I make dances that are:
quiet,
intimate,
precise,
repetitive,
effortful,
reductive,
single minded,
solemn,
simple,
unadorned,
tender,
human.
I make minimalist dances but the people in them, and the people watching them, are human.
Humans find meaning.
Simples structures are the underpinning for a highly complex physical vocabulary.
What we are doing is not easy.
When I start a dance, I move until I find a way of moving that feels like a something. I can identify this as a something that I would like to make more of. So I make more. I am picky. It takes many hours to make one minute. I am engineering a movement language. I am not making a dance “about.” At this point, all the dance is about is moving, about our attention to the moving. The dance is determinedly abstract. The movement material becomes a task. But we allow the task to be felt, and so to be read as feeling. I am interested in the fact that the movement makes us feel things even when I have not ascribed a feeling to the movement. This is how I make a dance. What if the how is also the why?
I choose nearness. My dances are meant to be seen close, the performers touch and sweat and see into each other’s eyes. I want the audience to be able to see into the dance. We see each other, we care. We are human.
Elsewhere: Heidi Henderson in conversation with Sara Smith
“Henderson looks like a character out of a deadpan Roz Chast cartoon. Her limbs are like pipe cleaners and seem to have been attached to her shoulders and pelvis by pure accident. She dances with earnest concentration, a wry contrast to some lush Schubert songs, and makes her way across the stage with pulled up steps as if she were traversing a vat of jello.”
The Boston Globe
Review of Egg Solo Number 2
“This is a dance that can only have been made by a grown up.”
Maura Keefe
Scholar-in-Residence at Jacob’s Pillow, on “Pine.”