“There's always a way”
Catherine Gallant
INTERVIEWED ON July 10TH, 2023
BY ANABELLA LENZU
Anabella: How do you define what it is to be female in the world, as well as a mother?
Catherine: Well, those are huge, huge questions. I guess it's hard to really respond to that because of its hugeness. I guess the female role question does relate to motherhood, because I was able to have more clear feelings about what that meant as my children were born. As far as the relationship to motherhood and artistry goes, I just never have stepped away from my path of making art. I define myself as a dancer, dance maker, and dance thinker. I found ways to have a parallel path when my children came along. I didn't stop whether it was difficult or sometimes impossible, I kept going. I made mostly solos for 10 years..
I do have a small story related to artistry and this idea of ongoingness. When I was in college, I had a teacher who taught a choreography class. At that time it was referred to as Dance Composition and students were complaining: “I don't have enough space to do this dance assignment. I don't have any dancers.” And she said, “wait, do you have a table at home? You know where you eat dinner? Do you have salt and pepper shakers?” She said, “Okay. Well, then the table is the studio and those objects are the movers. And if people are eating, you can do it underneath the table”. So this idea that there might not be space or dancers was an invitation to find another way. There's always a way. If there is something you feel passionate about, that you want to do, then what are the ways that it can happen within your restricted environment or despite the perceived limitations. Even though I never actually did that exercise, it stuck with me as a kind of guiding force.
Anabella: I'm very curious to know how you encounter the repertory and the Isadora Duncan technique and the way you live your life. I would love you to talk about what we know about the history of Isadora, and the whole idea of embracing maternity, the female body, and your journey.
Catherine: Going back to Isadora Duncan. I found her and her work after I read a book in my school’s library - I think I was 10. It was many years later,when I saw Annabelle Gamson dance on PBS, (the Dance in America series) that reignited the whole Duncan thing. It was the 1970s. Isadora Duncan’s non-traditional choices about having her children outside the requirements of marriage resonated with feminists of the time and contributed to the empowerment of notions of women’s independence. This fueled a resurgence of interest in her work from the late 1960s until the centenary of her birth in 1977, Many biographies came out about her amplifying her as this very free spirit, and this was very enticing to people. Also then it was still acceptable to “follow your dreams” without spending time worrying about the consequences. And so I come from that generation. Do your own thing, right? As long as you're doing what you love. And that's how things unfolded in a way that was not super calculated or scheduled. The design came as a result of the situation. After college I was already on a trajectory of being a choreographer, curious about making new things, not necessarily supporting the work of the past. I followed my friends from college to NYC and it just happened, quite by accident, that I went to a workshop taught by Julia Levien in 1982. I was very much a searcher rather than a planner and I allowed things to happen to me rather than trying to consciously make them happen. This is how I began my connection to the work of Duncan.
Anabella: After seeing you teach an amazing workshop at Peridance as part of the American Dance Guild Educational Program in the Summer 2023, I want to ask you about Isadora’s piece “Mother.” Tell me more about it and your experience performing and learning this choreography.
Catherine: Many feel that those last dances that she created around 1921 are the jewels of the repertoire and signal the shift towards modernism in dance. When I first learned that dance from Julia Levien who was my primary, teacher, and mentor in the Duncan work, she downplayed the personal tragedy part of it and talked about it being the narrative of motherhood from embracing the young child at the beginning to the release of the child and saying goodby as they go off into the world. The reality of Duncan's life in her terrible, unimaginable, loss is also part of this dance. I learned that dance before I was a parent, and of course, it changed a lot when I did it later. One thing I love about all of those dances is that they can shift and change for each person that's stepping into them. There's a lot of space for the performer to make choices within the range of what we imagine to be the “original”. And when I'm teaching and coaching others I like to add that element of flexibility from the beginning. I think that some of Duncan’s dances have, let's say, a stronger authenticity than others. I can understand that when choreography is over 100 years old, there are generations of interpretation which place it far from the original. And so how do we work with that? The dance, referred to as Mother, is very powerful for people to do, and to witness, and to think about what it means in their own lives and their own experiences as parents. I remember performing it in Moscow in 1993. My son was a little kid, and I was gone for two weeks. I was feeling so far away from him. He must have been five at the time. I remember it being a very emotional performance.
Anabella: Can you describe yourself as an artist, as a dancer, and as a mother?
Catherine: I don't really think about these facets as separate but intertwined. In order to survive, to continue, I had to overlap. There’s lots and lots of overlapping. For me the worlds are not separate. They can't be. I don't have the luxury of that kind of life. After my first son was born, I had a performance two weeks afterwards and I never considered not doing it. But I always had some supportive person to help. You have to. That's what keeps us going. It has to be a partner, a family member, or a fellow artist.
I left New York because I couldn't afford to live here and be a parent, so I moved to the Boston area closer to my family. My dancing partner, Patricia Adams, lived close by. She had a little studio in her home. She had studied with Sylvia Gold ( a student of Anna and Irma Duncan), and we found each other and started working together. She was my role model as an artist/mother/teacher. We would put my infant son on the floor in the studio and we'd have our rehearsals. He was happy as long as I was around. So I took him everywhere. My kids didn't know until they were older that not all moms put their kid in the corner of a studio for a few hours to play by themselves with promises of nice food at the end or whatever the deal was. When my son was five, we danced together at home. Sometimes he would play the piano, and I would move, and we were always painting and looking at stuff and making sculptures - so it all seemed quite natural. Later when he was 10, I was pregnant with my daughter. I was working on a solo, and he started sliding books across the floor. I didn't know if he was trying to hit me or just get my attention. So, it was my job to dodge those books, and then we turned that into another dance, a duet and we called it “Homework,” and we performed it on a number of programs including a performance at the 92nd Street Y (now 92NY) that Joan Finkelstein put together. I told her I was working on this dance with my son. She thought “oh, that's interesting, let's get some choreographers and their children together.” So it was Keely Garfield and her son Art Bridgeman, Myrna Packer and their son, and Jane Comfort and her two teenage children. So that was a moment where parenthood and artistry intentionally came together in a very focused, designed way.
Anabella: And that was in 92nd Street Y?
Catherine: Yes. I think that was in late 2000 or very early 2001. There have only been a few things that individual choreographers made with adults and children that I know of.
Anabella: But not a festival. I've been here for 17 years and I didn't hear anything about it.
Catherine: Well, it speaks to the rarity of that. We still have that old idea. We're not supposed to combine these facets of our lives in fear of diminishing one or the other. But that's an old box that has been opened now. Your focus on “motherhood” is trying to expose that even more, which is great, so that people don't put dance into this very narrow definition that we're still working on after all of these years. I mean, for me it's always been dance first, think later. That's from Samuel Beckett. “Dance first, think later. It's the natural order.”
Anabella: Great. Did you tell me that you have a son, and you have three in total, right?
Catherine: I have three. My son is 36, my daughter is 26, and my youngest just had his birthday yesterday, he's 24. And now I'm a grandma!
Anabella: How many grandchildren?
Catherine: Just one. As a parent, to get to that place, it’s oh so much fun.
Anabella: Can you talk a little bit about the idea of legacy with your kids?
Catherine: I was pretty conscious about not imposing any traditional role expectations about things like colors, toys, languaging, and any kinds of play activities. Whatever their interest was, I wanted them to follow that in a way of curiosity, letting the child lead. But this also comes from my studies within dance education. By the time my younger ones came along, I was fully invested in the Dance Education Laboratory and the DEL Model , so I could look at them as experiments about development and creativity. Where does imagination come from? Where are the seeds of that coming from? And what if I present an idea or raw materials, what will they do with it? So we allowed a lot to happen. A lot was unplanned, not designed, but structured somewhat by me because of my purposeful moving away from the popular consumer culture around us.
But going back to the question about traditional gender roles. In my teaching I sometimes see students, girls in particular, starting to step away from leaping and movement with strong effort qualities around the age of 9 or 10. I saw that separation and I thought that was very interesting. I'm sure there are many, many reasons for that. Not least of which is what children see marketed to them out in the world, and who's doing it. I try to compensate for that, certainly within my teaching, and always offer alternative opportunities to my own children. The social forces for conformity in our world are huge, and as a parent it's very, very difficult to move against those.
Anabella: Wow, definitely. Our kids keep us on our toes. I have a teenager now, and there are so many decisions, like how many hours can they be on a phone or in front of a tablet. We didn't grow up in this world. The generations are changing so quickly with technology, with the amount of access to information. It is really, really hard to catch up, and to know what is right or what is not. You know, of course it's about your child, but it's also about all the other social forces, peer pressure, etc.
Catherine: Oh, we had so much like that. For example I said, “you're not seeing that movie until you're 12, and that's it.” So then what followed was “you can't go to that sleepover because they're watching that movie.” I was pretty strict for a while, you know, But then we would counter that by seeing all kinds of other things. We made sure we purposely showed them old black and white versions of the movies like Beauty and the Beast before seeing the Disney version, So we would do things to give them more points of reference.
Anabella: Absolutely. We are very privileged to live and work in New York City. You told me that you moved to Boston, and then you came back to New York City. How was that?
Catherine: When my son was starting the 1st grade, we moved back and he started in New York City Public School. All my kids went through the New York City public school system PreK -12 and then college CUNY undergraduate and graduate. I’ve been a New York City Department of Education dance teacher for 25 years, recently retired.
Anabella: One question that I always ask: How do you deal with guilt? Many times I feel guilty on both sides - as an artist and as a mother. How do you deal with your life, as a dance maker, as a dancer, as a mother? Are blame and guilt something that you think about?
Catherine: It's pretty much ongoing every moment. There are steps in the guilt/responsibility chain. I tried to create a balance, and also be responsible for my choices in the smaller details. I dragged my children to a lot of dance performances. It wasn’t their first choice. In fact, when my older son was young, back in the day you could do this thing called “second-acting” on Broadway. We would wait outside the theater for people to come out at intermission. People would be smoking, and you walk in, pick up a program. We would go way up to the top balcony and get a seat, and hopefully it wasn't someone else's seat. That way you could watch the second-half of the show. We saw the second-half of so many shows. But then one day my son was asked, “mom, do you think one day we could see a whole show?” I like to think seeing all those live performances gave them a lot of knowledge about what performance and theater could be. My daughter is now a playwright. She rejected dance early on to differentiate herself from me. Her work is unconventional and includes a lot of music and movement.
But getting back to your question - the part of feeling that deep guilt, like I'm spending too much time away, for example if I was traveling. It was easier to travel with my children when they were little. They were very portable and easily entertained. Later I was always running home after a class, a rehearsal, a performance.. A few times I used babysitters that I didn’t know very well. Then I would run home even faster.. So I did some things like that. I have to say, I was fortunate. Usually it all worked out. But yeah, the guilt, of course,can always resurface.Then I think about the terrible, terrible story of Duncan. When I read Peter Kurth's book, I mean, I always knew the story, but reading the account of the drowning of her children, you realize she was rehearsing by herself outside of Paris when she said goodbye to her children before they got into the car that tumbled into the river on their way back home. They left her while she was rehearsing.
Anabella: You know, those are the choices that we have to make. I feel that sometimes even in the dance community the people that don't have kids don't understand what we're going through. Half of the time when I perform, it seems like one of my kids has a fever. You need to be at home, and you need to be in the dance studio. Not many people understand what a mother is going through.
Catherine: I don't think anyone who is not a parent would understand that.
Anabella: Having a companion…I feel that I could not do this alone. I don't know how a single mom can do it. I just don't know.
Catherine: Yes, there has to be somebody. And then, if you can't afford to pay, yes, it does have to be friends or family. So much of the whole thing is socioeconomic as well.
Anabella: Anything else you want to add for the interview, Catherine?
Catherine: I followed my dance path for over 20 years trying to keep that as my primary focus but then ultimately, it was having children that put me more on a different path. I got myself a job and I'd never had a full time position until I was 39.. So that helped me find security, because of having to be a responsible adult human. Not that I was irresponsible before, but it's the forces of the world that made that come together. And I have continued to blend being an artist and parent.
Anabella: That is true. There is so much behind the scenes. Thank you so much, Catherine. I think this is an appetizer for future collaborations between us.
Catherine: Thank you so much.
Catherine Gallant is the director and co-founder (with Patricia Adams in 1989) of Dances by Isadora which performs, teaches and collaborates with Duncan dancers throughout the world. She began her study of the technique of Isadora Duncan with Julia Levien, (a student of Anna and Irma Duncan) in 1982. She is a founding member of the Duncan Archive, an online repository for the Duncan legacy. duncanarchive.org. Catherine is the US performer of Jerome Bel’s Isadora Duncan, part of his dancer series. Ms. Gallant is a NYCDOE dance educator and has taught at PS 89 in Manhattan since 1998. She and her students were featured in the Emmy-nominated PBS documentary, PS DANCE! She was on the writing committee for NYC Blueprint for the Arts in DANCE and is on the faculty of Hunter College and the Dance Education Laboratory (DEL) at the 92nd St. Y Harkness Dance Center. Catherine creates fully contemporary works with her company Catherine Gallant/DANCE, recently performing at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. She is a graduate of the Boston Conservatory and holds an MFA in Dance from Temple University. www.dancesbyisadora.com www.catherinegallantdance.com
Originally from Argentina, Anabella Lenzu is a dancer, choreographer, scholar & educator with over 30 years of experience working in Argentina, Chile, Italy, and the USA. Lenzu directs her own company, Anabella Lenzu/DanceDrama (ALDD), which since 2006 has presented 400 performances, created 15 choreographic works, and performed at 100 venues, presenting thought-provoking and historically conscious dance-theater in NYC. As a choreographer, she has been commissioned all over the world for opera, TV programs, theatre productions, and by many dance companies. She has produced and directed several award-winning short dance films and screened her work in over 200 festivals both nationally and internationally.