Conversations with Rosanna Gamson

Today we’d like to introduce you to Rosanna Gamson.

Hi Rosanna, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
I was born and raised in New York City. My mother, Annabelle Gamson, was a dancer famous for her reconstructions of the early moderns, and my father, Arnold Gamson was an opera conductor, so I thought it was totally normal to go to class/rehearsals/the theater, all the time and that that’s what everyone does. My brother, David Gamson, was going to be a musician (he is a songwriter and producer) and I was going to be a dancer. I was on stage from an early age and while it was fine, I always knew that I wanted to be a choreographer. I still want to be a choreographer!
A great gift was being taken to see everything– Artur Rubinstein playing Chopin, the Moiseyev Dance Company from Russia, the Grand Kabuki and Bunraku puppetry from Japan, Twyla Tharp in Sheep’s Meadow, Shakespeare at the Delacorte, and Peter Brook’s circusy Midsummer Night’s Dream. My parents would wake my brother and me up in the middle of the night to watch Marx Brothers movies playing on tv. It was an artsy if fraught childhood. And I had a lot of dance classes with amazing teachers.

As a rebellious teenager wanting to get away from my parents I went to college at 16 and dropped out at 18 to be a dance star. Surprise! I wasn’t a star, but I did get to dance with some interesting people, toured in France, and started putting up shows with my friends and then on my own. I had many adventures, my apartment burned up while I was in the shower, I cleaned other people’s homes, checked coats at clubs, cooked dinner for art collectors, had some trials and some triumphs, John Lennon was murdered, the AIDS crisis decimated the dance community, the Berlin Wall fell. After seven years I went back to school at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. The chair was Larry Rhodes, and TSOA gave me an amazing deal with credit for my performing experience, so I earned BFA and MFA degrees in three years.

Then I broke my ACL. This was at the beginning of surgical repair, and it was hard to get the operation if you weren’t a professional football player. I persevered and was lying in the hospital on morphine when American Dance Festival called me and asked me to apply for a new initiative. They were bringing six choreographers under 30 to tour France as guests of the French Ministry of Culture to experience the decentralization of dance in France, would I like to apply? OK! I subsequently went to France in a full hip to ankle brace along with David Rousseve, Stephen Koplowitz, DJ MacDonald and two people who dropped out of the dance world shortly thereafter.

When I returned (still in the leg brace) I met my husband, Barnaby Levy, while catering at the US Open at a corporate party with a tiki theme. We watched Stefi Graff beat Martina Navratilova. Barnaby was an aspiring filmmaker. Many other things happened, we got married and had a baby, Clementine. About six months later, Barnaby decided to learn this new non-linear editing system called Avid on computers. We moved to Los Angeles to pursue more editing work (I was briefly his editorial assistant) and I had to learn how to drive and give up my rent-controlled apartment on Amsterdam and 83rd. Both were difficult.

I hated LA! I agreed to stick it out if I could put up a show. We were living in my brother’s house without any furniture, I was pregnant with our daughter Delilah, I didn’t know anyone. I asked all the people I met to be in the show, we rehearsed in the empty house, and six performers from New York came to help me out. Jordan Peimer came to the show and called the LA Times critic, Lewis Segal, to come cover, we got a rave review with a big picture. I loved LA! I was a big deal for a few years.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
My road has been pretty smooth, all things considered. I have managed one way or another to make and produce work my whole life which has certainly been a privilege. I work with amazing artists and deeple appreciate how much they contribute to our shared projects. The skill and depth of LA dancers continues to astonish me. I was hesitant to start teaching but it turns out that it’s thrilling and difficult and informative and humbling. I’ve been teaching composition at CalArts Dance where I started as a guest artist setting a piece on the students and now serve as Dean of the Sharon Disney Lund School of Dance. I also developed an improvisational game system that I’ve been teaching around the world called GO. Dance has allowed me to travel, most recently to Estonia to make work and China to teach GO workshops. I have a commission of a duet that will premiere in October in an international festival in Tainan, Taiwan. I know I’m lucky and I know how to work hard.

As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
The major theme that runs through my work is the complexity of living in shared space. I’ve pursued collaborations with artists holding points of view very different than my own that take me into new (to me) and sometimes uncomfortable worlds. Each project puts me in dialogue, through research and physical inquiry, with something I don’t understand intellectually, artistically or culturally. Previous projects have focused on the physics and poetry of light in Los Angeles; the potentially linked neuroscience of dreaming and improvising; the Romantic self-referential world of the Brontë family, the violence of fairy tales, the border between Mexico and the US.

I work with performers as collaborators while holding directorial authorship of projects. I love extreme movement and the intimacy that happens between viewer and dancer on that edge. Agreements are made about capacity, mutual effort, and commitment, always with respect for identity, physics and anatomy.

My works braid together several tracks of information– often via text, singing, or technology as well as movement. I pursue travel and collaborative partnerships– in Eastern Europe with Grotowski-legacy theater makers, in Latin America with committed expressionists, in Asia with dancers discovering improvisation– because these experiences provide valuable and unexpected lessons.

WHAT ARE YOU MOST PROUD OF?

The next project, always!

WHAT SETS YOU APART FROM OTHER ARTISTS?

Other than understanding the difference between “apart” and “a part”…? A pet peeve. Anyway…

Longevity, persistence, and relentless optimism hidden behind a mask of pessimism. I have been at this a good long time and I’m not done yet. My brother told me (probably after a crushing setback of some kind) that being an artist is not about doing the thing, it’s about getting up the next day and getting back to work. And when I get down about my unrecognized genius I watch the Anton Ego scene from Ratatouille.

Is there anything else you’d like to share with our readers?
Yes!
Please go see live dance! And not just the people you already know and to whom you have connection. This is a very precarious moment for the performing arts and for embodied performance in general, but also for dance specifically. Some of it will be terrible and/or boring, but occasionally your mind will be blown and you will experience heartbreaking beauty. It will be worth it. It IS worth it! As an audience-member, as a witness, as a fellow traveler, you are more important now than you can imagine.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.rgww.org
• Instagram: @rgww_dance

Image Credits
Photographers:
1. Denise Leitner
2. Rebecca Green
3. Jose Diaz
4. Unknown
5. Sallie DeEtte Mackie
6. Rafael Hernandez
7. Jose Diaz
8. Sallie DeEtte Mackie