Afro-Caribbean traditions in Concert Dance?

As I consider my intent behind continuing to write on this blog, I decided to change the name of the blog to "Ballet, Dance, and Paul Taylor", since the focus of my writing has shifted over the past year of creating posts. My original venture into blogging was in 2017 to record my six month Fulbright sojourn to India. Then I kept a short blog about being a Fulbright Specialist to New Zealand. 

Portraits from teaching in Goa, India. Photos: Purnendra Meshram

Early last year, 2025, I wanted to offer my perspective on teaching an Adult Beginner Ballet program at the new Taylor Center for Dance Education in New York City, this blog was the result. Over time, it evolved into how my life in dance shapes my perspectives, and it seemed appropriate to adjust the title from "Ballet Basics at Taylor".

The 2029/30 season of performances has begun, and every week there are numerous offerings of dance companies and projects being presented, both here in NYC and all around the world. Making choices of what to see is often based on the named dances and choreographers, and what I may or may not know about them. Below I remember some of the dances that put me where I am. I doubt it is readily possible to see them performed on stage today, and I am sad that this is the case. I will start with works that are fading into legend rather than being readily performed. These are dances that shaped my career and perspectives. I have no doubt the list will be decidedly different for you!

(Prof.) Rex Nettleford was one of the founding artistic directors of the National Dance Theatre Company (NDTC) of Jamaica in the West Indies. He was also a prolific choreographer, determined to develop a dance aesthetic that reflected Jamaican culture and experience. Many of the 1962 founding dancers were trained in conservatories in London and New York City, and would choreograph their own legacies in this tradition, while I was a young dancer training under them. Two dances by Nettleford have stayed with me since first seeing them performed in their premiere years, Street People (1973) and The Crossing (1978).

Street People photo: NDTC website.
pictured are two of my favorite Afro-Caribbean folk teachers,
Jackie Guy and Joyce Campbell!

NDTC performed Street People on tour at Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) in NYC and it was descriptively reviewed in the New York Times, April 9th 1974, by Don McDonagh: "The thing that most characterizes the Jamaicans is their relentlessness in presenting movement, song or music. They never try to overpower the viewer, but persistently and lyrically pour waves of sound and motion out like a net to catch attention." "Street People is ... about casual encounters in a large city. It emerges as a series of dalliances with laughter never far away, as a street preacher tries to ward off the inevitable slip from grace. The décor suggests a poor neighborhood by one with a rich capacity for enjoyment. In other hands the piece might have emerged as an angry social protest; in Mr. Nettleford's it was distinctly pleasureful."

The Crossing photos: NDTC Facebook
pictures include Patsy Ricketts and Barry Moncrieffe, Jamaicans who trained in NYC at Dance Theatre of Harlem and at Martha Graham respectively, and who helped shape NDTC's place in global dance recognition

For me, The Crossing was a bold, unflinching portrait of an African-American experience of The Middle Passage. Set to excerpts from Quincy Jones' score for the 1977 US television series "Roots", Nettleford blended contemporary and Afro-Caribbean movement languages to illustrate the beautiful and grotesque extremes of the events that included images of majestic African ceremony, willful death, slavery, striving for hope through community. 

Sulkari performed by NDTC. Photo: NDTC Facebook

Jamaica's proximity to Cuba was more than geographic, in dance we shared dancers and traditions. Eduardo Rivero-Walker was born and raised in Jamaica before he moved to Cuba, and become an anchor of Cuban contemporary dance throughout the 20th century. My first experience of Rivero-Walker's choreography was seeing his Sulkari performed by NDTC, when I was already pursuing a ballet career in the UK. My friends and peers at NDTC were joining the legacy of redefining Afro-Caribbean dance inspired by a range of African cultures, in this case Yoruba. You can find a Cuban studio film of Sulkari on YouTube - Sulkari.

photo from Ballet Nacional de Cuba on Facebook

Alberto Méndez is a Cuban choreographer whose celebrated pas de deux El Rio Y El Bosque was created for Ballet Nacional de Cuba (BNC) and I had the privilege of seeing it performed in Jamaica when the BNC was on tour in the 1970's. It brought classical ballet and Afro-Carribean dance together by literal representation of the female, Oshún (el Rio) character sur pointe in a decorative unitard, and the male, Oggún (el Bosque) clad only in a raffia skirt, trunks and in soft ballet shoes. Ignoring present day interpretations of gendered roles in dance, I recall being struck by the beauty of the sensual and sinuous qualities represented in both the elongated elegance of the pliant woman on pointe, and the grounded power of the man with a rippling spine to turn, jump and lift the woman. While there are other versions of the pas de deux available online, my preference is this blurry recording that is attractive to me because of my memory of seeing it performed live!

Every debut is a world premiere! It just depends on your perspective.

A debut performance for dancers, companies, production teams (and indeed this also applies to performing musicians, actors, et al) can sound like something a little less than a world premiere. Yet the reality is that for the above mentioned, their debut performance will be the benchmark of their experience with that specific work for the rest of their lives, and their personal world premiere. I recently completed re-staging "Company B" for Richmond Ballet's first ever Paul Taylor dance. My informal poll of the dancers and the audience indicated that almost none of them had ever seen "Company B", or any other Taylor works, while many knew his name. 

With Richmond Ballet dancers ready to perform "Company B". Photo: Sarah Ferguson

Still, no matter how much you may have read or heard about a dance, there is nothing that will ever replace the first time you actually dance in it, or see it performed live for the first time. The first cast and production you experience will be the performance with whom and with which you will associate every subsequent performance of the work. Hopefully the experience is a positive one, or at least engaging enough for you to care about returning for another show. 

With another cast of Richmond Ballet dancers in "Company B". Photo: Sarah Fergurson

I am not saying that the first performance of a work will be the only, or even the most storied, memory against which all other performances of that work will be measured. Only that for dancers it is their introduction of themselves to an audience within the framework of a particular dance.

Rehearsal with Josiah, Madeline and dancers of Richmond Ballet. Photo: Molly Huey

The first day that I walk into a studio as a rehearsal director to begin re-staging a dance, I remember what it was like to be early in my performance career with very little knowledge of what to expect. I did not grow up surrounded by dance and theatre, even though I did start dance classes when I was seven. As a young professional, I found myself decidedly behind my peers in terms of knowledge about the ballets, the dances, and the choreographers whose work I would be performing. In some ways this probably served me well, as I had no pre-conceived notions about what roles I might be dancing, or how hard/easy a work might be to learn and perform. 

Richmond Ballet in "Company B". Photo: Sarah Ferguson

The first step of programming a Taylor dance for a company is most often the choice of its Artistic Director, and at Richmond Ballet this is Ma Cong! I am grateful that his invitation, as familiar colleagues, provided me the opportunity to get back in a studio with dancers. Before the debut performances are revealed to audiences, the public must be enticed to know what and when such events will take place. Once upon a time word-of-mouth was likely the only option for marketing. Then came print: flyers and posters; soon after there would be advertisements in news publications. Radio was probably the next innovation to expand mass communications, and film reels and television would add to the attractiveness of what we were being told with synchronized visual action. A world wide web of electronic communications and wireless access led us to the previously unimaginable world of social media. 

Richmond Ballet in "Company B". Photo: Sarah Ferguson

While I might not be quite a luddite, as my generation is often described, I have to admit that writing this blog illustrates my preference for reading and writing, over video and reliance on images to speak for myself. Stepping along my proposed timeline of mass communication, I have engaged with interviewers for their podcasts in the hopes that my words might catch the curiousity of a listener enough to take a seat at a dance performance. My most recent interview was conducted by Lisa Ruth Niemeier, who is a musician and podcaster based in Richmond. She introduced herself to me after the opening night at Richmond Ballet, and asked to interview me. I thought that if we were going to talk about Paul Taylor and "Company B", wouldn't it be best to give listeners the opportunity to still catch a performance over their second weekend run at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. So we conducted the interview on Sunday, and you can listen to it HERE! 

Paul Taylor's dances are most commonly performed by the company that bears his name, and Paul Taylor Dance Company's upcoming performances over the next few months include Southport CT (9/19), Minneapolis MN (9/26), Denver CO (10/17), Bronx NY (10/24).

Then they can be seen at the David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center in New York City NY in seven performances a week from November 3 - 22. Each performance is a different combination of works selected from 16 dances, spanning 11 Taylor dances, 2 world premieres, 2 company premieres, and 1 New York premiere.

Navigating one's vulnerability as a professional performer.

I had set out to write this post at the beginning of August, and here it is, September! Yikes! A lot took place for me in the past month, and I found myself reflecting on what parts of my psyche served me better as a performer than as an administrator. I am who I am, and at the same time, I need to remember to balance the "roles" I play as a member of any given culture or organization. In simple terms my work life vacillates between Arts manager, archivist, dance teacher, rehearsal director, advocate, and (content) writer. This August put me though my paces in all capacities (well I thought about what I wanted to write! LOL). 

Me rehearsing Richmond Ballet in "Company B" by Paul Taylor. Photo: Molly Huey

I wrote about keeping archives alive in an earlier post Paul Taylor's vocabulary which provides a little explanation about that binder I am holding in my hand!

There is an interesting paradox in pursuing a profession of performing for an audience of strangers, you are asked to be vulnerable in the studio and on stage while being invulnerable to the reality that you cannot control how others may perceive you. In everyday life we learn acceptable behaviour, more often than not, from the consequences of what is unacceptable. On stage and in the studio dancers/actors/singers are consistently asked to let the world see their vulnerabilities to create a belief that observer and performer could be/feel the same as "humans". I believe this to be the essence of "theatre" where performers are metaphors of the myriad experiences of observers through their artful work. 

"Speaking in Tongues" & "Black Tuesday"
with Annmaria Mazzini & Maureen Mansfield. Photos: Lois Greenfield

In September 2026, Los Angeles Ballet will have their company premiere of Taylor's "Dilly Dilly" at the Broad Stage Theater in Santa Monica, CA, and Richmond Ballet will have their company premiere of Taylor's "Company B" at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, VA. You could also see Paul Taylor Dance Company performing Taylor works alongside new works by the likes of Robert Battle and Pam Tanowitz in NY, CT, and MN.

No matter the venue, for audiences, the dancers will be the heart of the performance. The choreography, costumes, production, and lighting provide the framework for them to be larger than life so that every viewer might connect with them. And it is my privilege to be shepherding Paul Taylor's dances and the alumni who stage the works. Having the opportunity to continue re-staging a Taylor dance myself is a welcome opportunity to hone the documentation I have been generating for use by our stagers (see my post Stager/Rehearsal Director/Répétiteur). Most recently, the rehearsal director at Richmond Ballet, Igor Antonov, was assigned to care for "Company B" following my time with them. I was extremely appreciative of his detailed care through which we adjusted oversights and mistakes in my documentation. However, this only served to underline that such documentation is only a memory aid for the "person at the front of the rooom" who is responsible to know how to communicate the roles to the dancers. 

I like to paraphrase Paul Taylor where he would say that individual steps are less important than the intent they were designed to convey. Yet Taylor did typically provide us with very specific steps and sequences as he built his choreography. The final sequences may ultimately vary somewhat from one dancer to the next, yet Taylor was always clear about striving for how choreographed movement had a purpose. So artistic decisions have to be made for the dancer learning to perform a role, by the stager. This leads back to the importance of knowledge and documentation that provides both context and possibilities beyond physical movement.

If you check out the Balanchine Foundation interviews on YouTube, I found that a very common tenet heard is that the steps of a dance are only the very beginning of understanding how to perform a role. Dancers must learn to give up their preconceptions of how to execute a movement in service of finding how technique serves intent and performance. In 1983, Paul Taylor created a "pièce d'occasion" for Suzanne Farrell and Peter Martins titled, "Musette" to music by Handel. In a NY Times interview, Miss Farrell is quoted, "Paul's movement is fun." And, "I always try to do exactly what the choreographers I work with want me to do. So I refuse to be bothered about whether the movement in a dance is strange or not." 

Taylor's "Musette", Peter Martins & Suzanne Farrell. Photo: Linda Vartoogian

In closing my musings for today, there is a wonderful interview on The Kael Report which is unfortunately behind a pay wall. But here are a few highlights quotes from Michael Novak, the current Artistic Director of Paul Taylor Dance Company, named by Mr. Taylor. I am guessing that anyone that has learned a Taylor dance from me, might have heard similar sentiments.

Michael Novak. Photo: Travis Caperton

"There is a craft and technique to the Taylor style in terms of line, épaulement and how your body reads from the front. There are tricks of illusion that happen. We definitely look at that and coach it."

"Gesture for Paul was more, I think, than just movement. It was how you communicate. It was how you express yourself. How you make a certain shape and the clarity you give something can have meaning. Whether or not Paul told us what it was about—and he usually didn’t—he wanted that space for a gesture to read."

"When you come and see Paul’s art, you’re seeing that he saw the theatre—the proscenium—as a picture frame. Everything you’re seeing inside it is a moving picture. If you like visual art, that may be a way in."

Quotes from Michael Novak's interview with Harold Finley for The Kael Report, August 2026.

Happy 96th Birthday Paul Taylor!

Paul Taylor's birthday is today! He would have been 96...

A birthday butterfly from Paul

There was a particular kind of privilege that many of us who worked with Paul Taylor enjoyed. It was to receive one of his handmade pieces of art on our birthdays. Often these gifts featured a butterfly, or more, that he had netted himself in eastern Long Island. 

Papilo Brevicanda ♀ (tiger swallowtail) Mattituck, NY, USA '94

Inscribed: "Dear Richard - You are a beaut. Happy Birthday! from yr. admiring bug-catcher"

I also discovered that seven years ago, today was designated "Global Tiger Day", so it seems appropriate to be sharing Paul's Tiger Swallowtail butterfly gift here. 

online graphic from pngtree.com

It is easy to think that being in the dance field means being active and physically moving in a studio or helping dancers work with their bodies. However, the type of work that has been keeping me busy of late is the meticulous, time-consuming notation of dances, professional networking, taking stock of current inventory of data/documentation and what needs to be addressed/expanded and how to do so! Before long, I will not have time to be buried in these tasks, and I will find myself back in studios working with dancers. But the latter does not exist without the former!

Maximizing the use of studio and stage time does not happen spontaneously, and there may come a day when much of the documentation of dances as they are created and re-constructed might live in the domain of sophisticated Artificial Intelligence (AI). But I have not found any real shortcuts to the human preparation needed to create dances and get them in front of audiences near and far.

Dancemaker clip of rehearsal in Broadway studio

As a dancer, studio time for me with Paul Taylor was always in the studios that once existed on Broadway between Prince and Spring Streets in SoHo, NYC. It turned out that my last rehearsals as a performer with the company would be the last ever for the company in those spaces. However, due to a particular scene from the 2000 movie Center Stage, the actual studio was memorialized for audiences beyond the 1997 documentary on Paul Taylor, Dancemaker. What is fascinating to me is how the main Taylor studio was "dressed" to be a more generic dance studio for open classes in NYC. 

Clip from Center Stage of Taylor Studio in SoHo posted on Facebook.

Things in the scene that lived in the Taylor Studio were all of the different chairs that lined the perimeter, and the arm chair with green upholstery was Paul Taylor's chair on which he sat at the front of the room. In addtion, Taylor used to use a reel-to-reel deck for recorded music which is sitting covered next to the column at the back of how the studio was shot. That was our piano in its location by the fire escape, and even our clock is up on the wall. I kind of love that so much of "our" stuff was used in the movie setting.

What we did not have was mirrors! As a general rule, Paul did not want mirrors in his studios, and we always worked facing him sitting with his back to the windowed wall. The neon signs of "Broadway Dance Studio" and the posters were all movie "dressing". The last shot in the above clip was taken from the offices of Scholastic, which occupied the building across the street from our studios.

Creative Domain clip of LES studio

The 2014 documentary on Paul Taylor, Creative Domain, was shot on location in the next studio home of the company in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. And now, we have expanded to having Taylor Studios in midtown Manhattan on W 38th Street as well! 

Paul's company always provided an advanced level modern class each morning that was open for the public to take, and it would typically be taught by current and alumni company members. In my generation, Paul also invited a few of his teachers from Martha Graham to lead the morning classes. However, it was not until we opened the LES studios that daily dance educational programming fully blossomed under Raegan Wood (whose background and pedigree deserves its own blog). Our current offering of studios both in midtown and LES allows us to grow our offerings of classes in many different styles of dance and fitness, in NYC. And our privilege is having the legacy of how Paul Taylor brought together ballet and modern dance in his extensive body of work, carving his own path that continues to influence choreographers and dancers today!

Paul Taylor a contemporary modernist?

Do we learn to see the world in the way that we learned in school, at home, in our community? In our language communication, it is essential to put each word into its context to fully understand its intended meaning. Somehow delineation of meaning has filtered into the larger consciousness of our humanity where societies often ask for everything to be categorized as though life can be only one thing. Yet I feel strongly that it is the freedom to interpret the non-specific that helps us make sense of a world far too complex to be fully understood. Performative dance is a place where both performers and audiences can explore an experience that can transcend words. 

Esplanade rehearsal with Julie Tice, Laura Halzack, Lisa Viola (blur), and me.

A dance in which to share such an experience is a complex experiment built on foundations of craft, curiousity, feedback and editing. Once again, these are just words and your understanding of them may vary, dependent on your knowledge of my language usage. For today I am going to focus on defining "craft" when it comes to creating and executing choreography.

Communication between any two entities requires a certain amount of common knowledge, and in dance, it usually means being open to the familiarity of dancers and viewers with the use of a human body, music, design, and lighting to convey a message. So if dance is viewed as an Art about communication, the technical bravura and physical contortions emphasized in our training as dancers might be likened to grammar and elocution, tools used to serve the mission of sentient interactions! 

Lisa Viola in Taylor's Oh! You Kid

Simplistically, in ballet we mostly look to pedagogical roots in structures of August Bournonville, Aggripina Vaganova, and Enrico Ceccetti. More contemporary approaches of training falls under less named structures which draw and expand upon these iconic roots, and we speak more of the style of such nationalistic institutions as the Royal Ballet (London), the Paris Opera Ballet, the Royal Danish, the Bolshoi, the Cuban and the School of American Ballet. 

John Mark Giragosian & Amber Neumann. Photo: Erin Baiano

In American modern dance annals we often refer to roots in the techniques of Denishawn, Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, Lester Horton, José Limón, and others who developed their own technical approaches to movement. Today, most contemporary dance forms shy away from naming themselves in order to borrow from the wealth of techniques from which the teachers learned. Paul Taylor actively sought out dancers to work with, whose training and backgrounds varied from each other, and from his own, trusting that performing in the range of his works would build and understanding of his technical expectations and craft. And he actively pushed against the development of a singular technique under his name. 

With Hernando Cortez, Tom Patrick, Patrick Corbin and me in Taylor's Musical Offering
Photo: Lois Greenfield

Mastery of technique and craft is honed in usage. Performing masterful dances that call upon technique in service of well crafted communication might then be considered cornerstones of generating new Art by contemporary voices filled with the gravitas of profound roots in cultural and familial soil. It has been common to perceive that a single style or aesthetic perspective marks a choreographer's whole body of work. Yet much like filmmakers and authors and composers and lyricists, choreographers can challenge their audiences to enjoy their output beyond a single genre or style. Over the years, I found that Paul Taylor certainly had an aesthetic perspective on how he created dances, but he also had a broad range of stylistic approaches to movement invention, and an uncanny ability to craft work, that both challenged its performers and engaged its audiences. 

Me with Francie Huber, Andrew Asnes & Lisa Viola in Taylor's Profiles
Photo: Lois Greenfield

The choreographers who shape how we perceive dance in the 21st century cannot help but draw from their experiences of the world in which they live and the techniques in which they were trained existed. I propose that Paul Taylor is one of the earliest contemporary choreographers from the 20th century whose works continue to teach and support a future for dance as an Art of communication. Without a singular technical approach to training dancers for the Taylor repertoire of dances, the performance of his varied output provides lessons in craft that continues to be effective. 

Lisa Viola and me in Taylor's Sunset. Photo: Sean Mahoney

There is huge benefit for dancers and audiences in having access to performing dances by the great choreographers about whom we mostly read, but can rarely see or dance firsthand. The live performances add to the artistic growth of the performers, and introduces the next generation of audiences to the unique conversation that happens with embodied experiences. 

Bowing with dancers of Volksoper Wien, violin soloist, and conductor for
Taylor's Dandelion Wine. Photo: Ashley Taylor.

The invisible processes behind dance performances?

There is many a step from an idea for a piece of choreography to a performance of a dance. And to paraphrase Paul Taylor, one cannot simply wait for inspiration to strike when your livelihood, or the business of a company's life is on a clock. And maybe this need for self-discipline to simply get-on-with-it generates its own kind of creativity. If I believed that the value of each day was to match the exhilaration and excitement of a performance, then I would probably be pretty disappointed with my life. So today I am writing about what it means to me when I am able to lose myself focusing on tasks that are the invisible engineering on which future days, or even just moments, of excitement are hopefully built. 

Setting Paul Taylor's "Promethean Fire" for the Wiener Staatsballett. Photo: Ashley Taylor

It is May 2026, and last year at this time, I was focused on how to join the ranks of free lance dance teachers in New York City! I had access to beautiful new dance studios at the expanded Paul Taylor studios in midtown Manhattan where I have my desk job as licensing director for Paul Taylor's works, one floor above. But I have not spent years building a following and a reputation as a dance teacher in this city that would draw the barest number of students.

I have no illusions that my career teaching and setting dances all over the globe has afforded me some kind of status that might attract NYC dancers looking to enhance their self-directed training, or that word-of-mouth is enough to attract dance students to my classes. This is, after all, one of the largest metropolitan centers in the world of open classes in almost any discipline you might like to try! Hey, I took acrobatic tumbling classes down by Cooper Union on weekday evenings for Adult beginners, for three years when I first moved to NYC in the early nineties. I was in my early thirties. 

Mid-dive-roll (not photoshopped) over Caryn Heilman. Photo: Lois Greenfield

As I have mentioned before, I started this blog to try and promote my classes and the new location of Taylor Dance West for the newly branded Taylor Center for Dance Education. And I was not naive to the fact that building both a readership and a following for my dance classes was going to be a slow process. So, I think of this process as the "doldrums" of creating a future. I still seem to be stuck without much wind in my sails (bad "sales" pun) for the time being. But this has not stopped me from pursuing other projects while finding a new perspective for which to sustain my writing here, and a few people did come and try my classes! And I am fortunate that a free lance teaching career is not really my goal, since I would have long ago become homeless if I was relying on teaching classes for my rent! LOL. I am truly respectful of those teachers here in NYC that can sustain themselves.

There is SO much that needs to (and can) be done to create (and sustain) a dance and its future legacy. Not all aspects of the creation tend to be done in advance, but ensuring the possibility of a legacy for future generations does require taking the time to construct a "scaffold" of documentation and history. There is notation, music scores, visual and audio recordings, production notes, concept sheets, program copy, interviews from all sides of the creation. All of these documents can assist in the contextualization of a dance, how it is applicable beyond its time, how it offers future generations a foundational lesson, or how it can just be an incredibly exhilarating accomplishment for both the dancer and the audience.

Beyond the documentation of dance, are the teachers/coaches/stager/directors who care for the dances and offer them to current and future generations. In most cases, the individual "homework" preparation that precedes bringing movement and choreography to life in a studio, is a huge time-consuming task that mostly goes unnoticed. As a principal manager of Paul Taylor's repertoire of dances, I have made it one of my responsibilities to review and generate as much helpful documentation as possible about the dances under my care. Hopefully this will underpin an audience experience that transcends expectations of repertory works, and sees each performance as the new and detailed event that they are.

In a recent performance at New York City Ballet, my mind wandered to the proportion of performers who were seen and who were invisible in each dance. The program opened with a work for eight dancers accompanied by a solo pianist in the pit, invisible to the audience. The middle act of the program was a couple of duets. The first duet was to a solo piano score with the pianist playing live on stage. The second was to music for oboe, strings and continuo, all of whom played in the orchestra pit and for whom only the solo oboist had a curtain call on stage. Watching a live performance highlighted the contrast between seeing just two dancers while realizing that the music was being played by 15 to 20 musicians. Then the closing act was for a full orchestra with maybe 25 or so musicians, all of whom I could not see as they were out of sight in the pit, and only the conductor took a bow from the stage. While the orchestra and ensembles in the pit did get acknowledged, they are mostly invisible to audiences, and the Art of these performances was designed that way. 

During a visual art class at high school, I remember a discussing the rationale behind how much Pablo Picasso's line drawing of a dove was worth, and how it needed to be measured in the context of his lifetime of experience. Longevity in pursuing and producing Art is often measured in the efficiency and effectiveness of such artists. Great choreographers bring to life works that elicit their ideas with a clarity that allows audiences to see the work for its beauty of  craft, and be impacted by emotion in ways unique to watching dance peformances. 

Pablo Picasso: Woman with Child (1904), Peace Dove (1961)

At times like now, you could call my work days "unstructured". And this is useful, if I can apply myself to focusing on the endless list of tasks that have no end (at least not in my lifetime of attacking them LOL), like documenting the stage blocking for every dancer in a work. I only say that they have no end, because the end keeps shifting as dances evolve with subsequent stagings and revivals. Count scores also evolve over time as dancers of new generations can sometimes count the music differently and still acheive the same end result. Oh... the development and execution of these scores takes months of dedicated work, that no one is supposed to see. By necessity, the joy of this work must be in the doing!

Professional relationships with companies also evolve as artistic directors and producers retire or move from one institution to another. Keeping on top of such transitions and introducing myself every year is also salient to developing or maintaining artistic relationships with dance companies and conservatories who might take an interest in performing a Taylor dance. Ultimately, a loyal audience member of a company far away from NYC, may not realize the amount of communication and time that had to be spent just getting particular dances lined up to appear in a given season. This is not necessarily a bad thing. It is just one more strut in the invisible scaffold that gets a dance on stage!

Lastly, for this post, I want to write about how dance tries to achieve what words cannot, and it is an invisible type of communication, that can produce very tangible reactions in the full scope of human emotions. I have laughed at, cried at, yawned at, been repulsed by, and desperately attracted to live dance performances. And the depth of my reactions to seeing dance on a screen is mostly tied to having seen so much in live performances. There is an apparent contradiction when I am describing a visual Art like dancing as being an invisible form of communicating. Yet it is the kinetic nature of dance that paints an impression on us that is not bound in a single moment or written letter. Even finding appropriate words to describe my thoughts seems inadequate and a disappointingly futile hunt for language.

We have created Artificial Intelligence that can produce written documents with minimal human prompting. But I have yet to encounter an A.I. that performs with all the transcendent imperfections of a trained dancer. Dancers spend their lives chasing "perfection" in whatever form that takes in their minds, yet it is an ability to project our flawed humanity to an audience that brings accolades of "perfection". Balance demands a synchornicity of more than one factor. Rhythm is in making sound visible. Shape is matching our bodies to a form based on our cultural and human aesthetics. These are ways to see dance that can only be fulfilled in practice and in the context of viewing a live performance. And the purpose of mastering these "mechanics" is to communicate thoughts, feelings, emotions, et cetera, making the intangible land with impact.

Teaching based on how you learn!

Teaching has always been a part of my professional life, whether it is in dance or in outdoor recreational sports. Yet, like this week, it comes in "stints" where I am teaching intensely for a few days or weeks, and then I am back at a desk or other pursuit. However, my thoughts never stray far from, "What does it mean to be a teacher?" I was still a teenager when I found myself studying ballet pedagogy, and teacher-training practice classes. I was in England where child-labor laws required that any individual under the age of 17, needed to be enrolled in some kind of educational program, and I had already finished my dancer-training curricula.

Screen capture from a video I made to analyze how I demonstrate exercises.

I like to imagine that my teaching of physical skills adapts to meet my students where they are in their knowledge and in their lives in the moment. As I watch people and dancers learning and executing exercises, I try to engage a sort of corporeal empathy where I imagine how that which I am witnessing might feel if I were moving as they are. Then I approach explanations / adjustments / coaching by remembering that people learn movement in different ways. I will attempt to "model" my critique, "verbally explain" my observation, "physically adjust" (with permission of course) the person in action or shape, and "encourage" them to try the exercise without too much forethought.

During my instructor training to teach physical recreational sports, most of the pedagogical research was based on how ski instruction had evolved. This approach directly affected my approach to teaching dance, especially for beginners and intermediate dancers who are still training to master new skills. For most people, learning physical skills employs the four principle learning styles (visual, auditory, reading/writing, kinesthetic) in slightly different ways. My breakdown works something like this.

Mimicry (visual): being able to accurately imitate a physical action and shape. 

Following verbal commands and/or tactile manipulation (auditory): translating action words and/or physical cues into movement.

Understanding mechanics and/or meaning (reading/writing): mental comprehension of the intent or the physics of an action or shape.

Trial and error (kinesthetic): Making a physical attempt to execute the action or shape.

At Taylor we use video to document dances without costumes or stage light.

This is a clip of me with the company in "Le Grand Puppetier" (title is satirical).

As a stager of Paul Taylor's dances, I always try to be efficient in getting dancers to understand not only the big picture of how their role fits into the choreography, but the complexity of detail in their individual parts. Ultimately, learning the dance is going to be new to most, if not all, of the company. So my responsibility is to provide as many clues and directives as I can, to hopefully suit everyone's different learning styles. And once again, I try to think empathetically about how each dancer might be best supported for how they learn choreography.

I am always astonished at just how much experience lies beneath the seemingly minimalist words and coaching of my most impactful mentors. Experience comes with age, not because you have to be old, but because understanding outcomes is often a reality of having been through more... everything. Nothing sticks with us more than personal experience! 

Parisa Khobdeh being coached by Paul Taylor.

Teaching movement is all about reading and responding to how the students in front of me present themselves in the moment. And the easiest way to move forward in dance, is to be wholly commited to your actions in the moment! 

I am always nervous (maybe even terrified) before the start of a class or rehearsal session. Will I remember what I am there to do? Will I forget some critical point of what I have prepared? Will the dancers be able to do what I ask? Will I be able to maintain the dancers' interests for the duration of the time? Will I have reasonable answers for their questions?... and so on. Experience has given me confidence that once class or rehearsal has begun, the outside world and my self-doubt will quickly be replaced by the immediacy of teaching. And the outcome is invariably a sense of accomplishment, that hopefully has been to the benefit of the students.

Living in New York City, it is easy to forget exactly how much access to great teachers and classes of all interests there is. I was an adult that came to NYC to dance with the Taylor Company, when I realized that learning acrobatics would greatly help my position. Here I was able to find open adult classes to learn tumbling from experienced elite coaches. One of my classmates was easily in his fifties, and had only started learning to do handstands a few years earlier. So it is a privilege to be teaching when there are so many other choices to be had. And it really is a dancer's choice as to where and from whom they take class. 

from studio shoot with Lois Greenfield.

The Taylor Center for Dance Education (TCDE) faces stiff competition in this city where there are so many other options. Yet they are the only place to have open classes in Taylor-based modern as well as offering ballet at all levels, other contemporary forms, and all kinds of dance and fitness modalities, including access to 3-D imaging (Kinotek) of your physical movements to help plan your training regimen. 

Amy Marshall working with Caleb Mansor with 3-D capture technology.

This blog was really started in hopes that it might help get the message out that the Taylor Company is now in midtown Manhattan, NYC, and TCDE is pushing hard to be accessible to recreationalists and professionals alike. For my part, I love being able to fill in to teach ballet or modern classes, and still there is so much more room in all of our classes for dancers or athletes to join in. Taylor Center for Dance Education

Until soon...

Metaphors, Moments, and how Dance reflects Life.

Sometimes I write the titles of posts first, as in this case, and I opted to capitalize only the nouns as one might in German. I find it interesting that these nouns are not solid matter, but constructs of thought and energy that take place in time! 

2001 - with Maureen Mansfield costumed for Taylor's "Black Tuesday"
Photo: Lois Greenfield

I had once been told that as a dancer, "you are a metaphor". The statement caught me off-guard, but it sort of made sense to me. I have since made use of that concept in my teaching and coaching when appropriate. 

2001 - stage setting for Taylor's "Black Tuesday"!

I love that dance is able to transcend words and yet audiences can often ascribe literal meaning to what they saw. We watch people and the world around us move through life, and we draw meaning and associations to our emotions sometimes calculatedly, but mostly unconsciously. For example, you might have a favorite city or place in the world because it is where you fell in love. If a dance somehow draws your thoughts to that city, or to how you felt in that city, you might have a very specific judgment of the work, unlike the person sitting next to you. The converse might also be true where you had an horrific experience in your life and a dance triggers an unpleasant reaction. 

2017 - Michael Apuzzo & Michael Novak in Taylor's "Black Tuesday"
Photo: Paul B. Goode

In both of the above examples, the value of a dance for an audience is that it remains as a work of Art that can spark visceral associations to moments in their lives, whether good or bad. Then the audience can choose to take those feelings away with them, or leave them in the theater. 

Performing dancers can never be a mirror to every audience member, but they do embody many of the things people observe on a daily basis. Great choreography frees dancers to seem as fluid or as hard as elements in nature, to reflect emotions in their postures and interactions with others, and to allow audiences a metaphoric window to their own life experiences retrospectively or aspirationally.

My perspectives on dance are certainly borne out of my own experience and the times in which I live. As such, I appreciate just how much I and my audiences learned from a broad range of the dance repertoire that I had the privilege to perform. Inside of this education is recognizing how brilliantly various choreographic devices are used repeatedly by choreographers. At the root of choreographers making their dancers recognizable for their humanity is their use of gesture within the movement vocabulary of a dance.

Borne out of critical analysis started by François Delsarte into movement expression, "gesture" in dance can be roughly categorized into (my descriptions) emblematic / culturally iconic, illustrative / mimetic, and directive / active.

Paul Taylor's "From Sea to Shining Sea" (1965)

Emblematic / culturally iconic gestures create identifiable images that intend to be recognizable. As an example, Michelangelo's Madonna della Pietá has become a classic image of a woman cradling an adult male on her lap, an image that is often associated with grief, loss, and quiet strength. This visual paradigm shifts when placed in context, but there is still an understanding of vitality in upright stillness and death in a prone body.

Alexei Ratmansky's "Solitude" (2024) for New York City Ballet. Photo: Erin Baiano

2022 - news photo that inspired "Solitude". Photo: AP
"Heart-wrenching image of the teen's father kneeling beside his dead son as he wept and clutched his lifeless hand has emerged, highlighting the stark reality of the brutal consequences Ukrainian citizens face at the hands of the warmongering Russian president.

Illustrative / mimetic gestures are used to amplify words and emotional intent through movement. Without speaking, dancers' actions can evoke a sense of joy, or share in concern for each other, and so much more. 

1997 me & Lisa Viola - Taylor's "Eventide"
Studio shot by Howard Schatz

1997 Francie Huber & Patrick Corbin - Taylor's "Eventide"
Performance shot by Johan Elbers

Directive / active gestures are when movement is intended to communicate an action-reaction type of dialogue without words. This can also hold true for solos and group choreography that seems conversational or narrative by design. 

2005 - Robert Kleinendorst, Patrick Corbin, Michael Trusnovec, and me.

"Offenbach Overtures". Clip from "Acts of Ardor" broadcast.

Tapestry. Life. Dance.

 

Paul Taylor's "Eventide" (Laura Halzack, James Samson, Michelle Fleet, and me)
- 2008 rehearsal -

I recently read a Substack blog post titled "What Uncle Barry Taught Me About Naming". The author muses about her memories and experiences with Barry Moncrieffe, a long time icon of Jamaican dance and culture, who passed away in 2020.  I too knew "Uncle Barry", a moniker of affection often used in reference to Mr. Moncrieffe by many who were not family. 

Barry Moncrieffe (1970s in performance). Photo: Maria LaYacona
- copied from Facebook -

As I read the article, I remembered the multitudes of people who influenced my development as a dancer and as an artist and as a person, most of whom never knew the extent of their impact on me. I was honored to know and be recognised by Uncle Barry throughout my life whenever I was home in Jamaica, and about fifteen years ago I did tell him how much his performances and teaching meant to me when I was a youngster growing up.

Woven tapestry inspired by Gustav Klimt painting
- copied from online post -

However, my momentary thoughts are imagining myself (and anyone) as a tapestry that is woven from distinctive threads that represent individual people (whom we may or may not have ever met), and who add color and dimension to my unique place in the world. A tapestry weaves myriad threads to form a piece of art in which it can be impossible to trace the role a single strand might play, and still each thread holds it together and makes it unique. If each thread were a person in our life... then where we intersect is how we become more than just a single thread. And still each "thread" has its own beginning and end, its own "lifespan".The joy and privilege of human intelligence is that our imagination is not bound by the physical world, or even our mortal existence. Art is one way in which this fabric of lives illustrates the complexity of navigating life itself. Dance, as an Art, has the capacity to transcend words, and when distilled into a singular performance it is a tapestry of tapestries. Choreographers, designers, composers, artists, performers (onstage and off) all bring their own life experience to the moment witnessed.

Paul Taylor's "Speaking in Tongues"
- screen capture - Great Performances video.

The longer we live, it is impossible to not face our mortality, and hopefully recognize how our experience is colored by a multitude of other lives. Looking back at my posts in this blog, I have mentioned only a few of the dancers and artists who have been a part of what made me the dancer I was, and the teacher and coach that I am. Mostly I was writing to aknowledge their ongoing influences on me, whether they have died recently or long past.

Arturo "Artie" Fernandez

This week Arturo Fernandez lost his battle with cancer and I am only one of so many who have been acknowledging the indelible color he added to our tapestries! When I first moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, I would follow "Artie" through Oakland Ballet Company and end up dancing alongside him for ODC/San Francisco. There is something deeply poignant to look at photographs and videos of our generation dancing together, and to not know who will be the last to see the end of our threads. 

1991 (clip from "Loose The Thread" with ODC)

Artie (cream suit), Ney Fonseca, Frank Everett, and me.

A recent view of Golden Gate Bridge from the Presidio!