A Day with May

“Any dancer in New York is the hardest working person you will meet,” choreographer Juliana May offers. In the midst of winter storm “Nemo,”we are tucked away in a Dean

& Deluca close to City Center studios where her company, MAYDANCE, braved the snow to attend their Friday rehearsal. “I think we’ll end a little early today,” says May.

 

It’s no secret that May values the dedication of her trio of dancers: Maggie Thom, Benjamin Asriel, and Kayvon Pourazar. In her newest evening-length work, Commentary = not thing, commissioned by New York Live Arts, they are the dramatic crux that brings her vision to life. It is a vision more defined by a series of questions than answers and, May reveals, “this was an exciting challenge.”

 

Raised on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, May was introduced to improvisation and composition at a very young age as a student at the Trevor Day School. She credits Laurie Roth and Jodi Melnick as early influences, encouraging her to explore her movement sensibility. Her parents, both architects, supported her blossoming love of dance—even as they hoped it was just a hobby— by buying her series tickets to the Joyce Theater and the Kitchen. Here May was exposed to luminaries such as Neil Greenberg and Twyla Tharp. These formative moments stuck with her all the way to Oberlin College where studies with Ann Cooper Albright and Nusha Martynuk saw her work with improvisation and composition grow. After graduating in 2002, May returned to New York City to continue making dance; “It just felt natural…” she says.

A big shift came in 2009, with her fifth evening-length work, Discrete Body Dilemma, at the Chocolate Factory. The change had nothing to do with May or her performers, but with the arrangement of her audience, who were located on three sides of the intimate theater’s space. “It was really difficult to go back to the proscenium after that point,” May explains. Her performances at New York Live Arts will find audience members seated on stage the entire time.

 

May sees Commentary = not thing as her most collaborative work yet. Her dancers and set designer (Brad Kisicki), lighting designer (Chloe Z. Brown), composer (Chris Seeds), and, for the first time, a costume designer (Reid Bartelme), have been in close dialogue since the early stages. Another key collaborator is Rebecca Holderness, an Associate Professor of Acting at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, where May completed her MFA in 2012. “Theater became an exciting, new, potent place to work from. I wanted to make work with an emotional impact and felt like my previous formal predilections were not enough anymore,” she notes.
 

The Dancers of MAYDANCE: Anna Carapetyan, Benjamin Asriel, Maggie Thom, Madeline Best

 

Holderness and May spent many hours ruminating about the essence of her work. What is it that May was trying to expose through dance and text?Even her title was the result of a think tank session where Holderness incidentally scribbled “Commentary = not thing” onto a blackboard.

 

“How do I let the thing be the thing inside of the work and not (allow it to) overwhelm my choreographic values?” May wondered, “It’s always felt really hard to locate ‘the thing’ in a work.”