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.

Jubilation! At The Apollo Theatre

Sad to say, but when dancers Aaron Dugger and Glenn Ford Good died, much of the magic and energy of Jubilation! Dance Company  went with them. Despite the enthusiasm of the Apollo Theatre audience at the June 1 [1991] benefit performance for Jubilation!'s Center of Enrichment, that overriding thought could not be dispelled.

Part of the problem was that with the exception of Robin Gray, all of the current members are new and, unlike their predecessors, who unfailingly gave me a spine-tingling, vicarious experience, left me totally without satisfaction.

And that's a shame because for me Jubilation! has always meant an evening of soul-stirring, sensational dance.

Another problem was with the program. I had trouble following it because the sequence of the dances did not always coincide with the printed program. Fortunately a couple of the works from the repertoire, "Nia Keii" and "Dedication," served as "landmarks."

The most beautiful of the night's offerings was Martial Roumain's assertive, thought-provoking "Essence (A Portrait of Four Women)," set to the music of Nina Simone, Roberta Flack, and others. Although the dancers, each wearing a dress of a different color (red, black, green, white), failed to bring dramatic intensity to their character (Robin Gray should have been cast here), the ideas and emotions expressed through the use of movement were recognizable.

During the intermission, a heavy-set, bespectacled West Indian lady approached me in the lobby when she saw me making notes and exclaimed, "That last dance ["Essence"] was so beautiful." Indeed it alone was worth the price of the ticket. The four women embodied the agony, despair, nurturance, and triumph experienced by black women throughout American history.

Jubilation!'s signature piece, "Dedication," which traces the African odyssey from the Motherland to present-day America in three sections, lacked its usual sparkle. In the first section, "Oluwa, Many Rains Ago," sung by [the South African performer] Letta Mbulu, I kept visualizing Aaron Dugger as the Child of a New World, a role he originated and partnered with Kevin Jeff (who was cast as the Ancestral Elder, a role he reprised at the Apollo). Willie Edward Hinton's performance was overshadowed by Dugger's indelible mark on the role.

Anthony Marshall's long, tedious "In His Name," dedicated to Dugger and soloed by Jeff in a G-string-like costume, had Jeff rolling and flinging himself all over the stage, making at times grunting sounds, like a person possessed by demons. I wasn't sure what point was being made. Was Jeff being tormented by the loss of his close friend?

At the end of the program, Jeff, Jubilation!'s artistic director and founder, addressed the audience. He brought the news that this might be the company's last performance. He attributed the possibility of Jubilation!'s demise to financial difficulties. Some of the trouble, I think, might be due to the fact that Jubilation! has lost much of the spirit and joy it once had in abundance.

Note: According to Denice Jeff, Jubilation!'s public relations coordinator, the company plans to return to the Apollo sometime in the fall [of 1991].

This article was originally published in the New York Amsterdam News (June 22, 1991).

Assessing The Dance World

In assessing the current New York dance scene, the four dance experts I interviewed saw very little, if any, trendsetting going on in modern dance or ballet.

The leaning in modern dance toward what Celia Ipiotis, the host of Channel 31's Eye on Dance, described as the blending of "elements from the world of theatre, music, and visual arts" is, said dance historian Joe Nash, "nothing new. Everything now is merely a continuation of what was started in the sixties." Although there is this cyclical aspect to modern dance, Village Voice critic Deborah Jowitt pointed out that "whenever those things come out, they usually come back in a slightly different form."

Back in the sixties, recalled Jowitt, there was "a dance revolution" that took place. It was at this point, said Nash, "when modern dance entered a whole new phase." What the early pioneers such as Martha Graham and Katherine Dunham "established [was] a style, a technique, an approach to modern dance that was related to [a period] when people were trying to communicate about issues, about the human spirit." But, further explained Nash, who teaches dance history at the Alvin Ailey school, the choreographers who emerged from the Judson Movement in the sixties--named after the church performance space on the West Side of Manhattan--wanted to "establish their own principles of movement that ran counter to what was considered traditional. It gained in popularity as more people entered the field. Critics began to try to analyze and describe what they were seeing. They still don't know what they're seeing, but they describe it anyway."

In ballet, particularly with "the major companies," said New York Daily News critic Charles Jurrist, "it is really hard to spot trends." Jowitt attributed this to "the classical language staying the same." She detected, although, "a kind of aggression entering ballet. You can see a lot of aggressive, violent dance today in ballet and contemporary dance."

Said Jurrist, "The New York City Ballet has clearly still not decided where it's going after the death of [its founder and choreographer George] Balanchine. At ABT [American Ballet Theatre], they've mostly been involved in cleaning up the company which needed a lot of cleaning up--disciplining the corps de ballet and sort of weeding out the repertory, making it a more stylistically coherent company." Jurrist added that he "really couldn't say that I would spot a trend in either one of those two companies--as yet."

On the other hand, historian Nash saw the influence of modern dance, particularly the African American contribution to it, on contemporary ballet. "At the root of American dance is the black movement styles. What the African American brought to a whole field of dance was just total involvement of the body in dance. You now see twisting and contorting the body as you would do in jazz or ethnic dance. This is the contemporary trend. Contemporary ballets are really based upon the New Movement as opposed to classical tradition handed down from the 17th century--'Swan Lake', 'Giselle.' The choreographer takes those traditional five-position movements of the legs and arms and updates them and places them in a contemporary mold. More and more companies are using contemporary approaches to ballet production and that will continue."

Although Celia Ipiotis said that today the definition of dance is "fluid," the Daily News's Charles Jurrist thought that a lot of what passes for dance--such as "carrying a transistor radio onto the stage and turning it on"--should be labeled as performance art, which he himself admitted is a catchall phrase, much like the term "post-modern." In his mind, dance has "movement as its primary mode of expression. Otherwise, it's another form of theatre."  Opined Joe Nash, "You will always have people engaged in multimedia because when you're lost for something to say through movement, you can always revert to words or [photo] slides."

This article was originally published in the West Side Spirit (December 19, 1988).