: I had built the piece with a election of sound scores with my favorite composers from, you know, carolyn, carolyn Shaw and Tyone Braxton to others, and really felt like it was missing a thread.
- 17:02Rebecca Lazier: It was missing a heartbeat that carried us through a journey in the music.
- 17:08Rebecca Lazier: And so I was introduced to Jeanne and went through her whole oeuvre and spoke to her and saw her in concert and she just watched some of our videos and composed a few tracks and they were so on point and then revealed something that the dance wasn't already doing.
- 17:23Rebecca Lazier: And that's always such an incredible thing that I don't want the music to just mimic where we are, but to add another layer and add a depth of richness, like a good stock does in a soup.
- 17:33Rebecca Lazier: And so she came and was in residence with us this summer, summer when we had a four-week residency at PS21 in Chatham, new York, which was a peace-changing moment for the work, and she could come and improvise with us and go and create music in her studio and bring it back to us.
- 17:50Rebecca Lazier: So it really also was a layered collaboration that continues to the day.
- 17:55Rebecca Lazier: She's coming next week to be with us in studio again so we can really continue that process together and that's really a thrive on collaboration and to be able to have a composer so committed to the process and come and join us has been a gift.
- 18:11Gina Marie Rodriguez: There's so much about this collaboration.
- 18:14Gina Marie Rodriguez: I mean there must be.
- 18:15Gina Marie Rodriguez: I know that CreativeX at Princeton University is involved here and actually you'll be having a talk back, I believe, after the February 7th performance, but I would love for you to touch on how engineering feats are being incorporated here, architectural feats.
- 18:33Gina Marie Rodriguez: There's more than just the music and the performance and the sculpture.
- 18:38Gina Marie Rodriguez: There's so much happening.
- 18:40Rebecca Lazier: When Janet and I first met, we immediately knew we needed a relationship with an engineer to be able to solve this problem, right To be able to bring people to the nets.
- 18:52Rebecca Lazier: And Sigrid Andresen is a professor of engineering at Princeton University and she specializes in tension-based structures and was immediately fascinated with so many questions that she brings to studying this, studying how movement moves through nets and how that can have applications across many, many fields.
- 19:10Rebecca Lazier: And so we were fortunate to do some work with her at the University of Washington in the architecture department's graduate school, and then more recently we had a residency at Princeton where engineer Bill Baker came and a mathematician, textile geometrist, came and Janet was there and riggers and three dancers and a grad student, so that we really took time to measure how forces move through the nets.
- 19:35Rebecca Lazier: And it was a remarkable coming together that both expanded the language the dancers had access to in describing things they had found intuitively and gave us new insights into how to rig these nets so that they behave both with stiffness and with flexibility and dynamics.
- 19:54Rebecca Lazier: So the coming together of these forms has been critical for us to be able to keep pushing the boundaries of what's possible within the forms.
- 20:04Janet Echelman: And we should mention that in 2020, we started to teach together.
- 20:10Janet Echelman: Sigrid, rebecca and I started commuting to New Jersey, to Princeton, to teach the atelier together, and that we were just gearing up when suddenly COVID-19 appeared and we had to adapt.
- 20:28Janet Echelman: Just like the dancers are adapting in the net, we also adapted in our process and found new ways to collaborate.
- 20:38Janet Echelman: And also we should mention that some of the engineering advisors on this project are the same people who, in New York City, advise Broadway for flying actors.
- 20:50Janet Echelman: So it's really a coming together of disparate fields in a very exciting way.
- 20:57Gina Marie Rodriguez: I love that connection so much, and maybe this is a simplistic question, but as we're talking about collaboration, can I ask what about the act of collaboration?
- 21:08Gina Marie Rodriguez: Brings you each joy?
- 21:11Rebecca Lazier: I think at the heart of a collaboration is the relationship.
- 21:15Rebecca Lazier: It brings me great joy whenever I see Janet's name on my phone, whenever I talk to her, and I think part of what has kept this piece going is my respect and humble gratitude and just amazement at Janet's view of the world and her way in the world, and that's certainly the drivers of collaboration for me, because they allow me to go to new places as well.
- 21:45Janet Echelman: I think the word I might pick is discovery, because it's like a good love relationship where you're discovering things that you would not have thought of by yourself and you know that's what's so exciting.
- 22:06Janet Echelman: You know the word collaboration is bandied about very frequently and I honestly think it's typically not real collaboration.
- 22:14Janet Echelman: For me, real collaboration is where I am so vulnerable that I am engaging in a way where I don't know where it's going to go.
- 22:27Janet Echelman: I'm engaging with things I don't know.
- 22:30Janet Echelman: I'm asking Rebecca, I'm asking Sigrid and the engineering team.
- 22:35Janet Echelman: You know what is possible asking Sigrid and the engineering team.
- 22:42Janet Echelman: You know what is possible.
- 22:42Janet Echelman: And you know I learn.
- 22:43Janet Echelman: You know I've been making sculpture with fiber at the scale of buildings that you know they dance with the wind, hurricanes and you know every kind of weather.
- 22:52Janet Echelman: But I've never had the chance to collaborate with someone like Rebecca as a choreographer, and the dancers.
- 23:02Janet Echelman: So I had to change the nature of the fibers that I braid into twines and the thickness and the softness because of the dancers' feet.
- 23:13Janet Echelman: We tried different kinds and I had to change because this is a collaboration with human beings.
- 23:20Janet Echelman: This is not just the elements of nature, or at least climate and wind and snow and ice.
- 23:28Janet Echelman: So that has been a learning experience.
- 23:32Janet Echelman: But I think the key for me is that vulnerability to discover something I would not have thought of or known were it not for us to be collaborating.
- 23:45Janet Echelman: So it is creating something that would not exist were we not to make it together.
- 23:53Rebecca Lazier: Brilliantly said Janet, I agree wholeheartedly.
- 24:00Janet Echelman: Brilliantly said janet, I agree wholeheartedly I would not be putting humans in the nets without you.
- 24:03Janet Echelman: Well, I think the relationships are sort of the icing.
- 24:06Janet Echelman: It's like the wonderful thing.
- 24:08Janet Echelman: When people ask me you know, why are you spending, you know, all your time doing these crazy projects with choreographers, I say, well, it's the relationships.
- 24:19Janet Echelman: You know, we have become such dear friends and we have, you know, we have been workshopping in New Jersey, at Princeton, in Seattle Washington, in Halifax, nova Scotia, in Montreal, quebec, in Halifax, nova Scotia, in Montreal, quebec, and in, I mean I think they're oh, and then in New York, chatham, yeah, so it's really been this.
- 24:47Janet Echelman: You know ever-changing, the dancers also change which, and they bring a variety of backgrounds, from hip hop and street dancing, you know, to aerial artists and you know very classically trained dancers.
- 25:05Janet Echelman: So there's discovery happening and I think vulnerability in the process is really apparent in the outcome.
- 25:18Janet Echelman: That's where the surprises come.
- 25:21Gina Marie Rodriguez: I was saying that I'm enamored of the fact that, janet, you brought up vulnerability as key to collaboration, because I think that what I love most about artists is their willingness to be vulnerable.
- 25:35Rebecca Lazier: Yes, yes, Do you know the expression when you have children?
- 25:40Rebecca Lazier: They talk about how it's like walking with your heart outside of your body.
- 25:43Rebecca Lazier: I don't know who to credit this to, but I think of it similarly in art making.
- 25:49Rebecca Lazier: I think I've never felt as vulnerable as I do leading up to this premiere, in terms of so many layers coming together and between the nuances of the rigging and the needs of all elements cascading and coming together, and the lighting design is going to be incredible by Leanne Vardy, and so that investment and I love that expression.
- 26:14Rebecca Lazier: You having children is like watching your heart walk outside of you and be apart from you, and yet you have to be okay with that.
- 26:21Rebecca Lazier: And it is like this with art too.
- 26:23Rebecca Lazier: It is a thing that is a letting go and it is a thing of nurture and it is a thing of becoming its own, being a bit of a mantra for us to be not afraid.
- 26:35Rebecca Lazier: You know it's be not if there's so many steps upon which you could become afraid, and yet we have to have that mantra to be able to move forward in the world.
- 26:45Gina Marie Rodriguez: What a beautiful message.
- 26:46Gina Marie Rodriguez: May we all remind ourselves.
- 26:48Gina Marie Rodriguez: Moving forward.
- 26:49Gina Marie Rodriguez: Be not afraid.
- 26:50Gina Marie Rodriguez: Noli Tameri will celebrate their world premiere with three performances at McCarter Theater Center in Princeton from February 7th through February 8th.
- 26:59Gina Marie Rodriguez: For tickets and more information, be sure to visit mccarterorg.
- 27:02Gina Marie Rodriguez: If you liked this episode, be sure to review, subscribe and tell your friends.
- 27:07Gina Marie Rodriguez: A transcript of this podcast, links relevant to the story and more about the arts in New Jersey can be found at JerseyArts.
- 27:12Gina Marie Rodriguez: com.
- 27:14Gina Marie Rodriguez: The Jersey Arts Podcast is presented by Art Pride New Jersey, advancing a state of creativity since 1986.
- 27:20Gina Marie Rodriguez: The show was co-founded by and currently supported by, funds from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.
- 27:26Gina Marie Rodriguez: This episode was hosted, edited and produced by me, Gina Marie Rodriguez.
- 27:30Gina Marie Rodriguez: Executive producers are Jim Atkinson and Isaac Serna-Diez, and my thanks to Rebecca Lazier and Janet Echelman for speaking with me today.
- 27:38Gina Marie Rodriguez: I'm Gina Marie Rodriguez for the Jersey Arts Podcast.
- 27:41Gina Marie Rodriguez: Thanks for listening.