Hallelujah North Carolina: From the Piedmont to the Blue Ridge - the Boone residency

Members of Appalachian State University's Theatre and Dance department during a "Hallelujah" warm-up exercise in Boone, N.C. Photo by Angela Tuttle. View a slideshow from the Boone residency.

Hallelujah: In Praise of Peaks and Valleys
Farthing Auditorium, Appalachian State University
Boone, North Carolina
April 27, 2002

"Town and gown, that’s the dichotomy of the people around here," said Sali Gill-Johnson in an interview at the rehearsal of Boone’s "Hallelujah." Gill-Johnson is general manager of the Office of Cultural Affairs at Appalachian State University (ASU), which presented "In Praise of Peaks and Valleys." ASU started talking to the Dance Exchange in 2000 about what shapes the character and concerns of this blooming university town in the shadow of Grandfather Mountain on North Carolina’s Blue Ridge (pop.13,500).

"People think the university is taking over," said Gill-Johnson. "It is the largest employer in town. The summer people feel they have an entitlements, as does rural Appalachia." Trying to reach out to all those stakeholders, Boone’s "Hallelujah" eventually involved 200 people from as wide a range as ASU’s Dance Department and Expressive Arts Therapy Program, the Wautauga Youth Network, Glenbridge Health and Rehabilitation Center and even the Strata G. Breakdance Crew.

Boundaries, zoning and politics around all this turf formed the content of "Peaks and Valleys." Said Michelle Pearson in the performance program:

When we first came to Boone, we heard tell that "this little valley can’t hold much more." People shared the highs and lows of living in Boone and presented a range of mixes that exist here in this valley. We immediately became interested in what happens when mountain folk and college kids mix. When ancient mountains undergo construction roadblocks, when scenic views are crowded by tourists.

"In Praise of Peaks and Valleys" called up the landscape in a variety of ways. Triangular armatures created by the Dance Exchange for their "Hallelujah" signature piece "Gates of Praise" did duty on stage as movable mountains. The text spoke warmly of the mountains and their history ("They’ve seen dinosaurs") and the antiquity of the river running through them ("The New River is older than time itself can be measured"). Special honor was paid to Grandfather Mountain, a rocky protuberance resembling the craggy profile of an old mountain man. Much attention was paid to "wildcrafting," the growing, harvesting and preparation of medicinal herbs, as well as the growing and harvesting of students as they pass through the community.

The engaged but contentious mood of the people of Boone showed up in a unique section called "Yes, But," staged like a debate. Two rows of dancers faced each other in a line perpendicular to the audience, arguing at the top of their lungs as they edged downstage and peeled off in different directions in pairs. Without stopping to listen to each other, they ranted about compromise, the money business, hotels, tourists, "my house," the ecosystem, "our children," the highway, the summer, the fall leaves, the ski season. The argument ended with a declaration that brought down the house: "There’s only one Monday and Tuesday a year when the streets aren’t crowded and I’m not telling you which ones they are!" This turf-war mentality echoed a concern Liz Lerman picked up from the "Hallelujah" initiative right from the start: People are deeply concerned about what’s happening to their neighborhoods.

Boone’s disputatious ambience was defused by an amiable dance section to the Bob Een music from "Fertile Fields," followed by a stunning moment where Thomas Dwyer walked forward into the downstage wings and let a floodlight cast the shadow of his hawklike face against the backstage wall, bringing the topic back to the ancient and enduring landscape.

There followed one of the most inspired moments in any of the "Hallelujahs" I saw. Dance Exchangers Celeste Miller and Sharon Chaiklin issued a challenge to the dominance of the Grandfather image by summoning up the spirit of a "Grandmother Mountain." Nine women entered gracefully, turned their backs to the audience and let down their long hair, spreading it over each other like falling water.

The down-home atmosphere was eventually shattered by the entrance of a team of breakdancers, expertly executing breathtaking moves, while being gently interfered with by the modern dancers of the Lerman company. This created a unique atmosphere that pleased the audience, especially when one of the breakdancers announced: "You think this is as good as it gets? It gets better."

"In Praise of Peaks and Valleys" had one special attribute not many expected. Dance Exchange company member Thomas Dwyer, the personification of Grandfather Mountain, danced with his two beautiful twin granddaughters, Joy and Anna Frimmel, who reside in and near Boone. His text grounded the piece gravely: "Survival is the only way to deal with change. I used to be a big man. I’m small now. Not here much longer. The landscape inhabits us. Passing it on. Passing it on." Dwyer was the last man standing after the whole cast built a human mountain, topped with a b-boy, which then collapsed to the floor.

This was not Thomas Dwyer’s only moment to shine. After the intermission, in the first of two "Uneasy Dances" that ended with the company’s 9/11 piece, "Anatomies and Epidemics," Dwyer presented a solo, "Journey," choreographed by Liz Lerman from an much-abbreviated version of "Self-Accusation" by Peter Handke. The program described it as "an investigation of emerging self-awareness," harmonizing nicely with the references to student maturation in the community piece. The text is a series of simple declarative sentences that begins with the speaker at birth: "I came to my senses … I became conscious … I came to my history … I made myself what I am."

Dwyer is for many the very symbol of intergenerational dance as embodied in the Lerman company. With his tall, wiry body, thick ruff of white hair and the facial expression of a disciplined skeptic, Dwyer lives up to the rumor about him, that he was once in the CIA. He admits to being at least in his late 60s, and only began to dance "after retiring from the U.S. government service in June 1988." He has told me he is enormously grateful to Lerman for enriching his later life with dance, and says he will do anything she asks. She asks a lot. He performs with vigor and rigor the hefty physical challenges she throws down to him, carrying other dancers, leaping backwards onto their shoulders, falling to the ground from great heights.

For this piece he appeared alone in a downstage spot, confronting the audience with the deliberate text and repetitious gestures to match, throwing his long, long arms out to his sides, sweeping to the floor, reaching to the sky in a riveting display of what one can only call tough resolve. The audience loved it.

Looking back at "In Praise of Peaks and Valleys," it is interesting to consider who was in it, and who wasn’t. While the residency touched hundreds, only a handful danced. Yet the voices of many were heard.

"In asking questions, we found answers and even more questions," said Michelle Pearson in the program. "This spirit has led to a tone of driving and healthy curiosity in rehearsals – perfect for making art and potions."

The potions came by way of Queen Mab’s Herbs, a business started by Gwenyfar, an ASU student, out of her campus dorm room. Gwenyfar was one of the 36 performers who eventually wound up in the piece. Most were from the university population: faculty, staff and students in dance, expressive arts therapy, biology, Spanish, sociology, music, interdisciplinary studies and psychology. They collaborated with townies like a massage therapist, a yoga instructor, the entertainment editor of the Mountain Times, a sheep farmer, a hip-hop dancer, a DJ, a hair stylist, a spiritual minister, a "mother of two baby whales" and a dancer who is planning to be the first female president of the United States, according to her bio in the program.

The vast majority of participants experienced the residency in workshop and in the audience. Young teens from the Youth Network enjoyed their workshop with Dance Exchangers Michelle Pearson and Marvin Webb, said Gill-Johnson. As they saw their story gestures being used to create dance phrases, "you could see the transformation in their faces. Each child owned a gestures, and when they were included, the kids’ faces just lit up. Like, ‘That’s mine. They’re using it!’" In March, the "Hallelujah" team mounted a Lerman repertory piece on the teens, but were unable to draft them into the performance at ASU. "Peer pressure kicked in," said Gill-Johnson. "It was not cool to be on stage."

Workshops with the Glenbridge Center seniors in wheelchairs was fruitful, providing a number of stories to the new work, but they were also not on the stage. They did appear in a moving photography show by then Cultural Affairs staffer Angela Greene (now Tuttle) in Farthing’s Catherine J. Smith Gallery. Documenting the project for eight months, Greene captured images from all the workshops, including striking shots of the seniors dancing in their chairs

Participants agreed the time-frame of the project was both too long and too short. "I would have condensed the time-frame," said Jeff Eason, a journalist who danced in the piece. "We met sporadically from September ’01 to March ’02. It was easy to forget things from one meeting to the next. When we finally met daily during the last week in April, that’s when we really made the most progress."

When asked about the large number of dropouts in both the Boone and Asheville pieces, Peter DiMuro said that it was difficult to form a working team with so little time to bond together. Performers whose prepared parts were edited or cut felt they were not important to the piece and tended to drop, said DiMuro. One of the unfortunate outcomes is that the piece had fewer individual voices, which they tried to counter by using recorded stories. DiMuro talked about a concerted effort on the part of the Dance Exchange to develop techniques that mold the cast as a team with a winning attitude, a team that works together toward a successful outcome. It would also help if they had had time to teach the performers the Critical Response Method that Lerman devised for works-in-progress, one that is especially sensitive to the artists’ heightened emotional state during art making. "If you have two years, you can chip away at preconceived notions," said DiMuro. In the short term, he said, when something gets cut from a piece, he is training the performers to respond with: "Darn it, but thank you."

But however much the company is fixed on the quality of the performance, it is always mindful of what the participants came here to do and say. "Virtuosity is not the key here," said Michelle Pearson in an April 2002 article by Miriam Sauls in North Carolina’s Our State magazine. "The social political and historical experiences are more important."

"Community involvement has been a part of our work from the beginning," said Lerman in the Sauls article.

Since the start, I have been attempting to look at all the functions dance serves: the artistic function, the healing function, the spiritual function, and the community function, and to bring them back together in the way that I imagine they were unified in our ancestors’ experience. We encounter a lot of either/or thinking as we do our work. People assume you’ll sacrifice rigor and technique if you teach in a nurturing way, or that you’ll compromise artistic quality if you encourage broad participation. They think that if your process is rich, your product is somehow less important. What we are saying is rigor and nurture, quality and participation, process and product.

The "quality" question is on everyone’s list as the field of community-based arts matures. Can a work be of quality in both process and product? Artists, community participants, audiences, presenters, critics and funders would like to know. The question was to come out full-blown at the "Hallelujah/USA" finale in August 2002.

According to project leader Michelle Pearson, the Boone residency may be the one to sprout a legacy in North Carolina:

I’m going to Boone pretty soon for something "Hallelujah" related. It’s the Boone crowd that’s been saying, "This has been fabulous. We loved the piece, we loved the work and we want to go back now with this information and start that process again in a different way, without the pressure of performance." I may go back to Boone and do that, and I’ve asked each of the [N.C.] presenters to think about that, to say we started with an easy kind of process, we got people excited, and then came crunch time, we edited, we made a beautiful performance at each site. They were happy. Everyone said it’s not what I expected, it was so good. Now that their expectations might have shifted, let’s go back and learn what they understand now.

Linda Frye Burnham is the co-director of the Community Arts Network.

Original CAN/API publication: January 2003