JOHN SCOTT INTERVIEW — Interlocutor

John Scott is a Dublin-born choreographer, performer, and founder/Artistic Director of John Scott Dance (1991), Dancer from the Dance Festival, and a member of Aosdána, an Irish affiliation of creative artists.

He studied and performed at the Irish National College of Dance/Dublin City Ballet 1982 – 1985 in works by Anton Dolin, Anna Sokolow, Pearl Gaden, and Babil Gandara. His choreographic works include Evolutions, Dances for Inside and Outside, Divine Madness, Inventions, Cloud Study, Lear, Fall and Recover, and Actions, performed in Ireland and internationally.

His new work, Hereos, is a journey of music and movement using the universe of German operatic heroes: Beethoven’s ‘Fidelio’, Wagner’s ‘Die Walkure’ and ‘Siegfried’, Weber’s Der Freischutz.

Through his virtuosic heroic tenor voice, John Scott creates a dance physicalization of music to show two selves, human and mythological. The music portrays heroes battling impossible dark forces and conquering darkness paralleled with the idea of escape and love. Heroes is framed through interaction with Jonathan Burrows’ collaborator, Matteo Fargion. It runs May 30 through June 2 at NYC’s La Mama Theatre.

Interview by Catherine Tharin

You began your artistic career as a tenor, studying opera. What attracted you to music? When did you begin studying dance?

I began my career as a literature student and started to study dance at the late age of 22. I wanted to study dance since the age of 12 when I saw a performance of the Green Table by Kurt Jooss but insecure 12-year-old boys in Ireland did not ask to study dance. I kept this to myself for several years. I went to college where I earned a degree in English literature but fell into theatre. My brother is a theatre director, and my late father was a lighting designer for The Abbey Theatre, which is the Irish national theatre. It was probably unavoidable that I was going to end up working in the arts.

In college I took classes with the American teacher Marsha Paludan, who pioneered Release Technique with Joan Skinner and who taught Todd Alignment, Alexander Technique and Contact Improvisation. I also took contemporary dance classes, but I thought it was too late to seriously start a dance career. I had a singing voice, but I hadn’t trained. When I eventually took singing lessons at age 26, my teacher described me as a natural singer with a natural talent.

I left Ireland and took workshops in France and ended up going on the road briefly with The Living Theatre in the early 80s while they were performing their famous production of Antigone. I had seen them performing Prometheus in Dublin and they inspired me because most theatre in Ireland was very formal and text based. What they were doing was exciting and inspiring. I’d befriended them and chased them around France while they were on tour. I swept the stage. I really wanted to join the company, but they didn’t have a vacancy at the time.

I returned to Ireland at the age of 22 to save money so I could return to Rome where The Living Theatre was performing. Dublin City Ballet, a classical ballet company that also performed works by modern dance choreographer Anna Sokolow (an original Martha Graham dancer), invited me to take dance class and workshops. They were starting a school and looking for men and offered me an apprenticeship. I studied with them and performed in dances appropriate to my technical ability. I left in 1985 to take workshops in Europe with members of Meredith Monk and The House: Pablo Vela, Bob Een and Andrea Goodman. I instantly connected with what they were doing. This was a place for me to try things. I was a better singer than a dancer, though my preoccupation was dance and choreography, but also the voice. My tribe has been more in the dance world than in the opera world.

In what ways does your musical training influence your dancing and your choreography? In what ways does your musical training intersect with the use of words in your dances?

The practice of singing in general, and opera singing in particular, is incredibly physical and like a dance practice. I am currently working on a trilogy of works about the singing voice in relation to dance. I treat the physicality of singing as a dance practice. There is a lot of connection in singing to breath and rhythm which is very similar to dance. The unique feeling in singing is the ringing bursts of sound and how the sounds fill a space and vibrate. This gives one the feeling of flying. With Heroes at the La MaMa Moves Festival! NYC (May 30 – June 2, 2024), I wanted to go into myself, as a person and a singer and dancer and make all the selves into one through a prism of the different operatic characters that I portray in the work. It is sort of autobiographical.

You’ve performed with numerous high-profile performers. Please describe your favorite experiences.

When I was a struggling apprentice at Dublin City Ballet, I watched a video of Twyla Tharp’s The Catherine Wheel. I was blown away by the dancer Sara Rudner. One time in New York while attending a performance, I saw Sara Rudner in the lobby of the theater, and I approached her. (I was a drooling fan of Sara Rudner’s!) I asked her if she might be interested in making a work in Ireland and she gave me her email. We began a correspondence. Eventually, she came to Ireland and made a four-hour work for 25 dancers. Sara later asked me to perform in one of her pieces at La MaMa Moves in 2008 with Jodi Melnick, Vicki Shick, Taryn Griggs, Chris Yon and Sara herself. It was a blast.

Another time, I was attending a rehearsal of the Meredith Monk Quarry revival (Quarry premiered at La MaMa in 1976) for the Spoleto Festival. They were still resetting the finale and Meredith asked me to stand in to help remember the finale. I walked in a circle singing the Quarry Weave, (an ethereal vocal round). Next thing I was performing in the chorus of Quarry two weeks later.

I have also had a wonderful working relationship with Valda Setterfield, when she played Lear in my dance version of King Lear, which we brought to Edinburgh, Scotland, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, and New York Live Arts. Valda also played Iago in a version of Othello I made in 2022. Her role was filmed as she didn’t feel up to traveling to Ireland following her husband, choreographer David Gordon’s, death. We portrayed Iago as if on a Zoom call. She was extraordinary and sinister and beautiful in both Lear and Othello. I really hope to show this Othello dance in New York. It was Valda’s last performance (1934-2023).

You work with victims of torture. What led you to work with this population? Describe the ways in which you work, please.

I began working with survivors of torture in 2003 when an institute in Dublin sent an SOS email to choreographers asking if anyone could come and teach some dance workshops to clients from African, Middle Eastern and European countries. The survivors had experienced either physical or mental torture. I am not a psychotherapist, and I was quite concerned what might happen and what I might be able to do. I proposed that I teach my normal workshop which involves a lot of breathing, soft movement, improvisation, and voice work.

When I was eventually in their classroom to work there was a group of beautiful and fascinating individuals of many ethnicities and physical characteristics with haunted eyes. I gradually became accustomed to their various reservations. They ended up teaching me. I took all the movement impulses from what they were doing. I also used the idea of personal archaeology that I had learned from Meredith Monk and Pablo Vela and applied this knowledge to the material that the survivors and I created together. I could not ask was what had happened to them because each was in the process of being reconstructed. The aim of torture is to spread fear through control and destroy the individual without killing them...but it kills something in them.

I did not try to heal them. I just tried to do my workshops and to keep them engaged and to protect them if there were signs of physical or emotional vulnerability. Their work was so electrifying that I was inspired to create a dance with them. I described the work as “fall and recover”, the eventual title of the work, because it seemed to fit what they had been through. It was presented at the Dublin Dance Festival and then I brought it to Armagh, Northern Ireland, in 2011, where we had an incredible response.

An early version of Heroes was performed in New York in 2019. In what ways has the work expanded? What influenced this work?

The version of Heroes that I performed in 2019 at 92Y was shortened to fit a mixed program for the Dancer from the Dance Festival (Irish dance festival). It focused on high energy manic heroes and less on love and spiritual and metaphysical elements.

The full version will be presented at La MaMa. It goes right through my personal process that engages and supports the operatic heroes who live inside me and force certain vocal and physical impulses. I was unable to perform Heroes between 2019 and 2022 because of Covid. The proximity of singing in public was completely impossible to do while wearing a mask.

Since coming back after Covid, it has been like recovering a treasured lost object to perform again with the audience so close. I address the audience that creates an environment and counterpoint to the heroes who pass through me. It is sung in German in Germany and in French in France and partially in Italian when I performed in Italy and in New York in English. I tried to humanize the operatic element so that it is honest and real ,and unspectacular. It uses all the space and goes through a type of cycle that is based on the structure of act one of Wagner’s Die Walküre (The Ring Cycle). In a way the Varian character of Siegmund is very close to me both in temperament and vocal color. He was my journey into finding my true primal voice. I felt like I was meeting someone from the other side of my consciousness. The big motivation behind Heroes was to reconcile my dancing choreographic self with my opera singing self as one person or creature. Maybe it’s owning up to all the parts of me because I have had two separate careers. I want to bring them together and all of me in everything.

Who are your heroes?

I admire anyone who gets up and gets on with it and is willing to fight for their conscience though I don’t know that I always have enough courage myself. People I admire most are the torture survivors I encountered in the workshops who lost everything. They tried hard to genuinely express what was happening to them in the present moment as they recovered the sovereignty of their broken bodies.

New York City is your performance home away from home. What attracts you to this city?

New York has always been an inspiration to me even before I came here. The dance, theatre, music and particularly the amazing artistic revolutions of the 1960s and 70s were like a beacon of hope to me struggling in cold wet Ireland.

I love how dancers in New York respond in rehearsal. There is a general positivity, generosity, and optimism among people here. (I have sometimes been told that if I lived full-time in New York, I might change my mind!) New York has been very good to me and remains an inspiration and a place full of people living and dead who I love very much and have given me inspiration, love and hope. They have supported me when making and showing my work. Maybe it’s something about the large scale, the space and the diversity and the presence of so many incredible pioneering artists from so many disciplines. There is always so much to see and do. I am among close friends engaged in never-ending conversation that picks up where we left off whenever I come back.

Heroes runs May 30 through June 2 at NYC’s La Mama Theatre

CATHERINE THARIN choreographs, curates, teaches, and writes. She danced in the Erick Hawkins Dance Company in the 1980s and '90s, was the Dance and Performance Curator at 92NY, NYC, for 15 years, and was a senior adjunct professor at Iona College, New Rochelle, NY, for 20 years. She writes dance reviews for The Dance Enthusiast and The Boston Globe, articles about dance for Side of Culture, and reports on dance for WAMC/Northeast Public Radio. She curated a 2024 dance season at Stissing Center, Pine Plains, NY. She continues to teach the Hawkins philosophy, technique, and repertory as an artist-in-residence. Her latest dance is a collaboration with jazz composer Joel Forrester and filmmaker Lora Robertson. Says Fjord Magazine of her work presented in November 2023: "gentle and precise movement contained to a small range, a good deal of floor work...cast a net of whimsical translucent sheen over it all. The evening was consistently charming, well-crafted and paced."