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Leif
Zurmuhlen
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Care
to Dance
Tracing its
evolution from avant-garde artists’ collective to multidimensional
arts-and-education organization, Maude Baum reflects on 30
years of dedication to eba
By Susan Mehalick
Caterpillars
turning into butterflies. It’s as good a theme as any for
a dance—especially for a group of eager 3- and 4-year-olds,
as a handful of the youngest dancers prove on a recent afternoon
at Albany’s eba Theater. With only their imaginations and
a bit of narration from their teacher to guide them, the students
creep, wriggle and flutter in their best efforts to illustrate
through movement the process of metamorphosis.
Again and again, they repeat the exercise, under the watchful
eyes of Maude Baum, their instructor-narrator. For Baum, this
is much more than a familiar scene, not just because she is
a veteran teacher and dancer, but because what is taking place
in the studio with these tiny artists-in-training can be seen
as a metaphor for the work she has done with eba during the
last three decades. In a sweetly poingant way, the little
ones—as they squirm on the floor, then retreat to their “cocoons”
and finally emerge to flit about the space with the reckless
abandon of prekindergarteners—are every idea that has been
hatched at eba and nurtured through its developmental stages
until it has grown into something perhaps unrecognizable and
more glorious than when it first was conceived.
It’s
precisely her unfailing belief in the possibility of what
something could become that has brought Baum to yet another
milestone in her career: the 30th anniversary of eba and Maude
Baum and Company Dance Theatre. On Saturday (May 3), Baum
and her six-member troupe will mark the occasion with two
performances at the Egg in Albany, at 2:30 and 8 PM. The 30th
anniversary concert will feature three older works from the
company’s repertoire: Aesop’s Fables by Jamie Cunningham,
Nanigismo by Kevin Wynn and Ennui by Baum; a
new work by Baum, Sometimes in My Mind, Always in My Heart;
and a “community dance” showcasing more than 40 people who’ve
been involved with eba throughout the years.
“I
thought of something old, something new,” Baum laughs when
asked about her choices for the program. In seriousness, she
quickly adds that she wanted to present a sampling of the
kind of work her troupe has performed over time. Her two pieces
both explore the theme of womanhood, and she says, “I thought
it might be a nice way for people to see how I dealt with
it years ago and how I’m dealing with it now.”
As for the community dance, Baum explains it’s “mostly about
people dancing together and having a good time.” She felt
it was important to include because “it harkens back to our
heritage. One of the important things that we’ve always wanted
people to understand is that they can dance for their whole
lives. That you don’t have to be a professional to dance.”
To that end, the evening concert will be followed by a champagne
reception featuring dancing to live music by Doc Scanlon’s
Rhythm Boys.
Talk to Maude Baum about eba, and a word that she uses a lot
is “we.” It’s like there’s a guiding force that goes beyond
herself and her current board of directors. Her use of the
first-person plural pronoun is rooted in eba’s origins. Although
she has always been the artistic director of eba, Baum describes
the nascent eba as a collective of artists from different
disciplines who came together in the early 1970s to work together
and create avant-garde art. Baum, who grew up in Rensselaer,
was back in the area after following her undergraduate degree
at Russell Sage College with a master’s degree in dance and
related arts from Texas Women’s University. She was teaching
at the University at Albany, where she remained for six years
while eba was simultaneously getting off the ground.
“There
were 12 of us, we were the 12 apostles,” she says now with
a laugh. “Eba originally stood for electronic body arts. From
the beginning, we were interested in education, working in
schools, doing specific programs for arts-in-education, creating
new work, collaborating with other artists, doing visual arts,
working with technology, as well as straight dance and straight
music. That has always been what we’ve been about. The mission
really has not changed.”
Still, eba has more than outlived its original members’ projections
for its longevity. “I thought this was something I’d do for
maybe five years before moving on to something else,” Baum
says. “All the information we had at the time told us that
was about as long as a small arts organization would last.”
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Perpetual
motion: Baum (upper right) and company outside the eba
Theater.
Photo Leif Zurmuhlen
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And
when did it become apparent that it was more than a five-year
project? “I don’t know that it ever did,” Baum says, “It just
kept going. It kept evolving and flowing. And we went with
the flow.”
Her original colleaugues have long since gone their separate
ways and, by necessity, her organization has become much more
formally organized as it has evolved from a funky ’70s arts
collective to into a funky 21st-century arts institution,
complete with a paid staff of about 20 full- and part-time
artists, administrators, faculty and technical crew.
Today, the not-for-profit entity known as eba, inc., is housed
in the historic eba Theater (which it purchased in 1977) at
the corner of Lark Street and Hudson Avenue in Albany, and
it has an annual budget of $280,000. It is an umbrella organization
for the eba Center for Dance and Movement, which offers classes
for adults; Maude Baum and Company Dance Theatre, a professional
modern dance theater company; eba Dance Theatre, its arts-in-education
program (in this case, eba stands for everything but anchovies);
and Kids Dancespace @ eba, which offers classes for kids ages
3 to 16, including a circus-and-dance summer day camp.
The bad economy and shrinking 401k plans notwithstanding,
most people who’ve reached the 30-year marks in their careers
begin to think about, well, retiring. While Baum says she
muses about running off to Casablanca with her sister to open
a nightclub some day, she doesn’t have any immediate plans
to turn the reins of eba over to anyone else (assuming that
someone exists who could begin to fill her shoes).
“I
don’t get tired of what I’m doing, even if there are times
when I’m exhausted from what I’m doing,” she says with a smile.
“In a day, I might teach 3- and 4-year-olds, go into a school
to work with teachers on how to make a school an arts-centered
facility, write grants, work with professional dancers and
teach a workout class.”
She explains that because eba was founded to be a “diversified
organization,” there’s always something new and different
to turn her attention to.
For instance, even as Baum prepares for her own 30th-anniversary
concert, over at Van Rensselaer Elementary School in the city
of Rensselaer, students are preparing for an end-of-the-year
performance that signals the close of a seven-year partnership
between eba Dance Theatre and the school. Funded by a grant
from the New York State Council on the Arts Empire State Partnership
program, it allowed Baum to work closely with educators and
students to integrate the arts into regular classroom curricula.
Sadly, because of drastic funding cuts, Baum is worried that
programs such as this will soon be a thing of the past—at
least until the economy swings in the other direction. And
she’s been around long enough to know that eventually, it
will. “From my experience, these things tend to go in 10-year
cycles,” she says matter-of-factly, as if it just goes with
the territory.
In the meantime, she’ll do what she’s always done: struggle
to pay the bills (“That’s one thing that never changes,” she
says) as she continues to keep her eyes on the bigger picture.
“I
see the work that we do here as being incredibly valuable,
and that’s all there is to it,” she concludes. “We only have
so many days to live and we don’t know how many. And if each
day I can make one person feel better about themselves or
learn something, then that to me is what it’s all about. I
have to take my energy and spend it doing what I want to do
and I have to help other people do that. That’s why I’m here.”
So it’s back to tending butterflies.
In the studio, the young dancers continue their work. This
time they’re bringing it all together for an impromptu performance
in front of their parents, who stream into the studio and
lean against the wall or sit on the floor to watch. Brightly
colored scarves serving as wings are adjusted, the children
take their places and the dance begins again.
Maude Baum and Company Dance Theatre celebrates eba’s 30th
anniversary on Saturday, May 3, with two performances: a matinee
family concert at 2:30 PM, followed by an ice-cream social;
and an evening concert at 8 PM, followed by a champagne reception
with dancing to music by Doc Scanlon’s Rhythm Boys. All events
take place at the Egg, Empire State Plaza, Albany. Tickets
are $30 for ages 30-59; $20 for ages 20-29; $15 ages 60 and
over; $10 ages 19 and under. For reservations, call the Egg
box office, 473-1845. For information, call eba, 465-9916,
e-mail ebadance@earthlink.net or visit www.eba-arts.org.
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