“Following Lynn Shapiro into the heart of her dances is a little like the trip through the overgrown forest to find Sleeping Beauty. Ms. Shapiro has a strong but understated sense of theater and, a rare gift, a feeling of succinctness.” –The New York Times
Learning sometimes means owning up to the multitude of gaps in your own knowledge. What is that saying, in becoming wise you admit to all the things you don’t yet know? Well, this week’s Monday’s Mentor is a woman whom, until after her death two days ago, I knew nothing about. But, like many things in life, death can often inspire us, and after reading this quote from the New York Times, I think Shapiro’s life is a sore thing to leave unchecked. She sounds like a wonderful, engaging and magnetic woman, achieving in her life some things I hope to achieve in mine…
Based in Soho for more than thirty years, Shapiro was a dancer, choreographer and, for the last twelve years, a writer. Born in Washington D.C., and graduating with a Bachelor in Fine Arts in Cambridge, Shapiro continued on to choreograph for her own company The Lynn Shapiro Dance Company, often collaborating with her husband, cellist Erik Friedlander, and was awarded several awards for her work, among them, Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, The Jerome Foundation and The New York Foundation for the Arts.
Writes Tere O’Connor: Oh Lynn Shapiro I am so sad to hear about your death. You achieved so much while you were here. You were a mother and a wife and an artist. After years of incredible work with dance, you became an excellent and celebrated writer. While you were making dances you offered us some of the most penetrating images ever experienced in the form. Your drastically honed aesthetic shocked us into an appreciation of ambiguity and mystery as central components in dance. Thank you for teaching me to make riskier decisions- not just for the sake of being risky -but as a way of excavating the deeper messages of choreographic thinking as you did so well.
Whilst I’m finding information scarce, a Dance magazine review paints an eloquent, however brief, image of Shapiro as a choreographer. She seems to have an intuitive and developed approach to creating imagery in her works, prone to potent scenes, glimmers of a greater story.
Though my sources are fleeting and still elusive at best, excavating this information slowly can’t help but spark some sense of intrigue within myself. Sensing and observing the life of a dancer in it’s entirety can’t help but highlight the different journeys we each take to satisfy our creative urges. Shapiro’s mind seems to offer poignant glimmers of something great and restless, perhaps evidence of her personality, or her health toward the end. From all appearances, she appeared to be a courageous woman, dancer, and partner, and I hope the memoir she had been working on had come to some fulfillment.
It’s ok to remain mystical about what you do. Delve into risky and poignant uses of imagery and tangle yourself deep into your own life. Challenge yourself in whatever artistic form you find most satisfying and never stop creating. These are things I’ll take away from my observations about this seemingly great dancer and choreographer.
Shapiro’s website: http://www.lmswriter.com/