The Synesthesiac Arts and Letters With Ashley Gamell

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syn·es·the·sia from the Greek (syn-) union, and (aesthesis) sensation; is the neurological mixing of the senses. A synesthete may, for example, hear colors, see sounds - and taste tactile sensations.



A small group of bedraggled Middlebury constituents pulled up to the New England Chapter of the 2008 American College Dance Festival on a dreary Thursday over February break. After milling around the grey grounds of Connecticut College, we made our way to catch the end of the first round of student performances at Palmer Auditorium, a somber modern building that sits on the edge of the strip. After a few 10-minute student performances in various genres and stages of evolution, and all with apparently unbounded costuming budgets, the lights came up. Middlebury Professor of Dance Andrea Olsen miraculously appeared to meet us in the mezzanine, making an affectionate sweep of the rows of red velvet seats below. In this very theatre - she told us, her eyes widening - Merce Cunningham had made his debut of Wintersong. A solid hour of darkness on stage save a few random flickers of light, revealing a shoulder here, an ankle there. Everyone but a few brave souls had walked out. (She had been counted among the brave, whether by accident or choice, as she was ushering at the theatre that night.) This place had witnessed greatness. It had witnessed tomfoolery - and often probably something bordering on the two.

Rising in animated gangs from the audience were a few hundred dancing co-eds from state, community and private schools across the Northeast, some in matching Olympian tracksuits. Handfuls of semi-famous dance figures were strewn about in the crowd. Seated at an improvised plywood table loaded with tangerines and water bottles were the three adjudicators of the conference: the radiant Bebe Miller, the slender tapper Thomas DeFrantz and JoAnna Mendl Shaw, the fierce contemporary choreographer most recently known for her dances with horses.

Over the next few days, conference attendees alternately attended three technique classes a day, hunted out Holiday Inn hallways in which to practice the dances they'd brought to perform, sat through three-hour long sessions of student showcases and then listened to equally rigorous analyses of those works from the adjudicators. One way or another, there was a lot of dancing. A troupe of immaculate ballet-dancers from Harvard presented a very geometrical dance en pointe to Phillip Glass. A Rutgers graduate student stood for many minutes in front of a video projector shaking her head wildly and there was a rumor that one of the girls in the pink-taffeta number lost her cookies on stage (her cover-up was first-class).

Among the highlights of the student offerings was a disarmingly witty commentary on modern dance from Hampshire College, which included four dancers galloping around stage singing "we don't dance to music, we don't dance to music" and holding up cardboard signs with slogans like "I don't get it." A deafeningly dark piece from Connecticut College was performed in 1950s prep school outfits. A duet from Middlebury College, which was among those chosen to continue to the National Chapter in New York this June, paired the athletic power of Simon Thomas-Train '09 and the dynamism of pint-sized Yina Ng '09 in a fiery and sensual duel.

At the adjudication session on Saturday morning, the three judges reflected on a tension they'd noticed throughout the weekend - the distinction between movement that is decorative and movement that is somehow more significant. Even throughout the radicalism of earlier decades - the days of Wintersong - dance has precariously skirted the line between spectacle and statement, struggling to balance artistic progressivism with the necessities of ticket sales and a sense of humor. Today, there's Momix doing fabulous stunts in baseball uniforms, but there's also plenty of humanity, political outrage and minimalism in the dance world. The judges wondered why Harvard had regressed to the forms of the early 19th century, but they also wondered whether significance meant meaning or meaning meant significance, and whether you needed either to make an arabesque worthwhile. We left the lecture room feeling as though we'd been in a wrestling match - provoked, restless, glowing.

At a talkback on the final afternoon of the conference, DeFrantz put the question of aesthetics and ethics aside. Turning to his own life, he mentioned that he had been working doggedly on a project for five years, a project based on the belief that "beauty is entirely productive." It was with this assumption in mind that a few hundred dancers dispersed from New London on Sunday morning, returning quietly to their studios to start generating pieces for next year.