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!

Dance is a "human" Art!

It is the end of March, and I wanted to write an entry about my perspective on all that I have been doing since the start of this year. March 1, 2025 was my first post on this blog and, as with life, a lot has changed. I am still debating with myself on maintaining this blog, as my original intent was to let readers know about my background and approach to dance pedagogy. As of today, I find myself writing about why dance continues to intrigue me since taking my first dance class as a child. 

2003 - the outdoor stage in Spoleto, Italy!

Yesterday, March 29, 2026 the sad news of Ben Stevenson passing away spread rapidly through social media. I could not help but think of the numerous dancers, directors, teachers, and technicians I have met and worked with over the years who had all crossed paths with Mr. Stevenson with nothing but great things to say about his impact on their lives and their art. I never had the privilege of meeting him, and yet I empathize with the sense of loss expressed by so many who knew and worked with Stevenson. For me, the legacy of individuals lives on in the impact they had on those around them. A dance legacy ripples through the performers who dance the creative output of choreographers, and whose technique and stagecraft embodies the nuturing from their teachers and coaches. 

Ben Stevenson (copied from Texas Ballet Theater online memoriam)

Dance is a discipline and an Art that is passed on through human interaction, both in its learning process, and in its execution. Choreographers shape the use of movement and technique to express emotions, intents, actions, responses, and create moods through how groups and individuals interact. The genius of some choreographers is how they construct dances that can be felt by audiences without verbal explanations, and how dancers become artists through their embodiment of the choreography. 

In Taylor's "Offenbach Overtures" with Tom Patrick, Andrew Asnes, Patrick Corbin
(photo: Lois Greenfield)

I am not meaning to dismiss the role that music, light and design can play into how dance is an art. However, I do believe that audiences return to witness exceptional dance for its ability to communicate on the most visceral level before words, or even sound, or touch. 

circa 1989 with Michael Armstrong (photo: unknown)

In natural environments, as best as I can currently surmise, that which you can spot from afar can be a striking "first impression". Searching for edible fruit or mushrooms in a jungle, Spotting an exotic orchid in the canopy layer of a rainforest, identifying a red-tailed hawk in a city skyline, and catching a glimpse of a moray eel retreating into a coral reef are all instances where what we see attracts our attention before we can hear, smell or touch the surroundings of what might draw our attention. Similarly, those of us with the privilege of sight use it throughout our lives to identify people we find attractive, avoid volatile situations when we see altercations happening, heed our biases for self-protection based on the appearances of strangers, and so much more. 

Dance is an art of body control in service as much for communication as it is for finding the limits of human ability and coordination. Even the most exceptional of us are benefitted by the encouragement and talents of observant teachers, perspicuous coaches able to explain intent and concepts, inspirational choreographers able to impart their ideas in some way. For me, Christopher Gable was amongst the most influential of my teachers and coaches, and Paul Taylor definitely defined so much of how I "see" choreography in the concert dance world. 

1991, Christopher Gable receives Manchester Evening News award
(photo: Linda Rich)

I think most people currently know of Ilia Malinin as one of the most exceptionally talented competitive figure skaters in the world. He did not get there alone. His parents Roman Skornyakov and Tatiana Malinina, along with Rafael Arutyunyan form his coaching team. While we cheer on the performer that is Malinin, I doubt that he will forget that his coaching team are a big part of why he is a cultural idol of today. 

Yuma Kagiyama, Ilia Malinin, Shun Sato - 2026 ISU World Figure Skating Championships

Dance also reflects our humanity and or mortality in reflecting an evergreen theme in books and dialogue in plays, movies and dramatic series. The year I retired from dancing with Paul Taylor, I read a book that had just been published titled, Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart: Thirty True Things You Need to Know Now by Gordon Livingston, M.D. Before you get into the lucid exposition within this book, my memory of the title was to look it up as, "Too Soon Old, Too Late Young". Hah. Irrespective, it highlights the human condition of gaining our life-wisdom almost too late for having the youth and vitality to enjoy the knowledge. In dance we get to embody the wisdom of those who came before us. Many a time, dancers are far more able-bodied than choreographers who dream up what might be possible when they cannot attempt such things themselves, not just in physical terms, but in the effectiveness of dramatic craft. 

James Samson and Paul Taylor (screenshot from "Creative Domain" documentary)

Watching the most recent episode of "The Pitt" on HBO Max, an aged man navigating his loss of independence due to age made the following comment along the lines of (I paraphrase), "Every old person knows what it is to be young, but no young person can know what it is to be old. Thank you for listening." As a dancer well past the performing abilities of my youth, I see the potential in almost every young dancer with whom I work teaching or coaching. And it is not necessarily for those young artists to understand my perspective, but I hope they trust in the wisdom of those who look to see them as they are in the moment. We wish them only the best in their performances and growth as artists. 

I think of dance teachers, choreographers, and coaches as cultural mentors to children, young dancers, and professionals. Some of the most influential of the above have a talent to bring the development of their own gifts to bear on those they have touched throughout their lives. As dancers, we celebrate our beloved mentors with how we move, perform, and give of ourselves to future generations in ways that go beyond words.

Every moment counts...

 It has long been said that "every moment counts" and I take that to mean that "every moment is different". A photograph is a moment in time, a literal split second. If the exposure were to be a whole second, the subject would be blurry. 

2023 studio shot by Fabrice Herrault

I enjoy watching many sports, and during the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milano/Cortina, there were many instances when tenths and one hundredths of a second were deciding factors. I wonder if those athletes actually feel time in atomic increments, or is it more that they know when they have had the least number or miscalculations that may have slowed their "perfect" run. Surely, their training over the years of their lives have constituted more moments than any human brain could be expected to recount and consider in the time of their given race/routine/game. And then we have to consider how our bodies "feel" different from moment to the other, much less one year to the next!

March 1, 2025 was when I wrote and published the first entry on this blog, and I have been considering whether or not to keep writing and publishing content. I don't have a large readership, and I have not been strategically attempting to build one. However, I have discovered that it is an easy place to make note of what I was thinking at the time of building a post. In the early posts I was concerned about getting noticed, and felt compelled to find images of myself, as few of the other people appearing in pictures/videos have been enlisted directly to be included on my musings. For now, I may write fewer posts, but I will continue to share them on Facebook, Instagram and Linkedin, when I do find the time and inclination.

Controversies of scoring systems, in-person attendance versus online viewing, et al aside, artistic figure skating as a discipline did bring my thoughts back to concert dance and my particular role in managing the reconstruction of Paul Taylor's choreography for dance companies, training institutions, and audiences. And for the sake of time, I want to focus on how a single moment (more loosely defined than a fraction of a second) can stand out and "stick" in your mind for most of your life.

The figure skaters I grew up watching on television were John Curry, Torvill and Dean, Robin Cousins, and so many others. However, in 1979, I was living in the UK and got to watch Robin Cousins' free skate in the European  Figure Skating Championships. Cousins actually won the silver medal behind Jan Hoffman (East Germany), but there was a specific element in Cousins' routine that caught my attention, and I have never forgotten how beautiful I thought it was, even witnessing it on a televised broadcast. He starts gliding backwards in a spiral on one edge, then seamlessly switched edges while also switching direction to gliding forward in the spiral. I recall seeing it being filmed from an elevated angle, but this clip is what I found on a quick YouTube search. 

1979 European Championships - Robin Cousins spiral clip.

I have looked for this small element in other skaters' routines, but Cousins is the only skater I have seen use it in such a fashion, and with such a sense of ease. My point is that this movement only lasts for a couple of seconds, yet Cousins' performance of this singular move has remained with me, while I had forgotten practically all other details about watching the competition.

From both on the stage as a dancer, and in the audience watching, I feel fortunate to have experienced a few similar "moments" that transcended time and events. These are the moments that I hope future dancers and audiences will have a chance to be similarly surprised for themselves. I have heard from dancers and audiences how Taylor's dances have provided such moments for them.

I work with, and manage the contracts for, about a dozen alumni dancers of Paul Taylor Dance Company, all of whom are from the generations that worked for Paul Taylor while he was still alive; many are even amongst the original cast on whom Taylor created the dances needing to be taught / coached / mounted onto the stage for organizations mentioned above. Each of us has a unique perspective on the same work, and we can all bring about trancendent moments by the dancers and productions because of our differences. As a "director" I try to provide as much support material and history on the dances in question for myself and other stagers, to provide integrity for the roles, the steps, and the intent of the dance as a whole. Also, we had the privilege of Taylor himself rehearsing us in multiple revivals of dances from his repertoire throughout the decades. How each of us gets to the "end product" is pretty unique to us as individuals, and it is the feedback from the institutions and the performances that helps determine the relevance and necessity of Taylor's dances for today and for the future.

In 2026 there are multiple productions of Taylor's "Company B" being performed by different companies. The productions have been, or will be staged variously by Patrick Corbin, Constance Dinapoli, Amy Kleinendorst and myself, all around the USA. 

Diablo Ballet performed "Company B" in Walnut Creek, California!

Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre performed "Company B" in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania!

Texas Ballet Theater performs "Company B" in both Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas!

Nevada Ballet Theatre performs "Company B" in Las Vegas, Nevada!