Dancemakers Interviews for Serge Bennathan's Chronicles of a Simple Life: Julia Sasso

 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

JULIA SASSO June 25, 2024 

Interviewed by Lucy Rupert at Julia’s apartment

LR: I’ll give you my official little spiel about why I proposed this to the dancemakers 50th project. I saw Chronicles of a Simple Life when it came to the University of Waterloo and I was in 2nd year in the dance program there. It had a big impact on me in several ways: one was the subject matter. I’d never seen death and grief dealt with in a way that wasn’t operatic and over the top. My mother had passed away just a little before, and this piece sparked a way through – not finishing the grief, but moving through, not being stuck. Another aspect of it was that I grew up in Sarnia, Ontario and I watched all the Martha Graham videos the library had but there wasn’t much else, so I had never seen modern dance that was so totally human and so incredibly virtuosic. I never saw anything like that before. And the last impact the piece had on me is because then and still to this day I feel like an outsider, I have felt this way since I was in kindergarten, but when I saw you all on stage in Chronicles, I felt some sort of connection. I felt I was seeing my people. It was beautiful without being ballet beautiful, that had been the only way I had seen beauty, and it wasn’t one I fit into.

JULIA: We have a similar story in that sense. I had the same reaction to seeing Dancemakers the first time. I went right away and started taking company class.

LR: Do you remember what you saw that first time?

JULIA:  Yes, it would have been before 1984, I joined the company in 84. It was two Paul Taylor pieces – Aureole and Epitaph, Karen Jamieson’s solo for Pat Fraser called despair comics, Carol Andersons’ wind cover….it was dancey-dancing. I came from a straight ballet background, and I was like “this is not what I thought modern dance was, I can do this, I can move like that”. 

Serge’s work of course has lots of ballet in it because of his background, but it wasn’t about the technique. I had wanted to be a ballerina. I had the technique but I didn’t have the body.

LR: I had neither the technique nor the body. And I was way too tall at five-foot-eight.

JULIA: I was too short and my legs were too short and my torso was too long. Oh, there was great movie I just watched – The Hot Chocolate Nutcracker – about Debbie Allen and her school. Watch it. You will relate ….it’s a black perspective but it’s all of us who have been through dance and how hard it is and the rejection and the hard work and the not fitting in, never being good enough. I want every dancer to see this movie.

LR: I think Debbie Allen is fantastic. Such a force for good in the world.  

JULIA: She seems very down to earth despite her immense fame.

LR: I will check out that movie…… I feel like Toronto has sort of forgotten Serge’s presence…

JULIA: Along with the rest of us.

LR: It’s true. There’s a whole generation that has disappeared or is disappearing. It’s happening to my generation a little now too.

Serge’s choreographic combination of humanity and virtuosity – there’s no presence like that anymore….so if there’s anything you want to share about any of your experience at Dancemakers with Serge, I’m game to hear it all.

JULIA: What you saw in Serge’s work is also what I experienced. I was with Dancemakers from 1984, so I started when Carol Anderson and Pat Fraser were co-artistic directors and then, Carol on her own, and then Bill James, which was something completely different. And it was in the Bill James years that I became assistant artistic director. When Bill was leaving and there was a search for a new artistic director, I was working with the board and really involved with the company, I pushed for Serge Bennathan for the directorship. There were other people being considered but I knew his work, not well, but I knew it and he had sent some videos. I was like “oh my god, that is the kind of dancing I want to do.” Virtuosic, challenging, dancey-dancing. Bill’s stuff was fun, but it wasn’t that kind of thing. Bill’s work was site specific, political. It was great but by this point, I’m in my mid 30s and I wanted to dance. I wanted to kick my legs high and jump and roll and get up…. because I could do all that stuff. I wanted to be challenged.

When Serge came, the company was always good, but he pushed us to the next level, as dancers. I didn’t know what I was capable of until he came and pushed. “Bigger, bigger! Faster, faster, I need more, more heart, more soul.” He insisted on it, he demanded it. And we were hungry for it. Everybody in the company was hungry for it. 

So, I could put up with anything, any kind of mean or bad behaviour. I was also brought up, probably like yourself: you show up and do what you’re told. If someone says, “do it again and do it better”, you do it again and you do it better.

LR: You just keep going.

JULIA: What year was Chronicles?

LR: I saw it in 1993. So, it was probably made in 1992?

JULIA: I was trying to remember if it was before or after we did Joe. Trying to remember where the shoes came from and the schlack. We did the cross-country tour of [Jean Pierre Perrault’s] “Joe” in 1995 I think…..but anyway…. 

I will say that what I remember and what is true doesn’t always match. Sometimes when I meet old Dancemakers people, like when I went to photo ident-a-thon that Dance Collection Danse did, there was a lot of “no no no no that happened there and this happened here and that was this person and…..”

I was thinking about this piece in terms of talking to you and what I remember is coming back to work in the fall, whatever year it was, and we started to work on this new piece, Chronicles of a Simple Life. I remember when we came back to start our contract, Serge had already built the solo for Carolyn Woods, which closes the piece. We came to work, and Carolyn ran the solo. Then Serge built the rest from there….that’s my memory of it.

He probably made the solo for Carolyn over the summer – he did that with a lot of pieces….and Carolyn was his muse and his wife, and they would work on things just the two of them. He had set the solo to a piece by Gavin Bryars called “Subrosa”. It was so perfect. And so beautiful. 

And I was not only a dancer, I was already making pretty big pieces of choreography, so Serge’s work had an enormous influence on me as a dancer and also as a choreographer. He was doing really different, really interesting things…..the opening images of Carolyn’s solo – she swings her hand up and looks at it…..and that gesture comes back. I feel like I remember so many things about the solo…..I was also rehearsal director so that was my job.

I was really soaking things in choreographically.

That’s what I remember about the beginning of it….”oh, this is so cool”. And Serge started to work on other sections, the duet with Gerry and Gary, I had a solo running down and upstage…it was exhausting. I remember the doc martens. Like “Oh wow, this is fun” the weight of those shoes, the way they behaved, they were heavy to so you could kick and the leg would go right up beside your ear. They influenced how the choreography came out of us, how Serge used the shoes …… 

When the music came, the original score by Arne Eigenfeldt, the adjustment I had to make with his music for Carolyn’s solo was hard. I liked the other music better, but Serge was really good how he worked with composers, trusting them, committing to it.

LR: I have a distinct memory of you speaking on stage during Chronicles. It’s one of the very specific things I remember, maybe from the trio with three women? I could be wrong, but I could swear you said “I’m too old for this shit.” 

JULIA: There was some conversation in that section. We were supposed to laugh and verbalize.

LR: I have a picture in my memory of you ….this one woman…. whatever you were doing I was fixated. I remember so distinctly.  It really hit me. That a dancer could have a voice. A literal voice, but also a voice as in a point of view. 

I watched it on a digitized VHSrecording a couple of weeks ago.

JULIA: I was wondering if they had it.

LR: Dance Collection Danse has a big box full of VHS tapes. They went through the box and picked a version they thought had the best angle, the best audio and video quality and digitized that one for me to watch. It’s pretty clear. You could probably remount it from that recording. But sometimes you can’t tell who’s who.

There was a really good filming of sable/sand.

JULIA : I think I’ve seen that.

LR: It was clearly done for camera not for audience or archival.

JULIA: That I’ve seen because the former school of Toronto Dance Theatre remounted it and I remember seeing the video of myself while we remounted.

LR: Last week I had coffee with Sasha [Ivanochko, at the time of the interview the artistic director of Dance Arts Institute, formerly the School of Toronto Dance Theatre], she mentioned that remount. I don’t know if she had been involved or if she was just there or just knew about it.

JULIA: No she was not involved. [… excised 23:15-28:31]

LR: IT is really lovely to talk to you Julia. I’ve always been a little intimidated by you because you are so strong and so powerful and not afraid to say what you think and I am a big chicken shit sometimes. I’m so glad to have this opportunity to talk to you.

JULIA: Thank you.

LR: The more of these interviews I do the more I want to do, not just about Chronicles and Dancemakers. We cannot lose our history. We shouldn’t have to relearn all the lessons, when there’s all this knowledge in the community. We need to come together.

Let me get myself back on track here…..sorry for the diversion.

Do you have any memories of specific performances or favourite moments?

JULIA: Favourite. The Joyce Theatre in New York. For a couple of reasons. I’m going to get emotional about this. My ballet teacher…. I grew up in a suburb of Detroit. The first ballet company I saw was the Royal Winnipeg in Windsor. There was a big auditorium there. I studied ballet with Rosemary Floyd, a big Cecchetti ballet teacher. She trained many dancers who went on to fame and fortune in dance including Donna McKechnie who was in the original of Chorus Line as Cassie. She had dancers who danced in the Joffrey Ballet, the Houston Ballet, Nederlands Dans Theatre. I was the kid who became a professional modern dancer in Canada. She was so proud of me. She came to New York twice – because dancemakers performed twice at the Joyce. To be on stage and to know that my teacher was there. She knew me better than my parents – we remained close to the end of her life which was just a couple of years ago. To know that she was there watching me and feeling proud of herself too. I can’t tell you how special that was. I loved being on stage, but I will never forget knowing that she was there, she came to New York just to see me in a professional dance company and you know my parents didn’t come, they were still alive…..that was very, very special. 

She met Serge and she loved Serge because he had been with the Roland Petit Ballet, she watched us do class on stage which always included a barre…..”oh yes it’s ballet”, she saw, but it was different. We’d go back to her hotel and get her into stories about her life. It was very, very special. It was huge for me. My dream was to be a ballerina, to dance with a company – it’s typical, New York was the mecca. I’d been going to New York since I was 14. I quit dancing for 10 years.

LR: Really?

JULIA: After I moved to Toronto and went to York University for one year, I stopped dancing because I did not want to be in school anymore. I wanted to dance professionally and if I couldn’t do that, I’d do something else. I did a bunch of other things, and I didn’t even go see dance because it was too painful. And then I saw Dancemakers. Basically, a year later I was in the company. And then, ten years later I’m dancing on stage in New York City. It was like being reborn. A dream come true. And I got to do it twice. I think we did Les Arbres D’Or and Chronicles [at the Joyce Theatre].

LR: How did you get yourself ready in a year? I mean you’re vastly talented but….

JUILIA: I was waiting tables, but I started going to class every day. First thing I did – I knew some people in the company because they’d been at York when I was there – so I found out about company classes there. I started taking class with Pat Miner at Pavlychenko, but she must have also been teaching at dancemakers in the basement at the Bathurst Street Theatre – where Randolph Academy is now. I started going. I was embraced by Conrad Alexandrowicz, Francisco Alvarez. “Oh! The red hot nun from hell is back!! Sasso!” I had long crazy hennaed hair at the time. 

There was a choreographic workshop and Francisco asked me, Janet Eierenoff (spelling? I couldn’t find a source for this) and Rene Highway to dance in his piece. We performed it at the Winchester Street theatre with other pieces on the program.  The powers that be were seeing me all the time – in class, and then also on stage. Then there was an audition, and they were hiring two women. I’ll never forget that audition. It was about 100 people – I might be exaggerating, maybe 60.

LR: That’s still a lot of people.

JULIA: A very full studio. Beautiful dancers. Myself and another dancer who had just graduated from School of TDT, we got the jobs. It was amazing. It was my dream I’d had my whole life, since I was a little girl, is tarted when I was four…..I was once dashed and then I got a chance. That was it. I was happy for the next 16 years.

LR: When did you leave the company?

JULIA: I left in 2000. The last five years I was there, things were not going well for me. Serge and I were at odds. I could say a lot about that – it’s a whole other story. And I’m still processing that grief of leaving the company, feeling like I had to leave, I had to go. And then six years later when Serge left and I applied for that job, not getting it. That was another nail in my emotional coffin.

LR: That was a weird time…..

JULIA: That was the end of the company as we knew it. It felt unfair and sad. A lot of people talk about it still…..what if…..?? On the other had I’ve come to the point in my life where I wonder what if I had been given that opportunity and I’d fucked it up? Then where would I be? I’ve failed at lot of things. It’s not easy. I know there were funding issues and pressure on the new director to change the make-up of the organization. What if we had gone forward as a company and then when this whole recent Artscape thing went down, and we lost our home – would that have been the end of the company?

So many things that could’ve happened. Everyone can have their opinion about it and maybe parts of all the opinions are correct.

LR: That’s probably true in more cases than we want to admit to.

When I spoke with Serge he said that he’s so proud of that group of who that he made Chronicles with. 

JULIA: I left after C’est bon ca la vie. We were starting to work on the Invisible Life of Joseph Finch. That‘s when I left. I was in therapy. I did not want to go through with the piece. In the piece I represented all the Jewish people. I was disrobed and burnt in the ovens. In my darkness I thought “Serge wants to kill me”. I had already told him that I was going to leave but I wanted to do one more creation with him. We started it, he wanted me to dance naked – I was 44 years old and I’d do it now, but at the time I was very self-conscious about my body. I didn’t want my last performance on stage to be me running around with my butt cheeks flapping in the breeze. And he was going to kill me on stage metaphorically.

My therapist said, “if you’re going to leave you better leave sooner than later.” I’d go in every day, and we’d start class, and I was with the other dancers and I couldn’t leave, I couldn’t say I was going to go, I couldn’t say goodbye. So my therapist said “You have to go, in ask for a meeting with Serge – don’t go into the studio, don’t take class, meet in the office ….because as soon as you see those dancers…..”

That’s how I did it. Everyone was mad at me because they thought I just quit without saying goodbye. But it was the only way I could do it.

LR: You had to take care of yourself.

JULIA: Yeah. Serge was mad at me, but he replaced me in two seconds with Susie Burpee who was just waiting in the wings. It was good for everybody, but it was tough.

LR: Gerry spoke about how hard it was to leave too. Especially to leave the company class, that act was hard….

JULIA: It was hard to leave the family. It wasn’t hard to leave the bad stuff. It was hard to leave the relationships.

LR: Especially because of that special aspect of Serge’s work  -- he talked it about it too. He said he always wanted his dancers to be ogres of life – it’s a bit raw and a bit monster-y but it’s positive. It’s not for destruction, but for life. When you put in that much – he asked a lot of you, “More soul, more heart!”

JULIA: “Take your clothes off and die!” He’s asking a lot. He’s asking for the most vulnerable parts of you.

LR: If you’ve gone there for so many years with the same people you have such a connection that is just as full of emotion and complexity as the act of doing the choreography. 

JULIA: Oh yeah. I watched that with Sylvie Bouchard, with Learie McNicholls, with Jackie Nell, with Gerry Trentham, with Gary, and even with Marie-Josée when they each left.

Now I want to say in my defence that not only were those times hard and difficult -- being asked to do those things, be that vulnerable -- Serge would not be able to do any of that now. You’d have to have consent people, people discussing the subject matter.

LR: True. I’ve been thinking that as I’ve been transcribing.

JULIA: Some of the shit he said to us……Metaphor is everything in dance.

LR: It’s all metaphor, the minute you make something a performance it’s a metaphor for something else. 

(47:45- 52:50 approx. excised)

LR: Some ways of giving imagery and coaching a performance just aren’t allowed anymore. 

JULIA: People stayed at Dancemakers for a long time. I was with four different artistic directors that valued me and kept me there. Serge didn’t have to keep me as a dancer or assistant director. When he came to Dancemakers, he let one person go. Bruce Mitchell. You’ll learn about him because Christopher House is doing a project on dancers who went through the AIDS crisis. Bruce passed away shortly after Serge came in. A couple of others left on their own, but Serge had to make room for Learie and Sylvie and Jackie who came with him from Vancouver.

Were you in school with Julia Aplin?

LR: No, she graduated a full year before I started there, but we knew about her.

JULIA: She was extraordinary when she arrived at the company.

LR: When I interviewed her Julia A showed me a solo from Chronicles, walking forward and being thrown off balance by others – I think it was Jackie’s solo originally but then she took it over when Jackie left. She said you taught her.

JULIA: That was my job.

LR: Do you have a favourite part of Chronicles?

JULIA: I loved the group parts they were really fun. Gerry and Gary were so delightful together, Carolyn’s solo….. And I got to do La Beauté du Diable, the first piece set on us when Serge came, it had already been performed.  That was very special. A big, 30-40 minute piece, a quartet. Just the four of us.  The story of my life in the work of other people is never being the Sugar Plum Fairy. In Midsummer Night’s Dream I was Puck because there were no boys at our school and I could jump and move like a boy. Doing that quartet was like a starring role.

After I left the company, I went and I saw The Invisitble life of Joseph Finch and then I never went again. I never saw The Satie project, and after. I was hurt. And Serge would not come see my work and that hurt. I didn’t do anything, I left. I left at a reasonable time.  I never saw the company again until Michael Trent was director, and then I saw a few things and then I didn’t go any more.

LR: Gary Tai told me too he didn’t go see dance after he left. When he left, he had to leave completely. Gerry said that he felt an emotional fallout about the splitting from Serge, that he had somehow hurt Serge by leaving. The connection that was built during that time as company, that first dancemakers company of Serge’s time, you had a bond that was so strong with each other and with Serge - to take one person out of that must have been really painful.

JULIA: Things kind of started to unravel between us, but Serge wouldn’t talk about it. I couldn’t get him to tell me what I’d done, what was bugging him, what wasn’t working.  But you know, that his issue.

LR: That’s part of when you get a real company feel. I’m sure things like that happen all the time at the National Ballet….

JULIA: Sure, and at Toronto Dance Theatre and many others…. I’ll go back to that Debbie Allen movie – so many classic stories of these kinds of things: not getting the audition, not getting the thing you dreamt about, no really good reason, or getting something and getting it not because of your talent but because it fulfills a quota.

LR: It ticks some box. It strikes me that this happens in so many different lines of work but in the arts its more heightened. Dance may be the most heightened because you are always working with your whole self. This idea of leaving your shit at the door is just impossible. You can try to not let it overcome you or beat you down so that it overcomes you. You walk in with your whole self and that’s what makes the art form so beautiful.

It connects to my impression of Serge’s work – people bringing their whole selves to the stage and when you’re doing that all the time – nothing can just then be business, or not personal. It’s always personal. I have quite intense post-show anxiety. I can’t leave the dressing room, sometimes I have to lie on the floor hyperventilating….

JULIA: I have had those same feelings – I was always the last person out of the dressing room after a show. I didn’t want to talk to people and be asked “what are you doing next?” when I just poured myself out there. Or “do you want to go out for a drink?” No, I just want to sit with the people I just performed with and hang on to that. We have so few opportunities to do these things. I always knew how special this was, I have never taken it for granted. When you make your own work, you know how special it is. It takes three years to get the funding together, to get through a six week process, if you’re lucky, and then to have three nights on stage….and then it’s over.

LR: So that “what are you going to do next?” is a hard question to hear.

JULIA: And when it’s your own work, it’s been your focus for all that time, plus you have your day job and if your day job is teaching, you’re pouring yourself out for a room of people, some who care and some who don’t give a shit. 

It’s the hardest job in the world, being in dance. It really is.

LR: I think so too. The wonderful former National Ballet of Canada dancer Tanya Howard said to me once, “it’s so hard what we do and yet it is also such a privilege.” She didn’t mean privilege in the political way, but a privilege to be an artist, to give to people as we do. The privilege of it does not balance with the hardness of it. In fact, the privilege kind of makes it heavier sometimes. Because we’re fighting upstream all the time.  People are hungry for dance, but they don’t know it and they don’t know how to find it.

JULIA: I’ve been through many, many psychological ups and downs, losing my teaching in 2022 that was a big identity crisis – what am I now? I’m nobody, nothing. But one doesn’t retire from being an artist. I’ve also in the last four years gotten into open water swimming in Lake Ontario – so I’ve met a whole community of people who are not dancers. I’ve gone from that really low period to also understanding how I’m very proud to say I’m a dancer and I do. I don’t say “I was a dancer” but “I am a dancer”. I’m still doing it. I’m still doing it. I still want to do it. I want to perform and create, and I want to teach. 

Regular people think we are really special. We’re like unicorns and there’s something really delightful about that. As much as artists can get slagged and pushed down, sometimes by their own communities, regular people are amazed. “Oh, you’re a dancer, I always wanted to be a dancer.” “Tell me about what you do….” Or some of the older women in the swim group who trained at the National Ballet School and dance is still part of their life and their psyche. It is really special.

It's not for the faint of heart and it’s going to barely keep you alive, but it’s very, very special. When you think about dance in the big picture, there are so few of us in the world. 

LR: We ARE unicorns!

JULIA: It’s very special and a privilege. A privilege that we have invested a great deal in. I feel very lucky I’ve had the life I’ve had. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I feel very lucky that I had the main part of my career when I did. It’s so hard now. It’s so hard. For you, for young people. It’s hard for everybody.

I got to tour all over Canada, Europe, the US [with Chronicles and Dancemakers] I danced in New York. Who’s going to get those opportunities now? Soon there won’t be a Fleck Dance Theatre, and CanStage is not featuring dance anymore. And what’s going to happen to Fall for Dance North?

LR: I’ve taken so much of your time already and we’ve talked about so many things outside of Chronicles and I’m so grateful for this conversation so I’ll just ask if there are any last things you want to say about Chronicles, working with Serge, that era?

JULIA: I loved those costumes. The gray shirts and shorts. Nancy Bryant’s costumes were always just incredible. Now she’s Crystal Pite’s costume designer mostly.

LR: I didn’t know that.

JULIA: And I mentioned in an email I think about the movement description of a photo, did you get the whole thread?

LR: Yes.

JULIA: When Dancemakers described the photos, everything was wrong. Describing the wrong leg, the wrong side and the description of “dress shoe”. No! They were Doc Martens. And we weren’t lunging, we had just done a big ronde de jambe and slammed the leg down.  The elbow wasn’t pointing to the ceiling. It was the chest popping up, breaking something open.

I’ve watched other old videos – I’d love to see Chronicles – and oh my god, there are pieces when I watch, I can feel every movement. I can remember making them, how they came about, how they were made. It is so overwhelmingly embodied. It stays there. You don’t remember everything chronologically but the visceral feel of doing those things they say…..

It’s quite incredible.

LR: That’s such a gift about being a dancer is that we’re so aware of how our bodies hang on to that stuff over time. 

JULIA: When Serge came to Toronto, I went from dancing in a repertory company to doing full-length works. That was an interesting experience. 

LR: It’s a big difference between several pieces in an evening length show and carrying one idea through a whole evening.

JULIA: Many, many things about those years that I feel extremely grateful for. Very special. I feel like I should write about it. I should write about my life -- but that seems even harder than dancing.

LR: That’s a good place to stop.

JULIA AND LUCY Laughing.