DAY IN THE LIFE OF DANCE: Seán Curran Company As They Prepare For Their NYU Skirball Season

DAY IN THE LIFE OF DANCE: Seán Curran Company As They Prepare For Their NYU Skirball Season
Cecly Placenti

By Cecly Placenti
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Published on April 14, 2025
Photo: Steven Pisano

Where: NYU Skirball, 566 LaGuardia Place, New York, NY

When: Friday - Saturday, April 18 - 19 at 7:30 PM

Tickets: https://nyuskirball.org/events/path-and-everywhere-all-the-time/


The atmosphere on the second floor of the NYU Tisch building on the afternoon of April 6 is invigorating and light as Seán Curran and his company prepare to rehearse for their upcoming show at NYU Skirball. Dancers gather and finish a quick snack as they chat, Curran among them. When I walk in, he greets me with the exuberance of an old friend. In fact, Curran was my teacher in the early nineties when I was a student at Roger Williams University, and then again during a summer intensive at Dance Space studios. There are hugs and excited introductions: 

“Cecly was my student in 1993! Were you even born yet?” he jokingly asks Isaac Velasquez, one of his youngest apprentices and a BFA student at Tisch where Curran is also a professor. There is playful conversation and laughter, but once the dancers enter the studio, the work begins immediately.

Jack Blackmon (foreground), Benjamin Freedman and Lauren Kravitz (background). Photo: Steven Pisano
 

As the company gets set to run Everywhere All The Time, Curran’s 2018 piece exploring the relationship between humans and nature, he instructs them to take it easy: “energy not effort.” The vibe I felt when I entered the building expands. It is an environment of enjoyment and fun but also of discipline and love for the work — an atmosphere I remember well from my days as Curran’s student. He has the ability to create spaces of deep respect, lightheartedness, and genuine appreciation for others that makes work feel like play.

From a chair at the front of the room, he watches, calling out words of encouragement: “Better! Good timing!” His instructions, like, “Peek out closer together,” are always followed by a “thank you,” and after Jacoby Pruitt finishes a short solo and exits, Curran sends him a heart gesture across the studio with his hands.

When he turns to share contextual information with me, he speaks with passion and excitement about the work, as if he too is still discovering its richness.
 

Jacoby Pruitt, Jack Blackmon and Benjamin Freedman. Photo: Steven Pisano
 

In a phone chat following rehearsal, Curran shares that Everywhere All The Time was inspired by a movie title that captivated him. “I liked the sound of it, the impossibility.” The work became about longing, loneliness, and the regret he still carries with him after 33 years sober.

In 2018, Anna Thompson, a presenter who Curran had worked with quite a bit, commissioned him to create a piece to music by Irish composer Donnacha Dennehy. Upon first hearing the percussion score, Curran initially thought it impossible to choreograph. “The music sounded more like weather than dance music.” So, he dove into that, creating a section that evoked falling rain with quick, driving foot work. Landscape architect Diana Balmori, having seen Curran’s previous work, reached out to create the set design. Her moveable screens resemble a tangle of naked tree branches in a dark forest, the dancers’ sculptural movements swirling and curving in complementary pathways.

Curran is also inspired by choreographers Doug Varone and Lar Lubovitch, who both have a captivating way of spooling and unspooling bodies in space. He observes how they create “intricate machines of bodies moving through, around, over, and under each other. I thought, what if Varone and Lubovitch had a baby and that baby was a choreographer, what would his work look like? That was the idea for the cloud burst section,” Curran explains. In this section a tight group expands and contracts like a lung, performing different arm gestures at varying rhythms, with lifts suddenly breaking the vertical plane at surprising moments. “The choreography was made in collaboration with the dancers,” Curran explains. “As a younger choreographer, I was more of a control freak and gave the dancers most of the phrase work. Now I do a little bit of that, but I give more tasks and prompts to get the movement out of them.”

Benjamin Freedman and Isaac Velasquez. Photo: Steven Pisano
 

Working in that way requires trust and regard for the unique artistry each company member provides, some of whom have been with him for nine or ten years, others only a matter of months. When the run through of Everywhere finishes, Curran cries out an enthusiastic “Wow! Astounding.” Although done for the moment, none of the dancers take a break. They promptly begin working out their hand positions in lifts and clarifying timing issues with one another. “Aren’t they incredible dancers?!” he says, turning to me with a smile. The dancers respond to his ongoing trust and recognition with deep commitment to his vision. When they gather together to discuss Curran’s notes, most of them stay in discussion afterwards, continuing to dive deeper into their work together.

Jacoby Pruitt and Jin Ju Song-Begin. Photo: Steven Pisano
 

Path, the second piece on the program and Curran’s newest work, is a “requiem for our current situation in the world: “To work is to pray,” he says in our interview, “So dance is also to pray.” While Everywhere is Curran at his more maximalist — dense movement phrases and dancers in nearly perpetual motion — Path by contrast is minimal, with performers often in still poses while others move around them. In one section, a series of Pietàs in which several pairs of dancers kneel in a semi-circle and cradle the prone bodies of other dancers, the images evoke grief and loss.

“I’m 63 years old,” Curran says. “I made it through the AIDS crisis with my immune system still intact.” Not everyone did. Moments of stillness like these that arise throughout Path offer viewers a chance to absorb and reflect on the emotion behind the images, making them personal. “I like to call myself a collapsed Catholic,” Curran jokes. “I was very religious as a child. I prayed twice a day and I wanted to be a nun — I made up stories just to be able to go to confession! I thought I’d grow up to be a Christian Brother. But when I realized I was gay at 13 or 14, I realized there was no place for me at that table. So, I transferred my faith into a love of religious kitsch and symbols that have a tongue-in-cheek vibe.”

Lauren Kravitz, Gabriella Flanders, Benjamin Freedman and Jack Blackmon. Photo: Steven Pisano
 

Yet there is nothing garish or overly sentimental about Path. Its forty-five-minute metaphysical pilgrimage is sensitive and serene, and while there are overt Catholic images, Path touches on universal themes and invites everyone along on its journey. There is a clear spiritual element to both works on the program. Each ebbs and flows in very satisfying ways; Everything... from frenetic to peaceful and Path from gathering together to falling apart. Both works are cyclical, like life, like coming to know oneself by peeling back the layers of everything we are not. Although very different, both works are atmospheric, creating worlds that are felt more than they are seen.

“I am at an age where I want to bring back old works to see how they hold up. But also just to see them again before putting them to rest.”


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