Bruce Wood and Texas Dance Theatre

Texas Dance Theatre (TDT), a classically trained company with a contemporary flair, opened its first season on September 25, 2009 with a new work by celebrated Fort Worth choreographer Bruce Wood. The company was founded by TDT Artistic Director Wil McKnight.

Manny Mendoza caught up with Wood in September for a story about Texas Dance Theatre and the premiere of his A Prayer for Mary Catherine at Scott Theatre. He and TDT artistic director Wil McKnight met at the Sundance Square boot store where Wood works.

"He said he was a choreographer and was trying to start a dance company," Wood says. "The girl who he was with told him that I had had a dance company. I said we should talk, and that maybe I could give him some advice as to avoid making the same mistakes I had made. So we met some time later and it turned out that our professional backgrounds were similar, so it was easy to talk to him."

Here are excerpts from an email response to Mendoza's questions:

What experience did you bring to the conversation with Wil?

I know how hard it is to start something like a dance company, and I wished I would have had someone like me help me out. Because when I started my company, no one in the performing arts community was very supportive. Fort Worth is a very turf-protective kind of place, and everyone is seen as competition as opposed to colleagues. It's a different mindset here than had been my professional experience, as it was Wil's. I hadn't choreographed since I closed the company. I honestly couldn't get any work in the area. So when Wil and I talked, I told him that I could do a small piece for his company and that may help with getting some attention for his own work. I was just trying to help a fellow artist out. So after their initial premiere last spring, it worked out that I could do a small piece for the beginning of their new season.

Tell me about the new piece.

The new dance I am doing is called A Prayer for Mary Catherine.

The music is Patrick Doyle and Leonard Cohen. It's a very small dance in three sections. The dance came about because I was trying to find a vocabulary for the dance that seemed to fit the dancers in the company. I also noticed that the rest of the program was going to be contemporary in style and music, so I thought I would do something that would show off another side to the company, something feminine, lyrical and emotional. I also decided that I would do it on pointe, as opposed to my usual vocabulary of doing it either in bare feet or some other kind of shoes.

My work is based on feels and emotions. All of my dance vocabulary comes from that beginning. I never plan, and I never predetermine what a dance will be. I always start with some kind of emotional experience that I want to create and everything stems from that. With this dance, my friend Mary Catherine is a beautiful soul, and I have known her for a long time, so I thought it would be a sweet thing to make a dance for and about her. She has a feeling that she emanates while you are with her that is feminine, emotional and lyrical. I just kept that feeling in my head and body and heart as I choreographed. It's really that simple. That's how I choreograph. The piece is small and short, but I have learned after many years that once you have created whatever you wanted to accomplish in a dance, the dance needs to end. And for some reason this particular dance ended up being shorter than I initially thought, but there you go.

What have you and Wil talked about?

Wil and I have met several times, and he has asked a lot of questions about the dynamics of having a company. There is his personal aesthetic, the dancers, the money aspect, vision, the planning and all kinds of other things that go into to creating a company from nothing. It's a much larger task than one might think, and I have been there to answer any questions or concerns that he might have.

I believe that the more art out there the better it is for everyone. This idea that a community can only have one dance company, one opera company, etc., does all artists a disservice. It limits creativity as opposed to opening it up. When a single aesthetic is all there is, it is no better than dogma, and all of our bright and creative minds move to communities where aesthetic diversity is appreciated and even insisted on. We become better artists when we have other artists around us doing all kinds of different and interesting things. Serious dance has lost its way, and we need to encourage as many serious artists as we can to revive it and embolden it.

You will often hear that dance is hard to support, and the basic reason for that has been that in the past dance has not pushed itself. It has gotten comfortable in doing the same thing over and over, constantly underestimating its audience. (An example would be that there are probably over 25 different Nutcrackers around the area during Christmas, but the rest of the year tends to be dead empty for new and original work.) As a result, I believe the audience has gotten smaller. Then the resources get smaller, and then there comes the competition for a smaller pie. Then only the biggest survives. It becomes a vicious cycle.

As with my former company, and now with Wil's new company, he is trying to widen the audience for dance, and I am all for that. I will support anyone who is making a serious attempt to enlarge our dance repertory and consequently broaden our overall audience and the support that that garners. The only other person I know that is also making serious attempts to bring new and exciting things to the community is Charles Santos at TITAS. And I want to wish them both well, and will do all I can to support both of them.