Rarely are listeners expected to get up and move during a lecture — unless, of course, the subject is dance. But that’s what organizers of the River Oak Arts’ “Literature and Dance Lecture Series” had in mind when they created this three-month-long “edutainment” event.
The series opened this week at the Oak Park Public Library’s Dole Branch with “Learning through the Body,” a lecture-demonstration featuring Moscow-born ballet teacher and dance author Anna Paskevska. It concludes April 21 with a collaborative dance performance at Oak Park’s Doris Humphrey Memorial Theatre in the Academy of Movement and Music. Other programs take place at Links Hall in Chicago.
“I’ve found that my dance background has gotten my creative juices flowing as a writers,” said Jenny A. Burkholder, executive director of River Oak Arts, a 9-year-old organization that sponsors readings and writing workshops and publishes an award-winning literary journal. ” I wanted this year’s program to convey how one discipline feeds into another.”
Paskevska, who teaches ballet at Columbia College and heads the dance department at the Chicago Academy for the Arts, has been a longtime advocate of creative cross-pollination. She is known to incorporate physics principles into her dance classes and, for her lecture-demonstration, will link the theories of Swiss child psychologist Jean Piaget to early movement studies.
She will explore how ballet training has a positive impact on a child’s development and sparks other creative skills — from music to writing to visual arts. Paskevska, who has written several books and directed instructional videos on healthy approaches to the study of classical ballet, is an advocate of dance’s ability to help young artists achieve their full potential.
“Dance has always experienced the problem of being viewed as entertainment,” said Paskevska. “Therefore, it was not taken seriously. But research and experience have shown that dance can be an important educational tool for awakening other areas of artistic growth.”
Besides Chicago-area dancers demonstrating movements, Paskevska will weave her own multidimensional interests — from painting to writing poetry — into her presentation.
Text and movement will join forces in “Word + Dance: The Process of Using Spoken Word in Dance,” Sunday at Links Hall. Choreographer Cynthia Oliver, assistant professor of dance at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, teams up with her husband, Jason Finkelman, a percussionist who specializes in the Afro-Brazilian bow instrument berimbau, to get audiences to “physicalize their personal stories.”
“I’ve never been restricted to one art form,” said Oliver, who grew up in the Virgin Islands. “I’ve written, danced and done visual art projects. And, as a dancer, I’ve felt that you can say so much more by including other forms — like spoken word.”
Participants can expect to talk and create a movement vocabulary around their stories, while Finkelman puts them in touch with their bodies’ natural rhythms. By program’s end, they will have composed a “speaking dance.”
Selene Carter, founder and curator of Poonies Cabaret, a monthly showcase for improvisational dance at Links Hall, will introduce audiences to the history of American dance by also letting them feel it in their bodies. Billed as “an experience,” her “Moveable Dance History” event on March 17 at Links Halls will ask those involved to re-create in their muscles and joints the political-artistic climate of the 20th Century, which inspired such iconoclastic choreographers as Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, Katherine Dunham, Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham and Twyla Tharp.
“I’m trying to create those historical conditions physically,” explained Carter. “For instance, Isadora Duncan changed the face of dance, and freed women in a larger sense, when she took off her shoes and corset. I would like participants to experience what it would be like to do that.”
Carter is a staunch proponent of recognizing the lineage of American modern dance and its influences on our country’s history.
“As much as we know about Susan B. Anthony,” she added, “we should know about Martha Graham. As much as we know about Martin Luther King, we should know about Alvin Ailey.”
In addition to Columbia College anthropology professor Joan Erdman’s workshop on writing a dance biography, March 10 at the Oak Park Dole Branch Library, a multimedia dance concert will bring all these disciplines together April 21 at the Academy of Movement and Music.
Writer Sheryl Ridenour and choreographer Lydia Bueschel will join composer John Kamys, performance-poet Cin Salach, alternative-dance choreographer Asimina Chremos, non-dancers and the Momenta ensemble to craft a performance piece celebrating creative partnerships.
So, despite the sedentary nature of literature, River Oak Arts reminds us that, at heart, we’re all movers and shakers.
———-
River Oak Arts’ “Literature and Dance Lecture Series” runs through April 21 at the Dole Branch of Oak Park Public Library, 255 Augusta Ave., Oak Park; Academy of Movement and Music, 605 Lake St., Oak Park; and Links Hall, 3435 N. Sheffield Ave., Chicago. Tickets: Free-$10. Call 708-524-8725.
