Title Comes Last

Title Comes Last

March 16, 2019
Baryshnikov Arts Center
Choreography by Esmé Boyce in collaboration with the dancers
Performance by Esmé Boyce, Cori Kresge, Kit McDaniel, Justin Dominic and Matilda Sakamoto
Set design by Kit Boyce
Costume design by Sue Julien
Lighting design by Joe Levasseur
Music Composition by Cody Boyce and Eleanor Hovda
In order of performance:
“Untitled” by Cody Boyce
“Glacier Track” by Eleanor Hovda
“Untitled 2” by Cody Boyce
“Record of an Ocean Cliff” by Eleanor Hovda
“Dancing in Place” by Eleanor Hovda

This dance came out of research into intergenerational choreographic dialogue enabled through direct or indirect influence. In making this work I considered the choreographic connections between me, Catherine Tharin and the late choreographer Nancy Meehan. Meehan (1931-2016) was a star dancer in the Erick Hawkins Company before leaving in 1970 to explore her own choreographic voice. Choreographer Catherine Tharin, also a former Hawkins dancer, was a frequent audience member at Meehan’s concerts although she never danced in her company. Through Catherine Tharin I was introduced to Nancy Meehan’s work and was struck by how similar her choreographic sensibility was to my own.

Choreographically Nancy Meehan, Catherine Tharin and I share interests in the texture of vocabulary, in moments of raw beauty, in our similar use of space, in our belief in abstraction as a vehicle to reveal specific states of internal experience and in our comfort with intuition as a compositional engine. While the osmotic process of choreographic influence is tricky to pin down, I do believe that Meehan, Tharin and I, though each entirely unique, somehow have sent and received inspiration across our respective generations and the influences to which we were exposed. Through the curation of the evening I hope to offer a lens with which to consider how dances of the past, present and future intertwine and reframe one another.

"Title Comes Last" is dedicated to the memory of Nancy Meehan, to her profound body of work and to the community of collaborators and dancers who made important art together for many decades. This community has offered me a window into a world of dance making that I, without knowing it, had been looking for.

About "Title Comes Last": My curiosity for Nancy Meehan’s work began by rehearsing in her studio at Westbeth Artists Housing. While many studios are nondescript empty rooms with smooth white walls, the Meehan studio is full of content. There are paintings by Nancy’s husband, Tony Candido; there are Candido‘s sets which fill a fireplace topped by a magnificent mantel. Out beyond the mirrors are windows that frame breathtaking views of the Hudson River. When the sun goes down the light hits the wooden surfaces and the room glows gold. This is a room with visible traces of the art that was made in its walls; in it a choreographer is never alone. I felt Nancy’s presence even though I never met her.

My objective in making "Title Comes Last" is to pay homage to Meehan and highlight our shared sensibility without diminishing or restraining my own choreographic perspective, nor in any way quoting Meehan’s choreography. Through interviews and observations, certain methodologies and choreographic devices came into focus which served as jumping off points to push me into an unfamiliar vocabulary. One of these ideas came from Tony Candido during an interview; he spoke of how Meehan would “mass” the dancers in space only to then have them disperse, cutting and shaping the stage as though making architecture with movement. The word “massing” itself was enough to send my choreographic brain running to the studio. I observed Meehan’s “obscuring and revealing” in Seven Women, a dance performed in silence in which there are ornate rhythmic, spatial, and grouping organizations. In this dance the soloist is covered for a time and later revealed; it feels as though one is watching a person as they move from window to window in a distant building or possibly catching glimpses of a deer passing through dense brush. These ideas served as challenges for my own imagination.

Like Meehan, I find it difficult to apply words to my dances. My professor, Dan Schuchart, recently expressed an observation that my dances were beyond words. I found this comment deeply moving, and also heard in it a clue as to what it is in Meehan’s work that speaks to me so intensely. Not unlike Tharin and myself, Meehan had a distaste for arriving at a title too soon. In an article written March 27, 1996, by Doris Diether in The Villager Meehan is quoted as saying, “’Titles come about a day before we do the performance. I never like to finally fix something in permanence. I like to let it float up and follow where the dance is taking me.” My title is a nod to Meehan’s commitment to making her art the way she needed to make it.