Ms. Pite, as a choreographer for over 30 years, what kind of challenges are you facing in your work these days?
The challenge is to keep pushing myself, to keep diving into unknown territory. I hope that I'm always able to do better work the more that I know, but it’s not necessarily a given, is it? These days, I'm making clear choices about what I want to be working on, how I want to spend the creative time that I have left, and who I want to be working with: I have to choose carefully and to be discerning, and I think that leads to greater depth and clarity. But I also know that I have to take risks and be comfortable with the unknown and not just settle and feel comfortable with what I've done. I have to continue to feel overextended, I have to continue to feel like I'm reaching just a bit beyond what I can handle, creatively-speaking.
I can imagine that your pieces featuring many dancers — sometimes upwards of 50 or 60 — really tick those boxes? It seems like the kind of thing you couldn’t have done earlier on in your career…
It takes an enormous amount of skill, for sure! And not just my own skill, but the skill of the people that I'm working with. They are constantly problem solving and finessing things as much as I am. But I've often found myself in the position of being a leader to a large group of people, even since high school, and even though often I feel nervous and overwhelmed, there are certain truths of how we can work together that I can rely on to cope with that. So when I go and do a project with a big ballet company - they sometimes have like a hundred dancers in the company - I often choose to work with a big cast just because I can, just because I have the opportunity! I learn so much about choreography in those projects. It sounds counterintuitive, but working with a big group allows me to achieve complexity through relatively simple movement in the individual body. When that movement is iterated across many individuals I can build complexity quite quickly using relatively simple physical vocabulary.
“Humans are always divided and craving unity, and when we experience synchrony, it touches us quite deeply. The patterns delight us, and the consonance rings true.”
You’re talking about when the performers are dancing in unison?
Right, that can be one kind of coping strategy because it’s so powerful to work with these large groups that can show up with a kind of military precision. It can be both thrilling and chilling, it resonates with a sense of humanity and community. A mass movement on stage can be the embodiment of what appears to be a single mind. It's exciting to do something meaningful with the dancers’ ability to align and to unify. And I think that resonates with an audience because it strikes an emotional chord. Humans are always divided and craving unity, and when we experience synchrony or unison, it touches us quite deeply. The patterns delight us, and the consonance rings true.
Those are always my favorite moments as an audience member, seeing the dancers form one sort of big entity, almost a creature, when they move as one. It’s so thrilling.
Absolutely, I'm drawn to it for the same reasons! It's potent. It’s powerful stuff, and I've certainly enjoyed it both as an audience member and as a creator. And surprisingly, I've noticed that in the studio, even working with gigantic groups — as you said, I’ve made pieces with 36, 54, and even 66 dancers. I'm always very surprised to see how intimate the experience in the studio can still be. You’d think it would just be standing on a chair directing traffic, but it's not like that at all. It's quite intimate, you still feel it on a very human scale.
Is that how it felt for your piece Polaris, which you crafted with not only more than 60 dancers, but also with 75 musicians who were scattered throughout the theater?
Yes, exactly that, because even with that many dancers, I still try to know everybody's names, I'm still working with each of them face to face, we’re in direct contact. With Polaris, I divided that enormous group into six smaller subunits, and each of them was assigned a leader from my own company, and we built it in smaller chunks then put it together. And we spent a lot of time prepping before we ever started that process, so that we had kind of a system in place, a working method that we knew would be successful. You have to be very prepared, because it’s a bit of an experiment. But when we finally did put all those pieces together for the first time, seeing it all together, when it actually worked… The excitement in the room was something I’ll never forget. It felt like a very powerful moment to be part of. It's really an honor to be there.
With your own company, Kidd Pivot, you work with smaller groups of dancers. Does smaller-scale work also come with its own kind of power and excitement?
There are things that I really love in both situations. With Kidd Pivot, I tend to take a year and a half to two years to make a show. It's a very, very different timeline. And as you said, it's a much smaller group, maybe six or eight performers so I'm able to work on a different kind of complexity. I’m able to invent choreographic vocabulary with the individual dancer in a way that I don’t really have time to explore in those situations with dozens of dancers. We then sometimes get to tour each piece for three or four years, and so through that process, I get to keep making the work better and better and better with every show, every new city, every new theater. I'm able to see the piece itself mature and deepen. It also means I have to choose really carefully the subject that we decide to work with, the content of our show, because this this story is going to be in our lives for years. From the first meeting to the final tour, it can be something like six or seven years of navigating this content. So I try to choose things that give us the potential to grow.
Your pieces can sometimes explore heavy themes like death, grief, and trauma. How is it to live within those darker stories for years at a time?
That’s a really good question. I'm just really inspired by things that can't be measured or understood, giant unanswerable questions. My mind gets on the edge of its capacity; there, when I'm in that really kind of overextended place, is where I feel the most alive. I feel the most creative. The struggle to understand something or make sense of something, it’s like a creative engine for me. So if I’m grappling with unanswerable questions about consciousness, or unimaginable loss and grief, it feels like the act of asking is creative and earnest. So even if the content is heavy or intense, the spirit of confronting it is loving and curious and generative. Even though the subject might be difficult, there's something profoundly optimistic in bringing it into the theater, and offering it as a place to connect. It feels full of love and hope.
Is it true that the kind of narrative storytelling you’re interested in is considered somewhat taboo in contemporary dance?
Yeah, I mean, contemporary dance has mostly tended to push against narrative, partly in counterpoint to what classical ballet has always done. I think that's where that idea of taboo comes from, like, dance was resisting that pressure to tell stories, it wanted to be free of that. But for me, I'm just interested in connecting with people, I'm interested in language. There are lots of different ways to work with story. In the context of my own company, I have been collaborating over the last few creations with the playwright Jonathan Young, and we've made work that is emphatically narrative-driven and decidedly non-linear. I have just loved being able to work with language as another pathway into the content, another way of connecting with people. It’s taught me so much about embodiment, about animating the body, it has enabled me to find new choreographic material, it's helped us to move in ways I think we wouldn't move in otherwise. Dance is mute, traditionally, right? It’s a very inefficient way to tell a complex story. But I never wanted that to stop me from working with complicated content.
How do you overcome that barrier?
If you're using dance to try to communicate other things — certain emotions or states or things that are literally beyond words - you can use movement as a shortcut to a very visceral response in the viewer. For me, I guess it's just having all these possibilities open and trying to find a matrix or a way of weaving them together so it feels whole. I'll use whatever tools I think are going to do the best job of connecting with an audience, whether that’s language, set and lighting design, props, costumes, physicality, stage magic… I'm interested in questions of how and why we are moved, and interested in finding out what dance can do and what dance can connect us to. But I'm also just interested in what theater is and does. So I don’t have such a separation between choreography and all the other things that you can do in the theater, it's all just one big idea for me.