The following is an unpublished interview from Spring 2016, celebrating the life and creativity of Gus Solomons Jr., initially scheduled to be published by Attitude: The Dancer’s Magazine.
A review is a testimony. On Saturday, April 2nd, 2016, at the 14th Street Y Theater in NYC, I witnessed an event of love, recognition, and support from the Dance Community to Gus Solomons Jr., a legendary dancer, distinguished teacher, choreographer and writer that has devoted his life to dance since 1964. Produced and created by From the Horse’s Mouth, the event shared magical tales of real dancers conceived and directed by Tina Croll and Jamie Cunningham.
Part reunion, part storytelling, and part improv session, the evening featured more than 25 participants of varying ages, including dancers, choreographers and writers.
On stage, Solomons’ friends, dancers, and collaborators from different periods of his life paraded by, telling stories and sharing words and movement (some via video) of how Gus impacted their life. The show opened with a solo of Solomons, where he used spoken word. This phrase stuck in my head: “I used to be taller, skinny, impatient, happier … and white-ish”
The section of the evening that moved me to tears was diagonal from right to left where the participants were improvising, walking, and enjoying each other’s company. Friendship and love connected the different generations of dancers (from a former student at NYU, to founding members of his company, to dance Critics like Wendy Perron and Deborah Jowitt).
Instead of presenting another review, I decided to interview Gus, the honored artist. Enjoy our dialogue!
(April 10th, 2016 at Gus Solomons Jr.’s apartment in Manhattan.)
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Anabella Lenzu: What is your secret? How do you stay so active? I can’t even keep track of all your activities!
Gus Solomons Jr.: Sometimes I can’t either! Because, I just keep doing the next thing. I like to have a lot of things in the pot at once because I don’t have a very long concentration. So right now I alternated between memorizing lines for a scene, memorizing lines for a play, do some applications and doing some puzzles.
AL: It’s unbelievable. You wear so many different hats and have had so many different positions. It is interesting as a young writer and choreographer, I want to know your secret. I’m forty, I have two kids and I can’t even keep up.
GS: I don’t have any secrets. The clue is to just keep doing what you need to do, keep doing what you love. If you love to do it that’s a bonus, but you just keep taking the next step after the other and continue. If you stop to think too much about it, then all kinds of extraneous thoughts come into your head and you worry about this or that. You just do it.
AL: How did dance fulfill you through the years?
GS: Well, it started out as a need at age 4. I taught myself to dance because I liked what the people were doing in the movies. I had an inclination to perform. I had a little theater in the basement, I built all the scenery and costumes. MY brother and some neighbors down the street were my repertory company. Well then I got tired of working with all those egos, so I decided to do puppets. Then I got into children’s theater which was wonderful because I had a very quick memory. There was a wonderful woman named Adele Thane who had the Boston Children’s Theater and I joined and did lots of plays with her. Because I memorized so quickly, I was able to be the wolf and a caterpillar and all those fun roles. In high school I did the shows and musicals, then when I got to college at MIT I tried out for the original musical they do each year, they were so impressed by my dancing they actually asked me to choreograph. And I said, “you mean make up the dances? Well… I guess I could do that!” So at that point I decided to go to the Boston Conservatory and enroll and see what modern dance was. I started with one class a week but quickly was enrolled two or three a week. So all the way through college I was dancing part time, and doing architecture part time. Each year I was dancing a little more, and architecting a little less. When I got my degree, I got invited to NY to audition for a show and I got it. So I was in NY as a dancer, and that was my decision. In my twenties I had boundless energy, I was full of pep. Then in my thirties, I was dancing with Pearl Lang, Donald McKayle, and Martha Graham. On my thirtieth birthday, my back started to malfunction and when you’re thirty things heal quickly so my back healed. Since there was no MRI they didn’t really know what it was. In my forties, I was depressed.
AL: Why?
GS: I had depression! It’s a disease! I don’t know why! So dancing was my therapy, and choreography was my therapy as a protection against having to be involved in life. Then in my fifties I got happier and started teaching at NYU. So I left the company, and that’s when I really started to feel mortal, like I couldn’t do all the things I wanted to do, but I was committed to dancing. It wasn’t like the young kids now who say ‘oh I’m going to dance for 15 years and then I’ll do something else’. It was a commitment. So I thought, how can I find other ways to do what I used to do, or how can I do what satisfies me without having to do all the tricks? Then In my seventies I decided it would be fun to see what other older dancers would like to join me in a trip of seeing what we could do. So we made some trios and I started commissioning choreographers to make work on us, and that carried me through till now!
AL: Well you have a special vitality and energy
GS: Well I eat as well as I can, I work out to stay strong, and that’s all I do!
AL: When did dance become intellectual for you? I’m talking about all the different transitions because eventually you started to write…
GS: I always loved writing, I loved grammar from the fifth grade, and I didn’t like reading. I started writing because the NEA had auditors or site visitors, so you would go to concerts and write quantitatively about them, and I did that and I enjoyed doing that because it helped me to see more clearly what I had seen. Someone then said you should be writing because your reports are so clear, and she recommended me to Camille Hardy the editor at Ballet News. So I started writing there then The Voice called and I said OK.. and I wrote for Dance Insider and The Native and I sort of had a free range to write what I wanted, but I couldn’t be regular because of my other schedules so I dropped out of that and then I started my own blog so I could write when I wanted and about what I wanted to write about. But I don’t think of it as intellectual so much. It was my pleasure to write, but it was helping me to understand better what I was seeing. And of course I was also teaching. They throw you into a room and say here teach improvisation. I’m like ‘what’? So I got in a room with 25 students and had to figure out a way to teach improvisation. What they needed to figure out how to do is to be with each other, be aware of each other, be sensitive to how other people are feeling and so I made up some exercises to do that. Then a few years later they said you’re going to teach composition. So I started teaching and figuring out how to give them tools to manipulate what they had invented and then ‘how do you organize this to communicate your concept?’ You have to be clear, concise, and you have to be coherent. If you just keep giving me new information, if you take me on a journey from here to there, I don’t care how you do it, just don’t bore me! Keep giving me new information, and that doesn’t mean you can’t repeat! But if something happens again, I want to see why.
AL: Now was this in your forties?
GS: No, this was in my fifties and sixties when I started teaching at NYU, that was in 1996 or 97.
AL: What do you enjoy most between dancing writing and teaching?
GS: I’ll tell you what I don’t enjoy is reviewing applications, but all the things I do, I enjoy doing. I don’t think I have the stamina to do something I don’t enjoy.
AL: Let’s talk about fear. It’s interesting how fears change through the years, what are some of yours?
GS: Fear of falling down, fear of not being good enough, all those neurotic fears dancers have.
AL: But how do you live with them?
GS: Well I don’t dwell on them! I haven’t been confronted with a fear. I think about and a little bit worry about not being healthy and what that means, how I’ll have to adapt. I have a fear of blindness, and I have cataracts now, but those little things that you think about don’t get in the way of anything.
AL: I think that’s your secret! I see dancers that are too much in their heads.
GS: Yes! And also acting has helped me get in touch with mostly other peoples and I guess my own feelings and being able to empathize more fully with what other people are feeling and the implications to what they’re saying. I wasn’t very sensitive to that growing up because all I learned about being a grownup was to make people like you because of my background, being a black person in a white community. So my awareness was shaped by the necessity for being better than good and being accepted even as good. So now I’m understanding how to figure out hwo I am and express that, and allow that. I am getting in touch with how to do that consistently. It seems to be taking in a lot of ways which makes me very happy, and very optimistic and contented in a way that I haven’t always been, so it’s all good.
AL: What about the next generation of dancers? What is coming next? You are a role model to all of us.
GS: Well I don’t know what’s going to happen next but I just keep up and see what they’re doing then try to reconcile that with my standards and expand my standards to encompass. And that’s why I love mentoring because I can ask people questions about what choices they’ve made and then figure out how to get them to shape those choices in a way that is satisfying to an audience. I don’t judge their choices, but I want them to be presented in a way that makes me say ‘well okay, you made your case.’ I guess, seeing so much dancing, I often get frustrated seeing the trends everyone is doing, passing them along like a disease. I saw a program not long ago, it was a company that I have respected and not seen that much. They have a new artistic director who was a star at ABT. They did a show at The Joyce, and the program was 3 pieces that were all the same piece. They were 3 pieces by 3 young male American choreographers, and they asses the same steps from dance to dance! I thought ‘oh my, this is a bad show!’ The artistic director is supposed to make a balanced program, but if he’s working with such a narrow ambit, it’s impossible. Of course the reason why he chose that program was because they were pieces created on the company, they were done before he took over, which are all reasons but not excuses for a boring program! Hello!
AL: It’s so interesting that dance has become so boring
GS: It’s a shame isn’t it? Dance started out as rebellious, and now I guess that’s what happens. People see what’s successful and say ‘oh give me a piece of that’ then suddenly everyone is doing that.. a generation later someone decides to break all those rules and the cycle continues. That’s how the world functions.
AL: You keep up with what is happening next, and that’s admirable!
GS: I keep up! I’m interested!
AL: What are your memories with Attitude Dance Magazine with Bernadine Jennings?
GS: Mostly, what I used to think was, ‘Bernadine who is editing? Who is checking the spelling?’ You need someone to do those things. It’s embarrassing to have read a nice review of something you did, if it’s written in terrible English!
AL: But you wrote for Bernadine?
GS: Yes I did! And I punctuated correctly, and I spell checked! (Before spell check was even a thing!)
AL: How did you meet her?
GS: She was in the dance community, I guess I was writing and at some point we connected, and she said ‘do you want to write for attitude dance magazine?’ And I said sure! I’ll do anything. Always say yes. Start with yes, then you see how it works out. It was so periodical, but not regular, so I kind of couldn’t keep up with it. I so admired Bernadine’s tenacity, and here it is today, still being printed! It’s amazing!
AL: When you’re mentoring, how do you teach your students to make choices?
GS: You can’t! If they want to make work, they will make the choices. If they don’t want to make work, they just want to be an instrument, that is a choice! Not everyone needs to choreograph, not everyone should! The ones who do have a need, a burning desire to make work, so you have to guide them in ways that make it comprehensible.
AL: I teach dance criticism. It is remarkable, students don’t understand. The new generation doesn’t know how to look at dance.
GS: Mentalities have changed. Concentration and focus has changed. You can fight it, or you can try and deal with it. Is it a bad thing? Or is it just a thing that is. If it is, then how do these people absorb communication and how is it different? If I’m writing about something that is incoherent, I’ll say, it’s incoherent (in a nice way) and then ill compare it to something that isn’t incoherent and explain ‘here’s why’. Even what is coherent changes because of the way people perceive and the speed at which they receive information which has changed quantum since the olden days. And to try to first tolerate that, and then accept it and then embrace it keeps you perceptually moving with the world. Then if you’re also a creator you can make your choice weather you want to join that maelstrom, or buck it. If you buck it, how do you make your rebellion against it perceptible to the audience you’re trying to reach. For instance if Martha wanted to show Frontier now, she’d put it in the context of where we are now. The things you would see about it may be very different from the things she was seeing in it when she made it. I think that’s something Jen Albers is doing with the company. She is taking antiques and re-contextualizing them so you see things that are relevant now, instead of what was relevant when Martha was making the piece. I think that’s how you keep the works alive. That’s how museums do it. They have the same Picasso’s because he’s not making any new work. But how are they going to show them this time? What point are they going to make about these pictures, and that’s how you keep culture alive, by always reexamining what is, and why it remains relevant.
AL: I think that’s your secret. You have this openness to accept change.
GS: Things don’t stay the same. I like to pick bones with dance historians who lament that it ‘isn’t the same as it was’ especially about something like dance. Mona Lisa isn’t the same as it was, age and dirt has changed the colors. The scale of the world has changed so that dinky little portrait is smaller than it used to be! Especially with dance that is passed on from body to body, change is inevitable. If you looked at the swan lake that they did when it was made, you would laugh because it wouldn’t be very good compared to today’s standards. The bar has risen. There is absolute change, and relative change. I think certainly absolute change is going to happen and I think relevant change is starting to happen because of the skill level we have come to. But none of that is bad, as long as there is a solid idea behind it!
AL: I want to know your feelings on your performance with From the Horse’s Mouth
GS: When it started, I thought it would be fun to have a reunion of all my old company members. I started thinking about people with whom I had a relationship that was interesting to me, and that became the cast. And then the week before it happened I was really sick, I had some type of virus. Then it cleared up just in time! The week of the show, I thought ‘I don’t know how I’m going to deal with this, I might be dissolved in tears the whole time’. It’s amazing to be in a place full of people all of whom names I knew. And then it became the same Horse’s Mouth experience of people getting together around some idea or no idea and enjoying each other, so that was just nice. It wasn’t sentimentally moving, but I was just a little bit overwhelmed, less than I had expected, but extremely grateful that everyone showed up! People even flew in! Marty Jenkins my first partner, flew in from Vancouver; that was huge.
AL: What is this sense of community?
GS: Dancers understand each other because they know what they’ve been through. When they communicate they do it on the most visceral level. It’s hard to misunderstand that the way you can misunderstand words so I think that’s why when dancers come together it’s much more real. When actors come together its all about each of them.
AL: What about your solo?
GS: What about that little solo? I had to make a 5 minute solo, which I couldn’t quite fill, for Dance Now. Dance now had been very nice to Paradigm. For the 30th anniversary I thought ‘oh I have to do something!’ The movement came from these instruction sheets that I love to use. I made these for myself years ago. So that’s how I started making the movement, and then I wanted to put in some of my inspiration from Fred Astaire. The last words ‘I used to be whiter’ in a sense, its where I come to from where I grew up, learning to please people, to appreciating the need to be racially conscious because of where our society has come to.
AL: The last question, I am teaching with Joanne Cass’ book, you’re ‘the rebel’. You didn’t follow dance tradition-
GS: Oh that makes me a rebel? That’s good! I had no connection to the black community other than I saw Bojangles dance, so the people I emulated and aspired to be like were the farthest thing from me you could imagine! Ballet dancers! And I liked to do everything, so I aspired to be on Broadway so of course I auditioned for tons of shows. But I went back to Martha where I was accepted, and I got roles. I’m just the thing that morphs into the situation which I find myself in and thrives in that situation. I think it’s called a parasite…
AL: Noo! You change because you adapt. You have this openness.
GS: I’m malleable. A chameleon!
AL: What is coming up for you?
GS: Well actually, I’m doing ART the play by Yasmina Reza, the next day I’m returning to Marsailles to resume Monument #0.1 with Valda. Then we go to berlin to do the second part of that piece. Then I come back and I’m here for a few weeks then back to Berlin, and Hamburg and maybe Vienna, then head back in December to do Brussels. So the rest of this year I am in and out. In September and October I’m doing a piece where I’m playing Noah in a piece on Staten Island. On the seventh of June we’re doing a reprise of a workshop I did with Rachael Chavkin, a fundraiser kind of thing and I get to sing ‘Feels Like Teen Spirit’. It’s a generational piece, she’s going to have a teenage band, and her team of millennials along with a team of seniors. Then as soon as I’m back from berlin in July I’m going to Fort Worth to do the solo again, and they’re going to revive a piece I did on them called the Thirteens. And I’ll get to see the Frank Stella show!
AL: And how old are you? Can I ask that?
GS: 77. Going on 78. I’m in my 78th year. My trainer doesn’t always acknowledge that!
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