Transitions - dance personalities - Obituary

Dance Magazine, Feb, 2000

JERALDYNE BLUNDEN, founder/artistic director of the Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, died November 22 of renal failure. She was fifty-nine years old.

Blunden was a quiet woman, perhaps a little shy, with large, wise eyes, a honeyed laugh, and a steady tide of courage. Add to that the blessing of taste, which enabled her to build a dance company of true artistic stature. She was fortunate in her first teachers, Josephine and Hermene Schwarz, founders of the Dayton Ballet. In addition to their fine training, they encouraged her to spend two seasons at the Connecticut College Summer School of Dance, where, during her first summer, she was the only black student. The range of her own training encouraged her to provide her company with equally strong exposure to ballet and modern dance.

At eighteen, she was already dreaming of a company. Not long after, she married Charles Blunden, a young businessman, who remained totally supportive of the dream.

By 1960 she had opened her own school of dance and had begun a modest performing group. It was incorporated in 1968. Her mother has told of Jeraldyne's initial effort to form the company: "She assembled eight or nine youngsters and told them of her aspirations. She said that they could not treat the company as a plaything. `If you can't come up to my demands,' she said, `then I want you to leave.' They all walked out."

When the Dayton Contemporary Dance Company joined the National Association for Regional Ballet in 1972, it was composed entirely of females. But the company style was already evident. By the time the group became an Award Company, the highest level in the organization, it also boasted a contingent of strong male dancers, and it was acquiring an impressive repertoire, principally, but not entirely, by black choreographers. To their works it brought a technical finesse and humanity of interpretation.

DCDC has toured internationally, as well as nationally, and has participated in several choreography projects, notably the American Dance Festival's Black Traditions in Modern Dance. Blunden's numerous personal awards include the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (1994), Dance Magazine Award (1998), Dance USA Honors (1999), and an inscription on the Walk of Fame of the Dayton International Airport (1999).

Blunden named her associate directors, Kevin Ward and her daughter Debbie Blunden-Diggs, to succeed her at the helm of the company. In addition to her daughter and husband, she is survived by her mother, Winifred Kilborn; her son, Derek; her sister, Carol Ann Shockley, and four granddaughters.

Contributions may be made to "The First 200 Fund" for Jeraldyne's School of Dance, Dayton Foundation, 2100 Kettering Tower, Dayton, Ohio 45423.

DORIS HERING

JEAN WILLIAMS, 70, a Philadelphia dancer, choreographer, and teacher who founded the Germantown Dance Company and School, died November 24 of complications from Alzheimer's disease. Born in 1928, Williams didn't begin seriously studying dance until she was eighteen years old. She trained at New York's Ballet Theater School and with instructors in Philadelphia. Her early career encompassed ballet, rope work with Ringling Brothers, and nightclub performances.

Williams opened her first ballet school in 1952 in the Germantown section of Philadelphia. She also remained active in musical theatre, choreographing for The Musicrafters and LaSalle Music Theatre, as well as for television shows and high school, civic, and church productions. Many of Williams' students later joined her ballet company--the school's faculty drew on dancers from the Pennsylvania Ballet and Philadelphia's modern companies. It was incorporated in 1971 as Germantown Dance Theatre and later became a member of the Northeast Regional Ballet Association. The company performed frequently in Philadelphia venues and at festivals throughout the U.S. and in Canada.

Williams's students received Ford Foundation scholarships to the School of American Ballet and studied at Juilliard, NYU, Carnegie Mellon, and Adelphi. Her legacy is evident in the number of students who became dancers or choreographers on Broadway, in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas; in those who opened their own dance schools; in those who teach at colleges or universities, as well as in the five generations of students who simply learned to love dance.

MIGNON GARLAND, 91, a second-generation Isadora Duncan dancer and teacher who devoted her life's work to the conservation and presentation of Duncan's art, died September 15, 1999 at her home in San Pablo, California.

She studied classical ballet and modern dance throughout her Brooklyn childhood; after talking her way backstage to watch a performance by Isadora Duncan's daughter, "Isadorable" Anna Duncan, the teenaged Garland was inspired her to focus on the senior Duncan's early-modernist technique.

Garland trained under Anna Duncan; by 1930, she was touring internationally with Irma Duncan's company. Garland was invited to dance in Moscow, and spent two years there studying at Duncan's Russian school. After returning to the United States in 1933, Garland helped found the New Duncan Dancers and was named dance editor of New Theater magazine. In 1942, she and Duncan dancers Hortense Kooluris and Julia Levier founded the Contemporary Duncan Dancers. The company performed at Carnegie Hall in 1944, accompanied by the National Symphony Orchestra, and again in 1952 with original members of the Irma Duncan Dancers, in a concert marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of Duncan's death.