I've long been a fan of Keely Garfield's work. Her nutty sense of humor, her surreal vignettes, the honest emotions that well up in her work, it all combines to make for a rich, enigmatic, and yet ultimately satisfying experience. I was very pleased to catch up with this elusive choreographer in Brooklyn, New York, and find out something about the artist behind these amazing works.

An abbreviated version of this interview appeared in Dance Europe magazine. I'm pleased to share with you here a longer, more rambling version of our chat.

Do you think of yourself as a dancer or an actor?
I don't really think of myself as an actor at all. This time last year a friend of mine, David Brick, from Headlong Dance Theater, and Dan Rothenberg—who's the artistic director of Pig Iron Theatre Company—approached me about being the lead actor in their new theatre work which was going to be based on Haruki Murakami's work, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and I was like "No way, what do you mean? I'm not going to speak lines in a play." Somehow they tricked me into coming along to do some kind of movement or theatre movement workshops and before I knew it I was not only improvising being a bear turning into a bird, but I was ad-libbing some very surrealist dialogue: there was an empty office and I'm waiting there for somebody to appear from somewhere to give me some official document that points me toward some missing person or moment. Anyway, the play evolved out of that and I did actually achieve the lead role, but we improvised a lot and scripts were drafted out of those improvisations—so I ended up having to study my own words more formally. It was a fabulous experience in terms of the creative playfulness and the cast—but I could not wait to get back into my more abstract landscape.

How did you get started in dance. Did you have parental influences?
Hardly any. I had a father who was—well, still is—a jazz musician, when I was growing up in London. My mother was probably his biggest fan. There was a lot of focus on my father's musical career and his writing. There wasn't a lot of room for much creative exploration in our house. I certainly recall wanting to dance, well I don't know if I wanted to, but I was dancing, I'd move the furniture out of the way and jump around and was very bossy with the kids in the streets. I'd put on my little blue wind-up record player and get everybody involved in some kind of ad hoc entertainment.

I once persuaded my mother to take me to a ballet class. I was eight or nine, and it was very, very hard. I had no idea what was going on in there. Plus, it was a ballet/tap combo and the tap portion of it fairly tripped me up. Plus my poor little sister was dragged along and she had no interest whatsoever, so she really suffered. Anyway, it was a disaster—so I reported to my mother, afterwords, that I didn't know what I was doing and she sort of threw her arms up and said "Well, screw that, we don't have to do that again." It's hard to articulate, but there was a sense that you were either a duck in water and you were swimming right away, and that anything else was probably going to be too painful an experience and perhaps she wanted to protect me from that—so we never went back. It was certainly a bitter pill because everywhere I went people assumed I was a ballerina. I had pointy feet and a long neck and silly, pretentious manners.

Where did those come from?
You can speculate on that. Probably Irish-Russian heritage. I was, by turns, moody and very idiotic. Good characteristics for a dancer. But no, there was no dancing in my house, and it was compounded, I think, by the fact that my father associated dancing with burlesque and strippers—he was in the jazz-music-nightclub world of smoke and feather boas. I don't think he thought that was a fit place for me.

So it wasn't until I was about thirteen when I ended up at middle school and there was a dance program attached, a very good dance program, and I enrolled secretly and became immersed in Graham technique and ballet and Laban theory and in a way that was very instrumental in shaping my career because it meant from the very beginning I was learning to dance, I was also learning about making dances. Looking back, it's a really odd thing. Probably explains why 13-plus years later, I think of choreography as a vehicle for dancing in my work as a choreographer, as a way to support the dance, rather than the other way around, with the dance somehow bringing life to the choreography. It's a subtle differentiation but it's a reason why I appear so often in my own work, because they happened side-by-side from the beginning.

I did also grow up with a big chip on my shoulder because I didn't start ballet when I was wee, like all the other little girls. And it took me a very long time, like until my late twenties, to really realize that I could hold my own and I was doing okay and it was fine that I didn't come out of the womb pirouetting. In fact some of the women that I encountered or worked with had gone that route and by the time they were thirty, they couldn't stomach dancing, they'd had enough of it. So who's to say what would have been the best course to follow?

When you signed up in secret for this program, it was somehow more agreeable to you than your first exposure?
Yes, certainly, because unlike the ballet class and the tap class which required standing up straight and moving your legs around vigorously, I was immediately introduced to writhing around on the floor...

That would be the Graham?
...right, and the idea that one could jump up high and fall down to the floor and it'll be there to catch you—this was much more agreeable, yes. Interestingly, I don't create a lot of floorwork now because as I get older, I find it harder to get up again. Once I get down there it's like "it's too far up!" I'd rather just stay up while I'm up.

It was agreeable, too, because I was, along the way, encouraged to make up my own stories and of course ballet would have involved interpreting other people's stories. I'm not sure how I would have fared with that. Obviously I liked making up my own stories and narratives and continue to do so. Looking back, it was the perfect training ground. Eventually I ended up at the grand old age of 18 and my teacher took me aside and asked me "What are your plans?" I think I reported that I was either going to become an astronaut or a secretary. And she took me by the ear—literally, it was sort of a Billy Elliot moment—she threw me in her little mini car and drove me to my parents' home in the middle of the day—and they were home of course, in the middle of the day, being that he's a musician, he'd probably just woken up—and she put me on the couch and started insisting I was going to dance college, and I was going to study dance, and I was going to become a dance teacher. And that was the big thing—my father started looking all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed: a teacher! He hadn't really thought about that. It all sounded rather respectable. And that was sort of it. We filled out the application, I choreographed a terrible solo, it was called The Door—I don't know that I want to say much more about it.

What did you feel was so terrible about it?
I was 18, that is what was so terrible about it.

But it was passionate and it was heartfelt and that set me on my course. I studied dance, performance arts, majoring in choreography and it was a gain that I had this training, because we were required to do a semester as a stage manager, there was a semester where I had to design and create a set, you know, and to make a sound track, I remember hooking up the lid of a piano and screaming into it, fiddling with the dials on a radio contraption. All kinds of things I hated, I hated the stage manager assignment but it certainly set me up with good relationships in the theater, I understand what that role is about. There was lots of choreography, lots of dancing, and I didn't really look back after that. I left school and danced for a while in England at various venues and various festivals and out-of-the-way churches. We had a little company that toured on a double-decker bus. We got stuck under a low-hung bridge one time, nearly missed a performance. We had to get off the bus and walk into the town.

I was doing a lot of training at the London School of Contemporary Dance. One of my fondest memories is of auditioning for a jazz club at the Pineapple Dance Centre. I'm not sure it's still there. I heard tell that it closed or maybe it expanded and took over the world, it's one or the other. So I auditioned for this class, it was taught by a wonderful man whose name was Charles Augins. He would announce to the class 'I'm black, gay, bald, and 40." That's that. And we were terribly intimidated, he was like the real thing. He'd put us through our paces and he would, on a whim, make us start from the beginning, with something like an extreme abdominal extravaganza workout that we did at the beginning of the class where we fairly threw up at the end of it. And he would say the only way you leave this class is if you throw up or die. And we thought he meant it. No one did either of those things, we just plowed through. It was pre-Fame, too, but it was a Fame moment. Somebody must've been spying through the keyhole at that part. But in terms of the musicals I've choreographed, when I worked in musical theatre, those classes were a goldmine.

In the background, all the time, was the thought that people say “You're not a real dancer until you've been to New York.” Because, at the time, it was the early- to mid-1980s and New York really was a thriving scene. I saw a show at Riverside studios with Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane, David Gordon, Molissa Fenley, I was enamoured of the work of Twyla Tharp. At school I had to read and study the writings of Deborah Jowitt who, as you know, all these years later, I have stacks of writing by Deborah Jowitt about me, which is a lovely turnaround. And it wouldn't have happened if I hadn't actually hopped on a plane an gone to see what was happening in New York.

How old were you when you did this?
I was 25. I thought I would be here for three months and it's been about 22 years.

It's been good, no regrets?
No regrets. Well, yes, regrets. I've always wondered about people who say they have no regrets. I've lots. Lots. I really do. But it's partly because I really think The Matrix is the gospel according to... —and that there are multiple universes, perhaps, and I do wonder about the different versions of those lives that I might've led. Absolutely. I often wake up and wonder why I'm not in a moldy, wet cottage in Devon, with a roof leaking and my farm dog yapping at my heels and my Wellies stuck in the mud outside the door and I'm off for a big walk in the bog on the dank moor.

No dance in that life?
No dance, only writing books.

Is writing something that attracted you at some point.
Yes, it still does. I write, I have written two novels.

I didn't realize!
Yes, well, nobody knows because nobody's read them. The first thing I did was to write a surrealistic autobiography. My alter ego, her name is Cherish English, does get up to a fair bit of mischief, and I did this as part of national novel writing month, it's a big thing that you do, you sign up with everybody and for a month you write and you write and you come up with 50,000 words at the end of one calendar month which is the equivalent of a small novel like Of Mice and Men, or is the 'official novel size' —it was the most fun I ever had. It was wonderful. It really got cooking when I ran out of ideas and themes and plots and what he was going to say to her and what she was going to say to him.

It also informed my creative process for making dance because the same thing happens. Once I've run out of ideas, once I don't know what happens next, or why we're even assembled in the first place, it's hellish and it's scary, but on the other side of that is the good stuff. The thing about writing that was so enjoyable, it's cheap, I could stay at home, I could drink my tea, I could keep my own hours, which tends to be the middle of the night, I don't have to pay dancers or family. I loved it. It was very freeing. I don't think I'm terribly good at it, but I've sort of freed myself from the notion that I should be good at anything a while back in my 30s and things have been better.

That's a brilliant notion, actually.
Yeah, it's very good.

Do what you enjoy, it doesn't matter if you're good at it.
For goodness sake, yes. Part of the system of this writing, one of the things that was stipulated, was that you write a note to your editor, 'here are your tickets to Spain, see you in a month. Enjoy yourself.' I'm being a little facetious, but I never invited mine back. It will cripple you. I've seen it, and every artist goes through it. It's crippling. In a way, the fact of the matter is that what we artists do is so subjective. I don't think there's an ounce of objectivity. So something that I made that somebody is completely on board with, or completely in love with, somebody else detests! And it's abhorrent to them. And the same thing with me. I'll look at something I've made and feel really in tune with it and feel a great nurturing toward it and there will be other moments where I'm aghast at it, horrified by it. I think all of this is just the business of the mind and not interesting to the heart and not relevant to the heart of the matter.

Tell me what it was like arriving in New York and trying to fit into the dance scene here.
New York is the kind of town where someone points at others and says 'You: yes. You: no. You: yes. You: okay, but not you.' I know people who've arrived here, they've lost their luggage, a cab's run over their foot, they got mugged on their way into their apartment and it's just a nightmare and they'd turn around and leave. There are others for whom I don't think a red carpet is laid out, but you do get some kind of a leg up. For me, that was about getting off the plane, being met by my good friend who took me to a coffee shop, that's where we hung out in the eighties, and the man serving me was a dancer and he said 'Oh, do you dance? I dance. Great. I have a studio. Let's get together next week. We'll make something. A week later we were showing it in somebody's living room somewhere and I think a week after that they wrote about it in the Village Voice.

I very much slotted right in. As I say, it's not about everything being laid out for you, I think the invitation is there and then you have to have the wherewithal, the curiosity, and the energy to show up. You can't sit on the fence, you actually have to get out of the house and go. And I did that and I continue to do that, so naturally there was an accumulation. I realized, a year later, the deadline for coming and going had gone by. I was enrolled at the Merce Cunningham studio as a foreign student at that point. I was making a lot of work with a lot of folks and we were showing it through P.S. 122 and at The Field and Eden's Expressway.

There's been sort of a return to that right now. When I got here, there were a lot of independent little spaces, people doing it for themselves, lots of places to go see dance and to interact with dance, and then it went through the 90s, a more formal period, I think people kind of thought we were going to have it big, like it was going to get plush and the institutions were going to take care of us and we were going to have fine establishments to work in with air conditioning, and heating in the winter. It didn't quite pan out that way. And so we're back to the far-flung lofts in Williamsburg, Queens and again dancing in living rooms and back yards and I think that's very healthy and totally cyclical. As I get older in dance, I realize when I was younger I thought I was inventing the wheel, like everybody else I know now that we were just re-inventing it and it's being re-invented again, and so on and so forth.

I had a bit of an epiphany when I first applied for funding, and at the time I was deterred a little bit by my fiscal sponsors who were like “you've got to get your name established a bit more, it has to go across the table a few more times, people have to hear about you consistently” and I said you know what, I've already written the proposal, I might as well just stick it in the post. And I received a call from the funding body, it was the Jerome Foundation, who said to me that not only were they going to fund me, they were going to fund me double the amount I requested. And that was because, and I offer this just as encouragement to younger dancers, and that was because they had heard about me from this person and that person and the other person and that they had essentially heard good reports not just about the work, but of my work ethic and that meant something and they wanted to get on board and support that. That was a very big moment to me, affirming my belief in the fact that you have to get out, you have to show up, that it buillds, it accumulates, it's a brewing of activity. Also the fact that I hadn't been deterred by voices who were actually trying to protect me and set me on the right course, but you really have to go out on a limb and trust your own gut instinct on things. It never hurts to put it out there, the worst thing that can happen is that it comes to nothing. Somehow, even that leads you to the next moment.

How long had you been here working before that turning point happened?
I think I'd been here about eight or nine years, so it was a long time. I had already had my work produced at PS 122, and at Dance Theatre Workshop and at some of the other major venues at the time, and I had been working consistently and had also figured out, early on, that the best thing to do after a show, whether it was a successful engagement, or not-so-successful, was to pretty much just head back into the studio and keep working. I understand that there are fallow periods, and you have to breathe out before you can breathe in, but you don't wait for somebody to knock on the door and hand you your next project, you have to head back to work. If you treat it like work, it's rigorous. Most people who work nine-to-five don't get to choose whether or not they're going to go in on Monday morning. It's the same in a way, for artists, you have to create that discipline for yourself, to go to work. It was certainly a bunch of years before I started to attract funding, but I didn't really need funding before that. I always worked very low key, it was back in the days when we would trade services—I'll dance in your work, you'll dance in mine. We'll rehearse in so-and-so's cold basement. It's really once you start to get a little more involved in production value and you get a little bit older and you need a little bit more time to warm up that it starts getting expensive. It's true. I remember when we used to rehearse in the park, now, it's “Rehearse in the park? Are you kidding me? What about the dogs?”

Yes, it's a different stage in an artist's evolution.
I still work pretty low key in that I still remain interested in what I call 'chamber dances', duets, trios, quartets, I love those relationships. I love the endless possibilities there and the intimacy and the intricacy that's available in those numbers and formations. I get my ya-ya's out when I work on student bodies and have a larger ensemble, or in a musical theatre setting, but I always return to these small dances—it keeps it manageable on some level, and I also have a very mundane/magical aesthetic in that I'll use found objects, as was demonstrated by the last show which was found objects run amok. A blue, plastic ball represents the entire planet—to me—and I love that kind of homemade, hand-hewn aesthetic. And I'm cheap—I work cheap, which is probably why I appear in everything, as well.

So when you're working with dancers, you're not imposing the steps on them? You're drawing out of them what they have?
In the sense that I'm sort of an old-fashioned choreographer, I tend to make up the steps, that's the classic definition, I suppose. To me, choreography is a collaborative form. It doesn't exist without the dancers interpreting and revealing what that is, responding to the choreography. And as I'm a dancer in my choreography, too, I include myself in that, as well. I think it's an interesting question because there should be an easy answer. It should be easy to say “Yes, I draw it out of folks”.

I almost see myself and the other dancers as scientists and the dance as an experiment, and somehow we must apply ourselves to this experiment in a way that may succeed or fail, but we're interested in whatever the results are.

It's hard to make clearer than that. It's about us versus an it: it's we, the dancers and the choreographer, versus the dance. That's a hell of a thing. Because she likes to slip out the door every chance she gets, or confound your expectation. I'm also a yoga teacher. The dance does become a spiritual, esoteric investigation for me, and there's a sense not so much that I'm drawing the dance out of anyone but that we are trying to snatch the dance out of the air around us. And noticing when each of us has been able to do that.

Dance is famously ethereal, it's held in the mind of the viewer, even the video, or film images, do not capture it. Video is actually its own medium. The experience the dancers are having on stage, sweat to sweat, skin to skin, eyeball to eyeball, is completely different from the experience the viewer—detached in their seats, somewhere a little further away—is having. There's no objectivity or subjectivity. It has to be filtered through each individual's experience and history. Nothing touches, nothing lands. It's a strange obfuscation, closer to science and religion than anything else, I think. Closer to science and religion than sport. Dance is often aligned with sport or other physical things, even acting, or other kinds of art forms, but I think it's closer to religion or science. And dancers are often priests or priest-like. They are often hermits. They often go to bed early so they can get up and go to class, to test their body in a certain way. They eat, sleep, and pray dance. It's a calling, and it demands everything of you and often doesn't give very much back. Cheers!

I've often thought of dance as a sort of green-eyed monster that will take anybody, it doesn't really care if you're good, you're bad, you're ugly, you're beautiful, it'll take you if you can do it, if you can't do it, it'll take anybody. It'll take everything you have. "Serve me!"

Paradoxically, I think the work I respond to is when I'm in the presence of other folks who've shown up to serve dance, as opposed to those who've tried to make dance serve us, I don't think it works that way. I don't think that you can actually bend the form to serve you. I think you must show up, somehow or other, in service of it. It's a weird thing.

You should ask something simple now. You'll be thinking “She's weird!” All dancers are weird.

I could ask something simple but this is the good stuff. The simpler things I was going to ask now seem so shallow by comparison to your aesthetic philosophies.
This is where my audience is—those folks who can handle the mystery, they're just fine with not knowing exactly where we just were. They're happy as can be. The others, who don't know where the heck we just went, and how we're going to get back, were not happy with that.

Funny you should say that. I was just reviewing the Groundworks company which did your Aqualung and I was saying that it's a fascinating piece to watch but it doesn't give up any of its secrets, it keeps its mystery. I imagine you making the steps on your own body, and then working with others, but Aqualung was very well tailored to those four dancers, so I wanted to ask about your working process. Did you make that piece on their bodies instead of your own?
Yes. When I receive a commission to go somewhere and work with a company, I have the great pleasure of crafting something that's for that company. It's never in my mind that I'm going to take this back and put it on my company. It's almost like perfumes, and shades and tones. Each person is so unique in that way that you do have to craft something very specific.

I've often set work on modern dancers and modern companies. Groundworks was founded as a modern company but with a very established career as ballet dancers, which gives them this fabulous facility. Technically, their range is amazing. It's a great gift to me to go in and have access to that range, both emotionally and technically in that case. It was a really great fit, right from the beginning. They're an extremely attentive group, they're hungry for imagery, they're hungry for challenges, they're hungry for narratives, they're hungry to find out about things they don't know, so it was a very good fit because those are all the things I'm interested in, too. They're very humble, they're very gracious, they're amazing, so that's all good. What I'm most amazed about is that we made it in twelve days, and when you look at it, it really is a ballet, a little jewel-case ballet. Twelve days really isn't a lot of time to make a work that's so fleshed out, it has a definite beginning, middle, and end.

Initially, we really worked with states of the body. So if we were exploring the idea of floating, simply put, then I would demonstrate what it felt like and looked like in my body, they would sort of respond to that by trying to copy it, and I would see their version of it and then extend a little further into that version of it and then we would come back and check in with the essential information in my version of floating, go back and look at how it corresponded with their version, and you can see, right away, we have the building blocks.

There was a section in the piece which we called 'car crash'. I explained to them that in this sequence of movements you should feel impact. You should feel as though a large object has hit you and that it would send you off as if you were a piece of broken glass, into shards. So right away dancers were responding to the fact of a blow, to the fact of gravity, to the fact of angular, edgy shapes and to a flow of movement that comes from up to down. Once again, I demonstrate what those shapes look like on my body, they articulate that, and then, through their technical facility, make it fully fleshed. So it was very easy and an extremely creative process to get that. It was a lot of back-and-forth which is why I say it is inherently a collaborative art form. It was wonderful.

Eventually I gave them permission to run with it. Dancers are so well-behaved, and reverent— again, it's the priesthood— that when they're learning a role originated by somebody else, they try very hard to capture that. But at some point you have to give yourself permission, or somebody else has to give you permission, to make it your own. Kill the originator. Kill the choreographer, too. It's your dance, it's not my dance at that point.

I'm fascinated by what performance is. What goes on when you perform? What happens to the audience? What happens to you? After performing for over thirty years, I still don't understand the alchemy. You never know what an audience will do. It could rise up. It could storm the stage and strangle you to death. They could! They don't, but they could. It's pretty scary. You feel it when they want to! On the other hand, to look out and see people moved, or in tears, looking at you like “I understand”—that is an incredibly gratifying experience.

Learn more about Garfield at her site: http://www.keelygarfield.org