Voice of Dance

Guest of Summer


July 30, 2008

By
TOBI TOBIAS
tobi@voiceofdance.com
© VoiceofDance.com 2008


It’s summer, the lazy season, and dancing, which never rests, has taken to outdoor venues.

Common to all outdoor performance, of course, is the viewer’s diminished concentration, what with the open air, the birds, the breeze, the pesky mosquitoes. Then there’s the often-stifling heat, the nagging worry that the drizzle might develop into a downpour, the low rumble of thunder escalate to Big-Bang effect, accompanied by slashes of lightning. Never mind; the unpredictability of Mother Nature is all part of the experience, relaxing the intensity of response to the stage demanded by the formality of indoor theatrical productions.

For New Yorkers, the first open-air entertainment that comes to mind is the annual, 20-year-old, Lincoln Center Out of Doors—free, wide-ranging dance and music shows at various locations in the complex. This year’s season runs from August 7-24. Currently there’s a plethora of similar undertakings all over town. I wonder sometimes how enough companies exist to fill them. But they do. Few things in life are as persistent as the desire to dance and, in doing so, to communicate with an audience. The miracle of these performances has been that, amidst the inevitable portions of dross, one work, one group, or even just one performer may make an instant dance fan or potential dancer out of a young person who lacks the money, inclination, or family encouragement to see dancing at a high-end venue.

Some predecessors of such summer dancing exist only in fond memory, like the Delacorte Dance Festival. From the early 1960s into the 70s, summer segued into the start of the fall dance season with consecutive evenings of free potpourri programs featuring veteran professionals and startlingly gifted newcomers. (This is where I first laid eyes on Bill T. Jones.) You picnicked first (summer’s dancing often involves picnics) on the slatted benches or raggedy grass surrounding the Delacorte Theater, smack in the middle of Central Park, then moved into its amphitheater-like structure—open to the moody night sky, of course—for the seemingly endless show. The structure of the site is such that the dancers can appear as if they are rising from the lake behind the stage; many a choreographer used this feature to dramatic or poetic effect.

Of the most memorable items I saw in the Delacorte seasons was, first, Pearl Lang in her Shirah (Song), an ecstatic, lyrical work based on Hasidic legend, with Lang herself at its vibrant center. And then there was Annabelle Gamson, widely thought to be the most potent performer of Isadora Duncan’s dances since Isadora herself. Gamson, who already had a long stage career behind her, appeared at Delacorte offering a spectrum of Duncan dances, most of them rapturously buoyant or palpably sensuous. She then capped her range with the Revolutionary Etude, which brought the entire audience to its feet, screaming, in response to its power, summed up in its final gesture of an arm and clenched fist thrust forward over a bent knee, the whole body pushing a surging energy—both physical and psychic—behind it. I also happily recall Robert Joffrey, seated in front of my family—everyone in the dance world turned up at Delacorte, everyone—accepting some grapes from our picnic.

Something of Delacorte has been resurrected in New York’s annual Fall for Dance programs, inaugurated in 2003. While they are held indoors (at the City Center) and are not free (though invitingly cheap), they retain Delacorte’s spirit by offering a handful of contrasting companies on a single program and succeed as well in introducing the dance-innocent to the field and expanding the horizons of experienced viewers.

Several venues for summer dancing that restrict their activities just to that season are often tourist destinations as well. The most venerable of them is Jacob’s Pillow, in Becket, Massachusetts. It’s in the beautiful Berkshires, and Lee is the nearest town. Founded in the 1930s by Ted Shawn and Ruth St. Denis, who lighted the path for modern dance pioneers like Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey, it evolved into both a widely respected school and a professional performance venue without losing its beguiling rustic atmosphere.

The Pillow’s main theater retains its original barn-like look, and the music played inside is sometimes accompanied by the thrumming of rain on the roof. During one particularly aggressive storm, with the Royal Danish Ballet’s Frank Andersen demonstrating the intricacies of the nineteenth-century Bournonville technique in which his company specializes, the storm quenched the electricity and the house went black just as Andersen essayed a fiendishly challenging enchaînement familiarly known as “The Dark Step.”

The charm of the nearby town is well-nigh irresistible, if you enjoy the old and simple, laced with the occasionally eccentric. An inn I stayed at once was straight out of Norman Rockwell, with its guests sitting on the porch in white rockers, chatting in New Englandly voices about nothing in particular. The town’s deservedly popular low-down diner—Joe’s—provides home-style meals that finish with the flourish of pies home-baked by Joe’s sister and crowned à la mode. Everything tastes like your mom made it, if she was a good plain cook, and the appreciative include the Pillow’s dancers as well as tourists. Naturally, part of the audience for the Pillow performances prefers to stay put and picnic in the venue’s picturesque landscape, that is if they’re not scared off by occasional signs warning that, if they venture too far into the gentle wilderness, there’s some danger of their becoming a bear’s dinner.

A general store sort of emporium (now, alas, defunct) sold most anything you could imagine as well as things you didn’t know you needed. Once, I emerged from its jam-packed depths having bought a jump rope and a Lilliputian cardboard box throbbing and clicking with its cargo of real live Mexican jumping beans.

Antiques and vintage stores are naturally part of Lee’s street scene, too. Staring through a dusty window that shielded furniture and china and god knows what else from bygone days, I once sighted Niels Bjørn Larsen, a beloved senior mime of the Royal Danish Ballet, which was in residence at the Pillow that week. Wearing his offstage summer uniform of shorts and socks with sandals, he was in animated discussion with the shop’s proprietress over a curio he grasped in one hand while he gesticulated eloquently with the other. Later Niels Bjørn told me proudly that he found old things intriguing and had successfully bargained for them in mime, with great success, on tours that took him round the world.

Saratoga Springs is a resort town, where the New York City Ballet has an annual summer residency of several weeks at the Saratoga Springs Arts Center (familiarly called SPAC). The performances are given in an outdoor amphitheater with conventional seating; behind that space, the holders of cheaper tickets can picnic, watch the performance, or just laze on the sloping lawn.

Besides dance, SPAC boasts many art attractions, among them musical events like the Philadelphia Orchestra’s residency and the Friehofer Jazz Festival. In the vicinity, literature is represented by Yaddo, the celebrated writers’ colony; the fine arts by the Sterling and Francine Clarke Art Institute, and academia by the Skidmore College campus.

Part of the venue’s popular fame is due to its medicinal springs. The water tastes horrid in each of its varied flavors (I use the word advisedly; a prominent one is sulfur). Still, if you can get it down, it supposedly does you some good.

Today more visitors favor Mrs. London’s Bakery and Café, with its irresistible pastries and an outdoor seating area in which you can consume them, sip iced tea, and watch the members of the New York City Ballet stroll by in mufti during the company’s residency.

When most people think of Saratoga, though, they think first of the magnificent horses. The Saratoga Race Course is a venerable track for thoroughbreds that operates from late July through August. One of the delights of equine fanciers is to breakfast at the track and watch the horses work out, displaying their beauty, their alacrity of step, their stamina, their discipline and courage. Surely there’s a connection between ballet and horses. The subjects certainly appealed equally to Degas, an unrivaled draughtsman in delineating the complex construction of the physique in action in both species.

For bibliophiles there’s the used and antiquarian treasure trove, the Lyrical Ballad Bookstore. Years back, the proprietor himself warned me that it was wise to time your Saratoga visit before Lincoln Kirstein got there, because he lavishly bought nearly everything worth having.

After a SPAC show or a racecourse event, people in the know will take a Saratoga newcomer to the lounge of the Adelphi Hotel, built in 1877 and faithfully preserved in harmony with its original design. In this evocative space packed with Victorian furnishings, good drink and good talk prevail. It’s an outpost of civilization as it used to be.

With so much to revel in, including a lovely if mildly melancholy landscape, the dancing at Saratoga can seem almost incidental.

The American Dance Festival, as it’s known today, has, by contrast, been something of a peripatetic affair. It got its start in Bennington, Vermont, was reincarnated in New London, Connecticut, and, in 1978, settled in Durham, North Carolina, where it has continued to flourish. Like the Pillow, it functions as a school and a retreat in which luminaries of modern dance can create and show their choreography.

One year I had a gig in the southern incarnation, interviewing every single dancer in the Paul Taylor’s company for something like five to ten minutes, one after another, under a (I think) magnolia tree, in blistering heat coupled with suffocating humidity. This was part of my assignment as writer of continuity for one of those Live From . . . television shows. The interview material, shot a couple of days before the show, would be edited down to the nuggets I cajoled out of the dancers and would be run in the intermissions of the live performance, for the folks watching on TV. I was assured that, since I was a writer by trade, and therefore preferred invisibility, I wouldn’t be seen or heard on the screen; the dancers would magically become talking heads. The process worked out well, with no one fainting, perhaps because fresh-faced students kept ferrying iced bottles of water to me and my victims, laying them like offerings at the base of the tree between takes.

What the TV director and his associates didn’t tell me beforehand, having decided it late in the evening before the day of the show, was that I was to interview Charles Reinhart, the director of the Festival, as well, appearing onscreen with him in what purported to be a casual conversation, the next morning. The director explained that they had no one else available or fit to do it and added, since the heat had us working in raggedy shorts and singlets, “Do you have a decent dress? Show me what you have.” Of the two dresses I sulkily hauled out of my motel closet, he chose a limp, pale jade Laura Ashley, faded from many washings. I tended to wear it for comfort on occasions of minor strain and absurdity.

I did not tell my family, at home in New York, that I’d be appearing on the screen and didn’t even know if they were planning to watch the telecast. Being Taylor fans, they did. My husband reported later that the kids fell off the bed they’d stretched out on, in astonishment. Moms who make your brown-bag lunch don’t usually leave the nest to exhibit themselves to the masses.

I don’t remember much else about that ADF adventure except a birthday party for Paul on the lawn, for which the company’s men had “choreographed” a little segment in which, standing, some upside down, they spelled out their congratulatory greeting to their leader. Oh, and as we finally sat outdoors, watching the live show on TV, Paul jumped up and ran into the theater in which it was being shot the moment the curtain came down one of the ballets that was having its premiere.

“Where’s he going?” I asked the TV director. “Is something the matter?” The director looked at me sadly but affectionately—he was Emile Ardolino, whom everyone loved and who died too young—and answered gently, “He’s going inside to take his bow, you dope.”

Summer dancing is certainly not confined to adults. Last year I took my ten-year-old granddaughter to Lincoln Center’s Midsummer Night Swing for children (held at high noon, of course). Pierre Dulaine, of exhibition-ballroom fame, led the proceedings, assisted by his partner, Yvonne Marceau, an ineffably lyrical dancer. Unwilted by the blazing sun, the pair taught the bevy of assembled kids the basics of a half-dozen forms, then let them try out the moves on their own. The youngsters, many of who had had some initial instruction in their public elementary schools (another Dulaine-Marceau venture), first danced shyly with their adult chaperones, but, warming quickly to the occasion, moved on to partners their own age. They were eager to try any genre Dulaine introduced, though none of them could get the hang of the waltz. (Louisa May Alcott would have wept.) My granddaughter, a self-contained type, gave the club dancing a valiant shot, though it obviously lay outside both her skill set and her natural inclinations. On the other hand, she was so instinctively alluring in the Latin dances, you felt she shouldn’t be allowed out alone with those undulating hips.

The main part of Midsummer Night Swing is conducted under the stars, so to speak. Designed for adults at all levels of skill, it offers introductory instruction by a pro, vivacious live music, and a different dance genre nearly every night: swing, Irish step dancing, the tango, Afro-soul and so on. July’s the month (three weeks of it). Be there.

Children also showed their mettle at a fifth-grade public school graduation to which I was summoned because of loving family ties. One of the ceremony’s many touching events had the entire graduating class, 140-strong, fill the stage and all the aisles to execute a formidable dance of rhythmic gestures, in perfect unison, each youngster rooted to his or her spot. The average age of the participants and their “choreography committee” was 11. My own family member and her best friend repeated the dance spontaneously, standing shoulder to shoulder, in my back yard, some three weeks later. I want them to remember it forever.

My absolutely favorite sight of summertime dancing wasn’t intended as a performance at all or even as a participatory event like square dancing in the park. Late on an August day, at Jones Beach, as the sun began to lower itself from the sky toward the sea, my husband and two half-grown children (one already with several years of ballet training behind her) were the only spectators, sensible families having departed for the long trek home, baths, and dinner; the elderly and the young swingers, for other pursuits, suitable to their respective stages in life.

My family had built the requisite sandcastles, frolicked in the ocean, taken long, dreamy, shell-gathering walks, consumed a scandalous number of sandwiches and their accoutrements, and were resting on our now sandy, soggy beach blankets at the edge of the shore in half-conscious contentment, when a sleekly built young man and woman appeared on the scene, as if out of nowhere, like a vision.

With the impending sunset and the gently rippling waves as their backdrop, they launched into a simple flowing duet, accompanied by sweet music streaming from a portable tape recorder. Both the dance and the music seemed utterly innocent and lovely. The couple had professional skill but very young souls. Were they practicing for an evening variety show I imagined Jones Beach put on? Or were they, perhaps, minor acolytes of some Greek divinities? We watched in awe.