Critical Correspondence

University Project: Sara Rudner, Director Dance Program, Sarah Lawrence College

in conversation with Jean Butler

Interview: 04.09

Sara Rudner became Director of the Dance Program at Sarah Lawrence in 1999. She was a long-time collaborator of Twyla Tharp and had her own company, the Sara Rudner Performance Ensemble, from 1976 to 1982.

Jean Butler: I think I became a dancer through being a professional dancer, i.e., in Riverdance and then in my own show. Before that, it was all about technique, but I didn’t really understand what it meant to be a dancer. The changing landscape now, it seems, is that a lot of dancers don’t have the opportunity to learn that way, so they may go to the university, as opposed to the route you took. You probably got most of your training working with Twyla.

Sara Rudner: Yes, I didn’t study dance in the university. I did Russian area studies at Barnard, a liberal arts college. By the time I got out, in 1964, I was introduced to New York City, and I was hungry for it. I had not been exposed to a lot of things. Fortunately I met Twyla. She was doing things that seemed logical to me. My experience of being a professional dancer was seeing the development of an artistic practice. It wasn’t about joining a company and apprenticing myself to someone who already had a full-blown practice like Merce or Trisha or Paul Taylor. It was like going through those steps with somebody.

Jean: Is that possibility available now? Would the equivalent be working with, for example, Tere O’Connor?

Sara: It was Tere 15 years ago. It was starting a creative process, and learning the techniques you needed to do that movement. The evolution of the dances grew on the strength of the individual dancers who were working with her. Twyla is brilliant, and she had the ability to really look at dancers and be able to use and encourage what they did well. Why it was different and why I could afford to do that is because it was 1965 and my apartment cost $35.10. I could have a part-time job, earn $40/week and spend the rest of my time dancing. I could take classes and go to rehearsals. I think that’s where it’s not the same. I think the impetus is there. Though not everybody has the kind of ambition that Twyla has, and there are not there the same opportunities in terms of government or foundation support.

Jean: How did you get involved in academia after your professional career? I dug up a recent interview for Dance Magazine where you were quoted as saying that out of all of Twyla’s dancers that taught during that time, you seemed to be the most curious. I wonder if you could talk about what exactly you were curious about.

Sara: I was curious because I was coming to this late. I was curious about how does all this work, I mean literally: Is it about the steps? Is it about what you’re doing? Is it about trying to make an atmosphere so that people can feel comfortable? Those were the questions I was asking myself.

Jean: And, in the teaching process, if you can cast your mind back to those early classes…

Sara: I couldn’t help but apply the energy and the dynamic that went on the rehearsal studio. I have some very good friends who remember me at that time and how my classes were like, and they say ‘You’re scary!’ Because some things came easily to me, and I was—we were all—in that area of pushing possibilities: ‘ok, we did it on this side, let’s do it on that side now.’ ‘Let’s retrograde it now, in no time!’ It was a little intense for a while. We were teaching what we were learning ourselves in the studio. It didn’t look like ballet, it didn’t look like Graham, it didn’t look like Limon… It was kind of squiggly and fast. But it had the same intensity and rigor. It was a rigor of, ‘there is nothing else in the world except this’. It was the most important thing in the world. We didn’t discuss technique historically, except to say ‘don’t do it like blah blah blah…’ It was very intense and I think it was extremely useful. I think people dug it. It was exciting.

Jean: What do you think Sarah Lawrence was looking for when they appointed you?

Sara: My situation at Sarah Lawrence is as unique as my meeting Twyla and being involved with her. I was still totally devoted to dance—very interested in it. I had just spent some time at Bennington, where I saw how an enlightened dance program could function. I had been in and out of universities, hired to teach a week and make a piece for a concert. But it was a very alienated process because, frankly, what I had learned from working with Twyla in those early days was about a community, not about the ambition of being dancers and performing all over the world.

Sarah Lawrence is a very progressive, liberal, out-there, off-the-charts place, in terms of how it educates people and its value system. It’s an open curriculum. There are no majors. I had a Master’s degree when I was hired at Sarah Lawrence, but I didn’t need one. I didn’t even need a Bachelor’s degree.

Jean: Would it be different now?

Sara: Slightly different. I still think Sarah Lawrence would hire a mature professional with a reputation. I think the school is enlightened that way, in terms of an arts practice. People in academia are starting to recognize the value of professionals coming in.

Jean: Did you know what your teaching philosophy would be when you took your position at Sarah Lawrence?

Sara: I was influenced by Twyla early on and then by being at Bennington. I saw how Bennington’s dance program worked on the community. And how it was by agreement, by consensus, by inclusion. We were looking at our differences and honoring them. Trying to bring together all the things that group of people knew to form a useful synergy for anybody—for us. To me, the teaching situation is a situation I can learn in—where I can learn from my colleagues, that then we can extend that to our students. And that it’s a communal effort, a caring effort.

Jean: You’re only as good as the people you surround yourself with.

Sara: And I learnt that working with Twyla. It is an effort to talk about the best things of a tradition, to transfer the passion and the love for the art form to young people. Sarah Lawrence is not a conservatory. Some of the kids who choose to go there could go to conservatories if they if they wanted, but not most. The majority has no idea who I am or anything of what I’ve done. We’re very seriously trying to say ‘what would you want someone to know about dance?’ What would you want someone to know about life in dance? What would you like someone to know about their minds, their bodies and their hearts? It’s part of a liberal education. We do not train dancers to go out and join a company.

Jean: Who is the program for? Is it a center for training independent artists, members of academic programs, administrators? Why do people study dance now?

Sara: I think they study for all of those reasons. Some people come in saying ‘I want to be a Cunningham dancer, or an XYZ dancer.’ And you say ‘let’s put this stuff together. Let’s look at the art form holistically. Why don’t you know something about all of this and then you are free to choose and work your ass off to do any one of those things?

Jean: So it rocks the boat of people who think they know they are in a trajectory.

Sara: Well, a lot of kids come with tons of years of ballet—sometimes not great training. So, our first step is to see what level they really are in classes. A lot of disappointed kids—‘I’ve had 13 years of ballet…” and I say ‘honey, you’re rolling on your feet, you don’t know where your back is, you don’t know anything. We can’t let you do that in good conscious. We’re not saying no to advance ballet, but we’ve got some basic work to do. This is Puritanism here, from the very beginning. Let us get in on this and really work at it.

And the way we do it at our school is everybody has to study experiential, functional anatomy, which Peggy Gould teaches. You start learning about yourself. You have a training conference where you meet, let’s say that you’re in a contemporary dance class and you’re taken out of that class, and Peggy says to you, ‘you’re having problems in class, what are your questions?’ ‘I can’t relevé. I’m having problems with my feet, my back.’ And then she says, ‘ok, let’s look at it, let’s look at what you’re doing; let’s look at, functionally, what is going on in your body. Let’s look at what’s going on in your head in terms of your imagery’ because many people, when you’re training—I’m sure you’ve experienced this—that’s bad, don’t do that! There’s what Irene Dowd says ‘there’s no bad movement.’

Jean: There are bad ways of doing it, maybe. You might hurt yourself.

Sara: You might hurt yourself. But then again you might, in your creative mind, want to try something. Let’s learn how to prepare you to do that. After you’ve done that, how can you warm down?

Jean: It makes me feel that I so need to go to this class!

Sara: Every style of dancing that you see comes from somebody’s creative passion. That’s what I mean with Twyla. She had all these images and we were all just trying to do them. And, in some way, that’s what I’ve taken to college and university—that it’s all dance, stylistically quite different for any number of reasons. But where did arabesque come from? It came out of a mind/body. It came out of an agreement, maybe one person, maybe among people… There was individual contribution, codification and then there was passing things on. Teaching is passing things on, but what are you going to pass on?

Jean: I find, when I’m teaching Irish dancing, there is really no interest in understanding. The students just want to get higher and they don’t want to take it apart. They want to know how to go faster, how to do this… And I say, well, first you can start by breathing.

Sara: There’s a lot of impatience. But if they admire and trust you, you can say, ok, let’s do all this at the beginning, get your jollies out, and then, when they’re exhausted… you say, how long do you want to dance? Do you know how magical it is? How richer and deeper it gets? Believe me, this is what you might want to find out about. With teaching, first you have to decide what and frankly I’ve gone all around the block. The wonderful thing, if you can do it within an institution, is to experiment with something, for example, ‘we are never going to stand on the same spot in this dance class—you will always be moving’. I have this deeply ingrained in my personal practice, and therefore was really curious about what kind of dance would come out of this kind of training.

When I see people standing still, doing tandus and stuff, I go ‘why tandu? What are you doing?’ So, what we’ve done is we have faculty meetings in studios where we ask these questions. Why are we doing tandus? What does it do for us? What style is it a part of? I know there’s a reason to do it, and it’s a very good reason to do it. But I want to be able to teach tendu, know my thoughts about it, my feelings about it, and why we’re doing it before I ask anybody else to do it.

I’ve come to some agreement with it. I’m not totally in love with it, but I understand why it’s useful for certain practices. I understand knowing the value of stability. But I know that if you spend too long time on that, you’ve cut off certain other creative or stylistic possibilities. So, knowing some of that stuff is very useful to being a teacher. I had been educated in everything that was intuitive and natural in me. Since my own injuries and since teaching, I have become more conscious. The teaching has taught me. It has been very rewarding.

Jean: You’re almost redefining technique for yourselves—amalgamating all the information you have, pulling it apart and putting it back together again.

Sara: It’s a deconstructive act, yeah.

Jean: What would a technique class at Sarah Lawrence be like?

Sara: It depends who’s teaching it. In other words, everybody teaches something eclectic of what his or her own understanding is. The only thing that I object to is if they are not responsive to who’s in front of them. If someone says that hurts, I don’t want someone saying ‘do it anyway’. I’m not interested in that tradition of teaching. I’m interested in people who want to learn about their teaching and change things.

Some people start class on the floor, breathing. Sometimes they work in partners; sometimes they start with a whole series of spinal exercises. It starts all different ways. But what we’re hoping we’re conveying is a sensational—and I mean as in sensation—understanding of yourself in motion, a unified mind/body, and an empowering of the student, which requires respect both ways. I’ve had some students who have been very nasty to their teachers: You’re supposed to be here to teach me how to do virtuoso dancing. I’ve had that from kids. And I just say, ‘you don’t know what virtuosity is, and if you don’t want to be in this class, that’s fine’.

Jean: Contemporary dance is blowing my mind about what dance can do, because I feel like I’m in the theater, in cinema, in visual arts, they are all wrapped up together. There seems to be a wonderful sense of individuality coming through and questioning what the form can achieve instead of saying, ‘here I am and this is what my body can do – aren’t I great and isn’t it wonderful’.

Sara: I don’t know if it was ever like that – in the true exercise of it. Do you know what I mean?

Jean: I think I do. What makes it like that—money, funding?

Sara: Or misunderstanding what the art form is. I think ambition without substance is what you’re talking about. I think that probably does exist. But what I’m saying is all the vital things that have happened in dance, I don’t think came from that place. There was a great deal of substance and true questions and commitment to it. The work is too hard. No, if you are really prima donna from the moment you start to the moment you end, you’re not going to sweat. You’re not going to get the horrible reviews.

Jean: How are the budget cuts affecting your program? Has it impacted you at all?

Sara: It will. It hasn’t, but it will, in terms of curriculum. We’re in a state of a slight contraction. My predecessor at Sarah Lawrence was a woman named Viola Farber, and she died with her boots on basically. She died still chair of that program. She was very good friends with Bob Rauschenberg, who gave a one-time-only gift to the Sarah Lawrence Dance Program. The College has been trying to get him to endow a Chair, and I said, what about sponsoring artists to come and do their work with as few strings attached as possible. The only thing we want is give the artists space. If they want to work with our students or not, fine. Just either do a little showing, a performance, invite us to an open rehearsal, talk to us—you can do all kinds of things—choose one. And here, have the space, have the kids if you want, and here’s a bunch of money. It’s not a lot of money, but that’s what he gave the money for.

Jean: When was this instituted?

Sara: 2000. It’s been going on for the last eight and a half years.

Jean: Who’s there now?

Sara: Sue Rethorst. We can’t do very many of them. In fact, we’re running out of money. I think all college and universities that have dance programs try to do something like that. Bennington, which is so isolated, they do a brilliant thing, I think, they basically think of improvisation as a creative act from the moment you walk into that program. We’re working with people from all over and all ages. I was fifty something when I went back, and now Jon Kinzel is finishing up, and we had Neil Greenberg.

Jean: What do you think those professionals get when they come back for an MFA?

Sara: I was able to get out of the rat race and really think about my dancing. It had a practical bend for me, but essentially, it was the hardest gift I ever accepted. It was very hard, but I learnt so much from that experience. A young woman I taught there who just got her own MFA wrote to me telling me how she remembers those classes. It makes this a community, the way I always believed it was. So, what I have found in university and teaching is the ability to fulfill some of my dreams.

Jean: You said that the most important part of your education with Twyla was that she let you find your own way through movement. What would you like your dance students to take away? What do you think is the most important thing for a dancer to have?

Sara: I haven’t come very far from that. I learnt how to work, how to concentrate on things. It’s about discipline, but discipline only in the service of knowing yourself and doing no harm. And that’s why I talk about respect. We try to not do any harm, to learn that as well because that’s another kind of discipline. I don’t think that anything is as interesting as watching somebody do anything that they’re thinking about. That you are engaged in what you’re doing and you are learning about what you’re doing. And that no matter how ambitious you are and how much of even a façade you think you need to do, that somewhere in there there’s some understanding of yourself, and that you’ve been generous with it. I’d like them to be very generous to themselves and to other people.