During a rehearsal on a rainy evening on July 17, 2018, in her barn in Sharon, Vt., Carol Langstaff gives direction to members of the Flock Dance Troupe, including from left, Clementine Dotter, 6, of South Strafford, Vt., Langstaff’s sister Caitlin Langstaff, of Tivoli, N.Y., Karin Curtis-Hill, of Etna, N.H., and Judy Thompson, of Thetford, Vt. The group’s July 21 performance of “Creations” will be the last for Carol Langstaff, who started the group in 1999. (Valley News - Geoff Hansen) Copyright Valley News. May not be reprinted or used online without permission. Send requests to permission@vnews.com.
During a rehearsal on a rainy evening on July 17, 2018, in her barn in Sharon, Vt., Carol Langstaff gives direction to members of the Flock Dance Troupe, including from left, Clementine Dotter, 6, of South Strafford, Vt., Langstaff’s sister Caitlin Langstaff, of Tivoli, N.Y., Karin Curtis-Hill, of Etna, N.H., and Judy Thompson, of Thetford, Vt. The group’s July 21 performance of “Creations” will be the last for Carol Langstaff, who started the group in 1999. (Valley News - Geoff Hansen) Copyright Valley News. May not be reprinted or used online without permission. Send requests to permission@vnews.com. Credit: Valley News — Geoff Hansen

Almost every July of her childhood, Kayla Glazer danced around the fields and woods on Carol Langstaff’s farm in the wild highlands of Sharon.

Then the Thetford Center resident hit the adolescent wall, and started finding excuses to avoid Langstaff’s annual Flock Dance Troupe extravaganza on themes ranging from protecting the environment to the perils of modern health care.

“I stopped going around age 13,” Glazer recalled this week. “I was embarrassed about dancing.”

That discomfort faded into nostalgia while she studied religion and neuroscience at Ohio’s Kenyon College. Some years, she even watched her parents, Stacey and Steve Glazer, perform in the “intergenerational collaboration” that she now remembered fondly.

And when she learned earlier this year that Langstaff, who had canceled the 2017 show while recovering from a stroke, would be hosting Flock’s last dance in late July, Glazer decided to take time away from her job at a New York museum of Hindu art and her life in Brooklyn to rehearse this week for Saturday’s finale.

“I was so taken aback last year,” Glazer said of last summer’s cancellation. “I felt such a huge loss. When I found out she was doing this one, I knew that I had to be a part of it.”

Until last winter, Langstaff wasn’t sure whether she’d be hosting one more Flock dance. She’d needed months just to regain her powers of speech and handwriting; to this day, she still needs to hesitate occasionally to form words while speaking.

And even before the stroke, the Martha Graham-trained dancer had noticed the focus of her restless creativity shifting away from dance and movement and toward visual art — particularly photography — and composing music.

“At some point I realized it was time to take the hint,” she said during a conversation last week on her sunny porch overlooking hills in nearby South Strafford and Norwich. “This has given me an opportunity to stop Flock and do other things. This is my goodbye to this kind of art form.

“We’re just going to fold up.”

Before the experiment in dance and expression, which began in 1999, fades into memory, Langstaff this week is letting her recruits — from usual suspects such as the Glazer family to newcomers — work out how they’re going to approach her general theme of “What is missing? What do we need? How do we get it?”

“I’ve been telling people what to do for a long time,” said Langstaff, who brought to the Upper Valley the Christmas Revels, which her father, baritone John Langstaff, founded in the early 1970s in Cambridge, Mass. “I was organizing my younger siblings into shows when I was very young. But since then, and especially lately, I’ve seen that when you get older and something happens to you medically, you become less controlling. You can try anything and go for it. That’s what I’m encouraging people to do with this happening.”

And one night, she added, should be enough, after years of staging Flock happenings over several days.

“I learned from being in the Occupy movement, in 2011, the value of speaking short, just saying what’s important, not endlessly repeating things,” Langstaff said. “Maybe the stroke came and made me do this more. Now, I enjoy getting to the point. Maybe you can be looser, more improvisational.”

Whether she’ll join the dancers herself, Langstaff was still pondering toward the end of last week.

“It was always a challenge when I was wearing two different hats, directing and dancing,” she said. “One role is fixing and driving what’s in front of you. Being something in it is quite different, more of a Zen experience. I’m not sure what I’ll do yet — whatever is needed, I guess. I do what needs doing, I don’t care what.”

The Glazer family has taken inspiration from Langstaff’s example for 16 years, since watching a Flock performance in 2000, when Kayla was 5 and her sister Emma was 3.

“There was something about sitting on the ground, watching people care about the earth and honoring the land, that really spoke to us,” Steve Glazer said this week, during a phone conversation from his home in Thetford Center. “She was taking on complex issues in a large, non-verbal way. At least one member of the family has been involved every year for 16 years now. Having (Langstaff’s husband Jim Rooney’s) music issuing from the woods, families dancing barefoot on the earth, was a revelation. Those issues were playing out through dance by untrained community members, 5-year-olds with 75-year-olds. They were forming relationships. Carol became an important mentor to our girls, Kayla especially, so she really worked to get this week off from her job in New York.”

During rehearsals this week, Kayla Glazer has reveled in watching more than 20 people, ranging in age from a 9-month-old to a performer approaching 80, “express themselves with their bodies, emote without speaking.

“After a year in New York, as wonderful as it is culturally there, this is going to be a really beautiful return, a chance to get my own creative energy going again.”

Flock Dance Troupe performs on Saturday evening at 5, at Star Mountain in Sharon. Admission is by donation. To learn more, visit flockdance.org or call 802-765-4454.

David Corriveau can be reached at dcorriveau@vnews.com and at 603-727-3304.