Durham Dancing : Every year, this Southern university town shakes off its summertime sleepiness to become the ‘U.S. Department of Modern Dance’

When American Dance Festival executive director Charles Reinhart called Twyla Tharp to inform her that she had been selected for this year’s $25,000 Samuel H. Scripps/ American Dance Festival Award for lifetime achievement, she replied: “Can’t you just send me the check? Do I have to come down?”

The response can be attributed in part to Tharp’s cheeky nature, but it also spotlights the off-the-beaten-track location of this major festival.

Each summer, hundreds of strikingly attractive young people, the women often in leotard tops and hair pinned up in chignons, roll into town. Their arrival was once described as “the invasion of the posture people,” a reference to their carriage, erect to the point of exaggeration.

The students come for classes, the audiences for performances by major companies. This year’s American Masters Plus series included Paul Taylor, Laura Dean, Eiko and Koma, Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, Erick Hawkins, Doug Varone and Trisha Brown and concludes next weekend with Pilobolus.

For six weeks, Durham becomes what Dance magazine calls the “U.S. Department of Modern Dance.” Because of the Duke Medical Center and related health-care industries, the city of 100,000 now calls itself the “City of Medicine,” although it is perhaps better known as the home of the minor-league baseball team immortalized in the film “Bull Durham.”

When the dancers hit town, the area just off East Campus shakes off the summer somnolence that once enveloped Durham: The Regulator Bookshop sells more dance books, magazines and out-of-town papers; the Ninth St. Bakery sells more croissants and, most nights, it’s nearly impossible to squeeze into Franchesca’s gelato parlor.

A new generation--’60s-era Duke students who decided they liked Durham enough to settle in, or to come back to after graduate school--has begun taking over the city’s political and economic leadership. Many, like Lex Alexander, owner of a health-food supermarket, have become actively involved in promoting and supporting the festival. Alexander serves on the board of a local support group, hosting cast parties and arranging for dancers to eat at the home of local residents, and organizes audiences for special performances.

“These artists increase the fabric of this community so much,” said Alexander, who each year puts the festival’s poster image and schedule on his store’s grocery bags. “At a time when the university is closing down (for the summer), you get this resurgence of energy, this wonderful influx of people, from all over this country and the world that are coming to this town to be involved in this dance happening.”

Tonight, when Tharp receives the award--just before a square dance in a 70-year-old, once-condemned gymnasium on the Duke University campus--the contrast with the first such award will be obvious.

That year, 1981, the curtain went up on Duke’s 1,500-seat Page Auditorium, revealing grande dame Martha Graham--seated alone in her red “Chinese Empress chair,” lit by a single spot on the otherwise darkened stage--waiting for former First Lady and Graham dancer Betty Ford to present the award.

“It’s what both of them wanted,” explained festival director Charles Reinhart. “And I think that’s the point. What does the artist want, and that’s what we try to do. The generation gap--it explains it very easily--it’s right there.”

But Reinhart doesn’t see the award to the 49-year-old Tharp as indicative of a complete changing of the guard in modern dance. “I don’t think that the baton has been passed to the younger generation totally,” he said. “There are people older than Twyla who will be getting the award. I think this was the year that Twyla seemed to be on the minds of more of our people than other times, and I think there’s certainly a body of work that justifies it.”

The Scripps/ADF winners bracketed by Tharp and Graham include most, if not all, of the pioneers of American modern dance: Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, Hanya Holm, Alwin Nikolais, Katherine Dunham, Alvin Ailey, Erick Hawkins and--named posthumously--Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman and Jose Limon. These names are intertwined with the genesis of the American Dance Festival, which traces its origins to the summer of 1934 and the founding of the Bennington School of Dance in Bennington, Vt.

Building on the work of the trio many consider the first generation of modern dance--Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn--Graham and her contemporaries went to Vermont each summer until 1942 (with one detour to Mills College in Oakland), to teach, learn and create dances in a free-spirited atmosphere. After a six-year hiatus, many of the same people reconstituted themselves as the American Dance Festival on the campus of Connecticut College in New London, Conn. During the next 29 years, the festival became more institutionalized, according to a published history written by New York Times dance critic Jack Anderson.

But in 1977, Connecticut College got a new president who wanted to charge the festival rent for the first time, and the New London City Council turned down a request for $7,500 in community development funds. Attendance at the evening performances was flagging as well, according to Anderson, despite train connections to New York City and the proximity to Connecticut shore vacation homes of metropolitan residents.

Reinhart got the message and went shopping for a new home, narrowing the choice to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, and Duke. At the urging of a handful of local dance lovers, Terry Sanford, then Duke’s president (and former North Carolina governor and future U.S. senator) successfully wooed the festival, in part with the promise of a $1-million endowment from the Durham-based Liggett Group.

The festival’s contribution to American modern dance is considerable. Reinhart points to more than 300 festival premieres, including Graham’s “Diversion of Angels” (1948), Limon’s “The Moor’s Pavane” (1949), Merce Cunningham’s “Summerspace” (1958), Taylor’s “Aureole” (1962), Tharp’s “Sorrow Floats” (1984), Bella Lewitzky’s “Pietas” (1971), “Five” (1974) and “Greening” (1976). Alvin Ailey’s “Masekela Langage” (1969), Tharp’s “Medley” (1969) and Pilobolus’ “Untitled” (1975) and “Molly’s Not Dead” (1978)--the last premiering in Durham--were also commissioned by the festival. Another Taylor premiere commissioned by the ADF, “Profiles,” was broadcast on public television live from Durham in 1979--the first-ever live PBS broadcast of a new dance work.

Most of Duke’s Georgian East Campus, where the festival is headquartered, is taken over by early June.

In coming to clean and leafy green Durham, the trade-off was the heat and humidity. Most days by mid-morning, even the best-conditioned, best-proportioned and most lithe of bodies are shiny with sweat and flushed-faced.

“I don’t mind the humidity,” said Stephanie Butler, of Dana Point. “I like to sweat.” The 23-year-old CalArts dance major said she came to Durham because she wanted an intensive program for the summer and “the ADF seemed like the best thing.” Halfway through the program, she found it “much more rigorous than anything I’ve done. . . . It opens up a whole new world of what dance could be.”

In addition to the 300 students--mostly female and most aged 18 to thirtysomething--on campus for the complete $1,000, six-week study sessions, there are shorter seminars for critics, dance therapists, teachers and international choreographers. Classes in technique, repertory and choreography occupy most of the indoor open space on the campus, including dormitory parlors. One jazz class takes over part of the cafeteria, covering the floor with a mat. Several weeks ago the class was working through routines, accompanied by a small tape machine playing “Vogue”--by 1978 festival alumna Madonna.

The gym where the Tharp presentation is scheduled was occupied each afternoon for most of the festival by choreographer Donald McKayle’s classes. McKayle, who now teaches at UC Irvine, attended the first American Dance Festival in New London in 1948 as a member of the New Dance Group at the age of 18.

“It was a very awesome summer for me as young artist,” he said, recalling his first meeting with Martha Graham. While his students find the current festival “very nurturing,” McKayle said, sometimes it “becomes an overload, almost,” and there is a tendency to “overextend themselves physically.”

For many of the students and visiting choreographers and dancers from abroad, the festival is their most intensive exposure to dance. In addition to classes during the day, they are given tickets to two evening performances a week. Promising students spotted by faculty members in class are often steered to auditions held by companies performing at the festival. Whether the gathering is international choreographers, dancers, critics or teachers, discussions invariably touch on emotions, politics and aesthetics, as well as movement and technique, often in eclectic and unpredictable ways. David Hochoy, a faculty member, explained to one small group his transition from being a Graham dancer to a rehearsal director, and the role of the festival: “It’s very hard to go to all of a sudden go from being out there to being behind the scenes. . . . This is a very intensive teaching process. . . . It made me change my consciousness.”

Glenna Batson, a faculty member specializing in dance and movement therapy, observed in the same session that “sometimes I think the worst thing that happened to dance was aerobics. . . .”

”. . . and MTV,” Hochoy chimed in.

“In all the concern with fitness,” Batson asked, “what happened to art?”

As with most artistic undertakings this season, the battle over the National Endowment for the Arts has hung heavily over the American Dance Festival. The governmental funding issue is not an academic one for the festival, which, since coming to Durham, has received more than $1.5 million--including $88,000 this year--from the NEA, according to associate director (and Charles’ wife) Stephanie Reinhart. (With an annual budget of nearly $2 million, the festival has been running a deficit of between $100,000-$200,000 in recent years.)

The festival was concerned with artistic freedom well before the current NEA crisis. In both form and content, its dances have touched some of society’s hot buttons. Rarely has a season gone by without fully or partially nude dancers of both sexes. The themes of many others have portrayed rape, adultery, violence and other challenges to traditional values.

Charles Reinhart has been extremely outspoken and active on the NEA front, challenging and ridiculing the anti-obscenity guidelines successfully proposed by North Carolina’s senior U.S. senator, Jesse Helms.

Reinhart says he agrees with Los Angeles’ Bella Lewitzky, who has compared the assault on the arts to the McCarthy era, and who recently announced she would refuse NEA funding rather than sign the current endowment guidelines. Reinhart said he doesn’t know what he will do if the guidelines are continued--he signed Helms-worded guidelines this year--but he was clearly in a fighting mood, outraged by the recent denial of grants to four performance artists.

When the ADF season began in early June, Reinhart began giving speeches at performances and made sure the lobbies were stocked with printed materials on the issue. He also helped organize a rally on the Duke campus--featuring the Cleo Parker Robinson Company--scheduled the day after President Bush visited the state to raise a million dollars for Helms’ reelection campaign.

The state’s other senator, Democrat Terry Sanford, who was so instrumental in bringing the festival to Durham and who is on its board, has been oddly quiet on the issue of the NEA--something Reinhart finds troubling in light of the campaign of former Charlotte Mayor Harvey Gantt, Helms’ underdog Democratic challenger.

Reinhart said he wouldn’t be surprised to see Gantt run a close race with Helms. “With Gantt running this time, and clearly stating his views, instead of trying to move closer to Helms--on pro-choice, on the arts, etc.--that maybe, just maybe. . . .”

If there is an artistic rap these days on the festival, it is that Reinhart has his favorites, whom he invites back regularly, and that the festival no longer is at the cutting edge of modern dance or its cousin, performance art. But in his history, Anderson maintains that once the festival settled in at Connecticut College, it was never that innovative.

From the start, the most popular of the festival’s near-regulars has been the acrobatic Pilobolus, and their various offspring: Crowsnest, Momix, Martha Clarke and, this season, Peter Pucci Plus. Some of the other artists particularly associated with the Durham years include Paul Taylor, Laura Dean and Eiko and Koma--the latter appearing more than half a dozen times, occasionally nude.

“As far as artists are concerned,” Reinhart said, “we have to go with the artists we believe in. . . . It is my firm belief, whether it’s Merce Cunningham or Eiko and Koma or Laura Dean or Erick Hawkins, that audiences will build for them. We’ve proved that in 13 years. In the early years, they were walking out for all those names.”

Now, most of their performances this year have sold out or come close to it, Reinhart said.

“I’m proud of our audiences. They respond to real talent,” he said. “Their openness to new things is much greater now than in the early years. . . . Our box office does well for Eiko and Koma, (which) is not something you serve as a first course, but it’s a course that you may never forget. . . . If you believe in something, and you repeat it, the audiences will come.”

There has been some grumbling that this year’s schedule leans too heavily on familiar artists performing familiar dances. Taylor, for example, offered “Arden Court,” “Runes” and “Esplanade”--all quite familiar to Durham audiences by now. In response, Reinhart says that newcomers to dance and to the area should also have an opportunity to enjoy the classics.

There are other criticisms. One is that no strong local companies--apart from the North Carolina Dance Theater, affiliated with the North Carolina School of the Arts--have taken root in the area, and an early program for area choreographers has lapsed. Another is that, for the remaining 46 weeks of the year, when the festival is not in town, dance does not draw nearly as strong audiences or attention in the media.

Acknowledging that no new American dance star or company has emerged from the festival in recent years, Reinhart points to its move into the international area.

Modern dance, which Reinhart pairs with jazz as “a basically indigenous American art form,” is now “exploding all over the world,” he said. After the festival closes next Sunday, he and 40 other staff members and dancers, including the Doug Varone Dance Company and the Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, are off for a two-week “mini-American Dance Festival” in South Korea. Two similar sessions were held in Japan in 1984 and 1986, the latter featuring a Laura Dean premiere. Next year, the ADF plans a similar performance tour to India. This year, after Korea, the group will attend the first graduation of a dance program they helped establish in Canton, China.

Numerous dancers, choreographers and companies from abroad have been invited to Durham to study and perform since 1978. Interestingly, the dances presented by the festival from the developed world outside the United States--Europe and Japan in particular--often speak in the international language of modern dance, and are less strongly reflective of their national cultures. Thus, following an earlier visit to Japan, Reinhart gave American audiences their first good look at Japanese Butoh (“dark soul”) in 1982. By contrast, dancers from the Third World--Indonesia, Africa, India and the Philippines--more frequently have integrated traditional native forms and melded them with modern techniques.

For example, Leonid Lebedev, the ballet master of the Mussorgsky Theater in Leningrad, is one of those who hopes to set up a modern dance wing at his conservatory--returning modern dance to Russia 70 years after Isadora Duncan performed for the Red Army. At one session of dancers from around the world, involving simultaneous translations in at least six languages, the Russian choreographer

described the informal atmosphere and the dynamic interaction between artists as “the glorious system of teaching dance here. I’m amazed by the organization here. I feel like a person. People treat me like a person.”

The American Dance Festival has evolved since 1978, both organizationally and artistically. As it became more comfortable on the campus, the festival moved its year-round headquarters south from New York in 1983. When major companies do three-night runs, they now perform the same program each night, which Reinhart says is to accommodate local critics and to take advantage of good word of mouth, as well as to cut production costs. It also has the effect of limiting the repertory. This year, the North Carolina Symphony is accompanying most of the performances at Page Auditorium, replacing taped music, a practice Reinhart hopes to continue. Durham has also changed considerably, becoming increasingly multicultural, thanks to the concentration of colleges and universities in nearby Raleigh and Chapel Hill, and the Research Triangle Park. When the festival arrived, tobacco and textiles were still economic factors, but in the years since, a new economy has been built almost literally on the ashes of the old. Today, the red brick shells that once housed cotton mills and cigarette factories have been leveled or gentrified into shopping centers, apartments, condominiums and offices. The courtyard of one such upscale shopping mall, Brightleaf Square, is the setting for annual street opera, beginning in 1985 with “Carmen,” an appropriate choice for a former tobacco warehouse.

Perhaps with the Connecticut College experience in mind, Reinhart would like to have a permanent home for the American Dance Festival. The Liggett Group moved its headquarters from Durham to New Jersey several years after the festival came, and the promised $1-million endowment never materialized, although Liggett has been a generous festival supporter.

Reinhart has long hoped that downtown redevelopment, proceeding in fits and starts and focused on the few remaining tobacco factories and warehouses, may one day provide the festival with permanent, expanded facilities. Performance facilities on East Campus are taxed to the limit and some are even more uncomfortable than necessary, inasmuch as the dancers won’t work in an air-conditioned environment. Administratively, there is a lot to be desired as well: To get to Reinhart’s East Campus office, you have to pass through a bathroom.