Zack Winokur, Director/Choreographer

Tell us what you are up to now!

I just got back from Amsterdam where I was restaging an earlier production of Les Mamelles de Tirésias for the Dutch National Opera. What a wonderful city! I have a week off now, so I’m in Vermont at my friend’s house, where I spend a lot of time. It’s paradise. I brought a bunch of books, scores, and recordings to study. I wake up really early, do yoga and an Irene Dowd regimen, take a walk in the woods, make myself breakfast, read, listen to music—this morning it’s been Currentzis’s recording of Dido and Aeneas in preparation for a production next year and Nina Simone’s Little Girl Blue album which is just maddeningly beautiful and good cooking music— take a bath, nap when I feel like it, and dance around in the studio. I’m preparing for La Calisto (at Juilliard in February) so I devote a good chunk of the day to sitting with the score and singing it out loud (badly) to myself or blocking it out in the studio with a recording.

Which upcoming project are you most looking forward to working on?

I’m really excited about directing and choreographing La Calisto at Juilliard in February. It’s such sensational music, extremely contemporary and radical, even though it was written in 1651. How little has changed! It’s a lot about the lessons we just keep not learning as a society and all with a healthy dose of gender-bending and sexy hilarity. It’s also a delicious cast spanning the Vocal Arts, Dance, and Historical Performance divisions (which I think is pretty neat, and a dream since I was a student at the school come true), a truly amazing design team of people I love and respect, and a conductor, Stephen Stubbs, who is utterly fantastic and an expert. It’s really amazing to have the opportunity to collaborate with all these extraordinary people across divisions and disciplines and especially meaningful to be supported in this way in the place that reared me. Come see it!

What has been the focus of your recent work at Juilliard?

I’ve been back at school in several guises. Last year, I was the directing fellow in the Vocal Arts Division under the mentorship of Stephen Wadsworth. This past semester, I was co-directing and choreographing the opera double bill. It consisted of two productions I made with Ted Huffman years ago. In fact, we made Kaiser the summer after my sophomore year at Juilliard. It was wonderful to have the chance to revisit those pieces on the students at school and especially fun to get these singers to really work like dancers!

Tell us about your most influential teachers and mentors.

I had a lot of wonderful teachers at Juilliard. The ones who are still very present in my life are Larry Rhodes, who taught me a lot about teaching and leading; Irene Dowd, whose powers and eyes I respect to no end, and who keeps pushing my thinking about the body and its expressive potential; David Parker, whom I owe so much for hiring me (possibly very stupidly) when I was 14 and staying present and extremely generous ever since; and Stephen Wadsworth, who is among the keenest craftsmen and whose multiverse thinking and rigor I can only attempt to emulate. I also had the chance to work with Pina Bausch before she died, which forever changed me, and William Forsythe, who taught me and keeps encouraging me to think about choreography in the expanded field and its applications beyond just dancing around. I’m so grateful to all of these people and lucky to continue having them in my life. And those who aren’t (R.I.P., Pina!) or are further away, I try to keep like parrots on my shoulder and call on them to squawk at me or peck me with their beaks when I’m in need.

What is your favorite memory of Juilliard?

Performing Nijinska’s Les Noces was pretty awesome. I remember this incredible moment where you stand in a formation so strict that you can’t see anyone else on stage and so you just think, "Oh #$%*!, is this the wrong part? Am I in the wrong place!? Is anyone else even up here with me?!" And then you take a breath, a moment of free fall, strike your right foot on the ground to start this rhythmically complicated peasant step, and feel the force and power of 20 other people doing the same thing with you at the same time. The ground shook, and I’ve never felt so alone and together at the same time. It was a moment where dancing just became about being part of a community, and that is what I love the most about performing: when you feel in concert with everyone else and the music and all the rest.

What is your favorite aspect of working as a freelancer?

When your friends come and visit! I find it hard to do some of these jobs far away from home (whatever that means) with a group of strangers (however wonderful) and feel like there isn’t anyone from your ‘real life’ living through these experiences with you, so it makes me super happy when I have people I love around. On the flip side, it’s fabulous meeting lots of new people and fun to create a space and culture of sharing, trust and intimacy, really quickly with a group of new folks. The best part of that, which is something worth fighting for as a freelancer, is getting to work with those people again and knowing that you don’t have to start at zero: that there’s some kind of geological accumulation of vocabulary and communication, and that you build a community that you can go back to and with whom you can build a real body of work.

What are some words of advice you'd like to share with our current students?

Finn Wittrock had the best line to answer this really hard question, and I’m going to steal it from him: it’s so much easier to give advice than to take it. That said…

• Spend time sitting in on classes and spying on studios of the other divisions! The Kaufman studio is built as a voyeur’s dream, so at least go check out what they’re up to in there.
• Do all the things, and experiment extravagantly. Do everything you want and apologize later… If you have to.
• Be exceedingly nice and kind to all the production personnel!! They’re massively talented, and you’re nothing without them.

Describe your ideal day off.

I can’t complain about my day today! The only thing that would make it better would be to have a bunch of my friends come up for a feast at the big table.

(photo by Joanne Bouknight)