Interlochen Center for the Arts - summer dance program - special section: Summer Study

Dance Magazine, Jan, 1997 by Kate O'Neill

Wherever you may wander throughout the 1,200 wooded acres of Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan, music seems to follow you: youthful string quartets practice under the pine trees; choral music swells through an open classroom window; and piano scales issue from a cabin studio. Then follow a path toward the sunlight glinting off the waters of Green Lake to the Hildegard Lewis Dance Building. Here the piano music issuing from its three studios blends with the beat of teachers' counts or the whir of twenty-five pairs of feet slipping through degages.

Although for many years Interlochen (founded in 1928) was known as the National Music Camp, other performing (and visual) arts have long been part of the camp curriculum. Camp dance alumni include former Twyla Tharp dancer Shelley Washington, Krista Swenson of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, and former Graham dancers Peter Sparling and Janet Eilber.

Interlochen offers an intensive eight-week summer program to high school students with five or more consecutive years of dance training. The dance major is also open to junior high and middleschool students with at least three consecutive years of training. Younger students or students majoring in music, theater, or the visual arts can take a dance minor, consisting of a fifty-minute daily class in ballet or modern dance.

Dance majors take four hours of technique classes daily and spend up to three hours each day in rehearsal for concert and workshop performances. "Performances here are high quality, something you can't get with a three- or four-week program," says Jenny Gassman-Pines, 15, a ballet student who returned to Interlochen for her fifth summer in 1996. "I decided to come back because the program here is just so wonderful. I knew that the [dance] faculty would be really good choreographers as well as good teachers."

Meadow Leys, 18, a modern dance student from Jackson Hole, Wyoming, returning for a second year at the camp, agrees. For modern dance students, Leys points out, it is particularly important to experience "all sorts of different approaches to the way you move." With four or five different faculty members teaching modern classes, students are exposed to Graham, Limon, and Cunningham, as well as other techniques that are more eclectic. "Each teacher has his or her own repertoire and offers a whole new expansion of technique and a different way of looking at things," says Leys.

Yet another perspective is provided each year by a guest artist who spends a week at Interlochen, setting a work on the dance students. In addition, a dance company, such as Urban Bush Women or Momix, is in residence for several days, teaching master classes and performing.

All dance majors take one ballet and one modern dance class each day. "We talk to the students about the importance of being `bilingual,'" explains Gay Delanghe, cochair, with Stephanie Rand, of dance at the camp. For many campers, this is a new concept. But with three levels of classes offered in each technique, Delanghe and Rand are able to place each student at the proper level in ballet and in modern dance. Students choose between ballet and modern dance when they sign up for the repertoire classes, and three times weekly ballet dancers go to pointe class, while modern dancers take composition. All students take jazz class twice a week.

In the daily repertoire classes students rehearse works for the end-of-the-season dance concert, which provides all dance majors with a formal performing experience. Presented in the camp's thousand-seat Corson Auditorium, the concert includes six works by dance faculty and guest artists, with full stage lighting and costumes. Most students perform in at least two pieces.

While Interlochen offers the usual camp sports and waterfront activities, dance majors have limited time for recreation because of their heavy rehearsal schedules. Most don't seem to mind. "Here, I think I'm working at my full potential," says Ricky Hinds, 14, from Fairfield, Connecticut, a first-year camper in 1996, who has been dancing since he was three. "I'm pushed more here, but that's good. Interlochen is different. Everyone here is serious. Where I come from, a lot of people don't appreciate guys who dance, but I don't have to do anything to fit in here."

Jenny and Meadow both said they appreciated the chance to get to know students working in other art disciplines. "They often come to see me dance, and we often go to the music concerts," says Jenny. It was exciting, she adds, to hear members of the camp's World Youth Symphony Orchestra tell about performing at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta.

On the last evening of camp, dancers join the music students for a concert under the stars at the Interlochen Bowl. While the stage is crammed with musicians, the dancers perform in front of the bandshell - and on the roof! The program traditionally concludes with Liszt's Les Preludes, a symbol of future artists, nurtured during an Interlochen summer.