Dancer Linda Gold’s Search for Artistic Freedom

Linda Gold doesn’t like playing what she calls “the career label game,” the process of defining herself as either an academic or a choreographer.

“The days are over when I placed myself in distinct boxes,” she declares, “before I found--I hate this word--a more holistic outlook. I know a lot of young dancers outside of school who end up resenting the artistic life because it can prove fatal when you’re also trying to put food on the table.”

Gold is referring to a familiar situation in the dance world, a dilemma she faced 13 years ago when, in her early 20s, she was offered her current position as head of the dance department at Santa Monica Community College.

Trained in both ballet and modern dance, she anguished over whether “placing job security over creative freedom” would effectively end her dreams of being a choreographer.

“I finally relaxed a little about this so-called dichotomy,” Gold recalls, “when I discovered that all the energy I was using to resist teaching, I could use to make (dance) work. In the process, I decided that the question isn’t whether you are one thing or another, but how creatively you can wear your various hats and still continue on with your very personal life journey.”

Such a preoccupation with what Gold calls “the exploration and layering of the self” is also the subject matter of “Linda Gold in Concert,” her first local program in three years, to be presented at the Japan America Theatre on Jan. 23.

Gold uses the solo form and occasional elements of Eastern dance-phrasing to create an environment where vigorous repetitive movement is alternated with prolonged and emotion-filled stillnesses. This “mythical atmosphere,” together with recorded music by Ravi Shankar and other Eastern musicians, plus the recitation of Indian poetry, help Gold arrive at what amounts to a dancer’s epiphany.

This state is similar to the personal realizations she hopes her students discover on their own: “For example, in some classes I ask the students to think of moving in a way that feels good and to work without music, waiting for an impulse rather than an idea as the reason for dancing. It’s very hard to encourage this exploration in a world based on profiteering, ambition, product, on the pressure to ‘do’ rather than to ‘be.’ I use the same exercises during my own rehearsals.

“I hope I’m not sounding like some teacherly Pollyanna,” she says, smiling. “The truth is, if someone gave me a lot of money to make work, I would have to clear the decks and really limit the teaching. Certainly, I don’t want to be billed as ‘teacher-takes-act-on-the-road’ when I’m on tour.

“I’m not doing my choreography or teaching with any great intention, any great need to save humanity,” she continues. “I have toured extensively (performances in the past year included appearances in France, Switzerland and Finland and, in 1986, she danced at half a dozen American universities and at the Merce Cunningham studio in New York). But I had to leave the local scene in order to become an artist . . . an artist in my own way, in my own time and without pressures.”

Gold says she “pulled herself away from the local dance scene” in the late ‘70s because she felt that integrity and honesty were missing in it.

“I wanted to avoid the vicious cycle of grant mania where if an artist can’t make a great work every year, he or she loses funding,” Gold says. “I think that there are more broad-minded ways of thinking of artistic growth. And just think how a dancer must feel now, as the spaces in L.A. dry up and teachers are squeezed out of studios.”

She admits she may have lost touch with some local activity. “I don’t see everything,” she says. “I go in cycles where I don’t need as much input as I used to. Years ago, I needed some exploration time to dig deep down in a personal inquiry into movement issues: to ask the basic questions--what is movement and what is feeling.”

Is Gold now at a point where she hopes that her dance concert might place her on the artistic map as an important local choreographer?

“Things will unfold as they need to,” Gold offers with a smile. “My main priority is to change the idea of what it means to be an artist--for artists, audiences and students--that it’s as much a process of ‘being’ as ‘doing.’ ”

“I want to tell my students that being an artist is a way to take the inner journey your whole life long.

“I don’t criticize careerism at all. I know how younger dancers struggle for recognition. Maybe I chose a safer route than they did, but I did it because I wanted to stay public--in another way. Dance is my life, and what better way to integrate it than to share it with students?”