Intro | Photo Shoot | Rehearsal | TECH | Performance | Why
by Jeanne Ruddy
I grew up in Miami in the fifties and sixties watching housing tracts replace the fields of strawberry, tomato, and vegetable farms that provided families the most delicious fruits and vegetables imaginable. South Miami had an almost rural feel. We spent our entire time outdoors, often barefoot and by the water’s edge. Every semester break from college, tall buildings would have broken ground eliminating the mangrove swamps I’d explored while sailing Biscayne Bay. My sadness over losing these natural habitats has not left me.
Fast forward to a career in Dance, rising to principal dancer with the Martha Graham Company in New York, a year on Broadway in the King and I, and finally a decade on the faculty of the Juilliard School. Living in New York did not erase my memories or replace the valued habitats of my youth or my consequent interest in the environment.
My marriage brought me down to Philadelphia where I started my own company, Jeanne Ruddy Dance. My husband and I spent summer weekends in Cape May Beach on the Delaware Bay. We began kayaking in the wetlands learning of its necessity to our ecco system and of the challenges to preserve the habitat still left.
Rachel Carson’s book, The Sea Around Us, has given me an appreciation of how the well being of the planet depends on the health of our Oceans. I continued to visit the Wetlands Institute and kayak with naturalists who unveiled the richness of the marshland. As a choreographer I began to formulate ideas for a dance that might be able to grapple with the beauty, the importance, and the dangers facing our Wetlands. Slowly the new work took shape in my mind.
Last summer I traveled to Vienna to study with a leading teacher of German Tanz Theatre, Suzanne Linke. There, at the Impulse Tanz Festival, I began my first choreographic explorations into what was tentatively titled, Oceans 1: Wetlands.
An empty studio is much like the blank page to a writer. Thoughts fly around and have to be corralled – a movement needs to come out of that thought and capture the beauty and underlying message I wanted. After two weeks of a disciplined two–hour daily technique class followed by a three-hour creative period with Suzanne Linke’s guidance, I had created a five-minute solo. Comprised of dialogue and movements, those two weeks helped me find a path toward a new work that addressed four important goals:
One, to capture the Wetland’s beauty while at the same time address the distressing issues of the habitat’s problems including man’s interaction, pollution, and the loss of land.
Two, to include humor so that it could be enjoyed and allow the audience to accept the new information given through the narrator.
Three, to explore using spoken word interlaced throughout the choreography.
Four, to have an original musical score created incorporating natural sounds of the wetlands.
In October, when I returned from Vienna, I conducted a two-week workshop directing seven of my Company dancers to explore movements of turtles, crabs, starfish, the all-important grasses, and of course, the birds.
JRD board member, Verna Prentice, arranged for Wetlands Institute Executive Director, Cindy O’Conner and I to meet. That opened the door for an on-site photo shoot with photographer, Bob Emmott, capturing pictures of three of my dancers set among the wetlands’ grasses in the cold month of December.
Composer, Ellen Fishman Johnson, is composing an original work using the sounds of the Wetlands. Each week we come together in the dance studio and put together movement and music. At this writing it appears that Oceans 1:Wetlands will be approximately 30 minutes long.
I am thankful for the Wetlands Institute. It has educated me to the importance and to the plight of these beautiful grassy marshes and how they relate to the balance of the planet’s ecological system. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has recently unveiled that global warming is “unequivocal”. It is only appropriate that works of art address this issue.