Faculty

I’ve been creating dances since 1979. I’m obsessed with the particular kinds of meaning that dance can provide (sensual, perceptual, phenomenological), and with how we construct “meanings” from the various data we receive, in dance and in life. The work for which I’m probably most known is Not-About-AIDS-Dance, which employs projected text as a layering strategy to complicate the performance moment, and to open doors for the viewer into some of the more abstract potencies in the dancing. Through this work, also, I became aware of how the intensely personal can contribute to the political. My long career in dance includes working as a dancer with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company; as a teacher on the dance faculties of Purchase College, Sarah Lawrence College, and the University of California, Riverside; and as dance curator at The Kitchen, the interdisciplinary performance space in NYC. Together with my ongoing work as a choreographer these experiences all inform my teaching, though which I hope to help students find a broad understanding of what dance might be. I undertook my own university studies relatively later in my career, at a time when I was questioning the validity of my life as a choreographer, open to the possibility of re-directing my energies. Instead, I found a reinvigorated commitment to the value of art, and to an education in the arts. I believe that an education in the arts—indeed, in dance in particular—is an especially fertile ground for the cultivation of critical thinking that is rooted in concrete practice.

MFA, Dance, Sarah Lawrence College

BA, Dance, Empire State College, State University of New York

Professor of Choreography, The Arts