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...