Confounding the Monolith Interview with Kevin Ward, Artistic Director, Dayton Contemporary Dance Company Interview by Arnecia Patterson

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Teacher, choreographer, and dancer Kevin Ward inhabits the title of artistic director of Dayton Contemporary Dance Company (DCDC)-the organization's leader who works to insure that the company performs a repertory of artistic vitality. Ward's definition of his role is shaped by his lengthy experience as a musician and composer. Not surprisingly, the form, cadence and content of his own choreography is informed by his music training at Interlochen Arts Academy as much as it is indebted to a solid upbringing within a Black American cultural framework.

In our conversation, Kevin revealed the thoughtfulness that drives him to make dances, even though they are not seen by large audiences. This is due in part to geography: he works in Dayton, Ohio not New York City. I've known Kevin for over fifteen years. Quiet and retiring in manner, he was groomed by Dayton Contemporary's founder, the late Jeraldyne Blunden, to spearhead DCDC's transition from a founder-centered company to its current configuration. This succession from a founding artistic director to the next generation is one that has been carried out by fewer than a handful of American contemporary dance companies. Despite such professional weight, or perhaps because of it, Kevin Ward's choreography is powerful in the bodies of DCDC's dancers; inevitably, his work is clearly focused on a humanistic treatment of life and dance.

Arnecia Patterson: Would you characterize the way you work as being part of the Western concert dance tradition? And what does that tradition mean to you as an artist?

Kevin Ward: If I understand what the Western concert dance tradition is-that we go into a studio with a set number of dancers, teach them steps, and then put it all together on stage-then yes I work pretty much in that tradition. But I hadn't thought about it in terms of tradition. Nowadays I'm less thrilled by it than I used to be. I think there's more that can be had-or more that can be said choreographically-in that box or that theater. There are other ways that I want to explore, other ways that audiences can be involved with my work. Maybe it's a matter of offering more direct involvement, more information, a dance event that clearly envelops the performers and the viewers. Perhaps something more intimate.

AP: What effect does being a black man have on your work?

KW: There are times when I call on that, I guess-experience or tribal memory, family memory. Some of that information my own family has passed on to me. There are times when I definitely call on that from an African-American, middle class male angle. There are times when I'm not necessarily using that information per se, but I always have a feeling that it really just keeps sneaking in anyway. And I'm not sure how or what it's actually saying, what it's actually making me do or create. I just know that when the movement is coming through me-and it's movement that your great-auntie did at a block party, and that she learned this dance from her great-great-aunt-it's that information that is being passed on. Where the movement is being placed is not necessarily something that has "black" written on or about or over it. Sometimes I find that it's movement coming from surprising places in my memory and my history. In a way I do draw on family experiences for my work: the way we were and the way our family dealt with each other, encountered each other, big old family dinners and gatherings and holidays and things like that. A lot of those feelings kind of envelop the works that I make.

Of course when I draw on African-American history, when I'm creating works that have some of that background information in them, I also look to my family, as well, to give me some account, some firsthand knowledge of what it was like or what they were feeling. You know, my grandmother is still alive. She's in her nineties. And my great-grandmother lived to over a hundred. So, they had lots of information to relate. They could tell me stuff about sitting on the loading dock at Rike's (note 1) as seamstresses in the winter and what that felt like. And we had aunts and uncles and grandparents from West Virginia talking about their lives and their difficulties and their everyday fears. And so without really documenting their lives in my work, I draw on that material.