Tag: Pearl Lang

Poetry and Art Inspire I Never Saw Another Butterfly

JoAnne Tucker / / New York Company

In the last post I mentioned the piece I Never Saw Another Butterfly.  It was actually created in 1977 in Tallahassee, Florida receiving its first New York performance at Temple Israel in 1978.  This was the first of four pieces that I created between 1977 and 2002 to remember the Holocaust or as memorial pieces for the Holocaust.  The book I Never Saw Another Butterfly  first came out in the early 60’s.  By 1977 there was a lot of interest in the poems both in music and in dance.  In fact, I was not the only choreographer that year to set some of the poems.  Pearl Lang created her I Never Saw Another Butterfly in 1977, as did Wendy Osserman collaborating with composer Peter Schlosser.

Pearl Lang was a member of the Martha Graham Dance Company from 1942 to 1952.  When she left the company to form her own company in 1952, one of the first pieces she did was Song of Deborah, and she continued to often create works related to her Jewish background. In a radio interview in 1977 she referred to the piece I Never Saw Another Butterfly as a memorial to the Holocaust. I did not get to see Lang’s Butterfly but I did see an earlier piece she created in 1960 called Shirah, which I found hauntingly beautiful.  I also had the opportunity to study with Pearl in 1960 at the Connecticut College Summer Dance Program.  For six weeks in an hour-long composition class a small group of students, maybe four or five of us, worked on studies. I was assigned to do a laughter study and an anger study.  Another older member of the class created a piece inspired by the fragile character Laura in The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams. I don’t remember the dancer’s name but the delicate way she wove movement together left a lasting impression.

 In dance classes with Louis Horst at Juilliard, particularly his second year class called Modern Forms, he often encouraged us to visit museums and to even develop pieces inspired by the art that we saw.  The Museum of Modern Art was one of my favorite places to go and there was one picture that I was strongly drawn to.  Titled Hide and Seek, it was painted by Pavel Tchelitchew in 1942.  The picture is a tree made up of children.  There are arms reaching for each other, faces calling out, hands and toes as roots of the tree. Standing in front of the painting I felt life and death captured in the same moment.  The painting seemed to cry out to me just as the poems in I Never Saw Another Butterfly did.  In studying the painting I saw five particular parts that stood out and so I decided to limit the piece and only set five of the poems.  Each dancer would recite a poem as they moved based on the five images that stood out. 

In my file on I Never Saw Another Butterfly is a postcard of the painting, sent to me by Nanette Joslyn, a dancer in the NY Company in the early 80’s who also shared that she was dancing at the time with Pearl Lang in a spoof on the Esther–Modecai story.

Postcard of Pavel Tchelitchew’s painting Hide and Seek sent to me by Nanette Joslyn.

A description of the book tells us that 15,000 children under the age of 15 passed through the concentration camp of Terezin.  Fewer than 100 survived. The poems and also pictures that they drew shared both the daily misery as well as their hopes and fears, their courage and optimism. 

There are only a few pieces of my choreography that I could get up and do now or at least set with only limited help of a video, and I Never Saw Another Butterfly is one of them. I also think it had the longest history of performances in the company, being performed through the early 2000’s. It opens with the group of dancers close together doing a random number of steps and stops as if they were bundled in a train car that stopped and started in no particular pattern.  1 hold 2 walk 3, 4, 5, hold 6 walk 7 and so the piece starts.  Later they peel off and take shapes related to the poem and it is from these shapes that each dancer emerges to begin his or her poem.  

 Bea Bogorad and Randy Allen rehearsing I Never Saw Another Butterfly at the Creative Dance Center Studio in Tallahassee, Florida.  Can you see the arms reaching for each other in Pavel’s painting that inspired this moment?

I was still performing with the company and my poem began:

I'ld like to go away
Where there are other nicer people,
Somewhere in the far unknown
Where no one kills one another.

After the first performance in Tallahassee, a member of the audience that I only knew casually came up to me and said he was very moved by the piece and that he was about to close out a bank account and wanted Avodah to have the balance left of $600.  That was a large contribution for our little company back in 1977 and we were most grateful.

The title poem captures both the optimism and the despair:

The last, the very last
So richly, brightly, dazzling yellow
Perhaps if the sun's tears would sing
Against a white stone.

Such, such a yellow
Is carried lightly way up high.
It went away I'm sure
Because it wished to kiss the world goodbye.

For seven weeks I've lived in here,
Penned up inside this ghetto
But I have found my people here
The dandelions call to me
And the white chestnut candles in the court
Only I never saw another butterfly.

As I write this, I have a sinking feeling in my stomach, aware of the current news where we in this country are separating immigrant children from their parents and putting them in large detention camps behind barbed wire and bars. Maybe this piece needs to be revived and seen again with the backdrop of current day pictures reminding us that we cannot be silent and allow this to continue.

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Building My Own Program in NYC

JoAnne Tucker / / Dance History, Personal Life

In the last blog I mentioned that although Martha Hill had encouraged me to re-audition for Juilliard, I never had a chance to discuss this with my parents because  my grandmother died at the same time. So … as planned, off I went to the University of Denver, my only backup school.  After only one dance class it was clear to me this was not going to work. Within a few days after informing my parents I would not be staying at the University of Denver, I had withdrawn from school and was packed and on the train heading back to Pittsburgh. I was filled with a clear determination that I wanted to study dance with the best, and the place to do that was in New York City.  There was no doubt in my mind that I wanted a career in dance.  I hoped that I would have the support of my parents and that they would financially support an independent program in NYC that wasn’t connected to a particular college.  I loved the Graham technique of modern dance and knew that would be where I would be taking modern dance classes. On my list was to find a good place to study ballet.  I valued academics and thought I would explore what kind of possibilities there would be to enroll in one or two college courses.  The long train ride from Denver to Pittsburgh gave me time to think through these different options and I found myself focused and clear on what my next steps were when I got home.

My parents were somewhat open but clearly had their own thoughts on what would be best for me, and my father in particular had a hard time with his daughter being a dancer in NYC.  My father’s stepbrother was a psychiatrist and having been consulted, he suggested that when I got home I should see a colleague of his and have someone outside of the family talk to me in  case there was something else going on.  So shortly after I got home my parents arranged an appointment for me.  I knew I needed to be cooperative because my first choice was having their financial support rather then having to support myself in NYC so I was willing to give it a few months home in Pittsburgh if I had to.  They also suggested I enroll in a typing course so I might have a skill to support myself if I needed to.  

So I enrolled in a typing course at a secretarial school and I had what turned out to be a single appointment with a woman psychiatrist.  The appointment ended up actually being lots of fun. I explained why I wanted to go to New York and how I was planning to structure my time.  She asked me quite a few questions and by the end of the appointment she was very encouraging and said that if I liked, she would have a follow up appointment with my parents and share with them that she thought my plans were very realistic and encourage them to support me.  

Following their appointment a week later, it was decided that I would move to NYC after the 1stof the year.  That would give me time to further explore options of where to live in the City and finish the typing course.  My mom and I visited New York to explore options of where I would live.  I was young and the idea of my living in an apartment was out of the question so we explored places like Y residences for women and the Barbizon Hotel for Women, where I had stayed once before. We then found a house on Madison and 68thStreet that was for women only and offered breakfast in the morning.  That would be where I stayed.  The neighborhood was great and the other women were a variety of ages. I think I even had my own room. I remember that living in the room next door was a model who was on the cover of Vogue,and another person living on the floor was studying acting. The house itself was a beautiful brownstone with a dramatic spiral staircase in the foyer where one entered. It was near the Cuban Embassy and there were often candlelight vigils and protests on our street.

I knew I would be taking classes at the Graham Studio which was located at 63rdbetween 1stand 2ndAvenue and an easy walk from where I lived. Next to explore was where I would go for ballet. I am not sure what made me decide that I wanted to go to the American School of Ballet which was pretty much for very serious young dancers but I got that in my mind and shortly after arriving in NYC I went for an audition and was placed in the beginning level class with outstanding teachers like Muriel Stuart. I actually loved the classes in spite of being surrounded by very thin “bunhead” ballerina types.  Later I would move to studying ballet with Nina Fonaroff, totally loving her class and feeling so much more at home with her.  She had danced in the Martha Graham company and also assisted Louis Horst, a composition teacher I was hoping to study with.  I continued studying with her even when I later attended Juilliard.  Her classes were fun and had a unique musical quality to them as she accompanied the class playing on the studio’s piano.  A friend I had met at Connecticut College the previous summer sometimes joined the small class too.  With the tension and competition that existed at places like The Graham Studio, School of American Ballet and later at Juilliard, it was a real delight to take class and get back in touch with the childhood joy of dancing.  Nina’s combinations were fun to do and her corrections excellent.  Ballet was fun –  something I had not really experienced before.

One more piece of the puzzle to solve.  I discovered that Columbia University had a School of General Studies that was designed for students like me who didn’t want to go full time.  So I took the entrance exam, was accepted and began taking a few courses there.

While I did spend a lot of my time on NYC subways and buses going from place to place, I liked the package I had put together and enjoyed the next six months in New York very much.  

The film A Dancer’s Work (1957) features the wonderful Graham teachers I got to study with including: Helen McGehee, Ethel Winter, Yuriko, Mary Hinkson and Bertram Ross. A lot of it was filmed in the big studio I remember studying in.

The following summer I returned to Connecticut College, this time focusing on composition classes and continuing to take two technique classes a day, one in Graham technique and the other in Cunningham technique which really never suited me well. The highlight for me was taking a composition class from Pearl Lang, and Louis Horst’s Pre-Classic Dance Forms.   I loved both of them. In Pearl’s class I spent the full six weeks creating a laughter study and an anger study in dance.  Louis’s class was a real challenge.  The pieces we had to create were short with an ABA form.  The theme had to be introduced in the first two measures of the A section and every movement in the A section needed to relate to something in those first two measures.  He was very demanding and would stop you in the middle of a section if you weren’t following the rules of composition that he outlined.  I immediately had great respect for him and knew I wanted to study with him more.  So at the end of the summer I asked him if I could take his next course (Modern Forms) at Juilliard, even if I wasn’t a full-time student.  He agreed and when I returned to New York in the fall I got approval to do just that.  It was a few months into the fall semester when he said I should stop this nonsense of running all around New York and just be a student at Juilliard.  And that is exactly what happened.  With permission from the dance office and individual teachers, I was allowed to sit in on the classes like Literature and Material of Music for Dancers, and Labanotation and if I passed the mid-term exams I could get credit for those classes.  I auditioned in late January, was accepted and became a full-time student at Juilliard in the winter of 1962.  By the end of the school year I had completed my first year at Juilliard.  Although the class had begun with about 40-plus students, when we started school the following fall there were only about 15 of us left. In the next blog I’ll share more reflections about my time at Juilliard.

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