DOUG NIELSEN LIVES OUTSIDE THE BOX

Witty, whimsical and blessed with a free spirit, dancer/choreographer/teacher Douglas Nielsen has spent his life being creative for a living. When it comes to thinking outside the box, Nielsen doesn’t have to because he doesn’t have one.

These days he is a member of the dance faculty at the University of Arizona. Before that he spent almost 20 years opening the minds of dance students who lived in countries that were once behind the Iron Curtain.

Before that, he was at the UA the first time, arriving on campus in 1987 to join longtime friends Jory Hancock and Melissa Lowe. The three of them made an instant impression in the Baked Apple, dancing Nielsen’s choreography all over town -- sometimes in Tucson spaces that had never seen a modern dance performance before.

While Hancock and Lowe stayed to build the UA dance program into a nationally significant school, which also enrolled an exceptionally large number of men, the more restless Nielsen couldn’t turn down an opportunity to start the first modern dance company ever in China. That began what would become his zeal for encouraging personal creativity in people who had been forced to live submissively for many decades.

“It was through the sponsorship of the American Dance Festival in 1988. David Wood was running the school of music and dance at that time. He encouraged me to go to China,” Nielsen remembered.

“Then in 1989 the Berlin wall came down. I spent nearly the next 20 years teaching dance in former communist countries.

“It was a time in history I wanted to be a part of,” the dancer continued. “To be a messenger for free thinking.”

Now his resume includes teaching assignments in China, Russia and several eastern European countries.

“I can count to eight in any language,” Nielsen laughs.

“I think I was good at it because the mission was to teach them to express themselves, not to teach them my technique.” This was quite a contrast to traditional Chinese instruction, where “they teach students to copy the masters.”

Nielsen remembers an early lesson when he, working through an interpreter, asked the students to create something personal. The interpreter told Nielsen there was no Chinese word for “personal.”

Coming up with new approaches to presenting ideas has always been one of Nielsen’s specialties. Always casual about his accomplishments, the teacher likes to say that he isn’t teaching a formula. What he encourages is more like an approach to free thinking.

But even as Nielsen’s passport kept filling up with border crossing stamps from other countries, he still kept his apartment in New York and still kept in touch with Hancock and Lowe.

“The turning point for me was the opening of the Stevie Eller Dance Theatre. When I first saw it I almost had a breakdown because I knew how hard Jory had worked.

“He was turning this place into the Juilliard of the desert, and I wanted to be a part of it.”

Nielsen returned to the UA campus in January of 2006. He’s been having more of an impact ever since. His collaborations with other schools on campus have people talking.

“I did two with the School of Architecture. Now I am working on a new one with Moira Geoffrion from the art school. It is a work in progress. Our next meeting is tomorrow.

“We will perform it next April.”

Nielsen estimates that over those years he was away from the UA campus he taught classes in 40 different dance departments, and all but the UA have been based in modern dance. Cutting its own path through the world of developing dance talent, the UA has always emphasized its triple track program of putting equal emphasis on ballet, modern and jazz dance.

“Incoming students have to be good at two of the three to get in. To get out,” he smiled, “they have to be good at all three.”

Almost as well-known as Nielsen’s dedication to dance is his dedication to collecting art. His loft is literally filled to overflowing with paintings and other art objects.

“I always think, if ballet is a straight line, then modern is a blurred line,” he explained, going with a visual image. “In modern dance there is still precision. I believe that part is so misunderstood.

“It is very important to humanize technique. To keep the dancer’s artistry and technique in balance is always a challenge.”

But modern dance is so vague, people say. There is no story. Nobody knows what a modern dance is about.

“Poetry connects words, dance connects movements,” Nielsen explains. “When people ask me ‘What was that dance about?” I always ask them ‘What did you feel?’.”

What Nielsen thinks is that anything goes, everything flows freely through the self-imposed barriers we construct in our minds.