Cornfield in the meadow, free from Windhover

Aug. 13—You don't have to be a contemporary dance aficionado to love the Cornfield Dance Company, but if you are, you are in for a major treat. Named for its founder and artistic director, Ellen Cornfield, the New York-based company has, since its founding in 1989, been bringing to stages the spirit and inventiveness of mid-20th century American contemporary dance, seen through a 21st century lens. Those stages include city streets and cultural and academic performance centers across the U.S. and in the capitals of the world.

Next week, it's Cape Ann's turn to be dazzled when Rockport's Windhover Center for Performing Arts premieres Cornfield's latest piece, "Wasp in the Window," in two performances on its outdoor stage and two more at free, public events in Rockport's Millbrook Meadow (see If You Go).

This summer marks a second residency in a row at Windhover for the Cornfield Company, and "The Wasp in the Window" grew out of its first Windhover residency in 2021. The piece is described as "a meditation on the dark and the light sides of life that coexist with surprising regularity."

For Lisa Hahn, who since the death of her mother, Ina Hahn in 2016, has been managing and directing Windhover, the Cornfield Company's return residency is part of what she calls "a plethora of dance" at Windhover this summer. Cornfield's young dancers, says Hahn, "bring to life Cornfield's elegant, robust, and at times quirky choreography." Their proficient technicality and what one dance reviewer called "kinetically expressive" energy creates a dance architecture that celebrates movement that can by turns be colorful and playful, or — as perhaps is the case with "The Wasp in the Window," meditative.

The company will also show its versatility with "Squaring into Space," a dance that incorporates material from two of its repertory pieces, with music composed and performed live by composer and long-time Cornfield Dance collaborator Andreas Brade.

Cornfield was for eight years, 1974 to 1982, one of the most revered dancers and in the company of choreographer Merce Cunningham (1919-2009), who in turn was one of the most revered pioneers of mid-20th century modern American dance.

Cornfield, who taught for years at the Merce Cunningham Studio in mid-town Manhattan, will readily say that her vibrant, "full-throttled" work is influenced by Cunningham, but it is also influenced by a compendium of American modern dance pioneers, who, as the 20th century evolved, influenced each other along their way to inventing a dance medium that, though rooted in classical training, was like nothing the classical dance world had ever seen.

A next generation product of that earlier generation of modern dance inventors, Cornfield is, like them, driven by art, not money, and her company is supported through grants from leading arts and cultural foundations, including The Barishnikov Dance Center, the Harkness Foundation for Dance and the Ford Foundation. Her workshops are laboratories of ongoing invention not unlike those raw space studios in mid 20th century New York City that gave birth to a new language of movement, sound and light that would eventually draw superstars of classical dance including, from Russia's great Bolshoi Ballet Company, Rudolph Nureyev, Mikhael Barishnikov, who said "I want to be influenced by others," and George Balanchine, who — as artistic director of the New York City Ballet— would revolutionize classical ballet through modern dance movement.

The many influences of mid-20th century dance pioneers are all present in Cornfield's choreography. Her small but mighty troupe of dancers — young, vibrant, well trained and fiercely dedicated — can, in the course of a performance, combine moves pioneered not just by Cunningham, but his mentor, Martha Graham, who also mentored Paul Taylor, who mentored Twyla Tharp, Katherine Dunham who influenced Alvin Ailey, and so on.

All of them, in turn, were influenced by first-generation pioneers of modern dance, such as Ted Shawn, who in turn was influenced by dance from the cultures of Asia, Africa, South America and beyond.

Shawn was also the founder in 1933 of the legendary Jacob's Pillow, a summer laboratory for modern dancers which was created in the Berkshires from farm buildings surrounding a barn which served as a dance studio. I

na Hahn, who along with her husband Hans Hahn in 1969 would found Windhover Center for the Performing Arts in Rockport, studied at Jacob's Pillow in 1949, and it obviously made an impression.

Windhover, like Jacobs Pillow, also began as a farm, its picturesque barns and building converted to house summer dance workshops.

For Cornfield, who may have seen Windhover as a living homage to Jacob's Pillow, that first residency at Windhover must have felt like coming home.