Margaret Fuhrer:

Hi, dance friends. I’m Margaret Fuhrer, content director for The Dance Edit newsletter and podcast. Welcome to another episode—the twenty-fifth episode, in fact—of The Dance Edit Extra!

In this installment I talk with the dancer and choreographer Lauren Lovette. Lauren was an acclaimed principal dancer at New York City Ballet until last year, when she retired from the company—though not from dancing—at age 29. She wanted more flexibility to pursue both different types of dance opportunities and, in particular, her burgeoning choreographic career. At that point, she had already created three works for City Ballet; it was clear that she had a distinctive, compelling point of view as a dance maker as well as a dancer.

As you’ll hear, Lovette put a lot of thought into her decision to leave ballet company life. What she did not expect was to become the first resident choreographer at Paul Taylor Dance Company, an opportunity that took her by surprise when it was presented to her earlier this year. But that sort of zig where one might expect a zag is actually in some ways a defining characteristic of Lovette’s career: She believes, as you’ll hear, that growing as an artist requires both careful planning and spontaneity, a willingness to rewrite the plan.

Now she has begun cultivating a beautiful relationship with the Taylor company and its dancers, for whom she’s in the process of making a new work. I’m excited for you to hear more about all of that, so: here’s Lauren.

[pause]

Lauren Lovette:

Hi, Margaret!

Margaret Fuhrer:

Hi, Lauren. Thank you so much for coming on The Dance Edit Extra today.

Lauren Lovette:

Happy to be here. Even with the bumpy start—it was hard for us to get connected, but now we’re here.

Margaret Fuhrer:

Yes. We had a couple of false starts, but now we are officially on, and I’m very happy to be talking with you. I was just realizing that the last time we had a proper interview was in 2010, when you and Taylor Stanley were on the cover of Dance Spirit as the exciting new apprentices at New York City Ballet. You were babies! You were such babies.

Lauren Lovette:

It’s been that long?

Margaret Fuhrer:

Yeah. But I remember you were already, both of you, entirely yourselves, too. It was very apparent that you were both going to be major stars. Do you remember that photo shoot?

Lauren Lovette:

I do, I remember it well. I love Taylor. We got in together, we were apprentices in New York City Ballet—man, so much has changed.

Margaret Fuhrer:

I know. Anyway, sorry for that random walk down memory lane. Let’s go back to a different point in your past and talk about your beginnings as a choreographer, because you started making dances pretty young. When and how did you first feel that drive to choreograph?

Lauren Lovette:

I did start making them pretty young. Well, I started making up dances when I was around three, so that was before I thought about dancing, before I ever thought about ballet as being something to do. I would make up little dances on my little brother and sister with whatever was around, whatever we had in the house, little moves for my brother and sister. So I’ve been probably choreographing longer than I’ve been dancing.

But I stopped. As soon as I got into a ballet class or a proper dance class, I didn’t think about making the dance. I didn’t think about choreography. I would do it in my head when I would listen to music, but I didn’t think of that as being something the dancers did. I just didn’t really—I didn’t have composition classes or improv or anything like that. I just had ballet class, my teacher telling me what to do, and then I would do the moves as perfectly as I could.

So it wasn’t something that I ever thought about until I got the School of American Ballet when I was 14 for the year-round program. And I saw that was something people did. And even still I didn’t really think that was something that I would ever be good at or would enjoy. I was quite shy, more introverted, and the thought of telling my friends what to do was a little alarming for where I was at 14, 15 years old.

Still, I was reading books, trying to get myself out of my insecurity, out of my fear, my fear of social situations—I guess they call that social anxiety, really anxiety of all kinds, my stage fright and just everything. I wanted to break free from all of those things in myself. And so I was reading a book that said, do something scary. And I ended up signing up my name for a choreography workshop. So that’s I guess a really long way of saying I didn’t plan it. It was something that I got into really by, I would say chance, but it wasn’t chance. It was by wanting something for personal growth. I got into it because I wanted to grow, and I loved it almost immediately.

I did try to back out once I signed myself up. I tried to back out, cause at the time you would have to choose your dancers and negotiate with other choreographers and say, I’ll give you Sally for Sue and whatnot. And so I just didn’t have that in me. So I let all of my choreographic options go, all of my dancers that I had in mind go, and I thought, well, this is the perfect opportunity to not do this. [laughter] Luckily Kay Mazzo, who was the dean of the school at the time, said, no, you signed up, you committed. Here are the five dancers that are left over, make something.

And so I got into it in the best way you could get into it. I had dancers I wasn’t expecting to use, I had all different heights, different skill sets—a jumper, a really flexible rubber band like woman, she could really move in ways that my body didn’t understand, a lifter who wasn’t sure maybe at the time that he could do other things. And so it was really a beautiful experience, because I got to find what was beautiful about those dancers, what maybe the school hadn’t seen yet or the other dancers and us peers hadn’t seen yet. And it was like an exploration of them more than it was, come up with some genius perfect concept. And so that ignited my love for choreography immediately.

And so I fell in love with that side of it before I ever fell in love with the, make a cool grid or pattern, or push yourself when it comes to a movement style, or use music that you wouldn’t normally use and see what that does creatively. I’ve since then found a lot of other things that I love about choreography, but I’m glad I started there with the people, because that will always be my first love.

Margaret Fuhrer:

Yeah, I was going to say that sounds very true to—looking at it from the outside, what I know of your choreography, there is that sense of generosity, of bringing things out of the dancers that you have, of exploring what their gifts are, what their interests are, instead of just top-down imposition.

It’s interesting to hear you say that you were interested in making things, but that got pushed to the background once you started dancing. Because I think that’s an experience that many female dancers in particular have, just because the demands as a dancer are so intense. And there’s been a lot of talk recently, of course, about how few female choreographers there are in ballet in particular. And there are a lot of different reasons floated as the cause of that disparity, with the intensity of the training required being one of them. And then also the fact that, maybe you don’t feel as comfortable telling your peers what to do because you haven’t been told from the beginning, as the boys are, like, Hey, you’re special, because there are so few of you, you’re special. It’s rather the opposite.

I’m wondering if you can talk a little, as someone who’s seen this issue from multiple sides, about what your feelings are about why we’re still facing this problem in ballet.

Lauren Lovette:

I think you touched on much of it, it’s—there’s so many of us. When you get into a ballet class, it’s clear very early on that you are amongst many that want the exact same thing that you want. And the price that you have to pay to get there is high. Especially for women, it’s not just all of your classes and trying to be the best dancer you can be. You’re also thinking about pointe shoes and sewing nonstop, or you’re stretching in all of your off time. You’re thinking about how you can get a leg up or some an edge in your class, because you’re all in the same class with the same teacher, with the same hours. So how can you make it in that audition to the one that gets chosen out of hundreds? And that’s sometimes thousands!

When that’s the reality that’s faced before you, you really do develop that…perfectionistic of course, but that more obedient mindset that’s like, anything that I need to do to get there, on that stage, with that company that I dream of dancing for, I’ll do. And so it really just occupies a majority of your mental space. And I know even after I loved choreographing in school—and I made something my last year in high school and my first apprentice year of being with New York City Ballet, I made something that year—I stopped. I remember Justin Peck came up to me, because we were starting around the same time, and he said, “I think you have some real talent and you should keep exploring it and keep going and keep making things.” And I said, “No, I really just want to be a ballerina. I want to be a principal someday. I want to be a principal ballerina”—that was my first love. And so you have to make decisions based off of your life and what’s in front of you and what feels true in your heart.

And then also it just takes a lot, I think for women to get to a place of those dreams. And then maybe they find out that they want to choreograph and run into other problems. Like maybe they don’t want to be a principal ballerina and they really just want to be a choreographer. You run into other problems where…I don’t know if this is true, but it’s a feeling that I’ve gathered over what I’ve witnessed in the field over time, that women can’t make mistakes. To me, it’s been very apparent that, I’ve seen male choreographers make masterpieces and then not the greatest work you’ve seen, but they get another chance. And I think for women it’s more, I don’t know why this is, but I feel like their failures linger longer in people’s minds. And so you’re faced with more pressure in that realm too.

It’s getting so much better. I’m an optimist, so I look around and I go, well, when I started, I couldn’t really name but two or three female choreographers, and now I can name many. And it is getting so much better. And I’m somebody that is tired also of having the conversation. I like to see the change and then just make things. So I think it is being more normalized. I think girls are seeing from a younger age that it’s something that they can do that is possible. They’re being represented. And they’ll just start making things. And then soon it won’t be even a conversation of what gender you are because it won’t matter—you’re just creating things and people either connect to it or they don’t. You’ll get the commission just for your work, not because you’re a man or a woman or any kind of a race or anything like that.

And I think we’re tired, especially in the US—I think we really just want to get there. Because I don’t believe that hierarchy should be taken away. I’m not somebody that’s anti-hierarchy. You want the best fill-in-the blank to do whatever job you have. I want the best carpenter to work on my house and I want the best dancers on stage to represent the company that I’m a part of. I want to be surrounded by them. I want to grow from them. I want the best choreographers to be getting the jobs because that will speak to the most people and can be the most impactful thing for the art form moving forward. And I think we all want that. So I just want some of these other things to go away, which is like, am I a girl or not? I don’t know, it doesn’t matter. It should just be, a choreographer or not.

Margaret Fuhrer:

Yeah. I know, in so many ways it’s, like your gender is the least interesting thing about you as an artist. And yet we’re constantly talking about it. Hopefully we’re reaching a point where you can just focus on your art soon instead of having to also be an advocate while you are being an artist.

So you said that when you were talking to Justin and saying, oh, I want to be a ballerina, I want to be a principal ballerina—so you achieved that dream, you got it, you were a principal ballerina for New York City Ballet. Last year, when it was announced that you would be giving your final performance with a company, I had—and I think a lot of ballet folks had—this very selfish knee-jerk reaction, which was, “We’re not ready yet!” Because you’re still very much at the height of your dancing powers, so to speak. But you clearly knew that this was the right step for you, it was very apparent. So can you talk about what went into that decision-making process?

Lauren Lovette:

Yeah, I mean so many things. That’s something about me: I never make a decision based off of one factor. There are always so many different things that go into whatever decision I’m making and wherever I’m moving forward into. And I’m not done dancing at all. I think probably the most frustrating part of that whole, all of last year, or just all the talk that was around last year, was the emphasis put on, “She’s retiring!” Like, she’s going off and like off the grid as a dancer. That’s just so not true.

I think the biggest reason that I had for wanting to move forward at the time was a desire to grow, to experience some new things. I had been with New York City Ballet for 12 years, which is a good amount of time, I think, to be in one place, and getting the same year—I was experiencing the same grid of a year and finding it difficult to fit in the things that inspire me so much. I wanted not just to take choreography jobs, which were becoming more plentiful and enticing; I also really very much wanted to take other dancing jobs too, which were getting coached by different people or dancing in other places and traveling, seeing the world and growing myself as a dancer that way, trying other dance styles and getting out of my comfort zone.

So COVID gave us a lot of time to think. Quarantine gave us a lot of time to think. I was going through personal things in my personal life, trying to unpack a lot of just..grief, grief about many things that were going on in my life. Trying to figure out what I wanted for the future, what it looked like moving forward for me as a choreographer and a dancer. And the support that would, I’d need to show myself first and then also be requiring from whoever I worked for, an understanding of that.

I had a really beautiful understanding of that issue with my old boss, with Peter Martins. And that was the last meeting I had with him, was a conversation about how he really believed that I could do both things and how rare that was, and how hard that was going to be because he did it himself, and that it was going to be a struggle that he understood and that he was prepared to help me with. So that was hard for me to go from somewhere where I felt very secure in what was going to happen in the future, to really all of us, because of COVID, but then also beyond that, I was experiencing that in my workplace as well, where I just didn’t have the same feeling of confidence as I had before, that I had that support.

And so I decided to take the leap out. At the time I had a house, so I was more secure in my personal life. And so that gave me the confidence to reach further in my professional life. And then that ended up just moving in a different direction a month after I gave my notice to leave New York City Ballet. So I wasn’t expecting to make every single life change at the same time, as I turned 30, but it just did. It happened that way, and I had to buckle up and move forward with my decisions.

And I had a good sense at that point as to what my workplace felt about my dancing. And they seemed to be pretty positive and optimistic about all the younger people that they wanted to bring up. And so I felt like, well, maybe I am not exactly needed here the same way I was, and maybe I can let go of this position and give it to the people coming behind me. And maybe I can move forward into something else with both my dancing and my choreography.

So I’ve gone through a journey, such a journey since leaving that stage, that stage that I call home, because it is. I’ve traveled all over the place and I’ve had a great time. And I was very honored, and fortunate, and surprised that Paul Taylor Dance Company came through. That job wasn’t in my mind, it was not something that I was thinking would ever occur when I gave my notice to leave City Ballet. I didn’t think that I would be able to have something that beautiful in my life and it came.

So I could not be happier. I love working with Paul Taylor Dance Company. I have since day one, there’s something about that space. There’s something about those dancers, and being at the start of something new, that I very much love. They’re exploring what they want to step into both respecting the past, but also moving forward into a future. And I love being a part of that conversation and I feel a great deal of respect there. I’m not taking it for granted at all. Every time somebody comes into my, I have an office now, so it comes into my office with, what do you think Lauren, we have this idea—I don’t take that for granted. I love being a part of a team and feeling that respect, and I’ll give it back.

And now I’m just exploring other dance companies too, and I’m dancing other places and I’ve been growing a lot. I’m very happy in my life and I couldn’t have foreseen this. So I’m very grateful that I followed my gut.

Margaret Fuhrer:

Yeah. An absolute clean slate that allowed the universe to give you what was coming. So this new position at Paul Taylor, which you said was an unexpected but wonderful thing—where and how do your vision and your artistic values overlap and mesh with the Paul Taylor Dance Company’s? And then also, because as you mentioned you have an office there, you’re not just coming in setting works and leaving—can you talk a little about how you are involved with the company as a team player as well, in addition to being a choreographer?

Lauren Lovette:

Yeah. They’re bringing in a lot of amazing choreographers into the company, so there’s no feeling in me that I am the new Paul Taylor, and I am here to make the next, I don’t know what you call it, I guess identity-defining work for the company. I don’t think that is why I’m there.

I love creating on the dancers. I feel like where our values mesh or intertwine is that the reason I got started into choreography, or why I fell in love with it, about the beginning of even this conversation we’ve had, was the people, and discovering them and understanding where they’re at and what they need and what they need to say. And I think when you’re in a company that has such a strong legacy of the past, and you’re a new dancer coming in, and there’s a lot of new choreographers presenting work and coming in and working with you that might understand, or might not, it’s really good to have one commission that will happen a year with somebody that is a part of your team, that knows you and understands you on a deeper level and is more of a steady presence.

So I think my place there, or at least what I’ve felt has been my place there so far, has been to present that energy. I love that. I love being in that space. And that’s how I started. One of my first days was an unusual time in the company. They had just had almost half the company retire after Paul had died, and then brought in all of these new dancers. And it wasn’t like oil and water, because that suggests that people were in disagreement and it wasn’t like that; it was just, how do we understand each other? And we start making dances together with so much newness all around in the environment and in the atmosphere. And so I come in and start making things, and I very much respect maturity and dancers. And I love fresh energy as well.

But because of those things, I think I was able to create a home for the dancers. And that’s my aim every day, that nobody feels left out of the picture, I don’t have favorites in the company. I really think they’re all very special for very unique and different reasons. I love that. I think Paul liked that too. He really liked to… If a dancer was the same as another dancer, he wouldn’t hire them. The company was too small. He wanted all of that variety and the inspiration that he would gather from those just unique artists. And so I feel very similarly, where I love to use dancers that are different and then figure out what’s beautiful about them and what they haven’t done before.

Margaret Fuhrer:

Yeah. Maybe it’s apocryphal, but I think about the Balanchine quote about, oh, it’s my garden of different flowers that bloom at different times, all the dancers. I was thinking about different connections between Taylor and Balanchine. Do you feel any of that kind of energy, as somebody who’s been part of both traditions now?

Lauren Lovette:

I very much do. Every day I hear a story about Paul…and I mean I grew up, I never knew Balanchine. So I grew up with the, some people might say it’s a heavy weight, but to me it was more like a magic, like a mysterious world that I never knew, but I was definitely a part of. And I would hear stories about George Balanchine and how he would create things and what he thought when he looked at dancers. And I didn’t like every story, of course—who likes every aspect of every person they meet? Nobody. But I would imagine what it would be like to dance in Balanchine’s company, because I was in Balanchine’s company, but how it would’ve been if he was making things then. And that would inspire me whenever I would dance one of his works: I think if he was here and he was watching in the front wing, he would want me to do it the way that I wanted to do it, or, like, I think he would be okay with this impulse that I have. I get the feeling that he made it for the music and that this is something he would like. And of course, you’ve got guidance and you can look at tapes and videos and things like that. But George Balanchine or Paul Taylor, from where I sit, I look at both of them—of course in my mind, they’re geniuses, and they were. But they were just resourceful, unapologetic lovers of dance. They just loved what they did, and that’s very apparent in everything that they did, and I think that’s why they have the legacies that they have. Both of them were rebels in their own way. And that inspires me all the time.

I feel very fortunate that I’ve danced in a Balanchine company and that now I’m grafted into the Paul Taylor company and adopted in, and I’m learning so much about modern dance and the richness of movement that’s very different. To me, it’s like earth and air. There are different elements that each of those creators would work with. There are a lot of similarities. There are a lot of differences too, but there’s a lot of similarity in their rebellion, in their fearless genius.

Margaret Fuhrer:

I love that image of being grafted into this earth—this earth-rooted choreographer, this rich soil now you’ve been grafted into. Let’s talk—coming back to your own work now—can you talk a little about Pentimento, your first work for the Paul Taylor Company, and the questions and ideas that you were exploring in that work?

Lauren Lovette:

Of course, yeah. Pentimento, what I love about that piece is that it just changed, and it’s why it has the name that it has. It’s like a painting that was, as I was taking things away or something would happen, it was getting revealed with time. And all of that happened during quarantine lockdown of 2020. We had bubble residencies at the time. I could only have six dancers in the room, and Pentimento was supposed to be a dance for only six dancers. It was supposed to be this smaller work. I chose that music because it had these six string guitar pluck strumming sounds at the beginning, and I thought, there are the six dancers. And they’re all going to do this form. And it’s going to create one body and it’s going to be about personalities that exist within a being and how many different faces we have in the world.

And anyway, so I had all of these ideas from the birth of that piece, but it happened out of necessity. It wasn’t my original idea for Paul Taylor. It wasn’t my dream work for them. Actually, it’s funny that I said dream, I had a whole piece called Dream Machine that I was so excited to do, and that was what I was prepared for, and that was the vision that I had. And none of that was able to happen because of socially-distanced orchestras, the amount of dancers I had in the room—it was just one problem after another that kept preventing my original intended idea from taking place.

And then Pentimento happened and I love it. I love it because it’s so—I can see each dancer that I created it on, first of all. I can see exactly what we were going through at that time, each emotion. It ended up being something like—have you seen the movie Inside Out? That was how it felt, it was like what’s happening in the mind of a person and how you have all these different aspects of your personality and you create one body. And I’m so glad it ended up being the whole company in the piece, because nobody was left out. It was the whole body.

And I ended up adding this scarf—we have this beautiful red scarf that makes its way throughout the work.

Margaret Fuhrer:

The scarf, yeah.

Lauren Lovette:

And that was a last-minute resourceful decision. Right before Jennifer Tipton came in to do lights for us, we were going to have our first complete, and we were going to show it to, there were some board members in there, there was a bigger group of people. And I stopped by CVS and I grabbed a scarf because I felt the impulse to do so. And I threw it at one of the dancers in the beginning, and it was like, “You’re going to pass it to each other. And that’s how we’re going to know that you are in the forefront of what we’re supposed to be looking at.” Because the dancers rarely leave the stage. So I kept wanting to call it Carpe Diem or something like that, like “seize the moment,” but it was too corny.

Margaret Fuhrer:

Carpe scarf!

Lauren Lovette:

Yeah, exactly. So that piece is so—it just changed and grown over time and completely by accident. It wasn’t one of those works that I had dreamt up for a long time, that I had written in a notebook, that I had costume ideas or lighting ideas for it, it wasn’t like that. It was spontaneous.

Margaret Fuhrer:

It seems like so many of these important creative inflection points in your career have been shaped by the unexpected, by the unplanned.

Lauren Lovette:

Yeah, that’s my way. I can certainly relate to that when I hear stories of how Balanchine would work. And Paul, Paul had works where a dancer’s headpiece would fall off at a certain time and he would go—

Margaret Fuhrer:

That’s cool!

Lauren Lovette:

That’s cool, keep it! It’s cool, keep it, that’s exactly what we need. And so I think I can relate to creators that create that way. Because that is how I create, I love being in the moment. But I can’t wait until Dream Machine finally happens one day. We keep running into reasons why I can’t do that idea, but one of these days that piece is going to happen. And I’m excited for that too. So I think there’s space for both. And you have to have both, you have to have the planner’s mind and a level of organization to your craft, and then you have to also have room for the spontaneous and you can’t be too ingrained in your ideas to not see the genius that’s unfolding before your eyes.

Margaret Fuhrer:

Yeah. Both help you grow in different ways. Actually yeah, that’s my next question, is the other projects that are on your horizon right now. Are you working on a new piece for the Taylor company? I know you have your finger in a lot of different pots.

Lauren Lovette:

I am. Yeah, I’m working on—I get back in the studio with the dancers in August, and very excited about a premiere that’s happening at Lincoln Center in November. This work is going to be…well, it will be very different. It’s going to be about more of the things that I’ve absorbed this year. It’s a great piece of music. I’m using Ernest Bloch, concerto number one. I’ve wanted to use that piece for quite a while. It’s been on my list for a while. And this piece of music has a really strong feeling of polarity at the beginning. There’s a lot of tension in the strings, and you feel this oil and water, two polar elements coming together, because there’s a lot of tension, like magnets that are like trying to tear themselves apart.

So, I don’t know, but to me that’s pressure, and how we do things that we might not want to do. What kind of outside force, what kind of pressure gets built up to have you react in a way that you wouldn’t normally? So I really like that concept. And so I’ve been thinking about that.

And then isolation. Isolation can be excruciating and horrifying, but there are moments where you can tap into rays of hope and extreme levels of self-understanding and a connectivity to the world—even though you’re isolated, you can actually have this moment of feeling like you’re actually a part of something way larger than yourself.

And the third movement may or may not occur. I don’t want to do it unless I feel like I have the right time to explore it and to do it right, and so we’ll see. But that one’s all expansive, about freedom and the opposite of solitude. The liberation of just, when you’re out in nature, it has that feeling of being outside and you’re just in a big expanse and you can do anything.

And then it all wraps up in the fugue, which a fugue, as you know, it’s like it unfolds, it keeps unfolding and it keeps repeating. And to me, it’s the most orderly music there is. It sounds like society at its best, when it’s like a clock that functions well. And so the last movement is going to be about that. It’s going to be about how we contribute to society and how we need more than just freedom and isolation, and repentance or whatever. I don’t know, like you can take it however you like, but to me that’s what the music is saying. And the last movement is about order.

Margaret Fuhrer:

That’s fascinating. So the first movement about the two poles in opposition, and then exploring each of those poles, each gets their own movement, and then the poles in harmony, creating order.

Lauren Lovette:

That’s exactly it.

Margaret Fuhrer:

That’s so cool.

Lauren Lovette:

I think that’s what the music is doing.

Margaret Fuhrer:

So my last question is a huge question. What do you see as the throughline, or see as the through lines, that connect your work in all of these different spaces—as a performer, as a choreographer, as an artist working in ballet, as an artist working outside of ballet?

Lauren Lovette:

The throughline, that’s so tough. Besides it being just me, obviously I’ve connected to all of those things. But I really do think it’s just a desire to explore, to grow. Maybe that comes from growing up so afraid of most things—water and people and every kind of new sport or game, or just social interactions, you name it, other kids, animals. Maybe it comes from that in myself, like that feeling so locked up with my own anxieties. And then growing up in an environment that was smaller in its views on the world also. So I had a very rigid idea of what was right and what was wrong. It was very black and white. And so I think the reason I make the decisions that I make and the why I move about the world the way I do, is looking for the color. It’s like, looking for the understanding that I’ve always wanted of why people are the way they are, and how things work, really. I just have an itch, like, a desire to understand.

And that crosses over into my relationships as well. I think, well, some people tell me I’m too agreeable or too nice. And I don’t think it’s niceness. I think it’s a real desire to understand people, why they think the way they do, not shut them off or judge them based off of one meeting or one interaction. And yeah, so I have this just desire to understand mixed with this exact desire to explore more and to see more. I love making things, so that’s going to be—even if I wasn’t making dances, I’d make other things, I’d cook or I would do crafts, I draw, I love creating things, like putting my mind to that kind of work.

And I’m lucky that I get to work with dance, because I really do feel like it’s human, it’s spiritual, it is a space that holds a lot of other artistic spaces. It’s not just music, it’s not just visual art. It’s not just a physical exertion. It’s all of it. It all comes together in space and time. And I don’t care where I am in the process, if I’m the dancer, if I’m the choreographer, even in the audience, I love being in the audience to watch dance still. Because it has all of those elements that come together. And for me, it’s nothing short of a spiritual experience. And I really believe in it. I really do.

So yeah, I’m somewhere here on the road trying to better understand it. And then yeah, I want to infuse energy wherever I can and optimism forward wherever I can.

Margaret Fuhrer:

Lauren, thank you so much for your candor and your openness during this interview. I appreciate your willingness to go there.

Lauren Lovette:

Of course, yeah. That will always be me. And if I’m wrong, you’ll see me in a couple of years and I’ll tell you how I was wrong. [laughter]

Margaret Fuhrer:

It’s been great to pick your brain again 12 years later. Thank you.

Lauren Lovette:

Yeah, it’s been awesome. Thank you for this conversation.

[pause]

Another big thank-you to Lauren. In the show notes, you’ll find links to the Paul Taylor Dance Company’s website and social pages, so you can find out more about their upcoming season at Lincoln Center, and to Lauren’s social pages, so you can keep up with all her various projects. And by the way, Taylor fans, make sure you check out Dance Magazine’s August issue, which features a really beautiful cover story on the company by writer Marina Harss—we have a link to that for you, too.

That’s all for now. Thanks to all of you for subscribing to The Dance Edit Extra. We’ll be back in two weeks with another new episode. Have a great weekend, everyone.