Interview with Dr. Nadine George-Graves with Artist /Choreographer Malcolm Low

Malcolm Low/Formal Structure Performs

In The Thrust Towards The Future…I Want To Leave Something Of Use

An Interview with the artist

by Dr. Nadine George-Graves

Oct. 2014

Tell me about your early years as a dancer/choreographer. How did you get started? When did you realize that you wanted to be a dance artist?

I first started dancing around 17, because my mother said that I had an abundance of energy, so she was trying to find a way for me to use that energy in a positive way.  I was dancing in the living room hours on end, so she put me into a performing arts high school, and there I had my first dance training.  While attending high school, I found out about Joseph Holmes Performing Dance Theater from others in school, so I started taking classes there - 6-10 at night jazz class with James Kelly, and modern classes from members of Joseph’s company.  What my mother couldn’t be sure about was how I was going to take to it, and truly, my body and mind took to it immediately. I never had focused on anything else in my life until dance – we tried guitar lessons, piano lessons, and I failed miserably.  But in dance, there was something – excitement, physicality, drama - for some reason I connected with it immediately and entirely, and so I kept going.  I took tap lessons, ballet lessons, and upon graduating from high school I got invited to dance with Holmes when I was 18, and at 19 I was offered a position with Ballet Jazz de Montreal and I moved to Canada and started dancing with them. 

I was fortunate to have the chance to work with a lot of important choreographers and major companies at a young age, from two Canadian ballet companies at the start through to Ralph Lemon today.  To be honest, choreography was a necessity for me – after I finished dancing, or I felt like I had finished my dance career, choreography was a way to continue my art, as well as to earn a living.  I started from square one.  As a dancer I was only focusing on achieving the choreographer’s vision wherever I worked – that’s how I approached it, which was not necessarily a good thing. When I started to choreograph, I found I had no personal voice - I had to begin to look at structures, design, what motivates someone to begin a work, what takes it to new places.  I first presented works at White Wave Dance Festival, at DUMBO Festival, at DanceNow – those works were more or less me directly using the influences I felt from the choreographers I worked with or knew.  I don’t think very much of Malcolm Low was in those works – they were more like me taking information and direction from those I had worked with and assembling it in what I thought was a personal way.  In fact, there was little of me in those early works. 

When I worked with Bill T Jones, I learned you can look at the world you live in and that can be the inspiration for making work, or you can respond to something happening in the world to make work.  When I revisited this thought when making my work, this felt revolutionary to me – I don’t have to just make pretty dances for dance sake, but can use my work to deal with the world I live in, it can be personally driven, to reflect on the world around me, maybe even instigate change.

What kind of change would you like to create?

In this work, it would be a great change if people could understand more clearly that we have all migrated, that we are all on journeys to somewhere better, that everyone can connect with each other’s stories, that we share so many similarities, that these human stories bind us, so our sense of what divides us can be reduced - racial, political, whatever divisions.

Describe this stage of your career. What's it like to be you...now?!

I’m in a wonderful spot right now.  My flow is just beginning in choreographic pursuit. I’m divorcing myself from stylized ideas I’ve incorporated from other choreographers and am now finding my own voice, which is an exciting place to be.  The well is endless once you find your own voice, how you begin to pull from things in your past and your present, and from your hopes for the future.  That’s not to say that I’m not still inspired by great influences like Ralph Lemon, David Thomson or others, but I am no longer taking movement and style from others but I’m finding my own.  I look to my roots in African American culture to motivate me – the church (only for its theatrical and movement aspects, movement I can see in retrospect and know that I have that movement in me) plus social dances, picnics in parks, the bus stop, even how my mother moved around the house is how I generate movement now, I can say it feels more like my choreography than ever before.  I am still in an exploration period, about how I generate movement and how I put it together, but it’s an exciting place.  I’m 41 now, so my interests have narrowed, I’m more secure in my likes and dislikes, more clear in knowing what I want.  Other things are also more important at this time: I’m in a secure relationship, and it’s very important, because stability and love supports me in a way that’s indescribably good. 

You say, “I’m more secure in my likes and dislikes, more clear in knowing what I want.” Give us one thing you like, one thing you dislike and one thing you want.

I like to work with the body.  I love the physicality in which I work, over the emotional.  This has become clearer than ever over time.  I dislike in art when we take ourselves too seriously and don’t allow ourselves to laugh enough.  I want to always be working, and laughing.

What is the inspiration for this piece?

Inspiration for this piece was sparked while reading Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, and I was also reading a lot of James Baldwin.  I was trying to connect myself with what my notion of blackness is. 

Blackness is no simple topic to deal with in life and in art.  I won’t ask you to define your notion of blackness because, in some respects, your choreography is your answer. But can you tell us your “way in” to these conversations?

Blackness is a garden, my garden, in which I can dig and find material.  I usually look to my family and my experiences growing up as my lens for viewing these issues and it’s the point where I begin when having these conversations.   Like making choreography, this comes from a sense of necessity. 

 Talk about how you collide worlds. “Uptown” dancers and “Downtown” dancers. Stories from the past and present about violence against black bodies.

What’s so wonderful about New York is that all these cultural collisions are just a subway ride away.  Beyond the simple contrasts of how differently people with different training can perform, we all have experiences, black experiences, North/South experience, all different and unique yet all bound together in some way - and I wondered how we could tell stories of migration together, bringing different voices into the room, to see what is different and what is the same.  How much has really changed? I was also interested in mixing and matching the movement and the visuals across generations and time.  You’ll hear stories of the past, of love and loss, but you’ll see imagery of the present – maybe the viewer will consider how much has changed and how much hasn’t.

How and why do you chose your dancers/bodies?

This is something that has changed as I grow as a choreographer.  Before, I used to choose based on physical prowess and technique – and now I’m more interested in the artist themselves, how they work, what they think about their work, how we work together, more the whole person rather than technical talent.  Uniformity is not interesting to me.  I like all different types of bodies, they all make for exciting possibilities. 

What do you want audiences to take away?

Hopefulness.  I think any audience member could potentially see this story of African American migration as something they can relate to personally, since we all came from somewhere else – except for the Native Americans of course!  We share a story in some basic way, we who left somewhere we considered home, to go somewhere else and make a new home, somewhere of promise, somewhere better.  And the roads were difficult, the progress wasn’t made without sacrifice, but we find ourselves along a journey where we can appreciate how far we’ve come, with much more to go.  Maybe there is some satisfaction and hope to be felt in considering what that journey has been.  It’s a very American story, and it’s my personal story, but I would hope audience members can see some glimpse of their own story reflected in the production. 

What’s on the horizon in your work?

Through this process of making In The Thrust, working with stories and text, I became interested in exploring language, how it can be such a helpful anchor to the abstract movement I make.  So I see text and language as becoming something I’ll investigate further.  In future works, I’m definitely also wanting to investigate my ideas and feelings about gayness, in comparison with my Christian upbringing, and the changes I’ve been through and changes the world has experienced.