Nina Watt: fusing the emotion and movement - modern dancer - Interview

Dance Magazine, March, 1996 by Terry Trucco

NINA WATT HAS BECOME A MAINSTAY OF THE LIMON DANCE COMPANY, PERFORMING AT THE KENNEDY CENTER THIS MONTH.

It's a sultry summer day in Purchase, New Yor, where the Limon Dance Company is in residence for its annual summer workshop at the State University of New York campus. In a huge, studio, Ninan Watt, the radiant modern dancer, is getting ready for a command performance. A workshop student, impressed by Watt's performance of Daniel Nagrin's solo, Spanish Dance, during a company presentation the previous night, has asked if she will dance it again. Watt obliges, graciously. "It's only four minutes long," she explains.

Still a little sweaty after an afternoon of rehearsals, Watt runs a brush through her long, strawberry blond hair and expertly twists it into a chignon, chatting amiably with her modest audience, which consists of the student and me. Then, smoothing her footless black unitard, she walks to the center of the room and takes a deep breath.

For the next few minutes, Watt seems to retreat into a world of her own, taking her two viewers with her. A technical tour de force, the solo, which Nagrin originally choreographed for himself in 1948, is peppered with rapid-fire footwork and bold jumps that Watt attacks with pinpoint precision. But her artistry, intensity and oneness with the music elevate this impromptu performance above mere technical fireworks, unleashing its emotional resonance. It's easy to believe she once thought she'd be an actress.

Instead, Nina Watt became one of the preeminent modern, dancers of her generation with an ability to dance almost anything. That facility has proved a near perfect fit with the Limon Dance Company, her home troupe for nearly twenty-five years. Besides leading roles in Jose Limon's great dramatic classics, including There Is a Time, Dances for Isadora and The Moor's Pavane, Watt's enormous repertory encompasses works by Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, Anna Sokolow, Susanne Linke, Kurt Jooss, Annabelle Gamson, Phyllis Lamhut, Jiri Kylign and, most recently, Ralph Lemon and Donald McKayle.

Dramatic dance is her forte, particularly works like Moor's Pavane that allow her to communicate a range of emotions and to respond to music. "I've never thought of dance in a technical, gymnastic way," she says. "It's always been very personal for me. So I've never understood doing pieces that didn't relate to me or pieces that I don't like."

Still, she has a gift for finding poetry in abstract pieces as she did in Hollow Lady, an idiosyncratic solo Alwin Nikolais created for her in 1991. (After Watt remarked during rehearsal one day that it would be fun if she could make her braid stand straight up, the choreographer devised a quirky headdress for her that points up, like an enormous swirl of soft ice cream.

Watt's lengthy career has not gone unnoticed by the critics. Camille Hardy in Dance Magazine declared her unquestionably a dancer of star magnitude" back in 1986. And more recently, the New York Times called her "the perfect Limon dancer, fusing emotion and movement into what becomes deeply humanistic imagery."

These qualities should be on display when Watt dances during the Limon company's visit to the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., on March 29 and 30. This is also an opportunity to see a superb modern dancer still at the height of her powers. Age is kinder to modem dancers than to ballerinas, but it creeps up all the same. These days, Watt, who is forty-four, will discuss her work with the company for the coming year but won't venture much beyond that. "Getting older is not so easy," she admits.

The last few years have, in fact, been bumpy for Watt. First there was knee surgery which, fortunately, was successful. But with her perfectionist tendencies, the longer she performs, the more difficult she says it becomes to summon the physical and, especially, mental energy to dance. "You don't think about that at eighteen, when you throw yourself into it with a passion," she explains. She recalls the emotion she felt after reading published selections from the diary of veteran ballerina Virginia Johnson a while back in which Johnson confessed that she often thought of quitting her art. "It was so inspiring to read that," Watt says. "I saw myself in it.

Yet she is grateful to be in a company stocked with meaty roles for dancers past the ingenue stage (Limon's richest burst of creativity came in his forties). "There's flexibility in the modem dance vocabulary," she says. "Motion is important in modern dance while ballet depends more on line. I can't jump as high as I once did, but I can bring a depth of understanding I didn't have at twenty."

In recent years Watt also began teaching the Limon style to dancers here and overseas; in 1993 she was named an artistic associate of the company. In addition, she is responsible for major reconstructions of Limon's dances. "I think I can stand it if I'm not dancing," she says quietly. She dreams of trading her New York City apartment for a house in the desert, where she'd take long walks, read about history and science and let her interests roam. "But I also feel I can go on for a while as a dancer," she adds. "The best way to handle the future now is to approach it in smaller chunks."