Last dance celebrates Mills College’s legacy
Students’ sad, sweet sendoff to department
Outside Lisser Hall at Mills College on an unusually warm night, frogs sang in the creek, just as they probably did on warm nights in the summer of 1939, when a critical mass of fearless talents in a thenradical new field called “modern dance” first leaped and spun across the sprawling Oakland campus lawns.
The renowned Merce Cunningham was part of that summer session, a first iteration of what became one of the longest-running college dance departments in the country. His independent spirit and that of Hanya Holm, Anna Halprin and legions of other dance greats still felt present 83 years later as, inside the hall, footage of a work by one of Mills' most famous dance alumnae, Trisha Brown, class of 1958, flickered on the screen. But this was, as several people present on Friday remarked, a bittersweet night: “Coda: Final Curtain,” a showcase of group and solo dance, live and filmed, is a master of fine arts graduation performance for the last batch of dance students at Mills as we know it.
“It's so much to carry on our shoulders,” said Caitlin Vanderveen, who was screening her dance film “Alternate.” “We want to honor everyone who came before us.”
This was the final graduating performance because, on June 30, the Mills College dance program will cease to exist. On July 1, the campus will become Mills College at Northeastern University, a satellite campus of the huge Boston institution that purchased Mills after more than a decade of financial troubles for the 170-year old women's college.
“There's relief right now, truthfully,” said professor emerita Ann Murphy, who was part of a successful campaign to save the undergraduate dance program when it was threatened by budget cuts back in 2015, before Mills leadership began to suggest the school might close altogether. “But there's also sadness because the recent years were also a time of extraordinary folks in the department, making the most of decentralized power. There was buy-in from the faculty and excitement.”
Current department chair Sheldon Smith agreed. He began teaching at Mills in 2008 and remembers school years of three simultaneous technique classes in the same hall, “music spilling out and all the students' voices interacting.”
“We'd put on shows in the basement, completely sold out,” he recalled, treasuring memories of courses in “dance forms” when he'd learn steps from styles as wildly different as classical Indian Bharatanatyam and New York club voguing alongside his students.
“It's always exciting to see students weave together research from their written theses and their creative work,” Smith said. “They're knitting together the way they think and the way they inhabit their bodies.”
The students who are entering history as the old Mills College's last class were eager to testify to the wildly explorative atmosphere.
“The first thing I learned at Mills was to relax and to give myself space,” said Ye Feng, whose concert solo, which involved rolling herself in crumpled paper, was titled “Work 19 — Journey.”
Feng is no newcomer to the stage — in her native China, she was designated a “national first-class dancer,” and contributed choreography and performance to three Olympics ceremonies. When this earned her a green card, she leaped at the chance to come to the United States, moving to San Jose in 2016.
“When I was in China my experience was that my body was not my own, that I was a Chinese national, and I had to dance for the audi
ence, the country, the politics, but not for me,” she said. “The teachers at Mills gave me a second life in dance. This piece is my new life.”
Her classmate Wade Reynolds presented an intense quartet incorporating scrambled voice mail messages titled “. . . and I climb.” Tawni Pizzagoni also created a whole score for her dance, “Overload.”
Whether the new Mills College at Northeastern University will resume the legacy of Mills dance remains unknown. The current faculty has the coming year to develop proposals for a new program, and it would take years beyond that to get such a program running. As for the new Mills Institute Northeastern has promised, “I’m pretty confused as to what that would look like,” Smith said.
But he knows that Mills’ influence will carry on in other ways, with alumnae including Nora Chipaumire and Molissa Fenley embodying its values, and other graduates teaching in programs across the country.
As Smith said with a sigh, “the Mills diaspora spreads throughout the world.”