Sean Reflects on our Trip

It seems odd that as dancers we have to sit basically still while moving through space in some kind of a vehicle to get to a place where we can finally do some dancing. Our trip from Athens, Ohio to Ashgabat, Turkmenistan took a very long time and employed a number of vans and taxis and airplanes and buses. I was nervous and concerned about so many things for our trip, and one of them was if our costumes would be appropriate for the Muslim countries we were visiting. We are generally covered up on stage even though the clothes we wear are very body-conscious, but before we arrived in Turkmenistan it was made clear to me that I would have to make sure that dancers' legs and backs and even arms would be covered. The week before we left I made quite a few trips to Capezio and American Apparel to buy turtlenecked, long-sleeved leotards, long leggings, and even skirts so as not to embarrass or offend our audiences. Imagine my confusion, and minor frustration, when, while sitting at immigration in the Ashgabat airport we saw Russian MTV on a large-screen television playing a music video of two naked women with small bars over their breasts and pubic areas while walking around a city at night. The stone-faced female guards with their long-skirted, army-like uniforms were unfazed and the male workers did not even seem to notice. This would be the first of many entertaining and enlightening paradoxes this trip would present.

Ashgabat by night

Our drive from the airport to the hotel was like Dorothy and company arriving in Oz, but without all the inhabitants. It was 5AM and the streets were empty, though they were almost as empty during the day too. The large and impressive white and gold, brightly lit up buildings were a strange mix of beautiful and intimidating, with an architectural mix of Ottoman Empire meets Radisson Hotels. Amazing, but they seemed empty inside and there was no one to admire and enjoy them on the outside. It was also interesting that the loud music playing on the van's radio was Whitney Houston followed by Michael Jackson. I have learned from many trips long ago that pop music and soda pop are the same all over the world. The hotel was another one of these white and gold structures, with an impressive imitation Chihuly glass structure over the reception desk. We seemed to be the only guests and everything was open 24 hours a day. The oatmeal with sweetened milk at breakfast was very good, and we got the BBC news in English on our TV. The BBC news theme that repeats over and over made me think, in my jet lagged confusion, that I was back in Cambodia, which was the last place I watched the BBC when I was choreographing Phnom Penh's first rock opera a couple of years ago.

Our first day in Ashgabat was just sightseeing; a national museum and an ancient mosque. Still not any people around. I wondered where are all those interesting people in traditional dress with way too much carry-on luggage from our flight from Istanbul to Ashgabat lived. We had great classes to mixed populations at the Lotus Health Club.

Enthusiastic Lotus students

The dancers ranged from 6-60 and seemed mostly interested or slightly versed in folk dance, ballroom, or hip-hop. What I saw, which I would happily see at every class we taught and in every class that I have experienced in all my travels, is that people love to find new ways to move and to dance and to show off and love the feeling of being what I call "in their bodies". They especially love to do so to interesting music. "Where can I get that music?" is a question I got everywhere we went, and I always told them where they could find it. I hope there has been a spike in modern dance percussion CD sales from Central Asia recently.

I especially enjoyed teaching the Mengli Traditional Dance Company. They were hesitant and ambivalent at first, and I thought "Oh no, tough crowd. They have to be here at this class," but with a bit of humor and a shared love for moving together to a beat, we had a great time. They taught us some traditional dance, then we showed them what we do, and then they danced for us. As we were to be performing in their theater, I invited their artistic director to have her dancers share our program with us and I am thrilled to say that they did. The curtain call with them in their long black braids and long colorful costumes with my dancers with their long-sleeved turtleneck leotards and their long leggings was a real "now" explosion of the traditional and the new, and the crowd went wild.

Bowing in Ashgabat

One Mengli dancer, in halting English, tried to explain that they love to dance and they are lucky to be in their company, but the monotony of their traditional dance lives can be hard and so it was great to try something different.

Backstage with Mengli

After many autographs were given and photos taken, we drove back to our hotel and I was once again struck by the vast, empty, brightly lit streets and I thought about another paradox: nothing is as it seems here. I felt like I was in someone else's grandiose dream and it was not a feasible reality. I then remembered that we had just danced and connected and entertained and, I hope, inspired a curious crowd and I was reminded that this was art doing its job.

Kazakhstan was so different from Turkmenistan; people everywhere! Beautiful, interesting, different-looking people. I was so happy to be back in a grocery store or at a beautiful Russian Orthodox church with other lookers looking and people praying. We saw a group of people, infants to older teens, getting baptized. There was also a bride waiting to get married, and old Russian Orthodox church ladies cleaning up old candles and wax to make way for new candles.

Outside the Russian Orthodox church in Almaty

I bought a couple of candles and, although I am, sadly, someone who has given up on and stopped praying, I lit one candle for my Irish Catholic parents in Boston, and I lit the other for the safety of my beautiful, intelligent, and deeply human dancers. I thought to myself "if I am lighting candles in a church for people does that mean I still pray?"

Yes, we saw people everywhere, but my favorite people were the beautiful dancers of the Samruk Dance Company. I had taught many classes already, but this was the first time I had a group that we shared a common language with. They knew what a tendu is and how to stand in parallel position, but, much to my surprise, they had not heard of Jose Limon or Merce Cunningham or Trisha Brown, though they seemed like they might have heard of George Balanchine. I gave them a demanding two-and-a-half hour technique class. We broke for lunch, and when we came back they ran through a program of three dances they would be performing in a couple of nights time after we were leaving.

In class with Samruk

They were great and versatile, moving from a Euro-centric brand of contemporary ballet to Broadway-style jazz. The jazz dance made me think of another of my heroes, Twyla Tharp, and I wondered if the jazz dance had been inspired by any of Twyla's Sinatra pieces, but they hadn't heard of Twyla either.

In Almaty we danced in a traditional opera house and in Astana we danced in a glass pyramid. What gifts to my company to be dancing in an old place and a new place. At the Pyramid in Astana we were told we had sold out the theater for the first time in its history, and also that we had ticket scalpers! That was a first for the Sean Curran Company. It was at a class at the Pyramid that we worked with the Terra Dance Company. I pushed them to go deeper and dance bigger, and then they delighted us with 5 different dances.

Terra Dance Company in their studio at the Pyramid

My favorite was a traditional Uzbek dance, so unusual with decorative hands, smiling, flirty eyes, and a strange percussive chest pump that was the most inventive kind of what I call "punctuation" in choreography. They finished with a jazz number, their version of "All That Jazz" from Chicago. I meant to ask if they knew Bob Fosse, but did not get around to it.

That amazing Uzbek dance stayed with me and made me think of my massage therapist in New York City, a healer from Uzbekistan named Mukhtar. So many of the faces here made me think of him and I thought, "I cannot wait to tell him that I saw this gorgeous, unusual dance from Uzbekistan." I also remembered that when I told him I was coming to Central Asia, he asked in shock "Why ever are you going there?"

Our last country was the Kyrgyz Republic. As the local people seemed to know this was the last place we'd be visiting, they all asked which was our favorite place. Human nature, I think, to ask that, and as I have been trying to be a real diplomat and a true cultural ambassador I said, "Countries are like performances and no two are alike, so it is not useful to compare them." This no-two-are-alike is one of the many things I remember from my days dancing with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. I was very upset as I thought I had danced poorly one night and Bill said "Get over it, no two shows are alike." and I still agree.

I did have a night unlike any other when in Bishkek, my company was invited to a private concert of traditional musicians. They were called Ustat Shakirt, and they were they were so young, so talented, so beautiful. Then I actually remembered thinking, now this was like one night when I was a boy. My parents would take me and my sisters to what the Irish call a "sessiune", a gathering of traditional musicians playing music with other people there, the listeners listening. The music that night was otherworldly. The instruments were quite foreign to me and the faces looked nothing like the musicians' faces of my childhood, but this was a sessiune. A dozen or so people facing us making amazing, rich, timeless music and a dozen or so of us facing them, happy to be watching and listening, tapping toes and bopping heads. I have a big dream and a crazy idea but I want to make a dance to this music and I want to get those young, invested, talented musicians to the US to play live for us.

Our new friend from Ustat Shakirt

On a day off we went to a gorge up a mountain, and as the saying goes "the gorges were gorgeous" just like my gorgeous dancers. I am no nature boy, but I was overwhelmed. I have used the quote here that "Art holds a mirror up so that we see ourselves reflected" Evan said that, for him, places in nature like this mountaintop hold a mirror up for him. Evan was in heaven; we all were.

Speaking of mountains, we had quite a long drive over and through some mountains to reach Karakol. The clouds seemed so close. There was a rushing river, a giant salt lake, and China just another mountain road away. In what seems to be Kyrgyz-style graffiti, people take white boulders and spell out names and sayings in the sides of the mountain hills with the rocks. I asked what it all said, and like everywhere else, it was "Iskender loves Irina" or "so-and-so was here" but then we saw 'American School' in big, block, recognizable letters.

We talked at an American Corner and it was another great time to tell our stories and have others tell theirs and to take questions. We got the question "How do I learn to dance?, "Can I teach myself to dance?" "What do I do if there's no dance schools where I live?" and I had to make the challenge to the asker that, "You have to do it yourself, be a self-starter. Use the internet and YouTube, get your friends together and make up your own dances, teach others." In other words, make something out of nothing.

It made me think of my company dancers and how they challenged themselves, and took great relish and joy in making a new "build-a-phrase" in each new city that we visited. They taped these phrases and I hope to use them in future collaborations, or maybe in my Central Asian dance. It also made me think of our lighting designer, Joe Doran, and the seemingly insurmountable obstacles he faced in each city, with outdated, broken, and extremely limited lighting instruments. Each performance was lit beautifully. Maybe it did not look like the original design, but he made it work. Joe, I think now, could light a show with three flashlights and a Zippo lighter.

As we drove back to Bishkek over the mountains so close to the clouds, I watched out my window admiring the yurts, small tent-like homes from nomadic days. I marveled at the many marvelous looking mosques, and I was so curious about the ancient cemeteries that looked like tiny villages with miniature houses for the dead. I actually got excited when I saw the wild grazing horses, and the sheep, the goats, the cows, and the chickens, but mostly I just loved looking at the people walking by or sitting down on the bumpy, tooth-chattering road. I saw wisdom in the old faces and an open quizzical look in the young ones. Like everywhere else in the world there children playing with sticks and old junk, making something out of nothing and improvising, kind of like a choreographer might do when looking to find new movement, or playing in the studio, starting or continuing the making of a dance, or the ending of a tour. The transition is no transition and success is a journey not a destination.

Forward, always forward

Hello to you, dear readers!

David here again to catch you up on some of what we've been up to, and we've been up to quite a bit!

The last week or so of this trip has been quite the whirlwind, traveling from city to city, teaching, performing, and meeting new people. It's hard to believe what we have accomplished during our time here. In the last nine days we've been the guests of the US Ambassador to Kazakhstan at a reception at the US Embassy in Astana, been the first performers to completely sell out the theater at the Pyramid, returned to Almaty, Kazakhstan for another 4 days of teaching, spoken at two more American Corner events, crossed the border into Kyrgyzstan, and performed to another packed house in the capital, Bishkek, at the Opera and Ballet Theater. After a morning hike along a mountain trail in the Tian Shan mountains and another day of classes, we were off on a scenic 7-hour drive to Karakol, Kyrgyzstan along the shores of the Issyk-Kul, one of the largest alpine lakes in the world. We're currently here in Karakol preparing for the final concert of our DanceMotionUSA tour of Central Asia. After this last show we'll have another couple of days of teaching and a day off at a resort along the Issyk-Kul, and then we'll return to Bishkek for one last American Corner engagement before our flight back to the US.

The Bayterek monument in Astana

The end of our time in Kazakhstan was a bit different than the rest of our trip had been. We left Astana to return to Almaty, which had been our first stop in the country. Our first stay in Almaty had been for only 2 days so we had been unable to teach any master classes or see any of the city, so we were glad for a chance to return. Our first day back in Almaty was also the first day off of our trip (!), which we put to good use spreading out around the city to take in some local sites including a local bazaar, a beautiful Russian Orthodox church, and a gondola ride into the foothills of the surrounding mountain range.

Almaty's Russian Orthodox Church

In the meat market

Herbs and spices galore

While in Almaty, we also had the privilege of spending a day at the studio of Samruk Dance Company, Kazakhstan's leading modern dance company. After spending the previous few weeks teaching master classes for  either younger, less experienced dancers, or dancers with purely folk dance or ballet backgrounds, it was a real treat for us to share a studio with other dancers who work within a similar idiom as us. Samruk has previously collaborated with artists from American groups CityDance Ensemble and Company E, so they were already fairly familiar with some of the concepts Sean works with when generating material for new work or finding new ways to approach existing movement.

Sean in action teaching a phrase from Metal Garden

After a fun class and a lunch break, we were treated to a studio showing of the program they were about to premiere that weekend. We were floored by the company's versatility, transitioning from European contemporary ballet to American modern to Broadway-style jazz from piece to piece. We were honored by their generosity in opening their space to us and giving us a gift of such a wonderful performance, and then topping it off with some delicious tea and cake!

Members of Samruk Dance Company

We said goodbye to Almaty and Kazakhstan as we boarded the vans that would drive us the 4 hours through breathtaking mountains and across the border to Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan. Our previous trips from location to location were all by airplane, so it was a refreshing change to experience the transition from the ground.

The Bishkek Opera and Ballet Theater. Our banner's on the left!

A closer shot of the banner

We spent most of our few days in Bishkek in or around the gorgeous Opera and Ballet theater, which is where our performance was. Sean taught master classes for young choreography students as well as for dancers from the resident ballet company at the theater. Our performance was fun as always, and made a bit more interesting for having been on the only raked stage we've seen on our trip!

Inside the theater

The real highlight of our time in Bishkek was without a doubt the evening we spent with a group of young folk musicians at the Ustat Shakirt Center. The group, led by musician/teacher/composer Nurlanbek Nyshanov, treated us to a private concert of traditional Kyrgyz folk music that left us all teary-eyed and speechless. It's hard to imagine what the musicians must have thought of us as, with each piece they played, they were greeted with increasingly more astonished faces gaping back at them. We had walked in expecting a pleasant evening of traditional music, but were totally unprepared for the depth of Nyshanov's arrangements and the phenomenal talents of his students. As we left we were practically begging them to come to our concert the next night so that we might give something back to them that might approximate what they had given us. I think I can safely speak for everyone in the company when I  say that it made my night when we came out to the audience after our performance to Mr. Nyshanov and all of his students waiting for us by the stage.

S.C.Co with the Ustat Shakirt musicians

We left Bishkek this morning and set out on the 7-hour drive along the north shore of the Issyk-Kul, between two ranges of the Tian Shan mountains, to reach the final city of our tour, Karakol. In previous briefings we had been told that the trip here was a sight to behold, but leaving it at that is quite the understatement. Generally, a 7-hour drive isn't something most people would look forward to, but I'm genuinely excited to make the return trip back to Bishkek in a few days just to see it all again. The countryside, mountains, and valleys in this part of Kyrgyzstan are unbelievably beautiful, and that's not just the altitude talking, though we are at about 1 mile above sea level!

Tian Shan mountains on Issyk-Kul's north coast

The far shore is barely visible!

We're looking forward to our performance tomorrow night and the promise of a day by the lake before we head back to Bishkek. There's still more to come, so keep an eye out!

Our Audiences

The company's Associate Artistic Director, Elizabeth Coker Giron, has been musing over what each of our audiences has been like and what it has done for us as performers. Here's what she has to say!

SCCo now has three performances under our belt on this Central Asian adventure, and I’ve been particularly struck by how different each show felt. There are more obvious reasons for these differences, especially highlighted by the technical demands (“surprises”) of each space. The grandly impressive Mukamlar Palace theater in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan (pretty much everything in Ashgabat is grandly impressive) provided the challenges of a slick, painted wooden floor with imbedded turntable and two-inch gaps around its seams. In Kazakhstan, Altmay’s opera and ballet theater boasted a slight (but perceptible) rake to the stage, and dancing into the intense side-lighting in Pavlodar rivaled driving into high beams on a rainy nighttime highway. Perhaps we dealt with some trials better than others, but with each show we are more fully armed for the challenges to come.

I feel much more personally affected, however, but the human differences between each performance represented by one of the most compelling reasons we are on this tour in the first place: our audience.

Turkmenistan does not have any contemporary tradition of live performative art. While local companies preserve indigenous folk dances, there are no extant examples of ballet and opera (let alone modern dance). Our schedule in Ashgabat allowed us to teach several master classes in the days leading up to our performance. Many of the class participants attended the show (in their DanceMotion USA t-shirts!). Even in such an exotic and at times alienating city, I felt accepted, confident, and driven to perform well knowing we had an army of new friends and possible modern-dance converts in the audience. The overwhelmingly warm and enthusiastic response after our show only reinforced the mutual empathy felt by audience and performers. I can say I’ve never been part of such a surprising and satisfying event.

Our first stay in Almaty (we return next week) did not include master classes, so I had a feeling of higher stakes at hand before the performance. Our audience would be strangers to us, giving us the challenge of befriending them, letting them trust us and ultimately convincing them through our performance to come along on the ride with us. Personally, I felt the increased pressure of performing in a classic European-style opera and ballet house where the traditional idioms are so well represented and full of such historic weight. Hearing that we’d sold out a thousand seat theater and inspired ticket scalpers was exciting, but also increased the jitters. What started as a polite (nervously quiet?) audience soon warmed to shouting, a standing ovation, and nine curtain calls. The success of the Almaty show felt especially sweet and well-earned.

Last night in Pavlodar we performed to an oversold house including the regional mayor, the US ambassador to Kazakhstan and his wife, and dozens of master class participants from our events the previous day. This city is less privileged than the others on our itinerary and probably better portrays the lives of most Kazakh citizens. I was reminded of what a great privilege it is that I am an artist not only by training but also by trade. Many of the dance students I met were surprised that I was a 30-year-old adult whose profession is “dancer.” This didn’t seem to be a feasible category for employment in most of the students’ imaginations. Once again, our audience went gamely on that ride with us and presented us with a humbling show of appreciation both during the performance and afterwards.

The morning of the Pavlodar performance I was honored to attend the opening of the first American Corner in the city and was really excited to see DMUSA’s gift of some truly stellar books on American dance traditions for their English-language library. I hope that our visit and the success of this American Corner’s programs will encourage a generation of Kazakh students to pursue live dance performance, whether as producers, performers or most necessarily, as a voracious and demanding audience.

Postshow Ashgabat and on to Kazakhstan

     Hi folks, David here again!

     Our performance in Ashgabat completed and our time in Turkmenistan coming to a close, the company moved on to our first stop in Kazakhstan: Almaty. As the former capital of Kazakhstan, Almaty is an enormous city rich in history, framed by the Trans-Ili Alatau mountain range. Our stay there, which is to be the first of two visits, was short but very sweet. We arrived Friday afternoon, had interviews with press, and spent all day Saturday in the theater preparing for that evening's concert. Our performance was to a completely sold-out crowd who must have enjoyed our concert quite a bit seeing as they continued applauding through 9 or so curtain calls! That night the company was able to enjoy some of what Almaty's night life has to offer, going out dancing at a local hot-spot, where we were recognized by a few very enthusiastic audience members. Much merry-making ensued and we left Almaty the next morning delighted that we would be returning in a week for another few days to enjoy the city.

     Our next stop was Pavlodar. Located on the northern steppe of Kazakhstan, Pavlodar's scenery is very different from our previous two stops. From the airport one sees the endless, flat expanses of this region of the country, which is a chilling and beautiful sight for me, since I grew up in New York City where the average visible range is the distance from wherever you are standing to the nearest 30-story building. Pavlodar is a much smaller city than the others we had yet seen, which meant we were able to do most of our travel on foot rather than by van; a welcome change for us! Being able to see the city at less than 30mph was great for us to soak up more of the feeling of where we were. 

     We spent two days in the theater in Pavlodar. The first we spent doing an all-day workshop with a group of local dancers, all around high-school age, who study a wide range of dance from traditional Kazakh folk dance to MTV-style hip-hop. Spending the whole day with them gave us a real chance to get to know them and let them get to know us. That night, a few members of our company were able to attend a performance of the Euro Circus, which Rachel will have a post on later! 

     Our performance night rivaled our evening in Ashgabat, with all of our master class participants (and I think all of their friends as well!) in attendance. Their energy was so palpable from the stage that it really pushed the entire company to give the best show we had in us in gratitude. I hope they had at least as much fun watching us as we did dancing for them, because I think it was the most enjoyable performance I've had yet. As modern dancers, we're used to a fairly reserved audience, so having such unbridled enthusiasm coming at us during the whole show was a real treat for us, and i think shaped our performance quite a bit. After the show we were greeted backstage by a group of cheering fans asking for pictures, hugs, and autographs that we were more than happy to give! Being treated like rock stars is still quite a novelty for us and is something that we will hopefully never grow tired of. Post-show can be an interesting time for a dancer emotionally, and to come out of your dressing room to see your audience waiting to tell you just how much they enjoyed the show is really magical and a great reminder to us of why we do what we do.

    We are now in the new capital of Kazakhstan, Astana, a couple hundred miles west of Pavlodar. Astana is one of the newest cities in the country and has been built up almost entirely over the last 15 years. It is a city of competing skyscrapers and buildings of infinitely varied shapes and sizes. We will have two days of master classes here with local professional dancers and then one performance at the Palace of Peace and Reconciliation. We can't wait for a chance to go exploring while we're here!

More updates soon!

Hello friends!

David here, writing to you from sunny Almaty, Kazakhstan. The company and I would like to apologize for the delay in getting our blog officially started. We've been on the tour for a little over a week now but have been unable to post anything due to a combination of long days of air travel and government internet censorship in Turkmenistan.

So, now that we're here in Kazakhstan we'll be posting lots of things from our tour that we want to share with all of you. We want to bring a little of our experience to you, whether it of the amazing sights we've gotten to see, some of the incredible people we've met, pictures from classes, workshops, and performances, or whatever else we can think of. We hope to be able to give you some idea of how incredible this trip has been already and what wonderful new experiences we have. I hope you'll join us on this crazy ride we're on!