We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Caitlin Trainor. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Caitlin below.

Caitlin, appreciate you joining us today. Do you think your parents have had a meaningful impact on you and your journey?

I grew up in the time before parenting was a verb. My mother was a fine art painter of portraits and nudes and a highly improvisational chef. My father was an irrreverent professor of philosophy who generally preferred books to people. So rules were hard to come by and with 3 older siblings, it was a ‘Lord of the Flies’ kind of culture. I like to joke that if you didn’t get dead, you learned to take care of yourself. We had no TV for many years, and the only tutorials you got were from schoolteachers back then, so DIY was the default mode- invention- the only option. My parents weren’t ruffled much by anything I made or did so long as I didn’t light the house on fire, so I really had to be internally motivated and failed often. My parents did not create a cookies and milk type of family, but they questioned what they had been indoctrinated with as youth and gave us the freedom to create our own worlds, be they dwellings in the woods, paper maché piñatas, or dance dramas to the full original Cyndi Lauper cassette. That wildness, that freedom…seems impossible now and makes me glad to be a GenX kid raised by laissez-faire parents. I think we all carry the mindset of early programming with us and I’m grateful for coming up wild. There were no rubrics for life and the improvisational mindset stuck. My M.O., for better or worse, is ready, fire, aim!

Caitlin, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I am the founder and director of Trainor Dance, a non profit company that creates and performs robustly physical, interdisciplinary work. I am also the founder of Dancio.com, which provides on demand dance classes with world class teachers and is in use in 180 countries and counting. I am an educator, mainly at Barnard College/Columbia University, where I teach contemporary dance and improvisation. And I am a performer, creating and dancing in semi-narrative multimedia work. I’m the queen of the slash career!

I once read that luck happens when preparation meets opportunity. I wish I were the super prepared type! Instead I’ve made a lot of decisions based on intuition and good instinct in the moment, and those turned out to be mostly very lucky! So what I’m most proud of is that by chance or circumstance, I’ve been able to carve out a career in which the majority of my work is creative, contributive, and extremely rewarding. Underlying that is an inborn sort of fearlessness. If we were living in the wild, I would surely be eaten by a bear, but a reduced tendency towards fear is great for any kind of profession where you are just constantly putting your ass out there. So I’ve had the opportunity to be creative as suits my nature, and I’m just so grateful not to feel stagnant or sold out, as can happen at mid-career.

In terms of the creative process, I think my superpower is to really see the special magical parts of others, and foster the expression of those special magical things through a new creation. My antennae, my reality sensors, are constantly scanning, analyzing, and gathering data, like a psychic kinesthesia, and drawing the fascination points into something tangible. How this manifests can vary, from helping a student solve a technical problem to finding the answer of what comes next in a dance by letting my subconscious attune to the subtle activities in the room– but it is always in collaboration, in relationship, and with a desire to the heart of things.

In terms of visible accomplishments, these are a few that come to mind:

I founded Dancio before the pandemic because it was crazy how hard it was to find a decent dance class online. Now Dancio provides 125+ dance classes in ballet, modern, contemporary and African dance from beginner through professional level, and is in use all over the world. In the early days, people asked whether anyone needed an online dance class, but when the pandemic came, the doubters said ‘ohhhhhhhh…I get it now’.

Artistically, I’m really proud of “Faux Pas”, from 2014. Seven dancers wear full length, jewel toned, pure silk skirts while dancing to Mozart. The piece is extravagant, wildly joyful, and imaginative. I made it at a time when New York dance felt so gritty and self referential, and the piece felt so drastically different from that. “Faux Pas” remains an audience and photographer favorite; there is just nothing like watching the silk skirts fly!

The other piece I’m really proud of is ” Fact or Fiction?” Performers tell stories through language and movement, and the audience votes on the veracity of each using auction paddles. From white hair traditionalists in New England to middle schoolers in the Bronx, audiences laugh, cry, and definitely want to talk about what the truth is after seeing the show! We perform this piece for schools, colleges, community centers, and even corporate events. We meld ‘pure dance’ with storytelling and crazy collaged audio elements. It feels amazing to connect with audiences so naturally, without the weird divide abstraction can put between performers and audiences and everyone loves the paddles.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

I just love that my job is to break rules, or at least have a healthy irreverence for them, and to seek out a state of wonder. In a time when what Rebecca Solnit refers to as ‘the tyranny of the quantifiable’ threatens the subtle, unknowable things, creativity beckons to the mysterious. I love using the body as a testing ground for big, unanswerable questions, and communicating in a way that transcends language.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

I’m always interested in bridging the divide between art for the people and art for the insiders. I grew up in the country and still feel connected to the people where I’m from, and when I make something I often wonder how they would experience it. One time years ago, my beloved aunt came to see one of my shows. There was a moment in the show wherein one dancer laid upon another and both floated their limbs upwards, a ripple through the bodies, like a butterfly’s wings in motion. My aunt later asked me about the seductive lesbian duet, because as a practicing Catholic, that is what she saw. So I’m always aware of how things look different to different people, and how strange and alienating dance can be. Sometimes the dance world can feel like some weird insider’s club, like in the ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’, and I wonder if abstraction is just a way of being vague. Miguel Gutierrez’s essay “Does Abstraction Belong to White People?” tackles some of the problems that I think about in relation to abstraction, narrative, hierarchies, and legibility. And I think about how the hierarchies we are all entrenched in play into the work and ideas of beauty, yet I’m interested in beauty. So while I know that the role of art is to push on norms, provoke response, and make us feel a multiplicity of things, I’m always engaged with the tension of interpretation and legibility amongst different audiences and questions of beauty. I approach these questions using form, story, symbols, and definitely joy- a radical act in the face of the world as it is. The miracle of aliveness is there in the movement of bodies, emotions, ideas, and nature, from the flight of starlings to the great cosmic dance of the planets whirling in the sky. And that connection of all life on earth is deeply moving and motivating to me.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.trainordance.org & www.dancio.com
• Instagram: @mydancio &@trainordance
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/caitlinmtrainor
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/caitlin-trainor-a0373391/

Image Credits

Headshot: THEGINGERB3ARDMEN
Dance Photos: Paul B. Goode

1. Emily Craver and Landes Dixon in “Faux Pas” in costumes by David Quinn. Photo by Paul B. Goode
2. Caitlin Trainor in “PAINT”, a game based piece in which the audience wields 36 paint loaded super soaker in a white box gallery. Photo by Paul B. Goode
3. Caitlin Trainor in the studio. Photo by Paul B. Goode
4. Caitlin Trainor, photographer unknown.