Exploring the Reasons Why They Dance
Felice Lesser is pulling back the curtain on all the rigors and rituals of the sometimes inscrutable world of professional dance. Ms. Lesser is the founder of her own company, the Felice Lesser Dance Theater, which has hovered on the fringes of the New York dance scene since 1975. Last fall, she began sketching out a 30th anniversary piece that would explore the dynamics of the rough-and-tumble world of freelance dancers.
The project found firm footing when Ms. Lesser, who has no permanent studio, won a Field Artist-In-Residence grant that provided four months of rehearsal space in a dance studio on Manhattan's West Side. The Field, a Manhattan-based service organization for performing artists, awarded the grant by lottery. The finished work, "I Am a Dancer," a 90-minute collage of live-action dance and video, will be presented at the Baryshnikov Arts Center this week.
The subject of "I Am a Dancer" — a valentine to being a slave to one's artistic vision — is one Ms. Lesser knows well. She is the quintessential freelance artist herself — loaded with drive and ambition, but still struggling after many years to find its place in the city's dance world. The sugarplum visions dancing in her head are as mundane as acquiring a studio and securing a steady stream of income to pay her dancers.
"I'm the poster girl for the person who has a dream and just won't give up," Ms. Lesser said. If not quite inured to calamity, she is certainly accustomed to it. During the course of making "I Am a Dancer," for example, one principal soloist suffered a crippling injury and another was hired by a larger dance company. But, with these setbacks neatly dovetailing into the subject matter, Ms. Lesser soldiered on.
The piece depicts the lives of seven freelance dancers in New York, sharing the approach of "A Chorus Line" in that it digs deeply into dancers' personal feelings and experiences. "I Am a Dancer," however, takes a different direction from its Broadway relative. For one thing, it has no script. The seven dancers speak conversationally on video about their busy daily lives, their financial insecurities, and the lengths to which they will go to pursue their craft — even dancing with cracked ribs and broken feet. Then, four of them dance live onstage to Brahms's cello sonatas with their filmed images as a backdrop. While there is no fictional plot to the work, several real-life dramas give the piece narrative juice.
At one point, the film shows a 23-year-old dancer, Kristin Licata, after she suffered two torn ligaments in her left knee. The injuries occurred while she was dancing with another company midway through her work with Ms. Lesser. A free spirit at the start of the video, Ms. Licata — who had never been injured before — confronts the end of her career as she learns she will be sidelined for six weeks with a cast on her knee. On film, she worries that, even after healing, she will be afraid to use her body with the kind of blissful abandon that had defined her art up to that point."You know when you're a little kid and have no fear and you go on these roller coasters and you'll try anything?" she says rhetorically, through tears. "I always thought I was like that about dance, and I think that's going to be my biggest struggle and challenge."
"I Am a Dancer" conveys the almost religious fervor that drives many of these dancers. Asked why they dance, they answer in various ways: "It's transcendence, almost a communication with God"; "It is my voice"; "It's your heart, it's like a high"; "I become one with everything."
"I dance because I hate the real world," Melissa Medina, who overcame a memory problem in childhood by mastering the complex steps of dance routines, says. Dancing is an escape, she adds, a way to "visit your fantasy world and make it reality."
The dancers speak candidly about topics like cleaning toilets to make ends meet, sharing a bed in order to split the rent, and wrestling the constant bugaboo of weight. Many express their frustration with the perceived lack of respect toward their profession. "When you say you're a dancer, people assume you're a stripper and dance on a pole," Ms. Licata says wryly.
In a poignant moment, a former dancer with New York City Ballet, Lauren Toole, questions just how much her profession contributes to the world around her. "Sometimes I feel I could just disappear and no one would even notice," she says on the film. The next sequence shows Ms. Toole dancing an extended solo in a darkened studio, her movements slowed and made to resemble the silent wings of birds. This, "I Am a Dancer" seems to say, is what the world would miss without her.
November 15–18, Baryshnikov Arts Center (450 W. 57th St., between Ninth and Tenth avenues, 212-352-3103).
