E-Mail This Article to a Friend Thirty years later Dance Collective has reason to celebrate BY IRIS FANGER

On stage, Dawn Kramer was the smoldering, sex-goddess beauty, Martha Gray the ferociously feisty one, Susan Dowling the image of a WASP princess, and Judith Chaffee, who joined slightly later, the lyrical poetic presence. Together with Ruth Wheeler, they formed Dance Collective in 1973, a commune of choreographers/performers who created and danced new works while taking on the management tasks of building and running a company. Other early members — Becky Arnold, Arawana Hayashi, Dorothy Hershkowitz, and Beth Soll — later went off to careers on their own.

Back then, when the world of modern dance was populated by companies built around a single personality, it was a novel idea to form a group of artistic equals. "A lot of us had just moved to Boston," Kramer recalls. "It seemed like a good idea to support each other administratively as well as artistically. We all performed in each other’s works."

"Dangling by a Thread," the 30th-anniversary concert that Dance Collective will present next weekend at Boston University’s Tsai Performance Center, will find many of the same names still on the program, albeit in different roles. Kramer will have a new work, De/Reconstruction, which she says "is probably my last solo ever. It reflects the developmental stage I’m at now." Her fellow artistic director, Mickey Taylor-Phinney (who joined the troupe in 1986), will also present a new work, Seeing the Forest Through the Trees. Kramer will revive her 1980s Blue Cheer, which features a trio of housewives with buckets in their hands; she’ll appear in it with Taylor-Phinney and Ann Brown Allen, another long-time veteran of the company. Work in Progress, which Kramer choreographed with Sean Curran, has her appearing with him on a video and then alone on stage. Curran has invited her to perform the work next year with his company in New York.

Meanwhile, Dowling, who became the dance coordinator of PBS’s New Television Workshop after she stopped dancing and was a founder of Art:21, and Chaffee, a respected theater-movement teacher, have compiled and edited a two-part video retrospective excerpted from films of the more than 150 Dance Collective works. Here’s hoping that will include the architectural extravaganza commissioned by First Night in 1989, Rondo for a New Year, which was set on a scaffolding 18 feet high in Back Bay Station (it was revived in 1990 as Pipe Dream at the Boston Center for the Arts), plus Gray’s Flowering into New Battles (which was taken into the Boston Ballet repertory for Tony Catanzaro and the late Anamarie Sarazin) and her Dance for Soundstair, which found the dancers at sites around the city on a staircase wired for sound by Christopher Janney.

For many Dance Collective members, of course, the company was only their night job. Gray taught at the Cambridge School of Weston, Chaffee, Taylor-Phinney, and Allen at Boston University, and Kramer at Mass College of Art. Gray was also a founder and the first director of the Harvard Summer Dance Center. When the Dance Collective history is written, it’s likely to become apparent that another lasting influence lies with the students, dating back to the first residency at Tufts, in 1973, when Art Bridgeman, Donald Byrd, and Harry Streep Jr. danced in the classes. In recent years, Dance Collective has expanded its educational programs, which include in-school performances and an extensive Boston-based summer program.

Kramer says she plans to step down after the anniversary event: "I’ve been doing this for 30 years. It’s time for a change." She also cites family obligations as part of her decision. "It doesn’t mean I’ll never choreograph or perform again. The wonderful thing is there’s now a second generation coming up in Dance Collective."

"Dangling by a Thread" will be presented next Friday and Saturday, September 19 and 20, at 8 p.m. at the Tsai Performance Center, 685 Commonwealth Avenue. Tickets are $15 to $30; call (617) 353-8725 or visit www.dancecollective.org.