Culture Mill: Talking with Strangers by David Norsworthy

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Alvin Collantes

Canadian dancer and choreographer David Norsworthy.

In his native Toronto, choreographer David Norsworthy has spent years investigating artists’ relationships with, and responsibilities to, their communities. Using dance for collective good involves continually questioning its relevance: “Why does it matter, both to me and the community?” Norsworthy has pursued this question in a three-week residency in Saxapahaw with Culture Mill, facilitating a series of conversations with people both within and outside of our region’s dance community. Those talks have been seasoned by the “interventions” of local social activists in theater, literature, and dance. “It’s very easy, even seductive, for an artist to think only within their own perspective,” Norsworthy says. “I’m just trying to get out of the bubble of my own head.” According to Tommy Noonan, co-director of Culture Mill, at the end of the twenty-one-day residency, we won’t see a finished product. Instead, we’ll see the immediacy of a performative process with an artist still engaged in the raw business of interrogating his findings. —Byron Woods