Building From the Bottom

THE RADCLIFFE-HARVARD Dance Workshop has several unique aspects. It provides the only performing art at the University whose works are created from the bottom up by students (no Shakespeare scripts, no Mozart scores); it is one of the very few organizations which has maintained its roots in the Radcliffe community; and it is the only creative art here which has a woman, Claire Mallardi, as its director.

Dance at Radcliffe-Harvard also suffers from various disadvantages. It is not well publicized so that audiences are not as wide as they should be. There is a constant lack of funds, which makes for overcrowded classes. And it is always difficult to find good male dancers. However, none of these problems was apparent in the Dance Workshop's performance for this year, last weekend in the Peabody School auditorium.

The ten short pieces made use of live and taped music, slides, some very interesting lighting, and, of course, the large technical skills of the dancers. The choreography covered a wide range of themes. The introspective piece, "Inescape," used shadows on a backdrop as a literal projection of the inner self. It was a good distance in mood from the last dance, "Intern," where loads of huge black balloons were thrown onto the stage by unseen hands, then played with by the dancers, and eventually dropped off the stage where they were tossed around (and taken home) by the audience.

The only criticism which might be made is that technique was at times given too much emphasis, so that the audience had some uncomfortable moments when they didn't know whether or not the action was intended to be funny. For example, in a fairly long piece called "Pisces," some very serious dancing was accompanied by a not so serious tape of what sounded like water gurgling down a drain. Shades of a modern Pisces living in the plumbing? The dance might have been better if the music had not sounded so hygienic, or if the dancers had taken themselves less seriously.

There were two especially nice solos, one a comic piece, the other a study of mood. In the first, Marcia Hanlon cooked "A Bun in the Oven" with such ecstasy that she couldn't resist kissing the floor and falling in love with her knife. In "Shawl Turning Dawn," Rylin Malone, very tall and beautiful, beckoned dawn in the Near East, accompanied by a wonderful flute.

THE MOST IMAGINATIVE and energetic work of the program, "Sanitas," was choreographed by Art Bridgeman, a graduate student. It is being made into a film to be shown at the Carpenter Center screening of student films sometime in May, and it is worth seeing. The theme of sanity is an old favorite, all too often overdone as a loosing struggle between an upright mind and its gloomy, evil oppressors. In this piece the heaviness is ingeniously avoided: Bridgeman, the man/mind, stands well over six feet tall, while the harbingers of insanity, Laurie Selz and Lisa Myerson in green Geotards and painted faces, are not much more than five feet tall. Innocently he plays with them, lifts them on his shoulders, all tiny, innocent seeming, yet sinister, they trap him.

So, modern dance is alive and very well at Radcliffe. Perhaps it is fortunate that this particular art has not, and probably never will be, institutionalized at Harvard. If ten polished but safe performances a year is the price of acceptance, better by far only two exciting ones.

Night Editor for This Issue: Walter N. Rothschild 74-3 Editorial Night Editor for This Issue: Eric Briendel '77 Feature Night Editor for This Issue: Geoffrey D. Garin '75