Dancemakers Interviews for Serge Bennathan's Chronicles of a Simple Life: Gerry Trentham

 

Dancemakers/Dance Collection Danse

Research project celebrating Dancemakers 50th anniversary

Interviews with original cast members of Serge Bennathan's "Chronicles of a Simple Life" (1993)

DANCEMAKERS: CHRONICLES OF A SIMPLE LIFE RESEARCH PROJECT

GERRY TRENTHAM May 2, 2024 

Interviewed by Lucy Rupert in Riverdale Park

LR: My pitch for this commission from Dance Collection Danse and Dancemakers is based on when I was in 2nd year university and Dancemakers came and performed at the Humanities theatre….and the things that struck me about Chronicles of  Simple Life, when I saw it then, were this contrast of the dancing being extraordinary – hard and rigorous and big and technically sound in how it was performed, and also so incredibly human. I hadn’t seen this before. Most of my experience was ballet and classical modern dance, where it’s still very form- based and symbolic. And also the way Chronicles dealt with grief – again I was used to opera and ballet where grief is tragic and heightened, and this was such a real depiction of dying and grief. I was still reverberating the death of my mother and I hadn’t had that experience of catharsis from watching a dance piece. Ballets never made me cry but Chronicles went straight to my core. I never really investigated why the piece struck me so hard. The third thing I experienced was that the people on stage did not look like dancers. You know that overly make-upped, Martha Graham drama. I saw you all and I felt like it could be me. The humanity of the dancers, not just the humanity of the choreography.

So those are the three things I’m interested in learning about from Serge, from you from Marie-Josée and Julia Aplin who I’m meeting in a couple of weeks.  And whomever else I can get in touch with.

Where I started with Marie-Josée was with the creative process, what she remembered. And she said she really didn’t remember the creative process, just the shows. So, I’ll lob that question at you and let’s see where we go?

GERRY: The creative process was really interesting. Serge would come in, he’d have fully formed ideas of where he would go. He would probably have drawn things. That’s where I realized that “wow, choreography is interdisciplinary for many people.” It’s based in a lot of different forms and ideas. It was no surprise that Serge is painting so much now. 

But let me think back….I would say, first of all, I thought there was no way I was going to get in the company. I was dancing with [Dancemakers under] Bill James. Gary Tai and I were hired by Bill. Then Learie [McNicolls] and Sylvie [Bouchard] and Jackie Nell came from Vancouver with Serge and he was going to cut a couple of people from the company to keep it 8. I was pretty certain I was going to be gone. I was mostly in shock. 

Carolyn Woods and I decided that we would go to the summer school in Vancouver at Simon Fraser University when Serge and Peggy Baker were teaching. He was teaching and choreographing in the afternoon, so we thought that way we could meet him and see, and he would be deciding. We went and every afternoon we got to work with Serge, he made a duet on us – that was really smart. If somebody saw me dance from a distance they’d say “who’s that cowboy in there? He doesn’t have the technique!” But when Serge met me in the process…. Serge and I had this thing, I think, that is really hard to talk about. I always felt like -- this is what I projected anyway – Julia Sasso and Marie-Josée and Gary and Carolyn: they all had a very personal rapport with Serge, they’d joke around and all that kind of stuff. Serge and I could never talk, and that’s funny, me being the talker I am, I could never figure it out.

LR: Serge is a talker too!

GERRY: We could have a conversation but….we weren’t sort of attracted outside of the rehearsal, but inside the rehearsals it was insane. He would be right in front of me and saying “no, more of this…..” I was always arguing with the others who were very technical. “No, he did it like this….” His quirkiness and that. I think he looked for me because I couldn’t make it into form. I couldn’t do the form. I could do the dancing. I could get my leg up. You wouldn’t notice when I danced with them. But they studied ballet since they were four…But what he saw in me was the actor. I think really, truly it was the actor he saw. That changed a little bit of the way we worked. Often times I was doing gestural work, solos. Why me? But because I had the acting, I couldn’t hide in my form. I was so exposed. Both of us had the same insane passion. Over the top.

The guy is so over the top. It was hard, beautiful. The way he talks. Everything has to be big.

There was something about both of us that was bigger than life. 

LR: That’s how you connected.

GERRY: Yeah.

LR: That’s interesting in light of some of the things Serge said when I interviewed him. We talked a lot about the trust, and courage, and that’s what I hear in you now. You may not have had the technical history that the other dancers did but you had the courage to just go ahead anyway. That’s a key thing that Serge spoke of a lot – this courage, courage, courage, courage. To do Chronicles and everything that came from it. It created this crazy kind of trust amongst the group because you had to. You’re throwing yourself into things blind and trusting that it was going to work out. No counts. So that the synergy between all the dancers becomes ….the courage gets embedded in the synergy.

GERRY: That’s when he figured out he didn’t need to tell us when to go. When you took his class, he would just start with something big and we’d be expect to start. No counting. Totally intuitive. That’s what I had with him, a sense. We also had two other things in common. He was a jumper, I was a jumper. I might be totally wrong – he and I were intensely musical when we danced. He would lift things out of the music. We were floating on some kind of other sense of the music in the air. The musicality that’s not necessarily about being on the beat.

LR: It’s not about the counts.

GERRY: The other dancers sometimes found it harder than I did because I hadn’t had all that training of counting chorography. You and I are like that now too. 

LR: That helps me understand why I was in love with Serge’s work from the first time seeing it. I haven’t had a way to describe it, but I feel that about myself. When I was young, I was told I was not a good dancer, but I was “musical”. I could not tell you about the counts or shit like that because it was a feeling. In rehearsal now I sometimes get anxious when people start talking about counts. I can go there, but I’m not feeling it through counts, it’s all rhythm and muscle memory. I’m a visceral learner. I need to do it, I don’t need to look at it. I need to do it in order to feel it and then it gets burned in me.

GERRY: There’s kind of a sense of water in it. Serge saw that….the water, the natural world. The nature comes through in his work. Serge being from a rural place in France, and I was from this weird place in Alberta. There’s a sense of bodyness to us.

LR: And the rhythm of landscape.

GERRY: The rhythm of landscape.

It was almost like this incredible adoration for each other. 

I was always envious of the other dancers who could go off after rehearsal and just talk.

I’d be over in the other corner….It was like both of us didn’t want to remove the mystery of our relationship. We didn’t want to talk it out or find words for it but keep it in this other place. That’s why it’s hard for me to find words for it.

Serge might say something different, but this is my perspective.

It’s very seldom I feel this, but I felt like I was able to be inside his body, his movement. Carolyn Woods was like that too.  It was intuitive. We’d say we’ll just jump this way, I’m going to try I’ll grab you here and …..zoom it would work. We’d get in some much trouble. One performance we were in a tiny space on Hornby Island doing a show but there was a quick corner we had to make. Like figure skating on a small piece of ice, Carolyn did this dive and went right over top of me and somersaulted on to the floor because I just missed her.

We had no idea how we did it. We had no technique. We did it the first time and then we just kept doing it the same way. It was so intuitive that it was also terrifying. I was terrified for my life every time we did Chronicles. 

There was one jump near the beginning where I do the solo and then Gary joins me. From two feet dead still I’d have to jump over him.  You jump in the air you don’t get quite high enough, Gary can’t move, you get stuck and fall on your face. The only way I could get through it was because I was terrified. The only way I could get through it was courage.

I was just always trying not do the gesture the way Serge did it, but to do the essence of the gesture from the inside. It wasn’t a shape.

LR: It’s like a visceral reaction to what he was doing, or a feeling you get?

GERRY: And he’d coach everything – “a little longer”, “invite them in”. He wouldn’t direct form or shape but something from the inside. He would direct every movement. Every gesture you did he coached. You never got to do anything for free. Every gesture had notes to make it more and more.

LR: That is challenging. I’m feeling a bit of the fatigue of that right now….working with people who never let you be sure-footed, always destabilizing you. Yesterday I hit a point in rehearsal where I felt I couldn’t go on, I just needed one metaphorical minute where I could feel the ground underneath me.

GERRY: Where you count on one thing.

LR: It’s hard to keep up the stamina to do that, to remain open to being challenged, to go deeper, more, further. It’s ok in the long view but in the moment-to-moment of rehearsal – maybe it’s just me – but it’s hard to keep your self-esteem in a healthy place when constantly being pushed off your axis, a little or a lot. It takes additional energy to manage that constant uncertainty.

GERRY: In Serge’s rehearsals, like in others, there are breakdowns because you’re all pushed and pushed and then you’d crack. You start to get competitive because you need to feel like you know something. You get into a battle about whether it was “this way” or “that way” not because it really matters which is right, but because you just want to be certain that you know something, that you’re right about something. ONE THING!  Just give me one thing to be right about!

It's a natural thing. At 64 I still find myself in this place. I need one thing to know. What I try to think of now is that whenever I have that impulse, it’s a call for help. It’s not about what we’re doing. I just need you to be quiet and not tell me anything else so I can just do the thing the way I’ve been doing it because I can’t take in anymore.

LR: Saturation point.

GERRY: Yes. Another that happened in Serge’s work would be Mondays. He’d say, “You need to figure out your weekends because every Monday we can’t get anything done.” It is rigorous and challenging -- always learning stuff, always setting the bar higher. 

LR: Do you think that that also comes from ….well, for instance with Denise Fujiwara (for whom we both dance), I know she’s not sitting there like she knows everything and is just telling us what do to. All of the push to do more, go deeper, more detail is because she’s curious, she’s wondering. She wants to develop too. I wonder if that makes a big difference in the getting worn down and getting back up and doing it. The dedication to the vision of a choreographer. It used to be more clear that individual directors had a specific vision, or physical style. But it doesn’t exist the same way now because we don’t have the company infrastructures.

I wonder if the gig-economy makes this kind of commitment to a specific vision impossible for dancers now. Or maybe it’s a generational thing? The social media, the attention span effecting our ability to commit. But that dedication to Serge’s vision was what was so fantastic.

GERRY: Chronicles was when the company settled down, he had his people.

LR: And then those people stayed for a long time.

GERRY: I think Chronicles created a gold age -- other people might say there was another golden era after that – when Susie and Dan Wild etc.

LR: That seems like a continuum not a change.

GERRY: There was something in that first group that was …he really curated that group,  

Chronicles toured for four years. How many things do get to take around the world? It was crazy.  The other thing in the process was you got some really good personal time with Serge. He really worked with individuals. Class was important, learning was important. You trained. You worked hard. We did Pilates. He brought in Diane Miller.

LR: I loved her ballet classes. She didn’t like me because I would only come for the ballet, not the Pilates. But I loved her. So dry, but her approach simplified things and created more possibility.

GERRY: She was my first major mentor. I trained with her in Vancouver a lot.  That training together as a company: we were able to breath together and fight together. We were all overachievers and maybe a bit snotty because we were so involved in what Serge was creating, all about passion. We’d have beautiful dinners together. I fell in love with [costume and set designer] Nancy Bryant. I learned how to sew from her. I cleaned her studio and she taught me how to make patterns. It became a full world. I still can’t fathom why I got to be that lucky to be there with those people at that time.

Rehearsals with Serge were exhausting…..before we went to the Joyce [Theatre] I wanted to be really ready, do everything. I would start in the morning, ride my bike to rehearsal, do Pilates, do class, do rehearsal, ride my bike 45 min. back home and go to the gym. For a year. I was so crazy, training. I wanted to apply myself, so focused. I wanted to see how good I could get. By the time I hit the Joyce stage, I was a totally different thing. Everything, I gave up everything for that.

LR: I’m so glad that you’re sharing this with me. I’m in a phase right now: up at 6, ride the stationary bike for 30 min, walk for 40 min, when P leaves for school I do gaga class or ballet and then go to rehearsals and then come home and sometimes dance again because I feel I didn’t get enough flow that day. I feel right now I’m supposed to be doing it. How good can I get?

GERRY: I feel I wasn’t as a good a dancer in my 50s as I am now. Now there’s potential for me to release a bunch of things – my spine – and find another level. Not in virtuosity but in motion, delicacy.

LR: A different kind of virtuosity.

GERRY: Maybe not everybody is that ambitious about what we want to wring out of life. Serge was looking for people who wanted to wring it all out of life.

LR: He said he needed the dancers to be “ogres of life”. To be like monsters for the sake of life.

GERRY: You had to fight for it, to wring it out of the dance. You were never able to just sit on it.

LR: Never about achievement.

GERRY: He would always give us things we couldn’t do.

LR: That’s so frustrating but that’s how you grow.

GERRY: You’d say “But Serge, I can’t do that I’m falling over, I just can’t do it”. And he’d say “that’s ok, you don’t have to do it right, you just have to do it.” It would become something in this new way.  Most of the things I did, I look at know and think they are impossible. What was the most sublime was dancing with Caroyln. So much passion, so much running and chasing and longing and wanting.

Being with Gary, in Chronicles, in that extended duet, we could be like one person on stage. We got to a timing that was crazy-beautiful. After you get to that place, how do you not polish that memory again and again? It was a partnership from heaven, that relationship between us in Chronicles. We never got to that same place again. Because other pieces we didn’t have a partnership like this one. 

The construction of Serge’s art was very human. When I teach acting now, I still reference that sensibility he had. Here at the end of Chronicles, this gorgeous solo by Carolyn, and I’m just lying on Gary’s lap, dying. Every night I would wonder about the last moment of life. I would think about the last four minutes of my life. I would see what would happen “this time”. The thoughts that came through made a whole landscape. I was always the dying person in everyone’s work after that.

LR:  One of the big breakthroughs I had was in theatre, in a long death scene. It transformed me.  After I did it, I wanted to die on stage in everything I did. I don’t attribute that breakthrough to me. I had an excellent director, really good material to base the scene on. Not everybody can do death on stage – even at the unconscious level it’s hard to go there legitimately – authentically.

GERRY: To accept an end, not everybody can do that. They’ll lift the moment at the end to not let it die. Carolyn was really good at letting something be nothing. Be done. It takes a long time to figure out who can do that.

LR: It’s a very specialized skill. And it’s a special performance work that can take you to that place or skill as a performer.

GERRY: After Chronicles it was hard to figure out how to go deeper.

Sable/Sand was gorgeous and it toured a lot too, sometimes with Chronicles. We did it before Chronicles in one program at the Joyce. And I was walking down the street in New York City and cute guy went by and I went off curb and wrecked my ankle. But I couldn’t stop.  I had six shows left. We went to this big party at the house of this opera singer, in a fancy building where JFK Jr. also lived and I went to the party and lay on the couch to get off my foot, while everyone was partying. I was exhausted. 

LR: But you weren’t going to give up that experience – the whole Joyce Theatre experience.

GERRY: After that, I went to Central Park and sat down and said to myself, “well, you can’t keep going like this anymore. You’re at the height. Do you leave the party now or do you keep going?” I decided to leave the party. I left the company. I loved the other people that were hired after I left. But I would be a very different person if I had stayed.

Serge was very mad at me. He had to put Chronicles to rest. 

LR: He couldn’t see it with anyone else?

GERRY: Ken [Cunningham] was learning my part. But I was also such an asshole. I came into the studio and saw Julia Sasso teaching my role to Ken and I just lost it. I said, “what the fuck! why are you teaching my solo, that’s my solo. Where’s Serge?” I went to Serge and said “that’s my solo, and I’m not gone yet. If you want to teach it someone why aren’t asking me to teach it? I’m the one who knows it!” He just looked at me. That’s when we finally broke that line and I think we finally understood how much we loved each other.

At that age I think I was….well you know how anxious I am. Sometimes that anxiety can be seen as judgment or that I’m not really there, but actually it’s just trying to tame the horse so you can get them to run the race. The horse is anxious and crazy. If you want to work with that horse you have to watch all the emotional panic. I’m really kind of thin-skinned…..I don’t think Serge noticed how much I cared until that moment. I was so self-involved in keeping my nerves calm enough to walk out on stage and do the piece.

We come from this era of dancer and choreographer not on equal footing, but every gesture I did he responded to. It was a dialogue. Dancers have way more power than it seems.

LR: Definitely in the 90s – that was when I got my proper training and started dancing professionally, even in the most grassroots situations, collective-minded situations, the choreographer’s word was the fucking word. In the 90s if you wanted to be a dancer you had to submit to the choreographer. While Serge certainly has that authority and weight and substance…..

GERRY: He worked really hard to be prepared to work each day.

LR: From what he said to me, he definitely trusted the process that he was setting up and trusted the dancers to take that process. It wasn’t a control – someone at the top controlling the dancers. This must have been an unusual kind of leadership. What I experienced from choreographers back then was “I’m going to control you and if I can’t control you, I’m going to undermine you through passive aggressive tactics to bring you into my vision.

GERRY: Serge was not passive-aggressive. He was absolutely direct. It was beautiful to have that boldness and directness. Not that there weren’t the politics in the office – who gets what role, who’s in the photograph. It has a lot to do with the ego. But I was lucky to be there with great people – the synergy. Really hard work but a lot of fun. He’d get mad on Thursday afternoons because usually we were exhausted and someone would fart or something and the whole company would lose it, we’d be on the ground laughing. It was a Thursday afternoon thing…..

Serge would get frustrated but he himself was very funny. He would make a section in his pieces that would be funny or quirky and usually he’d remove it. Relieving the stress of making the thing. Later he started keeping those odd sections in. 

He found a new way to move for Sable/Sand when he started to consider his father. Ahmed’s music was so stunning.

LR: Serge always used such good music.

GERRY: Ahmed’s sister did the singing. Serge asked me to coach her on the speaking parts, because I already had that training and I realized how it doesn’t matter what language you’re speaking, the audience can tell when the speaking is really present.

Another thing that Serge and I had in common was jumping by going down. Learie jumped by going up, like Danny Grossman. Diane would call it perseverator energy. Not resistor energy. That immediate up in the air. Julia Aplin was like that. If you had to catch her when she jumped, you better be ready because she was up fast. Serge and I were down to go up. Perseverator energy.

LR: I like that because it sounds like it has to do with perseverance.

GERRY: It’s about the field of intention and weight. Because gravity is perpetual, the rhythm of the down and the low is always there – this I learned from Zab [Maboungou]. If you go down to find it you’re late because it’s already there. No matter how much we’re lifting up the low is already there.

LR: Like in ballet when they tell you not to go the bottom of your plié because you lose power. And in gaga technique when they talk about negating gravity rather than resisting or lifting – you spread horizontally to create more possibility. 

GERRY: I learned about gravity from Serge.  We had this deep love of the work. A shared sense of joy, of love. We love those gestures. And it keeps us together.