Artist’s Statement: Marion Ramirez, MFA Candidate, Dance

 

“Marching into Necessary Change” is a creative collaboration with Erin Grothouse. We have looked at the revolutionary/ anti-fascist dance initiatives of the New Dance Group in New York City during the 1930ʼs. Specifically we have focused on the important and influential work of Nadia Chilkovsky-Nahumck, whose artistic work holds an important place in the development of American Modern Dance.  As our Nadia is no longer living, we have entered her world through hearing and seeing her in taped interviews, as well as interviewing one of her students Gwendoyn Bye,  who has also become a dance pioneer in Philadelphia. Additionally we have learnt about Nadia’s contributions to the Philadelphia Dance scene through parts of a rich collection of pictures, images and articles that live in the library at the University of the Arts.

 

While tracking Nadia’s legacy and constant contributions to dance history we have sewn together fragments of her life as an artist that have resonated the most with us. We were inspired by and are talking back to her descriptions on her piece “Song of the Machine”, a dance she made in the mid-1930’s inspired by the work of women sewing in assembly lines. Here a bodyʼs rhythm becomes a source of knowledge and creative action. It is an instrument, a machine, that works for collective ownership. In creating this piece we discovered the tension present when giving voice to a fragmented history which engages and disengages from the left-wing movements of the time.

 

It has been very inspiring to dip into the radical cultural movement Nadia was part of and how they saw the function of dance as a peaceful powerful weapon to empower cultural expression of individuals and groups responding directly to the struggle of the working class. Dance could participate in building a new society away from capitalism and call out for collective mass activity which celebrated the art of dancing. In bringing together individuals from different races,

economic backgrounds and making Dance accessible to all who wanted to learn about improvisation, creative composition and modern dancer training,  the left-wind Dance movement engaged people in a respectful environment towards self and others.

 

Nadia Chilkovsky-Nahumck’s pioneering work in Dance and her commitment to equality have to fueled my own commitments:  to approaching dance improvisation as a vehicle for inhabiting the bodyʼs sense of agency; to resisting violence to our own bodies, each other and our environment;  to experiencing the dancing body and making it available for the necessary change that each situations calls for, awake to engage in respectful actions.  Re-encountering socialist ideas at this time has revived my experiences visiting and dancing in Cuba as a Puerto Rican young adult seeing and imagining a non-capitalist world. I have gained a new perspective on the power of dance as a revolutionary vehicle for change and for approaching human connections as bridges and not as hierarchical economical ladders. Finally these ideas continue to speak to my values as a mother in a multi-cultural family and an educator guiding a new generation of students into the world and its social machinery.