Flying women.

FOUR FLYING WOMEN SIT ON FOLDING CHAIRS ON A PROSCENIUM STAGE IN AN AUDITORIUM OF THE SAN JOSE CONVENTION CENTER IN CALIFORNIA. ALL PRACTICED PROFESSIONAL performers. They are still uncomfortable since this is far from their regular performing environment. They are much more comfortable scaling tall buildings or flying on a low trapeze. They have never all appeared on the same stage before, yet they are roped together in a unique way, often sharing dancers, riggers, experience, resources, and a common heritage.

Sixty-eight-year-old Terry Sendgraff is often thought of as the matriarch of this airborne quartet. Raised in the Midwestern United States, she moved to Berkeley, California, in 1971. Sendgraff came out of a competitive gymnastics model, combining focus, strength, and flexibility. She was comfortable using apparatus such as trampoline and bars, but the existing benchmark forms were not enough for her. "I always pushed for something more," she said of her solo work and need to use space differently. But her workshops and teaching--and later, a performing company--required a larger view. Allowances had to be made for different bodies and personal styles besides her own; increasingly she moved into choreographed dance movement, but with aerial aspirations. Sendgraff is credited with being the inventor of the single-point (or motivity) trapeze, an apparatus that makes possible rotation as well as swinging while suspended. This device is now widely used by companies practicing circus arts, such as Make a Wish Circus; in aerial dancing, such as Orts Theater of Dance; and by dance companies whose members may have lower-body disabilities, such as AXIS Dance Company (see "AXIS: Dancing With and Without Wheels," page 58).

Sendgraff's Motivity Dance Company can be seen today at venues in the San Francisco Bay Area. But it is thirty years of teaching, inventing, and continuing to push back the frontiers of possibility for women dancers that are Sendgraff's greatest legacy. The other three women onstage have all danced with her at one time or another.

Joanna Haigood is an environmentalist. Her work with her twenty-two-year-old company, Zaccho Dance Theatre, focuses on what a new view of an architectural site can tell her audiences about its history and unique character. Of course, she and her dancers must discover all that first, making lengthy (sometimes years long) and elaborate arrangements for permits and variances to work in public places, working out sure safety requirements and procedures, and choreographing an enormous work of aerial dance art, often involving the commissioning of original music. Oh, and then there's fund-raising and audience building and maintaining a personal life as a wife and mother of a 2-year-old son.

"Did you become more afraid or safety conscious when you became a parent?" she was asked. "No," she explained levelly, explaining that confidence comes from the lengthy and detailed planning and methodically carried out safety procedures that her company has always required. That confidence provides the security to confront and overcome any fear of falling or failing, to release and surrender to the floating, flying feeling.

Haigood's work includes the memorable and never-to-be-repeated (according to city fathers) ballet, Noon, on the face of San Francisco's landmark Ferry Building clock tower. In each work she makes the site her partner. Her grant-supported, site-specific study of the immigrant experience included three sites: a towering grain silo in the Midwest, the Red Hook docks in Brooklyn, New York, and Fort Point, located just below the Golden Gate Bridge.

Like Haigood, Jo Kreiter has found herself drawn to create dances for hard-to-access venues such as abandoned industrial cranes, and rooftops and vertical walls of neighborhoods that incorporate her political statements. She holds a degree in political science and much of her work displays images of strong, independent women in control of their bodies. "It's about getting the strength to be articulate on the precipice," she says. "It takes courage to do work that has heart. We can make a dance or stage that's vertical, but it's still about choreography." As in modern dance, each company expresses the particular interest and soul of its founder.

The delicate-appearing Kreiter assures her listeners that women can develop the upper body and core strength that are required in off-the-ground work. She works out almost daily at the jungle gym in a park near her home to maintain her musculature. Kreiter has the distinction of being one of only a few women in history to master Chinese pole acrobatics.

Like Sendgraff, Kreiter is drawn to create unique apparatus, such as a giant merry-go-round-like wheel that is suspended in air for her work, Maybe Grief Is a Good Bird Flying Low (2001). Kreiter founded her apparatus-based dance company, Flyaway Productions, in 1995 while still working from time to time on projects presented by her three flying-woman colleagues.

Amelia Rudolph's Project Bandaloop is a company of nine dancers/climbers/adventurers plus a resident composer and musician, three riggers, and assorted other support staff. Perhaps the best known of the groups since being seen on the cover of Smithsonian Magazine, Rudolph's band of aerial artists nonetheless faces all the problems encountered by edgy companies: getting and keeping long-term funding; working with presenters who are not sure they can promote and draw a paying crowd for this kind of art; traversing miles and months of bureaucratic red tape for use permits; and insuring the health, safety, and reliability of cast and crew. "A million dollars of insurance always," assures Rudolph. (Like many other dance companies, Bandaloop had to cancel performances following the September 11 attacks.) Not the least of these challenges is maintaining artistic integrity and keeping the work fulfilling to its creators.

A trained ballet dancer since childhood, Rudolph also holds degrees in theology from Swarthmore College and from Pacific School of Religion Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. She is a skilled administrator with a down-to-earth, solution-oriented working style, but her work has a deeply spiritual component. You may have seen Project Bandaloop come off the Seattle Space Needle (1996 and 2000) or down Yosemite National Park's El Capitan (1997) and Houston's Industries Skyscraper, often to majestic original music. But Rudolph and her band just as often avoid public performance and go off a building or into the wilderness where there is no audience except the eagles that watch and soar with them.

And how do these flying women measure success? "We're still doing it," smiles Sendgraff.

References

TERRY SENDGRAFF, Motivity Dance Company 510/482-4729

JOANNA HAIGOOD, Zaccho Dance Theatre www.zaccho.org

JO KREITER, Flyaway Productions www.flyawayproductions.com

AMELIA RUDOLPH, Project Bandaloop www.newscience.com/bandaloop

Other Groups

ALBAN ELVED DANCE COMPANY www.albanelved.com

ANTIGRAVITY www.anti-gravity.com

AIR DANCE BERNASCONI [e-mail]

GREGANGELO & VELOCITY CIRCUS TROUPE www.gregangelo.com

Marcia Sanderson is a poet and writer. A portion of this article was presented at the annual Western Arts Alliance conference in San Jose, California, in September 2001.