Bringin’ down the Hothouse
By Linda Chang
Aug. 5, 2007 9:06 p.m.
Even performance professionals sometimes must head back to school. And for a few L.A. artists, UCLA has the right summer curriculum.
Hothouse 2007, the world arts and cultures residency program for choreographers and performance artists from the L.A. community, begins today at UCLA’s Glorya Kaufman Hall. The program runs for three weeks of intense artistic creation.
The program gives eight to 10 L.A.- based artists classroom space to create or perfect works and brush up on their skills while gaining feedback from fellow participants.
Victoria Marks, a professor of choreography at WAC, founded Hothouse three years ago in reaction to artists’ solitary style. She noticed that artists often create their works in a vacuum, without enough contact with other artists.
“In previous years, artists have told me that they are grateful for the warmth and community here (at Hothouse),” Marks said. “Every Friday they’d get together to have lunch and sometimes a couple of them would strike up a conversation and get really engaged in each other’s works.”
Much like college art students earn grants to fund their educations, Hothouse gives free space to professional artists. In Los Angeles, where studio rental fees can run upwards of $100 per hour, this free space is truly a gift. Not having to worry about the financial costs allows the residents to devote their energy solely to art. Each participant is given his or her own studio space in Kaufman Hall, free of charge for four hours a day, five days a week.
“The artists like that they have a space to work in consistently. Dance is one of the lowest-funded arts, so it’s nice that everything is provided,” Marks said.
Since the participants work simultaneously, one colleague can walk into another participant’s studio and request an opinion on the work.
“I would have people come in and say to them, “˜Tell me this isn’t completely stupid.’ I didn’t want my work to be this weird thing made individually in my workspace ““ I wanted to see what other people thought of it,” said Rosanna Gamson, founder of the dance theater company Rosanna Gamson/World Wide and part of last year’s Hothouse.
The program provided an important testing ground for the creation of her dance theater piece “Ravish.” The project examines the creative environment that impelled the Brontë sisters to write steamy romantic fiction like “Jane Eyre” and “Wuthering Heights,” a fitting subject for the Hothouse program.
On the last day of the program, Gamson and the other participants shared what they had completed in front of everyone. Gamson gained important feedback when she showed them the beginnings of “Ravish.”
“You can tell how much an audience is listening just by how they look or how the room feels,” she said. “They raised questions about what I was doing.”
While it is always nerve-racking to perform in front of an audience of fellow performers, the participants insist there is no rivalry at Hothouse, but rather a supportive environment meant to foster growth. The artists sometimes even let the audience learn and participate.
“Last year, some artists developed a process that they could use in workshops to teach dancers the moves to a certain dance quickly. They had us participate and dance to see if it worked,” Gamson said.
At this year’s Hothouse, Patricia Payne, a cinema and media studies administrator for the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, and also an installation and performance artist, will be participating in the Hothouse program.
“I got excited about the opportunity to work with (other artists). I like learning how to use dance to get my message across,” Payne said.
Payne will be creating a show called “Cruzifiction,” about a fictional encounter between singer Celia Cruz and one of her fans.
The performance deals with the idolization of Cruz, who shares Payne’s Afro-Caribbean origins. Payne will share these themes by incorporating video projects, text from Cruz and her then-fiance’s love letters, and possibly dance into a polka-dotted, interactive installation space.
With this year’s Hothouse program, Marks hopes to have Payne and the other participating performance artists share their art with an even broader audience of UCLA students in the fall.
“I’ve always thought if we give free space to artists, it might have a great impact on our students because they can share their work with them,” Marks said.
Allowing artists to share their work in creative collaboration rather than struggle through the artistic process in solitude is an important cause for Marks and she only hopes the program will expand.
“A hothouse is a place where things grow under very focused circumstances,” Marks said. “It’s a plant house, where dancers get lots of light, attention and no bugs.”
