I thought I would be going back to Perry-Mansfield in 1959 but instead I ended up auditioning for and getting into a bicentennial summer stock production that ran most of the summer in Pittsburgh. That will be another later blog. Right now I just want to focus on my history with Perry-Mansfield. Even though I didn’t return, I highly recommended the camp to other dancers and in fact my sister attended in 1965 and Murray and I, along with my mother, visited her while she was at camp. At that point Perry-Mansfield was in transition. The founders, Portia Mansfield and Charlotte Perry, had donated the camp to Stephens College, a women’s school in Columbia, Missouri. Harriet Ann Gray, head of the Stephens Dance Department, had been a regular teacher at Perry-Mansfield. The camp had a four-year transition period and would not be under full control of Stephens until 1967.
The camp became a summer campus for Stephens so that when our two daughters were ready for a summer program I was disappointed that it wouldn’t work for them. I pretty much hadn’t thought about Perry-Mansfield again until I saw a very small notice in Dance Magazine in the fall of 1991 that a group of townspeople had formed Friends of Perry-Mansfield, a non-profit organization to save the camp, as Stephens College was planning to sell it to be developed for condos or such. I think I sent in a $25 donation.
In the summer of 1992, Murray and I took a trip to Rocky Mountain Park and were staying in the western part of the park, about a 2-hour drive from Steamboat Springs where Perry-Mansfield is located. I suggested that we take a drive over to Steamboat and see what the town was like, as I had been pretty impressed that a group of townspeople were making an effort to save the camp. We did drive over and liked the energy in the town. It had grown from when I was there, particularly the ski area, but it still had the feel of a small Western town and none of the pretensions of Aspen or Vail. As we were wandering around town we picked up some brochures of condos that were doing summer rentals and even drove by a few of them. And in fact the next summer we rented a condo for a month and had a great time hiking, swimming and being in Steamboat. Strangely, though we drove by the entrance to the camp quite a few times I never wanted to go in to visit. Somehow I didn’t want to ruin the wonderful memories I had.
We continued to rent for a month each summer and then in 1996 we bought a condo and began to increase our time to five weeks. Since we were beginning to feel a bigger commitment to Steamboat and what the community had to offer, I decided I would go to Perry-Mansfield’s “Evening of Dance” concert. It was pretty bad and I didn’t go back for a few years until the summer of 1999.
Once again, I was very disappointed in the evening. There were a few lovely dancers but the choreography of the pieces didn’t appeal to me, seeming weak attempts at being avant-garde and not particularly challenging for the dancers. At intermission I was quietly talking to one of the townspeople that I recognized, sharing my disappointment, when someone interrupted the conversation and asked who I was. I shared that I directed a small modern dance company in NYC and that I had been at P-M the summer of 1958 and had loved studying with Tamiris and being in the piece “Dance for Walt Whitman.” At which point this lovely woman began doing one of the movements from the piece. So I immediately asked who she was. “T Ray Faulkner,” came her answer, and I just hugged her, telling her that I remembered her well from the summer I had been there. We laughed and she said we needed to talk and asked if I would be willing to go out to lunch with her.
I agreed of course, we exchanged contact information and set up a time to meet!
Before I go any further, this seems a fitting time to share more about T Ray and her role with Perry-Mansfield, and honor this beautiful woman who contributed so much to so many lives and to the well being of Perry-Mansfield. I think all of us who attended P-M from 1957 to 2015 have wonderful memories of T Ray. T Ray started as a counselor at P-M but soon was asked to assist the two directors, Charlotte Perry and Portia Mansfield, doing a wide variety of things that the ladies didn’t have time for. She was also a major help in making the transition to ownership by Stephens College.
T Ray was drawn to modern dance even though she grew up in a religious household where dance was “for whores.” I found this wonderful write up about T Ray on the website of the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma, honoring alumni, and I share it here as it lets us know about T Ray’s professional life.
In the early 1950s, Thelma Ray Faulkner was told that a college degree could take her anywhere she wanted to go, provided she used it. Forty-five years, four continents and hundreds of souvenirs later, Faulkner proved those words to be true. The 1956 OCW graduate has made her mark in the world of education, earning both her Masters and Ph.D. in dance and related arts from Texas Woman’s University in Denton, Texas, in 1965 and 1969, respectively, and has taught on every educational level from kindergarten to post graduate. She taught dance at Indiana University in Bloomington, Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, the University of Oregon in Eugene and Arizona State University in Tempe. During her career in higher education, she did post doctoral work at the Laban Art Movement Center at Goldsmith College, part of the University of London. She was a visiting professor at the University of the Americas in Chalua, Mexico, a guest teacher/artist at two colleges in Brazil and was a judge at Brazil’s major international dance competition. She retired from college teaching in 1982, only to reenter the field of education as an elementary school teacher. For the last six years of her teaching career, she worked with third-fifth grade Native American students on the White Mountain Apache Reservation in Whiteriver, Ariz. As a Language Arts Specialist, she taught creative writing to children with reading and writing limitations. Still not content to retire at the age of 65, Faulkner elected to work part-time at the Perry-Mansfield Performing Arts School and Camp in Steamboat Springs, Colo. Her travels have taken her to countries in Europe and South America, the island of Malta, China, Antarctica, Egypt, and around the world.
T Ray and I indeed had lunch together and we talked about how the dance program could be improved and might return to the outstanding status that it once held, of key people in the field of dance having a role at the camp. As we were talking I thought about my good friend Linda Kent, who had danced in Alvin Ailey’s company for seven years upon her graduation from Juilliard and then gone on to perform with Paul Taylor for 14 more years. She was now on the faculty of Juilliard and I knew how diverse and deep her contacts in the dance world were. I also knew that she didn’t have a summer program that she regularly participated in and I thought that maybe she would be interested in heading up the dance program at P-M.
Linda and I had worked together on several projects, she had set two pieces for The Avodah Dance Ensemble, had helped me with casting, been a guest teacher in week-long Avodah summer programs, and on one or two occasions had even danced with the company when a dancer was out sick. I had watched her coach dancers and I thought she was one of the best coaches of dance!! I’ll share more about how Linda Kent and I met and the various projects we did together, in a later blog.
T Ray loved the idea and thought the next steps were to meet with June Lindenmayer, the current director of P-M and Jim Steinberg, the President of the Board of Friends of Perry-Mansfield. She would set up those meetings and in the meantime I was to ask Linda if she would be interested in heading the dance program at Perry-Mansfield.
In the next blog I share what happened next!