Collaborative Staging
was rampant. The piece depicts a woman, possibly homeless, on the fringes of society, destitute and alone (Corey 2014). Tenant was inspired by Gentry’s own experiences with and reactions to homeless people as a child and as a young artist in New York City (Gala Concert 1994), and her haunting impressions are vividly depicted in the dance. The choreography, staging, and production elements are stark and dramatic with a sound score consisting of street noises (Corey 2014). A reviewer from The Washington Post commented:
As bums multiplied throughout the Depression, they also became invisible; but Gentry’s street urchin [...] refuses to be ignored. She locks eyes with us in her slow, hunched progress across the stage. But along with the spare emotional focus and physical tension, what made this solo so arresting was its stylized abstraction. Gentry worked in bold, elegant deco lines, making visceral the lean loops and streamlining that energized the decorative arts of the 1930s (Kaufman 2010).
Finding the Project
The nearly year long process of staging Tenant of the Street began during August of 2014 with Mitchell approaching Brodie about the possibility of adding a second major in dance. While Mitchell was extremely interested in pursuing a dance major, she was concerned about finding a final senior exercise project that would fit her interests. Brodie, however, already had a project in mind. Aware of Mitchell’s interest in Labanotation, Brodie proposed a project in which Mitchell could continue notation studies and stage a piece on Brodie herself. That was the beginning of the exciting and intricate process of staging Tenant of the Street.
Brodie’s role in the project had actually begun before the conversation with her student. Brodie had learned of Gentry’s piece from Trisha Bauman, one of her instructors in the Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) certification program. Bauman had suggested Brodie might consider reading and performing Tenant of the Street, as she felt the intensity of the piece benefitted from performance by a mature artist.
Bauman had performed the work herself in France with Compagnie Labkine, under the direction of Jean-Marc Piquemal and Noëlle Simonet. Instead of staging it on herself, Brodie thought it could be an interesting reversal for Mitchell to set the piece on her professor.
After Mitchell and Brodie agreed upon the project, Brodie went about finding the score and receiving the rights to perform the piece. Brodie contacted the Dance Notation Bureau and was informed that Mary Corey notated the piece in New Mexico for the American Dance Legacy Initiative. Brodie reached out to Mary Corey, who suggested she contact Mary Anne Santos Newhall for permission to access the score and perform the piece.
Mary Anne Santos Newhall is in charge of the Eve Gentry Foundation. She learned Tenant from Eve Gentry and Michelle Larson in 1993 (Gentry had previously revived the work for Michelle Larson in 1988). Mary Corey notated Santos Newhall’s perfor-mance of the piece in 1998 (Corey 2014). Mary Corey worked closely with Newhall in notating Tenant because of her intimate knowledge of the work. Santos Newhall coaches all stagings of Tenant, including the one Bauman had participated in with Compagnie Labkine in 2008. Upon learning about the proposed Kenyon project, Santos Newhall gave Brodie permission to stage the piece, and they arranged for Santos Newhall to come to Kenyon College to coach it at a later date.
The Process of Staging
As an undergraduate student, this was Mitchell’s first full reading and staging of a piece, but beyond that she was setting the piece on her professor. This led to a shift in the usual student and professor dynamic. Near the beginning of the staging process, Mitchell frequently tended to revert to their normal relationship with Brodie as the teacher and she as the student. It was challenging not to rely on and defer to Brodie when Mitchell did not feel confident in her own abilities. But as the process went on, Mitchell became more comfortable in her role as the stager of the piece. She had to take ownership in a different way when Brodie was on the floor dancing versus sitting next to her helping with the staging and communicating with the coaches.
Another aspect of the process Mitchell originally struggled with was a tendency to go straight from the page to teaching Brodie, skipping the step of putting the movement into her own body. Throughout the process, Mitchell discovered the vital importance of feeling the movement in her own body so she could fully explain it to Brodie. This allowed for more effective and kinesthetically satisfying teaching sessions.
For Brodie, it was interesting being on the other side of a staging again, specifically with her student guiding the process. She recognized the ever-present challenge of transition-ing from “page to stage” and encouraged Mitchell to find the movement in her body before entering rehearsals. She also found that it was easy for both of them to fall back into their normal roles and struggled a bit with balancing being Mitchell’s teacher and checking her reading while still giving Mitchell the authority to teach her the dance.
The entire process was a reminder about the challenges of dancing in an historic piece where the performer is being asked to stay true to the original form while bringing their own artistry to the work. It was also a learning experience in terms of experiencing (first hand!) effective tools stagers and coaches can utilize in addressing this challenge.
Two Coaching Experiences
To add to the process of staging, both Trisha Bauman and Mary Anne Santos Newhall visited Kenyon College to coach Tenant of the Street, providing greater
depth to the performance of the piece. Bauman came to Kenyon as a guest artist and to coach Tenant soon after Mitchell and Brodie had finished reading the score.
A significant factor in Bauman’s coaching efficacy was the LMA vocabulary she and Brodie share. Bowman contributed a great deal in terms of movement quality to the basics that Mitchell and Brodie had established, and Brodie found it helpful as a performer that Bauman could coach changes in terms of Effort and Space. In addition to Bauman’s coaching, videos of the Compagnie Labkine performances in France as well as coaching sessions and performances featuring Santos Newhall were referenced. Significant differences between performances underscored the need for the notation to maintain the original choreography.
Mary Anne Santos Newhall came to Kenyon to coach about a month after Bauman.
Santos Newhall’s detailed knowledge of the piece is second only to her utter commit-ment to maintaining the integrity of the work and to preserving Eve Gentry’s legacy.
Santos Newhall was able to share the backstory about Gentry and the history of Tenant, including pictures and letters that Gentry had left to her as well as stories of working with Gentry, bringing the full experience to life. Santos Newhall’s coaching largely centered on sharing the inner impulse or the inner monologue behind the dance. While Santos Newhall also worked on technical and qualitative details, she brought a unique perspective on the importance of finding motivation in support of the performance.
These two coaching experiences brought up significant questions as to when is the best time to bring a coach into the process of staging. By the time Santos Newhall arrived, which was less than a month from the date of the performance, some aspects of the movement were already so ingrained in Brodie’s body that it actually took longer to change than it might have if Santos Newhall had arrived earlier in the process. The timing issue is definitely something to consider for future staging processes.
Conclusion
Of all the significant and gratifying experiences associated with this project, Brodie and Mitchell drew three main conclusions from their work on Tenant. First is the effectiveness of challenging traditional roles in staging a piece. Both Mitchell and Brodie grew in ways they might not have by changing the power dynamic in this process. Second is the importance of allowing room for personal interpretation in a staging process, but also the absolute necessity for a score to maintain original choreography and intent. Third, it became apparent through this project how powerful and relevant Tenant of the Street remains to this day. In addition to the Kenyon performance, Tenant was recently staged again in France, with a version set on a young man. The piece lives on in new manifestations, continuing to resonate with audiences. This is reflected in the following comments from students attending the Kenyon concert:
Tenant of the Street featured many moments of active stillness, as [Brodie] looks out into the audience or the sides of the stage for a figure or people that do not appear in the flesh. The majority of the piece utilized bound movements that were strong in tone. These movement qualities echoed the feeling the character Julie is playing is carrying the weight of her lived experience.
and Gentry’s historic piece still feels innovative and current today, as she captures the brutality of life on the street during the depression of the 1930s. The dance itself appears to be relatively simple. Compared to other pieces in the concert, it seemed short and utilized a vocabulary of (what appeared to be) relatively simple movements. Yet, what makes this piece significant is its emotion and the quality and mood the movements produced. Movement through space was slow and deliberate—Brodie enter with a slow, deliberate forward walk, carefully lunging out to the side after each movement forward. The movements were beautiful, but they were also deliberate, conveying the desperation and fear of a woman living on the streets. The emotionality of the piece was palpable, as the room’s energy shifted to reflect the piece’s emotional weight.
or
Modern dance is an art form that I often have trouble connecting with, especially from an audience standpoint. I have trouble feeling emotion for it or understanding what the intent behind the piece is. However, Tenant of the Street genuinely made me feel things
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References
“Eve Gentry, 84, Dancer and Notator.” New York Times, 25 June 1994.
Gentry, Eve. 1938. Tenant of the Street. Notated by Mary Corey, 1998, revised 2014.
LabanWriter score. American Dance Legacy Institute.
Gentry, Eve. 1992. “The ‘Original’ Hanya Holm Company.” Choreography and Dance, vol. 2, no. 2: 9-40.
Kaufman, Sarah. 2010. “Martha Graham Dance Company’s Political Dance Project:
Old Times Feel Like Ours.” The Washington Post, 11 June 2010.
The New Dance Group Gala Concert: An historic retrospective of the New Dance Group presentations, 1930’s-1970’s. 1994. New York: American Dance Guild. VHS.
Newhall, Mary Anne Santos. 2009. Mary Wigman. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.
Phillips, Victoria. 2012. “New Dance Group.” 100 Treasures. Dance Heritage Coalition. <http://www.danceheritage.org/newdance.html>.
The original presentation at the Twenty-Ninth Biennial Conference of the International Council of Kinetography Laban included clips from YouTube and brief excerpts from the dance score to illustrated Balanchine’s innovative vocabulary. For the transformation of the multimedia presentation into a publication the moments of movement captured in the clips are substituted with screen shot stills. The labanotated illustrations remain in the publication.
The Four Temperaments is considered Balanchine’s first modern ballet and appears in the repertory of ballet companies throughout the world. Ballet Society, the predeces-sor to the New York City Ballet, premiered The Four Temperaments in November 20, 1946 with music commissioned by Paul Hindemith and costumes and décor by Kurt Seligmann. The Hindemith score presents a theme in three parts then a series of four variations named after the four temperaments of medieval cosmology: Melancholic (sadness), Sanguinic (cheerfully optimistic, hopeful, confident), Phlegmatic (calm), and Choleric (angry, annoyed).
In a 1947 article dance writer Edwin Denby described the ballet as “A large long piece packed close with intricate but boldly powerful dance invention. It appears to have the dispassionate ferocity of a vital process; … ” (49).
He goes on to say: “It is an impersonal drama that appears to be witty, cruel, desperate and unconsoling, like that of our time. Yet all that actually happens on stage is rapid exact ballet dancing in classic sequences that are like none you could ever imagine.
In fact the technical procedure … is that novel aspects of classic ballet technique — aspects apparently contrary to those one is accustomed to — are emphasized without ever breaking the classic look of the dance continuity” (50).
Ballet Society performed the revised version of The Four Temperaments in February 1948 and the New York City Ballet, in its initial season in October of that same