America dancing.

This is the first of a three-part series on regional dance in America.

America was definitely not a nation of dancegoers in the 1930s. Ballet for most communities was either nonexistent or was represented by touring groups--mostly Colonel de Basil's Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, Ballet Russe, and, toward the end of the thirties, Ballet Caravan. (Ballet Theatre wouldn't begin touring until the forties.) On the dying vaudeville circuit were the Albertina Rasch dancers and the Christensen brothers. Perhaps a few communities happened to see the exotic Denishawn dancers before the company's 1931 demise. And, speaking of esoterica, in New York City and in Bennington, Vermont, during the summers there was developing a stubborn group of originals who persisted in something called modern dance.

At the time there were few, very few, companies outside of New York: the Ruth Page company in Chicago, the San Francisco Opera Ballet, and Catherine Littlefield's company in Philadelphia were perhaps the only three. Major teachers were just as few and far between: Mary Ann Wells in Seattle, Lillian Cushing in Denver, Edna McRae in Chicago. Edith James in Dallas, Juliette Mendez in Los Angeles and the Christensen family school in Salt Lake City were among the handful.

By the early 1950s things were beginning to improve. New York City was becoming a mecca for dance. Some of the itinerant Russians, a few Ballet Theatre (later American Ballet Theatre) alumni, and occasional veterans of England's Royal Ballet--mostly couples who decided to settle down and raise families--were opening schools in what some would consider unlikely communities. Cities such as Tulsa, Fort Worth, Tucson, Miami, Dayton, and Dallas began to offer first-rate training; but to the rest of our vast and beautiful country, ballet remained a rarity. Eventually, serious teachers throughout the country, increasingly aware of how artistically and geographically isolated they were, recognized that their dancers needed performing outlets. As audiences for dance grew in their communities, they began forming their own companies.

That was the situation when Dorothy Alexander, founder of the Atlanta Ballet, the first civic ballet company in the United States, found herself lunching at the Russian Tea Room with Anatole Chujoy, the eminent dance critic and editor. Chujoy had recently attended a festival of regional dance in Canada and suggested to Alexander that something similar could and should take place in the United States. Alexander may have been grass roots, but there was no grass growing under her feet! By 1956 she had organized the first regional dance festival, inviting eight companies to perform in Atlanta. The success of this first festival led to the founding the following year of the Southeast Regional Ballet Association.

In the audience at the 1956 festival was Alexi Ramov of the Scranton Ballet Guild. The festival so inspired Ramov that he proposed something similar to his friend Barbara Weisberger of the Wilkes-Barre Ballet Guild. Together they formed the Northeast Regional Ballet Association, launching it in tandem with festivals in their two home cities in May 1959. Following not far behind was the founding of the Southwestern Regional Ballet Association, inaugurated by a festival hosted by Barbara and David Carson of the Austin Ballet Society in April 1963. Three years later, in May 1966, the Pacific Regional Ballet Association came into being with a festival organized by Barbara and Deane Crockett of the Sacramento Ballet. Last to join the group was the Mid-States Region, its initial festival hosted by Tom Steinhoff of the Kansas City Ballet in 1972. These groups were incorporated in 1963 as a nonprofit organization, the National Association for Regional Ballet (NARB). In 1972 a National Endowment for the Arts grant underwrote for the opening of a New York office, under the leadership of executive director Doris Hering.

Hering is one of the prime movers of organized dance across this country. Surely without her indefatigable energy and inspired vision, the regional movement would not be considered, as Bella Lewitzky, recent recipient of the National Medal of Arts, wrote in The New York Times, one of the "two forces [that] helped to further the growth of American dance."

I met Doris Hering when she was, forcefully, lecturing about the spread of dance in the United States. I remember her brandishing a card file, packed with the names of budding companies across the country which she was in the process of helping to organize. I was a naive young dancer who knew nothing about the subject, but I did sense that I was in the presence of a "presence." One recognizes the hand of that presence in the "modest" goals of the National Association of Regional Ballet, as put forth in its 1970 brochure.

* To foster dance as an integral part of the cultural and educational life of more people in more communities.

* To encourage and improve regional dance performance and training throughout our country.

* To widen the horizons of young people and help them to discover, create, and think through dance and its related arts.

* To improve the status of the artist and help him gain public recognition.

From the very first, NARB was concerned with excellence on a national scale. All festivals, which, even today, continue to be annual events in every region, are "adjudicated." An outside dance authority visits each company and observes live performances of the various works being submitted for the festival. It is up to the adjudicator to choose which companies will perform in the festival gala, the concert which is open to the paying public, and which companies will perform solely for their peers.

In addition, there are hierarchical membership categories, always chosen by outside evaluators or by evaluative criteria agreed upon in advance by the members of each region. Thus a group may join the organization as either an Intern (i.e., nonperforming) Company or a Performing Member, eligible to dance either publicly or for NARB members only (as decided annually by that year's adjudicator). A company can become a Regional Honor Company (selected by the regional directors based on the number of galas in which the company has been invited to perform) and a Major Company (no more than ten are selected annually by a national committee). Proof of the growing excellence of regional dance came in 1972, when major companies from Atlanta, Dayton, and Sacramento were invited to perform at New York's Delacorte Theatre in Central Park.

In 1976 a professional wing of NARB was established. with criteria set for the number of dancers and staff, the budget, the number of performances in the home community, the length of contract, and wage scales. The roster of companies that came through this hierarchy reads like a history of dance in America. As Robert Jacobson wrote in the March 1980 Ballet News:

The Regional Movement has given dancers a newfound ability and has helped dance grow in communities everywhere. making it part of people's lives in places where not long ago it did not even exist . . . NARB has had an enormous impact on dance and its decentralization in this country, and certainly shoulders a great deal of the responsibility for the much talked about dance boom of the 1960s and 1970s.

Now, it is rare to find a professional company that does not number among its performers a goodly number of dancers who have grown up in the regional ballet movement.

As Hering wisely recognized, one of the impediments to the maturation of regional companies is the fact that? bereft of suitable repertoire, company directors find themselves becoming choreographers, whether they wish to be or not. This choreographic problem was first addressed in 1961 when Josephine Schwarz, director of the Dayton Ballet and a stalwart of the Northeast region, organized the first Craft of Choreography Conference. The NEA, goaded by Schwarz, was so impressed with the idea that it awarded grant money in 1967 so that five similar conferences could be held in all regions. The regional Craft of Choreography Conferences concentrated on teaching form, compositional devices, music, and various kinds of dance, in addition to classical ballet, and encouraged experimentation and daring. To this day. a Craft of Choreography Conference is held each summer with an ever-changing staff of choreographers. dance teachers, and musicians. Among the choreographic leaders of the conference have been Todd Bolender, Birgit Cullberg, Martha Hill, Pauline Koner, Bella Lewitzky, Fernand Nault, Glen Tetley, and Norbert Vesak.

In 1975, with the help of a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Choreography Plan was initiated. The plan maintained a list of the best dances from the festivals. chosen each year by a panel of experts. A member of the Association may request a work from the list and have the dance mounted on its performers, a service that was originally subsidized by NARB's national office and is currently a fraction of the actual cost. Initially the plan listed sixty-four dances by such choreographers as Robert Barnett, Loyce Houlton, Roman Jasinski, E. Virginia Williams, Pauline Koner, Myra Kinch, Charles Weidman, Weisberger, and Vesak.

Today there are 144 dances on the list, including the works of luminaries such as Jeraldyne Blunden, Jean-Paul Comelin, Richard Englund, Choo-San Goh, Jiri Kylian. Kevin McKenzie, George Skibine, and Michael Uthoff. (NARB also offered other sorts of help to company directors: a costume and scenery rental registry; a handbook outlining such practical matters as how to form a board; guidelines for hosting a festival: networking information; and the like.)

An extraordinary gala in 1977 brought the dance world together to honor and raise funds for regional dance. Hering and NARB member David Howard organized a program at the Barnard College Gymnasium which featured Gelsey Kirkland and Peter Martins performing Balanchine's Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux; Kirkland and Helgi Tomasson in the adagio from the Nutcracker Pas de Deux; Lise Houlton and Andrew Thompson in Loyce Houlton's Wingborne; the Pauline Koner Dance Consort; Lee Theodore's American Dance Machine in a work by Bob Fosse; Bart Cook and Starr Danias in Robert Weiss's Of Other Times; Helyn Douglas and George Montalbano in a new Douglas duet; and the Tulsa Ballet Theatre in Roman Jasinksi's A Polish Tribute. Clearly the dance world had begun to recognize NARB's contribution.

By its twenty-fifth anniversary in 1981, NARB listed a membership of one hundred companies which had presented ninety-one festivals. That year founder Dorothy Alexander was honored with the coveted Capezio Award. Later, in 1985, Doris Hering was to gain the same honor, followed two years later by the equally coveted Dance Magazine Award.

Nineteen eighty-three was a celebratory year for NARB, the year in which the one hundredth festival took place. hosted by the Mid-Hudson Ballet of Poughkeepsie, Estelle and Alfonso directors. (It was my great honor to be the adjudicator for that festival--certainly a razzle-dazzle affair.) By 1987, however, funding for service organizations was drying up and an atmosphere of retrenchment was spreading throughout all the arts. The NARB board felt compelled to close the national office. It was a sad day for regional dance; however, phoenixlike, there arose from the ashes a stubborn group of company directors across the country who refused to see the demise of all they had worked for. Each of the five regions reorganized itself and together founded Regional Dance America (RDA) in the image and shadow of NARB. Thus the work continues to thrive, although unfortunately without the benefit of a central office. With the recent demise of the Carlisle Project, RDA now offers the only choreographic training program in the nation that is unaffiliated with a school or university.

In both 1990 and 1994, RDA was invited to present programs to the illustrious worldwide audience at the Jackson International Ballet Competition. The programs brought further honor to what is considered to be "the foundation of the art of dance in the United States," to quote Don Anderson, an early directors of NEA's dance program

This year will see yet another landmark in this remarkable story. Regional Dance America will have its very first National Festival. In lieu of regional celebrations, all one hundred RDA member companies will come together in Houston (June 3-8) for five days of classes, performing. seminars. networking, and just plain fun. Literally thousands of youngsters will be there, dancing. Can you imagine the impact this gathering will have on, for example, a thirteen-year-old young man who perhaps has never encountered another lad who understands his drive and dream? As Clive Barnes put it, truly "The regional ballet movement is one of the most remarkable aspects of contemporary American dance."

Muriel Topaz, a senior editor of Dance Magazine, was director of the Dance Notation Bureau (1978-85) and of the Juilliard School Dance Division (1985-92).