THIS WEEK: Tere O'Connor Dance

As Jean-Luc Godard was to cinema at the height of the New Wave, so Tere O’Connor is to phenomenological dance in his rejection of what he calls “narrative ideologies” or “abstraction as a cliché.”

“My work is not a journey toward aboutness,” O’Connor told Gay City News. “It’s more a kind of immersion or reflection on things without singular meanings.”

O’Connor has been creating important experimental work in New York for almost 30 years, putting theory into practice in the service of allowing dance to exploit its inherent properties.

For his latest work, “Wrought Iron Fog,” the artist is subjecting language to his choreographic process. “The overall experience,” he explained, “is more important than the hieroglyphic elements. I’m allowing experience to teach me how to make that frontal in the work, instead of letting people getting lost reading sign systems. Dance has a different grammar.”

“Inside of dance,” O’Connor asserted, “philosophy and psychology and systemic elements shape the surface. Instead of designing of shapes over time, there is a process that gives birth to dance. There can be elements of the known on that surface, but they are not strung together on a narrow accumulation of time.”

Cultural bias, the artist believes, inclines audiences to approach dance in a manner he called “looking for the ghost of the choreography.” He explained, “People go in trying to read dance like a book. It is not a book. It may have pages, and words are there, but reconfigured.”

O’Connor suggested, too, that dance has more to offer than an artistic experience. “I would like the power of this form to be unleashed,” he said. “It’s the great diffuser of monothematic dogmatic ideologies. It uses complication as a way to undermine linguistic logic, and shows its otherness. It’s a journey away from language, toward letting go of the naming of things. It’s an other experience that has its own value.”

“Dance,” the choreographer-philosopher concluded, “is looking at a constellation of consciousness and daily necessity; a work derived from total experience. I want to erase episodes, to create a sensation cloud where you can fall in and engage with your own narrative.”