Seeing the Invisible

May 26, 2025

An Interview with Megan Williams

BY EMMALY WIEDERHOLT

Megan Williams is a dancer and choreographer based in New York City. Her upcoming piece Visible explores the pull between our seen and unseen identities, revealing how our ever evolving and dissolving roles as family members, partners, caretakers, friends, colleagues, and artists shape and conceal who we are. Megan shares the impetus behind Visible from an aging perspective, and how she hopes audiences see the layered humanity in each of us.

Visible runs June 5-7 and is part of the Danspace Project Off-Season series at St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery in New York City.

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Can you tell me a little about your dance history – what kinds of performance practices and in what contexts have shaped who you are today?

I started dancing as a young person with an interest in theater and performing in general. I veered toward musical theater and jazz initially in high school. My skillset lent itself toward other kinds of dance, and at a mentor’s suggestion, I auditioned for Juilliard. I was accepted and went through that rigor, then danced freelance for four years with a few different choreographers, supporting my dance life by being an aerobics teacher and personal trainer. I auditioned for the Mark Morris Dance Group in 1988 and danced with him for 10 years. I began staging his work, including his ballets, while still in MMDG.  When I started having children in 1997, I segued away from performing toward teaching but for many years have been asked back to help MMDG in different ways, as a guest rehearsal director, performer, and repetiteur. I also assisted Mark on some big projects.

Along the way, I’d always been choreographing, but I had it drummed into me back at Juilliard that I’m not a choreographer, I’m solely a dancer. I would occasionally be asked to make something, to choreograph something small, and I began making solos for myself and doing small commissions. In 2000, I started teaching at SUNY Purchase in their conservatory, and in 2013 I went back to school to get my MFA. My identity as a teacher had put my choreographer identity in the backseat. I found myself desiring a space where I was always practicing making things. Though teaching is very much part of my current practice, I’m more confident now in the identity of choreographer, and that lands me here, making work on my own terms.

How would you generally describe your work to someone unfamiliar with it?

I use improvisation as a generative tool, but my work is not improvisational. It has a classical root and my interest is in the architecture of the body, and how shape and form reveal meaning. Some of it is distinctly to music, and some of it lives without music. Mark Morris’ work is musical in a very particular way; he thinks about music first, and the dance illuminates the music. I pushed up hard against that when I started making my own dances, but I don’t shy away from motif or other musical composition structures. A lot of my material is naturalistic and about human interaction in subtle spatial ways or in more performative ways. I like a lot of action, and no action at all. I think a lot about space. I’m a little anti-proscenium right now, having performed in proscenium spaces most of my career. I love to watch dance up close, so I’m making work that sometimes doesn’t have a traditional front. The delicacy of it is meant to be seen up close. My work is always changing but right now I’m leaning into a certain tenderness. Perhaps that comes from being a person of a certain age.

Can you tell me about your upcoming performance, Visible, and how the piece came about?

A couple years ago, I was working on a solo about the transition from perimenopause to menopause and what my body was experiencing. In our culture, it’s a time of life in women that we don’t talk about. Women don’t generationally talk to their daughters about what’s going to happen in menopause, what’s going to change, and how it’s going to feel. I was interested in cycles and the end of cycles. You menstruate every month so you can have children. And then you get pregnant and have a child, and you can’t imagine your body coming back to its previous form, but you menstruate again so you can give birth again. It’s this incredible physiological thing. I was obsessed with that cycle for a while, and brought it into the studio.

For years I’ve had conversations with women my age about how we feel in public. I’m 62. The mother of one of the dancers’ I work with told me that she, “can walk down the street now and no one bothers me.” As a younger woman, you receive a lot of attention you don’t want. She asked me, “Don’t you just feel invisible?” I told her yes, and some days it feels good, but other days it doesn’t. I started to feel interested in other aspects of people’s identities that are hidden or revealed or misnamed, and the assumptions that are made.  Both of my adult offspring identify as queer in unique ways. In my current roster of dancers, there is an array of identities on the gender and sexuality spectrums, and other traits that contribute to how we all self-identify that may not be what the public sees or can name. I started thinking how each of their layered identities intersect with one another and how that affects the way we move. What could that Venn diagram reveal and could that be a seed for a new dance?

I performed in my last show as a soloist with everyone else being 28 to 40 years old. I still dance and enjoy performing. For this piece, I wanted to have more peers in the mix, and I’ve enlisted other dancers over 60. That’s where it started, me as an older person feeling less visible, and then realizing the dancers I work with have their own unique invisibilities in their own daily lives. There’s no text or narrative in Visible; we’ve just been playing in the studio with how these aspects of ourselves overlap, when we feel lost in the crowd or seen.

What is your work process like?

I find that I’m trying different processes every time I start a new dance, but I do fall back on making something on my own body, sometimes in real time. I immediately give the material to the dancers in the space and start tweaking it and seeing how they read it back to me. I love to see how people do things differently. We make choices form there. That tends to be how I work.

In this piece, I have 10 dancers, and I can’t get everybody in the room at the same time, because of their busy freelance lives, so I’ve been making duos and trios based on who is available. I have some dancers I specifically wanted to have dance together. Sometimes I have the dancers do what we call inserts: I’ll ask them to do a phrase, and then at a certain point, they add in their own movements creating an unpredictable unison.

The last big process I did, I worked with a composer where the music was pre-written, and she added some connective tissue to the composition to make it work for the piece. The dance was driven by the music.

This time around, I started making material with no music in mind at all. Because of my budget being tighter, I started using music in the public domain. I found some the piano preludes by Alexander Scriabin, 19^th century Russian composer. I started playing with those in the studio. None are longer than three minutes. I decided I wouldn’t set any of the duets or trios to specific preludes. Instead, I would give the pianist, Isabelle O’Connell, a list and she will play them in whatever order she wants with silence in between. We won’t know how it all slots together until we hear it the week before the shows. There will also be compositions by composer Tristan Kasten-Krause who is an upright bass player and writes atmospheric, edgy contemporary music. I’ve made a music map that juxtaposes Scriabin and Tristan’s work but I don’t yet know how the dance sits in it.

The St. Mark’s Church sanctuary is a beautiful wooden floor with carpet around it and risers. For decades, the carpet has been a dirty gray color. A couple years ago, they replaced the carpet in a deep navy blue. I thought it would be interesting to put the cast in that color, so whenever they are offstage, they will blend in with the carpet. When they are not on the dance floor, they will be invisible, seen or not. I’m playing with the environment that the dance is in and how we can disappear and reappear in it.

What do you hope audiences take away from Visible?

When I shared some ideas about the piece with my husband, he asked how audiences are going to know that I made a duet on the two nonbinary people, for example, and I said, “They might not know.” People’s identities either read or they don’t. I can’t know how each person in the audience is perceiving any of it if I’m not giving it an obvious narrative. I guess I want the audience to observe a layered approach to humanity. I think having an older dancer do the same gestural phrase next to a younger dancer is emotional by design.

Looking at your larger body of work, are there certain themes or issues that feel important to you to keep tackling or addressing?

I’ve made many pieces on students over the years. In that space, I’m in a teaching mode, so the product is not nearly as important as the time spent in the studio teaching them how to collaborate and be themselves within a process. The professionals I’m working with now have that ability as well as lots of training and can do anything I ask them to do.

There are two of us in the piece who are mothers of adults. Whenever we are in the space together, parenting comes up. How can it not? We fell on the idea that once your children are grown and out of your home, a piece of you is always out there with them, and we made a partnering dance from that. A dancer who is the mother of a toddler joins us at the end of the duet, as herself, but also as a child. Even though each conversation and seed that’s planted about who we are feels like it could be its own dance, we are creating an anthology of these small episodes that will be the evening-length Visible.

I feel different about each work, but then people say, “Oh, that’s such a Megan Williams dance.” So maybe I am actually making the same dance over and over again, but it feels different to me.

Any other thoughts?

I saw on Instagram the other day a post that said that because of everything going on in the world, art that doesn’t have a political opinion shouldn’t be made. I disagree. I feel like those of us who are artists just need to keep doing what we’re doing, not with blinders on, but because we shouldn’t be stopped from being who we are. If artmaking is what we do, we should keep doing it, and we should support each other to that end. We have to keep being reminded that we’re all here managing this difficult life together. And dance, to me, does that better than anything.

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To learn more about Megan’s work, visit www.mwdanceprojects.com.