Expansive movements

The Bates Festival's new notions of modern dance

by June Vail

For information about all the performances call the Bates Dance Festival offices 786-6381, the Schaeffer Theater Box Office, 786-6161, or check out www.bates.edu/summer.

THE MAINE PREMIER of New York's Ronald K. Brown/Evidence dance company happens on the Schaeffer Theatre stage.

The Bates Dance Festival has become a multi-headed hydra of movement since its humble beginnings in 1983. Laura Faure, festival director since 1987, is now gearing up for the 2000 performance season, running July 22 through August 19, and has found herself in the position to present dance concerts by internationally acclaimed performers, run a two-week training program for young dancers and a three-week session of courses for experienced movers, administer a youth arts outreach program for local children, and educate Maine audiences about dance through lectures and demonstrations, many of them free to the public.

Highlights of this year's collection of talent -- the largest in the state -- include cutting-edge performances by improvisational tap dancer Herbin "Tamango" Van Caysele and performance artist Bill "Crutch" Shannon, who dances on skateboards and crutches. Shannon is just the type of dancer an influential Bates program needs, able to cross over and appeal to popular audiences.

The Boston Globe has called him a superhero version of Chaplin, the Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel has praised his transition from street culture to the theatrical, and some have gone so far as to describe him as the apex of what dance and movement should strive for. And he does it all on crutches.

Because of a disability -- Shannon was diagnosed as a child with Leg-Calf Perthese disease, which affects the development of the hip-ball sockets and placed him on crutches for much of his childhood -- he uses crutches as a catalyst for his unique style of dance. "Its a reversal of the physics for dance in that there's no weight in my feet and the weight is all in the top of my shoulders," he explains. "So when I'm moving, it appears very different, like I'm floating."

"Crutch" has taken his history with street-style dance to create the look of his movement. "It references some hip-hop, some skateboard moves, it comes out of the history of my disability," he says. "The distribution of weight, the kinetic direction, and how I move manifests itself as a radically different form. It's like dancing on your arms, except not really on your hands, but really way up in your shoulders. It was a development, a sort of synergy of different forms and influences that came together to create this very unique style of movement that I, basically, to some extent, created."

Somewhat miraculously, during adolescence Shannon was able to move without his crutches, teaching himself a modified style of break dance and skateboarding technique. As an adult he was forced back onto his crutches and was able to merge the crutch and dance into his style of movement.

Shannon is glad to be able to perform at the Bates because, "it's a way for me to get out of the rush of New York City and find a little space to discover maybe some new possibilities of movement."

Van Caysele and Shannon will appear in concert on Tuesday, August 1 at Schaeffer Theater.

The public performances at the festival offer an overview of contemporary dance styles that make terms like "modern dance" obsolete. The festival's guiding ethos of inclusiveness means that each concert tends to be different from the next, in entertaining and often surprising ways.

On July 28 and 29, choreographer Ronald K. Brown and his nine-member company Evidence will drive that point home. Brown's latest work includes the critically acclaimed "Grace" choreographed for the Alvin Ailey Company in New York, and "High Life," which premiered this month at Jacob's Pillow, the country's longest-running dance festival, which commissioned the dance. Brown is a choreographer concerned with broadening dance's horizons, incorporating narration, world music, and historical references.

His first-ever Maine concert at Schaeffer Theater will include the new work "High Life," a dance about migration and black identity, named after a popular African musical style. This amounts to a dance-coup, as The Berkshire Eagle's Allison Tracy wrote, reviewing the Jacob's Pillow performance. "His palette holds the colors of city streets and dirt farms; his music, drums, gospel, and hip-hop; his style, a mix of Alvin Ailey, tribal African, everyday gesture, and the raw emotional power of his own body; his message, a poem of lamentation, rage, vulnerability, and celebration that scaffolds the American Black experience." Brown and company will also be performing "Upside Down," set to the music of the late Nigerian composer Fela Anikulapo Kuti, an interesting contrast with the more familiar tunes of James Brown also featured in the piece.

In addition to the new talent coming to Bates this year, the festival has a long-standing relationship with several leading choreographers, including David Dorfman Dance and Mark Dendy Dance and Theater, who are returning this summer. One of the reasons for the festival's continuing success, according to Faure, is the sense of informality and community that builds among artists and students here. Choreographers and their companies who return to the festival over time build up a "clientele" of students and fans, and sometimes the professionals end up collaborating with each other.

The diverse faculty roster, which will also be performing, includes 24 dance artists and eight musician/accompanists. Teacher/artists are an exclusively American phenomenon. In Europe fewer performers and choreographers teach, partly because the two vocations are considered different from each other (and artists tend to have more prestige), and partly because systems of public support for the arts and individual artists make it more feasible to earn a living by performing alone.

Necessity is the mother of the American invention of the dance teacher/artist, a role that fosters personal connections that enrich and inspire both students and teacher. And, at Bates, the tradition creates faithful audiences of vocal students who turn out to see their mentors perform. Sometimes the 350-seat Schaeffer Theater nearly explodes with their collective enthusiasm.

With additional reporting from Brian Hanscom.

June Vail can be reached at jvail@bowdion.edu.