Laura Dean (born 1945)
Laura Dean is primarily known as a choreographer, but she often composed her own music for her dances, and she called her company Laura Dean Dancers and Musicians.
Laura Dean was born on Staten Island and began learning dance and music at the Third Street Music School in New York City. She later studied at the School of American Ballet, graduated from the High School of Performing Arts, studied at the Joffrey Ballet School, and was a dancer with the Paul Taylor Dance Company. She founded her own dance company in 1972, and by 1976 it had become Laura Dean Dancers and Musicians.
Laura Dean is best known for incorporating spinning and whirling into her choreography. Ballet dancers normally spin by “spotting”: To prevent dizziness they quickly turn their heads to remain oriented towards a particular spot for much of the turn. Laura Dean developed a technique to spin without spotting, reminiscent of Sufi dancing of the Middle East. She has said:
Spinning is a central fact of the universe. Not only are the planets spinning, but the galaxies are spinning, too, and the Milky Way, our galaxy is a spiral pattern. Even our DNA is a spiral. Whatever that universal force is, I feel a kinship.
Although Laura Dean choreographed dances to the music of other composers (most notably Steve Reich), many of her pieces use her own music, which was usually performed slightly offstage. Her music is minimalist in its use of repeating patterns, and relentlessly rhythmic, sometimes accentuated by the dancers stomping on the stage.
I saw at last one performance by Laura Dean Dancers and Musicians in 1978, and I can still remember the breathtaking exhilarating effect on the audience of the synergistic combination of her music and dance.
Unfortunately, the only way to experience a Laura Dean performance today is through old videos. This video is a 1978 performance of one of Laura Dean’s seminal works, called Spiral, created and premiered the previous year:
In this work, the spinning begins gradually but by the 30-minute mark, the whole company is spinning, as well as making spinning patterns around each other. Laura Dean is the dancer in white.