Artist Profile #97: Chantal Sampogna (Oakland, CA)

Hometown: North Hollywood, California

Current City: Oakland, California

Age: 41

College and Degree: UC Berkeley; major in Rhetoric, minor in Public Policy

Graduate school and degree: Juris Doctorate (Law) UC Hastings (21-24 years old)

How you pay the bills: Private practice – I focus on juvenile (foster care, delinquency, and special education) law (sitting as a pro tem, writing appeals, and assessing compliance) as well as general representation. 

Dance hats I wear: Dancer and Board member of Luna Dance Institute

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Growing up: 

Ballet, ballet, ballet! I grew up dancing at the Anna Cheselka Dance Center in Studio City. I took ballet 4-5 days/nights per week from elementary school until high school. I had the opportunity to perform as a child with the Los Angeles Ballet Theater, Boston Ballet, and in the 1984 Olympics (opening ceremony). I loved dancing and character dancing (my teacher’s focus) and the music and sweat. I got diabetes at age 12, and found it hard to maintain my dance focus with this challenge into my high school years. 

During college:

I took my first modern dance class at UC Berkeley in the PE department. It was magic. This is where I met Patricia Reedy and soon began taking modern dance at her studio, Luna Dance. I began to learn about this thing called modern dance and this thing called yoga -- full bodied, barefoot dancing where breathing mattered as much, and transformed, every move. I learned about listening to my own rhythm and the rhythm of others and dancing in the positive and negative space. I was very lucky to dance for Patricia Reedy and her company, Patricia Reedy and Dancers, until law school. 

During law school:

I moved to San Francisco for law school and found it very hard those first two years to find dance, to remember I danced, or to picture it in my future. A part of me knew that had to be wrong – I was in San Francisco, after all, and dance was all around. But for those two years I did not dance. By my third year, I missed Patricia and Luna and dancing very much. I lived in the Sunset District at that time, and I would take the BART and bus from Hastings to Park Blvd. in Oakland to take class, and then home. I loved it. By the middle of my third year, I decided I needed to move back to the East Bay and return to dance. My focus in life and law had been to find a way to work with children and families and the law. I used to be a summer camp program director (1991-2000) and missed that fun, play time with kids and families. I spoke to Patricia about this and began Luna’s intern program to teach creative dance to children and parent/child dance classes. This fed my soul and the internship and curriculum development introduced me to a new world of anatomy, initiation, and force. 

At the end of law school, I began taking ballet at the Berkeley Ballet Theater (BBT). This was a very warm, loving place to reengage with ballet and to try ballet in a true adult life. Patricia Banchik was very supportive and gave me much guidance for rebuilding and developing technique. Within a few years, I was able to dance for Patricia Banchik and her company, Kinesis. She let me know she also taught at this place called Shawl-Anderson – just down the street from BBT. I believe my first modern dance class there was with the fabulous Nina Haft. The soft transitions, the head initiation, the parallel positions. I felt like I was home again in my body and soul, though it was still all so new. There was an honesty and an unveiling I felt in Nina’s dance that made me know I would keep coming back. I was hooked. I haven’t left since. 

After law school: 

In my mid-20s to mid-30s I took class at night and on the weekends as much as could. In my later 20s, I started mixing this in with other exercise, mainly running. By my mid-30s I knew I was getting permanently stiff and I had recurring back injuries. I knew I wanted to keep dancing and decided I would have to balance out my physical activities to bring my best to dance. I began to set a schedule of dance, yoga, running, and weights within any given week. This also helped as work became more intense, as I needed other options I could fit in if I missed class. This continues to work best for my body. During this time, I had the opportunity to perform with more incredible choreographers and friends including Tammy Cheney, Rebecca Johnson, and Dana Lawton. During this time, and until this past year, I worked primarily for the State of California as an attorney (juvenile law) and administrative law judge (unemployment insurance). With this work, the hours were set, leaving evenings and weekends for family and dance.

In the second half of my 30s I had two children!!! How fabulous was that? And I got to dance all the way through the pregnancies.  The dance with my boys while in utero is one of the very best things I have ever done. Before I held them in my arms, I knew how to dance with them and find different ways of playing. The dance also helped me stay connected to me throughout and after the pregnancies – to have a constant me throughout. I continue to dance with my boys at home and at Luna’s parent/child dance classes. Dance is something we share very deeply. Dancing pregnant and while nursing also helped me become more attuned to weight shifts and the daily body adjustments that take our dances to knew places.

I was able to maintain dance as a parent, but did not perform after my second child was born and I returned to work. It is hard to maintain the balance – or to fit into my days and life all that I love and that feeds me. But when it feels hard, I just try to stop thinking about it because that process is really just making it all too important, and I just have to decide what I’m doing that day and when I will dance next. But then I just had the most amazing and dance-life changing opportunity to be able to dance for Rogelio Lopez this last March in his work Empty Spaces. The physicality, clarity and faith required to dance Rogelio’s choreography within my own body, and partnering with others, was a challenge and experience I had hoped for but couldn’t imagine.

On finding balance:

I recently returned to private practice and my schedule is perhaps more within my control, but at this point seems unpredictable. Be it 9-5, or a morning open this week and a regular night I am always free – life is busy and requires time of us that is not dancing – to be in relationship with others, to pay bills, or to just be our complete selves. Regardless, it’s about making a commitment to dance and realizing I’m not me without it. The act of creation and self-bodied challenge, sharing space with others and trying out someone else’s choreographic creation is what I need regularly. That’s who I am.  

Can you talk about your work with the Luna Dance Institute?

Luna Dance is where I united my life as a dancer and attorney, and my commitment to families and children. It is where I found that the continuity of integrity in my body and the continuity of integrity in my life choices, is one and the same. I taught creative dance with Luna from 1999-2007. I then had the opportunity to join the Luna Board and continue in this role. Early in my relationship with Luna, I co-created with Patricia Reedy and Nancy Ng, the MPACT program – Moving Parents and Children Together (parent/child dance classes offered to families separated due to abuse or neglect). MPACT is an example of what we create when we find the connection with our whole lives and dance. As a new Luna teacher I was observing parents and children dance together at Luna’s free Open Houses on the weekends, and during the week as a public defender representing children in the dependency system, I was reading about parents and children having a one-hour visit at McDonalds – regardless of age or the reasons for removal. I knew Luna could offer them more. We created the MPACT program, and ever since have been offering parent/child dance classes to parents and children in Alameda County separated due to abuse and neglect. Luna offers these families the opportunity to dance together with the support of teachers, curriculum, and a program that bears witness to how the abuse and neglect affected the space, force and time of those relationships – the elements of those parent/child dances. MPACT helps the parents and children develop new ways of moving and problem solving together to rebuild their attachment and relationship. 

Wishes for the future: 

My wishes for the future are to keep dancing and challenging myself physically, and to dance more often with my boys. 

Advice for those interested in pursuing dance and also another career:

I have learned from those around me in dance class – the doctors, lawyers, therapists, professors, artists, chemists, parents, care providers . . . – there are ways and places and times to keep dancing and to make dance in your life. It is a rare occasion someone makes it to dance class or rehearsal without leaving something they were working on, or a responsibility they were attending to. I try to eliminate the either/or. As the dancer/non-dancer has blended into me, it has allowed me to see the beautiful dance that happens in any given class and to really watch those dancing and how they find their expression and weight and balance -- where each person in class wants to take their dance. Class is no longer a place to "work on my dancing" but is a place to witness and be a part of actual dancing. So many people never see dance, and I get to see, and be a part of, it multiple times per week. As I have struggled through finding where I fit or who I am within dance and law, I am thankful for dance and my dancer friends and mentors who have given me the space to learn that in any given moment my instinctive way to receive and respond is linearly, analyzing and directly problem solving, while encased in an armor of determination. And while this is happening, I am receiving and responding to everything in dance – constantly having a dance, as muted as it may be to the naked eye, in me and in relation to others - because I am an attorney and dancer, dancer and attorney. And I let it spin around and around.

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Comments

[Liza]

In addition to the college programs mentioned in the guide to San Francisco, Dominican University of California offers a Bachelors of Fine arts in Dance in partnership with Lines Ballet/Lines Dance Center.