My heartbreaking choreographic debut
Spring 1968. 8th Grade. Pine Grove Junior High School Talent Show. For my solo, I wore a purple leotard, pink tights and pink pointe shoes, to dance my original choreography to the smash hit “Love is Blue.”
“Original”? Perhaps I stole a few signature moves from my beloved ballet teacher Sally Espino. From a young age, I’d taken her classes at Live Oak Community Center, Berkeley Parks & Recreation, an affordable choice for my parents (who were raising seven kids). When I was eleven, Sally approved me for toe shoes and sent me to a children’s shoe store on Shattuck Avenue, where a clueless, middle-aged man in a suit squeezed my feet into chunky Capezios. At age twelve, I performed with Sally, en pointe, in the Live Oak Theater, to music from the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy.
For the junior high talent show, I entrusted my 45-rpm vinyl single to the A/V boys, along with a plastic adapter in case the school’s turntable didn’t have a pop-up adapter.
On cue, I stepped out on the curtainless stage to face a sea of whispering, giggling middle-schoolers. My heart pounded through an awkward pause before the needle went down with a crackle. Pulling up to relevé for my first emboîté, I nearly froze. What?! A slow-motion nightmare. The turntable was set to 33 rpm! I slogged and teetered through a drawling parody of the music until, near the end, the pink ribbons of one shoe unraveled to the floor. Pretending my shoe wasn’t loose, I improvised a woeful, dying-swan-like ending and left the stage in sobs.
Dancing, Teaching, and Performing in the early ’70s
In high school, my parents upgraded my training to a professional studio, Dancer’s Theatre in Oakland, an affiliate of the Royal Academy of Dancing. An RAD examiner flew from England to California every two years to judge our progress. While seated, the examiner gave the exercises in French ballet terms and evaluated our technique as we executed the movements to live piano accompaniment.
When I was 18, I switched studios to Carlos Carvajal’s Dance Spectrum in San Francisco. Both studios often had live piano accompaniment. Pianists at Dancer’s Theatre played traditional classics, while the pianist at Dance Spectrum in SF improvised new-age minimalist kinds of melodies, occasionally adding wordless voice—appropriate for the vibe of the hippie years. We ballerinas defied convention, wearing socks for barre exercises instead of full-sole ballet slippers—that is, when we didn’t do the entire class en pointe. Flexible split-sole ballet slippers hadn’t yet been invented.
When live piano wasn’t available, teachers used LPs on turntables. Both the Oakland and SF studios had wood floors that shuddered when we jumped, causing the record to skip occasionally. At Dance Spectrum, Carlos used orchestral music for many of his center combinations—something that was different and exciting.
I performed with both companies, Dancer’s Theatre and Dance Spectrum. Recorded music for performances was played from a turntable or reel-to-reel tape player connected to the sound system. [My father had a reel-to-reel player at home and swore it was the best sound for his jazz favorites—although it required transferring music from his LPs to the tape!]
1973, a memorable performance. We danced Carlos’s choreography to live music at the SF Civic Auditorium, Arthur Fiedler conducting the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra (Fiedler’s “Pops” concert). For Saint-Saëns’ Bacchanal, we danced part of the piece in the aisles. What fun! Here are the front and back covers of the program.
When I was 18, I landed my first teaching job at—guess where—Live Oak Community Center. Every Saturday, six classes in a row, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. They paid me $9 per class. I supported myself on this, plus an 8-hour weekly housecleaning job at $2 per hour.
As you can see in this 1973 photo, the clunky turntable was on a long, folding table, a little wobbly. I don’t remember the records skipping when we jumped, but perhaps nothing could shake that shiny linoleum-covered cement floor at the rec center, where we risked shin splints, hairline fractures, and slips-and-falls.
My second traumatic choreographic effort
1973 spring recital. The choreography was all mine and not half bad, as far as I recall, but very short. Students in all six classes performed, a couple of minutes for each class. We weren’t in the Little Theater but in the gymnasium with folding chairs set up for family and friends.
As people arrived and took their seats, I sat with my students on the floor. Every student—but one—arrived on time. Five, ten, fifteen minutes ticked past the appointed hour, people getting antsy. Finally, I gave in, made my opening remarks, lined up the kids, and put the needle on the record. Fifteen minutes later, as we took our final bow, the tardy student and parents rushed in, half an hour late. “It’s over?” screeched the angry mom. Crying child. Embarrassed teacher.
That was the first and last recital I staged at Live Oak. My dance ambitions lay far beyond Berkeley Parks & Recreation.
Soon after, I left for Amsterdam, where I studied at Theaterschool with hopes to audition for companies—a whole story I won’t go into here. After five months, an injury sent me home, where I moped around for a bit, took a temporary job stuffing envelopes at a mass mailing outfit, and decided to go to college, then law school.
Interestingly, I did perform again at Live Oak Theater with the Berkeley Mime Troupe in 1975.
The’80s arrive with high tech! And… My third and fourth choreographic efforts
Gradually, through the ’70s, LPs gave way to cassette tapes. Oh rapture! No skips or warped LPs. Actually, the cassettes did warp if left in the sun. And there were other annoyances. Like, somehow, the tape could get pulled out and tangled.
And you always had trouble cuing up your song. All that rewinding and fast forwarding, no index or track indicator.
Then there was the extra expense, time, and effort to convert your favorite music from LP to tape. Equipment, cables, magic. Turntable with output, tape recorder with input. New possibilities! Compilations: favorite songs from different LPs on a single cassette tape.
’78-’81, while in law school in Boulder Colorado, I subbed a few dance classes, using cassette tapes. Nerves…not about teaching but about the music, fast forwarding and rewinding. Those years, I danced in local performances and with the Boulder Jazz Dance Company. One piece was called “Walkmania,” and these things were part of our costume!
My third and fourth choreographies were in Boulder. 1980: a solo entitled “Amor Lejano” (you can see excerpts here—yes, that young girl with shoulder-length hair). 1981: “Inner City Drama,” a dance for me and three others, performed in Boulder and New York City. I don’t have a video and don’t remember the choreography, but it included this whacky jump.
Each choreographer provided the sound manager with a cassette tape containing only their music. The sound person would cue each tape to the start and switch out the cassettes for each piece during the show. My tape for “Amor Lejano” was easy enough—a single piece “Utviklingssang” by Carla Bley But the music for “Inner City Drama” combined parts of songs from the “Together Brothers” LP, Barry White’s Love Unlimited Orchestra, something I couldn’t edit. A company member adept at splicing created the tape for me. Can you imagine doing this? Cutting the tape at the exact moment with a razor blade and taping it to the next section. Some of the splicing jobs for various choreographers were none too perfect, with little glitchy sounds at the edited points.
The ’90s and new millennium
Although CDs came on the market sometime in the ’80s, dance teachers were using cassette tapes most of that decade. As I started my law career in Manhattan, I was taking dance class whenever I could fit it in. In 1989, after having my first baby, I dropped out of the dance world for a decade. When I started dancing again, everyone was using CDs. On hiatus from my legal career, I danced like crazy from ’98-’08: taking and teaching classes, performing, choreographing, and running a dancewear store.
CDs: what convenience! But…have you played a CD recently? So annoying, all those extra seconds to open the tray, insert the CD, close the tray, select the track, wait for the player to “read” the disc. These days, it seems so slow.
Again, we had to convert favorite tracks from outdated media to CD. Somewhat easier with computers connected by USB cable to a turntable or tape player. In those days, every computer came with an ODD (optical disc drive).
I soon gave this up for the new thing—music streaming. In the early ’00s, we subscribed to Rhapsody for about $10 a month [avoiding Napster, a “free” service that violated artists’ rights and was later sued for copyright infringement.] I used the RealPlayer program on my Microsoft laptop to save selected tracks from Rhapsody on my computer and “burn” them to a CD. RealPlayer could also “rip” tracks from our store-bought CDs and burn them to a blank CD. I made a lot of compilations for listening and teaching.
But, more work! No metadata, so I manually typed the title and artist onto each track saved on my laptop. This information did not transfer to CD when burning. I typed and printed a list of the songs on each CD. For teaching, my compilations grouped songs with similar rhythms for certain exercises (e.g. for jazz pas de bourrées, kicks, and pirouettes); I labeled each CD and taped the list of songs on the CD cover.
I still have tons of these homemade CDs!!! They’re all good.
For my students’ performances in the early ’00s, the sound manager asked for a CD with the single track for each dance. Later into the ’00s, this changed to a separate USB flash drive for each piece.
Moving into now
After working another ten years in law, I returned to teaching dance in 2017. A decade had passed, and most teachers were using smartphones (or tablets or laptops) connected to the studio sound system by Bluetooth or cable/dongle attachment.
I was behind for a while, still using CDs, but soon learned how to transfer all the music on my laptop to iPhone with the sync feature. I made playlists for some of it. Every studio has different equipment so, to soothe my nerves, I travel everywhere with my own little speakers and use Bluetooth. I love them, especially when I use two for “party mode.”
For performances, no more cassettes, tape splicing, CDs, or USB sticks. Simply send an MP3 file to the sound manager on a file sharing platform. I’ve also edited and combined tracks on the Audacity program to create a unique piece of music for performance.
I could write pages about the technical conundrums of teaching dance on Zoom during the pandemic, but I’m not in the mood to revisit that! One good thing came out of it. When I went back to the studio, I recorded several dance classes and uploaded them to YouTube for my students who wished to continue dancing at home. Go ahead, take a free class at home! Here’s my YouTube channel.
The latest tool for dance teachers is a smartphone wristwatch playing purchased music or streaming from a service like Spotify. Freed from the sound equipment, the teacher can roam the studio, observing and correcting students while easily starting and stopping music. But, dare I admit…
I’m kind of afraid of them. So small, and my music is all over the place, favorite tracks in albums, others in playlists. Will I be able to find what I want? I’m getting nervous just thinking about it. Perhaps I’ll skip this and all subsequent innovations until we get to the point where it’s possible to simply think of the track we want and music will fill the air. I don’t doubt this will happen one day. It’s all magic.
Thank you for tripping through 55 years of technology with me!
Keep an eye out here for news about my upcoming novel! I’ll be making announcements soon.