Three Early Summer Dances

In this summer of torrential rains and torrid heat, dance, indoor and outside, hasn’t skipped a beat. As it began in May, Jennifer Archibald built an extravagant tropical rainforest for her BalletX commission under the dome of the Mann Center in Fairmount Park, one of the largest city parks in the world, near where I grew up.

Performance

“Terra/Bodies & Territories” by Silvana Cardell, BalletX's “Maslow's Peak” by Jennifer Archibald, “Pure Lucia” with Erick Hawkins Dance Company

Place

The Mann Center for the Performing Arts and the Schuylkill Center, Fairmount Park / FringeArts, Phildelphia, PA, May 2, 9, 10, and June 13, 2025

Words

Merilyn Jackson

Silvana Cardell's “Terra/Bodies & Territories.” Photograph by Michelle Smith

Along the Delaware River at the FringeArts venue, there was an entirely different, but enormously important two-day event. Dustin Hurt, who directs Bowerbird, a presenter of musical and choreographic esoterica in Philadelphia and New York since 2006, paired the incomparable compositions of Lucia Długoszewski with the small, but ongoing Erick Hawkins Dance Company. Długoszewski and Hawkins had been secretly married, perhaps for 20 years upon his death in 1994. They had met and began collaborating in 1953 while Hawkins was still married to Martha Graham. According to Hurt’s research: “They married in 1962 but kept this fact hidden from all but their closest friends. It was not until Hawkins’ eulogy in 1994 that Długoszewski publicly acknowledged their marriage.”

Cardell, whose work is assertively environmentally and socially oriented, didn’t have to build a anything. She simply set her work in a shady glade in the park, placed large logs around it for seating, and used all that nature provided as a place and resource: For her all women/female cast, she used long twigs to braid baskets that became dresses or cages when pushed down over the dancer’s women’s heads, shoulders or waists. Cloths turned two dancers into red pillars, suggesting blood.

Her soundscape developer, composer Devin Arne, ingeniously dug trenches around and through the perimeters of the space. You couldn’t tell where the sound of an airplane, or cawing bird was coming from, as if everything magically emerged from parts of the forest. Through dramatic themes, the cast fiercely confronted patriarchal abuse of female and marginalized bodies through the lens of Argentine-born Cardell.

She placed at least three of Philadelphia’s longtime contemporary power dancers as inspirational Gaia figures, sisterly caretakers, and shamans: Shiela Zagar, Germaine Ingram and Bethany Formica. In all, some 20 women, and one young girl, appeared and reemerged among the trees and brambles, leaping from branches, rolling in the dirt, hiding one another from predators unseen but felt, always on guard, and washing the wounded, feeding and protecting each other. The event was a mix of danger, determination, and spiritual qualities that left the audience in a state of reverie, as in a daydream.

BalletX in “Maslow's Peak” by Jennifer Archibald. Photograph by Vikki Sloviter

Archibald’s “Maslow’s Peak,” BalletX’s most ambitious work in its 19 years, stood in stark contrast to “Terra/Bodies & Territories.” Thanks to recent funding gifts, Guy De Lancey designed an elaborate set and projections to represent the jungle island that some 20 prep-school boys crash-land on in William Golding’s dystopian novel, The Lord of the Flies. Dozens of dangling ropes served as vines for the dancers to swing on, climb up or down, or simply sway, as if in a breeze, among them. The gorgeous, stylized Hollywood set included two halves of the small passenger air plane on each side of the stage. These broken, separated wings and a rough cliff provided multiple levels for the dancers to cling to, climb on or slide down.

The company relished the acrobatics, some of which looked exceedingly dangerous. Some scenes, especially those with Taiko drums beating, were heart stopping. As Golding depicted, most of the boys, (in this case the girls were also boys,) went native. They smeared mud on their bodies, wore masks, terrorized each other and lost all sense of civilization. Until they were rescued. In “Maslow’s Peak,” Archibald contrasts psychologist’s Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which suggests we should be striving to meet our highest aspirations, with Golding’s depiction of the boys decent into a feral state.

Too short a description, but I want to add that I cannot think of another space large enough to present it again in Philadelphia. The Mann Music Center seats 4,500 in the TD Pavilion and another 9,500 on the Connelly Terrace and Great Lawn, where entire families come with blankets to picnic—just as my family walked up to the Robin Hood Dell which the Mann basically supplanted. It’s still nearby and Philadanco will perform there July 25th.

The Mann is now 50 years old and undergoing an extensive renovation, which I hope will include more thought for the disabled. Handrails on the steep slopes are currently inadequate and many of us struggled to get to the box office from the upper reaches and to our seats. The jumbotrons, intended to provide closeups of the dance and the dancers faces to audience on the grass, did little to give us the sense of intimacy with nature that Cardell’s “Terra” did.

This may have been the only venue where such a monumental show could have been produced locally. As BalletX celebrates its twentieth anniversary next season, my hope is that Archibald’s work can be freshly rebuilt at places like BAM and Vail, where the company often summers.

JR Gooseberry, Hayley Meier, and Jason Hortin in Erick Hawkins’ “Cantilever.” Photograph by S.E.B Photography

As for the program called “Pure Lucia,” the choreographer’s and the composer’s work were wed over a two-night run at FringeArts. It’s an industrial renovation of a waterworks station that combines a bar and restaurant with a 220 seat theater beside the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, both structures about 125 years old.

Dustin Hurt researched Dlugoszewski’s processes for more than two years before pulling together multiple artists to perform some nine or ten instrumental works. After intermission the first night, the Erick Hawkins Dance Company danced his original choreographies to two of her compositions. On Night 1: Quidditas Suchness, Jason Hortin, Hayley Meier danced two excerpts from 1957’s Here and Now With Watchers. They held shields, or perhaps wings or large fans, across their chests in a dated-looking first excerpt.

While both were new to me, 1963’s “Cantilever” is the piece that lived up to its title. JR Gooseberry and Halie Landers joined Horton and Meier intermittently, executing a Cunningham-esque movement schema. With crisscrossing legs, forward bends balancing on finger points, tours devants, and airplaning tours, this work timelessly paid homage to the musical themes.

The music was performed precisely and masterfully by ensembles that included Network for New Music, Arcana New Music Ensemble, and Daedalus Quartet. But Space is a Diamond, with Peter Evans trumpet solo was the most enthralling. Every breath he blew sounded with love for the piece.

This was the second night, and Katherine Duke’s choreographic offering was to Dlugoszewski’s 1995 Disparate Stairway Radical Other. Rylee Lucero joined the four dancers above with Daedalus’ musicians Min-Yun Kim, Matilda Kaul, Jessica Thompson and Thomas Kraines playing strings downstage left. Arms pushing through space, legs crawling backwards, torsos bending forward, shoulders hunching over, and at least one downward dog, are what I remember most. A duet pulls apart as if by propulsion, and some fencing moves also made the piece look like updated Hawkins. These weeks felt like a dance festival to me, rain or shine.

Merilyn Jackson

Merilyn Jackson has written on dance for the Philadelphia Inquirer since 1996 and writes on dance, theater, food, travel and Eastern European culture and Latin American fiction for publications including the New York Times, the Warsaw Voice, the Arizona Republic, Phoenix New Times, MIT’s Technology Review, Arizona Highways, Dance Magazine, Pointe and Dance Teacher, and Broad Street Review. She also writes for tanz magazin and Ballet Review. She was awarded an NEA Critics Fellowship in 2005 to Duke University and a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship for her novel-in-progress, Solitary Host.

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