The Teach-Learn Connection - Paul Taylor Dance Company and Taylor 2 help to teach dance - Brief Article

Dance Magazine, June, 2001

TAYLOR 2 IS LITMUS TEST

Four years ago, the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Funds awarded Dance St. Louis a grant to develop "Audiences of Our Future." The Missouri project brings four major American dance companies to the region: Dayton Contemporary Dance Theatre, which focuses on the African American community; STREB, which works with a local circus to improve public access; the Miami City Ballet, which tours rural communities in southeastern Missouri; and the Paul Taylor Dance Company and Taylor 2, which target university populations.

For the Paul Taylor segment, known as "Big Man on Campus," dance students are chosen from Lindenwood, Webster, and Washington Universities to be coached intensively in a work from the Taylor repertoire. This year, the dance was a signature Taylor company piece, Esplanade. Taylor 2, a second company formed in 1993 to expand the Taylor residency potential, did the staging. (Susan McGuire directs the company, and Ken Tosti directs rehearsals.) The value to the six students drawn from each school is enormous. These pre-professionals develop as performers by learning this masterwork, and Taylor's genius is experienced by a new generation of dancers.

Taylor 2 taught and performed in the St. Louis area April 16 through May 6. So that the maximum number of students could benefit, sections of Esplanade were taught during regular class time on each of the campuses. The eighteen selected students had additional evening rehearsals, and the dance was performed on the spring concerts of Webster and Lindenwood Universities. Audiences had the pleasure of seeing the entire dance because Taylor 2 performed sections of the work not being done by the students.

For dance program directors Rob Scoggins from Lindenwood, Mary Jean Cowell from Washington University, and Gary Hubler from Webster, the program was an unprecedented opportunity. For Hubler, it was the students' chance to interact with the Taylor 2 dancers, who are close to them in age and succeeding in the competitive world of professional dance. Cowell appreciated the project's convergence with her program's commitment to students' understanding of choreography by doing it, in addition to reading and viewing assignments. The residency was a litmus test for measuring student achievement for Scoggins's program, which is the newest in the area

The project culminated with a major event for Dance St. Louis, the company premiere of a new Taylor work, presented on May 11 and 12, which was co-commissioned by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts for American Ballet Theatre.

According to Sally Bliss, Dance St. Louis's executive director, the result was "one of the most successful education and outreach programs we have ever done. It was brilliantly conceived by the Wallace-Reader's Digest Funds because it brings great dance to the whole community. This excellence is what generates the enthusiasm that builds future audiences. And education is an essential component."

--Alice Bloch

BARBARA HAMBLIN STEPS DOWN AS U.U. BALLET CHAIR

Since she was a high school sophomore in Klamath Falls, Oregon, Barbara Hamblin planned to attend the University of Utah. "I had heard about Willam Christensen starting a program [in Salt Lake City]," Hamblin remembered. In 1951, Christensen left the San Francisco Ballet and established the first ballet department instituted at an American university at the University of Utah. Hamblin joined the university as a ballet major in 1958, embarking on a lifelong journey devoted to dance and dance education.

She married during her sophomore year, then took time away from school to have her first child. Upon her return to school, rumors had started that "Mr. C.," as Christensen's students preferred to call him, was planning to start a company. In 1962, she was among the eleven charter members of Christensen's Utah Civic Ballet, later maturing into Ballet West.

"We were young and strong and vigorous," Hamblin remembered. The company scheduled six-week national bus tours. In the beginning, Hamblin said, the dancers were earning twenty-five dollars a week. Throughout her ten-year career with Ballet West she danced several leading roles, including her favorite as Swanilda in Coppelia.

After retiring from dance with Ballet West in 1972, Hamblin spent a summer studying with Vera Volkova in Banff, Canada. While there she made up her mind to make a career in teaching. In 1980, Hamblin took over a portion of the university's continuing education program that offered evening dance classes to high school students. She accepted a full-time teaching position in the ballet department in 1984, teaching courses in technique, pointe, ballet pedagogy, ballet history, and ballet fitness and injuries.

She received her appointment as department chair in 1988. Under her direction, a teaching emphasis and a character-dance emphasis were added to the ballet curriculum. With a grant from the university's Thomas Dee Committee, Hamblin organized a dance medicine symposium in Salt Lake City in 1995. "Dance injuries have been an interest of mine since I started teaching," Hamblin said. Dance educators from all over the United States attended the symposium to present movement therapy classes and dance science research studies.