Dancers in cap and gown: leading members of the American College Dance Festival Association in the southeast discuss the nature of multiculturalism, technique training, and the place of repertory in college dance programs.

WHAT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT ISSUE FACING UNIVERSITY DANCE PROGRAMS TODAY?

Nancy Smith Fichter: To make the curriculum relevant to the society in which a program is operating. This means that all of those "isms," such as multiculturalism, come into play. I would simply suggest that multiculturalism certainly does deal with different ethnicities, but that it also deals with the culture of technology, changing age, and changing demographics in ways other than just the ethnic component. The challenge is to deal with these issues, not in a trendy or token way, but in a way that will help the student advance in his or her mission while addressing an increasingly changing world.

Timothy Wilson: The word diversity is getting tossed around so much in our education today. I think you are correct that we are interpreting in terms of color, of ethnicity, and of token stabs at what we think is world dance. But diversity needs to be the very nature of the curriculum.

NSF: I think we are afraid that we will lose some of the things for which we fought so long, such as providing professional training in the classical forms. There is the danger of becoming trendy and dilettante so that the refining isn't happening.

Gretchen Warren: We have to remember that the majority of jobs out there are not in a bunch of peripheral ethnic dance forms. The majority of jobs still happen to be in classical ballet and in modern dance. Very few of our undergraduates come into college to get an intellectual understanding of the dance world. They come in because they like to dance, and they hope they are going to become dancers. For me, our biggest issue is changing the image of college dance as being outside the professional dance world. That just is not true anymore. The standards for the faculty in the last twenty years have gone way up. As the economic situation becomes worse, there are a lot of retiring dancers out there who want jobs, and the job market in academia is becoming a very desirable one. The standards for being hired are going up and up. Also, the standard of student ability is up because the magnet schools and high schools of performing arts are feeding better dancers into the college departments.

HOW ARE WE PREPARING OUR STUDENTS AND FOR WHAT ARE WE PREPARING THEM?

Patty Howell Phillips: Nancy, in your opening statements for the Southeast Regional American College Dance Festival, you talked about how, over twenty-one years of this organization, we have seen the line between the professional dancer and the university-trained dancer become less distinct--with more crossovers. That's a wonderful thing.

TW: One thing that's happening, particularly in modern dance, is that we seem to be one of the sole resources for learning contemporary dance. Students choosing careers in ballet have more alternatives, more places to learn.

GW: It is the same with choreography. Our primary mission, we hope, is to create new artists.

NSF: In making dances, as well as dancing, you are learning how to handle the materials. Specifically, concerning your question about preparing students, through the insistence on professional faculty, professional class situations, and circumstances that are every bit as intense and excellent as you would find in studio or conservatory.

Lynda Davis: Actually, those who leave to go to New York just don't get the kind of personal attention that they get in a university situation, where they have to be in class five days a week. And where their growth and development is monitored over a four-year period.

TW: Maybe one of the points that we want to make in response to this question is about making artists. That is the investment.

GW: I am not sure that you can make them, but you can nurture them. In the university setting you have a free theater, dancers, and the environment to support the blooming of talent, that you wouldn't have if you tried to scrape it all together. And you have faculty feedback.

NSF: You can teach how to handle materials and make dancers into artists. In terms of professional technique training, where else could you get two classes a day? When our dancers go to New York, they are lucky if they get one, because they are waiting tables and running across town.

GW: The problem, however, is that it's really hard to develop excellence in a dancer in a four-year period. It takes longer than that. I personally would love to see us go with a six-year program.

WHAT KINDS OF JOBS ARE THERE FOR GRADUATES OF OUR PROGRAMS? ARE WE

PREPARING PERFORMERS? TEACHERS?

TW: I don't know that it is realistic to say that we are meeting any demand in the job market. Or even that it should be our mission.

LD: Yes. What happens in those four years is only intended to be a foundation. Then there has to be a more specific apprenticeship. So we really are preparing them for professional work. We can't do it all.

NSF: Parents ask, What can we guarantee after four years? I say, "Nothing. If you choose to make your life in the arts there is no guarantee." Yet, we have an amazing track record--seventy-five percent vocationally in dance. They are also waiting tables; they are also doing other things. What you can guarantee is that they will get an excellent education, both professionally and as humanistically as possible.

TW: One thing that we can give them besides dance is a sense of self. They are investing their bodies and souls in this art, learning about who they are.

GW: I was thinking about that after I saw Schindler's List. My first thought was, "Thank God what I do for a living is to make art, because an artist who has that sense of self that you get from dancing and overcoming those little barriers every day, would be incapable of that kind of cruelty toward another person, because they feel so fulfilled as a person."

NSF: I can remember when there were a handful of people with college degrees in a professional company. Practically no one. Bella Lewitzky's company was an early example of a few people with early professional training in a university system. And now look at all of them.

PHP: When you look at the biographies in those concert programs, you see how many dancers have some sort of university experience.

TW: Contemporary choreography requires one to give so much more than the ability to dance. We surveyed dance companies and received that kind of response. They want someone with a university degree, someone capable of making decisions.

GW: You know that they will be physical survivors--there's nothing harder physically than getting a dance degree. It's four totally stress-filled years, of stretching to your absolute limit. If you can survive that, you can survive a company.

WHAT IS THE PLACE OF REPERTORY IN OUR PROGRAMS?

LD: This is the question that jumps out at me because there are so many layers of that whole process that are curcial to how you prepare the dancer to work with style and to work in various companies. Whether they are learning repertory from an old film, a recent video, Labanotation, from another dancer, or from the original choreographer, the links in that process are what encompass the whole business of becoming. I don't see a way to train a dancer without having that as an equal part of everything else they experience.

GW: The students from Florida State, following their Diversion of Angels open rehearsal, said a really beautiful thing: "After doing this work, it made the classroom work come alive. I understood what the emotional motivation behind every one of Graham's movements was as a result of doing this piece. So now when I do class, I've got all these little stories going on for every movement."

TW: Use of repertory serves as a salute to the legacy of dance. It indicates a particular point in time and one has to lock into that point. That is living dance history.

PHP: This paying attention to details also relates to the advantage of teaching in the university, as opposed to the open studio class, where a teacher can become divided about his or her mission. In order to keep the students happy and coming back, one sometimes resists "nailing" the student, which effective teaching sometimes demands.

GW: You can teach as you believe on a consistent daily basis. When I taught in New York, I never knew who would walk into my class. It takes me six months with incoming freshmen to know where to go with them--to know their bodies and moods enough to really, really teach them.

THE MAJORITY OF STUDENTS IN COLLEGE DANCE PROGRAMS ARE WOMEN. WHAT IS THE

PLACE OF YOUNG MEN IN OUR PROGRAMS?

GW: Recruiting men is terribly hard. I think it has to do with the job market. Men take the ability to support a family seriously. The young people who go to state universities now are very focused on getting a job. It's not as difficult in musical theater. I am always amazed at the number of men in musical theater.

TW: You also find that the number of men is greater at the graduate level. Commitment is greater there, and perhaps at that level a man can be more an individualist and is more mature.

It's tough. There is a perception about dance, which begins historically in the ballet world, that it is a feminine art form. We have to deal with that. When I teach boys in elementary school, I deal with a very physical approach to dance, and they go for it. They enjoy it, and it is challenging and fun. The creative aspect of choreography becomes a delightful thing because you don't try to find vocabulary for it. It is all about discovery, about play. This nurtures boys in a different way, so that it is not so much what we do but how we open doors.

GW: If we get boys when they are young enough, it works. The problem is that dance isn't in the school system like playing a musical instrument or drama and art. We have a long way to go.

PHP: On the issue of men in dance, I have found it interesting to see how the American College Dance Festival has helped improve the image of men in dance. Some of the material that is being danced there has the athleticism that is very appealing to the men who come to see the festival. Festivals are times to provide positive role models through male teachers as well as other male performers.

HOW ABOUT DEPARTMENT BUDGETS: HOW ARE WE SURVIVING?

GW: There was a time, during the sixties and seventies, when universities were putting in new colleges of fine arts and building really nice theaters, with rather well-funded departments. What we have seen in Florida are terrible budget cuts. We are depending more on raising our own money through private donors.

TW: Because of budget cuts, dance is being married to other departments, such as theater.

NSF: There are a lot of retrenchment strategies. One major eastern university dance department has been told that any production expense must come totally from funding on its own. It is in the production areas that administration thinks support should be cut. They don't realize that this is intimately related to curriculum and learning.

TW: The fact that we are being funded to teach, not to perform, is where the problem lies. Performance is what we are about, and students must be involved in performing in order to learn the craft of the art form.

NSF: These cuts, without additional funding, would put us back to the way it used to be in university: teaching people about dance, not actually doing it.