The Cultural Component

Wearing layers of black except for immaculate white sneakers, Judith Jamison climbs out of a van in front of the Capitol Theatre and dances a few fast, playful steps on the icy street.

A former star of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre and now the company’s artistic director, she is one of the dance world’s most articulate advocates. But dance isn’t the first thing she wants to talk about when she meets a visitor inside a theater conference room.

Today Jamison is caught up in Olympic fever and is still glowing from her participation in the torch relay the day before the opening ceremonies. “I carried it 0.2 miles,” she explains. “Norman Lear gave it to me, and I gave it to Kristi Yamaguchi.”

Jamison is one of the choreographers commissioned by the Olympic Arts Festival to create a work to be danced during the 2002 Winter Games. Like many of her fellow dance-makers, she came from an athletic background, is inspired by athletes and incorporates movement associated with sports in her Olympic commission.

But even though dancers and athletes represent twin icons of physical fitness and splendor in our culture, Jamison and her colleagues recognize that deep distinctions exist between what dancers and athletes do and how we view them. It isn’t just a matter of medals or choreographed versus spontaneous achievement. For Jamison, the worlds of dance and sports divide over the use of time.

Athletes annihilate time, she says, where dancers manipulate and sometimes seem to suspend it: “If you’re a sprinter, you have to do in 8.6 seconds or less what we sustain for 21/2 hours.”

“It’s phenomenal that they can produce a burst of energy like that,” she exclaims. “But, for me, their fire, sports fire, burns too fast. I like to float on a cloud and be there for a minute and then burn and do everything that comes in between. And athletes don’t get a chance to do that.”

It’s movement specialization that separates dance and sports, according to Joan Woodbury, the co-artistic director of Utah’s Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company. “Athletes train for just one skill and for an incredible amount of perfection in it. Dancers train for perfection, too, but we also train for quality of movement, to get nuances and new movement material that we’ve never done before.”

Woodbury and Jamison both choreographed works for the Olympics with unmistakable sports connections. But where Jamison’s “HERE ... NOW.” evokes the career and personal style of 1980s track champion Florence Griffith Joyner, Woodbury’s “Ready, Set!” celebrates athletes en masse: “I have sections in which you’re seeing all of the sports at once, the moguls, the ice skating, the distance skiing,” Woodbury says.

Although “Ready, Set!” is not an arts festival commission, Woodbury says she never would have begun it “without the impetus of the Olympics.” In contrast, Daniel Ezralow’s “Prelude d’Olympiad” for the Ririe-Woodbury company is a commission from the Salt Lake festival, but it focuses less on the Olympics than Olympus, home of the Greek gods.

Ezralow didn’t discover dance until college and before that was something of a jock. “I played football, I swam, I played basketball, I played tennis, I ran track,” he recalls, “and my sports background plays a part in my dance.”

When he was a member of the Momix company, for instance, Ezralow choreographed a pas de deux on skis and more recently worked with champion Romanian gymnasts in “Aeros,” in which three contemporary choreographers adapted the gymnasts’ movement vocabulary for a program of unorthodox dance theater.

That crossover between sports and dance taught him that “the physical repetition required of athletes, and sometimes of dancers, can bind your body. It almost creates armor. And to become truly expressive, you have to shed that armor.”

“We all know that dance is as wide as Misha [Baryshnikov] doing a leap to [butoh specialist] Oguri crawling across the floor,” he says. “In sport, when athletes invent new movement, some of them are disqualified at first. As a dancer I feel I am an expressive being much more than I would have been if I had continued as an athlete.”

No company is more identified with infusing dance with athletic movement than Pilobolus, so it’s no surprise that photos of its dancers in picturesque contortions adorn posters and brochures for the Olympic Arts Festival.

Co-director Michael Tracy admits that Pilobolus initially startled the dance world with its gymnastic people towers and other innovations. “But we didn’t see our work as sports on stage,” he says. “We were aware that we weren’t drawing from traditional dance techniques, but we were always interested in the arts, and in theater particularly. There was a part of us that considered our work athletic but really it was theater.”

Tracy emphasizes the role of theater when discussing the distinctions between sports and dance. “I love to watch great athletes,” he says, “but it’s the illusion and the artistic potential of theater that moves me more than competition. Part of the experience of a dance company going to the Olympics is the awareness of the Olympics as theater--it has an effect a little like the millennium celebrations. Suddenly you saw theater going on in every city around the world at once. In a way it gives the planet a certain self-awareness that’s rare.”

“But in terms of Pilobolus and how it relates to sports, there’s something I find in dance theater--some more mysterious experience or imagery that somehow resonates with audience members’ own lives--that interests me far more than physical prowess.”

Pilobolus’ Olympic commission doesn’t overtly explore sports themes or images, Tracy says. Rather, it’s part of a continuum: “In large measure, the subject matter and the way I treated it this year was very much an outgrowth of what I did last year.”

Like Tracy, tap phenomenon Savion Glover acknowledges that sports images do turn up in his choreography--especially in his solos: “I’m all over the place and I might do a step that describes a ball going down a court, or a skater doing a jump. But meanwhile I’m tapping out all these rhythms and I consider myself more of a musician, a drummer, than an athlete.”

Glover will be appearing in the Olympic Arts Festival with his new eight-member group and says he’s not going to change anything that he usually does. But he will also dance during the closing ceremonies and that Olympic performance will involve one big change that he’s none too happy about.

Amplification problems at that event will force him to prerecord a tap track and dance to it, Glover says. “I’ve never done that before, I always improvise my solos. But now I have to choreograph a routine and stick to it.” With billions of people watching.

Among them will be Margo Apostolos, who has been researching the relationship between dance and sports in projects at USC and Stanford. “After many years of this work,” she says, “I deduce that there is an athlete in every dancer and a dancer in every athlete. I’ve seen in the studio that elite athletes can transfer into dance skills very well. They can pick up the movements, at least on a basic level, because their bodies are so well trained.”

Ezralow would agree. “There was nothing greater in Michael Jordan’s prime than watching him go down the court,” he says. “It was pure athletics and one of the most beautiful dances you could see.”

Tracy also finds what he calls “an obvious relation between a great trained dancer and a great trained athlete, both in their dedication and in their economy of movement. It’s a two-way street: Beauty is a part of prowess. This is why people watch great dancers, and it’s the same reason people travel around the world to watch champion Olympic athletes.”