Creative footing BY JOHNETTE RODRIGUEZ

Dorothy Jungels, founder of Everett Dance Theatre (1986) and the Carriage House School and Stage (1993), has tackled some pretty unusual topics for a choreographer. She has created dances based on newspaper headlines; education and race; Newton’s laws of motion; the work that people do and what it means to them; and even humankind’s experiments with flight. In the process, she has collaborated with performers trained in drumming, clowning, new vaudeville, voice, mime, acting, filmmaking, and all kinds of dance. The five evening-length pieces that grew out of her vision have garnered rave reviews from New York critics, a "Bessies" Award for dance performance, and a loyal following in Rhode Island.

Jungels has managed to stay very involved with her sizable family (five children, 10 grandchildren) throughout her creative career — a situation borne out by how one of her grandsons, skateboard in hand, dropped by for a hug during our interview. Her two youngest children, Aaron and Rachael, have always been members of Everett. Several of her grandchildren took part in recent pieces presented at the Carriage House. Her nephews performed last spring in collaboration with Everett, and the theater’s newest piece, Home Movies (premiering this fall), takes a close look at what families and home mean to people.

The Carriage House, as school and as performance space, has also filled a niche in the Mount Hope neighborhood and the dance community. The Carriage House has sponsored break dance open houses, poetry slams, and video nights to draw in local talent, and it has organized a spring performance series to highlight national and local dance and performance artists.

Q: How did you get interested in dance?

A: I just always loved dance and I took a little ballet when I was a teenager, but when I went off to college, though it was always my love, there was never anything available. So I studied art — that was my second love. My husband and I were high school sweethearts, and we shared a deep love of art.

Q: After a friend invited your husband to come to RISD, and you were at home with five children, how did you get back to dance?

A: I started taking ballet twice a week — that was my little activity. I was a full-time mother for quite a while, but Gene Kelly had been one of my heroes. I suppose what made me love dance, and even ballet, was that Gene Kelly said that ballet was so hard to do. But I also loved tap dancing, and my only experience in performance came about with Brian Jones, as part of the All-Tap Revue. When I left my job as a housewife, I worked in the Art and Aging program for RISCA [the Rhode Island State Council for the Arts]. As an artist, it was surprising to get hired to do that. I was sent to East St. Louis, where Katherine Dunham was teaching an aging program. I spent a week there, with perhaps a couple of classes about the elderly, but mainly I took Dunham’s classes and experienced all the drumming and all that wonderful African dance.

Q: How did you translate that to what you were doing back in Rhode Island?

A: I started working with drummer John Belcher, because Dunham worked with a drummer, and I’d gotten the exercises for the elderly from her. And with John, we took music and dance to any place you could imagine: elderly [housing], meal sites, the children’s hospital, Ladd School, locked wards at the IMH, the women’s prison. We had no preparation about some of this stuff, but it was very broadening for becoming an artist. You ask yourself, "What is art? What is it when I’m a child hooked up to IVs? When I’m in a locked ward? How do you make the connection?" That was certainly a base for everything else that came.

Q: When did you start creating your own dances?

A: John and I started teaching a dance class at RISD, and you know what they say about teaching: "You use up your material after the first six months, and after that you’re making it up." I guess that’s how choreography happens. You start playing and coming up with ideas. He was a great partner, and we really investigated performance, and imagination, and what can happen on stage. What can you get performers to do? The RISD classes were our first company, you could say — the choreography and the shows we did there.

Q: How did your own company come about?

A: We were invited by a student at RIC to do something for the showcase there. So it was John and myself, and Aaron and Rachael. Aaron had been going to the Trinity Rep Conservatory and Rachael was still in Juilliard, and it was our first experiment, doing this little family show. John’s ideas and mine would overlap and we collaboratively came up with this piece. After the show, someone said, "You could be a company." Then I spent about six months living in New York, and I made a piece with Rachael and her fellow students at Juilliard. So I submitted the two pieces for a choreographer’s grant from the state. When I got that award, that was fate, I thought. Why go to college and try to get a degree in dance of some sort? Maybe this was a sign that I could do something.

Q: Where did you go from there?

A: We auditioned for Dance Theater Workshop in New York, and lo and behold, we got in. Executive director David White liked our piece, and he liked us and we got our break and almost right after that, we got to do Flight at his theater, our own whole evening. So, it was just falling out of the sky. What are the chances of those kind of lucky breaks? So, then we premiered all our work at DTW. Everything got its first reviews there. It was easier there. The climate here was still hard for dance companies — to get the attention or even get people used to reviewing dance. So it was ironic that we should premiere in New York, but when you have some New York reviews, it gives you more validation at home.

Q: How did the Carriage House come about?

A: DTW had a very big influence on us. It was the concept that theater could be small. In fact, that small is beautiful. DTW has 90 seats and every great reviewer came to that theater. And they honored these little theaters because often those are the laboratories for new ideas.

That was inspiring to me, that these new ideas could take place, and people could look at them, and think about it, and write about it. Back home, the small theater scene was just happening, and they were getting their reviews.

We had a meeting of dancers one time and I always remember Paula Hunter saying, "Theater has an address; dance doesn’t have an address. We need an address." What’s different than a play is that all the dance companies are doing original work, and it takes them a long time — they can’t keep season after season going like a theater does. They get their plays, they work six weeks, and they have a new show up. But for a dance company, it doesn’t work that way.

Q: Once you’d found this place, did other companies come here to perform?

A: Yes, I think every dance company in the state has performed here. People cut their teeth here. I remember when we opened it up, [former Providence Journal arts writer] Bill Gale said, "Yeah, you can open it, but will anyone come?" Because it’s off the beaten track. But they did, and it was wonderful.

Q: How did you get neighborhood kids to come to classes at the school?

A: Well, you know, they didn’t. I was very surprised. I just expected every kid on the block to be over here, and what really happened was what I called the all-city band. We were about the first to have an "open house" for break dancing, and people were coming from all over the city to dance here. In the beginning and when it was hitting its second wave, there’d be 70 kids in there and you’d have the best dancers in the state. It was a show every time. I sat through everything. Talk about dedication. These kids would dance five hours a day to get some of those power moves and skills and style.

Q: A lot of people talk about diversity in the arts, and this is one of the places where it really happened. Why do you think that was?

A: I’ve been thinking about this lately, and I think it stems from my own desire for wholeness. And if you think about the parts of the body and their particular connection to an ethnicity, you might think of the tongue as French, for example, and the feet as African. For a dancer, you have to have that connection to the beat, which comes from Africa. It expands you. Imagine if you were a piano player, and you could only play the white keys, or a painter with only a few spices?

Q: Where are you headed with the new piece, Home Movies?

A: We were extremely inspired by Aaron’s last piece — the two stories about his nephew, Silas — and we are doing a few stories based on that. The ongoing saga of Marvin’s family, pieces about Bravell’s father, Sokeo’s parents, and Rachael and Aaron’s home. So the local color is fun, with the East Side, the South Side, the West End, and Cranston represented. We even feature the houses. There’s some music by Louis Armstrong, some dance, some comedy. That’s always been a rule — we’ve always been attracted to people who are funny. I can’t believe that I’m working on another one. And it’s as much fun and as much discovery as there ever was.