Stance On Dance

By Emmaly Wiederholt; Photographs by Gregory Bartning

Over the past two months, I have posted the interviews of ten dancers over 50 from around the Bay Area who I was fortunate enough to talk to and have photographed in collaboration with Gregory Bartning. From here our goal is to expand the project to include older dancers from Los Angeles, Portland and Seattle, and to eventually turn the interviews into a book.

The point of this project is manifold. It aims to challenge popular perceptions around dance as a youth-oriented pursuit. It aims to educate young people about what it means to pursue an art over a lifetime. It aims to inspire others over 50 to kick off their shoes and take to the dance floor. It aims to remind people that there is grace, beauty and desirability in a body of any age, and that this is true for women as well as men. Lastly, it aims to pay homage to these older dancers who are leading by example.

Your support, readership, and interest in this project are so vital to its success. Please stay tuned in 2014 for more interviews and for ways to support the making of these interviews into a book.

For now though, a quick recap. These are some of our favorite morsels of wisdom and beauty we’ve collected.

Frank Shawl

“I never think about [success]. I just keep doing what I love to do. I never measure it. Ultimately when you do something long enough and well enough, you get acknowledged for it. The certificates on the walls downstairs, they’re just pieces of paper. But they are acknowledgements. If I didn’t get them I’d still be doing what I’m doing. I’m not after those kinds of accolades but they come in time.”

“It’s so great to see talent bloom, to take a little seedling and watch it grow into a gorgeous flower.”

Virginia Matthews

“I always figured at one point I would stop. It would stop being new or the aches and pains of the body would outweigh the benefits, but it hasn’t happened yet. Dance is like a mirror reflecting back to me where I am physically, emotionally, psychically. And I feel so good.”

“I’m not worried about my weight, or my technical proficiency, or my career, or if I’m being recognized. Now I just focus on how I feel.”

Bonnie Lewkowicz

“You often hear about someone going through a traumatic injury that they are still the same person. So the reasons why I danced before my disability were because I loved it. I loved being in my body. I loved expressing myself physically. Music is a big part of what inspires me. None of that has changed.”

“Every person has different limitations. But I knew that no matter how hard I stretched or worked out there would still be things I would never be able to do. And so I think my success as a dancer was not so much measured in physicality as it was in performance, what I could bring to a performance beyond physicality.”

Kim Epifano

“When I was younger there was a bravado element to [my dancing]. I wanted to be seen. As I went along and worked with different collaborators, I pushed myself harder. Now it doesn’t feel about me as much. I’m not trying to show something. And I think that does develop as I get older. Younger dancers are often trying to achieve something.”

“I was from an era that broke the female-male separation in dance. In that way I’ve felt quite relevant in the articulation of athleticism and the female body.”

Enrico Labayen

“I just did a performance last night and it went really well. If I’m going to dance though, it has to be age appropriate. I’m 60, and I’m not going to grand jete or pirouette even though I can. It feels ridiculous. As a mature artist I have a life experience and just being still, standing there with a gesture, is a lot already, even if my back is turned.”

“I didn’t get into this thing to be successful. Success and failure are the same thing to me. I do not rejoice in success. I do not cry in failure. I walk the middle path. It’s all about work. Work gives me dignity. Success is for other people to see.”

Randee Paufve

“I used to be concerned with being a good dancer, and I still am, but what a good dancer is has shifted. Now, more and more, I really make very little distinction between washing the dishes and the movement I do in rehearsal. It’s all of a piece.”

“I don’t ask the big questions anymore, oddly. And it’s not like I’m bogged down in the details, but the closer I draw to my own mortality, the less I feel like I understand about mortality, and the less interested I am in it. Death is part of the continuum. I’ll pass and I’ll figure it out then. Until then I’m going to live. To me that means dancing in whatever form that takes.”

Lizz Roman

“I feel hugely successful as a dancer. But nobody ever needs to know it. Success for me is the look on the dancers’ faces when I’m teaching, the look on the dancers’ faces that I’m working with, and the looks on the faces in the audience.”

“Be honest. Be honest in your training. Be honest in your creativity. Be honest in your mentoring. Be honest in your performances. Be honest.”

Cathleen McCarthy

“Pursuing dance is like being in a monastery; it’s that kind of discipline and focus that one needs to have. It’s about taking care of your body and being discerning about what you put in your brain. It’s about what you read. It’s about who you’re with. It’s about how you treat yourself. It’s about how you are in the world. It’s a really big commitment.”

“Times will come when you feel really discouraged and feel like giving up but just keep going. You’re building something tangible whether you know it or not.”

Nina Haft

“I do think that unless you become super famous and powerful, there’s some time in your 40s where – and I don’t think this is unique to dancers but more so to women in general – in this country you become less valued and more invisible once you reach a certain age. And because so many dance artists are women there’s a way in which a lot of us are seen as: ‘Oh, well, you didn’t make it by the time the buzzer rang so you’re less relevant.’ There’s a premium put on who’s the next it-girl. In that way there’s a focus on youth. It’s an ageism in our culture that hits dance especially hard because dance is so tied to the body.”

“I’ve seen a lot of young people pursue certain kinds of gigs, like, ‘I need to work with that person because that’ll mean that I made it.’ Or they train in a certain way that they get injured and then they feel like they can’t dance any longer. Or they get so fixated on ‘If I can’t dance for this or that company then nothing else is worth it.’ That mentality will torpedo your longevity in dance faster and more completely than any rejection that anybody could ever hand you.”

Anna Halprin

“Every experience I’ve had in my life is a resource in my body.”

“The word ‘success’ doesn’t mean anything to me. Success is not the word I would use. I would use recycle. If something doesn’t work I recycle it.”

“I’ve developed the phrase: as life deepens, art experience expands, and as art experience expands, life deepens.”

By Emmaly Wiederholt; Photographs by Gregory Bartning

Anna’s Mountain Home Studio is on a terrace below her house, accessible by a steep set of wooden stairs. When I arrived I couldn’t find her. Finally I interrupted the class going on in the studio to ask where I might find Anna. The teacher directed me up another flight of wooden stairs to a terrace.

As I reached the top of the steps, I came upon Anna standing in the sunlight. She didn’t look surprised to see me. I explained I had come to interview her, as we had agreed via email. “Okay, we can do that for a while,” she responded. “I might get tired.” She instructed me to sit at a table in the sun, and then went inside to get a snack. She was quirky and quick, and the air was sweet and warm.

~~

How long have you been dancing?

For me that question already says a statement about how dance is being defined. If dance is defined as traditional ballet or modern dance, then I can understand the question because that depends on a certain kind of youthful physical dimension. But if thinking about dance is a way of life, a cultural expression, a part of community or something related to life itself, it’s a foolish idea.

On television they do this program, “So You Think You Can Dance.” The obvious question that comes to mind is: so, you think you can dance? And it’s nonsense. That hasn’t anything to do with dance in terms of its historic value.

Okay. So you’re dancing.

Right. Your initial question immediately places me in a position where I have to redefine dance or excuse myself from continuing to dance.

But what I’m doing keeps changing, not so much because I’m getting older but because I am old, and I have a lot of experience and have accumulated a lot of knowledge.  I’m 93.

How has your dance changed and what are some of the reasons for those changes?

I’ve been able to find ways to communicate a philosophy about dance. I’m able to organize the content of what I do in a way that will help others make sense of what they do and why they’re doing it. For example, I might teach a class and say to my students, “I want you to understand that this class will be organized in three different dimensions. We’re going to start with the science of dance, and then we’re going to look at the philosophy of dance, and then we’re going to look at the art of dance. We’re going to look at the way these three elements combine and integrate them into an approach to dance.”

I can give you another example. Today I was observing the ways people were moving, and I said to myself, “It’s not: now arms are down here, now arms are up here. It’s not going from place to place, it’s how to get there.” And that’s how the mind needs to work in relation to understanding movement.

How do I lift my arms? I’m going to start from my shoulders, then elbows, then wrists, then through the fingers, but since I’m going up to the sky, each time I make a shift I notice what happens. I feel my ribcage coming up with my elbows. I feel the sides of my body. When I reach with my wrists it pulls me up off my feet. When I reach with my fingers my tendency is to curve my lower back but I know better. I pull from the center of my head. Now what has this done to my breath?

It’s a whole different way of looking at organizing movement.

Now I’ll look at the spine and how the vertebrae are connected. The spine starts at the sacrum, and it’s attached to the pelvis, so if I move my sacrum I move my pelvis, and if I move my pelvis there’s going to be rotation. Now if I’m not moving the sacrum but I think I am, I’ll simply rock. And those are two different movements. And because they’re two different movements they have two different feeling states that contain different images.

And what happens when I relate to gravity? I don’t exist in isolation. Movement always exists in relation to something in my environment, whether it’s inertia, gravity, or whatever the elements. If I relate to gravity all I have to do is let go and gravity does the movement. So then you start working with gravity and the image of the earth and being grounded.

(At this point Anna does a demonstration where she grounds herself and then asks me to lift her upward around the waist. I cannot lift her.)

What I’m demonstrating is that when I’m totally integrated and the mind and body work together, I have an entirely different relation to movement. I didn’t know this when I was nineteen. This is what I mean by gathering intelligence around movement. The body is my instrument. That means every little thing I’ve experienced in my entire lifetime is in this body.

For example, when I was five years old and my father would come home from work on the train, I’d run across the street and he’d catch me in his arms. One day a car came as I was crossing the street and hit me and dragged me for about a block.

I don’t know what I did with that experience, beyond being terrified. Now when I was in my fifties a body worker hit a certain muscle in my shoulder and I immediately saw the whole incident. I saw myself running, being hit by the car. I shrieked out loud with terror. It had been buried in my body all those years and had never been released, so I’d developed a frozen shoulder. I had never dealt with the emotional impact from that experience.

Every experience I’ve had in my life is a resource in my body. Movement can’t be taught just on a physical dimension; it needs to be taught as part of a feedback process. The awareness between movement and feeling is an intricate part of a dance experience, unless I want to dance like a robot which is an expression in itself.

What does success mean to you?

The word “success” doesn’t mean anything to me. Success is not the word I would use. I would use recycle. If something doesn’t work I recycle it. But it’s not a matter of success or not. If I were to use that as a measurement, then who measures success? The critics? The audience? Who defines what’s successful?

For example, at one point I was interested in the nude body because we mask it all the time with what we wear and how we think about ourselves. As part of one piece, one of the tasks was to very ceremoniously take off clothes, one piece at a time. I performed it in New York in 1965 and I was issued a warrant for my arrest but I had left the city before it was issued. The critics who were at the performance were called to court to reflect on the piece. It was a scandal. In contrast, when I did the same piece in Sweden, it was aired on national television.

For fifteen years I was blacklisted. Nobody would engage me. But it was a very good thing that it happened that way because I started doing more ritual dance and reevaluating performance. Who I performed for, why I performed, who I performed with, etc. It opened up a whole new avenue.

I’m a cancer survivor, and this new approach to dance led me to using dance as a healing tool. And actually I was able to reverse my tumor. I similarly worked with people with AIDS.

In other words, the scandal in New York released me. I didn’t have to do one particular thing with dance. It was a good thing, and it was a period where I had the most growth in understanding the power of dance to heal, educate, and unify community.

So the word “success” doesn’t mean anything to me. I wouldn’t use that word. I’ve developed the phrase: as life deepens, art experience expands, and as art experience expands, life deepens. I gained a whole new perspective of the power of dance; it’s not just about performing onstage, and it can still be art.  

How have you thought about dance differently over the years?

I think about dance’s application, how it can be useful in people’s lives and contain community aspirations. Like the Planetary Dance. It’s being done now in forty-six different countries and still keeps going.

I did it in Israel with terrorists who had been in Israeli prisons for fifteen years. We did it in Jerusalem with the Arabs, the Palestinians, and the Israelis together. We did it on the green line. An older man was so touched. He was in the center [it consists of a series of concentric circles] and he wept throughout the whole thing.

When we did it at Yerba Buena recently that older man just happened to be there. We hugged and hugged. Apparently he has a son who lives in the Bay Area, so he happened to be there. This time he danced.

There was also a man who was in a wheelchair, and I suggested he be in the center so he wouldn’t get trampled. Toward the end of the dance I looked around and he had gotten up out of his wheelchair and had his eyes closed and was rocking and waving his arm. Soon everybody in the group started doing the movement. Suddenly there was this consensus of spirit, and it had begun with this man in a wheelchair.

In Berkeley a woman participated who had one peg leg. I worried she would get trampled, so I asked her to start the dance. She was happy to, and it started with the sound of her peg leg. “Oompah oompah.” It intensified the spirit of everyone there.

Without the experiences of life, death, having a husband, etc., I don’t think I could have envisioned a dance that had this much humanity or this much humility. There’s nothing extravagant about it. It’s very simple. But I think it reflects the years of being scarred or disappointed, celebrating family, all of that.

Humility. It’s not about me. I just turn the ignition on and let the car go. And that’s something that develops with age, that it’s not me, it’s a process.

~~

Anna Halprin is a pioneer of the postmodern dance movement. In the 1950s she established the San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop to give postmodern dance artists a place to practice their art. One of her most noted works, Planetary Dance, gives a score to the audience, turning the audience into performers. Anna was diagnosed with rectal cancer in 1972 and underwent surgical treatment. When a possible re-occurrence was detected in 1977, she addressed it through dance, which she attributes to arresting her cancer.  She created The Five Stages of Healing, which she then applied to the larger community. Along with her husband, the late landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, she also created the RSVP Cycles, a creative collaborative methodology that can be applied broadly across all disciplines. She currently does research in connection with the Tamalpa Institute in Marin County, California, which she founded with her daughter, Daria Halprin, in 1978.

For more on this project, read the introduction.

By Emmaly Wiederholt; Photographs by Gregory Bartning

Nina had suggested we meet in Mountain View Cemetery, a beautiful spot between Oakland and Piedmont that sweeps over tombstones and crypts to an epic view of the San Francisco Bay from the top of the hill.

Her location choice in many ways felt emblematic of this entire older dancer project; it embraces the life cycle.

~~

How long have you been dancing and what have been some highlights along the journey?

I was one of those little kids who would put on music and dance by myself in the house. I made my first dance piece when I was in second grade. It was a solo to a Jefferson Airplane song – the White Rabbit song – it’s about tripping, but I thought it was just about Alice and Wonderland. So I was a choreographer from a really early age. I remember in third or fourth grade corralling my friends and making dances. I think I was nine when I took my first formal dance class. It was ballet, and I just loved it. I loved the structure, I loved the music, everything. I did ballet until I hit puberty when it became clear to me that ballet didn’t love me back. So I quit. My journey since then has been about finding my voice as a mover, and thank goodness I got involved in modern dance as a teenager.

It wasn’t until I got to college that I realized I wanted to dance but by then I felt I couldn’t do it because I didn’t have the right body. It’s been a long journey for me to claim it.

I spent a big chunk of time doing martial arts, which is what got me back into dance. I got a black belt in kung fu. It was through martial arts that I decided to love my body and feel good moving the way I move. It changed my relationship to movement.

But I’ve been dancing my whole life. Sometimes it’s just that I put on music and dance around to feel better. Other times I’m making dances with other people. It’s the medium where I can feel me and also be connected to other people. So I’ve been dancing for a long time. And I’ve been making dances a really long time – that’s really the part I love the most. I enjoy performing, but I love directing and choreographing most of all.

What does your current dance practice look like?

It’s changed recently because I’ve had some problems with my spine. It’s my first injury that’s a harbinger of aging. It’s not reversible, whereas every other injury I’ve had has been something you could remediate. What I’m learning from this injury are things that feed into my dance practice: pacing, not over-doing it, having consistency, thinking about what matters to me the most. A lot of my movement practice is through improvising, which is how I end up developing material for teaching or rehearsal. I also practice Feldenkrais, which has been useful in learning how to work with an injury. It’s also had a profound impact on me in how to tap into a deeper way of making things that isn’t so premeditated. I ask myself: what are my sensations and how do move from an awareness that’s not judgment? In the earlier part of my career when I was younger I would have been too impatient to do something slow and quiet. It’s not so much that now I’m injured so I can’t bounce around (I certainly do), but I’m curious now about the very subtle ways that habit recreates itself. When I watch people move and am creating a piece in rehearsal I’m seeing this whole other piece of how the mind, body, and spirit intersect in movement.

What reasons propel you to dance and how have they changed?

I don’t think I could have explained why I was dancing when I was really young. I just felt like I needed to do it, and I needed to do it all the time. Some of it was needing to push my physical self and discover what my boundaries were and what I was capable of. I don’t necessarily mean in terms of virtuosity. It was also in terms of endurance or risk-taking, finding out what happens when I’m exhausted. That’s something I got from martial arts training. A lot of it looks explicitly at what happens when you are put in different situations not in your comfort zone or most secure place. What do you draw upon?

What drives me to dance now is that moving helps me to be supremely present. That’s probably always been true but as I live more of life it feels like knitting and integrating what’s happened into a more complex tapestry. That knitting is something that movement really facilitates for me.

Do you perceive you’ve achieved some measure of success? What is your relationship to the idea of being successful?

I’ve struggled with that a lot. I wouldn’t say: oh yes, I’ve been very successful. But I think one of the gifts that’s starting to arise at this phase of my life is that I’m beginning to be able to let go of other people’s ideas or definitions of success. I used to think that success meant people gave you a lot of money to make dances and that you could travel all over the world and people who didn’t know you would be really excited to see your work, like a variation on fame. Success meant that you spent all your time making dances.

I’ve been doing this for a long time and have run a company for almost 15 years and I’ve come to understand that even the most successful people don’t spend all their time making dances. They spend a vast majority of their time doing other things to allow themselves to make dances. So that whole assumption – that if I can get more money and fame I can spend my time making dances – is not the way it always works.

And then it turns out that I love other things in addition to making dances, and these feed my dance-making. Like teaching, or being connected on the grassroots level to the community. I’m hopeful that maybe in this decade I’ll start to have my own definitions of success and not unconsciously be measuring myself against what I see other people doing.

Do you have a sense of your legacy?

I haven’t really thought about it. I’ve been teaching long enough that I have students that I’ve had the pleasure of really watching them launch and chart their own paths. So that’s a little bit of a legacy experience, to watch how someone might take ideas or values and filter them in their own way.

I do feel strongly that what I leave behind are deeply imprinting experiences that were co-created with my dancers – like traveling to the Middle East or performing here in Mountain View Cemetery among others, that didn’t just bond us but plumbed the depths that deep inquiry can reach in dance like no other. I do feel strongly that this is a strength of mine that makes my work potent from the inside out.

Do you perceive a bias toward youth or against older dancers?

I do think that unless you become super famous and powerful, there’s some time in your 40s where – and I don’t think this is unique to dancers but more so to women in general – in this country you become less valued and more invisible once you reach a certain age. And because so many dance artists are women there’s a way in which a lot of us are seen as: “Oh, well, you didn’t make it by the time the buzzer rang so you’re less relevant.” There’s a premium put on who’s the next it-girl. In that way there’s a focus on youth. It’s an ageism in our culture that hits dance especially hard because dance is so tied to the body.

This is something we have to deal with as dancers and choreographers, that age doesn’t have the same market value as youth. I feel like I’ve been very fortunate that I’ve been able to work in my field – a university position – in a way that pays my bills so that I don’t have to worry as much about my market value.

There still is a premium placed on physical virtuosity. Dance can be quickly and readily recognized if it comes in a virtuosic package. “I watched a video on YouTube that was seven seconds long and it was amazing!” We don’t tend to spend even seven minutes watching something very quiet and walk away thinking it was awesome.

Do you think you’ll continue dancing for the foreseeable future?

I’m not waiting to quit.

I seem to make a solo every five years, even though I’m not primarily a solo artist. But the pieces that I’ve made on myself have been pretty transformative and have gotten a fair amount of positive response. I never thought I would make another one though. I thought: “Oh, no, I don’t want to perform.” But they just sneak up on me. I don’t really have a sense of when I should not get out on stage anymore. But I also haven’t foregrounded myself as a performer for a long while.

What advice would you give to either your younger self or a younger generation?

There’s no right way to achieve success and happiness in dance. Doing what stretches you and affirms who you are reveals what you’re capable of to yourself. I’ve seen a lot of young people pursue certain kinds of gigs, like, “I need to work with that person because that’ll mean that I made it.” Or they train in a certain way that they get injured and then they feel like they can’t dance any longer. Or they get so fixated on “If I can’t dance for this or that company then nothing else is worth it.” That mentality will torpedo your longevity in dance faster and more completely than any rejection that anybody could ever hand you. Be open and listen to what feels right. Trust that. If you listen to that you’ll have a long happy pathway in dance. It’s hard though. There’s a lot of tides and winds pulling on us.

~~

Nina Otis Haft is artistic director of Nina Haft & Company, a contemporary dance performance group based in Oakland. Her choreography has been presented locally as part of summerfest/dance, Dancers’ Group Bread and Butter Series, The Bay Area Dance Series, Sundays at Sinai Jewish Culture Series, Festival at the Lake, as well as in New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, Boston, Milwaukee, Los Angeles, Portland and Novosibirsk (Siberia.) Nina’s work has been supported by numerous public and private funding sources, including the Alameda County Art Commission, the Clorox Company Foundation, the CA$H Program of Theatre Bay Area, the Zellerbach Family Fund, and numerous generous individuals. She has been honored as a recipient of the City of Oakland Creative Artist Choreographer’s Fellowship, and has served as Artist in Residence for the California Arts Council and at the Djerassi Resident Artist Program in Woodside, CA. Recently, Nina became a participating member of CHIME, Choreographers in Mentorship Exchange, a program of the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company. In addition to teaching modern dance at Shawl-Anderson Dance Center, Nina is on the faculty at the University of San Francisco and at Cal State University Hayward.

For more on this project, read the introduction.

By Emmaly Wiederholt; Photographs by Gregory Bartning

When Cathleen first began to dance there was no music playing. She danced the short phrase she had prepared for the photo shoot a couple of times, and then asked for music.

I put on some Bach and immediately the difference in her body was tangible. It was as if the light switch had been turned on and suddenly she seemed to glow. 

~~

How long have you been dancing and what have been some highlights along the journey?

I started dancing at age five in a little local studio. A 15-year-old neighbor ran it out of her garage. I come from a family of 11 and my parents put four of us in the Saturday dance class. My other sister Lizzy and I completely fell in love with the whole idea of ballet, tutus, and the beauty of the movement. We stayed with our young teacher for a couple of years and then I went on to a more serious school in San Mateo, where I’m from, called Peninsula Ballet Theater. I trained there until I was 18, doing very strict highly disciplined ballet. It was very restrictive and not a healthy environment. But I loved having that discipline in my life. I went there every day after school and became very devoted to the whole practice.

But as I got older I grew less enamored with the whole idea of ballet and the way it looks at women. At that point there wasn’t a lot of contemporary ballet/dance, or at least I certainly wasn’t exposed to it. I was feeling very claustrophobic but didn’t really know why. I quit dancing for a while. I traveled in Europe – I was an au pair girl in France. Then I went to SUNY Purchase Conservatory of Dance and that really changed my life. I was exposed to so many different kinds of dance. It was a really hard time for me at first because I felt behind technically.  I was ravenous in trying to acquire technique and in educating myself.  I went into New York City every single weekend to see exhibits at museums, dance, and theater performances. Having that kind of continuous exposure was inspiring. The experience of living in NYC also really shaped me as an artist and gave me a much broader world view. I felt that I didn’t have to fit into that little tiny niche of what a ballet dancer was. I didn’t need to feel bad about what my body looked like.

I had some really wonderful teachers who took me under their wing and appreciated how hard I worked. Kevin Wynn was one and Larry Clark was another and they both had professional companies, so after I graduated I was able to dance for them in New York. I danced with them both for a couple years and really loved it, though I hated living in New York. I missed fresh air, the ocean and space, so I moved back to the Bay Area and danced with Cliff Keuter, a former Paul Taylor dancer who had a company in San Jose. I also danced in Joanna Haigood’s Company (Zaccho Dance Theater) and with the Della Davidson Dance Company.

At that time, I decided I’d better get some other skills besides dancing because ultimately I had to support myself. I started choreographing, and not because I wanted to, but because I felt it was a skill I should have. At the time I taught at a small dance studio and used the space to choreograph for three hours a day in order to develop a movement vocabulary. It wasn’t something I loved doing but I felt I had to find out how I was interested in moving and to discover my point of view. Back then (1986) it was much easier to produce dance concerts.  I did it cheaply and I never lost money. My work was co- produced by what is now Dancers’ Group, but back then it was called Footwork. They supported and produced many concerts of my early work. I just kept doing it and got better at it.

I also started teaching at that time. I taught at the YMCA, I started and developed a senior citizen class, and also taught children’s classes through SF Arts Education. I was also an administrator/producer for many years. I ran what is now known as the West Wave Dance Festival. I founded it in 1991 because I saw there were so many choreographers producing their own work to limited audiences.  I wanted choreographers to combine resources, save money, and get larger audiences. I curated evenings of dance, and did that for 15 years for over one hundred choreographers.

Ultimately I think it’s really hard to make it in this profession and make a living. This is why I developed the parallel skills of dancer, choreographer, teacher, and administrator. I didn’t love all of it but I felt I needed to be a well-rounded person.  I badly sprained my ankle in a rehearsal and was sent to St. Francis for their sports and dance medicine clinic to heal and re-hab. As a result, I became very interested in Pilates and dance medicine. I became Pilates certified, Gyrotonic certified, and now I’m doing something called Z-Health, which works with the nervous system in alleviating pain and increasing joint mobility.

All these skills have made me a much more rounded person so if one job falls away, I have something else to fall back on. Right now I support myself as a teacher. I teach one class at USF but teach mostly at San Francisco State. I’ve been there for 16 years. I also have a Pilates/ Gyrotonic/ Z Health business that I run out of my home.

What does your dance practice look like?

I study ballet twice a week because that’s all I can fit in my schedule. I do Pilates and Gyrotonic on my own in my studio. I swim twice a week. I walk my dog. I meditate.

As a teacher I feel it’s important to keep my body in good condition. I’m 54 and very aware of my limitations. That can be hard, knowing what I used to be able to do. But since I’ve had all these years of dance trying to figure it out and get to a much deeper understanding, I feel like I can articulate things much better than I could have years ago.

What is it that drives you to keep dancing and how have those reasons changed?

Part of it is habit. Part of it is the discipline. Part of it’s the joy I get from moving with music. Part of it is continued self-discovery.

Another part is the joy I see my students get in moving and how it changes their lives in such an important way. I love being around that excited energy. The hard part for me is: they have this skill and love to dance but what are they going to do with it? There just aren’t a lot of options. Sometimes I’m amazed and they do really interesting things with it, but others flounder and that’s painful to watch. There isn’t a lot of opportunity. It was much easier 30 year ago. But in any field you have to figure out how to make it work while staying true to yourself. It’s difficult.

Do you feel like you’ve achieved some measure of success? What does success mean to you?

I’m still here. I think that’s success. I’ve certainly had my share of frustration, setbacks and aggravation in this field that I’m in, but I don’t  want to be doing  anything else.  It gives me great joy.

When I was younger I had this idea that I’d dance with a major company or choreograph for major companies. That never happened.  I made it work in my own way and on my own and learned a lot along the way.

Do you have a sense of your legacy?

Legacy. That’s kind of a big word. Well, what I try to do as a teacher is make my students really intelligent dancers. I want them to be inquisitive. I want them to explore. I want them to intellectually understand what they’re doing. I want them to understand how their body moves anatomically so they don’t get injured.   I want them to be exposed to a lot of great art. I want them to know that dance is an incredible discipline and a way of life.

Pursuing dance is like being in a monastery; it’s that kind of discipline and focus that one needs to have. It’s about taking care of your body and being discerning about what you put in your brain. It’s about what you read. It’s about who you’re with. It’s about how you treat yourself. It’s about how you are in the world. It’s a really big commitment.

I try to be an example and live what I believe.

What sort of advice would you give to either a younger generation of dancers or to a younger version of yourself?

I would tell my younger self to drop the self-criticism. I spent way too many years torturing myself. It’s inherent in the dance world to do that, but I spent way too much time feeling really bad about myself.

I would also tell myself and the younger generation that persistence pays off. Times will come when you feel really discouraged and feel like giving up but just keep going. You’re building something tangible whether you know it or not.

I feel it is so important to treat people well. There are a lot of people in this dance world that really don’t treat other people well. They can be dismissive and think they’re better than others, but it’s just so small minded. If you’re kind to people, it truly pays off. I don’t mean saccharine or phony. Just be genuine.

Another thing, it’s really important to see and experience great art as often as you can.

Lastly, you can’t get hung up on what other people think about you.

Do you have any other thoughts you’d like to share?

My husband David and I have two grown children who are both artists. We would often take them to see exhibits and performances when they were growing up and it has of course shaped who they have become.  I think they’ve grown up to be really interesting people. They (Jonah and Madeleine) are my proudest achievement.

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Cathleen McCarthy received her BFA in Dance from Purchase College. She performed with several dance companies in New York City and the SF Bay Area. She has received numerous grants for choreographic projects and has taught master classes at universities throughout the U.S. She is currently on the faculty at the University of San Francisco and San Francisco State University in the School of Music and Dance. She is certified in Pilates, GYROTONIC, and Z Health and has her own private practice. In 2010, she received an “Izzie” (Isadora Duncan Dance Award) for Sustained Achievement.

For more on this project, read the introduction.

By Emmaly Wiederholt; Photographs by Gregory Bartning

Lizz is a force to be reckoned with. She talks a million miles a minute and says exactly what she means. She is honest in a way that is both stunning and intimidating.

When she dances, that same honesty and force make for a riveting visual ride. Her energy seems boundless as she bounces off the floor and walls. Her body can barely contain her, much less the room she’s in.

She doesn’t apologize for any of it – not her bold quick speech nor her hungry dancing. She owns it all.

~~

How long have you been dancing?

Since I was four. I’m 53 now, so it’s been 49 years that I’ve danced.

I quit from 20 to 23 because I was making my living doing nightclub and dinner theater work in Chicago and I felt like I was at the bottom of the creative rung. What we were doing was so bad I would leave rehearsals and go into the hallway and re-choreograph the whole dance. When I was 24 I moved out here to the Bay Area to study psychology. I knew there was a lot of dance out here and I thought to myself, well I’ll do some dance and get my PhD. I worked as a counselor for twelve years. I finished counseling when I was 34; I left because with the drug scene it came to a point where I had to make a decision whether or not I wanted to keep doing that kind of work. I looked at myself and said I wasn’t really helping people. I was going to funerals and giving drug addicts food vouchers. I ended up feeling about my psych career very much like I’d felt about my dance career a decade earlier. I didn’t want to sit around for the nonsense; I wanted to shape my own career. I never did finish my PhD. Nor did I finish my masters in dance.

I started classical ballet at age four. I was in a youth ballet company by the time I was 13. I’m a rebellious person: a teacher came and hit me in the ass with a ruler, and I told my parents, “I can get hit at home and it doesn’t cost you anything.” I said I’m not going to do this and walked away from the company.

When I started dancing again when I was 23 I went in really soft. I was afraid. But as I was working on my PhD I realized I just wanted to dance. So I decided to get my masters in dance. Same thing. I broke my back and had a kid and said, the thing here that seems the least applicable in my life is this dance masters.

I did not dance with any famous companies, though if you asked me if I did I would just tell you I did. My joke is that when people say, “We forget Lizz, who is it you danced for again?” I just throw a name out. Those people seem to need that status thing.

I was always going to be a choreographer. At age four I knew that. I’d go to dance classes and come home and show my parents something completely different from what we did. I’d break furniture, jumping off of mantles. Because I knew this about myself early on I never tried to have that career that other dancers did. And when I danced for people I’d change their work anyways. Whatever they gave me wasn’t quite right, and I would feel that.

The first dances I choreographed were in my mid-20s. I was down at Edgewood which was an orphanage and is now a treatment center for kids. I would rehearse in their gymnasium. My husband now was my coworker then and he remembers me rehearsing there better than I do. I made some dances then, but they were bad. I thought, there must be composition class for dance, so that’s why I went to Mills for my masters in dance. I took a few composition classes and then hightailed it out of there. Dance in college is so in the past. They’re 30 or 40 years behind. I’d take class and do these turns and think, this worked in 1967, but is there a current version? And yet I loved all the young dancers. It was there I got my confidence and got together a young group of dancers that were good. 1993 was the first year I did a piece in San Francisco in my 30s. Right away people understood what I was doing. From there I just continued to make dances. Your career is something you make along the way, not just one dance in a moment. But that one dance is where you stop and ask, what do you know at this point, where do you want to go?

How regularly do you dance?

I only teach one class a week, and after I teach I take a contact improvisation class. I also dance improvisationally with a group of friends. And then I dance a lot on my own now. I live across the street from the beach, and my husband and I will go down there with our iPod speakers and set them up and dance down there. I’m teaching him to dance. I do not want him to hit 60 and still dance like a hillbilly. It’s really fun.

What keeps you dancing?

When you bring kids to art early in their life, they learn to either use it as a way to please their parents, or they use it to survive their childhood. I survived my childhood with dance. It became the way I processed everything that went on with me.

Do you feel like you’ve achieved some measure of success? What does success mean to you?

I feel hugely successful as a dancer. But nobody ever needs to know it. Success for me is the look on the dancers’ faces when I’m teaching, the look on the dancers’ faces that I’m working with, and the looks on the faces in the audience. I was teaching a contact improvisation class yesterday and there were new dancers who had never done contact before, and at a certain point when they were crossing the floor I pointed out to the other dancers the smiles on their faces. When people get it you see a smile, a look of serenity. That’s my success.

What do you perceive your legacy to be?

I think if anything I’ve been able to take the whole span of my career and make sense of how I’ve evolved. I’m a site choreographer. I could not make a dance for stage. I don’t see the proscenium; it doesn’t work for me. And I think that’s put me on a very interesting trajectory. Two years ago I went to the JCC in the South Bay. They gave me 18 kids to audition. Kids were hanging off of pipes, climbing all over each other. And they told me I had to choose six or seven of the kids. I told the parents to stand behind me and that I was going to use all the kids and we overran them and I used all the kids. Some of them I still mentor. These kids only had five rehearsals before we were shut down because people said, “We didn’t know you were going to come here and actually rehearse!” The kids were dancing on steps, they were on railings, it was the best dance in the world. In the fifth and final rehearsal I told those kids, “I’m gonna scare all these people away and we’re gonna get in two runs of this dance.” When the performance rolled around the kids had to do the dance in the rain and all their butts were wet like big huge hearts. They did it twice and in between they were all blow drying each other’s butts to get out there and do it again. Watching that, I felt my legacy. Those kids wanted to get out there in the rain and dance.

How much longer do you think you’ll keep dancing?

I’ll always keep dancing. But if I went to take a ballet class for example, my body would start to do things it doesn’t need to do anymore.

What kind of advice would you give to the next generation of dancers?

Be honest. Be honest in your training. Be honest in your creativity. Be honest in your mentoring. Be honest in your performances. Be honest.

That means there’s got to be conversations. People have to talk to each other in order to be honest in a process.

One of my dancers hurt themselves in a recent performance and I stepped in. I saw a video of the performance and I told her, “I feel like I did a good job for you.” I want that for my dancers as well; at the end point I want to let dancers do a good job being dancers.

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Lizz Roman, Artistic Director of LIZZ ROMAN & DANCERS, has been a dancer and choreographer in San Francisco since 1984. Lizz and her company are known for their trademark expansive works where dancers spring, roll and fly through buildings and off of large scenic elements. Her dances have been seen at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Z Space, ODC Theater and Commons Rooftop, Dance Mission Theater, CellSpace, DanzHaus, Dancers’ Group, Brady St. Theater, and CounterPULSE. Teaching credits include LINES Ballet Center, Shawl Anderson Dance Center, The School of the Arts in SF, Berkeley High and Rhythm and Motion Dance Center. Lizz is also a member of Divisadero Research Company, an improvisational dance group founded by contact improvisation maverick Nita Little. At ODC Dance Commons she is the choreographic mentor for their emerging artists program PILOT and currently teaches modern dance and contact improvisation. Before moving to SF in 1984, Lizz lived in Chicago where she studied theater at the Goodman School of Drama. Lizz is also a certified Pilates instructor and currently is co-owner of PARKSIDE PILATES LLC in SF. Additional information is found at www.lizzromananddancers.com.

For more on this project, read the introduction.

By Emmaly Wiederholt; Photographs by Gregory Bartning

Randee is muscular and athletic, though there is a softness about her as well. She speaks quickly and with a certain intensity, words flooding out of her in a rush.

At the same time, she seems prone to second guessing herself, and this juxtaposition between her rushing intensity and her hesitating reluctancy translates into the way she moves. When she dances it is as if she is shouting and whispering at the same time.

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When did you start dancing and what have been some highlights along your dance journey?

I took my first dance class when I was six, but I danced off and on, not sure I was going to be a dancer, until my late 20s and early 30s when I finally got serious. So in some ways I started really late, post-college. I didn’t major in dance in college; I thought I was going to be an anthropologist. I thought dancing was something I would enjoy but wouldn’t pursue.

I spent my junior year abroad in southern India. The program monitor went to Connecticut College and was a modern dancer, and then there was a guy in the program, a mathematician and musician who had done a lot of contact improvisation, and they taught me a little about modern dance and contact improvisation. I was also studying classical Indian dance – Bharata Natyam, and south Indian folk dance. I didn’t really know much about contemporary dance at that point, as I had trained in jazz, ballet, and tap, and I really started to wonder what else dance could be. Because I was immersed in Indian culture where the dance form I was studying was so ancient, I wanted to know what the dance of my culture and heritage was. I asked myself what my grandmother would have done at the turn of the century. A Caucasian educated woman in New York City in 1910 – what would she have done? I bet it would have been modern dance. So I came back and started taking classes at Cornell with Lonna Wilkinson, who had danced with Margaret Jenkins. I actually ended up doing an MA right out of college because I felt like I needed immersive training, so I went up to Brockport, auditioned and got in, and spent two years getting an MA. It was almost incidental to my desire to train, and getting an MA was the best way I could figure out how to do it, creating connections, finding out what was current, being associated with a program – it made sense. When I graduated I moved out to the Bay Area. It was either New York or San Francisco and I had more friends in San Francisco and the weather was better. I was young, and I had grown up on the East Coast. I wanted an adventure.

What does your dance practice look like?

I teach and I dance. When I’m preparing for a show I give myself a class on pretty much a daily basis, and I rehearse. I do Pilates as well, and I incorporate yoga, Alexander technique, and other modalities that I’ve studied. Every form I’ve ever studied informs my daily practice, and honestly sometimes my daily practice is meditation, downward dog and a walk around the block. It’s all dancing to me.

What inspires you to keep dancing and how have the reasons changed over time?

I used to be concerned with being a good dancer, and I still am, but what a good dancer is has shifted. Now, more and more, I really make very little distinction between washing the dishes and the movement I do in rehearsal. It’s all of a piece. One of the beautiful things about getting older, while some things are harder than they used to be and I have certain limitations, I also feel certain things I didn’t use to have, like an expansion in my body and in my joints. I feel more expansive internally. I think it’s because I am older and feel more integrated. It’s not like some big enlightenment though. I’ve just been around the block a number of times and I know more. I still make horrendous mistakes, as we all do. I still behave badly from time to time. It’s not like you get older and everything is correct. But I’m just bigger in some ways, and that has informed my movement. I don’t ask the big questions anymore, oddly. And it’s not like I’m bogged down in the details, but the closer I draw to my own mortality, the less I feel like I understand about mortality, and the less interested I am in it. Death is part of the continuum. I’ll pass and I’ll figure it out then. Until then I’m going to live. To me that means dancing in whatever form that takes.

What does the idea of success mean to you? Do you feel like you’ve achieved some measure of success?

The depressing answer is that I still get tripped up on ego and wondering why I’m not more successful. But at the same time, I look at the people I’ve taught over the years, the audiences I’ve managed to keep over the years, and the people excited about my work, and even though there’s places I haven’t been and things I haven’t done and things I’ve royally fucked up, on the other hand it all goes toward where I am now. I still get to dance.

I still want all those things that choreographers want – more visibility, more money, more support, more exposure, more residencies, more grants, more letters saying “You won!” – who doesn’t? That doesn’t go away. I don’t know if I’ll ever be so enlightened. But I also think that’s part of the juice. That’s part of desire. That’s part of what keeps me going and moving forward. Movement. Movement is good.

Do you have a sense of your legacy?

I don’t know how to answer that without sounding full of hubris, but I do think I have something to offer and that I have been offering it. It’s solid. I am a modern dancer. I hold the values of modern dance. I struggle with this because in some ways modern dance is really dead and over, and I’ve felt old fashioned and not progressive enough, but I also think my work is deeper than that. It’s not necessarily trendy, and I’m not even sure it’s progressive, but I think what I’m doing is solid and meaningful. This is where I lie.

I heard someone say this really great thing a couple of weeks ago along the lines of: “When I see another artist’s work and they’re doing something different and I think, ‘Why am I not doing that? It’s so interesting and cool. I should do that.’ And then I think to myself, ‘But they’re doing that, so I can do something else.’” I’ve really been holding on to that one.

Do you perceive there’s a bias against older dancers?

Yes and no. I never was the young hot thing, so I wouldn’t know what that felt like anyway. I think there are pockets of the dance and entertainment world that don’t value older dancers as much, but I’m not trying to make it on “So You Think You Can Dance.”

But I do think more and more, dancers are dancing longer and people are paying attention.

Do you perceive yourself dancing for the foreseeable future?

I never dreamt I would be doing this at 52. So the answer is I have no idea where this is going. And I can’t believe I am growing as a dancer still. Right now, this year, I’m growing.

What sort of advice would you give to a younger generation of dancers?

Stop second guessing yourself. Get out of the mirror, and I mean that on many different levels.

Any other thoughts?

I think that dance – and art – is one of the most important things. It’s expression, and expression sometimes gets a bad rap in this post-post-post-postmodern era. But I still feel like expressive art has a really important role, and dance, like none other, is a critical mode of expression. We’re only beginning to know what’s possible in our bodies. From Marina Abramovich to the ballet choreographers, what people are doing with the body is still in its infancy. The technological enhancements, even down to plastic surgery, are terrifying and fascinating. Where are we going with all this? What does it mean to be human? This question is upon us.

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Originally from New York State, choreographer Randee Paufve has been based in the San Francisco Bay Area for more than two decades. Randee graduated from Elmira College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Cross-Cultural Performing Arts. She spent her junior year in India, studying language, dance and music. Randee holds a Master of Arts degree in Dance Choreography and Performance from the State University of New York, Brockport and a Master of Fine Arts degree in Dramatic Arts from the University of California, Davis. Prior to forming Paufve dance, Randee spent 15 years developing a body of solo and smaller works, as well as a loyal and eager following for her work in the San Francisco Bay Area and in Portland, OR. In 2001 she formed Paufve dance, for which she has choreographed numerous works, including three evening length dances and several site-specific adventures, with biennial Bay Area seasons and touring on both coasts. 

For more on this project, read the introduction.