3.5 Million Years Later, Louisville Ballet Premieres Lucy - Brief Article

Dance Magazine, Jan, 1999 by Kelly J. Milner

LOUISVILLE, Kentucky--The heroine of Louisville Ballet's January world premiere is neither a princess under an evil spell nor a star-crossed lover. Instead, she is a primate that lived millions of years ago. Alun Jones's ballet Lucy is based on the skeleton found in Hadar, Ethiopia, in 1974 by Donald Johanson.

The oldest, most complete hominid skeleton, Lucy--named after the Beatles song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," which the archaeologists played over and over on the night of the discovery--resulted in a reexamination of previous ideas regarding the path of human evolution.

One scientific journal illustrated its coverage with a drawing of what Lucy might have looked like, In Louisville, when amateur scientist and composer Shirl Jae Atwell saw the drawing she instinctively knew she would compose music regarding the discovery.

The piece evolved slowly. Atwell began chronicling her ideas about the daily life of Lucy and her tribe and decided that Lucy's life could best be evoked in dance. After three years of composing music that Atwell can compare only to Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, the score was finished.

In 1991, Atwell says, she began "bugging" Jones, Louisville Ballet's artistic director, to use her score for a ballet. She sent him a tape of the percussive music played on the piano, but Jones was unresponsive.

"I thought the idea was sort of crazy at first," Jones says. Determined, Atwell borrowed $30,000 and hired the Louisville Orchestra to make a recording of the music. The orchestra, enthusiastic about the score, gave a performance of the work and invited Jones. "Once I heard the orchestra play the music, I liked it," Jones says. "1 remembered an old Petipa ballet called Pharaoh's Daughter, which is about a mummy. Suddenly it was a real possibility."

Jones did not choreograph the work to be a graphic depiction of Lucy's life. "The fact that it happened millions of years ago is unimportant," Jones says. "First of all, it's got to be the dance." The structure of the piece comes from the music, which is divided into eight tableaux: "Prologue," "Morning," "Hunted," "Songlines," "Ceremony," "Musings," "Warning," and "Leavetaking."

The ballet begins and concludes with scientists examining the fossils. When the scientists leave, the spirit of Lucy emerges into the ancient forest. Her tribe arrives. In "Hunted," the tribe hunts while simultaneously being hunted, and an animal kills one of the tribe members. The music, Atwell says, evokes the feeling of being stalked, and she had nightmares while writing it.

"Songlines" was inspired by Australian Aboriginal mythology. "Song is a very natural outgrowth of any kind of sound, and dance is a natural outgrowth of any kind of rhythm," Atwell says. In "Ceremony," the music shifts to the concept of early religion. "I imagine even in Lucy's time they would look at the stars and wonder what was going on," Atwell says. "That's the beginning of religion." Jones incorporated movements from the traditional African dance he learned in a workshop with the late African American dancer, choreographer, and anthropologist Pearl Primus. In "Musings," Jones explores tribal relationships. The ballet ends with Lucy alone. The time shifts to the present, and the scientists return to examine the bones.