October
31, 2003
Artist-in-Residence
KT Niehoff Brings Dance Theater to Campus
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Photo:
Matthew Cozier
Niehoff's
Lingo dancetheater, which she founded in 1996
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After staging two shows at Mount Holyoke to enthusiastic,
sellout audiences earlier this fall, choreographer KT Niehoff
is back on campus as a guest artist in the dance department. Niehoff,
one of Seattle's leading young choreographers and artistic
director of Lingo dancetheater, is working with a group of dancers
from Mount Holyoke and the other Five College dance departments
on a performance of her 2001 work, Dysfunction, for the
Mount Holyoke Faculty Dance Concert November 13–15.
Resetting the piece is a challenge for Niehoff.
"I decided to restage this work, originally a 45-minute piece
for five dancers, [for] eight dancers in 12 minutes!" she
said. "I'm trying to keep the most important parts and
to find the arc of the piece in its shortened form."
She is extremely pleased with the dancers she
is working with, all of whom attended her performance earlier
this fall. "Being here before and showing them what we do
was great. I walk in with a point of reference. I couldn't
have simply described what we do. But having seen my work, they
have an inspired vision in their heads. They're smart. There's
so much wit and commonsense among them. They've just got
it." Niehoff admits it will be difficult for her not to be
present for the performance. "It's like summer camp.
You fall in love. You get to know each other in a fun way. It's
a big, intense game, and I'll be missing their Super Bowl."
Niehoff described Dysfunction as an exploration
of the human instinct for survival and how we all cope with compromising
situations. "Look at the word," she said. "It means
'not broken.' It means that something is functioning,
but not in an optimal way. Most of us operate in that way all
the time, and that fascinates me. We spent a year making the piece.
It was tough, deeply personal, painful at times."
But the work, for all its tragic implications,
is full of humor. Niehoff recalled the moment after the first
performance when the dancers assembled offstage. "We all
looked at each other and said, 'I guess it's funny.'
The audience hadn't stopped laughing the whole 45 minutes.
People could identify with the situations we presented."
These include reading a magazine in a supermarket checkout line
while the person behind you insists on reading over your shoulder,
and being the one left standing in a real-life musical chairs
situation. "The piece presented relief for people who realized
that they weren't alone in these experiences."
Niehoff has ambitious goals for her Mount Holyoke
residency. "I also teach a class called Reinvent Your Eye
/ Tools for Abstract Composition. This is about giving artists
of all types ways to analyze abstract art. It is important to
me that I also leave my cast with this information as well, so
I'm not just setting the piece, but creating an ensemble
that thinks in the same vernacular. So that when I'm gone,
they can work together and talk in the same language."
Niehoff's work in dance theater evolved out
of her theater studies at NYU and a passion for dance that ignited
during her last semester at NYU in the spring of 1990. Once she
began to dance, she pushed herself to be as good as dancers who
had been doing it all their lives. "I was relentlessly hard
on myself," she recalled.
After studying dance for two years in New York,
Niehoff was invited in 1992 to join the Pat Graney Dance Company
in Seattle. That same year, she and eight other women formed a
repertory company called the d-9 Dance Collective. When she began
choreographing in the mid-90s, she worked strictly in the dance
medium. But piece by piece, she began adding a few words and bits
of gesture and humor. Gradually her theater background reemerged,
and, since 2000, her work has been a cohesive integration of dance,
theater, original music, and scene design. Her struggle with the
question "Is the pure abstraction of dance enough?"
is ongoing. But, at least at this point in her career, the answer
is no. She sees the world as a place where more and more integration
is taking place. "Integration of multiple mediums is not
just in the dance field. It seems to be what the world is about
at the moment. We have amazing and unlimited access to so many
constructs of communication. It seems only natural that our art
reflect this access. The merging of cultures, ideas, and art forms
is an evolution that just makes sense to me."
For information about the MHC Faculty Dance Concert,
call x2848. For more information about Lingo dancetheater, go
to www.lingodance.com.
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