Susan Osberg, an award-winning choreographer and filmmaker from Beacon, will premier two of her dance films, Remembering Pina and Mining the Moon, at CineHub on Thursday (Nov. 30).
What prompted your move to multimedia storytelling, and away from dance performance?
Once it’s done, the dance is gone, just images remain. I got interested in making films because I wanted the work to stay around longer. I edit the films. Once the material is given to me, I reframe and make it into dance for the screen. I don’t simply want to recreate.
With Remembering Pina, you fused “movement memories” with dancers’ remembrances of [choreographer] Pina Bausch. What did the process entail?
We all wrote down a story of our memories of Pina, then came up with gestures while retelling the stories. Then we went into different sections, where I worked with everyone separately. We shot it as material before we made it into a performance. Then we rehearsed, which for me meant finding different ways to work with people. There were stories spoken while others developed completely out of the movement.
You’ve worked with Beacon composer J. Brooks Marcus several times. How do you collaborate?
J. and his collaborator, Jonny Taylor, would come in and have me listen. In some cases, J. used songs he had already written. They could watch the shadows left in the movement of the dancers, feeling a rhythm and the timing, and they also worked in a lot of different genres, making it more popular and contemporary — covering a lot of bases, from jazz to pop. In Pina, some of the music is sad, some clever, some ridiculous, some humorous. That was Pina!
Does aging inspire most contemporary dancers and choreographers, or do the body’s physical constraints inhibit them?
This is funny because my next film, tentatively called Dancing On the Wheel of Time, will be on aging and dance. It is inspiring me. Aging has to be reckoned with. My early teachers were old and took their dance to their death. Now it’s a young world. You have to change, and aging is a part of dance.
Was funding easier to find earlier in your career, or now?
Back then we were starving artists. The thing was, it never stopped us. In Europe, they’re funded. Here it’s very, very hard. I feel fortunate to have been in New York City when I was young, and also fortunate to be able to work in Beacon. I moved here in 2004 and initially had no one to work with. Now we have a big trust, and know we can rely on each other. The next film will be an ode to them.
