TERE O'CONNOR may be glad the incident has been almost forgotten, but in many ways it sums up the choreographer and his work, writes Michael Seaver.

In 2005, Joan Acocella, the dance critic of the New Yorker, wrote how O'Connor belonged to a group of choreographers working in New York that she dubbed the "downtown surrealists." The article was generally positive, but it infuriated O'Connor who responded with a letter to the editor that, although unpublished, was circulated widely around the dance community online.

Angry, witty, thoughtful and razor sharp, the letter disproved Acocella's flawed analysis of his work and called it "intellectually porous". He wrote: "Through her lack of understanding and her inability to reach out and get information from artists, she joins a group of critics whom I will call 'the literalists'. These critics do not know how to read dances created outside the restricted confines of the narrative or musical frameworks from past centuries."

"I actually like Joan [Acocella]," says O'Connor, speaking by phone from Illinois, where he is a professor at the Dance Department of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She just happened to be the one he struck out at after years of being misunderstood and misrepresented in print.

Three long-serving critics at the New York Times- also "literalists" according to him - had also failed to grasp what he and other choreographers were doing and since they wrote for the journal of record in the United States, their opinions automatically became a kind of official record of dance. "It remains one of the most shocking things in our [dance] history," he says.

Two of those three New York Timescritics have been replaced since O'Connor's letter and although he wouldn't agree with everything now written by two younger critics, he rejoices in the fact that choreography is now being seen on its own terms. So when Claudia La Rocco, writing about his 2006 work Baby, states that "what seems carelessly arranged is anything but," she is articulating O'Connor's creative essence. In the absence of representation or narrative, he forefronts choreography within his pieces.

"For a while now, I've been pushing for the choreography to be the protagonist of the work," he says. "I'm not interested in dance as a form of translation of another ideas. Dance is the idea."

Rammed earth - the ancient technique of building with compressed sand, gravel and clay - was the initial spark behind his latest work, tying together his idea of self-serving choreography, what O'Connor calls his "natural, almost naïve love of architecture." Contrary to the famous David Bowie quote - "writing about music is like dancing about architecture" - O'Connor believes it's not such an unusual connection.

"I've always had this feeling that dance is a way of spraying powder on these invisible pre-existing pretend structures in an empty space. They are already there," he says "All empty space has the potential for architecture in it." So how does he translate these ideas into movement?

For him, the idea is just a portal into the act of creation and the idea is then almost always abandoned as the dance material takes on a life of its own. "That said, the movement does house the source material, but not at the level of depicting - or re-explaining it. And it's not necessarily something that comes out and speaks at the top of a work," he continues.

"It is buried deep into it and it's really a place of great subversive effect - I don't mean subversive in a political sense - but below the kind of level where we read symbols."

When he talks about his choreography, it is as a living being rather than an inert artifact. The verbs he uses are active rather than passive, so instead of the choreography shackled to a narrative or idea, the act of creation is about liberating movement.

"I prefer to think of myself as the nurse for the work rather than the surgeon for the work, helping it rather than calculating it," he says. "I learn more about the piece as I make it, but I try not to what I call 'Edward Scissorshand it', or craft it, until a very late point and let it try to give me its information as much as possible."

However clear he is about his process, the fact remains that some people, like those "literalist" critics, well, just don't get it. O'Connor maintains that there has always been this division between those who are willing to perceive a work at different levels and those who want things explained to them. "Dance certainly shows that clearly."

Deep research into his own practice has helped him mentor younger choreographers. Rather than outlining an a-b-c of making dances, O'Connor helps them take a jump into their own imagination and away from the default settings of choreography.

The form this takes is totally open. "But it's not just a hippy endeavour. You have to be credibly rigorous about locating and making manifest the nature of your process, whatever it is," he says.

The creative landscape around this generation is quite different from when he was starting out as a choreographer. Then, it was your goal to form a company with your name on it. Not any more.

"I think somehow through the sensibility of the internet and social networking and the impossibility of affording space, this whole new modality is being created. These is less ownership of information and more sharing. It's a whole different network of thinking."

This has also filtered through to how people watch dance. Web 2.0 changed people from passive receivers of information to active creators of content. It's a bit like the difference between representational art that is passively observed and work that seeks a creative and imaginative input from the viewer. O'Connor refers to a review of the Whitney Biennial by the New York Times visual art critic Holland Cotter.

"He said that much of the work is in conversation with the moment, as opposed to in statement. I thought that was a very legible distinction."

However fluent at verbalising concepts and practice, O'Connor's movement is even more limpid and eloquent. The idea might be born in words, but as it becomes movement it journeys away from language. It's also why he believes others hadn't spoken out against New York's critics before him.

"I got an incredible amount of emails supporting me, but why hadn't anyone spoken out before? Perhaps there is a certain nature of personality that goes into dance, someone who takes their own voice away as an intrinsic part of the form. 'I'm going to make myself mute to express myself.' It's a really interesting metaphor."

Although O'Connor's work is outside the mainstream, it certainly isn't elitist. It's an accusation often levelled at contemporary dance, but there is a clear distinction between being marginalised and being elitist. "Lacemaking is not very popular around the world, but is it elitist?" he asks. "I don't think so. Nor is making mozzarella cheese."

But he's happy with this marginalisation. "The margin is a really wonderful place to get a reading of a culture."

... MS

...

Rammed Earth is performed on May 1-3 at SS Michael & Johns. www.dublindancefestival.ie