FLOCK Dance Troupe: A Pastoral Symphony of Movement

by Mary Fifield and Margaret Michniewicz

"Are we supposed to be happy?"

The question is addressed to Carol Langstaff, but the FLOCK Dance Troupe leader is across the grass demonstrating a series of movements to another small group.

"No," the questioner's neighbor answers him. "I think this is a more serious sequence."

They proceed to carry out their choreographed gestures, doing their best to suppress smiles. It is, after all, a wonderfully warm early June day in a lush, green meadow on Star Mountain in Sharon, and when the boom box playing classical music is paused, a chorus of birds fills in with summertime songs. Even the occasional backbeat of nearby thunder fails to darken the mood.

Nearly two dozen people of wide-ranging age and many different levels of experience and physique have come on this Saturday afternoon to audition for the 2007 FLOCK Dance Troupe performance. These individuals will join with professional dancers from around the globe to enact a combination dance-theater performance about people forced to leave their homes, entitled Go! Move! Shift!. The performance, scheduled for six evenings in July, explores the uprooting of people, and the accompanying loss of their identity when living in diaspora. Its four parts have a global reach: the decimation of this continent's indigenous cultures and the Trail of Tears; European refugees leaving their homes and their arrival in America; the impact of wars for oil on indigenous populations around the globe; and the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia. Despite the sobriety of these themes, today's rehearsal indicates that audiences can expect both beauty and humor from Go! Move! Shift!

Instigating Change

Langstaff created FLOCK Dance Troupe eight years ago out of what she describes as an "urgent need to instigate change." "My despair and desperation towards the condition of our world led me to [ask myself], What can I do? How can I scream out how strongly I feel about the things that are wrong?" The answer came to her not in sound but in movement: "Something without words that showed through gesture, through movement - that goes, I think, directly into your heart," she recalls.

Those familiar with the spectacle and energy of the annual Pageant portion of Bread & Puppet's Our Domestic Resurrection Circus will find parallels with FLOCK, though the two groups are unrelated. By coincidence, Langstaff has been staging her outdoor dance-theater performances since 1999, a year after Bread & Puppet's Peter and Elka Schumann were compelled to downsize the more than two decade-old Glover tradition. Like the Schumanns, she takes advantage of a natural amphitheater on her property for her stage. Spectators are encouraged to settle in with lawn chairs and picnic dinners, while performers appear over the grassy horizon or from within nearby woods. Both Langstaff and the Schumanns raise themes of politically and socially conscious issues. But whereas Bread & Puppet is perhaps more theater or performance art, FLOCK is more dance. Props and even an occasional puppet may be encountered, but the meaning of a FLOCK performance is conveyed through motion rather than spoken or written expression. (FLOCK's name is even more suggestive than linguistic: the caps are not an acronym.)

Though there is accompanying music, Langstaff notes that hearing-impaired people can see the story. "I try to make my shows accessible... so that people understand what's going on," she explains. Langstaff's performers use the universal language of facial expressions rather than masks to convey emotion as an integral part of the physical gesture.

"I like using what we come with," she explains. "We all have things that we've brought along, and it's great if that can be pulled out and brought into the whole." What Langstaff herself brings is an impressive resume: dance studies with modern dance and choreography pioneers Martha Graham, Jose Limon, and Pearl Lang, and drama studies with Sanford Meisner. And, first among the influences she lists, her father, legendary baritone John "Jack" Langstaff of "Christmas Revels" fame, who said in 2000: "There's a need for art that connects us to each other. You go far enough back in any culture, and you find these rituals, these ways of bringing people together."

Langstaff's work clearly echoes her father's belief, while also deriving inspiration from Irish culture as did her mother. Diane Hamilton traveled to Ireland in 1955 in search of Irish folk singers, later founding a record label in addition to discovering The Clancy Brothers. Langstaff divides her time between Vermont and County Galway, Ireland, FLOCK's winter home. There, a major FLOCK constituency is individuals with disabilities, about whom Langstaff says, "I am privileged to work alongside these special friends [who] have the ability to be totally present, entirely filled by the experience. [Their] joy of accomplishment is unfettered by any worry over doing it 'right.' What a gift!" Langstaff adds that FLOCK is looking to expand its work with people with disabilities here in Vermont as well.

Embodying Nature

The imagery of earth, air, fire, and water have been celebrated through FLOCK's performances, which they see as a series of linked productions, since 1999. Elemental addressed consumerist waste versus agrarian living; Opportunity Calls, inspired by the art of Gustav Klimt, portrayed the demise of community in the face of technology; Joy represented the arts of living and dying well; Grace was a requiem for the loss of the natural world and its waters; and Regender explored the distinctive yet overlapping forms of masculine and feminine energy in the natural world and in human society.

A FLOCK performance spectator might as easily see the modernist spirals and contractions of Martha Graham's dance style as the naturally-occurring patterns and movement of flowing water. What Langstaff assures viewers is that, while conflict may be at the heart of a performance, ultimately it will be transformed through "humor, visual beauty, and ecstatic ensemble dances" which "build toward a conclusion that demonstrates some form of solution."

The auditions offer a sneak preview of how this may be portrayed in Go! Move! Shift!" Langstaff instructs the adults to pair off as person A and person B and do the following: circle around each other, taking turns suspiciously sniffing the other person, who recoils; "talk" at the other person through the motion of a part of your body, such as wagging your left elbow while the other person shakes a foot toward you; conclude your wary circling by coming to a halt as you stand back to back with one another, and then stride away from each other and turn to regard each other with arms tightly folded.

Langstaff summarizes the basis of the scene thus: different cultures have different acceptable boundaries of personal space; and, because of different diets, various cultures may smell differently. Social constructs can layer values and judgments upon our diverse practices even down to the kind of food we eat. The sniffing is a visceral act of sussing out the Other.

Next, Langstaff summons the children and has each approach a pair of the adults, resolutely and methodically alternating between each adult, bringing them closer and closer to the middle ground until they finally accept one another's hand, all three now joined as one.

Langstaff relates the story that inspired this scene: a member of the peace-keeping forces in Kosovo, finding himself in a highly-charged, tense crowd teeming with animosity toward one another, spontaneously reached for two opposing men, taking each by the hand and placing one's hand on the other and clasping both between his own hands - compelling them to look each other in the eye, breaking the impasse and thereby defusing the crowd's violence.

This "audition" is less a test than a venue for Langstaff to observe the prospective amateur performers in action and assess what will be their most appropriate roles in the actual performance. Among the exercises she asks the assembled group to do are pretending to carry something extraordinarily fragile and sacred, and walking the length of a clearing trying to be "invisible" to the assembled group. While Langstaff bluntly tells the group that some were far more successful at these exercises than others, there will be a role for everyone in the performances.

"It's very important to me to always mix professional [dancers] and amateurs," she adds. "Community members get cajoled into doing things maybe they think they can't do, then get swept up into the whole. The professionals have to break down and loosen their boundaries, [help them] grasp on to new parts of themselves.

"Dance expresses energy, which is the combining of time and power," Langstaff muses. "Our bodies express intentions; we can raise a fist…or offer a hand. We're trying to create change - and to make a shift in people's hearts."

So - as the famous Irish ballad about homelessness exhorts -- Go! Move! Shift!

Mary Fifield is a dancer wannabe who works for Vermont Vocational Rehabilitation in Barre; Margaret Michniewicz is Editor of Vermont Woman.