Colorado Dance News

September/October, 2010

 

volume 30, number 5

Paul Taylor Dance Company Returns to Denver after 19 Years

Tap Basics: How to Break Them Down for Your Students

A Passion for Movement at Any Age: Two Women Share Their Thoughts on the Dancing Life

Hannah Kahn to Perform at the Dairy

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Paul Taylor Dance Company Returns to Denver 
By Leslie Merrill   

It has been 19 years since the renowned Paul Taylor Dance Company appeared in Denver. The Company's return will feature the bold new work Brief Encounters set to Debussy’s Children’s Corner, the poetic and virtuosic Beloved Renegade set to Poulenc’s Gloria, and one of Taylor's classic Baroque pieces from earlier in his long and storied career. The Dallas Morning News proclaims: “Paul Taylor Dance Company is perhaps the most beloved and respected modern dance company in the world, famous for Mr. Taylor’s wit, its sunny expansiveness, its all-American optimism and its occasional forays into darkness and gloom.”

 

Mr. Taylor, who recently celebrated his 80^th birthday, has been described as a “choreographic chameleon” due to the stylistic breadth demonstrated in his 132-dance repertoire (Anderson, 182). Struck by his versatility, critic Deborah Jowitt has said: “He can make dances that are so beautiful, in which the people all seem blessed like spirits in some kind of Eden . . . and then he can make dances that scare the daylights out of you” (Diamond).

As a young dancer, I had the great fortune of viewing some of Taylor's masterpieces live. Dances like The Rehearsal and Esplanade expanded my understanding of the choreographic voice, and how rich and textured it could be. I was overwhelmed by the combination of Taylor’s spectacular movement invention and the multiplicity of perspectives evident in his repertoire. Better able to digest the work years later, I came across his own account of the dance making process: “I’ve never stuck with one kind of viewpoint. My pieces are not autobiographical. They’re not about me. What I do is called reporting. I think that’s what life is. I like to think that a dance is multifaceted and can be so many things” (Eichenbaum, 174).

Initially a painter, Mr. Taylor began his dance studies under the tutelage of Martha Graham and Antony Tudor at the Juilliard School. A soloist with the Graham Company from 1955 to 1961, Taylor formed his own company during the same period at the tender age of 24 (Hall, 60).

His early work was quite experimental and featured ordinary, pedestrian movement, sometimes to the supreme annoyance of his audience. “I was doing a series of postures with stillness in between so you could see them. After about the first ten minutes, the whole audience had emptied” (Diamond). Taking this sort of experimentation to the extreme in his notorious “Seven New Dances”, Taylor, with a young dancer at his feet, stood in perfect stillness in a suit and tie for a solid four minutes. Louis Horst, Martha Graham’s long time musical advisor and friend, responded to the “blank” dance with his famous “blank” review in a 1957 edition of Dance Observer.

Critic Clive Barnes has said of this early period in Taylor’s career: “I feel that a lot of the avant-garde excursions were partly to annoy Martha. He had to get away from the influence of Graham. Graham was such a saint, such a figure” (Diamond). If this was indeed his intention, Taylor was successful in eliciting a response from Graham, if not in entertaining his audience. She scolded him afterwards, perhaps only in jest, by calling him as a “naughty boy” (Eichenbaum, 174).

Over the years, Taylor’s dances became increasingly more physical and complex. Although many works still featured everyday movements, they were pushed to athletic extremes that could only be described as virtuosic when performed by his incredible dancers. Just to give you a little taste of what an evening with the Paul Taylor Company might be like, I include here a brief overview of the last five decades of the man's work as recounted on the Company’s website:

In the ’60s he shocked the cognoscenti by setting his trailblazing movement to music composed 200 years earlier, and inflamed the establishment by lampooning America’s most treasured icons. In the ’70s he put incest center stage and revealed the beast lurking just below humans’ sophisticated veneer. In the ’80s he looked unflinchingly at marital rape and intimacy among men at war. In the ’90s he warned against religious zealotry and blind conformity to authority. In the first decade of the new millennium he has condemned American imperialism, poked fun at feminism and looked death square in the face. And yet, while his work has largely been iconoclastic, since the very start of his career Mr. Taylor has also made some of the most purely romantic, most astonishingly athletic, and downright funniest dances ever put on stage (Paul Taylor Dance Company website).

 

The Paul Taylor Dance Company will perform for one evening only at the University of Denver’s Newman Center for the Performing Arts on Saturday, October 16 at 7:30 pm. A special Behind the Curtain Lecture will be presented at 6:30 pm. Also on October 16, The Newman Center Presents Series, the Colorado Dance Alliance and the Carson-Brierly Dance Library will jointly sponsor a master class with a member of the Paul Taylor Dance Company. The class will run from 10:30 to Noon at Hannah Kahn’s Studio, 75 South Cherokee, Denver. Please visit www.codance.org for more information.

 

Works Cited

Anderson, Paul. Ballet & Modern Dance: A Concise History. Princeton:

       Princeton Book Company, 1977.

Dancemaker. Dir. Matthew Diamond. Diamond and Kupfer, 1998.

Eichenbaum, Rose. Masters of Movement: Portraits of America’s Great

      Choreographers. Washington: Smithsonian Books, 2004.

Hall, Fernau. The World of Ballet and Dance. London: Hamlyn, 1970.

“Paul Taylor.” Paul Taylor Dance Company Online. 2010. Paul Taylor

      Dance Company. 20 Aug 2010 <http://www.ptdc.org/about-

      artists/paul-taylor-bio>.

 

 

Tap Basics: How to Break Them Down for Your Students

By Danielle V. Heller

A Tap Dancer plays music with her or his feet, but to play it well the dancer must take into consideration the entire instrument being played; mind, body, shoes, floor. If the body is not moving correctly, or the mind is not clear, the instrument will not sound good no matter what type of shoes and floor are being used. There are five simple steps that can be used to teach basic Tap manipulations in the classroom. These steps will assure that the two most critical parts of the instrument (body & mind) are being supported. 

Step One: Show the student what the finished product should look and sound like. Show them the manipulation slowly at first and then speed it up. If they see and hear the basic done several times in a row, they have time to process more of the information before they are asked to recreate it.

Step Two: Break down the body mechanics. Good body mechanics produce good sounds. This is the step most Tap teachers struggle with. They might be able to do the step, but they have never taken the time to analyze their own body mechanics.

Note: If this is an area you are struggling with you can do two things. One option is to video yourself doing the manipulation from multiple angles. Take the video home and watch it until you understand how your body is working to accomplish the sound. If you don’t have a video camera, watch one of your students who already can do the step and analyze what his or her body is doing.

Step Three: Call and Respond the Rhythm with the student. “Call and Response” is a method that has been used in music dating all the way back to Africa. In Tap, it is a simple technique where the teacher sings the rhythm with her or his feet and the students respond with the same rhythm. Sometimes a student can’t hear a rhythm to respond it back. This does not mean they literally can’t hear it. It simply means that the patterning of sound and silence doesn’t make sense to the student. In cases like these, I try to use some different methods; clap the rhythm, scat the rhythm, count out the rhythm or find a catchy phrase to sing to the rhythm.

Step Four: Give the student an exercise to practice the new manipulation. The exercise can be as simple as repeating the manipulation at different tempos or you could make it more complicated and challenge students to add accents or change rhythms.

Step Five: Check for Understanding This is a critical step that we sometimes skip due to lack of time in the classroom, but this step can be done in a number of ways that will speed up the process. If you need to check for understanding in a large class you can check line by line, or divide the class up into groups and have them check each other as you walk around and spot check in each group.

Breaking down Tap basics can be rewarding for both the teacher and student. Only by breaking the information down into small digestible pieces can the Tap student learn to speak clearly through their instrument; mind, body, shoes, floor. Once a student recognizes the joy in playing his or her instrument with ease and clarity, motivation to learn more and do more sky rockets.

From my classroom to yours, “Peace be the Journey!” Danielle V. Heller www.peakdance.com How to teach tap dancing workshop with Ellie Sciarra and Danielle Heller at Peak, January 15^th & 16^th , 2011. Call for details: 303.518.2974

 

 

Young tap dancers learn from teacher Danielle Heller.

A Passion for Movement at Any Age: Two Women Share Their Thoughts on the Dancing Life

Musings From A Young Professional

By: Chrysta Norelle Brown

 

You have to be 50 years old to join the Red Hat Society and 55 years old to cash in on all those senior discounts at McDonalds, Movie Theaters, IHOP, and amusement parks. While we’re on the subject, I think 55 is the appropriate age to buy brightly colored, floral patterned wind suits for power and mall walking purposes. I’ve got big plans for being 55+, which mean two things. One, I have to live to be at least 70. I was going to go for 55 but really I want time to enjoy these moments so I need at least 15 years, which leads me to number two. . . At 22, I am far too young to experience a midlife crisis and wake up one morning thinking that I’ve sacrificed my own dreams for those of the well intentioned people with whom I choose to surround myself. That life is simply unacceptable.

 

My sister recommends I look back at all my journal entries every couple of months, to remind myself where I’ve been and compare it to where I am. I came upon an entry where I wrote down what I wanted for my future. I probably wrote this list when I was confused and stressed, as lists and plans, even though they “often go awry,” typically calm anxiety. I put that I wanted to dance with a small and innovative company. I put that I wanted to teach. I put that I wanted to write and I went into details about each dream opportunity. When graduation came around and I was still unemployed, I decided I would pick a city and move there and make a name for myself. I was watching a baseball game and decided I would move to the city of the winning team. Three hours later, it was decided that I would be moving to Chicago. This is odd because I don’t even like baseball. All of a sudden, it seems, everyone got really excited about my life. They started offering all sorts of suggestions like where I should live, where I should dance, where I should eat, which trains to take, where I should work, and how I should live. Then fate stepped in the way, as fate often does, and I was offered a job with Ascential Dance. One month later, I accepted a position as a dance topic freelance writer for the Denver area. A week after that, I was offered a job teaching dance. So it would seem that I was living the post-graduate life I had put into writing for myself. The irony of it all, a contract, a column, and a number students later, why are people still asking me when I’m moving to Chicago? The worst part is that for a brief moment after I’ve told them I’ll be staying in Colorado for a bit, I feel a little ashamed, as if I’ve somehow betrayed the bright future everyone envisioned for me. I mean, I understand feeling ashamed about failure, but feeling ashamed about a legitimately accomplished goal? There is no logic in that.

 

After graduating from our respective colleges, my sister and I decided to spend a week celebrating ourselves. We decided to make the celebration of us a regular occurrence because, as she stated, “You have to celebrate yourself because most of the time no one else will.” The trick to surviving life as a professional is to celebrate everything, focusing not so much on the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel but the smaller lights that glisten around you every day, guiding your way. Each victory, no matter how small, is a victory nonetheless. There is, of course, one more secret, Alice Walker wrote, “Unload the useless information; say farewell to the comparing mind.” Believe me when I say, sometimes nothing is more useless than the mutterings of bitter, unhappy, and unemployed people. While it can be absolutely true that the people who always have something to say helped you get to where you want to be, in reality your career would be nothing without you.

 

“We are the ones enjoying life to the fullest, no matter where we are or what we are doing...Some may ask, ‘What do you do?’ The answer is, We do exactly what we wish to do.” It’s the motto for the Red Hat Society. I first saw it and thought to myself, “I can’t wait to live that way!” Now I’m thinking, what’s stopping me? Why on earth would I wait thirty-three years to allow myself the privilege of living and appreciating the life I have dreamed about since I was little? Merce Cunningham said, “You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.” We, as dancers, are lucky enough to have the opportunity to experience this moment of life, every time we go to work. So until I am old enough to be a Red Hat, I am more than happy to be a dancer exactly where I am.  

"Dance for yourself, if someone understands good. If not then no matter, go right on doing what you love." - Louis Horst

Above Left: Denver dancer Chrysta Norelle Brown performs a solo    

                      Below Left: Jennifer Delaney performs with 40 Women Over 40 (Photo by Eliza Karlson)

The Perfect Dance

By Jennifer Delaney

 

A tango dancer friend of mine told me that tango dancers strive to execute the “perfect dance.” Sweeping across the floor in a loose embrace, the couple is at one with the movement and each other. The dance flows through and out of them without thought. But what seems like an admirable goal can become an unpleasant obsession for some people. The likelihood of attaining the perfect dance slips when there is a command performance attached, a pressure on the other to perform. If the couple falls short they blame themselves and desperately seek out another partner who might be more capable of helping them to achieve the penultimate experience. This is not unique to tango. Golfers and baseball players strive for the perfect swing, Linebackers: the perfect catch, sexual partners: the perfect climax.

 

I was obese as a child. My family survived WWII and my mother almost starved to death several times in an immigrant work camp. Fat was a sign of abundance and safety. I watched dancers on TV as though they were another race altogether. But, I remember thinking, at age 7, that if I could learn to dance like that, particularly to do a pirouette, I would be the happiest person on earth. I remembered that today in ballet class when I executed a perfect triple pirouette into attitude, the kind that would fall into the category of the tango dancer’s “perfect dance.” I was steady and at ease and at one.

 

There were other times I experienced this feeling in dance – of being outside of time and through to another place – and so I understand that feeling. Granted, it requires a foundation of technique and devotion. I think back to my early days when I was 15. I took a class with Broadway choreographer Danny Daniels and my love of dance was sparked. While learning any sport or art, fierce love sustains one during the first year of training when everything seems impossible. (You want my legs to do WHAT?) At the end of the workshop Daniels told me he needed to speak to me privately. The other dancers and I were excited. What could he possibly want to tell me? I went into his office and he closed the door. Based on a poem I had given to Daniels’ son, he told me I could become a great lyricist, as good as Rogers and Hammerstein – that I had real talent and that dancers were “a dime a dozen.” That was not what I wanted to hear! I hoped he would tell me I could be the next Ginger Rogers or Twyla Tharp.

 

I continued to write, but dance remained my number one muse and constant teacher, teaching me about my spirit as well as my body. I obtained a degree in modern dance from UCSB and moved to New York and performed in summer stock, concert dance, MTV and film. Just like any love relationship, I struggled with dance: I battled eating disorders (and won). I delighted in much of the experience, working odd jobs in NYC and LA to support my passion.

 

I still perform with local companies, but dance – like washing the dishes or painting the house – has become a journey into my spirit. The little overweight girl sitting on the bed watching TV must have known that. Any activity can become a spiritual walk, a discipline that leads to profound awareness. And when those perfect dances, exquisite moments, perfect triple pirouettes occur they are gifts that light the path, synchronistic anomalies that grace our lives. Like meditation, these transcendent experiences help us to see outside our ego and limited reference into a bigger world. They are not tricks to prove we are better than someone else, or escape hatches to seek with obsession, but magical and serendipitous as a butterfly that alights on a shoulder.

 

 

 

Hannah Kahn Dance Company to Perform at the Dairy

The Hannah Kahn Dance company will present "The Last Go Round and Other Dances" at the Dairy Center for the Arts (2590 Walnut Street, Boulder, CO 80302) on October 8 and 9, 2010 at 8:00 p.m. Tickets are $22 for adults and $18 for students, seniors and Colorado Dance Alliance members. To purchase tickets, go to www.thedairy.org or call 303-444-7328. For more information about the Hannah Kahn Dance Company, go to www.hannahkahndance.org or email info@hannahkahndance.org.

The thirteen member dance company will perform five dances choreographed by Hannah Kahn between 1981 and 2010.

The performances will feature the premiere of Knoxville: Summer of 1915, with live musical performance by Irene VanHam Friedlob (soprano) and Mutsumi Moteki (pianist). The haunting and emotional Samuel Barber score sets to music words of James Agee, creating a nostalgic world which overlays adult awareness of mortality and aloneness on sweet memories of child hood. In a departure from her usual choreographic methods, Kahn connects the choreography with Agee's words and images. The concept of creating a work utilizing live music involving the fusion of voice, theater and dance is an exciting innovation for the dance company.

Also on the program: The Last Go Round, Homing, Linger Awhile, and Thaw.

The Last Go-Round (2010) is a dance in four sections for nine dancers. The music runs the gamut from Cuban rumba to mysterious and moody classical music by Scottish composer Malcolm Lindsay. The dancers are challenged with intricate choreography and quicksilver interactions.

Homing (1981) is an excerpt from a work created by Kahn during her years running her dance company in NYC. Viewing a dance created 29 years ago provides a context for viewing her more recent choreography, just as seeing a painter’s evolution in style over a number of decades can shed light on paintings created in the artist’s later years. The dance is an exuberant and youthful work with music by Brahms.

Linger Awhile (1995) has new costumes by Julianna Aberle-McClellan. Music by the Chieftains accompanies the six dancers in this audience favorite.

Thaw (2004), 1a quintet with music by Michael Hoenig, costumes by Russell Etmer, and video projection by Michael Richman, is a seamless and physically demanding work which explores movement that evolves slowly, then with frenetic pace, and then with constriction. Kahn has tightened up the work, editing and shortening it to maximize its impact.

Funding for the Company comes from the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District and the Denver Ballet Guild.

 

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CDA '08-09 Officers

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