Interview with the Creator: From Disassembling a Dancer - Vancouver Ballet Society
By Kyeren Regehr
An artistic director has the power to lift a dancer to company stardom, or to house her in the wings. Interview with the Creator offers a composite of several artistic directors and choreographers who I worked with in Australia in the 1990s. It explores the way their position of power, and their art-making, can distance them from human relationship — one choreographer in particular would make us cry in order to achieve the emotional veracity he wanted in the performance.
Like many dancers, I’ve inhaled everything from New York City Ballet — the epigraph from the company’s founding artistic director George Balanchine is one that has held my interest for a long time. As I wrote, I allowed his words to drift with me, and although the character I made is built from my own life experiences, the voice of the poem-monologue emerged flavoured by an Eastern European accent similar to that of the prolific and revolutionary Russian-American choreographer.
Interview with the Creator is excerpted from Disassembling a Dancer by Kyeren Regehr, published by Raven Chapbooks, 2021. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.
