The Juilliard Journal

On January 19 and 20, 2006, the Dance Division recalled its 54 years of the Juilliard School’s 100 with two-panel discussions held at the Bruno Walter Auditorium in the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. Here, in another tribute to the tremendous influence of the division, are excerpts from interviews conducted by Janet Soares with five leading dance professionals about their own careers and their relationship with the Division. Lar Lubovitch and William Forsythe are important choreographers and company directors in the field today. Sylvia Waters directs Ailey II after a long association with the Alvin Ailey Dance Company. Laura Colby directs her own management company, Elise Management. Educator, Elizabeth Bergmann (BS. 1960) now heads dance at Harvard University.

What is your mission in dance?

Lubovitch: I began a company originally to have a place to dance and choreograph. I don’t think that particular mandate has changed much. Today the essential focus is a place to create.

Colby: My mission is to assist performing arts companies, and the majority of my roster is comprised of dance. Dance is my passion and what I know best. My mission is to maximize touring opportunities for my companies, provide them with the proper level of visibility, to help them develop their careers in a consistent, sane fashion, and to grow and cultivate the infrastructures they need in order to sustain a career in the field. I am driven by my desire to bring this incredible form to as many opportunities as possible.

Bergmann: I have always worked hard to make a difference.

Waters: My mission as Director of Ailey II is to give dancers as emerging artists the most challenging experience to prepare them for what I call the real world. They tour extensively which is a lifestyle unto itself. It’s all about interacting. It’s about exposure and teaching skills, and a lot of outreach.

Forsythe: My mission is, I would say, as consciousness enabler.

How did your career get started?

Bergmann: As Juilliard graduates, we were extremely desirable for college positions back then. I was twenty- three with only a Batchelor’s degree and I was offered a full-time job at the University of Michigan in 1962. This would be unheard of today. Back then we went and did a lot of things: a toe into the college scene was one of them.

Forsythe: I think I had a tremendous amount of joyous desire. I loved to dance. I know it sounds insanely like a terrible platitude, but dancing is something to really love––any kind of performing––and I really enjoy it. I love watching it when it’s good and I enjoy making it good to watch. I pretty much saw as much as I could conceivably see. The one who I did end up sticking with was Balanchine because at that point I was doing ballet dancing, but I had about equal amounts of training in Graham and ballet when I came to New York. My career happened by accident in Europe, but I’m sure that being in Europe had a lot to do with the career happening.

Colby: With a high need for management in the field, people started asking for help and paying me so I worked as an administrator for my peers and people I was dancing for. After doing that for ten to twelve years, I got so tired of listening to my friends complain that they had no representation that I created Elise Management in 1995.

Lubovitch: The model for us at the time I was starting out was the Martha Graham model and the Jose Limon model. There were very few repertory companies at the time except in the form of classical ballet companies, and those weren’t particularly places in which we, who were using a contemporary language, would be expected to work. It was a very different time then. There weren’t many places to choreograph, and in order to create at that time, which was 1968, virtually one had to create one’s own company, and that’s what I did. I was dancing in a very specific way that was very personal to me rather than the way I felt about other people’s work. I became focused solely on a place for choreographing and creating my own dances.

What did you learn during your time at Juilliard?

Waters: Juilliard taught me that consistency in my classes and excellence in all of the opportunities we did have there was very important and time-consuming. Then being in New York was a very fortuitous thing and having all of that at your disposal. So being at Juilliard was the best of all worlds for me. It gave me a very solid sense of myself. It’s just as competitive for a dancer today. And if you do have an opportunity to hone these skills, to be on stage, to continue to grow and develop, it’s a gift. It really is.

Colby: Juilliard certainly broadened my vision. I pride myself in that sense of knowledge and I think my training had a lot to do with that.

Lubovitch: We were studying all of those forms simultaneously and it was perfectly natural for me to incorporate them in whatever language I was evolving as a choreographer. I came to Juilliard as a completely naive neophyte. But I discovered almost immediately that I was in the hands of the great masters of dance living at that time in New York. That was just good fortune really. At that time the idea of an academy created by Martha Hill was new, and she drew upon the leading people in the field. We were very, very blessed to be in those hands. It was being with those people and imbibing those powers that were the very essence of dance.

What Juilliard faculty members were most important to you?

Colby: Alfredo Corvino and Martha Hill, because the training was so hard, full of so many heartbreaks and so many disappointments and so much rejection. The simple fact is that those two believed in me in a very quiet way (well, Martha, a lot more loudly), and let me know that I was doing well, and that I was good at what I was doing. Corvino stood by my side. He was magic. And after I had graduated and was passed over at an audition, Martha consoled me with, “Well, their loss!” And that was huge to keep hearing after I was out of school.

Bergmann: It was Martha Hill as nurturer who always went the extra mile for me.

Waters: I would say the entire Graham faculty, and also Tudor and Alfredo Corvino. All of them were extraordinarily nurturing. They were all still involved in the field of dance not only as teachers, but also as performers, or choreographers. I remember Louis Horst very, very well. He was a dear person to me. Intimidating, terrifying, but his humanity and his humor was always there. He was someone I always held very close to my heart.

Lubovitch: There were so many powerful people in the course of a single day at Juilliard. I would go from a class with Louis Horst, on to Antony Tudor, and later in the day, I’d be spending time with Anna Sokolow. It’s hard to single out any one of them. They all incurred dramatic lessons. We were certainly not involved in learning the ABC’s of dance––they never spoke of those things. But they embodied something profound and they passed something on to us that can’t be bought and sold, and rarely understood in the classroom today. I guess I would have to say that Tudor might have been [the most important] in my mind at the time. It had a lot to do with the way that he focused on music. Never literal. His relationship with music was highly poetic. And when he put phrases together [they] became enhanced. The music he chose to work with was not at all the music other people were choosing. It was more obscure, more delicate, more probing, more intellectually challenging.

What is your impression of Dance at Juilliard now?

Bergmann: I have a sense that dancers are now being prepared for professional companies and that Juilliard students are being primed exclusively for performance in a dance scene that is burgeoning. There are more opportunities for that now.

Lubovitch: I don’t think the essential mission has changed, but that the standard has been elevated, because of the greater numbers of people that are dancing and the great expectations on dancers now. And although there are certainly choreographers coming out of Juilliard, I think that the mission has shifted more toward dance than choreography, and dance in a more specific style. I think that the kind of dancer that comes out of Juilliard now can be defined as working in an international style: the all- around dancer that can work with companies and choreographers using an essential ballet vocabulary.

Forsythe: I think that there are a lot of very awake people [there]. Very aware. Intelligent, and critical, and able, with high international standards. And I think the proximity of the other practices in the performing arts, acting and music and the quality of those other students make Juilliard a unique sort of conservatory.

What special characteristics do you find in Juilliard dancers you have hired?

Waters: They are very knowledgeable about their own body. They are very smart and alert. Their sensibility is not defined by one way of moving. They are willing to explore: they’ve been exposed to that.

Lubovitch: Juilliard has the pick of the field, so naturally they have the best dancers to choose from and therefore yearly turn out some of the best dancers in the field. Juilliard is the gold standard in dance schooling. One can find at Juilliard the highest technical expectations of what dance is all about. They have the open mindedness to [different choreographic] approaches. . I have to say that if I know they come from Juilliard I do give the dancers a close look. I want all of that technique, all of that ability and background. It gives me a great deal to draw from.

Forsythe: They have all been brilliant, what can I tell you? I just worked with one in the springtime at Juilliard and then worked with him again in the fall in a company in France. And he was doing spectacularly. Juilliard is a good school. What’s important is that you’re around good people. Juilliard is focused on motion, and other schools are focused more on theory in relationship to motion, so Juilliard dancers are extremely well kinetically informed. Modern gets neglected in ballet academies, and ballet in other academies. We don’t see those traditions combined with ballet anywhere else.

Do you have any suggestions for the Juilliard Dance Division in the future?

Colby: I’m hoping that Juilliard’s curriculum has a current edge to it that mine did not. I hardly suffered. The training was great, and my exposure was excellent but I would have appreciated a little more awareness of what was happening on the ground.

Lubovitch: I would say that there is an accent on decibels at Juilliard that has to be dealt with. Of course these dancers are young and they all tend to dance one hundred percent, but this is not really desirable in an artist- dancer. It happens if it’s ever called upon, but in real life, you really don’t want to dance that way all the time. So that one of the first needs for a guest choreographer at Juilliard today is to tame that high decibel and to bring it into a malleable and expressive tone. I ask for nuances in movement, punching everything into the top level. There are people that choreograph like that, where on their stages one can witness non-stop dance velocity. But I don’t think that anybody would consider that the be all and end all.

Waters: I hope that dancers will want to continue their connections with audiences in this very primal and beautiful language in body, mind, and experience. Alvin Ailey’s idea was he wanted dancers who could do everything. They need ballet, know how to move the torso, be expressive, dance from the inside out, and not afraid to reveal themselves on stage. I’m looking for that kind of total dancer––a consummate artist.

Forsythe: I think it could probably include popular forms like Hip-Hop. Definitely. I think it’s really important. And if the Juilliard dancers could learn how to Krump, that would be just excellent!

Any comments about the future of dance?

Forsythe: I think that dance institutions are all, in some sense, in jeopardy. Nothing is matter of fact anymore. It’s not always logical.

Colby: One of the things I remember most in my time at Juilliard was the international student body. There’s a shared body of knowledge that a Juilliard graduate has in terms of what we consider formal classical technique and form. Juilliard is important in terms of the future of dance on the universal level of dance, because its part of the game.

Forsythe: Dancers will be expected to be much more participatory in the process of making, I would suspect. They’ll be expected to be far more involved in the collaborative process. I think that every choreographer expects feedback from the dancer on some level.

Lubovitch: I consider myself a ‘lifer’. I notice how many people from my class turned out to be lifers as well. Having been exposed to that, as a kind of inspiration, was like a drug. And I think that the people who drank the Kool-aid at that time were left drunk forever.

I think that the Juilliard experience for me then, or anybody now is something that marks one for life. Good, bad, or otherwise, it’s a mark for life. And one takes it to the end.