Dancers Heal DANCERS.

When Zena Rommett, creator of the original Floor-Barre, first lay down to experiment with barre work, dancers thought she was avant-garde. One observer remarked, "Oh, that woman on the floor--what is she doing?" But in the last twenty years, Judith Jamison, Deborah Jowitt, Lar Lubovitch, Phyllis Lamhut, Tommy Tune and thousands of others have become devotees.

"I felt that classes were going too fast and some of the basics were being lost," Rommett said of her ballet training. "I found that doing a pre-preparation before class helped a great deal." For forty years, she has taught, coached and certified other teachers. Her results are evident. "I teach all over the world--Russia, Taiwan, Germany, Italy," Rommett said. "When people see one of my students, they say, `Those are Zena's legs.'" Rommett began teaching at The Joffrey School, where she became known for her keen eye. Camille Rommett, her daughter, remembered, "Robert Joffrey used to say, `Zena can see through a brick wall.' She can tell how a dancer is working by the way they walk into class."

Bodywork now comes in a variety of methods and techniques (see GUIDE BODYWORK APPROACHES). As bodies age, strength and flexibility become harder to maintain. For dancers, this is a career-threatening reality. By the time they are thirty, most have faced the question, "Can I withstand this career?" Either they find a solution--a way of healing, a new way of moving, or even a new way of thinking about moving--or they bow out.

"I think there was consumer dissatisfaction with conventional medicine," said former dancer Elyse McNergney. "People began to experiment with other systems--chiropractic, acupuncture, Feldenkrais, yoga--and got good results." Certified in both Alexander and Pilates, McNergney, 35, created IMX (Integrated Movement eXercise), used today by dancers, skaters--including Jojo Starbuck and Ken Shelley--and the New York Mets. McNergney draws parallels between dancers' and ballplayers' careers: "You train people to have a high level of strength and endurance--both cardiovascular and muscular--so that their efforts on stage or on the field are easier, more efficient." Barry Heyden, strength coach for the Mets, invited McNergney to Shea Stadium, where she worked with pitcher Orel Hersheiser. "Usually in spring training, a baseball player's fitness level peaks, and then during the season, it decreases. For Orel last year, his strength increased," McNergney said. Hersheiser is now a spokesperson for IMX.

Kay Cummings, chair of the Dance Department at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, first heard about Pilates twenty-five years ago. "Rachel Lampert was raving about Carola Trier, who had studied with Joe Pilates," Cummings said. "I was working on changing the way my muscles worked so that the weight distribution in my body changed. Carola's theory was that if you were using the incorrect muscles, you were reinforcing bad habits.

She wouldn't let you do anything unless you did it absolutely right. It was excruciating sometimes." Cummings has done Pilates weekly for the past decade with Kathy Grant, who teaches a required Pilates course for all first-year students in Tisch's Dance Department. "Students come in with chronic injuries or bad habits and we can correct a lot of them in Pilates class," Cummings said.

Before bodywork was integrated into dance programs, many dancers discovered systems by necessity. "I felt I had reached a dead end as a dancer," said Neil Greenberg, a New York-based dancer and choreographer who performed with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company for seven years. "In 1989, I went to a class in Klein technique. The teacher, Barbara Mahler, talked about the tail and I wasn't sure what she meant. As far as I knew, human beings didn't have tails. I figured out that she meant the tailbone, the coccyx. The first class focused on the tail and the second class focused on the psoas muscle [a deep muscle used in hip flexion]. We did some really simple exercises lying down with our legs up on the wall. After all of the athletic dance training I had had, I thought, `I'm not doing anything.' For me it was an exercise in visualizing the muscles not working. After that exercise I stood up and I felt totally different. My pelvis had changed its relationship to my legs. It was a mechanics-orientated experience that changed the shape of my body. That sold me. What I found is that Klein impacted my body and things became possible for me physically that had not been possible before."

Martha Partridge echoes this idea. After discovering Trager treatments, she began noticing significant changes in her stamina, her flexibility and her choreography. Like Greenberg, Partridge hit an obstacle and came to an epiphany: "I had a back injury. I went to a physical therapist who did a bunch of things that didn't really help," she said. "I was teaching at American Dance Festival at the time and performing a solo, and I was thinking about backing out. But then I had a Trager treatment from a practitioner on staff at ADF. It was extremely gentle and moved my back in a new way. My back had been in pain for so long. Trager was movement without pain." The work also fed her choreography: "When my body felt good, I could do all kinds of phrasing and rhythmic syncopation."

Karen Donelson, a Feldenkrais practitioner, treats ballet, modern and flamenco dancers. "Feldenkrais's basis is to put our intentions into action. Oftentimes I will look at someone doing a plie and ask, `What are you thinking about?' because they are doing it how they are thinking. If you just change their thought to, maybe feeling the bottom of their feet, you mobilize their thinking. Our intention comes from our own mind. You want to mobilize all the resources--mind and body."

This mind/body connection changed Mia Lawrence's career. For eight years, she danced with the Stephen Petronio Company. "I was studying a lot of Klein during the first four years I was in the company," she said. "Then I went to a yoga class at Jivamukti in New York. What hooked me is that it trains the body, but also uses the breath and the mind." By the end of her tenure with Petronio, Lawrence was warming up with an hour-long hatha yoga class. "Klein technique totally changed my understanding of the body and its structure. The yoga inspired me in a different way because it's physical, but it also made me aware of my emotional life and breath.

"When I started yoga it was for physical reasons, but then it developed into a spiritual practice. After about a year of doing yoga, people who saw my performing thought I had had ballet training, which I didn't. Through a combination of Klein and yoga, I was understanding how to connect down into the floor and then extend out. I suddenly could hold my legs up and I couldn't do that before. My aerobic capacity also changed from doing breathing exercises regularly." Now teaching at the Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance, Lawrence uses breathing exercises in her modern classes to "bring the energy in the room together, so we become a group."

Already offered by Tisch and the Salzburg Academy, yoga and other forms of bodywork are starting to infiltrate dance programs. A generation of dancers who discovered these systems to heal themselves is guiding a new generation to use them as preventive and strengthening measures. Sometimes seemingly simple exercises can have powerful, life-altering--and dance-altering--effects.

Kate Mattingly fractured her metatarsal mid-rehearsal in 1996 and used Pilates exercises to return to dancing and teaching. She writes about dance for The New York Times and The Village Voice.