Hi, dance friends, and welcome to The Dance Edit podcast. I’m content director Margaret Fuhrer, back with another interview episode.
This week our guest is the extraordinarily prolific choreographer and educator Sidra Bell. To say “extraordinarily prolific”—that is not hyperbole. Just last week, Bell’s choreography was part of Nashville Ballet’s world-premiere Anthology program; this week, she has a new work debuting at Nevada Ballet Theatre—you’ll find out more about that in a minute. She is currently artist in residence at Gibney, and her own company, Sidra Bell Dance New York, recently celebrated its 20th anniversary. Last year, she made history as the first Black woman to be commissioned by New York City Ballet. Those are only a few highlights from a calendar that includes numerous other teaching engagements and choreographic projects.
So, Bell is in the full flowering of her career, but she has been quietly and thoughtfully building to this moment for multiple decades now. “Thoughtful” is actually a good word to characterize everything Bell does. As you’ll hear, she sees the creative process as a way to conceive of and model the world we aspire to. And she has found the language of dance to be especially good at articulating those ideas, and ideals.
Here she is.
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Margaret Fuhrer:
Sidra, hello. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast today.
Sidra Bell:
Thank you for having me.
Margaret Fuhrer:
I really appreciate you making the time, because as we were just saying before we started recording, you have been just impossibly busy over the past months—the past few years. It feels like you’ve been everywhere.
But the reason or one of the reasons that we’re talking today is because you are about to premiere a new work, called Intimacy with Strangers, at Nevada Ballet Theatre. So I’m wondering if we could start there. Can you talk a little about how this piece came to be, and actually in particular about how you chose its music by Immanuel Wilkins?
Sidra Bell:
I started to conceive this piece a couple of years ago. I started to talk with Roy, the artistic director, via Zoom, somewhere in the middle of the pandemic, and just dreaming about what a residency in Las Vegas could be. He had just recently assumed the artistic director position and he was really interested in cultivating new voices, but he was also familiar with my catalog of work, and we just started to talk about what I could do while in residence—talked about workshops and new creation.
And over several months of listening and back and forth meetings, I came to the decision to use Immanuel Wilkins, who is an artist I had been collaborating with. We actually did a work through 92nd Street Y in the fall of 2020, which was a very tenuous time, and the work was called Waiting. And we were able to bring our two ensembles together safely in a residency at 92nd Street Y. And it was just such a beautiful, soulful, tender experience that I really wanted to bring his music to the Nevada Ballet Theatre. And I felt that the joy and the kind of spirituality of his music would be a really beautiful fit for the work. And so I approached Immanuel about using some of his recordings that already existed, and put together a sort of timeline of different pieces that I felt would work well together for the work.
I did my residency in the fall of 2022, so I was actually there for three weeks working with the company, but I also taught workshops for the youth of the Nevada Ballet Theatre School, and just really got to know the city and the company, and it’s a really beautiful environment that they have. When I come back for the technical week and the premiere, I’m actually going to be doing more workshops again with some of the youth from the school, but also with intergenerational members of the Las Vegas community. So I’m really excited to engage and be in dialogue through the week that I’m there and also at the performance run.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Oh, that’s so great. I didn’t realize there was an educational component to that residency too. That’s very cool.
Sidra Bell:
Yeah, Roy was really interested in the very beginning of our conversations and having that as an integral part of me being there. Education has always run parallel to my creative practice, and so it’s always a way of kind of sharpening my artistic language but also engaging with members of the community and building audience. And whenever I visit and do commissions, I like to do one or two things where it’s about sharing the language of the work. Particularly with new work, I think it’s really important to build community around new work, something that’s maybe not as familiar to audiences there. And just to share.
Margaret Fuhrer:
You’re anticipating some of my questions I have farther down, but before we get to them, I’m wondering if you could talk then a little about what this piece ended up looking like and feeling like in terms of the movement language.
Sidra Bell:
I like to go into a process with very little vocabulary established, because it’s a process of getting to know the dancers and where they are in their movement language and in their development as artists. And a lot of the dancers were actually new to the company, and so I think it was a beautiful way for them to come together as an ensemble and get to know each other in an experimental practice.
Normally I just stand in the front of the room with no information and just start to move my body, and there’s a process of mirroring that happens, and that connectivity that jazz has as well, jazz music, where you’re just sharing modalities and trying things out and shaping movement. And as I start to move with them, then I’m peering into their world and extracting ideas as well. So it’s always a shared process of what can shape be and how can shape form.
And normally I’ll develop several phrases over the first few days and then start to work with the language of bodies connected in space. And I would jump in a lot. I jumped in with the dancers and shaped partnering motifs with them, trying out weight bearing and counterbalance. And because it’s a ballet company, it was fun to be thrown in the air and lifted because that’s part of the lexicon of how they might approach a partnering idea. And so it’s an interesting combination of weight sharing and the classical motifs that you might see, but upending those a little bit where the female dancers are also able to partner and manipulate the male dancers.
So it was a lot of back and forth and just really driving out new ideas of the first several days. And then as the language of the piece starts to become its own, repetition starts to happen, manipulation starts to happen. And then I start to timeline the work in relationship to Immanuel Wilkins’ score and just responding to his music. As I said, it’s very soulful, spiritual rich. It’s also unpredictable, it’s jazz music, but he has a beautiful way of taking other turns in the music.
So, I was responding to what that was doing and the kind of hills and valleys of the sound and playing with mass, the distribution of bodies in space and compositional tactics.
So it’s a fabric, it’s an abstract work, but it felt appropriate to think about the idea of intimacy with strangers. In my travels, I’ve been so used to just dropping into worlds that I’m not familiar with. So that action unto itself is actually kind of trusting of this kind of intimacy and shared experience with people that I don’t know. And so it almost is a reflection of where I am right now in my career, which is a lots of nomadic traveling and dropping into these really unique and rich processes and trusting a group. And even people in the community as I travel, there’s a kind of outlier feeling that I have often and it’s a beautiful thing. I get to be an observer and interloper in some ways. And I think I was sort of feeling that, especially—Las Vegas has this incredible landscape. It’s almost surreal…
Margaret Fuhrer:
Like another planet. Yeah.
Sidra Bell:
Yeah, it’s surreal. And so I was having this sort of outer skin feeling, and I was there for three weeks, so it was a really nice long residency. And there was something that I felt like I was sort of floating above myself in a way. And I had just come out of another residency in the Santa Cruz mountains. So it was just this experience of being on the West Coast and observing, almost as if I was floating above the experience, and having these really beautiful interactions that were fleeting. And so that’s where the title sort of came from. And then in the piece you see this sort of sensuousness and interaction and tenderness. There’s some beautiful solo passages that happen that are really poetic constructions. It feels like a very supple piece.
Margaret Fuhrer:
The word “language” has been coming up a lot already in this interview. And here I guess I’m a little bit revealing my bias as a word person, but language also it seems to play a very important role in your creativity. Which isn’t surprising, since you’re also an educator and speaker—you have deep experience in these environments where words tend to come first. But broadly speaking, can you talk about how you think about the relationship between dance and language?
Sidra Bell:
I’ve been steeped almost unknowingly for many years in a writing practice. I’ve always sort of scored, and I think many choreographers have a way of outputting ideas, whether it’s through writing or through visual art. But I’ve always had a writing practice that I’m now starting to really lean into as a formal practice. But I always kept journals growing up and was always writing in a kind of poetic structure. I think that that’s sort of a mirror to the visual world that happens in my works and through my teaching practice, I’ve learned to reveal that.
So as I’m cultivating—whether it’s a workshop or I’m driving an improvisational practice or creating—I’m constantly speaking out loud and generating images and trying to open up language for the dancers and also find a multiplicity within language and find other ways of seeing or feeling shape. So I think through that kind of communication of the form, I’ve developed this lexicon of ideas and pathways and it’s always changing. I find such a kind of transformational feeling when I’m unpacking what’s happening within just one singular lived moment.
There’s also all these incredible conversations that I have on the road. And so I feel like I’m constantly carrying other people’s languages with me and I’m learning as I’m moving through these travels. And I feel like I’m always carrying someone else with me as I move on to the next commission or place or process. And I like to feel like nothing I’m saying is actually my own. It’s the combination of all these experiences.
And I’m just always blown away by the potential of language verbally, but also on the body, what the body can cue and what’s unsaid and the layers of embodied experience and memory. I have a dream journal, so I just have all these different systems that I’ve kept or retained ideas. I just recently put up a gallery at the Gibney Dance Center where I’m an artist in residence, and that gallery was a combination of ephemeral writings and costumes and films that I’ve worked on and photography collaboration.
So, I’ve just started to translate that into performance more and more and more and more, whether it’s a gallery setting or new work. I’m starting to write a book right now. And so there’s just this kind of leaning into what I’ve already been doing, which is collecting ideas.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Speaking of language, or I guess rather speaking of speaking, you have described your dancers before as artist citizens who always need to have a voice in the room. That’s an idea that I love. And it seems like more and more of the dance world is sort of coming around to after all these years of ballet, especially, telling dancers to be quiet and obey. Why are dancer voices so important and how do you help cultivate them?
Sidra Bell:
We need to be fallible in process. I think being vulnerable and fallible is so critical to deeper expression, and I always feel very tender in the process and vulnerable because it’s leaning into the unknown—and through the body. Just that action of standing in a room with our bodies is such a tenuous action that I’ve always felt that just being there was kind of an act of bravery. And in my work as I developed the company, and then going into these really drastically disparate experiences that I had to let go, there was no other way then to just let go into the process and into people seeing through me.
So allowing for transparency of spirit and communication to be there was always important to me. I think in the early years I was working with peer groups too, so we were really young artists tracking and charting unknown territory, and we were doing it together. And so there was this kind of laughter and spontaneity and struggle that was already inherent to the process. And so we were very transparent with each other and I just kept that.
Every artist that I brought into the company environment, Sidra Bell Dance New York, was always someone I felt that was very compelling and raw and political and individual. And I thrived off of that because it allowed me to learn more about myself and to be vulnerable and to fail to succeed. There’s so much journey through that process of developing a company. And then that was something I just took with me, that experience of allowing artists to really be themselves, to bring their ideas to the space.
So when I travel to other companies or to institutions for higher learning, I like that feedback. It allows for a liveness and a kind of discovery. And that’s why I stay in the practice just because I feel like I’m always growing. I’m never static and I like to be challenged as well. I think there’s nothing if there’s not challenge. And I find myself transforming every single day and it keeps me in the process and it keeps me feeling like I’m alive, I’m here.
Margaret Fuhrer:
I’m especially interested in your cultivation of young dancers’ voices, because as you were saying, you work very frequently at institutions of higher learning, college environments, and it seems like you often forge really deep connections with these students—something very special seems to happen in those settings. What is your approach to that work?
Sidra Bell:
It’s incredible. It really is. I’ve visited as a guest artist so many institutions for higher learning. I’m actually currently a visiting lecturer at Harvard University this semester, and developing a course on covering form, but I’ve also taught at the LINES Ballet school. And when I say I’m developing, that’s exactly it—when I visit these institutions, I’m developing ideas with the students. It’s not like I’m a teacher person, I’m there as a colleague, and someone that can guide them into their pathways of thinking and that commitment to research. And I think of my processes as research-driven, that we’re finding and allowing ideas to come together in space from various perspectives.
I think that that has translated into really deep mentorship and circular mentorship. So I’ve mentored over 30 young artists and I’m proud to say that I’ve gone onto this amazing careers in visual art and dance and performance. And I always take on about three or four mentees a year. Currently I’m working with an MFA student from CalArts and several other artists. And then they change into informal—we become friends over the years, and I continue to bounce and share ideas, but it’s in a way that we’re still growing together. And so it really is a sense of circular mentorship. My mentees become my mentors. And it’s that same thing as you’re pedagogically as a teacher, you’re always learning. It’s circular, it’s not one-directional.
I’ve just had so many incredible mentees. And I’ve also held formal mentorship positions at the Julliard School—I mentored their choreo comp project last year—and Marymount Manhattan College had me on board for their DAW student choreography course. So it’s something I take very seriously. And I try to make time for that in my schedule, just kind of create time where I can sit with an artist, even if it’s not called a mentorship, it’s just sharing time.
And also when I’m traveling. Last week when I was at Nashville Ballet, I was connected with an artist through another friend, a younger choreographer from Memphis, and he drove out to Nashville and we just had a lunch at Shake Shack and just shared—a sort of professional development, but also just meeting people. ‘Cause I think again, for me, it feels like it’s giving me energy and feeding my practice and I never want to be static in how I’m thinking about the practice. So it is circular mentorship.
Margaret Fuhrer:
I think the throughline that connects these past few questions is this idea that thoughtful artistic practice can offer a model for how we want the wider world to be. This is something that you’ve talked about before, and I’m hoping you can say a bit more about now. How can dance practice in particular show us or help us figure out better ways of being in the world?
Sidra Bell:
There’s something about the body work and being present, showing up that I think only for me, dance has really continuously taught me, and it’s less about the professional successes than the showing up. And I’m actually learning that more now at this point in my life, is the showing up is a model of—showing up for myself, showing up for others—it’s not complicated. And it is complicated, because we all carry so much. And I’m learning that too, this sort of empathy and seeing through other people’s eyes constantly and trying to step into empathy every day. But it’s in the body. There’s nothing else but just showing up in that way. We don’t need technology or a kind of large infrastructure to do that. If I’m just like there and present, that’s enough. And I feel like dance and movement practice teaches me that every single day. And it’s nothing more than just self and others and presence of mind, real time embodied action. It’s something that I think dance just has inherently in the way that we have to activate to be there and choose to be there.
Margaret Fuhrer:
This next question is sort of a sensitive question. You’ve had this obviously very impressive resume for a while now, for years now, but it feels like a lot of people, especially in the “establishment” ballet world, sort of suddenly became aware of you after the upheavals of the summer of 2020, when DEI work moved to the forefront of a lot of creative leaders’ minds. And all of a sudden you were getting endless commissions, more recognition, even though you’d been doing this great work for years. That shift—have you found that exciting or frustrating or both? How have you felt about that?
Sidra Bell:
I started out as a producer really in the beginning, when my first shows were in Harlem, New York. And I didn’t really even know what a choreographer was in some ways. I’d always been making dances from when I was a little girl at The Ailey School and Dance Theatre of Harlem. I was always making things. And so it’s been a really long journey, but I think the initial ambition wasn’t there in that way, and the careerism. And this is an idea that I kind of was talking about with another artist a lot this summer, like the idea of careerism can take over. And a lot of my more recent journeying was returning to that initial joy of when I started to really consider what making dances for stage was in Harlem. And it was really about teaching classes and bringing people in and kind of sharing time and space.
And as you continue through your career, you start to have that ambition, you start to think what if. And a lot of that too was actually about bringing other artists forward. I think at some point I really wanted to have these huge experiences because the team, I was sort of—as a director, producer person, I wanted to bring the team forward. And so when we didn’t get an opportunity, it was disappointing more so because I was so passionate about bringing the ideas forward and the team forward.
But in the time right before the pandemic and the upheaval actually, it kind of simmered down a lot and was starting to come to where I am now, which was just feeling kind of content in what I had done and achieved and thinking less about the recognition of some of the bigger or more monetized experiences, where I was starting to appreciate and return to what drived me in process.
And I think being a little bit outside of formal institutional dance spaces actually allowed me to be a little bit more experimental and travel to places I’d never travel and take on projects in theater and film and working on site. Something about being outside of the traditional mainstream dance infrastructure allowed me to develop my own systems in self-producing and forging relationships internationally. And so I’d kind of just started to feel content in that and understanding that I had a different system and that was okay.
And now everything that I’m getting is almost like sweet. There’s a sweetness to it. And it’s actually at the right time because I feel like I’m in my skin and I can really offer myself without having the kind of heated ambition. I can really offer the trueness of who I am and how I have learned to exist in this world. And there’s something about these huge things happening now that feels like the right time. So yeah, I feel great. I feel really great and happy and excited about the future. And while those sort of bigger commissions are coming now, I’m also continuing the things I’ve always loved, just trying new things constantly and having that in balance with some of these beautiful large experiences that are happening.
I never want to lose sight of the things that make me inherently happy, which are the experience of mentorship and teaching and developing systems in the body and working with artists of all disciplines. I think right now I feel like they’re all kind of in balance and satellite-ing around in my life right now. And without that heavy sense of ambition it’s really beautiful.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Well, here’s a question that—it’s a huge question, but you’ve essentially already started to answer it. It’s just kind of pulling all the different threads together. As someone who’s worked in all these different corners of the dance world, who has all of these satellites in motion, what would you say are the throughlines that unite all of your various artistic endeavors?
Sidra Bell:
I think that there’s a sense of it being a fabric of incredibly disparate voices. When I look at all the chapters of my experience as an artist, the thread has been the experimentation and the ability to bring people into a room that might not normally be in a room together. And particularly this last performance we did at the Gibney Dance Center in celebration of our 20th anniversary, it was a wonderful opportunity to just step outside of the work and see who was making the show come together, which were visual artists and dancers and curators. And we had some documentary footage of past collaborators in the gallery space.
It was astonishing to see how unique each individual was and that they were all coming together in this space. And over time, over 20 years, the people, like I think the people thread the work together. And it’s never just me, all of these… it’s a world of ideas. It really is a world of ideas. And the 20th anniversary celebration was a moment to really reflect on that. And these people have transformed me. They make up this fabric of who I am, and I feel like I carry all of their hearts and ideas on my body.
So I think it’s that. It’s just this threading and weaving of identities and people that have built this richness of…rich fabric in the images and the dancing and the textiles and the photography and the film and the community work and the relationships and the shared sweat, in the rooms that we’ve been in together. It’s all there and being carried through. And so it doesn’t disappear. It’s still inside of the work. And just being able to reflect on that at this moment is really profound.
Margaret Fuhrer:
So I’ll conclude with a huge question, another huge question. What are you excited about for your own future? And then what makes you excited or hopeful about the future of the dance field as a whole?
Sidra Bell:
It’s a transformational time, both for me personally and also for the field. I think there are a lot of considerations around structure and utility, necessity, how we can practice or support the practice. And I’m seeing a lot of shift and change in the institutions I work with. The way that we’re considering dance education and performance and models of performance is really shifting a lot. And I think there’s more fluidity in thinking about what performance can be and where it can be. And I think on an institutional level, there’s more of an embrace of that. Whereas when I was starting out, it was much more of an outlier thing to create performance non-traditionally. Now it’s part of how structures of support are being built. There’s more space and room for different renderings of performance and dance. Because I think experimental performance is one thing, and then dance sort of has been this other thing. I feel like those worlds are kind of colliding more.
And I see this in, as I continue to chart my path in building support around my work, but also mentoring younger artists and seeing how they’re forming performance and thinking about pathways to share dance. And I always like to use dance as a subset of movement. Movement is something we all own, and dance is sort of a way of maybe defining a kind of presentation of the body, but we all own movement as humans.
So yeah, I just think there’s more space. And I think on an institutional level, things are slowly changing. I’m excited for that for myself and also for the next generation of artists, how we can build sustainability. I think in cities a lot has shifted. Just being a New Yorker, a lot has shifted around how we think about space and sustainability.
So I’d like to be part of cultivating ideas around how we can support artists in better practice, because there’s still the trend of…it’s very difficult to create a sustaining career. And I’ve had 20 years, over 20 years now of being a sustained artist. But I also started in a very different time in New York City. And so things have become much more separate and volatile in centers for dance. And so I’d like to see more support in how artists are able to live and be in these centers for dance.
But also I’d like to see more of the country. I’ve always encouraged my students to try a different place, it doesn’t have to be in New York. It’s maybe a harder road and a more still road. The density isn’t there in other places in the country. But why not cultivate in your own community or in a community that needs it?
So I’d like to just see the whole industry kind of open up to what other kinds of spaces and places we can exist in. And I’d like to be part of that shift. I’d like to take on more of a leadership role while continuing to make my own art. I’ll never stop—I’m an artist first, so I have to always be making. And I am a studio creature, I love to be in the studio, and I’m excited to continue to carve that out for myself. I’ve started to perform again, which is exciting and something I had kind of put away, but I’ve started to step back into performing a little bit more. And just to continue to embody the work and take it inside and kind of savor it is something in the past two years I’ve returned to, and I’m just enjoying moving a lot and frequently and taking on unique projects with in theater and film.
And the next year I’m taking on quite a few projects where I’m a movement advisor and more in the theater world, and as a module laboratory, which is a research driven space that I’ve been developing over the past six years, and I’m building support around that and trying to support artists through that practice and laboratory experience. And so there’s a lot coming up, and finding all that in balance, bringing that all into balance and viability.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Sidra, thank you so much for coming on and merde for your upcoming premiere and also for all of these beautiful things on your horizon. There are so many!
Sidra Bell:
Thank you. Yeah, I’ll be premiering at Nevada Ballet Theatre. And I’m working on a project here with Karmina Šilec, a theater director, and it’s a piece called BABA, and that’s going up here in San Francisco. All in February, all these works are coming up into February. And then I’ll be working with GroundWorks Dance in March on a new piece.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Listeners, we will have links with information about all of those projects in the show notes. Sidra, thank you again.
Sidra Bell:
Thank you. I love talking about the work and I really appreciate it.
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Thanks again to Sidra. Please head to the show notes to find out more about all of the upcoming projects that she mentioned. We’ve also included links to her own website and to the Sidra Bell Dance New York website, which has a comprehensive calendar that includes everything on her schedule—it is both dizzying and incredibly impressive.
And thanks to all of you for listening. We’ll be back next Thursday with a new episode discussing the top dance headlines. Until then, keep learning, keep advocating, and keep dancing.