Working exclusively with sounds we dancers could make on our own, I crafted a string of short dances I called Traveling Songs. This piece picked up sounds from the insect world.

And to compliment that playfulness on the program of my 1981 concert, I added an extraordinary, strange, and eerie vocal solo I staged for countertenor Drew Minter.

I wrote about how I met and began working with Drew in the story, “First Collaboration”.

Exploring community ritual dominated the first couple years of constructing Body Voice Theater works. But my deeper passion shifted to structuring images and feelings from the intimate life I shared with Drew. The resulting piece about our relationship, “Intimate Voices: Duet” we created together and eventually performed in several venues in NYC and other cities as part of Gay Arts programs. Our dancing at first was not stellar and our voices were sometimes a bit off key, but the overall effect was breathtaking for gay audiences at the time. From the critics, we received remarkable, glowing reviews hailing our courage and talent in crafting a deeply moving piece out of our personal lives.

Working with Drew this way had a huge impact on my personal and artistic growth. I wrote more extensively about this in “Intimate Voices.”

I went further into Intimate Voices (dances accompanied only with the dancers’ voices under Drew’s musical direction) with a trio, a double duet and a double quartet. Here is a section of that last one:

In 1983, I had my first session in Trager Psychophysical Integration. It blew me away. I felt I had come home to myself, both in my body and in the trajectory of my life. I started dancing differently, informed by Dr Trager’s principles of movement as a way to agelessness. By 1985, I’d immersed myself in an investigation of the intersection of modern dance technique and Trager’s message about the lightness we can experience from letting go of weight. My dance technique classes in NYC incorporated the free swing and fall of the weight of the limbs to power turns, jumps, and movement through space. Here is a clip of me that illustrates that movement vocabulary.

And I used that quality to highlight a light hearted, playful and yet intimate relationship in this duet that I called “Dappled Morning.” It featured Demian Aquavella and Debra Kasmauski dancing to a score I commissioned from composer Frank Russo,

Following right on the heels of that piece, I used a grant from the NY State Council on the Arts to hire dancers, pay for rehearsal studio space, and create a wistful, lyrical quartet to some lovely music by Michael Hedges. Here’s a section of “Sketches for a Summer Afternoon” with the original cast,

If you look closely, I was weaving in a lot of tender gestures and soft embraces that had arisen right out of the close working relationship I had with these three dancers. A year later, I re-staged the piece with better lighting and two new guys in the cast. I liked the look of this quartet, and these two taller, stronger guys made the lifts more impressive, but some of the authentic sweetness was lost.

In 1986, I was exploring pattern and modulated repetition. I wanted to understand how the sea builds its mesmerizing unified messages working only with liquid and waves. And I was also challenging myself to work with a larger group of dancers, some of whom were inexperienced performers and completely new to me when we started the 4 month rehearsal process. The piece that emerged, “Currents,” featured 10 dancers, and a commissioned score.

Later that year, I was invited to create a site specific work for the Wave Hill Dance Festival. Wave Hill Foundation managed the grand home overlooking the Hudson River in the Riverdale section of the Bronx as well as an outdoor art park. Dominating the park was an ‘installation’ consisting of a sunken rectangle of lawn surrounded by a low metal frame. This was situated directly in front of the grand portico looking across to New Jersey’s Palisades. 

I worked with my dancers through the following spring using a musical score by Philip Glass as the rehearsal motivation. Besides the outdoor environment, the portico was too iconic to ignore, so, I incorporated that structure as an important visual backdrop and archetypal reference to classical sculpture. 

We premiered two new pieces that summer on that lawn. The performance date just happened to be one of the hottest of the summer...95 degrees, high humidity and no shelter from the sun. We were drenched in sweat before we even stepped into the performance space. Here is a clip from “Installations”:

By the 1988 season, I acknowledged that the more outwardly focused dances and the intricately crafted and tightly structured choreographic devices were losing their pull on me. My dancing had also gotten slipperier, smoother, more self-assured, and unpredictable. So when I produced a short evening concert of dance theater work the next year, I showcased my dancing prowess in an improvised piece set to some haunting songs from the Bulgarian Women’s Chorus:

For my own daily movement training, I let go of dance classes. I focused instead on breath work, sound exploration and the inwardly focused sensory work of Emily Conrad’s Continuum Movement. This video clip of Susan Harper demonstrating the fluidity of bone astonished me and informed my sense of possibility for years.

Later, I would come across this additional bit of inspirational footage from Continuum teacher Cass Phelps.

Along with the growth of my professional practice in Trager Movement Therapy, I began to teach classes in Movement and Transformation weaving sound, breath, touch, movement, energy awareness together for students’ personal growth. For inspiration, I drew from the energetic chakra clearing work I’d been doing, voice and breath training, Continuum Movement, self-taught skills in group process, as well as the bright playfulness and elusive subtlety of Milton Trager’s Mentastics.

To be authentic with my personal movement/energy/breath/voice explorations, I built a dance piece I called “Dark Shadows,” involving some of the students from my classes. We spent several months undulating our torsos in all directions in a variety of directions. I commissioned a score by Joe Tornabene to support these inner movement explorations and frame them for an audience. I wanted to bring the audience into the inner feeling work we were so immersed in, not just show them for their viewing pleasure. Although dimly lit, this clip from “Dark Shadows” does capture the way fluid, omnidirectional movement had taken over my choreographic mind.

After that concert, I got intensely busy with Trager Trainings, and several months later, with a bit of surprised relief, I let go of my dance career entirely. I followed the pull toward the new life path of bringing the feeling of freedom and lightness into others’ embodied experience, directly through facilitated movement. I convinced myself and others I was still dancing daily, but now no longer on a stage for an audience of onlookers, but rather inside the body of each client for an audience of one. The next several years found me grounding myself in daily meditations and walks along the Hudson, while voraciously charging my body with energy in Gyrotonics workouts. I like this demonstration of what I was exploring and developing from 1988-1996.

The 90’s were also a time of “basking in the vast ocean of pleasantness” as Milton Trager described the feeling of being in Hook-up. I was seeing as many as 20 clients a week and with that much time immersed in the field of Hook-up, my body tissue subtly changed, becoming more fluid, spongier, fluffier. My hands got so soft I would have to consciously remind them how to hold a pen or a fork at the end of a day. It was ludicrous, and at the same time luscious.

By the time I left NYC to move to Charlottesville with my life partner Michael, I had shifted my bodymind training to Ashtanga Yoga. This highly disciplined form was, for me, an athletic and dynamic practice, balancing all the easy loosening and softening of so much of the Mentastics I was teaching my clients and students. I needed clearer body structure, and the inner power Ashtanga built kept my body structure organized. I learned through my body experience that what is often taught in yoga as posture practice is really a very alive awakening of the body’s inherent bio-tensegrity -- what Milton Trager had described as “taking out the slack”.

Then in 2007, I gave in to my need for a new creative project. I gathered a half dozen local men (and one boy), guys with almost no dance training but with enough energy and enthusiasm to work with me off the ground in a rope web I suspended from the rehearsal space in Charlottesville’s Live Arts Theater. Together we developed an evening length dance theater piece called simply “Web”. Accompanied by a variety of musical compositions by local composer John Carden, and with a lot of friends supporting us in a variety of ways, we sold out 12 performances.

Here is a montage from different parts of the evening.

And here is the moving heart of the work. It was the result of a sweet personal relationship with my neighbor and yoga buddy, Tim Brazill. We called this section the “bat duet” for obvious reasons.

I continued to explore movement as a way to ageless ease, healthy pleasure and self-evolution. In 2011, I produced a video illuminating these themes. The full four part video can be seen here:

Part One:

Part Two:

Part Three:

Part Four:

In 2020, inspired by what I was feeling in Sunday morning conscious dance events, I decided to look at how my own dancing had changed from those early years on stage, particularly how I had danced in 1988. I collaborated with videographer Alex Brown and composer/percussionist Brian Festa to produce a short  Video-Dance piece. You will notice that, although not so athletic now, I am still fascinated with fluid, spiraling movement, dynamic shifts of tempo and direction, and the pleasure of the discovery.

After a year of isolation due to the Covid Pandemic, and the resulting depression from having to cancel all my teaching, I rallied my energies, and contacted Alex and Brian. They agreed to collaborate with me in creating a companion dance-video piece. This time I asked Brian to take the lead and give us a sound score to work with right from the start. The previous dance-video had seemed to ask a question, so I asked him to compose something that might feel like an answer.

Unable to rent a studio, Alex and I met in my loft to shoot some footage of me exploring both subtle and dynamic movement woven into the days during my pandemic “incarceration in luxury”. Then Alex arranged and edited it to ride on top of Brian’s score.