TALKING WITH BANNING BOULDIN ABOUT THE NEW ‘21 YESES’

BY Amy Stumpfl

We often think of lighting as something of an add-on in an onstage performance — a design element that helps guide the eye while illuminating and enhancing the performers. But with the upcoming premiere of New Dialect’s 21 Yeses, those elements are actually built right into the choreography itself.

It’s just the sort of innovative work that drives Banning Bouldin, who founded New Dialect in 2013. Her goal has always been to help build a more robust contemporary dance ecosystem in her hometown. As the company’s artistic director, Bouldin has created a host of imaginative new works. But in recent years, she’s been particularly drawn to working with tangible objects and materials that both support and inspire her choreography.

“I haven’t been this excited since I made The Triangle five years ago,” says the Nashville native and Juilliard graduate, who has garnered national attention for her contributions to the dance world. “I learned so much from that process — that’s really when I started using functional objects in unconventional ways, creating sculptural formations and lifelines between the dancers. So I’m really happy to keep pulling threads from that practice forward into 21 Yeses. Not only that, but the objects in this case are being used to cast light and to generate the visual effects for the work.”

It all started when Tracey Ford, a principal/owner at EOA Architects, approached Bouldin about the possibility of creating a dance installation for Nashville Design Week. A longtime dance lover, Ford had seen The Triangle at OZ Arts, along with Neon Nights — an immersive installation Bouldin created with New Dialect in 2021 that featured lighting concepts from Michael Brown, a Nashville-based production designer known for his work with Bon Iver.

“When Tracey asked if I would be interested in making something for Nashville Design Week, I was honestly terrified,” Bouldin says. “You know — terrified in the way that, as an artist, you know you’re right on the edge of your competency. It’s a good kind of terror, but still.

“My creative producer partner and I had been talking about how much we’d loved working with Michael Brown, and all that we’d learned from him as a production designer in the concert industry. So my partner said, ‘What if we take those wireless LED tubes that you see at concerts, and use them in your choreography?’ That was it — I couldn’t wait to jump in.”

Bouldin gathered a team of dancers and set up an experimental rehearsal environment that focused on how the LED tubes might best be utilized — from building the choreography to having the dancers create their own lighting design in real time. Together they created a 20-minute piece for Design Week that premiered at Soho House Nashville in November. A second performance took place as part of OZ Arts’ 10th Anniversary Bash in April.

“It was such a fascinating moment of reveal for us,” Bouldin says. “Looking at the way these LED tubes could impact the choreography, and then using the choreography to cause the lighting design — we realized that we were blurring the line between dance and design. The use of light and darkness, the shifts in coloration and intensity — it was so evocative. Audiences were really moved, but said it also felt very meditative. Over and over they said, ‘I just wanted it to keep going.’”

Heeding that call, Bouldin decided to expand the piece to an evening-length theatrical production under the direction of Michael Brown. Co-presented with the Tennessee Performing Arts Center, New Dialect’s 21 Yeses will premiere Nov. 22 at TPAC’s Johnson Theater. The project is funded, in part, by a grant from South Arts, in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts and the Tennessee Arts Commission.

In choosing to present the work in TPAC’s intimate Johnson Theater, Bouldin says she hopes audiences will feel like “they’re inside the dream.”

“It feels like this incredible space odyssey, but instead of watching the visual effects happen to the dancers from a distance, we’re hoping audiences feel like they’re part of the journey. The design is meant to evoke sensation, and I think dance composition does the same thing when you’re wielding it well. But we’re also playing with things that dance doesn’t normally play with here — that feeling of being at a concert or club, being inside the visual effects. I think that blurring of lines offers a neat point of engagement for audiences.

“I’m so excited for this work to have its world premiere here in Nashville,” she adds. “When I first started New Dialect, so many folks from the dance field were like, ‘You’re going to try that in Nashville?’ So the fact that we’re in our 11th season — that we’ve been met with so much support, and the dance community has grown so much over the last decade — is just amazing. I feel really proud to be working in this city, and to be sharing this piece with Nashville first.” 

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Intro by Nashville Design Week:

Rewinding back to 2023, Tracey Ford of EOA Architects and Banning Bouldin of New Dialect teamed up to submit a proposal for a Nashville Design Week event. In reviewing the “Design for Dance” application, our content curators gave a resounding “yes” to the submission, so this new project could have a platform to experiment. New Dialect leaned into the idea of dancers creating their own lighting design in real time and this research was unveiled during Nashville Design Week at Soho House. The feedback sparked the performance’s evolution into an evening-length theatrical production called, 21 Yeses, which premieres just one year after its inception this November.

Nashville Design Week invited Banning back to share the story of how it all began and what the future holds for 21 Yeses.

Jayla Jackson - Can I start by asking, where does the name New Dialect come from?

Banning Bouldin - That’s a great question. So philosophically for me, dance and language are inextricably linked. I believe that all movement is body language, and that new movement languages and dance styles can be created when we share our own body languages and influences with each other. When individual dancers come together to improvise and as a group choose to repeat specific physical choices, this process over time contributes to the creation of new movement dialects. So the name New Dialect refers to this search for body languages. It’s a search for many new dialects, not just one.

Jayla - What got you into this kind of dancing? Because, of course, it sounds like a step up from your average form of contemporary dance.

Banning - I wouldn't say it’s a step up necessarily. I know many contemporary dancers around the world who are investigating their own improvisations, what their movement style is, and what contributions they’re interested in making through collaborations with other like-minded artists. For me personally, as both a dancer and a choreographer, I want to create and curate environments with other dancers who also like working collaboratively, and who are interested in research and experimentation. In the case of 21 Yeses, for example, I am actively researching the intersection of kinetic sculpture, lighting design, and choreography with a team of four dancers. 

Jayla - What drew you to the addition of lights? That's what I'm really curious about, because that's fascinating. I’ve never seen anything like it before your “Design for Dance” event last year. 

Banning - I had never seen anything like it before either, ha ha.

We have the great advantage with New Dialect of knowing many wonderful artists across the fields of dance, design, and production. My creative partner, Teten, and I have a great relationship with a production designer, Michael Brown, who does a lot of lighting and visual effects design for bands like Bon Iver, the National, and Death Cab for Cutie. He comes from a totally different world than we do and uses entirely different instruments and fixtures for productions than what we typically use in theatrical contexts.

We first had an opportunity to collaborate with Michael a few years ago to create an outdoor installation at Cheekwood. It was such an elucidating process for us we knew we wanted to work with Michael again. So when Tracey Ford and EOA Architects approached us with their interest in supporting us to create an event for Design Week, immediately, Teten and I were like, “How can we take what we learned from Michael and use this as an opportunity to expound on my interest in working with functional objects sculpturally, but in a way that also creates the lighting design?” It was a real culmination of different relationships and ideas that we had been marinating on together for a few years. Design Week was the right time and context for us to implement them. Bringing in these wireless LED tube lights that are remotely programmable really encouraged me to expand on my history of using different physical materials in sculptural ways, and added a whole new dimensionality to that research with the lighting design.

Jayla - For sure, and let's dive a little bit into that. Could you just tell me about your “Design for Dance” event for NDW last year and how that experimental show led to being on a bigger stage now?

Banning - So Tracey Ford and EOA Architects have been hugely supportive. Tracey's a big dance lover, and I've always felt really supported by her. She's an architect, very involved in Nashville Design Week, and she also sees, in my choreography, a real interest in architecture and sculpture design. She's the one who invited us to create something for Design Week. We also have a wonderful partnership with Metro Parks and Recreation, and they provided a studio residency for us to experiment with the technology of wireless, remote-controlled tube lights to see how we could choreograph the movement and the lighting design at the same time, to see if the dancers could, in effect, create their own light. 

After we got great feedback from the first installation at SoHo House, we started thinking, how can we amplify the experience that we were having by drawing in more concert lighting design elements to further erase the line between audience and performer? So we talked to South Arts, a regional arts funder, about the possibility of expanding this work, and they were really excited about the idea. We reached out to Tennessee Performing Arts Center because their president, Jennifer Turner, is doing such wonderful things to promote dance and the future of dance in our city. It was really just the confluence of some wonderful partnerships that allowed us to transform a Design Week installation at SoHo House into an evening length production at Tennessee's largest performing arts theater.

Jayla - That's incredible. What pre-production challenges are you facing or forsee facing? 

Banning - I have a fluency in working with lighting design elements that are more traditional for theatrical stage environments. So it's been a big learning curve understanding concert lighting design elements and trying to figure out which fixtures are going to make the most sense in this non-traditional context that we're pulling them into. Typically concert lighting design elements are used in these huge arena-style environments, and so it’s a creative challenge to pull them into the smaller scale of a black box theater, to use such powerful tools in such an intimate space.

Jayla - Without, of course, giving away too much, what can your audience expect to see during 21 Yeses at TPAC this fall? 

Banning - Audiences can expect a full sensory experience. The show is an odyssey of sorts, so it has all the variations of an odyssey. There are deeply calming moments where everything grows quiet, where darkness grows into a vast stillness that feels almost luxurious. And there are moments of intense brilliance, moments where the light and sound and the motion of the dancers seem to perfect each other. We really hope at the end of it everyone comes away feeling like they know what 21 Yeses means, like they've experienced a kind of pleasurable meditation.