Earthly delights

ALL FOURS Williams, Clark, Olson and Rogers, from left, perform Rammed Earth.

Photo: Julieta Cervantes

In Rammed Earth, Tere O’Connor pays homage to the titular building technique, which dates back to ancient Roman times. “You add water to dirt that is on-site and create the material for the walls,” he explains over tea near his West Village apartment. “So you lift the building right out of the space.”

For his new quartet, which features Hilary Clark, Heather Olson, Matthew Rogers and Christopher Williams, O’Connor has traded his usual proscenium setting for the intimate space of the Chocolate Factory in Long Island City. As the audience moves in different configurations—alternately surrounded by the dancers, facing them as they move against a wall or placed apart at a far diagonal—he challenges spatial perception. “The thing for me is the idea of making something from where you are, in the site that you are in, with the people you’re with and in the moment that you’re in,” he says. “Just raising it up. That’s what I’m trying to do in my dances.”

Rammed Earth, as O’Connor sees it, marks a shift in his choreographic formalism; his aim in the dance is to allow the movement and structure to emerge naturally, as opposed to having them begin from a point of calculated craft. “It’s still formal,” he says. “Everything is. But I’m interested in a kind of liquid space.”

One of his key concepts relies on the similarity between walking through a building and sitting and watching a dance. “It’s about how you negotiate the space of a building, which happens through time as you walk through it, and the experience of a dance happening to you through time as you sit in front of it,” he explains. “Say there’s a building: In this piece, the notion of liquid space comes from the idea of how differently everybody walks through that building. The space is solid, but your perception of it is fluid and changing—that’s something that I’ve really been interested in in dance for a long time. I think I’m trying to turn the volume up on that in this piece.”

Essentially, the audience, which is instructed to shift its seating throughout the performance, navigates through the Chocolate Factory alongside the dancers. “I’m trying to bring into evidence ideas about how what is happening in the architecture around you is a form of control,” he says. “To make that watery or liquid is one of the root metaphors for dance. You can choose to look differently at structures that control you. I’m also really interested in the ideas of liquid perception: What do you take in? What do you remember when you’re watching something onstage—or even during a typical day? What do you place importance on or not? I don’t want this dance to exist in a closed space.”

Concurrently, O’Connor’s choreographic process has shifted in Rammed Earth; while he has made some of the movement, his dancers have contributed a great deal as well. In addition, some of it is improvised. “What I am doing is arranging when the space can be three-dimensional, when it’s directional and when I want to push a reference, like a domestic or geometric shape,” O’Connor explains. “There are times in which the dance collects itself and shows legible moments. I think that’s what the mind does, too. Half of what you do in a day you don’t understand at all—and then things come into focus. That’s how dance also reflects experience for me. In that way, the work finds a context for moments as opposed to editing things in and out according to some random ideas of good and bad that I have.”

In Rammed Earth, O’Connor has also moved away from his somewhat standard practice of creating characters—no matter how fleeting and nonsensical—for his dancers to embody. “I was starting to feel those were stylistic choices that I could pull out of my hat,” he says. “I’m always trying to unearth another way. I think it’s a really basic need for an artist: to see things in a different way all the time. For me it is more and more important to ask, What else is here? All the work that I really respect in the world goes through huge changes. Somehow even the politics of saying, ‘I found this thing I’m good at, and now I’m going to show it to you,’ seem hollow. It feels something like virtuosity, which is not my friend. That’s just not a part of what I’m trying to be on earth doing.”

Tere O’Connor Dance is at the Chocolate Factory Wed 26–Sept 30 and Oct 3–7.