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May-June 2007
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Jeté Propelled
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Photograph by Courtney Bryant |
Ballerina Heather Watts coached these Harvard Dance Center students in this performance of George Balanchine’s Serenade. |
“What we offer here is a blend of the experiential, the historical, and the theoretical,” says Elizabeth Bergmann, the energetic dance administrator who has led the Harvard Dance Program since 2000. A dance community that was often overlooked by the University as a whole now boasts extracurricular student troupes specializing in everything from Bhangra to ballroom, for-credit courses taught by dance professionals, and the glamorous, efficient space of the new Harvard Dance Center, which lies along the gentle swell of Observatory Hill on Garden Street and is busy from midday to midnight.
“There are 700 students using the building every week, and that’s not including audiences,” Bergmann explains. Dancing at Harvard can be a huge time commitment: some students rehearse and take classes up to 30 hours a week in addition to managing a full course load. It’s not uncommon to see a dancer stretching in the corner with a laptop open in front of her.
Though dance at Harvard may have a new visibility, it boasts a long tradition. Art connoisseur Lincoln Kirstein ’30 founded, with Balanchine, what would become the School of American Ballet and NYCB. Beginning in 1965, modern dancer Claire Mallardi ran the undergraduate dance program, expanding it to incorporate a broad variety of genres. As artistic director emerita she continues to teach “Movement for Actors,” a course she introduced in the mid 1980s.
But in 1999, the newly created Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study announced long-range plans to reclaim in 2005 the Rieman Center for the Performing Arts, housed in the century-old gymnasium in Radcliffe Yard that had been used exclusively as dance space since 1980. “Dance had been happening there since 1898; Mark Morris taught his first choreography class in that space and the feet of Anna Sokolow, Merce Cunningham, and the Nicholas Brothers, among other greats, had touched that floor,” says Cathleen McCormick, director of programs at the Office for the Arts, which oversees all of Harvard’s ongoing arts activities, including the dance program. “We had a problem. We had dance here and we were losing our home, so we had a concrete issue we had to solve.”
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Courtesy of Heather Watts |
Heather Watts with Mikhail Baryshnikov |
Students rallied. “They developed a 50-page report with all kinds of statistics, press clippings, and letters from alums,” McCormick remembers, “signed by a mix of people who had gone into the arts and others who were management consultants, software developers, policy people with the World Health Organization—all advocating for dance at Harvard.” A planning committee led by associate dean of Harvard College Judith Kidd worked quickly. In September 2005, Harvard cut the ribbon on a new $4.5-million facility, designed by Bruner, Cott & Associates, a stand-alone structure that sits inside one-half of the existing multipurpose Quadrangle Recreational Athletic Center (see “Big Step,” January-Feburary 2006, page 70).
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Courtesy of Heather Watts |
New York City Ballet star Damian Woetzel aloft |
Proximity between studio and classroom space makes it possible for an instructor to shift easily between discussing dance and presenting it. When Christine Dakin, former principal dancer and artistic director of the Martha Graham Dance Company, taught a course on Graham’s oeuvre last spring, she was able to combine intellectual and embodied methods: “Each week I showed a film of one of Martha’s works and discussed it from historical, political, sociological, and literary directions, as well as what I had discovered about the work, what Martha had told me about the work, and what the students saw in the work. Then we did some movement explorations to let the students discover the basic principles of breath and weight and energy as she was discovering them in the 1930s. They loved it!”
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