Alumni create moving tribute to movement

'Muscle Memory' is a multimedia undertaking exploring creativity, aging, and the gifts of the UC Santa Cruz dance program

"Muscle Memory" will be an interactive project about memory, dance, collaboration, and the pursuit of a creative life.

For a moment in the film, they look like students dancing amid the campus redwoods. Then, the camera moves in and the truth is revealed in the greying hair and the wrinkles that were not there before.

The dancing men and women are UC Santa Cruz alumni who graduated more than 30 years earlier and returned to the campus as part of a documentary film project being undertaken by alumna and filmmaker Mary Trunk.

Titled “Muscle Memory,” the multimedia undertaking explores the idea of creativity, of aging, and of what the UC Santa Cruz dance program gave to a small group of people who insist it changed their lives.

“Because the time period was so important to me, I had to reinvestigate it,” says the 54-year-old Trunk (Porter ’84, theater arts), who now teaches documentary filmmaking and film production at two Southern California colleges. “I wanted to see if I could reignite those feelings in me. To see if I could move again.”

To hear Trunk and others in the short film tell it, UCSC’s dance department in the 1980s was a place ripe with experimentation and risk-taking. Influential choreographers like Betty Walberg, national medal of arts winner Meredith Monk, and post-modern dance originator Robert Ellis Dunn were brought in to teach, next to Theater Arts Professor Ruth Solomon, who once created an entire village out of wood and stone for one of her dance pieces.

Students explored social and personal topics and pushed boundaries. Trunk, for instance, remembers once taping garbage to the walls of the dance studio for a piece. Their bodies grew taut from grueling technique classes. They learned about collaboration and finding their creative spirit through choreography.

“It felt like it was this incredible fertile place that just kept us making work and creating things and you never felt discouraged,” Trunk says. 

The result, says Trunk and two other dance alumni in the film, was the cultivation not only of creativity but also of a confidence that has continued in their lives.

Terri Jones (Merrill ’83, theater arts) who danced in New York before returning to California where she now manages a specialized veterinary practice in San Francisco, says her time at UC Santa Cruz “allowed me to build a strong foundation to go out into the world. I foolishly thought I could conquer anything and that has served me well in my life.”

She tells the story of coming back to California from New York without a job and opening a phone book to an ad for an automotive school. She enrolled and became a Japanese-car specialist for 10 years.

“I think what I learned [from dance] is that you don’t know what you’re capable of until you try it,” she says.

Kiera Coffee (Porter ’85, theater arts), who is a writer and stylist living in Brooklyn, says the dance program at UC Santa Cruz helped her develop a kind of hyper awareness of others and her surroundings that is an important part of her work.

It was those kinds of experiences, according to Trunk, that drew alumni from as far away as Toronto and New York to the UC Santa Cruz campus for a four-day filming session in June in which they not only danced but also choreographed pieces. The project will eventually include archival dance footage, an original soundtrack, and an interactive website, Trunk says.

And while some of the dancers lament their stiff bodies, their lost technique, and the fact they hadn’t danced in nearly a quarter of a century, they have no regret about their experiences at UC Santa Cruz.

“At the time we felt like we were doing new things and people encouraged us,” Trunk says. “We were sort of in our own little world but it was a magical place and it worked and so you felt worthy.”