Artist Story: Julie Mayo

I am an artist whose medium is dance and who also has a strong tendency towards philosophical musings. As a sort of thought experiment, taking place both in and out of the studio, I am looking at the question “What is dance?” I am referring to dance here as a performance art. I am finding that along with my inquiry comes also what dance is not. Of course there are no hard and fast rules or regulating body that defines what dance is, and surely there are as many definitions as there are dance-makers, but as I go into my 15th year of making dances, asking this question, while expanding the boundaries for myself, has become an essential part of my process, as has exploring some of the myths embedded in dance’s many mini-cultures. Here I am simply taking a wee bite into a mammoth subject. My thoughts on this come from both making dances and watching them.

While attending a workshop with choreographer and teacher Tere O’Connor several years ago, in one of our many discussions he said 'dance is not about dancing' and in the same breath implicated “the swans” in the well-known ballet Swan Lake as representative of anything but the pure and virtuous creatures they supposedly symbolized. Though I’ve not seen Swan Lake it was this paradox 'dance is not about dancing' that resonated with me. It was one of those epiphanous moments when hearing the words that describe an idea crystallized something I had been working with in my own dance-making, but was unable to articulate with language. It was a moment of congruence, a moment of affirmation.

More recently at a post-performance discussion here in Chicago at Epiphany Dance Experiment of which the evening’s theme was What is Modern? Contemporary? ExperimentaI Dance? I raised this broader question “What is dance?” and was met with one response that came quickly and seemed to say clearly it is about what the body can do, what the body expresses. Seems like a logical enough response, but, for me, a closer look is needed. I come back to ‘dance is not about dancing.’ I enter into this notion with the assumption that the nature of most things is paradoxical. Dancing is no exception.

Exploring the idea that dance is not about dancing necessarily includes that dance is, of course, about dancing. This being said, it is the 'not about dancing' that I am interested in, within the form of dance itself. Then what is dancing about? The making of it: perceiving, questioning and making choices. It includes a dancing bodymind, but the act of dancing is not an end in itself, in regards to dance-making. For me, the process of creating a dance is its subject and emerges through the mining of possibilities, asking questions, probing the answers, being with what is there, moving away from what is there, asking more questions, and making choices. It is about all of these things, of which dancing is a part.

Once, I had the good opportunity to study with dance artist Jeanine Durning at SUPA, a summer choreographer’s festival in PA. The first day we took some time to write down the influences on our dance-making. After we made our lists some people shared with the group what their influences were. I was not one who read out loud that day, but would like to list them here: humor, family history, seeing dance, conflict, immediacy, procrastination, David Lynch movies, the practice of Skinner Releasing Technique and the nature of fragments. This is a brief, not exhaustive list, but interesting, perhaps, that only one out of nine of my influences has anything to do with dancing or the study of it. And this was not unusual in the group. Surprised though they were, most people's influences had little or nothing to do with dancing itself or taking dance classes.

Perhaps it is a dilemma in dance that our bodies are the medium of our making. I think it’s worth repeating that a moving/still body is one of many things at work in our dances, but not the dance itself. Because it is the body and the self we are dealing with, it can be quite difficult to gain the necessary distance we need to perceive the thing, the dance that is emerging. What interests me as a maker and a viewer is the perceiving of what the dance is, since it is always both itself and something else- or as songwriter David Byrne put it,
“Which is my face, which is a building, which is on fire.” How do the parts relate? Or not relate? What does it do? How does it act on me? What are its poetics? Inherent conflicts? Does it have a resolution? If so, how? why? I have a difficult time playing with any of these questions when dance is simply about the mechanics of a dancing body without regard to the psychosocial environment and questions inherent in human beings moving. This is not an attempt at privileging psychology over movement, but a way of including it.

I realize that it is, perhaps problematic to say that dance is not about dancing. Surely many people will argue this point and maybe a few will agree. But it is the question “What is dance?” and “What can it be?” that keeps me going back to the studio, back to making the next dance. And each of us operates in conjunction with what we find to be true for ourselves in the present moment.


Dance Artist Julie Mayo is a performer, teacher and director of Dim Sum Dance, founded in 2003. She has been a visiting artist at Middlebury College, Virginia Commonwealth University, Ohio University, University of Virginia, Columbia College, Juniata College (PA), Wilson College (PA) and the University of Maryland. In addition to her teaching, she has been commissioned by several universities to create new works with their students and recently was commissioned by The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts to present her 2007 work On the Count of Three…Love. Mayo is a certified teacher of Skinner Releasing Technique ™ and holds a BFA in dance from Ohio University. Although a recent transplant to Chicago, soon she is headed to California to pursue her MFA in Experimental Choreography at the University of California at Riverside and will divide her time between these two locales.