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Tributes for two
Iris Fanger and Julie Ince Thompson
BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL


Boston’s dance community honored two of its own last week with performances, parties, and testimonials. On Thursday night at the Sanctuary Theater in Harvard Square, Iris Fanger received the 2005 Dance Champion award from the Boston Dance Alliance. Fanger, a long-time journalist, lecturer, and dance historian, ran the Harvard Summer Dance Center for 18 years, and she’s curated exhibitions for the Harvard Theater Collection and several art museums. She writes on dance and theater for the Patriot Ledger and the Phoenix.

Fanger’s varied career has focused on educating dancers and dance audiences. It was an inspired idea on the Dance Alliance’s part to showcase three companies of next-generation dancers as a tribute to that mission. Jeannette Neill’s Boston Youth Moves, José Mateo Ballet Theater’s YouthWorks, and OrigiNation’s NIA Dance Troupe did a short work each, representing three different styles of contemporary dance: Neill’s modern jazz, Mateo’s neo-classic ballet, and NIA’s Afro-fusion. Choreographer Martha Armstrong Gray presented the award to Fanger.

Two nights later, the faithful filled the Boston Conservatory Theatre for "Make of Yourselves a Light," in celebration of choreographer and teacher Julie Ince Thompson, who died in 2003 at 51. Thompson taught at the conservatory for eight years, and she worked as a dancer, choreographer, poet, and theater artist in the Boston area for more than three decades. Her family organized the commemorative concert (Jeremy Alliger produced it) and established a scholarship in her name for a student in the conservatory’s dance division. President Richard Ortner presented the first award to Angela Buccini, who choreographed and danced in Redeeming Gift from Beyond, a duet of compassionate friendship, with Megan Krauszer.

The evening featured generous selections of Thompson’s work — dances on film, poems printed in the program and read by her husband, Tommy Thompson — but she exercised a remarkable presence over the other offerings as well. An inspired teacher and mentor, Thompson collected a wide range of dancers, collaborators, and audiences around her interests; she was particularly admired for her portraits of unusual women.

I didn’t know her well, but what was fascinating to me about the concert was how all of the dances seemed related to Thompson’s sensibility. In the films, tall, beautiful, intelligent, she modeled an idealized modern-dance æsthetic. With simple, sculptural moves that probed out into space and curled back against her body, she could have been simply admiring her own physicality, but every action was vested with meaning, with intensity. If she put her hands on her face, you thought of weeping. If she stretched out a leg, then flexed a foot, it was like proposing and mastering some small question. When her daughter, Adrianna Thompson, danced "Freefall" and "Lament" from her Suite Julie, she projected a gamut of expression, not acting or telling a story, but moving with the resonance of something felt.

This, of course, was the basis of Martha Graham’s modern dance, way back at the beginning. You couldn’t do a Graham movement without this inner desire or impulse. Over the next half-century, Graham’s ruthless, controlled emotionalism grew softer, more elaborate, then hardened again into decadence and artificiality. Boston Conservatory graduate Jennifer De Palo-Rivera performed a duet from Graham’s 1981 Acts of Light with Maurizio Nardi. Both of them now dance in the Graham company.

The other contributions to the concert illustrated stages in between and beyond the first outbursts of modern dance. Marcus Schulkind’s Solo for Patricia, Carla Maxwell’s Etude on two dances by José Limón, and the "I Can Dream Can’t I" number from Paul Taylor’s Company B illustrated the prolific middle generation of heartfelt reflections on life and dancing. This way of working can always be re-energized by new individuals, as was beautifully demonstrated by Stephanie Guiland-Brown’s performance of "Solo" from Donald Byrd’s White Man Sleeps.

Modern dance in recent years has extended its supply of movement resources by connecting with popular and world dance cultures, as shown by Adrianna Thompson’s tango duet, Beloved. Seán Curran’s wonderfully quirky Schubert Solo not only brought this special Bostonian home to perform but reminded me of the terrific possibilities for step dancing — the non-balletic virtuosity of the lower body — that were mostly ignored by the earlier modern dancers.

The program ended with Charity Rising, which was directed by Diane Arvanites-Noya and Tommy Neblett, members of the Boston Conservatory faculty, for themselves and six other Boston dancers. With the three-women group Tapestry singing music by 12th-century composer Hildegard von Bingen, the dancers entered and collected into a slowly revolving mass, out of which they danced, each in turn, their personal offering for their friend and colleague.


Issue Date: May 20 - 26, 2005
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