It’s intoxicating to roll around with Sara Rudner every weekday morning at 9 a.m. while spending weekends watching her — larger than life in iconic dance films like Twyla Tharp’s The Catherine Wheel, and Michael Blackwood’s Making Dances. Or Jim Klosty and Carolyn Brown’s Dune Dance, in which she tumbles and glides across cascades of sand with astonishing abandon and grace. Sara is perennially youthful, a generous and mercurial presence on the screen and in the studio.

By the time I studied with her at Sarah Lawrence College, Sara was already a legend in postmodern dance. She showed me how to work in the studio and more importantly, how to experiment. She would ask a question and look around with delight for other questions before asking even more questions. And she was the first to jump in and puzzle them out. Joining was infectious: joyful motion and complex coordinations eclipsed form and repetition.

After I graduated, she coached me on a solo called Heartbeat, kinesthetically matching and goading me, a rare simultaneity. I was dancing to the sound of my own heartbeat, but I was racing with hers. When I reached out to her recently, she asked me, “Did you jump over a bonfire to celebrate the Persian New Year?”

I was excited to hear Sara reflect on her decades of devotion to dance, and to discuss how the evolution of a practice both collective and deeply personal is shaped by the people in the room, yes, but also by such disparate forces as aging, moving to the West Coast, and generational attitude shifts on getting paid for dance work. We weren’t sweating and rolling around here, but the mental gymnastics for conjuring memories of an exquisite, ongoing life in dance is a necessary workout. -RM

SARA RUDNER: Rashaun, what are we going to talk about?

RASHAUN MITCHELL: I know, there’s so much we could talk about. Well, I know what I don’t want to talk about, unless you do, of course: Twyla. [Laughs] Just because, you’ve talked a lot about her and, as someone who has danced for a “master,” I feel very sensitive to the ways in which that said master can follow you and cast a really big shadow. And most of your career, really, is after you left Twyla.

SR: You know, I left twice.

RM: Yes, that's true.

SR: The reason I left the first time was sheer exhaustion, and curiosity. Rose Marie Wright, Twyla, myself, we were carrying a lot of the pieces that had been made up to that point. I think it was in London; maybe you’ve had the experience when you go into a dressing room and you see your costume and you go, “No I can’t anymore.” [Rashaun laughs.]

But I will say definitively that I learned how to work from Twyla Tharp. I learned what work was, and I learned what it is to use everything you have. She had this unending energy and organizational smarts and moxie, and being in her company was like, the petri dish; it was very, very rich and it was very demanding. At the time, the structure always was three pieces on a program. Lights up, dance dance dance dance dance dance dance — for a long time, twenty-five minutes. Lights down, quick! Change your costume. Next piece! Dance dance dance dance — etcetera.

The curiosity part of it was, what does this really mean, to be a dancer, to produce dance? And what are all the alternative structures one might build to best suit this work? If I had had my way, I would have convinced them to do what I wanted to do. Because I loved working with those people. So, when I first left, 1974, it was a wrench, a separation not just from the choreographer, but from this group. [The original Tharp company consisted of Theresa Dickinson, Graciela Figueroa, Sheela Raj, Sara Rudner, Margery Tupling, Rose Marie White, and Twyla Tharp.]

RM: Family.

SR: Family. But I heard about lofts opening down on Canal and West Street, right by the West Side Highway, which was elevated then. It was like, $170 a month, $185, for a good-sized loft with a studio and I just said, “OK, I’m going to take advantage of this situation.” Someone I knew had rented an entire floor, and I took half of it. And that was my next role in life: hardware woman. I helped demolish it and Douglas Dunn — who was a really good friend, we had been living together — helped with the electricity. He got shocked and fell, it was terrible. The place was painted, like, puke green, the most horrible. I had a machine that could scrape the walls, which were brick; it turned out to be very beautiful, but I could barely lift that machine up over my head. I had to get a plumber to put in a bathroom. And then I needed to put in a floor, and I found out that my mother and father had been holding out on me: my paternal grandmother, when she died, left each of her grandchildren $3,000 and for $3,000, I bought a tongue-and-groove floor and the dance that that man did to install that floor was extraordinary. Have you ever seen anybody lay a hardwood floor?

RM: I have — we’ve been doing some constructions on our house and they’re not quite finished, our floors. [Laughs]

SR: He would lay out all the little bits and pieces and then he would proceed with that nailing machine: kick the little slats into position, walk down and hit, kick, kick and hit. It was extraordinary.

RM: It’s a beautiful little dance, very rhythmic.

SR: It was a gorgeous dance. And then the floor had to be sanded, which I think I did myself. And the way I got through that time was, I said, “When I get this all finished, they’ll all come and dance with me.” I had this fantasy going, because being on my own was just weird; I’d been with Twyla for nine years, through very early, interesting things.

So, one of the first pieces I did independently was a long birthday solo; I decided I wanted to do occasional dances. In order to earn a living, I had taken up summer residencies, and I had a residency at Goddard College in Vermont. I think Meredith was there, too.

RM: Meredith Monk, right?

SR: Meredith Monk. I think that was the summer she was working on that piece in a quarry. [Quarry: an opera in three movements, had its premiere 1976 at La Mama ETC in New York] I finally got in the water in one of her scenes. But I started making a dance that grew into my birthday solo. It was called Some “Yes” and More. “Yes” was a semi-improvised solo I did in the barn at Goddard College, and then I added things: thirty-two separate dances because I was thirty-two years old. I performed it at Lucinda Childs’s loft at 541 Broadway; you know the dance building where Trisha [Brown] was, and Lucinda and Douglas and David [Gordon].

RM: I love this idea of the occasional dances. Silas — who says hi, by the way — has this practice of making what he calls “the song of the day.” His mom would commemorate the day by going through everything that happened in song fashion, when he was a child. And so as a dance practice, he’ll make a dance in a day: “This is everything that I came upon, this is everything that I did, and I just need to make a little dance.” It’s a nice, bite-sized way to do it.

SR: I made three birthday solos. One at thirty-two, one at thirty-three, and another I worked on at thirty-four, that also became a group piece. Why do people dance? You know, dancing was a celebration, a commemoration in a way. And I’d been trying to find my own reasons for dancing. If I wasn’t going to do the structure of the formal concert in the theater, three pieces on the program — what was I going to do? It never crossed my mind to not dance.

RM: Was it hard to go from dancing with other people to being by yourself? Or was that part of the journey that you felt you had to go through?

SR: Well, I kind of cheated. Do you want to hear my cheat?

RM: Yeah. I love a cheat.

SR: In order to get the energy to create all of that material for thirty-two dances, I invited some people I met while I had been teaching at NYU. We were in the studio, making material, and at some point, I had to ask them to leave. “You know guys, thank you forever, but I do need to try to figure out how to dance this on my own.”

RM: Wow.

SR: But the first thing I actually did was the five-hour piece.

RM: Right, and who was in that again?

SR: It was Wendy Perron, Wendy Rogers, Risa Jaroslow, and yours truly — you know, I see Risa and Wendy [Rogers], we dance together now out here, which is a total gift. Just amazing. We had a background by Robert Kushner, who painted pomegranates, and we did it at Danspace. But it wasn’t the Danspace you danced in or I later danced in, it was the church as it was before the first renovation that put the dance floor in. It had a red linoleum floor, it had pews, it had a big wooden cross in the corner. Barbara Lloyd [now Barbara Dilley] was part of putting together the dance part of what the church was starting to present, alongside the poetry, and she said, “Would you like to do something?” I said, “Yes.” She said, “Well, what do you want to do?” I said, “I want to dance for ten hours.” She said, “That’s outrageous.” She said, “We can’t do that.” I said, “How’s about seven?” She said, “How’s about five?” I said, “Sold.”

RM: Right. I mean, of course you can dance for ten hours, you know. It’s possible.

SR: It’s possible. We worked on it a long time. We had a long-running phrase that was almost an hour that we made. Wendy and Risa remember some of it, actually, to this day. I remember nothing. We had a section called “Brain Damage,” we had “Radio Time,” and then the improvisation. So there was highly choreographed action, short problems to solve, and a menu, a program of what we were doing at every hour.

RM: Did you have a clock? Or was it more, these timings were in your bodies and you knew when it was time to move on?

SR: You know, in later marathons, like the version I did for Danspace Project’s 25th anniversary, I had a time-keeper, Sonali Prasad. But I don’t think we had a time-keeper. We just knew what the menu was and we’d start.

RM: In 2017, we did a nine-hour dance in Madison Square Park; there were twelve or thirteen people dispersed all across the park. There would be moments where we would gather in certain places, but we didn’t have a real queuing system. We had designed these little armbands so that we could wear our cell phones and be free to dance, and then we would get texts saying, “Meet over here by this tree.” But we ended up abandoning that completely on the day and just using our own queuing systems internally, being more informal and talking to each other. So, I’m fascinated by how people structure and queue things inside of the work.

SR: Well, it was highly structured in the sense of “this comes first, this comes second, this comes third,” and we had to think up all the sections that weren’t as precisely set as the running phrases. I have the menu, somewhere in my files, which will eventually be in the dance division at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. We then had to figure out how to keep up our stamina for five hours. “OK, this week, let’s do two hours straight of the dancing every day.” Then the next week, three hours every other day, then four hours, then finally, we did five hours, I think, every third day. We didn’t leave it to the time we were going to invite people.

RM: Oh no, that would be a terrible idea. [Laughs] Did you also think about like, the audience’s stamina? Or did you not care? How much were you concerned with how long someone might be willing to watch this?

SR: Well, I’ve always identified as a dancer. I choreograph, I make things. But in my heart, it was always, dancers dance. Dancers dance regardless of who is watching or where they are. So this structure was, we will be here. We will continue dancing. And you can come and go, or not show up, or whatever. This is a statement about the push and the passion of the dance, making dances, doing dances. It exists separate from the traditional audience-performer relationship. And, now that I think about it, that it was done in a church was somewhere in the back of my mind. It was dancing for some kind of, dare I think, higher purpose? There’s something about us, humanity, we’re compelled to dance.

And I again, put myself in an exhausting place, after having said, “Twyla, I’m too exhausted.” You know, there are all these ties to that original group, commitment to the process. I don’t know how well you know Twyla’s work, but she made a piece called In the Upper Room, which is all about transcending.

RM: One of my favorites of all time. Yeah.

SR: It doesn’t matter how much your feet bleed or you’re exhausted, you’re compelled for a higher reason to be doing this. Although she and I never talked about it, I never thought about it, I entered a successful collaboration with her as a dancer because somewhere we were really in sync about things. Maybe not totally, aesthetically — I mean she had a far more sophisticated idea of classical work and modern dance work and all that, I was much more basic, just, “Let me dance, let me do it!” In my first meeting with Twyla, she literally rubbed her hands together. We were maybe at a gym somewhere in Hunter College, and she said, “Oh, you have a lot more energy than other people.”

So that was really the first thing I did. It was in 1975, in June. There was no streaming, we didn’t have cell phones, we didn’t have anything. We had nothing better to do. But that experience — I never could have done that with my original dance family. And then I moved out of that loft on Canal Street eventually, Bob Clifford, my beloved ex-husband, and I were in a six-flight walk-up on Sixth Avenue, and that was when I began to make the first birthday solo. I didn’t do any improvisation in those thirty-two dances. I think I did two performances, one on my birthday, and my parents came — performing in a loft, you know, you see the whites of everybody’s eyes. You’re right there. I know you’ve had that experience.

RM: Oh yeah.

SR: It was one of the first times I had, as a soloist, been in that situation. I remember looking out at two rows of people and people standing… Siobhan Davies and Richard Alston were my ushers. They took the names and — maybe there was money? I think there might have been some money.

RM: I love how money is an afterthought here. Now you can’t really work with people without having a contract in place prior; it’s a really different beast. I was going to ask if people were being paid during this or was it just purely for the love of it?

SR: No, everybody had other jobs. I mean, even when I first started working for Twyla, most of us had other jobs. Not dancing jobs. I worked for the Cunningham Foundation.

RM: Oh really, doing what?

SR: “Hello, this is the Cunningham Foundation. Judith Blinken [later known as Judith Pisar] would like to speak with you.”

I would go there in the morning, or maybe I took class in the morning and worked part-time — these are really vague memories — the office was in the Brooklyn Academy of Music so there were dressing rooms. I would work work work work, give myself a barre in a dressing room, then go back and do some more office work. Rose babysat, Theresa Dickinson was married to Lewis Lloyd at the time, Margery was married — I mean, this is the first Tharp company of seven women; I had no contract with Twyla. I did have a contract when I went back to work with her in the late seventies.

RM: So was that something that had changed more broadly by that time, or was it because you were coming back?

SR: Well, when I went back to work with Twyla I had already had my own management. Performing Artservices. Have you heard of Bénédicte Pesle?

RM: Yes! She worked closely with the Cunningham Company.

SR: Yes. Bénédicte was a sponsor for many people. She sponsored Twyla’s work in Paris. An amazing woman. She also established an arts services management organization, Performing Artservices, and several of us downtown dancers, choreographers were clients. I eventually formed a company called the Sara Rudner Performance Ensemble, and we started doing that thing, you know, write the grant and get together a number of dancers and who was your musical collaborator, who was your visual art collaborator. I did that for awhile and I learned a lot. I learned that I was like, reiterating a form I was not that interested in.

RM: Right, right — it’s already there, and you have to fit yourself into it. I was going to ask, if you would even go as far as to say that the professionalization of dance and all these services and the money, if it took any of the magic out of it for you, or for other artists?

SR: Well, other people might have felt that. What happened for me was that I had a group of people, Vicky Shick, Kristine Lindahl, Linda Cohen, Shana Menaker. Tim Callaghan — we formed a little group, a performance ensemble. There’s a film called Making Dances: Seven Post-Modern Choreographers —

RM: Yes, I think I’ve seen it about fifteen times, I love that film. [Michael Blackwood’s 1980 film featured Sara Rudner and her ensemble, which she ran from 1976 to 1982.]

SR: Amy Spencer was in that group and eventually Deborah Glaser as well, Susan Van Pelt, Jean Churchill — Vicky left to dance with Trisha [Brown] and other people joined — maybe we were seven people. We did tours, we did a lot of work, and I don’t know how attached I was to any of it, really. Now when I think about it from like, forty-five years on — I didn’t hate it. I loved working with everybody, I was attached to the people. But what happened was, I had a call from Twyla, “Would you be available to be a sub in Hair? [Tharp choreographed the film and Rudner appears in one scene.] And then after that I began to appear as a guest artist with the company. Basically, I would do my part in pieces that we had already done, The Bix Pieces or The Fugue or whatever. It was Twyla Tharp and the company with guest Sara Rudner — so I’d rehearse with my ensemble in the morning and then in the afternoon, I would go downtown, wherever Twyla was rehearsing. By I think 1981, my body really couldn’t take it. I’m strong, but I’m not that strong. And I ended up with a three-quarter detachment of the retina in my right eye. At that time there was laser therapy, but not the way it is now. They would sedate the hell out of you so that your eyes and your head won’t move, insert a piece of plastic, a scleral buckle, and reattach the retina. It meant I had to lie on my back for almost three weeks and not move. I had to be fed. Both eyes, bandaged. So this was an intense experience.

RM: This must have been the hardest thing for you, to not move.

SR: You know, it wasn’t! Because I was very tired.

RM: Right! Right. Well, you said Twyla taught you how to work, but who taught you how to rest? Did you ever learn that? No. So here it was, hitting you like a truck.

SR: Yeah. I was ready to be on my back for that amount of time. The Tharp company was going on a South American tour, and of course I couldn’t go. They all chipped in and bought me a Walkman. Do you remember what a Walkman was?

RM: Yeah, oh yeah. I remember cassette tapes when I was little, you’d have to stick your finger in there and like, wind them up sometimes when they would get tangled up.

SR: Richard Colton was nominated to teach me how to use this. Because I had to do everything by feel. We would talk and talk and when he was tired, he would lie down and the nurses would come in: “What’s with these people? They come in here and they lie down on the floor.”

Anyway, dancers. But it gave me a chance to think. And I was again in that dance presentation structure, Rashaun — you know, I was fortunate enough to be on that list of people the NEA was sponsoring in the seventies, touring to universities and other places. What I felt at the time was, is this what I want to be doing now? Because I knew, tick tick, I knew how old I was [thirty-seven] and I knew that I wasn’t committed to the structures. I was committed to making things with and for other people.

RM: I feel so connected to that idea. I think it’s an underpinning of why I collaborate so much. How do you collaborate? Is it something you have to work at, or is it already there for you?

SR: I relish it. I relish someone saying, “What if we did this?” “Yeah, let’s try that!”

RM: [laughs] Yeah.

SR: That’s how I worked with Wendy Rogers. You know, before the Rudner Ensemble, Wendy and I were doing duets at the Roundabout Theatre on 23rd Street. It was an additive and then an integrative process, which meant that I could be a dancer-collaborator. Versus when I had the ensemble, I was the, you know, “OK everybody, let’s learn this.” And people were game, and they were — I mean, Vicky Shick, my God, fabulous —

RM: Fabulous.

SR: And people you don’t know, Linda Cohen, Kris Lindahl, all those people that were mentioned earlier. They were just a dream. But I was responsible. You know, it was a structure. Which, it’s not unusual and it was tolerable, until I was flat on my back. And then I realized how intolerable it had become. Twyla asked me, “Are you finished with that now?” And I said, “I want to dance.” And I knew that maintaining my little company meant I was going to be doing more fundraising, I was going to be doing more administrative work.

RM: And you were going to have to tell people what to do.

SR: And I was going to have to tell people what to do! We had a good time together, but this structure was not functioning for me as an artist. And it was a terrible thing, everybody was very angry at me for letting that structure go. After I healed, we did another tour, which was fine. You know, these relationships are ongoing. But for the kind of dancing I was involved in, the handwriting was on the wall. If I wanted to do it, I had to do it fully. And having the luxury of doing pieces I loved and I knew really well, as well as new repertoire from ’79 or ’77 on, with dancers I admired, Twyla could provide that. Richard Colton, Christine Uchida, Billy Whitener, Tom, and Jenny, Rose, and all the other — I love those dancers. I was the oldest person by eight or nine years, and I remember I would try to tell the others, “You have no idea how lucky you are.” And that was the first time I was paid as a dancer regularly. Half that salary was paid to me personally, and, while I still maintained the ensemble, half went into the 18th Street Dance Foundation and paid the other dancers. So I was in a way, supporting that ensemble as a performer.

RM: Well, you were returning, it seems like, to something more pure for yourself, which was just about your own dancing and the joy of that. I feel like that’s a huge part of your legacy; you’re such a celebrated dancer. You had a different kind of introduction to dancing than maybe most professional dancers. Do you think that that gave you some kind of advantage or allowed you to have this longevity in a different way?

SR: Yeah, you know, Rashaun, I was a ridiculously energetic child. My parents didn’t know what to do with me after awhile, and they didn’t have a lot of money. It was, “We do dance or we do music. We don’t have money for both.” And I opted for dancing.

RM: Did you have siblings?

SR: I had an older brother. He recently died. He was six years older than me.

RM: Did he also have a lot of energy? Was it in the family, or was it just you?

SR: It was in the family, but on the female side. My mother was a frustrated dancer. I don’t know what your introduction to dance was, but mine was at a music school, around the corner from my house in Brooklyn, at the end of the line in Flatbush. It was a residential house, the music school took over the upper floors and in the basement was a dance studio. First we had, like, modern interpretive dance. I think I was six or seven years old. And then it got serious and Bella Malinka came from the Performing Arts High School; she taught us once a week and we wore those cotton leotards, you know, no elastic —

RM: Don’t stretch, yeah. [Laughs]

SR: — and naked legs and little shoes. And I just looked forward to going across the floor. I did a couple of years there until the school closed, or the dance part of it closed, I can’t remember exactly. And so I didn’t have a lot of controlled training. Those teachers wanted me to go to Performing Arts High School but my family was not for it. It was in Manhattan and the family lore was that the life of the performing artist is bad for family life — my great-grandfather was an opera singer and a musician in Russia and was never home. And then these were immigrants, always trying to keep everybody safe and together. So they were really not impressed, and I didn’t want to audition anyway. So I went to regular high school, Midwood High School, and then on to Barnard College.

RM: And did you do any other physical activities during that time? Did you play a sport?

SR: I was always an athletic kid. I went to summer camps. I couldn’t do team sports; I couldn’t judge depth, because I have congenital amblyopia. But I ran and I swam. And I finally had my first modern dance class at Barnard. I was part of that group of children born just as World War II was ending, there were many, many, many of us, just ahead of the baby boom generation. They gave you exams and if you passed you skipped grades. So I got out of high school when I was sixteen and I left college when I was twenty. Dance at that time at Barnard was in physical education. There wasn’t a dance program but we had a dance club and we finally got a teacher from Juilliard, Janet Soares. We also had a technique class, a version of Cunningham technique. And Janet had composition students at Juilliard at the time, including a woman named Martha Clarke who she got to teach us one of her dances. I don’t know if that’s a familiar name.

RM: Yeah, it is. [A founding member of Pilobolus, Martha Clarke is a prominent director of dance, theater, and opera.]

SR: And I was still swimming and doing whatever, running around. I took some classes down at the New Dance Group. I studied Graham technique for a little while, but really just like, touching the edges of it. I was never marked as a ballet student or a Cunningham student or Graham — or the other forms, like [Alwin] Nikolais. So when I started to work with Twyla, I wasn’t, you know, tabula rasa, but I also wasn’t engraved. And I resonated with Twyla’s aesthetic. My preference was that we just do something!

RM: That strikes me as a real strength. I mean, it seems like you had a lot of catching up to do in a lot of ways, a desire to fulfill this thing that you hadn’t done.

SR: It was that and also — Twyla used us as she perceived what we could do, what our strengths were. In a way, it was the truly experimental work that was right up my alley. One of the first things I ever did with Twyla was a repetitive tap-dancing step. I never studied tap dancing, but I was game. Like, what is it? I loved learning difficult things. I couldn’t always do the big technical things — I can’t turn really well, because my eyes are weird. I can spin —

RM: I was going to say, I remember lots of turning in your classes.

SR: Yeah, because I like to turn. I just couldn’t do the classical turning. Well alright, I had an open mind and a more open body; you know, it was never, “You want us to do what?!”

RM: Yes and. In the Michael Blackwood film, you said something about wanting to dance forever —

SR: Yeah.

RM: — with other people, and it seems like you’re doing that. Would you say you’re doing that?

SR: I’m doing that! I’m doing my best.

RM: How often do you dance and what is the shape of it now for you?

SR: When I first came here, I started doing this three times a week. Now, I’m down to two days a week, and that is in part because I discovered I really want to be dancing with other people. And when I was dancing three times a week and maybe sometimes a fourth day, I was by myself for much of that time. But there is a core of people: Wendy comes once a week, Diane Frank, and Risa. And — oh, this is really amazing — a woman named Liss Fain. Liss Fain has lived in the Bay Area forever, but she’s from Rhode Island and went through New York in her salad days, and worked with Twyla Tharp briefly in the original Eight Jelly Rolls.

RM: And these are all people that you reconnected with or were already connected to.

SR: Margy Jenkins, in her generosity and wisdom, arranged for me to do a workshop in San Francisco a few years ago, where I met other people, younger people, and some of them drop by; sometimes we have seven, eight people. So what do we do? We don’t do a class together. Everybody does their own warm-up, which is depending on, you know, how recent was your hip revision or how are your knees doing. About a year and a half ago, I had a revision of my original hip replacement. You know at this age — shit happens. So everybody does what’s best for their bodies. Some people do a barre, or Cunningham-type warm-up. And I just lunge around the room. I do floor work, try to keep my core together so my sciatica doesn’t creep up on me. I do whatever my physical therapist has taught me, to maintain a body that is my age. And then we do a series of open improvisations with no prompts, and round robin solo improvisations. So let’s say Risa starts. She goes for a couple minutes and then Wendy might join her. They do a little bit of stuff together, then Risa leaves and Wendy continues. And these improvisations are really based on the air and our current fantasies and preferences. One of the women I met through that workshop is Taiwanese, living in the Bay Area — Chingchi Yu, a very dramatic dancer. She does improvisations that are like [throws up fist to chest as if to block a blow], Diane does her Cunningham, and I do whatever rhythmic stuff that I do. Everybody has their own flavor, but sometimes, in the changeovers come interesting dynamics and meaningful activity; you start like, copying or trying to sync up. We’re all older women, so there’s no traditional partnering —

RM: But there’s relationships.

SR: There’s relationships. And we do that for anywhere from a half hour to forty-five minutes, depending on how many people are in the room. And then after that starts my favorite stuff.

RM: The puzzles.

SR: You know, just crazy coordinations you can’t do, that we’re learning. The most recent one is, we put together a long stepping leg phrase and everybody contributed something. And then I say, “But we have these arm phrases that we made two years ago. Maybe we should relearn those and splice those together and then we should put those on top of the leg phrase.” That kind of shit. We work and we work and we work and there’s never any public showing.

RM: That’s beautiful.

SR: For a while a couple years ago, people were invited. We kept the improvisations off limits to viewers — now I think we might change our minds. Margy was watching — she looked at me and she said, “Well, what are you going to do with this?” And I said, “This!”

RM: [laughs] What I’m doing!

SR: What I’m doing, this is what I’m doing. This is really it, this is really it.

RM: The audience is incidental. But you’re also witnesses for each other in this whole practice.

SR: That is very true. With Twyla, there was a lot of painstaking detail stuff, and interesting improvisations based on re-organizing. We did a lot of early work that was jazz-based in terms of like, you got a phrase, you got what you’re doing, it’s like knowing the melody. Your chord changes, you rearrange that phrase, physically doing it. Like, there was a long Jelly Roll solo that was based on maybe fifteen seconds of material, but the solo was three minutes. And it was all about re-arranging the material, working musically — I think that’s kinda common now, you have a pool of material and you choose from it.

The work that we’re doing creates new coordinations and new possibilities. It’s not unlike what Merce did in his experiments with I Ching: what if the arms did this and the legs did that and you put it all together? You would have coordinations that you would not do naturally, with the training we had. You’re using different neural pathways — it puts you in unusual physical relationships in one body. We’re at the age of, “Let’s keep our brains working, let’s keep Alzheimer’s at a distance.”

RM: It’s like a crossword puzzle for the body. You’re talking a lot about coordinations and movement pathways. Do you ever apply the same ideas to space or time?

SR: Well, we try to take some of these patterns and make little trios; like Risa would sit out and say, “What if you did that all together?” And then Wendy would say, “Then try this pattern.” Let’s see if we can just improvise doing the phrase we know and let’s double-time and half-time and see how the relationships change in space. OK, let’s try switching the spatial fronts. Let’s change facing every four counts, or making it larger, making it smaller, interrupting the phrase in a space and then trying to do another phrase, then coming back. Those kinds of experiments.

RM: So do you have, like, protocols at all for how you work together? Are there unspoken rules, are there spoken rules?

SR: I would say the unspoken rule is that everybody can contribute what they want within this structure. Round robin improvisation. Be respectful, you know? We started to really pay attention as people on the outside, like understanding the world that each person was making, visually. And we have gone back to re-learning things that we made a couple of years ago. Like, a whole structure that Wendy Rogers made during the pandemic, when she was in her little house trying to work on contralateral and ipsilateral movement and different arm and time relationships. We’ve made a lot of things.

RM: Do you document it in any way? [Laughs] Is that a dirty word?

SR: It’s not a dirty word, it’s a failing on my part: I don’t want to take the time. Actually, one of the younger women working with us, she travels a lot with her husband — she said, “I want to record this so I can work on it when I’m away.” But we’re not making tapes for grant proposals, you know; I’m not looking for gigs. And when we first started to work, I remember saying to everybody who was in the room, “Look, whatever material we make, whatever material we are working on, is open source. If you do a performance and want to use some of this, do it.”

RM: That’s beautiful.

SR: I just really thought about it as open source. These are things that are available, things that we work on. It’s almost, Rashaun, like a mindset.

RM: Yeah yeah yeah. And you have to be there, you have to be participating in it. I keep thinking about, like, the dance lover, the student, the knowledge-seeker out there who may want to know about this. But it’s not really available unless you’re there, which is also a beautiful thing. So yes, it’s not for grants or for venues, for performance.

SR: You know, these are my obsessions and now the group obsession of, “Let’s try that again, let’s try that again.” It has to be done live. Sometimes we’ll be working on something like, the legs regular time, the arms half time and the legs half time and the arms double time, that kind of stuff. And I’m thinking, “But what if we did a retrograde?” At which point Risa would just grab me and say, “Cool down.” You know? [Rashaun laughs.] “Enough! Enough! Enough!” But that’s what’s important: what if we tried this? Yeah, we can walk in a straight line, but do we always walk forward? Maybe we should walk backwards, or maybe we should crawl. All those “What if we tried this?” It’s pooling that creative energy and coming up with something that you’ve all created together, that’s repeatable, that’s not totally improvised, but it’s definitely a product of a bunch of people being committed to investigation.

It has become rigorous. You have to do the details. And it’s so funny — we start working on this phrase and the whole thing disintegrates, because we can’t do it. Which arm is it now? What’s the rhythm of the legs? So there’s this working towards — that’s sometimes how you learn. Someone in the group would say, “If we don’t do this more than once a week, I forget, my body forgets.” And I’m at a point, after years of doing this kind of work, where my body doesn’t forget. One of the reasons is somehow or other, I just go into an emotional place when I’m doing these phrases. You know, this gesture is not just a plain gesture — something is going on, I integrate it with some kind of personal meaning. I don’t know how else to explain that.

RM: It’s almost like it imprints. I have a hard time with “meaning,” the word, and what is meaning and how does meaning get made? But I like to think, as long as I’m in relation to something else, other than myself — then it somehow has meaning. It somehow imprints for me a little bit stronger.

SR: I think you’re describing what I do intuitively. I learn it to feel it. My whole body goes into that gesture. It’s no longer just a gesture. And that’s the way I can make sense of it. Then once we learn that, I’ll say — I mean, this is so typical of me — “Well, everything is on a sagittal plane. Can we go off on the side? Can we do something on the side?” [Laughs] If I can integrate it a little bit faster, I don’t mind going over and over and over again. You know, talking with each other about how do you learn — how are you doing this? That means a lot to me. It means there’s a community. Some of us are older, some of us have an easier time balancing, some of us make movement that’s really, technically a little too hard and we have to like, shift it to where our individual bodies can do it. It’s, again, that process. But I like what you said about imprinting.

RM: Well, the physical challenges are always there and they don’t stay the same, right? What’s challenging one day might be different the next. But what’s coming to me from what you’re saying is like, the important thing is the mindset that you’re imparting through this collaborative exchange and witnessing and continuance and that’s really what the power of it is. So, it’s not a five-hour dance, it’s like a fifty-year dance. An ongoing beast.

SR: It’s funny that you mention fifty years. Last weekend, Twyla sent out a group of dancers with repertoire for the sixtieth anniversary tour; they did it here at Zellerbach. Yeah, I was there in 1965 when she was starting. And it was one of the best I’ve seen of Twyla's programs, virtuosic choreographically and performance-wise. It was like the essence of all her stuff.

But you’re right, it’s like, years of accumulation. In a way, that is how I was putting together those marathons. Working on the same dances over the years, material would appear, reappear in different marathons that we did. And you know, things start making sense together, like the arc of time in the art. It’s amazing that I really don’t remember dates, so that when those solos were —but it doesn’t matter.

RM: No, it’s like a helix.

SR: Yeah, and you’re saying things that remind me of my proclivities; for so long I wanted to do the thing I’m actually getting to do now, which is just dancing and not being responsible for making a production. It’s getting down to essences. Risa says, “We danced together in the seventies and now we are dancing together in our seventies.” It was harder in New York getting anything like this happening; during the pandemic and afterwards, it was hard to get people together. Everybody was so busy — you have to be, you have to be earning a living and doing all the things you need to do.

RM: Yeah, it’s hard for me now, just to gather a cast, to find common time. I mean, it’s more challenging than ever before, it’s a product of this busy modern world that we live in. When I left the city in 2019, I was craving the solitude and the quiet, passive, wandering time. I had that for awhile and it was really, really wonderful, but then I started to feel very isolated and like I was losing dance, actually. You know, you can dance by yourself and you can do your exercises and you can be in an embodied space, but there’s something about being with people — it made it really clear for me that really what drew me to dance in the first place was that communal experience of being in something together and being able to feed off the energy of others, to witness others and to be witnessed. That exchange is really important. And so, I love that you’re doing this now and still. It’s just, so inspiring. It really is.

SR: All the time I was teaching at Sarah Lawrence, I always had a practice in New York. I always was doing something. I never did my work at the college, you know. All this stuff that I’m talking about, that I’m really interested in doing, I never taught that or did that. It was about the students, their creative work and their education and just figuring out what the hell is an education in dance? I still really don’t know. [In 1999, Rudner became the director of the dance program at Sarah Lawrence College; she remained on the faculty until 2019.]

RM: I don’t know either. [Laughs]

SR: You know, it’s something that is maybe good and unanswerable.

RM: I feel like with students, the best you can hope for is that you’re imparting a portal, into a way of life or a way of being or a possibility. That’s all you can really do, is say, “This is also possible over here” and “You can also make your own possibilities.” Beyond that, I don’t know what dance education is, really.

SR: Well you know what Rose Anne Thom used to say? “Dance is a way of knowing.” It’s a way of knowing ourselves, a way of knowing ourselves in community. Getting closer to our own particular essences. What is that? And how does it start manifesting itself? Physically, for dancers, it’s this journey of essentializing it and attrition, in some ways — what you can do, what you should do, what you shouldn’t do. If you can stay with it, it teaches you a lot about yourself. And eventually, you find your people. And there will be different people over the decades. And just what you’re saying: you find what is important, what’s the value in this situation? There were many times at the college when I would be like, “What are we really teaching? What are we really doing here?” I started to think ethically about how people were with each other, how people treated themselves and what their value systems are, how we locate ourselves in our multi-level society, either vertically or horizontally. How do we relate to the space around us? So it’s dance but it’s more like, how to be a human. [Laughs] How do you live with regard for yourself, regard for others? And then also, I better get on a Pilates machine because I need to strengthen my legs, you know?

RM: There’s always the practical, right? But it’s true, there aren’t that many places to learn how to be human, how to be a good human. How to be a good citizen.

SR: Sometimes it’s too structured. Sometimes it’s not structured enough. And that can be for different people. I always think about my experiences working at ballet companies, assisting Twyla on reconstructing something. That was just an education in itself. I’m watching these amazing dancers just being squeezed into a time frame for learning — and different shoes and different costumes and different this, that. It was a real lesson in humility to understand — a piece like Deuce Coupe that was made in 1972, ’73, trying to teach it in 2019 to ballet dancers. And they got the ballet parts of that dance fabulously, but then there was this other stuff. They had a bond with each other, a hierarchal bond, but there was no way to really reproduce what the feelings were that led to doing that improvised part or that relational part. There just wasn’t enough time for the body to be imprinted. I remember sitting in the house and watching the dance and I said, “Oh, I think I know what’s going to happen.” And sure enough, all the meticulousness and the timing, gone because the dancers had to do what their bodies knew. So the spirit was right, but the form was kind of cock-eyed. And that was just —let it go, let it go — you know, the form of a ballet company or a dance company just requires certain training and certain style.

And then there’s the question of transcendence. When do you transcend? Every once in awhile, you’ll see one of those dancers. Watching that Tharp performance last Sunday, I saw another form of these dancers having bonded and as a result, they could do almost what I would call — like what you did with the Cunningham Company — this superhuman dancing. When the curtain went down on that first piece on Sunday — and it stayed down, it didn’t go right up for curtain calls. I said, “Oh my God, they’re dead. It was such a hard dance that they’re all lying on top of each other in a pile of wrecked people.” And they weren’t! The curtain went up and there they were. [Laughter]

RM: But it is a problem in how to keep forms alive, and whether or not they should be kept alive. It strikes me that it’s kind of impossible, but you do it anyway and something else happens, and that’s also fine. That’s also fine.

SR: Sometimes, by some miracle, you find the exact right person to replace the original dancer. Like, when you did Heartbeat downtown in Manhattan, you were the exact right person to do that dance at that time. [Heartbeat, in which a solo performer wears a device that amplifies electrical impulses in the heart, was created by the composer and interactive architecture artist Christopher Janney and originally danced by Rudner in 1983; Mitchell performed it in 2000, coached by Rudner.]

I tried to explain to somebody what that was like, how I saw you emerge during that dance. I’ve told you this before — it’s almost as if your body grew. Like, you started the dance as Rashaun and you ended it as Rashaun.

RM: It’s so funny that you say that, because when I think about it, it feels like an out-of-body experience. I have a really hard time even remembering it, almost. I think because it was so overwhelming, and I was so out of context. I don’t even think I really understood the magnitude of what I was inside of. So it’s nice to hear a different perspective, because it’s almost like it’s been erased, you know?

SR: That’s the ephemeral part of this, and that you were no longer consciously controlling any of that. You know, that’s what trance dance is.

RM: Yeah, yeah. Exactly.

SR: We don’t get to do that very much. Maybe when people are drunk or on drugs they do, but whatever chemicals were going through your body — it was amazing! And I saw it. It really happened.

RM: It happened. OK, I believe you that it happened. [Laughter]

SR: It’s one of those dances that is very, very personal, and it has the transcendent potential. Because you’re on your own and you’re with this thing that keeps you going.

RM: So maybe that’s a good place to stop. We’ve talked for two hours and I tend to turn into a pumpkin around this time of night. But this was amazing.

SR: Well, I just, I so admire you for everything you’ve done, from that kid I met at Sarah Lawrence.

RM: I’m just glad that we’re still in touch and we get to have this opportunity. I don’t get to do structured interviews very often with people I love and artists I respect, so it’s a real treat. Thank you so much for making the time.

SR: And when you go into work in the studio, make sure you’re dancing. Make sure you’re physically in motion. This is what I’ve found in my life, that ideas and things I’m interested in happen to me when I’m in motion.

RM: And maybe you’ll come to New York someday? I’d love to hug you.

SR: Yes, and I can show you the latest, you know, like [makes a couple quick dance moves].

RM: Yes, I want all the latest phrases. [Laughs]

SR: Love you, Rashaun.

RM: I love you too, Sara.

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Lead Image: Sara Rudner rehearsing 33 Dances at the Merce Cunningham Studio, 1977, New York City. Photo: Raymond Kurshals.

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