(ABOVE) With Lori Belilove, Cherlyn Smith, and some of the Intensive students in New York in June. Our syllabus included Tanagra Figures, Dionysian Movement, Barre, the Brahms Lullaby Waltz, the Chopin Prelude, the Chopin Slow Mazurka, Bach Gavottes I and II and the Brandenburg Concerto, along with grand, sublime sequence studues to Beethoven and Schubert.

Intensely affective, Duncan work asks the dancer to liberate the dance from singular obedience to technique and choreography. To stop hiding the human behind the steps.

Although there is technique and choreography in Duncan, they are not the source of her great genius, but products of it.

It is difficult to pin down Duncan's "secret", and attempts to articulate it verbally always fall short. I suppose Duncan must be danced and felt first.

In my view, it's firstly about the dancer's connection to herself and the discovery of her own emotive energies. From this standpoint, it could be said that there is an intensely subjective side to Duncan work. Everyone must take the journey inward prior to radiating anything outward, and that can be an extremely tall order.

Objectively, there is the Solar Plexus, which for Duncan, is the center of emotion and intent. It is what the Duncan dancer "leads" with; the limbs and extremities being servants to the Plexus and not the other way around.

Emotion and intelligence are first in Duncan dance. When contemplating Duncan's approach, I came to see that first, one must fully "be" before one can fully "do". The dancer must be fully present, mind, body, and soul, in order to dance in the way of Duncan. Stanislavsky called it "method dancing", and I think that's apt. It requires a deep belief and commitment to authenticity - a difficult acheivement contrasted by the elegant simplicity of the movements and lines.

I feel that Duncan's "way" is applicable to all dance forms, as it is more a discovery about how to more fully inhabit one's own being than a series of steps and movements.