Tuesday Night Dance Classes: Thank You, Jeanne Beaman

To get ready to write this blog I googled Jeanne Beaman hoping to find some pictures and a good bio online.  Instead I found an obituary. I knew Jeanne was getting up in years but somehow I didn’t expect to find that she had died just this month, having lived to be a hundred.  And an even bigger surprise was that she died in Bernallilo, New Mexico. My heart sank. Up until the end of January I had lived within a 40-minute drive of where she had lived. I could have visited her if I had known.  I hunched that one of her children must have moved to New Mexico and that she had been living with them.  Googling some more I discovered it was her son, Peter, and that he lived in Placido having moved from Pittsburgh. So… this blog takes on a special meaning for me. Not only do I want to share the strong impact she had on my development as a dancer and person but I deeply want to honor her.

I was probably about 14 when I began taking an adult modern dance class that met on Tuesday evenings in Genevieve Jones’s Oakland studio. Luckily a friend of my Mom’s regularly took the class and offered to drive me to and from the class until I was 16 and could drive myself. I was the only young person in the class and it was quite a wonderful group of adults, many of whom still stand out in my mind as if it were only yesterday.  Fran Balter, the friend of my Mom’s, had children close to my age and had studied dance at Bennington and the Martha Graham Studio. She was a tall, stately, elegant woman.  And then there was Cecil Kitcat. She taught dance at Carnegie Mellon (then called Carnegie Tech).  She had a strong British accent and was probably in her 60’s.  She seemed very old to me and quite a character as she enthusiastically attacked the movement.  Several other women were regulars, and I don’t remember if we had any men in the class. 

Jeanne led the class with focused intent.  Small, with her hair in a tight bun, she guided us through a serious modern dance class, drawing from several different modern dance pioneers and putting together wonderful combinations of her own.  The class was well thought out, beginning with standing stretches, progressing to sitting-on-the-floor work that included Graham contractions and turns around the back.  When we stood up again, with pliés and tendus we were ready to go across the floor.  And that was what I loved most.  I remember one combination that had a super fun fall in it where we ran and lunged with an outstretched arm taking us to the ground followed by a roll and getting back up.  I later used that fall in an audition at Perry-Mansfield Dance and Theatre Camp and it got the attention of Helen Tamiris and earned me a spot in a piece she was setting.  Tamiris even asked me to please repeat the fall again at the audition. Many of the campers/students had put together a short dance before they came.  I hadn’t, so I put together some of my favorite across-the-floor combinations of Jeanne’s, ending with the fall. 

For me, Jeanne wasn’t just my modern dance teacher, but someone who could understand my drive and determination to be a dancer and my desire to have a career in dance.  Sometimes when I was being challenged at home and discouraged from a dance career she would speak with my parents, helping them to understand my love of dance and encouraging their support.

When Martha Graham’s film A Dancer’s World was made and first broadcast at WQED in Pittsburgh, Jeanne held a reception at Chatham College where she was teaching at the time.  Graham was there and I remember being introduced to her and saying that I so wanted to come to NYC and take her Xmas intensive course.  And of course she assured me that was indeed possible even for a person as young as I was at the time. (Probably 14 going on 15 at the time…. it would take me until I was 16 to go.) 

Later Jeanne left Chatham College and began teaching at the University of Pittsburgh.  By then I was in NYC and Juilliard.  When I came back home from Juilliard to attend the University of Pittsburgh, the university wouldn’t accept the ballet or modern dance classes from Juilliard to fulfill the required PE credit.  So I took Jeanne’s modern dance class in the PE department and served as her demonstrator for the semester. It was kind of our joke that here I was in this beginning modern class to fulfill a PE requirement.

Among my many memories is the composition assignment based on computer-assigned movement. Unexpected movement sequences challenged us.  Jeanne was a pioneer in working on using the computer and dance together.

As my dance career developed and Jeanne and her husband had retired, moving to Rockport, Massachusetts during the year, and in the summers to an island in Maine, we kept in touch.  She came to a dance performance by Avodah when we were in Boston, and on another tour when I had a day off I visited her in Rockport.  One summer when Murray and I planned a Maine trip we had a delightful time visiting her and Richard on their Maine Island.

We kept in touch, occasionally talking and writing, through the early 2000’s. At some point I knew that her children were encouraging her to leave Rockport where she was then living alone since her husband had died.  She wrote that she wasn’t ready yet.  

The dance world is small with lots of overlapping connections. At a conference in October of 2018 (when Elizabeth McPherson and I were presenting a workshop on Helen Tamiris), Elizabeth, Lynne Wimmer (a dancer/choreographer/teacher from Pittsburgh) and I were having dinner together.  Somehow Lynne and I began talking about classes with Jeanne Beaman.  Elizabeth perked up and shared that she had interviewed Jeanne for a book she had written about the early Bennington College summer program.  We had fun sharing our memories of Jeanne and marveling at Jeanne’s dance history from starting in ballet with the San Francisco Opera Ballet, then studying with the early dance pioneers, training at Mills College, teaching for many years, and advocating for dance, particularly in Pittsburgh and New England.

There is a strange empty feeling in me right now knowing that she has passed.  I send heartfelt love and condolences to her family and am deeply grateful for the role she played in my life.

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