Emory professor George Staib admits that, for a long time, he’d never really thought of himself as needing research funds. It just wasn’t in the dance teacher and choreographer’s portfolio. But his most recent project began to change that.
“The costs associated with creating contemporary dance are extraordinary,” says Staib, professor of practice in the Dance and Movement Studies Program. “There’s the theater, the technical aspects of lighting and production. Then there's the labor of getting the dancers into the studio. And if they’re professionals like ours are, they have to be paid.”
But there’s yet another dimension to funding his latest production, “Ararat,” a contemporary multimedia dance project that addresses the Ottoman Empire’s mass killing of its Armenian population early in the 20th century. Like historians still working after so many decades to understand that tragedy, Staib was challenged by trying to grasp a chapter of history that had long been suppressed, handed down only through tales passed from one generation to the next.
“It's founded upon survivor stories,” he says. “All of this history is word of mouth, so there are already problems with that. And in the era closest to the event, in 1915 or 1920, it was hard to find even firsthand accounts. So the research needed to put up a piece of work is extensive. It requires resources — a conundrum where arts production is concerned.”
You could call his task investigative choreography. Born in Iran of Armenian descent, Staib wasn’t searching for facts alone, but for insight into what the survivors’ experiences felt like.
George Staib explains the different aspects of creating contemporary dance, from the theater itself to technical aspects of lighting to the dancers and beyond.
“I started to dig through the Library of Congress to find out where these stories are,” he says. “And, honestly, some of them were in a little gift shop in Washington D.C. I’m illiterate in Armenian, but a friend who’s also a dance enthusiast in Yerevan would send me articles and books. I’d be, like, ‘This feels important. Can you translate it for me?’”
With an award from Emory’s University Research Committee (URC), Staib was able to develop his vision for a work that brings survivors’ experience to the fore — commissioning original music and scenic designs, hosting a panel discussion and funding informal performances of the work at a conference.
The result was a work of modern dance that, according to Staib, conveys multiple meanings to multiple audiences. For the URC-funded version that premiered at Emory in 2023, he invited theater and music critics to the post-show. “I didn't want it to be, here’s how a dancer would look at this work,” he says. “Or here’s how a historian would look at it. How does somebody from a different discipline connect to what we offered?”
And at a September 2025 performance in Alabama, he says, “One hundred percent of the audience stayed for the post-show conversation. What was fascinating was that it opened the door for people to relate how they were connecting to the material. We had several intergenerational Armenian families come. Their relationship to it was very different from somebody who’s never traveled outside the United States. Jews who came to the performance found an alignment. It was a Holocaust before there was a Holocaust.”
The broad appeal wasn’t entirely an accident. “I tried to make this piece as universal or relatable as possible,” Staib says. “I built it as any major change in anyone's life — whether it’s a divorce, having a kid, moving, it could speak to all of that.”
Staib also incorporated the incompleteness of history’s understanding of that event into the dance itself.
“There’s a section that seemed to land most solidly for many viewers,” he says. “Where I made up ridiculous sentences like, ‘The blue ox stabbed the purple pigeon and threw it around into a tree.’ I asked the dancers to make that as cartoony as possible. I took the opening lines of very famous novels, like ‘Call me Ishmael,’ or ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.’ Then I segued into an actual survivor story, somebody who was starved to death or shot near a river. And just randomly associated all these things together.”
The result allowed people to make their own connections between the different elements with multiple meanings.
“If they’re looking for a relationship between text and movement, they’re going to find it,” Staib says. “If they’re looking for evidence of this actually being genocide, they will find it. In terms of societal norms, if you’re looking for economic discrimination, you’re going to find it. If you’re looking for, ‘Oh, things aren’t so bad,’ you’ll find that as well. So I think that pointed to the shakiness of telling and retelling history.”
Staib says the final version of “Ararat” has not been written. He’s still polishing, tightening and reworking parts of the performance for greater clarity.
“The version we did in September was dramatically different than the one we premiered at Emory,” he says. “We recently were invited to stage a performance in Yerevan, Armenia. If we’re able to take it there, it’s going to change again. There will be even more Armenian in the text!”
That flexibility is one reason Staib is grateful for the URC funding.
“The URC understands this is experimental,” he says. “We’re trying to figure things out. There’s a generosity inside the URC that allows for hypothesizing, then whittling an idea down. Which is really rare.”