Inquirer Q&A with ... Sarah Gladwin Camp of Green Chair Dance Group
What was the biggest difficulty you had to resolve to get your LA/Fringe piece from idea to performance?
Inquirer: What was the biggest difficulty you had to resolve to get your LA/Fringe piece from idea to performance?
Camp: We're always challenged by the Fringe schedule, when we're asked to title the show and write promotional material for it before we've even begun making the piece. We're then caught trying to mesh this early conception of the dance with the later choreography and the continual evolution of our movement ideas. Sometimes the promo material ends up perfectly describing the dance, and sometimes it doesn't.
Q: Do you expect your work to have legs - is there life after LA/Fringe, or is most of what is created for the festival destined to be seen only on the Fringe circuit?
A: We are already planning on touring Dances for the Naked Eye to the Dance Complex in Cambridge, Mass., in late October. We'd love to possibly perform at Simon's Rock College in western Massachusetts, and we'll also have a series of workshops and a performance at Swarthmore College this year.
Aside from those plans, we are excited to finally be working on Green Chair year-round and look forward to pursuing lots of new projects, experimenting, and hosting regular showings of our dances even as they are in progress.
Q: What's the primary source of your concepts - music, literature, geopolitics, personal experience, global tragedies?
A: We are primarily interested in physical interactions and the relationships and reactions between performers. For Dances for the Naked Eye, we played a lot with games and improvisation to create choreographic material. Also, in classic Green Chair style, we worked a lot by trial and error. For example, someone will have an amazing idea, such as "what if we could all lift each other at the same time?" and then we test out crazy ways of making it happen.
Q: How much does funding influence your choice of subject? Do you find that fear of losing it dampens the political choices you make in your work?
A: Funding isn't a big influence for us right now. We will start the process of obtaining non-profit status this fall, but currently we are not operating under any direct-financing grants. We've been fortunate enough to be supported for the last few years by the Swarthmore Project in Theater, which offers us rehearsal space and housing for the summer, and thus the space and time to create freely.
Q: Is having an edge of political, social or community-based change important to your work, or is your sole goal the artistic outcome?
A: We approach our shows with a pure joy in dancing together, mainly because we are a collaborative project. The fact that we are still working this way five years after becoming a company is a real testament to how much we enjoy being together and creating and performing as a team. This definitely influences our aesthetic and is quite evident in our dances.
Part of our mission is to create work that is human, real and completely accessible to our audiences, yet challenges them to see bodies, movement, relationships and story in a slightly different way. The combination of all these factors certainly contributes to a community- and socially focused edge.
Q: How comfortable are you in expressing your work verbally - to audiences, media, friends?
A: We are all graduates of Swarthmore College, and as such are very used to talking about dance and performance. Also, because we love what we do, we love sharing it with others through conversation as well as performance.
Q: If you have performed in other Fringes festivals, tell us how Philly's compares.
A: We haven't performed in other Fringes, but we have shown work in several festivals. We performed at the Florida Dance Festival, which differed from the Philly Fringe in that there was only one theater involved, and it showed a different program each night.
We've also presented a show at the International Festival of Contemporary Dance in Poland, where there are classes all day every day in various locations throughout the city. It's wonderful, and perhaps even more exhausting than the Philly Fringe. The programming is similar in that it spans the gamut of large-scale dance companies to emerging artists, and also seeks to bring in experimental and cutting-edge work. The Polish festival focuses completely on dance and dance-theater, however, rather than showing music, theater, and performances of all types.
Show Details:
Green Chair Dance Group
Dances for the Naked Eye
7:30 p.m. Sept 5
9:30 p.m. Sept 6
3:30 p.m. Sept 7
The Adrienne Mainstage
2030 Sansom St.
Web Links:
Festival show page: http://livearts-fringe.org/2008/details.cfm?id=5365
Artist website: http://www.myspace.com/greenchairdancegroup