In this episode, NCCAkron's Executive/Artistic Director, Christy Bolingbroke enters the 'studio' with Caribbean-born, New York-based choreographer and arts leader Paloma McGregor. McGregor is also the co-founder and Artistic Director of Angela’s Pulse and the Dancing While Black project.
In this episode, NCCAkron's Executive/Artistic Director, Christy Bolingbroke enters the 'studio' with Caribbean-born, New York-based choreographer and arts leader Paloma McGregor. McGregor is also the co-founder and Artistic Director of Angela’s Pulse and the Dancing While Black project.
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ARTIST BIO
Paloma McGregor (New York, NY) is a Caribbean-born choreographer. As co-founder and Artistic Director of Angela’s Pulse, McGregor has spent more than a decade centering Black voices through collaborative, community-specific performance projects. McGregor also facilitates technique, creative process, and community engagement workshops around the world. She toured internationally for six years with Urban Bush Women and two years with Liz Lerman/Dance Exchange and continues to perform in project‐based work, including Skeleton Architecture, an acclaimed collective of Black women(+) improvisers with whom she received a New York Dance and Performance Bessie Award for performance in 2017.
Alongside her choreographic work, McGregor founded Dancing While Black (DWB), a platform for community-building, intergenerational exchange, and visibility among Black dance artists. Since 2012, DWB has produced more than two dozen public dialogues and performances, supported the development of 22 Black artists through the DWB Fellowship, and published the country’s first digital journal by and for Black experimental dance artists.
INTRODUCTION: Thanks for joining us Inside the Dancer’s Studio where we bring listeners, like you, closer to the creative process. Inside the Dancer’s Studio is a program of The National Center for Choreography at The University of Akron, as part of our Ideas in Motion initiative.
This episode was recorded as a closed dialogue, via Zoom, during the 2020 pandemic. Today we join Christy Bolingbroke, our Executive / Artistic Director in conversation with Caribbean-born, New York-based choreographer and arts leader Paloma McGregor. McGregor is also the co-founder and Artistic Director of Angela’s Pulse and the Dancing While Black project among others.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: I’m really curious, how or when did you know you wanted to be a choreographer?
PALOMA MCGREGOR: So, I would say that started really early, even as I’m not sure I would have used the word choreographer. I’m from St. Croix, which is a US Virgin Island in the Caribbean, and parading and performance culture and dance is so much a part of the fabric of cultural life there. So, I feel like I was brought up in a performative culture, in a culture that values performance as an intrinsic part of living. And then I would say more concretely that my sister, who’s now a theater director, and I started making performances, I think, as soon as I could get her to do the things I wanted her to do. She’s four years younger than I am. And so, we started to hatch up performances for like, family gatherings, or like small groups of people who might be at our house, or we might be visiting their house. And part of the reason I think she’s a director is inevitably I would push a little too far in terms of the specificity of what I wanted, and she would quit the show. And then I would have to lure her back into the show and I think that helped her understand a little bit more about her own desire to want to be in charge of, of how a rehearsal process might go. So, I think that’s a seed of it for me is having childhood experiences of a culture in which performance was valued and then really feeling like, ‘oh, of course, that’s, I want to be a participant in that and one of the ways I can participate in that is to make performance for whatever audience might be before me.’
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Yeah. Well and I’m hearing so much this, the value and importance of language, I’m hearing making, I’m hearing directing, I’m also sort of interpolating from that there’s a navigation of personalities and ideas and, and I appreciate that, that choreography can lead to performance, but doesn’t have to only begin and end with movement making.
PALOMA MCGREGOR: Yeah.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: But that there is a larger way often sometimes like when we work like organizing things too. Though and I’m curious then, so how or where do you start when you have the kernel of a new idea or a deadline? What, whatever may drive making now. Does it begin with an idea or movement or music? We’ve heard a, a wide range from speakers, your fellow artists.
PALOMA MCGREGOR: Sure. I would say that over the course of my choreographic trajectory there have been a variety of reasons for me to be making and a variety of things that start a process. Sometimes it started with music.I feel really responsive as a choreographer if I have a piece of music, and the music for me informs tone, dynamic physicality, of course, links to an extent. You know? As another time-based medium. And also, for me, music is also about layers and sort of teasing through the many layers that might exist within a piece of music and seeing that create some interesting landscapes to create in relationship to. But more often than not, I think, so I have a, if, if I have a piece of music, I let that be the sort of initiator of a conversation that then I’m in with the music. And, but more often than not I would say I don’t start with music now that, you know, for the past decade my creative seed has been looking at my father’s vanishing fishing tradition, making broadly, like creative practice and visioning as it shows up in community, in relationship to cultural communities, in relationship to particular spaces and landscapes. In relationship to ecologies. And so going back and relearning how to build traps and then apprenticing myself to a fisherman has sort of opened up a, a way of thinking about choreography that takes into consideration what’s the function of the work. Like, what do I think the function of the work should be? Who is the work with and where is it happening? Do all those people need to identify themselves as performance makers? Yeah. So that's, I mean, I think for me now what that means is that my work has become very community-specific. You know, who are the communities that are showing up in these spaces. So, I’ve kind of pushed my language beyond site-specific, to think about communities who show up in spaces, historically or in the present moment, and maybe even thinking about who the future folks might be, who might show up in these spaces. What do we know about the spaces? What stories do we have? How do those stories help us to generate a sense of collective understanding? And then, out of that, you know, out of building a, a sort of collective of narratives and stories that intersect and diverge, then what do we envision making together? Now for me, most often that involves some baseline of moving, that movement practice is a powerful act when you gather people together to move. And that parading tradition also taught me that. And that when we move our whole bodies, we can integrate some of the information that we’re thinking or feeling in particular parts of our body. We can allow that information to kind of circulate and it gives us another sense of possibility. A deepening. And so, for me, movement making is a tool for community building and for having a deeper understanding of our experiences. And then creating a new experience together for ourselves as a group and maybe for whoever intersects with us who might not be a participant, but who is activated in the witnessing. So, a lot of it is generated out of who shows up. And so, for me who shows up is a big seed of whatever gets developed. Like, who’s in the room, who’s in the space. And that who shows up is both who I might have thought to invite and who just is there, especially when you’re talking about in public space. And how can we avail ourselves of the happenstance opportunities to dig deeper.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: There, there’s so much in that in terms of where one starts and where it takes you. Because I think one of the great disservice questions a lot of times people ask, like, ‘well, what’s the dance about?’ Which seems to have a finite idea, right? That it, it, it’s just this. And I think that sometimes inspiration or where you begin it, that can also, kind of, reflect that something finite. But what I’m hearing is this, and that so much of it is the process of becoming, then, and, and that I think is the case for a lot of dance, right? You may go and buy a ticket to a show and you see an hour’s worth of dance onstage if you’re doing a traditional environment, but we know that the dancers, the performers, they, they carry so much of the process, that whole piece of it. So, hearing that you’re really sort of creating space for the process, for all of those that might be there to witness as well as be a part of, co-conspirators in the making is really fascinating to me. A very sort of didactic piece, but we source some of these questions from our students too, and one of the big challenges was, like, how do you name something? How do you title it, at what point in your own process does that, you know, reveal itself when you want it versus when you have to do it? Yeah.
PALOMA MCGREGOR: That’s a great question. Before I came back to dance, I was a newspaper journalist and for part of that time, I was a copy editor, so every day I was being called upon to make headlines for any numbers of things that I may have had very little to do with the creation of, but that I was being called upon to distill. And so, distillation is a part of my practice that I came into this with. Which I think has served me quite a bit, not only in terms of titling but in terms of editing materials. But I would say that sometimes titles like, say, ‘Angela’s Pulse,’ which is the name for the broad umbrella that I do all my work under. ‘Angela’s Pulse,’ I recall the, like, sheet of journal paper where I realized, like, ‘oh, I really want to name what my work is.’ And it was covered with, you know, written in all directions and, like, doodles, and, you know, a brainstorm that was quite messy, as messy as I think my mind was at that time around what could possibly happen but also as sort of generative, like, it was very thick with language. And then ‘Angela’s Pulse’ came to be, but it came out of, like, allowing myself not to edit. So, allowing myself to write without editing and, you know. Liz Lerman talks about creating dances sort of in these couple of ways, like, you know, the way you unfurl, you surface, you surface, you edit, and that those parts of the process happen at different times. Like it’s not just, ‘oh, you, you unfold everything, you unearth everything and then you edit.’ It’s, usually the process involves iterations of editing, and so I think that’s also part of it, is like, ‘let me try this on, not feeling like title has to be perfect yet, but that you’re working on, towards something in the same way you’re working on the dance.’So, I think that’s another strategy is titling something as you go and letting the language evolve as the work itself evolves. Journaling, which I’m not a consistent journaler, but journaling can help because sometimes you if you allow yourself to freely write and free, do some free association, you can start to, you start to let particular languages reveal themselves. And I would say then broadly for me, that brings me to, you know, this idea of, I like to think of myself in process as kind of a vessel. Like an open channel and, so sometimes the practice of knowing what to title something, or knowing what to edit out, or at least having a sense of clarity comes for me from sort of clearing away things that might be distracting me or voices in my head that might be the, you know, the naysayer voice or voices that I can hear of other people. And sort of clearing that noise away so that the work can tell me what it wants to be, or what it wants to be named. Like, I do think of, of artistic works as having their own life. And that I’m, and maybe because I’m a parent of a young child, you know, that I’m here to like sheppard the work. And that it takes communities of people to sort of shepherd the work into what it potentially could become. And I guess also that for me performance, which sometimes I think in some arcs feels like a final arriving place, for me performance is a part, it’s a marker of a process that’s going to be ongoing. Whether that means that particular thread of word and that particular community of people that came together to make work are gonna continue in the same way or not, that their, that the marker of progress that is performance, that helps us to understand something more about our relationships with one another, about how to be envisioning practice together will continue beyond that moment. Whether we all assemble to do, perform, that work again or not. And so, for me that’s also, that’s a tangent, but that’s also something that I feel really strongly about. And so, I also feel like titles can be in progress.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: There’s, there’s something so beautiful about that real embracing of the process, just like in the making. Because the, in, I find that challenge a lot of NCCAkron, when people don’t want to be vulnerable to share something in process or there’s such a focus on the product and so we put off naming it until it fully reveals itself, and so how one might develop a practice along the way so that it’s, it’s not always so deadline-driven, but rather that you can let it live. There are deadlines in our world, and so one of the other questions is, it when you have the pressure of making, or you work your way into sort of a dead-end, how do you get out of a creative rut? Or how do you get unstuck?
PALOMA MCGREGOR: Yeah. I would say I feel grateful that I had the benefit of a great deal of pressure as a journalist to sort of produce something every day. And then be held accountable publicly for, for what I produced. That makes the pressure of making work in dance feel generative, that I like having some pressure and when I’m facilitating or leading a group in process, sometimes when I give people tasks that it, I ask them to do in five minutes, or three minutes to do this piece of things, I sometimes like to say that pressure makes diamonds. Which is, you know, so I feel like there’s, there is a generative potential just in nature in pressure and that I feel that myself, I would say. About getting stuck though, maybe by this point some of what I do not to feel stuck is I understand something about my own, what feels generative to me, what kind of process feels generative to me, and what kind of process feels like I don’t know why we’re showing up in the room together. And so, I tend to lean toward small workshops, like, short workshops, a week, two weeks, where we can feel the pressure and that we know at the end of it we, we’re not expecting to be done, per se, but we’re expecting to get some, get somewhere together. And that kind of short timeframe doesn’t allow for me to wallow too much in uncertainty or feeling stuck. And then I try to think of each new day within that as a new start, like, if something wasn’t working the day before, ‘ok, well let’s start again in some new place, you know?’ There’s never a loss for ideas, especially if you’re inviting other people in to be, as you said, co-conspirators in the work. Inside my practice in the past few years, I’ve started leading shared practice. Because everybody I invite into the room has a practice, you know, whether they think of it that way or not. And so, it’s a little, it’s, it’s also about folks stepping into their own leadership and so, yeah. Rehearsal process and workshop process often involve shared practice. I might lead the first few days where we spend thirty minutes, an hour doing something together that may or may not have anything exactly to do with what we’re making, but that’s building our collective. And that inevitably does generate something that may be of use in the making of whatever work we’ve come together to make. But then other members of the collaborative team will step in to lead their own ideas of shared practice. And for me, it’s an exciting time also for folks to take risks. And for me to take risks in terms of, you know, ‘oh, I think I’ve figured out a and b of how to lead this thing, but I don’t actually know what’s going to happen after that.’ And if we allow ourselves to bring that kind of energy into a generative process and we practice even that kind of uncertainty, it, I find that it yields something within the making of the work. To already be practicing in a low stakes kind of way being uncertain, being at the edge of our understanding of our own practices. And it’s, it’s what I’m trying to push myself to do and so inviting all of us to sort of be in that together has felt useful in the past few years as like a, a next strand of my practice.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Yeah, I love this idea of practicing uncertainty. And, and I feel. I’m sorry, I have two more questions and I feel you, you’ve sort of been answering one of them along the way, and it really comes from you, we chose to talk about this capsule series as ‘21st-century dance practices’ because it is acknowledging and reflecting on a moment. If, the 20th century was not only done this way, but really pri... seemed to prioritize single choreographer models. Very hierarchical, I'm going to make the dance, you’re going to do it positioning. I’m curious in your own words if you’d like to add anything. What does ‘21st-century dance practices’ mean?
PALOMA MCGREGOR: Wow. I think for me, as I think about the way in which my work, built into the past decade of work is this, is this loop. Like a Sankofa loop. Like, oh, go back, learn your father’s vanishing fishing tradition, ask yourself what do you take with you, leave behind and reclaim when you leave an ancestral home. Ask other people what they think about those questions. See what happens when you bring that up in a context that’s not your home context. See what connections you might make between these spaces. And then thinking of those questions and those intentional, sort of, communities of curiosity and visioning as being a forward direction, like, both about, like, in our present moment I feel like I’m pulling, pulling, and rooting myself, pulling on and rooting myself in traditions that I didn’t participate in that are from, that are vanishing in fact. And that are from another time and place. Thinking about what they have to teach me in the present moment and what about my own practice, about how what relevance my practice might have in a context broader than maybe concert dance and the sort of touring dance model. Like it’s not a model I participate in really. Even as, as a child, it’s, the touring dance model, let’s be clear, 20th-century dance and the way in which it allowed for folks like Dance Theater of Harlem or Ailey to come to a small island in the Caribbean and inspire me to dance is also a part of, you know, what I’m grateful for. So that’s also coming with me a bit too. And then thinking about how movement making, how dancing together, how activating the full body’s capacity and intellect in fact is a way that we might move forward together as communities into a, into envisioning a future where we might come together more often, to be in more sort of circular scenarios that eliminate the hierarchies in favor of valuing the things that each person brings into the room. That are important and necessary in that moment and beyond and maybe cultivating even more of a sense of value among the group of each person’s contribution. And that’s really what I’m interested in doing, and the body, the doing of it is why dance for me. I mean, I love dance, like, since I was in the womb I’ve been dancing, my mom says. So of course, dance is my way in, but, you know, clearly, I had this other trajectory where I also love writing and words and language. And even then, though it was about, like, how do we get more stories into the paper of folks whose stories are not always in there. How do you, and it also has a public component, so what is this, what might dance have, what might movement making have, what might creative practice that’s fully embodied have to offer a future that, that we might presume to be more disembodied, or more dependent on sort of technology, on sort of digital technologies. For connectivity, I feel like, in a, I think the body will always be significant, and so rooting my practice in people being in their bodies together and understanding how to do things together. How to hatch up visions together and then enact those visions feels like a necessary practice for the future, beyond dance.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Yeah, and so much that’s in that, it’s so much bigger than a single technique. Just acknowledging the words that I didn’t hear where it’s like, ‘oh, no this is a different question instead of, like, how flexible you can make yourself to how you can be in your body.’ Which may be being in the splits.
PALOMA MCGREGOR: Yeah.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Which may be standing still, but that invitation, it, it also feels like it’s kind of turning on its head that technique can be an underpinning that has a lot of different forms as well.
PALOMA MCGREGOR: Well, what I’ll say about, two things I’ll say about that, is one, we moved quite a bit when I was a child and so we left the Virgin Islands where I started dancing doing Afro Caribbean dance, but also ballet and modern and jazz. And I quit dancing somewhere in that trajectory because I couldn’t do the splits anymore. And so, this notion, and a, and even as a professional like when I came back to dance and then was touring and, you know, and sometimes doing school shows with Lincoln Center and what. And the kids ask, ‘well can you do the splits?’ Like this, so this idea that like a particular strain of technical virtuosity is a marker of your potential to be in dance I think is true in some parts of dance, you know? I mean a lot of my training has involved many classical techniques including my grad program was Graham and ballet, before that I was doing Horton. Be, so you know I feel like there’s a way in which I benefitted from having done, from having experienced these classical techniques. And I see they’re a part of my lineage. And that also allows me to choose how I want to value that within my own practice. And what are some of the other things that are part of my lineage that might not be dance-based. Like my mom was a public-school art teacher and a union organizer, that feels like it’s also a part of my practice.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Organizing, that’s directing, that’s yeah.
PALOMA MCGREGOR: Yeah. So, I feel like having a sort of non-linear path to dance and to my choreographic practice has allowed me, I think at some points felt like I was behind. Like I, I know that there are points at which I felt like, ‘oh, I got to, you know, push.’ And then at this point, I feel quite integrative about the ways in which the experiences that I’ve amassed over time that might not have a direct relationship to dance are directly related to the way that I make dance. And how I vision a creative process unfolding. And what I, what I value about the folks who show up in the room, the kind of process that I want them to experience, and the kind of process that I want to have sort of a larger reverberation for folks who witness the work. And so, it’s, I feel like it’s still unfolding like what the work is continually telling me what it wants to be now. And that feels really exciting.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: My last question is for anyone who is trying to navigate a creative life, be it choreographer, dancer, or otherwise, is there a particular piece of advice that you’ve received or that you would like to offer moving forward?
PALOMA MCGREGOR: That’s a great question. I feel like you can’t underestimate practicing listening to your gut bone, to your intuition about the direction you feel you need to go in regardless of what other pathways are sort of being presented to you. I feel like my trajectory has reinforced for me that impulse to kind of, ‘ok I know this is a trajectory I could take, but I’m not, I'm just not sure that it’s my trajectory.’ I would also say do your best all the time because our communities are so small in truth that, you know, I like to tell young dancers like, ‘the me who was a journalist writing crime stories, the me who was waiting tables in park slope, and the me who auditioned for Urban Bush Women and got it, you know, all of those me’s needed to be doing their best.’ So, I feel like that’s one thing, you can’t underestimate where a thing will lead you. And then I think one thing that has really served me is having a North Star. Like having something that felt beyond my reach but that I could set myself in the direction of. You know, I interviewed Jawole from Urban Bush Women when I was 20 and I was a journalism student, and what she said about dance in that time blew my mind. I was like, ‘wait.’ I mean, I realized that that moment, ‘oh, you're talking about storytelling, and I’m doing this journalism thing, but I really love dance and those things could actually be together in this very compelling aesthetic vision.’ And a decade later I was auditioning for her, but I had, you know, I still went, I still worked at a newspaper. I still did all the things, so it’s not a direct line. And it’s not, I’m not saying, like, ‘oh, that was meant to work out’ per se. But I ended up going back to graduate school, moving to New York in the hopes of working for Urban Bush Women and then establishing a creative community in, within that had that audition not worked out, I still would have set myself on the path that got me to New York, that built the strong community of folks around me. And that those decisions, it helped me eliminate, I’ll say, the reason I’m bringing this up, that helped, having a North Star helped me eliminate distractions. You know, ‘ok, if I really want to go and work for Urban Bush Women, then I should be working with other people who’ve worked with Urban Bush Women, who are working with Urban Bush Women. And if other things are calling my attention away from that focus, then I actually need to make some decisions not to do other things in order to stay focused on this thing.’ So, I feel like that was a big, that was really helpful for me because it both kept me in the direct, general direction that I was aspiring toward, but it also just helped me make choices. You know, New York, or anywhere you go will have multiplicity of possibilities of things you could do with your time, and so being, having as much clarity as you can at any given moment and then also forgiving yourself if you made choices that you later, you later wonder about. But, you know, having some clarity about how you vision for yourself, what you vision for yourself, and then making choices that seem aligned with that visioning in as much as you can understand it at the, at the moment. Feels like a huge part of how to make a life. Now that’s not all the practical stuff about making money and all of that, I mean that’s, that’s all part of it, but I do feel like if you’re doing your best in whatever you do the mon, you’ll figure out the money part. I feel like dancers are incredibly reliable generally, like to be early, you know, I think the kinds of skills that you learn when you’re training as a dancer are applicable in a lot of areas that we underestimate. So, I think my dancers showed up at, at my newsroom every day, you know, so, yeah. Those are some things.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Yeah, no, that’s wonderful. And I hear so much even in your advice, that Sankofa loop that you talked about, right? Cause we would say, ‘oh, what could I, what can I bring with me on this? How can I reflect on that, that may also, you know, lead where I want to go?’ Which is helpful to think about in our field because there is no one path.
PALOMA MCGREGOR: Yeah.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: And, and that, that’s both the, I often say, both the blessing and the curse. It can be whatever you want to make of it, but we do need those sort of boundaries, those sort of quick generative deadlines that you were talking about. Like, ‘ok, great.’ Otherwise, if you’re totally untethered, or could go anywhere, you could get stuck up in the multiplicity current.
PALOMA MCGREGOR: That’s right, that’s right. And then to re, reinvestigate. Like, continue to be curious about your own North Star. The thing you thought you wanted two years ago and how is that, is that still applicable. You know, what does it mean to set a North Star to get into a dance company, and then you get into it? What am I supposed to do then? You know, so it’s, I mean, so it’s, like, about constantly having some time for self-reflection to figure out, like, what is, what am I finding satisfying, what am I not? How might I create the opportunities for myself to feel like I'm fulfilling my potentials and therefore be satisfied? So, you know, it’s all, it’s always evolving. I don’t think you arrive there and then it’s done, thankfully so because we hope to keep on going in our, at least for me I feel like I want my life trajectory to be a continually sort of emergent, evolving one.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Yeah, yes. Paloma McGregor thank you so much.
PALOMA MCGREGOR: Yeah, thank you.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: For all of your wise words and being so vulnerable and sharing your path with us. We really appreciate it.
OUTRODUCTION: Inside the Dancer’s Studio lunchtime talk series is supported by NCCAkron, The University of Akron, The University of Akron Foundation, and the Mary Schiller Myers Lecture Series in the Arts. Our podcast program is produced by Jennifer Edwards, Ellis Rovin is our composer and editor, transcription by Madeline Greenberg, theme music by Flocco Torres, cover art by Micah Kraus, and Julian Curet and Kat Wentz are our artist coordinators. We hope you enjoyed this episode, and we encourage you to subscribe on your favorite podcast streaming platform by searching for Inside the Dancer’s Studio. Thank you for listening and stay curious.