Ellen Forman Memorial Concert

The roots of Philadelphia’s post-modern dance movement were revisited in a concert and studio dedication at Drexel University in memory of Ellen Forman, who died too early in 1990 at the age of 45. It was Forman and Alice Forner who, in 1974, co-founded the South Street Dance Company, perhaps Philadelphia’s first post-modern dance company. There she embraced a modern dance aesthetic, presenting her dynamic reconstructions of the work of Isadora Duncan and of the emerging post-modern world, where she introduced Philadelphia audiences to dance married to spoken text in a series of concerts titled “Body/Language.”

The wonderfully enterprising Miriam Giguere, who had been an assistant company director when Forman died in an accident while setting Concord Cafeteria on a local company, has persevered for more than a decade to establish Drexel’s first dance major and to dedicate Drexel’s first dance studio in Ellen Forman’s memory. The memorial concert presented reconstructed excerpts from Forman’s Bread Chronicles (1990) as well as the section “Are You Lonesome Tonight” from The Concord Cafeteria (1976). The Bread Chronicles segment was danced by a talented Maria Nguyen, whose vernacular movements of kneading dough and slicing were transposed into a dance of solemnity and grace to the music of Arvo Part.

The Concord Cafeteria segment of a couple (Alexis Dispenziere and Ray McCue) whose male half was glued to a TV screen while the woman unsuccessfully tried to wrest (as in wrestle) him into a more sensate state of engagement, elicited considerable audience laughter that echoed the merriment recalled by this writer when I first viewed this classic comic work three decades ago.

Giguere undertook the reconstructions, assisted in rehearsal by Susan Deutsch, who was one of Forman’s outstanding dancers.

The evening included a video by George McCullough and Pia Nicolini of a 1990 “Body/Language” autobiographical solo by Forman. The solo was filled with the humor, romanticism and ebullience that marked Forman’s life and work, and her wordless ending to the music of Brahms proved to be a tender elegy with which to remember her.