This is the second in a series of interviews with Brooklyn women artists at their favorite bars by Sarah Deming.  This week, she met modern dancer Julie Worden for a delicious martini at the magical Clover Club in Carroll Gardens.  Julie has been dancing with the Mark Morris Dance Group since 1994.

You can catch Julie and the Mark Morris Dancers at the Brooklyn Academy of Music this week on Tuesday the 23rd and Thursday the 25th through Saturday the 27th.  The program features the world premiere of “Socrates” to music by Erik Satie.  For online ticketing, go here.

Sarah: Tell me about your childhood and when you knew you wanted to be a dancer.

Julie: I grew up in the small town of Naples, Florida, where all the little girls took dance. We performed at the Swamp Buggy Parade, the Moose Lodge, and the local mall.  I was incredibly shy.  I think I liked the idea of being able to communicate nonverbally, by getting inside of something that already existed and expressing it from the inside out.  I was fourteen when I left home to go to the North Carolina School of the Arts.

Sarah: That’s a very rigorous program.  Looking back, do you think the strictness was helpful?

Julie: They tried to break you down, to see if you had a backbone. I was lucky in that I had a strong family and sense of self.  I suppose it’s good to weed out the people who won’t make it.  Better to learn the truth early on than after 25 years of dance classes.

Sarah: What attracted you to Mark Morris’s work?

Julie: I met Mark when I was fifteen and I knew I had to work with him.  I told my teachers that and they said, “He’ll never make it; he’s the bad boy of dance.”  But the next year they were showing us the BBC documentary on him!  I consider Mark a cultural father, not only in dance but in music and art. I see music better through his dances, through the things he pulls out of it.

Sarah: Is there room in the choreography for your own individual expression?

Julie: With Mark’s work, yes.  The choreography comes from him, but each dancer represents a different part of humanity.  Together we convey a more well-rounded expression of each particular move, and he wants that spread of personalities.

Sarah: What is your favorite piece to dance?

Julie: Lately it’s been “All Fours.”

Sarah: I love that one!  To Bartok’s Fourth String Quartet.

Julie: The amazing thing about Mark is that he takes pieces that are technically “undanceable” and makes them sound like pop music. Two smalltown girls in California told me they loved that piece and called it “the hip hop number.”  Mark assigned two dancers to each string part and broke down the piece bar by bar.  Sometimes we took two hours to work through two bars of music because it’s so complex. It has these very tense, spare, Orwellian moments that to me are about suppression and control of emotion, and it has pizzicato movements where it’s like the floor is opening beneath you. Mark shows the audience the structure and the rhythm so clearly.

Sarah: Tell me more about rhythm.  Do you think it’s innate or can it be taught?

Julie: I don’t think rhythm can be taught.  It’s something outside of yourself that you have to just exhale and open into.  Overly intellectual artists sometimes have difficulty with this, because there is a striving, a kind of reaching in advance of the beat.  But rhythm is about being almost late.  It’s about the bottom.  Sometimes when the company is most fatigued, that’s when we’re the most together. We’re all together – the dancers, the musicians in the pit, the audience.  It’s a huge and beautiful thing, because Mark’s work is based on folk traditions.  It’s like opening into a huge vibration.

Sarah: Where do you think the vibration comes from?

Julie:  The earth?  The ocean? I don’t really know.

Sarah: I think dance is the most fleeting of all the arts.

Julie: It’s the saddest thing in the world.  Once you get something figured out, it’s over.  The older you get and the deeper you become, the more your cartilage wears out.  Maybe that’s what makes it so beautiful: The fact that it could be taken from you any second.

Sarah: How do you want to be remembered as a dancer?

Julie: As someone with a pure and clear intent, who meant everything she did. I want people to look at me and see the music.  I want them to sit back in their seats and think, “I’m in good hands.”

RECIPE: GIN BLOSSOM

This delicate and delicious recipe comes courtesy of the Clover Club’s Julie Reiner, who says that when she opened her bar she wanted to create a cocktail that would be Clover’s house martini.

1 1/2 ounces Plymouth Gin
1 1/2 ounces Martini and Rossi Bianco Vermouth
3/4 ounce Apricot Eau de Vie
2 dashes orange bitters

Stir all ingredients very well over ice.  Strain into a chilled cocktail glass.  Garnish with an orange twist.  Drink while discussing deep things.