Two world premieres are set to grace ODC/Dance’s “Summer Sampler” program, which runs July 17–20 at ODC Theater: Nothing’s Gonna Make Sense (Reflections on Grief) by KT Nelson and Theories of Time by Mia J. Chong. The company is also reprising last year’s hit work by Catherine Galasso, 10,000 Steps: A Dance About Its Own Making.
Nelson spent 47 years with ODC, first as a dancer and later as co-artistic director; she left the group two years ago. Six weeks after her retirement, before she even had a chance to settle into her new life, her husband Doug died unexpectedly. Her subsequent path back to choreography is a story of reinvention, discovery, and the process of creating art out of tragedy.
Asked how long it took before she felt ready to make dances again, Nelson recalled, “Last October, I spent two weeks at Stinson Beach, walking at sunrise and sunset. In between, I would write or paint. I wasn’t trying to make anything. I wasn’t trying to say anything. That felt so good, and I started to organize myself inside.”
Nelson said that a year and a few months after her husband died, she made “a small duet that was about my lost self, my unknown self, and my future self. I was traumatized, totally out of my body, adrenaline rushing through me, but not still. I was wandering around. Missing [him] started to shift, and I saw that I can’t be the same person. My whole life that I knew had slipped away.
“I made a film out of it, but it was just a bunch of ideas in rehearsal,” Nelson said. “That felt safe — it was just two people.”
In May, Nelson started working with ODC again. “I just sent the dancers through some of my own processes,” she explained. “We had an improv about aloneness — just feel your body, feel yourself walking, feel yourself isolating. We did an exercise where you have 30 seconds to draw something, then someone comes to interrupt you and starts something else. That’s how I felt my life was interrupted. How are you going to carry that? Are you pissed off?”
During rehearsals, Nelson and the dancers also “wrote about when our bodies felt most comfortable or most afraid,” she continued. “I didn’t ever read what they wrote. We talked once or twice, but I said, ‘I don’t need anybody to share.’ What I needed everybody to do [was to] feel close to that inside part of their body, and then we made the dance. We continued doing some writing, improv, or drawing every day, if not twice a day. That helped me be in rehearsal.”
For Nothing’s Gonna Make Sense, Nelson chose music by Gabriella Smith, who is known for using natural sounds as a basis for her work. Her recent cello piece Bard of a Wasteland, which the composer describes as the “raw emotional expression of the grief, loss, rage, fear, and hopelessness experienced as a result of climate change — as well as the joy, beauty, and wonder I have felt in the world’s last wild places,” resonated with the choreographer’s state of mind.
Nelson understood that she was passing on to the dancers things she was learning about herself. Their time together was meaningful and relaxed — someone thanked her for discussing subjects other than art and letting the performers think about their own lives. Sharing was lifesaving for Nelson, and performing the work will extend that to a wider audience.