For us to call ourselves “aware” of the graduate program in dance at Case would be an understatement. Vic’s M.A. in Dance came from Case and his acquaintance with Program Director Karen Potter and Gary Galbraith, Artistic Director of Mather Dance Center, goes back to the days when all three were 20-something dance students themselves. But it’s only recently that we (Vic and Elsa) began to appreciate the national and international importance of that local program. We arranged an interview with Potter and Galbraith and heard how they feel their initiatives in Dance and Technology, and in Dance Wellness, have put Case ahead of the curve.
Cool Cleveland: We’ve noticed that you consistently attract talented students to your program, including international students. What’s the appeal of Case’s graduate program in dance to prospective students?
Gary Galbraith: We’re attractive because we’re small by design — our small size implies lots of face time with faculty — and we’re attractive because of our initiatives in Dance and Technology and Dance Wellness.
Dance and Technology leads us into distance rehearsals. Can you give us a list of the dance works by Martha Graham that you’re traveling around, reconstructing and reviving?
GG: STEPS IN THE STREET, PANORAMA, and APPALACHIAN SPRING.
What schools?
GG: Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Washington University in St Louis, Montclair State University in New Jersey. Also Ecole de Danse de Cannes Rosella Hightower, which is one of France’s Juilliards; and I’m contracted to go down to Jackson, Mississippi – same place as the ballet competition – to do PANORAMA.
There’s a lot of travel involved. We understand you minimize your commute and leverage your effectiveness with distance rehearsals.
GG: We looked at some successes we’d had with our own pieces that involved Internet technology and we asked how we could capitalize on what we’d done, how to use these as teaching tools in the performing arts. These types of tools are used in other settings, but they present unique challenges for use in the performing arts, especially dance because we need to use space. We can’t just sit in front of a web cam and do talking heads. We’ve been addressing these challenges with some degree of success.
So we’re not talking about multimedia here, but Internet applications to practical problems.
GG: Right. A couple of years ago I was setting STEPS IN THE STREET on Washington University in St. Louis. I had mistakenly committed to that at the same time I was involved in a 3-city project, Cleveland, Gainesville, and Miami. So I talked to the people in St. Louis and said, “Look, if I teach you some of these technologies, can I do some of the rehearsals from Cleveland with your dancers in St. Louis?” They agreed to that and so, in the course of one day we had 3 different rehearsals across 4 cities. In the morning we had a choreographer in Michigan working with our dancers here in Cleveland; later in the afternoon Karen ran the rehearsal with the 2 cities in Florida while I was downstairs rehearsing St. Louis. All I had to do was run up and down the stairs as opposed to across the country.
And when you say you’re running the rehearsal, you’re not sitting in front of a little web cam. You have a…
Karen Potter: a Polycom.
GG: That’s the high-end piece of equipment I have used in the past. Some desktop applications are becoming more robust lately – you have to tweak the bejeebers out of them – but you need a little more than just a web cam.
KP: That’s what we did with TRIBUTE RAG (a dance jointly choreographed by Potter and Galbraith, first performed in November, 2009). Gary was here for 1 week, so we got the dance started. When he left for his sabbatical I continued to run rehearsals and we continued to create the dance together while he was in New York. He Skyped in so he could work with one group while I worked with another. We’d videotape the rehearsal and then we could watch it together as co-choreographers and say, “Oh, yeah, that turn works,” or “That lift didn’t work.” Also during that process Gary was able to manipulate the video with video editing and send it back to me and say, “What if we did this?” That’s the creative application. There’s also the distance rehearsal application. The 3rd aspect is dances that Gary has created such as KINETIC SHADOWS (2002) that use Internet technologies for the multi-city thing.
That makes our understanding more concrete.
Now, about Case and Dance Wellness, the International Association for Dance Medicine and Science has an annual conference. Last year it was in The Hague in the Netherlands; the year before that you did it here in Cleveland.
GG: Yes. At the Intercontinental at Cleveland Clinic.
What’s important is that the international community thought so highly of what we’ve done here that they sanctioned the entire annual conference being held here. We were able to bring 350 experts here from 19 countries around the world.
KP: Our program is really a dance wellness program inside the dance program. We really care about the healthy dancer and we’re proactive about it.
Our program has been the model for many other programs established at universities throughout the United States… Goucher College in Maryland, TCU is looking at us, OSU modeled us, Western Michigan modeled us.
GG: We also get requests from medical schools for consultations.
Nationally and internationally we’ve consulted with physical therapy clinics. We worked with a group in Australia, in San Francisco; we’ll soon be going to Monaco in the south of France.
These are groups providing resources to their local communities. We’d like to be able to reach out and do that in the Cleveland area where there are a number of smaller companies who probably could bear some additional support in the area of dance wellness.
When you talk about Dance Wellness and “reaching out” to local companies, we understand that much of what you’re talking about is screenings. These are similar to the screenings that athletic teams do, but a good dance screening includes the findings of Dance Science, the results of Dance Research. Explain.
GG: Dance Science includes a huge research component. We’ve laid out technological infrastructure to support these research projects. For example, I was just going over in my dance science class emerging evidentiary information that’s reexamining this notion of the knee over the 2nd toe because, as you know, that’s been the age-old teaching mantra, that whole alignment issue. There’s now some emerging data that’s questioning that and backing it up with MRI studies.
KP: People have been doing research in dance medicine for a couple of decades now. We’re playing catch up a bit with sports medicine, but it’s happening.
Our dancers take Kinesiology and dance wellness. Kinesiology is a 3-credit class so they take it for one semester, but every graduate student takes Dance Wellness every spring semester for one credit, so they’re getting Dance Wellness every year, and they’re getting the most current information from this field.
GG: Dance Science is a big, big umbrella with a lot underneath it — the medical side, the clinical side, the research side, and a whole arm that handles just the educational side. Karen served as chair of this monstrous education committee that addresses pedagogy, a big, big topic.
KP: That is a draw for some of our applicants. We’re definitely ahead of the curve for graduate dance programs and that better prepares graduate students, so that if they got an academic appointment, then they could build something in the way of a dance wellness program at another school. They’re not just teaching technique, dance history, or dance appreciation, but they could approach the chair and say, “You know, we really ought to be concerned about our dancers.”
GG: One of our alumnae is now faculty at Texas A&M. Based on her experiences here she’s building a dance wellness program there.
Most of what we’ve been talking about so far is concerned with academic dance programs, but I also served on the task force on Dance and Health of Dance USA, which is only concerned with professional companies. At the various executive conferences of the executive directors of these companies, where the executive director of San Francisco Ballet talks with his counterpart from New York City Ballet, they compare notes on how to run a dance company…and they’re seeing the expense, the cost of an injured dancer. In supporting their dancers, they’re trying to save their bottom line, and minimize their health care costs by taking preventative measures. Dance has its own set of parameters that have to be addressed.
KP: Gary’s involvement in Dance USA, which addresses professional companies, is beneficial to Dance USA, because of his expertise in Dance Wellness, and it’s beneficial for us, the dance program at Case, because he’s that bridge between the academic world and the professional world. The key point is that the health of dancers, both in the academic world and the professional world, is being addressed and we at Case are in the vanguard.
Which brings us to the Dancer Wellness Project website.
KP: In order to facilitate the screening component of our dancer wellness program here, Gary built a computer program to analyze all the information. It’s now called the Dancer Wellness Project, a website. (dancerwellnessproject.com) It’s an independent program, but we use it here at Case and so do all of these other schools, because of his brilliance at computer programming and bringing all the pieces together into a dance wellness website that handles a great deal of information.
GG: The website, the Dancer Wellness Project, is something I created to support all these different dance wellness programs which oftentimes incorporate screenings, batteries of assessments that address certain characteristics of the dancing body. The assessment of physical strengths – is this muscle strong – flexibility, laxity, structural, cardiovascular… thousands of different data points. These screenings are terrific at preventing injuries, but they generate truckloads of information. I watched different groups going through this arduous process and then not knowing what to do with the information, and I thought, this is sort of dumb; that’s what computers are invented to do.
That’s where this started, creating the technology that would handle the analysis of all this information. Today it’s a comprehensive, Internet-based project. Screening now is only one component of it; it’s gotten much, much larger. It generates unique profiles for each dancer. Dancers now can go online, review their own profiles, and say, “this looks really good, but this over here looks like something we might want to address.” It’s not a question of acceptability, of failing the test. Rather, it’s “here are the areas where you might want to grow, here are the areas where you could benefit from adjustment.” All available online; it does the analysis for you.
KP: Dancers can go to the website and create a file that shows their unique and individual course of cross training. It’s like shopping on the Internet.
GG: We realized that if we’re going to push the technique and the dancers, we have to do something to prevent injuries. It’s really all about the art.
As if to underscore Galbraith’s words, the Spring Concert this weekend includes no dance technology visible to the viewer.
In addition to original dance works by MFA candidate Jennifer Birou Lakamp, and BA candidate Jody Herman, Herman will perform a reconstruction of an early work by modern dance pioneer Doris Humphrey, TWO ECSTATIC THEMES, a cornerstone of modern dance as we know it today.
The music for TWO ECSTATIC THEMES, by Nikolai Karlovich and Gian Francesco Malipiero will be played live on Mather Dance Center’s recently refurbished grand piano by our favorite accompanist for dance, Karin Tooley.
At Mather Dance Center on the campus of Case Western Reserve University, Thursday, 3/25 thru Saturday, 3/27 at 8pm and Sunday, 3/28/2010 at 2:30 pm. For reservations, phone 216-368-6262. $10 general, $7 seniors and CWRU faculty and staff, $5 students.
From Cool Cleveland contributors Elsa Johnson and Victor Lucas. Elsa and Vic are both longtime Clevelanders. Elsa is a landscape designer. She studied ballet as an avocation for 2 decades. Vic has been a dancer and dance teacher for most of his working life, performing in a number of dance companies in NYC and Cleveland. They write about dance as a way to learn more and keep in touch with the dance community. E-mail them at vicnelsaATearthlink.net.