E-Mail This Article to a Friend Hail and farewell Dance Collective closes up shop BY DEBRA CASH

"You can say hello and goodbye at the same time," says dancer and choreographer Sarah Slifer. It’s time to do both. After 33 years, local dance institution Dance Collective is closing up shop, retiring its name, and calling it a day.

Dance Collective founder Dawn Kramer remembers 1973 as a time when all forms of collective activity were flourishing here: food coops, feminist health organizations, bookstores, restaurants. "Being a collective was a practical, flexible ideal. We were nine young artists, all except one in our late 20s.

"We all wanted to make work, to perform and choreograph. This way none of us had to do it all by ourselves." The original nine — Susan Dowling, Martha Armstrong Gray, Dawn Kramer, Ruth Wheeler, Becky Arnold, Bob Cooley, Arawana Hayashi, and Dorothy Hershkowitz — worked together for only a few years, but the collective model continued under Dowling, Kramer, Armstrong Grey, and Wheeler and later with Judith Chaffee and Micki Taylor-Pinney. The Collective grew to encompass not only shared and solo dance performances and site-specific environmental pieces but educational efforts including a summer outreach program for teens. Over the years, the company received a few $10,000 grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and money from what is now the Massachusetts Cultural Council, but cuts in arts funding hit hard. And the original choreographers had moved on. By 2003, Taylor-Pinney was running the Collective alone. She met with Kramer and the company board to try to restructure the company and recruit new co-directors, but that was not to be.

So Dance Collective will go out with its metaphoric head held high. This weekend, September 9 and 10, the company presents "Commencement" at the Boston University Dance Theatre in the new FitRec Center, an auditorium that Pinney helped plan. A year of shows in the Newton public schools and a celebration next spring are in the works. "Commencement" features three dances by Taylor-Pinney, including Eggery, which she calls a "film noir take on a henhouse and its aging tenant" that will feature long-time Dance Collective dancer Ann Brown Allen, and a piece that Taylor-Pinney has created in collaboration with her musician husband, Marcus, in which she explores the idea that "you can’t always choose what you see but you can choose what it is you want to look at."

It’s part of the Dance Collective ethic that even in this final concert, the company is bringing a new choreographer into the fold. Sarah Slifer wasn’t even born when Dance Collective gave its first concerts. She grew up in Northboro and created her first piece of choreography under Taylor-Pinney’s tutelage when she spent a year at Boston University before leaving for Georgetown. In Washington, she danced with Maida Withers for eight years. Slifer says that she started to choreograph in earnest when she moved to Amsterdam and began exploring the relationship between voice and movement, improvising with Magpie, a collective that includes a number of Twyla Tharp alumni.

When divorce brought her back stateside, Slifer got to work almost immediately, directing the recent Gloucester New Arts Festival, which used the streets and spaces of the city for presentations of all kinds. Her work on "Commencement" includes a piece she developed with a Scottish breakdancer and one exploring her ideas of the private, and of privatization.

There’s no way the end of Dance Collective won’t be sad, but Taylor-Pinney’s sadness is tempered by optimism. After all, the dance scene in Boston is more varied than it was 30 years ago. Young dancers and choreographers continue to emerge. As she says with more than a hint of wistfulness, "I think of this year as a sort of celebration and acknowledgment of what this organization has accomplished over 33 years. While it’s very sad that it’s disbanding, we can all hope that the model is something that will be an inspiration to other people. It was a really good run."