If I hadn’t had the drive to to dance professionally I know I would have been perfectly happy to stay in Iowa City, because I love living and working here now. I married a professor of Chemical Engineering and a atmospheric climate scientist in 2023. After thirty five years of singledom I met the love of my life.
We all know, (at sixty eight years old–how did that happen?) that success is equal parts desire, hard work, good and bad luck, and some talent. Many of you know that in high school I wanted to dance. I got the dance bug very early, at nine years old, and almost immediately knew that I needed to end up in NYC, thanks to reviews of performances and photographs in the back of Newsweek.
In Iowa City I received encouragement for my dream from the University of Iowa Dance Department, where I took classes after school, and by fourteen was performing in the college dance concerts. I also danced in The Music Man for the opening of Hancher. Mr. Barker and my father came to think it a good idea for me to leave high school early so that I could dance more seriously. It was actually my dad’s idea. There was some question about whether I would be allowed to graduate, but since I’d already been accepted to college he felt it didn’t really matter. I spent my last semester of high school at the University dancing all day and taking courses in philosophy and French.
I lived in the Burge Hall dorm and had two roommates. During those months I also got my first paying dance jobs, with Michael Sokoloff at the Center for New Performance at Iowa and the Brick and Tile Works. I learned how to work very hard at my dancing. This gave me the confidence to go to Sarah Lawrence College, which is forty five minutes outside of New York City, and start the first chapter of what has been a three career life. I have been a professional dancer and choreographer, an actor/director and theater movement professor, and a somatic movement therapist. There has been overlap in these careers.
Iowa City was a formative gift to me: none of my eventual colleagues in dance had such a nurturing environment to grow up within. That was good luck. The emphasis on creativity was higher in my dance classes than in theirs and it helped me become a good dancer more quickly. That was desire. At college I studied with a famous dance composition teacher, Bessie Schonberg. She pushed me to go into New York City four times a week to take extra technique classes, so that I could catch up.That was hard work. I’d danced a lot, but the University classes were not strong on technique.
Dance is a career that lasts 20 years, if injuries don’t end it sooner. I danced in top companies: Merce Cunningham Dance Company and the Stephen Petronio and Dancers, which gave me the opportunity to tour internationally. That was talent. I had a company of my own for nine years, produced mainly in New York. I was grateful for fellowships from the NEA, NYSCA, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, among others. I received a Bessie (the top award for modern and contemporary New York dance) and that led to a starring role in a Broadway show called Largely New York, nominated for 4 Tonys. That show involved some acting, so I started to study and do off-Broadway plays and eventually did a couple of movies, one of them Scent of a Woman with Al Pacino. I had a small role, but a pivotal one. I also did many national commercials, which paid the rent between plays and movies.
During my years of dancing and acting, planning for the future, I also became a certified Alexander Technique and Somatic Movement Educator and Therapist. Because of touring and performance this took me seven years. I also worked nights at a law firm to earn much needed money. (Even today dancers in top companies average a yearly salary of $40,000). I used to joke that we were paid in steps and roles, and not dollars. After one of my concerts was seen by the head of Yale undergraduate drama and the director of a program with NYU Tisch School for the Arts I was invited to teach movement for actors at both universities. I was able to stop working nights and I discovered I enjoyed working in theater education.
In 1993, my 20th year in NYC and my 20th year of dancing and acting professionally, my son Robbie was born. Now she is my daughter, Kit. As a single mother with no child support (that was bad luck), I suddenly became worried one night about paying for private schools in New York City. Though seemingly established in the theater and film world, with top agents for commercials and legit theater, I felt discomfited by the financial insecurity of being an actor (99% of unionized actors are unemployed on any given day). My dad suggested that I return to Iowa and get an MFA. I applied and was given an Iowa Arts Fellowship for two years, in theater, and I started that fall, with a six month old baby in tow. I graduated in 1997 with an emphasis on directing and two Iowa Playwrights IRAM awards for best direction of new plays. I was very proud that one of them was for a play I adapted and directed. Eric Forsythe was my fabulous mentor. Once again Iowa City was my great nurturer. It was an amazing place for us to be until Kit was four, and I would have stayed if another piece of luck hadn’t landed in my lap.
A former colleague from NYU invited me to come and teach in a small graduate level conservatory faculty at Harvard, the Institute for Advanced Theatre Training, which was a joint program with Moscow Art Theatre. I co-headed the movement program with a Russian movement specialist. This job gave me the opportunity to direct and tour my projects to many countries in Europe, including Russia, and also to be resident movement coach for the professional stage in Cambridge, the American Repertory Theatre. I worked, and essentially apprenticed myself to many internationally celebrated directors.
Sadly the Harvard program ended after four and a half years and I accepted a clinical associate professorship at the FSU/Asolo Conservatory for twelve years, again heading the movement program. This gave me the opportunity to teach summers in London and tour a play I directed to Paris, where it won best international production at the La Foire St. Germain. I began to choreograph concert dance again, on commisions from other colleges. I toured two one man shows I wrote across Florida and acted in a play that went to Yaraslavl’s International Volkov Theatre Festival where we received The Crystal Bell for best international performance.
At St. Petersburg Academy of Dramatic Arts I was asked in a television interview how I could play three Russian women in one night so convincingly, and if perhaps I was of Russian ancestry. I explained that it was because I studied movement and movement is cultural! During my FSU tenure I was also adjunct professor of theater, dance and interdisciplinary studies at The New College of Florida. I retired from Florida State University as a full clinical professor in 2013, following a sabbatical in Iowa City.
At the end of that sabbatical I went for a walk in the country with a friend I’d made in graduate school. During the walk, looking at the spring bloom, I realized I just didn’t want to leave Iowa City again. I’m a fifth generation Iowan, so the landscape is in my blood. I love the Iowa City way of life and the lively city we have become. Plus, my dad was declining and I wanted to stay and help him. Because my daughter was in college and had never liked Florida I decided I could take the leap. At fifty seven I opened a somatic movement practice, first at Eastwind downtown and now in the Peninsula Neighborhood. It did well enough that I was able to buy my first house on my sixtieth birthday. Now I own a condo with a small studio and two offices, Movement for All, LLC. I offer individual treatment for chronic pain and autonomic disease, and give classes in movement and dance for beginners and people beginning to age, such as balance, dance for fun and fitness, pelvic floor control, balance, postural alignment, ballet for grace after fifty.
I’ve continued to choreograph off and on and have had dances performed at the professional New College of Florida New Music Festival, the Sarasota Ballet, and most recently the Museum of Modern Art, where a dance I made in 1985 was shown as part of a larger exhibition. Sometimes I coach young dancers who’d like to go pro, but I’m more interested in writing. That was my second interest, in both high school and college. I’m working on two memoirs, and improving my writing. But my absolute primary interest is enjoying my marriage and my new family, made up of Kit and Greg’s two children Gemma and Emmet and their spouses. We have two grandsons and we hope we will have more!
I can’t come to the reunion this time because I’m on another sabbatical, this time my husband Greg’s. We’ve been checking in with his projects across Europe and Asia since January, and are currently in China. I’m truly sorry to miss it again, but it’s just too far to fly back and forth. I hope there will be a little Zooming on Friday! It’s fourteen hours difference, but I’ll be sure to get up at night to check in. I hope you all have a fantastic time. Here’s to our next decade of health and joy!
Best wishes to all,
Meg Eginton-Carmichael
