Cheryl Wallace

Colleen Clark introduced me to Cheryl soon after I came to Cleveland in 1979. They had been school mates at Ohio University. Cheryl came to perform at the Styrene Studios which were located in the Industrial Park at East 40th and Superior. It was a small shoebox of a room with large windows at what served as the upstage border. The halls were long, cavernous and the stairwells dark. I brought Herb Ascherman to meet and photograph Cheryl in the building. The image that still haunts me to this day is one that Herb took in one of the stairwells of that building.

Cheryl was living in New York then, in a loft on Stone Street in the financial district. I was just beginning my work at CSU. It was the beginning of the 1980’s. We decided to present Cheryl’s company at the JCC. The house was three quarters full, and she danced The Streets Aren’t for Dreaming, Black Leather and other works that would live on in our memories.

Soon Cheryl met and fell in love with her costume designer’s talented musician son, Billy Larkin. The Wallace Larkin collaboration came to Cleveland to perform at the CSU Factory Theater. The director of the CSU program and I had determined to have a performance series, and Cheryl’s newly formed duet would launch a relationship with Cleveland audiences that continued for a decade. Billy was a genius at the keyboard. His talent and hers were perfectly matched. She was ignited, and the collaboration led to some of the most inspiring work I have seen on stage to date.

Copyright New York Times Company Nov 12, 1981 "Cheryl Wallace and William Larkin are engaging young performers, and their Duets: Solo Dance/Solo Piano, seen Saturday at Eden's Expressway, reflected that. If neither plumbed great artistic depths - or even small ones - they clearly have a solid collaboration going and their pleasure in it is infectious. The two, who worked together in Ohio before coming to New York, have similarly limited ranges. Mr. Larkin's piano pieces evoke both the French cafe music of Satie, with its lush, teasing melodious, and lulling present-day cocktail hour jazz. Miss Wallace is a lyrical dancer who, at times, seems merely swept along by the music. Her Toy opens wittily with stop-start halfturns across the floor to the rhythm of an irresistibly lilting waltz. She does tend to move with a tethered look and introduces such dramatic touches as the gestures of a tough little street kid in Black Leather and the ground-testing pawings of an animal in her inventive Ochre. But there is an uneasy sense throughout of dance that, left to its own devices, would simply wheel and dip the evening away." Jennifer Dunning, New York Times dance critic

The pair did not rest with conventional dance works as a repertoire. With Colleen and Billy’s studio partner, Chris Dahlgren, the quartet launched “movement, music and…”, collaborating with Thomas Mulready later. The group made such memorable works as Gaia, Couvade and Mud.

Cheryl served for a year as interim director of the CSU dance program. That may have been the highlight of the CSU dance program’s history. With such notable teachers in the studios as Colleen Clark, Karen Allgire and Cheryl Wallace, Mark Taylor and Mary Williford Shade, Art Bridgman and Myrna Packer, Doug Nielsen with Melanie Bales and Madeleine Scott with Keith Fleming as summerdance musician all available to students and audiences, the dance scene in Cleveland was getting a thoughtful infusion of growth. Unfortunately, due to a lack of foresight, hindsight or any real sight whatsoever, the administration at CSU decided to fill a PhD. quota instead of hiring Cheryl full-time as our continuing director. Cheryl didn’t have the credentials; she just had the knowledge and experience of the field. Things sort of spiraled away for us as a family from that moment onward. Colleen, Karen and I all eventually extricated ourselves from the shortsighted bureaucratic program at CSU and moved on to other things. Cheryl and Billy went to Cincinnati, where they continued to make dances and performance art works bringing them to Cleveland’s Performance Art Festival and back to Cain Park when we celebrated a decade of CSU summerdance.

But as important as the professional work we did together as dance colleagues was, the fact that Cheryl (and Colleen) taught me (and surely others) that dance and life are one and the same. Even when generations of dancers were still thinking that a child would be the end of their professional careers, we were having them, bringing them to studios and theaters, conferences and workshops. I can remember my husband walking up Lancashire Road in Cleveland Heights from our apartment with Colleen, Ariel (Colleen’s daughter), Mickey (our son) both 2 years old and riding in a stroller together, Mim (Cheryl and Billy’s daughter, 4 years old), me and a Cheryl who was pregnant with Liam (Cheryl and Billy’s son). Cheryl remarked to Jeffrey, “We are a bastion of fertility.” Indeed we were. The kids got together this past summer when Cheryl came to visit for Colleen’s birthday. Mim, Ariel and Mickey who spent so much time together as infants, toddlers and preschoolers reconnected as naturally as if they had last seen each other yesterday.

We never pricked our fingers and pressed them bleeding together to form a pact, but we are family all the same. I believe that it was a kind of real life humanity that colored the dance scene here in Cleveland during that era. It was not New York, where one might have to give oneself entirely to the art, fearing that a moment set aside to give birth or nurture an infant would set one too far behind the scrambling competition. Her children inspired her; Mim often providing movement material for her dances, and her struggle to be a woman, wife, mother, choreographer, performer, writer, teacher forming the basis for such memorable works as Mud, Couvade and On the Steps of the Conservatory.

Cheryl’s body is gone, but her work and her spirit, her progeny and her imagination live on with those of us fortunate to have known her, worked with her, seen her perform. As the Rabbi began to speak of her at her recent funeral service in Cincinnati, a loud rumble of thunder broke over the temple. We all laughed feeling that Cheryl was with us in that moment. Gone, but not forgotten. I kept remembering the movement that accompanied the line from Barthelme’s text to which she choreographed On the Steps of the Conservatory; “Still, it’s a blow, Maggie.”

Rememberance of Cheryl Wallace by Susan Miller millerbowenATadelphia.net

Photo of Cheryl Wallace by Herb Ascherman
This photo was taken April 1980 by Herbert Ascherman, Jr. in a stairwell of the industrial warehouse (E 40th and Superior Ave, Cleveland) where Cheryl performed as a guest of Colleen Clark. Cheryl appears luminescent, and prescient. The movement in her torso and hand belie the stillness and connectedness of her gaze. A 28 year old Cheryl prepares for her Cleveland debut.

There will be a celebration of Cheryl Wallace's life and work at The Dance Hall in Cincinnati on Saturday, 3/1, 2006 from 7PM to Midnight. Please send e-mail to Colleen Clark (leendance@sbcglobal.net) if you'd like to caravan or carpool there, or if you'd like to contribute stories, memories, words of tribute. She'll carry them down and read and/or give them to her kids. (:divend:)