Real People 1: Mary (Moore) Easter
Interview –Charles Campbell
This piece is sponsored by Springboard for the Arts
This project derives from interviews with local choreographer/dancers over 60. I am interested in questions of what accomplishment, failure, struggle, and “making it,” might mean as accumulated over time through the day-to-day life of an artist. Each of this series of interviews is edited from a much longer conversation in which I asked them about their beginnings, high and low points of their careers so far, and where they are now. I am interested in how their lives shaped and describe the life we inhabit, how their knowledge and experience might inform us, and the way familiar landmarks of humanity emerge from the geography of age. While I find each interview compelling, I am also intrigued by how together they begin to elicit a complex map of the structures and systems that define our ideas of success, failure, and work, but also our private goals, and our individual desires.
I came to it late by the estimate of what a dancer was at the time. At that time there was the Hauser Company, and there was MDT, and then there were the ballet people. I was 28 and living in Northfield. I was married and I also had two small children, and now people: it’s going to be dance or else! I kind of danced my whole life, but I also have training as a musician. I saw the Hauser company and I was taking class at Carleton from Linda Osborn, a Hauser dancer who came down twice a week and taught two classes and disappeared. In the space of a year – a school year – she changed my body. Completely. I sort of always accepted, “Oh, I have a short torso and long legs. I just don’t have the strength to heft them around. Huh, guess that’s the breaks.” Well then, here I am one hour, twice a week, and in May I can do pushing up into a bridge. It’s like fucking amazing! My head leaves the floor, and hey, it’s on! It’s ON! And she takes me to Margaret Dietz who’s teaching a summer session. I had been in ballet classes before and I had been in a couple of modern classes but this was the real deal. Margaret was a master teacher of the old school. She knew how to get your body so that you could do it, and how to critique the way that you were moving. It was wonderful. I will say that for those six weeks it was like being in heaven. When I think of the nature of it, it still moves me. It’s an amazing thing to find that kind of satisfaction.
I was still an apprentice when some of the younger people were taken into Margaet Dietz’s company, Choreogram. This was a huge turning point for me. Margaret announced to me without any warning whatsoever, “Mary, you’re a mother and that must come first. So we’ll see about you.” I mean my idol had just gone [cutting gesture]! She was out of the old school: woman-artist gives up everything, puts it first, cannot possibly be divided and do these things. Well, so what? Here I am! I’m not getting rid of the kids. I like the kids! And there was nothing to do except keep going with her. She was guiding, she was teaching me, and they were doing my choreography in the company. She accepted it. But I was still an apprentice, right? I’m the oldest person there, aside from her. And in the way that being the only anything brings up all the other only’s, I was not the only black person ever to be in that studio, but it was close. It was me and Derek Phillips, and Derek was my student at the time.
The University of Minnesota used to have dance summer sessions. They were taught by really well-known people. One year they had Nicholas Gunn of the Paul Taylor Company, and that’s where I met Nick. At a meeting of the faculty, Linda Tarnay and I stood up from the table at the same time. She’s 6’ tall and blond, and Nick said “Oh my god, you should do a piece together.” She started working on a piece for the two of us. We worked that summer and performed a version of it at the end of the workshop, and then we decided to work on it throughout the year. I would come to New York when I could. In the spring we would have it in good enough shape that I would have her come to Carleton and we’d be on the student concert. Then after that we would be in her concert in New York. She was lovely. We become quite close doing this. By the time of her concert, we went to the Capezio dance shop and there was a poster from our photo shoot! That was really wonderful. Phoebe Neville was in the audience and Phoebe Neville told Meredith Monk, “I saw a woman who’s just right for your work” and she didn’t know that Meredith Monk and I had been to Sarah Lawrence [College] at the same time. Meredith’s people called and asked me to be in a piece and I turned it down because I didn’t see how I could possibly go to New York and have my marriage survive. And it is a great regret of mine.
But again and again, the question was: how to continue? I came up with the idea of a solo concert because the big artistic question was “Could I have done what they were doing in New York?” I asked [Nicholas Gunn] if he would coach me because I had been in his classes. He sent me to acquire a dance from Senta Driver who had been a member of the Taylor company, and had her own company, called Harry.
I’d never done anything like that, never understood it. I just couldn’t get enough. Just because there’s a point where if you’re into being this, I don’t want to be stuck. I love what I love, but how come people are going to see this [other] thing, How come I’m not getting it? What is it? And one of the ways of finding out what it is, was to be in it. So it was a question of devising training for myself. It couldn’t always be driving somewhere to take a class. But I did what I could.
Photo Terry Gydeson from Skin at the Ritz Theater, 2009. Latex sculpture by Joseph Brown.
I had talked to Nick about assembling a solo show that would include my own choreography and New York choreographers’, and also Irina Lassoff who was here and had been with Nancy Hauser. So I made all these arrangements; I traveled around learning all these pieces. I rehearsed myself silly. In the middle of gathering all of this, Nick came back to teach at the U a second summer. He taught his classes in the morning and spent all afternoon coaching me. When I say he coached me, I mean he took every piece apart at the seams. He taught me how to do it. He pointed out the problems, you know “not grounded enough,” and then he had technical advice for being more grounded. Who’s going to teach you, when you’re 29? Who is going to teach you that?
The solo concert itself was a high point because I toured in it. My mother taught everyone who was the head of a music department in colleges and high schools in the south. We crafted a letter and wrote to all of them and enough people booked me that I went. So I had touring. That was during a one term sabbatical from Carleton. When I came back the touring package was together, I would just get myself booked somewhere and go for the weekend and rehearse and do it. It was an effort to build the dance life that, had I been 18 and free and had dedicated myself to it, I might have had. It was ten years later, but I was going to have it anyway.
After I had learned Senta’s pieces and she had coached me, I went to New York and at the end of her rehearsal with her company they all say down and lined up by the mirror and I did her two pieces for them. That was a high point. That was amazing. I thought, you gotta go for it because there’s no backing down or backing off. Because they know what it’s all about. This is what they are dedicating their lives to, working with her, and I’m this Midwestern old girl, whatever. That was a very wonderful thing. A sense of accomplishment, and meeting the challenge. And in Washington I got a review of my concert, of the tour, at the Washington Project for the Arts. The reviewer came, and I could not sleep all night. I just imagined – I don’t know why I imagined that I would be this important – columns of abuse. Columns of abuse. He did pick out a couple of things. He said there was not enough dynamic change in my dancing, but he said I performed Senta’s pieces better than she did. He put that in print.
Everything that came to the Cities I drove up and went to it. It felt like I’m always trying to put it together out of pieces. Because I was never in the place where it was all happening. I was never at the age that was when you were supposed to be doing it. I was never in the class daily with 40 people who wanted it as badly as I wanted it. It was always sort of me. And those were the givens.
I didn’t have trouble thinking of myself as a choreographer. Not like the trouble I had thinking of myself as a poet. Before I could claim that title as a poet it took a little while. I was writing poems a long time and it seemed pretentious to call myself a poet. But I wanted to be a dancer/choreographer.
I guess I didn’t think about it so much, and I wouldn’t have put it this way, but aside from Ailey, the artistic world I knew and admired was white. But I didn’t think of it that way. Everything was not divided that way. I didn’t feel out of my culture. In some ways I still don’t. I have the language and the philosophy to express it now. All of that is my culture, too. I was raised here. I really have that whole – it goes all the way back to W.E.B. DuBois – the double consciousness thing. I guess I kind of knew that, but we didn’t talk about that a lot.
I got the Bush Artist Fellowship [in 1986] and it was such a high point I was embarrassed. I thought, people are going to hate me because they know I don’t deserve it. So for three weeks I didn’t tell anybody. I told my mother and she said, “Sweetheart, this is a good thing.” It was really rewarding. I was already working on a piece that would make the big difference, Some People. This was a real turning point. And it was a turning point in my assessment of myself as well. It was a breakthrough in every way. It was. The whole blackness of it. It’s not that I hadn’t made any black pieces. I made a piece before that called Street People which was a black movement piece on Choreogram.
I retired [from Carleton College] on the last day of 2008. I gave a solo concert three months later. I really should have given myself more time. Even though people came, and people said nice things, I had one piece in that concert that I still have a tremendous feeling of pride about because I had never done anything like it. I knew that I was not depending on the past. I knew when I was crawling around in the studio and howling I thought, “Shit, where did this come from?” It was a process. Nothing in it was nailed to the music. I loved making it. It was a miracle that it was happening and it was in that way relatively recent. The rest of the concert I worked on very hard and I think I did a good job. A part of the crash after the concert was that I became embarrassed by it. It’s unfair to myself, but I felt awful. Awful, awful, awful.
Photo Terry Gydeson from Skin at the Ritz Theater, 2009. Latex sculpture by Joseph Brown.
I thought that I had fallen back into some old ways of doing things. There was one piece in particular that I had it in my mind I was so clever, but I don’t think it was clever. I also think if I had stayed with the creation process, say for a full year, I would have solved a lot of the problems.
I really did give up. And part of it was that intense disappointment, a sort of “Just face it. It’s over. It’s gone.” It is really a low point not to like what you make. There has to be something about it. I think I owe myself to look back at that video tape and reappraise all that. It’s been ten years. That was a part of the slide down to the end of dance and I’m going to be this other thing. I always knew I wanted to have a long period of writing while I was dancing, so when dance dropped out I wouldn’t be at the beginning I would be in the midst of something, And that was going well, so here it is. I really stopped.
Then Maggie Bergeron asked me to be in a piece. It was great. At that point, when somebody asks you, they know what they’re getting. That was a wonderful process. So all of a sudden I am in the studio with a lot of people that I haven’t known before who are fabulous. Then the next thing is Colleen Callahan whom I’ve known for years and have hired at Carleton to make a piece for kids. My partner is a 15-year old and the other two dancers are Kenna Cottman and Aneka McMullen — movement machines! I thought, I can do this and I’m not going to die on stage. If I collapse afterwards, that’ll be fine. Then Joanie Smith. What the hell, I’m in. When are you rehearsing? I’ll be there. That was also dancing, it wasn’t a nice mature walk-on. It was all dancing. That was a really wonderful experience. Because I really kept going. Damn it, I made my solo concert at age 68, I went on the stage, and I did it. And these were so great: I wasn’t making it. I got to contribute, but I didn’t have to make it. Then Supergroup came, and again I wasn’t making it, but I was making it, because all of their requests were “make something.” Not to mention the intricate improvisations that if you could just keep your brain operating, don’t worry about the legs so much. So it was almost like a new career. I haven’t much had the urge to make anything. I mean I’m making the poems and that has really taken off in public terms. I was doing it for a long time and seven years ago, eight years ago, they accepted me at Cave Canem Foundation for African American Poetry, so I studied again.
Looking back over my life, I have this theme of entering-an-artistic-arena-late in some ways. It has been an advantage because I have been so hungry for the knowledge. I’m so aware of how much people would have already known by the time I’m getting started on it, so I’ve kind of got to catch up. It makes me an ideal student. They can’t say a word that I’m not on. I’m on it all the time.
Charles Campbell is an interdisciplinary artist and a co-founder of Skewed Visions and Fresh Oysters Performance Research. www.skewedvisions.org
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