AN APPRECIATION : Gloria Newman’s Disciples Mourn ‘Great Lady’ of Dance

Gloria Newman, who died June 20, was a Pied Piper of dance, a choreographer who drew people to work with her even though they sometimes had other plans.

Karen J. Woo was majoring in business at Cal State Long Beach when she took a dance class with Newman. “I was hooked,” she recalls. She studied dance with Newman for another year, then joined her troupe and stayed for six years.

Karol Lee was a ballet-trained dancer studying at UC Irvine who remembers that she “wasn’t that excited about modern dance”--until she saw Newman’s work. She wound up joining the Gloria Newman Dance Theater right after graduation. She stayed for 12 years.

Gladys Kares was with Newman the longest, about 16 years. She was a ballet student at UCLA when Newman asked her to join the company “because they needed a jumper. Gloria was,” Kares says, “a great lady.”

Born in New York City 65 years ago, Newman worked with some of the greats in modern dance--Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey and Merce Cunningham, among others--before moving to California in 1954 and to Orange County in 1961. She founded her company that same year. But Kares says Newman was “very frustrated” with Orange County, and with California in general.

“She felt isolated. There was no community of dance or of art.” Newman felt people here were treating dance as though it were “dispensable,” Kares remembers.

The dancers stuck with her, though.

And “we weren’t empty vessels who came to be filled,” says Lee. On the contrary, she recalls that Newman worked with them “as people. Her work reflects that. It brings out the individual.”

“She had a particular ability,” says Kares, “to find what was special in each individual and hone that, so that we somehow became better artists in ourselves--not just a bunch of ‘little Glorias.’ ”

Over the years, Newman’s work with dancers grew even more personal. At the beginning, she would have specific movements and dances in mind. Toward the end, she would asked her troupe members to write autobiographical vignettes, which she then incorporated into her works.

But some things never changed.

“She would always complain if a dancer was moving just with the feet or arms and not initiating the movement from an internal source,” says Lee.

And nobody ever could be sure when a dance was finished.

Woo says she was shocked that Newman changed the choreography for “Carmina Burana,” the first Newman work that Woo danced in, on the day of the premiere.

“As it turned out,” she adds, “that was not unusual.” Indeed, “if you did not keep up the energy when you did a movement, she would change it. So we learned to do a movement always full out, not just to mark it. Otherwise she would change it.”

Kares believes Newman was “constantly revising because she believed that dances should change as people change, as times change.”

Such a process had its costs, however. Six months after joining the company, Lee was ready to quit.

“I came home crying every night after rehearsals,” she says. “Her movement was very foreign to me and it was very hard. Now it feels so right, but at the time it was very hard and I wanted to understand it.”

Kares feels that kind of tension was a result of Newman’s high standards and “incredible vision. She was years ahead of her time, always.”

Newman also knew how to spread healing balm. Kares describes her as “a taskmaster and at the same time a mom, if you can believe that. She would yell at you one day and feed you chicken soup the next.”

Newman tried to keep her dancers working all year long, even when she couldn’t pay them. “But if she had money,” says Kares, “we had it.”

Her final illness took the dancers by surprise. “She never gave any hint that anything was wrong,” says Lee. “It was a total shock.” The family has declined to specify what sort of surgery Newman had been hospitalized for.

Plans for preserving the Newman legacy are vague, and the dancers are concerned that the company will fall apart. “Right now,” Lee says, “it’s up in the air.”

Kares says there are copyright and legal considerations. But she also says she is determined to preserve her mentor’s work somehow.

“I’m going to find me a bunch of money and I’m going to open a theater and just do it.”