The last thing dancer-choreographer Adam Rose wants is for you to enjoy his work. He aims to inspire fear and dread.
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Rose, 28, speaks haltingly but articulately; a self-described shy young man, he’s transformed onstage. About half the time he performs as a woman. Pretty much all the time his movements are contorted, transfiguring his face into a mask of rage or grief and his limbs into agents of violence, sometimes directed at himself or, more rarely, someone else. “To me the point of performing is to throw myself outside of my self,” he says, “or to find other selves besides my supposed self-identity.”
Rose’s interests in dance and the occult developed simultaneously, six years ago, when he took his first dance class as a transfer student at Antioch College in Ohio. Called Thinking Bodies and Bodied Minds, he says, it confronted the mind-body split head on, combining psychology, dance, and biology. As his class project, he did a movement portrait of Antonin Artaud, got a “really good reaction,” and became a dance major.
Rose says that unacknowledged belief in magic pervades our society. Corporate logos and military propaganda are intended to “make us follow their program,” which falls under Aleister Crowley’s definition of magic “as the ability to create change in conformity with the will.”
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