"Theatre is a language that people can understand a little more readily, but it can also be too facile and not provocative enough. This marriage of the two [dance and theatre] could be really profound."

Ann Boyd is drawn to collaborative art forms, creatively influenced by dance, eager for pure artistic exploration and, at the moment, very pregnant.

Married for a year and a half year to actor and Shedd Aquarium presenter Kurt Brocker, they’ve chosen to keep one of the last surprises left in the world and not find out the gender in advance.

“Pregnancy has completely changed my whole perception of the world,” says Boyd. “It’s been amazing in a psychological and spiritual way.” Boyd’s creative life is centered around the physical expression of ideas in movement and dance. While she says this is not necessarily more difficult with a baby on board, she is getting used to her new physical limitations.

“It’s kind of sad that I have to admit I have limits,” she adds. “I can’t go running around all day and not have a bite to eat.”

Boyd, 38, started as a dancer at New Trier high school in Wilmette, Ill., where she was able to substitute dance class for physical education. And although she went to college at Cornell University to pursue an education in veterinary medicine, she continued to study dance. During her junior and senior years, June Finch, a choreographer and teacher at the Merce Cunningham studio in New York, came to her school as a guest artist. Finch inspired Boyd to pursue dance: “She was incredibly passionate about being an artist and a creator, and she felt to me like the most vibrantly alive person I’d ever met.”

After college—where she received a bachelor’s in Biology & Science—Boyd began dancing with Mordine and Company. She has also choreographed or performed with Rivendell Theatre, Hedwig Dances, Redmoon Theatre, Lyric Opera of Chicago, and Margie Cole. Her transition to theatre came when Steve Pickering asked her to choreograph Next Theatre’s Hunting of the Snark in the early 1990s.

There she met designer Stephanie Nelson and actors Allison Halstead and Heather Hartley, all who became longtime collaborators. She also got to work with her best friend and former classmate Julia Neary. This was only their second professional gig together since high school (their first being Judas Goat at Organic).

Boyd credits Next for giving her an opportunity to increase her artistic vocabulary. “Theatre is a language that people can understand a little more readily, but it can also be too facile and not provocative enough,” says Boyd. “This marriage of the two [dance and theatre] could be really profound.” She does this by often slipping abstractions into a more linear work, hoping to augment the audience’s experience without their knowing it. “There’s a resistance to abstract work because people feel 'I’m not going to get it, and so I won’t pay attention.’”

Now, as she works to bridge the physical world and the linear story world of theatre, she says, “The problem is, with dance a lot of times you really think you got it, but whether or not the audience gets it…Well, the crossover doesn’t always happen, and that can be frustrating.”

She describes a moment in The Man Who Fell in Love With the Moon, which she directed and co-adapted for her theatre company Running With Scissors (RWS) as its inaugural show. The two lead characters are falling in love, and they’re in an oasis in the desert—a magical, mystical place. “The ensemble became the lush vegetation,” says Boyd, “the magical environment of their love and the literal environment of the oasis.” This yielded mixed results. “Some people thought it did heighten the moment, and others thought it detracted. But, for me, it felt like the merging of the abstract and literal came together in a cool way.”

RWS was established in 2000 and, at that time, Boyd served as the artistic director of the company. Coinciding with her return to school and starting a family, RWS decided    to restructure. Now Boyd chairs the artistic committee, reflecting their evolution into more of a collective. “We try to listen to how a work speaks back to us, and when a piece gets the entire company fired up.”

In addition to their first production, Boyd directed Breathing Underwater for RWS in 2001 and appeared in Lysistrata last summer. She has directed and adapted shows at the Organic, Prop/Powertap and Lifeline Theatre. She is a resident artist at Steppenwolf’s Arts Exchange, where she directs Cross-Town—a 12-week workshop where teens from around the city create and perform a new piece.

Last fall, Boyd went back to school to get an MFA in performance at the School of the Art Institute, where she has the opportunity to continue her exploration of theatre and dance in a more focused way. “I wanted to give myself the space of pure experimentation,” she says. Having never formally studied theatre in college, she relishes the opportunity to experiment with movement, theatre and even new media.

“I love the freedom of success or failure not being the question, but only listening to your gut.” She has mentally prepared herself for the possibility that people will see her experimental work and think, “Wow, that is completely unengaging, but at least I have the opportunity to try something completely out of my comfort zone.”

As for new media, Boyd is making explorations into video, which she believes will influence her in subtle ways, whether or not she wholeheartedly pursues it. She looks forward to what this may bring to her theatre work. “There’s something so exciting about multimedia work that is well done—that dialogue between mediums has a resonant magical quality that transcends the mundane.”

Boyd’s current project, in addition to her baby, is the Running with Scissors SNIPs series (Scissors New Works In Progress). Throughout March at Links Hall, audiences have the opportunity to see new works from RWS company members. “It’s low budget, not fully produced, raw. It’s all work people really care about in their gut. Everybody is doing something that comes from a deep place of curiosity or passion.”

Boyd herself is working on two possibilities for SNIPs, which both started out as assignments in her “Techniques of the Body” class, taught by Faith Wilding. In the spirit of SNIPs, she went into these projects with pure curiosity and no agenda. Such is the freedom of school. “I don’t have to know what I’m going to find out.”

One project is a sound collage based on people’s feelings about their skin. She created the collage from people’s responses to very basic questions such as, “Describe to me the color of your skin;” “Has your attitude changed about your skin?” “Have you had any problems with your skin?” Such specific questions had a universal effect on her participants, as stories from their lives came tumbling out.

The other project is a video piece that she created in response to an assignment to explore “sensation.” Boyd, along with Carolyn Hoerdeman and Elena Jovanova, presented three women’s perspectives on pregnancy. It all came quite easily to them as a progression from being children together in a kiddie pool, to adolescents trying on different roles of being women, and then into their own stories. Boyd uses her current pregnancy as a source, while Jovanova reflects on her mother’s pregnancy with her brother, and Hoerdeman’s explores her preference for jumping out of airplanes rather than giving birth to a baby.

According to Boyd, this project came easily to them—it didn’t feel like they worked hard on it. “I feel bad saying that,” she says. “I admit I’m a workaholic, but I’m learning that grinding away on something isn’t necessarily the formula for success.”

Reconciling her wide array of influences has always been a challenge for Boyd. “I get frustrated at times. I have so many interests, and I can’t be simultaneously reading a book, taking a dance class, walking on the beach...it’s a dangerous frustration to have because you could just stay in that bad place.”

She enjoys solitary artistic pursuits such as painting, writing and photography, but finds herself consistently drawn back to collaborative art forms, where she can riff off other people’s energy. She holds a deep appreciation for the collaborative experience, intense human connection of a shared experience and creating something collaboratively that no single person may have thought of.

Her greatest influences are not necessarily big famous names, but instead they are the people she regularly collaborates with. “I feel like we grow together, even when we’re not working together.”

Ideally, she would like to work with a group of people on an intensive and ongoing basis. “Not like we put up a show and then it’s over. But to work for a year or two or five or 10 to develop work over longer periods of time. Maybe it would drive me crazy, like why won’t this show ever open? But I think I’d really like that.”

In some small ways she does get to do that with RWS, because she often works with many of the same people. However, it is rarely developing one single project over time. In some ways the SNIPs could be a step toward that, as a creative process toward original work. “I wouldn’t want to force that, though,” she says. “It’s a pretty specific thing to want. If Court Theatre calls, you couldn’t really run off and work with them. Not everybody is going to want to make that sacrifice.”

Possibly her biggest fear is that she is not living up to her potential. Although exploding with creativity, there is a nagging feeling that she’ll “look back and think 'I thought I was really living and awake and being bold and daring in my life, but I was really asleep.’”

In the future, she might pick up a piece she did “a million years ago. A movement piece with actors that expressed a linear idea in an abstract form. That’s the realm I really want to explore.”

That, and her lighter side. “I don’t have a lot of humor in my work. My friend, Julia Neary, is always telling me to lighten up. But when it’s my own original work, it’s harder to tap into that side of myself.” As seen in Lysistrata though, Boyd does indeed have a zany quirkiness that comes out when she does other people’s work. “I’m all willing to go there,” she laughs, “but it’s not gonna originate from me.”