B. Undergraduate Work, 1968-1973

Undergraduate Years: 1968-1973

Bennington College in 1968 was an exciting place for me because I was introduced to all kinds of modern dance that I had not experienced. I was very serious about being a Modern Dancer, and Bennington was one of the only colleges that offered a concentration in this subject. My teachers that first year were Jane Dudley, an original member of the Martha Graham Dance Company and a pioneer in her own right with the Dudley Maslow Bales trio. She was a great teacher, very strict and taught the early Graham dance technique explaining contract and release as a deep expression of the soul. My other teachers were Martha and Joe Wittman, Jack Moore, and briefly some guests from the Jose Limon Dance Company. I remember Jose Limon coming to teach for a residency in the summer, and actually taking a class with Martha Graham at Connecticut College in another summer residence when I was sixteen. These are the years that I began to remember everything, where memory started to really take hold.
I remember being very depressed much of the time, especially in my sophomore year, not wanting to get out of bed, but forcing myself to get up and take my dance classes. My academic advisor was the famous poet, Ben Belitt, who was very nice to me but could not understand why I was such a bad writer, and only wanted to take dance classes, which I mainly figured out how to do. I only remember three other classes during those years in addition to my dance classes, one with the drama wizard, Paul Gray, an anthropology class with Peter Wilson and a mathematics class that I was surprisingly good at with Rhein Van Der Linde. What I remember most were my fellow dancers: Penny Campbell, Lisa Nelson, Cathy Weis, dance fellows, Ande Peck and Ulysses Dove, and then later, Megan Bierman, Cheryl Niederman, Karen Radler, Annette La Roque and Paula Sepinuck. For the first two years, it was a pretty traditional modern dance program with Viola Farber visiting and teaching Merce Cunningham technique. I liked all of my teachers and when I wasn’t too depressed to get to class, I worked hard. I probably was at the height of my technical expertise except that I could not balance for anything, and had to practice all of the time to stand on one foot. In particular, Ulysses Dove paid a lot of attention to me, used to coach me after hours, and really helped me become the dancer that I am. In my sophomore year, everything changed. Judith Dunn and Bill Dixon joined the faculty and new topics entered the dance program. They were part of the radical Judson Dance movement at Judson Church in New York City. Judith had been married to Robert Dunn who taught the composition classes at Judson, and when Judi and Bill arrived at Bennington College, they were teaching improvisation as performance. It was very radical at the time, and I was really excited because it gave me a chance to return to my roots from the Philadelphia Dance Academy and the practice of improvisation, and I loved it. We had endless sessions in the Carriage Barn where Bill played trumpet and piano with Lou Calabro on percussion and Judi and her students (me) would dance our hearts out. It was all very serious, and we knew we were doing something radical and important. There started to be big conflicts over what was dance in the program (I remember discussing in one of Judi’s composition classes, how a student was washing her hair on stage). Pedestrian movement was accepted, technique was in the service of the ideas. Steve Paxton also came and taught during this time at Bennington, and he was in the process of exploring contact improvisation. I also have memories of 24-hour overnight improvisation sessions with him and others where people danced, slept and danced again. It was all very experimental, interesting and exciting. At the same time, there were tons of drugs, the culture was fracturing, the Vietnam War was raging, and civil rights and feminism were moving forward. The College closed down in the Spring of 1970, along with many other colleges in reaction to the murders of students at Kent State University in Ohio, and my best friend Pegge who was at Temple University, dropped out of school, came up to see me and in my Porsche (yes, I am serious, a guilt present from my father who had now run off with a younger woman, (my initials, S.E.M. engraved in the door), we left for a cross country trip to Berkeley, California.
        Berkeley was famous by then. The heart of radical activism, the anti-war movement, the West Coast for Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Angela Davis and the Black Panthers. Much went on in Berkeley, to be described later. Needless to say, it was a wild time. Pegge and I rented a house near Telegraph Avenue and hosted a major part of the population in Berkeley and San Francisco, where I worked in a boutique that provided costumes for big rock stars like Janis Joplin. I missed dancing, and after several months, we decided to return to Vermont, and I went back to Bennington College.
Having been so irresponsible and failed my major dance classes before I left, I decided that I was serious, made peace with Judi Dunn and focused on my dance improvisation work. I remember collaborating with percussionist David Moss and saxophonist Tommy Guralnik. It was deep and profound work and very special. Bill Dixon was creating the Black Music Division and it was a very exciting time. I was living with Pegge in Arlington, Vermont and we named the house, “Hoisten Hoiter, named after some drug induced expression from a drug dealer in Berkeley named Franklin. During this time, I reconnected with my future partner and husband, Richard Sgorbati, whom I knew from Cheltenham High School outside of Philadelphia. I couldn’t help myself and I left my education at Bennington College for the second time and went off to Alaska. Rick (Botch as I called him) and I left for about six months, traveled all across the country and into Alaska, almost died on the Alaskan highway in a serious car accident, had to stay in Dawson, in the Yukon Territory for weeks, and finally returned to Bennington College once again to graduate. Upon graduating, I was part of an improvisational ensemble, called, “The Collaborative Ensemble of Dancers and Musicians”. We toured for a while, and then I quit my dancing once again, moved with Richard to beautiful land on a lake in Sudbury, Vermont where we built our own house, raised our own food and animals, and really lived out in the country. It was only when Joy Dewey, the Chair of the Dance Program at Williams College, found me in the wilderness and convinced me to come back to dancing by teaching for her during her sabbatical, that I returned to dancing again. I was twenty-six years old, and had no experience teaching.