Catching your attention means...

 There is an inherent contradiction in learning to dance. On the one hand, learning to dance means focusing our attention inwards to feel and activate muscles and joints we had no idea were parts of our bodies we could control. On the other hand, projecting our focus outwards will often allow our bodies to find their natural coordination and bring things into balance. Obviously this is an oversimplification, but my assessment is that learning to dance is equal parts learning to control the motor skills of how our bodies move, and learning to engage our bodies to project an idea through shape and movement.

We would likely find ourselves unable to move anything at all if we had to mindfully control all of the muscles in our bodies individually. For most of us our nervous systems have been trained from a young age to bring our bodies into balance while standing upright as we become aware of activating a group of muscles to form a shape or turn, take off from the ground, land on the ground, transfer our weight, hold a pose, et cetera. 

Studio shoot of "...Byzantium". Photo: Tom Caravaglia

Proprioception is a word that has been introduced into the common vernacular of dancers and athletes, especially as they recover from various injuries through rehabilitative exercises. As a word, proprioception, describes the sense that informs our brains how to move our bodies without needing to see or focus directly on a part of our body to know where it is in space. Intellectually, we don't need to see our feet on a floor to know that they are attached to our legs, and we can feel the surface of the ground beneath them to know that they are bearing our weight. And we can usually take a step in any direction without looking at the actions of our feet. This is proprioception.

Learning to dance is about training to be mindful and articulate with our joints and muscles, and allowing our proprioception to take over as our teachers and coaches let us know that our bodies are doing what we think it should be doing. If an action we do causes us to unintentionally fall to the floor, we might be able to self-correct by focusing on our "sense of balance" to tell us what part(s) of our bodies is off kilter. However, a practiced outside eye is often the faster (and less frustrating) path to learning and successfully executing new dance skills.

When I first learn a new skill, everything seems to be going too fast. This is because I am having to focus on many different details that will eventually become an action/thought about which I will no longer have to be concerned, as it becomes a good habit, or just automatic. As a result, it is easier to do things more slowly at first, but if it is too slow then the coordination of a movement may lose its sense of rhythm, which is a part of what helps us turn complex actions into dance steps that we draw upon to make more advanced phrases of movement.

I mentioned in my last post that change and learning starts with the idea of taking the first step. Hopefully you find supportive teachers, guides, coaches to introduce you to the environments into which you pursue adventures in life. We all differ in what this means to us, and this is where I have discovered that if your first attempt at something is not going how you might have hoped, then don't be afraid to try and step on a different or parallel path. As a teacher, I often change my approach to classes and dancers when I don't feel like my intended plan was turning out the way I hoped, or I see a more immediate goal to address.

Here's a short clip from a solo moment Paul Taylor created on me back in 2004. I am guessing it only took him a few minutes to ask for the steps, and I remember it taking me quite a bit of practice to not only stay in the center of the stage, but getting it up to speed with the music. 

Klezmerbluegrass rehearsal clip from 2004.

The biggest changes start with a thought!

 Recognizing the thought that started us on a new path in life, or shifting how we see ourselves, can often be different each time we go looking for it. I don't think this is a bad thing, and it is the process of looking at how we got to where we are that can help us have faith that our choices today might be for a better unknowable future! How's that for a mouthful of an opening statement?

This year is turning out to be quite the adventure, as many projects seem to have come together after varying gestations of years, if not decades. Just on traveling alone, by the end of this year I will have visited more time zones than I care to acknowledge, and touched on a few Taylor dances that I didn't know very well before. Each of these adventures started with a single idea, and a willingness to see where it might lead.

Before I get too deep into my musings, this is also about the mindset of taking dance classes in either ballet or modern (or both, if you prefer). If learning to dance was the thought that germinated into taking class, the idea also needs time to self-determine what "dance" means to you. So why not try out different classes and different teachers to help the idea gain some perspective on what might be both possible and enjoyable to you. 

Before I write any of these posts, I try to figure out what ideas my day-to-day activities (and teaching) have me invested in for the moment. I am almost always trying to decide if a new approach to a familiar challenge is necessary, or, "am I just making things more difficult for myself for the sake of being different?" So I let my observations of the dancers in class determine if I need to try something different, or pull out the "tried and true".

Believe it or not, this is true of almost any task in my work as a director of licensing for Paul Taylor's dances to be staged and performed by outside companies and schools. The basic components always need to be addressed but how they go together can vary quite drastically, depending on the organizational culture, resources, inclination, and economic agility of the outside organizations. For dancers taking class, my metaphorical parallel is their amiability, their natural gifts, their desire, and their openmindedness to learning the unfamiliar.

Nothing in my childhood ever considered that there was a future in dance for me, much less having multiple careers within the field throughout my life. Yet I did have the thought that it was something I wanted to try doing.

My ballet career in the USA gained traction in 1982 with Oakland Ballet in California. I accepted the offer to join the company from taking company class alongside the dancers while they were on tour in Miami, Florida. I knew nothing about the company or California when I landed in Oakland and was taken to rehearsals the first evening I had ever set foot in the city, much less the state! Three years later, I was a featured dancer with the company, and had done my first premieres of original roles created for me by choreographers.

Jump forward ten years, I would join Paul Taylor Dance Company, for which I had flown into NYC solely to attend an open audition call. I was not confident I had any chance of getting a job with Taylor, but it was also the only company in New York for which I wanted to dance.

In my last post I mentioned the impact of Carlos Carvajal on my dance career at Oakland Ballet, and I have uncovered a short clip from the opening of his ballet SYNERGIES in which I originated the role of the opening dancer. 

1984 with Abra Rudisill, Mario Alonzo, Danny Ray

I also mentioned that I would find myself having opening solos created for me more than once. Here I am with Paul Taylor Dance Company. 

2000 joined at the end by Kristi Egtevdt

When no one imagined a video cam in your pocket!

 When I started my dance career... (in my head it sounds like a good opening line. LOL), almost nothing was available to watch of the repertoire dances I was learning. I was never involved with having work created on/with me until I was five years into my career, and part of our dancer-skill-set was not having a video of the day's rehearsal to review. However, I imagine that dancers today still rely more on what a movement or sequence "feels" like, over actually "seeing" what they did on a video. When I have the opportunity to see an old film/video of my early career, I am always surprised at what I looked like, as opposed to what it "felt" like to dance on stage. And I am not always kind about myself, while I might marvel at the dancers dancing next to me. LOL. 

1984 backstage in costume for the Jester in "Crystal Slipper" choreographed by Carlos Carvajal.

Self-image and daring to imagine being GOOD is essential to learning and progressing at any stage of our life. As children we rely on the support of our parents or guardians, if we are lucky enough to have suchlike adults around. And as young adults we rely on feedback from our peers and mentors to learn sooo many things! Having the privilege of getting older will always be peppered with the loss of those whom we considered mentors. And the older I get, the longer grows the list! 

A couple of posts back, I mentioned the passing of Linda Hodes. Today I will mention the passing of Carlos Carvajal, whom I first met around 1983 while I was dancing for Oakland Ballet, in California. Carlos would be one of the first choreographers with whom I would learn about creating a new dance! More terrifyingly for me, he had the dance start with me, all by myself, on stage as the curtain rose. This would be true more than a few other times in decade to come, but that was my first. In retrospect, Carlos placed a lot of faith in me to open his dance, "Synergies" with a brief solo that set the tone for the whole work. I also recognized that he saw and played to my strengths as a dancer, even when I imagined creating roles to which I was not traditionally suited, as a short muscular, ethnic-looking, man. 

I loved dancing for Carlos, and it was rewarding in very different ways, to dance in his full length "Crystal Slipper" (more commonly known as Cinderella in American literature). Each act had different roles that we might dance all within a single perfomance, and as a relatively small touring company, I may have had to do a full makeup change from one act to the next, and sometimes between scenes. So there was no time to psyche myself up for different roles. The make up change took up all the time between leaving stage in one role and appearing the next time in a different role. 

I can still remember the feeling and most of the steps for Carlos' dances, though I have rarely seen any video footage of what I actually looked like. I know that a video exists of "Synergies", but it is entirely possible that I was never filmed in a production of "Crystal Slipper", as I might not have been cast when a performance was filmed. 

For the majority of the world, most of the activities we pursue might rarely be filmed as a part of our recreational past times. Yet by the time I was training as a kayak instructor, a video assessment of my paddling skills and rescue techniques was becoming a standard practice. However, the ability to capsize and recover requires each individual to discover their own balance and motor control as they coordinate their bodies, a boat, AND a paddle in order to recover from a capsize, much less navigate one's craft on a moving surface. 

1989 as a kayak guide for Sea Trek in Sausalito, California.

My skills as a dancer definitely transferred to my skills as a kayaker. In turn, my analytic skills as a recreational sports instructor and coach improved my dance-teaching abilities. Exposure to different movement modalities and scenarios is at the heart of dancing! And seeing every student for their natural abilities as well as their inherent potential is one of the most fulfilling aspects of teaching movement. 

With kayaking, surfing, paddle boarding, there are ideals built on models of "efficiency" in using body-weight, hydro-dynamics of equipment, and reflexive reaction to ever shifting conditions of the water surface, air, and forces in the water. But you don't need to be an Olympic sportsman to enjoy and progress in the sport. 

The disciplines of dancing ballet and modern is similarly built on ideals that we observe exceptional professionals executing repeatedly on stages, in videos, and in our memories. Yet I propose that like the paddle sports I mention above, it is also possible to enjoy and progress as dancers, no matter your experience or aptitude. You just need to want to enjoy the experience of learning and practising!

2023 - setting a Paul Taylor dance for the Vienna State Ballet. Photo: Ashley Taylor

Learning can be hard. Practice builds confidence.

 I applaud the courage it takes to walk into a brand new class (of any kind), especially to start learning something completely new! It is not unlike meeting someone for the first time who speaks a different language, and you find yourself sitting next to them for an hour and a half. Hopefully this kind of situation is something that is intriguing rather than terrifying. Or maybe it is a bit of both?

Teaching in Taylor Dance West studios 2025. Photo: Amy Marshall

I think I have said this before, "The older I get, the less I like being a beginner!" At the same time, I do think that trying to learn something new is a very good practice to keep our minds and bodies agile and current with life events. It is astonishing to think that I can now say, "with each passing decade..." and it does seem that time speeds up as I get older.

The reality is probably more like me learning much slower as I age. Once upon a time I really enjoyed learning how to move in different ways, and studying how to speak different languages. I still love the IDEA of doing these things, but I am less patient with myself, and I realize that what might have taken me two weeks, will likely take me six months, and my personal sense of fluency may never live up to my imagined outcomes. However, I love having the opportunity to share some of what I have actually accomplished in life, whether that is the skills of dancing and coordination, or sharing perspectives from the myriad jobs, careers, hats I have worn.

It is easier to offer a different perspective on "outcomes" when I meet new dancers who come to take any class I am teaching. Beginners are often categorized because they do not know what they "do not know". And that is the way of the world. Adult beginners may have an easier time understanding that learning takes time, than children. However, in dance, there are similar strategies for introducing a movement language, and I am reminded of how much professional dancers need to take their hard earned skills for granted. Building good basic habits is the framework on which dancers can concentrate on the new and unfamiliar without needing to always be focused on how to articulate a part of our body, much less coordinate multiple limbs in relation to each other.

To paraphrase the author Lewis Thomas in his introduction to "Lives of a Cell", try to imagine how much of your conscious brain power might be needed to control the functions of the millions of cells that make up your body. Nature has allowed our cells and their collective abilities to hopefully develop and grow in service of letting our consciousness focus on training or muscles to move our bodies as a whole. Furthering that control relies on training our bodies with dance-habits that allow us to work on trickier combinations of movements, and so on...

Above is a short clip of an iconic section from Paul Taylor's "Dust". It lasts for under a minute, but is some of the trickiest movement to learn and dance as one for the seven dancers. This is the 1997 cast that includes myself with Caryn Heilman, Lisa Viola, Heather Berest, Silvia Nevjinsky, Takehiro Ueyama, and Ted Thomas.

Exactly what did you learn from your dance teacher/mentor?

 It is hard to imagine some days, exactly why I am keeping a blog. This particular blog was started in the hopes that I might reach a larger audience, than just my 10 most avid followers, who might have an interest in trying out a new dance teacher. I think I was also trying to expand my reputation in NYC as solely a former Paul Taylor dancer, about which I am incredibly proud. I started teaching ballet classes at the new midtown studios of Paul Taylor on W 38th Street, and it felt like, in the competitive market of NYC ballet teachers, I needed to have some place to explain why anyone might take an interest in trying out my ballet and my modern classes. I firmly believe that I have something to offer in both disciplines and in connecting those disciplines.

Demonstrating without jumping! Photo: Amy Marshall.

Just last week, Dance Teacher, released an article about how I address music in my teaching dance classes. I was honestly surprised that the writer asked to speak with me specifically, and I am very grateful to have been given the platform to speak about how important musicality and live accompaniment for dance class is in my approach to training dancers at any stage of their learning. Why Chen See's students... I apologize that the article is behind a paywall, and I will honor the magazine's request to not share the article in its entirety, at least for a few months. LOL. I may allude to some of my answers in future posts.

Keeping track of what I have written about previously in my blog can be challenging, so I do try to let "current events" drive my content. Sadly, it is the deaths of people who have had much impact on my career and pedagogical approach to dance, that has been fairly current in news from my life. Many of my peers and friends have written lovely notes on social media about how much our friends and mentors have added to our lives. And I thought that I would try to pick just one specific thing that someone who passed away recently continues to live on in my life and career. 

Linda Hodes in Martha Graham's "Phaedra". Photo copied from Graham Company's post.

The above pictured Linda is a much storied former Graham dancer who lived a remarkable life, spanning 94 years. I first met her in 1993 when I had just joined Paul Taylor Dance Company, and she was the director of the newly formed Taylor 2 company. We have maintained contact and friendship through the end of her life, and she taught me to slow down in my interactions with others, and truly hear what they were sharing with me. Whether people use words or demonstrate through their actions as dancers in my class, I have learned to take the time to truly observe and take in what they might be trying to communicate to me.

Linda was never one of my directors. I never learned a dance from her, though I did take a few classes that she taught at the Taylor School in my early years with the company. Still, I learned so much about how to listen and how to interact based on what I was hearing (observing) from how Linda spoke with me, and how she interacted with others.

At this point in my life, the list of people whom I have known far surpasses those with whom I get to spend time with regularly. Yet I know that I am a "sum of all who have touched me". This is particularly true of my sense of self and knowledge in the dance field.

I have mentioned many of my former teachers and mentors in earlier posts, and I am guessing I will both revisit lessons I have learned from them, and others in future posts. I just wanted to take the time here to be specific...  Maybe in the future I will discuss how certain excercises I teach were learned from particular teachers, and have become anchors in how I build classes based on how dancers execute those exercises.

Every teacher is different, because they are a product of their own unique collection of training and experience. And every dance student can learn so much from any teacher. The magic is in the effort to find the right teacher for the right dancer inside each of you!