Rosalie Jones: guiding light of Daystar - Native American choreographer

Dance Magazine, August, 1998 by Gordon L. Magill

Many of the themes in Jones's works, although archetypal or universal in nature, are centered upon the traditional stories of women not of this world who come to teach and bestow a gift upon humanity. The Corn Mother, for example, combines ballet and modern dance to tell the Eastern Cherokee legend of how corn came to native peoples. The Spirit Woman is a Woodland Indian legend about the origin of the seasons. Other dance-dramas tell of woman's struggle with her primal, often tragic role in Native American cosmology or the history of the Americas. The Woman Who Fell from the Sky is an Iroquois creation myth of a beautiful birdlike creature who comes from the heavens to give birth to sacred twin boys who create play, then war, and discover death and its horror. In The Legend of the Black Butterfly, an earthly woman of California's Maidu people finds and loses a glittering treasure in the Valley of the Butterflies.

Jones was born on the Blackfeet Reservation in western Montana in 1941. Her mother was of Blackfeet and Pembina Chippewa parentage, her father of Welsh descent. What she calls "an incredible drive to get out of poverty" led the family to leave the reservation, settling in the small town of Cut Bank, just over the eastern border of the reservation. Convinced that an education in the arts was a key to this better life, her mother managed to provide Jones with piano lessons at age six, as well as art and dance instruction. Jones showed talent as a pianist, and after high school she majored in piano at Fort Wright College in Spokane, Washington. A graduate program in concert piano lay ahead at Boston University, but one class in modern dance at Fort Wright changed her life.

"I felt that I was actually creating myself," says Jones, "forming myself into a dancer, physically, mentally, spiritually, psychologically--the whole thing. It was a total transformation! And I became a different person." She took a summer course in modern dance with Hanya Holm at Colorado College: "Another revelation! Dancing every day from nine in the morning to four in the afternoon... total ecstasy as well as pain, because it was the first time I'd ever danced barefooted."

She enrolled at the University of Utah, eventually earning a master's in dance and studying for three years under Joan Woodbury and Shirley Ririe. The research for her thesis on the Medicine Lodge Ceremony, or Sun Dance, took Jones back to the Blackfeet Reservation. Observing the ceremony reconnected her with her roots, she recalls: "It was my first attempt, for my graduate production, to translate traditional Native American culture, dance, and music into a modern theatrical idiom ... the beginning of my future work."

Immediately after graduation, Jones got a call from the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe. They needed a choreographer to take thirty students from Santa Fe to Washington, D.C., for original Native American dance-dramas to be staged with traditional and modern techniques at the Carter Barron Amphitheater under director Rolland Mienholtz. The cast grew to three hundred, representing many tribes, including Seminoles, Tlingits, Haidas, Dakotas, and Cherokees. Jones choreographed the modern sections. A special performance was presented for presidential cabinet members.