Aman: No Question, It’s Still a Time to Dance : L.A.-based ethnic folk ensemble works to lure back local audiences

“From the top!” hollers Barry Glass, above a mild din of laughter and lively patter.

The chunky cherub of a director turns to face his 40-odd performers as they group themselves into short lines and circles. At a signal they sing out in robust, thrusting chest tones. A somewhat reedy edge gives the massed sound a wild vitality.

The stage area becomes a riot of regimental patterns all moving in simultaneous, rhythmic motion. The pace quickens, someone hoots a high ad-libbed note and at a peak of whirling, stomping excitement the piece ends.

It’s Tuesday, a regular rehearsal night for the Aman Folk Ensemble and the Serbo-Croatian number at hand is “Ladarke”--one of 200 suites in the repertory. The studio, housed in what formerly was the downtown Design Center, occupies the building’s fourth floor. Two stories higher is Aman’s deluxe offices and storage rooms for more than 4,000 costumes. A real-estate tycoon-patron has been good to the troupe.

It’s business as usual, except that a milestone looms just ahead: the 25th anniversary of Aman and a celebratory performance at Royce Hall, UCLA, on June 10.

It’s a time to dance, no question. The company has grown from a scrappy collection of high-spirited amateurs with Moseyev-of-yore stars in their eyes to a slick professional ensemble.

But in 25 years, Aman has had its downs as well as ups. At one point in the early ‘80s its budget fell from a previous peak of $1 million to $200,000, an indicator of the company’s drop in popularity. But it’s on the rise again.

For this, a key force behind Aman, Anthony Shay, no longer takes credit, thanks to the powers that are. He runs his 12-year-old off-shoot troupe, Avaz.

Aman and Avaz are both at the six-figure mark now, “with the gap closing, but Aman definitely having the advantage of name recognition and a backlog of costumes,” says Bonita Edelberg, former Aman dancer and now an attorney who sits on the Avaz board of trustees.

Both troupes want to lure audiences back to the ethnic fold. However, Glass says he does not want Aman to remain “in its ghetto.” He’d like to possibly include rap songs and break-dancing from the inner city.

Ideally, so would Shay, “but my (Avaz) dancers could never do that sort of thing convincingly,” he says. “And why would I want to teach them Japanese classical dance, for instance, when right here we have authentic experts of the genre?”

Nothing has changed a quarter of a century after the founding of Aman. Two distinct philosophies prevail:

“I respect Barry,” says Shay. “He’s the best rehearsal director I’ve ever seen. But his aesthetic point of view--that’s another matter.”

“We’re not really rivals,” says Glass of Shay. “I see our two companies as friendly competitors.”

Aman’s 25th anniversary is a time to acknowledge roots. But some of them lie buried, with little hope of exhumation. And therein lies a tale.

The year was 1963, the place, UCLA. A folklorist with a bachelor’s degree in international relations, Shay had just come back from two years of study (Iranian language and literature) at the University of Tehran, where he also played principal flute in that city’s symphony orchestra.

“I was going to save the world,” Shay recalls, referring to his international relations major, “until I realized that it didn’t want saving.” He spoke Farsi fluently, read Serbo-Croatian and Turkish and functioned in Russian. On the heels of ‘60s folk-music madness he fell in step with ethnic dance, which was natural for such a citizen-of-the-world idealist.

Out of a campus recreational group he called the Village Dancers, Shay formed a new company--one named with the words that means “Amen” in Middle Eastern languages. And he became entranced by Leona Wood, a tall beauty of a belly-dancer, who, along with her percussion-accompanist husband Phil Harland, was part of the Westwood folk-dance scene.

“She was the kind of mesmerizing, spectacular performer, who could take her specialty back to its roots,” says Shay, “and Phil was a brilliant musician. They would have been a terrific asset to any company and I certainly needed a soloist of that calibre to elevate our amateur level.”

After several months, Wood accepted the invitation to join Aman. Once she did, becoming co-director with Shay, she followed her interest in Arabic and North African dance, taking charge of that wing and teaching it to the other members. Meanwhile Shay ran the Iranian, Balkan and Central Asian division.

No one took salaries or depended on them. Camaraderie, which epitomized the folk spirit, ran high among the smitten; they revelled in the multicultural joys of what they saw as a kindly global village.

Over the years Aman grew. Its fortunes enlarged with its exposure and experience, paving the way for a smooth professionalism. Auditions brought 50 contenders for every two openings. Because folk dance flourished as a socio-recreational force, with many cafes crammed with aficionados, the talent pool was full.

But so did the artistic discrepancy between Shay and Wood widen. He was a world traveler guided by a documentarian’s ardor. She loved the nest and didn’t want to venture. For a while it worked out; he did the footwork, so to speak, bringing back from exotic places the fruits of his research, showing her films of villagers dancing.

She adapted the material. “Once you remove the art form from its dung-and-dirt village,” Wood explains, “it’s already a showpiece, not authentic. I believe in technique as the key to re-creating the dances.

“How do you catch iron particles? How do you catch mice? With a better magnet, with a better mousetrap. That’s what Aman could do--attract the best dancers. I also believe in matching the material to the audience, although one has to be wary of wholesale revisions.

“When I saw Jonathan Miller’s English translated production of “Rigoletto” (set in New York’s Little Italy) it made sense as it never did before. By the same token, a thing can be choreographed to the nines and still be authentic.”

Nothing of this attitude made sense to Shay. He was in love with the genuine article, the anthropological context, even the taverna down the street in Los Angeles. He believed that Aman’s dancers could capture a people’s core expression without forfeiting, he says, “their human value or the meaning of their social existence.” His dance suites, which represented three-fourths of the Aman repertory, painstakingly preserved the essence of the material.

“But the minute you reduce that expression to patterns and pretty decorative trappings and colorful spectacle,” he explains, “is when you lose integrity. Leona was a fine visual artist before she came to ethnic dance. She’s very designer-oriented. We simply were not on the same wave-length.”

The inevitable split occurred in 1977. It came following Shay’s return from a Middle Eastern trip. This time he was not content to teach Wood the dances and then see, as a result, what he considered to be “second-hand choreography.” She resisted his desire to re-create the dances.

To mediate the standoff the board of directors formed an ad hoc committee that would judge both Wood’s and Shay’s choreography, choosing the better sample.

“Tony could not abide such a decision,” says Edelberg, an Aman board of trustee member. “Those people knew nothing of artistic matters. The whole idea was a sham--meant to protect the status quo. As it was he always gave Leona the benefit of the doubt.”

Slay continues: “One board member took me aside and said the company would be mine in a year, when Leona stepped down. But it still didn’t seem right. Art cannot be done by committees any more than it can be done by numbers.”

Edelberg sees the situation from a political perspective “and one in which greed, betrayal, lust for power and all those other deadly sins come into play.” Shay simply never developed the knack for ingratiating himself with the power players, she says:

“Keeping a low profile was natural to him. His interest was in the work, not the politics, which seemed to involve everyone else. He’s a deep man when it comes to his art, one who is compelled to keep it safe from trivialization. And I share the feeling. My cheeks get red when I sit in the audience today and watch the cutesy-poo stuff that passes for ethnic dance.”

As proof of his strong scruples she mentions that Shay never took a salary at Aman--”although all five subsequent directors, working only half-time, got paid nicely for the repertory Tony put in place.” To this day he earns his living as the head of a city library branch (with a third master’s degree in library science).

The differences between Wood and Shay went beyond artistic matters, however. She characterizes their relationship as “a love affair between mother and son, regent and heir--except that he wanted to put on the crown before his time. The end came when Tony, like the biggest puppy trying to grab the most food, wanted to spend the budget largely on his dances.”

Her estimate does not surprise Shay.

“Leona never experienced motherhood,” he says. “She did treat the dancers as her children, though, whereas I was satisfied to regard them as colleagues. As for the money, our beginning agreement never changed--since my group was larger it got two-thirds of the budget . . . a matter of simple arithmetic.”

Leaving Aman meant “starting from scratch,” says Shay. He knew that with no costumes, no board and empty pockets his Avaz Dance Theatre would not be appearing at the Music Center or any of the established venues. What’s more, he was at a disadvantage when it came to attracting the best dancers. But talent wins out and in 1989 he finds a cherished word--”authenticity”--in his company’s reviews.

“When that happens I know I’m doing something right.”

Since 1977, when Aman and Shay parted ways, the company continued in its expansion--venturing to the Brooklyn Academy of Music and throughout the U.S. on a major tour. The launching of Florida’s Disney World in 1982 found Aman in residence for 19 weeks at Epcot Center as the featured entertainment attraction. And when the United States Information Agency needed to select cultural ambassadors to the Middle East and North Africa it selected Aman.

Success begets success, as they say.

Apart from these honors, the company depends heavily on its performances in Southern California schools, logging anywhere between 200 and 300 a year. Through the Music Center Education Division and Performing Tree, Aman dancers also teach roughly 1,000 classes a year in these schools.

It’s a smoothly operating system.

But Glass, Aman’s director since 1985, says he is looking beyond the present to ‘a brave new world,” one that “will allow us to interface with other forms of dance . . . by not maintaining our separateness.

I want to do more than conserve dance documents. And I know we must be part of the larger picture to grow, not shut off in a ghetto. What intrigues me, for instance, is how much we have in common with Laura Dean--all those stage patterns and entertainment values. Yet Aman falls into the folk dance classification and she belongs to the postmodern movement.”

He talks about the fact that both are popular with series presenters.

“But Aman is considered an audience builder. We’re popular in small towns.”

Whether or not Glass ever sees the company merging with other forms of concert dance he acknowledges the multicultural forces in Los Angeles.

“Our audiences of the future will come from these ethnic communities. In one elementary school we found 38 languages spoken! If we can’t be all things to all people, at least we’ll have fun trying.”