Cori Terry, the founder of Wellspring/Cori Terry & Dancers, wants to make it clear: She is not retiring. She is, however, stepping down as artistic director of her namesake company on Sept. 1.
“I will still be teaching and choreographing, but I was ready to hand over leadership,” Terry says. Associate Artistic Director Marisa Bianan, a company member since 2018, will lead the company’s creative direction going forward (see story at right).
After 43 years with Wellspring, 92 works choreographed, 50 company members and many awards, the 71-year-old Terry is well deserving of recognition, given how much the dancer, choreographer, teacher and artist has contributed to the arts in Southwest Michigan.
“She never missed a year creating at least one or two new works, and her perseverance is incredible,” says longtime Wellspring board member Judah Gesmundo, who recently stepped down after 27 years on the board and who has known Terry for nearly 50 years, the two having studied dance together in New York.
“It’s rare to have a modern dance company in a city of any size, much less in a mid-sized town like Kalamazoo,” Gesmundo continues. “I’ve always been moved by her choreographic genius, her ability to express through the human body her uncompromising aesthetic vision, and how she gathered around her a company of dancers that could beautifully articulate the vision.
“Having a creative voice like hers has been critical to the diversity of the creative landscape of our community. We have great theater and music, and we need modern dance in that mix.”
Meant for modern dance
Terry’s interest in dance started early, but it wasn’t typical. “I don’t actually fit the mold of a little girl watching a ballet and deciding that’s what I wanted to be when I grew up,” Terry says. Instead, she started dance lessons at age 3 with former Martha Graham dancer Marjorie Mazia.
As Terry was raised in Brooklyn, her family routinely attended theater, music and dance performances, and she remembers seeing dance legend Merce Cunningham’s company with her mother as a teen.
“Neither one of us liked it, and we left,” she says, laughing while describing loud, grating music and performers doing headstands or aimlessly wandering the stage.
At 17, Terry headed to the State University of New York at Stonybrook. There was no dance department, but she took dance classes through the physical education department with Katherine Iverson, who had performed with dance pioneer Bella Lewitzky.
Two freshman-year field trips to Manhattan shaped Terry’s thinking about women on stage. The first, Broadway’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, sparked a strong feminist revulsion.
“There were half-dressed women parading around like strippers in bikinis. Not one had a speaking part.
They were just highly sexualized bodies, and I really hated it,” she recalls.
Seeing a performance by the dance company of Erick Hawkins (former husband to modern dance pioneer Martha Graham) was a different experience, to say the least, and one that seeded Terry’s future.
“This was the other end of the spectrum — all these intent dancers, serious and smart and focused and regal,” she says. “I had never seen anything like it before. There was a lot of stillness, which was new for me. What was I supposed to look at? But I liked it.”
After her freshman year, Terry spent the first of five summers at a dance intensive at American University, in Washington, D.C., where she saw Hawkins’ dancers “wearing leotards with no tights, swinging their limbs, doing all these flowing movements. They looked like grazing animals, and that was it. For the next 10 years of my life, I was a devotee.”
From NYC to WMU
Terry quit college after two years, moving to New York and working as a clerk in the fashion district to pay for rent and dance classes.
She joined the Erick Hawkins Company in 1974, a tenure that saw her performing at Carnegie Hall, in Europe and throughout the U.S. In 1980, she was invited to serve as an artist-in-residence with Western Michigan University’s dance department.
“I moved to the Vine neighborhood directly from the East Village and loved it from the minute I got here. Kalamazoo is big enough and small enough, and it’s such an artsy place. It seemed like all I met were artists.”
It was at the end of that residency that she launched Wellspring/Cori Terry & Dancers. Over the four decades that she’s headed the Wellspring dance company, it has evolved from her original vision.
“When I started, I was focused on my own voice and career and choreography, my own teaching. After about 20 years, I shifted focus to the dancers and the audience. I wasn’t doing it for me anymore. I wanted the dancers to have something to dance about, and I wanted to give the audience — who has supported us with money, attendance and love — a good show, an evening out, a sense of community and connection.”
The company’s longest-serving member, Alexis Smith, has performed in 67 of Terry’s works. She now serves as the company’s rehearsal director, instructor and occasional choreographer.
“Cori has been a friend and a mentor to me,” says Smith. “She has taught me about process and patience and self-trust. She has also exemplified incredible perseverance in her unwavering desire to create, to find that grit and that clarity of purpose. That’s why we are still here after four decades. She has built something that’s sustainable, that will continue.”
When thoughts of stepping away started creeping in for Terry, she consulted with Smith, who recommended that she consider company member Marisa Bianan, saying “You’ve been waiting for Marisa your whole adult life.” Terry agreed.
“When Marisa Bianan came to an audition six years ago,” Terry says, “my immediate response was, ‘That’s her!’ She’s such an impressive person in every way, very powerful as a dancer, choreographer and person. She’s one of those people who doesn’t have a big ego and is really into the work itself.”
A few years into Bianan’s tenure as a dancer with the company, she asked Terry for a support letter in order to apply to another company. It was then that Terry realized she had to ‘fess up.
“I said, ‘Oh, no! I was thinking you might take over Wellspring someday!’ It just came out of me, and that started our dialogue and a three-year transition process,” says Terry.
Kate Yancho, Wellspring executive director since 2016, says the company will continue its robust dance-education program, its concerts in November and May, and its hosting of the annual Midwest RADFest (Regional Alternative Dance Fest) in March. Grant funding has supported the digitizing of Terry’s catalog of choreography and the organization of a database of the company’s costume archive.
Terry’s contributions to dance and to the community have garnered her the Community Medal of Arts Award from the Arts Council of Greater Kalamazoo, the YWCA’s Woman of Achievement Award, and the Great Lakes Community Arts Award from the Michigan Association of Community Arts Agencies.
With many laurels to rest upon, Terry is rightfully proud of her dance company’s longevity.
“I’m proudest of the fact we have survived this long,” she says. “There aren’t many who could say they’ve had a company this long. Somehow through the years I’ve managed to change and evolve enough with the times and the company while holding onto the essence of what Wellspring is.
a Bianan has had a passion for choreography since she was young. “I would scribble choreography in the pew at church,” she says, smiling.
