Dance: Love, Work, Warm Night Air

The queue reached down the shaded walk and across the grass, streaming out like a scarf in the wind. Children and adults, they had come from Harlem, Park Avenue and Greenwich Village to gather at Central Park’s Delacorte Theater for the final scheduled performance in a ten-night summer dance festival. When the box office opened to pass out the 2,263 free tickets that filled every seat, the end of the long line was awash with customary disappointment. As had happened on every other night of the festival, there was one who was turned away for every one who got in.

Happy Results. The second season of the park’s Rebekah Harkness Foundation Dance Festival conclusively proved what its first had plainly suggested—that the Manhattan dance audience is as vast as it is eager to improve its slender diet. Conceived just last year as a $15,000, six-day experiment, the program was nourished along this year with a $39,500 grant from the Harkness Foundation, and was expanded to fill the “dark” Monday nights of the park’s Shakespeare Festival. The season was such a success with the crowds that plans are already afoot to extend it to two full weeks at next summer’s end.

To achieve such happy results, Producers William Ritman and Bernard Gersten signed up dancers for seven different programs designed to exhibit the breadth of American dance—modern, ethnic and ballet. They presented some of the nation’s star dancers: New York City Ballet Principal Dancer Edward Villella, Tap Dancer Paul Draper and the ethnic dancers of the Donald McKayle company. Even Ruth St. Denis, the 85-year-old queen of American dance, was persuaded to make a rare appearance.

Strong Spirit. Performances, as things turned out, were as varied in quality as they were in style, and though some of the troupes were crippled by the hyperkinetic choreography that can make a dance an awkward, literal joke, others brought to the park performances as good as anything in the coat-and-tie winter seasons. The dancers suffered some difficulties—hot afternoon rehearsals in the sun, damp boards to dance on at night, and a 40-by-50-ft. stage that was a shade too small for the prodigious leaps of a dancer like Villella. But all were eager to return. What inspired them, they agreed, was that the audience was everybody and anybody who cared enough to come early for his seat.

With the Manhattan skyline as a backdrop and the winds of the park ruffling a dancer’s hair, the spirit of their art seemed never stronger.