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THE FREE
PRESS
Saturday March 10, 2007
“Tu Hanina” performed by (in front row, left to
right) Anja Churchill, Hannah Goodwin, (second row) Clare Olson, Emily
Pote, Emma Brown, (back row) Madeline Owen, Amelia Merrill and Fiona
Boyd. Photo by Daniel O’Connell
Celebrates 25th Anniversary of The Lasansky School of Dance
—
by Nancy Griffin
The stage of the
Camden Opera House will come alive on Saturday, March 10, at
7 p.m., as a colorful array of more than 60 dancers ranging
in age from 5 to 17 celebrates the 25th anniversary of the
Lasansky School of Dance.
A tiger, a
puppet and a cello player are among the characters that will
be represented in the 16 different dances to be performed by
students. Five of the dances are new, to be premiered on the
Opera House stage. The rest are original dances already part
of the Lasansky school repertoire.
Besides
rehearsals and performance, students participate in every
aspect of the dance, from choreography through creating
costumes. This all-inclusive approach to the dance is the
hallmark of the Lasansky School of Dance, whose founder and
sole teacher is Jimena Lasansky.
Lasansky, who
comes from a large Argentinian family of artists in Iowa,
studied ballet and modern dance with the best — Jose Limon,
Martha Graham, Alfred Corvino and Lucas Hoving — among
others. She has been teaching dance for more than 40 years,
30 in Maine, and 25 of those in the seaside studio she built
in Lincolnville.
“I began
teaching in Harlem when I was 18 and a student at
Juilliard,” recalls Lasansky. “I studied with so many
different dancers at different studios during the Juilliard
years that I learned how different people impart
information.”
“Some teach
dance as technical elements only and don’t take into
consideration who you are. It’s purely physical.” While a
few of her teachers fell into the category of technical
teachers, a few stood out because they taught from the
heart, said Lasansky. “Alfred Corvino really stuck out. He
helped you to think through everything. Jose Limon also —
they taught from the heart and taught you to go into the
heart, to use ‘you’.”
“In the Beginning,” performed by (front
row, left to right) Kate Rich, Dakota Ledwith, (second row)
Francie Merrill, Sonia Rose Beckstrom, Rosie Lawson, Harper
Gordon, (third row) Eva Ritchie and (back row) Duncan Hall.
Photo by Daniel O’Connell
“That’s where
the desire to teach began — to bring a child’s life into the
picture. The technical part gives dancers the tools to
express what they want to say,” said Lasansky. “I think
there’s a large misunderstanding about ballet, for instance.
There are extremely technical elements in ballet. You are
presented with a step to learn. You may learn a perfect
step, but until you are given a role and the opportunity to
do something with the step beyond the technical constraint,
such as the placement of the arms and feet, it’s not alive —
once you have a character to play, you might stretch the arm
out a little more.”
With modern
dance, students may be taught a technical vocabulary or a
creative method that seeks the movement from within the
dancer’s body. “I try to help students find their own body
movement and guide them to expand it.”
If teachers fail
to take the student’s individuality into consideration,
Lasansky believes, “You can end up with students who are
master technicians but who don’t know why they’re dancing.
Students won’t understand there is something they want to
say.”
Lasansky’s
students are given every opportunity to learn what they want
to say as individuals, but as individuals working within a
group. When a group is working to choreograph a piece, the
individuals are encouraged to try new things and to express
their opinions.
“Then the
children watch each other, decide what fits and what
doesn’t. They learn how to accept being willing to cut
something out, and to learn to repeat,” said Lasansky. “They
learn to comment and speak up, even at a tender age.”
“Sometimes you
look at something after it’s put together and it doesn’t
work, so you take it apart — save the good stuff and put the
pieces back together differently.” One dancer in a group
piece might find a particular move works for her, while
another might say it doesn’t work in his space.
“I ask them,
‘How does it feel?’ and they’ll talk about it. If it’s not
working, sometimes it’s the music or the timing. If it’s a
bit off, two dancers might collide,” said Lasansky. “The
notion is they can be strong in their individuality and
still inform the group process. They don’t have to agree to
all look alike. They can agree to look different.”
Some pieces
start with a piece of music and the choreography derives
from it. “In the Beginning” is one of the new group pieces
that started with an idea.
“This dance is
very technical, but all the original movements came from the
creation myth,” Lasansky explained. “We started tossing the
idea for it around last year. Some of the kids were studying
the ‘Big Bang’ in school. That got it started. Duncan
‘googled’ the Big Bang. I read them some creation myths. We
read poetry about the beginning of time and looked at
paintings.”
Her student
dancers have been working for months to create and rehearse
the pieces they will present at the concert.
“They are
exposed to the hard elements and the joys of real
collaboration,” Lasansky said. “Because they are such a part
of the entire process, they are all as excited as I am.”
Each class is
different, and age makes a difference. At some ages “it’s
all about energy,” she explained. “You can almost see the
energy in the studio. If the energy had a color it would
fill up the entire space.”
This year, she
has added a Latin dance, Paseo des Mujeres (literally,
“women’s stroll”), with moves taken from the tango, so the
children “are being introduced to another culture, to the
body gestures from another culture.”
One of
Lasansky’s longtime students with a passion for dance has
also developed a passion for the cello. Anja Churchill,
dancing since she was 11 and now a high school freshman,
will perform Duet for Cello and Dancer with no cello, just
the bow. “She will bring both of her passions together.”
Jimena Lasansky going over rehearsal
notes with Olivia de Frees La Roche. Photo by Daniel
O’Connell
Much of the
music for the dances is classical — Brahms, Vivaldi and
Strauss — but one dance, “Tiger,” long part of the
repertoire, is performed to the sound of voodoo drums.
Students also
learn that a concert is more than the hard work of
choreography and rehearsal. For this concert, there are more
than 450 costume pieces that must be assembled, tracked and
cared for. “That’s a lot of coordination,” said Lasansky.
One parent volunteered to make all the skirts for one group
dance. Six other parents helped alter existing costumes to
fit the dances and the dancers, and to create new costumes.
Besides her own
pieces, Lasansky has premiered dances created by famed
choreographers Ernesto Corvino and Z’eva Cohen and danced in
venues as diverse as the Riverside Church in Manhattan and
the Maine Festival. For years she has been a member of the
Maine Arts Commission’s traveling artists program,
performing and conducting classes and teacher workshops
throughout the state. The first dancer accepted into the
Peace Corps as a dancer after her New York years, she went
to Bolivia as a dancer and teacher; she first launched the
Lasansky School of Dance in Costa Rica.
The student
dancers performing on March 10 come from throughout the
midcoast area. Tickets are $12 for adults and $6 for
children under 12 and are available at HAV II (236-6777) in
Camden and at the Opera House box office an hour before the
performance
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Camden, Maine
VillageSoup
Jimena
Lasansky: heartwork
By Shanna McNair
LINCOLNVILLE (April 8,
2004): If you know with your heart that your parents love you, you can
survive anything; that sacred bond will bring you back to life again and
again. Surely it is the same for the children of Jimena Lasansky's art
classes--they are shown the process of art, and given a foundation deep
within that binds them to creativity forever.
So it is no surprise that along the Midcoast, "Jimena" is said to be a
household word among parents, who must sign up their children quickly
for classes at Lasansky School of Dance on 11 Steel Road in Lincolnville
or be relegated to the long waiting list.
Lasansky is from a "family of artists," has taught nationally and
internationally, and has received numerous grants and fellowships,
including ones from the Maine Arts Commission and the National Endowment
for the Arts. She teaches classical ballet, point, modern dance and
choreography from the fall through the spring.
In the summer, she has an interdisciplinary class that explores all
manner of media. The central theme in this class is that the art process
should know no disciplinary boundaries, which means that ideas will be
playfully and organically manifested, not missing the breadth of
artistic possibility from poetry to sculpture.
In all of the cross-pollinating of disciplines seen in today's modern
art world, this manner of teaching is a standout--because it literally
demonstrates that these artistic "boundaries" are just differences in
making, not approach.
Lasansky's lyrical interdisciplinary classes work through ideas on
themes she finds lend themselves naturally to this mode of thinking. She
comes up with the theme, a simple word like "echoes," "gathering,"
"windows" or "edges." This year's concert, on March 17, will feature her
two most recent, "layering" and "steps."
The five W's (who, what, when, where, why) are any teacher's mainstay,
as Lasansky said: "They don't ever get to just say, 'that's really
cool.' They have to explain why." But Lasansky goes further, giving
children the chance to actualize their ideas in this experiential sense.
"My function in what we do is to ask questions; not necessarily to get
an answer, but so that the children understand that it's in asking the
question that you begin exploring and paying attention to details--and
having an opinion," she said. "It's not so much about trusting me, but
about trusting themselves, believing they can do it."
When a child says, "but I don't know what to write or what to draw," she
tells them to put the Cray-Pas or pencil in their hand and trust the
Cray-Pas or pencil.
"The Cray-Pas knows," she tells the child.
First, the class forms a group poem. From there, they explore those
themes in dance and then create the sounds to go along with the dance.
Then the class goes into painting and sculpture, all the while building
on the same ideas.
"They are always amazed by how different everybody's work is," said
Lasansky.
In the end, she weaves all of their moves together into a seamless
choreography.
"I take one child's move and put it in front of another, turn it upside
down, twist it, repeat it three times," she said. "They watch this
process totally live, without music. They see that their dance needs to
survive on its own, have its own heartbeat."
After this class is over, Lasansky relishes the time she spends alone
reading the children's poems over a handful of mornings with her mugful
of Yerba Mate in the "hug room." Charmingly enough, the windowy addition
was so named by a young student who, upon entering the room for the
first time, said, "Oh, it's so quiet in here; you can hug."
Though the poems reflect the kinds of imagination-sparking questions
Lasansky asks, they are remarkably profound and full of the artful magic
that either comes from a child or a wise man.
Lasansky reflected on why she's "always worked with children," since she
was just 17, a student herself at Julliard in New York.
"As we go through school, and confront different life situations, we
become tighter, less willing to risk things, less playful--things become
right and wrong," she said. "What I'm trying to do is keep fanning that
flame higher, that individuality. And I hope, hope, hope it stays with
them."
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Dancers in bloom
By Kaley Noonan
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CAMDEN (March 21, 2002):
| Jimena Lasansky and her students work on their technique at the
end of rehearsal. They are preparing for a performance Friday
evening at the Camden Opera
House |
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Jimena Lasansky, dancer, choreographer and educator, points to the Bird of
Paradise plant sitting by the window in her studio.
Normally fiery red and glossy, the Bird of Paradise flower has gone by, and is
now withered and browned. "If that plant were in a shop now and blooming,"
she says, "people would buy it." But not now, because the moment has gone,
"nobody would want it."
Lasansky has been teaching dance for more than 36 years. Owner of
Lasansky's School of Dance, based in Lincolnville, she comments that dance is
an ephemeral art. It is all about moments, both ugly and beautiful. What people
don't see before the performance is the process, days when students are tired
and cranky, they are sweaty and working hard.
"Even that's beautiful because it's real," she says. What an audience gets to see
is the moment when the stage lights go up and the curtain is parted. That's the
moment when her students, like the Bird of Paradise, bloom.
Friday at the Camden Opera House at 7 p.m., Lasansky and her students will
be putting on their annual dance and poetry event, marking the school's 21st
anniversary. Her students, who come from all over Maine, study creative
movement, introduction to dance, modern dance and classical ballet and pointe.
The one-hour performance will include all these styles, spliced with breathtaking poems written by her students.
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Jimena Lasansky gets her students into their costumes at the start
of rehearsal. As Lasanky helped her students dress, she taught them
how the correct use of their costumes would help communicate their
message to the audience.
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Her passion for finding the innate talent in children is what has fueled her these
last 21 years teaching at her studio. Growing up in a family of artists in Iowa City, Iowa, she says,
"creating was like breathing.
She did not dream of being a dancer as a child, she simply just did it every
day. Inspired by nature, Lasansky says: "I'd be totally fascinated by the way
things moved. If I was by the ocean and I saw the seaweed moving, I was
absolutely intrigued by it. Watching the leaves from the trees flip over to the
white side in the wind or watching the birds in the sky when they'd soar -- the
movement was what I was very drawn to. As a youngster, I'd simply become
it." |
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The girls rehearse "Layers Unfolding," one of three pieces this
group
will perform. |
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Already a gifted dancer by the time she was a teenager, Lasansky skipped her senior year and went straight into New York City's Juilliard School, where she did choreography and performances. She learned classical and modern dance
there and in private studios, including Martha Graham's. During this time, she also worked with renowned dancers Jose Limon, Alfredo Corvino and
Lucas Hoving.
"My time in New York helped me so much," she says about honing her technique.
Like one of her dance performances, there are layers to Lasansky that take time
to reveal. Her parents are originally from Argentina and when she was in her
early 20s, she traveled extensively in Central and South America to find her
roots. She joined the Peace Corps as a dancer and went to Bolivia to become a
soloist and teacher with the Classical Ballet. There, she also became an assistant
director of Folkloric Ballet. Costa Rica is where she first started the Lasansky School of Dance.
As a girl, Lasansky and her family used to summer in Vinalhaven, where she fell
in love with the movement of the ocean. She was about 27 when she moved to
Maine permanently, bringing the Lasansky School of Dance with her and
opening up a private studio in Lincolnville in 1981.
The studio is testament to Lasansky's love of nature. The garden pathways
surrounding it seem inspired by Japanese design with their wooden bridges, and
stone walkways. Inside the studio, the entire great room is warmed by light
wood, large windows and dozens of exotic plants. Two walls feature mirrors
and barres; hanging on a ladder are dozens of children's costumes.
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Callie Hand gets a hand from Jimena Lasansky with her costume.
There was no problem motivating this group; the girls would take
moments like this and rehearse difficult or troublesome passages on
their own. |
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As a dancer, Lasansky often works as a soloist.
"The most important thing for me is a statement. I work around ideas that
concern me, situations of humanity that trouble me and I create dance pieces to
express my opinions," she said.
As dance communicates without words, Lasansky often goes for the grit. "We
dance not to look pretty, not to wear costumes, but because we have something
to say. Sometimes dance can be painful. Sometimes people don't want to
receive it, don't want to go there," she says.
Last year at the 20th anniversary dance and poetry event, Lasansky did a small
performance piece, "Madres," about the political situation in Argentina, where
mothers silently protest the government by walking around the plaza with
photographs of their loved ones who have been "disappeared.
"Did the audience understand specifically understand what I was dancing about?
No, possibly not," she says. "What mattered to me was that the audience knew
that human suffering is a part of our life and not everything is cute, not everything
is pretty. Our lives are not all happiness. There is sadness.
Whether or not the adults picked up on this, Lasansky's younger students, sitting
in the audience during rehearsal, did. The expressions on her face as she danced
so disturbed some of her students that it prompted phone calls from some of the
parents the next day. Lasansky had to carefully take the children aside and
explain that it was OK to see their teacher sad and in pain. It was the dance.
And if anything, the young students learned the power of conveying emotion to
an audience without a word.
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Looking in the mirror while Jimena Lasansky explains some body
language are Gabrielle Benzie, Anya Churchill, and Callie Hand. |
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"I think children and the elderly go into the heart directly, without so much fuss.
Then life takes over and there are distractions left and right and that direct path
becomes confused. That is why I work with children. They keep my feet on the
ground," she says. "Their response to an image I might toss out is so honest, so crystal clear."
As part of Lasansky's program this year, 14-year-old Micah Conkling, a former
student, will read a series of poems written by her students over the years.
Sixteen years ago, during her first summer workshop, Lasansky chose the word
"echoes" as a way to inspire creativity in both poetry and dance.
The poems that that word inspired seem to have been written far beyond the
young students' years. When she was seven, student Julia Sortwell came up with
this one:
The Sound of Echoes
An echo is a dream.
When you toss it in a pool of water
You can hear the sound.
In dance, the vocabulary of each child comes from his or her body language and
movement. One student may spin in wide circles in the studio, whereas another
may curl up, chin on knee, and quietly watch everyone else. Lasansky uses each
child's natural movements as if it were clay, building upon it layers of technique
and discipline. At the same time, she encourages creativity.
"I don't want the children to be slaves to technique," she says, "but that's what is
so hard to convey to them. You will have freedom eventually, but to get there,
you must have discipline."
Within the disciplines of dance, she teaches her students about responsibility,
solving problems, honesty, kindness, compassion, generosity, and how to let go
of the ego.
"It's not about the individual -- it is about an idea and what is being
communicated. Of course it is incredible to me that a child is capable of these
things and that they're doing it as a community."
Lasansky's strong belief in community extends to her annual dance and poetry
events, which she continues to offer to the community, admission-free. Countless
hours rehearsing with the students, designing and sewing their costumes, along
with the expenses of renting the Camden Opera House, come directly from her.
As she teaches her students to "share" their dances with one another, she also
teaches by example, in sharing her enormous efforts with the community.
In the upcoming performance, the students have chosen their own music
(including Schubert and Hildegard von Bingen) and titles for each piece, as well
as participated in the choreography.
The program includes eight original pieces, a trio, a duet and three solos.
"I will continue to create pieces that have depth to them," Lasansky says. " I feel
that is very important for children to understand that dancing is a resource. It is a
way through which, they can express themselves."
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Anya Churchill displays some of the breathtaking intensity that was
prevalent during a recent rehearsal at Jimena Lasansky's studio.
(Photos by Daniel O'Connell)
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