A Leap to the West: Barbara Mettler and the Making of the Tucson Creative Dance Center

The Tucson Creative Dance Center shortly after its completion in 1963.

By the time Barbara Mettler decided to leave Boston and venture west in the early 1960s, she had already led an impressive life. Her extraordinary self- discipline and unique vision had resulted in several successive incarnations of her school, a well-received national tour with her company, the publication of her books and films about her radical approach to dance, and a devoted student following. She could have stopped there and felt a justified sense of estimable accomplishment, especially considering what she had endured to achieve that much. The Boston sojourn, however, had never been more than a stopover for her, a time to consolidate her efforts and publish her ideas. When the way finally became clear for her to take her work west, Mettler was ready to leap and explore once again. All of her accomplishments and travails were soon to feed into the glorious second half of her remarkable life. As she contemplated leaving the East behind, future decades of even broader success and fulfillment lay ahead, but how could any artist have possibly known such a thing and counted on it? In her mid-fifties by then, Barbara Mettler, had no doubt felt the new chill that seeps into one’s bones at that age, the realization that, no matter how open-ended and promising everything might have seemed throughout earlier decades of her life, the years remaining were not Dobson /A Leap to the West 2 numberless. For any ambitious artist with big dreams still waiting to be brought to life, there is never time to waste. Once again Barbara Mettler had to muster every bit of her considerable courage, stubbornness, and conviction to head west, just as some of her maternal ancestors had done when they sought the pioneering life in Illinois. She often proudly acknowledged that pioneer heritage. It is actually a wonder Barbara Mettler lasted in the East as long as she did. Few Midwesterners ever feel totally at home in the East, no matter what the attraction or how long the stay. Although Barbara Mettler always thrived on a diet of high-minded culture, for which Boston is known perhaps more than any other city in America, even in the world of fine art she played the role of rebel and had necessarily butted heads repeatedly with eastern cautiousness and traditionalism. Her very nature went against the grain in Boston. Midwesterners are born with a smile on their faces and a right hand extended in a ready handshake. Straightforward openness comes standard. Cool Yankees have difficulty relating to it. The bluebloods and bluestockings would never have admitted Mettler as a full member, nor would she ever have wanted such membership. She knew all along that she would always be happier on a frontier, both literally and figuratively. Actually, no big city ever would have suited her for the long haul. It was not just Boston, but urban life itself that Barbara Mettler chafed at as a true child of nature. Now, just as she had left New York City for rural New Hampshire, she left downtown Boston for the Arizona desert, thereby embodying her own theory about the rhythmic pulse inherent in all life. After years in the city, it was time once again for direct contact with the natural world. How did Mettler survive the narrow brownstones of the Back Bay for as many years as she did? No doubt her feelings on leaving Boston were quite mixed, but oh, the relief to leave it all behind! To run and skip and fly and soar toward the unknown expanse of the West! If nothing else, room to move! She had no idea what glories the Sonoran Desert held in store for her. Many an artist and spiritual seeker before and after her has felt the mysterious pull of the West. In fact, Barbara Mettler preceded a vast influx of them by just a few years. Throughout the 1970s Tucson, Arizona, in particular would draw huge numbers of young people seeking a more expanded life, something new, a fresh start, a warmer and friendlier universe. Mettler would zero in on Tucson for similar reasons, build herself the studio of her dreams, and Dobson /A Leap to the West 3 set herself on a course that would soon cross the paths of many of these young seekers. But, just as in an improvised dance, she knew she had to begin, had to trust, had to feel that the adventure would bear fruit. Barbara Mettler believed in herself, that much is for sure. At this point in her life, she was still quite strong, fairly healthy, and determined as ever. It took courage to leave everything behind and start over completely. It proved to be the right choice. In the dance of her life, it was definitely the next right move, the perfect organic development. Now the intrepid pioneer sets forth in her 1953 Ford sedan, her own Conestoga, for the West! Who among her students does not relish the mental image of Barbara Mettler tootling along cross-country in that car, sitting up perfectly straight with up-thrust chin and peering down her nose toward the new horizon? Mettler’s first Arizona teaching seems to have been workshops in December 1960 in Phoenix and Tempe. Then, preceded by her usual supremely professional publicity in the form of a brochure touting her accomplishments and reputation, she taught an intensive workshop at Arizona State College in Flagstaff in February 1961 for a group of fifty college students, about half of them men. Mettler settled in at the Cedar Post Motel while she explored her new environment. 1 She taught again at Arizona State College for two weeks in July specifically for students interested in learning more about teaching her approach. She also taught a more mixed group of art students, dance teachers, and Sedona residents at a five-week summer course immediately afterwards at the Art Center of Arizona State University in Sedona. The school made graduate credit available for both courses. Before this trip Mettler had probably never visited the property she had purchased sight unseen in Sedona during the 1953-54 tour in hopes of settling there immediately after the tour. When she finally got to see it eight years later, she no doubt found the environment enchanting. Sedona boasts one of the most beautiful settings in America, at the mouth of Oak Creek Canyon with its famous dramatic red rock formations. The town was vigorously promoting itself as an arts center, but Mettler ultimately decided that it was still just too remote to be practical for a studio she expected would have numerous students coming and going constantly and needing transportation, housing, and various accessible facilities. She visited Albuquerque, New Mexico, briefly but dismissed it as “too windy,” according to Will Carbo. 2 It was time to head for Tucson, about a four- hour drive to the south. She had taught a brief workshop one evening at the Dobson /A Leap to the West 4

Tucson Art Center in February 1961. By the fall of that year she had moved her entire operation to Tucson. Although Mettler later stated that she could have settled almost anywhere, because the dance challenges at that time were the same everywhere in America, there now seems, in hindsight, a kind of perfect destiny about her choice of Tucson as her next home. With a population of about 200,000, Tucson in 1961 was just beginning to emerge from its sleepy past as a former frontier town and enter into the transformation that took it to major city status over the next few decades. Despite a limited economic base consisting primarily of the University of Arizona and Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Tucson exuded a certain flair and mystique as a sort of mythological western town turned winter resort haven. Barbara Mettler participated in the beginning of its boom. Tucson, nonetheless, for all its urban development, still vibrates with a kind of subtle ancient magic available to one who notices. There is an unmistakable spiritual quality to deserts, and many of the world’s great religions have arisen from them. Tucson, at the northern edge of the Sonoran Desert, is indeed a powerful place, inhabited by Native Americans for eons and still today home to the O’odham (formerly Papago) and more recently the Yaqui from Mexico, with other Native peoples surrounding it in all directions. Visible about fifty miles to the southwest is a sharp peak called Baboquivari, or Waw Kiwulik in the language of the O’odham, who consider this sacred mountain the center of the universe. 3 Native peoples have been living—and dancing—in the Tucson area for a very long time. Mettler acknowledged these venerable cultures early on, 4 and she eventually taught workshops and presented her performing groups at many of the Indian reservations. These Native people would prove to be some of her most sensitive and appreciative audiences. To a new arrival Tucson can be utterly enchanting. In spring the orange trees’ intoxicating perfume wafts through the entire town. The sky is huge and accommodating, the prickly vegetation otherworldly, the atmosphere generally soft and mild. The cooing of Inca and white-winged doves and the small squawks of Gambrel’s quail form a soothing soundtrack always playing in the background. The place has a social atmosphere to match: laidback, easygoing, live-and-let-live. It is the major liberal pocket in a conservative state. The valley in which Tucson is located is surrounded by four mountain ranges, one at each of the cardinal directions, making it a protected spot that has a distinctly womb-like feel. It is, in fact, separated by long distances from other urban centers, the closest being Dobson /A Leap to the West 5

Phoenix, two hours’ drive to the north, and the next closest being San Diego and Los Angeles, eight and ten hours to the west. The relative isolation nurtured the kind of intense concentration Mettler wished to pursue and at the same time minimized competition and criticism from other dancers. Tucson is a unique place, and there is a do-it-yourself quality to the town that was an excellent fit for Mettler’s do-it-yourself dance. At best, Tucson would welcome her and support her experimental endeavors; at the very least, she would have room to function on her own terms and be left alone. As she noted, “The relaxed atmosphere of life in the Southwest suited our creative approach to dance.” 5 She had, however, learned her lesson about good community relations from the New Hampshire studio fire. She named her new creation the Tucson Creative Dance Center / Mettler Studios. If it seemed perhaps a bit presumptuous, it succeeded in giving the studio and her work the appearance of being a very public institution from the start. On Mettler’s part Tucson was pretty much love at first sight. For one thing, Tucson allowed her to be close to nature while still being in an urban area, as required by her work. Nature is unavoidable in Tucson. It is constantly in your face in the most wonderful ways. The weather, the elements, the mountains, the sky, the cactuses and desert trees, the wildlife—even in the middle of the city it is possible to feel deeply connected to nature in this desert valley. The spectacular sunsets and the intensely dramatic summer thunderstorms are overwhelming. Although Mettler later said that the desert had always attracted her, with its “vast emptiness,” 6 the Sonoran Desert actually teems with life. In an interview in the Tucson paper in 1962, she admitted to being a little surprised by it the reality of it: “I had rather thought of the West being like Illinois.” 7 Whether or not she said this for humorous effect, Tucson is a challenging and delightful surprise for any newcomer. For Mettler it was a strange new world, but a delicious and inviting one. It was also affordable. It had been clear for many years that she needed a year-round studio in which to hold classes and continue production of books and films. I remember clearly Mettler telling us in the 1970s that she would never have been able to build a studio like the Tucson Creative Dance Center in New England; the cost of heating and insulation alone would have been prohibitive. Tucson’s mild winters made building a studio only one cinder block thick feasible. 8 Sedona, at a much higher elevation than either Scottsdale or Tucson, would have Dobson /A Leap to the West 6 proven too cold for Mettler to build an un-insulated studio there. So many things about Tucson were just right. The proximity to Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright’s winter headquarters near Scottsdale, two hours north of Tucson, proved to be one of those fortuitous things. Mettler’s eventual choice of the Taliesin Associated Architects to design her studio reflected both her pride in her own work and her respect for the highest standards in any field. She had already devoted years to giving the world her radical approach to dance; with the studio’s completion in 1963, Mettler also gave the world a bold new piece of American architecture by one of the most famous architecture studios of the century. It began with a three-acre plot of scruffy desert that she purchased at the corner of Ft. Lowell Road and Cherry Avenue on what was then the north edge of town and is now, after decades of classic western urban sprawl, close to the geographical center of town. Mettler claimed that she had searched all over Tucson for a building she could adapt to her purposes but came up empty-handed and decided she would have to go at it from scratch. Her right-hand man, Will Carbo, who followed her out from Boston, had met Frank Lloyd Wright (referred to by Carbo as “the old man”! 9) while studying at Louisiana State University. It seems clear that it was probably Carbo’s urging that led Mettler to drive the two hours from Tucson up to Taliesin West to investigate what Wright’s architectural heirs might be able to do for her. She met with an enthusiastic response. The Taliesin architects were quite eager to work with Mettler on such an unusual project. They seemed to understand what writer and curator Mildred Friedman has noted, that “the most important influence on the design is the client, and if there’s a terrific client to work with, you get a terrific building; if there isn’t, you don’t.” 10 The Taliesin group began immediately to apply themselves to learning about Mettler’s dance principles in regard to her architectural needs. In her slightly imperious way, Barbara Mettler later wrote that they “came to seem almost like members of my own group.” 11 Wes Peters, who handled most of the engineering aspects of the Taliesin work, was involved preliminarily, but the design work went immediately to John H. (“Jack”) Howe, often referred to as “the pencil in Mr. Wright’s hand” 12 for the beauty of the many architectural renderings he had executed as chief draftsman for Wright over the final twenty-five years of Wright’s career. These included some of Wright’s most famous buildings, including Fallingwater in Pennsylvania, the Johnson Wax Building in Racine, Wisconsin, and the Solomon Guggenheim Museum in New York City. In Jack Howe’s collaboration with Dobson /A Leap to the West 7

Barbara Mettler, architect and dancer soon proved to be a perfect match for the project. With Jack Howe, Barbara Mettler got all the skill and vision without the infamous Wright ego. Despite this fortunate avoidance of the mighty struggles that probably would have ensued had Wright actually been Barbara Mettler’s architect, it is certainly a shame that Barbara Mettler and Frank Lloyd Wright never met. The master architect, forty years her senior, had died in 1959, just a couple of years before Mettler arrived in Arizona. The similarities and connections between the two are nonetheless uncanny. Both hailed from the region north of Chicago: Wright from Spring Green and Madison, Wisconsin, and Mettler from Hubbard Woods, Illinois. Both were strongly influenced by their fathers’ music; Wright’s father played Bach and Beethoven on the organ, Mettler’s played Chopin and many others on the piano. Both had progressive mothers who encouraged their artistic endeavors; Wright’s mother famously gave him wooden Froebel blocks to encourage his early interest in architecture, and Mettler’s mother encouraged her daughters in all things artistic. Both Wright and Mettler each acknowledged only a single teacher and set out on their own shortly thereafter; Wright had Louis Sullivan, Mettler had Mary Wigman. Both were renegades in their respective fields; Wright challenged and insulted other architects right and left while Mettler turned her back on the entire performance-oriented world of modern dance. Both Wright and Mettler disliked cities and worshipped nature and the outdoors. Both in later life established second centers for their work in Arizona. Both fashioned themselves as revolutionary prophets of a sort. Despite their patrician roots, both Wright and Mettler sympathized with humanity at large. Wright felt that everyone should have the chance to live in an architect-designed home instead of a “cookie cutter house” and developed his practical but attractive “Usonian” houses accordingly, although, ironically, they themselves eventually served as models for the concept of tract homes. For her part, Mettler believed that everyone can dance and developed her approach to make that possible. Both Wright and Mettler had broad and exalted humanistic visions of the future of the arts and believed in the interconnectedness of the arts; Wright had his Taliesin associates participate in weekly arts evenings in a specially built theater there, while Mettler claimed that movement “opens all the doors” to the other arts. 13 What a lively debate might have taken place between Wright and Mettler over which was truly the pivotal art, architecture or dance. Wright called Dobson /A Leap to the West 8 architecture “the mother art”; Mettler called dance “the central art” because of movement’s essential role in almost any other creative activity. Perhaps most importantly, both Wright and Mettler highly valued what they each called “the organic.” Wright championed an organic architecture that springs from and reflects its context; Mettler focused on organic form in the dance. Both believed in the importance of focusing on first principles, un-derived from any other discipline. Both were far ahead of their times and had to fight for acceptance of their ideas. Clearly, Mettler intuited that Taliesin West was the right place to go when it came time to build her dream studio. She later wrote that she felt Wright’s approach to architecture had much in common with her approach to dance, specifically “the concept of organic form as essential to a living art work, art as an expression of man’s inner life with the moral obligation to further health of the spirit, the creative relationship of the work of art to its environment and the use of available natural materials.” 14 Wright had been influenced deeply by early exposure to the American Transcendentalists and Emerson in particular, who argued that “all beauty must be organic.” 15 In addition, Wright also inherited his mentor Sullivan’s admiration for the theories of the prominent English critic John Ruskin, who also extolled the virtues of the organic. 16 Barbara Mettler missed the chance to meet Wright, but she found in Jack Howe perhaps an even more compatible soul. Yet another native of the area north of Chicago (born in Evanston, Illinois, just five years after Mettler), Howe established an instant rapport with his new client. He seems to have had a remarkable instinctive grasp of Mettler’s design needs, and the work proceeded immediately and relatively smoothly throughout the design process. Interestingly, whether Mettler knew of his personal history or not, her professional relationship with Howe was another example of her being drawn to highly principled individuals with a strong political awareness; Howe had served time in prison as a conscientious objector during World War II, as had several of Wright’s apprentices, influenced by his political philosophy as well as his architectural vision. Barbara Bezat, archivist for Jack Howe’s papers at the Northwest Architectural Archives at the University of Minnesota, describes him simply as “a gentleman and a scholar—trite but so true of him.” 17 Barbara Mettler soon came to trust and respect Howe so thoroughly that she maintained a lifelong trusting friendship with him and his wife Lu. In the extensive correspondence between Barbara Mettler and Jack Howe preserved in his Dobson /A Leap to the West 9 archives, it is fascinating to witness their mutual high regard and warmth. Mettler revealed to him her feelings about various aspects of her work that she shared with very few other people. 18 In Jack Howe, Barbara Mettler found something rare for her: someone she considered a peer. Their paths crossed at exactly the right moment, though their geographical proximity lasted for only a short time; Howe withdrew from the Taliesin group and left Arizona with his wife in 1964, eventually moving his practice to Minnesota, where he became well respected for his own work. Mettler often wrote to them and sent them little appreciative gifts, such as one of her favorite books on the desert, Ann Woodin’s Home Is the Desert ,19 and a recording of Arizona desert sounds, 20 as well as her own books on dance. Although the Howes were able to visit Mettler in Tucson only a few times after that, they enjoyed the friendship over many years, until Howe’s death in 1997, at which time his Taliesin colleagues published an appreciation for his “elegantly eloquent life” titled John Henry Howe: The Consummate Apprentice. 21 Among architects, designing what they would call “a single room” is a sort of Holy Grail, and with Mettler’s studio Jack Howe got the dream chance to do just that. Reflecting on the project in 2006, Lu Howe remarked, “Barbara was so courageous to build that studio!” 22 Jack Howe certainly seemed equally courageous and up for the challenge. Mettler had been dreaming of a round studio for years, ever since her experiments in the Rock Ridge Farm barn studio in New Hampshire a dozen years before had led her to surround the dancers with the spectators, the better to emphasize what she considered to be the essentially three-dimensional nature of dance. She also felt that dancers needed a big spacious place that would give them a sense of freedom and would also remind them that this was clearly not a standard flat proscenium orientation, that they would, in fact, have to let go of their notions of performance altogether. Howe’s design provided exactly the kind of visionary simplicity that Barbara Mettler was after. Mettler’s desire for a round space happened to be in sync with the circular geometry that Wright had been using for years in his designs. Although not necessarily obvious to a casual visitor, the site plan for Mettler’s studio reveals that the whole scheme consists of circles and arcs (see next page), not only for the dance studio, but for the outdoor dance space and even the driveway as well. It was certainly not Howe’s first involvement with a round building; for sixteen years he had worked intensely on Wright’s plans for the Guggenheim Museum. This world-famous landmark had finally reached completion only three years before Mettler engaged the Taliesin group. The Tucson Creative Dance Center, Dobson /A Leap to the West 10 although built on a comparatively miniature scale, benefited greatly from that huge endeavor and is thus in some ways a direct descendent of Wright’s final masterpiece, completed just six months after his death.

Site plan for Tucson Creative Dance Center*:

*Courtesy Barbara Mettler Archive, Hampshire College. Dobson /A Leap to the West 11

Mettler first stipulated that the dance floor had to be 50 feet across, with seating for approximately a hundred, but later revised that to 47 or 48 feet. In fact, the wood floor ended up being just shy of 44 feet in diameter, but the overall diameter of the room turned out to be almost 58 feet. Within the graceful round shell of the rose-colored walls sits a circular floor of light maple, surrounded on most of its circumference by two concentric rings of polished concrete steps, stained a dusky rose similar to the walls. The wood floor is spacious enough for up to forty dancers to pursue individual studies at the same time, or to dance all together as a large group, but Howe’s brilliant design actually gave Mettler even more room than she expected when her students surprised her by spontaneously using the surrounding raised steps for available dance space as well. Although originally intended primarily to accommodate an audience, or “visitors,” as Mettler preferred to call them, the empty concrete steps proved inviting to the dancers when no visitors were in attendance. The studio thus manages ingeniously to serve the dual purpose of both performance space and dance laboratory for daily use. Mettler had flat round cushions custom made for visitors, and wooden folding chairs were brought out for those who requested them. Noticeably absent are any mirrors or a piano, standard for most dance studios. In Mettler’s world no emphasis on the visual image or impetus from music would be necessary, thank you. The circle of the studio is flattened slightly on one side by a high white wall that serves as movie screen and appropriately plain backdrop for photography. The maple floor is, among other things, a large musical instrument, a huge drum. Remarkably resonant under the dancers’ feet, it is what is known as a sprung floor, built specifically with the give necessary for dancing comfortably. It rests above a two-foot-high lower chamber, or plenum, designed to be cooled and heated from beneath. No shoe ever set foot on that dance floor in Barbara Mettler’s lifetime. She used to claim that it was kept “clean enough to eat off of,” a fact appreciated by her dancers, who sometimes found their faces in contact with the floor in their movement explorations on all levels. Perhaps the most remarkable and rather confounding component, even after many viewings, is the broad shallow cone of the roof structure and ceiling of the studio, coated with a kind of cream-colored stucco on the interior. In Howe’s words, the roof is “supported by a tripod of steel beams, connected by a steel ring at the center…. Three fan-shaped skylights penetrate the roof where the structural tripods join the center ring.” 23 Confusing? A bit. Elegantly simple? Truly. Dobson /A Leap to the West 12

Of course, the happy ending of the studio’s eventual final design resulted from much discussion among the parties involved. A letter from Mettler in March 1962, after general plans were well along, gives a rare glimpse inside the process of coming to terms: There is a word which has often been used to describe the work of my studio which I may have neglected to use in talking with you: primitive. There is a primitive quality in our dancing, because of its emphasis on the first things of dance. The circular studio expresses this. Let us be sure that no detail is in contradiction. What about the “rich drapes,” the gold ornamentation? Are they not too refined? Let us avoid all feeling of sophistication or opulence. I have complete confidence in your aesthetic judgment as long as you fully understand the nature of the problem. Just as we dance with bodies almost bare, let the studio be as pure and true and beautiful as the unadorned human body. 24

Any student of Mettler’s can hear her voice speaking these words in her uniquely sincere and authoritative tone. She was also being polite. It had become obvious to her that the Taliesin group was applying a much plusher aesthetic, more aristocratic and elitist, than what she had in mind. Much of the latter-day Taliesin aesthetic resulted, in fact, from the architects’ involvement in dance, although it was an entirely different kind of dance, brought in by Wright’s wife Olgivanna and their daughter Iovanna, based on esoteric movement studies devised by Olgivanna’s mentor, the well known Georgi Gurdjieff, recognized by some as a spiritual master. For decades, Olgivanna and Iovanna had taught these complicated movements to many of the Taliesin apprentices and others as a kind of yogic spiritual exercise, but the two women also eventually elaborated on the movements, mounting huge theatrical presentations with ornate costumes and sets. Wright had even built a special pavilion for his daughter’s dance endeavors at Taliesin West. Wright’s apprentices were expected to participate in the dance productions as designers, musicians, and dancers. These lavish orientalist fantasies were not, of course, remotely related to Barbara Mettler’s work. Rich drapes and gold ornaments? Horrors! (It is especially regrettable that the Nature Conservancy has recently installed dark red floor-length plush drapes around the entire studio.) The original drawings for the Tucson Creative Dance Center do indeed show other architectural elements that never made it into the final Dobson /A Leap to the West 13 product, including a round outdoor fountain placed at the end of one of the roof’s tripod supports by the main entrance. The plans even called for a spire on the roof that was quite reminiscent of Wright’s Marin County Civic Center, which Howe had helped to bring to completion after Wright’s death. Will Carbo, when asked in 2006 about these extraneous features in the preliminary drawings for the studio, remarked simply, “Oh, we stripped all that stuff off.” 25 It is safe to say that despite the obvious two principals being Mettler and Howe, without Will Carbo the Tucson Creative Dance Center never would have materialized. In our 2006 interview Carbo stunned me by casually mentioning that he and Mettler had planned the whole thing “on a mountaintop in New Hampshire”—before the 1953 tour! 26 Carbo had been stationed in Tucson during World War II and had always wanted to return to Arizona. It was he who had brought Arizona to Mettler’s attention and had helped her dream up the whole thing. Mettler was notorious for giving scant credit given to others involved in her work. Carbo is the classic example. It was he who held this long-term Arizona studio vision with her for a decade and he who led her eventually to Taliesin West. When it all came to fruition, Carbo was fortunately still in her employ to act as architect’s representative and daily on-site manager of the building project. His skills proved invaluable. As he so aptly and matter-of-factly summarized it, “She had the dance, I gave her the framework.” 27 It was literally true. As Peggy Lane, business manager for the last twenty years of Mettler’s life, put it, “Will Carbo is ingrained in every block of this building.” 28 Those blocks are rectangular. The building Mettler wanted was round, and a round building is an anomaly in American construction. Designing it was no problem; executing the design was definitely a problem. To begin with, no bank would touch the financing because of the unusual design. No builder felt like tackling such a challenging construction. There were zoning problems. Neighbors had to be soothed. In heavy seasonal rains, the slight slope toward Ft. Lowell Road created a lake on the lot. Finally, as was so often the case in Mettler’s life, her perseverance paid off, landing her a loan, and at last a builder, W. F. Connolly. As she later explained, “Fred Connolly, a builder’s son, more interested in the arts than in the construction business, persuaded his father to take the job ‘because the building would be good for Tucson.’” 29 Mettler also noted afterward that although Wilbur Connolly complained throughout the process, he ended up being so proud of the building that he had his wife call Mettler to ask if they could put a picture of it on their Christmas card that year. Dobson /A Leap to the West 14

How exciting it must have been for Mettler to watch the round walls finally begin to rise. But those walls were only one of many daunting elements with which the builder had to contend. The walls were to be built of a single course of standard cinder blocks tinted a dusky rose. No such blocks existed. The company that produced the blocks had never used color in them before. Will Carbo worked with the company continuously, rejecting many a sample load until they got the tinting just right. The company kept the blocks in production for years afterwards, and they were used all over Tucson. 30 The masons then claimed that the curvature would be impossible with the blocks. Carbo promptly built short sections of partial mockup walls and patiently proved that the blocks could indeed form a smooth curve when placed with exacting care. In fact, the finished walls are simplicity par excellence, appearing utterly effortless to build. It was also Carbo who directed the concrete pours for the massive circular steps surrounding the dance floor and stayed up all night to watch over the crucial curing process. And then there was the roof. It leaked, of course. Many of the roofs of Wright’s own work had leaked, too, usually because of the unconventional designs and improper engineering or execution. 31 In one of his most famous flippant quips, Wright supposedly responded to one of his client’s complaints of leaks in the dining room with, “Move your chair.” Mettler would not have been amused. A terse letter from her late in the process complained that she needed to start teaching in the studio, and she withheld final payment until the leaks were repaired. Specialists had to be called in. Will Carbo remembers “crawling over every inch of that building” for years trying to find the source of the problem. 32 It was mostly solved by a major reroofing in 1975, but even in the 1980s leaks were still occurring. Creativity does not come without problems. Nonetheless, the studio finally opened, more or less on time, in the fall of 1963. Barbara Mettler’s work could now continue, in the simplest and most glorious custom studio imaginable. It was a unique home for her unique work. At the grand open house, on January 12, 1964, complete with lecture demonstrations by Mettler and dancers, Jack Howe acknowledged the well- deserved applause from the assembled crowd. Howe continued to be involved for the next several years, often without charging for his time, generously designing everything from studio stationery and publicity materials to a tool shed, as well as advising on various issues of lighting, signage, and landscaping. Adjustments, tweaks, and enhancements happened, with Howe’s advice and Will Carbo’s diligent and creative execution. The two tiers of large steps surrounding Dobson /A Leap to the West 15 the studio floor, each a rather unwieldy fourteen inches high, proved difficult to negotiate, for dancers as well as for visitors. The solution was to have Carbo build a long intermediate carpeted wooden step to place below each concrete step on either side of the white wall to create a more standard stair step. Those four carpeted steps remain in place to this day. Even with the added steps, visitors occasionally alarmed Mettler with near mishaps. Howe responded to her concern and a query about possibly using paint to define the steps better with an imperially witty handwritten response worthy of Wright himself: “A certain amount of grace must be expected of anyone entering a dance studio.” He conceded that a sign on the doors might give fair warning but declared that “any painting of the steps would be a ‘poetry-crusher.’”33 Early plans for the studio had included an apartment for Mettler integrated into one of the wings, but budgetary decisions seem to have removed it from the final plan. It was decided that the small brick house on the property would suffice, and it was incorporated into the overall site plan. A second major building opportunity for Mettler and Howe arose, however, in 1967 when Mettler’s ninety-two-year-old mother decided to move to Tucson after the death of Mettler’s older sister and announced she wanted to build a house on Mettler’s property. Only after Mettler had commissioned plans from Howe for a house for herself and her mother, to be built on the remaining third acre of desert, and only after Howe submitted complete drawings for a square house in a square garden that would have contrasted with and complemented the roundness of the indoor and outdoor dance studios beautifully, only then did Mettler’s mother vacillate and renege. Although still physically quite hale and hearty, she was already suffering from the initial stages of dementia and ultimately could not commit to Tucson. As Mettler put it in a letter to Jack Howe, “Mother is a big problem, and I have my hands full. When she is in Tucson, she wants to be in Winnetka. When she is in Winnetka, she wants to be in Tucson. It will not be wise to build a house for her.” 34 She also wrote, “I know how disappointed you will be if your beautiful design does not materialize, but I am sure that architects, like dancers, are used to such disappointments.” Their friendship weathered the setback. In 2006 Lu Howe commented that she supposed that for her husband it was a little like a doctor losing a patient: unfortunate but sometimes unavoidable. She said simply, “There was no lamenting.” 35 Mettler had warned Howe from the beginning that the plan might never be built. It was nonetheless a distinct loss for Mettler and for American architecture. Dobson /A Leap to the West 16

No discussion of Barbara Mettler’s Tucson studio and Jack Howe’s design would be complete without mention of the “outdoor studio.” It was included as an integral part of the grand original circular plan as a vast curved space that embraced the workroom wing and even Mettler’s small house and its olive trees, with a total area of close to 8,000 square feet, about twice that of the indoor studio. Double glass doors opened onto the outdoor area from the “small studio,” a sort of second lobby near the dressing rooms where Mettler displayed photos and instruments and conducted smaller group studies. The outdoor studio was a grand dream of a space, but in truth an indulgence, an easterner’s fantasy contrivance. It resembled nothing so much as a golf green on any one of the ridiculous watered golf courses throughout the desert Southwest. Its privacy was assured by a magnificent fifteen-foot-high surrounding hedge of pink and white flowering oleanders that stayed dark green year-round. The gorgeous carpet of lawn, the result of continuous experiments with bluegrass or leathery- leafed dichondra, allowed for dancing outdoors, so important to Mettler. The rest of the property, in utter contrast, was devoted completely to natural desert vegetation, but dancing in large groups amongst all that prickliness was hardly practical. The danceable lawn hearkened all the way back to the mown fields of the New Hampshire farms, where Mettler’s work first really sprang forth. She must have missed owning a good grassy surface during the Boston years. In theory the outdoor studio was perfect. The reality of maintaining it proved extremely challenging. Besides the expensive initial leveling of the ground and the installation of a costly sprinkler system, it then required a huge amount of water every month, and a gardening staff to tend it. Mettler and her staff fussed over it constantly, especially before each summer course. Having gradually learned a lot about her adopted environment, Mettler finally admitted to Jack Howe years later that she had tired of “fighting the desert” and despaired of continuing to use the outdoor studio. 36 No solution ever presented itself, but for many years it had certainly been an incredibly inviting oasis for dance. After Mettler’s death an unexpected chapter for the outdoor studio opened when the Nature Conservancy, to which Mettler had donated the entire property, finalized plans in 2006 to use the now dusty barren space to build an outdoor pavilion. This covered platform was to serve as an additional studio for dance, yoga, and the Conservancy’s own purposes. We can imagine that Mettler would have been pleased with an organic evolution of this sort, but as of 2013 it has yet to be built. Dobson /A Leap to the West 17

Barbara Mettler expressed her deep satisfaction with the building many times in letters to Jack Howe over the years, telling him how well it suited its function. Even as early as December 1963, shortly after she began using the studio, she wrote to him: In talking to a group of dancers here the other day, I said that the form of this building, like any living thing, expresses the life that goes on within it—and then I told them a little about the studio’s inner life: freedom of expression, art as activity, pure movement as the material of dance, dance as a three-dimensional art, rhythm as balance of activity and rest, natural movement as the source of rhythmic experience, relaxation as a creative element of movement, indoors and outdoors as dancer’s environment, spectators’ role as part of the dance. All these aspects of our dance life the building expresses, and I am boundlessly thankful to have such a home for my work. 37

In 1969 she wrote to him, “It is fulfilling its purpose—completely. A discriminating educator said of the Tucson Creative Dance Center, ‘The studio and the work are all of one piece—like a cathedral.’” 38 The studio continued to sustain Mettler through the long second half of her professional life and gained widespread praise for its own beauty and for the support that it gave to the work within. For Howe’s part, he called Mettler “an ideal client” 39 and told her years later that the studio was his personal favorite among his buildings. 40 In the summer of 2006, I asked John Bissell, a masterful designer and longtime Tucson resident with a background in architecture at Yale, to accompany me to Mettler’s studio to share his perceptions of the building with me. Bissell combines a keen and highly informed perspective on the unique design challenges and opportunities of building in the desert with a bold personal style. Although his career has focused primarily on private interiors, he is ironically best known in Tucson for his wildly festive saturated color scheme for updating the exterior of the 1970s La Placita retail complex downtown, which proved to be extremely controversial when narrow-minded critics howled at the replacement of its pale “earth tones” beige with Bissell’s riot of color. His radical vision invited viewers to see, really see, the intense colors that actually exist in the Sonoran environment and make Tucson unique. Bissell’s design for the 2005 visit of the Dalai Lama to Tucson was another typical tour de force that amassed dozens of Dobson /A Leap to the West 18 elaborate tangka paintings and countless Tibetan prayer flags in a stunning setting created at the JW Marriott Starr Pass Hotel. Bissell had attended various performances at the Tucson Creative Dance Center over the years but now relished the opportunity to observe it architecturally in detail. I have known Bissell personally and professionally for many years, and I knew his knowledgeable comments would not disappoint. He had already told me that he considers the studio a gem, one that is vastly under- appreciated in Tucson, perhaps because it does its Wrightian job of blending in with the environment so well. The outside of the studio’s block wall is surrounded by an embankment, now covered with chunks of tan and reddish rock Mettler obtained free of charge from an Arizona copper mine. The berm was originally intended to be covered with growing grass or other low vegetation, which eventually proved too difficult to maintain. Mettler discovered only later that rock piles are the favorite habitat of black widow spiders. Sometimes nature felt a little too close. Spiders and all, this berm’s slope forms a sort of skirt around the studio with almost the exact same slope as that of the low-pitched roof, giving the whole building a decidedly settled-in look. As we walked toward the studio, Bissell’s first comment was that he originally thought the stones a little stark when first applied but finds it appropriate now that the desert vegetation has grown in around it. The studio was in fact way ahead of its time as an earth- sheltered building, a concept that did not become popular until at least a decade later. John Bissell’s comment: “Almost everything that lives in the desert burrows—except us.” Modern civilization may have yet to put this principle to use, but the Hohokam, the mysterious departed desert people whose name means “Those Who Have Vanished,” had been building their slightly subterranean pit houses many hundreds of years earlier in the Tucson area, as evidenced by archaeological discoveries throughout the valley. Bissell noted that Wright used berms often in his work. 41 Bissell feels that Mettler’s Tucson studio in general looks as if built by Wright himself, with just a few minor telltale details of design giving it away. Otherwise it is pure Wright in so many ways, its low profile seeming to grow directly out of the level desert ground. In fact, the building is understandably often attributed to Wright by mistake. The association with Wright was clearly a determining factor when the Tucson Creative Dance Center was recognized in 2001 by the Tucson Architectural Landmarks organization for its exceptional Dobson /A Leap to the West 19 design quality and its “association with certain values represented by a period of time, culture or people.” 42 Bissell thinks that Jack Howe, who stayed with Wright until the end of Wright’s life, was the only one of Wright’s disciples who carried on successfully in the same vein. He points out that others, such as Paolo Soleri in the central Arizona desert, Blaine Drake in Phoenix, and John Lautner in Los Angeles and Palm Springs, all of whom stayed with Wright for shorter amounts of time, went on to successful architectural careers but in their own distinct ways. Actually it is a relatively small number of Wright’s apprentices who achieved their own success. According to John Bissell, “You really can’t copy a genius.” Bissell feels that in general Wright was an idiosyncratic master who made a huge splash but with less real ongoing effect on the practice of American architecture than one might expect. It is worth noting that despite the relative closeness of Tucson to Taliesin West, Tucson has no Wright buildings and only two by individuals who had been his apprentices: the Tucson Creative Dance Center and Our Lady of Fatima Church, on the south side of town, designed by Wes Peters. The two buildings share an interesting link: the priest at Our Lady of Fatima Parish had admired Mettler’s studio, and Will Carbo put him in touch with Taliesin West. The church uses the same rose concrete blocks and a large open hexagonal plan. John Bissell’s comment upon entering the dance studio building was that it perfectly embodies Wright’s updating of the concept of “processional architecture,” the idea that a building’s varying forms should lead one into its intended purpose. A darker space would lead into a light-filled space, a narrow space into a wider one, and so on. In major European palaces a series of grand rooms would lead deeper and deeper into the interior toward the king’s innermost private chambers. At the Tucson Creative Dance Center, Jack Howe put this concept to beautiful use. A visitor, after being first enticed up the curving crunchy gravel walk beside a high curving wall on the left, enters through double glass doors into a ground-level foyer that is a sort of wasp-waist breezeway, the narrowest part of the building, attractive in a classically mid-century modern way but economical and spare. The mass of the main round studio to the right is balanced on the left by a gracefully arcing wing, lit by domed skylights, that contains men’s and women’s changing rooms, the “small studio,” instrument storage cabinets, and a workroom/stockroom. From the foyer, three shallow, broadly convex polished concrete steps on the right lead up to a wide low-ceilinged landing. Before we can get to the studio Dobson /A Leap to the West 20 itself, we are diverted and tantalized by the convex dusky rose block wall straight ahead, where a Zuni quotation in brushed aluminum letters is mounted: “We dance both for pleasure and for the good of the city.” We will soon descend into the studio, and this entry from above seems to be a subtle reference to the kivas of the Pueblo Indians several hours to the north and east of Tucson. These ceremonial chambers are usually round and entered by way of ladders up to the roof and then down through a hole in the ceiling. The surrounding concrete steps of Mettler’s studio echo the benches found against a kiva’s inner walls. It is unclear how conscious this kiva evocation was on either Howe’s part or Mettler’s. Mettler did comment on the Zuni (Pueblo) quotation: “Is it not strange that this was chosen as our motto many years ago when my studio was young in New York City, long before I had any thought of settling down in Indian country?” 43 The coincidence is extended in two other ways: Barbara Mettler’s archives at Hampshire College in Massachusetts are stored in a room just down the hall from a sunken gathering and classroom space, with a similar obstructing wall, called “The Kiva,” and the University of Arizona College of Education, through which Mettler students could receive academic credit for many years, contains a large sunken classroom with tiered seating called “The Kiva.” Where Mettler found the quotation has remained a mystery. John Bissell mused that perhaps it came into prominence in the 1920s when Mabel Dodge Luhan and her New Mexico artist friends popularized all things Indian. Pueblo Indians or no, Bissell pointed out that the low ceiling above the landing at the top of the three low steps in the lobby is straight from Frank Lloyd Wright, who at 5’6” wore lifts in his shoes and enjoyed seeing other people bump their heads occasionally. This low ceiling, perhaps 6’6”, is always somewhat startling and creates a slight tunneling effect on the way to the open space that awaits. This rather confining entrance in a very practical way separates the concentrated work in the studio from any distracting comings and goings in the lobby. According to Bissell, the three low steps up are also pure Wright, who believed that people move more gracefully on deep steps with a low rise. Finally we follow the curve of the top step as it leads us through two pairs of plain wooden double doors on either side of the quotation wall into the stunning high-ceilinged, light-filled round studio. The approach is a carefully orchestrated grand entrance, ritualized by the architecture itself, inviting one to the extraordinary dance within. It is an incredibly effective set-up for the experience one is about to have, either as an observer or as a dancer. One cannot Dobson /A Leap to the West 21 help but feel that something special awaits, and the studio certainly does not disappoint. On a day when the studio is empty of dancers, the maple floor is especially beautiful under the soft light from the three large translucent skylights. The studio is always a surprise; it is such an unusual space. The dance floor itself is actually just barely below ground level, but it is the up-and-then-down-into experience provided by those small steps in the lobby and then the two larger surrounding circular steps down to the round studio floor that make all the difference. From the dance floor, only some treetops and the crest of the Santa Catalina mountain range are visible through the encircling strip of two-foot-high windows at the top of the circular block wall a little over four a half feet high rising from the top concrete step, thereby increasing the illusion of dancing in a special sunken arena. John Bissell commented on the “fantastic scale—not too spacious, not too confining, just right”—and the wonderful intersections of the components of the ceiling, where the three doubled tripods meet the central ring. We also marveled at the three massive three-foot turnbuckles, one visible in each of the three cleverly tucked-away storage closets in the legs of the tripods. Like huge cousins of the little turnbuckles used to keep a screen door square, they look like something you might see deep in the bowels of an ocean-going ship. With a three-quarter-inch steel tension cable that surrounds the studio, they hold the entire building together. Bissell noted that building round is “so challenging.” Building materials are not designed for round, and building costs involved with round elements are so much higher. Even the semicircular air vents in this room are perfect and gorgeous and no doubt custom-made. The actual cost of the building in 1963 was just over $100,000. 44 For the total area of 5,700 square feet, this comes out to a cost per square foot of $16.78. Would that such a building could be built for the same price today. Bissell says we might easily add a zero to adjust for inflation and multiply by 4 for escalation in building materials, bringing the estimated cost to build it today to at least $4 million. The building reflects limitations of its era in some minor ways. The single- paned windows would now be double-paned, providing both insulation and road noise reduction. Modern sealants would have prevented the porous block from developing water seepage stains that have accumulated in a few places on inner walls. But all in all, Bissell felt confirmed in his impressions of the building as a real treasure and beautifully preserved. As we stood outside on the street again, noting how the roofline echoes the slopes of the west end of the Catalinas several Dobson /A Leap to the West 22 miles to the north, his final comment was “Isn’t that divinely perfect?”

In the gravel parking lot beside the house, Mettler’s white 1953 Ford had for years adorned the property like the perfect ornament, lusted after by many a passing vintage automobile enthusiast. Mettler never made much mention of it in later years, but this was “The Cricket” of the 1953 tour. A black car was the last thing she and her company members had wanted for traveling through the Southern heat, but it was what they had been able to get and had eventually grown fond of it. Shortly after Mettler arrived in the desert in 1961, she made the practical decision to have the car painted white. Right up until the end of Mettler’s life, even long after she could no longer drive, this all-American vehicle sat there, aging toward antique status. To Mettler’s students the car was an emblem of the frugal and eccentric genius living in the little pink brick house beneath the olive trees, but it also called to mind this reclusive dance legend’s great adventure west, her rugged individualism, and her indomitable determination.

1 The Verde Independent , June 29, 1961. 2 Telephone Interview with Will Carbo, May 6, 2006. 3 Nabhan, Gary Paul, The Desert Smells Like Rain 19, (San Francisco, Cal.: North Point Press, 1987); http://native religion.org/case_study.php?profile=73336. 4 The Tucson Creative Dance Center , Barbara Mettler, [unpublished? article or letter] dated Feb. 8, 1966, Mettler Archives, at 1 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 The Arizona Daily Star (Tucson), May 17, 1962, C1. 8 Many Easterners, however, do underestimate the Southwest’s cold temperatures; Tucson’s winter nighttime temperatures often dip below freezing. The dry climate allows for the phenomenon of rapid radiant cooling, making post-sunset drops of thirty or even forty degrees not uncommon. The studio design had to include a heating system for the chillier mornings and evenings. 9 Carbo Interview, supra note 2. 10 Mildred Friedman in Sketches of Frank Gehry , by Sydney Pollack, PBS American Masters, September 2006. 11 Mettler, supra note 4, at 2. 12 Journal of the Taliesin Fellows , 23, Summer 1998. 13 Author’s notes from 1972 Summer Course. 14 Mettler, supra note 5, at 3. 15 Friedland, Roger, and Harold Zellman, The Fellowship: The Untold Story of Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship 8. 16 Ibid. at 18. 17 Telephone Interview with Barbara Bezat, June 12, 2006. 18 She confided, for example, that at one point she had “cut down on the number of my helpers. The more helpers you have, the heavier is the load.” Letter from BM to John Howe, Aug. 20, 1971. 19 Letter from John Howe to BM, Apr. 9, 1970. Dobson /A Leap to the West 23

20 Letter from John Howe to BM, Apr. 22, 1970. 21 Journal of the Taliesin Fellows , supra note 12. 22 Telephone Interview with Lu Howe, June 22, 2006. 23 Letter from John Howe to BM, undated, listing required features of the studio. 24 Letter from BM to Wesley Peters and John Howe, Mar. 31, 1962. 25 Carbo Interview, supra note 2. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 Interview with Peggy Lane, July 6, 2006. 29 Mettler, supra note 5, at 3. 30 Carbo Interview, supra note 2 31 Friedland & Zellman, supra note 15, at 327. 32 Carbo Interview, supra note 2. 33 Letter from John Howe to BM, May 21, 1964. 34 Letter from BM to John Howe, Dec. 20, 1967. 35 Lu Howe Interview, supra note 22. 36 Letter from BM to John Howe, Mar. 27, 1976. 37 Letter from BM to John Howe, Dec. 16, 1963. 38 Letter from BM to John Howe, Oct. 12, 1969. 39 Letter from John Howe to BM, Oct. 24, 1963. 40 Letter from BM to John Howe, Apr. 3, 1986. 41 Wright designed his first “berm houses,” an expansion of his “Usonian house” concept, in 1942 for a housing project for a collective of autoworkers in Madison Heights outside of Detroit. It is unclear whether Wright took this idea from the berms used by the Plains Indians. A. Dale Northrup, Frank Lloyd Wright in Michigan , Reference Publications, Inc., Algonac, Mich., 1991, at 43–44. See also Frank Lloyd Wright, Letters to Apprentices , selected and with commentary by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, The Press at California State University, Fresno, Cal., 1982. 42 R. Brooks Jeffrey, “Built to Last,” Tucson Weekly , Sept. 27, 2001. 43 Mettler, supra note 5, at 6. 44 John Howe, Cost Analysis - Mettler Studio, undated.

© 2013 Rob Dobson