Marcus Schulkind in conversation with Lizzie Feidelson

Lizzie Feidelson: You’ve been teaching for many years now.

Marcus Schulkind: About 46.

LF: Could you talk about your technique as a teacher, how it’s evolved?

MS: It’s changed mostly because I can’t demonstrate much right now. I have somebody who I work with before classes to set up what we’re going to do that day, and she becomes my body, and she demonstrates what we’re going to do, and then I do a kind of commentary on it. And I think, as I became less able to physically do what I wanted to do, I became more open and generous to everybody having their own unique take on something. I think when I was younger I was more harsh and abrasive with people, and I think that’s totally not there anymore. That’s changed. And that doesn’t mean that I’m not watching someone and wanting them to succeed to or be as good as they can, but I don’t have the need to kind of confront people at all. It’s not about confrontation, it’s about discovery. It’s about figuring things out.

I think if there’s one thing I’ve learned, after all this time, is that really everyone learns in their own way, and at their own rate, so that you’re trying to impose that on people means that they don’t have the time to discover their own uniqueness and their own underpinnings of what makes them who they are and what they have to say. So I don’t have that same edge, that you should be able to see something once and be able to replicate it, you should be able to do that, and I don’t think those things are bad things to have or to challenge yourself to do, but I think that truly everyone has a different way of approaching knowledge and learning. And that’s why movement is a language, and as a language, people have different facilities in how they put together the rhythm and the timing and the flow, and everybody has their own unique way of doing something and of taking it in, and their own kind of I got it moments, and that’s something to be rewarded, regaled and appreciated when it happens. So I kind of want to give people the ability to be whatever they want to be and the best they can be, and that’s actually what I’m teaching now, about and for.

LF: It must make teaching very gratifying, if you’re not trying to make all people adhere to the same way.

MS: Yeah. Not trying to make people be you. It’s really a fun thing to get to. It takes a long time, I think. To want people to be  them, and figuring out who  they  are. It really makes it a much more fulfilling, less frustrating issue.

LF: Could you talk about your early training and your discovery of dance?

MS: I hadn’t trained at all until I went to college. It was 1965. I went to a place called Goddard College in Vermont. It was a seriously progressive school. So I walked into this place, and I was sitting there trying to figure out what to do, and a woman walked past me in a leotard and tights and I got up, followed her, and she went into a dance studio. There were twelve women in tight fitting clothes…and me. And I kind of just signed up for it. And after the first two weeks, I was blown away by how hard the work was and how interesting the work was, and how working on physicality was beyond brilliant and interesting and fascinating.

I spent another year at Goddard, and my teacher said to me, I don’t have anything more to teach you here, right now, so I want you to go and apply to Julliard. I was so blasé and naïve—I didn’t even know what that meant. But I went down there and did a solo for them, and took a class, and they took me. I didn’t even know that it was actually a hot shit conservatory. I didn’t even know the people watching me were these amazingly famous people. I was so stupid [laughs]. God was watching out for me. I was so naïve it didn’t matter, you know? So then I went and spent a year at Julliard, and then the next year I went and started working, because I just really had the need to start performing and doing things, even though I was early on and premature and I wasn’t quite as formed as I could have been or needed to be, but a guy who has some talent can get a lot of work. That’s part of the unfairness of the world [laughs]. Right? A billion really unbelievably hardworking driven women, and a guy—at that time in particular—could just kind of show up and basically put on a pair of tights and it wasn’t so bad. You could get paid to do a lot of stuff when you weren’t half as good as the women around you and didn’t even know how to work half as hard, but that was the way it was.

In ’71, I went off and started dancing with the Batsheva Company in Israel. Then I came back and danced with the Graham Company, which was being re-formed at that time.   Then I danced with a lot of Graham derivatives—Pearl Lang and Norman Walker—and then I danced in Lar Lubovitch’s company. So I have a pretty extensive modern background.

LF: You did get a serious injury. Is there anything you wish you had known at the time or feel like you could have done to prevent it?

MS: No. I think it was so important for me to have that happen to me because it made me really consider how important dance was to me, and also really put on the brakes both in terms of my own egocentricity and full-of-it-ness. So it really served a lot of purposes. It was that fine line between humility and humiliation, and I think that moment was really good in terms of making me a better teacher and a better artist and a better something, a better person. Because I needed to kind of change the whole affect of things to get more clear and get more clarity about what it meant to me personally.

LF: So your injury served an important artistic function for you.

MS: I wish every dancer in the world had to take anatomy and physiology, because I think they should know what connects to what. Are they getting the kind of teaching that allows their bodies and their joints not to be at risk? I would like that to happen. If you’re working with people and teaching them, you can say to them, “You need to do some adjunctive work that’s not in a dance studio, to build your core and build your strength and your center, and you could do pilates, you could do Gyrotonics, you could do anything but there are needs that you aren’t seeing,”—and it’s not about taking another ballet class and kicking your leg up higher or those issues of technique—it’s really about getting so centered that you can do those things without hurting yourself at all. And I do say that to people, and I do recommend, when I see someone coming in who I think is at risk, that they look at that and do this or maybe work privately with someone to get at that feeling that’s healthier for themselves.

LF: How do Boston and New York compare? How does it feel different to dance in both those places?

MS: It’s a lot smaller group of people here. The fact that New York has so many studios with so many people teaching and they’re all able to afford to keep their classes running and have people coming, and people who want to train and people wanting to see performances—it’s a humongous difference in terms of what can happen. There are three small hubs of dance in the Boston area. There are three small—well, not so small—studios in Cambridge.  There’s the Dance Complex, there’s Green Street Studios, and there’s Jose Mateo.  Then in Boston itself there is Boston Ballet and Boston Conservatory. And then there’s a sprinkling of four, maybe six small private studios around, where people do very, very serious training.

LF: Is it harder or easier to dance in Boston?

MS: It’s apples and oranges in some ways. I think for some people, having their rehearsals and having people to study with and build their lives around, it may be a little bit easier here once you find what feeds you—whether it’s the people who are creating for you who are the right people for you—then it may be an easier place because you don’t need to struggle so hard to make the money you need to live. Whereas in New York I always got the feeling that there’s so much more going on but its so much more expensive and you have to be hustling all the time to get the money that you need to live and all that.

LF: It does feel like a hustle sometimes!

MS: We all know that there’s a very small amount of people who get into big enough companies that they have a 30 to a 50-week contract with them with benefits, where they’re dancing all day long. There are a tiny number of companies in any place who do that. But then there the independent people who are interesting to work, and you have to find other ways to support yourself to be able to do what you want to do.  And that’s true in both places.

LF: What prompted your move?

MS: I had come down about 30 years ago from a jump and tore an anterior cruciate and that was kind of career-threatening, and made me question what dance meant to me and what I wanted to continue to do with it after that time. I went off and tried teaching academically, which I didn’t find terribly interesting. And then a friend of mine who had danced with Lar Lubovitch, named Gerri Houlihan, started a company here when Boston was in its kind of—at a certain point Boston became important to the dance world—so there was a lot of money floating around from the Massachusetts Council of the Arts and there was a lot of dance happening here. So I moved up here and we had that going for awhile. It was called the Boston Dance Project. I had a lot of work up here, from various schools to teach and various companies to do work on, and it’s kind of become my home. And twenty years ago, with four other artists, we opened a thing called  Green Street Studios  which is in Central Square in Cambridge. It is a 7,000-square-foot, raw space that we turned into a large theater that is a 150-seater and two other studios. And we’re in the midst of celebrating our twentieth anniversary this year!

LF: Congratulations! What year was this, that you perceived a sort of hey-day of dance in Boston?

MS: Oh, I would say basically 25 years ago there was an incredible, incredible, explosion of dance here, and it ranged from people like next door to Gerri’s studio there was a woman named Susan Rule who had come out of Bella Lewitzky’s work in California and come out here and made her own company, Adrienne Hawkins had a jazz company that was very well-respected and doing a lot of creative choreography that crossed over into modern and ballet. There was a lot of stuff happening here. There was Dinosaur Dance, there were repertory companies, and then of course the big companies, which were Boston Ballet and Jose Mateo had a chamber ballet company at that point, too. So there was a lot happening.

LF: Do you feel that has been sustained, or has it tapered off somewhat?

MS: Well it boomed and  it busted, as the economy got worse and real estate got more expensive. That squeezed out a lot of stuff. Now there are small little areas of dance intact. Boston is a schizophrenic place, because on one hand there’s an incredible intellectual curiosity about everything, that’s obviously fostered by the academia that exists here, and on the other hand there’s a significant distrust of the body as opposed to the mind. So it’s kind of an interesting detachment.

LF: Is that what you found difficult about teaching in an academic setting?

MS: Yeah, I always found that unless you are in a conservatory, most academic places don’t give parity to the arts and in particular dance. They don’t give  academic  parity. My perception of dance is that it is a language, and it’s a spatial language, and it’s a language that is as difficult as any of the languages that are taught academically and that exist in the world, and that really makes it equal to the value of anything that’s academic, but most academic people don’t see it as a language or as expression that exists with any of the same due diligence or importance as any of the things that they consider important academically.

LF: Can you talk some more about having your own studio?

MS: The basic issues—and I’ve said this time and time again—are questions of real estate. Because dance depends on it, unlike any other art form. You need space in order to do dance. The best time is when the economy is in a downturn and you’re not competing with light industry or businesses for that space because then landlords are more willing to rent to you on your terms, which is the difficulty in being able to afford it and being able to support it, versus not. So it ultimately is a real estate game in terms of you being able to find a space and keep it functional. It’s difficult.

LF: You are also a professional acupuncturist.

MS: Sixteen years ago, acupuncture was part of the treatment for my knee. And little by little, I started to feel that not only was my  knee  getting better, but my  temperament  was getting better. I asked my acupuncturist—is acupuncture changing my temperament? Am I just growing up? Or is it a combination of things? And they said that as you get more balanced with your energetic flow, you probably get more balanced with your psychological-emotional flow as well. That interested me a lot. I kind of lucked out in that the oldest acupuncture school in America is in Watertown, called the  New England School of Acupuncture. I started going there, and that was an interesting challenge. It’s certainly the ying to the yang—the yang would be dance, which is the external, energetic—and the ying to that would be the acupuncture, which is the internal energetics of your body, and working on freeing up all of those energetics. They are kind of like adjuncts to each other. And it kind of felt like completing the puzzle that I was looking at all the time, by doing both things. I graduated 13 years ago, and I’ve been practicing for 13 years.

LF: How do you incorporate that into your dancing?

MS: I’m not sure that there’s a conscious shift. I mean I’m not sure that I consciously think that OK now I’m going to perceive  this, but I think a lot of the ways that you might structurally see energy move as a dancer is not that different from seeing energy move from the point of view of traditional Chinese medicine, through the way the meridians move in the body, and the way the energy pathways move in the body. So it has actually helped me as a teacher be able to see where there may be stagnation, or places where energy might be stuck, and then help them not only as a teacher from the point of view of the yang, which is the external, but also help them figure out how to help them on the internal as well, which is the acupuncture idea of energy.

LF: So you look for energy blockages in people’s dancing?

MS: Yeah, but it’s not so conscious. I’m not sitting there and having one paradigm over another as much as it’s all integrated. This is the way I look at how you move, and I have all of these various parts of me that I’ve learned, and I’m going to see how to help integrate you a little bit better, in what you are trying to do with your skill set and also in terms of what is or isn’t moving or isn’t working as well.

LF: Has this taught you about injury prevention?

MS: Yes. In terms of my own injuries, plus seeing how people get hurt in dance. It seems to me that there’s a younger generation teaching now—or maybe younger is the wrong word—but there’s a generation of people teaching now who are bringing to their teaching things are making them better movers, for example people who have been trained in Gyrotonics that teach dance, and that’s such an interesting energy flowing way of looking at the core of your body moving toward the extremities. There’s a lot of people bringing yoga to what they’re doing now, there are a lot of people doing shiatsu—which is acupuncture points in a Japanese form—and acupuncture work, so meridian work, energetic work. So there’s a lot of integration it seems to me, in people that are teaching now, at least here in this area, who are connecting a lot more dots, in terms of what they’re doing as teachers, than just demanding by rote—“This is the way I learned to do something, and screw you this is the way you’re going to do it too, we’re not going to think about it or evolve it, we’re just going to continue the tradition by saying this is the way I learned it, you do it too.”

LF: Does traditional technique seem archaic or naïve to you after immersing yourself in these other body systems that have so much to do with healing?

MS: No! I kind of like still honoring the historical past by warming up with some traditional technique work. I just don’t do the things that are risky or could put your joints at jeopardy. I don’t want to do that to someone, and I think there are things in all of our technical work that are tradition-driven and not as kinesthetically, correctly driven as they could be.

LF: How do you think people find ways to be safe within traditional technique and traditional—as you say, rote—teaching techniques? Even if dancers are asked to do dangerous things, as individuals they can find ways of performing the movement in a healthy way. How do you think people approach that?

MS: I can’t talk about the things I don’t know about—for example, I am amazed that anybody could work with Elizabeth Streb. I mean if we really talk about going to the  end-line of riskiness, I think there is nothing more risky. And certainly that is her aesthetic, to see what can we do, right? To the human body—and survive, and what is insurmountable and what is something that we can surmount.

My feeling is that in our training, technique means doing something with the minimal amount of wasted energy, and learning how to do something without either being wasteful or inefficient is a really nice way to go. Then of course if you choose show effort, that’s one set of aesthetic choices you can make, or if you choose not to, that’s another, or if you choose to go somewhere in the middle. Or, you choose to work on things that different choreographers want. That’s another set of choices you can make, all the time.