printable versionCzech out the moves: Vintage dance in a vintage city
BY CYNTHIA HAVEN
Castle Sternberk, where the group made an outing, on the Sázava River.
Victoria Wagner of Boston enjoys a waltz with Robin Warner of Dexter, Mich.
Jason Anderson of Danse Libre engages Stanford alumna Angela Amarillas, left, and Tracey Powers, right, for future dances.
Stanford alumna Julie Tsai of Danse Libre and Gerold Schubert of Munich share a polka in Prague.
Stanford alumnus Jason Anderson of Danse Libre whirls Beate Öllinger of Germany during a polka.
In Prague’s tourist-mobbed Old Town Square, the famous Church of Our Lady in front of Týn looms.
Fifty-two people trudged down a residential street near the Technická Univerzita in Prague, wearing feathers and heels, tuxedos, gloves and sequins. It was only late afternoon, but the women's long gowns swept the pavement.
A woman walking nearby nudged her husband. "Why can't we ever dress up?" was her implied message.
There was more to it than that, as a keen observer might have guessed, for the women weren't wearing elegant stilettos but durable and slightly worn "character shoes." This was Vintage Dance Week in Prague, and the group was being spirited down the street by Stanford dance historian and choreographer Richard Powers, one of the pioneers in a burgeoning field. More than a burgeoning field, really, vintage dance is almost a cultural earthquake. And thanks to Powers, Stanford is one of its epicenters. Indeed, he coined the term "vintage dance."
This summer's group of hoofers was typical: an international gathering with a number of bright young things in its ranks, including a good number of recent Stanford alumni and dance devotees from elsewhere in Europe—and, of course, it included Angela Amarillas, the dancer (and Stanford alumna) who has partnered Powers for the last 15 years.
But the crowd also had a reasonable sprinkling of salt-and-pepper boomers and retirees (octogenarian Dolly Weltin of Zurich is a regular participant at the Prague balls). Powers estimated that about a third of the group was Stanford alumni, and at least half of them were couples. Some were with Mountain View's Danse Libre, an alumni spinoff of Powers' Stanford Vintage Dance Ensemble. Why do they waltz so far from home? A passion for dance, they say, and a passion for Powers, too.
"There's a limited number of vintage dance workshops around the world," Jeff Kellem of Danse Libre explained outside Hotel Beránek, where the group bivouacked. "With Richard's passion for dance history, you wouldn't get this information at other workshops."
Onlookers' curiosity continued at the Universitní Restaurace, where the gathering had its dinner and a 1930s-style ball. Students in jeans and nose-rings pressed against the windows to gawk. Some snapped photos on their cell phones as the couples whirled and pranced in fox trots and tangos.
The event was repeated several days later: Crowding in a doorway to sidestep a sudden summer downpour, the unconventional group attracted more stares and whispers. Only this time, the women in the group sported hoopskirts and crinolines, sausage curls and snoods. The ball a few blocks away featured waltzes, mazurkas, quadrilles, polkas and polonaises.
For some decked out in period costume, the world of dance is the obverse side of a double life: They labor as technical writers or software engineers by day, then trip the light fantastic by night in Prague or Palo Alto—or any one of the other cities that Powers has used as vintage dance venues.
"I enjoy the charm of the 19th century, without the lice," said Michael Smithwick, who works with Internet music streaming at Live 365 in Foster City. "It's fun to see how people entertained themselves before there was Tivo or Gameboys or American Idol."
The connection to Prague is not whimsical or romantic. At least not entirely. The noted Czech choreographer and dance historian Franti?ek Bonus was a personal friend of Powers' and the dance pilgrimages to Prague began in the 1980s. (Powers even got married in Prague in 2005; his wife, Tracey, waltzes at Vintage Week, too.) Through the auspices of Dvorana, a dance organization spearheaded by Bonus' son Jasan, Vintage Week in Prague was born in the mid-1990s, alternating or combined with other cities in Europe. Powers is the head dance instructor during Vintage Week, but clearly the bonds among the group are deeper and more collegial than such titles suggest.
When Jasan Bonus died unexpectedly in 1997, and Franti?ek Bonu? two years later, Jasan's widow, Jitka Bonusová, assumed the Dvorana mantle, with dance instructor Jan Pumpr.
Dvorana injects a Czech theme onto the dance floor with such dances as the Beseda, the most famous of the Czech ballroom dances.
Powers' enthusiasm is contagious. During dance breaks, he discussed the history of the tango. "This dance is worth talking about," he said, and he was clearly excited. He talked about his latest find: a 1914 Argentinean dance manual from Buenos Aires. "This is something we've been looking for for decades," he said.
The dance steps he guides them through don't bear much resemblance to the infamous tango that was purportedly born in the brothels of Buenos Aires. It looks more like a dance that you could manage with your uncle at a family picnic. In fact, that reading is not far off.
At this point in the lesson, he announced that dancers were often "gravely disappointed" by the lack of drama.
"Where's holding your partner like a shotgun—long, stealthy steps?" he asked rhetorically. "Rudolph Valentino? Not yet."
In fact, he explained, the notion of the "tango" as a dance of debauchery was born when the rich young men of Buenos Aires discovered the dance as they were slumming in the barrios of the poor. Why were they in the barrios? Obviously, for one purpose. But the fact that poor young prostitutes danced the tango they knew from the cradle didn't make it a licentious dance.
Its naughty reputation was enhanced by the Parisians' "French tangomania" and by others who adopted the dance that had an exotic mystique—including the Argentines, once their dance proved to be a revenue source. (Actually, Powers credits aristocratic Jorge Luis Borges for promoting the "brothel theory" in the 1930s. Borges equated wealth with virtue, but he later recanted his aspersions on the tango.)
The barrios of turn-of-the-century Buenos Aires are a long way from Cincinnati, where Powers used to work as a design engineer and graphic designer. He joined Stanford's Dance Division faculty in 1992 but didn't begin as a dancer. He was a student at Stanford during the early years of its product design program and was one of the first to pursue an individually designed major. (He has a master's degree in mechanical engineering with a focus on creative process.) He holds seven U.S. and international patents—including one for a spray-pump nozzle that screws onto bottles of window cleaner.
Dance was a vocation he discovered when he was already in his late 20s. But his interest in it was an unusual one: He became fascinated with reconstructing methods of dancing the polka, waltzes and quadrilles.
"No one was collecting these dance manuals," he said. At bookstores, "I cleared out whole shelves."
His activities, however, weren't purely academic: He choreographed ragtime-era dance for Faye Dunaway and Richard Widmark in Turner Productions' Cold Sassy Tree (1989) and for the Hallmark Entertainment film Spring Awakening (1994).
He choreographed and directed the 19th-century ballroom dances for the TV miniseries North and South (1985) and trained dancers in 19th-century ballroom dance for the film Glory (1989) and public television's Mrs. Perkins' Ball (1986).
Yet he is taking on more than Hollywood and the halls of academe. He's tackling a culture where most people simply don't dance anymore. He explained that even dance crazes affect only a small minority of people, a subculture of dance fans. For example, during the disco craze of the 1970s, he estimated that less than 5 percent of the population went to discos. "If you look at the media of the time—Time, Newsweek and Life magazines ran cover stories on disco," he said, "it looked like everyone was doing it."
Even the kids who dance a lot no longer know how to dance with each other. For the last 200 years, he said, most social dance involved holding a partner in your arms. All that changed with the twist. "Less than 5 percent of my Stanford students know how to socially dance," he said. "It gets smaller every year."
The great news is that the river may be reversing its course with the help of Powers and others. "I have a thousand students every quarter," he said, including non-credit evening courses. The numbers add up. Thousands around the country know Powers, and know his work—and the effect is intergenerational as well.
For example, Sidney Kushner, who is on the Genetics Department faculty at the University of Georgia, has two children who have studied with Powers at Stanford. When he told his daughter that he was going to Prague for the workshop, "She just kind of swooned and said, 'You're going to love it.'"
No wonder. Powers' cheerful encouragement fortifies the timid and maladroit: What happens if you screw up and "miss" the next partner when the dancers turn back and reverse direction during the polonaise? Not to worry! The polonaise is self-correcting. Everyone in the room is giving you a cue about what to do next. "You won't feel good about it—but you won't be left behind!" he reassures them. During improvised dancing, he encourages the women to adopt a "Zen-like state, ready for anything, expecting nothing."
In a number of ways, it's not the kind of workshop you will find anywhere else. "It is very different—this week is more concentrated on American dances, and the American way of dancing," said Eva Faragó, a hydrogeologist from Hungary. "In the U.S., they mix every kind of step for every kind of music."
Is she glad she came? "Yes, yes, absolutely. I was glad to meet another continent."
Faragó is waiting out this particular dance, and her clothes are more modern, less cumbersome than many of those around her—and probably less expensive, too.
It's typical to plop down $2,500 to $3,000 on the dress and accessories. "But then, it won't go out of style," noted Madi Major, a Bay Area resident who was wearing a spectacular period hoop-skirted gown of embroidered rose-colored taffeta.
The 19th-century dresses, with their rigid whalebone corsets that encase the entire torso, teach more than a new way of dancing; they enforce a new way of standing and moving. The hoops and corset make the simplest maneuvers impossible. A dropped object is lost forever. You can't go through a door by yourself. One must again adopt a Zen-like detachment, this time toward things dropped. One must, of necessity, depend on the kindness of strangers.
It's only one kind of bonding that dancing provides; it's hard to dance well if you are afraid of feeling foolish. The decision to dance is the decision to take a risk. Leaping, holding someone in your arms—of all ages, sometimes both sexes—taking the hand of men and women. It's liberating; there's no room for low self-esteem or aloofness.
Dorothy Vernon of Boulder, Colo., wanted to correct a previous misimpression—that it was the passion for dance that brought them to Prague. It's not just that, she said. It's also the friends. "You'd come just for that," she added.
It's easy to see why, as one watches Kit Northrup's evident joy during a graceful promenade, Stanford alumna Julie Tsai of Danse Libre doing an exuberant Charleston, Angela Amarillas' cool, precise and delicate tango. Or the moments in between: Bob Chapman's singing a bass-baritone aria—"Scintelle, diamant," from Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann—at a restaurant during an excursion along the Sázava River to Castle sternberk.
Kit Northrup of West Hartford, Conn., heavily bound in a corset and hoopskirts, said the week can be exhausting; several described their schedule as sleep, eat, dance, dance, dance, eat, change clothes, dance, eat, change into a costume and go to the ball to dance, dance, dance.
Yet she was kvetching about a mere six-block walk when she had just been dancing for two hours? Northrup, fanning herself between dances, pondered the contradiction a moment and replied philosophically, "The truth is, you just suck it up because you'd rather be dancing."