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May 3,
2002
Waking
Up the Earth: Children Take Part in MHC May Pageant
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Photo: Fred Leblanc
Terre
Parker '02 with a young dancer during MHC's May Pageant,
which was held April 26.
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Terre Parker '02 was
sixteen when, during a visit to the Badlands of South Dakota,
she began to dance in a spontaneous celebration of the summer
solstice. Her eyes shut, her ears filled with the sound of her
mother's singing and a friends' drumming, Parker didn't notice
that she had attracted an audience.
When she opened her
eyes, she saw them: forty Girls Incorporated girls lined up on
the boardwalk, watching. "And I just stopped because I was
so scared," Parker recalls. "And my mother said, 'Terre,
give them your dance.' So I started dancing again, and then I
welcomed them in, and then they all came. And we made this whole
dance, right on the spot. And they were asking me questions about
the solstice and we all contributed movements and it was very
simple. It was so inspiring."
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Photo: Fred Leblanc
Dancing
around the Maypole at the recent May Pageant
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That experience guided
Parker, who has a self-designed major in dance, spirituality,
and community, when she began thinking about her senior thesis,
titled "Contemporary Community Dance Rituals for the Earth."
The result, performed as part of MHC's May Pageant on April 26,
was the "Dance for Spring," an improvisational work
that included eleven members of the Holyoke chapter of Girls Incorporated,
a national, nonprofit organization dedicated to inspiring girls
to be strong, smart, and bold.
The pageant, a revival
of a Mount Holyoke tradition that lapsed during the mid-1960s,
drew about 200 participants to Skinner Green. Despite overcast
skies, strong breezes, and intermittent April showers, participants
enjoyed joining in the dance around the Maypole, colorful ribbons
in hand, to the accompaniment of tin whistle, drum, and fiddle.
In "Dance for
Spring," Parker played the role of the Earth, still in late
winter slumber. She was awakened by the Girls Incorporated children,
who danced around her in their flowing pastel gowns whispering,
"Wake up! Wake up!" To Parker, the children are "the
emissaries of hope," the promise of renewal that arrives
with spring. "The reason the dance is the way it is, is because
of them," she says.
The challenge in creating
the dance, she says, was to come up with something that has meaning
for both the youths and the older people in the audience. Parker
chose to "make it out of what they give you," incorporating
dancing in circles, voiced wishes for the earth, and a good bit
of "running around with a streamer."
"The audience
is almost like the little girls," Parker says. "It's
okay if they come and have a good time and maybe they'll see something
significant happen for someone else and that will make a difference
for them. Or maybe it will mean something to them that we're all
in a circle, or maybe it will mean something to them to hear a
little girl give her wish. And that's plenty."
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