Dancing with a social conscience

With the premiere of “donde estas?” this month at the Charter Oak Cultural Center in Hartford, Professor of Theater and Dance Judy Dworin has reached the culmination of more than two years of research, class discussions, interviews, international travel, improvisation, rehearsals, introspection, embraces, and tears. What began in 1999 as a topic for Dworin’s course “Human Rights through Performance” has developed into an important work by the Judy Dworin Performance Ensemble and was the subject of a recent article in The New York Times. As with everything Dworin does, the subject matter is profound.

Dictatorships in Argentina and Chile “disappeared” thousands of their citizens in the 1970s and 1980s.  In most cases, the family members still do not know the whereabouts of the missing or their remains.  The title “donde estas?” means “where are you?” and is the call of the families, particularly the mothers, of those who disappeared. The mothers’ plight, their dignity, and the hope that springs from their efforts to protest the atrocities are the conceptual forces behind the performance.  Dworin is the physical force behind it.

Trinity beginnings
Dworin first came to Trinity in 1969 as an exchange student from Smith College. Attracted to the tutelage of Clive Thompson, a visiting lecturer in dance and a former soloist with the Alvin Ailey Dance Company, Dworin petitioned to transfer to Trinity after her exchange year, and in 1970 she received her degree from Trinity in the first graduating class to include women.  As an American studies major, her thesis was a dance performance related to John Brown’s anti-slavery raid on Harper’s Ferry.  The performance was broadcast on public television.

After graduation she filled in as a secretary in the Trinity alumni office while she taught dance in the community and continued to study under Thompson.  When Thompson left to pursue his own dance career in New York City, Dworin approached then-Dean of Faculty Edwin P. Nye about the future of the dance program at Trinity.  To his credit, she says, Nye agreed to give Dworin a chance to sustain the program. She succeeded, and in 1983, theater and dance merged to form a new department. Several other innovative programs at Trinity also bear Dworin’s fingerprints.  She helped to initiate the Trinity/La MaMa program in New York City and the global learning site in Kathmandu, Nepal.

Katharine G. Power, associate professor of theater and dance, has worked with Dworin for 22 years and co-chairs the department with her.  Power says her colleague and friend contributes to Trinity on many fronts, not only as an educator, but also as a role model and artist.  “Her vision for a department of theater and dance is an innovative, distinctive, and inspired one,” Power says.  The department is a model for the way creative work can be accomplished at the undergraduate level, she says, and Dworin is a model for the way an arts faculty member can be a working artist while staying totally involved as a teacher.

Dworin teaches classes ranging from “Introduction to Performance,” a beginning course for theater and dance majors, to “Performance Art,” a 300-level course in which students develop autobiographical pieces. Dworin wants students to complete her courses with new outlooks on the world.  “I hope they will have broken through boundaries as people,” she says. “I hope each student leaves changed up to the place where they were ready to go, and that the change continues” no matter what careers they pursue.

Lisa Matias Serrambana ’90 believes Dworin fulfills that vision. A theater and dance major, Serrambana has been a member of Dworin’s ensemble since its inception in 1989.  “She is a wonderful inspiration to her students and to the people that she works with,” she says of Dworin, who was her adviser at Trinity and who has been an important figure in her life.  “She has this quiet way about her, and she has changed so many people’s lives.”

Socially conscious performances
Dworin’s art focuses on social issues, and the Judy Dworin Performance Ensemble is an outlet for socially conscious performance ideas. “Artists have a really special opportunity to be catalysts for change and messengers of change,” she says. The ensemble has addressed such topics as the effects of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and the plight of women accused of being witches in the 17th century.

 “Donde estas?” is the latest creation of the ensemble, which rehearses at the College. Dworin began thinking about performing a piece about “the disappeared” when she attended a December 1998 reading by poet Marjorie Agosin, a Chilean exile. Dworin says she was deeply inspired by Agosin’s writing and the subject matter—events surrounding General Pinochet’s military coup in 1973 and his subsequent reign of terror. “When she read her poems, I started having these very strong images,” Dworin recalls.  In her mind, a performance piece already was taking shape.

She decided to incorporate Argentina into the piece because there are many parallels with the Chilean experience. Around the time of Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile, supposed enemies of ruling regimes in Argentina were disappearing, she explains.  In Chile, mothers of the disappeared protested by dancing the national dance, the cueca, in the streets. A man and woman traditionally danced the cueca together, but the mothers danced it alone.  In Argentina, mothers of the missing marched around the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires every Thursday wearing photographs of those who had disappeared.  Dworin integrates elements of both forms of protest into “donde estas?”

Dworin’s “Human Rights through Performance” class in 1999 developed the first version of “donde estas?” She subsequently brought her vision of the piece to her ensemble, which improvised and further developed the ideas. Last summer Dworin visited Chile and Argentina on a Trinity travel grant to conduct research for “donde estas?” She interviewed three mothers of the disappeared; visited places where people had been corralled, tortured, and killed; and met several central figures in the resistance efforts.  She recorded her interviews and incorporated the mothers’ voices into the performance.

After premiering in Hartford, the performance will have a run in May at the La MaMa Experimental Theater Club (E.T.C.) annex in New York.  Then the ensemble likely will take the performance on the road, and Dworin hopes eventually to perform “donde estas?” in Chile and Argentina.  Serrambana, who performs in the piece, speaks of “donde estas?” with awe. “It’s an amazing piece that is now so much larger than any of us,” she says.

–Becky Purdy