If you want to talk about contemporary dance in Nashville, be prepared to hear a lot about Banning Bouldin and Becca Hoback. The two dancers — whose stories intertwine intricately as if they’d been choreographed — have played outsized roles in the development of the city’s status as a hub for contemporary dance. Their interwoven stories are as good an introduction as any to the appeal of contemporary dance in general, the reasons it’s found such strong footing in Nashville, and the bright future it’s reaching toward.
From an early age, both Bouldin and Hoback knew they wanted to be dancers. Bouldin remembers being a kid in Nashville in the mid-1980s, dancing around to Madonna and cartwheeling through the house.
“From the time I was 5 years old, whenever people would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, my answer has never changed,” Bouldin says.
When the prestigious Juilliard School in New York held its first summer program for young dancers in 1996, Bouldin was there. She was only 15, but she had a head full of determination and a supportive family behind her.
“I went up there and thought, ‘Holy cow — this is amazing, people are inventing new dance languages,’” she says. “I came home from that summer, and I was like, ‘Mom, I love you so much. But I’ve got to move to New York, because there’s nowhere for me to train in the kind of dancing that I want to learn to do here.’’’ She was accepted into Juilliard the following year, and she completed her senior year of high school while enrolled as a full-time student there.
Bouldin, who is now in her early 40s, speaks about her time as a young dancer with a disarming kind of self-awareness that makes her precociousness seem clear, even now.
Banning Bouldin, Becca Hoback
“I really dove into working with these people, many of them modern masters, and learning approaches and frameworks for combining and fusing different vocabularies, existing techniques and methodologies as a way of collaboratively creating new dance languages with up-and-coming choreographers,” says Bouldin. “So from a really young age, I was able to be a part of those kinds of processes with people who are now internationally defining the directions of contemporary dance. I feel really fortunate to have been drawn into that.”
In the eight-year stretch between graduating from Juilliard and returning to Nashville, Bouldin stayed busy. She worked in New York and Europe. She lived in Stockholm for about three years, and lived in Paris for a couple more.
“In a way, I was especially driven by this desire to be collaborating with different artists, to be creating new languages,” Boulding says. “I was able to meet so many wonderful choreographers and dancers, and when I moved back here, and when it became clear to me that I was interested in building something for the Nashville dance community, all of those international connections and creative friendships were really central and essential to the initial framework of New Dialect.”
New Dialect is the contemporary dance company Bouldin founded in Nashville in 2013. And as it turns out, one of the most important connections she’s made wasn’t in Stockholm or Paris, but rather in Appleton, Wis. — a midsize city about two hours north of Milwaukee. That’s where Becca Hoback had been training as a ballerina from the age of 4 — around the same time Bouldin had taken that summer intensive at Julliard.
“In my teen years I swore that ballet was the only thing for me,” Hoback says from her home studio in Nashville. “But joke’s on me — many years later I happened to fall in love with contemporary dance. But I’d already fallen in love with movement as a whole.”
Hoback’s ballerina youth is evident in her physicality. At 6 feet, she still appears demure — she is at once statuesque and refined.
“I grew up in a very small space, in a very conservative religious household,” she says. “As a dancer, my worldview opened up. I began interacting with people from all over the country with different ways of seeing the world. I think my teachers in Wisconsin tried to provide that as best they could, but there’s nothing like being thrown into that environment.”
Hoback left home at 16 to study ballet in North Carolina, then in Montgomery, Ala., before finally landing in Nashville to dance with the Nashville Ballet in 2011. There she met Bouldin, who was teaching a contemporary movement class.
“When I first saw her,” Bouldin remembers of that time, “I was just stunned. She’s this tall, wonderful performer and a really interesting mover, and she didn’t really fit in a traditional ballet framework. Ballet is always trying to get women to be smaller.”
“I was the tallest female dancer in the room at all times,” Hoback says. “I felt like they didn’t really know what to do with me, just because I was so tall.”
Every type of dance carries its own traditions, and in ballet, one of those traditions is symmetry. Its aesthetics, traditionally, are based on everything being even, homogenous, symmetrical.
“It’s something I feel like they tried to work with and accommodate,” says Hoback. “It’s one of those things in ballet that I think and hope is slowly shifting. When you think about homogeny, you have to consider what else is being excluded from those spaces. I think the ballet world as a whole is really looking at that now in terms of diversity and equity, and making sure there are multiple kinds of people onstage. But I do wonder when body type — both height and weight — is going to be part of that conversation.”
The conversations around shifting aesthetic principles are certainly occurring in the ballet world, and at Nashville Ballet in particular — see Amy Stumpfl’s story for more about that. Those conversations might also be among the primary reasons that contemporary dance is such fertile ground for artists in Nashville right now.
“In Nashville, there’s a real sense of supporting each other,” Bouldin says. “Collaboration and community care have been a huge part of that from the very beginning, before they were buzzwords, you know. That is not something that I’ve experienced anywhere else.”
One of Bouldin’s current collaborators, Shabaz Ujima, is also the one she’s known the longest — they grew up together and took classes at Nashville Ballet in the early 1990s. Ujima is an accomplished choreographer in addition to a dancer, and the founder of a radically inclusive troupe called Shackled Feet Dance.
Shabaz Ujima and Banning Bouldin
“For me, New Dialect is really about trying to create and nurture this hub that we’re talking about,” she says, “and creating opportunities for artists and setting a structure in place to support them in their collaboration with each other.”
Community seems to be the core value of Bouldin’s practice. Through New Dialect, she wants to help other dancers fund collaborations, and give them access to training that they may have not had before — so that current and future generations of Nashville dancers won’t have to move to New York to be exposed to high-level contemporary techniques.
“I wanted to allow multiple projects to emerge in Nashville so that we could catalyze this scene together,” Bouldin says. “It’s not just about having like one dance company, almost like a ballet company exists as a piece of civic furniture in a city. But that we would together really work to build this scene where there’ll be lots of different things happening with lots of different artists at all times.”
Clockwise from lower left: Shabaz Ujima, Banning Bouldin, Becca Hoback
Naturally, Hoback is among the network of dancers working on just such an endeavor. Her Enactor Productions is presenting an incubator series on Friday, April 12, at DancEast. The incubator series will feature solo works made in collaboration with The Fire Cycle, Visionary Vocal Collaborative, Mauve Taupe and Lenin Fernandez, in addition to Hoback’s own piece, Sacral, which is autobiographical and deconstructs notions of purity in the body. After Friday’s presentation, Hoback will take Sacral on tour, performing in Italy, Poland, Turkey and the Canary Islands. After that, she knows there’s more to come.
“There is so much rich, beautiful, contemporary dance that is sprouting up that just needs little homes, little opportunities to showcase,” Hoback says. “And I think ultimately that is going to bring the kind of variety and the kind of vibrance that I know is already brewing in our city, and just needs to be seen.”
Looking at Nashville Ballet, the city’s contemporary dance scene and opportunities to learn and practice different styles
