Dance Along the Hudson
by Rebecca Webb

When asked about the reason for the large number of dance artists in the Hudson Valley area, teacher/choreographer Elaine Colandrea answered lightheartedly, “There must be something in the air or the water.” While “fresh air” has its pull, it seems that when it comes to dancers, the reason for their Hudson homesteads is really all about space, or the unfortunate lack thereof.

Ms. Colandrea has been working in the area for almost 30 years. She was brought here first by her asthma. Elaine had been working on her master’s degree and dancing in New York City—always with an inhaler in the wings—when she was told that if she did not leave the city she wouldn’t see age 30. Luckily she got a job working at the Millbrook School. And finally, she met a man who lived in the area. After working at Millbrook for ten years, she began teaching independently and creating dances in collaboration with local composers and poets.

Some of the classes offered by Ms. Colandrea at her Milan and New Paltz locations are Moving for Health and Continuum Movement. These also represent her take on dance: from a young age, she learned about the world by dancing and studying movement, since with two grandparents who didn’t speak English, language was not primary for her. “My whole life has been about investigating how best to promote life through breath and movement,” she says.

Colandrea expresses a great concern for the loss of movement in people’s lives today. In a culture of confinement, she laments, with people always at computers, engrossed in electronics, and as if afraid to “take up” the space beckoning around them, they don’t move in the way they used to. The way she approaches dance, and the way she teaches, aims to cultivate what she calls an “embodied presence.” People seem genuinely interested and the classes she offers are extremely popular.

This past summer was also the inaugural season for the Northern Dutchess Dance Camp, a weeklong program for teens (and adults) taught in conjunction with Abby Saxon and Martha Ross Tobias, covering modern, jazz, and musical theater. For Elaine, the camp embodies a desire to pass something on to the next generation. For as she so eloquently said “dance is passed from direct transmission, from one body to another. It’s always been that way.”

Jean Churchill, professor and former chair of the dance department at Bard College, discusses space, though in a much less spiritual way, as one of the big issues that confronted the dance program there.

The Bard Dance program puts its emphasis on the creation of original dance. Unlike other programs at liberal arts schools and conservatories, non-majors and majors alike are full participants. A wide range of styles and specialties is offered, with the only constant a belief in modern dance as a serious art form. Churchill herself has an impressive resume, as a former member of the Boston Ballet Company, and more recently as choreographer and director for Cinderella’s Bad Magic, an opera composed by Kyle Gann, which premiered in Moscow in 2002.

In 1980 when Jean first joined the program, all teaching, performing, and practice took place in the same theater. When she was chair of the dance department, the big thing was getting their own theater. It finally happened when the Fisher Center was built. Churchill herself consulted with the architects about the dance wing that her students would use.

The next big thing was getting institutional support for the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company on campus for a residency. That too has come to pass.

The Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company has performed worldwide and won many awards. The students were thrilled. However, as Churchill points out, 2009 2010 was just the first year of the residency, the company was at Bard for only three weeks, and the students were only just getting to know the company members who sat in on their moderation and senior project boards. It was only beginning. Company members attended Bard Dance Department classes and performances and also rehearsed Serenade/The Proposition, Duet x2, and created a new site-specific work, Another Evening: Venice during their time in Annandale.

Bard has an ambitious program. It is intensive but it’s still small, said Churchill, bringing everything back to the issue of space. Even after the construction, there are still only two studios. And, as Churchill puts it, “dance studios are gold.”

The founders of the Kaatsbaan International Dance Center in Tivoli know this too well. Their Center is located on a 153-acre historic site. They wanted to build a residency space for professional companies. With the small studio spaces of New York, companies were limited in terms of ensemble work. Further, artistic director Gregory Cary believes the lack of space in urban centers is affecting the nature of dance and dance choreography.

The buildings on the site were designed to get people moving, and not limit the dancers in any way. Today there are three studios, a 160 seat performance theater, and a recently completed Dancers’ Inn, which can accommodate 36 dancers in quality motel style rooms. Additional facilities to be completed this year include two additional studios, the second Dancers’ Inn and a lodge and dining room complex.

Nothing else on this scale exists in the United States for professional residencies. Companies from all around the world come to Kaatsbaan. Some notable residencies include ABT Studio Company, The Eifman Ballet of St. Petersburg, Flamenco Vivo Carlota Santana, and Monte/Brown Dance. While the studios can accommodate companies numbering up to 65 dancers, Cary has a “particular fondness” for housing smaller companies. Before their stay at the “playing field” (the English translation of kaatsbaan), many of these will have worked only in very small studios.

Residence companies often have open rehearsals to which community members are invited. There are also education outreach programs to local schools and dance lecture series.

The lectures initially grew out of the Extreme Ballet Program. Extreme Ballet is Kaatsbaan’s pre-professional intensive program for dancers who are at least 14 years old. There are both winter and summer sessions. Girls attending the nearly month long program each summer had always received lectures on topics like anatomy, music, and makeup, and these have expanded to include dance history and have also been opened to the public. Kaatsbaan also has a less strenuous academy of dance for local girls ages four to twelve.

All in all, however, the center is a serious kind of place. Argues Cary, “Dance can be more than fairytale entertainment.”

Though the dance venues in our area vary in seriousness and size they all provide good opportunities for dancers to move. This requires space. While Manhattan is a Mecca of sorts for artists, it also inhibits them in some ways. Many must leave it in order to create the art that it displays with such flash.