Interview with Alyssa Mitchel, Choreographer
This weekend, the North Carolina Museum of Art (NCMA) will host the regional premiere of Regard, a dance performance with choreographer Alyssa Mitchel and featuring dancers from Carolina Ballet. Mitchel is a San Francisco-based choreographer who creates an extremely physical and dynamic style of movement. She premiered Regard in partnership with The Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM). Regard recently won the Inspired Dance Film Festival’s 2024 “Best Live Performance Capture” award in Sydney, Australia. Regard also recently toured to Los Angeles for the 2024 Women in Dance Leadership Conference. We spoke to Mitchel about the upcoming performances and the Jewish influences on her work.
Choreographer Alyssa Mitchel (Photo credit: Frank Navas Photography)
What is your background when it comes to Judaism and Jewishness?
I grew up in San Francisco. In 2nd grade, I started going to Hebrew school. When I was 13, I had a bat mitzvah. To this day, we belong to a Reconstructionist synagogue, Or Shalom, and I continue to go to High Holiday services and have Jewish traditions with my family. We celebrate Shabbat every Friday. At our Shabbat dinners, we have a tradition where we will go around and reflect on the week. We each mention something we are proud of and something we want to achieve in the coming week. I’ve never been super strict, but we have family traditions that are important to us.
How did the upcoming collaboration with NCMA and Carolina Ballet come about?
I started working on Regard in 2022, then premiered it in August 2023 at the Contemporary Jewish Museum. After the show closed, I didn’t want it to be over. It was so beautiful in that gallery, so I wanted it to continue. I contacted a bunch of Jewish museums all over the country. I even went to New York to visit Jewish museums. A few museums reached out but didn’t have the budget for a performance.
I connected with Sean Burrus about a year ago. He had interest in Regard and I sent him video footage. We continued to talk, and this May he came to the Bay Area and we had lunch together. We continued to talk about the possibilities and thinking about what could happen. In September, Sean called me and said there was an opening for a dance group to perform at NCMA. The idea of setting this on the Carolina Ballet was awesome, because it gave me a chance to work with new dancers and the opportunity for them to do something much more contemporary with their strong level of training. We just finished our first rehearsal on Monday!
How do you approach integrating dance with your Jewishness?
However you observe Judaism, one theme I’ve encountered is the ability to ask questions and to reflect. There’s a lot of Jewish commentary that inspires me. As dancers, especially in the ballet world, we are told to listen to the director and not say anything. An important part of my Jewishness and art is that in the studio, we have open dialogue and communication. We work as a team, and really think about our characters and intentions behind the movements. Ask yourself questions, and ask others questions.
I premiered the piece in the Stephen and Maribelle Leavitt Yud Gallery at CJM. The gallery has 36 windows that bring in natural lighting in patterns on the floor. The number 36 is important in Jewish mysticism, so the ability to have dancers inside the windows and use that space connected me back to Jewishness.
It was also wonderful to collaborate with other Jewish artists not involved in dance. David Goldblatt, second cellist of the San Francisco Symphony accompanied the dancers in the world premiere of Regard in August 2023. ORLUarts, Bay Area-based muralist (also known as Liv Losee-Unger) designed six beautiful six-foot tall mobile murals that the dancers transported throughout the CJM's Yud Gallery. While the original murals won’t be in the space, I will be working with the tech people to have projections of the murals throughout the piece. The murals will be matched with each section and the different themes.
Regard was inspired by the disintegration of relationships, harsh criticism of artists, and how we relate to others with opposing views. How have your views on these topics changed since you first began working on Regard in 2016? Or in the last year? And how does this impact the evolution of the piece?
It’s been a hard year with what has gone on. October 7th happened two months after the original premiere of Regard. That highlighted the divisions of people, especially because one of the sections, “Trust” (which will close the upcoming show) was inspired by Martin Buber, a Jewish philosopher who wrote I and Thou, his most famous work. He discusses two ways of relating to other people. With the “I-It” relationship, we think of each other as objects and we don’t see each other fully. In the “I-Thou” relationship, we meet each other where we are. Buber wanted Israel to be a place where there was equality with Israelis and Palestinians coming together. It was interesting reflecting on Buber, wanting people to accept each other.
I wanted the audience to see the possibilities of coming together despite the divisions we face. The past year has been hard, to see how people can be so against each other and seeing how complex relationships are. That was why this piece was so important to me. I wanted to find unity and acceptance and trust in each other, which is why that final section is called “Trust.”
In terms of criticism of artists, I’ve gone through ups and downs. In my journey, I had a period of thinking about what I want to do next. I think there’s so much division in the world, which is why an audience member wrote to me last year how Regard is so important. More people need to see it because, now more than ever, our world needs to come together.
Where do you see taking Regard in the future?
I brought Regard to Los Angeles for the 2024 Women in Dance Leadership Conference three weeks ago.. It’s been nice to see Regard continuing to go to different places. I would love to set this work with more dance companies. I would be honored to bring it back to the CJM, but this has been my goal for a while.
I’m excited about this weekend! To go to a different part of the country and work with new dancers, to set the production somewhere else and to be in a museum I’ve never been to. NCMA is gorgeous and I’m excited to check it out! I would love to see it in more museums around the country, with more dancers. I think more dance also needs to be in museums. It’s so wonderful when that happens. Last year, we had a diverse audience of people from all over the world at the museum.
With Ballet companies, it’s nice for me to challenge the dancers to move in a different way. This work has a lot of different styles fusing several elements of my own dance background including, contemporary and modern with a ballet base, as well as elements of circus arts, hip hop, jazz and tap.
Some dancers I used to train and dance with live here in Raleigh, and they are both continuing to create work in contemporary dance and musical theater. There’s such a great art scene, and theater is flourishing here, too. I was mostly contacting Jewish museums but starting to connect with other museums. I haven’t been to North Carolina since I was five, so I love exploring new places! I’ve invited these two friends to the performance.
Is there anything you want our readers to understand about the upcoming performance?
I want people to interpret it as they want. In dance there are no words. It’s about you finding ways to connect to the movement. The original work was 80 minutes, and we are going to show 30 minutes of it with three of the most powerful sections. The first one is a duet I created in 2016. That was based on a personal experience of mine with a friendship that disintegrated. The 2nd section is about artists and critics, the inner versus outer critics. The 3rd part is based on Martin Buber’s I and Thou. I think people should come in with an open mind. I’m really excited to share this with the community, and I am also interested in hearing what everyone else observes. Hopefully, we have a discussion after, too, so think about your questions to ask! Being able to talk with the artists and people from the museum will be a nice way to learn more and dive deeper into the work.
The performance of Regard will take place at the North Carolina Museum of Art on Saturday, November 16 at 7pm and on Sunday, November 17 at 1pm. This event is FREE, but registration is required. CLICK HERE to register.