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Friday, Mar 29, 2024

Spotlight On: Catherine Cabeen

Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance Catherine Cabeen, also artistic director of Catherine Cabeen and Company (CCC), proves through her work that artistic creation can be an intellectual activity. While many students were enjoying the change of pace offered during winter term, Cabeen was busy creating, producing and performing in her company’s newest evening-length work, “Fire!”

“[‘Fire!’] is meant to be a response to Niki de Saint Phalle’s life and work,” Cabeen said. “As a female artist in the 1960’s all of the reviews of her early work talk about how beautiful she is much more than work that’s on the wall. She had no artistic training or invitation to study the arts as a child. ‘Fire!’ was a sad piece for me to make because I wanted to make a piece about how gendered expectations in arts and education have shifted and instead it ended up being about how many things have stayed the same. I’m hoping to problematize some of those things we take for granted, asking why we continue to judge female professionals on their appearances in a way that often overshadows the work they do.”

Cabeen identified some thematic ideas discerned from Saint Phalle’s work. She wanted “Fire!” to reflect acts of creation through destruction that are evident in Saint Phalle’s shooting paintings, as well the contradictory nature of mosaics as both fragmented and unified artistic works. Finally, with both formal and moral considerations, Cabeen was interested in Saint Phalle’s use and celebration of her own body in her work.

“A lot of the questions I’m wrestling with in my creative work also anchor the Ethics/Aesthetics/Body course that I will be teaching this spring at Middlebury,” she said.

In addition to her early training in the classical and rigorous traditions of ballet and Martha Graham technique, Cabeen spent a significant portion of her professional career dancing as a member of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company in work with a conscious social and political agenda. Cabeen’s aesthetic seems to emerge from a measure of incongruity between the formality of her training and the aggressive political activism of her professional experience. Her work reflects, in a way, an ongoing moral and aesthetic debate.

“A lot of contemporary feminist art actively rejects classical Western ideals of beauty as a way to create friction in relation to the male gaze,” she said. “However, I find the human body to be incredibly beautiful. I find the bodies of the women in my company to be incredibly beautiful, I find color to be beautiful, I find nature to be beautiful. My artistic question now is: how can I create something that is balanced, structured, classically beautiful, that is at the same time self-conscious, and able to comment on the subject-object relationship that it seduces the viewer into. ‘Fire!’ was one attempt at an answer and I learned a lot through making the piece.”

Cabeen will be offering a lecture demonstration sharing the historic research and creative process on Wednesday, Feb. 20 in the Kevin P. Mahaney ’84 Center for the Arts Dance Theatre at 4:30 p.m.


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