Dancing the Night Away

Of all art forms, dance has experienced perhaps the greatest growth during the past decade. The bold experiments in modern dances during the '60s have come to fruition in the '70s; audiences regularly pack theaters to see such well-known troupes as Alvin Ailey, Merce Cunningham, and Pilobilus. And the trend toward innovation has so spread that now companies in back-country towns like Northampson, Mass. perform works once restricted to New York's Greenwich Village. Fifteen years ago dance in Boston meant the Boston Ballet, which recently staged Tchaikovsky's "Sleeping Beauty"; today the number of dance and ballet companies in the area is too numerous to count.

Although dance may be experiencing a renaissance of sorts, it is still difficult for new groups to conduct the thorough public relations campaigns and secure the large performance halls necessary to establish a devoted audience following. For this reason dance troupes have, for the past several years, collaborated in dance festivals featuring a few name companies interspersed among local and experimental troupes. The most famous such festival, New York Dance Umbrella, has used groups like Merce Cunningham and Martha Graham as its "anchor" companies; for the most part, these festivals have so far been unsuccessful in Boston.

But now a local arts planning and production agency is hoping to reverse that trend. Articulture, Inc. is presenting a seven-week festival entitled Dance-New England 79, featuring 17 companies ranging the gamut from classic to modern to avant garde. The performances begin Saturday night at the Berklee Performance Center with nationally acclaimed tap dancer Leon Collins and the spirited Danny Sloan Dance Company. Sloan features a repertory of jazz, ethnic, modern and ballet, while Collins, who teaches at the Harvard Dance Center, has toured nationally with the Jimmy Lunceford Band, Duke Ellington and Count Basie. Saturday night's bill will also include the Jassin' Singers and the Joel Press Jazz Quartet, both of which are local groups who regularly perform new works. The festival will receive a strong kickoff Friday night when world-famous ballet dancer Edward Villella hosts the opening reception at Bonwit Teller's. He won't be dancing, though; he's just in town to promote the festival and the National Dance Week, which neatly coincides with it, April 23 through 29.

Articulture is billing the festival as "Boston's first annual festival of dance," a slight overstatement, but the festival is designed as an annual event to encourage collaboration among dance companies and develop wider dance audiences. Articulture acted as the go-between, handling the public relations and series subscription campaign as well as procuring space in some of Boston's more desirable performance halls: Berklee, the Hotel Bradford Ballroom, and the Boston University Theater. Since Articulture is non-profit, funding for the $50,000 program is coming from the Mayor's Office of Cultural Affairs, the Massachusetts Contemporary Dance Association, the Boston Phoenix, the Capezio Foundation, Liberty Mutual Insurance Company, and an $8500 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Peter Kosewski, a spokesman for Articulture, said the festival came about as a result of the near-unanimous responses to a questionnaire sent to 150 New England dance companies. "One hundred per cent said there is a need for a collaborative program which would remove needless duplication of effort, 100 per cent said there is a need for a concerted effort to develop a dance audience, and 100 per cent said a major problem was the cost of procuring space in which to perform--in a regulation high school auditorium, two leaps puts you in the audience," Kosewski commented.

Of the 52 companies and choreographers responding to Articulture's solicitation, 17 were selected to appear in the festival. "We were trying to find those choreographers who should be taken out of the small studios and given an opportunity to be produced legitimately in larger settings. Quality performance is important, but equally important is establishing strong programs people will respond to in a positive way," explained Michelle Satter, director of the Dance-New England project.

Future weeks of the festival will feature the Boston Concert Dance Company, the New England Dinosaur, and the Hartford Ballet. The concert dance company, which revives classic modern pieces ranging from Doris Humphrey's "Day on Earth" to the unique acrobatics of Pilobolus, will perform in the Boston University Theater the weekend of June 1 and 2. Dinosaur, Boston's oldest modern dance troupe, dances the weekend of May 25 and 26, also in the B.U. Theater. Founded in 1968 by choreographer Toby Armour, the group has toured nationally with numerous performances in New York. Armour was a member of Greenwich Village's Judson Theater, which in the '60s was the center of the most influential interdisciplinary theater-modern dance work in New York. And the Hartford Ballet, which plays the B.U. Theater on May 11 and 12, is the most widely-toured dance company in the country, having performed for more than 300,000 people in 44 states. Its members draw from the nation's best: the New York City Ballet, the Joffrey Ballet, the American Ballet Theater, and others. On Friday night the program will feature "Tom Dula," a bluegrass folk ballad, "Allegro Brillante," choreographed by George Balanchine, and "Valley," choreographed by Lar Lubovitch. On Saturday night works of Michael Uthoff (the Hartford Ballet's artistic director), including his evocative interpretation of the "Prodigal Son," will be presented.

Next weekend the dance festival will perform the new and repertory works of some of the lesser-known regional choreographers in the first of three "Dance Variations" programs, to be held at the Hotel Bradford Ballroom. The Dance Gallery of Northampton, Mass., the first modern dance group to tour New Zealand, will present works of resident choreographers Peter Schmitz and Kathreen Sanderson, while the Chortet Dance Ensemble will premiere Andrea Morris' and Kathryn Bresee's "Strush." Cambridge local choreographer Becky Arnold will present a solo performance of her own works, and the Impulse Dance Company will display the eclectic style (embracing modern, gospel, jazz and ballet forms) of its artistic director Adrienne Hawkins. Next weekend's "Dance Variations" program will be followed by similar such presentations, with different dance groups, on May 5 and May 19.

If you're interested in Dance-New England, give Articulture a call; they report series subscriptions and individual tickets are going quite quickly. However, if you'd like to experience some of the leaps and twists without making a dent in your wallet, check out the action at the Faneuil Hall marketplace, where three of the local groups will perform in a free, outdoor mini-series. This Sunday Danceworks will entertain the crowd at 4, 5, and 6 p.m.; Dancentral and Becky Arnold and Dancers will follow suit, respectively, on May 6 and May 20. It's a great way to experience a small, painless dose of local talent, and, who knows, you may just end up liking it.