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10/20/2009
Marjorie Folkman/Mark Morris Master Class

Marjorie Folkman of the Mark Morris Dance Company leads Master Class for area high school dancers.

Dancers from five regional high schools attended a special Master Class taught by long-time Mark Morris dancer Marjorie Folkman. Ms. Folkman has been restaging Morris’s early masterpiece, GLORIA, on five college dancers this fall. This project is being funded by an American Masterpieces grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and will culminate in performances at Mount Holyoke College (Nov 12-14), Smith College (Nov 19-21), the University of Massachusetts/Amherst (Dec 3-5), and the Academy of Music in Northampton (March 4-6).

Students got a first-hand, full-bodied experience of Morris’s dance technique, with its emphasis on rhythmic accuracy and musicality, as well as an opportunity to dance passages from GLORIA. Ms. Folkman related many of the images and performance cues used by Morris in the creation of this challenging piece. As one Amherst High School dancer said, "I found the verbal cues from Mark Morris easy to find in my body when doing the phrases from 'Gloria'”.