Morgan Beckwith: Southport, CT

Goran Interview 1:

Goran and I have decided to hold our daily discussion session by his outdoor pool area above the studio. This sanctuary including a salt pool and beautiful stone patio seems like perfect neutral ground with which to talk about the company.

Goran is extremely excited by the prospect of my involvement with Mystic Ballet and seems to think that this project could be useful in other venues of online and media presence. I have begun the process of feeling around the Mystic press market to see if there is some genuine interest in my observations of the company and how they relate to the wider dance world. Goran expressed his concern about the oversaturated advertising market for dance. I would like to conduct some more extensive research on this but as I see it now it appears that it is very hard to reach the target audience when there are almost too many media outlets with which to choose from. Goran indicated that larger conglomerate arts organizations also hold a monopoly on the target audience in terms of advertising, making it more difficult for smaller companies to break into the market.

Discussing the artistic process:

In the first meeting of the summer for Mystic Ballet Goran told his dancers to investigate Netherlands Dance Theatre resident choreographer Jiri Kylian. He mentioned this again to me when asked to talk about the Mystic ballet rehearsal process saying, “have you ever seen Kylian work?” Goran described Kylian’s process of making work as an ideal relationship between a choreographer and the dancer(s). Kylian’s is a respectful way of working, or a lowering of the ego in order to effectively collaborate with the dancers as artists of equal intelligence and presence. Goran emphasized that you can have a dancer with incredible physique and ability but ultimately the artistic director cannot simply impose their imagination and their way of thinking onto this artist if they want their choreographic intent to be clear and organic. This difficult and trying process in required in Goran’s opinion in order to produce something that is spectacular and translatable to the average human being. As he said, “the majority of people can follow directions, but we cannot call this art.” He equated this process to bouncing a ball against a wall. If you bounce the ball and it returns to your palm you have completed a reciprocal relationship of energy exerted. However, if you throw the ball and it bounces against the wall only to fall limp on the ground and continue to only exert this amount of energy you will try again maybe twice and then move on. Therefore, balance of energy and effort between choreographer and dancer is absolutely crucial to a successful and efficient artistic product. Because most times the audience will not be willing to bounce the ball again before moving on somewhere else.   

He says that this type of collaboration begins with the centralized intuition of the artist, a type of inner peace. Goran advocates his dancers involvement in martial arts training and doctrine, and it is clear that this makes its way into the daily rehearsal process. In order for Goran to probe and provoke emotion and movement out of his dancers they need to first understand how their physical center of gravity connects to their cognitive instincts. Goran believes that this amount of trust, understanding and open-mindedness can only be produced and manifested from dancers that he trains personally. He would rather invest in dancers who will take the time to learn and train with him and his visiting choreographers rather than bringing in talented dancers who do not have the capability of integrated into the mindset of the workspace in just two or so weeks.

This summer Goran is currently in that position, training new dancers of Mystic Ballet 2 in order to see achieve the highest possible caliber of collaborative choreographic work. I will continue to observe company rehearsals in order to see just how Goran’s philosophy manifests itself in the studio.