Photo: Travis Magee
Exclusive Q&A by Brad Balfour
Beginning with traditional Irish step dancing as a child in Boston, veteran choreographer Seán Curran’s career in the arts spans 40 years. As a boy in the Boston suburb of Belmont, Massachusetts, Curran began dancing by learning traditional Irish step dancing. “I used to go once a week for a dollar,” Curran recalled in a 1999 New York Times profile. “I learned quickly and our teachers had us performing, so the dance and performing bug bit me pretty early.”
From there, Curran graduated from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where he eventually served as Chair of the Department of Dance. Curran has also taught at the American Dance Festival, Harvard Summer Dance Center, Bates Dance Festival, and The Boston Conservatory as well as at more than 100 college dance departments.
Curran then performed with New York’s Danspace Project and was a lead dancer in the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. He also created and presented a solo evening of works which has been seen in the United States, Sweden, and at France’s EXIT Festival. An original member of the New York cast of “STOMP!”, Curran performed in the show for four years.
Curran founded the Seán Curran Company in 1997. Since then, the company has performed around the United States as well as in France, Germany, Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic and Turkmenistan. His contemporary dance ensemble, Seán Curran Company, has toured across the U.S., Europe and Asia.
Along the way, his notable opera/theater projects have included “Salome” (Opera Theatre of St. Louis, San Francisco Opera, Opera Montreal, San Diego Opera) – “Much Ado About Nothing,” “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (Shakespeare Theater) – “Champion,” “Harvey Milk,” “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” “Champion,” “Shalimar the Clown,” Ariadne on Naxos, Nixon in China, (OTSL) – “L’Etoile,” “Alcina,” Turandot, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Capriccio, Acis and Galetea (NYC Opera); “As You Like It” (Shakespeare in the Park); Romeo and Juliette (Metropolitan Opera); James Joyce’s “The Dead,” “Cymbeline,” “The Rivals” (Broadway, Lincoln Center Theater).
Curran has enjoyed other career highlights such as his “Bessie” award-winning performances with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, being an original STOMP! NYC cast member and becoming an arts professor at NYU Tisch Dance. In 2000, Curran was named in “Irish American Magazine’s” Top 100.
Presenting the world premiere of “PATH,” Curran’s company is making its NYU Skirball Center debut on Friday, April 18 at 7:30 pm and Saturday, April 19th. Bouyed by music from “Path of Miracles,” composed by Joby Talbot, PATH reflects on the phenomenon of the Camino de Santiago — the ancient Catholic pilgrimage route across northern Spain to the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia –– and Curran’s own spiritual wayfaring.
The company is also performing an older piece, “Everywhere All the Time” (2018), with music by Donnacha Dennehy. It explores the relationship of humans with the natural environment.
For tickets got to: https://nyuskirball.org/events/path-and-everywhere-all-the-time/
Q: You’ve performed all kinds of dance but at your core is traditional Irish dancing. How did you transition from it to other forms of dance?
Seán Curran: One thing I’ll just say on the side is that — and people don’t know this — but it was the African drumming that African people who were enslaved brought to the country. Irish step dancing kind of combined to make what we now know in American vernacular as “tap dance.” It’s a wonderful hybrid of those kind of rhythms.
With the arms down by the side, hen I started taking ballet and modern, I had a very hard time coordinating my arms. I caught up, but had my hands pinned to my side. In fact, my teacher would make me hold a little ball of toilet paper in each hand so that I wouldn’t move my hands. When you went to a dance, you held a Kennedy half dollar for good luck. You couldn’t drop the Kennedy half dollar while you were dancing.
Q: You’re four years old in the supermarket and you’re being wild. The legend is that you were suggested to do Irish dancing. What was the next step? You found a school there?
Seán Curran: My aunt Sally said that she knew of an Irish step dancing teacher in the neighborhood. It was Saturday morning for one hour. It was at a VFW hall kind of a thing. I don’t know why, but I had a first lesson by myself and was a quick study. I picked It up very quickly. Even though I was only four years old, everybody was impressed or seemed to like it [at the time.] I was put on the fast track to keep on learning more and more.
A year later, my sister — who was about a year younger than me — started coming, and we became a little team. My teacher, Mrs. Moran, put us in her act for St. Patrick’s Day’s or weddings or Irish dances, whatever. They would go and do a performance. It would be 8 or 10, you know, high school, college-aged, young women, maybe one or two guys. And then my sister and I would run out at the end and be the button, as they’d say in showbiz.
We sort of buttoned it up with a cute little finish. And it was great. People would clap, and they’d buy Coca-Cola for you. I caught the performing bug pretty young because I got so much positive reinforcement. I knew early on, if you can do something that’s hard to do and make it look easy or fun, people will love you.
Q: At what point did you realize you wanted to go beyond Irish dancing and do other things? Was that after you moved to New York? Or did you move to New York in order to be schooled in other kinds of dancing?
Seán Curran: It was a little earlier. In high school, I had a great English teacher who did all the theater. I say she was a great teacher because she was a great encourager. She knew I did Irish dancing, and one year she said, “Sean, I want you to choreograph the high school musical.” I hadn’t ever heard that word, “choreograph.” Like in Irish dancing, we just didn’t talk about choreography, or who choreographed this or that. They were steps that had been passed down through the years. So, I said, “What does choreograph mean?” She said, “Well, you’ll make up the dances.” And I loved a challenge, I guess, even then.
I would listen to the record; this was in the ‘70s. It was a production of “Bye Bye Birdie,” the kind of all-American musical based on an Elvis Presley type character. I had them doing sort of Irish steps. I didn’t know any better. She didn’t care. But it was a real strong sense of making something up and teaching it and being in charge. Part of me knew then that I wanted to be a choreographer, whatever that meant.
Then, of course, I went to school at NYU. I thought I’d be a musical theater performer, but the contemporary dance and ballet, I hadn’t had that. It was so challenging. I knew I had to get technical quickly. I had a lot of catching up to do. I just was drawn to the dance side more than the theater side. I wound up in contemporary dance.
Q: When did Bill T. Jones come into play? I have a Keith Haring poster, which is actually a photo of Bill T. Jones with Keith Haring patterns on him.
Seán Curran: Yes! I love it. I have it, too. That’s amazing. On a side note, I teach at NYU and have a student who [is in his] first year. He has a Keith Haring drawing tattooed on the left side of his chest. I said, “Do you know who drew that?” He didn’t have a clue. He just liked the artwork. So, I’m trying to teach everybody how important Keith Haring was and who he was.
But to answer your question, I was a dance major at NYU. In your senior year, you get several guest artists. Of course, we all wanted a famous choreographer. But the chair at the time said, “Well, I’m bringing in a young choreographer who is really talented. His name is Bill T. Jones.” And we said, “Bill T. Who? Bill T. What? Who is this guy? We don’t know him.”
But he came and made a great dance. He and I hit it off right away. He would improvise and I would copy what he did or what I thought he did. It was a way of making movement or finding movement. I was a pretty good mimic. I could copy whatever you did back in the day.
I’ve also been blessed with a really great memory for movement. If you taught me something, I could learn it quickly and then could show you what it was. I was graduating from college. And after Bill had made this piece and it was very successful, he invited me to come and apprentice with his company. Part of me was pulled to Broadway but I thought this guy was so interesting and I loved what he was doing, so I went as an apprentice.
I joined the company a couple of months later and stayed for 10 years and got very close to Arnie Zane. I stepped into Arnie Zane’s roles. It was before AIDS had really hit and people didn’t know they were sick. Arnie did not want to perform so much anymore [and he later died of AIDS]. He wanted to choreograph and administer the company. I danced with Bill and had my own parts in the company. I like to say that Bill and Arnie showed me a way to be in the world. It was galvanizing. It was 10 years, as a young professional dancer in that company. It was as important as my college education. I feel that Bill and Arnie are kind of my artistic parents. I was in Jones and Company from ’83 to ’93.
Q: This was before you created your own company?
Seán Curran: I had a group of friends, a group of dancers that would come and take my class. Part of my side hustle was that I’ve taught dance my whole life going back to when I was like, you know, a junior in high school teaching Irish dancing. If you’re a dancer and you don’t work at a restaurant or a store, you can teach. I had this following. I said to the people in my class, “I’m making this dance. It’s for Celebrate Brooklyn. Do you want to be in it?”
I think I paid them two subway tokens a rehearsal, and bought them dinner. It was not a professional situation at all. But they all wanted to be in it. They wanted to perform it. That was one of the things that led to my growing up organizationally and starting a company and getting a 501C3 and a board of directors and all that stuff you need to be taken seriously.
Q: Did you ever think, “OK, I’ve got my company going, starting to dance in the contemporary dance circuit. You’re at Jacob’s Pillow, you’ve done the Joyce, you’re doing all these things, and then you end up back at NYU, but as the chair. Talk about that arc.
Seán Curran: I didn’t ever think it would happen in a million years. I was a great dance student but I was not a great academic student. I graduated on time but all I wanted to do was dance. I took French and took … you have to take certain courses like psychology and all this stuff. I just did not do well academically, but I had a lot of people pushing me.
Of course, now I’m one of those people pushing my students. But I graduated and thought my whole life would be performing. I didn’t really think I’d be a choreographer with a company. I left the Jones/Zane Company and got into “Stomp!” which is a big part of my story. I was in the original New York City cast of “Stomp!” I did that for four years.
Q: Did that fulfill your Broadway leanings?
Seán Curran: That really nourished that. I was in a dancing company for 10 years and in an off-Broadway hit for four years. That really nourished the showbiz guy in me. Being in “Stomp!”, all of a sudden I was making more money a week than I did even after 10 years in a modern dance company. I was able to pay people $10 an hour to rehearse. I rented rehearsal space and everything. But the way the NYU thing happened was my old acting teacher at NYU called me up and said that Gus Solomons Jr was retiring. She said, “John, you have to apply. We’d love to have you and these jobs don’t open up.”
I was 49 or 48 at the time. I called a friend, Lois Welk, who is a wise older mentor. I said to her, “Do they want me to apply? I’d love to teach there eventually, but I don’t know. I’m doing all this in my company. Lois said, “When do you want to teach there?” I said, “I don’t know, in my late 50s?” She said, how old do you want to be? I said, 59. She said, they’re not going to hire you when you’re 59, John. They want to hire somebody now, so that they’re there for 20 years. I thought, oh, she’s right. I applied for the job. Everyone else and their mother in New York applied for the job because it’s a great job. If you’re a New York-based choreographer-dancer, you have to live in New York.
Anyway, because of my career with Bill and having my own company, being at “Stomp!” and having graduated from the program, I think that’s why they hired me. I was just a professor, teaching dance and choreography. Then two years into that, they asked me to be the chair, which I just couldn’t believe. I became the chair and suffered from terrible, crushing self-doubt and imposter syndrome. When you’re the chair, you do it in a three-year cycle. Every three years, the dean would say, “We want you to do three more. Please do three more.”
In fact, at the end of nine years, she said, “We’d like you to do three more.” I said, “I don’t think I can. I got us through COVID and we navigated all the social justice pain. That hasn’t gone away, but it was particularly tough.” I said, “I think it’s somebody else’s turn. I miss a lot of the job, but I don’t miss the stress.” When I go to the doctor now, my blood pressure is at a normal level. For the nine years I was chair, I think it was super high.
Q: It’s hard to be the dancer at… Well, you’re not that old are you?
Seán Curran: I’m 63 and it is really hard.
Q: Does that mean you still dance on occasion in your shows?
Seán Curran: I don’t really, not anymore. I’ll tell you a quick story. I teach a technique class three mornings a week and I jump around and I dance with the students then. But I can’t jump as high. Dancers fall apart. And I had two opportunities. One was to go to Ireland to dance in John Scott’s “Dancer from the Dance” festival — to do a solo. I choreographed a solo maybe 10 years ago. I thought I needed to choreograph a dance that I could do as a much older person. I made it fairly simple. It was a good dance and it was effective, But while I was getting back in shape –– running and doing all sorts of stuff –– I opened a stress fracture in my foot and couldn’t dance. So they showed a recording of me dancing.
Then this piece I was doing with Darrah Carr at the Irish Arts Center called “Ceili.” Darrah and I had a cameo. I did the same thing. Everything I tried to do: lose 10 pounds, run, get back into shape … and then I hurt my other foot. I miss it terribly. In fact, with my show this week, everyone I see, they’re like, “Oh, are you dancing?” It’s just not a part of my identity anymore. I have certain dancers in my group –– but I don’t say this to anyone else — they represent me, as if I were in the piece” I would be that dancer.
Q: It is liberating when you don’t have to think about how your body will deal with dancing?
Seán Curran: It is liberating, especially on opening nights when I don’t have to go and warm up. And deal with the stage fright and the nerves. If you have a bad show and feel bad, you remind yourself, “Oh, no two tours are alike.” If you want it the same way all the time, you make a movie. That kind of stress is gone [and] that’s great. Now, I’m sitting in the audience hoping that technically everything goes right. Nobody gets hurt on stage. The dancers do a good job. So there’s another kind of anxiety. But I’m saying, I’m trying to let it go with love and give it to this next generation of dancers. I have phenomenal dancers. We ran the show yesterday. They’re dancing like angels.
Q: They’re your company now and tour under your aegis?
Seán Curran: Yes. We did a lot more touring before COVID. COVID put a halt to that. We’ve come back from COVID and I’ve been focusing more on doing things in New York and less touring. Hopefully, we’ll get back to touring because they love to tour and that’s the way they make money. Maybe this show we’re doing at the Skirball … it’d be great if some people picked it up and want to present it.
Q: Talk about this show, the pieces that are there, and the dancers in it.
Seán Curran: Sure. So, it’s two dances on the program. The first one is called “Everywhere All the Time.” It was originally commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival. It’s with music by Irish composer, Donnacha Dennehy. It was a commission from the University of Notre Dame. They commissioned the music and commissioned me to make the dance. He’s an Irish guy and I’m an Irish guy, so I think that’s why they put us together.
Danica Dennehy’s music is a percussion score, but if you heard it, nobody would think it was Irish music. It’s modern music. When I heard it the first time, I thought, how am I going to crack this one? This does not scream out to be choreographed. But I had this idea, “Everywhere All the Time,” about a feeling of longing and regret, kind of like the blues that has come with me through my life.
A big part of my story is that I got sober when I was 32. I’ve always had this kind of feeling. I’m happy that I’m sober, but I have a kind of longing, a regret; I call it sadness. I wanted to put that into this piece. The music was so difficult. When I started, nothing was really working. But we started making sections and dancers always nickname a section. And one section was the rain, like dancing in rain, not literally, but the music sounded like rain. And then there was sort of a thunder and lightning section.
Then we made a section that we nicknamed cloudburst. When I saw this trend, I thought maybe I should think of the music less as music and more as weather. The dance kind of became about the environment, weather and the organized chaos of weather. It has a set by the late Diana Balmori. She was a landscape architect. She designed this set that we call “The Forest.” It was very well received at BAM.
I’m 63, so there’s certain dances I want to bring back and see them again to see if they hold up before I go to the big rehearsal hall in the sky. This was one of them, “Everywhere All the Time.”
The other piece is called “Path.” It’s performed to music by Joby Talbot. The name of the music is actually “Path of Miracles.” He was inspired by this religious pilgrimage, the Camino, that you walk through. It takes over a month to walk. You walk about five miles a day through Spain. You stop at cathedrals along the way.
Q: Does it have Catholic roots?
Seán Curran: Yes, many Catholics still do it. Interestingly enough, one of my dancers is from Korea, and her husband is an American: they’ve walked it. Whenever I had a question, she was there. In fact, yesterday at rehearsal, she was talking about how it feels in the beginning and the middle and the end. I was so exhausted. I wanted to make a dance that was also a prayer, in a way, for the desperate times we live in. But I’ve also always liked the idea of a requiem, you know, a mass for the dead.
My dad is John Curran. We called him, “Mr. Ireland.” He had an Irish radio program in Boston that was very involved in the Boston Irish community. Anyway, he died about 14 years ago. My mom is still alive, She’s 86. But they’re both very religious Catholic people. My mom still says the rosary every night. In fact, she’ll say to me if I call her, “Who needs a rosary?” She has said the rosary for my friends dying of AIDS, for big grants that I wanted to receive, and for opening nights. She’ll say a rosary for anything. In fact, I was talking to her on Saturday, and I said, “I need some rosaries this week, Mom, for my next show.” I went back to my sort of Catholic youth. I went to parochial school. I was an altar boy. I sang in the church choir and was very pious.
At one point, I thought I wanted to become a Christian brother or a monk. But when I was a young teenager and realizing I was gay, that was bad according to the Catholic religion. As I say now, there was no place at the table for me. I had to push it away. In my adult life, I’ve found that art and art-making, being an artist, can work in your life the way religion does for other people. In other words, it makes sense out of a chaotic universe where bad things happen to good people. I like the idea that work is to pray, whatever your work is.
For me, to dance is to pray or to choreograph is to pray. And this is my Catholic piece. even though I’m not an atheist or agnostic. My joke is, I’m a collapsed Catholic. You get that. That’s good. But I’m proud of it. I had some people watching yesterday to give me feedback, and I feel that there’s a sense of craft. It’s poetic. It’s three sections. The first section is seekers or travelers. The second section is a couple. A man and a woman are featured, and I think of them as ancestors.
Then there’s the third section that I call “saints”. Everyone’s a saint. And I have a great love for religious kitsch. I have a collection of religious kitsch. I love religious art. I had all my books of, you know, da Vinci’s painting of the Annunciation, and we looked at the Last Supper. I have a book from the recent Met exhibit about very early religious art. We literally took shapes and gestures from these religious paintings and put them into this dance that I hope acts as a prayer for right now and a requiem for everything we’re losing.
Q: It sounds like you found an ability to get along with your parents despite their religiosity and your aberration from their standards.
Seán Curran: Yes, we’ve come through fire, and before my dad passed, we really came together. He knew I was in the chair at NYU’s Dance Program. He knew that was happening, and I take great comfort that he knew it They let me be a dancer, but they never understood why I wanted to do that. The kind of dance that I wanted to do was very weird to them. My father, if he came to one of our shows, would look over his shoulder at intermission to the people in the row behind him and say, “Did you happen to get any of that? It went right over my head.”
He’d start talking to them, and my mother and sister would be embarrassed, but I said, “Dad, keep doing that. That’s art doing its job. You just sat in a theater for 45 minutes in the dark with all these strangers. If you’re talking to them in intermission, you’re making friends, and that’s art doing its job.”
Q: Which parent was from the Irish county of Roscommon?
Seán Curran: My mother.
Q: And your dad?
Seán Curran: From Ballinagar, and he was born in Kerry. Sadly, his father died while he was an infant, so my grandmother had to move to Crosshaven outside of Cork City. I was in Dublin two summers ago. I ran down to see my father’s family in Crosshaven and it was great. I look just like my father, now that I’m an old guy. Everyone was astonished. They thought they were looking at him.
Q: I pulled a picture off your website and saw you were wearing what I would call a yarmulke, a little beanie that you had on.
Seán Curran: I don’t remember what picture that is. I did make a piece with Central Asian music, where it’s not unlike a yarmulke. They covered their heads and we were costumed that way. That’s interesting.
Q: It looked like a Sephardic yarmulke. I’m Jewish, and the irony of it is that since I’ve been working for Paddy off and on for 25 years, I’ve learned more about Catholicism than any Jew I know.
Seán Curran: I love it. Happy Passover! It’s yesterday we were all here rehearsing, and I didn’t plan it this way. But the majority of my company is actually Jewish. So the hamantashen and rugelach, we had our little Passover rehearsal party.
For more on the company go to: seancurrancompany.com