"EMBRACE IT ALL”
Mary Seidman
interview on August 30th, 2022
by Anabella Lenzu
Anabella: Thank you so much, Mary, for being here, and allowing me to ask you questions about your life and your career. First, how did you decide to become a mother? And how was your life before having a kid and after? How did motherhood influence this change in your choreographic work, your teaching, everything!
Mary: Alright well let’s see, I was married in Boston for ten years. And that marriage was very young, kind of an immature marriage. It got to the point where we knew if we were going to stay together we needed to have children, and it just wasn’t going to work. So that is when I decided to really take my dance career seriously. Before, I wasn’t fully dedicated. I never danced as a child so I had a lot to make up for. When that marriage broke up, I came to New York and I experimented a lot. I took Limon classes, I took Graham classes, I ended up studying full-time at the Merce Cunningham studio for about 10 years. And while I was doing that, I was also the Children’s Coordinator at Peridance. I got to the point where I was lonely being single in New York and meeting men who just wouldn’t commit, and I realized how much I really did want to have a family. So, you know, the universe was really there for me and I met my husband. And he wanted to have a family too, so we got married and we had my son. We got married in ‘86 and we had my son in ‘88. I wanted that more than anything.
So there was no question. I loved being a mother. Loved it! He was always on my hip. I did miss being an artist, and I wanted to go back.
When I first started figuring out that I wanted to be a dancer, I was an English teacher in the Berkshires of Massachusetts. This must have been about 1974, and because the National Endowment for the Arts at the time was supporting a lot of smaller companies to tour around the hinterlands to promote dance. I was in a small, little watershed school in the countryside of Massachusetts, but it had a very innovative superintendent, and this art teacher who was very forward-thinking. They wrote grants and brought in the Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company from Utah.
I had never seen dance before. My family life didn’t revolve around the arts at all. My father was an engineer, my mother was a housewife. We lived in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, I never saw dance. So when I saw the Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, I was hit by lightning. They performed their adult work as well as work made for children. Both Shirely and Joanne were groundbreakers for women because they were Mormans from Utah, they taught at the university, and they did something called, “job sharing” which was very unique in 1974. They took turns going on tour with their company while the other one would stay at the University and teach, and both of them had four children each!
Anabella: Each! Oh my!
Mary: When I saw that this was possible, I was just amazed that they could juggle their home life and they made beautiful work! And they were so nice, so giving. Shirley took a liking to me and we wrote letters back and forth, and she was very supportive of me trying to become a dancer. Fast forward forty years when I did a piece at La Mama called, “Mama a Modern Folktale” which was about women influencing climate change. One of the things I did was invite luminary women as honorary guests, like Deborah Dowit, Joan Filkestein, and everyone who had been working with children and education. I invited Shirley to come from Utah as one of my honorary guests. Then about five years later when I was doing my MFA work, I was making a paper and a lecture on the history of the National Endowment for the Arts, and I went back to Utah and I went to the library with Shirely and I went through all their archives. She’s really like a dance family to me. Both of them were very influential female role models, especially in New York, because at the time when I was here in the early eighties, I didn’t see a lot of female choreographers who had children.
Now I do think that Trisha Brown had a son, but I studied at Cunningham and when I first started studying there in ‘83, most women kept their families a secret.
It was not deemed appropriate. You would hear of ballet companies where the women were not allowed to have babies, and if they had a kid they were fired or retired.
That was the atmosphere, so I kept my son a secret. Two years later one of the major teachers there, Susana Hayman Chaffey, who had been in Merce’s company and she was now teaching there, brought her son and he would roam around the studio while we were taking class. He would climb up the ladder. That was probably 1989, and so suddenly more women had become more comfortable showing they had children.
Now at the same time when I was coordinating Peridance as the children’s coordinator, I was pregnant, and two other women there--teachers--were also pregnant. And once I had the baby, it cost me more to pay for a babysitter than the salary I was making. So I quit. I just wasn't making any money. It was a lot of stress. That is when I organized my own school.
So I had a very supportive husband, and when we got married he said, “You know if you want to build a dance studio, we will build a dance studio”.
So we had a 500 sq ft studio in my home and I was terrified I wasn’t going to make use of it. Suddenly, it was really putting me to the test as to whether or not I was really going to follow through in being an artist.
So in 1990, I organized my company, and I got non-profit status. I organized a board and I organized a school.
I taught children in the school starting in 1990, when my son was two. And one of the things I did--which when I look back at it I thought was really smart--I would advertise at the playground where all the young mothers were and I would pass out flyers. I taught a Jane Fonda aerobics class at 10 o’clock in the morning, and the mothers would bring their babies, and the babies would come and stay in the living room and I would hire a babysitter. So the babysitter would take care of the children for an hour while they sat on the floor, they’d play with toys, and they drank their bottles. And then the mothers would go in after their aerobics classes and grab their baby and come in and take a mommy and baby class with me.
And then, I ended up including them in one of my pieces which I performed at the Center for the Arts down on Mercer Street, and it was to the music of this children’s book called, The Snowman.
I had this costume designer make these great big snowsuits for the women, and then these little snowsuits for the children, who came in dancing through the aisles. It was such a crowd-pleaser!
Anabella: Of course!
Mary: And then I taught ages three through fourteen at my school for about ten years. It was a lot to coordinate.
After ten years of that, I got really overwhelmed with the whole prospect of having people in my house all the time, cleaning up their mess, so I disbanded the school. I started doing a lot of work as a teaching artist for the Guggenheim, for NYFA, and other programs that had teaching artists and dance classes in schools. We started touring my company in the schools and making a lot of dances revolving around science and art. It became more or less like a lecture demonstration the teachers would buy into.
The 1990’s were an active time for me with my company. We performed at the Cunningham studio, [inaudible] Center for the Arts, Symphony space. I performed at Carnegie Hall through my church, as part of a big gospel performance. We were touring a lot.
Anabella: How old was your son?
Mary: Let’s see, in 1990 he was two, so in 2000 he was 12. And after I disbanded my school, he was always in my classes.
Anabella: …dancing around, playing with the other kids?
Mary: Yes. From age three to ten, it was just a way of life for him. When I disbanded the school he started taking tap classes at Steps. He continued to tap from the age of ten until eighteen --he was very good! And then he went to college and never danced again.
Anabella: What does he do now?
Mary: He’s an engineer. I kept saying, what happened? How come, what happened? I thought I was training you to be an artist and he said, “Mom, I never want to work as hard as you do for so little money! But the silver lining of all of this was, in May he got married, and at the wedding, right towards the end of the wedding when everyone was tired he pulled me onto the dance floor and he and I danced an unrehearsed duet to great music for probably ten minutes. I said, “Finally! Finally, I see the training that you had! Why didn’t you ever show me this?” It turns out he has a group of friends who go dancing once a month to group events to loud obnoxious music, and they dance as couples.
Anabella: This is wonderful, Mary! I guess you just never know. And does he like the arts? Does he go with his wife to see shows?
Mary: Not so much. He certainly knows what I go through. In 2019, my husband passed away. He had been sick for a number of years with Alzheimer's disease. As all that was happening I was slowly but surely doing less choreography because I just didn’t have the energy. So he passed away in 2019, and then in 2020 COVID hit, so I had to close my studio, and I got roommates to help pay the rent because I had a really big mortgage. We had refinanced ourselves so many times in order to pay for my concerts. And then in 2021, I sold the apartment.
So now I’m just living in a rental apartment– very small, living by myself– and I’m going to make a piece again for the ADG (American Dance Guild) festival this December, but I’m not really considering doing that much choreography at this point.
The day he was born was the happiest day of my life. And the day he got married was the 2nd happiest day of my life.
Anabella: Seeing your own kids making their own lives as adults. Must be amazing!
Mary: I don’t think there’s anything more fulfilling!
Anabella: Mary, some artists separate their private life, but you embrace it all. Your art-making and your family went side by side. It feels like a very holistic integration.
Mary: Right. As much as I could, I wanted to be a stay-at-home mom so I could be with him!
MARY SEIDMAN, Artistic Director of Mary Seidman and Dancers, founded her company in 1990 to act as a catalyst in our culture, promoting physical, emotional, and social change, and has performed in major NYC venues. On faculty at the Mark Morris Dance Center, and works as a teaching facilitator for DEL at the 92nd Street Y. She tours colleges and universities as a lecturer, guest-teaching artist, and choreographer at: Ohio University, Skidmore College, Rutgers, North Carolina School for the Arts, Mt. Holyoke College, University of Maryland, Emory, Rhode Island University, Dickinson, Duke, New World School of the Arts. Ms. Seidman writes feature articles for Dance Teacher, Dance Magazine, and reviews for EYEONTHEARTS. She served as Secretary of ADG for seven years. www.maryseidmananddancers.org
ANABELLA LENZU: Originally from Argentina, Anabella Lenzu is a dancer, choreographer, scholar & educator with over 30 years of experience working in Argentina, Chile, Italy, and the USA. Lenzu directs her own company, Anabella Lenzu/DanceDrama (ALDD), which since 2006 has presented 400 performances, created 15 choreographic works, and performed at 100 venues, presenting thought-provoking and historically conscious dance-theater in NYC. As a choreographer, she has been commissioned all over the world for opera, TV programs, theatre productions, and by many dance companies. She has produced and directed several award-winning short dance films and screened her work in over 200 festivals both nationally and internationally.