The ABCs of dance - dance renaissance on college campuses

Ebony, March, 1992

DANCE. From the Cakewalk to the Charleston to tap and the Twist, American dance is, in Large part, a gift of Black America.

Thanks to a surge of academic interest, that gift is alive and well on American college campuses, where daring Black dance directors are creating collaborative programs that link jazz and classical ballet and town and gown.

Brown University's Julie Adams Strandberg, for example, has collaborated with the community-based Dance Alliance of Providence, R.I., to give students greater exposure to professional teachers. In another cooperative venture, Sandra Burton, head of the Williams College dance program, organized a joint concert between her dancers and dancers from modern-dance paragon Bennington College.

But perhaps die boldest dance coup occurred at Howard University, which became the first historically Black college to offer dance as a major field of study. "A lot of Black students wanted to major in dance and had nowhere to go," says Terlene D. Terry-Todd,artistic director of die Howard University Dance Ensemble. "We can now focus on the diversity of the African-American experience."

In developing the performance-oriented dance major, Howard University set the tone for the Black College Dance Exchange, says Inez Howard, Norfolk State University's dance director and chairman of the exchange, which represents 18 schools.

In addition to breaking new ground at Black and White institutions, the nearly two dozen Black college-level dance directors have created highly acclaimed programs that meet the art and fitness needs of casual students and the professional needs of students preparing for dance careers.

Typical of these directors, almost all of whom are former professional dancers, is Julie Adams Strandberg, who virtually invented the Brown University program. In 1969, Strandberg, who was then a third-grade teacher trained in dance by modern dance pioneers like Alvin Ailey and Martha Graham, joined the Brown faculty as a part tune dance instructor. Nine years later, dance gained a degree of respect at Brown when the school created the Department of Theatre, Speech and Dance. Strandberg was the school's lone dance faculty for many years. But an expanded faculty now offers courses in ballet, modern, folk, African, tap and jazz dance. The serious dance student still cannot major in dance at Brown, but die school offers a major in theater and an independent concentration in dance. "We train the complete dancer," Strandberg says. "Students don't just learn technique. We train dancers so that they are the interpreters of the message, not just the vehicle for someone else's idea. "

While most of the hundreds of students who walk through Brown's Asahamu Dance Studio intend to pursue careers in other fields, some, to Strandberg's delight, discover a latent talent for choreography or movement. "Many didn't know they seriously wanted a career in dance," she says. "Seeing dance in the larger context--in the context of being able to do something for society, and as a valid way to devote their lives--convinces them."

Kenneth Green has witnessed the same phenomenon at Spelman College, where almost one-third of the 1,750 students take one or more of the 15 dance offerings each semester. The dance program is a minor area of study under the Division of Fine Arts, but students get performance experience in the college dance program. The college's after-school program attracts some 300 grammar-school students a semester and was a proving ground for jasmine Guy

Most students in the Spelman program, Kenneth Green says, take dance courses "for the love of the arts." But the major motivation at the Dance School of the California Institute of the Arts, which offers bachelor's and master's degrees in dance, is a desire for a job in the arts. And the school's dean, Julliard-trained Chrystine Lawson, has developed a production-oriented curriculum that offers yoga and modem dance side by side with African and classical Japanese dance and production courses. "I wanted to make a program that offered as much creativity in composition as it did in technique," lawson says.

Like most of her colleagues, lawson stresses practical experience. Before a student graduates from her program, he or she must work as a producer or stage manager or a member of a stage crew. Students are even expected to make their own costumes. "If a student wants to dance, " Lawson says, "he or she has to sew. It's a community operation. "

The major challenge Black and White dance directors face is convincing schools that dance is a serious discipline. A twin challenge is fighting off budget cuts by administrators who believe arts should be cut before athletics.

"We keep the wolves away from the door by turning out the best graduates we possibly can, because the quality of our graduates says more about what we do than anything else and is our strongest argument for continuing our programs, says Carolyn Adams, dance director for City College of New York.

Adams, Chrystine Lawson and other dance directors maintain that dance is a serious academic discipline and that all students should be exposed to the humanizing and transforming possibilities of the dance. And Lawson sums up the sentiments of many dance directors when she says that the pay off for her years of toil is seeing a student master a difficult piece of choreography or watching the curtain rise on a new production. "It doesn't matter how big or small the scope is," she says. "It's exciting."