This daughter of Terpsichore is 81 -- don't let the jet-black hair fool you. Or the years etched in her face. Maryann Sundown, featured with the Scammon Bay Maryarmiut Dancers at the Alaska Native Heritage Center, projects an energy, humanity, precision and communication that would shame Pavlova in her prime.
The mention of her name at Bethel's Camai dance festival or Quyana Night at the Alaska Federation of Natives Convention in Anchorage invariably sends thousands of people elbowing their way to good seats to find out what the dance diva from Scammon Bay is going to do this time. The recurring problem for Sundown fans is that, too often, one finds out about a performance after the fact, helplessly grinding teeth when someone asks, ''Did you see Maryann do the mosquito dance? Maryann do the Macarena? Maryann do her kick-boxing dance?''
So the heads-up from the Native Center is a welcome fair warning to anyone who can't get enough of this artist who transcends the expected boundaries of Native dance.
A first-time audience member won't pick up on her ability as she proceeds onstage with the rest of the dancers. A stooped, wiry, wrinkled Yup'ik great-great-grandmother with a deadpan face, slowly shuffling with the troupe, she cuts a particularly retiring figure. The elaborate headdress and dainty dance fans seem elegantly out of place on her.
But then the music starts and she begins to move -- and magic happens.
One does not expect such speed from an octogenarian. Her motions are swift and sure, each articulation sharp and crisp and easy to interpret: berry-picking, stirring, swatting mosquitoes, karate chops. Sundown has a Chaplin-esque ability to convey what's stirring in the bones of a character with the most economic of gestures.
As her hands and angular arms tell the physical story, her Buster Keaton face tells the emotional story. Like the late opera star Maria Callas or Broadway's Marian Seldes, Sundown can communicate across an auditorium using just her eyes. Some of that has to do with the setting of those eyes, a countenance so distinctively lined as to be a photographer's dream. But beyond that, there's something about the way that those eyes remain alertly all-consuming while providing bright windows into the interiors of her characters. She telegraphs expressions of surprise, annoyance, humor and longing as clearly as if using a reader-board.
Sundown grew up in a sod house in a long-vanished community in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. She saw the old dances before they went underground in reaction to disapproval by missionary and government agents. She married Teddy Sundown, a noted tradition bearer in Scammon Bay, who was a champion of Yup'ik dancing and composed many notable songs. One of those songs opens Pamyua's first CD, ''Mengluni.'' He died in 1996, at the age of nearly 100, and was said at the time to be the oldest man in the Delta. Several of their children are prominent in efforts to promote traditional lifeways, art and education.
But Maryann is not a strict traditionalist. Some of her most famous routines come straight out of material seen on ''Entertainment Tonight.'' At the 1998 Camai festival, she and colleague Agnes Aguchak (they often perform together, though Aguchak is unable to make this trip, according to a spokesperson at the Heritage Center), performed their version of the ''Macarena.'' Camai audiences hardly ever come to their feet when they applaud, but they did for that number, shouting and whistling as they clapped.
Mirth is perhaps the most infectious aspect of any Sundown dance. There's an inexpressible exhilaration in the uninhibited laughter, the twinkle and angelic smile that comes over the diva when she knows she's tickled her audience -- which she seems to do every time.
Covering this year's Camai, Daily News reporter Liz Ruskin saw the Scammon Bay team perform a number based on Bruce Lee movies. The tiny elder hurled herself into the kung-fu parody, ''traveling across the stage, throwing karate chops and blocking kicks. The audience gave her a standing ovation, and she doubled over with laughter."
