Stepping in to keep UArts dance robust

The nation's largest undergraduate dance program - now 15 staff musicians, 30 full- and part-time instructors, more than 300 students - has been steadily expanding at Philadelphia's University of the Arts under the nurturing eye of Susan Glazer, who retires this month after 29 years.

Succeeding her as the program's director will be Donna Faye Burchfield, who is dean of the American Dance Festival (ADF) School in Durham, N.C., and has been responsible for building the dance department at Virginia's Hollins University over almost three decades.

Each of these steadfast women has been a fierce advocate for her vision, making incremental changes within glacial university timelines to build and reshape the way her community taught and perceived dance. The resulting programs now draw students from all over.

Glazer arrived from California with her surgeon husband and three children in 1972. She taught at Drexel University's dance program, established in 1974, until 1982, when she was asked "to teach a summer session at UArts and then to take over the department."

"I got a lot of support from faculty [who] were after building a seamless energy between the studio and the liberal arts program," she recalls, "and my students always wanted to take their classes."

At Drexel, she had had a budget to produce several musicals - quite a different story from what came next. "For Anything Goes [at Drexel] I bought tap shoes for all the male engineering students who never tapped before in their lives. At UArts there was no budget for costumes, dance shoes or sets," she says, until she complained and was "very grudgingly provided a small budget. Luckily, we always had the Merriam Theater" for performances. And things got better: A small university black box theater, the Drake, became available in the '90s, and the larger Arts Bank underwent a William Penn Foundation-funded renovation in the same decade and reverted to UArts ownership when it failed as a community operation. Now the program had three performance spaces.

When Glazer took over, the three-year-old program had 53 students; ballet and modern dance were taught and piano lessons were still required, as was Labanotation, the standard method of analyzing and recording human motion.

"It was very amorphous," Glazer says. "I did almost everything. I did admissions, doled out financial aid, ran a publication [called Dance Dialogue], did everything but choreograph," she said. "I had virtually full autonomy."

(And in her spare time, she also headed the Philadelphia Dance Alliance for six years and cowrote with Swarthmore dance department director Sharon Friedler Dancing Female: Lives and Issues of Women in Contemporary Dance, now in its third printing.)

Glazer brought in new blood - composer/pianist John Levis as rehearsal pianist (he's now the School of Dance's music coordinator) and the late, legendary LaVaughn Robinson to teach tap - and new ideas: "I started a jazz dance department, one of the first in the nation where you could get a BFA."

Some things fell by the wayside, among them the school's master of fine arts in dance degree. It was offered until 1985, when "we dropped it to concentrate on and strengthen the BFA degrees," Glazer says, adding, "I'm guessing one of the first things Donna Faye will do is bring back the MFA program."

Of her accomplishments, Glazer is perhaps fondest of producing "2000 Feet: A Celebration of World Dance" in 1999, the largest international dance festival ever held in Philadelphia, and of helping to create the Pennsylvania Ballet Choreography Prize this year. The prize's first recipient is graduating UArts senior Mark Caserta, who leaves Philadephia's Eleone Dance Theatre for Complexions in New York and will be paid by the Pennsylvania Ballet to choreograph a piece for its second company next year.

Glazer seems on point in predicting that her successor will revive the UArts dance MFA degree program: Burchfield's most recent innovations at American Dance Festival School have included the MFA and combined BA/BFA programs in collaboration with Hollins University.

"In many ways, Donna Faye Burchfield's tenure at Hollins and ADF resembles Susan's directorship of the School of Dance," said UArts president Sean Buffington.

"It was an enormous challenge to find a director who could build on Susan's legacy. We turned to Donna Faye early in the search to seek her advice, not imagining that she would consider taking on the directorship of the school herself."

Burchfield still seems a bit surprised herself. "I've been at Hollins for 28 years, so uprooting and beginning again is causing me some anxiety," she said. But her husband, an artist and woodworker, was born in Philadelphia, and hopes to retire from his studio on their North Carolina farm sometime soon to join her.

Meanwhile, she said, "excitement is propelling me forward. I'm feeling momentum."

"I'm deeply driven by my intuition. I knew I wanted to make this happen the moment I stood and watched class in a UArts studio," she says. "I knew I could be here. It was a felt experience. I met with the provost and said, 'I'm on a mission - dance has to expand, move.' "

Burchfield already knows many of the UArts teachers who have also spent time at American Dance Festival. She plans, initially, to live near campus because "I want to be able to get my feet wet and see as much Philly dance as I can. I'm interested in nurturing young choreographers and in dancers who are curious and disciplined."

Burchfield's office at Hollins is famously filled with books, which she delights in lending to students, to get them thinking.

"This is a conservatory," she says of UArts' program of instruction and performance, "and Sean asked, 'What if we just take this word conservatory off the table?' "

Fine with her. "I believe in research and the thinking dancer," she says. "They will have to read and do creative investigation. It's a very different world dancers face from 30 years ago. In these times, I want dance to speak on its own terms."