Life as a Modern Dancer

Postscript: Further Discussion, Reflection, and Research Related to Shelley Senter's Artist Profile

Each week following an artist's post, reflection questions and research ideas will get posted. These are aimed towards college level courses (senior seminar, composition, dance education, and more), but of course anyone can read the postscript and find thought-provoking questions and activities.

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Discuss: "Training"

As Shelley described her dance life in her 20s, and dancing with Nancy Spanier, she commented about "'training' onstage rather than in the studio." In a class, discuss what this phrase means to you. What training do we receive through performance opportunities? 

Discuss: The Experience of Watching Dance

Shelley noted about Trisha Brown's work.....

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.

What does this passage mean to you and your inspiration for being on stage, and whose work you do?

Research: Movement Research in NYC

Shelley is teaching a regular Alexander technique group class at Movement Research this Spring/Summer. Spend 10 minutes on its website - reading about its classes, workshops, journal, email lists, and more. Click here.

Reflect: 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?" 

Spend 10 minutes, for yourself, journaling about these questions....

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Artist Profile #57: Shelley Senter (Brooklyn, NY)

 

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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New Blog Series: My Dance Week

We are excited to launch our new monthly series, My Dance Week. Once a month, an artist will sketch out or write out (literally) his/her week. One of the hardest things for a young dancer to envision is what a weekly schedule might look like - fitting in paying work, teaching, rehearsing, performing, training, family, friends, relaxation, and more. In particular, since the majority of modern dancers will teach in some capacity, how much teaching makes for "full-time?" Plus, "teaching" includes class time and also prep time. 

How do we balance our dance and non-dance life?

Please join us once a month as we look at different dancers' schedules and ways to balance a life in dance. 

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Schedule #1: Valerie Gutwirth (Oakland, CA)

Valerie is a teaching artist, spouse, mother of two teens, and performer (MoToR, Paufve Dance). She teaches at John Muir School in the Berkeley Unified School District (a .60 FTE position). 

FRIDAY

Home warm-up (60 minutes): myofascial release, yoga

School prep (2 hours): rainy day plans for 2 classes, Outdoor School notes review and email to fundraising committee, rewrite some class notes from Thursday for presentation today and next Thursday. Greet observers from Cal State University East Bay.

Classes

First grade: on the fly, adjusting class plan for very squirrely bunch due to rain. Using water imagery and work from previous week in Freeze Dance, Rocks and Rivers, Pattern Dancing formats. End with This Little Light of Mine prep for February assembly.

Third Grade: rainy day class in their classroom. Mostly tried and true stuff: Obwi Sana Sa (African chant with hand rhythms), introduce Tuwe Tuwe (Ghanaian folk dance), Go Bananas (new item from Energizers book), djembe rhythms and echo play

Kindergarten: rainy day class in their classroom, tried and true format of drummers and dancers, plus This Little Light of Mine prep for February assembly.

Lunch

5^th Grade: set warmup week 6 (automatic!! Yay team!), focus on plié. Small group work to finish phrases for Gettysburg Address performance dance, first rough run of the whole dance.  Structure is tried and true, content is new.

After School (60 minutes): notes for next week, progress notes to teachers, clean out the desk, prep notes for Tuesday and the weekend.

SATURDAY

Laundry, grocery shopping

Ballet class

Mom duty

Synagogue event

SUNDAY

Mom duty

Modern class

Cook for the work week

Berkeley Rep show

MONDAY

Errands for costumes for 2/28 performance

Yoga class

House jobs/Mom duty

Rehearsal 8:30-10:30

TUESDAY

Home warm-up (60 minutes): Pilates

School prep (90 minutes): prep stage for performance practice, prep classroom after rainy day the day before, review/rework class notes for the day (turns out it’s pajama and bring your stuffie day!), review evaluation notes from last Thursday’s evaluation

Yard duty

Classes

Grade 2: continuation of space ideas, part of a tried-and-true unit on mapping. Freeze Dance with stuffies, Tuwe Tuwe in warmup lines, in partners. Focus on high/low, circles, zigzags. Across the floor in pathways: zigzags, straight, curvy lines. Whole-group exploration using different drumbeats for different pathways. Ending with personal space book (new material from Toolbox curriculum) and line up.

Grade 4/5: Set Warmup Week 7, focus on pushing feet off the floor, plié. Final revisions to performance dance, review expectations for behavior onstage, sketch the dance onstage. Format is tried and true, content is new. Added in Personal Space ideas from Toolbox.

Kindergarten: continuation of Letter of the Week curriculum: Letter J. Added Personal Space ideas to warmup circle (jiggle, juggle, jog), across the floor (jog, jazzy walk), dance time (jump pattern) and ending (jello)

Lunch

4^th Grade: Set Warmup Week 7, focus on pushing feet off the floor, plié. Final revisions to performance dance, review expectations for behavior onstage, sketch the dance onstage. Format is tried and true, content is new. Added in Personal Space ideas from Toolbox.

After School: notes for next week, progress notes to teachers, evaluation meeting (40 minutes), hike (90 minutes), site council meeting (60 minutes).

WEDNESDAY

Yoga class

Ballet barre

Errands for materials for February 28^th performance

School prep (30 minutes): prep for dance in classrooms (100^th Day of school celebration)

Kindergarten: in the classroom. All pretty new. Introduce hambone, juba. Hambone and Juba with dancers. Read from Drumbeat In Our Feet.

Grade 4/5: writing and song prep for February performance. All pretty new. 3 writing groups, 1 works on opinions, 2 on synopses of content. The singing group practices with pitch and a rhythm keeper.

After School: notes for next week, progress notes to teachers. Staff Meeting (2 hours)

THURSDAY

Home warm-up (60 minutes): Pilates

Bus duty

School prep (1 ¾  hours): Room cleanup from yesterday’s event, planning for first and second grade to incorporate lessons learned from Friday and Tuesday.

Second Grade: Drumbeat In our Feet on drum sounds to start.Tuwe Tuwe in lines, in partners. Introduce personal space idea from Toolbox, use in Freeze Dance format. Carousel format in pathways: zigzags, straight, curvy lines. Whole-group exploration using different drumbeats for different pathways. Ending with djembe echo.

Third Grade: Chinese New Year Dragon Dancing and Drumming (tried and true, we had to put this on hold for two weeks due to assembly performance and rainy day).

First Grade: continuation of water dance ideas (tried and true theme with student ideas that are new; each group responded differently to observing the creek and reading A Drop Of Water). Warmup with water words (trickle, drip, float); across the floor (flow, move fast, move slow, jump rock to rock, intro pathway idea); dance time (intro ABA form with axial and traveling water words, e.g. float, move fast, float, then show watch reflect); ending with djembe echo

Second Grade: Tuwe Tuwe in lines, in partners. Introduce personal space idea from Toolbox, use in Freeze Dance format. Carousel format in pathways: zigzags, straight, curvy lines. Whole-group exploration using different drumbeats for different pathways. Ending with Drumbeat In Our Feet, djembe echo.

4^th/5^th Grade: yoga warm-up (this is usually our fitness day); staging of singers and movers with transition between this group and the 5^th grade group. End early for Valentine’s Day parties

(YES I ENDED MY REALLY HARD DAY WITH A GROUP OF 50 KIDS!! And they did great! And I was SOOOO tired!!)

Some notes on the not-dance stuff: Mom duty can be anything from driving kids to appointments to helping with homework to hosting a dinner to braiding hair to just being around. House jobs are endless. I do all the grocery shopping and cooking for our family, and most of the spot cleaning. We have a cleaning person every other week to do a super clean, change the sheets, etc, and a garden person once a month to do major yard stuff; these are our LUXURIES, and keep our marriage happier.

Notes on the dance stuff: I try to make notes for each class right after the class ends; these are really rough and I formalize them at the end of each day when I can. I sit and each lunch every day except Thursday (otherwise I get dizzy); Thursday I have only one 15 minute break between classes, and so I do bunches of snacking at that point.

 

Read Valerie's full artist profile here.

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Postscript: Further Discussion, Reflection, and Research Related to Tina Fehlandt's Artist Profile

Each week following an artist's post, reflection questions and research ideas will get posted. These are aimed towards college level courses (senior seminar, composition, dance education, and more), but of course anyone can read the postscript and find thought-provoking questions and activities. 

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Research: Mark Morris

Tina was a founding member of the Mark Morris Dance Group, danced in the company for 20 years, was an arts administrator at the Center, and continues to teach and stage Morris's choreography around the globe. Spend 10 minutes reading more about Morris himself, the company, and the Mark Morris Dance Center in NYC. 

Reflect: Teaching

Tina wrote:

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.

Reflect on your own feeling about teaching in your current or future dance life. Why teach? What age group(s)? What is the relationship of teaching and being an artist?

Discuss: "Being in Class"

Tina's final advice was about being in class. Currently, how often do you get to go to class? What role does going to class play in your life - with your training, performance prep, being seen for future performance opportunities, and building community?

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Artist Profile #56: Tina Fehlandt (Brooklyn, NY)

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 42^nd 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 7^th 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 5^th 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 8^th 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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Postscript: Further Discussion, Reflection, and Research Related to Jennifer Kayle's Artist Profile

Each week following an artist's post, reflection questions and research ideas will get posted. These are aimed towards college level courses (senior seminar, composition, dance education, and more), but of course anyone can read the postscript and find thought-provoking questions and activities. 

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Class Discussion

This activity can easily be explored in a variety of college courses.

Ask the students to select one sentence that most interested them from Jennifer's artist profile. Select 4-5 of these sentences and break the group into smaller groups to further discuss these statements. Have each group discuss one of the selected sentences.

After small group discussion, you can end with a whole group discussion about one or two more ideas in Jennifer's profile.

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Blog Series: Becoming a Teaching Artist

Beginning in February 2014, there will be a new addition to the Life as a Modern Dancer Blog. Once a month, there will be a post related to teaching. As most professional modern dancers will teach in some capacity throughout their careers, it is valuable to begin to develop teaching skills during college. The tips, resources, announcements, and questions posted here will support dancers as they become teaching artists.

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Luna Dance Institute (Berkeley, CA)

As we look ahead to summer, the Luna Dance Institute offers numerous workshops for dancers and classroom teachers to explore, consider, and develop dance programs. Luna is one of the top dance education organizations in the country, leading the way with high-quality programs about child development, teaching, curriculum, creative movement, assessment, and more. Absolutely, it will be worth your time to travel to Berkeley for one of these programs. 

Alisa Rasera of Luna describes the summer program as:

Using a constructivist approach Summer Institute 2014 participants cooperatively learn through critical reflection, dialogue, movement, teaching and writing. Dance artists will learn about child development, contemporary learning theories and how to present dance with an improved understanding of today’s classroom. Participants improve their own teaching practice and advance quality in the field.  School-based teachers & practitioners will learn about the elements of dance and how they enhance learning for children pre-k through high school. They will have opportunities to find the dancer within and practice creating dance activities, teaching them to peers, and exploring potential for authentic integration between dance and other subjects/goals. Both groups will examine the value and role of creativity in dance, learning and life. 

Luna also offers meetings and workshops throughout the year. Using technology, they even offer webinars and conversations that can be seen around the country via Skype. 

Spend 10 minutes on the Luna Dance Institute website to find out more. 

Patricia Reedy's book Body, Mind, and Spirit in Action is also a must-have for creative dance teachers working with students PreK-12. College professors - this is a great book to use as a textbook in a college course as well.

Download 14_suminst_pc1 

Download 14_suminst_pc2

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Artist Profile #55: Jennifer Kayle (Iowa City, Iowa)

From: Northeast – New Jersey, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts

Current city: Iowa City, IA

Age: 40-something

College and degree: Middlebury College, BA Dance/Sociology

Graduate school and degree: Smith College (graduated at 30)

Website: http://www.architectsdance.org/

How you pay the bills: Associate Professor, University of Iowa

All of the dance hats you wear: 

• At UI - Co-Director MFA Program, Undergraduate Honors Director. Co-Founder of collaborative improvisational company “The Architects”
• Co-director and teacher of “MICI: Movement Intensive in Compositional Improvisation”
• Independent choreographer producing work for “Kayle + Company” and on commission for Universities and regional companies/artists
• Independent performance improviser working with various dance and music colleagues

Non-dance work you have done in the past: Word processor, secretary, “temp”

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My journey in dance is non-traditional and zig-zag. As a young person, I was a competitive gymnast, sang in the choir and small groups, did musical theatre, and participated in sports such as field hockey and diving. I discovered dance in college in a program that focused on original creative work through improvisation and choreography, and bridging creative work with research across the liberal arts. I had a sense that I needed to play “catch-up,” with my technique, (which I did at summer festivals such as ADF, Bates, and White Mountain), but over time, realized that I had been given all the skills I needed to learn whatever was in front of me. I wasn’t as familiar with the technical forms and routines as other dancers, but from my improvisational training, and education about “performance,” I knew better how to see the movement, and how to make sense of the dancing in my own being.

I spent my 20s learning how to teach and direct a dance program at Northfield Mt. Hermon School, a wonderful, interesting, and progressive place for secondary school education. After I went to Grad School, I spent my 30s figuring out college-level teaching, first being somewhat happily under-employed as Sabbatical Replacement Faculty, Visiting Artist, and adjunct at places like Hampshire College, Amherst College, Keene State College, and even some regional private studios, teaching and also choreographing. I eventually got hired for my first tenure-track position at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, PA. I spent 3 years there cutting my teeth as a teacher in higher-ed with many wonderful and open-minded students, but also many moments of realizing I needed to hone my “spiels” about why we were doing what we were doing. I then took a chance on a Visiting Professor position at University of Iowa, not knowing if I would be there for 9 months, or thereafter. When a tenure-line was re-opened, I applied and was invited to join the faculty. Here I am almost 10 years later!!! It seems both inevitable and a shock that I am a tenured, Associate Professor, and suddenly, the person who says in faculty meetings, “how we came to this decision back in XXXX, and what we have done in the past,” and other such sayings of those who have been around a while.

Throughout my discovery of a life in dance, my passion has been in creative work, both improvised and choreographed. There’s really nothing that wakes me up more than making a dance, and I am endlessly curious about how it works, both for me and for others. Early on, I knew it was something I needed to have in my life, but in the beginning, I never imagined it could be at the core of a “career.” In every stage of life, I’ve figured out how to create and produce my work. Local arts council grants, a national grant, money from academia, experimenting on students of all ages, gathering peers and colleagues to learn from one another, professional workshops, self-created laboratories - all passionately created spaces for learning in and through the body how to compose something. 

It’s hard to define why I never focused on “performance” as an artist. My experiences as a performer have been fraught, and I suppose, the particular struggle or anxiety associated with making work, as opposed to performing work, has always better suited me.  I think it partly has to do with notions (real or imagined, personal or cultural) about the way my body looks. I don’t have what could be called in old-school terms “a dancer's body,” in its external form, but I DO have a “dancer's body” in terms of my passion for moving and for embodying deeply each moment, finding meaning in what I’m doing, looking at dancing as an act of communion. For this reason, I’ve always felt more authority as a performer of improvisation, where the standardized “should” about how things look is not so strong, but it is more a question of peculiar presence, creative acumen, intelligent response, and physical/artistic specificity regardless of pre-determined forms. 

I suppose I raise this question of performance because many young dancers assume that their entrance to “the dance world” must first be through performance, by reaching the heights as a chosen one, and by first embodying someone else’s (sanctified) vision.  For me, this was not the way, and I know I’m not the only one. As a young woman of 22, my mother died, and my father was not in my life, and I knew I had nowhere safe to go if the “starving artist” routine (ie trying to dance in New York) didn’t happen for me. I focused on teaching as a way to also teach myself, to pay my bills, to create a home life, to be assured that I could survive and also do what I loved. But I’ve always enjoyed it! And I’ve been successful in conducting my creative research and performance simultaneous to teaching. I was drawn to teaching for practical reasons, but also for reasons of the heart.  Please don’t look to teaching as some kind of escape or a “back-up,” because teaching in itself is extremely challenging, and also extremely important. If you are drawn to it, notice which of your teachers inspired you and moved you forward both as an artist and very important: as a HUMAN. Study your teachers and learn from the ones who injured you, as well as the ones who gave you back to yourself.  It is one of the most important things you can do if you enter the field.  Notice also, how your teaching and your artistic research can feed one another. Question the forms that were passed down to you. Make a conscious decision about what you want to see in the world, and use your classroom or studio as a space of possibility to promote those values.  Be on the lookout for ways that your teaching methods are accidentally producing the experiences and forms you wish would disappear in dance and in life. 

I will close by saying a few words about the powerful force that improvisation has been in my life. I was initially exposed to improvisation by Penny Campbell, student of Judy Dunn (Judson Church Movement, Cunningham Company), and Bill Dixon (free jazz pioneer), at Bennington College. I also learned the practice of Authentic Movement from Andrea Olsen, and from Daphne Lowell. And from another formative teacher, Peter Schmitz, I absorbed a distinct perspective on improvisation as creative process, and as performance through multiple media, especially “text.” I’ve studied Contact Improvisation with excellent teachers, but it has not been my main love. Later, in my collaborative research with “The Architects,” Katherine Ferrier, Lisa Gonzales, Pamela Vail, and our circle of associates in music and design, I have been able to continue growing in unexpected directions.  What I have learned through the practice of improvisation has been without boundary. Here are a few phrases that point toward some of the wealth I’ve received: the ability to arrive to the moment exactly as it is, and to be “moved” by what I perceived there; to look at a complicated scenario and make a conscious choice without fear; what is TRUST in action; stamina of attention, how to remain with whatever is happening without running away either mentally or physically; a sense of the poetic, and the vast expanse of poetic experience that is provoked by living through a moment in the body, either directly or vicariously; the materiality of intent, and of attention, that what we notice and what we intend is a powerful materializing force that goes way beyond our little selves; the capacity of a group to pay attention to one another with simultaneous respect for individual necessity and communal integrity; the limitless field of possibility; the huge leaps that are possible in one’s most important capacities; that building a dance and building a life are both spontaneous structuring processes that draw on every intelligence we can muster, and in that process, to have your expectations and assumptions dashed is perhaps the most important “teacher” on the journey. 

Let me also say that I understand there are many un-inspired or questionable improvisation teachers and methods out there, in studios and workshops and other spheres. If you have had negative, painful, or frustrating experiences, I apologize on behalf of improvisation as a phenomenon, and I urge you to keep looking for a teacher or a method or a place where you can finally experience the depth and richness that improvisational practice can bring.  You’ll know it when you’ve found it. A sophisticated improvisational method/practice can propel you to new territory, new heights, or new constructs for yourself, and will cause a creative stance that is both focused and expansive.  If you feel that your oeuvre or output is getting smaller – then that’s not it.  If you feel the possibilities exploding, and find you have means to contend with those possibilities in a state of curiosity and productivity – then YES. 

In conclusion, be honest with yourself – about what you love – about what you can and can’t live with. Learn to listen deeply (inside and outside). And if you feel called: KEEP GOING.  What unfolds for you probably won’t be what you’re able to envision from this point in space in time. But it will be something as meaningful as you make it, and your life in dance will be an equal gift to yourself and to those you touch if you are paying attention with a strong heart.  

Postscript: Further Discussion, Reflection, and Research Related to Graham Brown's Artist Profile

Each week following an artist's post, reflection questions and research ideas will get posted. These are aimed towards college level courses (senior seminar, composition, dance education, and more), but of course anyone can read the postscript and find thought-provoking questions and activities. 

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Discuss: Take Aways

In a course, go around the room and share one or two "take aways" from Graham's artist profile. What inspired you, caught your attention, or got you thinking more deeply on a particular topic? 

Research: Artists

Graham mentioned numerous artists in his profile, who he has danced with or is inspired by. Select two artists and research further on the internet.

Reflect: Dance and Family

Who are your role models and resources on this topic? What do you envision for yourself in the future, as a dancer and as a potential parent? You can also reference two profiles from this blog in the past year:

• Colleen Thomas
• Alexandra Beller

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Artist Profile #54: Graham Brown (Provo, UT)

Hometown: Annapolis, MD

Current city: Provo, UT

Age: 34

College and degree: Univeristy of Utah, BFA in Modern Dance

Graduate school and degree: University of Maryland, College Park; MFA in Dance (at age 33)

Website:  www.grahambrown.org

How you pay the bills: Assistant Professor of Dance at Brigham Young University

All of the dance hats you wear: choreographer, director, performer, writer, teacher, mentor, improviser, advocate, student (always)

Non-dance work you do: father, homemaker

Before BYU (as in, 4 months ago) I worked for over a decade at various hotels and restaurants, hustling to support my family while building my career.

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Describe your dance life in your….

20s:

My 20s began with the single goal of being hired by a professional dance company. They finished as a husband, father, co-director of an improv company, freelance performer, and adjunct faculty member.

While an undergrad I did have many great performance opportunities, but unexpectedly it was a developed passion for improvisation that would consume most of my creative energies through my 20s. I remember very specifically the moment it happened, in Stephen Koester’s workshop class sophomore year, watching groups of classmates performing an improv exercise. I was so impressed with these spontaneous performances, it just hit me “why don’t we do that on stage?” This spark started a snowball that was eventually realized in the SLC based improv company Movement Forum (MoFo). First as a group of students, eventually as grassroots professionals, we did spontaneous ad-hoc street performances as well as carefully designed presented evenings in formal theatres. We performed locally as well as in Seattle and twice in NYC. Always improvised.

Improvisation was really the inlet to my teaching career as well. Through MoFo as well as independently, I guest taught at high schools, universities, and independent workshops domestically and internationally. These experiences gave me an in to eventually be hired as an adjunct at Utah Valley University and Salt Lake Community College.

Beyond Improvisation, I had some really great freelance performance experiences, performing and touring the work of PEARSONWIDRIG DANCETHEATER, Stephen Koester, Juan Carlos Claudio, and others. The one big choreographic endeavor I took on in my 20s was a duet with my brother Joel Brown, who is paralyzed from the chest down. We first created I’ve Had It Up To Here when I was an undergrad and he was in junior high, and continued developing and performing the piece over the years. This work amplified my interest in how we perceive what a dancer is/does/looks like. (Joel now performs with AXIS Dance Company in Oakland, CA.) From 2006-2010 I was also the primary care giver of our then two children while my wife, Erin Lehua Brown, was working full time with Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company (RW).

30s:

In 2010, we moved to the DC area and Lehua and I switched roles. She became the primary care giver while I began grad school and working regularly with PEARSONWIDRIG DANCETHEATER and the Dance Exchange (formerly the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange). At this point my creative interests had taken a sharp turn toward choreography and theatricality. I developed an interest in making work that uses spoken text, stage design, dramaturgy, and other theatric elements as a means to more deeply convey emotional and interpersonal narratives. I actually made the first work of this nature in Salt Lake, just before moving to DC. It was a hip-hop theatre duet presented by the Sugar Space that explored the complexities of a love relationship. My time in DC was a massively productive one. I made four significant works of choreography, including two evening-length pieces. Each asked different questions regarding reconciliation with self, family, and/or community. I studied voice, acting, playwriting, and Alexander Technique in addition to all of my dance studies, teaching, and performing. I also began choreographing for theatre. I choreographed a devised work directed by Leigh Wilson Smiley at the University of Maryland (UMD), and assisted Nancy Bannon in choreographing two one act plays for The Studio Theatre in DC.

With PEARSONWIDRIG DANCETHEATER (PW), directed by Sara Pearson and Patrik Widrig, I performed throughout DC, NYC, various colleges up and down the east coast, and Santiago, Chile. This work challenged me in finding the peaks of my performative capacity, from the explosive and daring to the quiet energy within the subtlest detail.

I had moved back east expecting to establish and sustain my career and family there. Upon finishing my MFA, much to my surprise, I was hired on the faculty of Brigham Young University’s Department of Dance. So, three years after driving my family across the country, we found ourselves driving all the way back to Utah, now with another baby, Elliette, and Lehua expecting our fourth.

I’m now in my second semester of teaching at BYU. I never imagined myself living in Provo, but I have really found a home in mentoring students in their artistry while furthering my creative endeavors. I have a 5^th grader-Isobella, 3^rd grader-Oliver, toddler-Elliette, and 2-month old baby Ana. Lehua is quickly adjusting post-pregnancy, and we are all adjusting to our new life here in Provo.

How have you landed your performance gigs over the years (auditions, seen in class, etc)?

All of my performance work has come by invite through either personal associations or from being seen in performance. I have unsuccessfully auditioned for a small handful of gigs over the years, but our lifestyle rarely afforded me the opportunity to audition for things. In hindsight, I wonder how much necessity became the mother of invention for me. I wonder if having kids forced me to approach my career in a more creative, pro-active way. Since I wasn’t able to go out auditioning as I had originally planned, I started initiating projects, such as MoFo. If we hadn’t had kids so early, I wonder if I would have gone a more traditional route.

This is a little off-topic, but I’d like to share a little more about this aspect of the journey. Lehua and I were in no way planning on having a baby so soon (I was a sophomore and she a junior when Bella was born). To be honest I was devastated when I found out. I thought my career as a dancer was over, and I had no idea what I was going to do instead. The same year Bella was born, David Dorfman came to the U of U to set a piece and he brought his young son, Sam, with him. Just seeing someone balancing dance and family was all I needed to let me know that it was possible. Now, at the time I hadn’t pieced it together that David had already established his career before his son came into the picture, but in this case, ignorance was bliss. David set a work called Familiar Moments: the Family Project which included a family member on stage with each cast member. The piece began with nearly-1-year-old Bella sitting alone on stage, stoic in a pool of light. I took the process of making and performing this piece as a message that it was not only possible to juggle dance and a family, it was literally spotlighted.

I want to say that while the initial news was a shock, my relationship with Lehua, Bella, and each subsequent kid has defined me as an individual and an artist. They have charged me with a level of maturity, love, perspective, responsibility, as well as creative drive and professional pluck that I’m sure I would not have developed otherwise. When unexpected things come your way you have to improvise, so I guess that’s what I did.

What inspired you to go to graduate school? What did you want to learn, explore, or discover?

On one hand, grad school was the ticket to eligibility for a faculty position, which I knew I wanted. On the other hand, there were many things I wanted to work on; too many to reasonably sink my teeth into in three years. Specifically I wanted to:

• develop as a choreographer
• build more tools as a teacher, particularly in areas other than improv
• further my pursuits as a scholar (I haven’t talked about this, but by then I had published a few little things and was interested in going further into dance scholarship)
• develop stronger technical and performance skills
• gain skills in theatre
• maintain a foot in the professional world, particularly through performance

I knew this was too much, so I entered grad school ready to see which areas my program would most facilitate. To a certain degree I actually did have experience and development in all of these areas, but choreography became by far my most intense area of focus. Specifically I had the unique opportunity to work within the theatric modalities I was interested, as the UMD School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies put me in direct collaboration with top tier professors and grad students in design, stage management, and dramaturgy, as well as offering faculty mentors in both Theatre and Dance.

What is on your plate for 2014?

I have received a commission through Repertory Dance Theatre’s Link series, as well as significant funding from BYU, to mount my evening-length work You at the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center in Salt Lake City in January 2015. I have currently gathered most of my design team (stage manager, dramaturg, and costume, lighting, and scenic designers) and will be having auditions February 8^th and 15^th for the lead cast. This is a huge opportunity for me to further develop a work that I started in DC and now have the resources to fully realize. (Anyone interested in auditioning please see my website for details.)

This summer I will be touring to NYC and St Petersburg, Russia with PEARSONWIDRIG DANCETHEATER, making new site-specific work, and staging the company’s most celebrated evening- Ordinary Festivals.

Beyond this, I’m just trying to keep my head above water in my new faculty role at BYU and keep track of four kids at home!

Who are your role models and inspiration in the field of modern dance right now?

By far my biggest inspiration is DV8 Physical Theatre based in the UK. I saw their show To Be Straight With You in L.A. in 2009 and it changed my life. It really was the point of inspiration for my work in integrating theatre and dance. Beyond this, here is a small list:

• Hofesh Schechter
• Jasmin Vardimon
• Akram Khan
• Crystal Pite
• Susan Marshall
• Pina Bausch
• Ohad Naharin
• There are many others

Can you talk a little about being married to a dancer? How do you support each other? Do you perform together?

I am pretty proud of how we have supported each other over the years. I think we have both adjusted elements of our careers in order to make this incredible family work. It has been chaotic, and not without a lot of tensions, but I feel we have and are fulfilling both our career and familial dreams. As I’ve talked about, we have more or less taken turns. I slowed down, or at least channeled my work into a model that would give me the flexibility necessary to support her while she toured with Ririe-Woodbury. She did the same while we were back east and now while I’m getting started at BYU. It takes a lot of passion, a little crazy, and a lot of help from family and friends to have done what we’ve done. A couple of examples: our oldest, Isobella, was born when we were both in college. My sister would basically watch her all day while we were in class and bring her to the dance building at lunchtime so Lehua could nurse. In 2011, after we had moved to DC, Lehua and I were both busy with a significant amount of touring (sometimes together, but mostly separate). She would come home just in time for me to leave or vise versa. When we were both gone, her mother would come out to take care of the kids. Out of that whole year I think we were only together as a family for like 5 months.

Do we work together? No. Not really. We’ve found that it’s just so hard because then we’ve got to find a babysitter for every rehearsal/tech/performance. There have been a couple of exceptions, but not many. We did have this great period of time when we first moved to DC, when our oldest two were in school and before our third was conceived that we did a few very cool gigs together: we did Willi Dorner’s Bodies in Urban Spaces in NYC, a guest performance in Nicholas Leichter Dance’s The Wiz when it toured to DC and VA, and Tzveta Kassabova’s evening The Opposite of Killing. Lehua has been lying low since having Elliette, and then Ana. We are surely done at four, so now she’s regrouping and starting to get back into things, which I am very excited for.

An idea from your college years that you still think about/apply:

One thing comes to mind. At the end of my four years, bubbling with excitement, ready to jump into the professional world, Eric Handman said something to me that I’ll never forget and have echoed to my students since. He said to just “enjoy the ride.” I took this to mean something like: it’s a process, don’t expect everything to all happen at once. Every step is part of an accumulation that collects to make you the artist/person you become.

Final advice to young dancers:

A trend that I see in young dancers is that of having a generally apologetic nature. This attitude presents itself in not taking one's self seriously as a contributor to a field that is societally vital, as well as offering a sense of politely waiting one's turn to get picked. No amount of social change has been brought about in this manner, nor on a personal level is that the way to get work. Dancers need to find the power of their voices and artistic perspective and be willing to express it confidently. This will help in finding work and will help the field at large to burrow out of its state of marginalization.

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Graham wrote an update to this profile on October 20, 2017. Click here.

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