Paper Dance:

As a building the Radcliffe gym is a relic of Radcliffe's days as an independent women's college. Fluorescent tubes hang from the ceiling now, but jets for illuminating gas still dot the walls and the leather padded running track and gym nasts rings are definitely the stuff of a bypassed era of athletics.

Radcliffe's intercollegiate teams have fled the gym for the relative luxury of the IAB, but in a funny way. It makes an appropriate home for the Harvard Radcliffe modern dance program. There is almost a tradition that artists have thrived in--or in opposition to--locales out of the mainstream, and even if the building is so underwired that any dance performances in it have to be lit with electricity from Agassiz Theatre, its high ceilings and broad windows give it an ambience and a flexibility and--you might say-an "underwhelmingness" that no modern white-paint sheetrock-and-ten-foot-ceiling dance studio can match.

Harvard-Radcliffe's dance program has more character and problems than just an idiosyncratic building, however, The University is not malevolent towards its dancers, but it is not cooperative either. The budget for dancers-dance is strictly extra curricular does not relent. So dance at Harvard has to run on love and wile.

Somehow, however, it succeeds. The production currently being rehearsed, "paper event," is being financed in part by the fees non Harvard dancers pay in order to study with Claire Mallardi, director of the Modern Dance Program and choreographer of the show and in part from Mallardi's own pocket. And the "paper event" will be produced on June 5, 6, and 7--even though the production dates were determined not for any grand reasons but because that was the only time that Agassiz was available to have its electricity plundered and the gym could be wrested away from basketball and classes long enough for adequate rehearsal.

The "paper event" itself is what Mallardi refers to as a "structured improvisation." As choreographer she provided the structure long strips of kraft paper which the dancers contemplate, hug, tear into balls, build with, and eventually, abandon. But the dancers-a mixed group of Harvard students and the "outside people" who have come to study with her-have to make something of the structure, leaving the "paper event" as much theirs as it is Mallardi's.

"It's an adventure and a challenge for them," she says, even though some of the technique with which they realize her structure isn't dance-academy perfect. The interaction between her, the "outside people"-who are frequently semi-professional dancers-and the Harvard undergraduates of the group cannot reasonably be expected to produce technical perfection. The production is a function of three different worlds and Mallardi sees it as being educational for all three as much as it is an ambitious theatrical production.

"It's wonderful," she says, but it's also a union tenuous enough to be held together only by the energy that Mallardi has put into her program and that the dancers have returned. Yet, as long as that energy can be sustained, it will probably keep on creating a fertile community of artists and a unique experience for the students who make the trek up to Radcliffe Yard.