The Momentum of Action

February 17, 2025

An Interview with Rosie Trump

BY EMMALY WIEDERHOLT

Rosie Trump is a choreographer, dance filmmaker, and dance educator based in Reno, NV, whose interest is the momentum of action. She is the founder and curator of the biannual Third Coast Dance Film Festival. She also regularly produces her own stage and film works. She shares how she approaches choreography and dance film through a feminist lens, and how she sees the dance film field evolving.

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Can you share a little about your dance history and what shaped you as an artist?

I’m originally from the Pittsburgh, PA area. I grew up dancing ballet. I did an undergraduate degree in Dance at Slippery Rock University, which shaped my trajectory as a choreographer and a dance filmmaker. I lived in Southern California for a while. I did my graduate work in experimental dance choreography, asking, “What is the experiment?” It’s a question I’m still working on almost 20 years later. I’ve been in Reno, NV since 2013. I’m an artist who is interested in the choreographic process. My practice is grounded in a dance theater aesthetic and improvisation is a key modality.

How would you describe your choreography to someone unfamiliar with it?

I’m really interested in action, momentum, and how a movement can move from a pedestrian gesture into a radical action through a crescendo trajectory. Every new project, I think I’ll move away from that, but it’s at the core of what I do. For a long time, I was interested in distilling and looking at dance from a minimalist aesthetic. Recently I’ve swung the other way toward maximalism in both movement and stagecraft, but still asking what action in dance is. I’m interested in layering in more visual input in the dance.

My stage work can be narrative or abstract. I usually work in an evening-length format, alternating between content-driven work, usually political, and more abstract work. A lot of my work is grounded in feminism and representations of women in power. I often work with text, costumes, and objects that demonstrate that content-based approach. Then I make work that is more abstract but reinvests in the physicality. It finds a similar meaning in the feminine power but looks at it through a more embodied physicality.

I usually think about my dance film and stage work as separate. I alternate, making a film and then a stage work. I’ve been making dance films since 2005, but a 2023 project titled Try to Keep Up was the first time I adapted an existing stage work into a film. Otherwise, my works exist as their own beings. I made a work called Gravity Angels about falling. The dancer fell in all these different locations. That was its own work, but my interest in the action of falling is in all my work.

Is there a recent project or two you’d like to share more about? I was curious about Slow Motion Collision and Score Cards.

Score Cards started out as a COVID work. I was looking at a way of making work when we couldn’t be in a room with another person. I was looking at how visual and analogue mediums can be paired. I liked the idea of making something physical that could be sent through the mail. During the pandemic, the mail was put under duress. I consider supporting the USPS to be a political act. I also got to work with people I often don’t see because of geography. How do I keep working with people I have known in other places? The artist could interpret the score on the score card I sent and send me something back digitally. Right now, Score Cards lives as an archive on my website but I’ve been working to get it published as a book. Some of the films have been screened at festivals. I’m interested in how dance can be more than something that lives onstage.

Slow Motion Collision is a current work that had a works-in-progress showing in June 2024 but will be premiered in full in April 2025. It will have seven dancers. I’m looking at themes of crashing together and being expelled apart and how the familiar can become unfamiliar. There’s a lot of spiraling, colliding, and crashing; how can force bring us together and pull us apart? There will also be video projection. It’s still all coming together. I’m a slow-cook choreographer and I’m still in the process of digging deeper.

I’m wondering if you can share more about the dance film side of your work. What was your entry to dance film and what do you like about the medium?

I feel really lucky that I was able to take a course in dance film from Jennifer Keller as an undergrad. She continues to be a colleague, collaborator, and mentor of mine. Before that class, I had a separate dance practice and visual arts practice. I thought they lived in separate worlds. When I was exposed to dance film, it was a way to bridge these loves. I think about video editing as another choreographic process. I got hooked. I sought out opportunities to see dance film festivals, which led to my interest in presenting work through the Third Coast Dance Film Festival. I looked around my community and saw interesting work being made, but I didn’t see it reflected to me at film festivals. I asked what the disconnect was, especially why so few female filmmakers were being programmed at the main festivals. In 2010, I was working at Rice University. I wanted to leverage the resources at that institution to promote dance film. I started Third Coast Dance Film Festival at Rice University with this key idea of what I call low budget, high impact work that leverages the unique way that the camera can see dance. Those are works we’ve always valued in our festival, especially female-driven work. Now the dance film landscape is very different, thankfully, but at the time we started, there were only a few dance film festivals in the US. Who is getting supported and screened has also changed since 2010.

What’s the status of Third Coast Dance Film Festival now?

It’s moved around with me; it was based in Houston and now is in Reno. It usually tours to Texas and Pennsylvania as well as other locations that are interested in having the film festival. Now it’s also biannual. We do an open call every season and it’s wonderful to build up a network of artists over the past 15 years and people who apply more than once. We get submissions from around the world. I’m the main curator but I invite guest curators every season who help inform what work gets screened. We have two awards: a Curators’ Pick Award and a Spirit of the Festival Award.

From your perspective, what does the future of dance film look like? In what ways is dance film evolving?

The work being made now is not the same kind of work that was made 10 or 20 years ago. I’ve seen thousands of short dance films after 15 years of doing the Third Coast Dance Film Festival. We get between 100 and 200 entries every year. It’s such a joy and honor to witness this work. I’ve never stopped being surprised. There’s still new territory people are exploring. Dance and film have been partners since film was invented. But the ability for people to have cameras in their pockets and consumer-grade technology available to them has accelerated the volume of work being made. And yet, there are still new avenues. One of the biggest trends is the work has gotten sleeker, and the production values are higher even though people aren’t necessarily spending more on producing the work. It’s because the quality of the technology that’s available is higher. Now there’s also more collaboration. Ten years ago, the choreographer was also the director and cinematographer. That is still happening, but I find people are regularly collaborating and not wearing all the hats. That produces an interesting hybrid aesthetic.

What’s next for you? Do you have an upcoming project or focus you’d like to share more about?

The Third Coast Dance Film Festival is in Reno from February 20^th through the 22^nd, and then we’ll be running our touring program. I’m also finishing Slow Motion Collision. In this moment, I’m in production mode. There’s always something next on the horizon. I do know my next project will be a film.

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To learn more about Rosie’s work, visit www.rosietrump.org.