A matter of tradition - dance theater tradition - Column

Dance Magazine, Feb, 1995 by Clive Barnes

Yes, indeed, as John Donne pointed out, "Any man's death diminishes me," but in the tiny world of theatrical dance, we are diminished more than might seem fair.

The world itself is so recently formulated and its underpinnings still so fragile. New? Recent? I can hear you snorting from here: "But dance is as old as drumbeat and 'half as old as time.'" Yes, but no. Anthropologically, of course, this is true, and one can actually trace certain ethnic dances, such as the Greek balob, at least through three millenia. but theatrical dance is another matter.

However far we try to trace classical ballet we can, I think, go back no further than 1489 in Tortona, Italy, or more familiarly and probably more accurately, to Catherine de Medicis's Ballet Comique de la Reine in 1581. As for modern dance, where can we start here? Let's try Isadora Duncan's London recitals in 1897. as good a point as any, and a reminder that American modern dance might soon be enjoying its centennial.

Also, theater dance as we know it today still lacks, unlike music, universally understood notation. Admittedly, dance notation exists, and unquestionably both Labanotation and the more recent Benesh notation have proved useful, particularly when supplemented by video records, in preserving and sustaining choreography, the very fabric of the art. Yet for the maintenance of its living traditions, we still need the testimonies of the past choreography, even styles of dancing, passed down through kinetic memory from one generation of dancer to the next.

Recently, within a month, three exceptional dancers, three priceless memories, have died: seventy-four-year-old Pearl Primus, seventy-seven-year-old Michael Somes, and eighty-five-year-old Erick Hawkins. And the dance world is diminished, sorely diminished, by these irreplaceable losses, three major sensibilities that no longer feed and fuel our communal practice and awareness of the art of dance.

The Trinidad-born Primus was, of course, as much a scholar as a dancer and, perhaps even more than Katherine Dunham whose career ran to some extent strangely parallel, it is for her work as an anthropologist that she will be largely remembered. However, from the early 1940s. even in advance of her first visit to Africa in 1948, Primus was producing dances in a traditional African style. Even so, ever since her stage debut in 1943, when she included her fantastic solo Strange Fruit, based on the Langston Hughes poem of a Southern lynching, her work went far beyond the academic.

She and her husband, the late Percival Borde, taught widely, and for a time Primus had her own company, but today little, I suspect, is left except perhaps some fragments still in the repertory, or at least the memory bank, of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Company which, like the American Dance Festival, acclaimed her as among the founders of the black tradition in American dance. And whatever happens to her individual dances, there will always remain her inspiration, and the living legacy of her remembered presence.

For Erick Hawkins a different future awaits. As a modem dance pioneer (a dancer who, together with Charles Weidman and Jose Limon, was one of the first notable males in the field since Papa Ted Shawn) he translated a personal philosophy into bonding, bulging curves and sloping, arclike spurts of movement, and all to live, largely commissioned, music, the first phase of his long career is over. But no one present at the memorial service held for him at the Joyce Theater on December 5, 1994, could doubt that both his company and his work would be carried on by his former collaborators, including, of course, his wife, composer Lucia Dlugoszewski.

The inspiration of Hawkins, like that of Primus, can still bum bright, but the real preservation of his work, the actual Hawkins tradition, will depend upon the skill, perseverance, and acumen (a huge word, involving here such difficulties, among others, as fund-raising and maintaining the interest and awareness of dancers) of his successors. It can be done. Witness the living legacies of Ailey and Limon. But it needs, above, below, and beyond everything else, the muscle memory of dancers to retain the dance on the stage.

Michael Somes provided just such a muscle memory. He was the first important British male classic dancer apart from Anton Dolin, Harold Turner, and Frederic Franklin, yet people forgot how good he was. At his peak Somes could be compared with Andre Eglevsky and Igor Youskevitch. He later became the guardian at the Royal Ballet of the Ashton repertory. He had the steps, he had the style, he had the inspiration. He was the embodiment of a dance tradition.

He retired from dancing gradually. He was Margot Fonteyn's partner from 1949 until 1961. and after leaving the major classic roles he continued to appear in the mime parts until the mid-1980s. From 1963 until 1970 he was an assistant director of the Royal Ballet during Ashton's directorship. He was a good teacher and a great coach, doing much to polish the famous partnership between Antoinette Sibley and Anthony Dowell. And for years he had a particular responsibility for the Ashton repertory, which he staged all over the world, including works for Joffrey Ballet and, a couple of seasons ago, a brilliant restaging of Symphonic Variations for American Ballet Theatre.