|
|
America's Irreplaceable Dance Treasures: the First 100
Flamboyant, self-made, and with an infallible nose for dance fare the American public would buy, impresario Sol Hurok (1888-1974) was born in Ukraine. In 1906 he immigrated to the United States, eventually settling in Brooklyn where he began his managerial career by arranging concerts for labor organizations. In 1916 he was introduced to Anna Pavlova, who became the first of the many dance artists he would manage, and who inspired his love of ballet. The attractions that appeared under the banner "S. Hurok Presents" were legion as well as diverse, including Uday Shankar, Katherine Dunham, Mary Wigman, Vicente Escudero, and Martha Graham. He is best remembered for his promotion of the Ballet Russe companies during the 1930s and 1940s and for presenting Soviet attractions, such as the Bolshoi, Kirov, and Moiseyev companies, at the height of the Cold War. Hurok loved stars and first-night glamour, and he promoted his attractions to the hilt. In so doing, he helped create the large, enthusiastic audiences of the dance boom.
Known as a unique home for dance since its first public performances in 1933, Jacob's Pillow is the longest running festival of its kind in the United States. As a center for performances, educational programs, and archival activities, the Pillow continues to draw increasing numbers of participants and audiences to its rustic location in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts for ten weeks of diverse activity each summer. Recognizing its cultural significance, the U.S. Secretary of the Interior has designated Jacob's Pillow as a National Historic Landmark. First established as a family farm in 1790, the Pillow site achieved notoriety in the mid-1800s as a stop on the Underground Railroad. It became the home base for Ted Shawn's Men Dancers in the 1930s, expanding its scope under Shawn's leadership from 1942 until his death in 1972. As a champion of all kinds of dance and dancers—from Balasaraswati and Asadata Dafora to Mikhail Baryshnikov, Alvin Ailey, and Mark Morris—the Pillow provides exposure to the widest possible range of artists and companies. Its ongoing mission is to support dance creation, presentation, education, and preservation. www.jacobspillow.org
Founder and artistic director of the Joffrey Ballet and a producer of genius, Robert Joffrey (1930-1988) was born in Seattle. He began his training with Mary Ann Wells and continued it at the School of American Ballet and the Gertrude Schurr-May O'Donnell studio, dancing briefly with Roland Petit's Ballets de Paris and a few modern dance companies. He choreographed his first ballets in 1952; the following year, with dancers from his American Ballet Center, he formed the nucleus of his future company. Joffrey was an outstanding teacher, with a gift for developing dancers. He had a keen appreciation of the ballet past and developed a magnificent repertory of Frederick Ashton works and Diaghilev-era revivals that revealed his impeccable taste as a producer. He was receptive to a broad range of contemporary styles and was the first to commission ballets from postmodern choreographers such as Twyla Tharp. He supported Gerald Arpino's career from the start and against overwhelming odds and frequent encounters with bankruptcy, kept the Joffrey Ballet miraculously afloat. www.joffrey.com
Dancer, choreographer, and artistic director of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, Bill T. Jones (1952-) was born in Bunnell, Florida. He discovered dance at the State University of New York at Binghamton, where he studied experimental movement with Kei Takei, contact improvisation, West African and Afro-Caribbean dance, and various modern dance techniques. His encounter with Arnie Zane in 1971 marked the beginning of a seventeen-year collaboration and partnership. Two years later they founded their first company, the American Dance Asylum; this was followed in 1982 by the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, a troupe of unusual physical and racial diversity that honed his skills as a choreographer. After Zane's death from AIDS in 1988, Jones grieved choreographically. He began to make evening-long pieces—Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land (1990) and Still/Here (1994), among others—in which he grappled with major social issues like racism and AIDS, presenting them in highly theatrical formats that found an enthusiastic international following. He remains a popular and charismatic performer. www.billtjones.org/ Born William Henry Lane, Master Juba (c.1825-c.1852) combined quick footwork with powerful African rhythms in an extraordinary style that evolved into American tap dance. Lane was born a freeman in Rhode Island and began his early career in Manhattan's Five Points neighborhood, mastering the dances of Irish immigrants and free blacks. In this antebellum era, when blacks were not allowed to perform with whites, Master Juba was the first African-American to obtain international prominence as a minstrel entertainer, performing with four well-known early minstrel companies. Music historian Eileen Southern has noted that Master Juba was "a link between the white world and authentic black source materials, whose dancing contributed to the preservation of artistic integrity in the performance of black dances on the minstrel stage." In 1848 he performed to high critical praise in London with Pell's Ethiopian Serenaders and writers of the time noted that Master Juba's dancing utilized a potent mixture of jig, clog dancing, and African-American styles with unique rhythms. Because Europe was more accepting of Lane and his dancing, he became one of the first expatriate black dancers, never returning to the United States. A collective of dancers, composers, and visual artists whose experiments gave rise to postmodern dance, the Judson Dance Theater began in the summer of 1962 with a concert by Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, and other composition students of Robert Dunn at the Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village. Over the course of the next two years nearly two hundred dances were presented by the group. Together they challenged the prevailing aesthetic of modern dance, especially its use of narrative, myth, and psychology, while breaking new artistic ground. Collage, fragmentation, loosely-structured scores, radical juxtaposition, and chance were typical Judson methods; spontaneity, pedestrian movement, and a belief in the beauty of the ordinary were among the group's shared values. A spirit of anarchy and permissiveness reigned, along with a minimalist impulse to pare dance to its essentials, as in Rainer's celebrated "antidance" Trio A. Among the choreographers, in addition to Rainer and Paxton, who got their start at Judson were Trisha Brown, Meredith Monk, David Gordon, and Lucinda Childs.
Athletic, eclectic, and charming Gene Kelly (1912-1996) excelled as a dancer-actor and influential movie director and choreographer. Kelly began performing in clubs as a teenager, often with his brother Fred, and ran a dancing school while earning a degree in economics. He made his Broadway debut in Leave It to Me (1938) and became a hot property two years later as the lead in Pal Joey. Early choreographic accolades were gained in Billy Rose's Diamond Horseshoe Revue (1940) and Best Foot Forward (1941). Kelly's first movie was For Me and My Girl (1942). Alone and with frequent collaborators Stanley Donen and Vincente Minelli, Kelly made more than a dozen major movie musicals. His work in On the Town (1949), Singin' In the Rain (1952), and An American in Paris (1955) beautifully demonstrate his use of long dance sequences to integrate elements of plot and character, while introducing a moving camera into the choreography. Invitation to the Dance (1957) shows him pushing out boundaries of dance on film, mixing live artists with animation and special effects. With the 1958 television special, "Dancing: A Man's Game," Kelly helped to attract male performers to the field. Writer, critic, arts patron, co-founder of the New York City Ballet, and indefatigable champion of the choreographer George Balanchine, Lincoln Kirstein (1907-1996) was a towering figure in the history of American ballet. Born in Rochester, New York, he was a Harvard graduate, the founder of the literary review Hound and Horn, co-founder of the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, and a member of the junior advisory committee of the Museum of Modern Art, where he curated several major exhibitions, found a friend and patron in Nelson Rockefeller, and identified himself with the emerging avant-garde. In 1933 he brought George Balanchine to New York, where they founded the School of American Ballet in 1934 and, after several short-lived companies, the New York City Ballet in 1948. Both would benefit from his largesse, loyalty, and connections. As managing director of City Center in the early 1950s he tapped the Rockefeller Foundation for its first major grant to ballet. Later, he persuaded the Ford Foundation to underwrite the scholarship program that transformed the School of American Ballet into a truly national institution. Another of the recipients of his generosity was the Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. www.nycballet.com/about/nycblkbio.html
An outstanding figure in the modern dance world of southern California, Bella Lewitzky (1916-2004) was born in Los Angeles. She studied modern dance with Lester Horton, and in a remarkable fifteen-year collaboration became his leading dancer, a choreographic collaborator, and master teacher of his technique. In 1950 she left Horton to pursue an independent career; in 1951 she opened her own school, Dance Associates, and in 1954, she began an eighteen-year association with the Idyllwild School of Music and the Arts, at one point becoming chair of the Dance Department. She was also the founding dean of the School of Dance at the California Institute of the Arts. In 1966 she founded the Bella Lewitzky Dance Company. Unlike her earlier works, which were dramatic and socially conscious, her new choreography emphasized pure movement, and her dancers became noted for their strength, line, elevation, and agility—a tribute to her gifts as a teacher. Among her collaborators was fashion designer Rudi Gernreich, who contributed costumes and sets to many productions. She has served on numerous national and California arts boards. www.perspicacity.com/dancesite/lewitzky
One of modern dance's greatest male dancers and choreographers, José Limón (1908-1972) was born in Mexico. He came to the United States as a child, settling in Los Angeles, where he studied painting and music and briefly attended the University of California. He moved to New York in 1928, and in 1929, after seeing Harald Kreutzberg dance, he began to study with Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman. He soon joined their company. With his pantherine grace, charismatic presence, and noble bearing, Limón easily became its star. In 1946 he formed the Limón Company; Humphrey agreed to serve as artistic director. Under her guidance he choreographed the now classic The Moor's Pavane (1949), his best known dance. His works had strong emotional and dramatic content, and many celebrated the human spirit. In 1951 he joined the faculty of the Juilliard School's new dance department. He also taught at the Instituto de Bellas Artes in Mexico City and at the American Dance Festival. In the 1950s and 1960s his company toured internationally under the auspices of the U.S. State Department. www.limon.org 
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||
