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Story hour
From the Horse’s Mouth comes to Brandeis
BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL

From the Horse’s Mouth, the live dance-documentary project, started four years ago as a gathering of friends — mature dancers who’d contributed to New York’s downtown dance scene in the postmodern era. Originators Tina Croll and James Cunningham, choreographer-dancers with very different styles, had worked together in Cunningham’s zany Acme Dance Company and had belonged to the wide circle of artists presented by Dance Theater Workshop in the ’60s and ’70s. In its first incarnation, the Horse’s Mouth project had the flavor of reunion, comeback, and community rallying point. It was so successful that further installments ensued.

The population diversified to encompass a multi-decade age span and almost anyone remotely attached to any type of dancing, even critics. By now it’s been done more than a dozen times from coast to coast and has inspired a prize-winning video by dancer Sharon Kinney. Each performance is different, but the project itself stays intact through its overall structure, a typically postmodern blueprint that can accommodate the entire gamut of skills and personalities.

The show came to Brandeis University’s Spingold Theater last Thursday night as part of an ongoing celebration of 50 years of the Creative Arts at Brandeis. More than 20 local performers joined Croll and Cunningham for the occasion. The cast included professional dancers and choreographers, teachers, and three Brandeis students.

One of the artists who performed in the extraordinary 1952 Brandeis festival organized by Leonard Bernstein and Irving Fine was Merce Cunningham, who was just on the verge of consolidating his early experiments and forming his first company. The operating scheme of From the Horse’s Mouth owes a lot to Cunningham’s choreographic ideas: his use of everyday movement alongside technical virtuosity; his democratic, often overlapping deployment of dancers and actions on the stage; his willingness to incorporate unanticipated scenic elements, music that the dancers hadn’t heard before the performance, and even challenges in the dancing that weren’t worked out in advance.

Cunningham was on to a process of freeing up dance for the dancers and making it more reflective of our life, out beyond the stage. The process is still going on. At From the Horse’s Mouth, each viewer selects what to take in from a busy array of elements. Four people are performing at a time. By turns each is doing a story and some movement material that he or she has prepared in advance, making modifications on that material according to instructions drawn from a box on stage, and improvising with the other three people at will. There are built-in interludes, where larger groups of the cast members get to parade across the stage in their favorite costumes.

The stories tend to capture your attention — words do that — and I love it when people talk about their dance lives. This time, there were lots of recollected mishaps. Daniel McCusker arrived with a police escort for his first real performance, in Coppélia, with the New Jersey Classic Ballet company, having missed his ride and become hopelessly lost in the unknown territory west of the Hudson River. Michael DiFonzo became a prisoner of his costume while he was playing one of the Three Little Pigs one night in a Radio City Music Hall Disney summer spectacular. Anne Tolbert was revived from an asthma attack during a Remy Charlip piece at Judson Church by fellow dancer Aileen Passloff.

But there were triumphant climaxes, too. Leo Feinstein met his future wife at an Israeli square dance. A teenage Debra Cash landed a job, by mail, as the Michigan correspondent for Dance magazine.

Meanwhile, Adrienne Hawkins seasoned her own funky dancing with mimed comments on Julia Feldman’s story about being assigned five male roommates at Columbia Law School, and Tina Croll improvised with Peter DiMuro as if they’d worked together for years. Presenter Barbara Cassidy, arts project coordinator at Brandeis, stepped in at the last moment for a missing cast member and sang the Beatles’ " Blackbird, " an icon of the counterculture that I can almost remember accompanying an old James Cunningham dance.

This has been a year of self-reflection for a lot of people, and many of the participants abandoned dance as a story topic in favor of recounting inspirational anecdotes, dreams, ambitions, and a pet dove named Alexander Haig.

For whatever reason, this edition of FTHM was almost devoid of representation from the active generation of young choreographers in Boston and Cambridge. That left a big hole in the picture it uncovered. Hardly anyone had a story about dancing or studying in the Boston dance community, even though this has its own rich history. Maybe next time.

Issue Date: September 19 - 26, 2002
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