By Debra Cash

“I love to dance. I love music. My life is in the flow” — Seán Curran

Through Lines,  presented by Seán Curran Company and Decent Dance performance, at the Dance Complex, 536 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, on December 6 and 7.

Choreographer Seán Curran. Photo: courtesy of the artist

Whether it was as a first-generation American kid taking Irish step dance lessons in Boston once a week for a dollar, being the “barefoot modern dance guy” skittering across the stage for a decade as a distinctive member of the postmodern Bill T. Jones/Arne Zane Company, pounding the Broadway floor boards in STOMP!, choreographing dozens of operas and The Pirates of Penzance, or serving a nine year stint as chair of NYU Tisch School of the Arts Department of Dance, there has been a single through-line in Seán Curran’s artistic career.

That throughline is music.

“I love to dance. I love music. My life is in the flow,” Curran said during a recent Zoom conversation as we caught up after way too many years. “I describe music as my best friend – from Joni Mitchell to Janáček. I used to be embarrassed that I didn’t read music, but for me, the music is the motor. I’m finding how it is making us move.”

In December, Curran is having a reunion of sorts with Boston-based choreographers Brain Feigenbaum and Tony Guglietti. Guglietti, who studied with Feigenbaum at Tisch, was a founding member of Curran’s eponymous company in 1997, and now leads Decent Dance with his dancer wife Kristin Wagner. Loom will be the first ensemble work Guglietti has created for his small company.

“Tony was my student at NYU,” Curran recalls. “Someone was on maternity leave so I was his technique teacher. I taught in the morning and the afternoon, and he was so into it he took my class twice a day. I like his work ethic. I said to him ‘I’m starting a company and I don’t pay much but I’ll give you two subway tokens to come to rehearsal.’ He is an eccentric mover, and he was always my leading guy, an attentive, strong partner. When we were on a State Department tour of Central Asia, we spent five weeks together. He tells me that he takes a lot of ideas about wit and humor in dance from me. It makes me feel like a proud modern dance papa.”

Path, the new work Curran is bringing to Boston for his nine-person New York-based ensemble, digs back into his Irish Catholic roots. While he doesn’t consider himself much a believer – he does admit to having an apartment decorated with religious knickknacks, including 30 statues of a light-up Jesus blinking on the cross and carved wooden icons from Mexico that still smell of candle smoke, he feels that “organized religion can work in your life the way art does,” as a cathartic experience, a “wrestling with the angels.”

A look at SCC’s Abstract Concrete. Photo: Ian Douglas

His parents lived an unshakeable faith. Curran smiles when he says that his 87 year old mother, still living in the Belmont house where he grew up, says the rosary every night and “she has said the rosary for every one of my grant applications!” When he considered creating a memory piece that honored his late father, his mother, and the friends and colleagues he lost to AIDS, he chose a score by Jody Talbot based on the pilgrimage of Santiago de Compostela which he discovered, serendipitously, one of his dancers had completed.

“I consider myself a blue collar worker in the art world, the making and doing,” Curran says. “When I was Irish step dancing, we danced at a union hall.” From the intimate venue of Cambridge’s Dance Complex he’ll travel to Houston Grand Opera where he is the movement director for a new production of Kevin Puts’ Silent Night, an opera based on the legendary – and true –Christmas Eve truce of 1914, a production scheduled to transfer to the Metropolitan Opera. Next summer, he choreographs the Santa Fe Opera American premier of Lili Elbe by Tobias Picker, based on the life of the transwoman familiar from the 2015 film The Danish Girl. Plus, there’s a “dream come true” project for the gender-bending Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo.

For Curran, the variety works. He’s like a farmer, he says, and these assignments are “like crop rotation” keeping the soil of his creativity fertile.

“I’ve always been an ambassador for the art form,” he says. “I’m 64. As [choreographer] Donald McKayle used to say, I’m still kicking — just not as high.”

Debra Cash is a Founding Contributor to the Arts Fuse and a member of its Board. She once had a conversation with Sean Curran’s father, who hosted an Irish music radio show, waiting in the line at the Belmont post office.