Craft and intuition

The grit and grind of making art

What we see onstage is the thrill that emanates from the alchemy of performance, the gleam of the final polish. What we don’t see is the gathering of ingredients, the try and try again of formulas (before throwing them all out, most likely), the sitting and wondering, the work. Behind the scene—the show, the promotions, the excitement of everything that’s going on around here—is the process. 

Part of our job as informed citizens is to understand not just the glitz, but the grit that makes it happen. For this column, I spoke to working artists who are in the thick of exactly that.

You might have guessed that I’m not exactly an example of pearly-white objectivity on this issue. That work? It’s my work, too, as founder of the blog Tulsa Dances and as a dancer, choreographer, and artistic director at Tulsa Modern Movement. 

For the last four years, TuMM has welcomed people into the choreographic process at a donation-based event called the TuMM Gathering. It’s my favorite event of our season, a chance for creative communication to go both ways, before audience and performers get separated by the enchantment of costumes and curtains. The company will show excerpts from its work-in-progress, improvise and create dance on the spot, and engage questions from viewers.  

Why invite people to see work that’s still rough around the edges? 

“Watching the way we work and think out loud as we create demystifies dance a little bit,” TuMM executive director Ari Christopher explains. “[And it] educates our audience about what we value and how we make choices in art making. I hope it gives audiences a deeper personal connection with dance and new tools for making meaning for themselves as they experience future dance performances.” 

For Christopher, making dance starts with something anyone can connect to: a personal experience or feeling.

“I know it can be a dance when I have a couple of dance-specific ideas that connect directly to the initial idea,” she says. “For instance: how space will be used or which parts of the body are heavily involved. Then there’s a ton of just letting my mind wander, brainstorming and making connections, improvising, writing, drawing, plotting.”

(The completely absorbed mental meandering Christopher describes turns out to be a highly advanced state. The psychologist Mikhail Csikszentmihalyi dubbed it “flow.”)

“I use craft to bring out what my intuition wants to see,” she continues. “Right now, I’m interested in making choreography in a specific state of being for an extended period of time. The section we are currently working on is driven by the torso. Hip, chest, rib cage and belly will strain, reach, pulse, and collapse in a tight formation of five women in unison.” She says she was inspired by the “shaping” of Martha Graham’s Lamentation. 

“[The TuMM Gathering] is our most powerful way of showing what it really takes to make an original dance work and why we rely on charitable support,” Christopher says.

Her biggest challenge? 

“Time. Dance is a group effort, and due to basic safety issues it can’t be done in just any space. I also have ten people’s personal schedules to consider, complicated by the fact that we all work other jobs. We need enough time together to let the work develop.” 

Two other artists—Michael Wright in theater, Marianne Evans-Lombe in performance art—spoke to me about the “how” of their making. They’re both currently deep in the sometimes Sisyphean, sometimes flow-state process of creating new original pieces. 

“Process is the heart and soul of any work I undertake,” Wright, who teaches creative writing and film studies at the University of Tulsa, says. “Ultimately, the heart of the process is about what it means to be human in the twenty-first century, how the lives we’re leading now find expression through theatre.” 

Wright created two fascinating performance installations at the TAC Gallery and is developing another based around the image of a door. Making work in a non-traditional space allows him to focus, he says, “on what really close proximity to actors creates in the audience’s experience, since they’re not merely safe in their seats in the dark, but virtually on stage.” 

His work-in-progress expands on these questions. “The recent events in Paris have already had an impact on my thinking about doors,” he explains. “How we assume we’re safe behind them, on the one hand, and how we don’t know who’s on the other side of any door, on the other hand.” 

His process is organic. “I love the exploration and discovery that comes from not having a fixed image of the final product in mind but coming in with a gut feeling about the subject I’m undertaking and then digging in with actors.” 

Evans-Lombe is thinking about boundaries, too. Her “Colorline” is part deep community research, part challenging performance art. It consists of interviews about race in Tulsa (“I couldn’t speak for the community without speaking to the community,” she says) and a dance set at the intersection of North Greenwood Ave. and East Archer St., choreographed for “rollers” (performed by eight artists of color) and “steppers” (eight white artists). 

She drives daily across Tulsa’s actual color line. “Everyday, I carried this image of black, brown, white—and the reverse—white, brown, black. So stark. I couldn’t get it out of my head. So, I did what I always do to process what’s hard—I decided to create work. The concept was simple: to replicate the color line of Tulsa, to make the invisible visible.”

“I learned in art school that process is the art to me,” she continues. “In fact, I had to work very hard when I was young to care about the end result. That was a developmental milestone for me in a way: part of how I became a ‘grown-up’ artist was to get out of the making and into the world.”

Like Christopher and Wright, Evans-Lombe emphasizes how much she learns from her performers. 

“This is a hard piece,” she says. “I field a lot of questions, emotions, a lot of process from them after each rehearsal. None of us want to be what we are in this ‘dance’ but the truth is that we all are. I ask them not to censor their impulses—no matter how ashamed, shocked, sad, angry they might be about [them].”

Process means flow. Process means questioning. “I follow my instincts fully. I don’t question them, though I do question everything else. And I mean everything,” Evans-Lombe says. 

Process means “up-close,” and intimate, and raw. Process means losing some comfortable distance and gaining new awareness. Maybe even new motivation to go make art yourself.

A TuMM Gathering: Work-in-Progress
Showing + Conversation
Sun., Dec. 6 
4 p.m.-5:15 p.m. 
Flyloft, 117 N. Boston Ave.

For more from Alicia, read her article on the Weiss Kaplan Stumpf Trio.