Читать книгу The Grand Union - Wendy Perron - Страница 14

PART II The Gifts They Brought

In this section I describe the physical and expressive gifts that each dancer brought to Grand Union. I am not including their abilities as choreographers, though obviously those are huge in almost every case. Rather, I am focusing on who they were as performers/improvisers at the time of Grand Union. Each one had a searing uniqueness that is a challenge to describe. I start each mini-profile with a single paragraph about that person’s dancing as I remember it in the seventies, a snapshot of the dancer in motion. Then I go on to give a bit of background and describe the dancer’s abilities that relate to Grand Union. In order to provide a sense of immediacy—to give you the very present sense that I have while I call the dancers to mind—I have put each initial paragraph in the “literary” present tense. Midway through each mini-profile you may notice that I drop the convention of referring to the artist by surname and start using the more casual first name. This is for two reasons: first, I want you to get to know them each in a more familiar way, and second, in the (white) modern dance tradition (as opposed to ballet), we call even the most respected artists by first names: it’s Isadora, Martha, Merce, Paul, and Trisha. In the black tradition, it’s Miss Dunham and Mr. Ailey. I don’t know why these differences occur, but it’s been that way for generations.