Richard Powers: 'We're
integrating the old with the new...'
BY ELAINE RAY
Photos: L.A.
Cicero
 When Richard Powers' students take the stage
for the annual social dance extravaganza this weekend,
their performance will be the culmination of his life's
work -- well, half of his life. The engineer/product
designer cum dance historian and swing king has forged a
new approach that fuses the best of the ballroom
traditions with the best of the boomers, Xers and the
next generation.
Dubbed "Dance
Vortex," the show will take place Friday and
Saturday at 8 p.m. in Roble Dance Studio. It is being
billed as "a maelstrom of social dances, from the
cancan to swing." The main focus of the evenings
will be on the ragtime dances.
"What I want to do
this time is use the dances as an example to demonstrate
American creativity, crossover and individuality, which
began at the turn of the 20th century," says Powers,
a lecturer in the Drama Department's Dance Division.
"We'll show the 19th-century dances, when Americans
behaved in the proper way, which was European -- we
dressed and danced in the European manner. And then at
the end of the 19th century, we began to see that we were
different, and we started to feel less
self-conscious."
By the turn of the
century, he said, Americans began to enjoy ragtime music
and dance, and soon it caught on in Paris and London.
"We grew less embarrassed about our differences from
European culture and increasingly proud of our
uniqueness, and that continues to this day."
The concert will feature
the Stanford Vintage Dance Ensemble, Danse Libre and
Decadance. "They'll mix and match hustle and the
west coast and salsa and club two-step and swing all
together and do a fusion to some music that just came
out," Powers says of Decadance, which like Danse
Libre features current and former students. "They
completely embody everything I have been teaching."
Powers, shown
here with Angela Amarillas, a former student and frequent
instructing partner, has become fascinated with the
concept of partnering. He defines the leading and
following roles as "requiring a highly active
attention to possibilities."
Powers' efforts garnered
him a Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel Award at last year's
commencement for distinctive contributions to
undergraduate education.
"Richard has built
that whole area of the program," says division
coordinator Susan Cashion, who hired him in 1992 to add
diversity to the program. "Students just have a
wonderful time with him."
During a typical academic
quarter Powers teaches nine classes. "Social Dances
of North America I and II" and the "Vintage
Dance Ensemble" class are part of the division's
regular offerings. Then there are the three non-credit
offerings sponsored by the Associated Students, which
give graduate students, who often have course credit
limitations, access to Powers' expertise. He also teaches
three classes at the Palo Alto Women's Club, where the
majority of students come from campus. Still, students
line up at the beginning of each quarter -- often in the
wee hours of the morning -- to vie for a spot in his
Dance Division classes.
Powers, who is married and
has two young sons, also holds annual workshops in
Prague, Tokyo, New York and Cincinnati. He recently led a
Waltz Weekend workshop in northwest Georgia. And he's
gearing up for his annual summer dance week on the Farm,
which will feature octogenarian swing legends as well as
those now on the cutting edge of today's social dance
styles.
"We're integrating
the old with the new. Half the staff are focusing on the
traditions and half are the best that we can find for the
newer ones," Powers says. Stanford Xtensive will
take place on campus July 9-14. For more information, see
http://dance.stanford.edu/danceweeks/danceweek.htm.
Norma Miller, one of the
principal lindy hoppers in the 1937 film A Day at the
Races, will return for her second stint as a teacher
for Stanford dance week this summer.
"This is the first
time I've seen this dance organization at Stanford,"
Miller said when she was here for last year's dance week.
"It is immense." She was even more jazzed when
a group of young dancers recreated a routine from the
movie.
"The kids came out
and did what we did in our first film. I didn't know
anybody even wanted to do that. When you're my age, here
comes a 20-year-old -- what do they want with me? You
mean you learned how to do this? You could learn how to
be a computer expert!" Miller thought out loud.
In December, Powers
organized an 80th birthday fete for Miller at the
recently restored Sweets Ballroom in Oakland, the venue,
he notes, of Benny Goodman's first California gig.
"That was a magical night. It was the first time a
woman in swing had been honored in that way," he
says.
Powers' life has not
always been strictly ballroom. Asked if he had an
interest in dance as a kid growing up in Chicago, Powers
says, "None." It was basically a generational
thing, he explains. "My grandfather Powers taught
dance at Virginia Polytechnic Institute. My parents met
at a swing dance, but my whole generation skipped couple
dancing. A lot of boys in my generation were not drawn to
dancing. We grew up with girls dancing with girls and the
twist and the frug," while the boys hung close to
the wall.
Powers spent his
undergraduate years at Purdue, where he earned a degree
in engineering. His next stop was Stanford, but not in
the Dance Division. Powers was a student in the early
years of the product design program, which was created by
mechanical engineering Professor Emeritus Robert McKim in
1958. Powers also was one of the first students to pursue
an individually designed major. He graduated from
Stanford in 1970 with a master's in design and the
creative process.
The next stop was
Cincinnati, where he worked for a consulting firm, Alpha
Designs, and did freelance design work for companies such
as Procter and Gamble. He holds seven U.S. and
international patents, including one for the spray-pump
nozzle that screws onto bottles of window cleaner.
While living in
Cincinnati, Powers founded an artists collective and
studied calligraphy, then tai chi and kendo -- a Japanese
art similar to fencing. "The best way to understand
calligraphy and the spirit of it was not by more practice
but by understanding the movement. So I took tai chi,
which is the essence of that kind of flowing movement
that you find in calligraphy. I would never have guessed
that while I was trying to understand one concept, I
would discover a part of myself that was totally
neglected," he says.
In 1981 Powers founded the
Flying Cloud Academy of Vintage Dance and a year later
the Flying Cloud Troupe, a 30-member performing company.
He also co-founded the supporting Fleeting Moments Waltz
and Quickstep Orchestra. Powers' other credits include
training dancers for the 1989 film Glory and
choreographing the ballroom dance scenes for ABC's North
and South in 1985 and for PBS' Mrs. Perkins' Ball
in 1986.
"I would
never have guessed that while I was trying to understand
one concept, I would discover a part of myself that was
totally neglected," said Powers, a former engineer
and product designer. In the 1970s, Powers began studying
tai chi to understand the movement of calligraphy and
ultimately got hooked on vintage dance.
Megs Booker, a former
consulting professor in the Drama Department who spent
many years in New York theater before coming to the Bay
Area, says Powers' reputation as a historian and
performer is well deserved. "He is exceptionally
good with period dances, especially American period
pieces. He does everything from the lindy hop and the fox
trot. He's a wonderful teacher and is also magical to
watch. That makes him a real treasure," says Booker,
who is now a visiting professor at the University of
California-Santa Cruz.
Powers considers the segue
from engineering to dance a natural one. "When I was
a freshman, they hand-picked a few engineering students
coming in every year whom they thought showed the
greatest potential, then followed them. When we
graduated, we all got together at the dean's office, and
none of us was going to continue in engineering. They
considered that a success because we got the bigger
picture. I'm sure Bob McKim would look at this as a
logical progression of what they taught us as opposed to
a divergence," Powers says.
Powers' background may
serve him well in the classes he teaches, which almost
always attract more men. Moreover, 40 percent of his
students are studying engineering.
Perhaps, he speculates,
they can identify with someone who seems "a little
like them, someone who has gone through the same
struggles that they went through." He says his
classroom approach is to restate things in several ways
using physical terms, visual explanations or even
engineering speak. "If somebody is in human biology,
that'll go by them and then they'll catch the next way
that I approach it."
He finds that once many of
his students leave the Farm, the real world can be a bit
jarring. "I hear my friends, my students who
graduated who are now working in Silicon Valley. Just
when they were blossoming into the arts and dance and
self-expression, all of a sudden they have a
seven-day-a-week, 12-hour-a-day [job] in a completely
tech field. I hear a lot of frustration and
unhappiness." He encourages them to try to find ways
to keep their creative selves alive. He acknowledges that
many of these recent grads are simply paying off loans
and may ultimately get back to their art. "They have
a lot of life ahead of them," he says.
A new partnering
paradigm
One of Powers' primary
interests of late is partnering. Two generations ago, he
says, the man was the leader and the woman was the
follower in ballroom dance. "He was literally the
author of her dancing," he says. Then one generation
ago, the baby boomers started rebelling against that and
came up with a more equal definition of partnering,
"where she has some say and he has some
flexibility."
In his classes, Powers
emphasizes the need for the male dancer to be "very
responsive and receptive. The receptive mind is this mind
I'm talking about -- the alive mind, in the moment, as
opposed to already knowing what you're going to do ahead
of time, planning it out like the old-school dance. I
define the leading role as requiring a highly active
attention to possibilities. Not long ago the following
role was seen as opposite of leading. But I see the
following role as also requiring a highly active
attention to possibilities. In sports they call that
flowstate."
Powers' sports analogies
worked for at least one student. Cardinal hoopster Mark
Madsen took Powers to lunch last year to express how much
his social dance class had meant to him. "He told me
that it had improved his game. He said, 'The coaches
teach us to look down, look up and shoot. In cross-step
waltz, you taught us to always look over your shoulder
and use the widest possible peripheral vision.' More
active attention, more possibilities," Powers adds.
Another student told
Powers that learning to be receptive to her partner on
the dance floor taught her to pick up on subtle cues at
home, thus improving her relationship with her roommate.
The concept of partnering
is so fascinating to Powers that he spent the entire fall
quarter in northwest Georgia thinking and writing about
ways to teach it. The hundreds of pages Powers wrote have
provided the perfect overview for redesigning his Social
Dance I class, which now will have three weekly sessions
instead of two. During the additional session he will
integrate the practice of dance with the intellectual
concepts of appreciating one's partner, being flexible
and "welcoming chance intrusions."
A new generational
shift
Powers, who owns one of
the most extensive private collections of dance manuals,
is optimistic about the future of social dance. After
World Wars I and II, he says, men, who had previously
flocked to the ballrooms, shunned dancing.
"After the wars,
dancing became considered less masculine. I guess it was
going through the whole boot camp experience that
poisoned a lot of men," he says.
A new crop of men is
returning to the dance floor, even as their roles there
are changing. "I really like that the current
generation here seems to have kept those aspects of their
parents' subculture revolution that work and rejected
those that don't, and the aspect that works is more
gender equality," Powers notes.
He points out that one of
the other characteristics of Generation X and those who
have come of age since then is that they are continually
trying to decipher "what is real. I think our
younger generation is more streetwise and has a little
more common sense because they have to. Otherwise, the
hype is too overwhelming," Powers says. He adds that
so much has been pitched to them -- "ideologies as
well as products" -- that things like borrowing the
music of others are attempts to assess what has value.
"That's what the whole sampling culture is about.
Because the only way you know for sure is to try it.
"As a whole
generation, they're not buying the whole party line of
ballroom dance: 'Do it this way, because it's in the
syllabus.' 'Do it this way, because I said so.' They are
being playful and creative and they find that they can do
something that works. They're more responsive than they
used to be to creativity and crossover and genuine
partnering in my classes than they were eight years
ago."
Tickets for Dance Vortex
will be available at the door Friday and Saturday. The
cost is $8 for students and $10 for non-students. For
more information, contact the Dance Division at 723-1234.
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