<Begin Segment 22>

SY: And what did you do, then, after camp?

MN: Well, I, Katherine Wolfe got me back into dance. And one time, when I was in one of these dance programs in the field houses, all the girls (said), "Now you sit down here, and eat your cookies and drink your punch. And there's a guy (...), that he wants to meet you, so we'll send him over." So I was sitting there eating my cookies and drinking my punch, and a woman sat down beside me. And she said, "You are a dancer. Go study with Eleanor King." And, oh, I felt great, I was in seventh heaven. And the guy never showed up. I told Katherine Wolfe about it. And I think she kinda felt bad 'cause she didn't wanna lose me. But it took (...) half a year for me to get enough courage to go to a professional school. And so then I went to study with Eleanor King. And she seemed to like me, and she liked my choreography. So I was with her for about six years, and I was in her dance company. And (...) learned an awful lot about dance and performing.

SY: So this woman who just happened to see you in the field house, what do you think, why would she know that you're a dancer?

MN: Well, I didn't know who she was, but later I found out she was Maxine Cushing Gray, and she was the dance, music, and art critic for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. And she had danced with Eleanor King, and she had danced with Doris Humphrey in New York. But she realized that there was no future in dance, so she took up journalism. So she was basically a dancer, too.

SY: Did you ever discover what she saw in you at that time to say that you're a dancer?

MN: Well, I don't know. Maybe she saw that I had potential or maybe she was trying to get a new client for Eleanor King. [Laughs] I don't know.

SY: So Eleanor King became, in some ways, your first...

MN: Professional teacher.

SY: Professional modern dance teacher.

MN: Yeah.

SY: And what did she teach you?

MN: Well, she taught me technique to develop a dancer's body for strength and coordination. And she also taught me about choreography, how to make expressive dance.

SY: What did she, how do you do that?

MN: There isn't really anything, except that if you want -- if you're a dancer, you have to draw from yourself. You can't copy somebody else. You draw from yourself, from your own feelings and your emotions and your heritage and everything that's you. You draw from that to express something in movement and it should be beautiful, even though the subject is not good and not pleasant. It should be done so it has a sense of beauty to it and then you have to be able to communicate that over the footlights, to an audience. She told me, well, she taught that you conceive an idea or feeling or emotion, and you execute it in movement, and then you project it to an audience. And (...) that's what she taught me, as far as choreography goes.

<End Segment 22> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.