Cross-Pollination

33 Artists From Around The Globe Plus Tributes To Modern Masters Lar Lubovitch, Marilyn Wood, and Remy Charlip

The American Dance Guild’s annual performance festival offers a unique view of the rich diversity of contemporary modern dance. On November 8-10, 2013, we celebrated three highly distinguished leaders of modern dance: Remy Charlip, Lar Lubovitch and Marilyn Wood. Performances were held at the 92nd Street Y, in New York City, the original home of the American Dance Guild from its inception in 1956 as the Dance Teachers’ Guild.

The rich diversity of contemporary dance was on view with the return of the American Dance Guild’s annual Performance Festival, November 8-10, 2013 at the 92nd Street Y. Thirty-three artists/companies participated, with special tributes to modern dance luminaries Lar Lubovitch, Marilyn Wood, and the late Remy Charlip.

“It’s a kind of homecoming,” said Gloria McLean, President of the American Dance Guild. “The histories of the Guild and 92nd Street Y have been intertwined since the fifties when Lucile Nathanson, then head of the dance program, began holding conferences that sparked the formation of the Guild in 1956. Current director John-Mario Sevilla invited this co-production within his Dig Dance: Weekend Series to mark our shared legacies. We’ve named this year’s Festival ‘Cross-Pollination’ as a means to underscore that connection.”

The program featured:

• Lar Lubovitch, award-winning NY-based choreographer whose internationally acclaimed company celebrates its 45th anniversary at the Joyce in October, will offer work from the current repertory (tba) (Friday & Saturday).

• Marilyn Wood, Director of the International Center for Celebration, returns to New York from her home in Santa Fe, to offer a reflection through images and text of her “Celebration Art.” Ms. Wood will share her unique legacy of transforming urban spaces into sites of collaborative community inter-arts performance festival events, inspiring artists and communities around the world, from the Seagram’s building in NYC to the Adelaide Opera House. (Saturday and Sunday matinee).

• Remy Charlip, the inimitable dancer, artist, author, inventor of Air Mail Dances, who died in 2012, will be represented through four short works, including Ten Imaginary Dances (performed by David Vaughn), Falling Dance(made from Remy’s drawings interpreted by Aileen Passloff, danced by Arthur Aviles), Supreme Court, (duet for Lance Westergard and Patrick Scully), andTwelve Contra Dances (danced by soloists of H.T. Chen & Dancers) (see schedule).

• In addition, a rare performance by soloist Margaret Beals; Anna Sokolow’s “Kaddish” danced by Deborah Zall; works by Isadora Duncan, presented byCatherine Gallant and by Jeanne Bresciani; reconstruction of Martha Graham’s “Imperial Gesture” by Graham dancer Kim Jones.

In all, thirty-three choreographers, including Maya Dance Theatre from Singapore, Bill Evans, Tina Croll, Nai-Ni Chen Dance Company, and many more — from emerging to mid-career –will present their work, reflecting the American Dance Guild’s unique position as both a promoter of the new and preserver of the living history of modern dance as an art form.

Each evening in the lobby, videos of works by the featured guest artists were shown. On Friday, November 8th, there was a special presentation by CELIA IPIOTIS, Executive Director and creator of Eye on Dance, featuring a conversation with Remy Charlip. Celia returned on Sunday evening to present an archival interview with Anna Sokolow and Sophie Maslow.

Complete Festival Program 

FRIDAY, November 8, 2013 at 8pm: Lar Lubovitch, Remy Charlip/David Vaughan, Remy Charlip/H.T. Chen & Dancers, Margaret Beals, Susan Bernhard, Nai-Ni Chen Dance Company, Isadora Duncan/Catherine Gallant, Martha Graham/Kim Jones, Yuki Hasegawa

7:30 EYE ON DANCE in the lobby, video of guest artists hosted by Celia Ipiotis.

SATURDAY, November 9, 2013 at 8pm: Lar Lubovitch, Marilyn Wood, Remy Charlip/Scully/Westergard, Yung-Li Chen, Bill Evans, Adriane Fang, Maya Dance Theatre, Mary Seidman, Nancy Zendora

SUNDAY, November 10, 2013 at 3pm: Remy Charlip/Aileen Passloff/Arthur Aviles, Marilyn Wood, Michael Cerwinski, Kate Davis, Kaoru Ikeda, Belinda McGuire, Gloria McLean, Rebecca Rice, Maxine Steinman, Keith Thompson

SUNDAY, November 10, 2013 at 5pm: EYE ON DANCE (video of Anna Sokolow & Sophie Maslow hosted by Celia Ipiotis), Remy Charlip/Scully/Westergard, Isadora Duncan/Jeanne Bresciani, Anna Sokolow/Deborah Zall, Jean Churchill, Tina Croll, Teresa Fellion, Elizabeth Shea, Jenny Showalter, Sasha Spielvogel

About the Guest Artists

Lar Lubovitch, one of America’s most versatile, and popular choreographers, founded the Lar Lubovitch Dance Company in NYC 45 years ago.  Since then, it has gained an international reputation as one of America’s top dance companies.  His dances are also performed by major companies throughout the world. His Othello – A Dance in Three Acts, originally created for American Ballet Theatre, appeared on PBS’s “Great Performances” (and was nominated for an Emmy Award).  His dances on film also includeFandango (International Emmy Award) and My Funny Valentine for the Robert Altman film The Company (nominated for an American Choreography Award).  Lubovitch has also made a notable contribution to choreography in the field of ice-dancing, having created dances for Olympic skaters John Curry, Dorothy Hamill, Peggy Fleming, Brian Orser, JoJo Starbuck and Paul Wylie, as well as two ice-dance specials for television: The Sleeping Beauty (PBS) and The Planets (A&E) (nominated for an International Emmy Award, a Cable Ace Award and a Grammy Award).  His work on Broadway includes Into the Woods (Tony Award nomination), The Red Shoes (Astaire Award) and the Tony Award-winning revival of The King and I.  In 2007, he founded the Chicago Dancing Festival with co-Artistic Director, Jay Franke.  The festival is a series of performances by major American dance companies that takes place the last week of August at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Harris Theater, the Auditorium Theatre, and Chicago’s Millennium Park.  The Chicago Dancing Festival reaches over 15,000 audience members annually and is completely free to the public.  In 2007, Lubovitch was named “Chicagoan of the Year” by the Chicago Tribune, and in 2008, Lubovitch and Franke were named byChicago Magazine as “Chicagoans of the Year” for having created the Chicago Dancing Festival.  In 2011, Lubovitch was named a Ford Fellow by United States Artists, and he received the Dance/USA Honors, the dance field’s highest award.  The choreography for Lubovitch’s dance, Crisis Variations, was awarded the 2012 Prix Benois de la Danse for Choreography at Bolshoi Theater in Moscow.

Marilyn Wood – (Dancer, Choreographer, Honorary AIA). She developed as a professional dancer in two companies, first with Alwin Nikolais (1952-57) and then Merce Cunningham (1958-63). Based on her love of the public processionals, rituals and festivals from growing up in the Latin culture of Puerto Rico, Marilyn was inspired to leave the proscenium to explore her vision of reinventing this ancient art which engages the whole community through collaboration and participation. She created her own dance company, Marilyn Wood and the Celebration Group, of dancers as well as artists, inventing new forms to match the scale and use new technologies to frame her choreography into public spaces in the heart of the community — free, visible and accessible to all. Their early venues included a five day series of events on the Lincoln Center Plaza, the entire lobby of Grand Central Station and dancers on a tugboat in New York Harbor. Her breakthrough event was launched in 1972 by “Celebrations in City Place: The Seagram Building and Its Plaza” on Park Avenue where performers used all 38 stories of this iconic Mies van der Rohe building and the expansive “found stage” of its plaza.  Commissions for City Celebrations followed from Cincinnati, Columbus, Kansas City, Little Rock, Tulsa, Cambridge and more.  In 1976, she was invited to Adelaide, Australia to create three weeks of public performance events around the city leading up to her Opening of its bi-annual “International Festival of the Arts.” This shift to a global context led to the founding of the International Center for Celebration (ICC), a network of international artists who were inspired by her work to develop innovative art forms expanded for creating a site-specific theater in her large-scale public venues. Her work with local dance companies and her artists’ collaborations with local talents and resources in each residency focused each Celebration project to reflect the unique culture, environment and theme of each community. This process evolved into a legacy of events in such major cities as Hong Kong, Singapore, Teheran, West Berlin, Edmonton and Rio de Janeiro and many more. Marilyn Wood and the International Center for Celebration now operate out of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Remy Charlip (1929-2012) was a dancer, choreographer, designer, writer, actor, artist, and teacher. He studied art at Straubenmuller Textile High School in New York and fine arts at The Cooper Union, graduating in 1949. He studied dance at the New Dance Group Studio and at the Juilliard School with Tudor and Craske. He was a founding member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, performing as well as designing costumes and posters. He also danced with Charles Weidman, Jean Erdman, and Donald McKayle. In 1958 he co-founded the Paper Bag Players, a children’s theatre in New York. From 1964-70 he worked as choreographer, designer, performer, and director with the Judson Dance Theater. Off-Broadway, he was the Stage Director of a 1962 production of Bertolt Brecht‘s Man Is Man for Julian Beck‘s Living Theatre, for which he received his first of two Obie Awards and the second in 1966 for directing A Beautiful Day, at the Judson Poets Theater, NYC.  He illustrated and wrote more than two-dozen books, garnering three New York Times Best Illustrated Books awards and a first prize for illustration at the Bologna Book Fair, and was awarded a six-month residency in Kyoto, Japan from the Japan/U.S. Commission on the Arts.  Charlip was the model for illustrations of Georges Méliès in the book The Invention of Hugo Cabret, written and illustrated by Brian Selznick.  He wrote and directed two plays, Biography (1970) and Secrets (1971), as director of the National Theater of the Deaf. He made more than 200 dances, for his own company (founded in 1977) or for others, including London Contemporary Dance Theatre, the Joffrey Ballet and the Oakland Ballet. His choreography showed a rhythmic sophistication and a highly developed sense of fun, and sign language was frequently incorporated into his physical language. In 1972, he initiated his ‘air mail dances’, a series in which he sent out sketches of positions in the dance and asked contributors to link them together in whatever way they wished.  These dances, some of them performed by up to 250 people, have been staged in Europe, S. America, Australia, and U.S. He was asked to participate in Spring Dance Courses, Choreographer Theatre, at the New School for Social Research from 1967-1969. Concurrently, he became Head of the Children’s

Literature and Theatre Department at Sarah Lawrence College, where he taught a Workshop in Making Things Up.  Charlip went on to become a Joseph E. Levine Fellow at Yale University, a Hadley Fellow at Bennington College, a Visiting Artist Resident at Harvard University, and John Adams Distinguished Visiting Professor at Hofstra University.  Additional academic opportunities presented themselves as a Regents Lecturer at the University of California, Santa Barbara and The San Francisco School District Arts Education Project.