January 12, 2006
Dance DVDs celebrate historic choreographers and their work
Hannah Wiley was trained as a dancer and later became a teacher and choreographer, but now she finds herself creating DVDs, thanks to a grant from the UW’s Royalty Research Fund.
“I’ve never done anything like this before,” the UW dance professor admits. “And I could never have attempted it without the help of Thom Heileson, who’s done the design and technical part.”
The three initially funded DVDs are about the work of three historically important choreographers, and will include a performance of their work by the UW’s Chamber Dance Company (CDC), along with interviews and other information. They are really an extension of the work Wiley has been doing for the past 15 years, bringing in guest artists to recreate historical dances with the company, which is made up of graduate students earning their master’s in dance.
From the time she formed the company, Wiley explains, she has been videotaping their dance performances. But tape deteriorates, so something she’s had in the back of her mind in recent years is to transfer the performances to DVD. From that came the idea of including interviews with the dancers and with the guest artists who come to “set” the dances on the company (this terminology is used to describe reconstructing an existing dance for a new company of dancers). Add in archival film of the choreographers or performances by their companies if those are available and the DVDs turned into educational vehicles in their own right. Wiley envisions them being used in dance history classes and by individual dance students and dance researchers.
Choreographers to be represented on the DVDs are Mary Wigman, Michio Ito and Dore Hoyer, all of whom played important roles in the rise of modern dance, but whose work is not very accessible now, more than 30 years after their deaths. That’s why Wiley was led to create the DVDs.
Although she has about 60 videotapes of CDC performances featuring the work of 43 choreographers, there are particular ones she is most anxious to save.
“I’m not so interested in the big guys — the Paul Taylors and the Martha Grahams — those will be preserved in any case,” she says. “It’s the little guys I’m interested in.”
And these three are special to Wiley. “I love their work. I treasure their work. When I look over the last 15 years, there are certain pieces where there’s been a meaningful process and a transformation of the dancers involved in it, and these three represent that to me.”
Of the three choreographers featured in the first DVDs, Wigman is the most well known. She is, in fact, a major figure in modern dance, Wiley says. However, her work was done in Germany and those who hold legal rights to it are very protective of it. “There’s been a lot of back and forth about using photos, using original film footage,” Wiley says. “There are about 30 seconds of Mary Wigman performing Hexentanz (Witch Dance, one of her famous works), and getting rights to include that little snippet was pretty difficult. We had to say it’s strictly educational, not for sale.”
The woman who set the Wigman work on the CDC, however, was more accommodating. A professor who teaches at the University of Hawaii, she flew to Seattle to be interviewed. And since she also set the Hoyer work, the trip served a double purpose. Former CDC dancers have also been happy to talk about their experiences.
Work on the Ito DVD suffered a setback when the 86-year-old former dancer who set the work died this fall. But one of Wiley’s former students is Japanese, and during a visit to Tokyo was able to interview a contemporary of Ito’s, one of his former dancers, as well as a student of the woman who set the work.
Leah Schrager, an undergraduate student, is one of several who helped Wiley on the videotapes by transcribing interviews, giving input on the editing and going through the CDC videos in search of the ones with the best performance quality. For her, the project was a learning experience in itself.
“I’ve come to see it all as a more cohesive whole,” she says. “It’s one thing to dance in a historical work but another when you get the interviews and all. It’s so much more interesting when you understand the historical context. I’ve gained a new appreciation of how important these dances were.”
Wiley hopes that the three DVDs will be completed by the end of winter quarter, and that she’ll be able to find funding to produce others. About two dozen copies will be made of each DVD so that the library can have a copy and others can be loaned to dance students and dance programs at other institutions.
“I am determined that these dance not be lost,” Wiley says. “Making the DVDs is an act both of celebration and of preservation.”
