five college dance department newsletter · dance department newsletter 2017–2018 in spring 2017,...

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BEBE MILLER: The Blues Project

FIVE COLLEGE DANCE DEPARTMENT NEWSLETTER 2017–2018

In Spring 2017, the Smith College Department of Dance was honored to host choreographer Bebe Miller as the 2017 W. A. Neilson Professor. Since the late 1980s, Miller has been recognized as one of the most outstanding choreographers of her generation. Miller and Smith College dance faculty member Angie Hauser have a nearly 20 year collaboration. This creative partnership was the foundation for Miller’s residency at Smith yielding a series of performative lectures on the relationships between dance, gesture, performance, embodiment, memory and identity. In late August, Miller returned to the Pioneer Valley and together with Hauser staged The Blues Project on students from the Five College Dance Department. This is an adaptation of The Hendrix Project, a work that Miller originally created with her company in 1991.

As connoted by its title, the point of departure for The Hendrix Project was the music of Jimi Hendrix, the 1960s African-American rock legend who made guitar playing a highly visceral form of expression— enhanced by the distortion and feedback of high-decibel electronic sound. Miller has described the dance piece as her personal response to the emotional power of Hendrix’s music. As in the rest of her choreo-graphic output, she avoided overt metaphors, linear narratives and explicit meanings.

This approach empowers the spectator to find her own points of entry to the dance, her own modes of engagement with the performance.

The choreographic text of The Blues Project is open to multiple possibilities of analysis. We can trace the

Co-Editors: Rodger Blum and Joanna Faraby Walker Editing help: Emily Beckert and Andrew Shepard

relationship between dance and music in terms of both form and affect. We can follow the shifting rapport between the individual and the group, for as dancers move between solos, duets and ensemble passages they encode a certain definition of community. We can ponder how the dancers’ interac-tions might mirror the dynamics among the members of a rock band. Moreover, in the work’s movement vocabulary we can appreciate a dialogue between two aesthetics: 1990s contemporary/postmodern dance and 1960s rock dancing, as it manifested in rock concerts in which bodies shook, writhed, kicked, jumped and bounced.

And there is the context—the web of social, cultural and historical referents—in which each spectator could situate the performance and herself. What did countercultural icon Jimi Hendrix and his music symbolize in the rebellious and transformative 1960s, when he achieved fame, and how did Miller’s origi-nal choreography capture the zeitgeist of the 1990s, when rowdy, explosive identitarian art played an important part in that decade’s so-called culture wars? How does the present adaption speak to us in the current moment, a no less turbulent time than the 1960s and 90s? These are just examples, by no means prescriptive, of navigational coordinates for positioning ourselves in conversation with The Blues Project. There is not one but many roads to that act of meaning making.

—Dr. Lester Tomé (from program notes) n

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Amherst College | Hampshire College | Mount Holyoke College | Smith College | University of Massachusetts Amherst

“From Miller’s opening solo to the final duet ... The Hendrix Project plunged deep and flew high, with constant, supercharged shifts in level, direction, scale and impetus.” —Marcia B. Siegel

Left and right: Bebe Miller in rehearsal Center: Shayla-Vie Jenkins (SC MFA '18) in The Blues Project

J I M C O L E M A N D E R E K F O W L E S

2 • FIVE COLLEGE DANCE DEPARTMENT NEWSLETTER Amherst College | Hampshire College | Mount Holyoke College | Smith College | University of Massachusetts Amherst • 3

FCDD ALUMNI NEWS

Tierra Allen (AC ’09) is the Community Discussions Coordinator at TheatreFIRST in North Berkeley where she recently assistant directed WAAFRIKA 123 by Nick Hadikwa Mwaluko. This past summer, she attended the Urban Bush Womens’ Summer Leadership Institute and recently completed directing projects with Playwrights Foundation and Play-Ground. Tierra earned a San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle Award nomination for her role as Napoleon in The Farm at Theatre-FIRST. She was one of the 13-member Coalition of Black Women Profes-sional Theatre Makers who organized against Marin Theatre Company’s production of Thomas and Sally. Last year, Tierra won an Isadora Duncan “Izzie” Dance Award for Outstanding Achievement in Company Performance for her role as Babygirl in An OPEN LOVE LETTER to Black Fathers: A Choreopoem.

Rachel Aylward (UM ‘13) is a Brooklyn-based actress, writer, voiceover artist, and yoga and meditation instructor. She fuses her marketing background and creative talents at RAYS PRESS, a consulting firm for big message organizations looking to improve how they talk to their communities. www.rayspress.com.

Kate Bailey (MHC ‘08) continued formulating her own Pilates-based movement series based on spirals, and is now a Pilates instructor in NYC.

Pele Bausch (HC ‘96) premiered A.K.A Ka Inoa as part of New York/Pa-cific Island Time, curated by John-Mario Sevilla and Hālāwai, at the 92Y, Harkness Dance Center in December 2017.

Nicole Bindler (HC ‘99) taught an Embodied Embryology workshop, and performed an improvised solo Everything at the 2017 Texas Dance Improvisation Festival. She also taught Contact Improv at Headlong Studios. Nicole organized a U.S tour for Diyar Dance Theater to perform a collaborative work WOMEN, a hybrid dabke/contemporary dance that explores the parallels between the conquest of Palestinian land and Palestinian women’s bodies.

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ONYE OZUZU: DANCE CURRICULAR CHANGE FOR A DIVERSE CULTURAL SUSTAINABILITY How do our choices in curricular design affect our students’ relevance to and sustainability in the culture as dancers? How do our choices affect the sustainability of dance forms themselves? What is our responsibility as gatekeepers of our art form’s rarified infrastructures to provide access to forms from a diversity of cultures that reflect the diversity of our students? How do we interpret indicators like market demand and the interests of the philanthropic community in the context of an agenda that foregrounds racial, cultural and class equity? These are a few of the important questions Onye Ozuzu asked the students and faculty of the Five College Dance Department in the annual Fall Lecture.

Onye Ozuzu is a dance administrator, performing artist, choreographer, educator, researcher, former dean of the School of Fine and Performing Arts at Columbia College Chicago, and newly appointed dean of the College of the Arts at the University of Florida. Her work has been notable for its balance of visionary and practical progress in the arenas of curricular, artistic and community develop-ment of diversity, collaboration and interdisciplinary performance arts.

“I honor explorations that are detailed enough to recognize the workings of things, deeper than aesthetics. I am interest-ed in demonstrating, in enacting the adaptation, response and change that we can stimulate in one another. My work brings forward an ancient sensibility toward performance as ritual and places it into interaction with an awareness of performance as presentational. I believe in the human ability to absorb experience and through intentional movement convert it, re-direct it, shape it into possibility.” —Onye Ozuzu n

MASTER CLASSES AND WORKSHOPSContinuing our long partnership with the UMass Fine Arts Center, the FCDD offered master classes with several prominent dance companies throughout the year. In October, the all-male French-based, Algerian-rooted Compagnie Herve Koubi taught a series of master classes at UMass in a variety of dance forms—contemporary, traditional, African dance, and hip hop—that inform their unique style of movement; and one of Argentina’s greatest cultural exports, Tango Buenos Aires, taught an introduction to their art form to a class of contemporary dancers at Smith College. In March, Tara Keating, Associate Artistic Director of BalletX, Philadelphia’s premier contemporary ballet company, taught an advanced master class in classical ballet to Five College dancers at Mount Holyoke College.

In addition, the FCDD offered a workshop exploring potential careers in dance with contemporary dance historian Maura Keefe and a workshop series in stage lighting for dance with lighting designer Kathy Couch. n

Onye Ozuzu

BalletX Associate Artistic Director Tara Keating leads a master class for Five College dancers

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Strauss Bourque-LaFrance (HC ‘06) designed costumes for Tere O’Connor Dance’s Long Run, which toured in fall 2017 as well as a piece, Tiny Movements Tap into Vibration And Sensation, featured in the New York Times Arts Section.

Jonalyn Bradshaw (UM ‘12) is a freelance artist with Davis Contemporary Dance and Hard Candy Dancers, and teaches recreational modern, jazz, and ballet at Peak Athletics in Highlands Ranch, CO. She is the Education and Group Sales Coordinator for the Denver Center for the Performing Arts.

Kim Brandt (HC ‘01) premiered her new work, Problems at MoMA in NYC. Problems was developed in conjunction with Kim’s three-month residency at MoMA PS1, expanding upon recent work presented at SculptureCenter, Movement Research, Issue Project Room, and Pioneer Works.

Shirah Burgey (UM ‘11) graduated with a Post Baccalaureate Doctorate in Physical Therapy from Northeastern University and currently works as a Physical Therapist at Cambridge Hospital. She is a member of the Boston-based contemporary dance company Urban Under-ground, and has presented choreography with that company, Kelly Donovan and Dancers, and the Boston Contemporary Dance Festival.

Jessica Courtney (UM ‘08) received her Master of Arts in Clinical Mental Health Counseling and Dance/Movement Therapy from Lesley University in 2017. She is now providing career counseling to students at MIT in that university’s Global Education and Career Development office, and recently conducted a workshop for students and post-docs on Successful Interviewing Through Body Language, based on the research of Amy Cuddy.

Yolanda Daelemans-Greaves (UM ‘81) works part-time as a Stage/ Production Manager in both dance and theater. She is also running for her third term as Selectwomen in the Town of Ashland, MA. Her daughter Adriana Greaves (UM ‘18) just graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Dance and a Bachelor of Science in Kinesiology.

Joy Davis (SC MFA ‘15) was a Visiting Lecturer in Theater, Dance, and Media

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STUDENT RESEARCHEvery year Five College Dance Department students produce important research exploring the history, theory and practice of dance. Below are several selections from that research.

Following is an excerpt of a paper by Claire Lane (SC’20). The excerpt is taken from a paper entitled “The New Dance Group and Left-Wing Social Activism: Case Study of Jane Dudley, 1932-1942”, the culmination of research undertaken in Lester Tomé’s Studies in Dance History.

[...] Under the New Dance Group’s slogan “Dance is a Weapon in the Revolutionary Class Struggle,” Jane Dudley helped construct a new American modern dance form that distilled Soviet inspired agitational propaganda into a simple and instructable language. Working congruently with other NDG professionals, by 1936 Jane Dudley had helped develop a two-pronged teaching strategy to apply to all facets of the studio classes and productions: to educate the thinking dancer to bring attention to social issues of the proletarian audience, and to educate the moving dancer, through physical embodiment that would prepare them for the realities of protest. Thus, building upon socially relevant themes mediated by left cultural critique, Dudley could focus her energy on conveying ideas of social significance and catalysing the dissemination of dance as a popular art form.

To produce a viable form of political dance that would rouse sentiment for revolutionary demonstration, Dudley endorsed the pedagogy of “mass dance.” Illustrated in Dudley’s eponymous article “Mass Dance,” which was published in the December 1934 issue of New Theater magazine, she envisioned a choric or folk dance taught in groups of twenty to fifty people, around which was established a sense of community solidarity through the “clarity of ideology.” Formulated for her educational outreach to large crowds of industrial laborers, her concept of “mass dance” relied heavily on agitational propaganda techniques to mobilize individual bodies into a collective unit that demanded change from society [...] Grounded in reality and devoid of abstraction, the “agitprop” aspects of dance on which Dudley focused involved the transformation of the mundane, utilitarian activities of work into the dance of resistance, so that ideological directives could be transposed into a digestible form. In effect, the radical “mass dance” formulated a discourse on bringing desired social action into being through a performative act. By this process of diffusion, Dudley created a radical shift in what constituted performance, creating a space for dance to be protest and for protesting to be dance.[...] For Jane Dudley, this teaching practice enabled left-wing ideology to better permeate and circulate through the quotidian lives of the working public.

In Dr. Dasha Chapman’s spring 2018 Dance and Culture at UMass and Mount Holyoke, students pursued ethnographic research projects on a dance culture of their choice. The following are short excerpts of some of their final papers:

Elizabeth O’Brien (HC ‘19)“Sassy, Classy, Brassy Burlesque: An exploration of feminism, gender, and defining individuality”“Neoburlesque” refers to the 1990s revival of the traditional burlesque performance. Emerging in the mid-nineteenth century, burlesque was a combination of satire, witty political commentary, singing, dancing, and comedy, which by the 1920s developed into an affirmation of femininity centered solely on the striptease. Neoburlesque in its revival tends to encompass performers who more widely represent body type, gender, and sexual orientation, as well as explore a wider range of content and style in performance. Elements in Neoburlesque usually include—but are not limited to—striptease, costume, satire, and humor, all with the possibility of challenging sexual objectification and social taboos. While burlesque is traditionally performed by normative feminine bodies and drag queens, Neoburlesque is known to welcome genderqueer and trans performers. The subcategory “Boylesque” honors the role of masculinity and cis-gendered male bodies in performance. I question the purported inclusivity and purpose of Neoburlesque. Is a performance feminist only through mere representation of varying body types, gender, race and sexualities? Or must a performance force the audience to confront some misogynistic parable or subvert patriarchal expectations of gender in order to be a feminist Neoburlesque routine? Neoburlesque performances can be radically feminist through a provision of audience discomfort and provoking thought; at the same time, the satirical, gaudy quality of the form itself lends the performer agency though an ability to critique both the form and their involvement in it in the midst of performance and as a part of performance.

Claire Lane (SC’20) in The Blues Project

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“All that is important is this one moment in movement. Make the moment important, vital, and worth living. Do not let it slip away unnoticed and unused.”

—Martha Graham

4 • FIVE COLLEGE DANCE DEPARTMENT NEWSLETTER

at Harvard University, and is currently an Associate Professor at the Boston Conservatory at Berklee. Joy recently created work for New Dialect in Nashville, Urbanity Dance in Boston, and The Theorists in Austin. With collaborator Alexander Davis, The Davis Sisters were Schonberg (Boston) Fellows in Residency at The Yard this past summer. Joy offers Countertechnique workshops at the Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation, Lion’s Jaw Dance + Performance Festival, and the American Dance Festival.

Mariam Dingilian (MHC ‘14) presented a solo piece in progress, Static: Rewind, in the Fertile Ground New Works Showcase at Green Space in Queens during April 2017.

Eva Dean (HC ‘82) premiered her company’s new work Liquid Silver: Sanctuary during fall 2017 in Brooklyn. The company participated in the first Brooklyn/Malmö Interna-tional Exchange Residency, awarded to Maria Naidu from Malmö, Sweden. www.evadeandance.org.

Brendan Drake (UM ‘09) was a 2017–2018 Fresh Tracks Artist at New York Live Arts. His most recent work, This is Desire, premiered at Brooklyn Studios for Dance this past March.

Maura Nguyen Donohue (SC MFA ‘08) is an Associate Professor at Hunter College/CUNY and a Faculty Fellow at the Roosevelt House Institute for Public Policy. She toured Europe with La MaMa’s Great Jones Repertory Company in a joint project with the Italian company Motus. Maura continues to serve as co-chair of the New York Dance and Performance (Bessies) Awards Small Capacity Committee, as Vice Chair of the Board for Movement Research, as a writer for Culturebot, and as co-producer/ curator for the Estrogenius Festival. She’s also still involved in the ongoing durational performance of mother of 2.

Donatella Galella (AC ‘09) is an Assistant Professor at the University of Califor-nia, Riverside. She recently published chapters in The Disney Musical on Stage and Screen, The Palgrave Handbook to Musical Theatre Producers, and The Sixties, Center Stage.

Merli V. Guerra (MHC ‘09) continues to co-direct Luminarium Dance Company in Boston, with

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Maggie Golder (MHC ‘18)“The ‘Cultural Crafting’ of Zumba”Dance forms used in Zumba are not considered to be a part of the dominant cultural knowledge in the United States, and the practice is not always geared towards informing its participants of their contexts. Rather, Latin dance is specifically marketed as an ‘exotic’ point of intrigue to distinguish Zumba from other exercise classes: “adjectives describing Zumba exemplify its exotic, party-like nature and act as an enticement factor that draws participants into the classes. Hot, spicy, sensual, and wild…” (Schommer, 69). The language used in the marketing is meant to attract individuals with little exposure to salsa, merengue, cumbia, mambo, or reggaeton. Mirroring Lena Sawyer’s description of the commodification of African dance in Stockholm, within Zumba, salsa has become a product of leisure that promises an alternate experience of oneself and one’s body (Sawyer 2006, 323). […] I assert that in order to foster an ethical Zumba practice, one must provide instruction on the basic principles of the dance forms incorporated in the class as well as encourage their students to experience the dance forms in other environments.

Caterina Christodoulou (MHC ‘20)“Identity Formation Processes in the Greek Cypriot community; and its historical perspective”Learning how to dance in Cyprus is necessary in order to be a part of the community. Everyone, no matter how well, dances as a key way to participate in social gatherings. Does this mean that the whole nation really knows how to dance, or is it simply meant to be a figurative saying? Dance learning begins even before a child can walk, acquired and nurtured by parents and grandparents who sway the cuddled baby in time with the music. Young bodies attend all social gatherings such as weddings, birthdays, parties and christenings, and watch their older siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles. Observing their every movement, absorbing the sensation of their every step, young people embody the dance with their eyes, ears and limbs. Through the years of watching and swaying, children begin to develop their own vocabulary of movement. Then, without warning, they are thrown straight into the action where they will sink or sway. “You can’t explain it - you must feel it - some experiences, were simply unavailable to language,” (Sklar 2001, 11). Deidre Sklar discusses the importance of actively participating in order to fully understand and appreciate the meaning of the fiesta and rituals to The Virgin in Tortugas, NM. This is equally accurate for learning traditional Greek dancing, where one must be able to fully immerse their self in the activity in order to fully grasp all the contextual relationships that are created when dancing. On the dance floor you may stumble, but instead of worrying about it, you make it a part of your dance and learn from it. One’s first steps may not be as well practiced or as grounded as those of their elders, but they slowly pick up on the movements as others give them a hand and guide them along through the music and across the dance floor, until they are no longer dancing as many, but instead as one big unit all moving with the same pulse and the same rhythm in their step.

Myla Brilliant (MHC ’21)“Creating Queer Improvisational Spaces”A queer dance framework allows us to question the ways we are able to connect, both physically and emotionally. It challenges and redefines the spaces in which we are allowed to move, touch, and exist together. […] Queerness and dance exist together harmoniously. Both leave room for non-normative forms of embodied experiences that otherwise may not have a place in a heteronormative society. Intentionally designating dance spaces as queer allows us to look at dance through a queer world-making framework. This framework is personal, political, and social. Dance has the ability to play a huge role in queer politics if we, as artists, creators, and scholars, are willing to put in the work. As Fiona Buckland suggests, queering dance and queer world-making takes labor and effort. These spaces are not inherently given to us, because they are not seen as important to society. By creating intentional queer dance spaces, we can foster connections between queerness and dance by focusing on how we connect and interact with each other. We can start to question gendered structures in Western Dance and how they limit the ways in which we are able to form intimate connections.

Izzy Kalodner (MHC ‘21)“Gender Renderings in Irish Step Dance”Even with the lift of the body, the emphasis remains downwards, in the striking motion of the feet. It’s a bodily paradox--how to remain upright while focusing on the down beat. Even so, with repetition, the rhythm becomes easier. Because of the necessity of keeping my arms locked to my sides, I can’t use them to maintain my balance, and have to fight with my leg muscles to keep me upright instead of staggering into someone else. There’s a feeling in my chest, like a straight line is going through it, parallel to the floor. It makes me put my shoulders back and keep my chin tilted up, ensuring that the parallel line stays unbroken or unbent. I have, almost viscerally, a realization of the amount of concentration required. It’s not just the footwork that contains the difficulty, as the steps we are doing are basic, and only have the unfulfilled potential of intricacy. But it’s in all the other small details that are not necessarily visible--keeping the body straight and the chin up and the hands relaxed but straight. I want to bend over, to sway from side to side, and I have to keep fighting the urge to let my arms swing. There’s an invisible audience right in front of our grouping, and we can’t angle away, only face them, head on. It reminds me of the invisible line sticking through my chest again, a grounding point for the rest of the body’s activity, even though it’s so high up off the ground. n

Amherst College | Hampshire College | Mount Holyoke College | Smith College | University of Massachusetts Amherst • 5

Five College dancers in Court, choreographed by Isabel Thompson-Pomeroy (MHC ‘19)

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Kimberleigh A. Holman (MHC ‘09), now in its seventh season. Merli recently completed a six-month guest cohort position with We Cre-ate—celebrating female artists in Boston—in which she created new work tackling Alzheimer’s and memory loss. She also received a grant to bring Luminarium Dance Company to Fuller Craft Museum for a one-week residency continuing her breathing installation series from 2011.

Safi Harriott (SC MFA ‘14) recently presented choreography at the New Traditions Festival, a project of Brooklyn-based Dance Caribbean Collective (DCC). She is now a dedicated member of DCC, serving as Programming Coordinator and Assistant to the Director. DCC produces performances and develops educational programming which facilitate ongoing dialogue between traditional and contemporary Caribbean expressions. Safi remains deeply invested in community building through the arts, and is thrilled to be doing this work. She is also currently a Master of Arts candidate in the Sociocultural Anthropology program at Columbia University.

Lucille Jun (AC ‘08) spent the past eight years living and performing traditional dance in Korea. She is currently working toward her Master of Fine Arts in Performance and Choreography at Smith College.

Jasia Kaulbach (AC ‘14) earned a Master of Arts from the Met Film School in London after graduating from Amherst. She lives in Brooklyn where she works full time as a video producer at Inc. Magazine and Fast Company Magazine, in addition to freelance filmmaking. She has just won a NY Emmy award for producing the short documentary, Ghost: Bed-Stuy Veterans and the Evolution of Bruk Up in 2017. She also won a Folio Eddie award for Inc. Magazine’s documentary series Women Who Lead. www.jasiafilm.com

Sam Kenney (SC MFA ‘04) is Chair of the Department of Theatre and Dance at The State University of New York at Fredonia.

Justine Lemos (HC ‘95) recently had an article written in collaboration with Mark Wright published in the Journal of Latin American Antiquity by Cambridge University Press.

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AMHERST COLLEGE DANCE ENSEMBLE: NEW DANCE GROUP Amherst College Visiting Assistant Professor Dante Brown designed this ensemble for students to develop their skills as dance/theater artists by participating in the creation of a student dance company that would be viable and sustainable in a liberal arts environment. Student dancers in the ensemble performed at different sites in the Five College community. In addition to the ongoing practice of technique, rehearsals focused on learning and creating different repertory with Brown, guest artists, and the students in the ensemble.

Student dancers also examined different professional dance company models as inspiration in the formation of the ensemble as well as researched diverse examples for community engagement and the arts. Questions that informed the development of the ensemble included: What does it mean to be part of a performing ensemble in a liberal arts setting? How do performance art-making and community intersect? What are potential structures for organizing an ensemble performance company to insure flexibility as well as sustainability? What are some of the challenges in keeping a collaborative body together and viable? n

Leah Woodbridge (AC ‘20) performing her own work, Goodbye, Goodbye, in Amherst College Dance Ensemble’s Process|Reprocess concert

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“There are situations of course that leave you utterly speechless. All you can do is hint at things. Words, too, can’t do more than just evoke things. That’s where dance comes in again.”—Pina Bausch


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Cadáver Exquisito at UMass

2017-18 Virginia Wagner Scholarship awardee Isabel Thompson-Pomeroy (MHC’19)

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NEW VISIONS FOR DANCE AT UMASSThis past fall, Co-Artistic Directors and Choreographers Tom Vacanti and Leslie Frye Maietta created a surrealist evening-length exploration into the lives and work of two of the greatest Latino poets of our time—Pablo Neruda and Federico Garcia Lorca. Cadáver Exquisito reflected the surrealist principal of 'exquisite corpse.' Vacanti and Frye Maietta worked in tandem to craft a world of poetic reflection, of strange and rich relationship, of transparency, a world where Garcia-Lorca and Neruda are alive in all of us.

The past three years have been in an exciting time of re-envisioning the UMass Dance Program. A large part of that vision is how the faculty cre-atively approach dance scholarship and research-building new models, taking risks to create independent, self-sustaining, resourceful work that asks new questions of audiences, faculty, and students.

SCHOLARSHIP WINNERSThe Virginia Wagner Scholarship was created to recognize outstanding student artists and scholars in the Five College Dance Department. Awarded annually, faculty in the FCDD attempt to honor students from across the Five Colleges. Congratulations to this year’s awardees:

University of Massachusetts AmherstKelsey Saulnier ‘18

Hampshire CollegeMakenna Finch ‘19Nadia Issa ‘19

Mount Holyoke CollegeIsabel Thompson-Pomeroy ‘19

Smith CollegeSophia Noli Rosen ‘19

Amherst CollegeMatthew Holliday ‘19

“The future belongs to young people with an education and the imagination to create.”

—President Barack Obama

Jemma Levy (AC ‘95) is an Assistant Professor of Theater at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, VA. She is also the Founding Producing Artistic Director of Muse of Fire Theatre Company in Evanston, IL, where she directed Richard III this past summer. The company is about to head into its tenth season. Jemma is also a freelance director and recently directed The Merchant of Venice with Notre Dame Shakespeare Festival’s Touring Company.

Kellie Ann Lynch (SC MFA ‘07) is currently building community as Artistic Director of Elm City Dance Collective in New Haven through company performances, education, and community projects. She also performs with Adele Myers and Dancers, Kate Weare Company, and David Dorfman Dance.

Bronwen MacArthur (SC MFA ‘16) taught at Amherst and Smith Colleges this past year where her piece Welling was performed by Five College dancers in the 2017 Smith College Fall Faculty Dance Concert. Bronwen has been serving as Visiting Assistant Professor at Wesleyan University, as well as teaching at Yale University, including an undergradu-ate seminar in the history and practice of dance kinesiology, anatomy, and somatics. She toured nationally with the Bebe Miller Company presenting Miller’s new work In a Rhythm and recently traveled with the company to Colombia and Peru.

Michelle Marroquin (HC ‘94) holds the annual event Dia de los Muertos in Holyoke and Easthampton. She and others share this unique Mexican tradition through workshops, a film screening, a panel discus-sion, and performances.

Katie Martin (SC MFA ‘10) created and performed in several long-form and durational dance works for gallery spaces with the support of the MA Cultural Council Finalist Award for Choreography and the Northampton Arts Council. These included evening-length companion dances QUARTET and QUARTET redux, dancing with former FCDD faculty members Paul Matteson and Jennifer Nugent, as well as Kate Seethaler (SC MFA ‘16); Incision Objects, a 2-hour duet with Jenny Bennett (UM ‘06), embedded within Jake Meginsky’s sound installation at A.P.E Gallery; and QUARTET No. 3, a commission for the opening of the Arts Trust

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AFRICAN AMERICAN DANCE SYMPOSIUM

After months of dance master classes and film screenings leading up to the main event, African American Dance: Form, Function and Style, organized by Dr. Ninoska M’bewe Escobar, Consortium for Faculty Diversity Scholar in Theater and Dance at Amherst College, culminated on a bright sunny weekend April 13-14. The symposium featured a diverse range of speakers, performances, and master classes. African Diasporic dance scholar and Smith College/Five College Professor Emerita of Dance and Afro-American Studies Dr. Yvonne Daniel was the keynote speaker.

Dr. Daniel began her Friday afternoon talk by posing a few essential questions: “What is African American dance? What are its goals? Where is it found? When did it form? Who dances and represents it?” The answers to these questions, she said, are crucial in understanding why we study African American dance. Dr. Daniel stressed that African American dance is a critical part of “the identity and complete history of American dance.” “Its goal is to express and involve,” she said. “Its affect is contagious, [and] inspires emotional honesty, technical vigor, purposeful in-tent.” Dr. Daniel’s talk was followed on Friday evening by a performance featuring FCDD faculty members and special guest artists.

On Saturday, the symposium featured two dance master classes. The first was an Afro-Caribbean dance class taught by Dr. Rosemarie A. Roberts, an associate professor in the department of dance at Connecticut College. The second class, “Black Classic Modern,” was led by Alvin Rangel, an assistant professor of dance at California State University, Fullerton. Also on Saturday, Dr. Marcia Heard and Mansa K. Mussa gave a joint talk titled “The Art of Dance.” Dr. Heard, a dancer, teacher, choreographer and historian, and Mussa, a visual and performing artist, educator, and writer, discussed the form, function and style of dance from a historical and visual perspective. In a later talk titled “The Living Books,” renowned director, choreographer, and dance teacher Abdel Salaam talked about how he found his passion in African American dance and choreography. “I needed to know who I was as a man—as a black man—in America,” Salaam said. Through dance and choreography, he found a way that he could “empower and inspire while entertaining.” The final talk of the symposium, “The Presence of Pearl Primus,” was given by scholars Peggy and Murray Schwartz, PhD. n

Lauren Horn (AC’17) taking a master class at African American Dance: Form, Function and Style

“All the ills of mankind, all the tragic misfortunesthat fill the history books, all the political blunders,all the failures of the great leaders have arisen merelyfrom a lack of skill at dancing.”

—Molière

Building in Northampton, performing alongside Lauren Horn (AC ‘17), Ian Spak (UM ‘18) and Jenny, with live electronic composition by Jake. QUARTET No. 3 was reprised in the Faculty Dance Concert at Amherst College in September 2017. Katie also enjoyed collaborating and performing in ongoing dance projects with Wendy Woodson at A.P.E. and with Barbie Diewald (SC MFA ‘16) in the 2018 Five College Faculty Dance Concert.

Kaitlin McCarthy (MHC ‘09) is currently a staff writer for Seattle Dances and a choreographer in Se-attle. As a writer, she looks for the values expressed within the dance and evaluates how well the piece fulfilled those values.

Donna Mejia (SC MFA ‘12) is an Assistant Professor of Dance in the University of Colorado Boulder’s Theatre and Dance Department, and has affiliate appointments in Women and Gender Studies, and Ethnic Studies. She is also the new Director of Graduate Studies.

Anne Penner (AC ‘97) is an Associate Professor of Theatre at the University of Denver where she teaches acting, directing, and actor movement training. This past summer, she played Queen Margaret in Shakespeare’s Richard III.

Tara Madsen Robbins (SC MFA ‘06) is a full-time dance faculty member at The Cab Calloway School of the Arts, an arts-oriented magnet school for grades 6-12 in Wilmington, Delaware. She lives with her 6-year-old son Dylan outside of Philadelphia.

Jennifer Rockwell (UM ‘04) retired from dancing professionally with the Saint Paul City Ballet in 2012, and moved to CT, where she was a faculty member at New Haven Ballet until this past fall. Jennifer is currently enrolled at Sacred Heart University where she is getting a Master of Science in Occupational Therapy.

Katie Rubin (AC ‘99) is writing a solo piece about the #MeToo Movement from her home in Piedmont, California, for Capital Stage, an Equity Theater in Sacramento. She com-pleted a two-month run of Transitions at Theater Rhino, the world’s longest running LGBTQ Theater. Additionally, she teaches acting at the American Conservatory Theater, improv at Stanford University, and her

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BOOK EXCERPT THE BODY POLITIC: BALLET AND REVOLUTION IN CUBA (OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS)By Dr. Lester Tomé, Smith College Associate Professor of Dance

Professor Tomé’s new book examines ballet as a fundamental example of the political spectacles of the Cuban Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s. It inquires into the dancers’ various enactments of political ideology, labor, class, race, nation, gender and sexuality—both onstage and offstage—which made ballet an iconic art of the Revolution:

During the Ten-Million-Ton Sugar Harvest of 1970, ballet dancers exhibited their capacity for hard work and their disposition to face the economy’s challenges together with the rest of the nation. When the government asked the country’s workforce to forego the Christmas’ and New Year’s holidays and join a massive two-week operation to drive production up, the dancers of the Ballet de Camagüey pledged to volunteer one hundred hours of labor each. The magazine Bohemia documented the artists’ work in the plantation adjacent to the sugar mill Panama. On the final day, according to the magazine, the dancers were the last group to leave the field; they stayed at work longer than other groups with the goal of reaching the one- hundred-hour mark. Stressing the dancers’ industriousness, the article explained that the troupe, without taking time for a break, went back to rehearsals immediately after its period of work in the harvest. The ensemble had less than two weeks to get ready for six performances of an ambitious program combining the second act of Swan Lake with four other ballets, including a world premiere.

The six-page article contrasted photographs of the artists working in the fields and performing in the theater. In one group of images, they carried bunches of canes and were indistinguishable from typical harvest workers. Another set of photos captured them in scenes from Swan Lake—the elegant ballerinas in resplendent white tutus. Significantly, a third category of images, depicting the dancers in class and rehearsal, unveiled the trait common to the sugar cane cutter and the glamorous swan: hard work in its most physically demanding form. The latter photographs allowed a glimpse into the labor of training and rehearsing: dancers mending slippers, exercising at the barre, practicing the choreography, drying their sweating bodies with towels and standing attentive while awaiting instructions. The text made the physical affinity between agricultural work and ballet explicit: “With their days in the harvest barely over, members of the ballet troupe already sweated copiously in rehearsals, which demand extraordinary physical resilience and strength.” The authors brought attention to both actual and symbolic correspondences between dancers and the ideal of the Revolution’s New Man. While the dancers’ participation in the harvest constituted palpable instantiation of the Revolution’s demand for heroic feats of labor, their displays of strength and resilience in rehearsals and performances allegorized the exhausting manual work expected from the New Man’s proletarian body. n

STUDENT AND ALUMNI AWARDS AND HONORSJulia Antinozzi (SC ’18) was accepted into the fall 2018 post graduate program at the Copenhagen Contemporary Dance School. This program is designed for exceptional students of dance wishing to hone and refine their technical skills with personal, professional coaching.

Sofia Engelman (SC ’19), Emily Papineau (SC ’21) and Kelsey Saulnier (UM ’18) were all chosen to perform their choreography at the National College Dance Festival at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. in June 2018. Sofia and Em performed their duet where the air is light and clear, and Kelsey performed her solo Small Memory.

Ian Spak (UM ’18) was chosen to attend Springboard Danse Montréal 2018, a three-week intensive program that connects professional dancers and emerging choreographers with some of today’s leading Montréal-based and internationally renowned dance companies.

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Julia Antinozzi (SC ‘18) in Rodger Blum’s a chamber furnished only with the sun

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Article from “Bohemia,” Cuba, 1970

own writing class, “Tell Your Story.” tellyourstorywithkatie.weebly.com

Laura Ann Samuelson (HC ‘11) collaborated with composer Nathan Hall to curate an evening of micro experiences and explorations of music, movement, sound and dance at the Denver Art Museum in January 2018.

Jenney Shamash (AC ‘11) is currently in London working on a project, An Occupation of Loss by Taryn Simon. She also manages the US debut of Australian comedian, Hannah Gadsby. Recently, Jenney produced a light sculpture as part of the Amsterdam Light Festival with artist Ben Zamora. This past summer, Jenney worked on a musical, Born For This, written by and about gospel singer BeBe Winans. The multi-media concert by ETHEL that Jenney produces, commissioned by the Ringling Circus and Brooklyn Academy of Music, opened at the Ringling headquarters in Sarasota this past winter, and had its NY premiere earlier this year.

Kelly Silliman (SC MFA ‘13) is enjoying her role as Program Director for the Northampton Center for the Arts, and encourages FCDD alumni who want to stay local to contact her about rehearsal and performance space opportunities. Kelly also continues her work with the tinydance project, an arts and sustainability endeavor. tinydanceproject.com

Adam Sloat (AC ’99) is the creative director at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in NYC where he is responsible for all graphic design, copywriting, and video production.

Allison Smartt (HC ‘11) sound designed and composed the piece #PrayFor, featuring choreography and text by Andrew “Fig” Figueroa (HC ‘15).

Nat Smith (AC ’11) completed a Playwriting MFA at Ohio University this year and moved to Boston.

Heather Southwick (MHC ‘90) is currently Director of Physical Therapy at the Boston Ballet.

Rebecca Steinberg (UM ‘13) completed her third season as a dancer with New Dialect in Nashville, TN under the direction of Banning Bouldin. This past year, Rebecca traveled as a guest artist to lead master classes and workshops at various institutions. She continues to present her choreographed work, with upcoming commissions

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from New Dialect, Nashville Ballet, and Middle Tennessee State University. newdialect.org

Isaiah Tanenbaum (AC ‘05) continues to act and produce with his theater company Flux Theatre Ensemble, most recently appearing in the world premiere of Kevin R. Free’s AM I DEAD?, a dark comedy that explores America’s complex and broken relationship with black bodies through a remix of the Isis/Osiris myth and Sartre’s No Exit. Isaiah has started a new phase of his theatrical career, working as an Education & Engagement Specialist for NYC’s Conflicts of Interest Board, training public servants on NYC’s ethics law.

Andy Taylor-Blenis (UM ‘83) teaches at Tufts University and Wheaton College, and is the Artistic Director of Wheaton College Dance Co., Boston Scottish Country Dancers, and Back Pocket Dances. She recently received the City of Cambridge’s Trailblazing Women Award and the San Antonio Folk Dance Festival’s National Dance Award.

Mariana Valencia (HC ‘06) was awarded a 2018 Foundation for Contem-porary Arts Grant. These grants were established by John Cage and Jasper Johns to assist artists with funding to make their work in full.

Debbie Williams (SC ‘99) lives in London, where she recently completed her PhD in Dance at the University of Roehampton, exploring the claims of dance and transformation experience in adult non-professional dancers. She is currently the University of Roehampton’s UK Coordinator for the Choreomundus International Master in Dance Knowledge, Practice and Heritage.

Cat Wagner (SC MFA ‘13) completed her first year as the new Director of Dance at Stoneleigh-Burnham School in Greenfield, MA.

Margaret Wiss (MHC ‘16) made her choreographic debut at the Biomorphic Dance Festival in NYC. She has been pursuing work as a choreographer, and had seven residen-cies in the past year alone, including choreographing Superposition on Five College dancers for the 2017 Mount Holyoke College Fall Faculty Dance Concert. n


Nicole Canuso (HC ‘96) was awarded a 2017 Pew Fellowship in the Arts, a once-in-a-lifetime award granted to twelve Philadelphia-area artists per year. Pew Fellowships provide artists with an economic freedom that presents the opportunity to focus on their individual practices over a considerable period of time, as well as an opportunity to learn and exchange views with an accomplished group of artistic peers. n

GOODBYE JIM AND T!After 35 years, Mount Holyoke Professors Jim Coleman and Terese Freedman have decided to retire and move to their dream home outside Seattle, Washington. The Five College Dance Department will deeply miss all Jim and T brought to us: inspired teaching, important choreography, and valued leadership. Jim and T share a sharp intel-lect and silly wit that we found invaluable. Below are some further thoughts on these wonderful artists/educators:

When a musician and dance teacher make a beautiful connection, it is a special occurrence. Playing for Jim and Terese will go down as one of the highlights of my career. I started working with them in the Fall of 1987. The yin and yang of their professional and personal relationship combined with my music, manifesting itself in many ways. With Jim, his passion and unwavering displeasure with anything but the best from himself inspired us all. His glacial sense of timing, his desire to speak “the odd languages,” as he called them, and his dynamic phrasing perfectly matched my more classical point of inquiry and curiosity. With Terese, her astute musicality, rhythmic clarity, ability to groove, and consistent positive attitude brought out my more folk and jazz styles. There were classes where Terese would teach a long adagio phrase. Towards the middle of class, Jim would appear in the back of the studio and would come to demonstrate with Terese. They would break the movement into an A phrase and a B phrase. Then to the students’ surprise, this adagio transformed into a beautiful partnering duet. Both of them taught at such a high level—I am forever grateful and will never forget the beautiful, magical moments we shared in technique class with so many wonderful students.

—Peter Jones, Senior Lecturer and Accompanist in Dance, MHC

When I came to Hampshire in 1992, it didn’t take long to glean that something was going on at Mount Holyoke with some beloved people named Jim and T that everyone who knew more than me wanted to be in on. Before I’d found a way to get into that room myself, I was surrounded by the intelligence and excitement flowing through the bodies and dance thinking that sprang from Jim and T’s influence, a combination of deep chewy wildness with a love of precision. Eventually I found my way into the room, taking their classes, dancing in their work, and discovering a sense of power and rhythmic complexity that still underlies my emotional sense of dancing. The light coming through those old pool windows, the curving cyc, the grey floor—one e and a two e and a… One day I remember Jim, about to demonstrate pliés, pulling up his pants, turning around to face us, inhaling deeply and saying, “Oh guys… what does it all mean?” then swiveling back to send his hands down his legs and out into space, “and plié . . .” Pliés will always be conjoined with philosophy for me.

I took all that into my appetite and action as a dancer, but as my work life has stretched into teaching, I’ve appreciated being able to touch in to a way of seeing student work that I’ve always associated with Jim and T: not looking from a standpoint of correction but of always being able to see and name and celebrate the latent idea, the glimmering, fawn-legsy beginning of something not fully rendered but unique and worth pursuing. The something more, the unknown future.

—Karinne Keithley Syers (HC ’96) n

Ian Spak (UM ‘18) and Kelsey Saulnier (UM ‘18) in Leslie Frye-Maietta’s Waist Deep

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Jim Coleman and Terese Freedman

Jim and T with Angie Hauser and Chris Aiken at their retirement party at The Red Barn at Hampshire College

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“I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.”

—John Cage


Wendy Woodson

FACULTY UPDATES 2018Over the past year Chris Aiken (Associ-ate Professor, Smith College), has continued his work teaching and performing internation-ally in the field of improvisation and contact improvisation. He led two teaching intensives at international contact improvisation festivals in Paris and Barcelona. He taught and performed new works at the Texas Dance Improvisation Festival and the Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation with Angie Hauser. Chris created a new duet with Shaina Cantino (SC MFA ‘14), that was performed as part of the SCDT Riff Talk series. Chris taught an improvi-sation intensive in NYC as part of Movement Research’s Melt Series. He also gave a talk at Columbia University on his eco-poetic model of dance improvisation and participated in a panel discussion at Smith College with Dana Caspersen and KJ Holmes on tone and dance.

Rodger Blum (Professor, Smith College and FCDD Chair) continued working with his Grant for New Directions in Scholarship and Teaching, combining dance, technology and the handmade. He premiered a new installation this past spring at Hampshire College. Palimpsest projected dancers from Pilobolus Dance Theatre through three layers of hand-printed silk and cotton. In the fall, he choreographed A chamber furnished only with the sun for eleven FCDD dancers and two snow machines.

Dante Brown (Visiting Assistant Professor, Amherst College) taught master classes and set a new work, Loophole, on students at The High School for Performing and Visual Arts (Houston, TX). In addition, he performed his solo Lucille at The Dance Complex (Cambridge, MA), The School for Contemporary Dance and Thought (Northampton, MA), Triskelion Arts (Brook-lyn, NY) and as part of the 2018 Five College Faculty Dance Concert. His company, Dante Brown|Warehouse

Dance, also had the opportunity to tour this season, sharing Social Plaque as part of the 92Y Education Series (NYC), and BITE at Triske-lion Arts (Brooklyn, NY). Dante will be continu-ing his choreographic research this summer working with students in the JUNTOS Collective in Guatemala.

Dasha Chapman (Five College Visiting Assistant Professor

of Critical Dance Studies) had a busy first year teaching courses on three campuses, and participating in the scholarly and artistic circles that feed her interdisciplinary work. She presented her research at conferences for the Dance Studies Association, Haitian Studies Association, American Studies Association, and National Women’s

Angie Hauser and Bebe Miller

Cast of Marilyn Sylla’s The Joy of Movement

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Studies Association. She co-convened Afro-Feminist Performance Routes at Duke University, and presented with collaborators on a dance education and performance project in Jeremie, Haiti at the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance at Duke. Dasha also traveled to Cuba to build connections to dancers, choreographers, and performance scholars abroad through

Hampshire College’s program in Havana. In May, Dasha was in residence on a fellowship at New York Public Library’s Jerome Robbins Performing Arts Division conduct-ing archival research for her book on Haitian dance. She then trav-eled to New Orleans for a artist residency at A Studio in the Woods|Tulane Univer-sity, collaborating with colleagues and com-munity to excavate



Haiti-New Orleans connections.

Paul Dennis (Associate Professor, UMass) premiered a new piece, a leisurely collapsing of the thing into its possibilities…, commissioned by Compagnia Versiliadanza for their season Stagione Danza 2017/18 at Teatro Cantiere Florida in Florence, Italy. The event also included solos choreographed by Deborah Goffe, Daniel Nagrin, José Limón and Eve Gentry and performed by Paul.

During spring 2018, Molly Christie González (Assistant Professor, UMass) presented the paper “Dance as Rhythmic Motion: Investigating the Polyrhythmic Roots of Katherine Dunham Technique” at the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance at Duke University. She taught Dunham Technique and

presented an interactive lecture titled “Defying Categorization: Kath-erine Dunham’s Artist/Scholar Model,” at the American College Dance Association Northeast Conference in NJ. Molly premiered her chore-ography Alyma at the 92nd St. Y in NYC, with her fabulous cast of UMass dancers, which was also performed on campus as part of the Closing Celebration for the exhibit 5 Takes on African Art/42 Flags by Fred Wilson at the University Museum of Contemporary Art. During summer 2018, she was a Research Fellow at Jacob’s Pillow Dance, an invited guest of the Dance Educa-tion Laboratory in NYC, and taught pedagogy classes at the Institute for Dunham Technique Teacher Certification Workshop at Columbia College in Chicago.

Barbie Diewald (Visiting Artist in Dance, Mount Holyoke

College) was a Visiting Artist-in-Residence at The Iron Factory in Philadelphia in spring 2018. In April, she presented her work at the 5th annual We Create! festival in Boston, in collaboration with Kate Seethaler (SC MFA ‘16), Stephanie Turner (SC MFA ‘17) and Jenny Bennett (UM BFA ‘06). This year, Barbie’s work was also presented locally at The School for Contemporary Dance and Thought, The Northampton Community Arts Trust, and The Academy of Music where she choreographed Panopera’s production of The Marriage of Figaro.

Charles and Rose Flachs (Professors, Mount Holyoke College) enjoyed a fall sabbatical researching the technique of active stretching and its benefits to the study of contemporary ballet. They also directed the

Massachusetts Academy of Ballet’s summer pro-gram, the annual Nut-cracker and Sweets at Holyoke’s Wistariahurst Museum and gave a lecture-demonstration sharing the art of ballet with the residents of Loomis Village. Additionally, Rose co-taught the Vagan-ova teacher seminar with former National Ballet of Cuba Dancer and Ballet Master John White, and Charles’ choreographic work, Mighty Feat, was cho-sen for performance at the New York Finals of the Youth America Grand Prix at the Performing Arts Center at SUNY Purchase in April 2018.

Since its December 2016 premiere, Deborah Goffe (Assistant Professor, Hampshire College) has welcomed 100+ guests into her Holy-oke home to witness her solo performance of Privy. A focus of her

fall 2017 sabbatical, this salon performance series deepened both the work and its “auto-curatorial” frame through repeated en-counter with guests in this especially intimate setting. She presented a paper on the process at the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance (CADD) Conference at Duke University in February. The first iteration of Liturgy|Order|Bridge was developed, in collaboration with Leslie Frye Maietta and Lauren Horn (AC ‘17) , and performed as part of the 2018 Five College Faculty Dance Concert at Hampshire in March (funded through a New England Dance Fund from NEFA). Also in March, Deborah performed in Yellow Orchard by Aretha Aoki (SC MFA ‘08) as part of the EstroGenius Festival at the Kraine Theater in New York.

Angie Hauser (As-sociate Professor and Chair of Dance, Smith College) premiered and toured the new evening-length work In A Rhythm with Bebe Miller Company. The work was well received with performances at New York Live Arts, The Dance Center (Chicago), On the Boards (Seattle), and Wexner Center (Columbus).

Who knew a dance about syntax could be so interesting?

—Lauren Warnecke (The Chicago Tribune)

It’s the members of Miller’s ensemble who demon-strate the geographic spread of terrific dance intelligences. Rarely

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ALUMS! STAY IN TOUCH WITH US!

Dear Alums: Please send us your

e-mail and other contact information!

E-mail us at [email protected]

Paul Dennis teaching class in Italy

Wendy Woodson’s Sourcing the Stream Students from the Massachusetts Academy of Ballet, directed by Charles and Rose Flachs

is learning so much about dance such a sensuous pleasure.

—Elizabeth Zimmer (Village Voice)

We are left to consider choreography anew: a site of both steadfast intellectual rigor and fluid pleasure, of both beauty and political consequence. How lucky we are to exist in the same moment as such dances. —Maddie Kodat (Sixty Inches From Center)

Peter Jones (Senior Lecturer and Accompanist in Dance, Mount Holyoke College) released a new recording, Selections From The Timeline, and composed the score to choreographer Amy Miller’s Vade Mecum, performed by GroundWorks DanceTheater, which premiered at The Allen Theater at Playhouse Square in Cleveland during October 2017. Peter also composed the evening length score for choreographer Lida Winfield’s Imaginary which premiered at The Flynn Center for the Performing Arts in Burlington, Vermont in February 2018. He


was in residence at the Bates Dance Festival for his 26th year.

Daphne Lowell (Professor of Dance and Movement Stud-ies, Hampshire Col-lege) continues to teach Contemplative Dance/Authentic Movement with colleague and co-director Alton Wasson in summer week-long workshops at Hamp-shire College and in year-long training pro-grams to professionals from a wide variety of fields (somatics, social work, psychotherapy, medicine, education and visual and per-forming arts) and from near and far (Canada, Germany, Venezuela, Portugal). This summer will be their 30th week-long workshop. www. contemplativedance.org

Leslie Frye Maietta (Guest Artist, UMass) finished her second year as a full-time faculty member. Highlights included: creating and performing a duet with her son, We’re on a Stage, for Families Dancing at Mount Holyoke College; premiering Cadáver Exquisito in collaboration with colleague Tom

Vacanti, and Orontea at Jennifer Muller’s HATCH presenting series in NYC. She was thrilled to work with Deborah Goffe on her new work, Liturgy | Order | Bridge. The trio premiered in process at Jacob’s Pillow Dance, and was fully-produced for the 2018 Five College Faculty Dance Concert. Leslie also attended the ACDA Northeast Conference at Montclair Univer-sity and presented her most recent work, Last Loop First performed by Kelsey Saulnier (UM ‘18) and Adriana Greaves (UM ‘18). Adjudicators Gerald Casel, Gerri Houlihan and Jim Sutton selected the duet for the Gala Concert and described it as, “a sophisticated work, nuanced and beautifully/artfully crafted.” Finally, Leslie was awarded Research Support Funds from UMass to continue her research into Gyrokinesis.

Marilyn Sylla (Five College Lecturer in Dance) and Sekou Sylla (FCDD Musician) enjoyed teaching master classes in African dance and drum at Colo-rado Mesa University and setting a piece for that university’s fall 2017 faculty dance concert. They also conducted

workshops and per-formed at the Pomfret School in Pomfret, CT by invitation of Director of Dance Nina Joly (MHC ‘11). Marilyn was honored to be invited back for a third year to direct Immigrant Voices, sponsored by the Cen-ter for New Americans, and presented at the Shea Theater in March 2018. Marilyn and Sekou taught weekly classes at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival for the third summer in 2018, and continue their work in the healing arts and arts in education work in K–12 schools.

Lester Tomé (Associate Professor, Smith College) was pro-moted to associate professor with tenure in 2017–18. The peer-reviewed journal Cuban Studies published his article “The Racial Other’s Dancing Body in El milagro de anaquillé (1927): Avant-Garde Ballet and Ethnography of Afro-Cuban Perfor-mance,” and he was invited to contribute chapters to the Routledge Companion to Dance Studies and the Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Ballet. He was elected a member of the editorial board of Dance Research Journal. His book The Body Politic: Ballet and Revolution in Cuba is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. In April, Lester gave the opening keynote lecture at the VII Caribbean Studies Conference at Mar-quette University. He also was a speaker in the Lecture Series of the Department of Performance Studies at Washington

Barbie Diewald’s Pare in the 2018 FCDD Faculty Concert

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University St. Louis. Lester completed his third year as director of the MFA Program in Choreography and Performance at Smith College.

Mike Vargas (Musician in Dance Technique and Perfor-mance, Smith College) is reading lots of philosophy books these days and considering how to proceed to make a positive difference in the world, with or without music, with or without dance, after forty years of investigat-ing the combination of these two art forms intimately. He has been furthering this work lately with Nancy Stark Smith, in Poland and at the ImPulsTanz festival in Vienna. This year Mike also published a deck of cards version of

his 86 Aspects of Com-position, a collection of lenses for looking at art and life first published in Contact Quarterly magazine in 2003.

Wendy Woodson (Professor and Chair of Theater and Dance, Amherst College) created a new full-length video performance installation, Sourcing the Stream, in collaboration with Five College dancers and alums Christopher-Rasheem McMillan (HC ’04), Madison Palffy (HC ‘14), Molly Mc-Bride (MHC ‘14), Katie Martin (SC MFA ‘10), Lucille Jun (AC ‘08), Lauren Horn (AC ‘17), Forrest Locklear (HC ‘18), Ian Spak (UM ‘18), and Leah Woodbridge (AC ‘20), with music

Leslie Frye Maietta and Deborah Goffe in Goffe’s Liturgy|Order|Bridge

Rodger Blum’s Palimpsest

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and voice by Zeina Nast (AC ‘06). This project was presented at the A.P.E. Gallery in Northampton and at the Holden Theater in Amherst. It was also presented at Brown University in April 2018 as a video installation without performers as part of the international symposium Waters Edge. Wendy has been invited to do several new ver-sions of the project in South Africa at WITS University in Johannesburg and Rhodes University in Grahamstown in the fall of 2018 when she will be on sabbatical. She received an Amherst College Faculty Research Award to support the project. Also as part of her sabbatical, she will be an artist-in-residence at the Bogliasco Foundation in Italy. n


five college dance department newsletter · dance department newsletter 2017–2018 in spring 2017,...

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