The Hunter Museum celebrates a dance legend
“Music and poetry exist in time; painting and architecture in space. But the dance lives at once in time and space.” — Curt Sachs
Stepping through the Hunter Museum of American Art, Adera Causey, curator of education, has a smile on her face, a smile that extends through her whole body.
She’s discussing the January 10th in-house performance “Dancing with Isadora,” a compilation of Isadora Duncan choreography organized by Meg Brooker, artistic director of Duncan Dance South and assistant professor of dance at Middle Tennessee State University. It’s one of myriad events at the Hunter that place visual arts in conversation with other art forms.
“Dancers, musicians, actors see work in a new way—and the audience responds and sees it in a new way,” Causey says. “Some of these works of art have become a storehouse…when I see them, I remember what happened in that space. Songs and movement add depth [to the statues and paintings].”
Early-twentieth century choreographer Isadora Duncan could be credited with initiating the modern conversation between dance and the visual arts. A self-taught dancer, she looked to classical Greek art and nature to create her dances, stepping away from the formal rigidity of ballet and the come-hither appeal of vaudeville.
“With Isadora, the dancer became the author—the dancing subject, rather than just an object,” Brooker says.
Duncan, whose admirers included both men and women, also shifted the dynamic of female, often lower-class dancers and male viewers with money to spend, Brooker explains.
“Modern dance became a space for more women in the audience—it made it okay for middle and upper class women to participate as audience,” she says.
Certainly Duncan wanted to be seen and adored, but her work involves her gaze upon—her interpretation of—works of art. It’s dialectic in nature, just as Brooker’s performance and those of her fellow dancers will be.
In fact, the event was shaped by drawings of Duncan by Abraham Walkowitz that were on display when Brooker visited the museum some time back.
“I was coming down the elevator and through the modern gallery space,” Brooker says. “These pictures were on the wall in front of me. I’d been looking for a link and here were these beautiful watercolors. She’s actually here!”
Though the fragile Walkowitz watercolors are not currently on display, the synchronicity—a dancer inspired by sculpture, painted in watercolor, inspiring a choreographer a century later to stage a performance—is delightfully eerie.
“Dancing with Isadora” will follow the format of a gallery tour. Performers will move in conversation with several works of art. They’ll also dance in front of the long gallery windows overlooking the Tennessee River, Duncan’s undulating movements echoing the rolling rhythm of hills and water.
“Dancing with Isadora” is the inaugural event of Duncan Dance South, recently founded to “establish a regional presence for Isadora Duncan’s work,” Brooker says.
Along with Brooker, dancers include Elizabeth Disharoon Wright, performing courtesy of Lori Belilove & Isadora Duncan Dance Company, and Valerie Durham, co-director of Duncan Dance Project, a collection of dancers from London, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Chattanooga.
MTSU dancers Kadie Cooper, Sierra Smith, and Lauren Zachary will be featured, along with student and community dancers with Chattanooga High School Center for Creative Arts’ Project Motion, directed by Jessica Laliberte Bowman. And most intriguingly, guests will also be invited to join the dancers in some movements.
“’I have never once danced a solo,’” Brooker quotes Duncan as saying. “Her choreography has a very crafted spatial relationship inspired by the idea of a chorus, the idea or perspective of the masses, of a multitude—so I love to show other people in the work. I love to dance the work, but you see the work more fully when you see other people dancing.”
Guests may take in some words of technical explanation over the course of the evening, but there’s no need to feel apprehensive—“Dancing with Isadora”, as Brooker describes it, is deeply grounded in simple, pure emotion.
“In my experience of this work, the base note is joy,” Brooker says. “Even in dances representing tragedy, the movement comes back to this base note of joy. Part of my life’s work at this point is to figure out and articulate what makes this technique feel different than any other movement.”
“Does [dancing these dances] cause you to feel that joy?” Causey asks.
“It does!” Brooker says.
Come see for yourself.