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110 | American Dance Guild Concert Review American Dance: The Official Publication of the American Dance Guild 40, no. 4 (Summer 1996) For a few years I produced radio programs for WBAI, the Pacifica, listener-supported community radio station in New York City. Usually I interviewed artists, but I also occasionally wrote reviews and read them over the air—not my favorite way to do radio.This particular review later saw print in the American Dance Guild’s newsletter.The theme of aging as a dancer is something I touched on before and will again. There’s a new trend brewing in the dance world and it’s a very positive one. It’s the trend toward accepting and even celebrating older dancers. On June 8, the American Dance Guild produced a concert called “Breaking the Age Barrier.” All of the thirteen dances on the program, which was part of a three-day conference at nyU’s School of Education, were choreographed and performed by dancers near or over the age of sixty. The evening was a revelation not only of the rich resources we have in the dance world, but of the magic that can be created, not with the energy and virtuosity of youth, but with the deep knowledge of the expressive possibilities that come with age. Although there were wonderful duets and group dances by Gus Solomons jr, Richard Bull, and Alice Teirstein and Stuart Hodes, I want to talk about some of the solos, because they distilled a certain character in each case. And, in each solo, the dancer and the dance were perfectly melded. Carmen de Lavallade did a solo called Willie’s Ladies Sing the Blues, which she made with Geoffrey Holder. De Lavallade was Alvin Ailey’s first professional dancing partner—before he started his company, just to let you know how long she’s been around. She’s still drop-dead beautiful. Every little motion —the curling of a hand, the stretching of a leg—is so fully felt by her that it’s fully understood by us. She has a juicy sensuality that she shapes with great control. She recited a text that takes a modern, sassy view of Shakespeare ’s women characters, reinforcing the proud, volatile womanliness that she projects with every fiber of her being. Jamie Cunningham is impish and hilarious while looking for a lost contact lens in a piece from the seventies that is every bit as funny as I remember it, but with an added reference to a friend who died of aiDs. When he gets up from the floor to do a spoof of the Dying Swan, he’s both playful and ethereal, and he’s so willing to be vulnerable that I felt my eyes tearing as I was still laughing. The Nineties | 111 Deborah Jowitt, who writes on dance for the Village Voice, stood tall, perfectly at ease, and a little bit mischievous. Her talk-and-dance solo encapsulates her personal dance history, complete with instantly recognizable takeoffs of Anna Sokolow, Pauline Koner, and Martha Graham.Talking about her love of dancing, her eclectic dance experiences, and the frailty of her body, she said, “Perhaps I hadn’t counted on aging.” Mmmmm . . . I think I know what she means. She ended the dance by talking about Steve Paxton’s idea of the “small dance,” which is done by concentrating on the most subtle movements possible. She stood still, or so it seemed, and said, “I am dancing . . . right now.” As the lights faded, we realized that there are many ways to dance. Beverly Blossom’s new piece showed how she can create a wacky kind of drama with nothing but a stuffed monkey and superb timing. She handled the monkey the way a ventriloquist uses a dummy. Her movements were spare, and when she turned her quizzical face to the audience, she held us with her deadpan stare. The extremes of the concert were mapped out by Frances Alenikoff on the joyous end and Claudia Gitelman on the somber end. Alenikoff is in her mid-seventies and still dances in her own inimitable style—small, impulsive , elastic movements, with deep shivers of the body. In this piece she tells a story of a close brush with death, and to show how glad she is to be alive, she revels in the pleasures of her own body, like languid stretching and fullbodied laughing. She goes so over the top with her indulgences—sucking and chewing...

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