‘Ex-Rated’ Marks Dancers’ Return to Loeb

Tonight, dancers will pirouette, shuffle and groove as they never have before.

The sold-out Loeb Drama Center’s Experimental Theater—conventionally reserved for plays and musicals—will host its first dance performance in at least a decade.

The show, Ex-Rated, comes at a critical time for Harvard’s dance program, one that has been largely rebuilt in recent years by a new director at the Dance Program at Harvard’s Office for the Arts (OFA).

Currently, over 600 people enroll each semester in the OFA’s dance classes and Harvard officially recognizes 18 student dance groups.

Although Harvard offers no academic program in dance, student work has received national awards and several students each year go on to professional ballet companies.

But dancers worry about the fate of their burgeoning programs.

The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study plans to assume control of Harvard’s best dance studio—the Rieman Center in Radcliffe Yard—in 2005 and convert it into a meeting space.

For dancers, who have long struggled to gain publicity at Harvard, lobbying for the best alternative to Rieman will be a challenge.

In contrast to other arts on campus—like theater’s Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club (HRDC)—the dance community lacks an umbrella organization. Some students say this leads to division within the ranks, making it more difficult for dancers to argue their needs to Harvard’s administration.

And while administrators say they are working to secure an alternate arrangement, dancers say they can think of no adequate replacement for Rieman.

Something A Little Different

Traditionally, the Loeb’s two spaces, the Mainstage and the Ex, have only been used for drama and musicals—with the exception of a few dance shows on the Mainstage.

But dance has not been performed in the small, intimate space of the Ex for at least 10 years, and is rarely performed “in the round,” with the audience circling the performers an all four sides.

Last April, three student choreographers—Adrienne M. Minster ’04, Katie F. O’Brien ’04 and Ryuji Yamaguchi ’03—decided to change this.

And so they created Ex-Rated, a collaborative project of student-choreographed dancers with student-composed music. The nine participating choreographers each created pieces that the directors blended into a single show, said the show’s producer Dan Hoyos ’03.

Minster says she thinks Ex-Rated showcases the high quality of dance across Harvard—something that’s not generally well-publicized on campus.

Tickets for every show—700 tickets in total—sold out three days after going on sale, Hoyos says. “Harvard students are doing really amazing things choreographically,” Minster says. “It’s got to be one of the most amazing dance communities in the U.S.”

Moving in Sync

But no central organization connects the different clubs and companies that make up this community.

Although OFA has a dance program that publishes a 28-page guide to dance opportunities available on campus, it has no decision-making authority over the student-run groups.

Yamaguchi says the OFA mainly mentors individual dancers as opposed to working with student dance companies.

“There’s not as much interaction between student companies and the OFA as there should be,” he says.

The result of this structure is a lack of unity within the community, according to Christina M. Shelby ’04.

“The companies are so polarized,” she says. “There are very few actors or dancers who belong to more than one company.”

Some feel that the lack of structure within the dance community hinders their work.

“I think it’s impacted all groups negatively,” says Claire S. Sulmers ’03, the head of the Caribbean Club Dance Troupe. “You don’t really have dancers going into different groups. It might be better for the community if we had a network.”

Minster says this fragmentation decreases the dance program’s visibility to the administration—an issue that is particularly important in lobbying for a new space.

“It’s difficult for the administration to see how much dance there is,” she says.

“Dancers…don’t have as much power, because they don’t have a single identity,” choreographer Tina Y. Tanhehco ’05 agrees. “It makes it more difficult to fight for space—it’s disjointed. All the dancers are not happy about it…but we don’t know who to turn to.”

OFA Dance Director Elizabeth Bergmann says the dance program could benefit from better organization and more opportunities for faculty mentorship to provide more continuity.

“It wouldn’t hurt to look at structure,” she says. “I sort of get the feeling that both theater and dance keep reinventing the wheel.”

But students say it is hard to form an umbrella organization without being in control of a dance performance space.

Dancers contrast their situation with that of theater—where all would-be directors must go through the HRDC to perform in the Loeb.

“It’s a bit difficult because it’s not like we have a theater to rent out to groups,” Minster says. “Everyone’s on their own to find space.”

Will Dance For Space

Indeed, ask a dancer on campus the biggest issue facing the dance community and she—or, occasionally, he—will most likely reply “space.”

Aside from Rieman, which under the current plans will be lost permanently as a dance venue in 2005, students have practice space in the Loeb, the OFA’s offices and a few Houses. Lowell Lecture Hall will become the only space on campus designed with dance in mind.

But even Lowell isn’t up to par, student say.

According to Shelby, Lowell is plagued by bad audience visibility and poor technical equipment.

Rieman, by contrast, was recently revamped with new seating and technical equipment.

“The space is perfect,” Bergmann says. “It’s too bad there couldn’t be some kind of compromise.”

But Tanhehco says she thinks dancers are prepared for a fight.

“We don’t want to anger the new dean into not giving us space,” she says. “But we also want the space to the point that we’d consider hunger strikes, chain ourselves to the building, picket.”

Short of a sit-in, Shelby J. Braxton-Brooks ’03 says dancers have not organized a response.

“Losing Rieman is still very new news,” she says. “People are still so much in shock.”

She says dancers will pressure the administration to find a replacement.

“Harvard needs to find space. It’s that plain and simple,” she says.

Yamaguchi says he is concerned that the University will not put in the money to maintain Rieman as a quality dance space in its remaining three years of student use.

“Basically the space is going to deteriorate,” he says.

No Clear Solution

With a space crunch facing all student extracurriculars on campus, however, it is unclear where the dance community will go.

Associate Dean of the College David P. Illingworth ’71, OFA Director Jack Megan and Bergmann say they have begun the search for a replacement spot.

Illingworth says they haven’t found any answers.

“The college considers finding a dance space to replace Rieman to be a very important priority,” he writes in an e-mail. “While we do not yet have a definite solution, no one is forgetting how important this is.”

But Bergmann says she anticipates difficulties.

She says that all the sites they’ve examined so far—which administrators declined to name—would require an expensive renovation and would force out its current occupants.

With the University’s developing space in Allston, some students and faculty wonder if the dance program might eventually find its home across the River.

“Obviously Allston could be a helpful alternative at some point, but we’re not counting on it to solve the problems by ’05,” Illingworth writes.

But Bergmann says Allston is not an appropriate location for the OFA’s dance program.

“I just don’t think it would work,” she says. “We’re basically saying it’s too far to go to class; it would ruin our program.”

Student attempts to win regular dance space in the Loeb and Hasty Pudding building have not resulted in viable options either.

A report in May 2000 by a group of students requested that the American Repertory Theater (ART) grant dance a yearly slot on the mainstage in addition to the four currently accorded to the HRDC.

The ART rejected the proposal.

“While I am sympathetic to the needs of the dance community, I am naturally more responsive to the theatre groups currently using the Loeb,” Loeb Drama Center Director Robert J. Orchard writes in an e-mail. “These groups already want and deserve additional stage time.”

While they do not have a consistent slot, dancers have won space in the Loeb, for Ex-Rated and a Mainstage production last fall, by going through HRDC’s application process.

And Orchard says the promise of additional theater space elsewhere could bring dance to the Loeb.

“The only fair way for the dance community to have regular access to the Loeb is to have alternative spaces for either the HRDC or the ART to work,” he writes. “The renovation of the Hasty Pudding Theatre might provide for an opportunity in this area.”

The dilapidated Pudding building—which was bought by Harvard in 2000 and has been awaiting renovation ever since—had been considered a possible future space for dance.

The dance community’s proposal to the ART in May 2000 also listed technical specifications to bring dance to the Pudding space.

But Megan says the building’s small size did not allow the needed expansion of the stage in order to accomodate dance.

Without a concrete replacement on the horizon, dancers say they don’t know what will become of their program.

“I see a decline,” Shelby says. “You’re going to lose dancers because there’s not going to be as much space.”

Upping the Tempo

This loss would be significant, dancers say, because the program has—particularly in recent years—attracted students with a future in professional dance.

Shelby, who plans on pursuing dance professionally in New York City after she graduates, says she chose Harvard’s liberal arts program although the school is not known for dance.

“I felt it was important to pursue my academic interests as well,” she says. “[Dance at Harvard] is kind of a hidden gem. I don’t think people understand the depth of the dance community.”

Harvard choreographers have competed on a national level—last year, Yamaguchi and Tanhehco qualified for the American College Dance Festival. Tanhehco’s piece made it to the national gala performance and was nominated for the best choreography award.

Minster calls the double-nominations “virtually unheard of for any college dance program.”

Many students say Bergmann, who has directed OFA’s dance programs for the last two and a half years, deserves credit for reinvigorating the program.

“In the past three years the dance community went from literally just students to having a nearly professional program,” Minster says. “[Bergmann] has brought the level up to a lot of conservatory programs.”

Her rebuilt program offers 15 extracurricular courses in ballet, modern, jazz, tap and West African dance.

According to Bergmann, over 600 Harvard affiliates—including graduate students and faculty—enroll in these courses each semester, which Braxton-Brooks describes as high caliber, widely accessible, inexpensive and “pretty low-stress.”

But Bergmann says students often can’t take these classes as seriously as they would an academic course.

“It’s hard on the kids,” she says. “When the crunch is down for midterms, if [the class] was for credit they’d keep coming.”

But the Faculty of Arts and Sciences course catalog offers only two courses in the practice of movement—compared to dozens in Visual and Environmental Studies, Dramatic Arts and Music.

Bergmann says she thinks Harvard is reluctant to significantly increase the number of dance classes because dance is viewed as “experiential” instead of “theoretical.”

Bergmann says she would most like to see dance courses added to the Core Curriculum’s Literature and Arts B classes.

“That would make a big difference,” she says. “Being literate in the arts is not just giving you a visual or musical experience.”

—Staff writer J. Hale Russell can be reached at jrussell@fas.harvard.edu.