Q: What has been your professional dance journey?

I started dancing when I was two and trained pre-professionally through high school. I went to Princeton for undergrad where I majored in history of science, minored in dance, and took almost all of my pre-med prerequisites knowing deep down I was never leaving my dance path. I moved to New York right after college, working as a choreographer, performer, and Artistic Director of Sydney Schiff Dance Project. As an artist, I was driven by a need to reconcile my Jewish tradition with my concert modern dance tradition both in my art and in my life. Having found a landing place with an evening-length work produced at Judson Church, I sought the next chapter of my creative life at the University of Michigan, where I studied the relationship between social dance and concert dance through my MFA in Dance and as a Fellow at the Center for World Performance Studies.

After graduating, I traveled the world to study both the dance and the global narratives of Brazilian Zouk, sustaining myself as a teacher in both the Brazilian Zouk and Fusion social dance communities. I even managed to travel through Brazil for three months as an independent scholar guided by the research tools I gained at Michigan. Eventually I settled in Chicago to have a home base. (Not having to carry all of my possessions in two backpacks is almost as amazing as realizing how much you don’t need!) I teach weekly classes here, direct Evolucion Latina Dance Company’s ladies Zouk performance team, train and rehearse my solo choreographies, and maintain a rigorous travel schedule on weekends for festivals and workshops. Within about two days [of the pandemic hitting], all of the social dance events around the world were cancelled through June. The last thing we need right now are 400 social dancers in a hotel who travel from different places to dance with each other and change partners all weekend…

On March 11th, I excitedly announced a new program of weekly drop-in Zouk classes scheduled to start up the following week, Trump announced his European travel ban, and events started shutting down. In less than 24 hours I had to postpone my new venture. Two days later I made a group and made a post sharing an idea of how to do a daily drop-in Brazilian Zouk solo training class online. Within 5 hours, 250 people joined my group. A week later, I had over 700 members receiving updates and between 10 and 20 people a day in my classes. There was a bit of luck in my rush to create income from nothing. Because I got into the online teaching game fast, my name was highlighted among the first wave of Zouk teachers offering online classes.  I’m rather proud it took nothing short of a pandemic for our community to stop coming together and I really hope that the students who depend on the artists to create the experience they crave continue to support them so they can be available to them on the other side of this catastrophe.

Over the last year I have been introducing more classical technique into my performances and showing people what can happen when I take Zouk and blend it with ballet and contemporary technique and vocabulary as a solo performer. Because my students are interested in moving like me, they’re willing to trust me when I teach ballet and contemporary technique in a social dance class. For me, social dancing is not just about having a partner and reacting, it is about finding joy in dancing, honing the ability to share that joy with a partner, and co-creating something that cannot be created alone. It is my hope that the community as a whole will become stronger dancers and more mindful participants as we appreciate every moment more than we ever did before.

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Q: Using the idea of “worldmaking” how do you imagine the performing arts world after the pandemic? (Worldmaking: How you can re-imagine the world in your own terms, the way you want it to be. Using this tool one can construct new worlds and write themselves into narratives that have excluded them and systems that have disabled them.)

I see a huge revolution in dance classes being taught online. I got to take a ballet class from my high school dance teacher. There is so much more access. There hopefully will be a lasting impact and those teachers who build a good online following will continue this model. I have learned I can now teach from anywhere in the world. This allows me complete flexibility and allows me to provide a service to people who cannot physically be present with me. It closes the gap of people not being able to come to my class in Chicago because they live in Europe. Maybe I will continue to do online classes once a week. I can offer group classes, make a series — so basically now I have complete control over my job right now. I am my own boss and I feel like I have more stability as long as I can produce the product that people want to see. This has been very meaningful and I hope this trust and excitement continues because that is very sustainable.