Letting Dancegoers Interpret The Dance For Themselves

In April of 1989, avant-garde dancemaker and former architect Gus Solomans, Jr. collaborated with a team of Columbia University students in the creation of a dance work called Site Line, performed by members of the Solomans Company/Dance at the Danspace Project of St. Mark's Church in Manhattan's East Village. In a telephone interview, Solomans described the work as a dance with "a wall that would divide the dancing space in half. The audience on each side of the wall [will] see essentially a different dance. They'll be able to see the dancers on the other side. The wall is partly transparent, partly translucent, and partly opaque." Solomans said that he wants the audience to interpret what they see for themselves,"to make choices, to participate as viewers, not just sit there and [let the choreography] wash over them and be entertained. I try to make the visual atmosphere rich enough to get some stimulation."

In another dance work, performed at Danspace in January of 1990, Solomans's company presented a piece for five men whose title was  represented by a symbol described by Solomans as "an unpronounceable graphic gesture." Both the dancers and the musicians provided vocal sounds. And as with Site Line, the audience was expected to interpret for themselves what the vocal sounds and movement signified.


This article was originally published in the New York Amsterdam News. It was edited from two articles that were published in 1989 and 1990.

Creating Choreography Via Architecture

Avant-garde dancemaker Gus Solomans, Jr.'s segment will be half of a shared evening of dance at the Danspace Project of St. Mark's Church in [Manhattan's] East Village (April 14, 15,16 [1989]). In a collaborative work with a team of Columbia University [architectural] students, the Solomans Company/Dance will present Site Line, described by Solomans (a former architect), in a telephone interview, as a dance with "a wall that would divide the dancing space in half. The audience on each side of the wall [will] see essentially a different dance. They'll be able to see the dancers on the other side. The wall is partly transparent, partly translucent, and partly opaque." Solomans says that he wants the audience to interpret what they see for themselves, "to make choices, to participate as viewers, not just sit there and [let the choreography] wash over them and be entertained. I try to make the visual atmosphere rich enough for everyone to get some stimulation."

This article was originally published in the New York Amsterdam News (April 15, 1989) as part of a Spring 1989 Dance Roundup article.

N/UM Is The Word

Reginald Wilson is not just a choreographer/dancer. He is unapologetically a black choreographer/dancer, who, as an undergraduate at New York University, studied anthropology and sociology.

These multiple pursuits have culminated in the creation of "N/UM," a male solo, which he unveiled on March 3, 1991 at the 6th annual Morningside Dance Festival that was held at the Theatre of the Riverside Church in Manhattan. (The festival showcased more than 25 choreographers from New York and across the country during its February 25-March 7 run.)

The title of the solo, explained [the then 23-year-old ] Wilson, a Milwaukee native, in a telephone interview, came from one of the Khoi-san languages of South Africa and "means an internal healing force."

Reginald Wilson believes "there's a need for some energy, some source to bring us [black people] together. So many black people are in so many different levels of society now that it's hard to find common ground. That's what n/um acted as in the villages. It was a magical healing power, a common ground for everybody. Everybody had access to it."

Wilson made his professional New York debut in 1989 at the lower Manhattan dance loft called Eden's Expressway, prior to a month-long teaching/performance residency in Juneau, Alaska, with the Israeli-born choreographer Neta Pulvermacher.

During the Eden's Expressway engagement, Wilson performed in two ensemble pieces, one of which he choreographed himself, an energetic and percussive work (he clapped his hands and stamped his feet while five female dancers thrashed about the floor, doing various hand and arm gestures) called "Le Mignon Petit Noir Americain" (The Cute Little Black American). The title came from a French magazine reference to the late fashion designer Patrick Kelly. Like "N/UM," it drew on Reginald Wilson's African-American roots. "That piece, and more so the solo, is very much about being black in the nineties. The structure, some of the movement, is taken from black culture. The rhythms, to me, are taken from ideas of African drumming."

This previously unpublished article was written on February 19, 1991.