Digital Extra

  3/19/2000
Steps from the past
Sisters in synch to salvage modern dances from disappearing.

By WILLIAM K. GALE
Journal Arts Writer

A dancer -- a black man, muscular, shaven-headed -- swings his arms overhead. His feet stamp the floor over and over with the insistent rhythm of a heartbeat.

A work song is heard: Swing that hammer. Swing it high, boy. Swing it low, boy. Swing that hammer, till you're dead.

The dancer pounds his feet and his hands. He continues.

The dance is called Rainbow 'Round My Shoulder, a work about chain gangs in the American South that deserves much greater appreciation than it has had since it was conceived in the late 1950s.

And if a program aimed at saving lost masterpieces of modern dance, The Dance Legacy Institute at Brown University, has its way, it will.

After all, along with jazz, modern dance is the art in which the U.S.A. was Number One in the 20th century.

But what a difference there is.

Though it wanes and thrives, and cycles from the impudent and involved drive of bebop to the current liking for the lame ``smooth'' variety, jazz has one great leg up on modern dance: It has been written down.

What King Oliver and Louis Armstrong played almost a century ago can be read -- and re-done -- today.

Not so with modern dance.

This rebellious, and sometimes unfortunately elitist art never got around to writing down its work. For much of the 20th century, dances were made and danced -- and, all too often, almost forgotten.

Tucked away in the minds of their creators or in the movement memory of a few dancers, masterpieces faded away.

Today, dance teachers speak of students who have never heard of Martha Graham, much less early pioneers such as Isadora Duncan. It is as if young actors had not heard of Eugene O'Neill or history students
were unaware of Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr.

Which brings us to that day when Julie Strandberg went to see Vartan Gregorian.

The names may ring a bell. He was the president of Brown University just before the guy who is now taking off for Vanderbilt. Strandberg is director of the vital dance program at Brown.

For several years, she had been working on an idea to save lost masterworks of modern dance. She had been digging them out, reviving them. Call it dance archaeology.

Strandberg, and her sister Carolyn Adams, for 17 years a leading Paul Taylor dancer, had been trying to fund their dream, mostly through hard work. Hundreds of hours had been devoted to the project. The sisters,
hardly rich, had spent their own money and time, making a little headway.

But now Strandberg was in Gregorian's inner sanctum. She had sent him information on her project and she sat there and outlined it in fervent detail.

When she finished, the Brown president said simply: ``This is of national importance. What do you need?''

``I cried,'' the now 57-year-old Strandberg said. ``I don't think he saw me. It was just little tears that I wiped away. But I cried. To have someone recognize what we were trying to do . . .''

What the sisters and their organization are striving for is no less than saving the heritage, and masterworks, of an American art.

They have already found some treasures, re-made them as close to the originals as possible, and worked to make them widely available.

That may be what makes The American Dance Legacy Institute at Brown University unique: If you are a dance teacher, a leader of a company, a dancer yourself, or just an interested observer, you can buy what the Dance Legacy Institute calls an `` tude'' and learn all there
probably is to know about an American gem. Art reflecting life

Let us cut here back to Rainbow 'Round My Shoulder , that visceral
dance choreographed in 1958 and '59 by a young dancemaker named Donald McKayle, a black man reacting to the idea of chain gangs in the American South.

On the Dance Legacy videotapes of the original 1950s dancers and one from today, you can see a history, a legacy that must be preserved. The dance is art reflecting life, seeing it through a prism, telling us about it.

``You can see an image of race relations in it," Strandberg says. ``You can see how the culture gets made.''

Rainbow , as it is often called, was not a forgotten dance. It was in the repertoire of a few companies; insiders knew it and its history.

But today, Strandberg and Adams and their Dance Legacy program have packaged Rainbow and made it available.

A Rainbow ude tape costs $75 and includes a video with three renditions of the tude, a sound tape of the music, a score in dance notation (an esoteric form akin to written music but perhaps more complicated), ideas for costumes and background information. Anyone buying the etude also receives complete legal rights to perform the dance.

Another tape costing $49.95 is available showing the original 1959 cast doing the the complete Rainbow 'Round My Shoulder and has interviews with dancers who have performed the work over the years.

Rainbow is now in wider circulation than ever. It is being danced by school kids in North Carolina, and by students at colleges all over the country. It is, in essence, getting some of the attention that a national treasure deserves.

``It's a very exciting thing,'' McKayle says, shutting down his personal computer to talk on the phone from the West Coast, where he teaches at the University of California at Irvine. ``I can tell you that students call
me from all over the country. They E-mail me, they want me to go into chat rooms.''

Now 69, the choreographer remembers first working on Rainbow at a summer resort in the Catskills in 1958. ``I didn't know if it was the right thing, but it went over. So the next year I made it a full-scale piece.''

Does McKayle worry that his masterwork, now widely available, may be butchered in some less-than-experienced hands?

``No,'' he says. ``Let's get it out there.''

'An amazing experience'

One of the people Rainbow has gotten out to is 18-year-old Kristin Swiat, now a first-year student at Juilliard, the arts college in New York City. She danced Rainbow as a summer student in Saratoga Springs,
N.Y., along with the work of a nearly forgotten choreographer from the 1930s named Eve Gentry.

``It was really an amazing experience for me,'' Swiat says on the phone.``I had never done any dances with such emotional content.''

That is a key to the value of the Dance Legacy Institute. What Swiat learned by dancing a 1938 piece by Gentry was that modern dance was considerably different in those days. The dancers did not have the fiery technique of today's athletic movers. But they had something else,
a commitment to telling a socially relevant story.

Mary Anne Santos Newhall, who teaches dance at the University of New Mexico, met in 1993 with Eve Gentry, then well into her 80s. Together they recreated Gentry's social protest dance, Tenant of the Streets, now a Dance Legacy tude.

``The way we responded to the world in 1938 was in that dance,'' Newhall says. ``I had never been asked to work that deeply before.''

Tenant of the Streets concerns a homeless woman, one left out in the cold by the Depression.

``Today, dances aren't so much about ideas,'' Newhall adds. ``Dancers focus much more on what's going on between the dancers; they are not story-motivated.''

Certainly, that kind of stimulus was new to the teenaged Swiat when she danced Tenant of the Streets two summers ago in Saratoga Springs.

``I had to learn to be this woman,'' she says. ``They sent me out into alleys, around dumpsters. The guys in an auto-body shop laughed at me. I think it gave me a chance to understand a little of what she [the woman in the dance] felt.''

Many disappeared

That kind of experience, dancing a work made 60 years ago, is something that has often been denied young modern dancers.

In modern dance's cousin, ballet, there are hundreds of dances from the 19th and 20th centuries, kept alive because they were made for dance companies that preserved them. But many modern dances -- barefoot,
and more experimental -- were not made for companies, or the companies soon disappeared. And the dances did, too.

So in addition to its other motivations, the Dance Legacy Institute is bringing back to modern dance a sense of its own past.

There are other programs going on. George Balanchine's Broadway dances are being searched for. In Los Angeles, the American Repertory Dance Company has a wide array of dances from the past in their arsenal.

But what makes the Dance Legacy Institute unique is its emphasis on education -- on getting, as McKayle said, the work out there.

``What you've got going up there is first-rate,'' says Elizabeth Aldrich, director of the Dance Heritage Coalition, headquartered at the Library of Congress in Washington. ``No one is doing it with as wide a scope.''

But wide scopes take money, something the Dance Legacy Institute is short of.

After Brown's Gregorian got them going with $25,000, Strandberg and Adams raised some other money around the university, from the New York State Education Department, and from their family organization, the Harlem Dance Foundation.

And lots of their money came in the form of ``sweat equity,'' as Strandberg puts it. Were choreographers or dancers coming to town? They stayed at the Strandberg home on the East Side.

Neither Strandberg nor Adams has ever drawn a salary from the Dance Legacy Institute, and both have contributed hundreds of hours of work to the project.

Strandberg and Adams say they probably need another $200,000 to take their program to the next level, making tudes of the work of an organization that existed from the 1930s to the '50s, the New Dance Group.

``We've got to go after corporations and foundations,'' Strandberg says.

Are they confident they will get the money?

``Yes,'' she says.

Raised in N.Y.C.

It seems a reasonable enough remark for one of two girls raised in New York City with the idea that you did good, and could do good.

The father of Strandberg and Adams was a journalist who had followed the great African-American migration from South to North, moving from Macon, Ga., to become a writer and managing editor on a black
newspaper, the Chicago Defender. He moved on to New York, where he was managing editor of the Amsterdam News before moving to the Human Rights Commission in New York.

Their mother, Olive, now 87, was always someone with a sense of purpose. A musician and composer from Minnesota, she stayed home with her children, and later became an editor of a national medical publication.

``There's a story in our family, that when I was in the first grade, I was already reading, and was very curious,'' Strandberg says. ``My mother went to the teacher.''

The teacher was told that young Julie was always pushing for more information.

``Push back,'' the teacher is supposed to have said.

That quickly ended the Adams girls' public-school educations.

Both were enrolled in the Ethical Culture School, a humanistic rganization known for its devotion to social justice, among other things.

``We were brought up with arts and writing, with a family sense of commitment and purpose,'' Strandberg says. ``We thought we could make the world better; not only that, but it was one of the things you were supposed to do.''

And the family was always athletic. A cousin, Julius Adams, was a tackle for the New England Patriots in the 1970s.

After Cornell and a 1964 degree in French literature, along with a lot of dancing, Strandberg married a Navy officer, Josiah Strandberg, and ended up living in the Middle East for a time, teaching modern dance to Arab girls who would come covertly to her house, doff their black veils, and dance.

When her husband came to Brown in a Ph.d program, Strandberg became a teacher and guidance conselor in the Providence schools. She moved to Brown and now has the rank of senior lecturer and director of dance, although she never was able to convince the university to give her the tenure that most professors enjoy.

``Various political reasons,'' Strandberg says with a shrug.

Married 35 years next month, the couple have two daughters, one a dancer.

After graduating from Sarah Lawrence College with a degree in dance and French, Carolyn Adams was whisked into the Paul Taylor Dance Company, where she spent 17 years touring the world.

From the then-Soviet Union to the Far East, from North Africa to all but four American states, she was one of Taylor's favored performers. She was chosen to be the leading dancer in such classic modern dances as Aureole , Airs and Cloven Kingdom by Taylor, perhaps the most popular modern dance choreographer of all time.

At 56, Adams teaches at the Juilliard School and is married to a former Taylor dancer-turned-stockbroker-turned-caterer, Robert Kahn. (``He caters for stockbrokers and dancers, among others,'' Adams says. ``The dancers are a lot more fun.'') The couple do not have children.

Hip-replacement surgery

Today, neither woman sees herself as out of it as far as dance, a young art performed by the young, is concerned.

Adams faces hip-replacement surgery, something not uncommon for a former dancer.

Strandberg has formed a company whose core is a group of dancers who performed as the Rhode Island Dance Repertory Company in the 1970s, making something of a hit -- being the first modern dance troupe to perform at the Trinity Repertory Company, for instance.

Made up of dancers from age 42 to 57, with Strandberg as the oldest (``I don't feel old, at all.'') the new company is called Arabella Project, taken from a character in the film Tea With Mussolini .

``But we refer to ourselves as the biddies,'' Strandberg jokes.

Well, biddies is not the right word for Strandberg and Adams. Not for people putting forth a program of national importance, one that's out to save an all-American art form that hasn't much bothered to save itself over the years.

``Dance can tell a story with such eloquence,'' Adams says.

``It seems to me like the most complete art,'' Strandberg adds. ``It's both abstract and concrete. I like people, and this is a social art form. You rarely do it by yourself.

``And we are looking for something, something that has been lost. This has to happen, it just has to happen.''