Dancin' Six Weeks Away

The room looks like a scene from Fame. About 20 students garbed in dancer chic--leotards, leg warmers, and tights--fling themselves across the room to the rhythm provided by the pianist in the corner. The teacher stops and the students start the dance "one more time" as they wipe the sweat off their brows.

But the dance studio is not at New York's High School of Performing Arts; it's at Harvard's Malkin Athletic Center. And the students are not enrolled in a four-year high school program, but a six-week summer program that could prove to be the most intense dance experience of their lives.

For 14 years, the Harvard Summer Dance Center has been offering aspiring professional dancers and students who just want to dance the opportunity to spend six weeks of their summer totally immersed in dance. About 165 students come to Harvard to partake of the more than 20 dance courses offered. Classes range from the classical ballet, jazz and tap offerings to dance therapy and choreography workshops.

The Dance Center is not restricted to classes, however. Not officially affiliated with the University, the Center falls under the umbrella of the Summer School. In addition to the classes, the Dance Center also produces about two weekends of concerts per summer.

"For years we've brought people here that have no other way of getting to Boston," says Director of the Dance Center Iris M. Fanger. This summer David Gordon and the Pick-Up Company will perform in late July and Remy Charlip will dance a New England Premier Concert the following weekend.

Dancing 9 to 5

Classes are, however, the Center's primary focus. The students come from all over the world and range in age from 16 up. Some students are area residents who just want to take an intensive dance class, while others live in the dorms and for six weeks do nothing but dance. These students take three or four hour-and-a-half classes every day from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Such rigorous exercise takes its toll. "It's difficult, dancing all day long. I've never done that before," says Jennifer DeWitt, a high school senior from Houston.

Says Richard Bull, a senior at Loyola College in Maryland, "Muscles ache that we never knew we had." His friend, Jane Keller interjects, "You find you have to get a lot of rest and sleep on weekends," quickly adding that "no one does."

For Stephanie Nelson, a high school senior from Englewood Cliffs, N.J., the morning classes can be the most exhausting. She says, "You hate getting up at nine o'clock in the morning to go to classes, but once you're there, you become involved."

But the students don't begrudge themselves the exercise, by and large. Dewitt says, "You're only here for six weeks and we're going to make the most of it you can."

Keller, a sophomore at Middlebury College agrees that the short time span of the dance program is beneficial. "I'm learning a lot because they're cramming so much into a short period of time."

"It's good to be really physically tired," says Shawn J. Stirling. She adds that she dances more than she does during the school year as a dance major at Arizona State University. "This is just all dance and you have enough energy because you don't have other classes. You can be physical all day," says Stirling.

Her roommate Josephine Longuria adds, "Maybe it looks as if you work less, because you sweat less, but you really have to work internally. You work with your body. You're not only moving, you're moving, thinking, concentrating, controlling; it's very intense."

Most students say, however, that the exceptional expertise of their teachers makes the extreme exhaustion at the end of their eight hour dancing-and-prancing day worthwhile. Students praise their teachers' personal and professional attributes.

"The teachers are really encouraging, supportive. You get a lot of individual attention." says Dewitt. "You feel like you matter something to the teacher. You're not just another student. They're interested in what you're doing."

Stirling says, "The teachers don't alienate themselves from the students. They are very professional, they know what they're doing." Longuria of Mexico adds, "They pay so much attention to technique and cleanness of movement." Bull concurs with Longuria, saying that "the teachers really help you with the technique."

As for individual teachers, Chip Morris says of Lucinda Childs, his choreography teacher, "She's kind of inscrutable. It seems she doesn't want to interfere heavily with the class. It seems she wants people to have their own opinions."

It is no accident that the teachers of the Summer Dance Center receive such rave reviews from their students. Fanger attributes a 20 percent rise in enrollment this year to the excellence of her teaching staff. She says that while she "doesn't have anyone like Baryshnikov," she hires faculty members "for the quality of their teaching and the kind of work they're doing professionally."

Many of the faculty are New-York based and Fanger, a noted dance historian and critic who writes for the Boston Herald, says she makes several trips to New York each year to help her cull her 17-member faculty. Lucinda Childs, head of the Lucinda Childs Dance Company, David Gordon, head of the Pick Up Company and Remy Charlip are among this year's noted teachers.

Fanger adds that she keeps abreast of the latest styles in professional dance and attempts to have the classes mirror those trends. "I try to keep current with what the interests are in the dance world at large--post-modernism has become a great cry," she says. Accordingly, the Center has begun offering classes with post-modernist teachers and has sponsored an exhibit in post-modern dance which is presently showing at Widener Library.

Of course, sometimes post-modernist can be different from anything that the students have experienced previously. Nelson says of one teacher, "She's amazing. I come back with bruises." And Keller says that in one of her classes, "The teacher has you slam your body against the floor and do other bizarre things."

While almost all of the classes emphasize technique, which can be as individualistic as this style, Fanger says that "the basis of the work here is to expand what dance is." She adds, "We teach every class as if people were going on to the stage. The bias is prepared towards public performance."

Many of the students say they plan on being professional or already are. Robert Montague, a high school-level dance teacher, says that he chose to take classes from the Harvard Summer Center because he "wanted to expand my horizons. It's always interesting to work with more well-set professionals."

Others seek to join non-performance dance professions such as dance therapy or choreography. Says Stirling, "Some are very good dancers. They're very much into it. Some people are experienced, very cosmopolitan." Yet others are, as Keller--who is considering dance therapy as a career--says, "here just because it is a fun thing to do. The summer is really like playing for a lot of people."

The highly professional nature of the classes shock many students who say they came here expecting to be among the best. Longuria says that in the beginning, she felt a little put off because she was not the best in the class as she was in her classes in Mexico.

Then she says, she started talking to others: "Many people said they thought they were so good and then they came here and felt like they were just nobody." Now, she says, she realized that in the beginning, "everybody's trying to adapt to the class."

Life After Dance?

After the the last plie of the day has been completed and the last step danced, the majority of the students return to Harvard housing to rest up for the next day's dancing. High school age students receive housing in a Yard dorm and college-age or older students live in one of the Houses.

The Summer School makes an effort to place the students close together if not as actual roommates because, officials say, they realize that a dance student might share more interests with another dance student than with a student studying physics.

In addition, the schedule of the dance student differs from that of the regular Summer School student. Dance classes take up most of the student's day, leaving the nights free. Students enrolled in academic classes, however, must spend many of their evenings studying and this can cause problems, particularly for the students enrolled in the secondary school program.

"We have more to do before dinner, but then they [her entrymates not enrolled in the dance program] have more homework," explains Dewitt. "Everybody's got all this work to do and we don't have any." She adds that sometimes when she and her friends in the dance program want to go out, their friends in academic classes can't join them.

However, the older students say that when they return home, all they want to do is rest and talk to their housemates who come from all over the world. Although many undergraduate dancers live in Eliot, they are not housed exclusively with other dancers and therefore meet students enrolled in academic programs in the dining halls and in their entryways.

Many dancers cite the high number of foreign students at the Summer School when they discuss what makes the program such a beneficial experience. Bull says that he has spoken to "more people in the past two weeks than I have spoken to in my entire life."

And some of the high school age students say that just having the college experience is as rewarding as the dance classes. "It's a taste of independence," says Amy Landau, a high school senior from Scarsdale, N.Y. "You're thrown into a situation where you have to totally depend on yourself to get where you're going."

"Even in classes," adds Dewitt, "you get out of them what you put into them. If you really work at it, you can improve or you can slouch through your classes and not get any better."