Honorees, President Nazarian, Dr. Hutchinson, distinguished guests, friends.....

I am thrilled and delighted to be here, and I feel honored to have been asked to speak at this celebration of longevity, constancy and dedication, work and love, sweat and pain, beauty, truth, transformation, transcendence -- continuity that remains en route.

I wish first to share with you a scene that is indelibly etched in my heart. The clear picture of two women watching me dancing in a NY dance class 29 years ago. (I still remember the movement we were doing.) With my performer awareness and technique in peak form, I found myself slyly and a bit cockily jumping and kicking a little higher and spinning a bit longer than usual for no apparent reason, as the smiling and excited strangers peered through the open door of the modern dance studio. (by the way, as I recall, modern dance then, too, was, according to various media "in danger of dying," even during those boom years when we, as missionaries, spread the gospel of dancing throughout the USA and the world with the backing and seal of approval of the NEA.) After the class, these two modern - day de Medici visionaries approached me and simply, but directly, posed the question, "young man, can you choreograph the way that you can dance?" I hesitated; meanwhile, my diminuitive but powerful red - haired dancer friend, who also had taken the class, first elbowed me in the ribs, then spoke for me, "sure he can!" Thus began my life - changing collaboration with artists, Fannie Helen Melcer and Billie Ann Burrill, and my introduction to the Rhode Island College Dance Co. -- a state of mind as well as a training ground for thousands on both sides of the footlights -- an idea that persists to this day.

For four decades, one short of one half of a century, the vision of these two has remained courageous, central and clear. On their journey through storm and travail in service to dancing, the importance to them of dance and art has remained vital even as, in the unfortunate circumstance of Dr. Melcer, the tragedy of body systems began to betray. As we pause here on the edge of time at this oasis to revel, reflect and pay homage, it warms me to know that dancing, in its multitude of forms, remains alive here and continues on the trajectory started by Professor Burrill, even before I began my early dance training. A dance company established to fulfill a simple ancient function -- that of physical communication; still active, even as some nay sayers and false prophets deem some part of her a dying theatre form, based on statistical findings of low audience attendance. To this I throw down my gauntlet! If size of audience has become the only gauge to determine the life or death of this art form, then we need to ask much deeper societal questions of ourselves in our culture. As long as I, for one, continue to have the need to speak about things that I know not why, things I know not how, things I know not, but come to know through the empowering and transforming process of making dance..... I know it is alive because I am. I can no more not dance than to not breathe...and I donít mean aerobics or jitterbugging... at least, not today. I feel fortunate and grateful that dancing still holds for me all the beauty, mystery, question, joy and excitement that the cave drawings discovered in Africa must have held for our progenitors. The drawings are still here; some of us still draw. The now contemporary notion that the form called modern dance is dead, is ridiculous. The passion - driven revolutionary minds that created the heat which ultimately brought more light to the world of dancing never saw what they were doing as safe, static,popular, easy, comfortable or permanent...nor do I. In their dance, they asked big questions about living in a big world; with each newly discovered answer becoming, for them, the genesis of their next curiosity, question, and, finally, new choreography...as do I. When Fannie and Billie first invited me here to RIC in 1970 to make a new work, they took a chance in offering to me, a stranger, an arena in which to hone my craft of making dances based on what their perceptions of me were as a mover. (No guarantee of a choreographer there.) It was through their risk - taking that another facet of myself was realized and given the chance to grow. For that, I am eternally grateful. My ensuing 12 year collaboration with the Co. remains a testament to the vision of the revolutinist artists professors emeritae, Fannie Melcer and Billie Burrill, and to the transformative power of the art dance process; Iíve witnessed, innumerable times, what this process does in the shaping of young peoplesíminds....it ainít dead, nor will it die -- not even in our increasingly quantifying "theme park" culture where, often, quality seems to have become extinct. But we must remember that this time, on which art/dance has already commented.... is passing; it already was, and who knows, today could be the beginning of the time when weíll all, like sheep, flock back into the theatres, driven by a hunger to find and share something of value beyond a remote control.

History tells us that the Puritans thought of dance as work of the Devil. Lamentably, our home today, as we all so reassuredly know, is still a puritanical one. Perhaps that fact is part of the reason why that which we call art, or concert dance, is still not given credibility by our general public. When we consider the socio - religio - political sway of our country today, and the fact that dancing does involve using the body -- the whole organism, maybe this inherited Devil/evil fear accounts for lower attendance at dance performance, or perhaps, itís based simply on pre - conceived notions of the quality of work being presented today as translated for us by others. When human movement, the essential stuff of dance, is used in abstract ways that remind us that we are alive, feeling beings who are the essential ingredients in a single process of connectedness, we are moved deeply and inexplicably....and Iím all for being moved, whether it is made manifest through tears or laughter or through the joy of working with a young and talented dancer. When we hush and listen, as we are invited to do as audiences in the theatre, we are given the opportunity to look at ourselves in our human process through anotherís lens, not voyeuristically, but in new and different ways previously unthought of by us -- ways that often do, indeed, move us beyond cognition to where, as Blaise Pascal said, "The heart has its reason which reason does not know." Are we willing to risk that?

I certainly do not intend to preach to you here tonight, although my beloved and departed Mother, in her wisdom, informed me at a very tender age that that would be a part of my future. At that time, however, we had not the slightest inkling that my pulpit would be the stage and that my sermons, if you will, were to be spoken through a physical language; one that was discovered right here at RIC all those years ago ----where I was given, by two visionaries, a laboratory in which to hone my skills -- to facilitate speaking of the tragic reality and wonder of our human existence.

Fannie, Billie, Pat Cohen, Jennifer Cooke...... Christine, Doris, Angelo Rosati, and now, Dante del Giudice and all of you who have found cause or need to be a part of the life, thus far, of the RIC Dance Company, I salute you, my siblings, and say -- Onward! Hereís to fifty!