History Afoot

For dancers of a certain age, nothing inspires mixed emotions more quickly than meeting students who say, “Gee, I just saw a film of you in dance history class.” It’s undoubtedly just a little too close to, “Gee, I didn’t know you were still alive.”

The very word “history” can be unsettling for dancers, who place live performance at the center of their creative universe. But individual dancers do eventually become history, and they are chronicled in static texts and imperfect video and film records.

Somewhere between this variable realm of recorded remembrance and the immediacy of performance is a concept that New York dancer-choreographers Tina Croll and James Cunningham like to call “living history.” They more or less stumbled onto the idea a few years ago, when they decided to create a work using their friends--most of whom were, like themselves, in their 50s and denizens of the downtown modern/postmodern dance scene. The result was “From the Horse’s Mouth,” a largely improvised piece that enjoyed an overwhelmingly positive response during a week of performances this year and last in New York City.

Now Croll and Cunningham are going to test whether or not their idea has legs in Los Angeles. On Friday, they will lead a cast featuring California dancers and choreographers in a new version of “From the Horse’s Mouth” in a Dance Kaleidoscope program at the Japan America Theatre.

As in New York, they will use a loose framework and depend on individual performers to fill in the blanks--a process often called “structured improvisation.” In the case of “Horse’s Mouth,” every dancer contributes his or her own 16-count movement phrase, tells a minute-and-a-half personal story and jams with others before moving on, sometimes following directions given on notes they read on stage. Only four people are on stage at once, shifting activities each time one finishes speaking from a centrally placed chair.

A recently completed documentary of the first “Horse’s Mouth” performances (made by dancer-choreographer-turned-filmmaker Sharon Kinney, who was in the New York version and will dance here), catches the exhilarating results when Croll and Cunningham’s basic blueprint is mixed with an interesting cast.

At one moment, Viola Farber, an early Merce Cunningham company member, stretches into monumental modern dance gesture, looking like a statue of a goddess coming to life. Suddenly, former Lester Horton and Alvin Ailey dancer Carmen de Lavallade swoops around her in lyrical circles. Heightened emotions and serendipitous dance moments mingle with belly laughs and bittersweet anecdotes. Movement is dominated by the loose-jointed, free-flowing contemporary strain of modern dance, while the constant stream of talk bounces from childhood memories and adolescent fantasies to the hard-luck life of the underpaid modern dancer and its ineffable rewards.

“What we saw was a great willingness to give to each other,” recalls James Cunningham, on the phone from New York. “There were people dancing in these amazing combinations you’ve never seen. It has a tremendous kind of creative energy about it. A lot of these people maybe had lost the original impulse that made them dance, but when you’re actively improvising on stage, you’re very focused, and suddenly, you really open yourself up so something can really come through.”

Still, the co-creators had been unsure what they had in terms of a performance until they got standing ovations. Several audience members who had stopped dancing--among them postmodern dance figurehead Yvonne Rainer--were even inspired to make new dances.

Jennifer Dunning, in the New York Times, called the half-hour event “a live documentary” and “a rich portrait of dancers and their lives.” And--although some younger performers eventually joined the rotating casts--Dunning singled it out as part of a trend to showcase “the kind of burnished artistry that comes only with age.”

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Realizing that each time the piece was performed, a unique communal and historical event occurred, Croll and Cunningham decided that “Horse’s Mouth” could have incarnations anywhere there were dancers.

“We thought that it has such a simple structure, it would be wonderful to do it in different places,” says Croll, also on the phone from her New York apartment. “I’ve danced in Los Angeles and had some connections there, so I thought that Dance Kaleidoscope might be a good place to try.”

The process of finding a West Coast cast for “Horse’s Mouth” was relatively haphazard. Basically Cunninghan and Croll asked friends and acquaintances to recommend people who were integral to the dance community here.

Very quickly, they had more than 30 performers enlisted--including a few crossovers who wanted to fly in from the East--and at least 10 on the waiting list as word spread.

Compared to the New York version, which consisted almost entirely of people from the downtown dance world, the new cast is more eclectic. Several familiar names associated with the West Coast modern/postmodern scene are on the roster, among them Janet Eilber, Jacques Heim, Loretta Livingston and Lula Washington from L.A.; San Francisco’s Margaret Jenkins; and San Diego’s John Malashock. But there are also performers from the tap and show dancing world: Grover Dale, Lynn Dally, Alfred Desio and Patsy Swayze.

“I think there’s a greater range of styles in L.A.,” is the way Croll puts it--mildly. New cast member Dale, 57, concurs. As a dancer with much Broadway and commercial work behind him, and as publisher of Dance & Fitness Magazine, he constantly comes into contact with this area’s melange of dance styles.

“If the New York version was downtown dance, this will be all-over-the-town dance,” he says, laughing.

Will there be a clash of aesthetics between so-called concert dancers and show dancers?

“Oh, I hope there will be conflict,” he says, laughing again. “Hey, I’m taking my tap shoes.”

Even though there will be more kinds of dance in the new version, Croll admits that it could be even more eclectic--including, for instance, flamenco, folklorico and Indian classical dancers. But by the time she started thinking in that direction, the “Horse’s Mouth” roster was filled. To remedy that situation, she and Cunningham plan a “more international” version next year.

The cast that’s in place again emphasizes the multigenerational aspect of “Horse’s Mouth.” David Rousseve and Rosanna Gamson are pleased that, at 39, they are suddenly among the youngest. Since both are relatively recently arrived from New York (Rousseve’s company, Reality, is still based there, although he teaches at UCLA), they welcome the opportunity to make more intimate contact with the dance community here.

Others, like modern dancer-choreographer Karen Goodman, 51, look forward to even brief relief from the isolated feeling she gets in Southern California, where people routinely “live in our car pods.”

Croll and Cunningham didn’t end up with many West Coast dance pioneers--Bella Lewitzky, for instance, was invited but was unable to participate--but like the original, the Los Angeles group also has some senior dance icons, who will return to the stage to interact with the generations that followed them. They include Freda Flier Maddow, who was with Martha Graham’s company from 1937 to 1941, and Yvonne Mounsey, who danced for Balanchine from 1949 to 1959.

“I’m a little scared, because I’m the only ballet person, I think,” says Mounsey, who at 79 runs the Westside School of Ballet in Santa Monica. “I’ll be a sort of odd man out, but I think it will be kind of fun to do this thing. I can still move, and I don’t mind talking, but I don’t know what I’ll say yet.”

When told that many performers have used their “speaking turn” to recall their illustrious teachers, she says, “Oh, I could talk about Balanchine for hours; they were exciting years.”

Maddow, who is 80, retired from the Graham company to have children in 1948 but still goes to dance fitness classes. She heard from her daughter in New York what a success “Horse’s Mouth” had been there and agreed to participate. “It’s a little frightening to improvise in front of an audience and to talk--I’m not used to that, but it interested me,” she says. “Of course, when I danced, everything had to be so perfect--you know, with Graham you couldn’t just take it easy, you had to prepare and know it exactly. The technique was really important.”

Even when it comes to the dancing itself, Maddow and the others won’t be entirely at the mercy of the moment. Along with the basic instructions, they have been given a diagram--where to start and finish--and direction about how to end the piece as a group. The notes they receive on stage may say “reverse your phrase” or “do it twice as slowly.” The dancers also get a chance to try out the formula before the performance.

“We give them lots of instructions beforehand, and we have a rehearsal the day before and a run-through the day of performance,” Croll says.

But she emphasizes that flexibility is built into “Horse’s Mouth.” “We want everyone to be comfortable enough to do whatever they want to do, so we tell them they don’t have to follow the rules.”

There are some themes that can be expected to arise in any version of “Horse’s Mouth,” especially given the multigenerational casting. Issues of aging are foremost among them.

“I think many of us have reached an age when we’re feeling that we’re part of this ongoing world of the arts,” Cunningham says, “and I think it’s very significant for people in their 20s and 30s to see this. A lot of dance is concerned with the ideal body, and one of the pleasures of this piece is seeing that you don’t have to stop dancing just because you no longer have that ideal body.”

At one point during a rehearsal for the New York performances, captured in the Kinney documentary, a major problem is how to read the typed, randomly chosen instructions. Suddenly, for a group of performers over 40, the great choreographic dilemma was where to put reading glasses on stage, and whether or not they could be shared. (Larger type was the solution.)

Still, Cunningham insists that this will not be “a piece about elderly dancers,” and that other prominent themes tend to be the larger dance community, as well as career transitions. These will likely emerge again, if the expectations of new participants are any indication.

Former Paul Taylor dancer Nicholas Gunn, who is 51 and still dancing while making the shift to university teaching, sees himself as part of a continuum that he expects “Horse’s Mouth” to emphasize.

“This piece sounded so fascinating to me--the whole living history aspect of dance,” he says. “It’s what I love so much about the field, the handing down from one generation to the next.”

A personal story Gunn is thinking of telling on stage is about dancing at the Parthenon when he was 21 and feeling that “dancers had been on the stage for 2,000 years, and I had my place in that chain.” Today he believes even more in a sense of interconnectedness. “I really believe that I dance now because of the way every dancer before me danced,” he says. “And I have this small hope that the way people dance in the future will be affected by the work we do today. Maybe I don’t believe in God or an afterlife, but that’s the kind of immortality I do believe in, the kind of contribution I think you can make.”

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Whether or not the Los Angeles version of “From the Horse’s Mouth” can fulfill all expectations remains to be seen.

Cunningham notes that the only “wrong” thing that has occurred in previous performances is a touch of ego. “There have been a few instances of people who were very competitive or insensitive when improvising,” he says. “And this is not a piece about being a star--it’s about all these people who are just remarkable and unique. It celebrates both their uniqueness and their part in this field.

“It’ll be intriguing to see what happens with such a wide range of styles,” says Rousseve, “but in some ways that’s the beauty of it. Maybe part of the statement will be that the individual artists may be different, but they’ll all come together for one specific goal. Everybody will have their eyes of the same prize, which is pulling off this event.”*

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“From the Horse’s Mouth,” Japan America Theatre, 244 S. San Pedro St. Friday, 8 p.m. $12-$18. (323) 343-6683.