From dancer to choreographer part, 2

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From dancer to choreographer, the leap can be made when you seize opportunities, when you overcome your hesitations and when you access your own artistry and creativity.

In the second of this 2-part interview series with Kenneth Walker, we learn that collaborations make a choreographer.

So when did I feel like I was a professional choreographer??

Turns out…pretty quickly.

I was still a student when I started gaining steam as a choreographer. I was asked by my  former colleague Paula Vreulink to come make a dance on her company for a choreography competition she was holding. They had several people adjudicating the event and one of the adjudicators was my first pas de deux teacher, Dan Berney. He recused himself but everyone else deemed the dance worthy of winning winning.  I was shocked and excited.  Maybe I had something to say in the ballet thing, something people wanted to see..

I first started feeling like a professional choreographer when I received one of my first commissions. I had recently left Sacramento Ballet and on a return visit my friend Thomas Bell, told me he would gladly recommend me to a school he worked with which was looking for a choreographer. I met Debbie Jorritsma and begin a long relationship of creating work for Chico Community Ballet and their program Keeping Dance Alive. Around the same time I was also selected to compete in Sarasota Ballet’s choreography competition. I was one of four finalists. The other finalists were Alan Hineline who has done just about everything you can do in ballet, Stephen Mills who is an award winning director of Ballet Austin, and Colin Connor who just became only the third director in the history of the Jose Límon company. I was in way over my head as a twenty-something kid.

I’ve now been doing this choreography thing a long time and I’m still creating, still editing, still putting up new dances. Hopefully I’ll get it right eventually.

By the way, I rarely ever enter competitions anymore. They just seem narrow in scope and focus. George Balanchine never entered a competition.

 

From Dancer to choreographer, Part 1

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From dancer to choreographer, the leap can be made when you seize opportunities, when you overcome your hesitations and when you access your own artistry and creativity.
In this 2-part series, we learn how Kenneth Walker emerged as a choreographer…

Part I – An emerging choreographer.

The running joke is that I started choreographing because I couldn’t learn any of the steps in class, so I’d just make it up as I went along. That’s only partially true. I would often blank out in petite allegro, even though I loved it, and just kinda wing it.

My first choreographic vignettes were done in college at UCLA. Most of my classmates dreaded or hated choreographing, but I didn’t. What I hated was improv – most of my teachers at the time will say it’s because I hated being put on the spot. I don’t remember many of the projects I did but I remember doing a duet to Elvis Costello and I made a solo that turned out being done in silence. I think my training up to that point made me lose my fear because I didn’t know to be afraid or didn’t acknowledge that I was creating “new art”. Most of the dances I appeared in as a young dancer were new. I think my teachers had too much respect to tackle the classics with a small group of student dancers.

My first dance in front of an audience was also at UCLA. My professor let me expand a chair dance I did for an assignment and perform it for prospective students (we all had to get the chair dance out of our system!) It was some bizarre stuff. The background dancers had underwear on their heads and the music was Pink Elephants On Parade from the movie “Dumbo”. It was the Sun Ra version from the “Stay Awake” album. The album was in interpretation of Disney songs from Pop artists.

My first dance performed for the general public was done while I was training at Pasadena Dance Theatre. As part of Regional Dance America, they had an emerging choreographers night and I did a dance that we adjudicated to get on that program. It was accepted and I got hooked on making dances. Years later, “Savage Grace” would be the closing dance of the closing night of performances at RDA and I was proud to complete that circle.

These were all pre-professional flirtings. It’s one thing to do a dance under the auspices of a school or even on other dancers, which is what I continued to do while I danced at Sacramento Ballet. Ron Cunningham the Artistic Director allowed me to continue to do dances for RDA festival adjudications. He even allowed me to begin working on professionals as part of their Beer and Ballet program.