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Identifier
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HuntMeg
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Title
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Meg Hunt Oral History Interview
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Date
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21 June 2023
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Creator
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Meg Hunt
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Contributor
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Susan Fiksdal
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extracted text
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Meg Hunt
Interviewed by Susan Fiksdal
The Evergreen State College oral history project
June 21, 2023
FINAL
Fiksdal: This is Susan Fiksdal. I’m here with Meg Hunt on June 21, 2023, which is Summer Solstice, an
auspicious day.
Meg, I want to start your oral history back at the beginning. Where did you grow up? Who
were your parents? What kind of jobs did they have, and what kind of educational background did they
have?
Hunt: I grew up in Columbus, Indiana, which got the world’s attention [when Kogonada made the film
“Columbus” about its architecture.] The town had some outstanding architecture.
Columbus wasn’t my parents’ first choice. They would have liked to raise me further back East,
but jobs and all that, that’s where I grew up.
My parents were educated. They both had master’s degrees. Mother had a master’s in child
development. It’s interesting being raised by somebody with a master’s in child development.
[laughing] My father had a master’s in music. He was a church musician, choir director, piano teacher,
etc. Not a lot of money in that, but my mother was a very good manager. “I’m not a housewife. I’m a
homemaker,” she said.
She had gone to Carleton College and after graduation went to the Carleton-in-China program,
where they sent someone way back into the interior of China to teach English in a missionary school.
That’s why all the Chinese things [are] in my living room. I grew up with those. That’s how you furnish a
living room, right? That has informed my aesthetic a lot, just the visual stuff.
Fiksdal: Did she work when you were growing up?
Hunt: She had some work through the church that she did on the phone. I remember her being on the
phone a lot. She was the Director of Christian Education at the church, and she made some good
reforms. She took all the hellfire and damnation out of things for children and talked about the
Christian family, as a way of inserting a few things about “Here’s a better way to do childrearing.”
Fiksdal: Yes, I guess she would be very interested in that.
Hunt: Daddy was the church organist and choir director, and the church gave him a studio to teach
piano lessons. That was partly because they couldn’t pay him enough.
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We were good, educated white people, so there were perks. We got free medical care from a
doctor who was on the Church Session. Things like that.
Also, Mother had a more well-to-do friend that she had grown up with in Dubuque, Iowa, who
had a daughter just one jot older and therefore bigger than my sister. They would shop for clothes at
Saks in Chicago. Twice a year, a box would arrive—everything Susie had outgrown—and it went to my
sister, Barbara. Then it went to another girl that we knew. Then it came back to me. [laughter] Then it
went down to some other girls down the block.
It was high-quality clothes, but sometimes it was, “Oh, Mother, nobody at school is wearing
anything like this.” “Honey, this is better than what they’re wearing in your school.” A lot of class, with
no money attached to it but lots of perks. That’s how I see things in my upbringing.
Fiksdal: That’s interesting. What denomination was that?
Hunt: Presbyterian. Mainstream Presbyterian. The wealthiest people in town were Episcopalian, and
they all belonged to the country club, and they drank. Many of the Presbyterians also belonged to the
country club, but they didn’t talk about what they drank. The Methodists, I think, were next, and then
the Baptists. There was the socioeconomic hierarchy there.
Fiksdal: Did you sing in the choir and take piano from your dad?
Hunt: I didn’t take piano, and in a way, I regret that my father was the piano teacher du jour, and the
piano was right in the living room of our little house. You can’t practice in front of your teacher, so it
never worked out. That’s the one thing I would have liked. I know the keyboard. If you ask me to
arrange the chords to something, I can pick them out and say this chord and whatnot.
I got myself an electronic piano just to diddle around on. I would never let anybody hear me. I
just do these kind of dumb shit things.
I played the flute. That was what I actually did. There’s something about the fact that I could
take it into my bedroom and close the door to practice. Even though it could be heard everywhere, it
made it okay.
Fiksdal: It’s a portable instrument. I understand that.
Hunt: Daddy was piano, organ, violin, voice. It wasn’t one of his instruments. But he was my
accompanist. When I went to the music contests, I didn’t have to pay an accompanist. There was
Daddy, and he could advise about how you interpret this kind of note in a Mozart piece or whatever. I
had a lot of basic musicianship underlying there.
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I didn’t have dance lessons as a very young child, which is probably just as well because it would
have been bad quality ballet. I might have over-turned out my feet at the expense of my knees and
gawd knows what all.
But my mother had done this kind of Isadora dancing away at a camp in Connecticut. As a
teenager, I went to the junior version of the camp. I didn’t really get dance training per se until college.
But in a way, it was music that pushed me toward dance.
Fiksdal: How is that? Did you continue with the flute all the way to college?
Hunt: No. In my high school, the only instrumental musical organization was the band, and it was run
by this kind of little Hitler of a guy, and it was all about supporting football, and militaristic, and I did not
like that, so my senior year, I dropped out of band even.
Then I went to Oberlin, where I was in the college. The standards to get into the Conservatory, I
had not attempted that. I probably was not up to that level because I didn’t also have piano and things
that I think you’d have to have to get in.
The interesting thing about my education in Columbus, Indiana, was that we had very good
quality public schools. I had Latin through junior high in a regular public school. People today hear that
and can’t believe it. But people were willing to put money into education, and it was “our children,” not
“somebody else’s children” because we were a very white community. What few Blacks lived there
lived way over in one corner of town.
There was a Black lady who had a beautiful contralto voice and good musicianship, and my
father wanted her in his choir. He asked the minister, who said, “Yes, go ahead.” He lost some choir
members over that, and also there were some people who said, “I’ll stay, but I’m not going to sing in an
ensemble with her.”
Fiksdal: Oh, my gawd.
Hunt: Yeah. Southern Indiana was KKK country.
Fiksdal: What years are we talking about?
Hunt: I was high school class of ’64.
Fiksdal: I was ’65.
Hunt: I remember when we heard over the PA that John Kennedy had been shot.
Fiksdal: Me, too.
Hunt: That was my senior year, and that was the year the Beatles came to America. So, two historical
events! [laughing]
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I had some good teachers in high school, especially my English teacher. He was Brer Rabbit in
the Briar Patch. It just tickles me to death now that Catcher in the Rye is required reading for high
school students! That was one of those books you would never want to have seen around. You couldn’t
assign it. You couldn’t have it in the bookstore and all that.
But my teacher decided that maybe we ought to read it. We had our required texts on the
syllabus that we read and all, but he wanted us each to go out and choose some book and read it, and
report on it to the class. One of the things he mentioned was Catcher in the Rye.
Every time we read something with an angry, young—of course, male—protagonist, he would
say, “And how does he compare with Holden Caulfield?” A whole discussion would ensue. Everybody
who had read Catcher in the Rye would have some things to say about it. I wasn’t that interested, but I
finally read it just so I would know what was going on in class. He gave it a thorough treatment without
it ever appearing on the syllabus, or ever appearing in the bookstore. He was sneaky like that, and he
did several other sneaky things that were just terrific.
He later finished his PhD and taught at the University of South Florida in Tallahassee. I found
him, and I wrote to him about an experience I had had in Alaska in the dusk that reminded me a lot of
“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” I wrote him all about it, and he was thrilled. We
corresponded for a while. He died a year or two ago.
Fiksdal: You were well-prepared for Oberlin.
Hunt: Well, except college is different. I had made A’s without hardly thinking about it. My graduating
class in high school was 400-some. I was salutatorian. But college is different. And, of course,
everybody at Oberlin was a valedictorian or salutatorian. It was a whole different ballgame.
My grades weren’t that terrific. I was only there for one year because at the time, I had
concluded I wanted to major in dance. If I’d been a few years later, I could have stayed and done that,
but at the time, it was not something you could do at Oberlin, so I transferred to Ohio State, which had a
good, up-and-coming department.
My youth. Music took me to dance, I think.
Fiksdal: Because it wasn’t something you had thought about in particular until you got to college, or
was it?
Hunt: Um. There was a lady who arrived in town my senior year of high school who had done some
modern dance and wanted to have a little class. She got a class together—housewives and me—and
taught some modern dance. I was really into it.
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I’d done this Isadora dance, and I also took dance at Oberlin, just the courses that were
available, and I decided that’s what I wanted to do.
Fiksdal: That’s really good in your freshman year to make that decision. So, you went to Ohio State, a
much bigger place. How was that?
Hunt: The saving grace was that the Dance Department was small enough you knew everybody. The
thing I think people join sororities for, I didn’t need. On a personal level, I wasn’t very smart about
relating to the opposite sex. A period of confusion about that lasted past college and into much of my
life.
I didn’t have the guts my senior year to look at going to New York City, taking class at some
studio, and maybe getting into a company, and having a day job to support doing that. That was a little
too scary, and I got married instead. It didn’t last very long. It wasn’t the right person anyway.
When I was getting a master’s at Temple in Philadelphia—because I had landed in Philadelphia
about that time, or at the end of it—I married again, a more appropriate person, but we were in way
different life stages, and that didn’t work out either.
My life as far as relationships has been kind of . . . what do I say? But in the ‘80s, I met Ed
LaChapelle, and we lived together for 25 years until death did us part. I currently have a boyfriend, Jim.
We don’t live together. We haven’t really looked to do that because we’re each deeply entrenched in
our own paid-for house, and he’s kind of messy, and we’re better off where we are. But we get together
lots and do stuff together lots.
Fiksdal: It sounds like it all turned out fine.
Hunt: It is, and at our age, we’re in it for the long haul. What’s the point of breaking up, whatever that
would be?
Fiksdal: Temple University you went to for your master’s. That’s considered a terminal degree in dance.
Right?
Hunt: Mostly, yeah. [What really is the terminal degree is an MFA]—what I got was an MED because
dance was lodged in the School of Health, Phys Ed, Recreation and Dance. Dance doesn’t get a fair
shake in very many places.
But what really now is the terminal degree is you do your undergrad, you go join some company
and go on tour and get out there performing, and then, when your joints begin to not stand it too well,
you go back for an MFA. That would be, I think, what Kabby [Mitchell] probably did. Did he get an
MFA? He might have.
Fiksdal: I’m not sure.
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Hunt: But he had a major career in ballet. Major. It was sort of what was going on at the time.
Standards in all levels—like technical standards in everything—have gone through the roof since my day.
Fiksdal: After you got that degree, you were not going to tour. Is that when you started looking around
to teach?
Hunt: Yeah. I was married to my second husband. He was finishing up as an undergrad at Denison
University in Granville, Ohio. I got a part-time, visiting lecturer gig there. I think I had three semesters
of that or something. We later had a little period of living in my parents’ basement. [laughing]
Then I got a job at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana. It was a half-time instructorship. It
was better than a visiting lecturer. You just got half of everything.
Fiksdal: These are all really good schools.
Hunt: Yeah. I know how to talk the right way to people such as would be hiring me at a Quaker-related
college. My parents were always interested in Quakerism. There wasn’t a Friends meeting of the silent
and pacifist type, which they would have been members of if there was such a thing, and if Daddy
wasn’t a church musician, and etc.
Fiksdal: You had a teaching position, half-time.
Hunt: Yeah, but we lived on the cheap and could live on that. tuition. It was when there were really
cheap places you could rent to live. I don’t think they exist anymore. That’s where our two life stages—
he was still finding himself and I was embarking on my career—took us apart.
I’d heard of Evergreen from Kathleen O’Shaughnessy—who had a different last name at the
time—and who was on the faculty in Psychology. Then she came out here and was a was a visiting
faculty at Evergreen. She was coming out here and I heard about the place. Meanwhile, I had developed
some interest in the outdoors, and I spent a Christmas vacation and some summer time out in Alpine,
Texas. A friend I’d met at Earlham was connected to this bunch of birders and some crazy biology
people. [laughing]
I was out there on several trips, just hanging out with them, going out to wild places and
camping, and looking for peregrine falcon aeries, and doing that kind of stuff. I had applied to
Evergreen.
Oh, my interview. I was at Earlham, and it was an icy day. Rudy Martin was on a recruiting trip.
He was in Chicago. That was kind of a “fer piece” over icy roads. I got in my old VW bus and I went up
there. I had time to go to the restroom and get lunch and talk to Rudy.
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One thing Rudy said to me was, “You have to know, the faculty of Evergreen are a real bunch of
prima donnas.” Oh, well, whatever. He was so right, and I didn’t really understand what that meant.
[laughing]
Anyway, I had my interview. I went back many hours over the icy roads back to Earlham.
Fiksdal: How did you feel the interview went?
Hunt: I didn’t have anything to compare it with, really. I was so young, career-wise. But I got an
interview out at the college.
I got to meet Pam Schick and Susie Strasser on the side. They weren’t on my interview
schedule, I don’t think, but I went out to dinner with them, and we talked.
Fiksdal: Do you remember the year that this was?
Hunt: I started in the fall of ’76, so this would have been spring of ’76.
Fiksdal: Pam Schick. Remind me a little bit.
Hunt: She was a one-year hire. In those days, if you had a one-year, you had to go away afterwards.
You couldn’t stay. She went up to Seattle and started Kinetics Dance Company. She had technique
classes.
Fiksdal: Oh, she was a dancer.
Hunt: The Washington Hall Performance Gallery, she and some other dancers had quite a thing going
there. I would go up there to take class. Technique class is forever. You keep going.
Fiksdal: They were welcoming, I imagine.
Hunt: How did it work? I had two days of interviews. I hung around one more day and poked around
the campus myself, and I think that’s when I got to talk to Pam. Then I took one day and went up to
Seattle and poked my head in one dance studio up there. It was sunny weather this whole time.
[laughter] Saw Mount Rainier and everything.
I got the job, but I was spending the summer with the birders in Texas doing whatever stuff. I
got this call from the provost at the time, and he said, “Well, we thought we had a job for you, but it
turns out we don’t.”
Fiksdal: Oh, no! Was it Ed Kormondy?
Hunt: I think it was. I got a call from Rudy. “You’ve been shafted. I feel like I’ve been shafted.” There
were three of us—Matt Halfant, Josie Reed, and me. We all got the same treatment. Rudy connected
us with a lawyer and we got our jobs.
This was my introduction to Evergreen. Plus, in my first year of teaching in Performing Arts
Today, my colleagues were cool toward me, and one of them wrote an evaluation saying I didn’t belong
7
at Evergreen. I was getting more and more interested in outdoor ed, and that was a distraction from
being purely dance, dance, dance and dance.
The other thing is, of course, with dance as we understand it, a student—building skills for a
minor or a major—can’t do it at Evergreen. In the curricular structure it cannot be done.
Fiksdal: It’s the same problem with French language—any language study—or mathematics.
Hunt: Oh, yes. Yeah, absolutely.
Fiksdal: Anything with a lot of repetition, a lot of concentrated work. I think we forgot to focus on what
kind of dance you do. It’s modern dance, right?
Hunt: Modern dance. That was my thing. The classical dance of India came along much later. I think I
was in my forties by then.
Fiksdal: You taught this one program. It didn’t go really well.
Hunt: The program, I guess, went okay, but nobody understood why I wasn’t turning out dancers, I
think. And I didn’t know how—this has been a problem, as I look back. All these colleagues, who lived
from the neck up, I’ve never found the language or the means or the something to communicate that
what I’m doing is real stuff.
You heard what I said at Charlie Teske’s funeral where we both spoke. Charlie understood. He
didn’t know anything about dance, really, but he understood the oral traditional process, where you
pass an art form on, and you can’t write it down. Technically, there’s a dance notation system, but you
don’t use that to pass it to the next dancer. I never found a way or a language to communicate to my
colleagues the importance of what I was doing.
I’m skipping forward a little bit. I spent some time in India on one of my leaves and my
sabbatical. Anyway, I wrote it up for my portfolio, some experiences I had to do with the dynamics of
doing art and where you are in relation to all the authorities and stuff. One of the evaluators was Terry
Hubbard, the librarian who was on the reference desk a lot. He said to me, “This is good writing!” I was
terribly flattered. Later, I thought, yeah, the dude probably thinks a dancer can’t write.
Fiksdal: Yeah, that’s possible.
Hunt: That’s quite possible. Because I think if I would apply myself, I do have some facility with words.
In fact, when my spine was messing me up a few years back, I undertook to study poetry with Gail
Tremblay. I was going to sign up for four quarter hours at the College, and shit, for half the price, I can
just take my checkbook to her house, and we’ll do a deal.
So, I sat down and wrote poetry, and a couple of the pieces are kind of good. But it takes hours
on your butt. It does. That’s not me. [laughing]
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Fiksdal: Let’s go back to your first years.
Hunt: I taught in the Outdoor Ed program—much to the disgruntlement of all my arts colleagues—with
William Aldridge and Barry Williams, who was a visitor. As I felt around, it was like, I don’t know who I
can trust around here, but I could confide in William. It was a completely non-romantic relationship—
maybe he was kind of a father figure—but he got me, and he was just somebody I could tell anything to.
I needed counseling. He said, “Here’s a person I recommend.” So, it was all good.
Fiksdal: You needed counseling because of the job or just personally?
Hunt: Everything.
Fiksdal: You had a divorce before you came out?
Hunt: Right, I came here single. The divorce was probably in process, but no kids, no property.
Fiksdal: You were free.
Hunt: Yeah.
Fiksdal: I’m glad you found someone that you could confide in.
Hunt: But he was not an artist at all, so there were things that he probably didn’t understand. But I
could say anything to him, and I could feel okay about that.
Fiksdal: You continued that relationship?
Hunt: Yeah, we were friends. [After I met Ed, I didn’t see as much of him because Ed lived in Kirkland
and I commuted a few days each week.]
Fiksdal: What were the students like in those early years?
Hunt: Here’s the thing. They were ready to be really free and loose and all that. At Earlham, I got these
studious ones—some of them came from Quaker families, some of them just from families who thought
this was a nice philosophy and all that—they were very serious. I was the one in class—like doing
choreographic exercises—saying, “Loosen up! Loosen up!”
But when I got in front of all these students who were loose already, I didn’t have the language
to say, “Tighten up” without sounding like an old fuddy-duddy. It was hard to communicate that in the
long run, the discipline will free you.
As a dancer, you start your technical training and you get technical, and you’re technical, and
you’re working on your technique. Pretty soon, you feel that’s the only thing that’s in your body. I
remember when I was at Ohio State—I was a senior or something—and I went to the in-house showing
of the freshman composition pieces. I was stunned with the imaginativeness of their work. Well, they
didn’t have all this technique in their bodies yet. Also, the teacher must have done some things to really
stimulate the imagination.
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It’s interesting. I go to a freeform dance on Sunday mornings and there’s a woman there who’s
a longtime dance teacher and we’ve had these great talks. She’s talked about getting people to be truly
imaginative in their work. One time, she got a bunch of students to really crank out wonderful stuff, and
the people who organized this symposium or this session or whatever couldn’t believe that she didn’t
choreograph it all. She said, “No, I didn’t do it. They did.” They just flat out didn’t believe it.
Just something about imagination and discipline, you keep with the discipline and at a certain
point, it increases your toolbox. If you can get your imagination going again, you’ve got so many more
tools to work with. But it’s hard to communicate that to a beginner who’s all about freedom.
Fiksdal: You’re trying to say that they are all imagination and loose and doing all this work, and not as
interested in technique, or not seeing the point.
Hunt: I think they don’t see the point. And if they don’t see the point, at Evergreen, you don’t have to
do anything. [laughing]
Fiksdal: Right, they’re not going to stay.
Hunt: I’ve come to believe in distribution requirements, as long as they’re not too rigid.
Fiksdal: Yeah. Were you stuck with beginners your whole time there?
Hunt: Pretty much.
Fiksdal: Oh, wow.
Hunt: Sometimes people would come in with some dance technique. They’d taken ballet for umpteen
years or something, and they would use the tools they had, which was nice. But basically, I couldn’t take
a group of people and in one quarter, bring them up to X technical level and then we’d do Y. It was
mostly about how can you create works of movement art with the tools you’ve got?
Fiksdal: You’d have them maybe a quarter?
Hunt: Yeah. Students move around so frequently, and I can’t blame them because they’re interested in
a lot of things.
Fiksdal: But back then, in the ‘70s, weren’t you in year-long programs? Maybe by then, no. Maybe
they were two quarters long.
Hunt: I think maybe a couple years, year-long programs, and then they began to parcel out.
Fiksdal: Yeah, that really wreaked havoc on your curriculum. I can see that.
Hunt: Except that there wouldn’t have been a place for me to take one group of students up through
levels to something. There wouldn’t have been any context for that.
Fiksdal: There was no way, unless it’s extracurricular, which is not what you wanted.
Hunt: Yeah, right.
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Fiksdal: We taught together and that was a great year. I was there only for two quarters—I took a leave
in the spring—but that was a good program.
Hunt: I might have taken a leave also. I don’t remember if I actually did it all three quarters.
Fiksdal: It did go on three quarters.
Hunt: It did. Okay. What year was that?
Fiksdal: It was The Making of Meaning 1985-86.
Hunt: Okay, then I probably did go on three quarters.
Fiksdal: It was with Charlie Teske, and Ainara Wilder, and you and me.
Hunt: That was it.
Fiksdal: Okay. For me, it was really a little scary because you were all firmly in the arts. As far as I was
concerned, so was Charlie, with his music background. He’s broadly humanities, but my humanities
background was not as broad. I was in French literature [and linguistics-sf]
Hunt: But The Making of Meaning: “meaning,” there’s your piece.
Fiksdal: But you and Ainara helped me so much because I would lecture, and I think after the first
couple times, you both talked to me about space. I said, “What?” [laughing] How I needed to use the
space.
Hunt: Oh, the gesture.
Fiksdal: And gesture.
Hunt: Yeah, the French teacher does this. The lecturer does . . .
Fiksdal: Yes, I was not presenting myself well as a lecturer, which I had never thought about.
Hunt: That’s from Laban movement analysis work. Ainara probably got it through theater. Without
knowing Laban, she just got it through how you do theater. Interesting.
Fiksdal: That was just a little tidbit that I remember from teaching together. I also remember us sitting
there and planning the program for five weeks while Charlie was talking to some reporter about
Evergreen.
When he came back, he fully expected us to be, I don’t know, in some sort of disarray. Instead,
we had planned the program, we had figured out everything we were going to do for five weeks, and he
was stunned—and pleased. Very pleased.
Hunt: I don’t remember that part at all.
Fiksdal: It was great. We were really proud of ourselves. It didn’t kill us. It was easy because we had
plenty of ideas, and we all had experience. Who else did you teach with in those early years? You did
Outdoor Ed.
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Hunt: The next year, what did I do? That would have been ’77-’78. But ’78-’79, I was in The Arts in
Social Perspective, which folded after one quarter. Then contracts, and in the spring Making Dances,
which led to a performance. I don’t remember much of that year.
Fiksdal: That’s okay.
Hunt: I taught with other performing arts people mostly.
Fiksdal: That makes sense because you were trying to get that going.
Hunt: Although getting it going, that implies continuity, and—
Fiksdal: there wasn’t. Is that because the faculty would rotate into other programs?
Hunt: I think in performing arts in general, what would constitute an upper-level program? You would
have to have people who had previous experience on the college level in all of those arts. Somebody
could do a group contract in music, say, where prerequisites are audition or something. You could get
one art form. You might get enough people who you could call somewhat advanced. But any
interdisciplinary teaching, how do you do it? You’ve run into this.
Fiksdal: Yes, of course. It’s quite difficult. At first, it was not hard at all because we had so many
transfer students. We had students at every level of French. But as time went on, that wasn’t the case.
Tell me about India. When did you go to India?
Hunt: That was later on. I taught with Ratna Roy, Ainara and Anne Fischel. We each were going to have
a unit of our own discipline in the program that we would teach to whoever wanted to do that, and we
could do each other’s. I thought about taking Anne’s media—which would have put my life in a whole
different direction—but I decided to do Ratna’s Odissi dance unit. Having dance technique, I picked
things up pretty quickly. We did a little performance for the program and all that, and I continued with
that.
Fiksdal: Oh, you did? Did you study with her, or you said you went to India?
Hunt: Both. This is a slightly tricky dance because, according to the Indian protocol, you have a guru.
Fiksdal: I can imagine Ratna wanting to be your guru.
Hunt: Yeah, but she also wanted me to pick up some stuff from some of the other artists in India and
bring it back. Also, I wanted to go to India to study, so she set me up with somebody who was of a
slightly different school, but very well reputed, I think just to pick up some stuff.
Fiksdal: It’s still Odissi.
Hunt: Yeah. It wasn’t in the province that they’re now calling Odisha, but it was in Delhi. I had been
with her and some other faculty on a Fulbright-sponsored, six-week trip in India. Delhi is easier than
other places in India if you’re not Indian. It’s an easy place to be.
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There was this teacher there that she thought would be a good fit. Also, stylistically, I think, for
me, given— stylistically, I never did satisfy her because I have too much modern dance in my body. I
would have done better at Bharatnatyam, but that wasn’t the form.
Part of the history of dance in India is trying to make something that had been respectable,
became disreputable, trying to bring it into respectability on the stage, as opposed to either in the
temple or in a degraded form in the temple. I think those who revived Bharatnatyam were very much
influenced by Western dance. Some of the posture. I see ballet training in everything.
Fiksdal: Was this a form that you knew about before or that you encountered?
Hunt: I knew about it, but I didn’t have any special access to it. Ratna was my access and Odissi is her
form.
After that six-week trip to India, she found me this teacher in Delhi, and that’s where I went on
my sabbatical. That, and Ed came, and we did a little trek in Nepal. That was in my forties.
Fiksdal: Did you bring that training to Evergreen?
Hunt: Yes, I taught a four-quarter-hour unit for the beginners in Odissi for a number of quarters. I
taught them a piece that they did on Super Saturday, on the dance stage organized through Leisure Ed,
with Ratna’s blessing.
Fiksdal: That can be a little tricky.
Hunt: Yes.
Fiksdal: Did you also mention Chinese dance?
Hunt: I never did Chinese dance except I took one class in the Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival. My six
and six pattern was two quarters at Evergreen, a quarter leave without pay, so I could live with Ed in
Alaska for six months.
I did one class, and because I had had all this stuff on movement of the eyes and hands in Odissi,
I was quite complimented on how well I did this class. I didn’t actually study it, but it was another thing
in the toolkit. You know?
Fiksdal: Yeah, that’s wonderful. Now, I’m interested in all these forms of dance that you’ve done and
tried.
Hunt: Every modern dancer also studies ballet, not to perform ballet but as a background discipline. At
Ohio State, we had modern dance three days a week and ballet two days a week. My two last years
there, that’s how it was.
Fiksdal: Did you continue with ballet in any way afterwards?
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Hunt: If I was living someplace and didn’t have some other place to go for a technique class, I would go
to a ballet class. But, no, I wasn’t going to perform ballet.
Fiksdal: Let’s think back to Evergreen. Were there any faculty colleagues that you taught with that
inspired you or taught you ways of teaching that you adopted or that you admired, or just people that
you admired?
Hunt: I don’t know that I learned a way of teaching from anybody, although that would have been a
good thing to do. Of course, Charlie.
The one I taught with Andrew Buchman and Rose Jang, we did Foundations of Performing Arts.
We had a wonderful time together. We’d be brainstorming for what we were going to do about such
and such. Somebody would have an idea and we’d all say, “Yeah!”
But interestingly, I taught with Andrew later, just the two of us, and it didn’t work so well. There
could be a zillion factors about that. But FOPA with Andrew and Rose was probably the most successful
team effort that I remember.
Fiksdal: That’s good.
Hunt: Just thinking. What have I blocked out? [laughing]
Fiksdal: Sometimes you get these ideas a little later. Did you become interested in another discipline or
area of study because of working interdisciplinarily?
Hunt: Let me think on that.
Fiksdal: It sounds like you were mostly in the performing arts, so in a way, you were already there. You
already knew something about—
Hunt: There was one thing. It would come up in the arts, the right brain versus the left brain. I thought
people weren’t quite understanding it right. I think I even used a blackboard and I tried to explain what
was being said. Right brain is not emotions, it’s forms and this and this.
I was explaining this to a bunch of arts students, and somebody said, “You should be a scientist.”
I thought if I had been interested enough in science, I think I could have done well. But there again,
growing up as a girl in the era I grew up in and all that, there would be no way I’d ever go in that
direction.
It’s funny because I always hated math. “I hate math. I hate math.» I never liked it. But then I
got to geometry. This is news you can use! Hey! Because I had been a craftsy little girl. My parents
didn’t have a lot of money for toys, but every little piece of foil out of the Christmas envelope, and any
interesting raw materials . . . and I was taught to use scissors as soon as I was old enough, and to thread
a needle . . . a lot of my play was making stuff. Little ditzy things, who knows? But making stuff. I just
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thought, geometry, you can use this stuff! And I knew how I would use it. And I did very well—I did
extremely well—in geometry class.
Fiksdal: That’s very interesting.
Hunt: But that wouldn’t have taken me into mathematics. I think it’s too abstract. I’m a concrete
operational person. I’ve always wondered, was it inherently in me, or was it living in Alaska? Because if
you’re living way out in the middle of nowhere, it’s all concrete operational. You have to think about
how you’re getting your water. Is the pump in repair? Where do you put it in? All the details of life are
concrete operational.
Fiksdal: When did you start going to Alaska? Do you remember around your age?
Hunt: I met Ed in ’81 or ’82. I think it would have been starting ’85 or so, during a spring leave without
pay. I’d go up there to the cabin he had at the time.
Fiksdal: I kind of remember you retiring early in order to just be there with him.
Hunt: Yeah, that was in the early 2000s. When I was age 55 and 20 years in the system—that’s to stay
on State benefits—you’re self-paying, but you’re staying in the pool—that would have been the early
2000s. I think ’04 was probably the last time I taught one of those three-strikes-you’re-out quarters.
Fiksdal: Three-strikes-you’re out quarters?
Hunt: After retiring, you could come back and teach one quarter.
Fiksdal: A post-retirement contract.
Hunt: A post-retirement contract. You got three of those. I don’t know what there is now.
Fiksdal: They don’t have that anymore. [laughter] They are in financial straits.
Hunt: Yeah.
Fiksdal: We’ll get to Alaska in a little bit more depth and retirement, but I wanted to make sure to ask a
few other questions. The college was always in trouble when we were teaching there.
Hunt: I remember all that.
Fiksdal: There were demonstrations. Students in an uproar. Did students ever have a revolution in your
class?
Hunt: I think a lot of the revolutions I’ve heard about happened after I left. There may have been some
that happened in spring when I was gone. I always thought it was a bad idea to move Day of Absence,
Day of Presence to spring—it used to be in the winter because spring—I mean think about it. In the bad
old days, that was the time they did panty raids and all that. Spring, something happens to people.
Fiksdal: They become less serious about their work.
15
Hunt: Something’s boiling up in people. So, I don’t remember any campus revolutions. They happened
when I was not there.
Fiksdal: Were you there when the Day of Absence was moved and there were all these issues with Bret
Weinstein?
Hunt: No, all the time I was there, it was in the winter.
Fiksdal: Okay, you’re just talking about later.
Hunt: I’m just talking about later when I heard about all this foofaraw, I thought, they should have left it
in the winter. But I understand, there are so many winter holidays, faculty probably said, “We can’t
have yet one more interruption of the schedule.” But I still think it would have been smart to leave it
there.
Fiksdal: Do you remember any students with fondness, or was there anyone that really struck you in a
particular way? Did you have someone go off and actually do dance or performing arts?
Hunt: There may be some who’ve gone into the area of performing. I didn’t hear later from students. I
have to feel like “I shot an arrow into the air,” etc.
Fiksdal: Yeah, because you weren’t able to really work with them at an advanced level, so it’s a
different—
Hunt: I may have influenced somebody who remembers the influence and that there was somebody at
Evergreen who did that for them, but they don’t remember my name. [laughter]
Fiksdal: Yes.
Hunt: That’s possible. There was a program where students rotated in through media, movement, and
something, and I remember some students who were particularly imaginative. I ran into one of them
years later here in Olympia. She was doing something entirely different. I was impressed by how this
foursome of students working as a little team came up with some wonderfully imaginative pieces. They
weren’t formally dance trained, but they just did it.
Fiksdal: That was great, and you recognized each other later.
Hunt: Yeah. But I really am not in touch with students I had—oh, except Outdoor Ed, I’ve run into a
couple of them. One of them, I see at the Co-op from time to time. Another I’ve run into some.
Fiksdal: I really remember your Swan Song for your final performance at Evergreen as you retired. I
remember Betsy Diffendal being there because she was laughing so loud. [laughing] It was a fabulous
performance. You did such a beautiful job.
Hunt: Thank you. It would have been nice if I could have passed that on.
Fiksdal: Yeah.
16
Hunt: But the Evergreen curriculum structure just . . .
Fiksdal: Yeah, it didn’t work for some disciplines. Just to clarify a little bit, in case people don’t
understand, part of what you were doing in the Swan Song was pretending that you couldn’t do certain
things anymore, or it was harder; that your body—
Hunt: Oh, the last piece in the program.
Fiksdal: Yeah, the last piece.
Hunt: Yeah, the underarm—
Fiksdal: Underarm fat. It was very cleverly done and nicely choreographed. I just wanted to let you
know that I remember that.
There was maybe partly an aging body that had you leave, but you were also in love, so you
were off to Alaska.
Hunt: The aging body, that may have influenced me to take up Odissi because I began to notice in my
modern dance technique classes, I wasn’t doing elevation work as much. Elevation goes in your early
thirties. You stop having quite so much ballon. Maybe you keep it through your thirties, but then, it’s
gone. You can jump, but even if you can still do a leap, it doesn’t have that ballon, a kind of lightness.
I think it’s also in my movement signature nature, Odissi is down into the ground. The Indian
forms are down into the ground—grounded—and that appealed to me, I think.
Fiksdal: When you moved to Alaska, you were full-time, having to think concretely, as you pointed out,
because you were still in the same home, I guess.
Hunt: Yeah.
Fiksdal: Was this in the wilderness?
Hunt: A community surrounded by Wrangell-St. Elias National Park. Very touristy in the summer and
nothing in the winter. There were some people who were doing science out of there, and there was a
summer program that had some educational things, so there were some compatible people around in
the summertime. They were very busy, of course. Well, we were all busy, I guess.
I did some community stuff. I was president of the board of the local museum, and secretary of
the community council, and several of those things that a lot of local folks didn’t have the skillset to
handle.
Fiksdal: Yeah, and you were organized.
Hunt: And I knew about the white-collar world. I knew how it operates. The other people involved in
the education and the science that were there in the summer, they understood it, too, but they were
busy with other things.
17
Fiksdal: That’s great, so you had positions that you could fill. [
Hunt: Yeah, community volunteer positions.
Fiksdal: But when you were in Alaska, were you able to do dance?
Hunt: This became a problem. When I was six months on and six off, it seemed to work. All of my six
months in Olympia, I’d have access to performances and libraries and all the good stuff. Then, it was
nice to have a break and go to Alaska and grow vegetables and go hiking and all that.
Being up there full-time, it was a problem. I would go to the Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival and
the Valdez Theater Conference, but that would be only a couple weeks. Then we actually got an
apartment in Fairbanks for the winter and Ed would spend some time there and I would spend more
time there. I got involved in things locally. I actually taught one semester at University of Alaska
Fairbanks, an intro to the arts program. Oh, my gawd! Brand X, and it’s a required course. The jocks
sitting in the back were doing something on their laptops.
Fiksdal: Not your cup of tea.
Hunt: Oh, no. The thing is that after that experience, if I had to do that again, I would completely
revamp the course. Some students would appreciate it, others would hate it, and then university
structure—do you know the racket in textbooks? The publishers’ racket. Unbelievable.
Okay, here’s a history of the visual arts, and this textbook about this thick, at least 100 bucks.
They do have some used ones in the bookstore, but the same publisher comes out with a new edition. I
compared the new and the old and there were a few variations. One painting was reproduced
backwards, and I didn’t know which one was backwards.
I told the students, “You can buy either of these editions. Let’s look at them. If we see any
major discrepancies, we’ll deal with it in class.” I was just stunned how much they’d have to spend on
this thing for one course, and they had a whole slate of other courses. I had never been involved in
textbooks per se.
Fiksdal: No, because we didn’t use them.
Hunt: We didn’t use them, and in my field, there wasn’t one that I would have picked up. That was a
shock.
Then there were the hockey jocks. There’s no football in Alaska because snow comes too early.
Hockey rules. Interestingly, a Canadian person can go to school in Alaska as an in-state student. That’s
how they get their hockey players. I think that’s one of the motives.
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They had games on the road, and I was to send along the quiz to be proctored by one of their
coaches or whoever, and it was very noticeable how much better their scores were on those quizzes. I
thought, this is bullshit. Do I want to deal with this bullshit? [laughing] It was a shock.
Fiksdal: At Evergreen, we really didn’t have sports issues too much.
Hunt: I remember Jan Lambert. She was Athletic Director. She would go to the coaches’ meetings
where they set up the schedule, and she’d say, “We play on Wednesdays and Saturdays.” “What??!!??”
“We play on Wednesdays and Saturdays.” [Wednesdays were Governance Days in the afternoons so
most students had the afternoon free. -sf] She fought for that, but nobody had heard of that. School
comes first? Hello?
Fiksdal: I didn’t know that. That’s helpful. You retired. You lived in Alaska until Ed died. I presume
that’s when you left?
Hunt: It was after that, but it took a while. First of all, you’re there, and you just carry on. You have to
admit to yourself that you want to leave Alaska. It was absolutely the right thing to do. I thought about
staying. I would have moved, say, to Homer or something, but even that, it’s such a long way to
anything. And I’m not getting any younger. I wasn’t really feeling age so much yet, but I think—well,
maybe I was.
This was the logical place to come back to. I could have gone anywhere. But I felt like this was
my town.
Fiksdal: You had lived here quite a long time.
Hunt: I had lived here plenty before.
Fiksdal: You came back, and you’ve been doing dance, it sounds like.
Hunt: Some, yeah. I subbed for Ratna. One quarter, I think, she was gone to India. I subbed for Joanna
Cashman, who was doing modern dance downtown for a little bit.
I danced in her group, and then I did some dance with RADCO—Random Acts of Dance
Collective. But it was such a hornet’s nest of personalities. I thought, I don’t need this.
Fiksdal: That reminded me of the prima donnas at Evergreen. We’ll continue talking a little bit about
your retirement years, and then I want to go back to that statement.
Hunt: What floats my boat now is this freeform dance on Sunday mornings. The music is arranged, and
you just do your own stuff. I’m dancing for myself.
If an interesting performing possibility came along, I’d be open to it. No jumps, leaps or hops.
No high kicks. No, the body is what it is, but there’s so much you can do without those. But I’m not in a
place that I feel like I want to organize that myself.
19
There are one or two other people I’d love to cook something up with if they had a lot of energy
to put into it. But then, the whole thing is the performance venue. Where are you going to put it on?
Then you’re off and running in this whole other direction.
I need to dance, but I do it for me on Sunday mornings. Or if I’m fixing supper and some music
comes on the radio, I kick off my shoes and I just do it. That’s my dancing currently.
I actually put a floor down in the garage, a real dance floor, and I haven’t been using it lately.
Maybe because I have to heat the space and all that. But I tell myself that it’s going to waste; I ought to
get out there and do it. We’ll see.
Fiksdal: You’re still hiking, you mentioned?
Hunt: Yes, that’s major.
Fiksdal: Why is that major? What are you doing that’s major?
Hunt: I’m involved with the Mountaineers. I got back to the Mountaineers Club. I had taken the basic
climbing course, but I don’t have the speed or stamina for climbs anymore. But hiking, there’s lots of
hiking to do. I’ve led hikes for Mountaineers. Just did one last Thursday. Jim used to be a hardcore
climber. Now, not hardcore. He’s a hiker also.
Fiksdal: Who is Jim?
Hunt: He’s my sweetie. When I rejoined Mountaineers, I fell in with this group of people who were
doing stewardship work—sawing up the logs that fall down on the trails, a little tread work. I don’t do
the hardcore tread work, but I can saw up a storm.
Fiksdal: We all appreciate you. That’s a lot of work.
Hunt: We organize trips to go out and work certain sections of trails and all that. Also, this year I led the
whole effort to clean up, and make ready for the season, Big Creek Campground. You make the turn to
go to Lake Cushman. It’s right there at the intersection.
I organized a big crew of us. Students who were taking basic climbing or some other course are
required to do a day of stewardship, so we got a lot of captive young muscle, which is nice. So, I’ve
gotten involved in that.
Fiksdal: That’s good. You sound pretty busy.
Hunt: Busy enough. Sometimes there are lulls when I ask myself, what am I doing? But then, like I said
to my sister, there’s always a project coming along. [And I am very much involved in Samba OlyWa,
mostly as a drummer, but I am also on the Board now. And I do dance with the group occasionally.]
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Fiksdal: Let’s go back to the comment that Rudy made to you at your interview about the prima
donnas, and then your arrival, and your discovery that it was or wasn’t true. Do you remember any
personalities that you would have said, “Well, there are four or five of them right there”?
Hunt: I don’t know. I had trouble with some of the men in humanities. Among other things, there was
a bunch of sexism.
Fiksdal: There was a lot of sexism.
Hunt: Oh, yeah. I didn’t have the guts to stand up to that. I didn’t have the language and the
something-or-other to stand up to that. Prima donnas. Yeah, I think those would be my chief prima
donnas.
Fiksdal: I know pretty much who they were because I was around them all the time.
Hunt: You were probably teaching with them all the time.
Fiksdal: Yeah, and we were both young and in disciplines that were not respected by them. Language
teaching is not a respected discipline among people.
Hunt: But you’ve got linguistics.
Fiksdal: That was later. When I did that and came back, suddenly, I did have respect.
Hunt: The PhD factor is also—
You start thinking about any linguistic issue, it’s connected to everything else.
Fiksdal: It really is.
Hunt: If I were doing a whole career over again, I’d want to study some linguistics.
Fiksdal: That would be great.
Hunt: I grew up in a language-oriented family. We had conversation at the dinner table. Our grammar
was corrected, or if there was a dispute about something like that, someone would be dispatched to go
look it up.
Fiksdal: That’s great.
Hunt: The TV, when we finally did get one, was put in the basement so it would not interfere with
conversation. The sad part is my parents weren’t savvy about sociolinguistics. My father was bilingual
in French and English. His mother was French. He learned English when he went to school. I could have
been bilingual just like that.
But he would have tried to teach it, which is not the way, and Mother would have been left out
and resisted. “It’s bad for their digestion at the dinner table.” Eternal regret. It would have been so
simple to be bilingual in French and English.
21
Fiksdal: It is extremely difficult, though, to raise kids bilingually, because in this country, you’re
surrounded by English everywhere.
Hunt: That’s true.
Fiksdal: I really understand his decision.
Hunt: And they didn’t have the money to take us to France. They didn’t have the money to do that at
all.
I always aced language courses. I took German because I thought I was going to be majoring in
music and going to the Mozarteum [University] in Salzburg my junior year from Oberlin. That went by
the boards way back. I got into AP classes and all that, and then I took French, got into AP.
But now, as an adult, just in the last few years, I’ve tried to learn Spanish, which is very easy if
you have a background in language. I can’t retain it. It’s the aging brain. I took it because Spanish, you
can actually use. I have years of study of these two languages I never got to use. What good is that?
Fiksdal: It’s still good to try.
Hunt: Oh, yeah.
Fiksdal: Usually towards the end of the interview, we talk a little bit about Evergreen now. Do you
know very much about what’s going on now at the college?
Hunt: No, I don’t. I haven’t been to campus lately. I don’t know anybody anymore, and performing arts
got erased completely. There just hasn’t been the motive. I didn’t even go to the emeritus event this
year because I was leading a hike that day. The previous year, I went, and Marla Beth Elliott gave a
lecture to everybody about the Five Foci and the whatnot, and how the performing arts are right in
there.
Fiksdal: Good for her.
Hunt: And how to use a microphone. Who was it before her? Somebody that we all respect, but he
didn’t get his mouth up to the mic, and I didn’t hear a word he said.
Fiksdal: That can be very difficult.
Hunt: This is the concrete operational again. You’ve got all these ideas, but if you don’t put the mic
right up by your mouth like a rock star, we’re not going to hear you. [laughing]
Fiksdal: That all has to do with performance, and that’s something that I really gained from our
program—how much conversation is a performance. I hadn’t thought about it that way before. It’s like
singing. You say something and then it’s gone. Whatever you remember from that, someone picks up,
and then someone picks up, and then someone picks up. But the arena for misunderstanding or for
forgetting or for whatever, all those things, are very prevalent in conversations because we
22
misunderstand each other, a tone can be a little off. Performance, I think, is really important to
understand.
Hunt: We’re missing, I think, with all the e-mails flying around, how much you actually communicate
face to face.
Fiksdal: Exactly.
Hunt: If you transcribe the words, it looks the same, but it’s not what’s going on. Movement analysis is
all over this, of course, but people don’t need to study movement analysis. Within your cultural
movement habits and the physical distance and all that stuff, you get a lot of messages that don’t come
through if you just transcribe the words.
Fiksdal: Which is amusing, since that’s what we’re going to be doing to this recording. [laughing]
Hunt: Well, we’ll see what it looks like on paper. “Did I say that?”
Fiksdal: Yeah, that’s exactly what everybody says. “Did I say that? I couldn’t have said that. And why
didn’t I finish my sentence?” You can go ahead and finish sentences. You can write that in and help us
out.
Let me ask another question about Evergreen. Is there anything you wish for the college? You
know it was an experiment. We were there experimenting away all that time. They’ve recently been in
trouble trying to get more students, which they have in the last two years. They’ve gotten more
students. Things are looking a little better.
But what do you think Evergreen should be? Should it change? What do you think about the
interdisciplinarity, for example?
Hunt: I think the interdisciplinarity is good, but it doesn’t have to take the structure that we built. In
college, I took art history. It was required for the dance major, but I took more of it. I took as much as I
could make room for. When I went to dance history class, some of the same slides were coming up. It’s
like, yeah.
Fiksdal: Everything’s connected.
Hunt: Everything's connected. There are ways to be in everything-is-connected mode without the
structure that we have. Maybe if, in the teaching of a given discipline that has to be taught like the way
language does or the way dance does, if elements are introduced that have to do with that that aren’t
technically part of it but that feed it, if everybody makes a real effort to do that, I think that
interdisciplinarity happens that way.
Meanwhile, a student, in this four-year slot they have, especially if they’re high-school-direct,
they are going through so many changes in their person, you can’t expect them to stick in one thing for a
23
whole year. They only get four choices in their entire career? So, of course, they move from program to
program to program.
Stephanie Kozick was telling me she taught with Rob Esposito. They had a two-quarter program
planned, and at the end of the first quarter, their students wrote them encomiums of how wonderful
this all was, and how much they learned! And then they went off somewhere else.
Fiksdal: Oh, for heaven’s sakes!
Hunt: Yeah. Now, how much was that about the devaluation of dance in Western culture, which people
don’t realize how deep that goes, or is it simply that a student who’s interested in many things can’t
take these year-long hunks and get what they want.
They also use the curriculum differently. I have one student who I had for an eight quarter-hour
. . . was it dance history? It was more intellectually oriented. It must have been dance history or more
theoretical. One student who took it did it because she wanted to take a four quarter-hour course with
a certain creative writing teacher, and she wanted this other four quarter-hour with the performance
unit that I was teaching. The way they use the curriculum is different from the way we designed it. I
think you can be interdisciplinary in a multitude of ways.
Fiksdal: Yeah. In that case, she had to put it together herself, but it worked.
Hunt: Yeah, she did it. That wasn’t the intent of having the eight quarter-hour [program], although the
eight plus the four in performance was semi-allied.
Fiksdal: It’s very connected.
Hunt: Another student would enroll for spring, summer, and fall, and then go off and work in the ski
industry in the winter. They organize their lives according to their own needs and desires.
Fiksdal: Not the way we’re thinking, right.
Hunt: Also, the way we have done it at Evergreen, the scientists—these are kids who want to go to grad
school in the sciences—they capture them, and they do nothing but science. I heard one new female
science faculty member say—she was teaching with a bunch of male scientists—she was a scientist
herself, but she was the one who “did” seminar. They read books that had to do with—
Fiksdal: No one else in her program was doing seminar?
Hunt: Apparently not. But books that had to do with what science was doing in the larger world, and
ethics and everything related, that was her job.
Fiksdal: Oh, no.
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Hunt: The structure, I think, doesn’t work. But I believe in crossing disciplinary boundaries. Where
things are now, I think there are some special things that Evergreen can be and do. One is the
relationship with the tribes. I think this is a real important thing.
The other, I have a neighbor down here, Savvina Chowdhury. I haven’t really gotten to talk to
her, but I understand she teaches feminist economics. At this point in history, that’s way off in the
theoretical. But those are important ideas if your motive is rather than to make money, to go out and
do good in the world, that’s the kind of focus that you’re going to want in your education, among other
things.
Evergreen is to the left, and it’s serving the left. If it’s a hotbed of leftism, but it’s the intellectual
basis for things . . . it’ll be called lefty no matter what we do. [laughing] So, I think, for people who want
to think more idealistically, they have to get the intellectual grounding for it, and that’s something that
can potentially happen at Evergreen.
Also, a more hospitable home for gay and trans people. There needs to be a place where this
stuff happens. I wish to God performing arts would be in there. I’m not sure how it would work in the
curricular structure, unless that is completely changed. But I think linguistics is all about de-prejudicing
your thinking, right?
Fiksdal: I did teach about language and power a lot.
Hunt: Good.
Fiksdal: It’s humbling because you’re trying to learn structures of other languages as well. Great, Meg.
This has been a really good conversation. Thank you for meeting with me.
Hunt: Thank you for bringing all this stuff up. It’s like, oh, gosh, I hadn’t thought about that for a while.
Fiksdal: Do you remember the year that you retired? Was that in 2000-something?
Hunt: Let’s see . . . I would have been 55 and had 20 years in the system. It was somewhere around
2000. I skipped one of my post-retirement contracts and I did a couple of them, I think.
Fiksdal: You’ve been gone a long time.
Hunt: I’ve been gone a long time. And I’ve been in this house for 14 years! I can’t believe it.
Fiksdal: Yeah. That’s great. I’m going to turn this thing off.
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