Artery

• photo courtesy Christy Pessagno
• Departing ADF Dean Donna Faye Burchfield

When Burchfield announced last month that she would leave ADF and Hollins at the end of the summer, the news sent shockwaves through the dance world.
On the afternoon of July 19, and briefly on July 24 and 25, we talked for a couple of hours about what she’s leaving, where she’s going—and why.
Thanks to head librarian Kelly Lawson and the staff of Lilly Library at Duke University for hosting our conversation.

INDEPENDENT: At this point almost everybody knows what you are leaving—your positions as Dean of the American Dance Festival and as Director of the Dance Program at Hollins University.
Let’s open the conversation by focusing instead on what it is you are moving toward.

DONNA FAYE BURCHFIELD: Open space. (pause)

Tell me more.

I was talking to a friend late Saturday afternoon. It was after a long day, and she had called to talk through this news of me leaving. At one point in the conversation I said, “I feel like I’m jumping off a cliff.” Which is pretty true.
This is my 28th summer here. That’s more than half my life.
I don’t even know what my address will be in Philadelphia. I’m selling the home my children grew up in Roanoke. I’m leaving Hollins, which has been this cradle of—reassurance.
If you can imagine, when I went there my son wasn’t even potty trained, and my daughter had never been anywhere except a one-room schoolhouse and she was about to go into first grade.
[Burchfield worked in the region at Carolina Friends School and N.C. State, before her time at Hollins.]
So it was a big deal for me to leave here to move to Roanoke.

I can only say it really is a valley, and it really did reassure me and comfort me. Roanoke and Hollins became this reflective space. It just was.
Something happens in a place where you sleep there, you eat there, you watch your children grow up there, you walk down a hill behind your house and you teach your class. And you dance there, and all of these minds and bodies are working together and thinking, and bodies are moving between classrooms. It’s that idea of circulation—a circulation of knowledge and of hope.
I would say that the circulation of knowledge and feelings generates an ontology of hope, in a way.
Something happens in that kind of space.
So really, it was just ideal at that time in my life. (laughs) Also, just being in that women’s space; it was just essential.

• Artistic associate Sara Procopio

INDEPENDENT: You were one of the founding members of the group.

SARA PROCOPIO: Yes I was.

What was your first contact with Shen Wei; the first time you saw anything he did?

I first met Shen Wei at Hollins University in 1997. He came to Hollins for a couple of weeks in the midst of creating a solo show he was performing in London and New York, to finalize the show and prepare its technical elements, using the theater on campus.
He was a guest in Donna Faye Burchfield’s dance history class. He spoke of his experiences growing up in China and training in Chinese opera, but at the time his English was very limited. He taught a master class, and after his technical rehearsals were finished, he gave a performance of his solo show.
That was my first introduction to him — as a solo artist, and not someone who had a company or was interested in having a company.
I remember thinking that his solo was beautiful, and I enjoyed his master class. And that was that.

At the time, Burchfield was bringing in a host of guest artists to the dance program at Hollins; though he might not have exactly been just another face in the crowd, it sounds like he was just one person among a constellation of artists you were being exposed to.

Exactly, exactly. It was an experience — and then we moved on the next experience, I guess.

• Jean Freebury

INDEPENDENT: I know your history with the company goes back to the early 1990s. What was it about his work that made you seek him out?

JEAN FREEBURY: I had seen Points in Space on TV when I was 16; I didn’t understand it at all at the time.
I had [Cunningham dancer] Catherine Kerr teach me in London for the first time, but I had never seen the work, and it was a mystery to me. I was very curious and quite amazed at what she could do. But she was pretty intense and I was a little shy, so I never asked her anything more. I was pretty young; it was my first year outside of Canada.
I think I actually saw the company do an Event in London, but at the time it still didn’t get me.
I hadn’t seen very much of other kinds of dance besides ballet until I was 20; originally, there was zero modern dance in Alberta.
I remember the first time I saw the company, live, in 1990. I was on spring break from the [UNC] School of the Arts. I went to City Center to see them; the program was August Pace and Fabrications.
I was totally blown away; they had a kind of physicality that I really liked. I was 21, and at that age you’re looking for movement you’d like to do, that you’d want to perform.
When I saw the company, I said I really have to try this; I have to figure out how to get here.
But really, it was the physicality in what they were doing, more than the choreography, that got me when I first saw them.

After five full weeks of dance, it was hard to shake the inaccurate sense that we’d already seen it all. But when a dapper young man shot a young woman sitting across from him at a café table in the face, without warning, with a high-power water hose on stage during the final week of last year’s American Dance Festival, it was a wake-up call, to say the least. Then, just to make sure we got the point, he did it again. And again, as the stunned party crowd on stage went as still as the audience.

• from Rosie Herrera's "Various Stages of Drowning: A Cabaret"

INDEPENDENT: The title of your work, Various Stages of Drowning, brings one question immediately to mind. Who’s drowning?

HERRERA: That’s a good question. I think it symbolizes several different types of drowning: drowning in somebody’s presence, by an experience, by an emotion, or being drowned by memory.
It also comes from my personal experiences, having felt at times like I was drowning, too—professionally, emotionally or psychologically. There are five stages of drowning; I used that as a structure to help separate those different ideas.
I’ve always had a very strong connection to the ocean, to the freedom of being underwater. My father’s Cuban and my mother’s Puerto Rican, so I’m genetically predisposed to being below sea level. (laughs) I’m bound to be within five minutes of the beach; that’s my structure. I’ve been working with underwater photographers and underwater filmmakers; I’ve always felt this incredible energy with the water.

But Various Staging of Drowning was based on series of dreams. I felt at first they were disconnected, but then I realized they were part of the same thing. When I started developing a structure for putting them all together, I was interested in created the surrealist atmosphere of a dream. The closest I could get to that would be underwater.

It’s been a whirlwind of a year—but it’s not at all clear that MARTHA CLARKE would have it any other way. In February she workshopped a new arrangement of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess for a Broadway producer. She also learned two bits of news: She’d won the Scripps/American Dance Festival award for Lifetime Achievement, with an honorarium of $50,000. Plus, she’d received a commission for a new work to premiere at this year’s ADF. The result, ANGEL REAPERS, is based on the history of an obscure New England sect: The United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing—better known as the Shakers.

We spoke with her by phone on June 23, in New York—the morning after the first full run-through of her new work.

INDEPENDENT: How’s it going?

MARTHA CLARKE: Very hot in New York.

My sympathies; it’s already broiling down here. And you’re not in a place where you can enjoy a beverage, something cooler?

Well, this apartment has air conditioning, but the studios don’t.
And working with hot dancers, on a hot day, in the heat is, uh, a little hard.
I’m emailing somebody who wants to come to a run-through. I’ve just said, “Bring a fan.”