Four North Carolina Choreographers Bring Dynamic Works to the American Dance Festival

Made in NC | June 22, 7:30 p.m.  |  Duke’s Page Auditorium, Durham

A few years back, Courtney Liu was deciding where in the United States to settle down with her partner after some time abroad dancing for the famed British choreographer Matthew Bourne. 

“We were looking at places where I could really thrive as a dance artist,” Liu said. 

The choice came down to one classic option and one slightly unexpected one: New York City or Durham. Liu had previously spent time in both cities: In New York, she’d danced in Broadway shows like Phantom of the Opera and in the Radio City Christmas Spectacular; in Durham, she’d earned both her undergraduate and graduate degrees at Duke University.

Liu and her now-husband landed on Durham, thanks in large part to the American Dance Festival (ADF). 

“ADF has created a really special community in North Carolina for dance,” she said. “It’s a draw for so many dancers who either did the program or just want to be around dance and say, ‘I could live in this beautiful area that’s not New York or Vegas or LA, and still feel really full as an artist.’” 

On June 22, the festival will celebrate the richness of the local dance community it has helped grow with the annual Made in NC program, which is co-presented with Cary, NC. (The event will take place in Durham but an encore experience is slated for September 26 at Downtown Cary Park.) 

Made in NC will feature four world premiere works by North Carolina-based choreographers. Liu is one of them. 

“It’s always been a big celebration moment to see my friends and colleagues put up work,” she said. “I’m excited to be a part of it after seeing it for all these years.”

Each of the four choreographers on the program—Liu, whose background is in ballet and musical theater; Pretty Ugly Dance Company founder Amanda K. Miller; tap dance artist Jabu Graybeal; and jazz teacher and choreographer Tracey Durbin—will bring both a distinct artistic perspective to the ADF stage and a distinct relationship to the local dance community.

Courtney Liu

For Liu’s ADF commission, she’s going deep. Really deep. Her piece, called The 85 Percent, explores the fact that 85 percent of the ocean remains unexplored.

 “Look at what humans have done to the other 15 percent,” she told the INDY. “Maybe we could leave the 85 percent unturned. Maybe we don’t need to keep colonizing and exploring. Maybe we can satiate our curiosity for the unknown in an artistic way. It’s me exploring what the 85 percent could be without going out there and maybe unintentionally harming it.”

Who better to represent the unknown depths of the ocean than merpeople? 

“I was inspired by the idea of mermaiding as a verb—‘to mermaid’,” she said. Liu’s five merpeople include several students from Elon University where she teaches, as well as other local performers. 

“We’re creating an underwater world together,” said Liu. The costumes and set, made of all recycled materials, are created by Clare Parker, a professor of costume design at UNC Greensboro. 

For Liu, who in recent years has mostly choreographed for musical theater, it’s a chance to spend more time crafting a movement language than she usually gets. 

“That isn’t always possible when you have nine days to put up a musical,” she explained. “While I’m rooted in ballet and musical theater, these dancers are rooted in different forms, and you’ll see our collaboration come out in that way.”

In addition to her choreographic work, Liu researches the concept of flow states in dance. 

“I don’t think of flow as good or bad,” she said. “I think of it as useful or not useful for the situation. I’m aware of those dynamics at play anytime I walk into a dance space.” 

“I don’t do it on purpose,” she said, of any thematic connection between “flow” and the ocean. “I just like both these things that are watery.” 

Amanda K. Miller

Though the as-yet-untitled piece that Amanda K. Miller will premiere at Made in NC will be new, it will contain many traces of her long and storied history as an international dance artist. 

There are the costumes, recycled from an earlier work and handmade by Seth Tillett, a frequent collaborator with Miller’s former Germany-based Pretty Ugly Dance Company. There’s the music, by avant-garde Czech violinist and singer Iva Bittová, with whom Miller shares a mutual past collaborator, the English guitarist Fred Frith. Another part of the soundscape will be a recording of “baby monks”—aka young students of Buddhism—that Miller took while in India studying the religion. And there’s the setting—a sort of homecoming for Miller, who grew up in Chapel Hill, but since her return in 2009 has not shown much of her choreography. 

Miller says that her living room looks like a kaleidoscope at the moment, full of the music, pictures, and documents that weave these facets of her research and history together. For her, this approach is not just about her own personal artistic process, but about “expressing the importance of dramaturgy,” which she feels can be lost in the American dance landscape. 

“There’s an invisible depth; an invisible research history,” she said. “When that evolves within oneself, one can share it with the dancers.”

The dancers are one element of this work that will be completely new for Miller, who cast four North Carolina-based performers at an audition in Durham. 

“I was like, ‘Oh my god, I have to audition people?’” she said. “I never gave auditions at Pretty Ugly. It’s so hard.” But Miller was pleased with the turnout and the results: “I really believe in the people I work with,” she said.

For Miller, having the opportunity to create a new work in the place where she grew up “has a lot of meaning.” 

“Ever since I came back to America, I’ve wanted to help,” she said. “Europe cares about the arts, and there’s money—not money to waste, but money to not be afraid. I’ve always wanted to be able to help people here not be afraid.”

Jabu Graybeal

Take a scroll through tap dancer and choreographer Jabu Graybeal’s Instagram page—where he has upwards of 125 thousand followers—and you’ll find videos of him dancing to some songs you’d expect to see from a tap dancer, like “Singing in the Rain.” 

Mostly, though, his riveting videos are set to music not typically associated with tap dance. There’s lots of country music and hip hop. There’s Eminem and AC/DC; Old Crow Medicine Show and Lady Gaga. 

Graybeal realizes that his music choices are a bit unusual. But for him, it’s about marrying his love for tap dance with the music he actually listens to in daily life. 

“Tap dance is very close siblings with jazz music,” he said. “Growing up, I only danced to jazz, and most of my mentors thought that was the only way to do it. If you’re dancing to anything else, it’s not really tap.”

For a while, Graybeal, who grew up on a farm in Chatham County and danced with the Chapel Hill-based North Carolina Youth Tap Ensemble, stuck to jazz. 

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“But I listen to all different kinds of music—country, hip hop, alternative rock, pretty much everything,” he said. “I would dance to it in private, and found that I was the happiest dancing to what I actually wanted to listen to.”

Graybeal’s Made in NC commission, a duet for himself and another tap dancer, will explore this idea. (Though Graybeal won’t let on what music, exactly, he’ll be using—the surprise seems to be part of the fun.) For him, it’s not just about dancing to music he enjoys, but allowing unexpected music choices to unlock unexpected ideas in his dancing. “You’re gonna dance differently to a hip hop track than a classical track,” he said. “It definitely brings out new ideas and allows me to express myself in different ways.”

After many years on the road, touring with the band Postmodern Jukebox and Riverdance as well as tap artists like Caleb Teicher and Michelle Dorrance, Graybeal returned and is now based back in Chapel Hill.

“I love the people, I love the nature,” he said. “I love it here, and it’s nice to get a break from the busy life of touring. Leaving North Carolina made me appreciate North Carolina.”

Tracey Durbin

Jazz dance teacher and choreographer Tracey Durbin considers herself an instinctual artist. “I just trust my gut and go with what I feel,” she says. So when she saw a large branch on the side of the road that spoke to her, she didn’t question her desire to stop and look closer. 

The branch will be a part of her Made in NC piece, called “All Along the Watchtower.” To her, it represents Durham, a city she “used to make fun of” when she came to visit her sister, but that she has come to appreciate after seven years of living here full-time. “I love it here—the nature around me is in my blood,” she said. 

It was instinct, too, that drew her to the piece’s musical score—which includes several classic folk songs covered by Richie Havens—and its themes. Though she wasn’t setting out to create a love story, the duet “has turned into the beginnings of one,” she explained. “It’s about finding each other, and how we get through the world together.” 

The duet will be performed by two local dancers with whom Durbin recently worked on a piece in conjunction with a North Carolina Museum of Art exhibition on Grace Hartigan: George Barrett, who also serves as the executive director of Chapel Hill’s Marian Cheek Jackson Center, and Layla El-Khoury, who recently earned her PhD in Biological Engineering at NC State University. 

Both dancers were originally Durbin’s students: She teaches at NC State and ADF, among other local and national dance organizations, and she sees herself as a teacher first. 

“I’m really just a teacher who loves to choreograph,” she said. “I really want to challenge the dancers emotionally and technically and keep pushing them. I keep saying, ‘I just want you guys to crack open.’ So hopefully, we’ll have some cracks.

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