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Oct. 11, 2013
Ballet BC dreams new
Eiferman talks about dancing, Walking Mad.
CYNTHIA RAMSAY
Dancer Thibaut Eiferman has performed and trained with choreographers and companies from around the world. In his second season at Ballet BC, it seems he may have found the perfect home.
“It’s the first time that I’ve met a group of people that has been classically trained that had so much hunger for other things, for contemporary, for sensation ... and it was the first time that I saw everything that I had been taught all put into one place, where everyone just wants everything and it’s not one style,” Eiferman told the Independent about working with Ballet BC.
Though born in Paris, the now 21-year-old Eiferman and his family lived in the United States for a couple of years when he was very young. They returned to France, but his father’s job brought them back to New Jersey.
“I started dancing at Princeton Ballet School in New Jersey right after we moved away from Europe, ironically enough,” said Eiferman, who was seven years old at the time. “It was kind of a long shot. I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into, but I stuck around and it became my life.”
His parents – his father works at Merck Pharmaceuticals and his mom is a painter – were always supportive of his being a dancer, said the youngest of three children. When his older siblings left home to attend a French lycée in D.C., Eiferman, then in his early teens, and his parents moved to New York City. There, he trained at the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School at American Ballet Theatre.
“It was very competitive,” said about his early years in dance. “It was more so competitive when I moved to New York. Luckily, my teacher was very supportive of me and we had a good relationship. I did it more for myself, and I think I was very lucky. I don’t know, you kind of learn how to work with it. I feel that I’m less competitive now, and I’ve learned how to do it more for myself than for the people around me.”
In that vein, Eiferman admitted, “I think about dance a lot. I think sometimes, because we work so much all the time on a specific piece, the muscle memory is in my brain all the time. I’ll be trying to go to sleep and I’m doing a step over and over in my head and ... if you look at the body as like a rubber band and you’re constantly twisting it in your head into this one step, when you go into the studio the next day, you’ll have thought about it so much ... that, in a way, it’ll feel easier and you’ll be more at ease doing it.”
He described dance as “a way of life also, it’s a state of mind. If you’re into sensation and it helps your artistry, then when you’re walking outside, when it’s raining, whatever, I’d say I’m sensitive to all my surroundings as much as possible because it helps me in the studio.”
After four years of study in New York, Eiferman attended the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance. He has also trained in Israel, taking part in the Gaga Winter Intensive in Tel Aviv; in the Netherlands, in the Nederlands Dans Theatre Summer Intensive; and in Danse Montréal’s Springboard.
About all the programs in which he has participated, Eiferman said, “Well, they’re all different. I think, as a dancer, especially for me, it’s really important to not get comfortable in one place because it’s a slippery slope once you start getting used to what’s around you and there’s so much more that we don’t see outside in the world, so I try as much as possible to see how other people dance in other places. For Gaga, when I went to Israel, it was like a whole new world opened to me, where sensation was much more important, much more valued than shapes in dance, or trying attain a certain physique or a certain look. It was really about trying to feel the most possible and trying to have as much sensation and, from there, the dancing could actually evolve, which I had never thought about because I was always trained to have my legs stretched or jump as high as this, or something very concrete, so that was amazing.
“And then Springboard ... showed me the options of where a dancer can go, that there’s not a classical route, that’s there’s not a modern route, that there’s all these other options. [There are] people who are more expressive, people who like the floor, different mentalities that work better together. I discovered that world.”
And he has discovered the geographic world as well. Based on his many travels and his work with various companies, the Independent asked Eiferman if he could make any generalizations about how different people, with different histories and cultures, approached dance.
“When I was working on Israeli choreography,” he noted, “there was a research that exists everywhere, I think, but [in the Israeli case] you couldn’t move on to the choreography if you hadn’t found the original base of sensation in your body first, and that could be as simple as releasing your arm and bringing it back up again only from your shoulder and not anywhere else. Sometimes I feel like, in other work, in other companies, in certain companies, things go very fast, but I remember that when I was living in D.C. and we went to Israel, I remember that we would take our time to try to find the sincerity in your shoulder, or not to fake anything, because to fake something, you can see it on stage. When something is produced from not a real place, it’s something that is so visible, and I think that Israelis see that very, very innately. I mean, that’s the experience I had, and I remember that it was a real research all the time, from beginning to end, and it was more introspective, in my body. They would promote introspection and finding things for yourself, nobody told you what to find, it was really you, and a personal journey.”
An important stop on his professional journey, it turns out, was Springboard.
“I met Emily at Springboard,” said Eiferman, referring to Ballet BC artistic director Emily Molnar. “I worked with her and we kept in touch. I had a really good experience there and then I was looking for something else and so I contacted her. Somebody here was injured, so she hired me to come and I was first a guest artist and now I’m a full company member.”
Eiferman came to Ballet BC from Company E. “It was amazing,” he said about working with the D.C.-based group, “but it was not all year ... and I needed something more, where I could dance all day every day ... [knowing] I wouldn’t be laid off and I knew I could keep working.”
And working he certainly is, currently on Johan Inger’s Walking Mad, which is being reprised by Ballet BC this fall – the company performed its Canadian première in March 2012. About his part in the piece, and whether it offered him any particular challenges, Eiferman said, “Well, for Walking Mad, I’m not used to working with a character. We don’t have character names, we don’t have roles in Walking Mad, but you do have, like there’s an awkward guy and there’s a goofy guy. And I’m a very serious person, I think, and I have kind of a, I’ve been told that I kind of have a ‘serial killer face’ when I dance, so I have to work on being goofy and kind of awkward and trying to find my own voice in the piece, so I’m still working on that and it’s been a challenge but I think it’s going really help me.”
Walking Mad will be featured in Ballet BC’s season opener, Tilt, which will also première two new works, one by Molnar and one by Jorma Elo, resident choreographer of Boston Ballet since 2005. Performances will run at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre Oct. 17-19.
“I feel really happy to be in a city that is so progressive and new, and is not tied down by tradition,” shared Eiferman. “It’s great to be part of a company that’s dreaming and that is trying to do new things. It’s so rare, and it’s so fortunate that I’m part of a group like that.”
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