Visiting dancers showcase cultural traditions

The E. Gwynn Dance Company, a troupe that has traveled the world, shared its talents with the UD community in March, leading a master dance class for students and area residents one day and performing before an enthusiastic audience the next.

The 25-member dance company, part of North Carolina Agricultural and Technical (NCA&T) State University in Greensboro, performs a variety of dance styles, including jazz, modern, tap, ballet, Haitian and African. It is led by artistic director Eleanor Gwynn.

The dancers’ visit to the Delaware campus followed a lecture given at UD in the fall by James C. Renick, chancellor and professor of political science at NCA&T. In delivering the annual Paul R. Jones lecture, “Why Art Matters,” Renick proposed a partnership between the two schools, using the Paul R. Jones Collection of African American Art to deepen skills and understanding through multidisciplinary faculty and student exchange programs.

The collection, which was given to UD in 2001 by Atlanta businessman and art collector Paul Jones, is among the pre-eminent collections of works by 20th-Century African-American artists.

UD President David P. Roselle accepted Renick’s proposal for academic collaboration, and Provost Dan Rich said recently that NCA&T has been invited to participate in a joint faculty institute created by the University of Delaware/Spelman College Partnership Committee to better use the Jones collection as an educational resource. Plans for other exchanges between the schools also are proceeding.

“In our modern, North American culture, we don’t have dances for ceremonies, and we don’t use dances the way African cultures do to celebrate birth and death and rites of passage,” Gwynn explained during the master dance class on the UD campus.

“That often leads to misconceptions, because a lot of people outside the African culture are not aware that many traditional dances have deep meaning and purpose. An important goal of our troupe is to give our audiences a sense of this heritage and to educate them about the vital dance traditions from south and west Africa.”

All members of the E. Gwynn Dance Company were, or still are, students at NCA&T. Gwynn— a professional dancer and teacher who studied for 14 years under Katherine Dunham, the acclaimed African-American dancer and civil rights activist— founded the troupe in 1985. The dancers have traveled and taught dance and drama workshops at universities, schools and cultural arts centers around the world, including Ghana, South Africa, Jamaica, Egypt and South America.

The dancers and their drum corps performed in Mitchell Hall the evening after the master class. The performance, “Embracing Our Past,” focused on various regions of Africa and drew a standing ovation from the audience.