Past …. and Present – December 2022: A Guest Post by Dina McDermott

After earning her B.F.A. in dance at The Juilliard School in New York, Dina performed in the downtown and Off-Broadway scene. During over four decades in the dance world, she has been a contemporary dancer, choreographer, teacher, artistic director (LEAVING GROUND/DANCE) and writer.  Her books include A Dancer’s Diary: Around the World in Thirteen Dances (see excerpt below) and Birds of a Feather, a Memoir.  Additionally, her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Dance International and on criticaldance.org. She has served on the faculty of Pacific Northwest Ballet School since 2001.

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After I graduated from The Juilliard School Dance Division in 1981, I auditioned and was accepted into the Avodah Dance Ensemble, directed by JoAnne Tucker, Ph.D. Tucker’s movement vocabulary showed a distinct influence of Graham technique, so I felt right at home, having studied at both the Martha Graham School and Juilliard. I dove right into learning the repertory – “Kaddish,” “I Never Saw Another Butterfly,” and “Noshing,” among others. The company toured throughout the U.S, performing in reform temples and Jewish Community Centers. Although I was raised Roman Catholic, I was fascinated with JoAnne’s weaving of movement from Jewish liturgy and ritual; it was definitely a learning experience at the intersection of dance, religion and culture.

I danced with Avodah for two years, and then took an offer to join the Easy Moving Dance Company based in North Carolina for a short tour, then returned to New York City to dance with the Douglas Hamby Dance Company, Chen and Dancers, and Dance Circle, directed by Ernesta Corvino. Fast forward to forty years later – JoAnne and I reconnected on social media, and upon my visiting here at her hacienda in Costa Rica, she has kindly asked me to be a guest blogger for mostlydance.com.  I am happy and honored to both renew our friendship and to oblige her as a guest blogger on mostlydance.com.

Whereas most of my fellow dancers at Juilliard and later at graduate school at Arizona State University loathed any writing assignments, I relished them. I have always been a voracious reader and in recent years, I came to identify as a dancer who writes.  In the early 2000’s, I became a moderator on the website criticaldance.org (it’s still going strong – check it out!) during its formative years, a site featuring reviews and feature articles, curated from around the world. After returning from a cultural tour of Cuba in 2014, I wrote a review of the National Ballet of Cuba’s transcendent “Swan Lake” production for criticaldance.org. I later contributed reviews of the works of Akram Khan, Crystal Pite, Aspen/Santa Fe Ballet and classical Balinese dance. A friend, mentor and set designer, Bou Frankel, suggested I collate these reviews and articles from criticaldance.org into a book, and so my first book, A Dancer’s Diary: Around the World in Thirteen Dances, was born.

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In today’s blog post, I share the Introduction of my book. I want to invite you on a journey with me through the mesmerizing and memorable world of dance, with stops along the way in thirteen different countries/choreographers.

Dina McDermott and Marty Ponte in Mandala. Photo: Shaun Parkhurst

Dancer’s Diary

Introduction

Like trying to capture a delicate butterfly, the art of dance enthralls yet eludes us. Like sand running through our fingers, it slips through our grasp when we attempt to quantify it. A dance performance can shock, bore or perturb us, but when the final curtain descends, it is gone forever, never to be repeated precisely the same way again. Dance embodies the elusiveness of time and memory, the impermanence of life.

As we tumble through the twenty-first century, globalization and the ever-widening influence of technology and social media render the art of dance ever more precious and necessary. Dance connects us to our humanity and helps us to locate our unique identity within humanity. In this book, I highlight some lesser known and distinct forms, choreographers and dancers, both theatrical and indigenous. Whether it be a specific Hindu view of the cosmos (Bali), an exquisite ballet tradition in an isolated, socialist country (Cuba), exploration of identity/sexuality (David Rousseve/REALITY), hybridization of Easter/Western forms (H.T. Chen/Remy Charlip) the Jewish/Arab conflict presented in We Love Arabs (Hillel Kogan), the tragedy of Betroffenheit (Crystal Pite/Jonathan Young), or the ancient spirit of duende in flamenco, (Spain), dance is rooted in the corporeal, but aspires to the divine. Join me on this terpsichorean journey, and together we will explore the sublime panoply of human movement-dance!”

 A Dancer’s Diary: Around the World in Thirteen Dances, is available on Amazon. For further info-dinamcdermott.com.  Questions or to purchase an autographed copy, contact Dina directly at mcdermott910@gmail.com.