Pirouetting Professors
four barnard professors open up about dance and academia
PrintBarnard lecturer Liza Gennaro and actress Sarah Jessica Parker have something in common. Besides being cultured New Yorkers, they both played important parts in crafting the 1996 Broadway revival of Once Upon a Mattress, a musical based upon the fairytale The Princess and the Pea. Sarah Jessica Parker played the lead role while Gennaro choreographed the show. Gennaro says she loves that she is “always challenged” by her teaching, writing, and choreography projects.
Gennaro’s colleagues Mindy Aloff, Lynn Garafola, and Chair Mary Cochran are also distinguished members of the Barnard dance department. Like Gennaro, they have all constructed dynamic professions within the dance world that allow them to follow their unique and varied interests, which include writing, choreographing, curating, editing, and performing.
Liza Gennaro grew up around dance. “Both my parents were dancers,” she says, adding that she took ballet lessons at eight years old and trained at the Ballet Theater School during her high school years, when she attended the Professional Children’s School in Manhattan. Gennaro’s specialty is musical theatre dance—she even teaches a course entitled Choreography for the American Musical at Barnard.
Gennaro was a member of the “American Dance Machine, a company devoted to the preservation of musical theater dances” when she graduated high school and continued to work professionally as a dancer and choreographer. “I did things backwards,” Gennaro says, referring to the fact that she received a master’s degree in dance studies from NYU Gallatin after the birth of her daughter. Currently, Gennaro is working on a project with New York Theater Ballet called Dance/Speak, about choreographer Agnes de Mille. Gennaro knows a lot about the dance legend, citing de Mille’s Rodeo as one of the best dance performances she has witnessed. Her other favorites? “Balanchine’s Serenade” and “Mikhail Baryshnikov in anything.”
Mindy Aloff, in her own words, has “been teaching one subject or another at Barnard since 2000.” The courses she teaches at Barnard span several disciplines: Aloff helms everything from dance criticism and From Page to Stage in the dance department to The Art of Being Oneself, a first-year seminar in the English department. Officially an adjunct associate professor, Aloff says she would describe herself as a “cultural generalist,” adding that she’s “written and taught literature, film, and art history as well as academic topics in dance and dance criticism.”
As a child, Aloff found dance to be an activity that required her to use her imagination, exercising both her brain and her muscles. She describes parents who encouraged her to attend ballet performances, audition for Broadway shows, and “read dance history.” A graduate of Vassar College with a major in English and a double minor in philosophy and art history, Aloff notes that though dance was not a major at her school, she would take classes about four times a week as a member of a dance group. On the weekends, Aloff and her fiancé, then a student at Yale, would take cultural excursions to poetry readings and rock concerts. A lover of poetry, Aloff wrote her own poems in college, many of which would be included in her senior thesis.
When asked about the best dance performance she had ever witnessed, she responds, “The very best?” She goes on to describe a special vision of her then-five-year-old daughter, who loved her ballet and tap classes even though “she wasn’t right for ballet: her tendons were very tight.” Aloff elaborates, saying, “She looked so beautiful and radiant” on stage, displaying “such a gorgeous port de bras, carriage of the arms, holding them just so overhead as if they were made of glass” and rendering herself “the prima ballerina abssoluta of the universe” in Aloff’s eyes.
Aloff has surely accomplished a lot since her review of the Ballet Russes de Monte Carlo appeared in a self-published neighborhood newspaper when she was in elementary school. Her most recent publication is a book called Hippo in a Tutu: Dancing in Disney Animation that charts choreography in animated films. The Eye interviewed Aloff about her new book earlier in the semester.
Given the eloquence of Aloff’s writing, it’s surprising that she can easily describe herself in just three words—“Oh, that’s easy,” she says. “They refer to my obsession with literary revision, and they’ll be on my tombstone: ‘Wite-Out, Her Mark.’” Indeed, Aloff is obsessed with literary revision and tight editing: She triple-checks the correct spelling of “Wite” on the company’s Web site after she answers the question.
On the Barnard Dance Department Web site, Mary Cochran’s biography states that she “has performed and taught on every continent except Antarctica.” With a performer for a mother, Cochran grew up around dance. She left Juilliard after only two days to dance professionally with Nikolais Dance Theatre and then Paul Taylor Dance Company, where she was a principal dancer. She was 18 years old. “I think I was drawn to the kind of people that the dance world attracted. People who valued individuality, talent, and hard work over money and the like,” Cochran says.
Cochran became the chair of the Barnard dance department after being invited to apply by former chair Janet Soares—who fellow professor Lynn Garafola says “built the department until it became a major”—and recommended by Liz Bergmann, the current dance director at Harvard. Cochran teaches modern, improvisation, composition, and the senior creative thesis.
Lynn Garafola actually sets the clock in her office ahead by about 15 minutes so that she can keep herself ahead of schedule—a testament to the bustling nature of her career. A Barnard alumna and professor of dance history, along with criticism, research and senior seminars, Garafola teaches such specific courses as Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes and Its World and Western Theatrical Dance from the Renaissance to the 1960s.
A dance student for many years, she “went to graduate school as an audience member” and allowed her interest in the arts to flourish. Returning to New York in the 1970s after being away for seven years, Garafola speaks of “having the opportunity of seeing extraordinary dancing of all kinds” when “there were still a lot of student tickets.”
As a comparative literature student in graduate school, Garafola wrote about dance, starting with a piece on Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes. She has since written for many publications, including Dance Magazine, where she currently holds a position as a special advisory to the editor. “I no longer am writing much criticism,” says Garafola. “That’s one thing I am a little unhappy about, but there’s only so much you can do. The day only has 24 hours.”
Garafola has also dabbled in curating, an aspect of her job that she beautifully describes as bringing “together so many different realms of knowledge.” This past spring, Garafola curated an exhibition entitled “New York Story: Jerome Robbins and His World” for the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Her next exhibition—”Diaghilev’s Theater of Marvels: The Ballets Russes and Its Aftermath”—opens this summer.
Beyond the impressive professional involvement and qualifications of these professors, they each take genuine interest in their students, and are invested in making personal connections with them in the classroom or over coffee. For Aloff, the best part about teaching is hearing the passion with which students discuss literature or dancing. Cochran considers her students colleagues, evoking a feeling of mutual respect and inspiration. She undoubtedly speaks for her fellow faculty members when saying that at Barnard, she values the chance to build relationships “that last a lifetime.”
These four women of the Barnard dance department show what it truly means to have a rich life. Ensconced in their work, possessing remarkable knowledge of subjects from philosophy to German studies, and bubbling with enthusiasm to share themselves with their students, Mindy Aloff, Mary Cochran, Liza Gennaro, and Lynn Garafola are four distinguished faculty members whom the Barnard Dance Department is lucky to have.
23 April 2009
vol. 6, issue 11
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