12 or 24 different dances... preparation and good habits are key!

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. 

Grid of Taylor dances in 2025 Lincoln Center season of PTDC, November 4-23.

Today, Taylor's dances still make up the majority of dances being performed by the company with exciting world premieres by resident and guest choreographers. 

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

Articulation... is a good thing, especially in dance.

So... the Fall (autumn) season of dance in NYC has begun, and live audiences have an abundance of choices to make. If you have ever watched a live performance and wondered how it is possible that someone like you might be doing those amazing moves, those performers started training many years earlier. Yet you can start learning those basics in Adult Beginner dance classes, especially here in NYC! 

I love this recently published article about starting to learn ballet as an older person. Ballet at 70 ...

Every dancer eventually learns that there are infinite ways of using their feet, beyond just standing, walking and running. This is particularly true when avoiding trips, falls, sprains, and more serious injuries. Mostly, our feet are our connection to the ground, and paying attention to articulately using them builds good habits for complex choreography. 

1981 or so, a shot of my feet in rehearsals...

Indulge me for a minute when I speak about learning diction as a part of my early education under a British school system. Students started out by learning to enunciate our pronounciation of words (no matter our accent, I have a decidedly West Indian island lilt to my speech) and how words could be broken down into syllables. Ironically, I still have trouble determining how many syllables are attributed to different words, because of how my native accent might pronounce certain words. Take away from my digression, that I perceive physical articulation as akin to vocal enunciation.

Ballet is a great way to learn how to use our feet and build not only strength, but also understanding how they help us to balance and move. 

2025 candid shot of me rocking as I speak. Courtesy of my cousin, JoAnne.

As a dance teacher, I am often looking at how dancers use their feet in ads and now all over social media. 

Tiler Peck once guested with Paul Taylor Dance Company, and she is featured this season at our former home theater, City Center, while PTDC now shares her home theater at Lincoln Center! This is one of her Instagram promo reels.

Professional performers are expected to be the best of the best, and I am going to be blatantly biased as I include the preview for Paul Taylor Dance Company in their upcoming NYC season at Lincoln Center. I only ever performed with the company at City Center, but our new studios where I am teaching now lives easily within reach of both theaters. 

PTDC promo reel on Instagram.

The Taylor Center for Dance Education is filling with a huge range of dance and fitness offerings with exceptional teachers! Please come check us out on the

9th Floor, 307 W 38th Street, NYC, NY 10018, and you can sign up through 

our website Taylor Center for Dance Education

Dancing as we age... is not a new idea.

It is reassuring to see how many articles and perspectives I have had the pleasure to read about ageing and dance, over the past forty years! Most recently is this one, How dancers navigate changes that come with Age published in Dance Magazine. 

My perspective evolved as I aged, dealt with injuries, dealt with emotional maturity, dealt with identity, dealt with professional life versus personal choice... and so on. At the root of the questions for me was the evergreen "why?" Why was I pursuing dance, rather than some other activity, or profession, or means of expression, and more... 

Me aged 46 in Paul Taylor's De Sueños Que Se Repiten.

So here is how my perspective changed over the course of some sixty years.

As a child I learned that I could grow up to be a dentist, policeman, fireman, architect, and so many more, but not dancer! Dancing was something people did socially, and athletics were not professions even though I grew up watching Olympic track and field stars from Jamaica. Fortunately, I grew up thinking that age only had to do with being at the top of your game, not to do with participating in dance or sports. 

Yup! This is me...

As a teenager with the opportunity to start a ballet career, I thought that by 29 I would need to have a new profession lined up. Then overwork and injuries taught me to critically assess how I used my body as a dancer and a recreational athlete. This period also found me reflecting on defining myself as a person first and my occupation (dancer) afterwards.

Coppelia with Lizanne McAdams...

In my twenties, my world of movement had expanded to dancing and sporting with both able-bodied and physically challenged friends. Injuries, degenerative diseases, age, all demand and deserve our considered attention; our physical abilities are to be enjoyed in the moment, and less in the memories of what we once did.

With Matthew Soyster in performance...

My thirties deepened my focus on dancing and outdoor sports as befit my condition. Injuries and setbacks were managed with the knowledge that I had recovered with new found knowledge about myself before, and re-training was part of ageing and staying physically active.

Kayaking is like being partnered by water with a boat for legs...

I retired from performing as a dancer in my late forties, and acknowledged all the benefits I had gained from spending my life, to that point, focused on both how my body moved, as well as how to help others assess their physical abilities from the most basic actions to the most elite demands. For myself, minor injuries from once normal activities became more commonplace, and recovery took days or weeks longer than in the past.

During my fifties, I tried to balance movement instruction by modeling details and physical skills with actively addressing how rapidly my body changed without the demands of daily workouts, rehearsals and performances. It actually felt good to have the greater proportion of my weeks spent in more sedentary pursuits, and a less structured regimen of physical activity. I was also happy to no longer be pursuing a singular career, but exploring how to use my lifelong experience with movement and independence as building blocks for new projects and life choices about work.

2018 in India fulfilling a Fulbright Senior Teaching fellowship...

Now in my sixties, I am happy knowing that being physically active is both a choice and a privilege. I have learned to be efficient, and to notice changes in my physiology both dramatic and gradual. Adjunct to this self-awareness is how it heightens an empathetic approach to teaching and coaching dance, or other physical activities at all levels and stages in life. I may not be the perfect teacher for everyone, but I am confident that I am a good teacher for a large proportion of people who might want to join in one of my classes. 

2024 - teaching modern class. Photo: John Lyons

Testing good ideas... takes time!

 Okay. It's been a minute since I've been able to clear time to write a post here. I blame myself for having interesting ideas and then realizing that making them happen takes up time I don't always have available. In my last post, I mentioned the idea of filming myself teaching class exercises for my Adult Beginner Ballet students, so they could review what we had done in class during the week. I have to admit that attending one class a week on a new endeavor can seem like too little time to learn and retain information! And I appreciate that there is interest in adding a second class each week, but that is for another discussion. 

cropped screenshot of video set to film me demonstrating barre.

I do like the idea of begining adult dancers being able to review and practice what we do in class. This is not unlike professional dancers today being able to review video footage of their rehearsals each day, especially when they are learning or developing new choreography. 

However, my own sense of efficiency meant planning out the least intrusive method of filming class, and respecting that my students would not necessarily want to see themselves taking class. After class, I edited the footage into 8 short clips, to provide the clearest explanations and include the music played by our accompanist, should dancers wish to practice on their own. Yet even as I was editing this first attempt at recording class, I kept thinking of better ways to edit certain things (zooming in and cropping the frame, including some of the explanations beyond just giving the exercises, whether or not to have a video/still image available while the music plays, etc.) So in the interest of timeliness, I allowed myself to try and improve the next exercise, and left the earlier ones as I had done.

There is so much good (and more carefully planned) instructional video available online, that I would not dare to presume a general viewership for this little endeavor. But I will check with the dancers in class, if they took a look, AND if they have suggestions, OR if this was helpful in any way. For the time being, I am only sharing access to watch the videos if you have taken the class. As I mentioned before, the progression of each class is often dictated by the dancers in the class, and I don't want to be building a prescribed syllabus that may not work for the particular types of learners, and experience of the dancers in class. 

However, since I cannot provide more than one class a week for the Adult Beginner Ballet dancers (a few are able to take classes with other teachers, but others only take mine), I would like for them to have the chance to reinforce their learning. Even just mentally reviewing material on a daily basis has been proven to improve assimilation of new movement skills.

Recently, I have been playing with a language app on my phone to see how much German I remember, and it sends me an email reminder each day to do a short lesson. Mostly I can do a short lesson in about 5 minutes, so it is obviously not a serious commitment on my part. But German is a language that I used to spend about an hour a day following a language program, when I had no knowledge at all. 

I appreciate all that technology and communications infrastructures affords most of us these days, in terms of access to learning different skills. However, as a teacher from an earlier generation, I am trying to embrace how I might incorporate and add to the positive experience of the dancers who come to my classes. I am a self-taught cameraman/video-editor/online-content-generator, and I make lots of blunders! This self-taught thing though, means that I spend a lot of time just trying to figure out how to do things, as well as evaluating if what I am doing is effectively in line with my goals.

The Taylor Center for Dance Education has built a large and varied program of movement learning, from 3-D assisted body-mechanics analyses to yoga to ballet to modern to many other approaches. If you have not already danced in our new spaces at,

307 W 38th Street, 9th floor, in NYC, I hope you will come by and see what we are offering.

Until soon...

Dancer driven teaching...

 When I began taking dance classes as a child, my ballet classes were very much focused on learning the set sequences required by the syllabus. In turn these sequences would be performed infront of an external "examiner" for assessment of our execution and understanding. Well... maybe not so much understanding when the young dancers are pre-teenagers. This model still exists, but I think for adult dancers at a similar stage of learning dance (i.e. children's beginner ballet) there are so many more resources for how I approach teaching classes. 

Leading a class at Peridance in 2018 or 2019.

I recently asked my adult beginner ballet students if they thought it would be helpful to have some kind of documentation to review between their single weekly class. The consensus was that they would like to have an online video where they might be able to follow along and practice movements and sequences on their own at home. Initially, I thought this was a pretty good idea, and maybe I could make the time to film myself demonstating a series of exercises.

Then reality set in. Time is not something I find to be readily available in my week. Just keeping up with the content writing for this blog has become a challenge to carve out, and I am trying to post just once a week at this point. Another reality was that as I watch the enthusiasm of the adult dancers in class, I cater and adjust my exercises to suit the needs of the dancers on the day of the class. And I enjoy being able to create exercises to suit where the dancers' actions tell me what each progressive drill or sequence should be. 

Film instruction for dance was not a part of my awareness as a child. In truth, I imagine that it was on account of celebrities like Jane Fonda and Olivia Newton John making home exercise videos which came out in the early 80's, that "how to dance" learning by video became a thing. Then the Covid-19 pandemic hit the world, and suddenly we were teaching by video feed in real time. Most everyone has a smart phone with camera capabilities, and also the ability to play back or stream online content.  Yet the learning that can take place when both instructor and dancers are in the same space, is many times more effective than virtual learning. And yet I still find benefit in how well learning to dance can be enriched through virtual vido learning. But maybe there is also a place to include video learning, or at least video practice.

In the next few weeks I hope to experiment with video-taping myself demonstrating exercises during our sessions, which I will then make available to the sudents in class. At the very least, dancers would be able to practice on their own while accessing a record and guide of what they had done in class at any point in the week. This might also help in choosing the best progression of class goals based on how the dancers are developing and retaining material each week.

I do love watching online dance instruction videos, but they always strike me as requiring that the dancer observing, needs considerable knowledge about their own abilities, to truly benefit and progress.

How we learned isn't always how we teach...

 From my perspective, learning to dance is a very individual thing, and not all teachers are good matches for different learners. Last night at dinner, a friend asked me, "Why don't dancers flock to try the newest teacher or class they come across?" In her world of visual arts, painters and sculptors always seemed interested in seeing and trying the latest thing!

I imagine that both dancers and visual artists learn their craft by doing and practice . However, unlike painters and sculptors, dancers must learn to em-body their artistic expression. And most beginner dancers need to take at least 3 to 4 classes with a teacher to know if that teacher's methodology works for them, and what they hope to achieve. Each class is both a time and monetary investment, and there are so many factors that play into where and with whom to experiment, when exploring new studios and teachers.

Adjunct to the evolution of "sports medicine", learning physical movement has been observed to take place in four primary modalities: mimicry, mental visualization, physical manipulation, and experimentation. This is not to say that any of us learn exclusively one way, but we might lean in a certain direction, and use a combination of different modalities to make sense of how we learn to both control and "listen" to our bodies. 

Teaching a creative movement workshop in 2002
City Center, Young People's Dance Series. Photo: Martha Holmes

I was still a teenager when I found myself taking classes in dance education and teacher training for ballet curricula. Ironically, I was taking courses in dance pedagogy because I was still a minor living in the UK, and the reactive laws against "child labor" meant that as an immigrant, I needed to remain enrolled in educational courses, even though I had completed my advanced pre-professional training as a dancer. 

A decade later, I would be training to teach and guide recreational kayaking to weekend warriors who likely had no experience with outdoor sports, much less on the moving surface of water. In both the cases of dance and of kayaking, I was personally quite accomplished. However, teaching was about helping dancers and clients realize their greatest potential, which meant honing my skills of observation and listening. For me there has never been a single solution to teaching a physical skill. And knowing in my own body what a movement skill feels like is only a measure for empathy with individuals struggling to grasp the concepts of "Tendu. Fondu. Pirouette." or "Catch. Power. Recover."

Practising whitewater drills in Colorado 2005.

Admittedly, I was a pretty quick learner when it came to physical skills both with respect to my own body and in interacting with the physical elements of the outdoors. And the methods that were used to teach me all the skills on which I have built careers in dance and kayaking, are only starting points from which I have developed my approach and methods for teaching movement disciplines.

I am pretty quick to identify challenges that a class or an individual might be struggling with, and one solution will typically not work for everyone. Time and age have given me confidence to not rely on just what I was taught, but to use everything I have learned to find new solutions as needed, whether I am teaching the most enthusiastic beginner or the most self-assured professional.

Over the next few months, professional dance projects are pre-empting my teaching open Taylor Technique classes on the weekends, however, I am maintaining my Adult Beginner Ballet classes on Tuesday evenings at Taylor Dance West, 307 W 38th Street, 9th floor, NYC.

If this location is convenient for you, you will also notice that we are now the Taylor Center for Dance Education, sometimes shortened to Taylor Dance Center.

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!