One could say that Vanaver Caravan, Livia Vanaver’s dance company, started in 1972 with its first concert, titled “Coming Together Festival of Dance and Music.” There, a group of 10 women in Vanaver’s senior class at New York University performed with a Balkan singing group and four live musicians. In reality, the seed of the company was planted earlier that year when Vanaver first met her late husband at a Balkan dance festival.
Bill, co-founder of Vanaver Caravan, was a folk singer at the time. Vanaver would sing songs in his program, and he would compose music for her dances.
“We wanted to create an entity where we could go out and get a booking and then do everything we loved to do,” Vanaver said. “That’s how it started.”
Vanaver Caravan – composed of Bill and Livia Vanaver, along with other dancers – performed at festivals in Canada and the United States and worked for the U.S. Department of State from 1974 to 1981. They traveled around the world in a cultural exchange, performing American folk dances and learning new local ones.
Out of the roughly 30 countries she’s been to, Vanaver said her favorite was Greece. She traveled there in 1971, and it was the first place she went to outside of the U.S. Greece was just the first stop in a tour around the world.
The caravan tried to perform in Greece in the 1970s, but they were met by an audience with an anti-American sentiment who did not want them to perform. In a cafe, the caravan pleaded their case to the performance organizers, explaining that it was not about politics and that there were good people in America who wanted to be represented in the dance. They were eventually allowed to perform.
“People to people is a good way of saying it,” Vanaver said, describing the conversation with the performance organizers.
During this era, the Vanavers also went on a two-and-a-half month tour of the back rooms of pubs in Europe. People in those towns and villages would have a folk gathering every week and the pair would perform and learn local dances. They met a man named Johnson Ellwood in 1975 who had been either an English clog performer or a teacher for most of his life. He was in his 70s and had a broken ankle when the Vanavers met him, but he held himself up on two chairs and taught the two an English clog dance.
“I remember his daughter coming down the stairs,” Vanaver said. “She was so moved that her father was dancing and teaching us, she went up and got her shoes and came down [to join].”
The next year, Ellwood won the Gold Badge Award from the English Folk Dance and Song Society – an award that honors significant English cultural contributions. He died in 1977.
“He was a culture bearer,” Vanaver said. “He was able to contribute his memories and his dances that he had done in the English Music Hall scene.”
Now, the Vanaver Caravan does performances, teaches classes and runs international dance programs in local schools. They created a curriculum in 1989 where artists from the caravan teach international dances to students. The program culminated with a world dance performance at the end of the week-long period. This is one of Vanaver’s favorite parts of her job.
“It’s the little epiphanies where all of a sudden there’s a child who never spoke before, or couldn’t read before,” Vanaver said. “All of a sudden, because they were engaged in movement and singing, they could speak and read.”
At Hofstra University, Vanaver is an adjunct professor of specialized programs in education who teaches Folk and Square dance – a class attended primarily by dance and physical education majors focusing on how to teach national and international dances. She previously taught at Columbia University. According to her, teaching in universities pushes these dances into new generations through the students that go on to teach them to their pupils.
“This is a way that we can create more peace in the world, through appreciation and understanding of one another, so that we’re not afraid of each other – that we really are more curious and interested in embracing each other’s cultures and backgrounds,” Vanaver said. “In this country many things divide us. This brings us together.”
