Manifestation Blooms by Chelsea Tikotsky

Apricity Magazine interviews those who have contributed to the advancement of the humanities or the documentation of the human experience.  

We revive our interview series with Leah Cox, a dancer, maker, and faculty in the University of Texas at Austin Department of Theatre and Dance. Join us as Leah discusses her journey as an artist and dancer, collaboration as part of her artistic practice, and advice on sustaining motivation and creativity throughout life.

Interview

Kerryn Xu: As Apricity is a literary, visual, and performing arts magazine, I want to ask, in your opinion, what makes good art?

Leah Cox: I don’t think there’s one single thing that makes good art. But even as I say that, there is something underlying it, which is regardless of the art form: visual art, dance, music, there’s evidence of commitment by the artists to investigate something. The art deeply matters to the artists and there’s real investment in it. That comes through as an attention to detail, which can look like many things: many layers to the art form, an incredible sense of imagination, or thoroughness. I keep going back to good art and finding new ways in because the artist has built something that has a lot of depth or layers and has spent time doing it in some way–either time imagining it or time practicing to where this is the moment that it really comes out so effortlessly. So, I think what makes good art is time spent and care.

Kerryn Xu: I’ve heard that the first art form that you’ve explored was actually music, you played the piano. What compelled you to begin dancing and to stay with dance all these years? 

Leah Cox: I started dancing because my grandmother said that I needed discipline. She researched all of the different ballet academies in our area and enrolled me in the one she felt had the most discipline and structure to it. It’s perhaps not the most auspicious beginning, not something like we saw talent. But the lineage of ballet that I learned was Royal Academy of Dancing, which comes through England and what I found is that dancing was a way for me to feel the music more.

When I was playing the piano, even though everyone seemed to think I had a lot of talent and I was very musical, I would get the critique that I would move too much when I played or I would express too much when I played. And I’m not really sure what that means. I mean, I was eight or ten at the time, and maybe I valued expression over technique. I would go to these piano competitions and I would start getting incredibly nervous months ahead of time. I would just dread it. And everyone was hiding behind their hands when it came time to like for me to play because I would do it so beautifully at home and I would just mess up horribly in these competitions. Eventually I thought this was just too tortuous and I realized that the best way that I could continue being a musician was to dance. Ultimately, I think I’m a musician who dances and I had to stop playing the piano because for whatever reason, I never got nervous performing dance. It was fine because I had the music there to support me and I was expressing the music. 

Kerryn Xu: Of all dance forms, you now specialize in postmodern dance. What drew you to this form? 

Leah Cox: I still love ballet, but American postmodern dance is the form that really resonates with me. In part that’s because of who I trained with in my undergraduate career. Both of my primary teachers in my undergraduate training were postmodern dancers, and then I ended up working for a lot of companies that were rooted in contemporary postmodern dance. The big one that I worked with was Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company. That’s where I really learned what postmodern dance is and that was what I was practicing. I was part of this lineage and for the longest time I didn’t really identify with a specific dance form. It wasn’t until I left Bill’s company and I started to try to explain what I was doing to other people and when I was trying to teach students, that I realized there were specific things that I was taking for granted about why we do things one way versus another way. It wasn’t because it was the right way, it was because this is the lineage they’re learning. Then, when I volunteered to teach dance history one semester, I thought I should teach postmodern dance history because that really is my form and I have been privileged to be able to work with one of the second-generation postmodern dance artists, Bill T. Jones. It was really affirming and it continues to be very clarifying and affirming the more and more I own that tradition, as opposed to trying to be unspecific or unconscientious about what lineage I am working within. The more and more I go, “Is this part of my lineage? Ok, why or why not?” I find I am better able to make decisions and make commitments to things, because I’m not trying to be everything or nothing specific. I am this particular extension of dance tradition.

Kerryn Xu: Are there any specific messages or ideas that you think translate most strongly through dance? 

Leah Cox: One thing your question points out is not every art form can express everything. Some art forms are better suited to specific mediums. If I’m being very strict and talking about dance without the aid of visual media, I think it can animate the non-linguistic side of the brain. Dance can create an appreciation for spatial and musical rhythm, pattern, and the relationship between two bodies doing the same or different things. When I think of choreographers who are working very exclusively with dance, I say it gives us a strong sense of harmony, counterpoint, many things that music does — but it does it visually. There’s a way that emotion and affect come through without verbal specificity that wakes up what I call the physical intelligence in the body and the part of the brain that doesn’t need everything explained through language. Dance does something important for contemporary society where we live so much in digital mediums and things that aren’t really anywhere in space. We deal with language and theater, but dance creates a space where people are working with others nonverbally, purely expressing through action that’s intentionally rhythmic and melodic. Dance keeps something vital present in us that we miss in the way our world is moving today. 

Kerryn Xu: In your dance projects and dance in general, you collaborate with a team to explore and create something that appears entirely new in the performance. How does collaborating with other artists impact your own creative process? 

Leah Cox: When I danced with Bill T. Jones on a piece, he quoted a friend. So to quote Bill T. Jones quoting his friend, “If you do solo work, you are destined to make the same dance over and over.” Maybe that’s not true for a while because you are still figuring out all the tools that you have, but very soon you’ll come up against the limits of your own thinking. The only way to continue to make anything that’s going to feel new is to collaborate with other people. I collaborate with other people because it’s the best way to be excited. I’m constantly amazed by what other people come up with. They’re a really great sounding board for that back and forth of “here’s an idea” then they add on and then you add on. That volleying back and forth gets us to a whole other world because another person put their perspective on an idea. So I’m of a ‘the more the merrier’ mindset. 

Lately, I’ve been interested in creating interdisciplinary art where each medium comes together toward an idea, problem, or curiosity. The latest work I did focused on the question “How can we get audiences to come in and not judge the dance and see it as a consumer exchange?” That led us down the volleying back and forth of 

“We need to do this” 

“We need to bring in this expert of this medium” 

“We need to bring in these experts from these fields.” 

Because I’m working across different mediums, if I want to understand something about theater, I need someone who’s working in the theater, and if I want something to do video-wise, I need someone whose jam is video. When the emphasis is on doing something that lives between different forms, no one can be the expert of it all. No one can cross their arms and judge it, so we can all experience it. 

In this work, we want the audience to genuinely engage. If we give them something they’ve never seen before quite in this way, they’re more predisposed to have delight and wonder. The same thing happens on the back end of creation. If none of us have quite done this pattern of creating before, we are all in unfamiliar territory and that’s useful for our world right now because there is so much emphasis on being the expert, being right, or being liked. We need some space where we all work towards a goal that hasn’t been perfected so we can all have a bit of humility and wonder. 

Kerryn Xu: What advice would you give dancers or any artist who’s trying to improve? 

Leah Cox: Delight and joy and enthusiasm are not small things. Artists have to stay motivated to be creative. So that might mean that you have to be creative about how you practice your form. I think artists above all have a very special role in society. They are truth tellers and they are wondermakers, so they have to have that within them. Maybe some days I’m not being creative with dance, but maybe I’m being creative in other ways. Maybe one day I’m not moving through dance forms, but I’m moving in other ways. Maybe I’m not dancing with other dancers, but I’m doing things and collaborating with people creatively in other ways. So, my final answer would be that you need to stay true to what artists do, which is to be creative and create wonder and to show the world back to people. To do that, you have to stay motivated to be creative and practice your craft and make processes that you want to be involved in. And that might mean you have to be creative about how you practice so that you want to engage in a process.

Kerryn Xu: In our current world where it can sometimes seem as if art has been sidelined, why do you feel that it’s important to champion the arts?

Leah Cox: Because the arts are a celebration of life. As a parent now, putting art into a capitalist system forces it to behave in ways that I don’t think art is meant to behave. It’s not meant to be competitive or lucrative. Once you need to make money or get a grant, that means you have to position yourself in relation to someone else’s artmaking and be strategic. That puts containers on art. But if you can get around this, art awakens us. If you think about the history of art, why do children create art or why do we listen to a song? It’s because it consoles you. It helps you navigate life. It’s speaking to you in a way that no one else can at that moment. When I think of why my son makes so much art, how it delights him, and how he just runs and wants to share it, there’s no thought of “Is it good or not?” It’s some way that he’s so excited that he’s created something. The arts are so important because they are evidence of something so essential to who we are as humans, which is: we’re creative and we’re social. To make something and want to share it, that’s the whole loop of art. It’s not to make it and to keep it private. Sometimes you’re sharing it with some other part of yourself–you look at it and you feel affirmed. The same cycle happens when you make something and you share it with someone else–they look at it and they feel affirmed. And somehow you feel affirmed too. Both people can feel seen. 

Kerryn Xu: Thank you so much Leah.

Leah Cox: You’re welcome.

Biography of Interviewer | Kerryn Xu