Prior to the opening night of Camera Illuminata - Dušan Týnek Dance Theatre’s upcoming season at the Joyce SoHo – journalist Lenka Studničková sits down with Artistic Director/Choreographer Dušan Týnek to discuss the show and his work.

After your company’s debut, staged just a year ago, do you feel like you’re starting anew or is your upcoming show a continuation of your previous work, presenting whatever has remained unspoken?

I think it’s definitely a continuation of my work.  The central piece last year was “Pilot’s Dream” which consisted of mostly duets and solos - a compilation of seven vignettes that I had to link together to make one cohesive story and everything had to relate.  The other two pieces on last year’s program were “Charge” and “Wardrobe Spectre”, each for seven dancers. This time, I’m presenting on a smaller stage that wouldn’t accommodate such big-scale pieces and I wanted to explore different situations, different scenarios. So each solo or duet in this program is a story of its own.

So, there’s no common theme linking the five pieces in Camera Illuminata?

What connects them is that they all are inspired by paintings, spanning over 400 years. The name comes from camera obscura which literally means “dark chamber” and is a device that painters would use to view a scene as a two-dimensional image.  Camera Illuminata is my “light chamber” where two-dimensional paintings come to life as dances.  I have a fantastic set of collaborators – beside dancers, of course: Rick Murray on lighting, and Christina Giannini, Karen Young, and George Hudacko on costumes, who help recreate the mood and look of the paintings.

Could the concept for this show be influenced by the fact that you are a painter yourself?

I think partially it’s that.  Recently I’ve been painting a lot and studying visual arts on my own - but another factor was the possibility of staging the show in a white space, which is very much like a canvas - a space that is at once confined, yet blank and infinite with possibilities.

Having a white box theater at your disposal, does your mind play more with colors in choreographing the pieces?

Yes, there are certain things you can do in a black box theater, and certain things you can do in a white box theater. Visually, you get more drama and depth in the former, while in the latter the possibilities are more limited. The smallest amount of light makes everything visible. The advantage to a white box is that you can play more with colors and also with shadows and reflections, like in a hall of mirrors.

Can you be more specific about the sources of inspiration for your dances?

There is one dance that I actually made several years ago, in some ways a very simple piece inspired by the French Neo-Classical artist Hippolyte Flandrin’s “Young Male Nude by the Sea” from 1855.  I took the central pose of the painting and developed it to portray the struggle a person undergoes to learn something new.

That’s what the painting evoked in you?

Exactly. And then recently I was very impressed by the contemporary artist John Currin’s painting from 1999 called “The Pink Tree” that I saw at the Whitney Museum.  At the time, I was planning to choreograph a new duet for two of the company’s female dancers and was so struck by this painting that I decided to use it as the inspiration for the piece.

What makes the painting so attractive for you?

Currin paints in a very classical style, so it’s very realistic on one hand, but when you look closer you’ll see that the figures of the two nude women are completely distorted: the limbs are extended, bellies distended, necks too long. A real person is not built that way. At first glance, the women look beautiful, but they’re complete freaks - like mutants. I try to capture the awkwardness of their movement and their attachment. For me, they represent a schizophrenic mind, or two sides of the brain: one tries to free itself, to get away, while the other clings on, holding back. The dancers – who represent this attraction and repulsion - eventually switch roles and start all over. What I try to do in each piece is to develop an idea from a particular painting and recreate a snapshot of that image. It may be very quick, but you’ll see it, somewhere, if you’re familiar with the painting.

You have recently shown “The Pink Tree” and it received good reviews. Will it be the opening piece of Camera Illuminata?

No, we’ll actually open with a duet “Death and the Maiden” based on Egon Schiele’s painting of the same name from 1915. Schiele is one of my favorite artists. I did a little research and found that “death” actually represented Schiele himself and the “maiden” was his model, Wally, with whom he had an extremely intense working and romantic relationship for several years. He eventually proposed to her, but she flatly rejected him, and ran off to join the Red Cross during the war. She died of scarlet fever two years later and Schiele himself died of influenza the following year, at the age of 28, and so the painting became kind of a farewell portrait to both of them.

Why do you feel compelled to analyze Schiele’s relationship?

Because I find it fascinating and I wanted to show how two people may be living together for a long time and know each other intimately, but there still may be a fundamental disconnect. In the end, it might in fact be better if they just part. The structure of the piece is like a pyramid; the dancers are climbing to the top where partnering is the monumental embrace of the painting, and then they’re falling away from it when they become separated again. It’s a very dramatic, heavy piece, watching their life together dissipate inevitably, but she seems to somehow maintain the upper hand in the end.

Let’s move on to the next piece.

“Trinity” is a duet, inspired by Caravaggio, another of my favorite painters. I used a whole series of paintings, 10 to be exact, most from around 1595. All of them deal with Christ, in some way or another. It’s structured as a kind of animated tableaux vivants, as we move from one painting to the next. I’m not trying to comment on Christ as such, actually more the expressions and reactions to Christ of the other figures in the paintings. I want to convey what the art evokes - the shapes, light, the atmosphere.

How did you choose the title – “Trinity”?

Because although it’s a duet, there’s an invisible yet omnipresent third character in this piece.

Does the transformation of a painting into a dance come naturally to you or is it a struggle?

It’s not a struggle - I think it’s a great tool for making up a story. Caravaggio’s paintings are not abstract at all, there are real figures that are very easy to use in a dance piece as an image. It’s a very different approach from the other pieces.  In “Death and the Maiden”, for instance, I’m more interested in the psychological makeup and behavior of the two characters, as is the case with the last piece, a female solo, inspired by Edgar Degas’ painting “The Absinthe Drinker” from 1876. The woman depicted there is a tragic figure who is drowning her life in liquor. I’ve named the piece “Suicide by Drowning”.

Is the story about the central figure one you’ve invented?

Yes, I’ve invented it. You see from her expression that she’s given up on life, she’s breaking up with someone, or just breaking up in general. The dance shows the spiral of her downfall from the moment we find her walking into and then sitting alone in a cafe. Perhaps that was the last sip of absinthe, or anything, in her life.

You seem to enjoy trying to enter people’s minds and fantasizing about what you find there.

I’m usually trying to develop some story based on human experience and comment on it through my dance.  The spectator can choose to focus on the form and structure of the dance, but if you look further, there is always a story to be found, sometimes it’s more obvious than at other times, but it’s always there.

Once you chose the paintings and created the stories behind them, that’s when the music came in?

Sometimes the music came first, as was the case with “Trinity”. It’s different with every piece. I’m very specific about music, it’s a very integral part of the dance for me, not just some background noise. It has to give the dance the right ambiance and sensitivity that agrees with me and with what I want to express.

I know that a Brooklyn composer is writing new music for “Death and the Maiden”.

It’s the first time that I have ever commissioned music for a piece. It’s scary, because you don’t know what you’re going to get. I’ve only recently become familiar with Ted Reichman’s work, but instantly became a big fan and felt that our artistic sensibilities were coming from the same place.  I had already begun to choreograph “Death and the Maiden” and so I gave Ted a very rigid basic structure within which to work so as to match the structure of the dance. I knew he’d be terrific for this collaboration, and the Jewish and East European influences in his work perfectly suited both my own and Egon Schiele’s work. It’s been a very rewarding process.

Speaking of origins, do you think your Slavic or European roots have influenced your creative methods?

I guess so. People comment here that I’m very European, and when I come to Europe and someone sees my work, they say it’s very American. Strangely, although most of my artistic development has taken place here, the more I create, I can really see my East European background coming through. It’s probably most evident in my choices of East European or Jewish-oriented music. There is something about the melancholy of this music that speaks to me.

Do you think your work is more reflecting yourself – your mind, your way of thinking - or is it more oriented toward societal or political events?

I don’t try to comment on politics or world events. My most recent pieces are definitely very inward. But it’s not the kind of inwardness that is about me necessarily; it is primarily my imagination that gives birth to the dance. And I try to transform the images into movement as the key means of expression – I don’t rely heavily, if at all, on text, video or other media in performances.  I think my movement vocabulary is quite physically demanding and requires a high degree of both classical and modern technique and I feel very fortunate to have such strong and accomplished dancers with whom to work. 

So, what’s next for Dušan Týnek and his Dance Theatre after Camera Illuminata?  Do you have a specific project in mind to work on after your December performances?