Choreographer Tere OConnor says his work is not some esoteric exercise in headiness or symbols—its dance for the sake of dancing.
  • Courtesy of On the Boards
  • Choreographer Tere O'Connor says his work is not some esoteric exercise in headiness or symbols—it's dance for the sake of dancing.

Choreographer Tere O'Connor doesn't want to tell you a goddamn story. Unlike in traditional ballets or more contemporary dance polemics, he doesn't afford his audiences the safety net of preordained plots or moods. His choreography is not trying to communicate some line of argument or point of view, nor are there messages to glean from his dancers' movements. Instead, O'Connor gives the viewers the opportunity—the challenge—to simply watch bodies in motion. His work is experimental, but it's not an abstraction of something else. It is concrete without being literal.

"Dance is sometimes seen as something ambiguous and mysterious that some people call enigmatic," O'Connor explained in an interview this week. "Clarity is something we establish to make society work and capitalism work, but we're actually in full ambiguity all the time. Some people who are totally new to dance say my work affects them and they don't know why." Trying to live and work in the ambiguity, he adds, makes it hard to write press releases.

This week, Seattle will see four O'Connor works—BLEED, poem, Sister, and Secret Mary—in an unusual collaboration between On the Boards and Velocity Dance Center that also includes a series of workshops, discussions, and performances. "He is a dancer's dancer, a choreographer's choreographer," said Tonya Lockyer, Velocity's artistic director. She thinks O'Connor's work is especially relevant in the context of a culture that is increasingly intertextual and decentralized. "[It] speaks the language of the world that we increasingly live in, which is all about multiple tangents," she said. "People who are literalists will not enjoy it." (The word "literalist" has a special connotation when people talk about O'Connor—in 2005, he wrote a letter eviscerating New Yorker dance critic Joan Acocella and other "literalists" who "do not know how to read dances created outside the restricted confines of the narrative or musical frameworks from past centuries.")

"Tangents" is a good way to describe what O'Connor's work looks like...

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