Stockbridge — It might have been his third performance of Isadora Duncan’s “The Many Faces of Love” in the gardens of Chesterwood, but three years ago, Berkshire/New York City dancer and writer Ian Spencer Bell, set to perform the next day, tore three ligaments in his toe. “So I can dance tomorrow, right?” he asked. “No, you have to go the emergency room,” he was told. Bell spent the next six months in recovery.
On June 8, in what will perhaps become a tradition at Chesterwood, Bell returned for his second performance of Duncan’s dance cycle, set to Johannes Brahms’ 16 Waltzes, Opus 39. The modern dance pioneer Duncan began choreographing them in 1910, 12 years after dancing in the gardens at Chesterwood for Daniel Chester French and his wife. First, to a full crowd, Bell danced “Six Chelsea Love Poems,” reciting poems of his own, while traversing the open air stage to his own choreography.
The show was the first in a full season of artistic performances at Chesterwood. Arts Alive! continues French’s tradition of inviting artists of all genres to share their creativity and gather inspiration at Chesterwood. This summer, as Site Manager Margaret Cherin noted, the series will showcase some new partnerships. In a free community event on July 17, the Tanglewood Music Center Fellows will perform a cantata called “Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight,” for piano, cello, violin, and mezzo-soprano. Shakespeare & Company, who also wanted to get off their own campus, will stage an open rehearsal of “The Winter’s Tale” in the garden on July 20.
The outdoor venue is unique in the Berkshires. As Cherin notes, “we don’t have a stage set up, it’s very organic, in the garden, dancing barefoot, hoping that no one gets hurt!” A groundhog often runs across the space, and birds sing in tandem with musicians. “It’s been really fun for us to see the relationship between the art and nature.”
“It’s a big change dancing outdoors,” Bell admitted. “It’s very difficult dancing in grass, and it’s so hard to project in the outdoors.” Not that Bell is complaining; he is humbled and excited that this show “feels like it’s becoming a Berkshire event.” Pianist Lauren Aloia, who knows Bell having played for his dance classes for five years, said that while they also performed “Many Faces” in New York City and at Bard College, she really loves this place and how much they do to bring the arts to their audiences.
Lucas Griswold, Chesterwood’s new manager of interpretation and education, has also planned a couple of Pride Month events—intimate studio tours exploring the “queer whispers” French left behind, every Wednesday evening in June, and a drag story hour on June 29—but Bell’s performance easily qualified, too.
This premiere of “Six Chelsea Love Poems” (Bell premiered a different piece of danced poetry last year) included—amid the domestic, food-laden homages to his New York City home—a poem responding to the shooting at the Pulse Night Club in Orlando. Describing his process putting movement to words, he explains, “When I’m writing a poem, it usually comes because I’m saying something to myself that is really, really important.” After a night of “feeling like a happy, lucky, joyful, gay person in Chelsea, I woke up in the morning and looked at the news. Forty-nine of my family were murdered while I was hanging out with my gay friends, living my perfect gay life, and it was something that I spoke to myself all day, and by the end of the day put it down.”
He revises the words as they get shuffled from phone to email to paper, and “by the time I get it into a dance, it is already there.” The words already live in his body, he says. The dance source material pieced together and “reorganized the dance language” from a lot of historical dance works, based on elements in the poems.
As for talking and dancing at the same time, he has been doing it for a long time. “As a teacher, you get in the habit of talking and dancing, but it is so extraordinarily difficult.” He likes that it “demands that you’re always being improvisational, and that feels really essential and good for live performance.”
Isadora Duncan’s Brahms waltzes are also love poems. “She was breaking up with the love of her life,” Bell explains, “and she was writing him letters, and I’m a writer; I should learn this one if I’m going to learn any of them,” he thought. “And that has helped me feel like I can add my work to it, like my own work is in conversation with hers in a way that I would have not ever considered.”
Duncan, a lover of poetry, and married to the Russian poet Sergei Yesenin, was also obsessed with Walt Whitman. “She would take ‘Leaves of Grass’ with her when she went on tour,” says Bell, “and here I am in the grass, in the home of the person who built the monument for Abraham Lincoln—of course I’m thinking of Whitman, so that connection feels really deep. And it’s also a deep queer connection,” he says, referring to Whitman.
The Brahms waltzes provide a richly lyrical and expressive impetus to the dance. “They’re very hard but really special,” said Aloia, who pointed out that as waltzes, they are already meant to be danced. Seeing Bell move as she played enhanced her experience of the music, and probably made her play better, she said.
Duncan’s choreography was taught to him “in a very detailed way” by two experts, with varying interpretations but commonalities as well. “The softness of the hands was something I focused on a lot,” said Bell. “I try to honor as much as I can Isadora’s body and Isadora’s desire, but it is totally a different dance because it is my body doing it.”
At one point, Bell grabbed the bouquet of roses sitting on the piano and methodically ripped them up. “She did not rip up the roses,” said Bell. “I was thinking of her and her fury and her love letters, and also how in the creation of a dance, or a poem, there’s a moment of shredding and ripping up before we bring something back together.”
“One of the main things she brought to modern dance,” he says, “was the use of natural weight, also the use of natural gesture. A real and true gesture, like tearing something up, felt like it was honoring her legacy.”
Duncan’s work is very rarely performed by men, especially in the U.S., although Duncan at one point brought Greek boys into her company and taught them. Duncan, who garnered some criticism for refusing a corset and lifting her knees, believed in freedom for the body. Duncan biographer Peter Kurth reassured Bell, “Yes, you should be doing this as a man, you should be doing this with your weight, and you should be doing it as you think is right, because that was what she believed in first and foremost.”
Visit Chesterwood’s website to see this summer’s events.
