ABSTRACT
Next we set the programs for the first season, 1976-77. Each program had its own logic. The Joffrey Ballet, a young, talented and popular company, would lead off. Next would come Martha Graham, the master of modern dance and a national living treasure. Then Twyla Tharp, the leading innovator of the period, followed by the Pennsylvania Ballet, an outstanding regional company. The final program would be a dance documentary, Trailblazers of Modern Dance. (To reproduce now the productions we taped 25 years ago would cost twice the money. In 1976 our budgets were between $300,000 and $500,000 per show.)
The nagging fact was that we were not overflowing with experience in presenting dance, especially on a continuing basis. Jac Venza, the executive producer, had long championed dance on television and had produced most of the programs during the decade before Dance in America. Emile Ardolino, coordinating producer, had studied ballet and had filmed dances for the archives of the Dance Collection of the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center. Judy Kinberg, associate producer, had been my production assistant at CBS; dance was a foreign language to her. I was the series producer and was scheduled to do most of the directing. For the eclectic Camera Three, which CBS delighted in referring to as “a stroll through the marketplace of ideas,” I had directed several dance programs. I remember six half-hours that included Merce Cunningham, Twyla Tharp, and Maurice Béjart. (Two of those half-hours are as bad, as boring, and as uninformed as any television I have seen.)
I was not to be the only director for the series. There would be others as inexperienced as we were; and if I knew directors, each would have his very own ideas. As series producer I wanted each program to look as if it had been sired by the same father. I wanted each director to rein in his own personal impressions (“This is how I feel about this dance; this is what it means to me.”) and think of himself as an accompanist for the ideas and intentions of the choreographer.
