by LM blog contributor Charlie Mogen
photo courtesy of Randy Karels
Throughout her career, dancer Eva Mohn has prioritized the betterment of the collective above advancement of her own name. Originally from Jasper, MN, Mohn studied dance at the University of Minnesota before finding success in St. Paul, New York, and Stockholm. However, the limelight will be hers with the premiere of When Isn’t Yet, a Liquid Music commission to be presented April 17 and 18 at the Lab Theater in Minneapolis. In her words, Mohn has chosen to work with those who “have devoted the labor of their artistic work to being collaborators, company and ensemble members, supporting roles, and who have done so intentionally at the expense of their own solo career for the joy and reward of collaborative energy.” The result: a collective of artists striving to put the goals of the whole before individual accolade. I was able to chat with Mohn about career growth, difficulties in collaboration, and the pursuit of artistic oneness.
CM: You were a member of St. Paul dance company (and LM alumnus) TU Dance. What does it mean to present new works in a return to your former stomping grounds?
Former Alvin Ailey company member/Mohn mentor Toni Pierce. Photo by Jack Mitchell.
EM: My work today feels like a collection of so many parts and innumerable influences. Studying at the University of Minnesota and working with TU Dance connected me to an array of artists, those working in dance as dancers, those working in dance as choreographers, visual artists, musical artists, all types of media and medium. I feel so grateful for the people that I met and community I found through choosing to stay in Minneapolis, where I come from, starting with Sue Gunness in Waconia, MN. At the University I also met Toni Pierce-Sands who was that kind of teacher, mentor, guide, who says just what you need at just the right moment to propel your life forward in monumental ways. I am deeply grateful for her work and her interventions in my life. She convinced me to keep dancing when I, repeatedly, had the proverbial towel in hand ready to throw it in. This will be the first time I’ve performed in Minneapolis in more than 7 years, the last time being with TU Dance. This will be the first time I present my own work in the United States on this scale. I have no idea how it will be. I feel like a lot has changed for me. My body is changing rapidly and I view dance very differently now than I did 7 years ago. It’s exciting for me to have this opportunity to see what comes out, what falls together. I feel so honored to come back and offer something to the community that supported me so much.
What is your experience with compositional collaboration? How does your experience as a musician shade this collaboration and the creative process?
During my work at The Cullberg Ballet we have tended to work side-by-side with composers during the process. The musician is sometimes even watching how we warm up to understand what sort of environment we are marinating in. Our work there is rarely choreographed “on music” or “to music,” but they weave together. Likewise the light design. This has shifted my perspective on how composition can work. How image and sound can illuminate each other. In When Isn’t Yet we are trying to have the music and movement be married so that the sound infiltrates the dance and the dance infiltrates the sound. Given that I also have been a song writer and dabbled in music composition, I am constantly composing movement together with the sound of my own body, my own singing, the rhythms that my feet make. They always come out together in the laboratory time. In this collaboration with Mike we have ping-ponged back and forth the music I imagine, the songs that are coming up for me as I am dancing, and the sound that he sees in the movement we make. It’s like we are playing magicians or clairvoyant mediums and together figuring out what sort of composition wants to get made by us and doing what we can to let that happen, trying to make way for the very subtle voices of the “whens” and “not yets” of composing.
You and musician-composer Mike Lewis recently completed your first creative residency—walk us through the initial creation process, ideas, snags, etc. that you experienced.
We had a working month in Minneapolis in September 2018 to map out our methods and blueprints of the piece. During that month we had a great three day residency at Carleton College in Northfield where we could stand the piece up in a theater with incredible acoustics and let the scale expand beyond the studio version. We (Michael Lewis, Sarah Baumert and myself) were amazed by what we could accomplish together in three fully concentrated days of work. The biggest snag is the resource of time. I have been shocked, actually, at the amount we all have to work on our other work. It’s almost financially impossible for people, artists, us, to be able to set time aside to dive into a project. I thought that the biggest snag would be distance, since I live full time in Sweden, however it has added something special that we continue our personal practice of this piece from our satellite locations. It is time as a material that is scarce. Work, as in the stuff we have to do to make a living, takes a disproportionate amount of time. If I could do something to provide Michael, Sarah, and Maggie a solid month of time to focus solely on practicing their way of doing this composition, I would. But that would take a much larger restructuring of economics and how we value. Yes, value as a verb.
Many young Midwesterners have a romantic notion of leaving the area in pursuit of artistic greatness. How has your move changed how you think, create, or act?
Leaving the Midwest surely can feel like a romantic notion of finding “new” or “more”. And then coming back to the Midwest can have this romantic notion of returning to where there is fertile and sustainable life. I think that I realized that what I want to pursue the most is continuity of my person, whether I am in Minnesota, or working in New York, or in Stockholm, whether I am working as a dancer, or choreographer or teacher. I am pursuing that my person and my values stay consistent. It’s very easy to jump into some other value system working in a larger, more economically driven city, or jumping roles from a dancer to a director or teacher. I think I want to consider that my pursuit of “artistic greatness” is about consistency of practice. One thing for sure that has changed for me though, is that I am much slower than I was when I was living and working in the States. When I come back to work in the US I always feel like I have to gear up to keep up with how much people do in a day. I can effectively do about two things, and one of those is make food.
Do you have a favorite piece of music you’ve danced to? Favorite choreography?
My favorite music so far is a piece designed by David Kiers for a work called Plateau Effect choreographed by Jefta Van Dinther and performed by Cullberg Ballet. David makes heavy, subterranean music and it’s impossible not to be moved by it. I have to mention also a light designer Minna Tiikkainen. She interprets dance and sound in ways that have shifted my performance experience in big ways. My favorite dance experience to date is doing a piece by Deborah Hay called Figure a Sea. I have performed or practiced this dance alongside my colleagues at Cullberg at least 50 times, and it only gets finer and more rich and more surprising. Her method of asking questions and offering dance-defying scores is an endless exercise in curiosity. She has influenced greatly how I think dance. Not think about dance, but think dance.