Since dancer Mary Cochran retired from her position as senior member of the Paul Taylor Dance Company, she has time to work on her songwriting career. After 12 years of intense performing and touring with the company, Cochran is focusing on teaching, reconstructing Taylor's works and even plunging into weighty choreographic endeavors of her own.
"Now I have autonomy. I decide what needs to be done," Cochran explained casually in an interview with The Michigan Daily. As a visiting artist-in-residence at the dance department last semester, Cochran has spent the last four months teaching modern dance technique and reconstructing Taylor's classic 1976 work, "Esplanade," which members of the University Dance Company will perform in the "Tanzmusik" concert this weekend at Power Center.
Cochran shows her love for teaching with students. Without any traces of pretentiousness or disinterest, Mary throws difficult Taylor repertory on students with enough encouragement and coaching to make even the hesitant students feel worthy enough to attack the material. She continually spews out images that have helped her dance the memorable choreography which she now eagerly passes on to the next generation.
"With Mary, there is no difference between teacher and student," first-year dancer Tamika Washington. "She likes to be on a personal level with students."
Previous to her residency here, the bulk of Cochran's teaching had been master classes as part of touring with the Taylor Company.
"I didn't really know if I loved it (teaching), but it is great to know students, learn about their lives and see progress." Teaching enables Cochran to offer her own pure approach without preconceived ideas. Inspired by the process of understanding how different people work, Cochran describes teaching as a two-way street instead of "shoving an agenda at people," which can become the case in the professional world.
"(Cochran's residency) was a good reality check for students to see how physically demanding it is to be a professional dancer," Chair of the Dance Department Gay Delanghe said.
Yet, Cochran, still humble after so many years of inhabiting the largest roles in the Taylor repertory, freely admitted, "I do feel that I'd like to have my students dance better than I did."
A North Carolina School of the Arts High School graduate, Cochran attended The Julliard School for only a few weeks. Abandoning the prestigious institution, she plunged straight into a professional career when she was offered a job dancing for the late choreographer Alwin Nikolais.
After a two-year stint and her career with Taylor, Cochran toured and performed extensively, taking her talents into a different arena. "I toured to the maximum. By the end (of my time in the Taylor Company) I was getting to dance the parts that I wanted to a lot."
Now her responsibilities have shifted from performing roles to recreating them with other dancers. Certified to reconstruct Taylor's works, Cochran has taken on the task of teaching all roles, both male and female of "Esplanade," to two separate casts of dance majors.
"(The reconstruction of a piece) is satisfying in a different way than performing in the dance, almost more satisfying. I am still so involved and responsible for a total recreation - it is like a birth. I got to do it - make it happen."
Inspired by the beauty Taylor found in seeing a woman run to catch a bus, "Esplanade," marks the first of Taylor's pieces in which he, himself, did not perform. Set to violin concertos by J.S. Bach, the piece embodies Taylor's original ideas about gesture, pedestrian movement and the beauty of people and their motions through space.
Cochran describes Taylor's efforts as "taking what had been everyday motions and making them beautiful." Gestures reoccur in a variety of moods, depending on the section of the dance. A particular motion is happy at one point and later becomes tragic.
On top of the hundreds of hours of rehearsals for this project, Cochran generously gave private coaching to members of the casts. Impressed with the students in the dance department here, Cochran recognizes their good energies and their abilities to cover space and express gestures honestly. "This sounds simple, but so many dancers lack these skills," Cochran emphasized.
"Mary is so clearly at the top level a performer can be," sophomore Lucille Anderson said. "She expected that same standard from us."
Cochran spoke excitedly about the variety of styles within the modern dance field. "There is so much you can do in dance. The profession needs everybody."
She can intelligently elaborate for hours on the joy and skill in finding a common ground between different modern dance styles and applying techniques from one class to another.
And the future of modern dance? Repertory, repertory, repertory. Cochran would like to see modern dance companies performing the works of multiple choreographers in a single concert, rather than companies always presenting whole evenings of dances by only a single choreographer.
That is exactly what she is trying to do with her recently formed company, NCNY. With husband and fellow Taylor dancer Thomas Patrick, Cochran aims to create a true repertory company featuring works by different artists and musicians.
But for now, she teaches and reconstructs passionately, imparting her personal movement ideas while simultaneously carrying on the Taylor tradition with love and meticulous attention to detail. And, of course, she never forgets her biggest inspiration.
"Comprehend that you will die. Then you will dance with a heightened sense of life," she said.
JACK MITCHELL/Special to the Daily
DAVID SMITH/Special to the Daily
Students Jason Marchant and Amal Elwardi perform Cochran's choreography.