Word: mallardi
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Claire Mallardi, director of the program and the company's artistic advisor, talked the other day about "bending students' imaginations," encouraging pieces with more depth than the usual student-choreographed works. From glimpses of rehearsal it seems she's succeeded...
Somehow, however, it succeeds. The production currently being rehearsed, "paper event," is being financed in part by the fees non Harvard dancers pay in order to study with Claire Mallardi, director of the Modern Dance Program and choreographer of the show and in part from Mallardi's own pocket. And the "paper event" will be produced on June 5, 6, and 7--even though the production dates were determined not for any grand reasons but because that was the only time that Agassiz was available to have its electricity plundered and the gym could be wrested away from basketball...
...paper event" itself is what Mallardi refers to as a "structured improvisation." As choreographer she provided the structure long strips of kraft paper which the dancers contemplate, hug, tear into balls, build with, and eventually, abandon. But the dancers-a mixed group of Harvard students and the "outside people" who have come to study with her-have to make something of the structure, leaving the "paper event" as much theirs as it is Mallardi...
...with which they realize her structure isn't dance-academy perfect. The interaction between her, the "outside people"-who are frequently semi-professional dancers-and the Harvard undergraduates of the group cannot reasonably be expected to produce technical perfection. The production is a function of three different worlds and Mallardi sees it as being educational for all three as much as it is an ambitious theatrical production...
...wonderful," she says, but it's also a union tenuous enough to be held together only by the energy that Mallardi has put into her program and that the dancers have returned. Yet, as long as that energy can be sustained, it will probably keep on creating a fertile community of artists and a unique experience for the students who make the trek up to Radcliffe Yard...