Martha Hill and the Making of American Dance

An Even Keel, 1973–1978

An Even Keel, 1973–1978 Performances by the Juilliard Dance Ensemble in the school’s theater were now annual events anticipated by New York critics. With limited resources for commissions (a grim reminder of Mennin’s stifling hold), programs now relied on choreography by “in-house” faculty members, adding hours to their fixed teaching and coaching responsibilities . The May 1973 concerts featured Sokolow’s Three Poems, a work with such “passionate integrity that it makes almost everything else I’ve seen recently seem false,” Jowitt opined in the Village Voice. By comparison, she found Hirabayashi’s Black Angels “full of empty virtuosity.” Danny Lewis’s work fared no better. She was displeased with the late Limón’s “bowdlerized” version of Humphrey’s classic Ritmo Jondo, adding, “It’s too late to say how dare he.”1 ADF’s 1973 season was dedicated to Limón’s memory; helping to make his company the first performing unit dedicated to a single choreographer’s work after the death of its artistic director. Once the memorial concerts were completed , however, ADF’s leadership was determined to move on to fresh vistas for the dance field. Having lost control of the summer sessions once so important to her life, Martha was privately dismayed with the happenings at ADF. Reinhart had, in her eyes, discarded the tenets she had worked so hard to establish. Any rebellious upstarts—beyond the institution—were suspect. Although Hill readily admitted that she too had once been an “outsider,” she refused to believe that being submerged in the Juilliard model had dimmed her ability to judge new directions in dance.2 If many believed these new voices were energizing the field, for Martha, struggling to keep an open mind, the dance scene seemed to be clouded by raw, ill-mannered choreographers and dancers. Worse, this new generation was clearly able to get along without Martha’s guardianship. Yet others considered the new movement problematic. Hering complained in Dance Magazine that at ADF “self-indulgent choreographic junk [was] disguised by pretentious categories like structured improvisation, unstructured improvisation and inter-communal workshop.”3 Still, Martha gamely tried to keep up with new happenings on the choreographic scene; after seeing Rudy Perez’s work in fall 1971, she recommended it as a “new wave” entry for ADF. (Rudy had begun a trend of choreographing for huge casts of people in mammoth collages. His Steeple People and Countdown were performed on a split concert with Charles Weidman’s Christmas Oratorio for Dance Uptown. Seated on the “first come, first serve” bleachers in Barnard College’s gymnasium, Martha thought back to the time almost forty years earlier, when in that same location, Robert Leigh approached her with an offer to consider Bennington.)4 Facing poor press notices, Reinhart used an interim tactic for the 1972 season . He regained Martha’s support and that of other board members, along with funding, by agreeing to form a repertory company at ADF for its celebratory twenty-fifth anniversary—this time using the starting date, not of Bennington , but of its first residency at Connecticut College in 1948. This final effort to save the festival as the board wished it to remain was aided by the Rockefeller Foundation’s willingness (through Norman Lloyd’s urging) to plant the seeds for a more encouraging financial picture. The retrospective at ADF was soon fortified with grants from the NEA and the Ford Foundation for filming the works. Martha served on an audition panel that spring of 1972 to select eighteen dancers for the project: eleven were from Juilliard (once more attempting to create the elusive modern repertory company). The board was enthusiastic about Charles Weidman‘s reconstruction of Humphrey’s New Dance, calling it an example of “beautiful healthy dancing.” Still, the job proved to be more difficult than anyone imagined. Company members from the original cast returned to the studio to rehearse with Charles and the dancers “remembering lots of feelings but not a single phrase.” But the project did reawaken the convictions for those who were part of the original undertaking. Charles reflected, “Revolt is always good and will always be for a modern dance. One should never be satisfied with what you’ve done.”5 For the opening festival performance that summer, Rosemary Park spoke of “the uniqueness of the school” as an indicator of “the temper of the country at large.” Martha delivered brief reminiscences about her generation of dancers who “were really gypsies, with no...