In a 1913 photograph that has become an iconic representation of the Women’s Suffrage Movement, Inez Milholland Boissevain, a New York lawyer and prominent suffragist sits proudly atop a white horse at the head of an activist procession in Washington, D.C.
An elegant white cape falls in ripples around the horse’s flanks and a tiara crowns Boissevain’s flowing curls.
She exudes strength and beauty. Around her, other suffragists, one holding an American flag, are dressed in contrasting black attire. It’s an image that conjures heroic women like Joan of Arc and Artemisia I of Caria, an ancient Greek queen.
“It is very powerful. … This is the woman warrior right here,” said Karen Shulda, of Shelburne Falls, director of “Gloria,” a multi-discipline performance honoring the legacy of suffragists like Boissevain taking place this weekend. “That’s why we chose simple costumes: white. … We’re not wearing hats. We’re not wearing raincoats, which the suffragists often did because they picketed the White House in the rain.”
2020 marks the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, the culminating event of the Women’s Suffrage Movement, guaranteeing and protecting American women’s constitutional right to vote. In honor of the historic political step, “Gloria,” a free production that features dance, song and creative narration, will take place Sunday in the backyard of Shulda’s Shelburne Falls home. Audience space is extremely limited due to social distancing requirements and, as of Thursday, there were no more spaces available. Donations will be accepted.
While this will be the performance’s 2020 premiere, it was first put on last Dec. 11 for the Shelburne Falls Area Women’s Club. And if all goes well this weekend, there’s a possibility that “Gloria” will hold an encore performance next month.
“The program, basically, consists of narrative snippets that tell a little bit of the progress of the Suffrage Movement. They’re very short and, I hope, telling,” Shulda explained. “Dance is in many ways like poetry; it compresses images. It doesn’t tell a literal story, but it tells an emotional one. We go from narrative to song, back to narrative, to another song, to dance.”
In pacing, “Gloria” follows the linear timeline of the women’s movement, starting in the early 1900s. But while historically accurate, Shulda says it’s intended to primarily capture the emotion of the era as opposed to its details — the decades of struggle, pain and the final triumph experienced by women activists who would not give up in the face of unrelenting challenges. In this endeavor, Shulda noted the medium of dance provides an ideal vehicle. Compared to other artistic mediums, dance is limited in its ability to relay specific information. In “Gloria,” that limitation “becomes (a) strength because you have to focus more on things that are symbolic, that are more poetic. … It has choreographic detail, but the lack of historic detail means you rely on emotional nuances of history.”
This nuance was well received by the audience at “Gloria’s” first performance last year.
“The experience of the audience in that premiere performance was very immediate — their response was very visceral. I had people coming up to me saying they were in tears; that they didn’t exactly know why they were in tears, but it was very moving,” Shulda said.
Among the audience members in December was Michael McCusker, owner of the Bridge of Flowers CoWorking Business Center. According to Shulda, he was so moved by the performance that he decided to sponsor this weekend’s showcase.
Since then and taking into account social distancing concerns, Shulda and her crew have been rehearsing the choreography and fine-tuning everything for Sunday’s show.
The performance, which has been carefully designed by Shulda with input from the piece’s six performers, is comprised of two Irving Berlin songs (included to create emotional juxtaposition) by singer Carmela Lanza-Weil and accompanist Laura Josephs and two dances. The artistic vignettes are threaded together by narration delivered by Louella B. Atherton, of Bernardston, whose mother, Julia Louise Pratt Barber, cast her first-ever vote in the November 1920 election — a local story, among others, that will be featured in Sunday’s production. Barber wrote about that historic occasion in her diary, which was passed down to Atherton.
Compared to famous suffragists like Boissevain, who sacrificed everything for the betterment of society, “The story of Julie Louise is a contrast to that. It tells the story of a woman who was not a suffragist, nor was she somebody who was breaking down barriers. She was a local woman who grew up on a hardscrabble farm (in Bernardston),” Shulda said. “She is an example of the women who could not — and that would include most women — participate in the Suffrage Movement for a variety of reasons. It wasn’t approved by husbands, by brothers, by fathers. Most women lived very confined and constrained lives. The coming of the right to vote really gave them a voice. It gave a voice to the voiceless. The story of Julie Louise is a story of one of those women who was, in a very public way, voiceless.”
The estimated 40-minute production culminates with “Gloria,” an original dance choreography by Shulda and the performance’s namesake that’s set to the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
“It’s martial. It’s triumphant: ‘Mine eyes have seen the glory.’ It is an anthem; it’s anthemic,” Shulda said. “It evokes the struggles as well as the camaraderie of the women who made up the Suffrage Movement. It shows images of long ing, determination, struggle, bonding and camaraderie, pain and triumph — all compressed into 6 minutes — perhaps even less, 5 minutes.”
The other dance piece included in the production is notably by Isadora Duncan, a famed American dancer who rose to acclaim in Europe during the early 1900s, according to Shulda, who is herself classically trained in Duncan’s methods.
“Isadora is known as the ‘Mother of Modern Dance’ and the piece that is included here is called the ‘Revolutionary,’” Shulda said, noting it was choreographed by Duncan in support of the Russian Revolution. “She was a champion of the oppressed, especially women.”
“Revolutionary” will be performed Sunday by Cynthia James, a local dancer whom Shulda describes as an exceptional talent.
“She is principally an Isadora Duncan-style dancer and she is impressive — she is a fourth-generation Isadora Duncan dancer, in a direct artistic lineage from Isadora Duncan,” Shulda said, noting that James is one of four dancers, including Shulda. The others are Ella Cottrill, the youngest at 14 years old, and Colleen Rauch, a local dancer.
Shulda, who grew up dancing and attended the University of Massachusetts Amherst for English, trained with various dance teachers in New York including Don Farnworth and Peff Modelski and performed with the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance in New York City. Later, Shulda moved to New Orleans where she started her own dance company, Ballet Renversé, which she operated for a decade before moving back to her native region of Franklin County. In Shelburne Falls, Shulda changed Ballet Renversé’s focus from “from a professional company to a student company, training children and adults,” and managed the business until her retirement in 2016.
In a way, “Gloria” came about because of her efforts at the school. In teaching, Shulda became friends with Rauch, then an adult ballet student who later became a colleague; the concept for “Gloria” emerged through their friendship.
“She was often the stage manager for Ballet Renversé. As a student, she became interested in the Women’s Suffrage Movement and (did) research. It was an individual interest that she pursued as a student,” Shulda said. “Colleen and I began working on dance vocabulary for this piece as an outgrowth of ballet classes that we did together … ‘Gloria’ began to emerge as we talked about the possibility of honoring women’s suffrage through dance and images. Once we put together something that resembled a skeleton, Ella came on board and we had a cast.”
While rooted in the past and intended to honor the work of the Women’s Suffrage Movement, Shulda noted the performance reverberates in the present: voter suppression continues to be an issue in modern-day America.
At the end of the dance piece “Gloria,” Shulda says the dancers strike a pose reminiscent of the “silent sentinels,” those brave women who unrelentingly picketed the White House despite the elements, the political opposition, the social oppression and the outright hate that was displayed toward them. The imagery is intended to show that, while progress has been made because of the heroic efforts of suffragists like Boissevain, the work of modern-day American women continues: “It’s a battle,” Shulda said.
In this, Shulda says she finds the Women’s Suffrage Movement to be “very inspiring. Among other things, it’s inspiring for its longevity. It took a ridiculous amount of time for powerful white men to accept women as equals, intellectually and socially — women who could think and therefore take an active role in their own lives. They weren’t even allowed to own property. It all became the property of the husband. And they didn’t have a lot of choices. Through this process of creating the dance, “Gloria,” and creating the production, “Gloria,” I have come to understand how persistent women had to be and how many barriers they had to knock down. And how they had to get knocked down themselves in order to achieve what we often so lightly dismiss as a dry civics lesson.”
Andy Castillo can be reached at acastillo@recorder.com.