Optimism can be tough to summon even in calm times. The present is clearly not that. But Juliana F. May, known for weaving movement, text and song into a complex choreographic language, is feeling defiant. She named her new dance “Optimistic Voices.”
For her, titles are artistic prompts. “There’s something so audacious and kind of impossible about optimism,” she said. “I was like, OK, I’m going to start with this hopeful, slightly ironic prompt.”
In “Optimistic Voices,” opening on Wednesday at BAM Fisher, May is on a mission: to explore sincerity. Songs are her pathway. For the past 10 years or so, she has been inserting them into her dances, so much so that they are now on equal footing with the movement.
“There’s something about songs that allow you to say very hopeful things, but for people not to completely cringe on it because of the history of pop music,” she said. “We accept it. And so it’s given me permission to kind of say some very big things about myself, about the world, about my children, about being a parent.”
As the mother of three boys, ages 3, 6 and 11, May is “deeply in the trenches,” she said. “I have no time, but it’s also made me be incredibly efficient as an artist because I’m constantly hiding and finding spaces to go make my work. And I’m constantly singing with them in the bathtub, and they’re telling me to shut up.”
In “Optimistic Voices,” May, 45, wrestles with her early artistic and erotic awakenings, and family, past and present, to create a work of songs and movement that she calls a dance show album.
The setting evokes a rec room, a basement. The stage is covered in wall-to-wall ruby-red carpet, and her cast of six, in a mix of jazz shoes and sneakers, wear costumes that echo the late 1970s and early 1980s.
“I think there was something about wanting a compression of musical theater and postmodernism,” she said. “It felt like the only thing that we had that could kind of ground us inside of that was like an inside space, like a living room.”
Lately she has started to think of it as an attic, a space that her husband, a psychologist, told her speaks to the unconscious. “We’re starting the piece with this kind of like Stockhausen, Gregorian thing about sex in the attic,” May said, referring to the opening song that includes harmonies with lyrics like, “Come home with me in the attic” and “Are you hot for me in the attic?”
Another of May’s early influences is Robin Byrd, the former pornographic actress who has long hosted a show on cable access television. At times the dances have an aura of awkward sensuality as repetitive phrases are knitted together like crawls and rolls on the soft carpet and frenetic crossover steps that breeze across the stage.
Duets and trios converge mid-carpet like mini sculpture gardens. In other moments dancers shuffle on their toes, plunging a fist through the underside of a shirt or tights. There’s a sense of anxiety; pent-up emotions are released through songs, which are performed a cappella by the dancers who layer their harmonies a bit like a school choir.
As her work has pushed more and more into music, May has looked at how the ballad operates inside of musical theater and “how it kind of lets us into this saturated emotional landscape of a person,” she said. “I want that in my work. And there’s something about my training as a choreographer and the work that I’ve seen or maybe been influenced by that is more stripped of those things.”
May grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, steeped in musical theater — watching movies and going to Broadway on occasion, as well as to dinner theater in Florida. She also studied improvisation and composition under Laurie J. Roth at the Trevor Day School in Manhattan.
Roth, a dance educator who was rebelling against her own dance training, met May when the choreographer was in sixth grade. “I’m more technical now,” Roth said. “But when I first started teaching, I was really convinced I could teach everything through improvisation.”
She described the young May as a force. “What I really remember of her was this incredible use of space she had both as a mover and as a choreographer,” she said, later adding, “It’s like you either connect to your body and how it communicates or you don’t.”
May made dances from an early age and had other contemporary influences as well. When Roth was on leave, the choreographer Jodi Melnick filled in; May recalled learning the beginning phrase work from “In the Upper Room,” a Twyla Tharp classic. Melnick would also improvise with the students. “The most fascinating thing about Jodi,” May said, “is that her body was so central to her teaching.”
“Optimistic Voices” is about May being honest about her interest in both experimental and more accessible forms. “It’s not that I’m just saying, Oh, now I want this thing, I want the other,” she said, “but that I want them together.”
The pull between the two is related to her early influences — musical theater, Tharp, Melnick and others — and how, in some ways, “Optimistic Voices” is a tunnel into them. She’s also trying to understand what beauty means to her and to her work. She’s not a trained musician and yet she composes songs. “They’re demanding, they demand a high-register falsetto in some situations,” she said. “And it takes a lot of virtuosity to do those things.”
For May, the magic happens when virtuosity is met with difficulty. “You see the truth of the moment, of whether someone can do something or not,” she said. “And it takes a lot of practice because I don’t want to fail at the end of the day. But it has to be sincere.”
Gia Kourlas is the dance critic for The Times. She writes reviews, essays and feature articles and works on a range of stories.
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