This title was digitized by the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia (MOCA GA).
About Art papers. (Atlanta, Ga.) 1981-current | View Entire Issue (Sept. 1, 1981)
Susan Eldridge’s Warm Up, Weed Out, Wear Down, performed at the 1981 Atlanta Dance Festival (photo: Neil Chaput, courtesy of the Atlanta Department of Cutlural Affairs. By Taffy Martin For diversity, inclusiveness and an apparently democratic selection pro cess, the 1981 Atlanta Dance Festival might not have an equal. Each of the four evenings of dance as well as the mid-week showing of dance films played to packed audiences—a demonstration not only of support for local companies but of Atlanta’s strong and continuing interest in dance performance. In offering all that it did within the confines of the officially proclaimed Dance Week, the Festival made a number of de mands on its audience and raised some challenging questions about the nature of regional dance and the definition of dance itself. Clearly the festival programming was the result of a decision to offer as much variety and as many selections as possible, and it produced a challenging assortment. The mid week evening of dance films provided a familiar and assured crowd-pleaser in Sue’s Leg, Twyla Tharp’s contribu tion to the WNET Dance in America series. It also offered a rare chance to see Helen Tamiris performing her interpretations of Black spirituals in 1958 at the age of 53 and to contrast her work with Fernand Leger’s still startling and prescient 1924 Ballet Mechanique. Each evening of live performance offered just as much variety and con trast but with varying degrees of suc cess. The range in style and ability of the festival companies might have ap peared in evenings neatly segregated into professional and independent, traditional and experimental, or black and white dance. Fortunately this was not the case, nor was any evening in comprehensibly diverse. If the open ing night’s first piece, Entering Faerie, seemed to an embarrassed audience more like an obligatory children’s dance class recital, the parents who attended also saw the Augusta Ballet’s traditional selec tions, the professional showmanship of the City Center Dance Theatre, and Sharrone Mitchells’ theatrical and colorful Pursuit in which Claude Fabian’s elaborate headpiece was as much a part of the performance as Mitchell’s choreography. There was, almost certainly, something to please each member of the audience on any given night, but only with the hindsight that comes of having seen the entire festival does a series of patterns appear to make the weak spots in each program less troubling. The immediately obvious pattern is one of contrasts and then combinations. Along the continuum from narrative to abstract dance, the pieces ranged from the far too literal choreography of Duncan Noble’s Episode for the Augusta Ballet to Susan Eldridge’s enigmatic and thoroughly successful Warm Up, Weed Out, Wear Down. They also ranged from the broadway theatri cality and calculated crowd appeal of City Center’s Flim-Flam-Paradiddle- Ruff and Roll to Louise Runyon’s Night Shift, which nearly defied her audience to enjoy the piece or to recognize it as dance. The most unfor tunate contrast was in dancing ability, particularly when choreographers set clever pieces on dancers whose execu tion suggested only that the dance might be appealing if performed com petently. Within these contrasts was the noticeable and at times appealing variety of ways in which each com pany or independent choreographer played to or ignored the audience. City Center’s impressive precision and technique wouldn’t be as effec tive without its dancers’ engaging eye contact and smiles, nor would Carl Ratcliff’s Environs work as well as it does in any style other than the self enclosure of the piece. Ratcliff’s dancers dance only for each other, even in their curtain calls, but their ex clusion of the audience, even in a piece which accepts and works within the confines of a traditional frontal stage, succeeds because his choice was conscious and skillfully managed. This seems not to be the case with Lee Harper’s selections from Nocturne. In spite of a dynamic use of space, her dancers neither transcend nor acknowledge the separation inherent in the boundary of the stage. In the concert presented by The Dancers’ Collective of Atlanta earlier this season, Joanne McGhee’s Gesture doubled and redoubled self-enclosure in a trance-like piece so successful and memorable that her lighthearted Pas de Deux for the festival which featured Donna Rizzo and John Adair was disappointing. Neverthe less, along with Brooke Hunter’s Duet (for four dancers), it was by far the best of the many pieces which played without much imagination upon traditional sex roles, particular ly as they appear in classical dance. These pieces were at least a welcome contrast to the traditional and compe tent but otherwise unremarkable classical pas de deux presented by Ruth Mitchell and the Augusta Ballet. Dance is a performing, a public art, particularly and inescapably when it is presented for a diverse, public audi ence such as that for the Atlanta Dance Festival. But it is also a tradi tional, symbolic and private act. Three choreographers, Carmencita Romero in Samba Lele, Claude Fabian in The Limbo, and Barbara Sullivan in Imi Cilte combined these two types of dance effectively. Romero, who performed with the Katherine Dunham Dance Company, presented simultaneously the best of ethnic, rather private dance and theatrical, public dance. She com bined the spirit of Dunham’s study of Caribbean dance with studio dance technique so skillfully that each enhanced rather than obscured or diminished the other. In Claude Fabian’s The Limbo, the same com bination emerged somewhat more on the side of private ritual. Pure perfor mance, complete with drummers and a daredevil encounter with fire, this initiation dance seemed just that. Fabian has incidentally invited the festival audience to view his perfor mance. His drummers on the other hand, were part of his achievement. Their clowning both encouraged him and made it impossible for him to withdraw from the challenge. That the performance was staged was never, of course, entirely forgotten; but as a ritual re-presented, it was a great success. Barbara Sullivan’s Atlanta Dance Theatre opened the last night of the festival with Weep No More, imaginatively conceived but poorly performed, making it difficult to look forward to her closing piece, Imi Cilte. However, that dance, per formed to the accompaniment of The Society of African Drummers, was a rousing closing piece, capturing both private celebration and theatrical per formance. The established companies in Atlanta offered no surprises but some very pleasant entertainment. The strongest section of Meli Kaye’s over ly long Kinetistory was the hand-play carried on behind a black screen, but for the most part the older, larger companies remained within tradi tional bounds, leaving experimenta tion to independent groups. It has also become difficult to determine who is an independent chore ographer. Lee Harper, now working exclusively on her own under the name Lee Harper & Dancers, pre sented three pieces, only one of them her own. That dance, selections from Nocturne, continues to develop her quick almost skittery style of move ment. It seemed a dance of lifts and shapes rather than movement. Shar ing the same evening with Susan Eldridge’s Warm Up, Weed Out, Wear Down, it presented a sharp con trast in their apparently different ideas about dance. Both use the stage effectively and with large numbers of dancers, but unlike Harper, who plays to an audience’s hunger for vir tuosity, Eldridge ignores the audience deliberately and with great success. Warm Up...is a difficult piece, not an easy one to like. It tempts, perhaps even taunts the audience into wonder ing whether and to what degree it is personal, perhaps narrative. Eldridge begins at the center of the dance but isn’t necessarily its star. It is less mechanical than last year’s Based Loosely on Clothing, but it doesn’t give away anything more. We want to know more about the dances and hope that we’ll see more of her chore ography. The 1981 Atlanta Dance Festival was tiring, rewarding, promising. Almost every dance, with perhaps the single exception of Carmencita Romero’s Samba Lele, could have been shortened, not just for inclusion in the too packed, too long programs each night, but for future perfor mances under any conditions. It is the Dance Festival itself that needs to be longer. Carl Ratcliff, Company Kaye, City Center, and Ruth Mitchell have been performing in Atlanta and on road trips for a number of years. They have the appeal to draw the large crowds that supported the dance festival, and therefore, the power to offer that exposure to smaller, newer companies and independent chore ographers. The Dancers’ Collective promises to add even more variety to the independent dance community and should surely be able to support a dance festival month of performance, films, and master classes next year. Taffy Martin, who is a faculty member of Emory University’s English Department, has long been interested in dance. Art Papers September-October 1981 12
