Unlike the master works of painters, poets, playwrights, and composers, a choreographer’s creation gains permanence only by entering the permanent repertory of a dance company committed to presenting it to audiences. Yes, there are video documentations of great dances, sometimes reclaimed from the dusty archives of a studio or an administrative vault. But these often grainy images, flattened in the medium of the screen, are a pale semblance of the flesh-and-blood physicality of movement and form that originally made the dance great.
Major U.S. dance companies are increasingly mindful of the challenges of safeguarding the legacies of their founding choreographers. The great dances of George Balanchine, for example, remain part of our cultural landscape, both through legacy investments at New York City Ballet and through the many Balanchine-shaped regional ballet companies, now directed by his former students and dancers.
Modern choreographers who created important dances with their own companies encounter challenges that are especially daunting. Will their works survive their retirements, or deaths, as their companies dissolve? Will their works be introduced into the repertories of other companies, either as living entities given fresh shape by their acolytes, or as museum pieces deemed worthy of preservation by critics and directors?
Happily there have been a number of success stories, where great dances of deceased choreographers continue to engage new audiences as lovingly-maintained and vigorously danced pieces. The dances of José Limon survive his death (and that of his artistic director Doris Humphrey) in the well-managed New York organization that bears his name, with a robust commitment to touring his choreography and licensing his dances to ensembles across the country. After a period of uncommon turbulence, the towering legacy of American master Martha Graham endures as a trove of seminal art works, anchored in our culture by the choreographic daring, as well as the pioneering staging elements of designers such as Isamu Noguchi and composers such as Aaron Copland. Internecine struggles within the Graham organization, not unlike the contentious bickering among extended family clans, all intent on snagging the inheritance, nearly derailed the survival of this extraordinary body of American modern dance. With these unsavory struggles now thankfully behind us, the Graham Company has reentered a period of organizational strength and artistic integrity, to the enduring benefit of our nation’s cultural life.
Two of our most treasured choreographers – Paul Taylor and Merce Cunningham – are now entering the final years of their active careers, but with astonishing bursts of brilliance that defy all expectations of end-of-career cycles. The freshness and geniality of the work they continue to make are matched, fortunately, by organizational strength and archival preparedness that will ensure the perpetuation of these two remarkable careers many years into the future.
Other choreographers of their generation have not fared so well. Bella Leweitzky, Erick Hawkins, Joyce Trisler, and Louis Falco (to name but a few) occupy prominent ground in American dance history, but their dances are largely absent from the performance stage. The same is true of a number of important younger choreographers such as Senta Driver and Laura Dean who left the field too early in their creative lives.
Dana Goia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, has acted to mitigate this sense of endangerment by funding reconstructions of dormant American Masterpieces in dance. The first round of awardees was announced some months ago, and dance lovers will be quick to note how opportunities are being seized, with a range of choreographers and styles of dance being supported, encompassing a lovely spectrum of aesthetics that will be returned to active performance repertories in the dance world.
Five of the 13 awards are for dances originally created by major African-American choreographers, through sponsorship of venerable dance companies located in several parts of the country. The Alvin Ailey Company will remount Talley Beatty’s jazzy Road of the Phoebe Snow, created in 1959 to music by Duke Ellington. Las Desenamoradas, Eleo Pomare’s sizzling retelling of the Garcia Lorca’s House of Bernarda Alba, reenters the touring repertory of Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, which benefited from a similar restoration project in the 1980s with the “Black Tradition in American Modern Dance” program spearheaded by the American Dance Festival. Another of Beatty’s dances – his Southern Landscapes of 1949 – will be remounted by Philadanco, another of our major black dance companies.
These early forays into significant choreographic statements by African-American dance makers were both pioneering and fragile, for lack of sufficient company infrastructure to ensure an enduring platform before the public. The current reconstruction initiative, as well as similar efforts in decades past by such groups as the American Dance Festival, Philadanco, and DCDC are all the more valued for saving these historic dances from oblivion.
Two more recent works, each from the 1990s, will be remounted by African-American companies with briefer histories than Ailey, DCDC, and Philadanco: the late Ulysses Dove’s Dancing on the Front Porch of Heaven, created in 1991 for the Royal Swedish Ballet to music of Arvo Pärt, will find its new home in the Complexions Dance Company, co-directed by fellow Ailey alums Dwight Rhoden and Desmond Richardson, and Blondell Cummings’ Chicken Soup of 1981 will be adopted by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar’s always-exciting Urban Bush Women ensemble.
Other awards were made to single-choreographer modern dance companies that will reach deep into their artistic history to revive major works for fresh presentation. Perhaps the most exciting of these is the commitment by the Graham Company to remount the 1954 ballet Ardent Song, widely regarded as a masterpiece in the Martha Graham oeuvre that is long overdue for restoration.
Two awards deserve special mention: Martha Clarke’s 1984 landmark creation Garden of Earthly Delights will reenter our cultural world at this summer’s American Dance Festival, and Alwin Nikolais’s Tent will be brought into the active repertory of the enterprising Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company of Salt Lake City, fast becoming the living repository of this American master’s visionary works. Clarke’s dance is a work of pure magic, an homage to the 1504 Hieronymus Bosch painting in which dance, music, theatre, and poetry commingle to invoke the mythic images of Eden and the unfolding of Adam’s fall. This is a work of profound beauty and grand accomplishment, with an ensemble cast of musicians, dancers, and actors that few dance companies could sustain over time. Its return to touring sites around the country, no matter how brief its revival may be, counts among the most valued of this year’s NEA restoration efforts.
To learn more about this Dance Reconstruction Initiative go to the websites for the American Masterpieces Grants Program at the National Endowment for the Arts and the New England Foundation for the Arts.
