Dance Alloy recalls Kent state massacre - 25th anniversary of Kent, Ohio, killings during its military occupation

Dance Magazine, May, 1995 by Karen Dacko

KENT, Ohio--At the apex of the demonstrations against the Vietnam War during the late 1960s, college students nationwide protested violently against the draft and the Southeast Asian conflict. In 1970 President Richard Nixon's decision to escalate fighting into Cambodia incited several thousand people to riot on the campus of Kent State University. The resulting military occupation of Kent, Ohio, culminated on May 4, 1970, when National Guardsmen shot thirteen students, four of whom (Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer, and William Schroeder) died.

Marking the massacre's twenty-fifth anniversary this year, the university has expanded its annual commemorative service on May 3 by scheduling guest speakers and artistic presentations throughout the semester. The commemoration's organizers selected Mark Taylor, director of Dance Alloy in Pittsburgh, to conduct two ten-day residencies at Kent State in February and April and to produce a new piece about the massacre, slated to have its premiere on April 29 at the E. Turner Stump Theatre.

Working with the nine-member Kent Dance Ensemble, with university faculty, and with the Kent community, Taylor and the Alloy developed Witness a forty-minute collaborative work that unites movement and extemporaneous text with archival materials including faculty letters, student telegrams, and radio reports.

Preliminary movement workshops taught the dancers "how the body responds to rioting" and how "to explore inner emotional reactions," says Taylor. Other sessions encouraged participants to share their experiences. Combining these elements, Taylor translated eyewitness accounts and archival photos into broad movements, providing "a framework for the verbal presentations" onstage.

"The dance was structured around the stories that the witnesses told," says Taylor. "One woman remembered leaning over a dying student. His legs were weaving in a particular way. We used that movement," he says. Another witness, who was a teenager at the time of the massacre, recalled confronting a guardsman just a few years older than herself.

"There is an impassioned quality to the people who remember," says Taylor. Some view the incident as "unjustifiable." Others believe "that order should have been imposed." Assembling both viewpoints onstage, Taylor envisioned the forty-six witnesses "as meeting for worship."

"The memory of the four who were killed and the fact that they were killed by our government needs to be kept alive," he says. "This doesn't negate the validity of different points of view." Although the project was originally conceived to complete the healing process at the university and among alumni and townspeople, as well as to enlighten current students, Taylor says the work serves "to preserve the memory of events, [and] of the people."

Taylor perceived himself as a facilitator. The project, he says, used "my skills as a choreographer and a director. I worked as hard as I could, but tried not to get in the way of the material. I hope that the participants have the sense that they have made [the work] themselves."