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AXIS Dance Company: past, present, and future pg. 3-4

Trio A Pressured #X: thoughts from Judith Smith, Artistic Director pg. 5-6

Yvonne Rainer: Choreographer, Trio A pg. 7-9

Q&A with Marc Brew, Guest Artistic Director pg. 10-12

Sneak Peek Photos from The Gift (of Impermanence) pg. 13

AXIS Dance Company past, present, and future

In the early 1980s, when physically integrated dance was first developing as a dance form, it was a revolutionary concept. The forerunners of the movement sought to broaden the definition of "dance" and "dancer" and increase opportunities for artistic expression through movement for a wide spectrum of physical attributes and disabilities, and so they began to physically integrate dancers with and without disabilities on stage. In recognizing all dancers as equal collaborators and all body types as dance-capable, the form gave way to previously unseen possibilities in the field of dance and a key social element in the battle of equal rights for people with disabilities.

Around this time, a larger Disability Arts Movement was gaining momentum around the world. In the UK, Disability Theater was gaining traction, while in the US, a number of pioneering groups were developing. Some of these groups explored contact improvisation – the improvisation of dance and theater through the contact between people – while others explored integrated dance as a theater art and as a way to challenge the perception of dance as an art form only for able-bodied people. A common thread running through all of these groups and defining the movement as a whole, was a recognition and celebration of the first-person experience of disability, not as a medical-model construct, but as a social phenomenon, through artistic, literary, and other creative means.

received and AXIS kept getting offers to perform and requests for classes. Soon, the AXIS dancers were all hooked, rehearsing and teaching regularly and putting together an infrastructure to support a dance company.

The company members created all of AXIS’ early works collaboratively. In 1997, AXIS began a new strategy of commissioning renowned choreographers to create dances for them, resulting in a repertory that is artistically excellent and diverse.

Thaïs Mazur, the founding Artistic Director and with AXIS until 1997. She gathered a group of dancers and non-dancers with and without disabilities together to create a dance piece. The piece was well

AXIS, founded in 1987, was at the center of this movement. AXIS grewout of a movement class for women who use wheelchairs taught by

Photo by Andy Mogg

Also central to AXIS’ work is an on-going commitment to community outreach and education. This two-pronged approach continues to define AXIS’ work, with an unparalleled education/outreach program Dance Access and its youth component Dance Access/KIDS!, which offer a kaleidoscope of events for adults and youth of all abilities locally and on tour. Today, AXIS is well-recognized throughout the Bay Area, US, and internationally for its unflagging artistic and educational standards, and for paving the way for physically integrated dance to be included within the contemporary dance community.

AXIS has created over seventy repertory works, including evening-length, site-specific and youth-focused works, and performed and taught throughout the United States, as well as in Germany, Siberia, Slovenia, Russia and Croatia. Other professional highlights include multi-year commissions from the Yerba Buena Gardens Festival with additional commissions from Bates Dance Festival, San Francisco Exploratorium, and the Off the Wall Series by Cal Performances and UAM/PFA. Being named twice by Philanthropedia as one of ‘The Bay Area’s Top 10 High Impact Non-profit Organizations’ was also a particular honor. In 2011 and 2012, AXIS was thrilled to be featured on the nationally broadcast FOX TV's So You Think You Can Dance. AXIS has also been featured in several national and local broadcasts including KRCB’s One in 5 Stories, KQED's Spark, WNET's nationally-broadcast production of People In Motion as well as in a documentary video, Dancing From the Inside Out, which won over a dozen awards including Dance On Camera in New York and the National Educational Film and Video Festival. Additionally, AXIS dancers & artists served as consultants and models for the creation of Life Forms choreography software used to introduce disabled students to dance and choreography.

After celebrating its 25th Anniversary in 2013, AXIS’ vision is to remain a leader in the emerging field of physically integrated dance by continuing to set new artistic and educational standards. AXIS’ work challenges the traditional definitions of ‘dance’, ‘dancer’ and ‘ability’ and the company longs to see the disability community welcomed into the performing arts as they have been virtually left out until now. As a contender in the field of contemporary dance with commissioned works by renowned choreographers, composers and designers, AXIS is excited about the lasting contribution they are leaving on the field of contemporary dance. This year brings the exciting premiere of AXIS' first-ever dance for the camera: The Gift (of Impermanence), choreographed and filmed by choreographer Alex Ketley, as well as a re-staging of Yvonne Rainer’s seminal work Trio A.

Top to bottom: In This Body (1988), Tellings (1989), Ready To Go (1992) Photo by Brenda Prager; Flesh (2004) Photo by Margot Hartford; Decorum (2005) Photo by Matt Haber

Trio A Pressured #X thoughts from Artistic Director, Judith Smith

Looking back, I have to admit that I’m not really sure what I was thinking when I decided I wanted to join a dance company. Honestly, at the time I couldn’t have been more clueless about what it meant, so I guess that helps to answer the question in some ways. Had I known, I may have sped off in the other direction!

But in all seriousness, my time with AXIS since the very beginning in 1987 through until today has been thrilling. This year has brought yet another exciting new challenge, and an honor that I could never have predicted.

This year, AXIS will be re-staging Yvonne Rainer’s iconic postmodern work, Trio A. Our re-staging has been titled Trio A Pressured #X, and represents the first time in history that this piece has been set on a cast that includes dancers with disabilities. That I would ever have the opportunity and honor to be a part of an historic adaptation of one of modern dance’s most iconic works? You can add that to the list of things I didn’t know when I got this all started 26 years ago.

It started years ago when I by happenstance met Yvonne Rainier in a café with Susan Foster and Deborah Haye. At the time, I knew who Yvonne was and a little about Trio A. I very much respected her work and after spending some time in conversation with her that day, I was really enamored by her! A few years ago, Mills College hosted a teach-in for Trio A and a discussion with Yvonne, and I found myself absolutely fascinated with the piece.

There was something about Trio A that I loved. And an idea lodged itself in my brain: what might a physically-integrated re-staging of the piece look like? The piece itself, and its premise, fascinated me. Nothing in the piece repeats, it is not counted, and no movement, gesture, or sequence takes on greater significance than any other. The entire piece is meant to carry equal weight, which poses a unique challenge to the dancers, who must master the task-based movements with an almost meditative attention to detail and complete fairness. Throughout, the dancers never meet the audience’s gaze, and though the piece is often done to In the Midnight Hour, it may also be staged in silence.

I had been wanting AXIS to re-stage an iconic work for a while, and at the time of the Mills teach-in, our first attempt at re-staging Tricia Brown’s Set and Reset/Reset had stalled. Last year while planning an AXIS residency at Mills College with Ann Murphy, the department chair, I mentioned that I had been thinking a lot about Trio A. Ann was immediately excited and contacted Yvonne and Linda K. Johnson, one of Trio A’s few répétiteurs. Yvonne is rightfully and famously selective with who she allows to re-stage the piece, and only then may they do so by being taught by one of very few répétiteurs worldwide. After some discussion, Yvonne agreed to the idea, and Linda was on board.

March, 2014

Judith Smith and Sonsheée Giles, 2001Photo by Trib LaPrade.

A component of our month-long residency at Mills became Linda doing an inclusive teach-in of Trio A with our company dancers, Mills students and community members, with and without disabilities. In translating the piece to disabled dancers the question immediately became how to maintain the integrity of the piece, both in individual movements and as a whole, while also creating movement for someone like me, in a wheelchair. At the end of the day, I asked her if she thought it would work, and she gave an unwavering “yes.”

Despite Linda’s rock-hard support of the project we had embarked upon, early on I vacillated back and forth between ecstatic excitement, and wondering what the heck I’ve gotten us into. Afterall, it is a risky choice we’re making - the AXIS re-staging of Trio A will be an unprecedented re-staging of the piece that is famously one of the most particular in the field of modern dance. Sonsherée and Juliana, the two dancers without disabilities performing the piece, have the incredibly difficult task of learning and mastering the piece as it is. Marc and Joel have the entirely unprecedented task of deciding with Linda what essence of the original movement is most important - the facing, the gesture, pathway, directionality? - and then translating those decisions into movement. Throughout this translation process, we have continued to explore the balance between maintaining the integrity of individual movements, while staying true to the piece as a whole. Together, we have the incredible honor and responsibility that accompanies it of figuring out how we can make this piece work. After our first rehearsals with Linda, she sent the clips of our work to Yvonne. Linda has been incredibly supportive since she started working with us, but Yvonne would be the final word. We were all thrilled to hear that Yvonne was very excited as well. She said the translation was capturing the essence of the functionality of the piece. Since then, we’ve been hard at work to make sure that our translation of the piece continues to remain true.

Overall, this has been such an incredible thrill and an honor. My fascination with Yvonne, love of Trio A, and the risk involved in trying to figure out how it all could possibly work, have resulted in something important, I think. I’m so proud of the dancers and grateful to Yvonne and Linda for taking on this challenge and really soaring with it.

Yvonne RainerChoreographer, Trio A

Yvonne Rainer was born in San Francisco in 1934. She trained as a dancer in New York at the Martha Graham Dance School and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and began to choreograph in 1960. She was a founding member of the Judson Dance Theater, a movement that began in 1962 and proved to be a vital force in redefining dance for the following decades. Starting in 1968, Rainer began to integrate short films into her live performances and, by 1975, had made a complete transition to filmmaking. She has since completed seven experimental feature films, and, in 1997, retrospectives of Rainer’s films were held at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York City.

In 2000, Rainer returned to dance with a commission by the Baryshnikov Dance Foundation for the White Oak Dance Project titled, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (2000). Most recently, she choreographed AG Indexical, with a Little Help from H.M. (2006), a reinterpretation of George Balanchine's Agon; RoS Indexical (2007), after Vaslav Nijinsky’s Rite of Spring; and Spiraling Down (2008), a meditation on soccer, aging, and war. In 2010,Yvonne Rainer: Dance and Film, the first major European survey of Rainer’s work was presented at the Tramway in Glasgow, Scotland. A premiere collection of Yvonne Rainer’s poetry, Poems is newly released by Badlands Unlimited <http://badlandsunlimited.com/> (2011).

Rainer is the recipient of numerous awards, including two Guggenheim Fellowships (1969, 1988), three Rockefeller Fellowships (1988, 1990, and 1996), a MacArthur Fellowship (1990–95), and a Wexner Prize (1995). She currently lives in New York City.

"It is a well-documented fact that in 1965 the dance and film icon Yvonne Rainer spent about 180 days in a studio in New York City creating what has come to be regarded as the seminal work of post-modern dance - Trio A or The Mind is a Muscle, part 1. As Sally Banes so articulately states in her influential work on the dance-makers of that period, Terpsichore in Sneakers, the resulting impact of Trio A has been nothing less than transformative for our notions of dance creation and performance. "The history of dance theory has been the repeated conflict between those who value technique and those who value expression...With Rainer's Trio A the cycle is at last broken. The debate is made irrelevant. The possibility is proposed that dance is neither perfection of technique nor of expression, but quite something else - the presentation of objects in themselves. It is not simply a new style of dance, but a new meaning and function, a new definition of dance, that has appeared." *

Yvonne Rainer performing Trio A in Portland, 1969

* Finding Trio A by Linda K. Johnson, first published in InDance magazine, January/February 2010 issue, Dancers Group. appeared on page 4.

1968 Statement by Yvonne Rainer on Trio A

1968 Statement by Yvonne Rainer on Trio A

Q&A: Marc Brew, Guest Artistic DirectorChoreographer of Divide

Marc, could you start by telling me a little bit about your new piece, Divide? Where does the name come from? And what themes are you exploring here?

Well, for this piece I wanted to start by exploring a minimalist approach to choreography by setting a very simple angular and linear arm phrase which I taught the dancers. In my work, I often like to play with set and design, but for Divide I’ve stripped it back to form and shape. From this more conceptual viewpoint, I’m exploring the divide in human interaction in movement, space and time.…What are the different ways we can use the space? How do our interactions between each other shift along our journey through space and in time and how do we manage with or without the structures we form? Mostly, I’m interested in human interaction through physical movement. The piece is an entanglement between the dancers, and I’m looking at the push and pull, the getting into knots and finding separations - how do we divide relationships between ourselves and others, own space, build boundaries and barriers or break them down? And then how do we physicalize that and set that in time with music? It’s very much an abstract piece.

Award Winning Choreographer and Artistic Director Marc Brew, trained as a professional dancer at the Victorian College of the Arts Secondary School and The Australian Ballet School. He has been working in the UK and Internationally for the past 18 years as a dancer, choreographer, teacher and speaker; with the Australian Ballet Company, PACT Ballet of South Africa, Infinity Dance Theatre in New York, Candoco Dance Company and was Associate Director with Scottish Dance Theatre - ‘Scotland’s principal contemporary dance company’ - where he co-directed NQR. He was a guest performer, collaborator and media spokes person for the London Hand Over Ceremony, for the Beijing Olympic and Paralympic Games Closing Ceremony. Since 2008 Marc has been dedicating time to his own choreography with Marc Brew Company and was featured by Time Out Magazine as the best of the new breed of London’s Rising Dance Talent. In 2012 Marc received an Unlimited Commission to create Fusional Fragments, a collaboration with world - renowned percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie,

which was part of a series of commissions across the UK celebrating the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad and toured internationally. Marc Brew Company's new outdoor work (i)land has been commissioned by the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games and Without Walls Consortium to perform as part of the Commonwealth Games Cultural Festival and tour the UK outdoor festival circuit in Summer 2014. It is with much excitement that Marc has returned to be guest artistic director with AXIS Dance Company and create a new work for the company titled Divide.

What was your starting point for creating this piece?

I started with inspiration drawn from visual art and design. A while ago I was going through my design book on minimalism and the work by visual artist Carl Andre really appealed to me, the simplicity and beauty of his work, “Copper Ribbon,” “8 Cuts,” and “Spill.” They all have a very architectural use of space and divide the space up in different ways. These works formed the starting point for me in imagining how division might be manifested physically – a lot of the work in creating this piece has been exploring that marriage of idea and image in movement…you know, I can come to the studio with inspiration from a particular image, but I don’t know until I’m there and working with the dancers what that inspiration will generate.

Can you describe a little more of the process of creating the work in the studio?

I create almost all of my work collaboratively with the dancers. I like to come in with choreographic material or specific tasks, and then have the dancers interpret and embody that material or task. After, I manipulate the material they create to fit in the piece and fulfill my artistic vision for the work. For example, one way I created material for this piece was to just improvise myself – figuring out how to embody the concepts I was playing with around “division.” So I went into the corner in the studio, facing the wall, to really simplify and isolate myself in the space I was working with, and just started looking at how I move when I’m isolated in a corner? What are all the ways to divide this space up with linear movement? That investigation generated the base phrase of the piece, and then working on that material with the dancers has created a lot of the movement in the piece today.Another way was giving the dancers tasks. For example, I came in one day with a whole load of Scrabble tiles and spilled them all over the floor in the studio. I had the dancers each choose seven letters and create words with those letters, and then use the spatial pattern created by the tiles on the floor and the words they made to create five movement phrases. Then the question was, how do we put this together?

Wow, how did you come up with that one? Carl Andre’s work “Spill,” , it looks like a load of scrabble tiles all over the floor.

Clockwise: Carl Andre’s “Spill,” “8 Cuts,” and “Copper Ribbon”

Ah, true, I see it… You worked with AXIS back in 2011 when you created “Full of Words.” How is this process similar or different to working on FOW?

Lots of my work stems from a desire to bring out the human in people, so we’re not just like, “oh, we’re being dancers” onstage. That was true in FOW, and is true in Divide. FOW was two years in the planning, and it was about three different couples in distinct settings with distinct narratives and very defined relationships drawing from the dancers and their offerings. In Divide, I’m working more in the abstract, and the piece is about motifs and spatial design. But the piece is also about these three people - what they bring to the work, how they work as a unit. There are common themes, but I want the audience to take away their own ideas from the work - I’m definitely trying to push and challenge my own artistic practice.

In terms of process, Divide was also quite a division, in a way, from the way that I usually work. I often start with a very cinematic vision of “this is the beginning, the middle, and the end”, but with Divide, I really didn’t have a clear structure or how it looked in my head before I began. I had inspiration from the visual art world, but I didn’t know what it was going to generate and I didn’t know what task I would offer until I got in and started working with the dancers, they are also my inspiration. Working with such professional, generous and artistic dancers makes my process a huge joy, and a wonder of possibilities.

Is there anything else you’d like the audience to know about the piece?

There is no particular narrative to the work. It’s not as rooted in gesture and character as my other pieces have been. I hope the audience is open to their own interpretations and experiences of the work and enjoy!

Top: Marc Brew and AXIS dancers in rehearsal, February 2014; Right: AXIS performing Full of Words in 2011. Photo by Andrea Basile

The Gift (of Impermanence)a glimpse behind the lensThe Gift (of Impermanence), a film by Alex Ketley, will be premiering this Home Season. Shown here are a few sneak peeks of rehearsals and the making of the film.

Top photo by AXIS Dance Company. Middle photos by Andrea Basile. Bottom photo by Mark Travis Rivera.