The Baroque Dance Ensemble at Aston Magna Music Festival, 1973
Dancers from left to right: Catherine Turocy, Kristin Draudt, Sue Wanveer, Georgia Burns, Robert Fenwick and Ann Jacoby. Albert Fuller, harpsichord, Stanley Ritchie, violin, Auguste Wessinger, cello
Dr. Shirley S. Wynne pioneered recreations and reconstructions of Baroque dance in the United States as well as bringing these works to the stage. Her first production of Jean Philippe Rameau’s Pygmalion in 1969 with conductor, Alan Curtis, may have been the first staging in America. I was fortunate to have studied with Shirley as a student at Ohio State University. At the recommendation of Ruth Currier, I became one of the younger members of the newly formed company for historical dance at OSU. After being called the Rococo Dance Ensemble, the Court and Country Dance Theater, the group finally settled on a name: The Baroque Dance Ensemble.
As a teacher and artist, Shirley greatly influenced my beginning studies and presentations of historical dance. This posting contains reviews of her groundbreaking work for Rameau’s La Naissance d’Osiris, also done in collaboration with Alan Curtis.
Thank you Shirley for all the beauty you created in your life and for all those dancers you inspired.
Sincerely,
Catherine Turocy
ARTICLES
Preview article 1972
Debut Review
Review, Alan Kriegsman
Review, George Gelles 1972
Castor et Pollux Review, 1973, by George Gelles
Dr. Shirley Wynne was my mentor and supervisor of my MA program in dance at Ohio State University in the late 1960s. Working in a nascent field with a handful of colleagues, she was interested in the determinants of style in movement practices that no living person had ever seen. She gave life to notation systems and iconography of the past for which we are deeply appreciative. Bach, for example, has been interpreted in many ways for centuries but the challenge of bringing the whole body to life in movement, costume, comportment and gesture was another task altogether. It was a process Shirley embraced and loved and was unstinting in her demand for excellence. In retirement for many years, she will be remembered for a magnificent contribution to dance and its history.
Dianne, Thank you for being so articulate and putting her work into perspective. I hope others will come forward and contribute their words with the same gratitude and understanding.
How I found Shirley Wynne: A perspective from the West Coast.
This writing is simultaneously a paean to Shirley Wynne who remains such a creative inspiration and catalyst in my work, and it is a history of how she and I came to know each other. My relationship with Shirley intertwined with my professional museum work and academic inquiry in a way that created more questions than answers.
The connection with Shirley started after graduating from UCLA with a MA in Dance and Ethnology. I took a position in 1968 as Associate Curator of History at The Oakland Museum in California. This museum was in the process of being created from the ground up – architecture by Eero Saarinen and the history gallery conceptual design by a lead member from the office of Charles and Ray Eames. We were being challenged to re-envision history in museums. The level of inquiry and spirited discussions into the night about re-creating the lives of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century California for museum audiences led me to re-consider what I understood as dance and what I was constantly re-focusing on as the body in historical context. How is the presence of the moving figure to be made tangible in museum exhibitions and inserted into ancillary events like live performance and demonstration? In the finished history gallery was a dance ‘platform,’ done with full cooperation and input from California’s Miwok tribe. I was not involved in this, but the results are an example of how some people were thinking about body posture and gesture at the time. Plaster casts were made from the postures and gestures directly from the bodies of Miwok Native Americans performing one of their dances, and these ‘mannequins’ were then adorned with ritual garments and accouterments.
Translating, or ‘reading,’ collected and inanimate historical artifacts, I thought about what this pile of objects, material culture, could tell us about how subsequent European and Spanish settlers in California took on, assumed culture, created society, devised interactions, and formalized the non-verbal in posture and gesture.
In the mid 1970s, I began a doctoral program at the University of California at Davis. Mid-stream in my research and thoughts, I began working on an inter-campus and, eventually, an interdisciplinary degree — trying to determine a path through the maze of visual, written, and artifact resources that one needs to draw upon to understand how human beings in history experienced their bodies and moved in their culture and time.
I learned about Shirley Wynne on a trip to the Smithsonian Institution where her work had drawn very favorable notice. As Shirley was then a professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz (thus in the UC system), I chose her as a key faculty member with whom to work. I commuted weekly to study with her. Shirley brought my attention how to consider ‘style,’ something that she saw as a sphere of elements – a gestalt — that expressed an era and could be used to unmask written and visual records in order to re-create dances. Combined with my ethnology and folklore studies at UCLA, I joined the hunt, as she put it – “to bring back the dance alive.” The game was afoot!
I saw the problem of re-making historical dance from a different perspective than Shirley. My culture studies background led me to put more emphasis on an assessment of material culture, history, sociology, folklore, and theater – to delineate a process on how to capture ‘the body concrète’ from clues in the midden, literally the dump for domestic waste, leftovers. And it was on this point that Shirley and I had fruitful misunderstandings. Should the process of re-fabrication be built on high art or the ordinary, or perhaps both? For without dance manuals and visual patterns, how could the moving body be understood, let alone be made to materialize with any accuracy? (Of course, the question of exactness of a dance form, ‘the true form,’ or “accuracy” may not be so important as how one arrives at answers in the re-construction process. In the end, the results may prove mythical.) It is pure coincidence that Shirley had just finished working with Allegra Fuller Snyder on their film “Baroque dance, 1675-1725.” Allegra, a guiding force to bring culture study and dance together at UCLA, had been a faculty member to my study of expressive movement in the gold rush in California. To both of these professors, I am indebted.
With distance I have longed to have a final conversation with Shirley – on ‘re-constituting,’ not just an historic dance form, but the pulling out and the re-assemblage of the pieces of ‘truthiness,’ a kind of simulacrum from lives lived. When attempting to bring this postmodern position to bear — the reconstructed form and its meaning — I would ask her: Should the focus be put on the dance or the dynamic dark matter, the object or the space that holds the dance shrink-wrapped?
Shirley Wynne, I thank you. I also am very grateful to your students who have become colleagues and friends.
Dear Gretchen,
Thank you so much for this essay which illuminates Shirley’s work as a teacher and mentor. I am certain she is smiling down…
Catherine