Goldies Extra: Nol Simonse reaches for discovery

By Rita Felciano

Nol Simonse

For Nol Simonse, it all started with that most popular of all ballets and most common breeding place of American dance. The oldest of five children growing up in College Park, MD, Simonse had seen Baryshnikov in The Nutcracker on TV and “thought it awesome.” So he asked his parents whether he could do that. At age nine they enrolled him in a “tiny little ballet school above a pizza parlor. He’s still in touch with the teacher-owner.

Compulsory education was not exactly a good experience, particularly for a boy “who came out very early” and didn’t like to deal with linear logic: “As long as I could learn with a diorama, I was OK”. It took Simonse a while to find his own way of learning, through his body.

Nol Simonse, How Fortunate the Man With None

Janice Garrett, who had never seen Simonse dance, took a chance on him when she added male dancers to her heretofore all-female company for Ostinato in 2002. “He has worked out beautifully,” says Garrett. “What I admire is his ability to express what is deep inside. He has such humanity as both a person and a performer. In the studio, he is incredibly generous and brings his whole heart and mind to the creative process. He doesn’t need to be in control, and his sense of discovery is such that I can go wherever I want with him.”

The admiration is mutual. Simonse seems to be getting as much as giving in the artistic relationship, because Garrett manages to contextualize direction so it is not just technical but respects the dancer as a full person. “She told me once,” he remembers, “to push my lower ribs out, because being vulnerable doesn’t mean you are weak. She also once said that I had ‘emotional shoulders’.”

Garrett’s choreography grows directly out of the music, often collaged from eclectic sources such as Eastern European and folk-inflected idioms. Stephen Pelton has more of a literary bend, and initially works with his dancers to develop movement from specific verbal references. No problem for Simonse, who is very interested in Greek mythology; this match, too, seems to work.

Pelton, who spends half a year in London, writes in an email: “If Nol looks upwards in a dance, I not only see the sky with him, but I feel how he feels about it. When he focuses inwardly, I feel the depths to which this gesture takes him. And when he looks at the other dancers, I see how he loves them.”

Simonse, in a dance for "Shared Space"

Nol Simonse and Kara Davis dancing at SFMOMA

Now in his mid-thirties, Simonse knows that one of these years, his body will no longer support the physical rigor he brings to dance. Besides, he says, “I want to have my own voice.”

Choreography has become his next great adventure. In 2007, for “Shared Space 1” (with Todd Eckert), he created Orion, a dramatic ensemble piece about the Greek hunter god who ended up in the night sky. In it, he seems to have drawn from both Garrett’s ability to collage a musical score and Pelton’s interest in literary inspiration. At the sunny studios of Dance Mission Theater, he’s been working on his second Greek piece, again drawing on poetry and patched-together music. This one is based on Persephone, goddess of innocence and queen of the underworld. It will premiere in “Shared Space 3” this Nov. 13-15 at the venue.

Post a comment