Chautauqua movement: led for the past ten years by Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux and Patricia McBride, the summer program at Chautauqua provides up-to-the minute training in a genteel, nineteenth-century setting - Chautauqua Institution's performing arts and dance studies, Chautauqua, New York - includes related article on former New York City Ballet principal dancer Violette Verdy's classes for Chautauqua

Dance Magazine, Feb, 1994 by Nicole Dekle

For many vacationers, the Chautauqua Institution, in southwestern New York State, is a retreat where one may summer in tranquillity and languor, enjoying lakeside recreation and a full season of cultural activities. For the price of a gate ticket, almost all of the thousand or so events at seven theaters are free, and visitors are welcome to attend rehearsals and to look in on the classes at four professional arts schools.

Life in the arts schools themselves seems to go on at a more frenetic pace. At the dance school, people often appear to be racing against the clock. In a variations class that I observed during a visit last summer, former New York City Ballet principal Violette Verdy reminded students that it is important to learn choreography quickly, because "there is never enough time"; director Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux frequently sounded the note that "ballet dancers don't have much time, you know." Their awareness of time's passing informs, too, a special sense of its preciousness - for Bonnefoux and his faculty, good teaching seems to be at once about carefulness, patience, and urgency.

Bonnefoux danced with the Paris Opera Ballet for thirteen years and was a principal at NYCB for a decade before he retired in 1980 to teach. Patricia McBride, his wife, retired from NYCB in 1989 after thirty years with the company; she was, of course, one of the company's leading ballerinas, for whom Balanchine created nineteen ballets.

For the last eight years, McBride and Bonnefoux have directed the dance department at Indiana University, in Bloomington. Each June they and their two children relocate to Chautauqua, where they have a second home. Chautauqua has a tiny population, but in just ten years they have cultivated a vibrant audience for dance there, a development that still eludes them in Bloomington. Because the site is so remote, however, Bonnefoux's summer program remains one of the field's best-kept secrets. "Dancers know about it," says McBride, "but no one else does."

Many people who know of Chautauqua at all know of the institution's historical importance: In the late nineteenth century the Chautauqua Movement articulated a philosophy of self-improvement and lifelong learning that the times seemed hungry for. Women, especially, took advantage of the courses and lectures offered there. Small-scale "chautauquas" sprang up to accommodate the demand, and traveling chautauquas carried the ethos far afield.

These independent chautauquas vanished long ago, and the heyday of the original Chautauqua is also long gone. The lectures and courses and the recreation on Lake Chautauqua still draw a loyal community of summer vacationers, some of whom trace their family residences back seven generations. Nevertheless, the institution seems to yearn for its glory days in the last century. Instead of visiting another place this summer, visit another era," beckons last summer's brochure. A desire to preserve the past is surely one of the reasons that car traffic is discouraged on the enclosed property. As families walk or bike along streets lined with comfortable Victorian cottages, the America of the Gilded Age seems to live on. In this picturesque setting, Bonnefoux's dance program stands out for its innovation. Guest choreographers and teachers sometimes seem unprepared for what they find. New York City-based modem choreographer Peter Pucci was among those invited to set work on the Chautauqua Ballet Company last summer. Initially unsure of what to expect, he plans to return - as do many guests who have once been there, it seems: Lynne Taylor-Corbett also spent her first summer at Chautauqua in 1993; in 1994 she may lead its first choreographic workshop. As a teacher-director, Bonnefoux is at once gentle, authoritative, approachable, and demanding; he stewards his program with full confidence in the vitality of classical dance and a limitless belief in its capacity for new expression. In part because of his own optimism, Chautauqua impressed me with an overwhelming sense of promise: This promise is evident in the youngest students, eleven years old, who benefit from careful, rigorous training. It is also evident in the company dancers, nearly thirty professionals who travel there partly to work with both young and established choreographers. A summer at Chautuaqua is also an extraordinary opportunity to learn some of the ballets of George Balanchine under the expert, watchful, and caring coaching of McBride. These are not ballets that present classical dance as a precious artifact from a former time; nor do they present neoclassicism as a radical departure from the nineteenth-century tradition. They are, appropriately, ballets that invoke a vision of the old as nourishment for the new.

Bonnefoux and McBride could not have foreseen the current flowering of classical dance at Chautauqua when they first encountered the institution in 1974; their introduction to the place was inauspicious at best. The NYCB principals had been invited to perform an evening of dance at the Amphitheater, a century-old wooden structure that resembles a giant gazebo. On arriving at the open-air auditorium, they discovered that the wooden stage floor had been meticulously waxed in their honor. They discovered, too, that some viewers would be watching them from behind, in choir pews above the backstage wall. The seating arrangement was merely odd. The waxed floor was a menace, a dangerously slick surface for dancing on pointe. The pair considered canceling.