Dan Wagoner: a homecoming.

How complicated is the idea of "home," with its many colorings and nuances. Home is where one is born; home is the space one chooses to live in as an adult; home is the figurative base where one belongs. For Dan Wagoner, these various constructs of the term have formed the center of his career in dance: subject and outline, body and mindset.

Born in West Virginia and raised in the rural Appalachian Mountains, Wagoner came to New York in the late 1950s, following the pattern for modern dancers similar to that established by Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, and the generations that followed. First he became a performer with Graham, then with Merce Cunningham and Paul Taylor (the last for eight years). In 1969 he established a company of his own, Dan Wagoner and Dancers. The company lasted for nearly twenty-five years before it closed, a victim of the economic malaise of the 1990s that affected dance in the United States.

Wagoner, thinking in terms of the past, thought that his company would continue forever: "I kept the company going for almost twenty-five years. I closed the studio at the end of September 1992. The NEA and NYSCA grants were cut way back, and the economy meant there were very few bookings. I had come out of the time and the tradition of having your own time and space as Martha, Paul, and Merce had. I didn't try to cut back, to rent space by the hour. It seemed so difficult at the time. That summer was also my sixtieth birthday.

"There were deep anger and disappointment that I couldn't have it my own way. I was the youngest of ten children, and I was used to having my own way. Since these losses for me, a lot of my work has been teaching. I love dance. When people who are dancers come into a room, I'm very touched by that. I try to be as excited about the possibility of teaching something of technique or helping them make a new phrase of choreography or taking them new places."

In the past three years Wagoner has found that the dance world can furnish a roof as secure as that of his own studio, only on different turf. Since 1992 he has been in enormous demand as a teacher; his 1994--95 residencies include University of California at Los Angeles, Connecticut College, and Harvard Summer Dance Center. He spent part of the 1993 fall term at London School of Contemporary Dance, where he set a work on twelve student dancers. The work later won an award.

"Making the work is the first priority for me," he says. "It's the ultimate to being in this field. Dealing with the ideas, the movement problems. It's always frightening, because you're going somewhere you've never been before. At the same time, it's the most challenging, the most thrilling, the most rewarding. So it's been very difficult for me. To do the work I need people who can train with me, learn my repertory. There's a continuity. My work has a point of view. It takes time to learn to do it. I've learned that I can make a dance with people I meet for the first time, but it's much harder."

Judy Mitoma, head of the dance department at UCLA, believes that Wagoner is so potent a teacher because he can "speak to the very young person entering the field for the first time as well as the more experienced person." Wagoner spent the 1994 fall term in Los Angeles, his third teaching residency at the dance department of UCLA.

When Wagoner ran his own troupe, he filled its repertoire with works that reminded him and his viewers of the life he had known as a boy: Dan's Run Penny Supper (1969), A Dance for Grace and Elwood (1976), and 'Round This World, Baby Mine' (1983), among them. In 1975 he choreographed George's House, a video dance piece for WGBH-TV, Boston's public television channel. Filmed in and around an eighteenth-century cabin in New Hampshire then owned by George Montgomery, his friend and collaborator of thirty-four years, this most evocative of Wagoner's works is set to a sound score of bittersweet American hymns and folk songs.

"No one piece characterizes the dances I have made," he says. "I followed my instincts. I was very naive. There is a native, rural Americana feel about my early pieces. I often used country music or bluegrass."

Birds Fly and Life Runs OUt (1992), the work he made on the students at London School of Contemporary Dance, has music by American composers as varied as Lou Harrison and Leadbelly, as if to prove that memories of home have not diminshed with the passing of years. The title of the work comes from a poem by Montgomery. "What I love about Dan is his love of the land. He constantly supports where he came from," says Lan-Lan Wang, director of the dance department at Connecticut College, where Wagoner will be teaching for the spring term of 1995.

Wagoner literally and metaphorically continues to return to his roots. The house he owns in Romney, West Virginia, has stood since 1789, a date he's sure of because it is carved into the stone gable. The house is large, with ten rooms and nine fireplaces, essential for heating and even for cooking, although Wagoner has installed a small propane gas stove. The house had been owned by a man named Joe Andy Pancake, but it was uninhabited and neglected when Wagoner found it. On his first visit he saw a trumpet vine with orange blossoms growing upstairs on the bedroom floor. "It looked like a sculpture," Wagoner recalls.

Since 1978, when Wagoner bought the house, vacation periods have started with the drive south to Romney in his pickup truck. The journey is both a trip home and a trip back to his childhood in West Virginia. Last summer, working with Montgomery and members of his family who live nearby, Wagoner restored a 10-by-46-foot porch. "I'm interested in the processes. I've tried to rebuild, restore, even reweave the fabrics I've collected, early coverlets, pieces of chintz and toile, bits and pieces," he says. He has collected early American antiques for many years, "folk art and American country things, what farmhouses would have had," he says. He keeps some of his collection in Romney and the rest in the New York City loft he shares with Montgomery.

The image of Wagoner as a country boy has stuck, but he began to find something else near the end of his tenure with his company. To Comfort Ghosts (1988), set to Shostakovich's Fifteenth String Quartet, opus 144, in E-flat Minor, received considerable critical acclaim at the time. Unlike the country dances with their perky music and reminders of contradance forms, it is somber in mood. The eight performers are silhouetted against a dark background as they enter in a friezelike formation. There are suggestions of anguish, a passage where an outcast tries to find a place among the crowd, times when one person tries to help another. Typical viewer reactions were "His work is a dance poem ... seemingly private and yet able to unlock a universe of shared emotion ... It is a major work." Says Wagoner, "I was getting older. There had been an accumulation of losses."

Wagoner made a piece entitled White Heat for London Contemporary Dance Company, a company he directed for the 1989--90 season, before he made the decision to return full-time to his troupe in New York. He considers White Heat, which is set to Bela Bartok's Fourth String Quartet, his breakthrough. "There's a depth or gravity that has come into the work, or so people tell me," Wagoner says. Stop for Tea and Gas (1994), set to the score and text for Hydrogen Jukebox by Philip Glass and Allen Ginsberg, brought the student concerts at UCLA, according to Judy Mitoma, to "a new level of technical content and professional skill. He left a remarkable impression on the entire department."

The paradox for Wagoner is that he is making work to a new purpose without a company of his own. Yet his choreography, whether on student dancers or not, continues to grow and change.

Wang thinks that Wagoner's best work is yet to come. She has opened negotiations at Connecticut College to establish a home for a professional company for Wagoner. "Dance education has merged with the professional world," she notes. "We would like to house a professional company here, headed by Dan, to provide an example for our students. Dan has been unique in the dance world in his associations with Graham, Cunningham, and Taylor. He began his professional associations at Connecticut College at the American Dance Festival (ADF). He was in the original cast of Paul Taylor's Aureole, which had its premiere here. Because of his deep roots in its history, Dan symbolizes twentieth-century dance development in this country." Another possibility under discussion is a studio professorship at UCLA that would allow Wagoner to pursue professional assignments between his teaching stints at UCLA.

One of Wagoner's earliest memories prefigured his calling as a choreographer. He was born in 1932, in the little village of Springfield, West Virginia, which had a population of about 150. "When I grew up we had a radio. There was no movie house. There was a general store that sold overalls and boots along with the vegetables, butter, and milk."

He still recalls the time he discovered the impact of theater. "The grade school had an auditorium with a little stage at the end and a curtain that you pulled and closed," Wagoner says. "I stood on the stage and someone opened and closed the curtain. I remember how thrilled I was. Space does that for me." He also remembers riding with his older siblings to the high school in Romney where they were decorating the gymnasium for a dance. "I can still remember that I was almost trembling with excitement. It was the space."

While at West Virginia University in Morgantown, he discovered modern dance. "I saw a performance by Orchesis, the college dance society. It excited me so much that I started going to classes. They took me in right away. They were desperate for men everywhere in dance. I had done a lot of social dancing, but had no technique. I started choreographing right away."

Wagoner also read about dance and tried to "figure it out" from books. He had never seen a professional company until a professor took him to Pittsburgh to see a performance by Sadler's Wells Ballet and another by a company directed by Agnes de Mille.

After graduating from college with a B.S. in Pharmacy and an ROTC commission, Wagoner joined the army as a second lieutenant in the medical corps, stationed at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C. He studied at Ethel Butler's studio on his days off. He began rehearsing with her small company, met some of her friends, including Louis Horst, and heard first-hand stories about Graham. After his tour of duty, he received a scholarship to the ADF in Connecticut in 1956. Doris Humphrey chose him for her production of Song of the West. He also danced with Jose Limon and took classes with Graham.

"After class one day," he says, "Martha came up to me and took hold of my waist. She told me I needed to lengthen up through the middle and get more articulation through the center. Then she said, 'But you'll do.' Of course, it was quite wonderful to me, to have the benediction from her to dance." He began studying at Graham's school in December and was invited into her company the following August. After dancing for her from 1958 to 1962, Wagoner also performed with Cunningham (1959--60) and Taylor (1960--68). He danced one more season with Graham in 1968 but had to leave for a tour with the Taylor company.

"I had to make a choice," he says. "It was very difficult to tell Martha, and she was very angry with me. In those days if someone asked you to dance with them you didn't discuss finances at all. You made an aesthetic choice on whether you wanted to do the work. You'd find out later if there was money."

During his early years in New York, Wagoner worked in a pharmacy to pay the rent. "New York was a wonderful, nurturing place when I went there in the late 1950s. I met so many exciting, interesting people. It opened up the whole world of poetry, playwriting, music, dance. I knew it was exactly what I wanted. It was like crossing a threshold, finding the key to things for me."

Wagoner also found friends. Jennifer Tipton, the lighting designer, met Wagoner his first summer at ADF. "Dan introduced me to Paul Taylor," she says. "I became stage manager for the Taylor company, then lighting designer. I became lighting designer for Dan when he began making his own work. I've been a friend of his ever since.

"For me, what is so extraordinary about Dan is the complexity of his form and the simplicity of his story. He digs in very deep. The structure of the pieces becomes very moving to me, and sometimes about the simplest, most homey subjects. I consider him one of the supreme artists in the dance world, one of the most creative artists I have known, and I have known many."

Wagoner talks as he teaches class, about what he learned from Graham, Taylor, and Cunningham. He dances as he speaks, becoming breathless, but never stopping the stream of firsthand recollections. During one class at Harvard last summer, he gave the students a special charge: "Learn to stay alive in your body, even when five hundred people are watching, the lights are in your eyes, and you are dressed in some impossible costume."

One wonders what image Wagoner had in mind. Was it a night onstage in Graham's Clytemnestra, or the first performance of Acrobats of God in 1960, or Episodes onstage with New York City Ballet at City Center in 1959? Or perhaps he was remembering the premieres of Taylor's Junction or Scudorama, or one of the many works he choreographed and performed with his own company many years ago.

The information that Wagoner is transmitting to the next generation of dancers is straight from the bloodline of American modern dance, one more record of a century of remarkable progress.