Toward a New Folk Dance: Caregivers and other partners

Noted choreographer Stuart Pimsler and his partner Suzanne Costello devote a major amount of their energy to "Caring for the Caregiver," their workshops and collaborations with healthcare professionals, designed to offer a creative outlet for the stress and complex emotional issues often encountered by doctors, nurses, medical students, hospice staff, social workers, therapists, counselors and administrative personnel. Their company now includes many of these caregivers, who create new work, rehearse and tour regularly with the professionals. We asked Pimsler to write about his work and what draws it all together into what may be viewed as a new dance form. —Eds.

I made my official debut as an adult choreographer in a sleepy New England town on an extremely hot summer's day. I separated the tiny but enthusiastic audience from the performing area by seating them on the opposite side of a tall chain-link fence. The work was performed in silence but for the ambient noise, which included the slapping of my sneakers on the clay tennis court. I was a graduate student at Connecticut College presenting my first dance/theater work, titled Net Game. I enjoyed the gladiator-like feeling suggested by the caged setting, which transformed an unexpected place into a temporary theater. As art, Net Game was a modest offering, garnering mixed reviews. One of my esteemed instructors voiced his disappointment at the lack of "breath phrasing." (At the time, his criticism was particularly confusing for me since I spent most of my time in Net Game running all over the court until I was gasping for air.)

Twenty years later, I can only speculate whether my passion was enough to balance the naïveté of my first dance. However, I am convinced that my tennis-court dance did foreshadow many of the aesthetic concerns that I have continued to refine throughout my career. My interest in familiar, ordinary and predictable locations and their potential for being transformed has since been realized in a variety of works by my company, Stuart Pimsler Dance & Theater (SPDT). In McKinley's Carnation (1992)—a site-specific performance work on the grounds of Ohio's capitol building—a cast of 54 individuals, ages 7-86, including third graders, body builders and senior citizens, distilled idiosyncratic historic facts about the Ohio Statehouse. Rest/Stop (1994) transported audiences on school buses to five different outdoor locations in Gainesville, Florida. Ticket holders and random onlookers observed performances along a nature walk, at a rest stop, inside two rooms of the Florida Motel and its adjacent swimming pool, on the verandah of a retirement home and at a man-made beach in a vast parking lot. An intergenerational cast of 35 individuals offered commentary about "travel over a lifetime." An empty, sandblasted public swimming pool in Allentown, Pennsylvania, was the site of Out Of Our Hands (1995), a work for four dancers and four nurses. All of these works have stirred new ways of looking at locales that have often been taken for granted, forgotten or even unknown. These site-specific performance works have extended the experience of creating and performing outside of the theater into the actual communities of their origins.

The counterpart to my investigations of art staged in real places has been a fascination with real people and the spectacle of the everyday. My partner Suzanne Costello and I created Glory Portraits, our first full-length work in 1981. Its premise set the American family against the nationalistic politics of the nuclear age. At that time, Suzanne and I had been living together and working together for two years, sharing our space with other artists in a downtown New York City loft. Our extended family was our loftmates and company members. In Glory Portraits, Suzanne and I became instant parents by incorporating three dolls in the work. (Suzanne and I have since had a daughter, Sophia Cecile, who is four years old.) At the personal layer of meaning, Glory Portraits was about Suzanne and me, two artists as a contemporary couple struggling with our own personal politics. In the final scene, ten couples of varying descriptions left their audience seats and danced with the six SPDT company members.

Real life and real people were again focal points in our next full-length work, House/Home (1985). Highly personal and driven by childhood memories, House/Home also included a cast of community performers joined with our company ensemble. Each company member ballroom-danced slowly with a community performer who undressed his/her partner. In the work's final tableau, the company became live nude sculptures resting on their knees atop five tables (where five televisions had been), watched from chairs by the community performers.

The desire and need to make art connected to the stuff of real life, with real people, has continued to drive our work. Creating away from traditional stages, in community settings or on stage with community performers has often felt like a new kind of folk dance—a type of social dance with a movement vocabulary that is redefined for each project and often created by the participants. The style of this work often has an awkwardness as well as a generous, emotional abandon and a simple, human elegance. It allows participants to connect in deeply intimate ways. Creating performance work with community performers extends the experience of art outside of the theater into people's lives. It offers people an opportunity to make art for which, like the doing of most activities, there can be no substitute. Working with communities has given us the chance to extend our aesthetic belief that everyday life can be a rich source of creative expression.

Recently, the community of healthcare providers has been a particular population of real people with whom we have formed an extraordinary connection. During the past five years, Suzanne and I have worked throughout the U.S. and abroad with doctors, nurses, therapists, hospice staff and other caregivers. Our "Caring for the Caregiver" program includes movement/expression workshops and commissioned performance works that provide caregivers with creative outlets for the emotional stresses encountered in their work. These workshops begin with discussions reflecting the issues—such as loss and grief—that participants confront in their work. In the workshops, caregivers explore through movement and voice, memories and stories, the concepts of support, trust and release. For individuals who confront loss daily, being held by a colleague or telling a patient's story can be a powerful experience.

In retrospect, there was an extremely poetic connection for our introduction to the healthcare community. During a southern tour in 1992, Suzanne and I, with our company, were asked to present a series of residency activities as sponsored by our cohosts, The University of Florida and Florida Arts Celebration. One of our activities included a workshop for physical, recreational and occupational therapists at the university's Shands Hospital. The workshop atmosphere was extremely charged, and, as the residency week progressed, we continued to meet with more caregivers from the Gainesville community. Simultaneously, we were touring what has become a signature work for our company, Swimming To Cecile (1988). This work, dedicated to my mother, who was killed in a car accident when I was 15 years old, is a personal meditation on living with loss. The subject matter of Cecile was all-too-familiar territory for those caregivers attending our performance at the end of the residency. Our work, with its embrace of real-life matters, brought us to this intersection with the emotional availability and knowledge of the caregiver. This experience led us to subsequent projects with the caregiver community in Gainesville and the establishment of an Arts in Medicine Program at Shands Hospital. It marked the beginning of a new relationship for us with the caregiving community throughout the U.S.

We continue to broaden our making of work with the healthcare community, which includes performance works created with and performed by caregivers. Last season's Still Life With Rose (1996) was performed by twelve Columbus caregivers and inspired by their personal histories. Still Life focused on their relationships with their patients as well as their rage, fear, pain and hopes about their workplace. Our company has subsequently expanded to include this dedicated group of twelve caregivers who rehearse weekly, usually at the end of their daily shifts. There is an emotional power in their directness and commitment. Audiences continue to comment that they are deeply moved by their simple elegance. Still Life was presented as the closing work during our 1996 home season and will be toured this season, including a National Performance Network residency in Tucson, Arizona.

For our dance/theater works, caregivers have been ideal partners, as they are eager to express the emotional complexities precipitated by their work and their workplace. In collaborating with caregivers, at home and on tour, we have been deeply affected by their personal wisdom and strength. The caregivers' influence is also evident in two recent SPDT stage works. Saba (1994) pairs four audience members with four company members and is in memory of our friend who died of AIDS the year before the birth of our daughter. In Schvitz (1996), I talk and dance with my deceased grandfather, father and uncle in a steam room as we bemoan the twisted pleasure and tradition of sweating. This persistent desire to make art connected to an emotional underbelly has been encouraged and confirmed through our relationship with caregivers. One healthcare provider described our work this way: "You ask us to seek out movement that comes from inside, that comes from an experience or that comes from something known. When you ask people to do that, you don't get a trickle, you get a torrent."

Out Of This World/The Life After Life Project is our newest collaboration with the national healthcare community. Out Of This World will be presented in New York City, Pittsburgh, Tucson and Columbus over the next two years. It will join healthcare providers in each city with other community participants to create and perform a new work inspired by a collective vision of afterlife. This new project begins at the place where last season's Still Life With Rose ended—exploring the caregivers' personal belief systems and coping strategies for surviving daily losses. Our early rehearsals have included vivid portrayals of near-death experiences and descriptions of the other world. Caregivers/performers have talked about their visions for getting to "the other side" as: "riding on a big yellow bus," "like going down to the basement as a kid, looking over my shoulder," "holding my breath five times," "in slow motion," and "alone." Some of the participating caregivers have countered these prosaic projections of afterlife by firmly stating that "dead is dead."

As our new project promises to look through potential windows to the other world(s), our partnering with caregivers feels ever more strongly connected to this world. Our new folk dance continues in and with communities—making art where it lives.

This interview originally appeared in High Performance magazine, Winter 1996.

Original CAN/API publication: September 2002