In August of 2010, Susan Cahan, Associate Dean for the Arts in Yale College, asked me if I felt I had enough strong dancers among my students to put together a dance performance that could rival the high quality of the Yale Symphony Orchestra. I thought of the many students yearning to dance at Yale – those who have enrolled in the dance studies courses, and others I have watched in extracurricular productions – and said I thought we could manage something. This is how the idea for the Yale Dance Theater Pilot Program came into being.

YDT builds upon the development of the dance studies curriculum at Yale over the past five years, and enthusiasm for dancing generated by the extracurricular dance groups. Like the dance courses, YDT emphasizes rigorous artistic practice as a site of research. In learning EIGHT JELLY ROLLS, students gain knowledge of Twyla Tharp’s worldview, as well as the particular historical and cultural context in which her thinking evolved. They also learn something about the benefits and pitfalls of dance reconstruction. We could not have asked for more expert advisors in having Katie Glasner and Jenny Way, both long-time Tharp dancers, stage the work, and Sara Rudner and Rose Marie Wright, the highly lauded original members of her company, guest coach.

This four-way input does, however, amount to four interpretations of choreography that in its essence admits and insists on a large degree of individual choice. Among other challenges, the dancers are navigating this bounty of information. An experiment in movement and words, YDT offers students the opportunity to reflect on these issues, articulating the value of their studio practice even as they are out of breath and sweaty, exhausted by the very ideas they are considering. The dancers of YDT are free to write about the studio work in whatever way they desire. Utmost creativity in dancing and writing is our guiding m.o.

The blog not only documents the process of learning EIGHT JELLY ROLLS, it allows us to hear from the dancers–voices so often undervalued in dance history. This blog allows us to hear about the experience of interpreting choreography from the dancers themselves.

Do you realize how chock-full of ideas even a snippet of choreography by Twyla Tharp can be? Read on!

Drum roll, please…