Philadanco: silver anniversary for 'danco.' (Philadelphia Dance Company)

PHILADELPHIA'S AFRICAN AMERICAN DANCE COMPANY CELEBRATES TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OF ACHIEVEMENT WITH THIS MONTH'S NEW YORK CITY VISIT.

The country's most renowned African American repertoire dance companies are Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Dance Theatre of Harlem, Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, and Philadelphia Dance Company (Philadanco). Of the four, Philadanco (or "Danco," as it is affectionately called) has the distinction of being deficit-free.

That's a remarkable achievement in a city whose resident classical company, Pennsylvania Ballet, has several times faced extinction, but it is by no means the core of Philadanco's uniqueness. Nor is this the reason why it can be counted on to fill New York City's Joyce Theater for the week beginning June 20. Philadanco spells energy - pure and simple. Its seventeen dancers love to rocket onto the stage and dance their hearts out.

Critic Edwin Denby once said of New York City Ballet that its dancers displayed an "angelic unconcern toward emotion." In a way, the Danco dancers typify this same quality, even though they perform at full heat, and syncopation is their natural pulse.

When I ask artistic director Joan Myers Brown whether she stresses these qualities in the training and rehearsing of her dancers, she explains that these are instead inborn traits. "You can't define them," she says. As the years have gone by, and the company has accrued polish and sophistication, even these overlays have not blurred the dancers' emphatic way with a beat and their equally emphatic conquest of space.

Some observers feel that Philadanco performs too consistently in high, that Brown selects only choreographers like Talley Beatty, the late Gene Hill Sagan, and Elisa Monte, whose works tend to begin at peak energy and remain there. But Jeri Packman, a longtime Danco board member, observes, "It's hard to get new choreographers to explore other aspects of our dancers. They're immediately attracted to that wonderful energy."

The choreographers selected for Danco's twenty-fifth anniversary celebration in Philadelphia (June 1-3) and the subsequent Manhattan engagement are Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Louis Johnson, Beatty, and Danco's resident choreographer, Milton Myers. The company will also present the second installment of an interesting project devised with Jeraldyne Blunden's Dayton Contemporary Dance Company. With funding provided by Jacob's Pillow, the two directors engaged choreographer Donald Byrd to create a work called BAMM, incorporating seven dancers from each group. It was performed last year to celebrate DCDC's twenty-fifth anniversary, and this year will serve the same purpose for Philadanco.

The Danco dancers work in a plain building in West Philadelphia, a modest university neighborhood quite far from the center of town. The building, formerly a factory, also houses Brown's Philadelphia School of Dance Arts, currently celebrating its thirty-fifth anniversary.

The school's reception area is adorned with every possible kind of plaque, statue, and citation - all conferred upon Brown over the years. Most recent is an honorary doctorate received last year from the University of the Arts, where Brown is a Distinguished Professor. Despite this recognition, there is something endearingly down-to-earth about her. For example, when I visited the school recently, she was in a back room diapering her three-month-old granddaughter.

That no-nonsense attitude also extends to the way she looks back on her life. Shrugging a shoulder, she says, "I've been called nigger, colored, black, African American. My grandmother was a white German Jew; my grandfather was Ceylonese. As for me, I'm darker than a paper bag. I guess you'd call me sweet-potato brown. When I was little, the light-skinned kids got to be Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, while I was always a flower. I knew that I deserved the better parts, but I didn't say anything. I just climbed up on my little porch and made up my own programs ."

She's been doing that ever since. Along the way, she founded the International Association of Blacks in Dance, and this year hosted its eighth conference, which was preceded by a highly successful festival called Dance Black America II.

Brown is a handsome woman with classic features and large, wise eyes. At one point during company class she stood quietly in the corner of a studio. Everything that was going on seemed to be retained in her gaze. It was serious, perhaps reflective of the effort and persistence that had gone into her own quest for training.

Joan Belle Myers was never given the opportunity to join a ballet company, nor any style of company, for that matter. She spent nine years as a nightclub dancer in package shows headed by luminaries like Ray Charles, Cab Calloway, and Pearl Bailey. No, it wasn't at all the kind of work she wanted to do, but, as she puts it, "At least I was dancing."

Born in Philadelphia, the only child of Nellie and Thomas Myers, she was a bright but restless scholar. She received about six months of dance training under a reputable black teacher named Essie-Marie Dorsey, and eventually became involved in the Philadelphia Cotillions. These were black debutante balls that included elaborate entertainments. Brown performed in several, and along the way learned much about production from Marion Cuyjet, a pioneer in ballet training for black dancers. She was also awarded a coveted $100 ballet scholarship that enabled her to study in New York once a week for an entire summer.

During this period, the most potent influence on Brown's training came from Antony Tudor. He taught in Philadelphia every Sunday at the invitation of a new organization called Ballet Guild. "With him I didn't have to hide in the back line," she remembers. "I wasn't 'the black girl.' He made me come down front and demonstrate. He even put me in Les Sylphides, much against the Guild's wishes." Tudor also told her that a black dancer had virtually no chance at getting into a ballet company.

In 1950 she married the first of her three husbands. Two years later when they were divorced, she had already begun her career as a nightclub dancer. (Wherever she toured, she faced the difficulty of finding a school where she could take class: her happiest experience was at the National Ballet School in Toronto.)

She married her second husband while performing in Atlantic City. By 1960 she had opened a school in Philadelphia and was caught up in the tedious commuting between the two cities. Eventually, her school brought in enough money to enable her to say farewell to hoofing. She also said farewell to her husband.

The third marriage lasted eighteen years and coincided with Brown's growing recognition. "Nearly every one of those awards cost me a black eye," she observes with more than a touch of irony. "Some men can't deal with successful women. So I got a divorce."

Despite these experiences, Brown has a deeply ingrained love for family life. Her two daughters, Dannielle and Marlisa, both of whom teach at her school, come first. Then there are her other "children" - the dancers; some of them live next to the studio in three houses that Brown purchased and remodeled. There are six two-room apartments; the dancers rent five at low rates; the sixth is reserved for guest choreographers.

Philadanco's leading artists are Kim Y. Bears, an assistant artistic director who has been with the company for fourteen years, and Warren P. Miller II, who doubles as wardrobe master and has been with Danco eleven years. William N. Grinton, who has been with the company six years, is also a member of Les Ballets Trockadero. The Philadanco men are for the most part tall and stalwart. The women are more varied in physique. All partake of the company elan.

Salaries are modest, but Danco, unlike most companies, offers a fifty-two-week contract. Dancers are trained in ballet under Delores Brown Abelson and in Graham technique by Pat Thomas. They are also encouraged to study Dunham, Horton, and jazz techniques."

Despite Philadanco's longevity, some Philadelphians are not familiar with the company because it does not perform enough in its hometown to sustain a subscription season. Attorney Spencer M. Wertheimer, who has served on the Philadanco board for nearly twenty years and who is also chairman of the mayor's arts council, ruefully points out that Philadelphia has fewer performing arts venues than any other city in the United States, and that the Zellerbach Theater in the Annenberg Center, which Philadanco uses, is too large. It is also so heavily booked that Philadanco must regularly accept dates that are less than desirable.

How, despite its limited earned-income level (only 20 percent, when most companies count on 50 to 60 percent), does Philadanco manage to remain solvent? Brown is a gifted administrator who earns her dual title of artistic and executive director. She also has a board of directors devoted to the company and to Brown. Their eyes shine when they talk about her.

When Wertheimer says, "Joan is one of my absolute best friends in the world," it is no adolescent effusion; it is the mutual admiration that a force in the business community feels for a comparable force in the arts. And when Beverly Harper, Danco's board president, says, "It's an honor for me to be president of Joan's board," she speaks as both a self-made woman and the president of her own consulting firm.

Along with board and staff, Brown plays a meaningful role in company fund-raising. But Philadanco has a perverse problem. When potential funders see the healthy financial report, they assume that the company doesn't need help. In other words, Philadanco runs the risk of being penalized for its prudent management.

An exciting new real estate development is afoot in the City of Brotherly Love. Called Avenue of the Arts, Inc., it will extend along Broad Street, locale of the venerable Academy of Music. There will be five arts organizations in residence there, and Philadanco will be the only dance company.

In addition to a new theater, what else do Brown and her cohorts see in the company's future? Higher salaries for the dancers plus an endowment. Neither goal is unusual among dance companies, but for Philadanco these ring of fulfillment because, according to Pearl Schaeffer, executive director of Philadelphia Dance Alliance, "Joan has always had the guts to fight not only for black dance but for dance in general. She is a true leader in the community."

Doris Hering is a senior editor of Dance Magazine.