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Some dances were meant to last forever

JMU dance professor Shane O'Hara continues the legacy of modern dance pioneer Daniel Nagrin

By Colleen Dixon
Photographs by Richard Finkelstein
See condensed story "Dancing with the issues" in Winter 2008 Madison

Shane O'Hara listens as his mentor, and modern dance pioneer, Daniel Nagrin critiques a rehearsal.

Shane O'Hara listens as his mentor, and modern dance pioneer, Daniel Nagrin critiques a rehearsal.

"There's something about this dance stuff," says Shane O'Hara, professor of dance and dance program coordinator in the School of Theatre and Dance. "Physically, it's a difficult life. But dancers get these peak moments that people have to spend three hours in a gym to even get close to. We get them constantly -- in class, on stage, working one-on-one with people. What's underneath it all? If you stick with dance and keep going, it gives you a certain spirit in life that you don't get from other jobs. That's what a life is about -- money has nothing to do with it."

In a rehearsal room in Godwin Hall O'Hara warms up with leg kicks as he prepares to dance. As his stocking feet scuff the floor he glances over to where Daniel Nagrin, his mentor for almost 20 years, is perched on a chair. "What do you have a hankering for?" O'Hara asks. "Let's do Path," replies Nagrin.

O'Hara is in rehearsal with modern dance pioneer Nagrin, now age 90, in preparation for a performance at the Centre national de la Danse, the National Center of Dance, in Paris. O'Hara will rehearse six solo dances over the next several days -- dances developed by Nagrin that O'Hara has performed since 1989. These rehearsals are not so much about learning the solos as fine-tuning them.

"Before you start Path, we have to talk," says Nagrin. "Let's have you wear a belt for Path. You never wear a belt," he chides O'Hara, who agrees to this adjustment. The younger dancer turns and, pulling on a pair of work gloves, strides to a 12 foot long 2" x 4" block of wood lying on the dance floor.

Traveling the path

As the dance begins O'Hara balances the wood with his arms extended, appears to center himself and then takes a few steps. Immediately he pauses, slides sideways to the right and takes a few steps backward -- all while balancing the wood. Slowly advancing diagonally across the stage, he repeats this sequence several times. Watching him is like watching someone go through life -- progress, hesitation, a lateral move and then backward steps, over and over. Is life a balancing act, just as the wood is balanced in O'Hara's hands? Is each of us dancing on our own path, moving ahead, sideways and back again as we plod through our existence?

"If you stick with dance and keep going, it gives you a certain spirit in life that you don't get from other jobs." -- Shane O'Hara

O'Hara continues across the floor and Nagrin periodically speaks quietly into a tape recorder. These words capture the observations the two will use to refine the solo dance. Just as important, Nagrin is leaving his legacy on tape -- a legacy to guide O'Hara in coming years, long after Nagrin has made his final curtain call.

O'Hara's face has a light film of sweat as he finishes Path, and he is breathing harder. "That's the trick to the technique and the trick to dance," he says. "At a certain point you make it look easy, even though it's very difficult. Someone told me once after a performance, 'It's nice to see a dancer sweat, instead of just being happy and glowing at the end.'"

The ending of the dance concerns Nagrin and a discussion ensues about how best to transition to the end. Nagrin asks O'Hara to close his eyes. "The question is: does the dance continuously evolve?" murmurs Nagrin. "Is something different happening in each sequence? If not, it's very abstract." O'Hara remains still, his eyes closed, for several minutes. Nagrin firmly believes that a gesture can't be done as a gesture. If it's done simply as a gesture, it dies a slow, painful death. The intent, the idea must be behind the gesture; then the dancer has a wonderful freedom. Some dancers do beautiful choreography, which is much more about what is going on physically with the body or visually with the eye. Emotion is described in abstract terms such as "flow of movement."

Nagrin rises stiffly from his chair and shuffles to the stage. He picks up the wood block and mimics the steps O'Hara has just performed. He then turns the wood on end, leans it against the wall and takes off the gloves as he walks away. That gesture lends finality to the dance. "We want to make a ceremony of this," he says. O'Hara goes through the last three sequences several times. At last, Nagrin calls out, "That's it," satisfied with the look of the ending.

"What's your next dance?" he asks as O'Hara rests for a few minutes. "I think it will be Someone," replies O'Hara. "I haven't figured out the order for the concert in Paris."

The costume changes will be the most difficult part of the logistics puzzle. The stage in Paris has no wings into which O'Hara can duck to change, and Nagrin wonders about the physical aspects O'Hara will contend with between dances.

Nagrin firmly believes that a gesture can't be done as a gesture. ... The intent, the idea must be behind the gesture ...

"If you do Someone after Path, is that physically possible?" he asks. O'Hara believes he can pull off the costume changes. The goal is to be off the stage for as short a time as possible. Because this will be a solo concert, the audience will be left waiting for O'Hara to return. Too long a wait tends to make people nervous. "I've found it works better if I say, 'I'm going to be gone for a little bit. Relax, talk to each other and I'll be right back,'" O'Hara says. "Just saying that makes them relax. People are so used to waiting for the next part of a performance, telling them you'll be right back gives them time to just not worry about it."

The preparation for the concert in Paris is "wonderful," according to O'Hara. "It's been a while since we got together. It is really important for me to get the feedback on Daniel's impressions of what I'm doing. I've gotten feedback from him through the mail, but today we are actually running the solos. Because Daniel hasn't seen them for awhile, some of them have gotten too big, as a movement, that is."

"What happens when someone learns the solos is that the dances become theirs," Nagrin says. "Artistically, they bend it with their need and their viewpoint. Sometimes that casts a wonderful, fresh light on the dance. And, sometimes, it casts a shadow on the dance."

Indeterminate Figure purposely open to interpretation

O'Hara makes his costume change and returns clothed in pajamas. "Are you wearing knee pads?" asks Nagrin, as he prepares the soundtrack for Indeterminate Figure. This simple question gives an inkling to how physically challenging this dance will be.

Nagrin starts the tape as O'Hara takes his position -- one leg crossed in front of the other, arms out as if beginning a hula, upper body leaning significantly in the other direction. He will say later that this position is incredibly hard. "The leg supporting my weight is going crazy, while my upper body is completely still. For those who think dancing is not difficult, I would like to put them in this shape to see just how demanding a move it is."

The soundtrack begins with notes from a French horn, followed by the whistle of a bomb falling and impacting. O'Hara remains still during these noises and the sound of rain showers. He begins to move when a jet is heard flying overhead, his head following the imaginary track across the sky. Throughout the dance, O'Hara appears to either react to or create sounds. The precision of his movements blurs the line between reality and illusion, and he seems to be actually jumping across a squeaky floor, stopping a faucet from leaking or answering a ringing telephone. Interpretation of what the dance means becomes, at times, secondary, as the eye follows him from one spot to another, one imaginary moment to another.

One more whistling bomb strikes the ear and interrupts O'Hara's figure as he dances, pretends and plays. He throws himself to the floor as a blast seemingly blows him backwards. The dance ends as O'Hara lies crumpled on the floor, apparently lifeless.

Throughout the dance, Nagrin has recorded his comments. O'Hara rises, picks up a red leather notebook and sits at Nagrin's feet, waiting for his mentor's observations. The pair discusses timing of several of the movements and O'Hara's opening position. Nagrin asks how O'Hara plans to emerge after his costume change to take that pose. O'Hara says about rehearsals, "Sometimes I need to quit dancing and just do. I need to just be there for what is happening with the piece. Not to make the piece look good, to just do it."

The life of a dance

How hard is it to learn when a sound is coming or when to stop in order to give the impression that you are actually creating or stopping the sound? "Very hard," O'Hara says, and laughs. "People say, 'It's so precise,' and that's really good. Indeterminate Figure is a sound score--it's not really music. If you miss one sound cue, you might as well not do any of them. Normally, when I perform Indeterminate Figure, in the general part, I reach across and grab the phone as it's ringing the very first time. After that, every time I do it, I do two pirouettes. The last time I performed Figure, for some reason, I came down, did a move, and then did a pirouette. In the middle of the pirouette, I was thinking to myself, 'this is wrong.' So I stopped and immediately reached over to grab the phone. And I got it! I was so close to not getting the phone when it rang, because I had a glitch there.

"I think that's one thing about Daniel's work, even in the more musical solos, an element of rhythm that is constant through his work."

"It takes a long time to learn about all the sounds. When you come back to a dance, you spend a lot of time getting that feel for the sounds back. There's no count. The squeaks, you just know when they're coming, and you just know it so well, that there's a rhythm. It's all intuitive; you've got it so much into your body.

"I think that's one thing about Daniel's work, even in the more musical solos, an element of rhythm that is constant through his work. That memorization isn't just sound, it's the rhythm of the sound. Sometimes you make the sound happen, sometimes the sound catches you by surprise, and sometimes you're right on it."

Nagrin's groundbreaking work still relevant

"Indeterminate Figure is pertinent today, 50 years after Daniel first performed it," O'Hara says. "We're still talking about bombs and war, homosexuality, horror and terror. That's what is different about works like Daniel's. If you know dance, historically there are things in a dance that give you a reference point to it being from the late '50s or early '60s. But, because Daniel's solos are about the human condition, that never changes. We're not this happy, wonderful world where everyone is living together. There's more struggle now than in the '50s.

Daniel's work is not about time and space and shape motion; it's not an abstraction. There's an inner life to Daniel's work. Some dances from history are dated. They're nice, and they're representative of that time, but it doesn't hit you. They don't have that passionate inner life that connects with people today. Not every dance should be reconstructed. But some dances were meant to last forever."

Over the course of three days, O'Hara rehearses the six dances which make up "The Nagrin Project." For each, he makes careful notes on Nagrin's comments. He refers to his notebook constantly. "When Daniel leaves, and I have three weeks before the performance, I have stuff to work with," says O'Hara. "I have places to go with it. And sometimes, going means going back. And that's good. It's a constant forward and back. When you do a solo many, many times or for so many years, anything that recharges or reengages it is really important. I do a lot of solo work besides the dances from The Nagrin Project. When I pick up a solo I haven't done for three or four years, it's always a wonderful journey, as if I have to find a new entry point. If I do a dance consecutively, over a period of time it will lose some of that freshness. That's the key -- as a solo performer, you always have that light and discovery going on.

"Daniel Nagrin's work is about the human condition, the struggles we all go through."

"In the past, I would work with one of Daniel's videotaped dances for a month and think I had the dance. Then I would fly out to work with Daniel in Arizona and, within the first hour, I would realize how little of the dance I really knew. I knew the movement, but I didn't have what was behind the movement -- the finesse of the movement and why the movement was there. That could take a week to just touch upon. There's an inner attention, an inner life, to Daniel's work that a lot of choreography does not make so specific.

In the beginning

The starting point of this collaborative relationship was 1983. Prior to that, O'Hara studied acting for two and a half years. One particular play required that he perform a dance. "I was the Grand Mufti in The Would Be Gentleman by Moliere. As I worked with the dance teacher to learn my role, he told me I should really think about taking more dance. He said, 'There are a lot of out-of-work male actors, but there are not many out-of-work male dancers.'"

Nagrin laughs. "You never told me that," he says, still chuckling.

"I started taking classes from this same dance teacher and his wife," O'Hara continues. "And then I studied choreography and that was it -- I liked that I was able to create a dance, and I was able to perform it. I'm very odd because I only danced for a year before I started making dances."

O'Hara began studies for a Master of Fine Arts at Arizona State University in 1983. There he met Nagrin, a professor at ASU. The friendship developed with O'Hara helping out with Nagrin's lawn care chores and Nagrin assisting O'Hara with his graduate thesis on solo dances.

Nagrin's career as a dancer, choreographer and teacher spans more than six decades and includes hundreds of accolades. He developed his first solos in the '40s -- a time when solo modern dances were not in vogue. Nagrin's solos broke with the abstract form favored by dance companies and instead dealt with social and political issues. Beginning in 1957, Nagrin began touring throughout the United States, Europe and the Pacific, performing the extensive repertory of dances he had created. Nagrin began teaching at ASU in 1982 and helped create one of the finest modern dance programs in this country.

O'Hara portrays a seedy gangster in <em>Strange Hero,</em> a dance created by Nagrin.

O'Hara portrays a seedy gangster in Strange Hero, a dance created by Nagrin.

Strange Hero and Man of Action were the first solos of Nagrin's that O'Hara learned in 1989. He then learned Wordgame -- A Cartoon. This solo was part of a much longer solo, Peloponnesian War, which Nagrin developed in 1968. That two-hour dance was a statement against the war in Vietnam. Wordgame uses near-freeze-frame poses to highlight the types of people who use words and gestures for power -- a preacher, politician, professor and scientist.

"Originally I learned a couple of Daniel's solos and then learned more over the next 18 years," says O'Hara. "When we were deciding which solos should make up "The Nagrin Project," Strange Hero was at the top of my list. That's the one a lot of people know from Daniel. It gets mentioned in dance history books. Connected with that, from his 1948 concert, was Man of Action, from the first solo concert he did.

"One special thing about 'The Nagrin Project' is the concept of dances being passed down and continued: Daniel's work coming to me, my having the opportunity of working with him for an extended period and then possibly handing that experience down to someone else. That's a very rare thing," O'Hara explains.

When asked his feelings about passing on such ground-breaking work, O'Hara pauses for a moment. "It would probably be a personal relationship I would develop with someone wanting to learn a solo and, maybe, continuing to learn more dances," he finally says. "It will be very interesting how it works out. Some people might make their whole career just doing dances their mentor taught them. I could quit doing my own solo dance work and just concentrate on 'The Nagrin Project,' but I'm not interested in that. That's one of the reasons Daniel is interested in my continuing, because he doesn't see me as trying to steal something of his. I enjoy this work, but I also have my own work; both of them feed each other."

The Daniel Nagrin Dance Foundation

Nagrin appointed O'Hara as the future artistic director for his nonprofit organization, The Daniel Nagrin Dance Foundation, once he dies. Nagrin's wife, Phyllis, and another board member will work with O'Hara. "One will probably deal with the video and book area, the other with the archives; I will be the one dealing with the solos," says O'Hara. Dance companies or individuals wanting to learn Nagrin's dances will come through O'Hara. "I would be in charge of setting the dances and negotiating the contract for rights to the work for performance," he continues. Setting a dance means teaching the actual steps of a dance.

"... modern dance ... makes you think, it pushes a button"

"I think I'm different from other dancers in that I actually have these six solos of Daniel's, plus two other solos that he set just on me, and that I'll come back to later on. Most people just have one dance. That amount of work doesn't just involve knowing the work; it's about knowing the process." He thinks for a few minutes, and continues, "I was invited up to New York and, besides performing, I taught improvisation using Daniel's methods. I really enjoyed doing that. I like being connected as far as knowing the solos, but I also like being connected as far as the processes. I feel that, every time I teach, I'm passing information on. That information is getting passed on every year to my students at JMU.

"I'm also interested in being a teacher of the methods Daniel used. The New Dance Group was established in the '30s, and Daniel did a few things with them. That was the first group to use social and political issues as themes and ideas. These weren't pretty or entertaining dances. They were about workers rights, women's rights, Holocaust, loneliness, urban decay. From that point on, that's always been a part of modern dance. There is a part of it that's in the social-political protest/resistance form. That's also why modern dance will never be really huge as an entertainment -- because it makes you think, it pushes a button; people don't like to go to theater and get their buttons pushed or have to think."

Passing on the inner life

These few days of rehearsal may be the last time that O'Hara works directly with Nagrin. O'Hara has not decided how he feels. He says, "Frankly, it has been so much work that I haven't had time to think about that. It was like being a professional dancer again, and not teaching a class." He reflects for a moment on what comes after the concert in Paris. "I would love to learn another solo, and there are a few that are not technically difficult. Picking a real physical dance of Daniel's would be difficult because, physically, he just can't do it anymore. Also a lot of the footwork is complicated."

One idea O'Hara toys with is to eventually recreate the entire Peloponnesian War piece that Nagrin developed in the late '60s. The dance was an entire evening's program. One of the difficulties in recreating the entire dance is doing so without Nagrin directly relating what O'Hara terms the "inner life" of a dance. O'Hara says, "Even if I didn't learn any of the movement for the piece from Daniel, just for me to go out and watch it with him and have him tell me what's going on would be enormous. Because that information I can't get from anywhere. I can't get it from a video."

That's the part I'll miss -- Daniel passing on his own idea of his solos."

About the dancer

Shane O'Hara has taught dance at the university level since 1986 and has worked extensively with modern dance master Daniel Nagrin. O'Hara tours professionally as Shane O'Hara*Solo Dance, sharing his work with audiences throughout the United States and Europe. A Fulbright Fellowship winner, O'Hara's choreography commissions include the Eisenhower Dance Ensemble of Detroit, Southern Danceworks of Birmingham and Grupo de Danca de Almada in Lisbon. O'Hara began studying acting, but a professor told him, "There are a lot of out-of-work male actors, but not that many out-of-work male dancers."

About the mentor

Visiting guest artist for fall 2007 Daniel Nagrin is professor emeritus of dance at Arizona State University, where he first met Shane O'Hara. Nagrin's career as a dancer, choreographer and teacher spans more than six decades and includes hundreds of accolades. He is the creator and performer of an extensive solo dance repertory, which he toured throughout the United States, Europe and the Pacific beginning in 1957.

Download the PDFs for a condensation of this feature and all of Winter 2008 Madison."Dancing with the issues" begins on Page 26.
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