Beyond What People See

November 18, 2024

BY JESSIE NOWAK

Photos by Shannon Butler of Shabu Studios

Note: This article was first published in Stance on Dance’s fall/winter 2024 print issue. To learn more, visit stanceondance.com/print-publication.

Anything said about making art sounds at once cliché and reductive. “Making art is healing” sounds like a quote right out of Chicken Soup for the Soul. Regardless, that is my biggest takeaway from the making of the dance film, Emerging. Although perhaps “healing” isn’t the right word, as it’s a word that has been hijacked by the wellness industry and misses the grittiness of moving through pain and challenge. The process isn’t a trivial inconsequential undertaking, but more like trying to make molasses run uphill in the winter. “Catharsis” is more accurate, a word that brings up images of shock therapy and exorcisms. For me, it’s far more accurate of the art making process.

It was 2020 when my dance partner Monica Parra Allen and I came up with the idea for Emerging, to weave science fiction metaphors into a dance film format, to go big with an idea, put dancers in makeup, on location, and explore what it means for two different groups of people to grapple and gel. For two years, we went back and forth on the concept, first over FaceTime, then when we felt comfortable in the studio together. We played with movement, we created storyboards, we picked the brains of potential collaborators, we threw out ideas that were beyond the scope of the project, and we picked up new ideas that seemed more feasible. We changed the scope entirely. All this was while navigating a global pandemic and the first project of this scale or type that either of us had undertaken. I attribute the very creation of this work to the close friendship and communication I have with Monica. Creating art is intimate and terrifying. It is best done with someone whom you deeply trust!

What started as an inkling of an idea in isolation and boredom in 2020 turned into production in 2022 and continued on into post-production in 2024. Since editing has gone through two editors and right back around to me, I have four years of retrospection to see how naïve Monica and I were back in 2020. Concepts and big questions do not a dance film make. We lacked basic understanding and language to communicate what we wanted of our collaborators.

We entered production with two cinematographers, a makeup artist, a photographer, three dancers, and Monica and I. Between shooting the promos and full production, we hired six more dancers. We hired people we knew and trusted, but also hired dancers who we had no prior experience with. This made for even more communication challenges; the whole range of human emotions were crammed into an eight-week rehearsal timeline. There are a lot of personalities in a group of 15 people. Add to that everyone having their own lives to navigate, plus two collaborators whose lives legitimately fell apart. I love this film. But it is also filled with pain. The costumes I made came out of a marathon day of grief sewing, as I cried for another’s loss and furiously tried to clothe my dancers mere days from shooting. Finally, at the end of filming, there was this copious amount of raw footage that needed to be turned into something.

The Emerging project was always intended to take Monica and I out of our current state of art making – sporadic, small, scrappy – right on past emerging artists, to a more established place. These are labels I don’t put much weight on, but the title pun was definitely intended. And I’m happy to report that it seems to have worked, with the film being finished and moving on to the film festival circuit. But the state of art making doesn’t necessarily feel different. I spoke with a filmmaker lately who in casual conversation said, “Post-production exists on its own timeline.” That is how an inkling turns into four years of all-consuming work and why the labels “emerging” or “established” have little meaning in the trenches of actually making art.

I often get asked, “Where did you come up with the idea for Emerging?” My answer struggles somewhere between a condescending “Don’t ask an artist how they come up with their stuff” and a vague unhelpful shrug, complete with a dopey face, I’m sure. I haven’t figured out how to talk to people about my art. The whole point of being a dancer is less words, please! I also legitimately don’t know how we came up with the idea, except for bouncing an idea between Monica’s brain and mine for the two years before filming. “Ephemeral” was a word that came up often during my university dance career, applied primarily to live performance. But it also describes how an idea turns into a dance film. Much of the “thinking” takes place in the movement. The biggest sticking point is explaining in words what appear as images in our minds.

When I have a really sticky problem to sort out, I get this powerful image of my brain enveloping the issue, and squelching and sucking it in with all the goo a brain should have. I had that image a lot during the making of Emerging, attempting to jolt my subconscious into solving problems while trying to claw something worthwhile out of the muck. Whatever my brain came up with was then regurgitated to Monica for her take on it. The process has made us better at problem solving. It has also made us less naïve about making art.

Healing has come knowing that this piece of art – this wacky science fiction dance film – can hold so much more than the story we wanted to tell. Emerging holds all the emotions, the life incidents, the personality clashes, and the naivete we brought to the project.

The cognitive dissonance between what people see when they watch the film and what we know went into it is jarring. People experience the images, the movement, the music. They don’t see the agony of making art, but it doesn’t matter. For Monica and me, we see the pain, the grief, the constant agonized decision making, the real-life meltdowns – not just ours but of everyone involved – but also the joy, the camaraderie, the laughter, and the utter silliness it takes to come up with anything gritty, anything joyful, anything new.

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Emerging won Best Dance Film at the Toronto Experimental Dance & Music Film Festival and is being adjudicated for entry into several other dance film festivals. Learn more and view the trailer at irregulardance.com.

Jessie Nowak has been a mover all her life, but has taken time away from dance twice because the training required was not compatible with her own physical and emotional needs. After she had her kids, she found a circuitous route back to dance, which has formed her current approach. No longer is she interested in perfect technique or virtuosity, but rather finding and amplifying everyone’s own strengths as movers. She firmly believes that dance is for every body, regardless of each individual’s unique challenges. She fuses her years of formal training with improvisational methods to create deeply inclusive work.