Joe Goode, a pioneer in Bay Area dance theater, whose warm cowboy voice twangs with irony, got things rolling one Saturday night in late January during the first Dance IS Festival in Berkeley. About a hundred people gathered at the Julia Morgan Theatre for the second of three performances on three consecutive days. This one was dedicated to dance as a storytelling medium, and Goode, a skilled maker of wistful vignettes about place, self, and body, was on hand to explain what it meant for dance to tell a tale. Dance, he said, always recounts a story because it uses the body. The body is inevitably telling us something.
The night before, Frank Shawl, éminence grise and cofounder of the Shawl Anderson Dance Studio, had said that dance is movement. And before a matinee performance the next afternoon, Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates and Assemblywoman Loni Hancock talked about dance as social change.
Dance, it seemed, could be anything.
Four hundred years ago, without having to define it, Puritans condemned dance as the work of the devil. Even fifty years ago, it still wasn’t something “nice girls” did for a living. We’ve come a long way since then, putting dance back into our lives and making the United States an international leader in modern dance and ballet. You would think that what dance is would be self-evident by now, and that no one would still need to ask.
Just a few generations ago, no one would have had to bother to define it. Dance was an intrinsic part of life, performed in the field, in the tavern, or on every ritual occasion. These days we might dance at a party or a club, do the hora at a wedding, or walk in a processional at a funeral, but otherwise dance is a performing art typically reserved for professionally trained experts. Over the last century, the professionalization of dance has deepened. Ballet morphed into one of the modern arts, with training demands rivaling those of Olympic sports. Modern dance was born, with its own highly individualized methods. It is now possible to never watch dance as an audience member except on Sesame Street or in Super Bowl half-time shows. And after childhood is over, you might never have to dance except at your own wedding. Not many people seem to mind.
Nevertheless, there are a few people who see dance as a critical form of expression that the public — even an apathetic one — should have access to. What’s more, this thinking goes, if the public doesn’t want to see dance, someone should figure out how to convince them otherwise. Julia Morgan Center executive director Sabrina Klein joined this camp when, one year into her tenure, she discovered that there are few viable East Bay dance venues.
Dance is so ephemeral, Klein believes, because it has no script or score to anchor it. And except for large companies with significant budgets, dance runs tend to have the lifespan of a moth. This makes it difficult, she says, to “form a core place for dance” the way that plays have theater companies, and those companies have buildings that house them. Klein, an actress and director who came to the center three years ago after heading Theater Bay Area in San Francisco, wants to help the Julia Morgan Center make a place for dance to flourish in the East Bay.
She began to invite dancers to talk to her. Finally, she says, “On September 11, 2001, if you can believe it, we scheduled a community conversation, and forty people were signed up to come.” Despite the events of that day, Klein recalls, 29 people actually attended and discussed “the chaos and terror in our lives. Everyone agreed that things need to be said through dance that can’t be expressed in any other way.” From that meeting, Dance IS was spawned.
Klein says the ultimate goal of the festival, which she hopes will become an annual event, is to make dance a more visible and stable presence in the East Bay performing arts scene, where local theater and music thrive but dance is produced only sporadically. And the hope for the long run is to establish a public profile for dance as a necessary and exciting art form. Unlike most other venues in town, the Julia Morgan has the physical goods to help this happen. While it doesn’t have the best sightlines, it has a real theater with a real stage big enough for modest ventures and is physically central enough for dancers throughout the East Bay to use.
But is the issue really about venues? Space alone isn’t the problem, and organizers of the Dance IS festival knew that when they began. They decided to try to tackle some of the other barriers they believed separate the public from dance — which range from lack of interest to incomprehension — and hoped to do it through a combination of sheer aesthetic variety and intergenerational diversity. Although no one said as much, an intergenerational approach was also the best way to secure an audience of kids who bring their parents and friends, and parents who bring their kids.
“Originally we had three separate weekends planned, one for college, one for high school, and one for professional dancers, but then we thought we should combine them,” explains Jill Randall, a dance teacher at the Julia Morgan Center’s Lincoln Center Institute, who borrowed the festival’s catchphrase from the “Art IS Education” campaign of the Alameda Art Council. Themes seemed a way to “to pull people together and unify them,” she says. It also seemed the best way to link radically disparate groups.
Dance was movement on Friday, story on Saturday, and social change on Sunday. Twenty-four different companies or performers joined the bill, running the gamut from veteran choreographers with dozens of productions to their names to one high school student who began dancing three months ago on a dare. The sheer eclecticism of the participants was almost dizzying. It included the youth violence prevention/hip-hop group Destiny Arts; the neoclassical ballet company Company C; the big-dancer troupe Big Moves; and Chingchi Yi. At the student end of the spectrum, Berkeley and Moreau Catholic high schools were represented, along with Mills College, UC Davis, and Cal State Hayward.
It sounded good. It rang with idealism. But in practice, the Dance IS festival materialized as a wacky kind of talent show not awful enough to be novel or inventive enough to be eye-opening. There were top-drawer offerings, like a polished dance film by Rebecca Salzer and a wonderfully weird work by Chingchi Yu where the dancers resembled creatures in a Japanese anime. There was also a spark of invention in new troupe Ophelia’s Stage, well-crafted ballet from Company C, and solid modern dance from Nancy Karp and Berkeley Ballet Theater. But much of the festival didn’t hang together. In fact, “Dance IS Social Change” was as misguided an agglomeration of offerings as I have seen since high school.
It was also misguided as a category. As Berkeley High dancer Sam Raskin noted, all dance is movement, and if you believe all movement has meaning, then all dance can also be construed as story. But by elevating social change to the same level, earnestness and message were allowed to trump the art form itself.
Ironically, the one company most unambiguously oriented toward social change, Destiny Arts — which springs out of an Oakland after-school program dedicated to teen violence prevention — was the one that fused its message and form most seamlessly. Fifteen girls of all sizes and hues took the stage in a work called Social Change IS. Combining well-wrought rhymes, nicely crafted hip-hop, and high-test personalities, each was given a chance to say what social change meant to her.
At the other extreme was Mass Movement, a group of large women. Believing that “everyone can dance,” the quintet engaged in movement devised by Dandelion Dancetheater choreographer Eric Kupers. The excerpt, from something called Clutch, was worthy of a dance therapy class for the benefit of the performers only. There is nothing wrong with plus-sized people on stage. There’s nothing new about it, either. What is wrong is to make one’s size (or color, or disability, or gender) the point of the public display. Fodder, yes, but an end in itself, no. The array of floaty arms, cautious-but-schmaltzy trundling across the stage, and a hand touching a face, all done in a bad array of black garb, was not enough to qualify even for a recital, much less a festival performance. Besides, it’s no more true that everyone can dance than it is true that everyone can play the violin. These women would do themselves a service by finding an artist who can use their size and shape as aesthetic elements to be employed — not sentimentalized and speciously politicized — the way choreographers have used the limits of the disabled performers in the AXIS Dance Company to make riveting work of broad significance.
Castlemont High School Dance Theater did precisely this in its “Dance IS Story” concert the night before, performing a compelling dance that made beautiful use of the dancers’ limitations. In Staying Within the Lines by Karis Griffin and Dance Company, these twelve kids moved with simplicity, reaching out, walking, gathering in a circle, and raising their arms. It was achingly simple but powerful. Without a lot of training and clearly not much stage experience, these teens said more about the potency of people moving purposefully together than many slick professional performances can.
In fact, the youth groups seemed to have a better understanding of the fusion of expressive form and content than some of the more established companies. Jono Brandel’s high-powered dance for six, “Cyclic Photophosphorylation,” was an athletic explosion of movement. The group from Moreau Catholic High School, exploring metamorphosis, exemplified the shape-changing in M.C. Escher’s drawings through a dance called Metamorphosis that evolved before our eyes.
But veteran Julie Kane’s hilarious, well-wrought Bridal Bridle suffered for being in a league by itself, its delicious irony seeming to drift sadly off into the rafters. You know something is amiss in a festival when the most professional work looks out of kilter.
Shelley Senter, longtime dancer with Trisha Brown Dance Company in New York and a recent Bay Area transplant, helped curate one day of the prefestival activities. She believes next year’s festival has to select performers based not on written appeals, as happened this year, but on videotaped submissions. But even having a better selection process isn’t enough to make Dance IS a community-building endeavor: “Opportunities to perform, in and of themselves, don’t promote the art form.” What does, she says, is the time to view work, share ideas, and talk about what is movement, what is story, and what is social change.
For Jose Maria Francos, another adviser, who cofounded the now-defunct Bay Area Dance Series and is current production manager at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Dance IS was a step forward. “This is a fine group of people trying very hard to make something happen,” he says. “Dance has been pretty much abandoned in the East Bay, and just for that Dance IS is laudable.” But Francos is still bothered by what dance can be, but wasn’t. Much of what he saw, he says, had no relation to the exigencies of contemporary life: “It’s people trying to entertain themselves in a chaotic time. I see the lots of the dancers doing the same stuff as ten years ago.”
So is Dance IS just another festival reinventing the dance wheel? “Maybe we’re going back and backstitching,” Klein says, but if so, “we’re pulling something forward into a world that’s changed.”
Let’s hope next year the organizers will find novel ways to help artists push into new terrain. And let’s also hope that what dance is doesn’t stop it from becoming again what it ought to be — a vital, expressive form that everyday folks can relate to.
