By Ellen Ashdown
Special to the Florida State Times

You're in the middle of a dusty floor, worn bare by thousands of feet before yours.

You can't hide behind your clothes, because you wear a covering like your skin equalizing you and all the others.

You're at a fever-pitch of attention, every muscle tensed.

Because you must MOVE - exactly as the commanding figure tells and shows you, no matter how fast, languid, elegant, flailing - trying to be not just right, but perfect.

It is a moment of truth: a test of skill and self. And you may fail.

Feeling a little too close to one of your sweat-soaked nightmares?


The scene is real, a sweat-soaked audition for the number-two ranked dance department in the country: Florida State. Students who pass will stay in audition for four years. And be grateful.

The ranking by Dance Teacher Now magazine, though recent, was 30 years in the making - a tribute to the pioneering efforts of FSU dance chairwoman Nancy Smith Fichter. Her peers across the country judged FSU's program second only to Ohio State University.

And no wonder: Fichter and Florida State have helped define university dance for every department in the country.

Years ago, the performing arts and Academe danced a cool, if not quite hostile, minuet. After all, dance professionals sneered, wasn't college dance just p.e. - or a mere pirouette away from Miss Dolly Dingle's Dancing School?

Today, Florida State graduates dance in more than 90 companies. Dance stars eagerly visit campus. And the faculty boasts artists from the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, Dance Theatre of Harlem, Julliard and the Bella Lewitzky Dance Company.

"The dream of a conservatory-within-the-university," says Fichter, "is in place." Most of her waking hours went into it. Fichter created the first dance major in Florida; the first BFA and MFA dance programs in the Southeast; the state dance association; and a regional repertory center that brings FSU more choreographies, classic and commissioned, than virtually any other university.

Yet "formidable administrator!" isn't the first praise from faculty and students. Supremely Southern, articulate, witty and warm, Fichter is above all a dancer and choreographer, passionately commited to art-making. Ballet faculty member Richard Sias believes "her own drive for excellence leaves the door totally open for us."


4, 6, 8 . . . 12 Days of Dance

The bedrock of FSU's program is superb technical training, along with highly professional performance. As Fichter puts it, "we mean business."
Every student, every day, takes a 90-minute class of modern dance and another of ballet.

They also take repertory classes. They take dance composition. They study (and make) music for dance. They sweat through hours of rehearsals that don't earn them course credit. They make non-dance roommates feel like slugs.

But bone-weary as the dancers get, this is what it's all about: driving themselves like professionals, with professionals. The annual student-faculty series Twelve Days of Dance (which began as Four Days, but steadily multiplied) offers three completely different concerts-and sells out every night.

"Unpredictable" puts it mildly. Lyrical ballets consort with hip-hop; student pieces may overshadow guest repertory. And when the final set is struck, auditions start for the year's major concert, Evening of Dance.

"Turning out dancing machines," though, was never Fichter's aim: "Our whole curriculum is about balance - between modern and ballet, theory and studio, tradition and the new, art and intellect - cultivating yourself as a human being."


Calloused feet, dancing minds

A day in the life of a dance major is definitely full-tilt forward: dance history, performance theory, a lecture by a national dance critic ... not to mention other university courses and the aforementioned sweating.

Exhilarating? Yes. But what about the perpetual audition? Few other university departments put students under such a microscope - or offer so much careful mentoring. Fichter and her faculty created an assessment program that student Amy Crandall admits, "some students think of as the firing squad.

"But it never happens that way. You may hear things you'd rather not, but it's part of life, a big part of dance. It helps."

Twice a year all faculty discuss every major; then studio faculty confer in more depth. "Delayed rewards" is Sias' take on this tough love. "In the first years, students may only hear, 'Fix this, do that,' and want us off their backs. By senior year, they know it's a rich gift. After they leave, they realize they'll never again have so many people fussing over them, giving them every chance."

Skill. Inspiration. Versatility. Thick skin. Precisely the qualities graduates need in the competitive and underfunded world of dance.

Former student Jawole Willa Jo Zollar drew surprised praise in New York because she "knew how to use time in a theater, with unions." Zollar now heads Urban Bush Women.
Crandall appreciates the "fantastic faculty who gave total support" but "made clear this isn't a nine-to-five, paycheck-on-Friday type of life."

Patty Phillips, a 1969 graduate who returned in 1992 as assistant department chair, has watched a generation of dance administrators "follow Nancy Fichter's choices."
For Phillips, "the only disadvantage of coming from FSU is that it's so perfect. You will never find conditions like these again-unless you do it yourself."