untitled sad piece at United Skates of America in Rumford R.I. Thursday, Nov. 7 at 7:00 PM. Presented by Motion State Arts.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity
James Baumgartner: Does the music of The Carpenters have a special significance to you? Why did you use The Carpenters for this piece?
Heidi Henderson: I don’t start with music to make a dance. I start with moving and trying to find a way of moving that feels new or significant or meaningful without putting words to it. But this solo that my dancers and I started making together, we each performed the same solo, felt very sad. And then I was in the car one day listening to music and on came one of the Carpenters songs, and that is. No, I sang along to the Carpenters on the radio when I was a little girl, and I felt like the sadness in her voice matched what we were working on in the movement.
Baumgartner: Aside from singing along with the radio, is there anything about her voice? She has a particularly sad tragic story to her life. Is there something about that that you…
Henderson: I mean, there’s something about the fact that she wanted to be a drummer. She did not want to headline or whatever you call it, be the front person for a band. She wanted to be in the back. She was evidently an excellent drummer. And so there’s something about that too, about sort of exposure or, privacy. That sounds a little political, maybe not really privacy, but something about display or in the way we, when we stand there in front of an audience, we feel that we’re on display and we have moments at the beginning of each piece where we have to stand for a slightly uncomfortable, long period of time. hopefully not uncomfortable for the audience, but definitely uncomfortable for the dancers.
Baumgartner: untitled sad piece has a very minimal, but compelling opening. The five dancers come out on stage, holding phones, or mp3 players and wearing headphones. Could you describe that for me?
Henderson: My dancers are younger than I am, but what I did as a child was sing along to the Carpenters, or to Karen Carpenter. And I wanted to make that part of the piece, but none of us are trained singers. A couple of my dancers have beautiful singing voices. They’re not, not me and not others of us. So we have headphones on and one of us starts and then we do a canon, but none of us can hear each other. So the timing of the canon is not specific. And so it just becomes cacophonous.
Baumgartner: One of the highlights for me when I watch the piece is a duet about two thirds of the way through. It’s set to, I need to be in love.
Henderson: Yes.
Baumgartner: And when I see a duet, it’s inevitable I’m always going to sort of interpret it as a relationship, right? A relationship between the two performers. A romantic relationship, usually. Am I being too literal with this?
Henderson: No, the task for Christina and Sarah, who danced that duet and made that duet, was to make a love duet. They are not partners, but they are dear friends who have known each other for a long time and have danced with me for quite a long time, so they know something about what I’m thinking about. We had made the solos by that point, so there was an atmosphere in the air about a way of moving. But yes, it is a love duet as is the men’s duet earlier in the piece.
Baumgartner: It’s hard not to interpret some of the movements as controlling or … not the best relationship at times. At times It looks very loving. Am I looking at this wrong?
Henderson: Maybe. I think in person it looks loving. It looks like togetherness and sometimes it’s messy. The togetherness and there are catches. So one person flies into someone else’s arms or catches them in an awkward position. So I would say that rather than being controlling it’s being sort of like wait, wait, where are you going? I’ll help you or don’t go there. Let me stop you from going to that place. Yeah.
Baumgartner: Is there something you’re trying to convey overall with the whole piece together?
Henderson: I don’t want to ascribe an audience’s feelings about the piece or the meaning that they might find in the piece. I want to present it. In my brain, I seem to be able to hold both the task of the movement material and ignore the meaning at the same time, even though I know we have created meaning. So, as a dancer in the piece, I am not emoting, ever. I am just trying to do some very difficult physical material. And it may not look difficult physically because it’s, there’s something sort of plain about some of it, but it’s very difficult to do. And so our task is to perform the material with exactitude as opposed to performing the material with emotion. If that, so any, and I have had people cry seeing this piece. I had a student once who one of the songs was the song she and her mother listened to together every day as her mother was dying of cancer. So we have, you know, there’s weight there. For some people, there’s also joy in this section we call the disco bounce. and yeah, I don’t want to tell anyone what to think about it.
Baumgartner: You’ll be performing at United Skates of America in Rumford, a skating rink. How did you get to a skating rink and why a skating rink?
Henderson: 1970s. Right? The short answer. We will not be on roller skates, but the audience will have the opportunity to roller skate after the show. I think that it, I was just thinking about alternative spaces that might be large enough. There are not readily available spaces for dance in Rhode Island. This piece has been performed in three other New England states, but never in my home. And so it felt. We were offered the Wilbury, and I just wanted to try something different and try something that could be maybe wacky and exciting.
Baumgartner: What’s exciting to you about performing there?
Henderson: The lights are wild. There’s games all over the place with flashing lights. They have neon in the space. We will not light the space theatrically at all.
Baumgartner: Will you use the disco ball?
Henderson: We will use the disco ball that is already there in the space. Same thing with the music, right? They have sound capability. So that is in place.
