My cousin Maxine, who is a year younger than I am, started taking dance classes when she was 4 or 5 and my family would drive to Uniontown, which was about an hour from where we lived in Pittsburgh, to watch her recitals. These were long evenings with kids in satiny, glittery costumes doing various routines. Usually the kids had several costume changes since they were in quite a few numbers. So when my Mom wanted to expose me to dance classes she selected Kelly’s School of Dance, which was in our neighborhood and run by Louise Kelly. Louise was one of Gene Kelly’s sisters. Gene had grown up in Pittsburgh and now was in his prime in Hollywood. It was somewhat similar to the kind of dance school that Maxine had gone to, with the emphasis on recitals and costumes and young kids being exposed to tap, acrobatics, and a kind of intro to ballet.
My recollection is that this was taken when my ballet dance class performed Swan Lake. I think somehow we must have had individual photos. I was definitely in the chorus of ballerinas and sort of remember being in a semicircular formation with the other dancers. Note the braces so I think this was towards the end of my involvement with dance training 6 days/week when I decided as a teenager that I liked academics a lot more than dance and did not have the talent or the desire to be a ballerina or a dancer.
Today, I am most grateful for the self discipline, the coordination, mental development, the muscular training and the appreciation for the art of dance that I received from all of that hard work. My involvement with Tai Chi over the past 10 years brings back so much of the joy of dance – practicing steps, being graceful and remembering combinations. I also attribute my physical strength and my ability to comeback from my traumatic brain injury to this early training.)
Once I got to know my friend Regina and learned about the dance classes she was taking I thought I would like to try the kind of dance she was doing. Regina was studying with Genevieve Jones and had recently been in a delightful production of Johnny Appleseed. She was invited to play a skunk with an older group of kids. Genevieve had a totally different approach to working with kids. Students were encouraged to make up their own movement, usually to a story she shared. The music was mostly live accompaniment. I wanted to do this instead of learning routines!!
Genevieve was a real pioneer in modern dance in Pittsburgh. She was born in 1906 in Pittsburgh and attended the University of Wisconsin, majoring in dance. (The University of Wisconsin-Madison, according to its website, offered the first university dance degree program in the country.) Genevieve brought her love of modern dance back to Pittsburgh. In the 30’s she began bringing such dance legends as Martha Graham, Hanya Holm, and Jose Limon to her hometown.
I soon was loving the creative movement classes she led, and I remember one dance program in which I was an Irish Lady and we danced a poem about the Irish famine when people only ate potatoes.
In addition to the children’s classes that Genevieve taught, she also conducted quite popular ballroom classes for pre-teens. Five of us from Shaw Avenue carpooled to these classes. One of our parents would drive us to the class and another would pick us up. Jimmy Levinson, Joan Davis, Regina, Bobby Moser and I would pile into a car and off we go to her very large studio with chairs all around the room. I seem to remember we had to wear white cotton gloves and it was all very formal learning how to do the basic ballroom steps. We learned to graciously accept being asked to dance, and when it was women’s choice, to ask someone to dance. Afterwards we would go back to one of our houses and have fun hanging out together. While I didn’t keep in contact with Joan Davis, I do know that Bobby Moser took over his father’s interior design business in our neighborhood of Squirrel Hill. He died in his sixties. Jimmy and I have kept in contact through the years. He has done amazing things in agricultural economics and with work in India. His son is part of an amazing non-profit in India which works with pregnant women and their newborn infants. And of course, if you have been reading this blog you know that Regina and I continue to enjoy both our friendship and working and collaborating together.
As a teenager I began teaching classes in my basement as a way to earn some money and found myself using many images and ideas from Genevieve Jones’s classes. And many years later when I had a full-grown practice working with children in Tallahassee I again turned to ideas I had experienced in Genevieve’s classes. By that time she had published a book sharing her stories, telling how she guided children in using them in movement, and providing original music from the person who had accompanied her classes. Her materials were wonderfully useful, especially for working with children ages 3 to about 8.
I also remember the simple imagery she used when doing some warm-up exercises like saying hello and goodbye as we pointed and flexed our feet!!
Genevieve was a wonderful influence in helping me develop my creativity and starting me on a fun journey in dance. As I became a teenager I wanted something different and found other dance teachers with a more disciplined and structured approach.
As I was going through my scrapbooks getting ready for our move to Costa Rica, I came across an obituary that I had saved, written when Genevieve died in 2002. In it she is quoted as saying, “Dance (always spelled with a capital D) is a sacred thing, a great and wonderful thing.”
I very much wanted to find a picture of Genevieve Jones to include in this post. I wasn’t able to, but what I did find, in a literary journal, was a wonderful piece entitled “Letters to Genevieve,” which describes her beautifully and shows the profound impact she had on one individual’s life. The work was written by Sarah Golin, and here is the link to it. https://blackbird.vcu.edu/v18n1/nonfiction/golin-s/letters-page.shtml. Thank you, Sarah, for writing this.
Regina Ress has also written about her experience in dance and the influence of Genevieve Jones. Here’s a link to it. Thank you, Regina, for sharing this.
[print_link]