Hometown: Brooklyn, New York
Current city: Berkeley, California
Age: 41
Attended an arts high school? I did not attend an arts high school, but my high school—John Dewey High School in Brooklyn—offered dance as an alternative to PE. So, I got to do a lot of ballet and jazz, and one quarter of Graham technique.
College and degree: University of Wisconsin-Madison, BA Russian and History
Graduate school and degree: Stanford University, MA Russian Literature (1996); University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, MFA in Choreography and Performance (2003); University of California-Berkeley, PhD in Performance Studies (started in 2008…still working on it at age 41!)
How you pay the bills: I have a graduate student fellowship at Berkeley that pays a decent stipend by graduate school standards, but is not enough for a family of four to live on by any means.
All of the dance hats you wear or have worn: I have been a dancer, choreographer, teacher, and critic.
Non-dance work you do: I write…but mostly about dance.
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Photo courtesy of Nina Haft and Company (Oakland, CA)
The following is the Personal History essay I wrote to apply to graduate school in performance studies in 2007. I believe most graduate programs in the humanities require an essay of this nature.
I was raised to believe that a smart person did not become a dancer. My secular, Jewish family regarded dancing as both physical labor and divertissement, two things for which my grandfather did not kill himself working. He did not pull himself up by his own bootstraps from his (bootless) Moldovan, Jewish-ghetto childhood just so I could jump around mindlessly in a tutu.
If a smart person had to become a dancer, she had to “make it,” either on Broadway or with the New York City Ballet. Since I had hung up my toe shoes about forty-five minutes after my first lesson on pointe, and my mother had convinced me I couldn’t carry a tune (not true!), I was without hope. Dancing would have to remain a hobby.
Writing, however, got the seal of approval. It would serve well as the climax to the all-purpose “I’d-like-you-to-meet-my-son/daughter-the-_______” ammunition deployed at competitors on special occasions, such as weddings, Bar Mitzvahs, and upon chance meetings on the sidewalk on Kings Highway, Brooklyn. Beginning with my first diary, a blue book with Wonder Woman stickers slapped at odd angles on the front and back covers, writing has been a pleasure, a solace, and a challenge. I wrote papers for school, poems for my mother, and notes to myself. And I wrote (and read) as a means of appeasing the ghost of that near-legendary grandfather — a man who died when I was five, leaving me with a guitar, dozens of blank racing forms, several dolls from his world travels, and fuzzy memories of Florida beaches, heavily-accented English and late-night stops at the refrigerator for cold chicken.
With dancing kept at a safe distance from writing, vibrating on the sidelines as an extracurricular activity, I devoted my academic studies to my family history. My grandfather was a business man: textiles. To emulate him, I joined my high school’s Academy of Finance program and spent a summer working on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, marvelling at the way a floor trader could swallow an entire hot dog in one gulp on his way to buy or sell. I thought my grandfather spoke Russian, so I became a Russian major in college. When I found out he never spoke Russian (only Yiddish) I went to Oxford to study Yiddish with a great, woolly bear of a man named Dov Ber Kerler. Sitting in the St. Giles café, we would speak the language of The Old Country over bacon and baked beans (more treyf, please!). My grandfather’s secular and cultural Jewishness became my great obsession. I read every holocaust narrative, watched every Woody Allen movie, and reflected on the hours spent as a child in the homes of my orthodox neighbors, babysitting their innumerable children while trying to keep the silverware straight.
After studying Russian over seven weeks of endless sunlight during a St. Petersburg summer, I began the doctoral program in Russian Literature at Stanford. There, I laid my grandfather’s specter to rest. Under the direction of Gregory Freidin, I wrote my master’s thesis on the Formalist critics while taking dance classes on campus with Bay Area choreographer Robert Moses, and at the Shawl-Anderson Dance Center in Berkeley with Joan Lazarus, Cathleen McCarthy, Gail Chodera, and Randee Paufve. These four women changed the course of my life. Their approach to dance was as much intellectual as physical, and after a year under their tutelage, I left Stanford to write —about dance.
I started writing reviews for The Oakland Tribune and after a short time, found a home at the San Francisco Bay Guardian. My editors at the Guardian, particularly Johnny Ray Huston and J. H. Tompkins, supported my efforts to advocate for dance as much as chronicle dance events, to write for an audience of both dancers and choreographers, and to maintain personal and artistic relationships with the women and men I wrote about.
As I wrote about dancing, I observed how my writing was informing my dancing, and vice-versa. I encouraged dialogue between local choreographers and critics. My love of dance, a passion that had started with ballet when I was four years old in a one-room studio above a pizzeria in Brooklyn, exploded. I had found a way to pay homage to my grandfather, honor my own desires, and explore what I knew to be true: the mind and the body live and work together, an arrangement that may not always work best for romantic partners, but is simply how human beings are built.
Despite my ever-increasing appreciation of dance as practice, art form, and cultural text, something pushed me to learn more. Though I never wanted to be a choreographer, preferring the role of student and performer, I decided to pursue an MFA in order to bolster my understanding of the creative process behind the art of choreography. I studied composition and improvisation, and worked with lighting, set, and costume designers. My fellow students and I spent countless hours discussing and debating diverse dance styles, the sociocultural import of live performance, and the best way to heal a sore hamstring by opening night.
What I missed in a fine art program was the reading and discussion of scholarly texts. Glimpses were given: an unexplored essay here and there about dance and architecture, dance and the colonized body, dance and the Derridean trace. Though the education I received in the MFA program greatly enhanced my studio teaching, my “performance” in the lecture hall felt in need of supplementation. It isn’t always easy to convince students that dancing is something worth thinking about; that, for example, one’s beloved Sleeping Beauty can be analyzed and defamiliarized or that Ronald K. Brown’s use of dance forms from various African nations, New York gay clubs, and American black churches informs the use of space in his contemporary concert choreography. Such an effort requires a specialized language and an understanding of contemporary critical theory in addition to a knowledge of dance history and techniques.
So, by the end of my MFA, I had arrived at a crossroads. I knew I had more studying to do, but I had a different, unfulfilled desire nipping at my heels. As my dancing, writing self rumbled down the highway, another part of me chugged beside it along a service road: a Jewish girl’s love of Italy. With moderate effort, I could construct an explanation for this love from my childhood — some amalgam of having eaten pizza every day between 1982 and 1987, the story of my parents’ honeymoon on the Amalfi coast, and having gone to the prom with a Sicilian boy named Vito. I grew up in Brooklyn, where mainly because of some shared physical and cultural traits, Jews and Italians were often lumped together, mostly by Jews. But while we all may have been overfed duirng ear-shattering dinner conversations, I never saw groups of Jewish boys in Chams de Baron shirts and Sergio Valente jeans dancing together on sidewalks to the sound of house music blaring from boom boxes placed on the hoods of Cadillacs and Lincolns (with fuzzy dice hanging from rear-view mirrors) parked under the elevated train tracks along 86th street in Bensonhurst. The Italian girls leaned against the cars snapping gum and teasing their hair. The Italian boys danced. A fascination with Italy that grew out of girlhood crushes morphed into a will to immerse myself in Italian society.
Three-and-a-half years after packing up my California life, I find myself a stay-at-home-mom in Naples. My daughter and I are rarely at home, spending our days wandering the streets and parks of Naples, and visiting with Neapolitan friends. It doesn’t take long to recognize Naples as living theater, a locus of ample opportunity to observe and reflect upon expressive practice. Gesture, posture, and facial expressions take precedence over words in daily communication. It did not take long for a movement-related research idea to emerge, the first inklings of my desire to conduct an ethnographic case study of a Neapolitan dance company.
Dancing calms my mind. Yet it also makes me think: about why more people don’t dance, why dance programs and staff writers are always the first to go, how the principles of diverse techniques inform quotidian existence, how dancing marks us as human beings. Contemporary dance is my core interest, perhaps because I have a profound aversion to “gear.” All you need for a contemporary dance class is a pair of old sweats and your bare feet. You don’t even have to have feet. Contemporary dance is open to every living, breathing individual.
Had I known that dance could be as much as an intellectual pursuit as a physical one, things might have gone differently. But then, I would not have found myself where I am today: a 36-year-old woman with a passion for dance, a desire to bridge the yawning chasm that still lies between bodily practices and scholarly pursuits in American culture, and a conviction of her unique fitness for a career in performance studies.
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So, now it’s the end of 2012, and I am in my fifth year of graduate school at UC Berkeley. I am “ABD,” All But Dissertation, which makes it sound like there’s nothing to finishing the degree at this point. If only that were true. It’s a challenge to be a graduate student in any circumstance, and having two children (one 6 ½ years old and the other 2 months old) makes it even more difficult (so little time!) but also easier (I know my priorities and know how to budget that little time).
My dissertation project has morphed several times over the last few years. It seems to have solidified, finally, around the subject of dancing and talking. I am writing about dance theater in the Bay Area from the 1980s to today, tracking the work of the likes of Joe Goode, Sara Shelton Mann, and Krissy Keefer. I have loved the Bay Area dance scene for over fifteen years, and I hope to contribute a document that interrogates and celebrates its artists.