Dance Dance Evolution | Vanessa Owen and Gavin Stewart

Gavin Stewart and Vanessa Owen have spent many years building lives for themselves in contemporary dance. Not long ago, they believed they largely had to perform and teach around the country to make it sustainable. Now, fueled by artistic residencies in Western North Carolina and the embrace of the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts, the couple hopes Stewart-Owen Dance can become a fixture for Asheville dancers and audiences.

This conversation happened just after a rehearsal inside the Wortham's Tina McGuire Theatre, where the company performs a string of performances there, May 9-19. We dissect their artistic process, how they translate concepts into movement and what sustainability looks like in today’s ecosystem of contemporary dance.

Help "The Overlook with Matt Peiken" podcast reach its very reachable goal: Just $1,000 in monthly contributions by Election Day. Membership at our Patreon campaign starts at just $5/month. 

Transcript

Matt Peiken: How much of your one-week residency at Trillium Arts helped or informed or shaped what we're going to see here at the Wortham? 

Vanessa Owen: It helped a lot. And at Trillium we developed, I think four different sort of nuggets, individual ideas that we were working towards and one of those is very present in this show.

And actually the three other nuggets we have planned to put towards a new piece we're making for American Dance Festival this summer. Basically Gavin and I have been brainstorming, but in our bodies, if you will, for almost a year now on what we would be doing this spring.

Basically since last spring, it was already on our minds and in our bodies to start creating and generating base material for what this show would become and start to develop a movement language that we would teach to the dancers. And I would say maybe an eighth of the total language we've built is something that we drew from at Trillium.

Wouldn't you say, Gavin? 

Gavin Stewart: Yeah, I think so. In terms of actual material that we're bringing forward into the show that if anybody was at our showing at Trillium, they might recognize some of that material. It's about that much, but then in terms of concept and the themes that we're working with, those are fully present.

They're all over the work in terms of like physical connection and relationships that are very sensitive and have some sort of oddity about them that is fully present in the work that we've been making in the last week or so and that's where we started to develop a lot of those ideas was at Trillium? 

Matt Peiken: So when you're talking about ideas that you're working on, these are more Conceptual ideas or are they physical ideas or both and what stays with you longer? When you're talking about themes and ideas, are they physical or are they conceptual? 

Vanessa Owen: Definitely both. The themes, the ideas behind the work, at least for me do stick much longer, but there is something to be said for how that lives in your body and it may not b e exact details of the phrase work that we make. Those are rather transient. We have to work hard to keep that detail in our bodies and in our brains over a long period of time. And that's why we rehearse so much. But there is something to do with the themes.

For example, if we were to make a work about loss, that might actually be coming from what that sensation feels like to us. And so sometimes it is the sense memory of how the themes feel in our bodies. And sometimes for me, I can remember what something feels like better than I can articulate what it is that I'm trying to portray. I can feel it physically. 

Matt Peiken: So that's interesting to me. So do you take notes on the movements that you're doing? Because you're saying it's a feeling rather than what you're trying to see physically. It's more what you're trying to feel and manifesting that in movement?

Gavin Stewart: Yes, and both. We take notes Sometimes we take notes on the physical forms and the musicality that we want to carry forward and the details that we felt were Significant or powerful or really spoke to the ideas.

Sometimes we write that stuff down. Usually we capture that on video. And a lot of times the material changes, like the actual dance steps will change several times before we get to performance. But the concepts, we really do write that down because They require a lot of work to communicate clearly and to convey to our dancers who are working very collaboratively with, and we always write that stuff down in order to be better communicators.

And so it's not just saying it feels like this. It's This feeling is coming from this place, and the message that we want to convey with this moment is this, and then now let's put the details together. Let's put the steps together that we know and change them for this moment. 

Vanessa Owen: We often say that the same set of steps could tell any number of stories.

So The actual content, just dry content, if you will, of, this is a 5, 6, 7, 8 left, arm goes here, contraction here, things like that. You could, just as in speaking, the way you say something can really mean a lot of different things. It's definitely the same with dance and with choreography.

And what we are writing down a lot of the times is what is the most potent, crucial moment that we are trying to express here? 

Matt Peiken: You just said something that I thought was really interesting. I hadn't thought about before. You're saying just as you can speak, emphasizing certain things, you could say the same set of words, but if you emphasize Some words, it can have a different meaning than if you emphasize other words.

I'm wondering if you try to do that in your movement, because your movements are abstract, by and large. They're abstract, and people can interpret meaning as they want to, for the vast majority of it. Correct me if I'm wrong in that. So then, how do you play with emphasis, then, in your language, when all of it is abstract by nature?

Vanessa Owen: Yeah, exactly. That is, and I think that's really where the dance is for us is in that question. I just got excited by that question. There's so many ways that we play with this very idea. And that's actually how this process is working is that we taught the dancers on the very first day many minutes of set choreography that was, Just, here are the steps, here are the counts, here are the details. And that happened on day one, basically day one and a half. And then ever since then, we've been taking that material and stretching it and playing with it, thinking about how does musicality change it?

How does space change it. How does putting that same movement into a different part of your body change it? How does making that movement a partnering moment change it? What if we take that movement and flip it upside down and add a sense of weight to it rather than a sense of lightness. And thinking about for each moment in the show, if we know something is a sensitive moment, how do we take this step and make it the most pure, sensitive thing it can be?

Or if something is an exciting moment, how do we really explode an idea? 

Matt Peiken: Is it difficult to avoid getting into the weeds? When you're an author, for instance, You can have somebody look at and say, wait, you're getting too far away from your central idea here. You're running off on a tangent.

Are tangents okay in what you do? Can you get so into the details of things that you How do you pull yourself back in? Or do you even try? Do you let these tangents or these running into the weeds, to drill that metaphor into the ground, do you just run with it and let that take you where you want because you're not hemmed into a specific narrative?

Gavin Stewart: I think getting into the weeds is a really important part of the process. And even if what we come up with while we're in that place of just rolling with an idea doesn't end up making the cut for the final edit for the performance, the exploration of that idea always translates into something else or inspires something else that either it's, Maybe it's something that it just inspires us to be more clear about what we want to say.

But we have done a lot of work up to this point in planning essentially what weed patches we want to get into and what ideas we feel like are really worth playing with. What ideas we really can't do on our own without dancers. We've compiled a list for lack of a better word. We have all those ideas compiled in a document of sorts.

And yeah, they're basically our thoughts on where we can get lost and what's important to get lost on and why it's important to get lost on them. 

Matt Peiken: When we started this conversation, I was connecting it to what you accomplished or sought to accomplish at Trillium. And it seems like the way you were describing this, so this is a stepping stone toward the American Dance Festival.

Is this also a residency in a way? Is this like part two of your residency, first was at Trillium, here it's at Wortham, en route to something that will be grown and expanded upon for the American Dance Festival. 

Gavin Stewart: Ah, actually really important distinction. We have to make a very, a completely separate piece for American Dance Festival than what we, it can never be premiered when we premiere it in the summer.

So while some of the themes are themes that we'll be drawing on, that the dance will be a completely new dance and that we'll make in June for our July performance. And then, for here, it is like building on those stems of ideas or the seeds of the ideas that we planted in September, October.

We are really building on those ideas and Actually we had a conversation after that showing where you were like this is like a compilation of licks that you want to put on an album if you were a musician. And that's exactly what we've done. We've turned some of those licks into like longer phrases and now we're expanding those into become their own essentially sections, songs, if you will to continue with the metaphor.

Yeah. So we are really expanding on a facet of what we worked on there. And then we have another facet of what we worked on there that we are saving for our next residency, you could say before American Dance Festival. 

Matt Peiken: Is this a way of working that you've always cultivated, or do you now have a certain freedom and opportunity to work through these things in a way you didn't before. It seems like in your not super distant past, everything was its own thing, piecemeal thing, and maybe COVID had something to do with that. But now, do you have opportunities now that you didn't even just a couple of years ago to play these things out and present work in a more formal way.

Vanessa Owen: Yeah, I would say in some ways we have more freedoms and in other ways we have less because we have more opportunities to share our work this year. We have back to back things that we are choreographing. And we know that there is a limit to how much we can Put out creatively.

And so we talked about working with the same general themes, working in the same world this year. So it's not that we are building on the same piece or even Creating, not even creating necessarily a collection of pieces that are obviously relatable to each other, to an outside eye.

But for us, it's deciding what language we're writing in and what. And if we were to write a book, like what language is the book written in and what is the setting? Where does it take place? And that's how we're viewing our choreography this year, because we have so much on our plate.

So we have really a feel of the world that it comes from, which is very hard to put into words. It's, it comes from us dancing a lot together and working on This movement now for many months and developing this language that we can pull from and developing a sense of what kind of instrumentation is right for this world when we're selecting music and just what does it feel like? 

Because our interests are so broad, we could go all over the place. And for us, it's actually quite difficult to narrow that. And for a lot of choreographers, they always work in the same world. They have their thing that is their language that they always speak in, but that has not been the case for us in the past.

We've tried to develop something that feels foreign to us. 

Matt Peiken: All the time. Yeah, each time you're inventing a different language or wanting to. And also, I would think there would be a challenge in terms of the dancers you're working with.

You don't have quite just a full pickup company that every Production is new dancers. You retain some dancers and pick up new ones. How important is it to you to have dancers who are familiar with your work? And if you're, especially if you're trying to create new vocabulary every time, I would imagine in some ways that makes it less important that your dancers have worked with you before and know how you work because you're trying to change it all the time.

Talk about the dancers you have and that familiarity or lack thereof, how important that is to you? 

Gavin Stewart: I think it's everything. I think having dancers that we know, and that know us is crucial to creating the work we create. You're right. We're in this in between place of being not really a full time company where we retain the consistent group year round, but we really try to.

And I think what is interesting about contemporary dance specifically and contemporary dancers is that they're like multi linguists and so they're ready for the bumpy ride of learning a new language kind of all the time. And that's a wonderful thing about all the artists that we have joining us this year and have joined us in the last year is that they're so adaptable and creative and want to bounce ideas back and forth.

And that is, that's crucial to the building of the world every single time. And if they are the same group, they know our communication style in the rehearsal process that gets another sort of layer out of the way of learning each other, understanding who each other are.

And that if we know each other, it is more efficient. 

Vanessa Owen: Yeah. This process, the show that we're building right now will be at least 60 minutes. And we are trying to completely create that with the dancers in two weeks so that we have a week with them after that to what we call clean it, which basically just means rehearse it like crazy and you know, edit, edit and see how we can make it the best it can be in that final week before shows.

Matt Peiken: Did I hear you correctly that you're putting together a 60 plus minute piece in what will amount to two weeks of rehearsal? 

Vanessa Owen: Yes, that is accurate. It's wild. We have never worked this quickly. And it really is just a function of funding because we only work with dancers if we can pay them fairly for their time.

So we would love to have had a longer process with them. But they're humans and they are dancing from nine to five, five to six days a week. 

Matt Peiken: That's a long day. 

Vanessa Owen: It's a long day. It's a lot on their bodies. And yeah, so that, it's part of our mission. We will only do a project if we can pay the dancers.

So we did a lot of prep work in advance. So that it doesn't feel for us, like we're building it necessarily from the ground up, but for them, they're coming in, and they have two weeks to do this with us. And that's another reason why it's so important that they have this sort of multi linguist ability because they have to learn something foreign very quickly and it's so helpful for us to know each other and to have worked together in the past because the trust and the communication is already there.

And we do a lot of partnering, we carry each other's weight and we just jump right into it, we don't have a lot of time to do like a week of trust building where we all catch each other and trust falls, we'd love to, but 

Matt Peiken: does that even happen anymore with the company?

Vanessa Owen: I don't think that happens in contemporary dance companies very often because they're all most of them are in the same situation we're in, which is that they're pressed for time. 

Matt Peiken: Yeah. Let's talk a little more specifically about this piece. We're sitting in the Tina Maguire theater and you've performed in this space before, and the audience is seated, if not 360 degrees around, I'd say 300 degrees around. There are no chairs just a little bit on one side, but otherwise it's fully surrounded. What does that do for your choreography? Is that how you prefer to do things? I've seen you a number of times in situations where the audience surrounds you.

American Dance Festival, I imagine, will be a proscenium stage, right? Which is a whole different thing. Tell me about your preferences and how you work. That changes everything, right? When your audience is solely in front of you versus fully or almost fully around you. 

Gavin Stewart: In rehearsal today, for instance, we're doing a lot of these really close Formations with dancers where they're all connected and they're connected, sometimes their full torsos are connected and I would pause them in the middle of something and say, just hold that for a second, let me run over here and see what it looks like over there and run over here and see what it looks like over there and we would make choices and changes so that we could do something within each moment that includes Yeah. the majority of the audience. There's always going to be something in the round that you miss, but that's the excitement of being in the round. I don't know if it's a preferred mode. I love doing what we're doing. I also love creating proscenium works. It limits some of those options, which is nice when you're creative.

Matt Peiken: Cause in a way that imposes an edit on you in a way? 

Vanessa Owen: It imposes some things on us and freeze up some other things for us. But being in this small space, what's exciting about it is that we can really show some detail that might be lost at a distance.

And we've talked a lot about how, when people sit this close to performers, a big part of what they're taking in is really just the person in front of them. They're not probably able to see a full stage pattern at once because they're so close to it. They probably don't see formations that well.

Whereas if you're at a proscenium show and you're sitting far back, or if you're in the balcony, a lot of people go to watch dance to see the patterns on stage, the formations, all those sort of effects that you can make on a big stage. So it's very different in here. A lot of our focus has been more on how to show each individual artist, really show them to the audience, and how can how can they be their most expressive self. 

Matt Peiken: Yeah, I'll tell you from an audience standpoint, I much prefer watching contemporary dance in this setting than proscenium. And one of the reasons is because it's differently experiential from movement to movement. If the dancers are close to you, you take in gesture and expression. And if they're away from you, you do see more pattern. And so it changes for person sitting in chair 1A, it's a different performance in that moment than it is for somebody on the other side of the room 90 degrees away.

When I first met you both, you were traveling a lot. You weren't performing a ton in Asheville itself.

You, you made your way on the road, whether it was college performances and others, and you're doing It seems like a little less of that now because you have this Wortham residency, you had Trillium, you have the American Dance Festival. Is this just an anomaly of time where you are more at home? Do you expect to go back out on the road more as the years go on?

Or is this something that you really want to cultivate and anchor more here in terms of your performance? 

Gavin Stewart: To be short, we want to cultivate a dance community in Asheville. And we know that the biggest piece to that is consistency in Asheville. 

Matt Peiken: When you say a dance community, are you talking about audience as well as dancers?

Gavin Stewart: Yeah, all the parts of the community that would make a dance community. a dance community sustainable 

Matt Peiken: and funders, I guess you're saying too. 

Gavin Stewart: Yeah, of course. That's crucial to almost any nonprofit dance company like what we are. 

Matt Peiken: That's interesting. Cause a few years ago, at least pre COVID, you weren't talking this way, or at least not to me that you had that ambition. It seemed like you felt your reality was, We live in Flat Rock.

We love it there, but we have to leave this area to make a living, to be sustainable as dance artists. You're saying you don't think you have to travel to do that. You have a little more hope here? 

Gavin Stewart: I think that the traveling is a great promotion for the company. I don't think it's a sustainable option for, I don't think it's the only way a company can survive. It is the way some people do. But I think that building the framework at home is the most important piece to us. And will we continue to tour? Sure. Yes, absolutely. Where it makes sense and when it makes sense, those are always questions of time and money. And we love to do that.

That's Basically, as you said, it was our bread and butter for years. And it's exciting and we love meeting people and performing for new audiences is always an incredible experience. And it's just, it's less of our focus now.

Vanessa Owen: I would add to that, that a big part of what What is rooting us right now, of course, is our residency at the Wortham.

We have a home base to create work and to perform, and we now host ongoing adult classes here. And all of these pieces have really shown us that there is quite an appetite and a need for what we're doing. And I think, both of us are the kind of people where if we feel like we're able to fill a gap or fill a niche or fill a need, then we're going to do it.

And we didn't know that this need was here when we moved here. And now that we are doing something that actually supports others in the community, that we were able to hire local artists, that were able to provide space for community members to dance each week. I think for me, at least that really feels like I'm actually doing, I'm actually doing something, as a, as an independent artist, I think a lot of independent artists struggle with this feeling that am I doing for the world?

Yes, art does good things for the world. We all know that. But like me, the individual artist, what am I doing for the world? And that, that for me was always such a struggle, especially with traveling and being on the road and feeling like there was not a specific place where I was making impact I think is challenging for a lot of traveling artists as you, you lose that sense of connection to how your work is actually able to impact and affect people positively. Once you taste the sweetness of actually making a positive change where you live, I think it's hard to leave that.