The Garden: Five Questions for Nichole Canuso

Oscillating between viewer and participant, four audience members embark on an intimate journey inspired by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “The Garden of Forking Paths” in The Garden by Nichole Canuso Dance Company. This immersive physical and aural experience is being performed through October 30, 2016 as part of OBERON’s Mini Series: Performance for Small Audiences. For more information about the show, and for tickets, click here. 

1. Where does the name The Garden come from, considering that the work is usually staged indoors?
The title comes from a Jorge Luis Borges short story: “The Garden of Forking Paths.”  The development of this project was inspired by this story as well as Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.

2. Most of your work is movement-based. How does movement play a part in this work?
The project is primarily driven by choreographic impulses. One of its goals was to invite an embodied awareness in participants. Audience members spend time alone, with other dancers, and with other audience members throughout the work. They are included in choreographic images in both subtle and obvious ways. At times they witness movement from afar, at other times they are the center of the image. The language of the piece invites them to zoom in on the small details (like the lines on another person’s hand) and zoom out to a larger context (imagining the co-ordinates of all the people they know).

3.  What has drawn you to create theater for an audience of four?
Over the years I’ve become increasingly interested in the relationship between audience and performer. I’ve been involved in several projects for intimate audiences in Philadelphia, where I am based. I started making work that included change of scale, proximity, and touch into the palate of the choreographic language. I am interested in a 360-degree experience. I find it satisfying to create a work that can respond directly to the energy and attention of a single audience member at a time. With this work, the goal was to design individualized audio tracks for each audience member.

The draw to make dances in general and make this dance specifically is to honor and highlight the value of human contact as well as the value of solitary reflection.  In a time of greater and greater divides between people, I felt compelled to create a dance that invites eye contact and simple physical connections between strangers. Creating space for the intimate interactions between strangers as well as time for solitary reflection continues to feel like a meaningful activity, and a direction I’m pulled to explore further with future projects.

4. Can you explain the source materials for this work?
One aspect of Calvino’s Invisible Cities that inspired me was the episodic attempts to poetically describe a city, over and over, each new version shining light on a different aspect of community, landscape, impermanence. Each section of The Garden is designed to be another lens through which to experience your own body in relationship to the other bodies around you. Each section is a different choreographic moment that includes you.

Borges’ “The Garden of Forking Paths” is a beautiful elliptical story about relationship to self and to time.  At one point a character in the story is asked “what is the one word you do not mention in a riddle about time?,” and the answer is “time.” I approached this process with the decision to never mention dance or choreography to the audience, but to instead invite the participants, in various ways, to experience their life as an ongoing dance.

5.   Music plays an important part of this work. How did you find the musical voice for this piece?
The two composers—Michael Kiley and James Sugg—were deeply involved throughout the two-year development process that led to the premiere of this work.  There was a lot of conversation about the ways music, text, movement, and design would interact in the work. The audience is receiving information visually, sonically, and kinesthetically at all times, so we wanted to make sure the interplay between those mediums was well cared for. Sound ranges from atmospheric sound to complex musical scores to verbal instructions to poems. When we tour the work, we re-record all the instructions and transitions to suit the new venue.

This interview was conducted by James Montaño, a second-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T. Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University.