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Modern jazz blues dance pioneers Elvia Marta (left) and Bayan Jamay (right) have taught classes together since the mid-1970s and are still going strong. Many of their students have been with them for a quarter of a century. Photo by Rebecca Wilkowski.

September 2008

Long-time Dance Teachers Build Community

By Lori Higa

When the elegant, composed, red-haired dancer Bayan Jamay turned 60 she gifted herself a tattoo.  The multi-hued petals and leaves of a flowering foxglove intertwined with a dragonfly are inked on her right shoulder.  “Foxglove is the plant from which the heart medication digitalis is derived.  I feel my tattoo represents dance, or ‘heart medicine,’” Jamay explained.

Medicine for the heart is exactly what Glen Park resident Joanne Cohen, a 39-year-old therapist-counselor, has received from Jamay and her teaching partner, Elvia Marta.  According to Cohen, “Bayan and Elvia are the most dedicated teachers I’ve ever known.  Their approach is spiritual, and shows a level of commitment that is unusual.  They’re about building community.”  Though Cohen has studied with the two for 13 years, she swears she’s a newcomer.  Many of Jamay’s and Marta’s students have been dancing with them for decades.  “Most of the students are in their 40s, 50s and 60s,” Cohen said.  “Some take classes from both Bayan and Elvia, who teach four times a week back to back.”

“I learn so much from watching older dancers,” explained Jill Harris, who’s been studying dance with Jamay and Marta for a decade and a half.  “It’s about depth, emotion and grace, not how high you kick your legs up.  They have more elegant movements.  As they get older, going into their 60s, they become even more beautiful in their movements.  They stay young and strong, continue to challenge and motivate me to see new things,” said Harris, who owns a Hayes Valley pilates studio.

Jamay, a Boston native, thinks of her students as family. “We’ve grown up together…I’ve watched them marry, have children, get divorced.”  When Cohen first met Jamay, the instructor had had both hips replaced and had recently survived breast cancer.  Jamay subsequently had both knees replaced, earning the affectionate nickname “Bionic Woman” from her students.

Jamay’s alter ego is her teaching partner, the pixie-ish 57-year-old Marta.  The slender Panamanian native moved to San Francisco’s Ingleside district with her family when she was 15 years old.   Marta wasn’t interested in dance, preferring track and field.  One day at Balboa High School, the head of the dance department, Yvonne McClung, caught Marta and her sister salsa dancing as part of a cultural demonstration.  McClung knew raw talent when she saw it, and immediately enrolled them in dance classes. At first, Marta didn’t take to the lessons: “Modern dance was just too dry for me. I liked salsa and contemporary Afro dance, which are gutsy, have a lot of feeling, touch my heart.”

After high school Marta moved to Massachusetts, following a romantic partner who was enrolled at the prestigious Berklee College of Music. It was in Boston that she began studying with Jamay, who changed her attitude towards classical and modern dance. The two were members of Expansion, Consuela Atlas’ dance company.  After a year, Marta was homesick for San Francisco, and Jamay was restless for change; in 1976, they moved to the City to begin new lives.

Jamay and Marta teach modern-jazz-blues, which evolved from their studies with Atlas, a soloist with the famed Alvin Ailey Dance Theatre.  Their classes are held at ODC Dance Commons on Shotwell Street on Potrero Hill’s western edge.   Both cite modern dance colossi like Jose Limón, Martha Graham and Lester Horton as influences, and point to ballet, Afro and jazz, as key influences.

The two have diverse musical tastes. “I like a lot of new music, like Ice House, a band from Australia, women singers, I’m working on a new piece using Laurie Anderson’s music…Nina Simone, Regina Bell, Mariah [Carey], Lizz Wright,” said Jamay.  Marta grew up on “salsa, Donny Hathaway, Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder” and likes Santana, Alicia Keys and world music. Marta has strong roots in Latin and Afro styles, while Bayan is ballet-based. “Our two extremes met in the middle.”  They take each other’s classes, teach for one another, feed off each other, enriching the genre they created.

“I began late for a dancer, I was 28,” recalled Jamay.  She took dance class “eight times a week” with Atlas, who became a mentor.  It was she who gave Jamay her unusual moniker (she doesn’t use her birth name).  “It means ‘she who sees from within.’ I really feel like I got a chance to start over. I used to be a lab tech, I was married and lived a straight life. Now I’m on my second life. My mission is to keep going until I’m 80,” she said.

Maria Benjamin, a Wells Fargo Bank vice president, has been studying dance with Jamay and Marta for almost a dozen years.  Jamay is “…an amazing dance teacher and choreographer whose teaching conveys what a dancer should feel, evoke, and emote, far surpassing others in my dance experience,” said Benjamin.  “Not only does Bayan have this gift, but she’s also an incredible dancer.  Despite her age and many physical challenges, she continues to rock it out on the dance floor and do what many people half her age can’t do.  She’s quite an inspiration on many levels.”

The community engendered by the dance class is so tight-knit that many students arrange their lives around it.  “When you do something for as long as a quarter century, you can’t help but form friendships and community,” said Sharon Ellsworth, a dance student who’s been with the two divas, as she calls them, for 25 years.  “I’m 64 years old and am among the oldest in the class.  I’ve lived in the Mission since 1975; moved to San Francisco in 1967. I’m currently retired, spend time taking classes through San Francisco State’s Olli program and volunteer one day a week at a soup kitchen. I can’t imagine my life without their four classes a week!

“Bayan and Elvia have created a safe place for us to be emotionally and physically exposed and supported... it’s ok to make mistakes, be vulnerable…dance is after all an emotional thing,” Ellsworth said. “They constantly challenge us in a loving way and provide us the tools to explore the passion and emotion of dance.  It’s a very supportive environment. They have created a community of friends who support each other and share the love of dance.”  When people move away, “you stay in touch, you email, you keep the bond,” Ellsworth commented.  “You connect with others when you have community...when you need something, you go to each other and the community works together to solve the issue.  “For example, my husband is an architect...When Bayan and Elvia wanted to remodel their house, they went to him.”

After setting roots down in the Mission district, Jamay earned a Master’s degree in Social Work from San Francisco State University (SFSU).  She worked for a decade in the oncology and radiation departments at the University of California, San Francisco, while volunteering for the LGBT-focused New Leaf Services clinic and teaching dance.  She still maintains a private psychotherapy practice.

Meanwhile, Marta’s talents landed her in a show called “The Evolution of Black Dance,” which toured throughout the Bay Area for years. She then found work in the San Francisco Opera ballet company, performing with the likes of Luciano Pavarotti, Leontyne Price and Placido Domingo. She opened for Gil-Scott Heron with her sister, worked with Roberta Flack, percussionist Mongo Santamaria, local jazz chanteuse Rhiannon, her all-female quintet Alive! and African-American poet-playwright Ntozake Shange.  She traveled across America modeling the jewelry of San Francisco painter and artist Laurel Burch.

After taking “10 years to finish a five-year program,” Marta earned a degree in dance and a teaching credential from SFSU.  Roughly a quarter of a century ago she landed the dance directorship at San Francisco’s prestigious School of the Arts High School, in Twin Peaks, a job she holds to this day.  Most recently, she was honored with a lifetime achievement “Izzie” award, named for the celebrated San Francisco terpsichorean Isadora Duncan.

 

 

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