Learning From Cultural Elders

Visiting dance professor Sherone Price (in background) works with master class dancers during a rehearsal for the Dance Program's faculty concert, which will take place Dec. 4-6.

Among their other responsibilities, teachers act as keepers — “elders” — of their culture.

This is an important concept to Sherone Price, UW–Madison’s first Bascom-Henry Visiting Professor of Dance.

“My own teachers really made an impression on me,” he says. “They were familiar with the connection between the body and what goes on in your head. ‘Use the muscles that are closest to the bone,’ one of them told me. I’ve continued to be amazed at what incredible things the body can do.”

When not a visiting “elder,” Price is a member of the Gamble/Van Dyke modern-dance touring company and the Chuck Davis African-American Dance Ensemble. The route he took to that career began on the football field at his rural North Carolina high school.

“I injured my ankles,” he says. “One of my teachers suggested dance to help me heal.”

Price’s residency is part of the UW–Madison Dance Program’s year-long festival of African and African-American choreography, dancers, musicians and scholars. As Bascom-Henry Professor, Price is teaching technique, repertory and African-American dance classes to about 30 students.

One of those students is Andrea White, a junior from Brookfield majoring in education with a dance minor who is now preparing Price’s new dance “Fractal Images, Indigo Moods” for the Dance Program’s upcoming faculty concert. In addition to broadening her dance horizons, Price’s work, which examines human conflict, also offered White some perspective on human relations.

“It’s showing me there’s more than one solution, that there is more than one way to do something,” she says.

“Fractal Images” also represents a revelation to Tyrone King, a returning adult student from Milwaukee who will get his degree in dance in May.

“You can see some of the movements in modern dance have come out of the African tradition,” he says. King adds that he also is gaining valuable insight into the mechanics of human movement: “I’ll be able to share that knowledge with my own students,” he says.

Price himself is hard at work in the rehearsal hall on colleague Anna Nassif’s new “Makrokosmos,” which he will dance in the concert.

“I’m studying the movements off video. Later, Anna and I will get into the real meat, the internal stuff that I’ll bring to the piece myself,” he says.

When he departs Madison in December, Price hopes that he will leave behind a legacy of joy, although he realizes he probably won’t be able to experience it firsthand.

“My students are so serious when they’re working on the piece now,” he says. “I know some of them will call me later all excited and say, ‘Sherone, I took this class and really turned the place out!’ And I won’t be there to see it. That hurts me. But the dance world is so small. We’ll all meet again sometime.”

The faculty dance concert, featuring the new works by Price, Nassif and other dance faculty, will take place Dec. 4-6 at 8 p.m. in Vilas Hall’s Mitchell Theatre. For tickets and other information, call 262-1691.