SPENSER THEBERGE

“Stand up for your values”

Spenser Theberge is an amazing freelance performing artist and creator, who has been working with NDT II and I, The Forsythe Company and as a guest artist with Crystal Pite's Kidd Pivot, the Gothenburg Opera Dance Company, and the ARIAS Company. Spenser's own work has been presented and supported internationally.

-You have an outstanding career. What is the key to your success?

“I have been lucky to have some really really wonderful mentors in my life, because it is not so easy for me to make choices, and I worried a lot. So, I trained at Julliard, and I was fortunate because I was dreaming of going to NDT and I got in. And then, I began to change my needs and wishes and maybe I didn’t expect that, because you thought you were staying somewhere forever. But you start to change, based on what you are learning about yourself. So, I learned that I wanted to specify, instead of doing a lot of different things, and I wanted to focus, and I didn’t know that about myself. I made the difficult choice to leave, without knowing what I was going to do, and I tried to trust that feeling and that later I had the opportunity to work with Forsythe, and it was a great gift I am very grateful for. I learned to trust myself, follow my instinct, and try to go for that.”

-How can you recognize the right time to follow your instinct?

“I think we all have different situations: with the family, with their home, or if you have children, or financially you cannot take a chance. But, honestly, the thing that I found most helpful is to read, reading books speaking about mind/body connection, reading books that really speak to the power of the impulses of the body. I find that to train in the studio and my question was why leave that in the studio, why not bring that into the world, into life. But, it was difficult for me, it was hard to make a choice because I am worried about balance, but it is like a practice, and then discover what you like or not about it. And when I am very very worried I remind myself what is the worst thing that can happen and usually the consequence is not that bad. There was a period in my life in which the worst thing that could happen was to live with my parents for a while and have some time to redefine my work, and that was not so bad, I love my parents. Sometimes we catastrophe, we imagine a catastrophe. When I remind myself that I allow myself to take a chance.”

-You worked with NDT, the Forsythe Company, and also in Kidd Pivot and Goteborg as a guest artist. What do you bring with you about all these different work? What really helps you to grow as a dancer and artist?

“I love to learn about how other people work, how they make things because I’m also interested in creating myself and I feel that it is a sort of school for me. I find it important to not only understand how I want to make work, but also how I want to relate to people I am working with, and what kind of environment I want to create. Continuing to be a part of others’ work is important for informing that. You also learn from experiences that you don’t like, and this doesn’t mean it is bad, maybe it is just not good for you. I try to enter the room with the perspective of what I care about in mind and start to receive, expand, and develop from there. So, I love the opportunity to know different people for that reason. What I learned is how to get closer to myself. I used to think that I wanted to dance other people’s works forever, and I used to think that I want to be a representation of somebody else’s works, but now I understand that actually I want to perform to make work as an investigation of myself, not like an investigation of somebody else. This is why I shift my balance in doing more of my work rather than other people’s work because I'm trying to figure out who I am and who I am representing. But, I get really tired of myself sometimes, trying to ask myself to do things, and trying to be the only person I’m talking to, that is why I make work with Jamaine because I think it is important to challenge yourself to think differently.”

-How were you able to develop your artistry?

“First of all, I would say it again, I had beautiful mentors in my life and they have reminded me that it is the pursuit of art I am interested in and that art is related to humanity, what does it mean to be human in this world and how you want to related on that in what you make. All the people I’m close to representing this in really different ways. When I was very young, I took a lot of theatre classes and I was also training in theatre at my school and I learned a lot about the exploration of a person, of being human, but I also learned that my skill and my body’s abilities are in moving. And I used to think of dance and theatre as two really different disciplines like I had to choose in between them. I spent many years understanding how to join the two, which I think is what I am now. In NDT, I remember a piece of Alexander Ekman, and he asked me to write a text for his piece “Cacti”, and I wrote it and I recorded my voice for the performance, and I loved it, I felt so free, and I thought “I am doing it in a dance company, maybe I was wrong about this imaginary wall”. A few years later I worked with Johan Inger and he asked me to speak an invented language, in the solo, and it was like doing something that I have always known how to do, it was just like finding a part of myself that was always there and I have never met before. I was just free, and myself. In the Forsythe Company, for me, I felt in an intense school of figuring it out where the walls are that I have created. Then I started to deepen my personal work and research.”

-How much do you think technique is important?

“I teach ballet a lot and ballet are what I grew up with, it is the technique that I needed for the work I have done in my career. But what technique do you need in order to be the dancer you want to be? And is ballet truly what is needed? I think this question is something we should really engage with, and I am saying this as a person who loves ballet and believes that it was a great gift in my life. It is a problem when choreographers and dance companies (especially in the contemporary dance world) are representing technique in only one way. This narrows our world and makes people feel as if they don’t have this particular technique (ballet), then they are not valid dancers. I love ballet, but if programs only prefer ballet than we are missing quite a lot, and opportunities aren’t given to dancers whose technique is in different forms.I think pursuing the balance between technique and performance is also about redefining what technique and performance are: when we think about it in one way, with one result, it is really limited.”

-You are also a choreographer. What fascinates you about the process of creating a piece?

“Creating, to me, means engaging with stress, confusion, indecision and somehow continuing anyway. But, I actually do love being a part of something that forces me to engage with conflict, because then the work is really about considering what you care about, what you are trying to say, and then figure out how to get those things to show up in the work. I think this really matters. And when you engage with inner conflict, it requires true reflection. Not a lot of jobs allow you to get in touch with a deep reflection like this, and I am really grateful for that. I am fascinated by the agreements you make with yourself in the process of creation.”

-What catches your attention in another dancer? So how do you pick dancers for one of your pieces?

“I love to see somebody working on something and I don’t have to know what it is, I just love to see people committed to tasks, to process in their own way, with their own bodies. I love to see also somebody engage with the idea of a challenge with a sense of enthusiasm, instead of resisting it because they don’t want to feel. And I also love the idea of just trying to challenge yourself without knowing that you are going to achieve it already, without judging, but the act of trying is something really fascinating. Try a task, a piece of choreography with enthusiasm, and honor for what it is asked for without knowing if you can do it yet. This is a really exciting quality. And you should always question during the process “what would I engage with? What kind of boundaries and freedom do I have on my own? What is the relationship with myself?” Then, when you have that sense of freedom helps me for what I want to do.”

-What is the relationship between dance and theatre for you?

“I am making performances and shows and I am not thinking necessary of dance or theatre anymore, I just think about which devices I want to use to emphasize the idea I am pursuing in a particular performance. If it requires text, visual representation, singing, movements, this always can be possible. Sometimes in making a piece, I don’t feel I can use other elements, and sometimes I feel the people that are involved are surprised by what I ask for, because different from a usual dance show. I love people with freedom, so without categories, really welcoming to everything in the process, that suggest and play and emphasize the work.”

-What do you think is the role of the dancer and the artist in society?

“I think it is very important today that the dancer, and artists in all fields, insist on their values. There are too many dancers working for free or little pay (and I’m referencing pre-COVID time here, as well). There is an incredible lack of diversity and abuse of power. There are so many things that institutions have developed and normalized over the years that we need to re-think. If we insist on what our values are as artists, then the institutions must listen, not the other way around. Start to notice what you believe in, and stand up for your values, because this encourages the person next to you to do the same.”

-What is dance for you?

“Different things on different days. I love to dance because I think, as somebody who has a very busy mind and worries a lot, dance is a focus place. It is like a support for me, because of the dedication of time: I have spent more time in dance than anything else in my life and I feel that I know who I am in that context. I also love the body as a record, so I love the history of myself as a dancer inside me, that I can visit whenever I want: choreographies, friends, memories. I can spend time with the history inside my body and this integrates joy for me. It is unusual to people and it creates wonder in people, and this makes dance really special to share with others.”

-You are also a teacher. What would you like to transmit to your students while teaching?

“What I hope to pass to my students and dancers I work with is the idea of recognizing the delineation you have made in your work and really asking yourself those that are necessary. And we should break walls and allow ourselves to a total experience, not being only a certain type of dancer. Anything you learn can affect your work in any other class. In ballet, for instance, we can work on dance ideas, not just becoming a ballerina. Use whatever you are doing to grow the things you care about in dance It is not always about the form telling you what to do. This means we have to recognize boundaries, how we want to combine boundaries, and how we want to challenge and reimagine them.”

-Can you give some advice to young dancers?

“To be freely re-imagining what being a dancer in this world can look like and can be. And how does dance collaborate, not only with other arts but other fields, so that dance doesn’t become a narrow world, for a specific kind of audience? But how can it include more people and places to give more opportunities to dancers? I think now it is important to figure out how to make the world bigger, for yourself and the people who will come after you.”

Thank you so much, Spenser! Talking with you was an honor and an inspiration for us!