ROBERT Cohan fell in love with dance while serving as a teenage GI in the Second World War, and aged 90, he is still creating work.
Robert’s life in dance reads like a Broadway show. Inspired by catching the Royal Ballet in London during the Blitz he joined “Mother of Modern Dance” Martha Graham’s company, eventually partnering her, bringing contemporary dance technique to the UK as founding artistic director at The Place in Euston in 1967.
Later this month The Place is to stage Robert Cohan at 90, honouring this pioneering dancer and choreographer. There’s a chance Robert might even appear in a cameo role onstage as himself.
A lifetime in dance means that Robert still finds himself keeping time during everyday activities, counting his steps as he climbs stairs and the rate of slicing as he cuts onions. He believes this mindful division of time and movement is second nature to dancers.
“Dance only exists ‘now’. Scientists have figured out that ‘now’ lasts between two-three seconds, everything else is past and future,” he said. “I think every dancer knows this. It’s those two-and-a-half seconds where you exist, you were alive at that point. Any dance is a sequence of two-three seconds. If you perform a lot you learn to live those one after another. You learn how to be present.
“My approach to choreography is to try and not get in the way. In all the other arts you can work anytime. With dance you can only work when you have the dancer and the studio. You know you have to be creative at 2pm on a Tuesday. You have to come in primed and magnetised.”
Growing up in Brooklyn, Robert remembers running to catch double bills at the cinema, ingesting Fred Astaire musicals as reality, believing that men and women actually fall in love through a well-choreographed Busby Berkeley dance number.
Classical music wasn’t part of his childhood, if it came on the radio it was turned off. When we meet in The Place foyer he looks every inch the classic “choreographer” from a 1930s musical, leaning lightly on a walking stick, his laissez-faire scarf draped over a shoulder yet his accent retains the strong pull of Brooklyn.
The well-stocked libraries in army camps fed Robert’s thirst for inspiration. He would spend hours listening to classical music and reading Zen Buddhism books. “I came at it left field,” he said. “I didn’t come to analyse it in any way, just accepted it. I came to it as music I had to respond to physically, that was my approach and it stayed my approach.
“After the war I was strong. I only had to learn what to do with my body. I was seeing a girl, a dancer. She came to New York to study with Martha Graham and thought I would like it. I was hooked and knew then what I was going to do. I said to her ‘I don’t know how to dance yet’ and Ms Graham said ‘there’s only one place to learn to dance and that’s on stage’. So I took her advice.”
The choreographer is still reacting to classical music from an impartial position. In new quartet Lingua Franca he found that Bach’s solo for violin in D minor wasn’t quite long enough so simply called in long-term collaborator Eleanor Alberga to improvise an extra 10 minutes of music.
“It’s about four people moving to this gorgeous music, each making their own statement to explore space and dance itself. So far it has worked. I feel it’s up to choreographers to tell audiences that they don’t have to worry about what it means. I know the music very well, it’s my physical relationship to the music through the dancers. I don’t just think about it, my nerves get together and go into the muscles and tell them what to do. That’s mostly how I’ve always worked.”
While Robert’s technique may have remained true for decades he has noticed the role technology now plays in studio time. “It’s all changed, everyone videos everything on their phones and iPads during rehearsals and puts it on their laptops. If I say ‘do you remember what you did yesterday?’, everyone runs off to check on their laptops and I’m left standing alone in the middle.”
A prelude to Lingua Franca will expose this trend for “digitally enhanced” rehearsals with a possible walk-on cameo from Robert playing himself. It comes as no surprise that Robert is sitting on an unopened archive including every photo and review from his long career.
With the 90th birthday celebrations this month, people have been urging him to open the bulging boxes he has stored away but he is adamant not to look back, not to live in the past.
“I don’t live in my memory,” he said. “I decided long ago to say yes to everything” he said. “If you say no you can’t do it. I’ve been saying yes for years. That’s how I got it all done.”
• Robert Cohan at 90 is at The Place, 17 Duke’s Road, WC1, on Friday, March 27, at 8pm. Tel: 020 7121 1100.
*First published in the Camden New Journal, West End Extra and Islington Tribune
