Former New York City Ballet principal dancer Lauren Lovette is now a rising star choreographer, unafraid to create new works on dancing bodies trained in classical ballet and modern techniques. As the newly appointed resident choreographer for the prominent Paul Taylor Dance Company, she is looking for ways to push the art form's boundaries while maintaining a balance with established aesthetics. She spoke with Dance ICONS, Inc., about her artistic roots, creative processes, and current and upcoming projects.

Dance ICONS: Tell us about your journey from performing to choreography.

Lauren Lovette: I was choreographing long before I ever danced and was always a kid who liked to move. I was hyperactive by nature and home-schooled my entire life. I spent much of my time with my siblings, and I loved to create funny little dances for them, dress them up in costumes, and have them burst out of the closet on a certain part of the music.

I didn’t get into dance until I was eleven, and that was because my aunt owned a dance store. That was my first introduction to dance. I got a free class to see if I had any talent for ballet because the director of California Dance Theatre in Southern California, Kim Maselli, walked into the store at the right time while I was twirling around with my shoes off. She was the reason I danced.

I was grateful to be able to continue dancing on scholarship because my family could not afford ballet classes, and my aunt generously drove me since she had the store nearby. I always loved ballet, even in its structure and confinement, and it allowed me to find freedom in the music. Despite my intuition to break free of structure, the different combinations of steps also inspired me.

When I made my way to New York after years of training, the Balanchine style reinforced the importance of music and big movements that are much more dynamic and playful than some classical techniques. 

ICONS: Can you tell us about when you choreographed for the first time in New York?

LL:  When I choreographed the first time, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I was homeschooled my whole life, and when I was trying to cope with being around kids my age, I felt so ill-equipped for the real world.

 
I had a lot of tools in one regard, like introspection and emotional depth, but my social skills and confidence weren’t there. Those had to be practiced, so I was reading self-help books because I didn’t want to be afraid or anxious all the time. One of the books said to do one scary thing every day. So, what I did was sign up for the Student Choreographic Workshop, where I learned how to work with other dancers in the studio. I was really grateful to Kay Mazzo, the head of the school at the time, who forced me to develop my skills and gain confidence. 

ICONS: What about choreography is challenging for you?

LL:I resisted it every step of the way. It’s the most vulnerable thing we can do in dance. Even more than just having our moving bodies be seen, choreographing is having our minds be seen – all movements of the mind.

 For me, that was just too much. I was able to accept having people form opinions about my body, but looking into my brain?! I was not ready for that, and I don’t know that I ever would have been ready if I wasn’t pushed to do more of it. 

In my experience, we are never really ready to deal with hard things and only begin to gain confidence when we begin believing that we're capable of it. I have loved coming to the realization that these are really an opportunity to prove to ourselves that we are strong.

ICONS: How do you create – in terms of beginning, middle, and ending?

LL: I love creating because there’s no right or wrong way to do it. A dance piece may begin with a concept or idea; other times it starts with music, and sometimes it is just a bigger societal problem I am trying to work out. 

In one of the latest works I am choreographing with Colorado Ballet, the inspiration was the environment of the place itself. It started with thinking: What does work feel like in Colorado? What is it like in the mountains? I go to Vail every summer and I feel intimately close to the mountains of Colorado. Then I found this music called Three Views of a Mountain, which gave me the structure I needed to put some ideas into movement.

ICONS: Could you talk more about how you find inspiration?

LL: Inspiration comes in different forms. When dancing, the process is about absorbing information and then asking: What do I do with this material? How can I make it interesting and personal? How do I take it up a notch from the last dancer who performed it?

When choreographing, the process of input and output is different; it’s about looking, choosing and presenting various views of something that relate to the creator's individuality. I love the expanse of it. For me, it feels liberating, and my whole world just burst open when I started working more creatively in this way.

I've never been a very good researcher. However, I am good at absorbing much information and saving what is interesting. I often take the things that I've seen, heard or learned from years ago and weave them together. I feel like a sponge, open to whatever comes along. I never know how the dots will connect until they've connected. Every time I finish the creation of a dance, it brings me to tears because it honestly surprises me.

ICONS: Do you have a favorite or recurring collaborator in your process?

LL: My favorite collaborators are the open-minded ones with good communication skills. I'm not a micromanager, so I don't need to have control of the whole process and prefer the process of going back and forth and meeting in the middle.

I love working with Zac Posen. He's a brilliant designer, an expert draper, and a wonderful collaborator. He doesn't spend as much time sketching or drawing, but what makes him a genius is that he'll be in space, creating in real time. That's how I work as a choreographer as well. I don't spend hours in my room by myself finding moves that feel perfect and then pasting them on people. But once I'm in that room with the dancers, there's no place I would rather be.

ICONS: You're premiering a new piece at Lincoln Center at the Paul Taylor Dance Company this fall. What can you tell us about the work?

LL:  The world premiere this season is titled Echo. This piece came to be because this season, Michael Novak decided to do Vespers, the amazing all-female piece by Ulysses Dove for all of the Taylor women.

Michael came to me and said, “Would you be down to make a piece for the men?” At the same time, I had been playing around with an idea that has been on my mind for some time: statistics that show men are more likely to be ones suffering from incarceration rates, depression, dropping out of school, suicide, addiction, and substance abuse issues. 

I've wanted to do a piece about men and gender and what it means to be a man within the unrest and societal expectations in our nation. All this is on my mind as a proud feminist and someone who fights for women's equality and learning how to say no and speak up for myself.

But what do I know about being a man? Nothing, I’m a woman. I thought Zac Posen would be the perfect collaborator for this project. Something that I wanted to highlight was how the dancers were each different but also had the potential to change throughout the course of the dance, which is a lot to ask about costumes. 

Zac had the brilliant idea of adding snaps to very standard-shaped fabrics and wide belts with snaps. The way he constructed each piece created endless possibilities of draping the same fabric in ways that made each dancer stand out and also speak to the question of what it means to be a man. We have these gorgeous skirts, and then they turn into Grecian gowns, and then they turn into warrior-looking pants, just with these snaps. I wanted something that shows edge, competition, physical strength, force of will, vulnerability, and softness.

ICONS: What other projects do you have coming up that you can share with us?

LL: I just finished a creative process with Colorado Ballet for a work that is premiering in the spring and I have the two premieres on Paul Taylor this fall. Also, in October, I am creating the ABT Gala Défilé: JKO School meets ABT Studio Company on the stage, and it’s over 100 dancers. I'm also choreographing for Juilliard this season, working with the first-year students. We're collaborating with a classical guitarist I know and love who's currently pursuing their doctorate at Juilliard, and my goal is to show the versatility of the Juilliard School dancers and the many styles they excel at.

Next year, I am also doing a piece for the New Jersey Ballet that will be performed at NJPAC in May. 

One other project I am excited about is co-directing the Nantucket Dance Festival with my longtime colleague Lauren King. We are working with women on the island who run a new nonprofit called Nantucket Dance Theater that raises money to support more dance on the island. This past summer, we took a legacy that's been a tradition on the island for 15-plus years and were able to reinvent it and rebuild it from the ground up.

There are endless things on the horizon, but let's leave it with that!

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MORE INFORMATION AND A BIOGRAPHY OF LAUREN LOVETTE:

https://www.lauren-lovette.com/about

VIDEO SAMPLE:

Choreographer Lauren Lovette and the Art of Moving People | MAKERS WHO INSPIRE

Lauren Lovette in the most recent rehearsal for Echo.

 PHOTO CREDITS:

Photography © Ruven Afanador, Lauren Lovette portrait

Photography © Whitney Browne, performance images from Pentimento (2021) and SOLITAIRE (2022), and rehearsal photos

Photography © Erin Baiano, rehearsal photos

CREATIVE TEAM ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:

Interviewer: Charles Scheland

Executive Content Editor: Camilla Acquista

Executive Assistant: Charles Scheland

Executive Director: Vladimir Angelov

Dance ICONS, Inc., October 2023 © All rights reserved.