Delineation Dance, founded early in 2015, is a contemporary dance company based in both New York City and Los Angeles. Their full company premiere, bringing dancers from both coasts together for the first time, came at the Upsurge Choreography platform, held November 19-22. We sat down with co-directors Devon Smith, from New York, and Lisa Anderson, from Los Angeles, before their premiere performance.
What spurred the creation of this project?
Devon Smith: We grew up together. We danced together in high school. We’re on separate coasts now, but we’ve both always been teaching and choreographing. And we kind of got to a point in our creative careers where we were like, “let’s do something of our own.” She was here visiting earlier this year.
Lisa Anderson: In January.
DS: And a mutual friend of ours was like, “oh, you both want to start creating? Why don’t you do something together?” And we were like “Ha ha ha,” and then we were like “we should do something together!” And then this whole bicoastal thing just kind of grew out of nothing, and we’re creating as we go. We operate our own dancers separately, but we have major FaceTime communication, and a lot of the pieces you’ll see have both casts in them. We also had to do FaceTime blocking, and kind of figure out a puzzle to put this together.
LA: It’s been pretty cool. I came out again in August, and I was planning on working with her dancers already, but it was right after we found out that we were doing [the Upsurge Choreography Platform] performance, so I taught an entire piece on her dancers while I was here. And then when I got back and we had the grand idea to make that a full company piece, so we had to puzzle piece it together: LA enters here, New York enters here, they’re all here. Just coordinating formations. It’s been a lot of phone calls.
DS: I think we’ve seen the focus of this company really come to life—about bringing dancers from opposite coasts together that would never really meet, let alone dance in the same piece in the same show. It’s been really cool for them to see that there’s another group, off in the distance, working just as hard, and it makes them feel like they’ve not been alone in this process; that there’s a whole other family of Delineation across the country that’s working right in tandem with them.
How has that been, in terms of the dancers getting to know each other and having to work with each other in this limited time?
DS: It’s been good. We’ve been blessed with some really outgoing individuals and some really easygoing individuals that are very welcoming to new energy.
LA: And I think everybody’s just been so excited for this project too, so that as soon as everybody was here, they were just anxious to get to know each other more. It’s worked out great.
DS: This being the first time that we’ve put both coasts together, I think this is the first step towards building a much stronger bond between the two coasts, now that they’ve met in person. They were always sort of aware of each other, but now that they’ve physically met each other, I think this is just the first step towards feeling really complete.
How do you envision taking these two separate corps of dancers that you’ve brought together, and then separating them out again into the future? How do you think that’s going to evolve you guys as a company or the pieces that you’re putting together?
LA: I think for this project specifically, we had already had a body of work separately, and we decided to come up with a concept that mixed all of those pieces that we had already had with a nice through line and concept, and so I think once we’re on our separate coasts again, we’ll continue to create separately. We had talked about moving forward with a nice cohesive idea from the start, and building from that, rather than finding an idea from something that is already existing. I think moving forward, we may work that way next: come up with an idea and then build on that from scratch.
DS: Yeah, the piece we’re performing this weekend can definitely be deconstructed into smaller pieces depending upon what is called for for future performances. If you take one section of this piece, it can branch out a whole new idea. This might even be the seeds towards a million other concept shows.
Where do you find your inspiration from for something you’re going to do together, or for your individual pieces?
DS: (Laughs) I am a sad, sad person. I think we both tend to steer towards the more heart-wrenching, rip-your-guts-out kind of music and movement.
LA: (Laughing) Even on our happiest days. Just every day.
DS: It’s definitely a therapy for myself, and I think we both use our choreography and our movement to express and release and share. It’s funny, during the process for this piece, we were identifying the raw, angry emotions and then trying to do the polar opposite, and it’s so much harder to identify the happy moments and emotions, because you don’t pay attention to them because the more negative stuff is more obvious in life. I’d say real life experiences.
LA: Yeah, definitely
Do you find that that style has evolved from what you studied together? Or has it emerged from your different experiences?
LA: Yes and no. I feel like both of us naturally, not even because we trained together, but just naturally have a similar way of wanting to move, and wanting to choreograph, and I do think that that has progressed over time. And I feel like we’ve joked about it a few times. How over the years as we’ve reconnected, as far as what we’ve been doing choreographically, we recognize that our stuff is oddly similar. Even when we haven’t necessarily been seeing each other’s work. We do have a lot of natural tendencies that just keep progressing over time.
DS: Yes, like having the similar base to start with, and then after high school moving on to very different things. She went to college and had a very modern base, and I went and did the cruise ships and more commercial stuff, so I think we’re bringing our own flavor to a kind of consistent start. It’s been cool to see our own voices put into something that’s very similar to begin with.
I find it so interesting that you’re bicoastal and you’ve basically just started. People believe that there’s a dichotomy between the two coasts: ‘New York Dancers’ vs. ‘L.A. Dancers’; do you find that that comes into play at all?
LA: No … really not as far as the dancers are concerned. I feel like we both have equally strong, incredible movers.
DS: It’s been a really bizarre process, just the way that everything has fallen into place. We joke about it all the time, like “where is this all coming from?” We’ll need a song and then all of a sudden we have to Shazam something really fast because there it is: the piece we needed. And I think that as far as the dancers go, we’ve had a really similar group from both coasts kind of fall into our laps through friends, through connections, through referrals. Their personalities are definitely very similar. We were joking around that my group [New York] tends to be a little more on the reserved side where her group is more boisterous. I don’t know if that’s necessarily a coast thing, I think it’s just a personality thing. But it’s been a really cool thing to see them all come together. Laugh at the same jokes (Laughs).
LA: And I think too, going into all this, back in January or February, it didn’t occur to us the …
DS: Magnitude?
LA: The magnitude! Of what bicoastal meant, and then all of a sudden we’re shipping costumes back and forth because it’s cheaper to FedEx them than it is to buy new ones, or sending videos of choreography like “teach your dancers this section, I’ll teach my dancers this section, and then we’ll meet in November and put it together.” It’s just been unreal. I mean, prior to two days ago, they had never been onstage together, and they have two full pieces that are combined cast. That we put together on Tuesday.
DS: That also gives the company much faster exposure. Because it’s one name, so it’s like people on the West Coast hear this name, people on the East Coast hear this name, so the exposure is double. I went to LA in October to set a piece on some of her dancers, who didn’t travel here, so we’re able to get our choreography to the other side of the country in a very quick, efficient way.
LA: And then we just rotate rehearsing each other’s pieces for whatever event is coming up. So the piece she taught my dancers that aren’t here this week, they could perform it in a festival next week, and I’d take over rehearsing it leading up to that and vice versa.
DS: So our brains are spinning with not only our own choreography, but each other’s choreography to remember.
Do you find it a struggle to teach each other’s choreography? Or are you so ingrained in each other’s styles that it’s like second nature.
DS: I think so. It’s like our brains are one person. It’s really kind of frightening.
This is the first time you’re combining for the same performance. Any plans to do the same in LA?
LA: Yes, we would love to. We don’t know exactly when and in what facility.
DS: This is a huge financial endeavor, so I think right now, realistically, we’re thinking maybe one big travel thing once a year. Financially it’s really, really big. It’s hard. We’ve seen that first hand with this project, so I think that gives us a really good idea for the future of what will need to be done to support what we want to do. If we’re willing to keep the flow going that we’ve had since the beginning, I think we can keep going at the same rate, which would be kind of cool.
LA: It would be great
DS: We’re really excited.
LA: It’s a whirlwind.
Delineation Dance's next performance will be on January 23 in LA, at the Awakenings and Beginnings Dance Festival: https://www.rubansrougesdance.
