A New Dean for American Dance Festival - Donna Faye Burchfield

Dance Magazine, April, 2001 by K. C. Patrick

"So how does it feel to be a chair?" I asked. And in a beat, we both rejected that Stanislavsky moment so brutally pinpointed in A Chorus Line; we chuckled at the language and got down to serious interviewing.

Donna Faye Burchfield is the new dean--not chair--of the American Dance Festival--and she's ready.

"Even though I've spent half my life at ADF, it's taking time to sink in. So much of my time there has been tied up with Martha [Myers, Burchfield's predecessor], who was--is--really my mentor, that I never really imagined it any other way. So when Charles and Stephanie [Reinhart, co-directors of ADF] told me at the end of summer that Martha was stepping down to focus just on her teaching, it was a really challenging moment," relayed Burchfield, even now getting misty-eyed.

"I'm really delighted that Donna Faye is inheriting this position; she's been with ADF for nineteen years, so she certainly knows all the ins and outs," commented Martha Myers. "She has limitless energy and creative ideas."

"I care so much about dance, and the students of modern dance.... But my job will be to keep ADF the place where students from everywhere want to come and learn and experiment. Dance training needs to shape itself to the process of who is there, what they love, and how ADF can play a role.... When I first came to ADF as a student in the summer of 1982, it was such a profound experience for me. I want it to continue to awaken all parts of our sensibilities, to provide the best teachers for the students who come and have the best students there for the teachers to teach." The memories and beliefs poured out of Burchfield in a rush.

Burchfield has spent her modern-dance life racing to learn and absorb everything. Born in Jackson, Mississippi, she took her first dance classes with Lamon Goings, who had danced with Fokine in New York before he moved South and opened a school. Her father's transfer to the suburbs of Atlanta when Burchfield was 10 left her without a strong connection to a teacher or in-depth training. Consequently, she entered the University of Georgia in Athens as a pre-med student. But when she took her first modern dance class from Marilyn Trigg, director of the small dance department there, it changed her life. "It just blew my mind," remembered Burchfield. "I took everything I could; Mark Wheeler was there, and Alex Moore [from the University of Michigan], who taught improv. I spent hours and hours over there." When she was faced with taking organic chemistry, she knew she had to choose. Warned that she would be the only junior in the dance program, she changed her major anyway. But before long, she knew she needed a bigger school. It was her father who said, "I think you should go and visit TCU [Texas Christian University]. The admissions lady was especially nice there." So was the dance department, it turned out.

In 1979, Burchfield entered a BFA program followed by a MFA program in dance, directed by Jerry Bywaters Cochran. "It was wonderful," Burchfield recalled. "I was a first-generation college kid; she called me her sponge. She brought in laundry baskets of books and I read them all. Her father had been curator of the High Museum and her mother had the largest dance library in Texas ... and Jerry Bywaters Cochran had the second largest. She had been everywhere and knew everyone. We talked about Martha Graham because she knew her; she talked about the sound of Jose Limon's feet going down the hall at Juilliard. We drove clear to Austin to see Twyla Tharp. It was an awakening of all the sensibilities, not just dance. I wanted to know everything she knew."

One day, Mary Cochran, dancer daughter of Jerry Bywaters Cochran, asked, "Why have you never gone to ADF?" It had never occurred to Burchfield; she would need a scholarship. Martha Myers taught the audition class, and Burchfield was awarded a one-half scholarship for the summer of 1982.

"No one else from TCU went that year," Burchfield remembered. "I had class from Betty Jones, who had danced with Limon; Gus Solomons jr, who had danced with Merce [Cunningham]; and Daniel Nagrin, a soloist, but also husband of Helen Tamiris. On the last day I sat against the wall and cried, trying to figure out how I could hold onto the experiences there ... What I found out that summer, though, in class next to dancers from North Carolina School of the Arts, was that what I had learned at TCU was in line with the best programs in the nation."

By 1984, Burchfield was on the road much of the time, recruiting students to ADF and running auditions: "It was the first year that Charles brought international choreographers to the festival, and there was an explosion of interest from everywhere." Burchfield grew with the festival, teaching and choreographing on her own and at ADF. But with marriage and two children, her personal and professional needs changed.

"One day I got a call from Li Chiao-Ping, whom I knew from ADF, saying that she was leaving Hollins College's dance program ..." remembers Burchfield. "Chiao-Ping is such an artist--we had given her a scholarship to ADF--I knew she wouldn't be back. So I went to look at this lovely little college in Roanoke, Virginia, at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains. I just felt that I wanted a place where the children could grow and I could sink my heels in and let out all that I had absorbed from all my teachers. As soon as I walked on that campus, I knew instinctively that this was it."