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Program

Artist: Kate Wallich
Title: Tuning Systems, Part 2: (Bieber cont.)
Performers: Marlie Couto, Keilan Stafford, Kate Wallich
Score: Ben Babbitt
Bio: Kate Wallich is a dancer, choreographer, educator, and founder who believes in the combined power of artists and the public. Named one of Dance Magazine’s “25 To Watch,” Kate has cultivated community through Dance Church®, the inclusive dance-fitness movement she founded in 2010, and Studio Kate Wallich, the non-profit arts organization she started that housed her dance companies The YC and YC2 for ten years and now serves as an incubator for dance-based, design-forward experiences. Kate’s work has been commissioned and presented nationally and internationally by institutions like Walker Art Center, On the Boards, Mass MoCa, The Joyce Theater, ICA Boston and Henry Art Gallery amongst many others. In 2019 she collaborated with Perfume Genius on the critically acclaimed dance and music performance The Sun Still Burns Here. Kate lives and works in Los Angeles, intentionally working outside of the traditional dance company model. She is currently working on her next company, Body of Work, a movement practice focused on embodiment and personal growth, and is in the beginning stages of her next large-scale creation. katewallich.com / @katewallich @yourbodyofwork

Artist: Stephanie Zaletel
Title: more vagus excerpts
Performers: Tom Tsai, Malloy Fabian, Stephanie Zaletel
Additional research and collaborative support: Rosanna Tavarez, Cory Feder, Clarisse Hazel Lopez, Murphy Martin
Bio: Stephanie Zaletel (they/she) is a choreographer, dance artist, movement facilitator, educator, dream-tender, caregiver, environmentalist, and somatic based mental health advocate based in Los Angeles. They create captivating works for various mediums, collaborating with musicians, filmmakers, theater and opera companies. In 2015 they founded SZALT, a trauma aware and feminist led dance company which brought their performance based offerings to prestigious venues nationally and internationally including Ford Amphitheater, REDCAT, and BAM, as well as beloved independent communities in Los Angeles such as Pieter, The Handbag Factory, and LAX Festival. Stephanie is currently dancing in projects for Rosanna Gamson // World Wide and directing an opera-in-development called SENTINEL with Danielle Birritella simultaneous with their independent project, vagus. As a movement facilitator and educator they work from a place of empowerment, emphasizing autonomy, intuition, and empathy for varying levels, ages, abilities, and backgrounds of mover. Their current body-harmonizing workshop i care about your body will be occurring seasonally in Los Angeles and across the country this year. They hold a BFA in Dance from California Institute of the Arts and a CE Certificate in Somatic Psychotherapy and Practices from Antioch University. szaltdances.org / @_szalt

Interview

Kate: I was thinking about why I wanted to do this interview. and I came up with two good reasons. One, I want to talk to more choreographers and colleagues working in dance and two, we are getting this new WIP series off the ground on the first monday of every month and I think an output like this will help to get dialogue going between artists and, hopefully audiences. Since you and I are showing work for the very first showing of this series, I thought it would be great to try this out as the first one. Think interview magazine, think deep dance discourse. How does that feel?

Steph: Cool. I think this is a cool idea. It will link our projects together and then I will have more context to what you will be bringing into the room. I already care about it, but I will be able to care about it from a different place.

Kate: I care about your work too. So, I was thinking about when we actually first met. Was it at Strictly Seattle, when you were a dancer in my work? Was that the first time?

Steph: Ya, I was like “I really want to get into Kate Wallich’s piece”. I think it was summer of 2012.

Kate: Oh my god. Wait, really?

Steph: Yea, and I really wanted to be in your piece

Kate: Well you were, and you were the soloist.

Steph: [laughs]

Kate: Well, of the many things I love about you Steph, not only are you a brilliant mover, dancer and choreographer, but you're truly an amazing performer, and I just remember being so drawn to you. You had this really slow, stoic opening solo in the piece.

Steph: Yes, “Teen Dream”.

Kate: Yes, during my phase of drones for an hour, and then a pop song.

Steph: And I took Dance Church when I was there.

Kate: Oh yes, the early days.

Kate: So I think that we weirdly have the same trajectory as dance makers in the sense that we both graduated from college and immediately went into choreographing very seriously. We both did one off projects a bit for choreographers who lived in our cities perhaps, but really the core of what we were attempting to do was to build our own worlds. Is that true?

Steph: Well yea, I was craving a certain type of dance experience, and it didn't exist, so I carved it for myself. I was clear and specific about what I wanted it to feel like to be in professional dance and the experiences I was having were not quite that. I wanted more autonomy. I don't even know if I was fully aware of what I was doing as I started making work, but I knew it had to be happening. As I got older I was like yes, it is a “choreographer”, this is it.

Kate: I don't know if it's our generation or when we entered the field, or maybe it's in our personality, but at the time it felt rare to be doing what we were doing. We did not take the typical model of going into the field and dancing for other choreographers or companies and then transitioning to making work. For me it had a lot to do with my location in Seattle, and I wonder if you being in Los Angeles, and essentially us not being in NY, helped with this. They were both locations that were ripe for potential.

Steph: When I graduated from Cal Arts, there wasn't really much in LA. Maybe one or two companies that were extremely competitive. I wanted to be dancing, but I was living here, so ya, it was sort of birthed out of location and necessity. The landscape was sparse at the time, but it's changed so much since then. On any given weekend you can probably go see some dance in LA, but at that time that was not the case.

Kate: When you started making work, both you and companies like Ate9, Bodytraffic, and Micaela Taylor’s company The TL Collective started getting a lot of opportunities out of that sparse landscape ya? It seemed through my perspective up in Seattle that there was this influx of institutional support that just started to pop off in Los Angeles at the perfect time.

Steph: Ya, that feels right to some degree. Because there was so much space, it felt like we could make an impression. But at the same time, getting people to take my work seriously was hard because I was not established via a company or like an MFA. I was just a 23 year old on a mission [laughs]. But then the work ended up speaking for itself, people didn't care about my age anymore. But it definitely took awhile for them to take the work seriously. What about you? You just have a BFA right?

Kate: [laughs], yeah, just a BFA from Cornish. I would say I had a similar experience. I definitely developed institutional relationships that then turned into commissioning and presenting support over the years. There was this moment in Seattle dance when Tonya Lockyer became the Artistic Director of Velocity and she really helped to put us on the map. At the time in the field, Israeli dance forms were beginning to come to the states and it was like this heatwave. It was the first time I had seen a dance company that had ever been marketed that way. Hot dancers, exciting work, there was this mass desire for this thing. I saw something that I had never seen before, and that was exciting to me. I felt stuck in Seattle, but I had a desire to make work, I saw that it was possible to do it, and I had an environment that encouraged and supported me. I knew that it was odd to be 22 and choreographing so rigorously, but I think for sure the state of dance funding, entering a field where all these big companies were slowly dying, this all became part of my desire for creation too. I mean, that has always been the case in dance, but being young and not knowing that, and having starry eyes of starting a dance career…. I feel like we were brave Steph. We just did it.

Steph: [laughs] yeah.

Kate: Okay, let's talk about your process. You’ve been making work for over ten years now. Where did it start, where did it go and where is it now? What's the same, what has shifted. Tell me.

Steph: I want you to answer this question too. But man, I don't think I am special for thinking or feeling this but even from a young age, it was the only place that I would stop thinking and become fully present. And it's still that today. That has not changed. I grew up with a lot of dysfunction and a lot of really gnarly stuff is carried in my body because of how I was raised, and what I have lived through. Dance was always healing, but it wasn't until I found choreography that I was able to repair some of the dysfunction and disorganization of my upbringing. I was able to literally organize things in front of me, and I could make sense of things in front of me. I could feel what I wanted to feel. And I could create an environment where other people could feel, have catharsis and share safe experiences that were moving towards a picture, or a message. I don't think there has been a year when I have not made a project since I was 15. It’s only evolved since then. I feel like I am at the point where my work has become prophetic, like if I am in a studio, I just trust that whatever is coming out will make a lot of sense to me later, or it will allude to a lesson that I will learn in like three years or something. I trust it like I trust dreams. It knows more than I know. So, everything has changed and nothing has changed since day one. I think I have only gotten better at tuning the instrument and trusting it. In my twenties I wanted more and more of that feeling. I was fortunate to have Miranda Wright who believed in me, and then she helped me find resources and support. I was in an intuitive landscape of wanting people to see my work, but I learned the business end way later because people started to get curious.

Kate: Ya, wow, this makes a lot of sense and is helping to color in for me why we started choreographing so early. My experience is similar. In terms of process, historically it’s been very internal, and individual to me and my subjective experience. Making work has always been about processing, and I think similar to you, dance was first the escape, ya know?

Steph: Yeah, like the safe place.

Kate: Yes, and then once I found that place, the opportunity to create something inside of that container, be it a dance or a class, revealed to me a place to process my lived experience and everything that I had going on in my life. Then put on aesthetics, scores and the desire to transcribe my kinesthetic body to other people to shape and mold time and space. The combination of this all allowed for this release. It's always been clear to me that I needed other people in the room to do it, dancers or class takers. That stayed consistent through learning the systems of the dance world, so much so that I consciously and strategically formed a version of a dance company to do this work. At a certain point, I realized that this format was both not financially sustainable and not serving that original purpose in the same way it used to. What was driving the work now? Research and a mission? Or was it a commission, business goals, and being fiscally responsible for dancers? So now I am working on actively shifting that original model I made for myself. In terms of your format of making work, has this shifted for you over time?

Steph: Oh yea. I mean talking about parallels, we were learning really similar lessons about the dance company model at the same time. It got to the point where I was like, “how do we just keep it afloat” rather than “what are we making and why”. It has had to change and I am glad it's changing. The entire field is changing really slowly and gradually. Everyone is waking up to the things that were unsustainable from before, and asking why more often. At first, my goal was to make an evening-length work a year. I would bring in people who I trusted and loved, my friends, and exceptionally talented artists who shared a vision, aesthetics, and work with whatever themes were resonating. As we got more resources, and there was demand, and it became more of a job, and you have payroll, you end up having to take things that maybe you are less passionate about and have to say yes to things because they pay. I started to realize that maybe an evening length work a year is not sustainable.

Kate: I don't think it is.

Steph: Yeah, I learned that. So, I did that for five years and then szalt started tearing at the seams. Then the pandemic happened, and everything in my personal life changed, so I decided to slow down and reassess. Now that I have returned to work, I am returning to it with everything I have learned but with that original kernel of “why”, but with less urgency. I don't want to be in the studio if it doesn't feel authentic. It’s pretty much all nervous system based decision making for me now. But of course, now I am struggling with the business end. There is no business end.

Kate: It’s so fascinating because what became my business model was this sort of dual situation between having Dance Church, that pulled in community and generated revenue, next to a dance company that was subsidizing project budgets funded by commissions and fundraising with earned revenue from this class. At one point I thought “I solved it”, but then the moment I had that thought, everything started to outgrow itself and Dance Church seriously needed more support for itself. When the pandemic hit, I just knew that we had to board up the dance company, and put the oxygen mask on Dance Church. Now that it’s almost functioning as a sustainable business, I have really come to realize that this decision pretty much decimated the model I had built to sustain making my work. But honestly it's been a good thing, because not only has it taken me back to my beginnings, and reminded me of why I even make work and need dance in the first place. That's stronger than ever now. But it’s really making me solve this new model problem. And in a post-covid era. What can it be, and how it can be revealed to an audience and serve the artist and the work. It makes me think about products, and dance as service. How can our skills that we use in the studio, in our creative process, be used to heal and help other people process. Do I need dancers, or do I need clients? Knowing how much we have learned from our past experiences, I feel like we are perfectly positioned to make these new paradigms. We use words like “healing” and “processing”. You have this class series called i care about your body and I am exploring this new project called Body of Work. Does this have you thinking about the new model? What is on the periphery for you here?

Steph: I mean, I still feel like I am in a nebulous place with it. Before the pandemic we were fortunately very supported by private donors, we were getting commissions and my workshops were packed with young dancers because I had a company.

Kate: Oh yes, we had jobs for people.

Steph: Right. So now the challenge is that I am project based. I have shifted. I want my offerings to be more accessible. I still love teaching technique and dancers, I will always love that. But I am really becoming interested in the somatic space, and the healing power of what it means to understand your body and to co-regulate with other bodies. So right now, I am more concerned with sustaining myself as an entity, and if I am okay, then I can do work. And if the work is happening, then I am figuring it out as I go. One of the ways I support myself is through workshop series like i care about your body, but it's slower than a summer intensive where I might be looking for a dancer at the end of it. So, I am not sure if I am there with the strategy of how I am going to rebuild. Basically before, I was putting everything and everyone in front of myself. Now I need to make sure that I am okay, and then I can make work. I am thankful to my younger self for that hussle, but now I am definitely in a place where I am moving very meticulously.

Kate: That makes sense, and hearing that, now I want to talk about the work. Last summer I saw your piece at REDCAT’s New Original Works Festival. The title really stuck out to me because you called it vagus, obviously in relation to the vagus nerve, but seeing this work without knowing really what was going on with you, it really had an impact on me. We had all just gone through the pandemic, but I really could just feel you. For me watching this work, it felt like this huge maturation had happened for you. Previous to that, the last time I had seen your work was probably five years ago with your company in Seattle. It just felt like with vagus, you were onto something new, deeper, and richer. The way that you were putting the work forward just felt more articulated and clearer, more to your truth. Can you talk about that process, and what was the entry point into the work? How did the work manifest? That spooky, incredible solo at the end? Are you still on that wave with what you're doing now? That work said to me “I have to make this work”. And as an audience member I felt, “we need to see this”. Can you talk about it please.

Steph: I mean, I'll just be really real with you. 2020 was so traumatizing for me for so many reasons. Again, going back to growing up with so much dysfunction and uncertainty, and losing this pillar of my adulthood with my divorce, it was so destabilizing in so many ways. It was like my brain stopped working for a year, which was also weird to experience. And in that same year we couldn't be in dance spaces. So it was like this bizarre loss of so much of the things I identified with, and so many of the things that I held onto for my mental health. In a way I even surrendered the reality that maybe I wouldn't be able to dance anymore. I essentially went rock bottom. But from that place there was this other thing, like the thing that keeps you alive, I guess, and that kept me curious. It kept me improvising, even if it was just for me, even if it was just for the birds outside, even if it was just to feel something. I still was planting little seeds for future Stephanie, applying for residencies and festivals, but I was just kind of like throwing seeds and trusting that whatever’s meant to catch, will catch.

Then I got accepted to Log Haven, which is this month-long artist residency in Knoxville, Tennessee. My whole application was just like, I just wanna reframe my relationship to my practice. I'm not trying to make anything. I don't even know what I'm doing anymore. I remember writing my application, and I couldn't even see straight. So then when I got there I was like, okay, well that's what I said I was gonna do. So every single day I would go to the studio with no intention other than to have an experience and be present with that experience.

Inside of all that though, came this research for vagus just because I had decided to drive across the country to get to Knoxville by myself, which was really scary for me. I was afraid to do that. But I told myself I was just going to make all these decisions from my nervous system. I'm going to sleep where I feel safe sleeping, and if I don't feel safe, I'm gonna leave. And I'll hang out with people that I feel good around. And if I don't feel good, I'll leave. I was kind of training my nervous system to feel safe as a solo individual. The same thing was happening in the dance studio once I arrived. The studio is in the middle of the woods and there were only two other people on the 90 acre property. One night when I was working really late, I was really scared.

Kate: You were like, if I scream, no one can hear me [laughs].

Steph: Yeah. And also, I was in there doing vocal warmups, because that was another thing that emerged during this year. I wanted to start using my voice more because I was sick of feeling repressed. So that night I was like, what if I'm scarier than this? As afraid as I'm feeling, what if I can be scarier than that? And then that's when I started acting like the witch, that shadow character you saw in vagus excerpt piece. My poor dog was in the corner, just like, what is she doing?

Kate: Your dog's, like, an exorcism is happening.

Steph: Dori hates the witch. But it just started to come out and I realized that there was this power in all of the dark shit that I had been suffering through. I was like, oh, there's energy in that, it's not all just me. I was like, fuck, and then it just snowballed after that. So I left Log Haven thinking that I didn't have anything. I wasn't walking away with a phrase or anything interesting. At least that's what I thought. And then I just continued on the road without a phrase [laughs].

Kate: I can’t make a phrase for the fucking life of me. I don't know how to do it anymore.

Steph: Yeah. That skill died with Covid.

Kate: I love that you left like, I don't even have a phrase lol. That is so choreographer of you.

Steph: Well, I remember being really upset about that, because I used to be able to make phrases for days, you know?

Kate: Yeah. But you didn't need a phrase. You found something else, but, okay, so you're driving away…

Steph: Yes, I am driving away, and I met up with you. In Utah or in Ohio, not Utah.

Kate: Yeah, same thing [laughs].

Steph: Then I drove to New York, and when I was there I got the NOW Festival notification and they were like, what are you working on? And I was like, oh my god…

Kate: You’re like, well I have this witch solo [laughs].

Steph: Yeah, exactly. I didn't know who I was going to work with because szalt had kind of disbanded at this point. So I sent out a Google form to a bunch of people that I had dance crushes on and said, if the schedule lines up and they wanna work with me, then I'll work with them. Two people replied, I had three weeks to make the piece, I didnt even live in LA at the time, but basically I was only saying yes to anything if it was easy and felt good in my nervous system, which was like the whole point anyway. Bringing the witch back out felt so good because I was just like, this is already back here anyway. This process has been so much more than any other process I've ever done. It really feels like it started in 2020 and it's still kind of revealing itself to me right now.

Kate: So would you say that the stuff that you're working on to show at WIP 001 is an evolution of all this?

Steph: It is. Once the thing that happened at NOW Festival took shape, I was like, well now that's the thing, and where is there availability and ease and alignment to still work within what feels good moving forward? What's the allotted amount of time? Who's available? What am I interested in? How can I stay on the theme and this same train of thought.

Kate: Yea, because you are living it.

Steph: Yea, exactly. Okay, can I ask you the same question?

Kate: Wait, what's the question [laughs].

Steph: Where are you at, what you're working on now and like, how did we get here?

Kate: It's so weird, because we actually have a very similar experience. And I'm not just saying that because we're in a relational dynamic right now. You went through a divorce, and I basically went through a divorce with a long term partner and some other very close people in my life and I had a lot of dysregulation that happened in my body because of it. I also grew up with not the most holistic upbringing, similar to you. But between 2020 and 2022, I basically have major memory blackouts because it was so traumatic for me. I started doing a lot of research on dissociation and dissociative disorders, because I already did not have the best memory, which I think comes from my childhood, but I literally can’t remember so much that happened over the past few years. Right when we were allowed to travel again during COVID, and at that point I had already made some pretty major decisions with the company I founded, I had just gotten back to my apartment from a trip to see my best friends in LA, and when I came back I just started to dance in my living room, recording myself improvising. I laid down marley and I just started dancing a lot. And it was the first time that I had danced like this outside of Dance Church since the pandemic. And in my body, it felt like when I first started making work in 2010, which just so happened to occur right after my brother was diagnosed with schizophrenia. I didn't know what I was doing in my life, and I just spent a lot of time in the studio, like just improvising, dancing and working through things. I wasn't even conscious of how I was working through them. So this started happening then, and it felt like it was happening again. Then I eventually moved to LA and by that point we could go into dance studios again, and I was doing this there. I would get addicted to specific songs, particularly this Justin Bieber song, and really I’d just listen and dance to the same song on repeat. I couldn't set anything. I didn't even try, like literally I would make a playlist, I'd go into the studio and I'd be there for like an hour and a half and I would play the same song like four times over and over. And then I would take a break because I would be tired and when I was taking a break I would watch whatever I had just done to learn from it, and then I’d do it again. And then after like an hour and a half of doing this, I couldn't do it anymore. And then I'd go home. It felt like it was self-care kind of, you know, but something was also developing in that.

And so this process has escalated since then, and I have continued to do this practice to the point where eventually I felt like I had enough information to share it with dancers. So I took the same framework that I have done in the past but in a new way because I live in a new city and I don't have access to the same people, definitely not the people who have known me and danced with me for 10 years, and I just experimented. What happens if I take this information and give it to other people? Will they be able to feel something?

I used to have a dance company so that I could explore all this stuff with dancers, right? And I would go into a studio and cultivate this energy communally with them. And I do like to think that it was cathartic and helpful and self-care for them too, or co-regulation like you said. But now I'm kind of in a place where I think there is more of a meeting point if people are coming to me and they're like, Hey, I need your help, I have problems, I'm going through something like, can you give me systems and tools to be able to regulate my nervous system and feel better? Like teach me how to find catharsis. I know the frameworks to do that. I just spent two years doing them for myself and developing new ones, you know? So in terms of what the work is revealing itself to be, it's like the work is sort of revealing itself to be a service or a product in some ways, but that's not all of it. You know? That is one way that it's becoming. And I think that the other way is through the lens of a dance. And so in full transparency, I'm still trying to figure out what that dance looks like for an audience and what the experience of the audience is from that, you know?

Steph: Yea, I get it.

Kate: After hearing what you were going through, your vagus excerpt really felt like a success as a dance. Being the receiver of the work, I actually was getting everything you talked about out of it. It worked. It was regulating me. I think that's enough of a reason to have it live as a dance, you know? That said, I do want to try to re spark some of those younger self ideas, like aesthetic world building, and things that I love doing, that I've just kind of been putting to the side because I've been processing [laughs].

Steph: Yeah. And those parts we’re good at that already. That came first, and more naturally than like this other thing that required a lot of time and like living through to arrive at, yeah?

Kate: Totally.

Steph: Do you mind if I pee really quick?

Kate: No, go. Of course.

Steph: I was like, nervous system is asking for that.

Kate: Lol

Kate: Um, I guess to put a closer on all that. I have the potential for a new commission I think, and even if I didn't actually have a commission, there will be a dance, right? Like, when you’ve been working in that evening length format for so long, you want that, or at least I do. I want my piece to be big, full, juicy. That doesn't mean it needs to be expensive or have like a lot of things in it, but it will be an evening, because that is what I like [laughs].

Steph: Same. I love it. That's what I like to see. That's what gets me fucking high.

Kate: That is what I like to make. That is what I make. That is my art, you know? But I have really felt the limits of a dance company. Which is a large part of why I am starting this new company. I don't really like telling people what to do. I like putting a lot of things in a pot and just letting something new happen from it. I believe that creation is beyond any one of us. I can help shape things and put the framework and produce the thing, but like, that thing is beyond me. How do I do that without having a dance company now, you know? And without funding a dance company. So I am experimenting with different ways of doing that and Body of Work is one example. With BoW, someone comes to me and says, I have this problem, can you help me. And, in the past, I would go into a space with the company and say, hey everybody, what are your problems? Let's talk about it. Let’s put it on the table and look at it. Like, that's where my work started to go. And not every dancer wants to do that work. They're like, I don't wanna process my real life with you, [laughs]. But if other people, clients, are coming to me and I can help them, and they are also helping me, then I'm like, okay, that's getting me somewhere, ya know? How does it all get revealed in a dance? I don't actually know right now, but that is what I am trying to work towards. I want to help people, by watching and engaging, and I want to help myself. And I also want to make something beautiful [laughs].

Steph: I think you and I both are going through our dark night of the soul [laughs] and this shit actually is saving me, like my practices and the tools I find in those practices are the reason that I'm functioning. I have told you this before, but I always knew I needed dance. Dance is my life raft. Once you learn the power, like the power of the witch, the power of the shadow, the power of all that, you're just like, whoa.

Kate: I know, there's so much there. Dance Church is an example of this for me too. I really see and think about Dance Church as an extension of that 10 years of my life, making dance and entering the field. When I was going through a hard time, it all went into the Bible of Dance Church. It really stabilized and still stabilizes me. And other people. Mostly other people now. How many people have come up to you being like, this thing has saved my life. It feels like what I'm doing now and where my interests are at now is the beginning of another version of that. The only way that I could be here right now is by way of all that. All that time working in the field, a huge global shift in the world, literally having my whole life that I built for 14 years kind of getting blown up, and having the, what did you call it? The dark night [laughs].

Steph: Dark Night of the Soul

Kate: Yes, having a dark night of the soul moment. I don't feel this hustle energy anymore. I feel slower paced. I feel more open and receptive to just following my intuition a little bit more. I'm much more interested in putting my head down in a book, reading about the vagal nerve and listening to podcasts by Sam Harris than whatever I feel like I should be doing, you know [laughs].

Steph: Things are always progressing, you know?

Kate: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I did have one other thing I wanted to talk with you about. So, I'm newer to LA. You've been here for a long time. We've both worked in other cities, Seattle and New York, tours and stuff. I've really been thinking a lot about the dance ecology here, and the history of LA, like what the industry is here, what gets made from the commercial world, entertainment, and now tech too. And also have been thinking about the institutional and philanthropic legacies here. It feels like there's so much money here. Like, let's build this amazing cultural institution in the middle of a canyon with a tram, but make it sexy kind of money [laughs]. I just feel like there's people who like art here, and who like to engage with it. This feels very different from Seattle in my opinion, and more akin to New York. So to me, LA has the things that I liked about Seattle, which is ideas, trying new things, that innovative spirit, plus it has patronage via Hollywood, and it still has that wild west feeling to it, meaning like, it still feels kind of desolate and like it's always kind of forming, you know? Why do you stay here? [laughs] is honestly what I want to ask. Why are you here? Like why do you choose to be in this city? I’m genuinely curious, because I think I know why I am here and what I want to do with my time here, but I'm so curious to know why you're here and what you are doing with your time here.

Steph: Initially it wasn't on purpose. I graduated from Cal Arts and I didn't have any money and my partner at the time wanted to be here. And I was like, well, I guess I'm here. And like, I'm going to make the most of it. I'm just going to utilize the fact that there's a lot of space and just start making a bunch of work. But then when I left last year, I went away and was truly gonna try on other cities. I was trying to find new places to live, trying to find new communities that I identified with. I was like, maybe I'll live in Nashville. Everyone out there is really cool. Maybe I'll move to New York. Like, I've always wanted to live in New York. I was kind of just like …

Kate: You were on your world tour.

Steph: I was [laughs], but honestly, I felt so drawn to return. I feel like right now living here, it's like I really chose to be here. The reason was just the community, and I don't have a better answer than that. I love the people here. I love the artists here. I love the aesthetic.

Kate: [laughs]. I get it.

Steph: I like the pace. People want to be healthy. People move a little bit slower. Like in New York, I feel like my jaw is always clenched. I love New York, but like, again, being nervous system attuned and making work from that place, I was like, oh, this is not the place [laughs]. And if I really had it my way, I would live in the woods somewhere and just go make work when it was time to go make work, but I'm not there yet. I'll get there. But right now I'm in the place where I feel the deepest sense of friendship. And I feel the deepest sense of kind hearted people, which is also ironic because LA gets this bad rap for being fake and all this, and there are aspects of that, but my feeling here isn't that. The dance community here is just so passionate and supportive of each other. It doesn't feel competitive. Maybe it did when I was younger and I was running up the hill, but I feel so supported and I love going and supporting other people.

Kate: Aw

Steph: It just feels good to be here. I don't wanna be in a city, but I have to be in one right now [laughs].

Kate: I love that you're doing that. I feel like there's just so much potential here. And I actually think that people wanna see it and they wanna engage with it. There are a lot of really amazing dancers and artists here. I just think that there could be more opportunities for more rigorous talk around work and composition that is being made here. I crave that, you know? And so, we are just making it. Which is cool that we can do that here. There is space for that.

Steph: Even doing this talk feels interesting and new. I feel so bonded to you now as a choreographer. Like in a way I didn't already [laughs] because this dialogue happened.

Kate: Yeah.

Steph: A lot of times I feel like I have to perform a version of what I do. I'm like, I am a choreographer and here's how I do it, but to take a route that’s really genuine and actually inviting people in, between colleagues. It’s just two people who've been doing it the same amount of time. [laughs]

Kate: Artist driven. Yeah.

Steph: There you go. Artist driven. Having more work like this will unite a community that's already so with each other. It makes me feel less alone in the world.

Kate: You're not alone. I'm here. Yes. [laughs] . And I will happily talk to you about any of this stuff or anything else.

Steph: Same.

Kate: Hey, remember when we went to pizza and I was like, we should do work in progress thing. It's happening.

Steph: It's happening now. I'm so excited.

Kate: Thank you for just talking to me for two hours.

Steph: I'm really glad we did this.

Kate: Me too.

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