Site Dance: Choreographers and the Lure of Alternative Spaces

11. Sara Pearson and Patrik Widrig

11 Sara Pearson and Patrik Widrig Sara Pearson and Patrik Widrig are the artistic directors of PEARSONWIDRIG DANCETHEATER, a company that presents site perform­ ances and conducts site workshops all over the globe. Invested in siteadaptive works that may travel from the grassy expanses of a garden estate to a bird sanctuary in Maine to the campus of Dartmouth College, Pearson and Widrig enjoy finding both the universal and specific traits of place. Their work has been produced by Lincoln Center, the Joyce Theater, the City Center Fall for Dance Festival, DTW, The Kitchen, Central Park SummerStage, Danspace Project, P.S. 122, the 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Project, and Dancing in the Streets, and they have received foundation support from the NEA, NYSCA, NYFA, NPN, NCCI, Rockefeller, Jerome, Joyce Mertz-Gilmore, and Arts International, among others. They discussed their work with Kloetzel on August 30, 2006, from their home in New York City. An Interview with Sara Pearson and Patrik Widrig MK: While perusing your Web site, I noticed that you use the terms sitespecific and site-adaptive when you discuss your work. Can you talk about the difference between those terms? SP: It all began when presenters would invite us to make a site-specific work that they couldn’t afford on their own. So they would team up with another presenter who was interested in a completely different site and then ask us to adapt the same choreography for each of them. Our first attempt was truly unbelievable! Conceived as the brainchild of Elise Bernhardt and coproduced by Dancing in the Streets, Wave Hill, and Lincoln Center Out-ofDoors , Common Ground was initially created for this bucolic hillside garden at Wave Hill that invited choreography impossible to do anywhere but there. And then we translated it to the urban cement landscape of Lincoln Center ’s Damrosch Park. It was a wonderful, terrible assignment that we resisted 218 Sara Peason and Patrik Widrig mightily, but we needed the job, and so we said yes. This project underscored the fact that while artistic vision is one thing, dealing well within the limitations of the practical world is another. It was one of the great early challenges of our site choreographic careers; it taught us so much and opened the door to a whole new world of touring site-adaptive works. So, by the time we started theCurious Invasion series at an Audubon Sanctuary in Maine in 1997, we had developed the skills needed to plan and organize such a residency. Figure 64. Jason Akira Somma flips over a hay bale in A Curious Invasion (1997). Photo by James Murphy, courtesy of PEARSONWIDRIG DANCETHEATER. 219 An Interview/The Honeymoon Is Over PW: Sometimes a piece that starts out as site-specific can become site-adaptive . One example of this came from a section of A Curious Invasion/Wave Hill in 2001. We originally made the section on a two-tiered stone ledge in the middle of this beautiful, secluded garden; it was a luxurious unison quartet to Ethel Waters’s 1930s recording of “Moonglow” and was just about everybody’s favorite section. A couple of years later, we were invited by the Hopkins Center at Dartmouth College to create a site-adapted version of A Curious Invasion, and of course, there was no two-tiered ledge anywhere in the chosen site. But then we found these great old leather art deco couches in the boathouse by the lake, and we asked if we could move the couches out to the terrace in front of the building and perform the dance there. So we adapted that same dance to these four couches. It was completely different, and yet it was the same piece. MK: So it sounds like making site-adaptive works is more economically viable . PW: Well, the template we’ve created with A Curious Invasion can really be taken into practically any natural and/or architectural space and adapted to the particulars. This adds to its economic practicality. It’s exciting for us to come up with appropriate solutions for each new space, but we don’t have to start from scratch every time. SP: Often, we must make choices based on the economics of a project, although , to be honest, it was economics that drove us to site-specific work in the first place. Economics ended up being responsible for opening up one of the great...