October 15, 2009
What’s old is relevant again: Dances from the ’30s featured in Chamber Dance Company’s ‘The Shape of Dissent’
A homeless woman does not seem at first glance to be the perfect subject for a dance. But a homeless woman is indeed the center of Tenant of the Street, one of the dances to be presented in the UW’s Chamber Dance Company concert Oct. 22-25. And although we may think of homelessness as a recent problem, the dance was created in 1938.
Tenant’s choreographer, Eve Gentry, was a member of the New Dance Group, a collective of artists in New York City beginning in the 1930s who were known for their social activism. It is these artists — along with some of their students and associates — who are being spotlighted in the CDC’s program, which is titled The Shape of Dissent.
The concert is another in the company’s continuing efforts to bring dance classics to modern audiences. Company members, who are graduate students in dance (augmented by undergraduate performers), have been rehearsing through the summer, working with choreographers who are licensed to re-create the works.
Tonya Lockyer, for example, worked on Tenant of the Street with Mary Anne Santos Newhall, a professor at the University of New Mexico who learned the dance from Gentry herself.
“We discussed what had inspired the work and who this character was,” Lockyer said. “We also did this process where I did the movement beside Mary Anne, which I found very informative — to be right next to her and try to get inside her body and find out what was going on physically for Mary Anne as she did the movement. That was very helpful to me.”
The dance was inspired by two events in Gentry’s life, CDC Director Hannah Wiley said. One was a train journey she took with her father as a child, when she saw through the window a woman looking into a barrel. When she asked her father what the woman was doing, he said she was hungry and looking for food. The other happened many years later, when she was living in New York and saw a homeless woman staring at her.
In the dance, the woman is scrounging for food or other valuables, and she is in a hunched position. Lockyer calls the movement “bound tension,” as if the character were trying to move inside a box. But she says the woman is not cringing in fear. “This character is fierce,” she said. “She actually has a lot of pride.”
That, she said, is obvious in the dance’s opening image. “The first thing I do is, I hear a sound and I look. Mary Anne told me the subtext is, ‘You think you see me; you don’t see me. But I see you.'”
Tenant is just one of the dances to be presented in the concert, the idea for which came out of Wiley’s love for another dance, Harmonica Breakdown. Choreographed by Jane Dudley, another New Dance Group member, in 1938, it was inspired by the music of blues harmonica player Sonny Terry. Terry, an African American, performed a concert that year at Carnegie Hall — a momentous event.
Wiley saw a video of the dance and spent two years acquiring the rights to it. In the meantime, CDC performed The Pursued, a dance by Joseph Gifford, an associate of the New Dance Group. It was based on the choreographer’s reaction to Picasso’s Guernica (see our story about that dance here).
“Then I started thinking, maybe I could make a suite of these dances,” Wiley said. “And just about that time, we were having all sorts of economic problems in this country, and I thought, ‘Wow, these dances could be about right now.’ So it was a motivation to have that happen this year.”
The Pursued will be reprised in this year’s concert, and Harmonica Breakdown is also on the program, re-created by Sheron Wray, the artistic director of Jazz Xchange in London, where choreographer Dudley spent the last 30 years of her life. Wray considered Dudley a mentor and friend, and learned the dance from her.
Dance Professor Betsy Cooper is excited about the concert. Her research has centered on this era in dance and she wanted to disseminate information about it to as wide an audience as possible.
“I wrote a grant for a public humanities lecture because I wanted to work with other scholar artists and go out into the community where we could lecture to a multigenerational audience, which would spur interesting conversation,” Cooper said. “When the Simpson Center saw my proposal, it was the time of the budget cuts and they couldn’t support everything, but they thought it could be a Wednesday University.”
Wednesday University is a collaborative program sponsored by Seattle Arts & Lectures, the Simpson Center for the Humanities, and the Henry Art Gallery that offers three classes each year. Classes are noncredit and open to anyone. Cooper is doing a course with Mark Jenkins and Barry Witham from drama, Susan Casteras from art and Jennifer Bean from cinema studies. Called Art, Dissent and Social Change, the class focuses on how the arts can be used as a voice for commenting on important social issues and challenging the status quo.
Cooper did the first lecture in the class — on Oct. 14 — which gave her the opportunity to talk about the New Dance Group and promote the concert. (To learn more about Wednesday University, visit online here.
Students in the Wednesday University aren’t the only ones to benefit from the CDC concert. Dance 101 students in summer quarter did readings about the New Dance Group and attended CDC rehearsals. And, when it came time for their final project — a dance they choreograph themselves in groups of three or four — students were asked to choose a social or political issue to create a dance about.
“So in a way they were replicating what the dancers in the New Dance Group did,” Cooper said. “They did showings at the end of the summer and they were great. There were dances about the environment, about forms of power struggle. One group did a pro-life piece. I was pretty amazed with how well they did because these students are beginning dancers. It was a great way for them to see that dance is a potent way for communicating ideas.”
In addition to the dances already mentioned, the CDC will perform Lynchtown, by Charles Weidman; Dink’s Blues, by Donald McKayle; Strange Hero, by Daniel Nagrin and D-Man in the Waters, Section 1, by Bill T. Jones. Performances are at 7:30 p.m. Oct. 22-24 and at 2 p.m. Oct. 25. UW Dance Alum and Cornish Professor Lodi McClellan will lecture about the dances 45 minutes before each performance in the Meany West Lobby. Tickets are $18, $16 for faculty and staff and $10 for students. They are available at the Arts Ticket Office, 206-543-4880.
In keeping with the concert’s social justice theme, the Dance Program will be collecting nonperishable food items for the University District Food Bank in the Meany lobby during performances.
