When choosing a college dance program, it is important to look deeply into the school setting and course offerings in order to decide which campus world you will want to immerse yourself in for what will be four of your prime dancing years. It can also be important, however, to look beyond the campus boundaries and to examine how the college dance department interfaces with the larger dance community in which it is situated. If you choose to attend a college that is located in a large urban area with a vibrant dance scene, you may find yourself becoming an integral part of the professional dance world before you even finish earning your degree. Back Stage spoke with teachers, dancers, and administrators who work in and with college dance programs in New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Miami to discover exactly how university dance departments interact with the professional dance communities in their cities.
NYU Forges Generosity Alliances
"We're really a conservatory training program," said Kay Cummings, the chairperson of the dance department at New York University, "and there are numerous ways in which we interact with the professional dance community in New York. First of all, our faculty is made up of working professionals. They have all had long and illustrious careers in the professional dance world and many of them are still active in the field. Gus Solomons, jr., for example, was with the Graham and Cunningham companies, and now has his own company. Phyllis Lamhut is a working choreographer. One of our technique teachers, Jolinda Menendez, danced with American Ballet Theatre. And then," Cummings continued, "we have lots of guest choreographers who come and do work with the students. They are also working professionals in the field. Last year, we had Bill T. Jones—and one of our graduates is now an apprentice with his company. We also brought in Tere O'Connor, and Paul Taylor gave us a work—'Cloven Kingdom'—which one of his company members set on our students."
"There's also our summer program, Tisch Dance Summer Residency Festival," added Cummings, "which is six very well-known contemporary choreographers and their companies in residence here for six weeks during the summer. Each company teaches and interacts with the students through informal discussions and lecture-demonstrations for a week, and then the company does their own work here for the rest of the time. Our students get to watch them in rehearsals and see performances. It's a chance for students to get to experience the profession in action, in a very intimate way." Next summer the residency festival will be hosting Doug Varone, David Dorfman, Doug Elkins, Ronald K. Brown, Sean Curran, and Jennifer Muller.
The summer festival also provides an unusual opportunity for professional dancers and students from other colleges to work within the NYU dance program. "The summer program," Cummings explained, "is the only time that we allow people who are not directly enrolled in our degree programs to come in and participate in what we do. Though they needn't audition, we do expect the participants to be at an intermediate or advanced level of technique. We get dancers from all over the country—students from other colleges, or professional dancers who just happen to like these particular companies and want the chance to work with them, and we even get some high school students." The program fills up very quickly, so dancers interested in participating next summer should request application materials by January of 2002.
In addition to the formal curricular ways in which NYU's dance department connects with the professional dance community, the university's location in New York City affords its students numerous opportunities to view professional dance performances that they may not be able to see elsewhere. The department often arranges dance concert "outings." The students are actually required to attend a certain number of professional dance performances and must be sure to see work at some of the city's smaller, experimental venues. "The first-year students are required to attend performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and write about what they see," said Cummings. "Most of our students are not from the New York area and have not been exposed to many different kinds of dance styles, so we want to make sure they get some kind of exposure right away."
Even after a student graduates, the NYU dance program may continue to play a role in linking the dancer with the professional dance field. "A lot of our alumni work in the professional dance community," Cummings explained, "so what has developed is this funny little network whereby choreographers and dancers find each other and end up working together. We also run a mentoring choreographic workshop for our alumni because there are very few places in New York where emerging choreographers can practice. It's called the Bessie Workshop in honor of Bessie Schonberg, who was the first mentor. The current mentor is Don Redlich. The choreographers meet as a group five times during the spring semester and can use our studio spaces. They show their work and talk about their craft and then they put together an informal presentation. It serves as a wonderful cross-fertilization. Some of our alumni go on to establish reputations as professional choreographers and then wind up coming back as guest artists to choreograph on our students. Sean Curran, for example, is one of our alumni. And virtually all of the companies who participate in our summer residency festival have NYU alumni dancing in them."
The dance department at New York University focuses on performance and choreography and offers both B.F.A. and M.F.A. degrees. Unlike the traditional four-year college programs, NYU's undergraduate dance program is essentially a three-year-and-two-summers program. The students' fourth year is their "company year," during which time they perform as members of the school's Second Avenue Dance Company. The whole graduating class works together for the entire year, taking technique classes, rehearsing, working with guest choreographers, and attending lots of workshops. The workshops are designed to help the students make the transition from college into the professional dance community. "We have audition workshops, resume workshops, grant-writing, pedagogy, and we arrange to have headshots done for them," said Cummings, "all these things to prepare them for the transition."
Though the NYU dance program is without question an integral part of New York's professional dance scene, Cummings declared, "I'm always interested in trying to make stronger links and to find ways to make our program more responsive to the dance community, to forge what I guess you could call 'generosity alliances.' The choreographers and companies that come in to work with our students are so terribly generous to us. Performance opportunities and space, for example, are such hard things to come by in New York, so I try to provide them whenever I can to guest artists and professional companies who work with us. I want our program to be able to give back to the professional dance community, as well as to benefit from our extensive interactions with them."
Cal State L.A. Embraces the Avant-Garde
Dancers looking to attend college in Los Angeles would likely consider the long-standing program at UCLA or perhaps the fine offerings at Cal Arts. Yet there is another program, an emerging, lesser-known dance program at the California State University in Los Angeles, which has established strong links to the city's professional dance community. Located downtown, in East Los Angeles, the campus of Cal State L.A. has been known to the city's professional dancers for over a decade as the site of Kaleidoscope Dance Festival, an annual production that was directed by Don Hewitt, a ballet instructor in the university's dance program. Typically, anywhere from 200 to 300 companies from Los Angeles' multi-cultural dance scene auditioned to be part of the festival, which has presented ballet, modern, jazz, and a variety of world dance forms. About eight years ago, in order to broaden the university's ties to the professional dance world, the dance program at Cal State L.A. invited noted modern dance choreographer Hae Kyung Lee (who had often presented choreography in the festival) to join their faculty. Her assignment was to forge links between the university's dance students (who can earn a B.A. in dance or an M.A. in theatre) and the larger dance scene in L.A.
The first thing Lee did was to invite some of the city's well-established choreographers and performance artists to come to the campus as guest artists to set new works on the university students. One of the guest artists was Tim Miller, who founded The Highway, a hip, avant-garde performance venue in Santa Monica, modeled after New York's P.S. 122. Many Cal State L.A. dance students and alumni soon found themselves presenting their own choreography at The Highway. The program Lee has developed, though it offers classes in ballet and jazz, is heavily focused on modern dance and is designed to encourage students to discover their own choreographic voices. It is a non-traditional, not academically oriented program that places a strong emphasis on student choreography, which is sometimes a "hard sell," according to Lee, because many of the students are "first generation" college students. Their parents, in many cases, did not attend college and can sometimes pressure their children to view the college experience as simply an opportunity to learn skills and earn a degree that will afford them more lucrative job prospects. Lee often finds it a challenge to convince her students that the study of dance making and the notion of a career as a dance artist are important and viable pursuits.
"Originally, my parents wanted me to get a degree in business," recalled Claudia Lopez, who earned both a B.A. in dance and an M.A. in theatre from Cal State L.A., "but while I was taking business classes at Cal State L.A., I noticed they had a dance program. I hadn't really studied modern dance before—though I had done a lot of Mexican folk dance—so I began taking modern dance classes, and I discovered it was a way in which I could be creative. So I decided that's what I really wanted to pursue." When Lopez began her dance studies at Cal State L.A., she had not even heard of the university's dance program, whereas in the last few years, she explained, "the program has become much more developed and is now well known throughout the city. It has a reputation for its focus on developing student choreographers and for bringing in guest artists from the city's avant-garde dance scene, who create new, experimental works on the Cal Arts students."
The dance program also has a reputation for accepting dance students of all body types. Students who may not be admitted to some of the other university dance programs in the city because they don't have the desired look or physicality might find themselves welcomed into the dance program at Cal State L.A., which fosters a more inclusive aesthetic as it encourages the exploration of the students' own choreographic languages. Today, Lopez is a part-time instructor in Cal State L.A.'s dance program and is working on attaining a teaching certification that will allow her to teach dance in elementary or secondary schools.
Many of Cal State L.A.'s students (most of whom come from L.A.) have readily embraced the program's teacher-training component as an attractive, practical outlet for their dance interests. Lee felt that she did not learn enough about how to teach dance when she was in college, so she designed a pedagogical component as a required element of the Cal State L.A. dance program. Through this aspect of the program, she forges links to the community in yet another way. Each fall the dance students choreograph their own works and present them in a dance concert on campus. In the winter, they take their works "on tour," performing them in the city's local high schools, where they also conduct lecture-demonstrations about their choreography. The college students gain valuable performing and teaching experience, while simultaneously serving as a recruitment tool for the university's dance program and stimulating interest in the study of dance among the city's youth.
Lee runs her own professional dance company—Hae Kyung Lee and Dancers—which is now made up largely of Cal State L.A. students and alumni. Her company performs about 10 concerts a year. They appear at many prominent local venues, such as the Getty Museum and the California Plaza, and also perform abroad in international festivals. In addition to filling the ranks of her own company with Cal State L.A. dancers, Lee fills many requests from the city's choreographers, who commonly call her when they are in need of recommendations for dancers for their companies. The city's dance and arts organizations also call upon Lee to provide students who might be interested in doing administrative internships. These experiences allow the dancers to not only get a "foot in the door" (no pun intended) with major dance companies, but also to explore and make the contacts that might lead them to other related jobs in the arts.
While the dance program at Cal State L.A. operates with a much smaller budget than that of the larger universities in the city, it is, ironically, the need to economize that has allowed the program to enjoy greater links with the city's professional dance community. Because Lee can't afford to hire guest artists from New York and abroad, she instead makes extensive use of local dance artists who, in turn, often provide career opportunities in Los Angeles for the Cal State L.A. students upon graduation. For dancers looking to earn a college degree and then live and work in Los Angeles, the dance program at Cal State L.A. can provide a stimulating course of study, as well as direct entry into the city's professional dance community.
Philadelphia's Temple University Teams with The Painted Bride
"We encourage both faculty and students to perform and choreograph throughout the city and region, and our alumni are among the most active dance artists in Philadelphia," asserted Luke Kahlich, the chairperson of Temple University's department of dance. Describing numerous examples of ways in which the university and professional dance communities interact, Kahlich began with the faculty. He noted that Temple dance instructor Eva Gholson has an affiliation, as a teacher and choreographer, with Philadanco, the city's popular, nationally acclaimed modern dance company. The work of faculty members Ann Vachon and Merian Soto has linked Temple to dance activities at the city's other universities, such as when Vachon restaged a Limon work for dance students at Philadelphia's University of the Arts, and when Soto's company, Pepatian, was invited to perform at the University of Pennsylvania.
Temple's alumni (who've earned bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees in dance) have gone on to establish themselves as leading forces in the city's professional dance community. Many have started their own companies, such as Grace Mi-he Lee (Ghengis), Tina Bracciale (Winged Woman Dance and Company), and Ann Marie Mulgrew (Ann Marie Mulgrew and Dancers). Others present their choreography regularly throughout the city at showings produced by loosely organized groups of dancers and at Philadelphia's Fringe Festival, a growing, annual festival of avant-garde performance work. Temple alumna Lorin Lyle recently purchased a property in South Philadelphia and is working on remodeling and developing it into a new neighborhood dance space for the city.
It is not only through artistic contributions, however, that the Temple dance department nurtures Philadelphia's dance community. It also offers pedagogical and physical services. Throughout the year, workshops and master classes held on campus are open to participants from the outside dance community. Currently, the department is working out an arrangement with NovaCare that will allow the Temple dance department to offer physical therapy services to the larger community at nominal costs.
In addition to the services and "ambassadors" that the Temple dance department sends out into Philadelphia's professional dance world, there are also professional dance artists who are invited to come in and work with the dance students on campus, either as part-time faculty or guest artists. The modern dance artist Hellmut Gottschild, for example, a highly regarded force in Philadelphia's dance community for many years, has and continues to work with the Temple dance department. Many of the city's dance companies are also regularly included on the schedule of dance concerts (more than a dozen a year) presented at Temple's Conwell Dance Theatre.
One of the most exciting alliances that Temple's dance department has forged with the city's professional dance world is the new cooperative venture (which includes shared artists and funding) between Temple Dance Projects and The Painted Bride Arts Center, a multi-discipline presenting organization in visual arts, dance, jazz, and new performance/theatre and poetry. The Painted Bride presents a full season of dance performances by local and guest artists. In addition, they often commission works as special projects. "This year," explained Terry Fox, the dance curator at The Painted Bride, "we have four big community-based projects. For one of the projects, we have commissioned a work from a New York artist, Tamar Rogoff, who is in residency here and is working with Temple dance students. She will be developing a dance piece based on stories she has been gathering from Vietnam War veterans living in New York and Philadelphia."
The project began when Rogoff discovered some letters and diaries from her father that he had written when he was in World War II, flying suicide missions over Burma. She grew fascinated reading about his war experiences, which had never been spoken of in her household when she was growing up. She decided to make a dance piece based on the stories of war veterans and has titled it "The Daughter of a Pacifist Soldier." "The piece is not really about her father, though," Fox explained. "It's about the impact of war on soldiers. So when she came to Philadelphia and discussed doing her piece here, I thought it was a wonderful idea. You see, Philadelphia has a long tradition of war resistance from the Quakers. So what she's doing is working with six graduate students from Temple's dance department and she's showing them, through the making of her piece, how she works with specific communities of people to extract their stories and then tell the stories through choreography. She does it in a very dignified and sympathetic way. And I think the way she is going to be telling these veterans' stories will be quite remarkable and poignant, particularly at this point in our history. And then what will happen is that the Temple students will create satellite 'sister' pieces based on their experiences working with Rogoff and the veteran groups." Rogoff's finished work will be performed in early 2002 at The Painted Bride and also at La MaMa in New York. The satellite works by the students will be performed at Temple, as well as at a Philadelphia veterans center and at Quaker organizations throughout the city.
"We've done projects with Temple before," noted Fox. "We have an ongoing relationship with them. Particularly since Merian Soto came down from New York. She realizes the necessity of the interaction between university dance students and the professional dance scene. We have a relatively supportive funding climate for dance here in Philadelphia, so what is happening is that many students are coming out of the university dance programs and are choosing to stay in Philadelphia to pursue their dance careers instead of going to New York. They're forming companies here, making their choreography here, and it's creating a lively professional dance scene. Merian has been particularly instrumental in getting the Temple students to realize what's available for them here in Philadelphia when they graduate. Last season, we had a local hip-hop dancer in residence, and he incorporated Temple students in the work he created and presented here at The Painted Bride. And though we've been doing projects together for a long time, it seems that in recent years the collaborations have been getting more and more interesting, more complex, and more focused on getting the Temple students off-campus and out into the professional community. I feel like a very interesting kind of web is being built and I'm very happy that the Painted Bride is able to participate."
New World School Feeds Miami Dance Scene
"Every dance company in the city of Miami has at least one dancer in it who graduated from our program," said Daniel Lewis, the founding dean of the dance department at Miami's New World School of the Arts, one of only two institutions in Florida that offers a B.F.A. degree in dance. "We are constantly feeding the city's professional dance community, providing them with the dancers they are looking for. Our students are really going out there and filling the bill for what's needed in the dance world today."
While many of us think only of Edward Villella's spectacular Miami City Ballet when we think of dance in Miami, there are actually many other flourishing dance companies and artists in the city and the surrounding areas. "This is such a diversified city in terms of types of dance; you can see everything from Panamanian to Haitian to Afro-Cuban," explained Lewis, "and all of my teachers here are working professionals in the dance community. Plus we bring in other local artists—choreographers, teachers, specialists in various areas—to conduct master classes for our students on a regular basis."
"Also," Lewis noted, "a lot of the college students in our program are already out teaching in the community at local dance schools. I get calls all the time from dance schools asking me if I have a young college student who can teach ballet, modern, and jazz dance to children. A lot of our kids get part-time jobs that way."
New World's dance program also makes links to the larger dance community through relationships with the city's professional dance companies. "For example," Lewis explains, "Maximum Dance company, which is the city's second major ballet company, after Miami City Ballet, is a smaller company that focuses on presenting more contemporary repertory. They were preparing for their first European tour and hadn't had an opportunity to try out the works they were taking with them. So we invited them to come to the school and perform for our students. We gave them an audience and a theatre to perform in. It was very important for them to have that opportunity to try out their program before taking it to Europe. And at the end of the performance, they spoke with the students about the work. The experience was extremely beneficial for us as well as for them."
"I'm constantly getting calls from dance companies who need help," said Lewis, "Sometimes it's as simple as a company that needs a dance floor. They might be doing a performance somewhere that doesn't have a dance floor, so we lend them one." Before being recruited to found the dance program at New World about 14 years ago, Lewis taught for 20 years at Juilliard, and directed his own dance company in New York during the 1970s. His rich expertise in dance allows him to establish connections to many different groups in Miami's community of dance professionals.
Miami-Dade County Public Schools' District Supervisor for Talent Programs and Dance Virginia Shuker expressed great enthusiasm about the relationships Lewis has established with the dance teachers in her school district. "When we first developed our Summer Arts Institute in conjunction with the University of Miami, we decided we needed a technology component," Shuker explained. The Summer Arts Institute is designed to give arts teachers three free graduate credits for personal renewal, and as a means for renewing their teaching certificates. It was Daniel Lewis, from New World, whom the Institute brought in to teach an eight-hour segment on Life Forms, a computer software program that is used as a choreographic tool, most notably by Merce Cunningham. Lewis returned the following summer and expanded his workshop to 16 hours and has done additional workshops for dance educators throughout the school year.
"He has always been most generous with his time when it comes to doing anything for our district's dance teachers," Shuker emphasized, "I do not have a budget to pay him for the additional workshops. And he has allowed us to use the New World School of the Arts Dance Theatre for our student choreography showcase. He also arranged for his lighting designer to do the lighting for our showcase. From the beginning of his tenure there, he has opened the doors," declared Shuker. "The Miami dance community really knows who we are, and they use us to their best advantage," Lewis asserted, "which is something I think we all feel very good about."