Dance Pioneer Langstaff’s FLOCK Will Reprise ‘Go! Move! Shift!’

FFLOCK's current production explores the topic of people displaced from their homes. Performances are at the Star Moiuntain Amphitheater in Sharon on two successive weekends, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, July 13, 14, and 15 and 20, 21, and 22 at 6:30 p.m. For more information visit www.flockdance.org.

By John Freitag

Vermont has always had a way of drawing creative interesting people to its hills and valleys, and artist Carol Langstaff has always been a person ahead of her time. Not only did she come to Vermont far earlier than most of the modern migration, she also has a uncanny way of sensing change and incorporating into her work themes that are often only an undercurrent for most of us.

For example, while the issue of immigration is just now coming to a head, four years ago Langstaff created a full-length dance/theater production around the issue of the uprooting of the world's traditional cultures by environmental, commercial, and military disruptions. Fortunately for those of us who have come late to this important issue, this July there will again be performances of her work "Go! Move! Shift! at the Star Mountain Amphitheater in Sharon.

The daughter of singer/performer John Langstaff and traditional music collector Diane Hamilton, Carol first came to Vermont in the early 60s to finish her last three years of high school at the Woodstock Country Day School. She arrived on the old mail train in White River Jct. and spent her first night in the state at the Hotel Coolidge. She immediately felt an affinity to the area and after graduating kept coming back while studying dance with Martha Graham, and drama at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York City and music at the Longy School in Cambridge Mass.

Eventually, Langstaff ended up renting a cabin for $25 per month from John and Shirley Pease in Tunbridge while looking for a small farm on a back road, years before this kind of thing became popular and while prices for such places were still incredibly low. She found her home on a beautiful piece of property bordering the Downer State Forest. There she says she was looked after by Eric and Betty LaWhite, who served as mentors for rural living, and Sharon Road Commissioner Ken Chase, who knew that she taught music at local schools and made sure she could get out during winter and mud season.

While raising three children on this small farmstead, Langstaff also began to use her talents to put together unique productions that involved music, dance, and tradition. In 1971, she started the Christmas Revels in Cambridge and managed the productions there for 25 years. Building on the success there, she brought the Christmas Revels to the Hopkins Center in Hanover, where it has remained a popular annual event.

Annual Christmas Revels now also take place in New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Houston and Washington D.C. In addition, celebrations of other seasons and sources of inspiration have led Langstaff to develop Country Revels, Sea Revels, Shaker Revels and Spring Revels. A constant theme in all the Revels was the sense of place and connection to the earth reflected in song, and dance

Beginning in the early 1980s, Langstaff felt the need to move beyond traditional celebrations to productions that where she could have a freer hand in design and add contemporary social commentary. Her "Button—Button A Dream of Nuclear War" was a large-scale production performed on the waste tailings of the Elizabeth Copper Mine at the height of tensions between the U.S. and Russia at the beginning of the Reagan Presidency. The production was taken on the road the following year in a number of communities in Vermont and made into a short powerful film.

In 1990, Langstaff created "Pilgrimage Home—A Vision of Our Healed Earth," and later, a United Nations Day observance, "Visions of Our Future."

In the mid 1990s, Langstaff served as executive director of the Connecticut Riverfest, a non-profit organization dedicated to educating and celebrating the Connecticut River watershed. There she brought together artists, educators, scientists, and ordinary citizens to focus on the life on the river and its importance in our lives.

In 1999, Langstaff started her dance/theater troupe FLOCK, creating six full-length dance works on environmental issues, media and consumerism, male and female energy, embracing death and dying, the need to be in the present, and with "Go! Move! Shift!" the dislocation of peoples from their native lands and the resulting loss of identity. An underlying theme through all the productions is the importance of and the need for rebuilding community in harmony with the natural world.

Langstaff’s theater troupe, FLOCK represents in itself this community building. As in her Revels productions, it combines virtuosic professional performers and community volunteers of all ages (from around three to around 80). The dancers and performers all become a part of a series of moving images that combined with music and the remarkably beautiful setting make for a magical experience.

In 2001, Langstaff and her husband Jim Rooney, a Grammy Award-winning record producer, started spending winters in Galway, Ireland. There she brought her FLOCK productions and developed international contacts with dancers, including performers from Japan, Zambia, and Ireland who will perform in this July’s production in Sharon.

Now in her 60s, Langstaff is not sure how much longer she will continue with FLOCK, as she finds her interests moving in the direction of working with people with disabilities. She says that people with special needs live much more in the present and often respond to dance and theater, where communication can be done without words.

However, this July for sure the music and dance will once again fill the space at the Star Mountain Amphitheater in Sharon and you are welcome to a part of it and the community that Langstaff creates.

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