Recently, he choreographed James Joyce's The Dead for Playwrights Horizons and took up residence on Sesame Street as a featured performer, but one thing that's remained near and dear to his heart since founding it in 1997 is the Sean Curran Company. 

This summer, his company headlined the Dancers Responding to AIDS' (DRA) Fire Island Dance Festival and we caught up with Sean when he got back from the beach to find out how he keeps everyone happy, what DRA means to him, how his company is like a dysfunctional family and where you can catch them next.

 
Tony: What made you want to do The Fire Island Dance Festival this year?

Sean Curran: I was at the very first DRA meeting at Hernando Cortez' apartment--which I guess is now ten years ago. At the time, I was dancing with the Bill T. Jones / Arnie Zane Dance Company and several company members had died. Arnie had died. I had two roommates who hadn't died at the time, but were sick. And so it had quite an impact. I believe that artists are activists in a way, being an artist is a political statement, especially in our society. And as artists, one of our jobs is to be a changer. Art does a lot of jobs for us, it can hold a mirror up to society, but it can also help change it. And I just thought being an activist and an artist was part of my mission. I'm not a leader in the sense that Hernando was, I just think what he's done is so heroic and generous, but I wanted to be a part of the team. And I was really glad that somebody like Hernando was willing to lead it. So it was because of a lot of personal pain that I became involved.
  

Does that make your work political?

I learned from Bill and Arnie, they would say that all art is political. Even your omissions are political, what you choose to leave out. My work is not what I would categorize as fist-in-the-air political, but I'm very interested in partnering and I always include two same-sex couples and one opposite-sex couple. In fact, my dancers jokingly say, "Are you the homo, the hetero or the lesbo couple in this?" We do one dance called "Folk Dance for the Future" where I took it even a step farther. The three couples--the homo, the hetero, the lesbo--are all interracial and they all have a baby. We jokingly say, "One baby's black, one baby's white and one baby's cappuccino."
  

You danced that piece last year in Central Park, right?

Yes. And we're doing it again--we do it all the time. The dancers are sick of it. They'll put it on my tombstone, the one thing I'll be known for. It was really made as a lark for a one-time gig in Brooklyn, but it's become my reluctant hit. We just did it at an outdoor festival in Pittsburgh. The first time we did it was for the Celebrate Brooklyn Festival and I thought, "Wow, there's going to be 2,000 people on a hot summer night outdoors, are there going to be three people who decide to throw rocks?" [Laughs]. So I said to the presenter, "Look, this is what I'm doing: interracial, gay, lesbian and straight couples all have a baby doll like they've adopted it." And they said, "Go for it." And the video tape that was taped from the back of the audience--there's couples holding up their babies. 

When we do it on the road, I've gotten cards and letters. Two lawyers that adopted a nine-year-old abused little boy and a lesbian with two Chinese little girls. So basically, these letters say, "Thank you for putting us on stage." And that's been a really satisfying thing. So, to answer your question, the work is political, but in a different way form Bill and Arnie. I want to be political, I want to be a poet like I feel Bill and Arnie are, but it is also a response to music in a Mark Morris sort of way. I'm not a storyteller, I don't want to tell a story in a linear or a narrative way, but I do want to rouse emotion in the viewer.
  

You have a really diverse background, from STOMP! to Sesame Street. How do you choose what you do?

I've been really lucky. As a kid I did Irish step dancing, that's what got me into the dance world. I went from NYU--I was a dance major at NYU--right into Bill's company and from Bill's company into STOMP! for four years. I knew even in high school I wanted to be a choreographer, I wanted to be somebody who made stuff. As a little kid I thought I wanted to be a visual artist and make collages, so it's sort of in my makeup. Along these same lines--I was talking about folk dance and babies--it's the way community connects family. It's not always the best paradigm, but having a dance company provides me with that. I have nice dancers and people always say, "How do you choose your dancers?" I say, "Well, I have to fall in love with them." In a way, because we're going to be together pretty intimately sharing dressing rooms, hotel rooms, hot stuffy rehearsal halls for four hours a day, we really do have to be in love. So that's the way I have community and connectiveness in my life.
 

How do you stay in love with your dancers. How do you keep them happy?

That's a great question. A downtown dancer--especially a contemporary one--loves a challenge. Being a dancer is a challenge in and of itself because they have to supplement their income and they don't have very comfortable lives. Along those same lines, dancers love to be challenged in the rehearsal hall. And all of my work, especially my recent work, is a collaboration choreographically with the dancers. It even says, "Choreographed by Sean Curran in collaboration with the dancers." And in sort of a real post-modern way. I'm coming up with the dance material--or what I call the fabric of the dance--and they manipulate it into what actually becomes the dance. 

I'm very interested in partnering, how we handle and dance with each other. Same-sex partnering is almost a cliché now, but to me it's still really sexy. I love to see the same duet done by a man and a woman and then done by two women, say. And a lot of the partnering is made up by the dancers. So I need a dancer that is a self-starter and someone who is a good problem solver. By constantly making new repertory, I think I keep them and challenge them.
 

It seems like with this Jerome Robbins bio, we're on the verge of a Mommie Dearest era for choreographers. Are you worried about how you'll be remembered?

You know, without sounding grandiose, I think I'm a pretty nice guy. I will say it's not a democracy, but I learned that dance companies are the most dysfunctional families in the world. And the reason is that you have this head of the company, be it the mommy or the daddy, and then the kids. All the kids want to impress and please the leader and they all want attention and want to be the favorite. Right there you're set up for disaster. My company, I incorporated in '97, there's nine dancers and six of them have been with me since that period. It's a group that wants to be together, one of the women has a baby who is now 17-months-old and tours with us. So there literally are eight aunts and uncles. One of my favorite times is when we are doing dress rehearsal or tech, this little girl sits in my lap and I take notes. She knows the music and she knows her mom's on stage. 

There is the danger that you're going to piss people off or people are going to be disappointed. I just had two dancers leave, they were in the company less than a year and they just felt that I wasn't featuring them enough and that I had my favorites, these six, and they weren't getting what they needed. People leave and you're heartbroken. I didn't give them enough love and attention and why didn't I challenge them more? It wasn't a perfect or right fit. I think I'm a pretty patient and tolerant guy but as I said, it's not a democracy. I come up with the final decision. One thing that's great is I have a rehearsal director who's really involved. She's the glue that holds it together. So part of my challenge has been learning how to ask for help--I hate to ask for help. I'd rather just do everything myself, but to be a good leader you have to delegate responsibility and everyone has their little job. So I hope nobody writes a Mommie Dearest book about me, but I don't think they will.
 

Do you ever go out dancing for fun?

I don't anymore and I miss it desperately. Part of the problem is I'm almost 40--not that that should preclude disco dancing. I take great joy from my work and the company, but there's an element of fun that's gone and it's from the days of going out six nights a week and disco dancing until four in the morning. And part of it is that I'm sober, I've been sober for eight years, so it's a part of my life that I sort of associate with that. There were those mornings I'd have to get up and sweat out all the alcohol in company class or ballet class. But I literally spend the day dancing, I teach usually in the mornings and rehearse all afternoon and I'm home doing payroll or trying to do some booking or fundraising in the evening. I do dance around my apartment [laughs] and still lip synch to the odd Bette Midler record--I'm kidding about that--but one of my fantasies when I was a kid was that I'd be a musical comedy star. I wanted to be Ben Vereen. So there's still a touch of that in me.
 

The current administration and the movie Footloose, any correlation?

Wow, that's an interesting way to put it with this administration. I'm so removed from it, my heart breaks a little when we're on the road and the company is like, "Where's the fag bar?" and the girls want to come. We were in Austin, Texas, and all of them except for me and the woman with the baby--me and the mom usually go back to the hotel together--they went to a cowboy karaoke bar. And I thought, "Oh, that would have been fun." And I would have been doing that 15 years ago. So their sense of nightlife is pretty healthy, but I'm so out of the loop.
  

Okay, how about the current administration and funding?

It's pretty desperate. I work quite a bit in Europe where I'm so well taken care of and so well compensated that it's just a different world. And in post-performance discussions now and recently in Boston, where the Boston Dance Umbrella has folded, in my curtain speech I mentioned the fact that we have an Attorney General, John Ashcroft, who thinks that dancing is a sin and he won't dance because he thinks it's sinful and he thinks we shouldn't. That says a lot about the administration. 

I don't want to say that Europe is perfect, but they get that art is the soul of a society. As I said earlier, art does many things: It gives you a sense of community and it connects you with spirit. There's a great healing capacity in the arts and the people at DRA have known that for a long time. Certainly my work ten years ago, when DRA started, was about love and loss and the difference between loneliness and solitude. And it took being a choreographer to help me figure that out. Those pieces were like little journal entries and as I go back and look at the pieces, I'm reminded. I support my own company by doing a lot of commercial work. 

I do have a development director and we get funding from New York State Council on the Arts and a few foundations, but when I was in the Jones/Zane Company in the 80s it was a much more comfortable time. And it's really interesting to me that the Kennedy and Nixon administrations gave the most money to the arts, it was like triple of what they're doing now, but this administration doesn't get the importance of art for community. Along with that, I don't understand this country's fascination with organized sports and the money we pay athletes. It's also my beef with Western medicine. Rather than putting money into holistic approaches, all of the money goes into developing the new pill, which will generate income for the pharmaceutical companies. Everything can be fixed with a pill. It's through people who are suffering with HIV and AIDS that I've seen what massage and things like Reiki, nutrition and these basic alternative therapies or approaches to handling disease can do. That ties into the whole thing with art for me and Western culture. And also religion, spirit. I think about the East and Zen and Buddhism and that spiritual path. Then people like Ashcroft, this righteous, Christian, homophobic, against dance kind of guy--it's frustrating when people don't get it or you can't get them to look at it how you see it.
 

I think of your company as one of the great outdoor dance companies so when I think Sean Curran, I think summer. What are you up to this winter, do you hibernate?

That's funny. I just finished choreographing an opera at GlimmerGlass Opera Festival called "L'Etoile." It was a co-production between the GlimmerGlass Opera Festival and New York City Opera. And I taught at a lot of festivals, the Boston Conservatory and the Bates Dance Festival at Bates College in Maine. My company came back together in the fall--they had the rest of the summer off after Fire Island--and we are getting ready to do some touring on the college and university circuit. Because we just did a season at The Joyce, I have to go out and make some money to be able to pay off those bills. I'm still doing it via the independent filmmaker model where you have ten credit cards and you just charge costumes and lighting rental and you make the money to pay it back.