Interview with Deganit Shemy

We sat down with Deganit Shemy, choreographer and 2007 Fresh Tracks Artist to ask her a few questions about her Fresh Tracks experience, what inspires her, and her new piece, Arena, which debuts at Dance Theater Workshop this weekend. Tickets are only $10 in advance, so get them now!

DTW: How did your Fresh Tracks experience in 2007 advance your career? Did it lead to any new artistic discoveries or interests? What was the next step for you?

DS: Fresh Tracks opened me up to many new opportunities.

We performed an excerpt of queen-tet for Dance Theater Workshop’s Gala in 2007, and received other offers for residencies and performances. The show also helped build an audience for my P.S.122 show.

Through the career workshops I got a better idea about how to build a company in NY; how to run a small business, and how to set attainable goals for myself. It was great to be part of a group of choreographers with whom we were about to share our concerns and needs. It was very supportive.

The experience gave me a sense of relevancy and the confidence to go deeper with my interests and themes.

DTW: What is most inspiring to you?

DS: The most inspiring for me is human psychological situations. A memory that comes back to the mind in abstract form.

DTW: How do these resurfaced memories appear in the work?

DS: Memories are subjective. The way you remember something is often not the same as how it actually was, but re-experiencing it as a memory offers insight into ourselves and our psyche. I want my dancers and audiences to get close to these memories; to touch them, to live inside of them. I set up these memories and then break them apart as if they had been forgotten.

DTW: What can you tell us about Arena, the piece you are debuting in April at Dance Theater Workshop?

DS: Arena uses the structure of a sporting event. Inside this event there is a set of rules. The boundaries of the arena are marked in the space. There must always be at least one person outside of the arena to observe; to walk around with the metronome as if they are controlling the time.

To get in to the Arena the dancers must sneak in slowly. Sometimes, they will be pushed back out by the group or an individual. Once inside, they must fight or search to fight.

Along with the arena comes a primitive desire to win, a desire for control, and a necessity to continue. Competition is a distilled or heightened version of the emotions and actions of real life, and the arena allows this to surface.

The structure of the arena itself can function as an experiment in a lab–a petri dish under the light. The audience can look at this thing inside the mind from a distance, almost as if they’re an external consciousness. There is also irony in this view, like the laugh of God. You see all the rules in this little world and how easily they can be changed, and when you do change the rules of the game, all the meanings change instantaneously. Any set of rules raises questions about what is hidden and what is exposed. What is the world behind the rules? What do the rules mean?

The contact in the dance is not limited to violent sports-type interaction. At a certain point this breaks open to allow memories to come alive and the contact becomes more intimate, tender, hesitant, and vulnerable. These memories begin as something nice and beautiful and transform quickly into something dark and frightening. There’s the victim vs. the victimizer, the will to be an individual vs. the desire to be a part of a group, and the sudden recognition of your physical limitations.