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SHE TAUGHT FSCW TO LISTEN TO THE BEAT OF A DIFFERENT DRUMMER
By Amy Zukeran
Special to the Florida State Times
When Nellie-Bond "Bondie" Dickinson stepped from the passenger train that brought her to Tallahassee to teach dance, Tennessee Street was a dirt road, horses grazed where the Bellamy Building now stands, and few Southerners had seen Dickinson's kind of dance.
Dickinson, who brought modern dance to Tallahassee, arrived dreaming of a world that would love the new art form. Through hard work, perseverance and a big dose of stubborn gumption, the vision became real.
Today, FSU's department of dance is among the top programs in the nation.
"It was an uphill fight not just for interpretive, or modern dance, but for dance to find a wider audience," recalled Mary Lou Norwood, a 1947 graduate.
At the time, Norwood said, Florida State College for Women had only two dance classes - English country dancing and tap. Dickinson's arrival at the college opened a new era of dance in the South.
In her time at the university, 1935 to 1963, Dickinson was unique.
"She marched to a different drummer," said Janet Wells, retired chairman of the physical education department and faculty member from 1957 to 1989. "She liked outrageous behavior, wore outrageous clothes, and she doesn't suffer fools gladly." While she was at Women's College, University of North Carolina, in Greensboro, a required dance class led to her life's passion.
Modern dance, which broke conventions of classical dance forms such as ballet, appealed to Dickinson's love of physical movement, music, theatre and the outrageous.
"I like that you're not supposed to do the same movements as they were doing for the last 100 years," she said from her home in Arlington, Va. Dickinson's first exposure to modern dance was Martha Graham's "Lamentation," which she saw in New York. (Dickinson earned a master's degree at Columbia University.)
With only her face visible, Graham was enshrouded in a white cloth as she swayed against the material that trapped her.
'Is this dance?" Dickinson recalled thinking as she watched Graham. "I couldn't imagine what it was. And the audience was so still and watching so quietly."
"When she finished, the house came down. I thought, 'If so many people are excited about that, I am sure I am missing something.' "
Dickinson's curiosity led her to study the Graham technique whenever she could. Armed with her knowledge, she arrived at FSCW in 1935 determined to create an audience for modern dance.
Louis Horst, another modern dance pioneer, had taught Dickinson and continued to encourage her. "He felt dance wouldn't be its own art form until it began to use elements of form that became its own," Dickinson said. "He also used 'dissonance of movement,' which reflected the stress of life in this world."
She introduced Tallahassee to Graham.
"Well, the curtain goes up, and then an arm appeared from behind a side curtain and started heading downward. And then slowly the rest of her body emerges and follows the arm straight down to the floor. At that moment I thought, ' Oh no, my job is gone.' "
The audience was "stunned. They didn't know what to think.
"Dance is a performing art that requires an audience that understands it. Every society has had a way to express itself, whether through carvings or painting or something else.
"A society without art doesn't, or can't, exist. It shows you something
you can appreciate but might never have thought about before."