One More Time

Hello again all, David here one last time. I wanted to take the opportunity to do a little reflecting now that we're all back home again from our amazing DMUSA experience.

We departed Karakol after our final show tired but in high spirits. Before returning to Bishkek, we were given a day to recharge at a resort along the north shore of Issyk-Kul called Aurora, which exists (unintentionally, I think) as a sort of time capsule from the Soviet era when Russian bigwigs would visit the various resorts and sanitaria along the shores of the lake for their health and recreation.

Aurora was charmingly well-appointed in 60's era furnishings and nautically-themed, having been named after a Russian cruiser that fired the first shot of the October Revolution. We all spent the better part of our time there wandering around the massive grounds along the shore-side of the resort, taking in the views of the lake from the beach and making our way through the gardens.

It was both an amusing and relaxing experience, giving us a chance to unwind a bit and to get a glimpse into another era of the region's history.

Our last couple of days in Bishkek were somewhat surreal for us. With all of our performances done and only a couple of classes left to teach before our departure, we were all a little confused about what to do with ourselves. The prospect of returning to our everyday lives back in New York seemed somehow impossible after having had the experiences we did. After so many weeks on the road together the idea of waking up in our own apartments and not living out of suitcases anymore was almost as exciting as the impending separation anxiety was frightening, but we all knew it was going to be hard to say goodbye to the trip, to Central Asia, and to each other, even if only for a few weeks. Some of us would be extending our trip with a few days together in Istanbul for vacation and sightseeing, but the majority of us would probably not be seeing each other until we start rehearsals again in late July.

We made the most of our last days teaching an impressive group of students in Kara-Balta, speaking at our last American Corner, enjoying our favorite local foods for the last time (if anyone can find me a chechel hookup in New York, I actually might kiss you), and hunting for regional tchotchkes, knickknacks, bric-a-brac, and what-have-you. Loaded up on gifts and personal souvenirs (our favorite store by far was a contemporary folk-art shop called Tumar. check them out!), and blessed with almost perfect weather, we did our last exploring and sightseeing of Bishkek before making our way to the airport in the middle of the night for the first leg of our journey home.

I was among the group that stayed over in Istanbul for a few extra days, which was a refreshing experience for sure. After our weeks of touring and being the focus of attention in a region that doesn't see many foreign faces, it was nice to be just another tourist seeing the sights. And oh what sights there are! Istanbul is a truly magnificent city with over a millennium of history visible at almost every turn; I really cannot recommend visiting there enough.

We've all been home for a couple of weeks now and I've been doing a lot of thinking about our trip, the places we went, the things we saw, the food we ate (my favorite part, always), and the people we met along the way. I've also been sifting through the 3,000 or so pictures I took, most as the resident photographer of the company, but many just as a wide-eyed visitor far from home. I'm glad I have all these pictures to remind myself of the trip because it's honestly been pretty difficult to believe it all actually happened. We saw and did (and ate) so much and met so many amazing people, and on top of it all we got to perform in all these incredible theaters and opera houses in front of lively, engaged, and startlingly enthusiastic audiences. It was an unbelievably fulfilling trip and, when I remember that it wasn't just some kind of dream, I feel very lucky to have had the chance to be a part of it.

On behalf of the Sean Curran Company I'd like to say thank you to everyone at the US Dept. of State and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, as well as the embassy and consular staff we worked with in Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, for making our entire DanceMotionUSA 2012 journey possible. They all pulled off the titanic feat of making it all happen and of somehow shepherding us through almost five weeks of touring, and we could not be more proud to have worked with them to make our tour the success that it was.

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.

Lighting Ballet

So as the name may imply, you may think I am talking about "How to light a ballet". Actually I am trying to explain how amazing our lighting technician, Gala Kugatova, was at the Opera and Ballet Theater in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. She took "running lights" to a new level, performing her own ballet behind the scenes, which took me back in time when the light board operator was as much an artist as the designer. Technicians like her are required to be as "in tune" to the show as the performers. Let me try to explain.

When I walked into the theatre, I had to quickly assess what was possible and where we could hang and focus lights to achieve all the looks needed for the show. The first thing I noticed was how old the lighting equipment was, but how cool some of it was. Some of the equipment was older than the majority of the people who worked in the theatre, literally.

While very little of the equipment worked, you could tell that when it was installed in the 50's this opera house was extremely state of the art! My favorite piece of equipment was this old-school moving light. It consisted of motors and gears that could refocus the light while it was in the air. It was the first modern "moving light," a lighting term that describe the modern-day automated lighting equipment we now use.

The lighting equipment was built in the 1950's which required the board operator to truly be a part of the show. The lighting control console was very interesting! There were 4 panels on it each containing 180 switches. This allowed the operator to preset the next few cues ahead of time.

Then there was the center of the panel that had master knobs that would fade from one preset panel to the next (what we call a crossfade.)

Watching Gala work was as interesting as what was going on the stage. I was amazed at how well she had memorized what each switch controlled.

All this older equipment required Gala to really understand the systems in the theatre. Even before the house lights faded, Gala started her magic. Basically, I had to simplify the show to 4 major looks and then Gala could preset the looks into each scene. Then I woud tell her which cue to crossfade into and how quickly we would transition. This simply became Fast (2 seconds), Medium (5 Seconds), and Slow (15 seconds). She only had 1 rehearsal to learn the show and because of the translation issues some mistakes were made during that rehearsal. What amazed me most was how she was able to understand the corrections of the mistakes and adjust to the needs of the show, feeling the energy and flow of the production. During the actual performance all the cues were operated with perfection. She would sense the rhythm of the show and execute the cues with sensitivity to each piece. A few of the cues were difficult and required some adjustments to the base cues, but Gala would immediately make the adjustments in the preset with her memorization of what each and every switch did. She was a choreographed artist executing a live show in the booth! Amazing! Technicians like her are as integral to the show as the performers.

Brava, Gala, and thanks for making my design look so great in your opera house!

The Bear Went Over the Mountain...

...to see what he could see.


We climbed up the foothills of the Tian Shan Mountains in Ala Archa State Park yesterday. It was humbling and a beautiful reminder of my place in the world. Yes, in a hippy-dippy, spiritual, one with nature kind of a way, but more so in a you can't help but be a part of the world kind of way.

You are here. You are alive.

Visitors tie mementos to the trees to make wishes

While most people spend their whole lives striving and struggling to leave a mark on the world, I've sort of stumbled into affecting at least a few lives. Admittedly, that's not at all why I do what I do, but I can confidently say that I will never be able to ignore that fact again.

The other day at an American Corner event, a young girl said to me, "Thank you for coming and shaking up our lives," and I said, "Really?"

Modern dance shaking lives up? She explained that it was the fact that we were people who were clearly passionate and enjoyed doing what we did, and that, most importantly, we were doing it. The questions at that meeting weren't about being famous, or MTV, or Step Up 2 (which I was in), they were asking us "How do I live my life in a way that will make me happy?, how do you define success, how do I do what I love?" etc. 

The idea of doing what you want, saying what you have to say in the way that you want, or, as Sean would say, "Speaking an old language in a new way with a contemporary accent," is something that as an American I completely take for granted. Or I used to, anyway.

Each day I am more and more grateful that I can do exactly what I want and have the opportunity and inclination to live my life as an artist. For me there is no other way, but now the blinders have come off. Nothing exists in a vacuum, it's simple physics. You cannot create something from nothing, a life of creation cannot help but alter the world, and we cannot help being changed by the world around us in the process. For this I am humbled and extremely grateful.

---Shane

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!