Orange County Participants Are Bullish on Durham Festival : Dance: “Drums” by UCI’s Donald McKayle had its premiere there. Students say the festival “opens up a whole world” for them.

To travel 2,500 miles to dance in weather hotter and more humid than Orange County has seen lately might seem incongruous. But six people--four college students, one professional dancer and a respected choreographer now teaching at UC Irvine--made the trip to the American Dance Festival here at Duke University.

For six weeks each summer, the campus becomes something of a modern-dance mecca as 300 dancers from around the nation take over the dormitories, dining halls, classrooms and stages of Duke’s East Campus. This year’s festival continues through Friday. As in the past, the school’s art museum has gotten into the act too, featuring an exhibit called “The Fugitive Gesture: Masterpieces of Dance Photography 1849 to the Present.”

Donald McKayle, the choreographer who is a UCI professor and five-time Tony Award nominee, was here to oversee a premiere of “Drums,” his new work--performed earlier this month by the Chuck Davis African American Dance Ensemble--and to teach for part of the session. After the festival ends, a two-week mini-American Dance Festival will go to South Korea, where the performances will include the Cleo Parker Robinson Company re-creation of McKayle’s 1959 classic “Rainbow Round My Shoulder.”

Some of McKayle’s other early works have been re-created at the festival over the past three years, as part of the “Black Tradition in American Modern Dance” series, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation.

Dancers who participate in the Duke University festival pay about $1,000 for the session and another $1,000 to $1,500 for room and board on the campus. The festival offers tuition scholarships judged by auditions conducted around the country, financial aid based on need and work-study positions.

After three days of orientation and auditions to determine class level, the students take four 90-minute courses five days a week. There are optional master classes on weekends.

The experience is one of total immersion in the discipline from morning to night: taking and teaching classes through the often-sweltering days, creating and performing new works, watching and auditioning for the major American companies that perform at the festival.

McKayle, who attended his first American Dance Festival in 1948 when it was still in New London, Conn., predicted that “there’ll be a lot more (students) coming” to the festival from UCI in the future. Last season, he was able to steer two promising dance students at the festival to auditions held by the Cleo Parker Robinson company. Both returned to the festival this year as performers.

The tuition includes tickets to all evening performances, both in the 1,500-seat Page Auditorium, where companies such as Paul Taylor, Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham perform on weekends, and the 300-seat Reynolds Theatre, where more adventuresome groups and performance artists appear the first part of the week. “You do see very good dancers” performing throughout the festival, McKayle said, and the stimulation doesn’t end with the performances. The atmosphere--the presence of dancers and choreographers from around the world--is as stimulating as the classes.

“The kind of conversation that goes on amongst the artists is incredible,” said McKayle, who is writing his autobiography for Duke University Press. “You go to Franchesca’s for coffee,” he said of an off-campus gelato parlor, “and you hear all these languages.”

One of his graduate students, Amanda Parrott, 22, was here, not only to study dance in order to teach it, but also because, she said, “I really want to perform professionally.” She was able to attend the festival, thanks to some scholarship money from UCI, support from a Laguna Beach arts organization and by working at the festival.

Parrott, a Visalia native, said that being at the festival “cultivates this deep desire to keep dancing and affirms what I’m doing with my life. The training that you get here is just incredible.”

Laurie Landis, 32, also a UCI student, said she came to record dance history and to work on her master’s thesis on choreographer Lucas Hoving. Hoving, 78, is the Dutch-born director, performer and choreographer who lives in San Francisco. He is a former member of the Kurt Jooss Ballet and a founding member of the Jose Limon company. With financial support from UCI, Landis was able to work as an assistant to Hoving, who is on the festival faculty, and to interview him extensively.

Landis said she did not need any urging to attend the festival. It has played a pivotal role in her life. She recalled attending the festival in 1983 when “I was still in the corporate world and wanting to be in the dance world. The festival gave me an opportunity to see things happening all over. It opens up your eyes to what the dance profession has to offer.”

Stephanie Butler of Dana Point, 23, a dance major from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia--where McKayle taught before coming to Orange County, came to work toward her goal of being a member of an international dance company. Butler said she has been “learning and growing a lot” since coming to Durham, that the program “seems so much more rigorous than anything I’ve done. . . . I’ve been exposed to a lot I was not exposed to in California, exposed to totally different teaching. It opens up a whole world of what dance could be.”

Karen Woo of Fountain Valley said she came to polish her skills and to broaden her understanding of dance. For the past five years, Woo has been a member of the Orange-based Gloria Newman Dance Theater, the county’s best known dance company. Company founder Gloria Newman, who herself attended two of the festivals when it was still in Connecticut, encouraged Woo to attend. “It’s so important to understand how big the world (of dance) is,” Newman said from Orange. “I think sometimes we get a little isolated out here.”

Woo, 30, said coming to Durham was a “treat,” although she has had to rely on financial support from her company and the ADF and to work part time as well in order to be here.

So far, she said, the experience has been “very intense. By the end of the week you are so exhausted you want to give your body a rest.”

The intense study and performing schedule can sometimes take a physical toll on the students, with the types of injuries sometimes reflecting the techniques and choreographers most popular that season. Glenna Batson, a faculty member whose specialty is dance and movement therapy, said that this year, there are “very few foot problems this year. Shin splints, that’s one of the big things. Last year it was more backs--more lifting problems.”

“The teachers are stressing, take care of your body,” Woo said. “It’s your instrument.”