George Mason U. alumna and Mark Morris dancer Rita Donahue teaches a master class at Mason earlier this month. (Photos by Evan Cantwell, courtesy of George Mason U.)
By Rebecca J. Ritzel
Erika Langmeyer was only a sophomore in high school when her parents took her to see Mark Morris Dance Group perform near their home in Seattle.
“I was just starting to look at colleges,” Langmeyer said. “I had never heard of George Mason University. But I figured I should look at where good dancers went to school. And there George Mason was, in Rita Donahue’s bio.”
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George Mason U. alumna and Mark Morris dancer Rita Donahue teaches a master class at Mason earlier this month. (Photos by Evan Cantwell, courtesy of George Mason U.)
By Rebecca J. Ritzel
Erika Langmeyer was only a sophomore in high school when her parents took her to see Mark Morris Dance Group perform near their home in Seattle.
“I was just starting to look at colleges,” Langmeyer said. “I had never heard of George Mason University. But I figured I should look at where good dancers went to school. And there George Mason was, in Rita Donahue’s bio.”
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Within months, Langmeyer was on a plane en route to Mason, a public university outside of Washington, and trying out dance classes at Donahue’s alma mater. Two years and five successful auditions at schools across the country later, she enrolled. Now she’s a senior, preparing to dance in her final spring gala and planning a post-graduation move to New York.
“Everyone at Mason has been wonderful,” she said. “I’ve gotten such a well-rounded dance education.”
Langmeyer’s why-I-picked-George Mason story is becoming more and more common, says Dan Joyce, a dance professor there.
“Mark Morris is as big as a choreographer gets these days. His company goes all over the country and all over the world.” Joyce said. “He’s like a melting iceberg. That certainly helps us.”
From 1988-1998, Joyce was a member of Morris’s company, and that’s just the beginning of the university’s connections to the this internationally renowned troupe. Morris brings his dancers to Mason nearly every year, creating a bidding war with the just-across-the-river Kennedy Center. Two of eight tenured dance professors in the program have performed with Morris when he calls in additional dancers to perform large-scale pieces like his holiday farce, The Hard Nut. Two other alums have performed with Morris en route to getting full-time gigs with Jose Limon and Ririe-Woodbury dance companies.
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And then there are current Morris company members Donohue (Class of 2002) and William Smith III (2007), the darlings of the dance office wall. To the left of the door there’s Donahue, in a full-page picture from The New York Times, dancing with Morris just before he retired from the stage. And to the right there’s a highlighted press release, announcing that Smith was accepted as a member of Parsons Dance Company.
That’s old news, but no one is taking the clip down any time soon.
On a recent February Friday, the headline around campus was that Donahue and Smith were there in the flesh, in the expanded performing arts building, leading masterclasses for Mason’s roughly 80 dance majors. In brand-new studio 3011, Donahue walked freshmen and sophomores through a sequence of movement in “Silhouettes,” a duet included on the Morris company’s weekend program.
“This is part coordination, part torture,” Joyce remarked, watching his students follow Donahue through what were, for her, an easy series of playful leg lifts and turns.
Upstairs in 310, Smith was teaching the juniors and seniors a choreographic sequence of his own devise. Dancers leapt four at a time across the studio floor, while the house drummer and Michael Nickens, the pep band director, jammed on the sidelines. Afterward, Smith chatted with the students like a sweaty celebrity. The Fredericksburg, Va., native came to Mason on an academic scholarship, originally planning to double major in engineering and dance. But the arts triumphed over the prospect of working for the likes of Lockheed Martin, and he had no trouble getting hired as a dancer, first by Parsons, then by Morris.
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He looks back fondly on his time at George Mason, but prefers to think of himself more as an evangelist for his professors than the university itself.
“It’s not important where you go to school; it’s the experience you have there that’s important,” Smith said.
Both Smith’s and Donohue’s George Mason experience included performing multiple Morris works at the university’s annual spring galas. As dance program director Buffy Price said to Donahue, “I think we still have your costume.” She wasn’t joking. The choreographer prefers licensing his works to universities rather than other dance companies, and George Mason buys rights to a dance every other year. When the dance group visits campus, students have a chance to see the alumni perform the real thing live.
The February performances found Smith soloing in Morris’ “Going Away Party,” a country-western barn dance that also functions as social satire. In her review for The Washington Post, critic Sarah Kaufman called Smith “a prince in cowboy boots. … a splendid dancer who combines nobility and innocence.” Donahue performed in “Petrichor,” a new work, the first Morris has created for his female dancers alone. Kaufman called it “a dazzling centerpiece.”
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There are no Morris works on the program for this year’s spring gala at George Mason, but the students are learning pieces by other international heavy hitters. There’s an Israeli-modern fusion work by Ohad Naharin performed by 15 students seated in a semi-circle. A smaller ensemble will perform a work by Robert Battle, the incoming artistic director of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre. (He was kind enough to stop by and watch rehearsal when his company was in Washington.) And there’s a full-length barefoot ballet by Lar Lubovitch.
The students rehearsed all three the day of the Morris master classes, and by 2 p.m., they were tired. The last thing they wanted to do was push through “Dvorak Serenade” with Donahue and several other Morris dancers still in the studio.
For Langmeyer, this was her chance to perform with the dancer who indirectly brought her to George Mason watching. In “Serenade,” she’s one-fourth of a central quartet performing a series of elegant moves at awkward angles. She calls it the most athletic dance she’s undertaken yet. The students hadn’t rehearsed since the end of fall semester, but they gave it the old college try, and one alumna found herself very impressed.
“That was great,” Donahue told several of her former professors gathered in the hallway outside the studio. “I can’t believe they hadn’t danced that in two months.”
And then she was off to her own rehearsal, leaving the Mason dance department less likely then ever to take Donahue’s photos down from the walls.
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Rebecca J. Ritzel is a freelance writer in Washington who contributes regularly to The Washington Post and other publications. She also teaches in the Professional Writing Program at the University of Maryland.