Giving women a stronger voice, through movement

Kate Mueth has a mission: She wants to give women a stronger voice. For most people, that kind of objective might suggest a strategy of drawing on the persuasive power of language and literature, using essays and arguments or plays and fiction with compelling heroines to make the case for women being heard more clearly, for attention to be paid.

Ms. Mueth, though, is not most people.

In an interview lasting more than an hour during a break in a solo choreography rehearsal at Guild Hall two weeks ago, she never once used any of the catchwords typically associated with her goal, including the loaded labels of “feminist” or “feminism.” And it’s unlikely that she sees any irony in the fact that her efforts to give a stronger voice to women are incorporated in a performing arts medium that uses no words at all.

Ms. Mueth is a dancer. In truth, she is a lot of things—actor, choreographer, mother, wife, teacher, designer, producer—but dance, and her love of dance, shows up in all her other roles, and all her other interests likewise help to strengthen her work as a dancer.

It’s not that she doesn’t have the words, or know how to use them. She has plenty to say about the topics that ignite her passion. It’s just that she believes that dance provides the most powerful and evocative means of getting her message across.

The piece she is working on now, for presentation this summer at Mulford Farm, has a working title of “Trojan Women Redux.” It starts out with the theme of classic Greek drama “but then goes away from Euripides,” Ms. Mueth said, “and has a newly imagined ending.”

“Women’s voices aren’t heard enough,” she said. “We are taking what people try to politicize a lot, and deconstructing it and taking the politics out of it.” That effort is reflected, she suggested, in the name she is currently using for her dance company, Neo-Political Cowgirls, and in the troupe’s tag line: “We transcend politics in a wild way.”

“Women are discounted a lot. People try to put us into these safe little zones as a way to understand us,” Ms. Mueth said. “If we can see everything breaking down as being based in either fear or love, this kind of compartmentalizing is clearly a fear-based way to try to gain control over people, and then not have to think about them.”

“The more we can explore who we are and how we are,” she said, “the more we understand, the more we can get to peace. If we explore the way we do harm to each other, if we look at it, we can change.”

Ms. Mueth has been exploring identity and forms of expression through movement ever since she was a child, although she never received the kind of professional training in dance and choreography routinely listed on the resumés of people working in her profession. “A lot of choreographers are all, like, ‘My influences are this or that, Martha Graham or Alwin Nikolais,’” she said. “I can’t do that. Growing up where I grew up—in Dakota, Illinois, population 500—there just wasn’t that kind of exposure to dance.

“I’m not trying to be critical of other choreographers,” she continued, “just honest about my lack of training. I started to choreograph on my own, telling all my girlfriends what to do in my basement when I was 7.”

She took ballet classes from age 6 to 15 in a little dance studio in town, and “kind of hated them, but liked the costumes,” she said. “That was all that was available.”

Then a Bronislava Nijinska-trained dancer named Ed Parrish came to town, bringing with him foster kids he was trying to get off the streets of Chicago by giving them structure and discipline through dance. “He was amazing and taught me real technique,” Ms. Mueth said. “Basically I always wanted to be an actor. For as little dance as there was, there was absolutely no opportunity to take any kind of acting class. I could only learn from what I saw on TV.

“You want to know who my early influences were?” she asked with a laugh. “Carol Burnett is one. Not in this piece, but in other pieces, I think she comes through.”

“I am influenced by honesty in people,” she concluded after some reflection. “My dance is less about form than organic-ness. It’s more about ...” she paused, as if to be certain she was selecting the right words, “about intention, and story, than about formalized movement.

“In a lot of ways, that’s why I like working with untrained dancers. We talk about stories first, think about what it means, what the truth is. We do a table talk, just like for a theater piece, where actors sit around a table and read the work and discuss it.

“With the untrained dancers, bodies, experiences, abilities are very different. We get to the form through the process, rather than starting with the form.”

In her reimagining of “Trojan Women” as a dance piece in a contemporary context, the choreographer said that she is “de-emphasizing beauty,” while looking at what perceived beauty can do to women, and men, in terms of jealousy and vanity and self-esteem, because of the desire to have it, in oneself, or to possess it in another.

“These are not made to be pretty dances,” Ms. Mueth said. “They are raw: it has to be what’s happening inside you, palpitating through you. You have to take that soul experience and turn it inside out. The most interesting experiences are not the beautiful ones. The more theatrical ones are the raw ones with some grit to them.”

Along with the rawness, there is sensuality in the language of this kind of movement. “You can’t speak about being a woman without dealing with sensuality,” she said. “People talk about sensuality as a weakness of women sometimes, but it’s undeniably one of our strengths.”

As a choreographer, she is not that fond of using trained dancers, only because a lot of trained dancers, she said, don’t have the patience for this kind of process. She starts with the women doing movement and improvisation. “I let them go, watch them and use their organic movement,” she said, describing her process. “I look for ideas and then work at home, visualizing.”

“Trojan Women Redux” is scheduled for presentation outdoors at the East Hampton Historical Society’s Mulford Farm in late July or early August. There might be two performances, offered in rotation with Ms. Mueth’s theatrical efforts, which will be “All in the Timing” by David Ives this summer, presented in repertory with another piece, possibly a reprise of last summer’s “Sylvia” by A.R. Gurney.

The lack of certainty about this summer’s schedule is tied to the biggest challenge that Ms. Mueth is currently facing, one that has people in every kind of artistic endeavor pulling their hair out: lack of funding.

Ms. Mueth described herself as “bloody from working on grants,” at both the national foundations and local levels. “It’s incredibly time consuming,” she said, “and takes too much energy from the creative. Looking for money is exhausting and very stressful” for a person already rehearsing four days a week and, when not rehearsing, working on choreography, both for “Trojan Women Redux” and a separate project in New York City.

“You can ask anyone,” Ms. Mueth said, “I’m very good at stretching a little bit of money a long way.” She is aided in this effort, she said, by the fact that she is surrounded by “incredibly talented people who aren’t in it just for the money,” citing as examples lighting designer Sebastian Paczynsky and set designer Brian Leaver.

She would be delighted to get tax-deductible donations of any size, she said, but zeroed in, for the present, on a figure of $10,000 for her current project.

“With an annual budget of $10,000,” she said, “I could do one major production a year, at a time when a $30,000 budget for a single show is not considered a large budget.” The budget would be dedicated to production expenses, she said, noting that she will not be taking a salary and is hoping to pay the dancers in her company a stipend drawn from ticket sales.

“I want to create work for women and girls,” Ms. Mueth said, “a forum for expression.

“I’m looking for sponsors from the local community,” she continued. “It would be a great opportunity if they wanted women to have a stronger voice, or if they care about dance and want to see a different genre of art in our community.”

For more information about “Trojan Women Redux,” or to discuss sponsorship opportunities, contact Ms. Mueth at (631) 329-7130 or (212) 696-8998.