Dance: Poetry, Chesterwood, and Thou, With A Visit From Isadora Duncan
Dancer/poet Ian Spencer Bell brings Isadora Duncan back to where she once performed: Chesterwood.
[Editor's Note: Due to the dancer's injury, these performances have been canceled.] Look forward by looking back: more than ever in dance, that seems to be a draw. Choreographer Adam Weinert recently restaged Jacob’s Pillow founder Ted Shawn’s "Dance of the Ages," an immensely rich suite based on the elements. Watching the dancers rehearse at Hudson Hall in June (prior to a performance at the Pillow) provided a glimpse of just how revolutionary and expressive Shawn was as a movement maker and cultural pioneer.
Enter dancer/poet Ian Spencer Bell, who performs Lori Belilove’s setting of Isadora Duncan’s Brahms Waltzes on August 3 and 4 at Chesterwood, the estate of famed sculptor Daniel French Chester (1850-1931), where Bell is a dance artist in residence. Chester is famed for his sculpture of President Abraham Lincoln in DC’s Lincoln Memorial. Mary Adams French, his wife, wrote in a memoir about a summer day in 1898 at Chesterwood. Duncan met with Chester to discuss issues about drapery and costuming, and as a thank you, performed an impromptu dance or two on the lawn outside his studio. Duncan, a pioneer of modern dance, also loved poetry.
Belilove is the founder/artistic director of Isadora Duncan Dance Foundation and Company. She is noted as “the best, most devoted Duncan dancer in America” (Dance Magazine), staging and overseeing performances and tours of the work. Bell, who has had roots in the Berkshires for 13 years, invited Belilove’s company to perform at Nightingale-Bamford School in New York, where he is on faculty, and she in turn asked if he would perform some of Duncan’s work. Bell, who rehearsed with Belilove for 10 weeks, will dance "The Many Faces of Love," set to Brahms waltzes, which Bell remembers hearing as a boy at ballet school. Bell also choreographed dances for seven undocumented Duncan waltzes. Lauren Aloia will accompany Bell live on piano.
Ian Spencer Bell performances "Banderole" at Pier 84. Photo: Blue Richardson
At Chesterwood, Bell will also perform a new solo work, "Rosing." This suite is based on six original poems by Bell, including “Smoke Bushes,” published by Narrative. The poems, set in Bell’s old garden and studio in the Berkshires, examines his relationship with his ex-husband, choreographer Ben Munisteri. These dance poems (defined by Bell as “a dance inspired by, or that uses, poetry”) performed in proximity to Chester’s studio feels fitting to Bell.
An unusual development process led to the creation of Rosing. “I use dance as meditation and as a match, a way to ignite. I work nearly every day in my studio,” Bell said. “Sometimes as I’m dancing, I’m overwhelmed by feeling, and I’ll blurt something out. Dancing does this. It gets us in touch with our original, first, ancient selves and those feelings. So I dance. Then I speak. Then I write, slowly forming the language into a poem on paper. I try to find the shape of it. And at the same time I’ll form a dance to accompany it.”
Bell’s psychic and geographical connections with the Berkshires and its famed artists run deep. In 2020/21, he created and performed "Banderole" on the grounds of Edith Wharton’s Lenox estate, The Mount, and thought about Isadora Duncan in the process. Duncan read Walt Whitman’s poems to the extent of carrying a copy of Leaves of Grass on tour. Bell is similarly enamored with Whitman’s oeuvre, saying he “tried to evoke the power and intimacy of Whitman’s poetry” while choreographing the lost waltzes.
Not unexpectedly, his thoughts on his divorce are, he noted, “lamentations.” For "Rosing," capturing these thoughts in words, and then in movement, is perhaps a catharsis, a way to move beyond the rift. “So the process is a bit like raking a yard. I see what’s there, gather it up, find a home for it.” A fascinating artistic process to be shared with audience members, fittingly, in the splendor of an artist’s Berkshire retreat.
