Reflection anchors future possibilities...

In 2025, I started this writing this blog. It was originally intended to offer some perspective on how my ballet training aligned with many different forms of dance, and why a reader might be curious to come and take an adult beginner ballet class from me at the newly established Taylor Center for Dance Education in the heart of New York City. However, writing a blog in 2025 feels decidedly different than my previous online writing endeavors. I share news of each new post on social media, and there is little direct feedback on my posts. So the posts have evolved to offer my perspectives on how I see the dance world today, and where I think my place in it might land.

I'm pictured on this poster for the 1997 documentary about Paul Taylor,
with Patrick Corbin, Fancie Huber, and Thomas Patrick. Photo: Howard Schatz.

In 1993, I joined the Paul Taylor Dance Company as a dancer when I already had fifteen years as a professional dancer under my belt. My early dance training was in classical ballet, afro-Caribbean dance forms, and a hybrid Graham-Horton based modern. Prior to dancing for Paul Taylor, I had worked with ballet and contemporary dance companies, as well as independent performance projects, in the USA and internationally. And, in retrospect, I am deeply appreciative of my peripatetic early career. I got to work and meet with some of my generation's greatest choreographers, teachers, and regisseurs. Those individuals, no matter how brief, have left indelible influences on my own careers in dance as a performer, teacher and regisseur. My choreographic work seems hardly worth mentioning, but I have made enough attempts to appreciate the genius of those choreographers whose work I have both admired from the audience and had the privilege of dancing.

Paul Taylor died in 2018 at the age of eighty-eight, and this month in 2025, Hans van Manen died at the age of ninety-three. For me, these were two of the most influential choreographers that came out of the twentieth century, with whom I feel a very profound connection for completely different reasons. I spent fifteen years as a dancer in the studio with Paul Taylor, and I first saw him perform in 1969. I had never met Hans van Manen until 2016 when I was staging a Taylor dance on a program where van Manen was rehearsing his Grosse Fugue for Ballett am Rhein. I had read and seen photos of van Manen's work as a child and first saw his work performed on stage around 1979. Most striking to me was how easily I saw each performer as individual dancers in both choreographer's dances. And in the briefest of conversations I had with van Manen, he related a fond memory of meeting Paul Taylor at the Spoleto Festival in Italy during the early 1960's. When I shared the story with Taylor, he did remember meeting van Manen in Italy. They had a mutual respect for each others work, and believed in seeing the individual dancers in front of them, as they created or rehearsed their work. 

A documentary originally released in 2020 about Hans van Manen is available to stream online.

As I watched the most recent documentary on Hans van Manen, I was struck by how familiar his manner and intent during rehearsals on camera felt to me, from my memories of working with Taylor. In addition, it was such a pleasure to see a number of dancers with whom I had been working with on Taylor dances at Ballett am Rhein and Wiener Staatsballett rehearsing and performing van Manen's work in the film! I continue to be honored to have been filmed dancing Taylor's works for the 1997 documentary on Taylor, and I can only imagine how this current generation of dancers that worked with van Manen might treasure seeing themselves on screen with the master.

Hans van Manen in rehearsal with Doris Becker, Vincent Hoffman, Alexandre Simões, Sonia Dvořák.

Dancers are the legacy of choreographers. And those of us entrusted with bringing the works of choreographers no longer able to be here in person attempt to exemplify the detail, rigor and original intent behind the steps. In "Just Dance The Steps" van Manen is recorded as quoting George Balanchine which goes on to say that in doing the steps a dancer will find the meaning in the choreography. 

In rehearsal for Prime Numbers with Paul Taylor and cellist Alexis Pia Gerlach.

When Taylor would watch us dance, he would challenge himself, and us, to illustrate his intent by who we were as dancers and individuals. Yet he would rarely verbalize his thoughts or motives behind the steps. And in performance, there was often magic in feeling how your individual movement and intent were aligned to music, costumes, lights and scenic design. For me, staging a Taylor dance is about bringing out the best in each dancer and their relationship to the rest of the cast and the work as a whole. How I get there, is not only based on my experience of the work as a performer or understudy, but in as much information as I can gather about changes and adaptations that Taylor made as he revived work during his lifetime. I have been trying to document the evolution of each Taylor dance under my purview as licensing director for Paul Taylor's choreographic body of work, and make it available to the other regisseurs who stage Taylor's dances. Some of these exceptional professionals danced for Taylor long before me, a couple have tenures after my time. There is much to be learned about Paul Taylor from dances created and revived both before and after our respective eras in the company as dancers. 

In most aspects of our lives, we understand the value of learning from what has been established. Within the Arts, we learn the rules of grammar of our languages that have evolved through decades and centuries. Then we apply them to reading and acting and writing to communicate our ideas. Visual artists learn to draw, paint, sculpt and more, and their work is measured against the evidence left behind that helped to determine composition, balance, perspective, and aesthetic points of view. We learn music that is passed down aurally and for most musicians, they will learn to read what often becomes a standard form of notation, dependent on where you might be in the world. Unlike musicians, a relatively small percentage of dancers have ever learned any of the various forms of movement notation that exists, and so the process of learning and maintaining technical and artistic fluency still lies mostly on the human interaction of working and learning from each other in a studio or other such environment. 

What still remains common to speaking, visual and theatrical production arts, singing, and dancing is that they all require practise to become fluent in our delivery beyond just the words, the designs, the notes, the steps. Yet dance remains one of the most reliant on a human interactive tradition, much like environments that rely on oral or musical traditions that do not have physical documents to leave behind for future generations. 

With the lessons learned from masters of their Art such as Taylor, van Manen, and so many more, I feel as though there is a deep responsibility for us to play our parts in their legacy. A legacy upon which today's and the future's generations of artists can learn from what we know to be timeless and ever-meaningful contributions to our human need for expression, understanding, and emotional trancendence.

May all the amazing memories of your life be pillars of serenity in the coming years.