Hometown: Wilmington, Delaware
Current city: Brooklyn, New York
Age: 56
College and degree: I left high school a year early and went to Point Park College in Pittsburgh. I started in a summer session and then stayed through the spring semester. I transferred to American University in D.C. but left after one semester to move to NYC to study at the Joffrey Ballet School. Several years later I enrolled at NYU’s Gallatin Division – their “University Without Walls” program. I did two semesters there but it seems it was still too many walls for me! New York City in the late 1970s was an incredibly exciting and stimulating place to be a young dancer!
How you pay the bills: Currently I am a full time Lecturer in the Dance Program at Princeton University. In the summer I teach open classes at the Mark Morris Dance Center in Brooklyn as well as teach in and coordinate MMDG’s Summer Intensive (with the School Director, Sarah Marcus). I stage Mark’s work at college dance programs, most recently at New York University’s Dance Department, and stage and assist him with the work he creates for ballet companies. Last year I assisted Mark on the new piece he created for Pacific Northwest Ballet, and I staged existing ballets on American Ballet Theatre and Houston Ballet.
All of the dance hats you wear: I retired from performing with MMDG in 2000 after twenty fabulous years, just shy of my 42nd birthday. I performed a solo on a Princeton Faculty Concert in 2008 –my colleague, Rebecca Lazier, convinced me to do a dance! It was a lot of work to get back into performing shape but I enjoyed the experience of dancing for my students and my son. But most of the time I’m too busy teaching! I have been developing my own choreography recently but my primary focus is in the studio teaching all levels of ballet and modern dance.
Non-dance work you have done in the past: I’ve done all kinds……retail, waitressing, phone sales and surveys; I was a receptionist in a dentist office and for a chiropractor. After my son was born I took some time off from dance and went to work at the NYC PBS Station, Channel Thirteen.
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Describe your dance life in your….
20s:
To get to my twenties I have to go back in time! I started dancing around age 5, and with each passing year became more and more convinced that I WAS a dancer. When I hit 7th grade my training became more serious. I attended ballet class every day, started pointe work, and took additional classes in Character Dance and Modern. I performed in the school’s production of The Nutcracker from an early age and advanced into featured roles. My teacher, the esteemed Agnes de Mille dancer James Jamieson, put together other performance opportunities for us and I was very, very busy dancing and ever more committed to the idea that I would dance. I had a rough patch from my mid-teens into my early twenties struggling with what is now referred to as an eating disorder – it derailed me for quite awhile - to the point that I stopped dancing completely. Anyway…. Moving forward a few years into my twenties …..after studying at the Joffrey for six months or so I moved back home for a bit and then went to study at the Pennsylvania Ballet School in Philadelphia. I wasn’t happy there and decided to move back to New York. On my first go round in the city I had made friends with a whole gang of dancers from Seattle, one of whom was a young guy named Mark Morris. When I first met him, Mark was dancing with the Eliot Feld ballet. By the time I moved back he had left ballet behind and was dancing with Lar Lubovitch. My other Seattle friend was Penny Hutchinson, and it was she who brought me to Marjorie Mussman’s studio on 5th Avenue in the Village. What a phenomenal time it was! There were so many amazing dancers in those classes, classical and contemporary, waltzing across the floor together. I started to have hope again, and the idea of a life in dance once again seemed a possibility.
One evening Mark and I were hanging out having a drink and he mentioned that he was planning on doing a concert the following year at the Cunningham Studio – did I want to be in it? And thus the Mark Morris Dance Group was born. That first show in November of 1980 was peopled with Mark’s friends from class and from the various companies he was dancing with – Lubovitch and now Hannah Kahn. I was twenty-two and the youngest and most inexperienced of the group. (I hadn’t performed in several years and this was indeed my first time on a New York stage.)
I spent the next few years studying, performing with whoever would have me, and working in restaurants to make a living. The Mark Morris Dance Group – MMDG – appeared at DTW in 1981, 1982, 1983 and then got invited to be part of BAM’s Next Wave Festival in 1984. 1985 we were back at DTW, and 1986 we once again back at BAM. Mark went back to Seattle every year and I started going with him to be in those performances. A few other small gigs started popping up but I was still waitressing and doing other work for money to live on. It wasn’t until ’86 that I was able to quit my non-dancing jobs. At that point we had enough weeks of work to qualify for unemployment benefits!
LUCKY CHARMS, circa 1994, with William Wagner and June Omura
30s:
I turned 30 in 1988 and later that year moved to Brussels, Belgium. MMDG had been invited to become the resident company of the Theatre de la Monnaie. It was a hard transition for me and I seriously considered leaving the company and moving back home. But I stuck it out and the next years were absolutely the most rewarding for me as a dancer. Mark made amazing work – L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, Dido and Aeneas, Love Song Waltzes, Behemoth, The Hard Nut among others. We did extensive touring. The company moved back to the States at the end of our three - year contract in 1991 and the traveling continued. I married my boyfriend, and we lived happily together in the East Village. I taught in and organized MMDG’s Summer Intensive and spent a great deal of the company’s off time staging Mark’s work and assisting him on his ballet projects. I was, however, starting to feel the effects of all my years of extensive dancing and began considering an exit from my life as a performer.
40s:
A time of great change! I did my last show as a dancer with MMDG in January 2000 and in October of that same year I had a baby! (My son, Samuel, is now thirteen and in 8th Grade.) I had been the Rehearsal Director for the company since Brussels, but I didn’t want to travel with an infant, so I was pleased when I was offered the position of School Director at the new Mark Morris Dance Center, scheduled to open the next year in Brooklyn. I administered and taught at the school for a few years then left to try something new - I took at job with the Dance in America television series at Channel Thirteen. Learning about and working on several dance productions was super interesting, but ultimately I missed being in the studio and decided to return to teaching. I spent the next five years or so adjuncting at several universities - Barnard, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Long Island University Brooklyn Campus, Princeton – and teaching at MMDG and in American Ballet Theatre’s Summer Intensive Program. I was also continuing to stage Mark’s ballet repertory at ABT, Pacific Northwest Ballet, SF Ballet, Boston Ballet, and Washington Ballet. All in all a busy and hectic time!
50s:
I had come to Princeton initially as a guest artist for one semester. It’s a bit of a schlep from my home in Brooklyn but the trip was worth it! Beautiful campus and intelligent and engaged students. I was asked to stay and fill in for a departing faculty member and I’ve been there ever since, doing more and more each year until my position became full time. (Just to clarify, I do not have a tenure track position. My appointment with the University is on a year-to-year basis.) I love teaching here and plan to stay well into my next decade!
Do you still perform?
I haven’t performed in quite a while - partly for financial reasons but mostly because I’m so busy teaching and being a parent. But if the right opportunity presented itself I might just leap back into the fray!
Current training and care for the body:
I try to do a private Pilates session every week. I don’t have time to take class but I do warm up before I teach whenever possible. I take walks. I worked so hard for so long and now I’m happy to take it easy!
Non-dance movement practices important to you:
Pilates, yoga.
What is on your plate/on your calendar for the next year’s time as a dancer, choreographer, and teacher?
I choreographed a piece for our students that will be performed as part of Princeton’s Spring Dance Festival this February. I’m teaching two courses this semester (Beginning/Intermediate Modern Dance and Advanced Ballet), and I’m the Production Advisor for our Senior Thesis Concert later in the spring. I plan to spend some time this summer in the studio developing movement ideas for another piece. I’ll teach Ballet at the MMDG Dance Center this summer. I’m always busy!
Advice to young dancers on teaching, learning how to teach, and the role that teaching will most likely play in their dance careers:
Teaching is incredibly rewarding and a vocation unto itself. Not every dancer is meant to teach. Don’t do it just because you can or someone says you should. If you make this decision, then be sure to give yourself the opportunity to experience all kinds of educational situations. For example, it took some trial and error for me to discover that I didn’t enjoy teaching young children - I greatly admire those who can – and that I really clicked with college age students regardless of their technical level.
What are the skills a modern dancer needs in 2014?
An open mind and an open heart – curiosity and tenacity – the ability to be critical and compassionate – respecting the beauty and efficiency of your instrument, taking good care of it while at the same time constantly pushing to expand its range – and understanding and having respect for the past, present, and future of our art form.
What/who keeps you excited about modern dance as an art form?
I’m excited, that against all odds, it still exists. That’s it’s almost impossible to describe. That it can be anything, really, and that it constantly re-defines itself. That people still feel the need to express themselves through movement.
Final advice to young dancers:
Go to class! It’s not just about technical training, it’s about being part of a community.
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I really enjoyed reading this. It comes across as both honest and helpful for those following your lead. /
Posted by: Marvin Lee | 02/16/2014 at 10:51 AM