Rosalie Jones: guiding light of Daystar.

Rosalie Jones, founder, director, and choreographer of Daystar: Contemporary Dance-Drama of Indian America, is backstage awaiting a performance of Sacred Woman, Sacred Earth, her evening-long cycle of modem Native American dance-dramas. Tall and slender, her long silver hair pulled to one side revealing a beaded earring, Jones, or "Daystar," as she is known professionally, resembles one of the elegant Native American women painted by her contemporary, Navajo artist R. C. Gorman. In Sacred Woman, Sacred Earth, she takes the part of White Buffalo Calf Pipe Woman, a character drawn from Lakota Sioux legend. Wearing a white fringed buckskin Plains dress and moccasins, carrying a sacred pipe bundle of beaded, fringed buckskin, she looks otherworldly indeed. The theme of the piece is the Native American view of the feminine principle as revealed through stories from various native cultures: Iroquois, Eastern Cherokee, Blackfeet, and Lakota, as well as intertribal.

The first dance of the evening, "Wolf," is a masked dance of transformation. "The wolf is one of my favorite animals in the natural world," Jones says. "I would like this dance to pay respect to the wolf as an animal. The wolf has been pushed to the brink of extinction due to our misconceptions of it as a bad creature. The Native American views the wolf as a good creature, given to man as a companion to teach us about community. It's said that what happens to the wolf happens to the Indian people."

The curtain opens on a stage empty but for a huge, shadowy spiderweb in the background. Flutes play hauntingly and drums throb as first one, then another male dancer, both wearing wolf heads and long, fringed buckskin skirts, move onstage with taut, pulsating steps. The dancers pantomime the wolf's stalking, watchful movements; the lead dancer grows more menacing, chasing away the others; then a metamorphosis begins as the wolf sheds its skin, inch by inch. A mask of an old man's deeply lined face is revealed. Part animal, part human, he dances a catharsis of transformation in a frenzy of joy and fear with lithe, muscular movements. We are not sure what he becomes--a young man or a young wolf, a male or a female. He has become a shaman, a magician of change.

Afterward, Jones, her head cocked to the right in a characteristically sidelong, quizzical posture, reflects on the meaning "Wolf" holds for her. The words come in a measured, articulate stream, punctuated with emphatic pauses: "`Wolf' is what I've been working twenty-five years to achieve. It has a shamanistic feel to it because it's pure transformation, from beginning to end. It brings together everything I've learned about modern dance, mime, mask, characterization, dramatization of story line. It's based on the traditional Plains straight dance, in which the men pantomime both stalking the animal and being the animal. If it were strictly traditional, the music would stop; the dance would end. But when it's choreographed, you compress time down to its essence, which is what both mime and poetry do.

"I think that `Wolf' points the way toward a certain style of dance," she continues, "the fusion of Native American traditional forms and modern dance. It might be possible that there is no such thing, but I like to think of it as a possibility. I don't know if you would call it style, or genre, or what. The vocabulary just isn't there yet. But that vision of it is out there, someplace. At least that's what has driven my career, my creative life."

It has been a long, often difficult, journey for Jones, from her first attempt at choreography in 1966 through her winning of a 1995-97 National Endowment for the Arts Choreographer's Fellowship to this moment of insight as she stands in the forefront of her chosen field, modern Native American dance. Her creativity in this new form has been prodigious: nine solo dances (another in progress); twelve ensemble dance-dramas based on Native American oral tradition; six modern dance works; and choreography for eight plays, including a Native American interpretation of Oedipus Rex.

Over the years, she has performed her works throughout the United States, from Native American reservations to the Kennedy Center, from summer festivals in the Midwest to theater festivals in Bulgaria and Turkey. Richard West, director of the National Museum of the American Indian, has said, "Rosalie Jones is the preeminent Native American dance artist today." Another contemporary and colleague, Hanay Geiogamah, founder of the American Indian Dance Theatre, has written, "If there is any artist among Indian people who truly merits the label avant-garde in its most positive expression, it is Jones. Her Daystar performing arts company has produced some of the most experimental, bracing, and compelling Native-themed dance works imaginable."

Modern Native American dance is a comparatively small world, still in its adolescence, that has been nurtured by Jones and, among others, Juan Valenzuela, of Aztec-Yaqui parentage, and Rene Highway, a Canadian Cree. Their joint vision is of a dance form that synthesizes traditional tribal and modern dance, ballet, and jazz. Jones, who founded Daystar in 1980, was the first to begin working in modern Native American dance.

Many of the themes in Jones's works, although archetypal or universal in nature, are centered upon the traditional stories of women not of this world who come to teach and bestow a gift upon humanity. The Corn Mother, for example, combines ballet and modern dance to tell the Eastern Cherokee legend of how corn came to native peoples. The Spirit Woman is a Woodland Indian legend about the origin of the seasons. Other dance-dramas tell of woman's struggle with her primal, often tragic role in Native American cosmology or the history of the Americas. The Woman Who Fell from the Sky is an Iroquois creation myth of a beautiful birdlike creature who comes from the heavens to give birth to sacred twin boys who create play, then war, and discover death and its horror. In The Legend of the Black Butterfly, an earthly woman of California's Maidu people finds and loses a glittering treasure in the Valley of the Butterflies.

Jones was born on the Blackfeet Reservation in western Montana in 1941. Her mother was of Blackfeet and Pembina Chippewa parentage, her father of Welsh descent. What she calls "an incredible drive to get out of poverty" led the family to leave the reservation, settling in the small town of Cut Bank, just over the eastern border of the reservation. Convinced that an education in the arts was a key to this better life, her mother managed to provide Jones with piano lessons at age six, as well as art and dance instruction. Jones showed talent as a pianist, and after high school she majored in piano at Fort Wright College in Spokane, Washington. A graduate program in concert piano lay ahead at Boston University, but one class in modern dance at Fort Wright changed her life.

"I felt that I was actually creating myself," says Jones, "forming myself into a dancer, physically, mentally, spiritually, psychologically--the whole thing. It was a total transformation! And I became a different person." She took a summer course in modern dance with Hanya Holm at Colorado College: "Another revelation! Dancing every day from nine in the morning to four in the afternoon... total ecstasy as well as pain, because it was the first time I'd ever danced barefooted."

She enrolled at the University of Utah, eventually earning a master's in dance and studying for three years under Joan Woodbury and Shirley Ririe. The research for her thesis on the Medicine Lodge Ceremony, or Sun Dance, took Jones back to the Blackfeet Reservation. Observing the ceremony reconnected her with her roots, she recalls: "It was my first attempt, for my graduate production, to translate traditional Native American culture, dance, and music into a modern theatrical idiom ... the beginning of my future work."

Immediately after graduation, Jones got a call from the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe. They needed a choreographer to take thirty students from Santa Fe to Washington, D.C., for original Native American dance-dramas to be staged with traditional and modern techniques at the Carter Barron Amphitheater under director Rolland Mienholtz. The cast grew to three hundred, representing many tribes, including Seminoles, Tlingits, Haidas, Dakotas, and Cherokees. Jones choreographed the modern sections. A special performance was presented for presidential cabinet members.

Tempered by this challenge, Jones was invited to the IAIA to teach dance in Santa Fe from 1966 to 1968. Two years later an extraordinary gift fell from the blue: she was given a year's scholarship to the Juilliard School by the Center for Arts of Indian America, founded by Lee Udall, wife of then-Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall. Udall's goal was to get sponsorship for young Native American students in the performing arts. In New York City Jones lived at International House and took classes in Graham technique with Bertram Ross and in ballet with Alfredo Corvino; she also had a special private choreography class with Jose Limon (because of his mixed Indian-Spanish heritage, she felt a personal rapport with him).

One of the conditions of the Juilliard scholarship was a commitment to teach Native American youth. When Jones left New York City, she taught at Flandreau Indian School in South Dakota for a year. It was-tremendously exciting for her when Limon, accompanied by Martha Hill, then director of dance at Juilliard, flew out to attend her students' final performance. "It was a direct involvement and caring that he had, to see where this is going and what they are doing," Jones says.

Another mentor was Barry Lynn, a seminal, iconoclastic pioneer of modern dance, whom she met while she was at the University of Utah. "She was full of fire, but didn't quite know what to do with it," Lynn recalls. "She said, `You're doing the kind of dance I want to do.' I said, `Let's get going, girl.'" Jones has often worked with Lynn at his studio and performance center, ChaliceStream, in Ladysmith, Wisconsin. Besides Limon, Lynn has been Jones's most influential teacher from the time that she was in her early twenties. From him she learned much about costume creation and design and how to produce a performance on a shoestring. At ChaliceStream, in the early 1970s, she developed her first series of solo dances based on Native American stories: Tales of Old Man, from Blackfeet "trickster stories," and Spirit Woman, a Woodland Indian fable.

Reid Gilbert of the Wisconsin Mime Company in Spring Green was another major influence. "Reid broadened my movement vocabulary," she says. "I found a way to incorporate masks, which led to characterization, which led to the story line. Mime technique gave me another way of looking at it."

An invitation to perform at the Stand Rock Indian Ceremonial in the Wisconsin Dells in the summer of 1979 gave Jones the opportunity to dance Spirit Woman for eighty-two consecutive performances. By summer's end, she was resolved to form Daystar: An American Indian Theater. With the money she saved from the job at Stand Rock, Jones produced Changer, a cosmic history of the Northwest coast written by Skokomish playwright Bruce Miller, that she and her company of four dancers performed from 1979 to 1981. But times were lean and income insufficient to support the fledgling company, and Daystar had to disband.

Back in ChaliceStream, Jones created La Malinche: The Woman with Three Names, a solo in which she compassionately portrays the Nahuatl woman, caught in the machinations of history, who became the mistress of and interpreter for Hernan Cortes, the Spanish conquistador who conquered her people. Like much of Jones's later work, its theme of a woman torn between love and loyalty has been seen as controversial. Lynn observes, "Rosalie has always encountered resistance to her progressive, innovative techniques and approach to dance because of the ideas she was presenting."

The Dispossessed (1975), a solo dance-drama performed for a primarily Indian audience, proved to be another characteristic leap into the unknown. It dealt with the oppression of a Native American girl who had a spiritual awakening to her native traditions after being raised in a government boarding school and exploited and raped in the city. Applause afterward was meager because that is not a traditional behavior. Jones was elated later when a little old woman approached her in the lobby to ask, "Was that your vision?" The word vision was gratifying. "Ceremonials and songs are given to individuals through a vision," explains Jones. "The vision must be taken back to the community and enacted with them in a dance, song, or ceremony. She got it! This was my vision."

In 1985 Jones met Tony Shearer, a playwright, musician, and poet in the oral tradition. They collaborated on The Mythmaker, a fable inspired by Native American history, and The Gift of the Pipe, based on the Lakota legend of White Buffalo Calf Pipe Woman and her gift of peacemaking. Jones toured and performed with Shearer for four years during which she wrote, choreographed, and directed Piye: The Legend of Star Boy, based on Blackfeet oral tradition. Another major leap forward in Jones's teaching and dance career came later when she was offered the position of Professor of Dance at the IAIA. Back in Santa Fe after more than twenty years, she chaired the performing arts department and represented the IAIA at conferences throughout the United States. Her position gave her the opportunity in 1990 to revive her company as Daystar: Contemporary Dance-Drama of Indian America.

For the next seven years performance invitations and commissions flowed forth. A generous grant allowed Jones to choreograph and present Sacred Woman, Sacred Earth, which incorporated five of her shorter dance-dramas for Kituwah, a festival of Native American arts in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1991. During the winter of 1993-94 she traveled to Andalou University in Eskisehir, Turkey, and to the International Theatre Institute in Istanbul to lecture on her work and to perform some of her solos.

Jones's tenure at the IAIA wasn't always smooth going, however. According to Lynn, "Rosalie encountered some opposition among traditionalists to her approach to choreography and dance." Cutbacks in federal funding in 1995 eliminated IAIA's performing arts department. As if to soften the blow, however, Jones was awarded the NEA Choreographer's Fellowship immediately afterward.

Now she had the freedom to work on choreography and to travel. In 1996 Jones was invited to teach at: American University in Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria. She presented solo performances there and at the American Center in Sofia and collaborated with Bulgarian choreographer Borjana Setchanova in demonstrations at both the Varna Theatre and the Sliven Theatre festivals. Jones returned in 1997 to teach and choreograph with Samodvska Bile ("The Wild Women"), a troupe of young Bulgarian folk dancers in the town of Biala. Her work there culminated in a performance of Deer Legends, a merging of Bulgarian and Native American stories and dance. "It opened up the whole possibility of international exchange," Jones says, "and taught me about how people in Eastern Europe see Native American people."

Most recently, Jones has been artist in residence at the Native American Preparatory School near Santa Fe where she has been choreographing No Home But the Heart. This solo dance-drama is based on the life of Jones's great-grandmother, Susan Bigknife, who came from Canada with the Little Shell band of Chippewa to live on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana. It premieres at Theaterwork in Santa Fe August 21 through 23. Jones says, "It has taken me into new territory ... and will be a new kind of format for me as a performer.

"I'm very aware of universality when I pick a story," she continues. "I feel that it's important that when someone comes to a performance they learn something, are touched in some way. That the story, the expression, has some relevance to their life, and also that there is a spiritual uplifting. You find that in most Native American stories. They do deal with archetypes and constant universal struggles and journeying from where we are to where we're going."

Gordon L. Magill, a student of Native American culture, lives in Santa Fe, "where the sound of ceremonial drums shakes the earth and moves the seasons round."