Title: School of Ives

Premiere: Interlochen Arts Academy summer camp, August 1989 by the advanced dance summer campers. Subsequently performed by the University Dance Company as part of the University of Michigan Department of Dance’s major annual production “Vital Elements: Dances for 1990” February 8-11. 1990.

Performers: At Power Center: Arlene Bass, Desiree Buonbrisco, Nicole Burns, Neila Fortino, Dana Gilhooly, Wendy Light, Jill Moskow, Kate Phelan, Jennifer Walkowicz, Jennifer Greene, Cary McWilliam, Jennifer Mongeluzo, Mary K. Mullaly

Duration: 5 minutes

Music:  The Unanswered Question, by Charles Ives

Lighting Design: At Power Center: Mary Cole

Set Design/props: At Power Center, John Schak

Description: This was a group version of the solo Perennial, performed, as I recall in a loose canon and featuring some soloists. It was the first work on the program at Power Center, and featured several first year dance majors as a way to give those students a performance experience on our major annual production. (On the same program, I presented Connoisseurs of Chaos.) As students in the school of life, the dancers begin backing up to and then slowly sitting into a school chair with a desk arm. As Ives’s horn poses the existential/perennial the question, the dancers raise their right hands, and then rise to move forward in the space. The movement phrases closely follow the growing insistence and agitation of the wind instruments in Ives’s score. At one point, a dancer traces a large question mark on the stage, ending with a broad jump to create the dot of the question mark. The designer John Schak was delighted to find 13 wooden school chairs from the 1940s at Property Disposition, for $5 each for the dance. After the performance these chairs were distributed to some staff members and faculty. I took a couple of them, one of which now sits on my front porch.