By MatchBook.org
Interview Conducted September 25, 2007
The Liz Lerman Dance Exchange was founded in 1976. Its unique brand of dance/theatre breaks boundaries between stage and audience, theater and community, movement and language, tradition and the unexplored. Peter DiMuro, Producing Artistic Director of the Dance Exchange, describes the work of the company as an art making process, inclusive but challenging, free but rigorous… a way of life.
Peter DiMuro earned his MFA from Connecticut College, lead Peter DiMuro Performance Associates (1990 – 2000), has performed with the Boston Ballet and created new works for Dance Umbrella/Boston, Boston Ballet II, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and several venues around the country. Peter was named a 1995 Mayor of Boston/ProArts Public Service in the Arts Award recipient, a White House Millennial Artist in 2000, and has received grants from the National Performance Network, Artists’ Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. This summer (2007), he acted as a mentoring artist for the New England Dance Lab at Connecticut College in New London. The Dance Lab is a part of the Regional Dance Development Initiative (RDDI), a program of New England Foundation for the Arts' National Dance Project.
In this interview, DiMuro shares his experiences and knowledge about building lasting relationships and creating conversations about artistic work.
MatchBook.org (MB):
In your time with the Dance Exchange, what is the most valuable lesson you’ve learned about building relationships?
Peter DiMuro (PD):
Be good to everyone. Be authentic and up front with the people you talk to and about who you are.
Think of dialogue as a triangular relationship. Because the Dance Exchange works in community a lot, we know that’s there’s a triad, and one person’s role in the triad is to help to facilitate communication. For our purposes, the triad might include Dance Exchange artists along with a member of the community along with a presenter. Things go smoother when you’re no longer in that polar “I want this, so you must want that” either/or place. Once you make dialogue into a triangular relationship, it pulls the conversation out of a polar place into a world where we’re seeing more than just two things.
MB:
When building new relationships, how do you know who to talk to or which relationships to pursue?
PD:
You don’t really know which relationships to pursue. Say hello to everybody and recognize that everybody is important.
Liz [Lerman] and I learned that valuable lesson from our fathers. Her father was a real ‘60’s liberal, marching for people’s rights, and my father was a police man in a small town. Some people looked up to him as a police officer and other looked down on him because people had very extreme feelings about the police in those days. I remember his ability to say hello to everybody – saint or sinner, there was no hierarchy, and [his attitude] that everybody was important. I think that goes back to being authentic.
Also, you have to be able to find true joy in the networking you have to do. Though they can be a great place to meet a lot of people, big conferences can feel very inhumane. It can feel like you’re at a big car show trying to show off how shiny your bumper is – or it can really feel like a meat-market. I think some people mistakenly put a lot of energy into those four or five day conferences. It’s not wasted energy because you’re meeting people and you’re seeing other work and you’re shaking hands. But I think you can get caught up in the fervor of it and feel like your deal is going to be made or broken because of your presence there or because of how well your showcase went. But it’s the long term relationships you have, and the recurrence of seeing people over an arc of three, five or ten years, at these conferences but out in the world, too, that really speaks well for your artistic integrity, your artistic longevity
MB:
Thinking about first impressions, can you speak to the importance of professionalism or etiquette? To what extent is professionalism important in our field?
PD:
I think this question is imbedded with multiple definitions of what is professional and what is the appropriate behavior. Sometimes there is a need for translation between what internal dialogue an artist might have in the studio and how the artist might explain their work when greeting a presenter for the first time or showing the work to an outside audience for the first time.
I’ve been in situations where the artist is being totally professional, but totally in their creative process head and hasn’t communicated as effectively to those who he or she might need to. So I don’t think that it is necessarily a matter of an artist being unprofessional - I think it’s actually that the artist hasn’t evolved an articulation of their processes to a next level of understandability outside their very intimate act of making art.
MB:
What if – after making that initial contact with some presenter or grantmaker – you both come to the conclusion that the work isn’t going to resonate for a particular audience or situation, how do you continue the relationship, and do you continue that relationship?
PD:
There are people that may or may not present us, but when we’re talking to them they may say, “Well you’re not quite right for our theater or my program but I know somebody else who would be interested in your work.” By being your authentic and true self, you can pursue dialogue with other people who are ready to think like you or to be in dialogue with you about your work.
With grantmakers, I think it’s more about engaging with representatives from the foundation in dialogue. It’s sometimes hard because you feel like you’re begging for food. But if an artist can imagine the picture more like two colleagues sitting across the table from each other: The artist is there representing their work, and the representative from a funder is there representing the funder. Funders have their mission just like artists have their mission. It’s really important to know more about what each other’s missions are all about, to have dialogue about it and to see where our missions truly intersect.
If it’s not going to happen because the intersections of missions aren’t enough, then it won’t happen; but that representative might work for someone else some day and remember you. We’ve had people call us up and say, “I couldn’t fund you then, but I can fund you now because I work for another organization.” Again, it’s good to just be as authentic as you can all the time, with out looking at people’s roles so much – just see them as people.
MB:
I think this might be a good place to talk about capacity building. In the past 30 years, the Dance Exchange has grown from a school for dancers including "senior adults and special populations,” to a nationally and internationally touring company. What kind of relationship to building capacity is required to make growth happen?
PD:
Liz is a great communicator and a great partner in conversation. She really wants to know what presenters or community leaders are thinking about so she knows how a work will relate to an audience and community. I’ve learned from Liz and being here at the Dance Exchange, that the work is about an ongoing dialogue between the art and the audience, between the artist and the audience, and between the funder and the artist. These conversations lead to growth in all respects. It’s not just about having a big staff or enough money to put a big staff into place: you can have all the money you need and be completely stagnant. In some ways I think it can be almost a hindrance to have too much money.
I feel like there’s a lot of good that comes out of conversations with presenters, communities and funders. Sure, there’s frustration and there’s bad timing and there’s luck and there’s chance meetings in elevators; but there’s also pursuing dialogue, and I think that that’s really important.
MB:
So capacity building is not just about the growth of an organization or dance company, but about the growth of the art?
PD:
I think so. As I look at Liz’ work over the years and I look at my own, I feel like each time that I have a conversation about what went right, there’s also due diligence to be paid to the things that could go better and the things that could have been more efficient or more appropriate or effective for a particular group. In essence, you don’t want to repeat that performance when you go off to a new place where there’s different set of factors - a new community or a unique audience, but you do want to be able to be a better and more facile thinker and a better conversationalist in those future settings.
MB:
What are some solid relationship building strategies you can offer to presenters and artists?
PD:
Practice. It’s just like technique. To get better at tendues, you do lots of tendues. To get better at conversation, you have lots of conversation.
Be Authentic. Don’t start a relationship with a line of untruths, even well intentioned, that will eventually unravel. You don’t want to be caught in a mode of behavior that’s false. It might get you a gig immediately, but to sustain oneself in this world – and it’s a small presenting world and a small artistic world – you need to be authentic.
Think of the conversation as a Triad. Try to create a third entity. When a presenter and I are going to talk with each other, I don’t want to have my objective as, “I’m going to get you to present me”. My objective is “how can this presenter and my company make some good art happen together?” This kind of conversation takes pressure off of me or the presenter and puts it’s on an action that we’re going to accomplish. We’re going to bring a really good show to his audience, or we’re going to make a really great residency happen in schools. If our objective is about making good art happen, it means I have to talk to the other person and listen, and the other person has to talk and listen to me. The surest way to build a wall is to demand a want of somebody else. We know this from our personal relationships, and we’ve got to apply that to our artistic life too.
Take a Chance to Breathe. Try not to get swept up by what’s happening for everybody else. It’s easy to think that everything’s greener in everybody else’s studio. You have to remember that it’s about living this life that you’re meant to live, and to breathe through it in the most humane way possible. Concentrate on the gifts you bring to your creative life, and learn from the gifts others have developed, as well.
This interview was conducted on September 25, 2007
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