RESCUE MISSION

Philadelphia City paper, April 8, 2004
Deni Kasrel

Gwendolyn Bye: dancer-choreographer- gemologist. How's that for a nifty combination?

Bye's been a dancer for several decades and is best known these days for her role as artistic director of Dancefusion, along with heading up Gwendolyn Bye Dance Center in West Philly. As for the gemologist moniker, well, the woman loves to unearth and polish jewels that might otherwise be lost or forgotten.

Only Bye's jewels are dances, or, as she likes to call them, "little lost gems." These particular gems shone brightly in their time, but have long been out of the limelight. Bye restores their vitality by
reconstructing them with her company. She picks works that are lesser known, though to her mind, no less worthy of being preserved. "I am looking for pieces that are a little more obscure but deserve to be 00reconstructed because when they were created they were beautiful pieces," she explains.

Dancefusion has reconstructed works by various choreographers, including Mary Anthony, Pauline Koner, Charles Weidman ad Anna Sokolow. Often, there are no videotapes of these pieces. There could be a few pictures and perhaps some notes - still, as Bye observes, "Notes don't make a dance." If the person who originally created the dance is still around, Bye will seek them out to help with the reconstruction. If the choreographer is no longer alive, she goes for the next best thing: Dancers who performed the work, lo so many years ago. That's how Dancefusion learned to do Sokolow's "Time+".

There is much history between Bye and Sokolow, who died in 2000. Bye worked with Sokolow, dancing two of her better-known pieces, "Dreams" and "Rooms” Bye credits Sokolow with encouraging her to begin choreographing in 1976. Decades later, in 1998, Sokolow created "Shadowed Sun" for Dancefusion. And there's another connection between the choreographer and the company: Longtime member Suellen Haag, who also worked with Sokolow, is co-founder of the Anna Sokolow Foundation.

Both are eager to restage "Time +". "This particular piece had an urgency because it was not notated" say Bye. "It's still in the bodies of the dancers, but we don't know how much longer they'll be around."

Lorry May, co-founder of the Sokolow Foundation and director of Anna Sokolow's Players' Project, and three of the original dancers taught "Time +" to Dancefusion, demonstrating moves and relaying the choreographer's intent. According to Haag, both are equally important because Sokolow sought honesty in movement. As she explains, "When one dances a Sokolow work there's a high level of technical ability, but the other side is the emotional involvement. You cannot pretend. You have to draw on your own images from our own life...There has to be a personal investment."

Sokolow was a choreographer with a conscience whose works held a mirror up to society. "Time +" , for instance, was created in response to the Vietnam War. It makes reference to the anti-establishment mood of the day along with an aristocratic class that chose to look the other way.

Bye feels that in presenting this or any other old work, "You are bringing history alive, and to a certain extent you have to reflect that this comes from a certain place in time."

She concedes that while it may not be possible to recreate all of the original intent of "Time +", especially the fervor "of the whole '60's revolution," one can conjure up a fair replication of the spirit on which the work was build. "Our dancers pulled on issues of today," she says, "like gay rights and the ongoing battle of discrimination." Of course, with American engaged in a new war, in Iraq, the timing of the re-staging is fitting. The company is also reconstructing another lost gem by Sokolow, a female solo called "Quartertone." The intent here is not quite so clear. Some of the movement seems to suggest the Statue of Liberty, but Bye says that Haag's research shows that it's really about the music score, by Charles Ives, featuring two pianos, one tuned a quartertone different than the other.

Besides these reconstructions, Dancefusion presents two more selections at its upcoming concert. "Ur Mutter," a new work by Bye, is based on three aspects of womanhood: vulnerability, sensuality and the goddess-earth mother. In contrast to Sokolow's work, which tends to be angular and minimalist, this one's built on lyrical, fluid gesture punctuated by jumps and broad turns. Also on the bill is Kun-Yang Lin's "Guanyin," featuring Asian-based movement, and in which the 50-year-old Bye, who has not performed for three years, appears. She notes that in her youth she trained in East Indian dance, and besides, while dusting off old gems is surely rewarding, "I still have to put myself out there."

Sokolow Dance Foundation © 2004