Patrick Corbin paid homage to Paul Taylor and to his own technique in a master class at the Harvard Dance Center. PHOTOS: Teresa Lattanzio

Student dancer Jun Shepard ’14 was a joyful participant in Patrick Corbin’s visit to the OFA Dance Program. Here’s her recap of Corbin’s master class at the Harvard Dance Center.

Patrick Corbin, director of CorbinDances and former principal dancer with the Paul Taylor Dance Company, is a visceral choreographer and vigorous teacher. He defines joy through movement, and uses his dancers to delineate human relationships. On April 19, I had the opportunity to take Corbin’s master class at the Harvard Dance Center. In this class, he presented an eclectic movement vocabulary, allowing us to touch the legacy of Paul Taylor while exploring a new dance methodology and practice.

The author, Jun Shephard '14, participated in Corbin's master class.

He began the class with a warm-up created by Taylor. The Taylor technique heavily emphasizes the back and torso spiral. Taylor dancers dance with a rounded and effortless quality that is very particular to this type of training. Corbin presented the true Taylor exercises in their original form, which was a pleasant surprise, as many teachers today have strayed away from codified dance techniques.

This is not to say that Corbin did not present anything of his own; the longer choreographic phrase that he taught us characterized the particularity and innovation that define his choreography. The phrase, taken from a larger piece he is currently choreographing for CorbinDances, aims to explore the importance of human contact by negating it. Presented as a solo, the movements depict a person who does not want to be touched. Corbin uses a combination of pedestrian and technical movements, in collaboration with his dancers–he even got some input from a student taking the master class. In doing so, he epitomizes the blending of 20th century modern and 21st century contemporary dance.

David Lutken as Woody Guthrie in "Woody Sez." PHOTO: Wendy Mutz

The other night, when David Lutken began playing his guitar for the opening scene of Woody Sez at American Repertory Theater, the audience fell silent in a combination of readiness and reverence. The show is about folk and Everyman icon Woody Guthrie, whose populist music — This Land Is Your Land — taps deeply into the American spirit and identity. Lutken, who plays both the narrator and Guthrie in the show — he is also co-creater and music director  – channels Guthrie and, with three additional uber-talented cast members,  the milieu of Guthrie’s life and times. The result is part revival, part rally — to the human spirit and to the power and penetration of folk music. The show, running through May 26 at the Loeb Drama Center, is a 90-minute tribute to Guthrie. But the experience is as much about the performances as it is about the stirring of Cambridge audience members — many of whom are likely to bring their guitars, mouth harps, fiddles, spoons — you name it — to a series of post-show hootenannies with the cast and special guests. Below is an edited and condensed interview with Lutken, whose championing of Guthrie is nothing short of an American mission.

Why did you want to write a show about Woody Guthrie?
I’ve done a lot of guitar playing in my life. When I began working in the theater in the late 1980s, I immediately caught the wave of what could be called “guitar theater.” It’s been a great thing for me, and I’ve done a lot of varied things in the last 25 years. I happened to know about Woody Guthrie from being a folk musician for a long time, and Woody’s life is really what it is. That’s really what it is about: Woody. What he did, what he accomplished and what he tried to accomplish with the music he wrote. Woody’s story is all the more interesting because of the life that underlies it. And that’s what made it theatrical. What he was trying to do with his music and social consciousness was, to some degree, unique.

What’s unique about his life?
Part of what is unique about his life is his tragedies and his travels, which he experienced all because of his art. It occurred to me that Woody’s life and experiences with his mother and her descent into madness and all the operatic things going on around him – his house burning down, his sister dying, his father being set on fire – swirled into this tornado of poetry and creativity in him. Then when it came out, it also had an element of speaking for the displaced and trying to get people to do right.

You talk about wanting to change people’s minds with this show. That’s no small mission. What is it that you want to change people’s minds about?
When I first got the idea to do this a long time ago it was with the help and encouragement of Harold Leventhal, who was Woody’s old manager – and Pete Seeger’s manager, and Arlo Guthrie’s manager and Bob Dylan’s manager for a little while. Harold was a great old guy. I came to him with the idea of doing a children’s show, and he went into the back room and dusted off an old script of his called California To The New York Island. This was right after George W. Bush had been elected president for the first time. I was looking to do something international to try to prove we could export art and other things that didn’t have to do with what our international image was at the time. To cut to the chase, we ended up touring all over Austria and the Czech Republic and central Europe a few years later. In Austria, a teacher came up to me and said: Young man, are you responsible for this? And I said: Well, yes sir. And he said: You should be very proud because you have done more for you country in 45 minutes than your government has done in the last 25 years. I got all choked up and thought that was great. When it came around to going on to create a real theater piece beyond the children’s show, I guess I always kept that fellow in mind.

The audience has intense identification with the character of Woody Guthrie in this show. It’s almost like a revival. What’s it like for you to represent an American icon? Is it creepy?
My portrayal onstage – whomever I am in a show – is influenced heavily by the writer Peter Stone and his musical The Will Rogers Follies, which I did on Broadway as an understudy for the guys who played Will Rogers. That, too, is a role where the actor is in one way always himself and is playing the title character narrating his own life from some omniscient perspective. It’s sort of like The Great Gatsby being told by Gatsby instead of by Nick. So it’s three-tiered. To use some actor-school speak: I go in and out of two circles of concentration. Both of them are playing Woody Guthrie. It’s only rarely that I go back to David playing Woody Guthrie playing himself. It’s fun and interesting and strange. I suppose it’s eerie. Not creepy.

Do you come from a family that prized music?
There are a lot of musical influences in my family. My father’s mother was a classically trained pianist from the backwoods of Mississippi. She was a brilliant musician and a soloist with symphonies and orchestras in the 19-teens. Then she married my grandfather and had three sons. She continued to play all of her life, but not at the professional level. My mother’s father – also from Mississippi – was an interesting and garrulous fellow who played popular stuff. He knew all kinds of old songs and was not a musician but would sing and dance. So that was a big influence on all of us. I’m the youngest of four children, and all of my older siblings play mostly string instruments – my one brother plays a wind instrument. When I was a little boy, that’s just what everyone was doing. I studied classics at Duke University — and played in bars and honky-tonks — and in 1986 at age 30, I went to acting school in London and got a classical education in theater. I went to New York City and immediately got a job playing a guitar in a musical. The very first show I did was a show about Woody Guthrie back in 1988.

What have you learned from this internal encounter with Woody Guthrie? As a human being – not as an actor – what’s your takeaway?
I keep coming back to a quote of Woody’s that I’ve always really liked that is not in the show. He said: “I think back through my life to all the people that I owe. I mean the ones that I can remember in person. Of course I know that I owe these folks, and they owe some other people, and all of us are in debt to others. And all of us owe everybody, and the amount that we owe is all that we have. And the only way I could ever pay back all of you good walkers and talkers is to work.” I guess that applies to me. I learned through the whole process that there isn’t any such thing as a one-man show. I could not have done the physical production without the help of all these other people. But as an actor, I couldn’t have done any of this without my grandmother and grandfather and siblings, and Woody’s sister Mary Jo. These all add up to what happens every night when you walk out there.

Keir GoGwilt ’13 (violin) and Matthew Aucoin ‘12 (conductor) perform in Paine Hall, ARTS FIRST 2012

ARTS FIRST 2012 saw many of our Artist Development Fellows in action. Violinist Keir GoGwilt ’13, ADF recipient ’12 and conductor Matthew Aucoin ‘12, ADF recipient ’10, performed the Beethoven Violin Concerto: I. Allegro ma non troppo.

David Hallberg's master class advice was: "Let's just have fun." PHOTO: Liza Voll

Guest blogger Mari Sosa ’12 shares her enthusiasm for David Hallberg‘s master class at the Harvard Dance Center.

As a senior stepping into my last Harvard ballet class last week, there was no better way to commemorate the moment than with a greeting from David Hallberg, the first American principal dancer with the Bolshoi Ballet, and one of the most inspiring male dancers in the current ballet world. After OFA Dance Program Director Jill Johnson introduced him, Hallberg said, “I’m not here to impress you. So don’t try to impress me. We’re all here because we love to dance. So let’s just have fun.”

Of course, as soon as he took his first tendu, I was impressed. Those arches! The length of his arms! Everything was clean, precise and “sang” with the music. As he explained his learning process to lengthen and improve his arabesque, I couldn’t help wonder at Hallberg’s modesty and continuous enthusiasm to refine his technique, even after all he has accomplished. While I tried to concentrate on my own technique, and, as he instructed, my breathing, I contemplated how incredible it was to have this kind of opportunity as a college undergraduate.

Whether or not the class was my best personal dancing, the energy in the room more than made up for it. Every eye was trained on Hallberg’s lines and soaring movement across the floor, trying to pick up every drop of information. I could sense my fellow students’ eagerness as we all tried to live up to the challenges he gave us. Especially when he demonstrated the grand allegro, jaws dropped. He absolutely levitated, and the grace in his upper body made it look completely effortless. He told us to “loosen the chains” and “just dance it,” words of encouragement that are often lost in technique classes, but that make all the difference in how good the movement feels to the dancer.

The class was rounded off perfectly with a question-and-answer session. For me, the most inspiring moment came when he was asked why he chose to join the Bolshoi, and he answered that he knew he had to do it because it scared him. This is an important lesson, especially for anyone graduating from Harvard: Don’t take the safe route in life, but do the thing that is most frightening.

“When I had taken the risk and knew I made the right decision, I felt so alive,” he said. Hallberg’s class definitely left every student feeling alive.

The emblematic question of ARTS FIRST weekend is always: “What first?” Jammed with a seemingly limitless constellation of creative events to attend, the schedule for the weekend is an aesthetic overload. To help you navigate the embarrassment of riches, I’ve put together this helpful cheat sheet of the extravaganza’s can’t-be-missed happenings:

1. RE:RE:RE Dance Installation Excerpts

• Pause in front of Widener Library’s majestic steps to watch Harvard students perform excerpts from their RE:RE:RE Dance Installation, choreographed by OFA Dance Director Jill Johnson. A collective meditation on the nature of modern interconnectivity, the piece may make you want to silence your phone for a few hours—or days!
  Friday, 6:45 p.m., Steps of Widener Library

2. Throwing on a Potter’s Wheel

• Time to get your hands dirty. Join the OFA Ceramic Program for demonstrations using a potter’s wheel. Spectators welcome, but active participants encouraged.
  Saturday, 1 p.m., Science Center Lawn

3. B!tch: A Play about Antigone

• Catch the modern retelling of the classic Theban tale, updated with the healthy addition of a few expletives.
  Various performances, Farkas Hall

4. Performance Fair Stake-Out: Sanders Theatre

• Cozy up in your favorite Sanders Theatre spot beginning at 1 p.m. and catch some of the best student performance groups on campus deliver their punchiest pieces in 20-minute intervals. Bach Society Orchestra will be kicking off the extravaganza, but watch out for appearances by Harvard Wind Ensemble, Pops Orchestra, The Krokodiloes, Radcliffe Pitches and the Dunster House Opera
  Saturday, 1-5 p.m. Sanders Theatre

5. HAIR

• The Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club is staging this iconic musical in the Loeb Experimental Theatre for a five-show run. So let your hair down and reserve your free tickets before they sell out by emailing hairtickets2012@gmail.com.
  Various performances, Loeb Drama Center Experimental Theatre

ARTS FIRST is my favorite time of year in Harvard Yard and in all the venues around the college and town. Cambridge comes to life with the spirit of student creativity — and often student arts are charged with an energy rarely captured by professional companies. Students take a different type of risk from professionals. It’s a moment in life when the “let-go” factor is very strong, and often it yields art of unparalleled moxie.

“What the students do here is  real, gritty, prolific, perfect, imperfect, joyful, determined, brilliant, terrible, and as varied as the cultural heritage and life experience that each brings to Harvard,” says Jack Megan, director of the Office for the Arts, which produces ARTS FIRST. “This environment of art-making suggests to every new student that you not only might like being part of a creative process, but that you really should be.”

And that’s it. You really should be part of the art-making at Harvard — not just as a student, but as a member of the faculty, staff, community and greater Cambridge and Boston areas.

Here are my TOP THREE picks for this year’s 20th anniversary ARTS FIRST FESTIVAL which runs in and around Harvard through Sunday, April 29. It’s free and open to the public. Bring the kids. Bring a friend. Bring lunch. Stay for 15 minutes or make a day of it. You can follow my suggestions or curate your own festival experience. Either way, put arts first this weekend. And enjoy the show.

1. SLOW DANCING. David Michalek’s video uber-installationon of dancers in slo-mo projected onto the facade of Widener Library is a world-class work of art. What does that have to do with the students? Let’s just say: Kids, get out there and see this one. It will rock your world.

2. HAIR. I’m partial. One of my students produced this. But I am eager to see if there’s any reverb from American Repertory Theater’s Diane Paulus — whose Broadway production won a Tony and who helped students think about the show. And, I confess, I am eager to how students in 2012 depict hippies. Peace out, everybody.

BONUS 2. ALL THEATER. I can’t wait to see HAIR, but theater students have packed every single stage with their  original thespianic pursuits. Here’s the full lineup of shows that are original and otherwise. Just go. You’ll see what I’m talking about with students taking risks, daring to discover and finding their theatrical mojo.

3. OVER THE CENTURIES: POETRY AT HARVARD (A LOVE STORY). Ever wonder what it would be like if all the famous Harvard poets — past and present — got together to read their poetry in one place? Yeah, me, too. Geek out on this event at 3 p.m. Sunday in Agassiz Theatre: Poet Jorie Graham and an ensemble of her students will present a multi-media poetic recitation composed of many of the voices of Harvard poetry.

Of course, don’t limit yourself to my picks. Hundreds of other events created by hundreds of student artists and creative teams are at your fingertips this weekend. Here’s the online guide, but look for the printed guide around town and campus. It’s the best book you’ll read this weekend.

When the actor Tommy Lee Jones ’69 stopped by his old room in Mower Hall, the freshman dorm in The Yard, he had a moment of wonder. “I never thought I’d be back in this room,” he said. But there he was sitting on a couch surrounded by agog freshman.

Margaret Ho ’15 didn’t know she was living in the historic room until recently. “I think it’s really cool,” she said. “I feel like I can be great, too.”

Students mostly wanted to know what life was like when Jones was famously a resident in the room where they were holding a reception for him. How many roommates did he have? (Three: One was former Vice President Al Gore.)  What kinds of things did he do as a student?

Turns out, Jones – best known to this generation as the sheriff in the 2007 hit film No Country for Old Men – cooked a turkey in his dorm fireplace one Thanksgiving, strung the carcass on a tree and carved lines into another tree that he has visited whenever he returns to his alma mater.

The tree, he said, is “not only a measure of time but a botanical lesson that bark grows upward.” He paused as students laughed and then he added: “As you will.”

The college-crazy stories were not the only part of Jones’ education. He also built the foundation at Harvard for his life as an artist, for which he will be recognized today with the 2012 Harvard Arts Medal.

“I read a lot of books while I was here, and I studied narrative structure rather thoroughly, and that’s all very informative for an actor,” he said. “You were able to get a practical education in the theater here because there were so many plays going on. So you try and fail, try and succeed – whatever you did, you were always doing it.”

And he still is.

The Harvard Arts Medal Award ceremony at 3 p.m. Thursday, April 26 in Sanders Theatre is a part of ARTS FIRST, Harvard’s annual celebration of the arts, April 26-29.

It should come as no surprise that Slow Dancing, the brainchild of contemporary artist David Michalek, was not developed overnight. After all, the work is rooted in a deliberateness that goes beyond titular acknowledgment. The piece is comprised of more than 40 video portraits of dancers. Each vignette is displayed on a super-sized screen and in hyper-slow-motion, such that a would-be instantaneous gesture can play out over the course of a full minute or longer. The effect is mesmerizing.

The work’s pacing of 1,000 frames-per-second can be both difficult and pleasurable to watch—an experience that Michalek compares to that of gazing at clouds. Just as a fluffy white mass in the sky can look like an animal or a person or an object, so too can the minute actions of Slow Dancing’s subjects be analyzed and interpreted. The youngest participant in the project is 12-years old. The oldest is 92. Michalek stresses the importance of incorporating different styles of dance as not simply pluralistic, but also as aesthetically interesting. A ballerina’s split-second pirouette drags out across an agonizing span of time, and each muscle’s contraction gets a starring role in its own few moments of screen time. Meanwhile, on a neighboring screen, a break-dancer’s gravity-defying movements change at a glacial, gorgeous step. Creative imagination, says Michalek, lives in that tension. And the work itself is driven by his desire to create “a little oasis of contemplation—a secular chapel—” in the midst of our daily bustle.

Although Michalek began his career as a photographer—working as an assistant to the famed Herb Ritts—and eventually accruing credits in publications such as The New Yorker, Vogue and Interview, his interest in installation art was born early. In 1998, he gave up commercial photography entirely and began challenging notions of technology and art and points of intersection through his multi-disciplinary projects. Slow Dancing premiered at Lincoln Center in 2007. He has shown his work at the Brooklyn Museum, Sadler’s Wells, Trafalgar Square, Opera Bastille, and the Venice Biennale, among others.

The Harvard community is already enjoying the fruits of Michalek’s labors as part of the lead-up to ARTS FIRST weekend April 26-29. Michalek’s multi-disciplined dancers are “performing” nightly on the façade of Widener Library between 7 and 11 p.m. Students, as well as passersby, can drop in and sit for as long as they’d like in the informal seating area that faces the Widener steps. And thanks to Dudley House, which opened the limited-run Slow Dancing Café, patrons can enjoy a spot of al fresco dining nearby, replete with small-plates and sweetly faux-flickering tea lights.

Original reduction kiln built in 1987, prior to demolition.

Like most things, the life of a kiln is only so long. Kilns must often roar to temperatures around 2,400 degrees Fahrenheit and then cool within 48 hours, so the artists can eagerly claim their ceramic work. Lined with firebrick and framed with steel supports, these materials degrade over time and with use. The Harvard Ceramics Program reduction kiln, built in 1987, was well loved and well used for more than 1,000 firings in 25 years. The studio decided it was time to build a new kiln in 2011 and began fundraising the thousands necessary to buy a new reduction kiln that would fit the needs of the unique program.

Judah Birkeland and master kiln builder Donovan Palmquist welding the frame for the new reduction kiln.

Through generous donations and fundraising efforts during the studio’s annual show and sales, the Ceramics Program was able to raise enough funds to see their dream come to fruition and bring in master kiln builder Donovan Palmquist from Minnesota in January of 2012. The Studio not only built a new 80 square-foot reduction kiln, but a new 36 square-foot soda fire kiln as well. Throughout the building process, Harvard students and studio participants were able to watch the ever jovial Palmquist and his assistant Judah Birkeland work magic as the kilns went up brick by brick.

For the soda fire kiln, a master class allowed students to aid in the building process. A range of students from harvard undergraduates to international participants cut and stacked bricks layered with mortar, made numerous measurements from the foundation to the chimney, and even created a wooden support on which to build the braided arched roof of the kiln. Such structural basics harken back to the days of Roman arches, with nothing but careful geometry and gravity holding the materials together. The tasks were exciting and rewarding, allowing creative spirits to explore a mix of engineering and science. Local professionals were responsible for fitting out the gas pipes and electrical work, but were more than happy to talk to students and explain their processes. Read more…

"Slow Dancing" on the facade of Widener Library at Harvard University. PHOTOS: ALICIA ANSTEAD

National Poetry Month is winding down but before the month of literary love comes to an end, I’d like to pause for an ekphrastic moment. That is: A moment in which we consider the use of one art form to illuminate another art form. In this case, I’m talking about  Slow Dancing, the hyper-slo-mo video public art installation projected onto Jumbotron-like screens on the facade of Widener Library at Harvard University. After spending the last three nights taking in Slow Dancing – and you do “take it in” as opposed to “watch it” (more on that later) — I was suddenly struck last night by how much David Michalek‘s mashup of movement and film is a vehicle for understanding both dance and poetry.

Poetry is the most succinct type of literary art. The condensed format forces readers to slow down, consider every word, take in the mood, the shades, the nuances. You must give in to poetry, give over to it and let it lead you to revelations. For Slow Dancing, which premiered at Lincoln Center in 2007 in New York City and has since traveled the world, Michalek filmed more than 40 dancers for five seconds each and slowed each clip to 1,000 frames a second. The typical ratio for filming is 30 frames per second — thus the word “slow” in the title. It takes 10 minutes for each “five seconds” to unfold.

By expanding the moment, Michalek forces viewers to slow down, to consider every movement, to witness the vocabulary of each genre of dance and to enter into a mood, shape, tone, image. If I were teaching poetry or any kind of writing, I’d send all my students to Slow Dancing as an exercise in rhythm and form. And I would further suggest they sit in “the scene” for the entire evening.

Why call it a”scene”? Actually, you don’t have to spend three hours at Slow Dancing. You can stroll by and something beautiful Read more…