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Tribute to Mariel Louise McEwan

Posted in General News, tagged , , , , on September 7, 2026|

September 1, 1942 – August 27, 2026
We are all saddened at the passing of Mariel Louise McEwen last week from a long fight with cancer. She was a dear friend and colleague. This past April, I received a call from her asking me to write a tribute/obit when she passed. This is so typical of Mariel, always planning and anticipating. She also did not want to burden anyone. But, given her independent spirit and enthusiasm for life, it is hard to imagine her ever being a burden. She was one of my biggest fans and I owe her a great deal for pushing me to document our educational workshops. Her time recording the classes was mostly contributed until we could afford to give her a fee. She always encouraged me when I was down. Her creative mind quickly solved problems and her optimism never wavered. My only regret is that we did not finish our collaboration, Harmony of the Spheres, due to her illness in 2017 followed by Covid and then a return of bad health.https://www.marielmcewan.com/harmony-of-the-spheres
“First meeting with members of the New Mexico Film Office and Catherine Turocy for the “Harmony of the Spheres” planetary dome project. We all left smiling!” Mariel

When I met Mariel, she was living in Los Angeles, California and was a freelance writer, director, and editor specializing in dance choreographed for the camera. Her dance camera videos were screened in national and international Dance Camera Festivals including Lincoln Center in New York and venues in Europe, South America and Asia. Her video Pilgrimage won the “Filmmaker of the Year Gold Award” at an International Indonesian Film Festival in 2015.

Mariel came into my life in 2012 as one of our students at The New York Baroque Dance Company summer workshop in Santa Barbara, California. She participated in the classes but soon offered to video and photograph final class presentations. She became the videographer for our summer workshops in Historical Dance which continued through 2017 and only ended because of her illness. Documenting my work and that of guest artists invited to the workshop, Mariel had compiled more than 60 videos on a Vimeo dance channel she created for us. We will all be forever grateful to her for creating these documentary and educational videos which were a rare occurrence at the time. She was truly a pioneer in creating this important online collection visited by many dance teachers internationally.

Link to vimeo channel beginning with Mariel’s work: https://vimeo.com/channels/nybaroquedancesbhd/page:4
Banquets and Balls https://vimeo.com/141741784
Medea recording at NYPL: https://www.nypl.org/research/research-catalog/bib/b15294393  
Mariel had always been interested in historical dance since her studies in college with Sandra Noll Hammond. She also worked with her friend, Regine Astier. Mariel’s talent in costume design and construction was a major asset. Her active dancing career had already concluded before I met her and I apologize for not being able to include more information. With no internet or smart phones in the 1960’s through the 1970’s and 80’s, this period is not as well documented as the next century.

In her spare time Mariel enjoyed sewing costumes for her 3-foot-tall doll. This was actually very historical as dolls were the “models” of their day for the latest fashions. Many were mailed from Paris to clients in England and helped the clients to choose which dress to order.
 In addition to her work with the NYBDC, Mariel’s strength was as an artistic collaborator, bringing stories to life in film and video. Niu Niu’s Story and Against the Dark of Night were created in collaboration with Jia Wu from Shanghai, China. They also co-instructed a Dance Camera Workshop for graduate and undergraduates at St. Mary’s College in Moraga, California for 3 years ending in February 2018.  Her film studies began in 1988 when Mariel moved to Los Angeles to attend the American Film Institute as a Producing Fellow. After graduating she worked for the film production companies Jones Inter-Cable and Mitsubishi. From 2004-2006 she worked at Sparkhill creating DVD bonus documentaries for the Warner’s and Paramount Studio for the re-release of classic films such as The Thin Man Collection for Warner’s Home Video and a series of documentaries for seven John Wayne films for Batjac Productions and Paramount Home Video which included The High and the Mighty, Island in the Sky, Hondo, McLintock, The Track of the Cat and Seven Men from Now.
While living in Sun Valley, Idaho, she worked with the Footlight Dance Centre to create an original three-act ballet based on the book Bijou, Bonbon & Beau, the Kittens Who Danced for Degas by Joan Sweeney. For the production, she produced animated slides that were used as projections featuring French Impressionistic paintings of the streets of Paris, Degas’ paintings of ballerinas and an animated theatre of the Paris Opera.  As a dancer, Mariel was interested in many dance styles. She was a student of both folk and classical Japanese Dance and began her earliest studies as a young student at UCLA with the Bugaku master, Suenobu Togi. In 1999 she became a member of the folk-dance group Hoshun Kai taught by Hoshun sensei Kimi Kawamura. It is a branch of the Nippon Minyo Kenkuyo Kai based in Nagoya, Japan, led by Kachi Hosin sensei. She studied classical Japanese dance for five years with Dianne Fukuwa of the Fujima Seiyumi Kai (school) Returning once again in 2009 to UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures Mariel participated in classes conducted by the Japanese dancers Eiko and Koma.  Mariel was a recipient of two grants from the California Council for the Humanities. The first grant assisted her in the research and production of Reconcile. This documentary explored the lives of three children of different ethnic and political backgrounds, growing up and surviving in Nazi Germany during WW II. In the post-war era, all three emigrated to the US to attend universities to begin the process of adapting themselves to new political realities and relationships. This hour-long work was based on the best-selling book, An Uncommon Friendship by Frederick Tubach and Bernie Rosner. Reconcile was screened at film festivals and at many community discussion groups in Southern and Northern California. The second grant supported the staging of her original theatre piece Love’s Wild Desire at the California State University in Los Angeles. A mixed media presentation based on 18th-century poetry with music of love, seduction, and marriage, the show was first performed at the Mark Taper Auditorium at the main branch of the Los Angeles Public Library. In August 2011, it was presented by the American High School Theater Festival at the Edinburgh International Fringe Theater Festival. In February 2012 it was presented as a Valentine Day special event and fundraiser for the Ridgecrest Branch of the Kern County Library sponsored by the Spring Hill Suites by Marriott. I have read the script for this work and would welcome the opportunity to stage the piece on the NYBDC.














Mariel at work…
In conclusion, Mariel was a free spirit. This short video shows her enjoying what she loved so much, dance. https://vimeo.com/742492122 5 minutes and 30 seconds in, Mariel is in purple and is an anonymous “extra” fully enjoying life.
As comments and articles appear I will add them to this article which will be posted on our website, https://nybaroquedance.org/
Many thanks to Mariel’s two sons, Mark and Chris Gillespie, who have kept in communication these past months. Mariel was very proud of you.

Official obituary: https://www.legacy.com/legacy/mariel-mcewan

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Seeking out the Character in an Early Character Dance

Posted in General News, tagged , , , on May 5, 2026|

 by Alan Jones

In 2024, Julia Bengtsson and I collaborated on a stimulating project for The New York Baroque Dance Company, centered on dances to music by Francis Johnson performed in the United States in the 1820s. We decided to continue our work in this vein as we reunited in Paris this past February to present our work for the Centre National de la Danse (CND), which made the Johnson project possible. 

As I have been immersed for some time in research on different national dances, I was particularly curious about exploring Cossack dance, which was widely taught in dancing schools of the United States. Slavic dances were first applauded on the American stage during George Washington’s presidency, notably a Pas Russe performed in Philadelphia and Baltimore in the 1790s by James and Lucy Byrne, formerly of Covent Garden. The Pas Russe was soon eclipsed by the Cossack Dance, which naturally appealed to American audiences because of the Cossacks’ fierce attachment to independence and freedom. One of the most important interpretations of a Cossack Dance took place in New York in 1805, by Louise Gervais  Gervais article) and Charles Berault, both French dance teachers. Their duet was apparently derived from the Scythian Dance from Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride. Not long after, Gervais and Berault jointly released a collection of dances with music selected by Mr. Berault and dance figures by Miss Gervais. This work is important as the first example of choreography published by a woman in the United States, but the two chose to limit themselves mainly to simple cotillions, and so the choreography of their Cossack Dance was lost. 

A rich selection of choreographic sources nevertheless has been preserved at the library of the Paris Opera and other international archives. All these sources present interesting artistic possibilities as well as logistic challenges, and I ultimately opted to study all of them and to create an original piece of historically informed choreography, rather than a reconstruction of any one dance. Our plan was to rehearse while we prepared for our presentation at the CND, which meant that I would not have the luxury of experimenting, but that I would need to have a dance nearly complete before Julia’s arrival in Paris. For music, my choice fell upon an anonymous Cossack Dance published in Baltimore in the early 1800s, which I had already worked on with the Mexican ensemble Concierto Barroco, for a zoom workshop with the NYBDC.

Of the different sources at my disposal, I worked most closely with the notebooks of Michel Saint-Léon, now preserved at the Paris Opera. Saint-Léon wrote down two Cossack dances about 1830, while serving as dancing master to the court of Würtemberg in southwestern Germany. Of the material offered by one duet, I retained bows following the form of the minuet, but adapted stylistically for Americans’ idea of dancing Cossacks. Just as in the minuet, the two dancers split off into opposite corners. One girl does a step very distantly based on male prisiadka technique, alternating demi-pliés with pointings of one foot forward, while the other does eight pas de basque forward. I developed this into a repeating motif, which continues with other elements of Saint-Léon’s instruction, including a hand hold borrowed from the allemande. Photographs of Ukrainian dancers from the early twentieth century interestingly recall some of the engravings familiar from the two main Parisian handbooks on the allemande, by Guillaume and Dubois. It is also curious that the spatial paths of Saint-Léon’s dance frequently correspond to a Cossack Dance from the mysterious “Dance Book TB 1826,” now preserved in Wellington, New Zealand. 

Another useful source proved to be the manuscript of Terpsichorographie, a treatise planned circa 1815 by Jean-Etienne Despréaux, former dancer of the Paris Opera who was then an inspecteur of the School of Dance. Two fragmentary Cossack dances in the manuscript were probably intended for pupils of the Opera school. Using his own notation system, which employs letters of the alphabet read from left to right, Despréaux indicates steps executed by a single dancer whose gender is not indicated. From this source I exploited an opening stamping sequence, rendered in different ways in the two examples, as well as a combination in which the dancer strikes the floor alternatively with heel and toe. These movements were called piqués, the earliest use of that term in dance literature, and still exist in the French tradition of danses de caractères. 

Among these combinations I introduced double pas de basques, common to both the Cossack Dance and the Pas Russe, as well as the cabriole known as the golubets or hołupiec. This step, which involves striking the legs together in first position while traveling laterally, was described by Charles Durang, son of the famous John Durang, and is familiar from the character dances of Swan Lake, Coppélia, and other ballets. 

For general inspiration and details of posture and arms, I constantly kept in mind two images of the French danseuse Angélique Saint-Romain, who performed a Cossack dance in Vienna circa 1820. One Soviet character dance manual, talking about Ukrainian dance, says that these dances should be filled with a “playful sense of humor, and robust, high-spirited exuberance.” Our Cossack dance is meant to temper the the energy of Eastern European dance with the refinement of the French school. Our way of working is certainly novel, with one-on-one rehearsals in Paris followed by company rehearsals in New York, along with email and telephone exchanges, and zoom rehearsals. My hope is that the exuberance of the originals will come across in the spirit of the whole. 

Julia Bengtsson is presently rehearsing the Cossack Dance and other duets, solos, and quartets to dancers of the NYBDC, which will be performed May 10th in Dallas with the Dallas Bach Society… https://www.ticketdfw.com/event/homage-to-lafayette

Tempesta di Mare, performed on May 17:  https://tempestadimare.my.salesforce-sites.com/ticket/#/events/a0SVQ000002w10z2AA

and at the Berkeley Festival on June 12: https://www.berkeleyfestival.org/new-york-baroque-dance-company-music-of-the-regiment

To learn more about Louise Gervais and other pioneers of American dance, watch for Alan Jones’s forthcoming Substack,  Early Ballet USA.

 

Images Below: Angélique Saint-Romain in a Cossack dance in Vienna c. 1820. Period engraving, and re-imagined in color by ChatGPT.

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