I’m Anni Turkel, a senior History of Art major at Bryn Mawr. Though I grew up dancing – ballet, tap and jazz – movement slowly began to play an ever smaller role in my life as I progressed through adolescence into early adulthood. A couple of years ago I was babysitting for a family whose neighbors had a giant trampoline in their backyard that we (or really just the kids) were invited to use whenever we liked.   As summer became fall I found myself practically coercing my two charges, ages 4 and 7, to rush through snacks and homework, or postpone dinners and baths, in order to play on the trampoline with me. Blood pumping, joints coiling and springing, limbs flying – the physicality that children take for granted in their daily play – I was experiencing this forgotten exhilaration of movement! Most sensational was not just my body flying through the air but the buoyancy of spirit I felt too.

So, two years post-airborne revelation, I am now writing my History of Art thesis on a choreographer and multi-media artist through the critical lens of feminist psychoanalysis, and I’m in my second semester of beginner dance classes in Bryn Mawr’s Dance Program.

In response to a journal entry I wrote for my Beginning Modern Technique course last semester, Mady Cantor, Associate Director of the Dance Program, approached me at the beginning of this semester to ask if I might be interested in helping to document the reconstruction of a Martha Graham piece that the Modern Ensemble would be doing. I, of course, said yes!

And that’s what this blog will do: 1) record this process of reconstruction from my own perspective, as observer, as well as from the inside perspective of some of the student dancers; and 2) explore what we gain, as individuals and as an institution, as our “steps” in 2014 are placed within the legacy of those first made in 1936.