Barry Lynn

“I love butterflies. They're such beautiful things,”

muses Barry Lynn, who is wrapped in a turquoise shawl he stitched himself to resemble the flitting insect’s delicate appendages. Lynn sits in a small office next to a dance studio in Eau Claire’s Banbury Place, perched atop a wooden bench, moving his arm like a butterfly’s wing. The trick, he explains, is to pivot just from the shoulder. He demonstrates the movement gracefully, and for a moment is a gossamer-winged sprite, not a bench-bound centenarian. “That whole weight action has to come from that one muscle,” he explains, gripping his upper arm. “I’ve gotten so sore.”

If I had one thing left to say to somebody, it would be never let someone else try to live your life. // on his legacy

The movements are part of “I Dreamed I Was a Butterfly,” Lynn’s latest storytelling dance, which he’ll perform later this month. With his arched eyebrows and flowing, snow-white hair, Lynn is both the embodiment and antithesis of the butterfly. Like a butterfly, his movements are fleeting; unlike a butterfly (or most any living thing) Lynn has seen a century pass by – although it might be more accurate to say that Lynn has passed by the century.

“I can’t believe it. One-hundred years that I’ve put up with the world,” he says with a characteristic combination of humor and insight. “No, I’m glad I’m living in this world, and right now I’m setting myself and preparing myself for the next 100. Because I love life, I love living, I love doing the work I’m doing.”

Lynn – who, with his partner Michael Doran, is proprietor of ChaliceStream, a dance studio in rural Ladysmith – has been dancing since the 1930s. He underwent a knee replacement at age 93, and his body isn’t as cooperative as it once was. Yet instead of retiring, Lynn embraces his physical condition.

“I do all my work now from a bench. he’s my dancing partner,” Lynn quips. “Despite the 100 years, I’m perfectly fine here and here” – he indicates his torso and lower legs. “The weak part is there” – his knees. “I just can’t make them behave to stand up,” he explains. “But I’m satisfied because I found out all these beautiful designs and patterns and things that you can do with the aid of a bench that you couldn’t do standing, so I feel compensated.”

For Lynn, life and art are synonymous. Born in 1914 in the small North Carolina town of Roxboro, he was the “strange one,” he says: Instead of playing baseball like other boys, he was drawn to beauty in art, music, and the natural world.

As he grew older, he bristled against the repressed social climate of the rural South. “At 19, wrote a note on a summer night and stuck it on the front door, and on that note I said, ‘When I get where I’m going, I will let you know,’ and that was all I said,” he explains. He left with a bus ticket and $50 in his pocket. He studied art in Raleigh, N.C., and opened a studio where he taught and specialized in portraiture. A few years later he discovered that dance classes were being taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “Here was my opportunity,” he says. “I leaped at that opportunity, and I’ve been there ever since.”

After military serving in World War II, Lynn found his way to Salt Lake City, Utah. In the ensuing years, his dance career blossomed: He was a member of various dance troupes and theaters and toured the U.S. and Europe as a soloist. He taught dance – sometimes in his apartment, sometimes in his own theater, and sometimes at the college level – and served on the production staff for the dance department at the University of Utah.

He led three dance companies and four dance theaters – one housed in a vacant grocery store – and even relocated his troupe to a tent for a few seasons.

In 1978, after retiring from the university, Lynn decided to relocate his dance company. He broached the idea of moving to Ladysmith, where Doran, a young troupe member, had property. The idea didn’t sit well with the other dancers, but Lynn and Doran moved anyway, setting up shop at an abandoned farmstead. They bought and relocated a one-room school, which they converted into a dance studio and christened ChaliceStream. They still give recitals there, and Doran teaches in Ladysmith and Eau Claire.

ChaliceStream has become a showplace for Lynn’s descriptive style. “I’ve developed a dance form that is a form of storytelling,” he says. “I call myself a storyteller, because what I’m interested in is the story about people. In my work I use anything I need to make the story clearer and more interesting. If I need dance, I use dance. If I need music, I use music.”

The intimacy of ChaliceStream, he says, makes it an ideal place to dance: “You’re so close to people. You can see every flick of an eyebrow from people who are sitting there,” he says. “You have such a feeling of having reached a person. Because the thing I’ve tried to do, everything I dance about, always is the same thing: I dance about what does it meant to be a human being.” He wants his performances to carry messages through stories, rather than to come across as sermons, he says.

But what is he were asked to preach? He’s quick with advice: “If I could put it in electric lights and put it over the town: ‘Be your own master. Don’t let anyone else run your life.’ ”

That’s a lesson Lynn continues to embody in his second century.