Higher Ed: On Campus and Beyond

Chatter filled the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center on opening night of New York City Ballet’s highly anticipated Ocean’s Kingdom, the collaboration between Peter Martins and Paul McCartney. Critics, photographers and VIPs attended the gala, and it was Marymount Manhattan College sophomore Ailina Rose’s job to greet journalists with press materials and assist photographers in the viewing room during the show. “I stood at the end of the red carpet and was awestruck,” she says. “Dancers I’ve admired for years were walking right past me!”
 

A semicircle of 13 chairs faces the packed bleachers at the 2011 Informance, an annual event organized by the dance program at New Jersey’s Montclair State University. In the chairs sit MSU theater professor Neil Baldwin and the 12 student danceaturges, who, under his mentorship, spent the past semester analyzing choreographies composing the department’s yearlong Americana repertory and spring concert, working in a unique manner he describes as “from the inside out.” The danceaturges excitedly swap stories and pose questions to each other and an attentive audience of students and faculty.

For Jill Johnson dance is an unfinished project. “It’s not defined by the dances that already exist,” explains the newly installed director of dance at Harvard University. “We don’t know all there is to know about it.” Johnson’s belief in the open-ended nature of dance is what fires her hunger for inquiry and innovation. Her journey is a lifelong quest for knowledge, one she is eager to share with Harvard students and colleagues.
 

The first assignment students get when arriving at Headlong Performance Institute is to create a three-minute self-portrait. They can use whatever idiom they choose—dance, theater, song, visual art or a mix of genres. And that’s just the beginning. They’ll spend the next 14 weeks studying movement techniques, commedia dell’arte, clowning, contact improvisation, dramaturgy, mask work and other cross-disciplinary artforms, all while seeing dance and theater performances and learning the practical skills they’ll need to succeed as artists.
 

As with many university dance programs, California State University, Long Beach, provides ballet training primarily to students who are interested in becoming contemporary rather than classical dancers. Ballet training in a university setting is therefore not a means to an end as much as an additional route of movement investigation.

Every other year in August, a crowd of people gathers at Vedauwoo, a popular rock-climbing area outside of Laramie, Wyoming. They tilt their heads up, not to gawk at climbers, but to watch dancers hanging from ropes and harnesses as they perform against the curtain of a 200-foot rock face. Pushing off the rocks, the dancers strike poses in the air, flip over each other and move gracefully up and down the rock face. The scene, a combination of fluid choreography and natural grandeur, is stunning.
 

Though she had always been a mover, Diane Frank had taken few formal dance classes before college. In fact, she entered Ohio University’s theater department in 1966 planning to become a high school drama teacher. While there, though, she took class from Shirley Wimmer, founder of Ohio University’s School of Dance, who saw her potential and encouraged her to explore it.

They live on campus, eat in the dining hall and spend five to six hours a day dancing for three or more consecutive weeks. But do younger students who attend university summer programs really get an accurate taste of collegiate curricula? College dance faculty say “absolutely.” The small classes, individual attention, professional class structure and exposure to college dance faculty gives pre-college students insight into the everyday life of a dance major and a strong foundation upon which to build their technique.
 

Everlea Bryant wasn’t a medical student. She was a dance performance major at the University of Florida—which made designing a dance program for youth with sickle cell anemia especially daunting. Individuals with sickle cell anemia have a range of limitations, including osteopathic issues and severe, sudden pain crises that can be triggered by dehydration or too much exercise.
 

Last summer, six Juilliard students—two dancers, two actors and two musicians—spent two weeks in Arusha, Tanzania, sharing their art with students in a poverty-stricken region. Meanwhile, seven other Juilliard students traveled to Botswana to teach dance and drama to schoolchildren, many of whom have been impacted by HIV/AIDS. And yet another team of dancers, actors and musicians headed to Detroit, to launch an arts immersion program for abused, neglected, long-term foster and paroled youth.