Old-Time Music and Dance: Community and Folk Revival

32. Breaking Away

— 292 — 32 BREAKING AWAY When I inquired among Bloomington dancers to compile the facts surrounding the dance group’s history, John Levindofske recalled an eerie yet half-forgotten scene from the summer of 1978. He remembered that summer watching from the second floor out the Walnut Street window of Bloomington Music as a film crew below worked on scenes for Breaking Away (1979), a feature film about Bloomington written by playwright Steve Tesich and filmed there on location. The scenes he no doubt saw were those filmed around the Monroe County Courthouse. The courthouse and other sites of local import served as a crucial physical and symbolic backdrop to the narrative. As dancers each week paced the contours of practiced community, this potent meditation on Bloomington as locality and community was unfolding around them. For the longest time I viewed Breaking Away as a clever, innocent, coming-of-age film set in a time and place both familiar and dear to me. As the world changed over the course of the 1980s, however, Breaking Away seemed to retain its vitality while, simultaneously, the motivating spirit of the Wednesday Night Dance receded into the past. As that gap widened, the film became emblematic of the seismic shift in — 293 — Breaking Away worldview, in Bloomington and in American culture in general, that was curiously imperceptible at the time the film was first released. This shift had everything to do with the formative conditions of the dance. For this reason I devote a chapter to the film, depicting it as a kind of prelude to the cultural watershed that some dance veterans were later to feel. When Breaking Away first appeared, Bloomington viewers naturally took great pleasure in the vivid and flattering depiction of their area. Indeed, the film drew astutely upon local places that had long served to engage the symbolic tensions that defined the Bloomington experience. Squarely upon this symbolic foundation, the film superimposed a harmless comedy in which an underdog protagonist overcame great odds. Less perceptibly, the film exacted a transformation of cultural values that echoed, reinforced, and localized a broader shift taking place in American society at the time. This transformation had a profound impact on the reception and experience of folksong revival in America. It is for this reason that Breaking Away, in the way it refigured the cultural setting of the dance, warrants attention here. An early sequence from the film was enough to signal the theme of locality. On a summer’s day, four recent Bloomington high school graduates arrive at one of the old abandoned limestone quarries, a familiar though unauthorized swimming hole for locals. One is singing “Bury me at the A&P” to the traditional tune “Bury Me on the Lone Prairie” (a song Lotus Dickey, in fact, loved to sing), and the viewer soon learns that the existential despair appropriated from this reference is meant to approximate the feelings they have confronting their future in the local service and retail sales industry. Like Lotus Dickey at this age, they face a “season of decision.” Forced to strike some compromise between obligation , opportunity, and ambition, they seek to alter their immediate surroundings to suit their spiritual and intellectual longings. One of the four, Dave Stohler, earns his protagonist status by his fixation on Italian bicycle racing. It is immediately apparent that it is not mere sport but, somewhat like the folk revival, an adopted cultural alternative to his apparently drab prospects as a townie. So he studies Italian, addresses his pet cat and even his parents by Italian names, belts out arias at every idle moment, dreams of racing with Italian cyclists, — 294 — Old-Time Music and Dance and views Indiana University coeds through the foggy lens of operatic romance. Indeed, the first half of the film follows his pursuit of the affections of a coed, undertaken in the guise of his Italian persona. In truth, it is less genuinely a romance than a test of the validity of his persona and, it turns out, of the validity of adopted authentic identity in general. For the time being the scheme works—so well that his companions and the whole narrative momentum of the film cling to it also. But there is more: Stohler’s father had invested the whole of his own identity in the toils and aspirations of the limestone industry south of Bloomington. The best of his life, in...