Two’s Company – ArtDesk

LARRY KEIGWIN: Hi, you guys. So I am calling from a car on the campus of the University of Central Oklahoma. Where are you calling from?

ALICE KLOCK: We are in a car on Vashon Island in Washington State—close to Seattle, just a ferry ride away.* We’ve been here working as part of a residency with Seattle Dance Collective.

LK: Tell me how you guys met.

FLORIAN LOCHNER: We met at Hubbard Street Dance in Chicago where we were both dancers and also choreographic fellows. We discovered a connection between us and started playing around in the studio and it became a bigger thing.

AK: I was going through this time where I needed to take a lot of time for myself and not really hanging out with people. Florian was, like, I want to be Alice’s friend, and he was very pushy. It was so great. It broke me out of this hermit phase that I was in. We really discovered this kinship.

LK: So tell me about the word flock, and when you came up with that.

AK: In a way it started almost as a joke. One of our friends was, like, you guys should be a team and you should be called Flock like Florian, F-L-O, and Klock, C-K. As we became a duo choreographically, we talked about other things that we could be called and ended up back at Flock because it also philosophically worked with our mission. We are the central unit that is the constant, and we bring in new people. The flock expands and contracts around us.

LK: My first introduction to you was on Instagram. It was during the beginning of the pandemic, but you were making videos before then. How did that play out?

AK: We did a lot of free Flock warm-up Instagram livestreams, especially for the first few months when everyone was totally trapped. We connected with a lot of people, and those people auditioned for our online intensives. We’ve built this network that somehow felt even bigger and more powerful last year than ever. Working with people in India or Korea, people were waking up in the middle of the night to come to one of our classes, and that was very inspiring. It pulled us through.

FL: We didn’t know before that there is this large following outside the US or Europe. We suddenly saw that all these people from all these different countries were following us, and we would have never seen that before. We’re connecting with so many people, which we would have never had the chance to otherwise.

LK: A beautiful opportunity in disguise. I’ve noticed that a lot of your videos are very, very short. You have identified a unique language.

AK: I’m a very geeky person, and to me Instagram is an interesting platform. In this context, we can achieve this satisfying loop that isn’t something we would present onstage. It is embracing the Internet culture of short attention spans, giving people this feeling of eye candy as a fun thing.

FL: Most of the time we are sharing clips and little things from what we are working on and don’t want to show too much; we try to keep it really short so people can get excited. We think about how we put stuff out there because it is fun for us to share our work, share our language.

LK: It’s going to be interesting when audiences come back to the stage. Their attention has been on a minute or less and now we’re going to be, you know, twenty to thirty minutes. Do you have any thoughts on how audiences are going to approach the theater again and the experience of time?

AK: I’m hopeful that audiences will be more willing to sit down and marinate in something, because we’ve been so deprived. I’m hopeful that we continue to present dance through media in a way that is as accessible as it has been during the pandemic. It’s a tricky business model to have both and to do it in a way that is sustainable. Being able to share with audiences who wouldn’t be able to see your work, I think that’s a really important evolution of what we do as dance makers.

LK: What about your online workshops? You have these audiences around the world now. Do you think you’ll continue teaching online?

AK: That has been huge for us to connect with people who wouldn’t be able to take a workshop in person. We’ll definitely continue with that.

LK: Can you describe each other in one word?

FL: That’s hard. With one word?

AK: Okay. This is, like, a cheat-y word, but I think my one word to describe Florian is “soul mate.”

LK: Is that two? Is that two words? It can be one.

AK: That’s why it’s a little cheat-y!

FL: I see Alice always as my idol. I look up to her. I looked up to her as a dancer at Hubbard Street when I was, like, I want to become Alice’s friend, and that was one of my goals, and I always saw her as this idol. I looked up to her and the work she created.

*For more about Vashon Island, see the ArtDesk masthead page.