I missed out on teaching my Adult Beginner Ballet class yesterday, and I was thrilled that my substitute was Beth Goheen. Beth is a teacher whom I first encountered while I was still a performing dancer, and I loved how her classes were always attentive to the most basic details of dance and movement.
By the time I retired from performing with Paul Taylor Dance Company, our annual New York performance seasons at City Center Theater, could cover as many as 24 different dances spread in a different combination of three or four dances for every show! And in my day, they were all dances choreographed by Taylor himself.
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| Grid of Taylor dances in 2025 Lincoln Center season of PTDC, November 4-23. |
As a ballet and modern dancer working for concert repertory companies, I was unsure of how varied the scope of Taylor's repertoire would be when I joined his company. I was not disappointed with the challenges of Taylor's many different choreographic works, all of which were created to be different from what he had done before. Dancing the range of works created as far back as 1956, through my retirement in 2008, provided a profound breadth of technical and artistic challenges that filled my fifteen years as a dancer for Paul Taylor.
Knowing how much I enjoyed being able to perform such a variety of dances upon demand was cultivated through great habits. I was privileged to have had great training to execute the most basic of physical actions as instinctive habits. These habits are the focus of my classes for the adult dancers who have found their way to join me on Tuesday evenings!
2025 screen capture from video of teaching Adult Beginner Ballet in October.
My previously mentioned experiment of videoing me teaching class has been started, and I have been able to post the videos on a YouTube channel that I share with the students in class. These are not meant as polished public clips, but more as review aids for dancers in class.
A fascinating boon for me was seeing how my exercises progressed through class in ways I had not necessarily anticipated. Back when I was still a teenager, one of my teachers took the time to explain how to build a class based on just one movement sequence (enchainment) broken down into its parts from pliés, to transference of weight, to center drills, to an adagio version, a petit allegro version, and ultimately a grand allegro version. This approach has anchored much of my teaching technique classes both in ballet and modern.
The concept of deconstructing, and building variations on the same movement phrase is also a common chreographic device, used to great effect by Taylor. Prime Numbers was created back in 1996, and two solos were built at the same time as a single sequence. Then my counterpart got to perform it to a slow adagio tune to open the dance, while I performed it much later as a quick allegro. 
1996 - Prime Numbers. Photo: Lois Greenfield
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