Because Randy James is president of Dance New Jersey, a New Brunswick-based nonprofit that seeks to raise awareness of dance and fosters the development of dancers from 4-year-olds in tutus to grown men in tap shoes, his is a familiar name in mirrored studios from Hackensack to Glassboro.
Lately he’s on the radar of thousands of Jerseyans making an initial effort at dance appreciation.
“I can’t believe so many students are willing to get up on a Monday morning at 9:15 to watch dance. That turns me on,” said James recently at the Morris County School of Technology in Denville, where he was the main attraction at Dance Educators’ Appreciation Day, a workshop-like gathering of dance studio owners from across the state.
James, 52, of Highland Park, was talking about the runaway (jeté-away, maybe) success of his dance appreciation class at Mason Gross School of the Arts, part of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, where he has been an associate professor since 1998.
“When I started this three years ago, it was because we had theater appreciation and music appreciation, but I noticed we had no dance appreciation. The faculty said, ‘It’s because no one wants to do it.’ I said, ‘Well, I do,’” he recalls. “At first we had one section of 53 students. This [past] semester we have four sections and 1,200 students.”
With the course, James transforms the way college students look at all kinds of dance—from ballet to contemporary to cross-cultural—by implementing such cool-professor devices as getting a class to memorize and execute 23 football hand signals to music. “Even that is movement,” he says. “A place for them to start understanding.”
But the course also has led James down a path of personal reinvention. “I know practically everybody in New Jersey who has something to do with dance,” James says. “Through this class I’ve been able to connect them.”
The previous night James had gone to see Pilobolus, the Connecticut-based dance company, at the State Theatre in New Brunswick. Mason Gross’s 1,200 dance appreciation students came with him, he says. He considered this evidence that he’s building something big: “I was just so tired of going to dance concerts and seeing 20 people in the audience. Now, people I know at venues from Raritan Valley Community College to the State Theatre are willing to book dance, because they have a guaranteed audience,” he says. “Who doesn’t want 1,200 19-year-olds on their mailing list?”
James’s awakening to the power of newly minted dance enthusiasts arrived on the heels of personal tragedy. In 2006, his best friend, Scott Cagenello, a former dean of students at Mason Gross, was killed in an auto accident.
“I just sort of had a breakdown,” he says. He put Randy James Dance Works, the Highland Park-based professional company he founded in 1993, on a long hiatus. James is again choreographing and accepting commissions, but the company, which toured extensively, is still in a state of semi-slumber.
“Balance was Scott’s word. And after he died I realized, ‘Oh, maybe I’m a little out of balance,’” says James. “Now I have a little more control over my life.”
A very little, perhaps, given his classes, his commitment to Dance New Jersey, and what he described as a slavish attachment to Jets football.
“I still find I need a Red Bull at 4 pm,” he says.