Dianne McIntyre: The Body Dancing
This year’s 2020 USA Fellowship Awards includes Dianne McIntyre, one of America’s living legends in Modern Dance. Born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1946 Dianne McIntyre began taking ballet lessons when she was four years old. She was exposed to Modern Dance early on, she said, “…it wasn’t like a side thing that was very esoteric—modern dance was really a centerpiece in Cleveland. When I was nine, dance was offered in after-school programs, and it wasn’t just, “Let’s babysit the children and have them do something,” it was very strong modern-dance training because our teacher was a Karamu dancer. She was a professional dancer, a beautiful dancer named Virginia Dryansky.”
With intentions to study Linguistics at Ohio State University after high school she fell in love with modern dance there after studying dance history. She said in an interview honoring her for the 2006 Lifetime Achievement for Dance in Cleveland, “There are people who dance today the way they did a thousand years ago and their dance is functional. They are vital to their communities. The dancer is almost like a priest because the power of their dance brings the rains. It brings blessings. It brings a community together. When I realized that then I said I can make my life as a dancer. It’s something that can make a difference in people’s lives.”
Dianne McIntyre considered the body dancing equivalent to a musician playing an instrument. In an interview with Veronica Hackethal as the 2012 American Dance Guild Honoree McIntyre about the interdependent relation between the dancer and the music maker, “‘Life’s Force’ was choreographed in 1979. It was a dance music collaboration. In my mind and vision, dance and music come alive together. Dancers become part of the band. It’s not a hierarchy. They support each other. Ahmed Abdullah, musical director of my company, developed the dance together along with the people in the company. For him Life's Force celebrates the energy that takes people to higher consciousness. It’s the inner spirit. There is a rhythmical source that keeps on throughout the whole piece. The pulse is still going even when the piece finishes.”
In the span of McIntyre’s career she carefully integrated the roots of American music into her bodies of work. Her collaborations with historical figures such as Max Roach and the Master Brotherhood opened a space for her to blend improvised dance and choreographed phrases. By interpolating between the two independent processes, a fluid dance phrase emerges as an important compositional model for structuring her work. McIntyre’s dance making, in parallel to the Black Arts Movement in the 1970s, reflected her ability to expand cultural ideas of what forms a dancer might make, or perhaps more specifically, How will the dancer sound their instrument and what will it look like?
From 1972 to 1988 McIntyre toured Nationally and Internationally with the company she created; Sound in Motion. Her musical thinking in her choreography gave way to profound collaborations with the poet, Ntozake Shange. McIntyre’s Sound in Motion company produced Shange’s Choreopoems, “Spell #7 (1979)” and “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf (1982).” Together they exchanged forms. Shange learned modern dance from McIntyre while Dianne embodied a new poetic cadence in her African American dance making. Sound in Motion influenced generations of dancers, poets, musicians, playwrights, writers, teachers, and students in the 1980s until McIntyre decided to dissolve the company to dive deeper into her creative work.
Dianne McIntyre’s joyful engagement with her students and her practice provides a template for artists to approach the process of dance making, music making, and art making with their whole being, the body that carries its histories, its triumphs, and its will to move forward.
“You have to immerse your whole self in your work. It won’t be whole if you don’t put your whole being in it. And your whole being is beyond what you think you can do.”