Summary
Both personal and cultural history have provided the impetus for [Robin Harris]' work. The typewritten record of an epic canoe ride that her father and a friend took down the Mississippi River while they were Boy Scouts in 1941 was the basis for the 2000 work 30 and 73. The experiences of the Chattanooga Times' first woman reporter in the 1920s inspired Blanche in 1997. The piquant humor of 2000's Resort (How I Should Love to Marry) found its genesis in the peculiar mating habits of mid-century women who dreamed of finding husbands at summertime retreats. Cheesy, long-playing 33-1/3 rpm instructional albums from the 1950s that claimed to teach "Swimming Skills Through Dry Land Drills" and looking young forever through "Isometric Facial Exercises" were sent up in a 2001 satire, How To.
After a high-school injury, [Carol Kyles Finley] thought she would never dance again. During the year she applied for Design school, she took Modern I. "I had no expectations that that class would propel me into anything else," Finley recalls. But after seeing her student's beginning studies in technique class, Harris encouraged Finley to take a class in composition, and then join the dance company. "Then she encouraged me to choreograph," Finley remembers. "The first piece was a really bad group piece," she chuckles.The second one won Dance Magazine's award for best student choreography that year at the American College Dance Festival. Finley still cites Harris as her most influential teacher. "I've never wanted to copy her work. If I want to copy anything it's her commitment to an idea and her commitment to work until she gets there. She doesn't give up. She doesn't compromise. When it comes to realizing her vision she doesn't settle for less, and that sticks with me."See the full content of this document
Extract
Moving Audiences and Students
You could taste the dust. The heat was a little less than flattening. And somehow you could tell: no air was stirring anywhere within 50 miles of the place.
The combination of the three nearly seemed to change the gravitation. Solemn people, long since grown accustomed to economizing--to the bone--on clothing, food and furnishings, measured out their movements just as...See the full content of this document
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