INTERVIEWS
"We are so lucky that we get to work in an environment that is creative and new and challenging and pushing boundaries."
SANDRA KAUFMANN
"Stephanie [Clemens] created a safe space for me to land."
Returning to Chicago
After training with Stephanie Clemens at the Academy of Movement and Music and graduating from Northern Illinois University, Sandra Kaufmann joined the Martha Graham Dance Company and later served as Artistic Director of the Martha Graham Ensemble. She is the founding chair of the Dance Program at Loyola University Chicago.
May 24, 2019: At her home in Chicago, Sandra Kaufmann recounts her earliest exposure to dance as a teenager and her route to a scholarship and subsequent role in the Martha Graham Dance Company. She gives a brief history of American modern dance and details her own interest in re-staging modernist works. Kaufmann outlines the curriculum and focus of the Loyola University Chicago dance program, which she started.
"There is a profound post modern
dance scene here in Chicago...
there's women leading companies"
Chicago's Dance Glow Up
"[a teacher once announced], 'we didn't know what to do with her, but we knew that if we let her go, somebody else would take her. "
Joining the Graham School
"...in the end, really appealed to me was Graham's profound investigation of the unconscious and her desire to draw from the unconscious and bring it into consciousness"
Joseph Holmes, Moments and Martha Graham
"...So women were not allowed to drum, too powerful. I was like, Oh, I will think about that. "
Katherine Dunham and feminism in dance
"We danced a number of Humphrey pieces...it was an extravaganza, in a whole site specific space"
Doris Humphry's Legacy
