TEACHERS AT HOME AND ABROAD.

Gusztav Fogarassy, former Southwest State University dance professor, was recently named the Dance Education Teacher of the Year for 1998 by the Minnesota Association of Health, Physical Education, Recreation, and Dance (MAHPERD). Each year MAHPERD recognizes the outstanding services and contributions of a dance teacher in Minnesota.

Fogarassy was dance professor at SSU from 1970 until he retired for health reasons in 1998. His best-known work is the creation of "Dancefusion," a trademarked and copyrighted method using the principal elements of many dance forms fused into cross-training routines and choreographed performances.

Vincent Sekwati Mantsoe, Goucher College's guest artist in residence and recipient of The Jane and Robert Meyerhoff Visiting Professorship, performed his award-winning solo in February at Kraushaar Auditorium on campus. The South African dancer, choreographer, and teacher of afro-fusion technique, a fusion of modern dance and African tribal dances, taught master classes for intermediate through advanced dancers during his residency. Mantsoe is assistant director and resident choreographer of the Moving Into Dance Company in Johannesburg, South Africa, where he received formal training. In 1995 he won first prize at the First Contemporary African Dance Competition in Angola for his piece Gula Matari. In 1996 he created Sasanka for the Dance Theatre of Harlem, which premiered at the Kennedy Center.

Professor R. M. Mettleford, a former Rhodes Scholar and currently vice chancellor of the University of the West Indies, Jamaica, was present with celebrity guests including Harry Belafonte and Maya Angelou at a benefit gala for the university in January in New York City.

UWI was granted its royal charter a half-century ago by King George VI. At the time, a total of thirty-three students were enrolled at a single campus located in Mona, Jamaica. Today, with campuses in Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad, and Tobago, and centers in all fourteen independent English-speaking Caribbean nations, this regional institution enrolls more than 20,000 students each year. The university's motto is Oriens Ex Occidente Lux, which translates as "A light rising from the West."

Nettleford's extraordinary career began with a degree in history at UWI, followed by postgraduate studies in politics at Oxford. He is also founder, artistic director, and principal choreographer of the National Dance Theatre Company of Jamaica and a leading Caribbean authority in the performing arts. The much decorated Nettleford has received his country's Order of Merit, the Gold Musgrave Medal (from the Institute of Jamaica), The Living Legend Award (at the Black Arts Festival in Atlanta), and was made a Fellow of the Institute of Jamaica in 1991.

For the first time in Korea's dance history, Yim Hak-son, professor of dance at Sungkyunkwan University, has codified positions, comparable to the five ballet positions, fundamental to traditional Korean dance, such as sungmu and salpuri. Yim points out: "We were aware that these basic positions were inherent in our dances, but no one had attempted to arrange them systematically until now."

Korean dances consist of three basic movements that resemble a brush stroke, a crane, and a bow. Yim devised a dot, a line, and a circle respectively as an easier way to understand these movements. Yim says that these three basic body forms can be broken down into thirty-six smaller movements according to different techniques such as breathing, turning, and jumping. All thirty-six movements take thirty minutes to perform, an ideal length of time, according to Yim, for a warm-up.

Yim, a dancer-choreographer, is a graduate of Ewha Woman's University. She has produced numerous works for ChangMu Arts Center, the nation's leading institute to preserve and modernize traditional Korean dance. She previously served as dance professor at Suwon University.

Towson University, in Towson, Maryland, presented "An Evening of Dance" by the university's faculty and alumni in February at Stephens Hall Theatre on the campus.

The program was an eclectic mix of ballet and modern dance by faculty, guest faculty, and alumni. Plangent, a contemporary work, was choreographed by faculty member and dance department chair Dennis Price. Bibelot was a romantic classical pas de deux. Stephanie Powell's New Dawn featured nineteen dancers. Guest faculty member Juan Carlos Rincones and the DC Contemporary Dance Theatre presented Nine Love Songs and a Bucket of Tears, a humorous and poignant tribute to relationships, performed to a suite of favorite Patsy Cline songs.

Faculty performers included Price, Powell, Rincones, Alison Crosby, Dana Martin, Nancy Wanich-Romita, Terence Duncan, and featured soloist Maureen Berry from the FOOTWORKS ensemble.

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