On Cue

By Naomi Shulman

One fine fall day nearly a quarter-century ago, a young, slim woman with hair to her waist walked into an empty gymnasium with five teenagers. The space seemed cavernously large, and the group of students laughably small. But the woman kept her head up and her eyes focused. She had been charged with creating Deerfield Academy’s dance program, and if this was what she was given, she was determined to make it work.

That was Jen Whitcomb, longtime head of Deerfield’s dance program and chair of the Visual and Performing Arts Department. Today, 25 years later, she is still youthful, and still looks every inch the dance instructor. Straight-backed and lithe, with flowing hair that can easily be tightened into a ballerina bun, she moves with fluid grace. You might assume this came from a childhood spent at the barre, but you would be mistaken, because while Whitcomb may look as though she pirouetted before she walked, she didn’t start dancing until she was older than many of her students.

“I came to dance quite late,” she admits. “I had been an athlete, horseback rider, and serious skier. I didn’t dance till I was 16, but when I started, I knew right away that it was what I wanted to do with my life. It married all the things I cared most about—creativity, physicality, self-expression. I learned to stand up in my bones and present myself.”

There’s an apt analogy here. Just as Whitcomb came late to the performing arts, a fully formed performing arts program was a latecomer to Deerfield. There’s always been a stage presence on campus, of course: The earliest theatrical playbill goes back to 1903; alumni of a certain age can recall at least a couple Gilbert & Sullivan librettos; and the Glee Club kept the school in song for decades. Still, a formal performing arts department is relatively new. 

“When I first came here in 1976, music was an activity that took place in afternoons, not a course offering,” says Robert Moorhead, who headed the department before Whitcomb. “There was no dance program until the school became coed, and theater faculty were actually English teachers.” But over the decades, the school’s performing arts opportunities gradually became regular course offerings as well as co-curriculars. To use Whitcomb’s words, the arts program began to stand and present itself.

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