Can you boil down a creative movement to a single motion?
That question bubbles up as Terry Sendgraff describes standing on a stage and looking up into the rafters. Legendary dance instructor Merce Cunningham had been urging her to think differently about the space, to gaze up and imagine the possibilities of the environment.
“He told me to use the whole stage,” Sendgraff said of Cunningham, who sometimes employed helium balloons in his pieces. “But what could I use? A rope? A trapeze?”
In fact, Oakland, Calif.-based Sendgraff, now 74, used both, inventing the “motivity” trapeze. As a pioneer of modern aerial dance, she expanded the possibilities of motion by lifting dance off the ground and into the realm of improvisation and intuitive performance art.
Ever since Sendgraff’s mid-1970s innovation, an increasing number of modern dancers have joined her.
The spectrum of those innovations will be on display at Aerial Dance Festival 2008, which kicks off in Boulder on Sunday and continues through Aug. 16. Founded by Nancy Smith, artistic director of Boulder- based Frequent Flyers Productions, the festival attempts to celebrate, display and reinforce the rapidly expanding aerial dance form.
“Having been one of the few in the early years, it was a struggle for people to understand and acknowledge the value of it,” Smith said. “People in the dance world didn’t think it was really dance, that it was a gimmick.”
Twenty years after Smith founded her company, there are about 25 aerial dance companies across the country. An international cast of instructors, students (nearly 200) and audience members will come together for Smith’s 10th annual festival, which features classes, lectures and performances.
“It’s really terrific to see how it’s growing,” Smith said. “And I think our book will move it forward even more.”
Co-written with Baltimore-based instructor and choreographer Jayne Bernasconi, the simply named “Aerial Dance” is the first full-length chronicle of the art form’s history. Published last month, the student- oriented tome even includes a DVD to offer newcomers a sense of the action.
“It’s within the dance genre, but it’s a unique category,” Bernasconi said. “We wanted to show how modern dance was really the influence and (that) it didn’t come from circus arts, because that has its own history and people.”
The aesthetic created by people such as Terry Sendgraff and choreographer Stephanie Evanitsky lives on through the 5,000 students Nancy Smith has taught over the years — to say nothing of the countless dancers who have passed through classes by Sendgraff and others.
These are people who have discovered the pleasures of womb-like near-weightlessness and adapted it for themselves.
“We may have forgotten that feeling, but when we see it there’s still a kinesthetic memory,” Smith said.
Bernasconi espouses a style of aerial dance that bypasses the brain for that muscle memory. She said that the power of the art form is hard to articulate until someone experiences it.
“The first time one of my students stood up on the trapeze she began crying, like it was this relief,” she said. “She remembered when she was 8 years old, saving her money so she could go to the hardware store and get ropes to swing on all summer long.”
John Wenzel: 303-954-1642 or jwenzel@denverpost.com
