Restoring the balance: Celebrating women choreographers

By Barry Johnson

Last month, when Anna Halprin was in town, a visitor from New York mused that if a male choreographer of similar stature had decided to stage an impromptu performance in Portland, the New York Times would have staffed the event with its lead dance critic. In Portland, Oregon? Yes, in Portland, Oregon.

The comment has two important parts. The first is to emphasize the importance of Halprin and her free-wheeling approach to dance-making in the history of modern dance. The second is the reason I'm bringing it up now: The contributions of women to modern dance have been undervalued in recent decades, woefully undervalued.

I don't have a systematic "proof" of this, just my own observations and what I hear, but I believe it's true. And that's why I was happy to help White Bird with its Celebrating American Women Choreographers Past, Present and Future discussion on Saturday, which featured choreographers  Lucinda Childs, Josie Moseley and Andrea Miller,  and dance preservationist and historian Norton Owen from Jacob's Pillow.  It's time we started redressing the balance.



The immediate occasion for the discussion, which attracted a hundred or so dance fans to Lincoln Hall, was the performance of Childs's Dance (1979) over three nights at the Newmark Theater. I think of it as one of the great achievements of what we call Minimalism, gathering the composition of Philip Glass, the film design of artist Sol LeWitt and Childs's choreographer into a perfect hour of performance.

Perfect? Maybe I mean "fully realized," but that doesn't quite contain the transport it offers to a pure aesthetic realm, in which infinite variations of songs and movement are working themselves out in discrete modulations, linked and logical. I'm not an Idealist, but Dance almost persuades me to become one, a place where the geometries are strict, the dancers are tireless, the music perpetually in motion investigating the tiniest crevices between notes and phrases.