Dance - Some nerve

Nobody would have been terribly surprised if the Nerve Series had quietly faded away this year. One of the five founders was leaving Atlanta, one had already left and one had just barely moved back after more than two years away. The collective of experimental choreographers and dancers had no money, no board, no permanent home. In the absence of any institutional momentum, the Nerve Series was facing its Tinkerbell moment: It would survive or expire based solely on the clapping of hands and the will to believe.

“We’ve really been operating way underground,” says choreographer and dancer Jhon Stronks, who is in the process of moving to Houston. “How do we experiment inside a society that wants a product? Experimentation doesn’t necessarily yield to product, doesn’t necessarily lead to profit.”

Blake Beckham, who moved back to Atlanta two months ago after completing a master’s degree in dance, says this year was a particularly challenging one. “I was just returning to town, Jhon was away, Elizabeth [Dishman] was away although she visits often. It was a little scattered. I just said to everyone, ‘Listen, I love Nerve Series. I’m really proud of this thing, and we’re going to make it happen this year.’”

And so they did. Now in its fifth year, the Nerve Series presents its latest sampling of dance this weekend with work by Dishman, Stronks, Beckham and Wayne M. Smith.

Despite its avant-garde aesthetic, the collective was founded on some pragmatic ideas. “We had a feeling that younger or emerging artists were lacking opportunities to produce work in Atlanta,” says Dishman, who moved to New York at the end of last year. “We wanted to create an environment where we could take risks as artists and maybe not have the whole burden of producing fall on one person.”

Stronks says this strength-in-numbers approach helped the five choreographers produce works beyond their own. “So we decided to get together and produce a show. And it worked. And the next year it worked again,” says Stronks, who will perform a dance based on a dream he had in which he was pregnant and was given a series of movement instructions to follow in order to protect the structure of the baby’s head.

There are, of course, twin dangers for any endeavor aimed at being experimental; oblivion is one, respectability the other. The Nerve Series would fail just as surely if it ever became something safe and well contained.

“I’m interested in a constantly shifting boundary or a boundary that keeps erasing itself,” says Beckham, who will perform a dance about scars and the relationship between the interior and exterior of the body. “I know that I need to and want to push myself, because that’s what [Nerve Series] is about. And that’s a real accepting environment to work and present in. We all feel pretty OK that if you try something and you fall on your face, Nerve Series is a good place to do it.”

It’s that opportunity to experiment and produce new dances free from pressure of the profit motive that makes the Nerve Series so important to the collective. “I was really thankful to have Atlanta be my testing ground early in my career,” says Dishman, who, in her seventh month of pregnancy, will perform a piece about the weirdness of pregnancy and the bizarre ways in which people respond to her ballooning belly. “I’m a little further along in my career than many emerging artists [in New York] who haven’t had the chance to make work.”

As an audience, we benefit, too, from the chance to see dance that pushes us to rethink our understanding of the art. “It has grown, and we have grown, because it’s given us the opportunity to grow,” Stronk says.

For at least one more year, we haven’t lost our Nerve.