Dancing the Art of Building with Sarah Emmons

Each year at our annual meeting, the Creative Technologist Conference, we commission an artist collaboration to commemorate the occasion. This year we had the honor of inviting contemporary movement artist Sarah Emmons to create a site-specific dance performance on the California coast, inspired by our motto, the art of building. Drawing from The Ohlone Way and working with live musical collaboration, Sarah created an interactive piece where conference participants voted on the structure of the performance itself. We spoke with Sarah about ritual, her creative process, and dancing at the edge of the ocean.

BAUKUNST: Tell us about yourself and what this project meant to you.

SARAH EMMONS: I'm a Bay Area movement artist who teaches classes around the city and at ODC's Rhythm & Motion Program. Movement is joy and an excellent way to express and feel feelings. It's a form of therapy and my happy place. When Kate asked me to make this work, it felt like a very high hill to climb. I'm usually "just a dancer" who gets brought on as the vessel for movement rather than the creative brain, so getting handed the full reins was exciting and intimidating.

BK: How did you conceptualize the starting points for this project?

SE: When I received the flow of the day and "art of building" framework, I immediately knew I wanted to create something interactive between the participants and myself, a way for the audience to influence how the dance would play out. While hiking, my partner suggested a book that inspires me: The Ohlone Way. It explores the rituals and dances of the Ohlone people, including how they harvest, marry, and perform coming-of-age rituals. I chose 10 items from the book to explore in movement. These were conceptual ideas, not learned dances.

BK: What were some of the movement concepts you drew from the book?

SE: "Acorn Harvest" was about how the Ohlone people are tied to the rhythms of the oak tree and its yearly cycles. Movements here were cyclical and inspired by the life cycles of trees. "Dancing Shaman" explores how ill tribe members would call on shamans for rhythmic, repetitive, many-hour performances where the movement comes through rather than being produced.

BK: Can you tell us about how the collaborative process worked?

SE: I wanted it to be an approachable way for people with no dance experience to dive in. We met for a breakout session at the CTC, and I explained what was going on in the book and where I was drawing textures of movement from each passage, without demonstrating the actual movements. Participants were able to vote on Acts 1, 2, and 3, and what happened inside each act.

BK: How did the choreography process work once you had the votes?

SE: Each of the 10 movement phrases could be performed in different orders. I read the descriptions aloud, gave each a number, and participants tallied their votes. I then had an hour and a half to practice the order we came up with. I was worried about how each phrase would link together, but the order that emerged flowed very well. Ben attended the breakout session but I didn't tell him the final order because I wanted him to react to what he was seeing live.

BK: What was it like to perform with the beach as your stage?

SE: It was a beautiful and important setting. In the moment, I felt very connected to the sounds of the ocean, and Ben played into that with his music. One section called "Grasshopper Circle" was chosen for early on in Act 1. That part of the book talks about people making a circle and running in to collect grasshoppers, so I drew a giant circle in the sand with my movement and intersecting patterns, creating a kind of proscenium for the rest of the performance. The section with the rock wall was a reference to another passage about the island of the dead and the soul's journey to the beyond. Going into the rocks and reemerging signified a kind of rebirth.

BK: Did anything surprise you about the conditions on performance night?

SE: The tide was coming in instead of going out, which added an element of anticipation. The water creeping forward helped aid some of the intensity that came up in the performance. Dancing in sand is really challenging and fun. I had come up with a lot of the movements on a dance floor, so during my first site visit I was shocked at how effortful it made the dancing. It didn't change the choreography much, but it made the element of struggle and perseverance more visceral. The sand was smooth and compact at the beginning but became more difficult to dance on as the performance progressed.

BK: What is the "art of building"? What did you learn from this process?

SE: I'm very musically driven in my creative process, and I usually let music rather than concept influence me. Taking that away challenged me to find other outlets for creating, and I really latched onto the book and text as the creative sparking point. Ritual is important in my own life, but for this setting, being so tied to nature, it felt important to look into the enriched processes and rituals of the Ohlone people.

Performing live while reacting on the spot makes you attend to the performance in a unique way. You're watching yourself, collaborating with the audio, and you're almost able to view the performance from the outside in.

Watch an aerial supercut of Sarah's performance on Instagram.

Sarah Emmons is a Bay Area based movement artist and dance educator, performing nationally and teaching at ODC. Find her on Instagram at @sarah___emmons.

Ben Juodvalkis is a San Francisco-based composer creating original music for dance, film, theater, and multimedia installations.