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Real People 2: Erin Thompson
Interview with Charles Campbell
Photography by Randy Karels
I never have thought of myself as a choreographer, even though on my resume it lists a lot of pieces that I’ve choreographed over the years. I feel like I am a dance educator [big gesture], a dancer [medium gesture], and a choreographer [small gesture]. I don’t feel the need to make work, but I have made many pieces along the way.
I started [training] with Loyce Houlton. My generation was the first group under her first adult company. It was a completely modern company at that time. It was like a combination of Martha Graham and José Limón techniques sort of mixed together. Loyce Houlton was an amazing teacher and she trained all her company members to be teachers and the school grew and it was a huge, huge school at the time. And mostly modern. People don’t know that, so I like to talk about the early days of the Minnesota Dance Theatre, formerly the Contemporary Dance Playhouse. And then ballet started coming in more and more to our training. Loyce Houlton brought in Royal Ballet people to teach us. Johnny Kriza from American Ballet Theater taught us Billy the Kid. Mary Hinkson from the Graham Company was brought in to teach us many times. Loyce Houlton would take us to New York to study at the Graham School and American Ballet Theater. I performed at Jacob’s Pillow in Junior High and High School. We went to Spoleto when I was in tenth grade for a month and worked with Glen Tetley who choreographed for American Ballet Theater and Scott Douglas of the Royal Ballet. It was amazing. It was amazing.
Loyce Houlton gave us an incredible education here and wherever she took us to study. She was like…God. She made all the movement and I didn’t think there was any other way. Then I went to New York.
At the time when I left here it was really just Loyce Houlton’s Minnesota Dance Theater, Nancy Hauser, and Andaházy [School of Classical Ballet], and they didn’t speak to each other. MDT had gotten a little more balletic and I was never interested in ballet even though I could do it. I took over some of Lise Houlton’s roles when she went to ABT. I loved modern dance, and then Twyla Tharp’s company came through.
I can’t remember when first I saw the Tharp company, but they came to the Walker in the late 70’s.
I took a class and I felt like I was made to do this. So I did a workshop with them. I got a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, I think, for five weeks outside of Boston and it just blew me away. Problem solving stuff – just for the mind – taking a seven count arm phrase and a ten count leg phrase in Sara Rudner’s class and putting them together over and over until they came out even, that kind of stuff. So I just had to go out there. Actually the Tharp company members encouraged me to go to New York because I didn’t have that much confidence, so that was it. MDT was going through a change anyway. I think we had been laid off for lack of funds or something like that. It was an opportunity: cut the long hair off, move to New York.
I got into Nina Wiener right after moving to New York, and danced with her for 10 years. Byron [Richard] and I worked together with Nina Wiener and made a lot of duet stuff together. Nina had been with Twyla Tharp. All of a sudden I was asked to make all of the movement myself. You know – take the arm-gesture phrase and make it into legs, take it across the floor, put it on a dime, make a duet out of it. So that was great and I was with her for ten years.
Bebe Miller had danced with Nina, was in Nina’s company, and about a year-and-a-half after that she left, and I was in her first piece, a duet for the two of us. With Nina we performed several times in BAM’s Next Wave festival and in 1986 I received a Bessie Award for performance.
In New York in the 1980s all the modern dancers took ballet class, which they don’t necessarily do anymore. It was sort of phasing out in the 1990s and everybody was taking yoga. It was fun to see everyone from all different companies in the morning at class.
Then I was invited to be a Cowles Chair Artist at the U in 1988 and 1989. I was asked to choreograph probably the second year and that was kind of my first piece, and it was very exciting. Carl Flink was in it, and Maria Tierney and Joanne Horne Spencer. I designed the costumes and gave those designs to the theater department to do and it was a great feeling. It was a great feeling. I didn’t think I was tremendously good at it or experienced, but it was a great feeling to realize I could choreograph and it was super interesting to be playing and making those kinds of decisions.
We moved back here in 1990. We were kind of ready to leave New York and I had been a Cowles Chair Artist twice, my mother was ill, we had performed here with Nina Wiener a couple of times so Byron knew the Twin Cities. It was a kind of a no-brainer to move back here. In Brooklyn we had a little place in Fort Greene with this much [small gesture] of a backyard and that did it. We wanted more green space. I had seen Zenon Dance when I was here teaching and thought, “Oh my god. These are amazing dancers! I would love to dance with them!” I started teaching an Advanced Professional Modern Dance class at Zenon in 1990 and I’ve been doing it ever since.
So I danced with Zenon for two years. Because Bebe [Miller] was making work, Doug Varone was making work, all these friends of mine in New York were coming [to the Twin Cities] to make work and it was just great. We decided to have a small dance company. Byron danced for New Dance, and we both left those companies and that’s when we started 45 Chartreuse, in 1992. [Byron] had the overarching ideas and the text ideas of what he wanted to say, but I just adored making movement for our dances. I felt like my job as a movement editor was really strong. The company performed at [Minnesota Dance Alliance’s Studio] 6A and Old Arizona Studios. We got some McKnight and NEA grants, but 45 Chartreuse only went for three and a half years because once I became pregnant with my second child, we just felt like financially we couldn’t do it and energy-wise we didn’t think we could do it, plus job stuff.
My teaching at the U began for real in about 1992 and stayed part time because when my kids were little I wanted to be home as a mom. As they grew I was able to take on more and more teaching and have been a full time adjunct for several years now. I direct the University Dance Theatre Concert and get to work with our guests artists from all over the world.
I think of myself as a movement maker, for sure, in my research. I make most of my movement for class. Part of it is science for me because of my Alexander training and my work with Barbara Mahler and Susan Klein in New York and everything else that I have in my body and keep studying. I go into Zenon an hour before class for the 28 years that I’ve taught there, and that’s where I choreograph. And sometimes dancers ask me to make solos on them — Joanne Horn Spencer, Duncan Schultz, Emily Michaels King — and I make solos on them, but it’s a really different way of looking at being a choreographer. It comes out of their being my longtime students who like the way the movement feels in their bodies.
I had heard about [the Alexander technique] in New York and then at some point back in Minneapolis in the 1990s I took some from Elizabeth Garren. I did some one-on-ones with her but she was already moving into David Gorman’s work so it wasn’t just physical stuff, it was more like “What are the thoughts running through your brain right now that are having you move like this?” We moved to Philadelphia from 2000-2002 with our little family so Byron could do a PhD in Dance Education at Temple and that’s where I did my training at the Alexander Alliance in Philadelphia which was run by two former modern dancers so it was very physical, very movement oriented.
As a dancer, just being in a rehearsal studio, that’s probably where I feel most alive and in the moment. I dropped out of performing to be a mom, especially once we had two [children]– one: ok, but two: no. I was already 40 and I had had quite a career, so the commitment to just being a mom was a fine choice for me. But I really missed being in a creative process with myself, my body. I was making movement material for teaching, but I wasn’t teaching that much then either so I really kind of dropped out. Part of that reason was I was tired of the ego stuff. I was tired of being in a dance company where there’s all this competition and ego and blah blah blah, I was just sick of it. Then I was asked to do some projects, little bits here and there. But I did not feel completely whole and alive and expressed as a person from about 45 to 55 maybe. The early 2000s were a low point. I think I was kind of depressed. There was just something missing. So I sang in the choir at the Unitarian church, and that helped. Just working toward an artistic goal is so alive and exciting. If you’re the director/choreographer, you’re feeling yourself make decisions all the time and that’s exciting, but even as the mover – well, with most choreographers we get to make movement anyway, to become a part of the process – but just the math of figuring out the movement in my body, it’s just – there’s just nothing like it.
So I sort of made a wish that I would be dancing more and it has come to happen! I have been performing a lot these last five years. With Shapiro and Smith, many times with Judith Howard’s work, a couple times with Sharon Picasso recently, and I’ve just finished dancing in Deborah Thayer’s All Hail the Queen. It’s amazing, and I hope that the idea of someone dancing and performing in their 60s at a pretty full out level is inspiring to young people. “Inspiring,” maybe that’s not the word: I don’t need to be the one that’s inspiring, but just that people, that dancers can do it. It’s so great. I feel like it is happening more frequently, and that the bodies can do it to whatever extent that they can do it, but the artistry is incredible. And the face – I think we’re getting more used to seeing older faces. That’s the one thing that was a little hard for me, a little bit hard for me. I’m just blown away at my age to be asked to perform.
Charles Campbell is an interdisciplinary artist and a co-founder of Skewed Visions and Fresh Oysters Performance Research. www.skewedvisions.org
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.
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