coda’s starter kit at Sugar Space

If you become a member of coda, Sugar Space’s new professional dance company, you’ll find yourself in a situation much like Repertory Dance Theatre is said to have been in its early days. You and your comrades make dances on each other and you pool your knowledge to provide each other classes and choose a guest artist. Every few months, there’s a new audition and the process repeats.

I just came home from watching the first iteration of this cycle. My initial takeaway is that it read like a real ensemble evening. Diverse interests were explored, but it didn’t feel like a grab bag where a half a dozen people had been chosen from a pool of random, opportunity starved dance artists applying by mail. Care had been taken in putting a show together, in a more than idiomatic sense.

Molly Heller’s work, which was split into three, provided a narrative scaffold for the rest of the evening. In these “acts”, placed between other dances, Heller explicated her relationship with husband Brad Heller. Each vignette was also a performance of (and to) Rod Stewart’s monster(ous) hit “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy” [Rod’s spelling, not mine]. In part one, Heller (in golden stretch pants and a flouncy green top) gave her husband (purple tights, peasant ruffles up top) what might have been post modern prelude to a lap dance, while matter-of-factly telling him to periodically adjust the volume. Act II saw Brad and Molly coyly singing the song to each other while Molly slid herself across Brad’s passive form. She crept slowly, giving choice attention to certain curves, arriving in unison next to Brad just in time for the second or third chorus of “If you want my body and you think I’m sexy/ Come on honey tell me so/ If you really need me just reach out and touch me/Come on Molly let me know”. “No. It should be sugar.” Singing this line lying face down next to each other earned a healthy laugh from a crowd that had been gently giggling the whole time. The final number was a giddy romp through the space for Ms. Heller and non-dancer Brad. The song was finally playing at full blast, which was quite satisfying, when all of a sudden the dancing devolved into a slide show of Googled images of Rod himself on the back wall. The piece ended as choreographer, husband and technical director struggled in turns to disactivate of the projector and diminish the specter of Rod.

As light, fun and self-effacingly hip as this all sounds it did leave me with a few lingering questions. How was I supposed to feel about the relationship between “trained” wife and “untrained” husband? Was this just a big joke or is this really “their song” in some serious, if sentimental, way? If I am being invited into an inner joke space of their relationship, why and how? And if not, what was the aim of making it seem so?

Nancy Carter’s Hold me tight if I love you left me with many similar questions about form and content. The work was a modern dance trio, mostly, thought it began with each dancer choosing one audience member with whom to slow dance. They did this a few times at the very beginning, with a tender awkwardness that left me wishing they would make everyone in the audience dance at least once and then that would be that. What ensued instead was an exploration of formal themes such as how a trio  functions, how Shira Fagan could stay in unison with Jane Jackson with Anne Marie Robson Smock attached to her body etc. The varied musics, notably a spoken word piece about hearts “bruising but not breaking” provided an unexpected modicum of contrast.

I am pretty sure that the it in Everything is Nothing Without It was dance itself. Jane Jackson’s ensemble piece was a melange of fast paced dialogue and introspective group dancing. The six women fought over a cupcake (“That’s not really dancer food!”), went to a “showing” within the dance, and argued about the primacy of the left vs. the right brain in dance making. There was some serious unison dancing, and then we returned to the image the dance started with, the heart of the dance really, choreographer Jane Jackson trying to decide how to start dancing. Standing there twitching with indecision, is something everyone who makes dances (and probably everyone else as well) can identify with.

Particularly in Everything is Nothing, but in everything else I’ve discussed as well, I noticed one recurring issue. Though each was an excellent first draft, all of these pieces seemed to be looking for a kind of high drama, something surreal, possibly even operatic. And yet none couldn’t quite get there because they were held back by a commitment to a certain idea of dance-theater “realism”.  There’s nothing “actorly” or “real” about the way most dancers talk and emote on stage- and that’s fine- we’re not actors, at least not in the same sense. What would it look like if we embraced that and became the strange, unique creatures that we are? In doing so maybe we could learn a little bit more about ourselves than the fact that we’re afraid of food and that we don’t know our left from our right.

Guest artist Shannon Mockli demonstrated commitment to a ballsy idea in her solo A Space Between. A slow, contemplative solo, almost too dramatic, happens in front of a video where slipping focus is an obvious metaphor for the areas between states of consciousness, life and death. There’s a recorded text of Mockli discussing an ambiguous experience of “being between” that caused her to reflect on mortality and the life of the body, as it is and as it is imagined. In other hands, it could have been a tragic failure of a piece, yet Mockli is so committed to doing things because she feels them, that we feel them too. She transcends trend and conceit, working in a format that is reminiscent of a great essayist. She lays out several co-existent threads that can only be tied together by holding them inside ourselves all of them at the same time. Her dancing is so strong it can’t be overpowered by other the other media- and that’s rare.

Mockli’s group piece Vital Rein did similar things for each of its performers. Annie Robson Smock in particular danced in a way that I’ve never seen before, her length bridled and released with a sense of timing I didn’t know she was capable of. Mockli and dancers never lost interest in the realness of the task, nor in the responsibility of holding each moment’s metaphoric capacity.

Samuel Hanson writes in this blog often, makes dances, makes coffees and makes videos.

When the Daughters Shave Their Heads

In one of her smaller black boxes, The Rose Wagner provided a cool, air-conditioned escape from Salt Lake’s summer heat on Saturday, June 16. People gradually filled the chairs for “Daughters of Mudson” in the intimate space, and theatre workers pulled out extra chairs for last-minute concert-goers, which had already seemed especially replete with spectators for the production by loveDANCEmore (a division of the local non-profit, “ashley anderson dances”). The chitchat amongst the audience evinced a sense of community between attending dancers and reinforced camaraderie between the audience- and performers-to-be that evening. Ashley Anderson introduced Daughters of Mudson and the Mudson series at large, explaining how the “ashley anderson dances” Board President, Ishmael Houston Jones, selected five Mudson works-in-progress by five different women choreographers, who would show their completed pieces that evening.

As Anderson wrapped up her introduction to the showcase Rachael L. Shaw’s “Chrysalis” ensued. The piece begins with a woman in a yellow dress pacing along the perimeter of the stage, moving toward upstage left. She approaches the center of the space and begins a pattern of movement involving deep, harrowing breaths, twirling, and then an excruciatingly slow ascent of her forearms that cross in front of her face. She reinstates this pattern with another twirl, with her arms positioned as if she’s a ‘little tea pot,’ then knocks her arm in vertical, 360-degree swing. For me, the positioning of her crossed wrists in front of her face indicates a narcissistic mania caused by self-movement, a disconcerted acquiescence of a previously unfelt state that is to come, but is alien nevertheless. The unease of chrysalis, a transitional state, makes its presence felt as a second dancer follows the same path onstage—again, in a yellow summer dress—drawing out the length of the path that the piece must traverse. As she enters, the first dancer begins to flop around violently, like a rag doll, and plummets from her slow, calculated movement to chaotic flailing that communicates a delirium onset by change without clear resolution. The second performer’s motions involve the raising of her arms (the first dancer kicks up her legs, laying down, then exits). The lone dancer left onstage continues her pattern, just as steady as her predecessor. As a third yellow-dressed pacer enters, the second dancer increases her speed and begins lapse into disarray as well. The third dancer never arrives at her movement niche, as the lights cut out before she can attempt her dance to complete the triptych. Thus, “Chrysalis” evinces a Laocoon-esque quality, but without leaving any foresight as to how the situation will resolve—it leaves me forever in a state of deferment, without expectations, foreboding.

Leah Nelson then took the stage, jogging in place to Edith Piaf, her arms erect in the air, waving them back and forth to begin “Wow, Utah.” The first snippet of her monologue explains why she chooses this limb predicament—because she’s been told that she has prominent shoulders. The performer goes on to section off areas of the stage where she sidles into ‘dancy-dance’ phrases and makes deliberate, angular shapes with her arms and bends her legs, almost as if she’s perverting aerobics workout videos. She seems to begin and end as to strike a pose, so to speak, because she’s all that’s there for us to behold—why not? As she moves about, she goes on to say that there is a lot of space in New York City, referring back to the initial skyscraper she formed with her arms pointed vertically; she subsequently elucidates that, because of this, all the available space has been taken up by people (hence her shoulders). She continues to try out different areas of the stage and how she fits into and around them. She continues her eroded soliloquy by commenting on how the piece feels different than the first time she performed it, as she has been away from her NY friends longer. She then examines the different reactions she witnessed, from New Yorkers and Salt Lakers alike, to her move, still surprised that there can be “opinionated questions.” ‘Oh, are you going for work?’ In a way, she seems to say, as parses through the stage, now in Utah. ‘It’s beautiful there.’ It’s beautiful because I’m here, is what I almost hear, as she moves. She responds to all of the comments and questions by moving. She is about 20 feet away from me, from the front row, and she has the space she needs to articulate herself without me getting all up in her business, without her having to get too close for comfort. Her loose, paisley-esque pants reflect the earthy styles around these parts—she appears to be one who values comfort. Some people, she says, responded with a “Wow … Utah.” She’s all over the stage—Wow! Utah! seems to be the retort. She ends her speech by illustrating how somebody who was already here felt selfishly glad that the dancer would be coming here, as they would in the same city; this person, however, implored the performer to reconsider.  Nelson comments on how this person’s words were chosen carefully because they were conveyed via email, and the lights shut off. Ah, carefully chosen words then a slumber paced between another’s work—no more hustle, no more bustle till tomorrow.

A couple ad-hoc stagehands set up a square structure for Emily Haygeman’s ode to her grandmother, “For Dorothy.” It could be an easel. It could be a window or picture frame. A woman enters wearing a blue dress, tearing out sheets of paper and strewing them about the stage, away from the frame. Another woman, Dorothy, comes over the speakers and begins the tale of her daughter’s passage into the world. Dorothy was a Catholic girl, and there was no sex talk in her family’s household. She had had a one-night stand with a boy, and was well into her pregnancy when her parents finally relegated her to a before-unknown couple’s house to have her child then bequeath it to the government. The woman in blue continues the sheet-tearing, and hops to the occasional piece of paper like an island. She twists atop it, almost tortured, but silent in her task. Dorothy continues: She tried to get her baby back from the State of California, but her parents and a priest stopped her, and let her know that what she had done was disgraceful enough. The dancer tears the sheets out—they’re everywhere—and they crinkle beneath her footsteps. Dorothy ends by stating her retroactive gratitude that it all happened so that her daughter would call her and instill her with glee in their reuniting phone conversation. But it also forced her to relive the treachery of her loss of someone she wanted to love face-to-face. Dorothy bids Emily farewell. The dancer sits in a chair behind the frame, like she’s trapped at one side of the structure, but not within. A second performer enters, and a Mama Jungle song plays. The newcomer collects the pages and tapes them up along the frame as the song plays. When the song stops, the blue woman dances, oftentimes to the edge of the frame, just craning her neck out of its confines. The song restarts, and she sits back down, the second woman taping up the pages all the while. Sometimes the song stops abruptly, and the blue performer starts up again until the song restarts, and she begins to appear as a silhouette behind the reassembled pages. She never had the chance to read them in the way they were meant, but can now see them as a pallet. The story seems completed, but it is bittersweet—the two dancers have brought their stories to the other, but remain separated by a re-appropriation of their respective pasts, characterized by scission and the lack of an in-person experience of each other’s journeys. The two part ways in the darkness.

Members of Movement Forum, a local improvisation group, began Ashley Anderson’s piece, all holding hands toward the back in a line, wearing an assortment of clothes—one man wears a brown vest over a blue long-sleeve that lends him a beatnik-like vibe, and one of the women wears a white leather jacket, which Joan Jett would drool over. Five of the seven dancers move to the front, toward the audience in a casual groove to an Elvis Presley classic, “Don’t Be Cruel,” which is eponymous with the piece at hand. The troupe eases into languorous poses, which evince a sense of teenage angst and apathy set forth by the rock n’ roll revolution. Two of the front line occasionally dip onto the floor and emulate a top in its final stages of its spin, a dilapidated (hip hop) windmill that segues into another rendition of “Don’t Be Cruel.” Two in the back synchronize arabesques. Dancers in the front engage in flow-y arm movements like they’re dancing to the music in a nonchalant way, like they came to have fun, but are reticent and don’t want to talk to anybody at the dance party, like contact improv would result in an awkward push away from the pursuer. Anderson seems to take what she thinks it would be like to dance to pop music from the ’50s onward if Soul Train had never happened. Another version of the song plays through, and the dancers continue their patterns of movement. It almost says, I don’t need narrative to dance. In light of what I’ve seen that’s been hip over in NYC for the last couple years, Anderson seems to answer back with a cold shoulder to being bawdy to be bawdy, or injecting her work with mono/dialogues to add a ‘performance’ aspect to the piece. She’s like the girl you try to grind on at the club that turns away and simply says, “I just want to dance,” and finds her swagger through the music that she likes, then gets a drink when she isn’t feelin’ the track.

Kitty Sailer’s gaggle entered in the dark for “Honey Cake Pony,” the final dance of the evening. Of course, knowing Sailer, the entrance isn’t typical, as rude audience members scuffle into the front row, loudly whispering “excuse me” and pointing distracting flashlights to find their seats, and asking each other boisterously if the others are to dance, or if they themselves are to dance. I have known it’s part of the performance all along, but Sailer has inducted me and those around me into her piece; she lets the fine line between audience and performer bleed into an ambiguous space, where she paradoxically inducts us into her work by sending her dance birds to squawk amongst us. As the lights come on, the giddy ebbs and flow of Sailer’s piece go on as she goes to her hands and knees in front of a male performer, Samuel Hanson, who then makes a phone call using her bare, calloused dancer foot. I am privileged enough, at one point, to have Sailer and Amy Falls play kitty cat at my shins and calves, and Sailer lifts my legs up with her back (I tell the two, “I hope I don’t have swass …”). The women she has contracted to be in and out of the piece dance in almost a can-can line in front of Hanson and Sailer, then retreat up to the back corner with the audience, farthest away from me. Sailer forces Hanson’s hand onto her left breast, and then they continue the tele-foot game until Hanson says, “Have you ever had a cat?” They both play a seductive cat in front of each other. Hanson begins a sing-along with the women in the audience—a church-choir-like tune. They begin to file down and the lights go off, and the flashlights come back on. Hanson and the women stand around Sailer, who sits in a chair at the forefront of the stage. Each takes a turn having a make-out sesh with her then sit in front of the kissing orgy to start up the previous song, and the flashlights turn off. Some may say that Sailer doesn’t necessarily take herself ‘seriously.’ They are wrong. Sailer is like a punk rock screamer who holds the mic out to the audience to sing along, foregoing any distance for the audience to make a high-brow judgment that we would normally make with another performance of a Graham piece. She’s weird, but remains enigmatic and without explicit use of the latest Nicki Minaj hit. She masks what this is ‘about’ without having to be Lydia Lunch.

Daughters of Mudson was a success. Plain and simple. I didn’t have to endure the stuffy atmosphere of academia. I saw a showcase with real artists, but didn’t have to fly where I can’t use a public restroom without buying something. I felt scared, and I laughed and I was engaged. I felt that people had made an effort to reinstate the element of danger.

Alexander Ortega is a freelance writer and musician about town. He also works for SLUG.

alexander.r.ortega@gmail.com

Of Meat & Marrow review

The piece begins with humor: a Gilbert Gottfried soundbite that speaks of the body as an excessive weight, vegetative, without the operating mind – easier to reconcile with, humorously, if dead and done. The character of the piece, situated discretely amongst the audience as one of us, is then summoned unwillingly to the stage with a lottery ticket. Thus at the onset of the piece, we are called to identify with our character as we try to understand whatever chaos has demanded her presence in the grotesque world that follows.

In this world, skin ripples. Flesh melts. Bodies on stage fold as though millions of cells emit final breaths – repetitively, microscopically. The dancers onstage introduce us, with conviction and startling continuity, to the quality of this dimension.

A duet between Toni Lugo and Christine Hasegawa, bathed in red illumination and suspended by meat hooks, becomes the profound epitome of this world of decomposition. Here we become all at once disgusted, confused, and intrigued by the slapping of skin and the molding, folding, and gyrating of the human form.

As so often seems to be the case in life itself, the piece becomes a battle between body and mind. Our character returns, giving voice to the ego: I am, I am, but – “Where am I?” she asks, confused, anxious, alone. We recognize her questions throughout the piece – “Is this the line to heaven?” – as expressions of a way of thinking (and hence, a mode of living) where all action is guided by the belief in a divine, transformative ending. But this world is no heaven as we’ve been told to expect. The bodies on stage provoke and disassemble our character, sweeping her up with an asterisk-shaped prop, turning her over like a leaf in a compost bin.

A morgue cart becomes the most necessary and powerful prop, weaving together a beautiful solo performed by Juan Carlos Claudio with duets and full-cast dances, and underlining the rolling movement quality of decompositional break-down. There are large metal tubs, too – utilized most powerfully when collecting and consuming the human form, their presence evokes meat, blood, and slaughter.

The character we have been asked to identify with is always terrified or skeptical of her inevitable decomposition, even as it happens. As the piece concludes, she is swallowed by waving folds of fabric. The body disappears, becomes motionless. But the ego persists with its commentary – “it must be karma!” – as we discover that her transformation through decomposition has turned her into a carrot, an earthly thing that is picked up and bitten into.

Executed beautifully, “Of Meat and Marrow” exhibits the exceptional potential of dance to root us in our bodies and remind us of our mortality. I take issue, however, with the humorous context in which the piece begins and concludes because all other elements of the piece powerfully evoke the idea that dance, an artistic form that directly involves the physical potentialities and – most importantly – the physical limitations of the body, could be compelling all participants to internalize their mortality more deliberately, and could be asserting itself as the most powerful vessel of empathy and compassion.

The fact that we, as an audience, are expected to accept within the comforts of humor a truly thought-provoking piece that reminds us – through physical, empathetic sensation – of the vulnerability of our flesh speaks volumes regarding our pervasive, tired world view. I oppose the framing of this piece with humor because I believe we should instead be seizing the moment to emphasize the communicative power of dance, well-demonstrated in this piece, as a potential means for a transformation in perception – for what we need now most of all in our world view is the reminder that the organic world, of which our bodies are a part, has limits and repercussions that our intellectual realm does not.

The state of humanity is now too dire to merely chuckle at our cultural fear of death and the unknown. We must be called to do more than just laugh in the face of our uneasiness – otherwise we are permitted to leave the theater and return to whichever of many microscopic groups, by which we define ourselves through a false sense of belonging. And there, in that dangerous state of isolation and illusion, the salience of our mortality again becomes lost. We must be instead called to act, to live with full consciousness, in accordance with the belief that everything is connected – beyond death, across time and place – and that nothing can be resolved sustainably in isolation.

Moving forward, let us embrace dance as a means of communicating compassion and empathy, of encouraging communion with all that is. Let us be reminded that these are the qualities that we are so desperately lacking in our relations with others and with the natural world, that must be embodied on a massive scale if we truly want to live in a more just society.

Alison Hoyer re-located to SLC after completed a degree in linguistics at McAlister. 

Having it All

If a test of civilization be sought, none can be so sure as the condition of that half of society over which the other half has power.  – HARRIET MARTINEAU from “Society in America” (1837)

Times change, societies progress and things get better.  In 1952, the word “pregnancy” could not even be uttered on American television; today, the sight of a baby emerging from its mother’s vagina is an everyday occurrence on The Learning Channel. Ballet company directors used to say things to dancers like: “No more babies.  Enough is enough.  Babies are for Puerto Ricans.”  Ballet company directors now say things like: “Children are part of the human condition.  We need to have women who have [given] birth to portray characters with depth.”

What has caused these remarkable changes in America? Feminism and the loosening of Puritanical values have played an important part, as has the fact that 74% of mothers are in the labor force.  “Historically, women have borne and raised children while doing their share of necessary productive labor, as a matter of course.  Yet by the nineteenth century the voices rise against the idea of the ‘working mother’ and in praise of the ‘mother at home’” writes Adrienne Rich in her seminal feminist work Of Woman Born.  She goes on: “The nineteenth and twentieth century ideal of the mother and children immured together in the home, the specialization of motherhood for women, the separation of the home from the man’s world of wage earning, struggle, ambition, aggression, power…all this is a late arrived development in human history.”  Female dancers and choreographers have long ignored these “raised voices” and “historical ideals.” Choreographers Branislava Nijinska, Isadora Duncan, Doris Humphrey and Twyla Tharp and dancers Melissa Hayden, Allegra Kent, Sylvia Waters and Natalia Makarova have studded the pages of dance history with prototypes of the “having it all” superwoman.

How did these women combine motherhood with a career as demanding as dance? Each forged a new path and found support in different ways, from a spouse to an extended family to a nanny to an understanding company director. Shockingly, the American Guild of Musical Artists did not add a maternity clause to its contracts until 1990; until very recently, even dancers in unionized companies have had to rely on the largesse of their company director if they wanted to have a child and keep their job.

In this article I will examine three major American dance companies: New York City Ballet, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and American Ballet Theater.  I will look at the origins, history and leadership of each company to find its unique “motherhood culture.” Certain attitudes, beliefs, experiences and policies have produced threads running through each company’s history. These threads from the past continue to form the current fabric that supports dancing mothers; each of the companies is a little “civilization” and can be “tested” accordingly.

NEW YORK CITY BALLET

Rarely has a figure in the dance world been so reviled and so loved as George Balanchine.  Long an easy target for feminists and disgruntled dancers, he has been accused of everything from causing anorexia in all dancers to “denying women their agency” and producing “sado-masochistic” choreography. Merrill Ashley thought that “Balanchine held the keys to the kingdom. All knowledge, all power was his and, as I saw it, I had no choice but to place my faith and trust in him.”

This king was a jealous one, and his ballerinas agreed. “No babies, no husbands, no boyfriends,” was Balanchine’s unwritten rule. Merrill Ashley remembered his “notorious aversion to the husbands and boyfriends of his female dancers.” The truth of the matter is that there were New York City Ballet dancers who did have boyfriends, did get married, and did have children. Melissa Hayden, who had two children while dancing for Balanchine, has said that although “there was an underlying feeling at New York City Ballet that dancers shouldn’t get married or have children, he was very generous to the dancers who did have children – giving them time off and keeping them on the payroll.”

Balanchine was outspokenly opposed to unionization, and the atmosphere of subtle dehumanization he created seemed to make his dancers passive and apathetic about salary, benefits and other union matters. Although Balanchine is dead, his legacy lives on. Currently, the New York City Ballet offers its dancers the least generous maternity benefits of the companies researched for this article.

ALVIN AILEY AMERICAN DANCE THEATER

Section 13, subsection H, paragraph 9 of the current Collective Bargaining Agreement between Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and the American Guild of Musical Artists states: “The Employer will provide space at its New York Studios during two (2) weeks each year, as selected by the Employer, for children of the Artists with a paid caregiver during the rehearsal day. The Employer shall provide a total of Four hundred fifty ($450.00) per week to subsidize the expense incurred by the parent(s). This childcare providing paragraph is unique among the dance company contracts examined for this paper. The maternity benefit offered by the Ailey Company is also far more generous than the bare minimum suggested by the American Guild of Musical Artists. The Ailey dancers are allowed up to 21 days of sick leave, followed by extended sick pay of $250 per week for six months, followed by a four month unpaid leave. Dancers are guaranteed re-employment “without loss of seniority.” The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s contract illustrates Andrea O’Reilly’s contention that “mothers and motherhood are valued by, and central to, African American culture…black culture recognizes that mothers and mothering are what make possible the physical and psychological well-being and empowerment of African American people and the larger African American culture.”

The Ailey dancers were listened to and were “encouraged to be outspoken.” Historically, the company “gathered regularly to air difficulties and differences of opinion, or simply, as Sylvia Waters put it, ‘to tell Alvin how we felt, how we needed him to tell us what he was seeing, what we were doing.’” Judith Jamison, prior director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, continues to “listen to what the dancers are saying onstage as well as off.” She writes: “Alvin never wanted dancers to be parochial-minded. You have nothing to offer on stage unless you’ve lived your life. He encouraged everyone to experience his or her life.” This Africanist spirit of acceptance, care, humanity and love is reflected in the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s generous support of pregnant dancers and new parents.

AMERICAN BALLET THEATRE

The maternity leave offered to the dancers at American Ballet Theatre is the most generous of the companies researched for this article. The reason for this is the unique relationship between dancers and management at this particular company. American Ballet Theater was not the result of one artist’s vision, as New York City Ballet and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater were. “Ballet Theatre has had no single choreographer whose development could be traced through the years. When its founders opted to present an eclectic repertory, they in effect declared that Ballet Theatre would not be bound by any set artistic policy in the generally accepted meaning of the words,” writes Charles Payne. Although Lucia Chase was very important in the founding and bankrolling of ABT, she never inspired in her dancers the kind of devotion and loyalty lavished on Balanchine and Ailey by theirs. Still, she, “for better or worse, made most of the vital decisions that dictated the course of the company’s progress through the years.”

“In the fall of 1979, the dancers at the ABT took a historic step. With the aid of an energetic labor lawyer, Leonard Leibowitz, they decided to reject the offer of small increases in salary and benefits put forth by the ABT management during contract negotiations. In response ABT locked the dancers out of their studios and cancelled its winter season. Dancers and management haggled for eight weeks, during which – for the first time in ballet history – dancers brought their cause to the public, as they picketed, leafleted, negotiated and stated their case to newspapers, television and radio.” The dancers had raised a strike fund to support themselves and they voted unanimously on every offer from management. Finally, the dancers prevailed and “their actions have resulted in significant changes in wages and working conditions at the ABT.” Subsequent contract negotiations netted the dancers even more concessions and benefits. At last, sure of their power, the American Ballet Theatre dancers eventually left AGMA to form their own union. Now, guaranteed a generous maternity leave and a job when they return, dancers like Julie Kent can say: “I’m so looking forward to raising a baby in the ABT family.”

Times have indeed changed. In her 2005 article on American Ballet Theatre Erika Kinetz writes: “Today dancing during pregnancy and after childbirth, once a privilege of only the grandest stars, is unexceptional.” Many women today, dancers included, choose to “have [their] kids while, not instead of following [their] other dreams.” Although star dancers in the past have successfully blended motherhood with their careers, they were dependent on paternalistic permission and special generosity from their bosses. Strong union regulations have allowed the rank and file company members the same opportunity to “have it all.”

Things do indeed get better, yet in America women’s reproductive freedom is under constant threat. Women will never have equal status until they have control over their own family planning and the full support of a society which values working mothers and their children. Adrienne Rich ended Of Woman Born with the following: “We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body. In such a world women will truly create new life, bringing forth not only children (if and as we choose) but the visions, and the thinking necessary to sustain, console, and alter human existence – a new relationship to the universe. Sexuality, politics, intelligence, power, motherhood, work, community, intimacy will develop new meanings; thinking itself will be transformed. This is where we have to begin.

Brenda Daniels is the interim dean at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. Below you can find the footnotes from this article which a revised version of a paper written for the Hollins/ADF MFA program in 2006. The article is printed in the current issue of learning to loveDANCEmore which can be ordered from the journal tab above.

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“These words were written in 1976, but their message and call to arms is just as necessary and urgent today.This note refers to the television show “I Love Lucy.” “On December 12, 1952, ‘Lucy is Enceint’(French for pregnant, which the CBS censor would not allow) aired.” Karin Adir, The Great Clowns of American Television (London: McFarland, 1988),14. See also TV ACRES Website: “Censorship and Scandals – Lucy’s Pregnancy,” http://tvacres.com/censorship_lucy.htm.

This note refers to the television show, “A Baby Story.” See Pie Town Television Productions, “A Baby Story – Show Info,” http://www.pietown.tv/shows/babystory.html.

George Balanchine, quoted in Allegra Kent, Once a Dancer, (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1997), 187.

Stanton Welch (director of Houston Ballet Company), quoted in Erika Kinetz, “Belly Dancing,” New York Times, Arts and Leisure section, April 10, 2005.

“Among mothers ages 15 to 44 who do not have infants, 74% are in the labor force.” U.S. Census Bureau, “Women by the Numbers,”  http://www.factmonster.com/spot/womencensus1.html.

Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: W.W. Norton, 1976), 44.

Ibid.,46.

“While still in Russia, Nijinska had also separated from her husband and was raising two children and supporting an aged mother on her own while running her school.” Sally Banes, Dancing Women: Female Bodies on Stage (London: Routledge, 1998), 120.

“It seemed as if Isadora had at last found everything she needed in life: a great career on the stage, funds at last to establish and keep going the school of her dreams, two adorable and beautiful children, recognition in the country of her birth and in the great capitals of Europe and a lover who would give her anything she asked for.” Walter Terry, Isadora Duncan: Her Life, Her Art, Her Legacy (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1963), 48.

“Humphrey’s own life as a wife and working mother were unconventional for her time. Devoted to her art and her career, Humphrey refused serious relationships with men until at the age of 36 she married Charles Woodford, a seaman who was away on duty most of the time. Pregnant at 38, Humphrey worked the entire term, and she even induced labor early, so as not to miss a concert date. She was never inclined toward domesticity, and often her colleagues and even her colleagues’ relatives helped care for her child, sometimes taking him on trips while Humphrey worked.” Banes, Dancing Women, 145. See also Doris Humphrey, Doris Humphrey: An Artist First  (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1972) , 122-153 and Marcia B. Seigel, Days on Earth: The Dance of Doris Humphrey (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 130-205.

“In a way, Jesse (her son) conducted rehearsals as we all took turns changing diapers and feeding the baby.” Twyla Tharp, Push Comes to Shove (New York: Bantam Books, 1992), 158.

Molly Glenzer, “Baby Boom: Motherhood Gets an Ovation,” Dance Magazine, April 2004, 35.

“’The Look’ as dancers refer to this idealization of the thinnest of the thin, is, most critics and dancers concur, a concession to taste, taste that has largely been formed by one man. That man is George Balanchine – America’s chief arbiter of ballet style and aesthetics.” Suzanne Gordon, “Ballet in America: The Art and The Anguish,” GEO, January 1981, 46.

Ann Daly, “The Balanchine Woman: Of Hummingbirds and Channel Swimmers,” from chapter 3, “Theorizing Gender” in Critical Gestures: Writings in Dance and Culture (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), 286.

Ibid., 83.

Ashley, Dancing for Balanchine, 62.

Patricia Neary, quoted in Glenzer, “Baby Boom,” 35.

Ashley, Dancing for Balanchine, 121.

Hayden, in discussion with the author.

“And so the choice is to stand up for ourselves, our security, out financial security, or to give second place to such values and act on respect, devotion, love and deep belief in one man. Balanchine is more important and valuable than we are individually. If personal security is our primary aim, dancing is not the career for us.” Bentley, Winter Season, 88.

“City Ballet offers 21sick days, followed by a brief disability leave and up to three months of unpaid leave.” Kinetz, “Belly Dancing.”

Collective Bargaining Agreement between Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and American Guild of Musical Artists: June 1,2002 through May 31, 2005, http://www.musicalartists.org/HomePage.htm, 35.

Ibid., 42,43.

O’Reilly, From Motherhood to Mothering, 11.

Dunning, Alvin Ailey, 244.

Ibid.

Judith Jamison, Dancing Spirit: An Autobiography (New York: Doubleday, 1993), 244.

Ibid.,172.

“Members of American Ballet Theater receive four weeks of sick leave, at full pay; when that’s used up, they are eligible for state disability pay for up to eight weeks and an additional $400 a week in disability from the company for up to a year.” Kinetz, “Belly Dancing.”

“Lucia Chase…is both the hub and foundation of American Ballet Theatre. For almost thirty years since its inception she not only took the most active part in its overall artistic direction, but was its major source of financial support, diminishing her own private fortune to keep the company alive.” Franklin Stevens, Dance as Life: A Season with American Ballet Theatre (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 87.

Payne, American Ballet Theatre, 23.

Ibid., 48.

Frank Smith (former ABT soloist), in discussion with the author, October 2005.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Warren Conover (former ABT soloist), in discussion with the author, September, 2005.

Glentzer, “Baby Boom,” 38.

Kinetz, “Belly Dancing.”

Ariel Gore and Bee Lavender, eds., Breeder: Real Life Stories from the New Generation of Mothers (Seattle, WA: Seal Press), xiii.

Rich, Of Woman Born, 285-286.

Innovations in review

Last night Ballet West opened its fifth installment of “Innovations,” a program where Ballet West dancers present new choreography alongside one established artist. Principal Artist Michael Bearden, Artist Aiden DeYoung, Soloist Easton Smith and Demi-Soloist Emily Adams showcased their choreographic work alongside a revival of Susan Shields’ “Grand Synthesis.” As a whole I agree with Director Adam Sklute’s assessment that the evening was diverse and creative. “Innovations” expressed a range of artistic interests from traditional narrative ballet to the cool of more contemporary choreographers; at it’s best the show was innovative, as the title promised and all pieces offered an exploration of the effort it takes to craft a ballet.

Michael Bearden’s “Descent” handled a tragic, historical romance which wound its own path around recognizable narrative ballet traditions. It was freeing to follow a story without expected full length features of a Grand Pas or large Corps but the path was not without difficulty. The use of props was sometimes distracting and certain plot elements, namely the Russian revolution, were dealt with too briefly and in ways too comical or melodramatic for the overall tone. Bearden should be applauded for continuing to work on the project since 2010; when you imagine that many ballet stories have been performed endlessly it’s clear that with more growth Bearden’s concluding dance of the dead could become beloved and fixed as other wicked ballet fixtures like the Willies.

Easton Smith dealt with narrative more abstractly in his premiere of “With You”.  The opening scene was evocative with dramatic lights warning of looming tragedy. The dancing that followed might have been linked in the eyes of the choreographer — emotions spilling out of a tragedy resulting in lush partnering — but the resonance of the dancing didn’t match the strength of the opening imagery. In dancing what we feel matters, but in choreography it’s creating the realm for the audience that matters, not just what the dancers are sensing. Much like Bearden’s work the kudos are for diving right into the process and taking risks. I’ll be interested to his how his aesthetic evolves with new projects.

If Michael and Easton posed choreographic problems for which they strive, as young artists, to find solutions, Aiden DeYoung and Emily Adams demonstrated the importance of new voices in the more codified forms of ballet. Aiden’s work “Eenvoudig,” and Emily’s “Forces at Play” were remarkably fresh and complex. “Forces at Play,” benefited from being the only piece to feature live music. Many of the dancers, specifically Tom Mattingly, were able to dance from within the score and highlight the quick, light sections that mark the dance. While it seems there is more to address within the staging, the choreography had come a long way from its preview in the fall and I found the duets among the men were truly unique.

While Aiden’s preview of “Eenvoudig” last fall seemed too derivative of William Forsythe, this revised version moved beyond the shock of ballerinas in black socks and into new territory. Using a choppy selection of music and approaching movement directly and succinctly the choreography offered a sampler of non-narrative vignettes. Aiden seemed apt at choosing dancers for each section, particularly a solo in which Katie Critchlow walked past the wings smacking each one with an open palm. To think of how many dances I’ve watched, or how many times I myself have tried not to touch a wing, and then to see her hand purposefully erase what I thought I knew was important or what I should expect was  magical. This was just one taste in which Aiden explored unconventional choices. Some were obvious (exposing a back wall and lights) and others less so, like the subtle incorporation of alternative movement styles.

The magic continued to the last piece of the evening with “Grand Synthesis” as a reminder that longevity is what makes any choreographic career worthwhile. Susan Shields’ ability to move bodies through space with ease created complicated and surprising patterning from which joyful dancing emerged at every turn. While she could have used a more contemporary look at costuming from her younger counterparts it was a great way to end the evening.

“Innovations” continues at the Rose today at 7:30 and next week (Weds-Sat).

Ashley Anderson runs loveDANCEmore community events as part of her 501c3 “ashley anderson dances” she regularly choreographs and teaches in SLC.