BWW Interviews: Marie-Christine Giordano

Atlantic Crossing: A Dancer Comes to New York

Marie-Christine Giordano found her passion in Switzerland as a teen; a series of unexpected events brought her to the U.S. dance capital

By Michael Goodman

Dancer and choreographer Marie-Christine Giordano is one of countless non-natives who, drawn to New York for myriad reasons, have made the city their home. A veteran of the Alvin Ailey Center school and the Martha Graham school and company, she resides in the Greenwood Heights section of Brooklyn on the edge of Park Slope. She arrived here from Switzerland as a young woman in 1987.

Her minimally furnished apartment, where she has lived for more than a decade, is in a building that previously served as a pearl factory. Presided over by her 17-year-old orange cat, Leo, it doubles as a home and studio. The studio is light and airy, pleasant even in the summer. Diaphanous white curtains billow in the wind, which with the mirrors and white walls give the visitor the sense of floating in a cloud.

Some years ago, Ms. Giordano founded her namesake dance troupe, Marie-Christine Giordano Dance. The company has benefited from a program grant that has been renewed annually since 2007 and a 2013 Community Arts Leadership grant, both awarded by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

MCGD has taken various forms over the years, but as it closes out this year with a new board of directors, new interns and new round of fundraising, Giordano hopes 2014 will mark a critical year in its development and expansion.

Sitting in her kitchen, I ask Giordano, sporting an eagle tattoo, close-cropped blonde hair and gold hoop earrings, about her introduction to movement in Fribourg, Switzerland, where she grew up. "I was seven years old," she says, in her slightly French-accented English. "My friends were taking dance classes at a local studio. I asked my parents if I could join them, but they wouldn't allow it."

Not to be deterred, Giordano decided that if she could not take classes at the studio with the other girls, she would teach herself. "When we played together, I'd watch my friends practice the movements they'd learned," she says. "Then I'd go home, close my bedroom door and, using the window as a mirror, work on my own."

Giordano's first exercise in choreography came at age 18, when she was taking dance classes at a private school outside her hometown. The school's director invited her to perform in an end-of-the year recital. She tried to recruit other students to join her, but there was no interest.

In the face of this indifference, the director suggested Giordano prepare a solo. "I hesitated at first," she says. "I was so insecure that I wasn't sure I could face an audience alone." In the end, though, she took on the challenge. It marked a turning point in her creative life.

"In the course of choreographing that piece," Giordano says, "I discovered the medium that best allowed me to express myself."

In the early years after her arrival in the U.S., she took classes as a full-time trainee in the Martha Graham Dance Company. After completing the entire range of Graham technique classes, she moved on to a year of practical training.

During this time, Yuriko, a former soloist with the company, restaged the early Graham work "Panorama." A group of dancers had been selected to begin rehearsals for the company's New York season at City Center, and later to perform at the Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, S.C., and its counterpart in Spoleto, Italy. The two months of rehearsals would serve as auditions.

Yuriko was a harsh taskmaster and drove her charges mercilessly. On one occasion, after a rehearsal, Giordano lay down, jaws clenched, and wept silently, her face to the floor to hide her tears. In the mind of the former soloist and instructor, though, her "tough love" approach was critical to the formation of a professional. Yuriko would later point to the young Swiss and say, "Do you see 'that lady' there? Jerome Robbins said that you either make a dancer or break a dancer. I made her."

In one of the rehearsals for "Panorama," the rehearsal director, Carol Fried, kept moving her around. "She said that I was so striking and beautiful that I stood out no matter where she put me," the dancer recalls. For a member of a dance ensemble, where individuality is often sacrificed in the name of exact replication of movements in unison, this was clearly not a compliment.

But for Giordano, it pointed the way to future creative endeavors. "I eventually realized the cookie-cutter approach did not work for me," she says. "To this day, I have never choreographed a piece in which dancers are forced to move together on the same beat."

Looking back on her more than fours years at the Graham Center, Giordano says that what left the greatest impression was the founder's insistence on a dancer's "sacred curiosity," her admonition to "always marvel at the world," in movement and in life. It is this that Graham deemed the mark of a true artist. "I came to realize I could do that best by exploring choreography," she explains, "not as a member of a company repeating existing dances."

As a student at the Graham school, Giordano had choreographed solos and duos of her own. The school's director, Diane Grey, astutely pointed out at one point that Giordano stood out in works of her own creation. On leaving the Graham Center, Giordano continued her exploration of movement, also performing in her own works. This would be a prelude to the founding of her own company.

MCDG's identity is founded on an approach to technique Giordano developed over the past decade while working closely with a small group of apprentices in her studio. Her works explore the texture and dynamics of dancing, which for Giordano begin with the body's center. The inner energy and strength of the core radiate outward into movements of extreme subtlety, to the point where movement is sometimes suspended.

This is a language an audience may find difficult to discern, let alone understand. It may even go over the heads of dance aficionados and experts. Giordano comments that one critic who came to a performance mistook the subtle motion in her work for inaction, entirely missing the point. "In my dances, Giordano insists, "the core is strongly engaged and at times contained, but this is not inertia."

It is quite a jump from practicing movements in a child's room in Fribourg to founding and directing one's own dance company in New York. Some are drawn to this metropolis by the sheer energy of the big city and come without a plan, leaving the outcome to providence. Others, less impulsive, recognize career opportunities in fields for which the the city is well known, finance, the arts and fashion among them.

For Giordano, though, it was a leap of faith that brought her to Manhattan, not a deliberate plan, and that leap was aided by a chance encounter. After completing her baccalaureate at age 18, she made her way to Geneva with the intent of furthering her dance studies. There she took as many classes as she could at the Ecole de danse de Genève.

One night, after a jazz dance class, the instructor approached her. A tall black man from Tahiti, Hans Camille Vancol, he had been a dancer with Les Ballets Jazz de Montreal and had also trained and performed in New York. Looking directly into Giordano's eyes, he asked bluntly, "What are you doing here? You can do it. You've got the talent to be a dancer. But you're not going to do it in Geneva. You have to get out. And it's got to be modern. It's too late to become a ballerina."

Giordano acknowledges that some Swiss can be cautious and unwilling to take risks. But with Vancol's prodding, her perception of the possible began to widen. If modern dance was to be her vehicle, it was clear she must go to New York. "He told me to look into scholarships at Alvin Ailey, which had a program for foreign students," she says. "I had studied modern languages, but I was not fluent in English. He helped me draft a letter to the Ailey school and complete the application."

Six months later, the school accepted her into its program, and by 1987, she was living and studying dance in the U.S. dance capital.

Today Giordano, a newly minted American citizen, is recruiting new dancers for 2014. Training in her technique is rigorous, and it requires about a year to learn the language fully. She is also gearing up for an ongoing outreach effort to teach dance, pro bono, to classes of 20 students, ages five to eight, at a nearby elementary school, P.S. 24, in the Sunset Park section of Brooklyn. She has taught there since 2007.

In parting, I ask Giordano, now firmly ensconced in Brooklyn, to reflect on the life she has led since she arrived in the U.S. "As soon as I got here, everything clicked," she says. "Since then it's been a string of encounters, performances, discoveries - most good, some bad, but all of them interesting." Flashing a smile, she adds, "And you know what? I'm hungry for more."

MCDG hosts salons six times a year on Sunday afternoons in which it showcases new and evolving work of its own and of other dancers, musicians, visual artists, poets and writers. For more on MCDG, visit www.mcgdance.org, follow the company at www.facebook.com/mcgiordance or write to info@mcgdance.org.

Photo Credit: Kokyat 2012

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