MIT Professor of Theater Arts Thomas DeFrantz speaks with New York choreographer Cori Olinghouse. Cori discusses VOIX DE VILLE, which premieres at Danspace Project February 3-5 as part of Platform 2011: Body Madness – Absurdity & Wit, curated by Judy Hussie-Taylor.

Interview date: January 4, 2011

Thomas: It’d be really terrific if we could start talking about your pathway to the new work that you’re engaged in now. Especially in terms of coming from a strong performance background with Trisha Brown, to the vaudeville and the eccentric dance that you are working with now. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Cori: Yeah, absolutely. So I had danced with Trisha Brown from 2002 to 2006 and I actually left the company with a pretty bad knee injury. It was a very difficult time in my life; my father passed away from a severe case of alcoholism and also my partner, at the time, and I had broken up. It became an extremely pivotal time in my life and I could see that humor, joy and transformation were really necessary in my art-making practices. I began to look at other forms of movement. I think that there was something inside of me looking to explore humor, anger, pain and pleasure in movement. In my exploration of other forms, I began to study a lot of different artists. I began to study the old silent clowns: Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, as well as Grock, Max Wall and other eccentric dancers. I also started to study voguing with Archie Burnett and Benny Ninja, from the House of Ninja. I was also really moved to see various performers from the underground such as Kim Aviance, Princess Xtravaganza, and a woman I danced with in Bill Irwin’s work, Ephrat Asherie.

Around this time there were two powerful teachers and mentors that were a part of my journey. The first person that I had begun to work with was Bill Irwin. I had been moved so deeply, and still am, by his ability to shapeshift, create illusion, and by the sheer magic of his work. After working with Bill, I also started to study voguing with Archie Burnett, grandfather of the House of Ninja. Right away I could recognize that he is a master at what he does. I was very moved by the way he approached his students and began to fall in love with voguing. During this five year time span since leaving Trisha Brown’s company, I had been going through a very deep journey of my own; starting to breakdown my own dancing identity and seeing if it’s possible to go from a postmodern understanding of the body to a different kind of understanding that incorporates a deeper sense of identity and expression. That’s where it brings me today. And this process, that I’ve begun, feels very much like a life-long process that I’m very much in the beginning of.

Thomas: There’s this wonderful strand in your narrative. You were looking for joy in a certain kind of way, or certainly a release that re-tooling your discipline, or re-tooling your technique, helped you access somehow. Is it something that you experience physically in these other forms? Or was it just as much a part of your emotional creative sensibility that you were looking to shift?

Cori: Well, I think that there was something in me emotionally that was looking very deeply for joy. It was a very important need that felt related to my survival as a person. But as an artist, the body was my point of entry because it is where my expertise and background are. This was the base where I began to unravel myself, and also unravel my understanding of all the movement languages that began to interest me. It was through this process of working with the body that I began to look at a deeper form of expression. But part of this was looking at the structuring principals and the composing elements and patterns that are inherent in these forms. And as an improviser, I was taking some of those principals back into my creative work.

Read the full interview here