Molissa Fenley's choreography bewilders the eye, entices the ear, and challenges both the memory and the intellect. Incessant, everchanging motion, saturated with polymorphous arm gestures, performed to a driving, repetitive, percussive beat, the dances are complex series of tensions between constancy and mutability, structure and disorder, abstraction and imagery, exoticism and familiarity, social and theatrical forms.

American dance audiences are accustomed to watching ballets composed of legible phrases, often matched to equally distinct musical patterns. The traditional modern dance creates a succession of expressive postures and gestures that prompt the spectator to arrange them in a narrative flow or a metaphoric gestalt. The achievement of post-modern dance was to isolate an even smaller unit of perception in dance—to frame the posture, gesture, or movement itself as the central subject of the dance—either by repetition or complexification.

In the performance area are two wooden-frame tents side by side. They are 8 feet square, 6 feet at their apex, and covered with white muslin. The “insect” tent is at the right, tent flaps open, a duplicate miniature tent suspended within the opening. Two flourescent industrial lighting fixtures form a bright “V” upstage on the tent floor. From the opening a clear plastic tube coils its way over to the “scientist” tent at the left. This tent is closed, except for a triangular window centered on its front wall. It is illuminated by a blue light from within.

Improvisation has always had a shaky reputation in the dance field. All too often, it's been shown up as a license for playing around, a grand and ultimately disturbing notion of freedom. Some dancers never get beyond reproducing movements they've learned, simply jumbled around in a satisfyingly lawless way. During the 1950s most dancers and choreographers of any consequence associated improvisation with the windy impressionism they had encountered in children's classes or even in college dance departments (“be a cloud”). The Judson Church choreographers of the 1960s, however looked on it with some favor — particularly as the individual's unplanned working-out of a predetermined task — and there have always been some, like the contemporary Japanese dancer Min Tanaka, who improvise in performance because, clearly, anything other than a response to the immediate climate (interior and exterior) would be unthinkable.

Blondell Cummings has worked with Meredith Monk's company, The House, since 1969. She performed in Juice (1969), Needle Brain Lloyd and the System's Kid (1970), Vessel (1971), Education of the Girlchild (1973), Chacon (1974), the film of Quarry (1976) and Venice/Milan (1976). In addition to working independently, she now performs with the Nimbus Dance Theatre Company and Bill T. Jones' Everybodyworks. The Cycle Arts Foundation presented a program of Cumming' works May 1-4, 1980, at the Warren Street Performance Loft in lower Manhattan, offering The Ladies and Me (1979) that will be discussed here, and A Friend (1980). Excerpts from The Ladies and Me were performed on October 10, 1980, at the All-Craft Community Center on St. Mark's Place in New York as part of the Women's One World Festival.

Mary Overlie's demeanor is quiet and thoughtful. She speaks calmly, her words carefully chosen, analyzing ideas. The brown hair is always pulled back from the face, the face is always free of makeup; the body is long and lean, the ideal dancer's body, and her gestures tend to be spare. If the impression she gives is of almost shy reserve, it reflects only part of the personality.

Born in Bozeman, Montana in 1946, Overlie stayed there until she was 17. For a short time following her graduation from high school, she tried to be a sign painter but “couldn't focus on it.” That interest has been refined and converted to an interest in calligraphy. In fact, she often uses the word “calligraphy” to describe the patterns and shapes made by the body in space.

Elaine Summers has two identities: a respected choreographer coming out of the Judson Dance Theatre and a highly influential teacher of Kinetic Awareness, a system permitting an extraordinary range and ease of movement that has been studied by many people in the performing arts.

Summers began her dance training by studying ballet as a child. She attended the Massachusetts College of Art and, because degrees in dance were not offered at that time, studied to become an art teacher. She attributes her interest in the breakdown of forms into their component parts to her Bauhaus-oriented art training. During her sophomore year, she studied briefly with Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham in New York. After graduating, she taught art for three years and then went to St. Louis where she taught dance to the mentally ill. In 1952 she came to New York to study dance at Juilliard.

Among the multitude of writings about actors and acting which appeared in the 18th century all over Europe, Johann Jacob Engel's Ideen zu einer Mimik (1785-1786) merits special attention, at once as a pioneering attempt at a semiotics of acting and as a valuable source of information about the actual practice of contemporary actors and actresses. It takes the form of 44 letters (numbers 1-27 making up Volume I, numbers 28-44 Volume II). Despite its easy and apparently casual style, it is in fact a quite systematic analysis, even if it repeatedly disclaims the ambition to be exhaustive. It is difficult to account for the long neglect the work has suffered. When it first appeared, its importance was evidently recognized, since it was promptly translated into other languages, but it seems to have been soon forgotten.

The early years of Mary Wigman's career as a dancer involved a search for a new dance form. She found no medium for communication in the dance styles of the early 20th century. The prevailing techniques of ballet and popular stage dancing concerned themselves with unreality and illusion. Isadora Duncan was startling the world by dancing barefoot to the music of the great composers, but her inspiration derived from a bygone era. Mary Wigman's dance was a deeply personal message of its time, and neither the form, the music nor the subject matter of any existing dance style could completely and satisfactorily express this message.

Wigman returned to the fundamentals of dance as she examined the expressivity of movement and the function of movement in space with an awareness that was remarkable for its time.

Anita Enters came to New York City from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, late in 1919 to begin study at the Art Students League. (According to personal correspondence and various newspaper interviews, her given name is Angna, although she was addressed by her family, her early friends, and her husband by the nickname Anita.) She was probably 18 years old at the time, although her birth date is usually given as April 28, 1907. If the description of her life before arriving in New York, as told in her fictionalized biography Silly Girl, is only partially true, it is certain that she was a precocious, withdrawn, independent child.

After the first quarter at the Art Students League, she became discouraged with her artwork and did not register for the next quarter's classes.

Mime in America today is a many-faceted art form without a single clear definition or a place to call its own. Mime is sometimes joined with theatre, sometimes placed with dance. To some people it is street mime or clowns but since 1955, when Marcel Marceau took the country by storm, most people associate mime with white-face illusionary pantomime vignettes, if they think of mime at all.

When David White produced four American mime artists in September 1980 under the heading “New Mime: New Investigations in a Theatre of Movement” at the Dance Theatre Workshop, it was no accident that the word “new” was used twice in the title. By presenting some of the most imaginative concert artists working in mime today, White took an innovative step toward reaching a fresh audience for what has been consistently a neglected stepchild of the arts.