Hometown: denver, colorado
Current city: brooklyn, new york
Age: 54
College and degree: university of colorado at boulder - BFA performance track
Graduate school and degree: american center for the alexander technique (ACAT), age 32
Website: http://www.shelleysenter.com/
How you pay the bills: teaching alexander technique - privately and in academic institutions and various non-dance professional settings as well as in dance festivals and organizations; teaching dance - in festivals, dance organizations and academic institutions; performing/choreographing; transmitting, staging, archiving and adapting the choreographic work of trisha brown and yvonne rainer.
All of the dance hats you wear: performer, director/choreographer, collaborative artist, improviser, teacher, lecturer, repetiteur, curator, dramaturge/coach, somatic instructor, panelist, legacy steward/archivist
Non-dance work you have done in the past: restaurant work, personal assistant, personal accountant, office temp
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Describe your dance life in your….
20s - finding and beginning to dance at the university of colorado in boulder (and deciding not to be a forest ranger); joining the company of one of my professors, nancy spanier, and touring the US and europe ("training" onstage rather than in the studio); moving to new york to become a founding member of bebe miller's company; joining the trisha brown company and touring the world with this extraordinary artist and her collaborators (such as robert rauschenberg, donald judd, john cage, laurie anderson); meeting my soulmate and eventual spouse in naples, italy (when we were working on the opera, carmen, with lena wertmuller).
30s - teaching, teaching, teaching - in festivals, academia and arts organizations (i.e. american dance festival and ADF linkage programs, movement research, for anne theresa de keersmaeker/P.A.R.T.S., cal arts, the island of tinos, greece, SFADI, etc.) and continuing to tour and perform as an independent and collaborative artist with many new york based performers/choreographers (traveling throughout north and south america, europe, asia, russia and australia); shifting away from "set choreography" to improvisational performance practices, beginning to think of choreographing, composing and dancing as "research"; training and becoming a certified alexander technique teacher, having my two children and weaving them into my art-making.
40s - moving from new york to california, from southern to northern california and into a rocky relationship with dancing and dance-making (mostly because i was so busy raising my children and dealing with the isolation of moving to a new community with two babies). my choices to dance or do projects were much more predicated on economics, so i spent a lot of time staging trisha's work and teaching, bringing my kids with me on tour. i also directed AXIS dance company's rehearsals with stephen petronio and was artistic director for an AXIS project with remy charlip. i kept retiring from, then returning to dancing. by the end of my forties, i was teaching full-time (one semester i taught six courses!) at mills college.
50s - moving back to new york city and igniting my love of dancing again (with a lovely welcome home - a commission by danspace project on a platform called "back to new york city", curated by juliette mapp); joining LOWER LEFT, the performance collective that i am a member of (with nina martin, margaret paek, andrew wass, kelly dalrymple-wass and leslie scates); teaching in academia here and there (juilliard, the new school, hunter college); finding a new artist/parent balance; establishing a thriving alexander technique private practice and continuing to teach and perform (most recently at MoMA in "20 dancers for the 20th century").

Photo: Liz Titone
Can you talk about your extensive relationship with Trisha Brown? When did you first meet her? Did you audition for the company? What was that journey like over the years? What is your current role in the company?
i first met her company in 1983 in boulder, where i took a master class, but was not in town for the performance (i was getting married just at that time). the first time that i saw her work was at city center theater in new york shortly after moving to the city, and i was blown away by the performance. for me up until that point, the experience of watching dancing never matched the physical/intellectual/spiritual experience of dancing itself. watching this work almost felt like dancing it, and i could see as well as feel both it's clarity and it's mystery. back then (1984), it was still very unusual to see people dancing in a released way, as if the movement was falling out of them rather than being generated by them.
at that time, the company taught classes only occasionally when they weren't on tour, and i took a couple of them, relishing learning the material. shortly thereafter, there was an audition, and i went (i had only auditioned once before - for twyla tharp). it was huge, and being a small person, i was sure that i was completely invisible in the crowd. it went from hundreds of dancers to maybe 4 or 5 of us - men and women - they were looking for one man and one woman - and then a few days later trisha called me and said that she would like to invite me to dance with her and the company. i went to her loft for breakfast and we talked about ourselves and our childhoods (she grew up in the olympic mountains and i grew up in the rocky mountains). it was the beginning of a fascinating relationship.
the company was becoming incredibly popular at that time and we had much work. we toured nine months a year, which was both exciting and grueling. it was a very intense experience being on the road and therefore in a sort of "bubble" so much of the time (no email or skyping back then!). while i loved dancing the work, navigating that bubble was tricky for me, and i left the company after four and a half years.
as i began to establish myself as an independent dance artist and my relationship with trisha and with the work became less complicated, i began to do projects transmitting, staging and adapting the choreography. for example, i created a unique version of "set and reset" called "set and reset reset" with the dancers of the lyon opera ballet. i used those opportunities to experiment with conceptual sustainability, arriving at a familiar "end" by way of a different means and testing the choreography with my own artistic choices, which i felt trisha appreciated. i am very fortunate to have had her trust and blessings to work with her choreography in this way.
as the company moves into a new period of focusing on trisha's legacy, i continue to do this kind of work (i recently directed early "equipment pieces" projects at the pompidou in paris and in metz, france and at barbican in london).
Talk a little about Alexander Technique. When did you first get to experience it? When did you know you wanted to do the full training and become a practitioner yourself?
i first learned about AT in boulder in the early 80s. i started studying the technique regularly in new york right around the time i joined TBC, taking private lessons with judith lakin, and then june ekman, with whom i still study (and who was there, with her hands on me when i gave birth to my first child). it was really june who inspired me to train, for she saw that i had a very deep affinity with the technique. it had given me an amazing scaffolding to hang my experience (and language and philosophy and conceptual preferences, etc.) on. it aligns with many of the aesthetic principles that have been most influential to me: self as habit, non-doing being as important as doing, seeing what is already there, the novelty of the present moment. it was a pretty effortless decision. i also, at the time, thought it might be a compatible career choice with a family,which it has turned out - more or less - to be.
Current training and care for the body:
dancing (this sounds obvious, but i mean just dancing rather than exercises or some sort of linear warm-up), the same ol' simple movements and gestures that i've been doing for years + the novelty of the present moment, teaching alexander technique, dancing ballroom with my son, walking in the woods (okay, the park) with my family.
Non-dance movement practices important to you:
there are non-dance movement practices? ;)
What is on your plate/on your calendar for the next year’s time as a dancer, choreographer, and teacher?
this spring/summer i will be teaching a regular alexander technique group class at movement research in nyc; visiting arizona state university to work with dancers, media engineers and the "digital culture" department; working with somatic practitioners in taipei, taiwan; teaching at the university of stockholm; working with boris charmatz and a team of artists in berlin; creative research with LOWER LEFT, the performance collective that i am a member of, also in berlin; teaching at impulstanz in vienna, and hoping to start a new solo work. not sure yet what the fall will bring, but it will be a very different one for me, as my oldest child will go off to (swarthmore) college!

Photo: Tony Edlestein
Advice to young dancers on teaching, learning how to teach, and the role that teaching will most likely play in their dance careers:
teaching will most likely and most fortunately play a role in your dance career. this is where dance artists walk the walk. to articulate what you are 'up to' is one of the most profound learning experiences one can have. an important principle of teaching (for me) is transparency: let your students in on your questions, your research, your willingness to not know (or perhaps your fear about not knowing). a good teacher is not so much one who teaches things to others, but one who allows others to learn. getting out of the way to allow students to learn (to try, to fail, etc.) is huge.
One piece of financial advice you would pass onto young dancers:
save, save, save! value yourself and your time! always pay your dancers even a tiny bit, because you are professional.
What is your relationship these days with technology – for your artwork, teaching, as a dancer, to connect with the dance world (marketing, connecting, learning, archiving, etc)?
i am such a practitioner. i am seduced by physical experience and am profoundly in love with movement, live art, the hand-made. so i am a reluctant technology user. i feel i spend way too much time sitting in front of a screen, and, the older i get, the more i resent it! but i do depend on it for communication (though i am not on facebook or twitter, etc.), and who knows what i'll learn from the media engineers at ASU...
Current passions and curiosities:
to name a few: being with my family; living in new york; politics; all forms of art; my teenagers' and their concerns (social, artistic, personal and political); the earth and her uncertain future; unplugging; aging with grace. in dance, i continue to be interested in language, the interface of behavior and architecture, shifting from theater to visual art, critique of sensation, spatial support, addressing un/sub/conciousness - particularly in the use of the eyes (notice that i did not say "gaze"?), hypnosis and trance.
What/who keeps you excited about modern dance as an art form?
see "current passions and curiosities". also, our community - look at this blog and the quality of the contributors - incredibly exciting and inspiring.
Final advice to young dancers:
question everything.
speaking of questions, there is a difference between the question "should i dance, be a dancer?" and "how can i dance/be a dancer in this moment?" and "how can i make this happen?"

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