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
