In this episode, NCCAkron's Executive/Artistic Director, Christy Bolingbroke enters the 'studio' with Akron Ohio based choreographer, Dominic Moore-Dunson. Moore-Dunson's recognitions and fellowships include the 2019 Cleveland Arts Prize, MOCA Cleveland’s “New Agent” award, Jacob’s Pillow Ann & Weston Hicks Choreography Fellowship, the Devil Strip Magazine’s 2018 Breakout Artist, National Arts Strategies (NAS) Creative Community Fellowship, and others. His large-scale community-based dance theatre project called The ‘Black Card’ Project premiered in September 2018 and is currently in its second iteration.
Dominic Moore-Dunson hails from Akron, OH, where he attended the University of Akron and Firestone High School (Akron School for the Arts). Recently recognized as a “New Agent” by MOCA Cleveland, Dominic has received numerous fellowships and recognitions as an emerging artist and arts leader. He was a 2019 Jacob’s Pillow Ann & Weston Hicks Choreography Fellow, a 2018 Breakout Artist by the Devil Strip Magazine (Akron), a 2016 National Arts Strategies (NAS) Creative Community Fellow (DC), and an inaugural member of Leadership Akron’s Diversity on Board Program. His solo work, CAUTION, was a 2018 commission by Akron Art Museum.
Dominic completed a certificate program with the National Arts Strategies Executive Program in Arts & Culture Strategies (University of Pennsylvania) to enhance his capacity in all aspects of running a thriving arts & non-profit culture organization. Moore-Dunson currently serves on the board of ArtsNow and the Akron Cultural Plan Steering Committee.
Dominic was a dancer, rehearsal coordinator, and educator with Inlet Dance Theatre (Cleveland, OH). During his time with Inlet, he developed a community-based dance theatre project called ‘Black Card’ Project that premiered in Sept 2018. The ‘Black Card’ Project is a live-action dance-theatre cartoon that examines the narrow definition of blackness and the African-American ideal of the “Black Card”.
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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, and was recorded in front of a live audience on the university campus. Today we join Christy Bolingbroke, our Executive/ Artistic Director in conversation with Akron-based performer and choreographer, Dominic Moore-Dunson.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: How and when did you know you wanted to be a choreographer?
DOMINIC MOORE-DUNSON: Gosh, so I think I really started to understand why choreography was cool when I went to learn, to Firestone. So, in Firestone’s dance department, the four years that you’re there, it’s actually about being a dance maker. So at 14, you get your first little, bitty assignment that’s supposed to be 30 seconds long. And you’re just, you’re making and it just came kind of natural to me and it was fun to do, and that’s kind of how it started. I was like, ‘oh, this is really fun, I get to make my own stuff.’ After just growing up dancing, being in class, and having people tell you to do. And I’m like, ‘well, I can make my own.’ And you’re challenged a lot in that department to not make things that somebody has taught you how to do. And so when you’re 14 and you, you’re trying to figure that one out, it’s really interesting. And so as you get older, that becomes something that’s a little easier to do for some people, or depending on which route you go, you might end up in a company for a long time, so you have to reinvestigate how to do that. But if you’ve done that at 14, you know that you know how to do it, right? So I think I was 14 is when I really figured it out.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: A lot of our guests, surprisingly, started in high school.
DOMINIC MOORE-DUNSON: Yeah, you start making stuff, right?
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Yeah. Maybe when you’re still a little fearless to not judge yourself so much. Cause you think you know everything in high school.
DOMINIC MOORE-DUNSON: Right, yes. Right. Oh, yeah. Always.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Yes. And with The Black Card Project, you had a very deep personal experience to mine. Is that typically where you start?
DOMINIC MOORE-DUNSON: Yeah. I, I’m a really big thinker. Like, I spend a lot of time in my life by myself in silence just thinking about life. And how I relate to the life around me and so I’m always, like, kind of looking for what is that next thing I need to work through in my life. And so usually when I make work, it’s as a result of months or years of thinking about this thing I need to work through, I don’t know how to work through it, I should probably choreograph about it, and during the process of creating I will figure out where I need to be inside of this thing. I could say there were some parts of The Black Card Project, there is this class you go to called ‘Thuggin’ 101,’ where he meets this thug character named C.T. Pain, big, big burly guy, and it’s, it’s me.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: C.T. Pain.
DOMINIC MOORE-DUNSON: Yeah, C.T. Pain. And his name’s actually Clarence Theodore Pain. And, I had a really hard time choreographing this, this part and it took me, like, nine months to choreograph this ten minute section whereas, like, Sister Burnitas church section, ‘Buked and Scorned,’ it took me a week to make it. And I realized it’s because deep down I had my own biases against people who were thugs. Or, gangster-like people. So I had to do, like, mass amount of research, not for the piece, but to get over my own and realize things about those people and why they live that way, and have empathy for them. But it took me that long before I could get to the other side. So now I'm in a very different place with people who live that kind of lifestyle and it’s because I tried to choreograph it that I got there.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Right.
DOMINIC MOORE-DUNSON: So it, my work is usually always autobiographical to some degree that’s usually about what I’m working through at the moment.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Or, or trying to process.
DOMINIC MOORE-DUNSON: Yeah.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: And a, and a choreography is a means to that processing, not just a means to produce.
DOMINIC MOORE-DUNSON: Right. Right.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: So, how would you characterize your choreographic relationship to sound? Cause there’s a lot of popular music in The Black Card Project too.
DOMINIC MOORE-DUNSON: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Yep.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: With some things we recognize.
DOMINIC MOORE-DUNSON: Yep. Yep. In that, so it’s funny, what's really fun about The Black Card Project is that, cause we had this kind of old school Saturday morning cartoon vibe. So I had to go online and search and search for these, like, old sounds, like the Flintstones sounds, and like the how they run, they take off, and all those things, and use those sound bites to help communicate the movement of the character. Right? So when Artie’s about to run and he starts running like this, you have to have that Flintstones sound to remind us of that thing when we were kids. We’ll use popular music in, in this one section called ‘How to Dance on Beat,’ but the reason we use it is as a mechanism to teach Artie about Black dance and Black social dance through the ages. So even when we use pop music, it’s as a tool to help the story move along. What we also really, really like to do is we also how do we use pop culture music to contrast what the character’s going through as well.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Can you elaborate on that?
DOMINIC MOORE-DUNSON: So back to the history section, there is the runaway slave moment, and, you know, Artie’s running and you turn around and you see this giant red slash on his back, through his clothes, and it looks like blood, and at the same time you hear this really, really, Jaron LeGrair, who some of us may know. Here in Akron he’s a singer, beautiful, beautiful voice, heavenly, singing Roll, Jordan, Roll, which is a negro spiritual, but it’s so beautiful and what’s happening is so not that there’s something about the juxtaposition of hearing and seeing that that gives an emulsion, like, it feels wrong, so then what you’re watching feels wrong. Because it was. Right? So this kind of how we use music as a tool to help the story along and get the audience to, to kind of deal with that thing that the character is dealing with emotionally.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: I think that that also speaks to a judicious use, a lot of people are, are put off by dance or theater, ‘I’m not gonna get it, I’m not smart enough.’ And there’s something recognizable that it also can be an invitation in, in terms of, you know, ‘you know, wait, you do know this, a little bit.’
DOMINIC MOORE-DUNSON: Right, right. ‘You know, you know, you know what you’re talking about.’
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Come with us, follow along.
DOMINIC MOORE-DUNSON: Yeah, you’re right. Exactly. Exactly.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: So, you engaged with Kevin specifically, Kevin Parker, to create this. But what do you look for in dancers and collaborators? Especially for any of our burgeoning dancers out in the audience.
DOMINIC MOORE-DUNSON: First and foremost, people I can trust.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Trust.
DOMINIC MOORE-DUNSON: Trust is huge. Because I’m, I’m working with material that’s usually birthed out of what I’m going through, I’m usually coming into the studio with something really raw that I don’t understand yet about myself.So I have to be in the studio with people that I can trust with me, and what’s in here.And, cause what happened with Kevin specifically, cause I’ve known him for a really, really long time, is that I’ll come with these things, I’ll just kind of like vomit things out at him constantly.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Dance vomit. Nice.
DOMINIC MOORE-DUNSON: And he’ll, he will shift through the things and then find the nugget I’m trying to get to. And because we have a relationship I know I can just talk, and talk and talk, and then he’ll point out the thing to me that he thinks I’m trying to say, and I’ll go, ‘oh.’ And then I'll vomit more about that one thing until we start to get, you know, closer and closer and closer and closer to what it is.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: A vomit feedback mechanism.
DOMINIC MOORE-DUNSON: Right? And then, you know, also that, but then physically, you do the same thing. You just start, like, making stuff, and you’re making all this stuff, and Kevin’s really, really good at being like, ‘that looks really, really good, it doesn’t make sense.’ And I’m like, ‘word, let’s try something else.’ So he, I’ll call, I also call him sort of my idea regulator. Like, it gives me the ability to just go and go and go and have somebody else that’s like regulating the ideas in the process. And then looking ok, ‘ok what actually works?’ And that I can talk through what works and go, ‘ok, this is what we need to do.’ So when I’m finding people, it’s totally about trust, it’s totally about that person being all of who they are in the space at the same time. I’m not looking for people to do what Dominic wants them to do because I don’t know everything, so why would I want that?I don’t even know what I’m looking for when I’m in the studio half the time because the thing I’m after is always greater, is always greater than where I am as a maker. Always. Whether it’s, like, craft wise, or it’s emotionally, or it’s my understanding of people, it’s always a step or two farther than where I am currently, so if you’re coming to the studio waiting for me to tell you what to do, you’re going to be really disappointed.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: I’m meeting you where you’re at.
DOMINIC MOORE-DUNSON: Yeah.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: And you’re like, ‘no, I want to go where that’s next.’
DOMINIC MOORE-DUNSON: I want to be over there. So how are we going to get over there to that thing and also love to be in a studio with people who are willing to take the subject of, of what I’m trying to get after and then look at themselves and start asking them the same question coming to studio with what they think about themselves.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Some vulnerability maybe.
DOMINIC MOORE-DUNSON: Yeah, yeah. And let’s just talk. I don’t know how many times me and Kevin during The Black Card Project, we spent an hour and a half laying on the ground talking, you know, like two buddies looking up at the sky just laying next to each other just talking about life, that had nothing, that seemed like it had nothing to do with what we were doing, but had everything to do with what we were doing. Right? So now when I’m looking at him in his eyes, and we’re, like, performing and things like that, I have hours worth of material that I can think about when I’m looking at him.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Background.
DOMINIC MOORE-DUNSON: Yeah, there’s so much in there, cause we just talk. We’re just people in a studio. We happen to be making dances to talk about our humanness, and those are the kind of people I’m trying to be with.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Is, is talking one of your tools? I, I, I offer that up because one of the, our questions, we all deal with deadlines in our daily life, and whether you’re in a choreography class or working cause when curtain up, it’s curtain up.
DOMINIC MOORE-DUNSON: Oh, it’s time to go.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: How do you work through a creative rut?
DOMINIC MOORE-DUNSON: Oh, talking.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Talking?
DOMINIC MOORE-DUNSON: Talking, I talk and I talk, and I also found, talking while dancing works really well. Because if you’re saying the thing, the statement you’re trying to give.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: If you want to illustrate, I think we would welcome that, no pressure.
DOMINIC MOORE-DUNSON: But yeah, so, yeah, if you’re trying, if you’re moving you’re trying to say the thing and you get stuck, you stay there and you talk it, and you talk it, and talk it, until you kind of hit that like lightbulb. And sometimes you have to give up and talk and you’re like, ‘I just said this, what does the thing I just said feel like?’ And then it takes you to the next spot, the next spot might not be right, but it got you out of the rut so that you can find the next thing that’s supposed to be.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Thank you, thank you. If I might also offer it’s interesting, the concept of talking and dancing, perhaps you're also getting out of your own head?
DOMINIC MOORE-DUNSON: Yeah, yeah.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Right, so if you’re trying to make the work, and you know people are talking inside of here.
DOMINIC MOORE-DUNSON: Oh, yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: So if you’re like no, no if I give it voice, make some space for what might happen next.
DOMINIC MOORE-DUNSON: When I was teaching this, this morning the class I was talking about ‘don’t dance in your head, dance in your body, dance out in the space, dance out in the world.’ There’s something about talking that puts everything you have out there, and I don't get it, but I’m going to keep doing it until I understand it. But this kind of thing starts happening which your movement and your voice start kind of attaching themselves together. Me and Kevin can go through the literal 90 minutes of the show and talk about it without moving what the two characters are thinking and saying to each other, and a lot of the times when we’re like trying to work on a moment we don’t understand, or like, ‘why are we doing this?’ We’re questioning this moment, well but, ‘ok, let’s go back two minutes, let’s start here, let’s do the dance, and talk, and when we hit that moment, we might actually figure out what it is if we’re talking and moving at the same time.’
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: It’s not always about the physics and just trying to defy gravity, or say, ‘you must be weak today, this isn’t working.’ But to give it actually some of that emotional and human background.
DOMINIC MOORE-DUNSON: Yeah, cause the intention, like the difference between saying with your voice like, ‘hi, how are you?’ and ‘hi, how are you?’ They’re completely different, right? So if i’m moving and talking with those different intentions in my voice, when I go to do that moment that doesn’t make sense if i just came at it with a different intention I might go, ‘oh, that’s what I should be doing with my body, I'm not doing that, that’s why it doesn’t make sense.’
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Yeah, I feel you can always tell when you’re watching a show if it’s been choreographed and then they were handed the script and you can say, ‘I can see your, like, stretching yourself to deliver these lines on top of 32 fouettes,’ I use that example a lot. You’re like, ‘that wasn’t organic, that wasn’t from an honest place a little bit.’ So that’s great to think about how you’re moving through it. I would offer a favorite David Byrne quote of mine, since you’re wearing his shirt, it is if you watched his 1986 documentary and it’s when his concert has a giant suit which made his head look really small and when he interviews himself he said, ‘what’s with the big suit? What are you thinking? And he said, ‘well cause sometimes the body gets it before the mind.’ And I always love that too for, as a dancer, I was like, ‘yes, true, for sure.’
DOMINIC MOORE-DUNSON: Yeah, so good, that’s so good. So good.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: I appreciate you talking about stretching for what is next. Further than where you are. And also in this morning’s class you talked a little about lineage and I wonder if you might illuminate our audience, how do you navigate between old movement vocabularies and new movement vocabulary?
DOMINIC MOORE-DUNSON: You navigate it with a really fine toothed comb. You get really honest with yourself, if it’s your intention is to find your own thing and kind of move away from the thing you’ve been doing for so long because it’s somebody else’s you’ve learned and you’ve gotten really, really good at it, but now you’re trying to find your own, being in the studio and being honest with yourself when you’re making and being like, ‘nope, that was somebody else’s, I need to start over.’ As opposed to, ‘well, no, I look good doing that, so I’m gonna just stick it in there,’ right? Because audience’s can see that, ‘oh they’re doing that because they’re good at 32 fouettes.’ And lineage is such an interesting thing I've been really thinking about a lot lately, going back to the fact that I just spend a lot of time thinking is, you know, with Inlet Dance Theater, our base technique is the Hawkins technique. Eric Hawkins technique. Eric Hawkins danced for Martha Graham, he was the first male in her company. Depending on who you ask, they were, they were also together, and he took Martha’s work and how she moved her body and her technique and used a lot of the same exercises, but looked at it from a very different vantage point. He was interested in how is the body a set of hinges and how can you use the body with those hinges in such a way where you don’t have to use a lot of muscles to make things happen, which gives you the ability to have a greater emotional arc and tone inside of your physique. As a way to also be able to survive a 90 minute dance a lot easier because you’re not muscling anything. So Eric Hawkins taught a woman named Alice Rubenstein at Julliard, and she danced with him for years. Alice ended up moving to Cleveland and starting a company called Footpath. Footpath was Ohio’s leading modern dance company in the ‘80s, and Bill Wade the artistic, the executive director of Inlet Dance Theater danced in Footpath. And so he kind of, he took that thing from her and the way she did it and you know years and years and years down the line, and many other things that he did, he started Inlet Dance Theater and our base technique is Eric Hawkins. So every morning I get up, and I dance, and I do the Eric Hawkins technique and that’s how I warm up. I’ve been doing that for 10 years.So that stuff is ingrained into my physique and as I’ve become my own maker I’ve started asking the questions, what is mine and what is what I’ve learned?
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Also with these learned or inherited techniques, these, these were from white makers.
DOMINIC MOORE-DUNSON: Yeah, it’s, yeah very different.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: And, and so that has to carry differently as well.
DOMINIC MOORE-DUNSON: Yeah, definitely. And there, and because, you know, if I were to be on the other lineage that, you know, started with a Black maker all the way down to me, it would look completely different, just because how Black makers move their body naturally just has been different in time. There's no value statement, it's just different. And so, you know, I'm looking at that and then looking at how my own body just likes to move because I come from a Black background, I'm Black, I know social dances, I've been dancing in Black communities my whole life. So that's another, you know, learned thing. How do I take those two things and take what I appreciate out of both and use them? And where do I also just find my own, and not take from anybody, and let that birth something new. And I think for me, it's just, it's a process. It's a process of honesty. It's a process of talking it out. It's a process of being okay with not feeling like you're disrespecting by not taking that thing from somebody. That's a pretty big emotional thing I had to get over that like, ‘if I'm not doing this this way. I feel like I'm rebelling against that person therefore disrespecting them.’ Or, ‘if I do it this way, am I just gonna be another Black choreographer? Who does that thing that way?’ Right So there's, like, all these kind of like intellectual, emotional things you have to go through when you're just trying to find your own. That's not something they teach you, right?
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: No, no. And what I appreciate about, in The Black Card Project is, I feel that just because it's a known or an old vocabulary, whether it's in concert dance, or social dance, or popular culture, how you very exactingly, I appreciate the fine tooth, toothed comb analogy, will incorporate that. Both to tease the audience in, ‘Im gonna do a little cabbage patch. Here we go. I'm gonna reference Alvin Ailey's Revelations because that’s what everyone thinks that’s what Black modern dance is, or should be.’ And so it's both a tease for the audience, and commentary.
DOMINIC MOORE-DUNSON: Yeah, yeah, we spend, if you actually, you have a chance to see The Black Card Project, and you really, really look at it and maybe see twice, the second time think about the whole thing being a commentary on everything it's referencing, right? So it's a ‘90s Black sitcom. We're making commentary on the fact that the only way Black people could really get on TV in the ‘90s for TV shows was by being Urkel. And they were taken in and, and, and loved for that, if they were funny, they could be on TV, but a Black person in the ‘90s, trying to do a really, really serious role that had nothing to do with their Blackness. Wasn’t gonna happen, right? So just a commentary on that. The commentary on doing the cartoon thing is that in the history, there's been, you know, these cartoons made, it means basically, Northern or, or Southern propaganda at the times, that they would have these, in the newspaper, they would have these caricatures of Black people, right? And once slavery was abolished in the South, go back, before slavery was abolished in the South. What happened inside of these cartoons they wrote, there was these images where the Black people all looked really, really happy. They looked happy, they were always dancing in these photos. They were eating watermelons literally in these photos, they looked like, just like they were having a ball being slaves. As soon as slavery was abolished, and reconstruction happened, those caricatures, those images changed drastically. And all of a sudden, they look like criminals. All of a sudden, all the stories were about these Black people who were down there, you know, raping white women, and all these things. And that's how they were making them. So we're making a commentary by doing the cartoons of how we've been looked at as cartoon characters for much.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: In, in that, that this was the system of categorizing Black people.
DOMINIC MOORE-DUNSON: Right. Exactly. And then the kind of Vaudeville minstrel show, it’s a little bit more obvious, this idea if I’m going to talk about the narrowing of the identity of Black people, why don’t I take a theater structure that was about narrowing the vantage Black people, right? Like, ‘oh, Black people they have, you know, really, really dark skin, like it’s shoe polish, and these really, really big red lips.’ I don’t have the big red lips. Right? But that was the image, so let me take that and also use that.So every single thing that you see is always a commentary on what it looks like we’re doing. So, it’s kind of really, really multilayered that way. And we have all these Easter eggs inside the show. We hint at the idea of colorism. In the Black community, this idea that, like, I’m darker skinned, so if I had a lighter skinned friend, there’s a little combatant against us. And actually how that comes from slave times of being a field slave or a house slave. And it shows up just suddenly in the opening scene where you see these three bears. It’s a really dark bear, and a lighter skinned bear, and a lightest skin bear that could pass for white. And it’s like, but, we put that there on purpose. Right? So there’s all these tiny Easter eggs that you have to see it a bunch of times to go, ‘holy crap I’ve never seen that before. I see what they’re doing here.’
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Oh my goodness.
DOMINIC MOORE-DUNSON: Yeah.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: I’m curious. Can you then in your own terms I invite you to define, what is Black dance?
DOMINIC MOORE-DUNSON:Black dance is whatever dance Black people do.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Great.
DOMINIC MOORE-DUNSON: Which is, I’ve had arguments about that. But it’s the same with The Black Card Project, the whole point of it is that career path is Black if a Black person’s doing it. End of discussion. Right?
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Love it.
DOMINIC MOORE-DUNSON: Black dance can be, it can expand more. It can be more. It can be all it wants to be, we don’t all have to feel like we have to look like a descendant of Alvin Ailey. We don’t have to. Because for as many Black people there are in the world, that’s how many different Black experiences there are in the world. So, you can’t tell me that out of all of our experiences, we’re all gonna look like Alvin Ailey. We’re not, you know, we’re not the same people. We’re from the same people group, but we’re not the same people, right? Me and Kevin are both Black, we’re two different people, so our art should look different. It will have similarities because experiences, you know, on a macro level might have some similarities, but…
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: And more of your experiences have been woven together.
DOMINIC MOORE-DUNSON: Right, and but, when people make art, like we’re dif, we're different kind of thinkers, we’re different kind of movers, we’re different, emotionally different and all those things. And I think we had to be careful to fall into this trip to think we all have to look like Ailey, cause Ailey did Ailey and he did that real good.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Yes.
DOMINIC MOORE-DUNSON: And let that be that, you know? And if you want to dance for that, power to you, do that thing. But don’t feel bad if yours doesn’t look like that, right? If yours looks kind of like Cunningham? Word. Do that then. But do it for real.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Yeah.
DOMINIC MOORE-DUNSON: You know?
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: So what, how would you define virtuosity in dance?
DOMINIC MOORE-DUNSON: Virtuosity to me, just in my small perspective, in my small world, is obviously there’s the, the physical virtuosity, the ability to do many things with your body. Clearly. That's a big deal.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Well, cause another part of your lineage is from Pilobolus, I don’t know that we had gotten to that. Which you may or may not have, recall seeing on the Oscars a couple of years ago when bodies would, you know, do these crazy death defying shapes almost like the circus to make the shape of a car out of six bodies.
DOMINIC MOORE-DUNSON: Right, right, right.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Which largely means, like, holding people up, counter balance, and, you know, that, that, that’s also in your lineage.
DOMINIC MOORE-DUNSON: Right right. And so you have to, virtuosity is so tightly connected to this word craft. This word of like what does it mean to do that thing but it be so clear that the audience really understands what you’re saying? And that can be in your physical body, that can be in the, the acting values that you bring to the stage. You know, you can use your body in such a way where it’s not about character, it’s about literally what your physical body is doing. Or you can use your body in such a way where the movement itself communicates emotional tone. Or you can use your body where you are literally a character who’s having an emotional reaction to something else that happened on the stage. So, virtuosity to me is about your ability to fine tune your craft no matter what it is, in a way that is clear in its communication.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: If, if I might also offer, you know, The Black Card Project is deeply researched. And how one incorporates that research, kind of showing your work to great effect, and incorporating it in the finished work is not necessarily something that just comes necessarily, that’s part of the craft too.
DOMINIC MOORE-DUNSON: Oh yeah, yeah, that’s part of the craft. Part of the craft is like how do you take the, the years of reading that you did and that show up in your body so that they don’t have to read it. They just read you, and they got it. And that’s that’s a different kind of making process, and a different kind of performing process as well.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Yeah. So, I'm curious in making a creative life, what's the best piece of advice that you’ve received and, or would like to offer? Both for our makers, but anyone who ever had, had to make anything. Whether you’re writing an essay or building a house.
DOMINIC MOORE-DUNSON: Right, right. Best piece of advice I got was ‘trust,’ how was it said to me, it goes back to trust, right? ‘You have to trust that the thing that you’re grappling with will connect to people. As opposed to making stuff always for those people.Trust that the thing that you’re try, you’re working through because you’re human, because you’re being honest about your thing that you’re going through, when it ends up onstage, whether it’s, you know, fully produced, or half produced, but you have that virtuosity and you do it clearly, that it’s gonna connect to people because you’re, you’re never the only one.’ Right? And sometimes there are going to be people in the audience that didn’t realize they were grappling with that thing until you showed them that you were. And that’s different than you showing them that, that they’re grappling, and therefore, they realize they are, and now all of a sudden there’s an engagement, and a connection that’s different then, ‘let me make something for you because you need to change.’
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Right. Because I think you need to do this, or ‘I think you’re gonna like this, and so that’s why I’m gonna make it this way.’
DOMINIC MOORE-DUNSON: And it’s like, ‘no, make, make the thing that you need to make.’ And then in the process, if you’re interested in other people’s, you know, ideas and their thoughts in the process build them in. But you have to start with what is the thing that’s true and honest to what you’re trying to do and what you’re trying to say, which is, that is a thing that can be harder than it sounds.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: It, it is the blank page. Right?
DOMINIC MOORE-DUNSON: Yep, yep.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: You know when you’re in school and you get that prompt, you're like, ‘ok great I know I have to write five pages, or ‘x’ number of words for this grant on that.’ But to truly start from a place of self-reflection is scary.
DOMINIC MOORE-DUNSON: Right. And it, and it’s really scary that, and there’s no, there’s no rules. There’s no, ‘well, this is the way you have to do this.’ It’s you saying, ‘ok, here’s, here’s this studio. Here’s me. I’m looking myself in the mirror. I guess I’m gonna stay in here until I figure something out.’ And, you know, there’s many a time where I’ve been in a studio by myself, and just like I used to with Kevin, I’m just sitting on the studio floor, laying on the ground, by myself, not knowing what I’m doing or why I’m there. But gra, even grappling with that. Being in a space by yourself for hours at a time, how much does that happen for any one person, right? Without having outside stimulus happening. And so the best piece of advice I’ve ever gotten, is trust that the thing you’re grappling with is going to connect to other people.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Thank you.
DOMINIC MOORE-DUNSON: Yeah.
CHRISTY BOLINGBROKE: Everyone, Dominic Moore-Dunson.
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 we'd like to thank Julian Curet and Kat Wentz for their work. 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. Please share with your friends and if you’d like to help get the word out, rate us and leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Thank you for listening and stay curious.