Doing double duty: Stephen Koplowitz, teacher/choreographer.

FOR HIS 1985 DEBUT AT NEW YORK'S DANCE THEATER WORKSHOP, CHOREOGRAPHER STEPHAN KOPLOWITZ OFFERED A WRY MEDITATION ON THE ANXIETIES OF ADOLESCENCE. CALLED I'M GROWING, it showed six young guys darling around in gym clothes while a voice-over recounted the emotional toll of homework and registering for the draft.

Nearly two decades later, Koplowitz is still grappling with pubescent angst. As director of the dance program at Packer Collegiate Institute, an elite private school in Brooklyn, he spends his days teaching hormonally charged teens to make dances on their own bodies. Somehow, he finds time to follow his own muse, too.

During the nineteen years he has taught at Packer, Koplowitz has created forty-six professional works, ranging from intimate pieces for the stage to sprawling, site-specific shows in the United States and abroad. He won a New York Dance and Performance Award, or Bessie, for sustained achievement in choreography in 20013. In April 2003, he snagged a coveted Guggenheim Fellowship.

"Some artists are: shocked when they find out that I teach full-time," he says. "And some teachers and students are surprised to see that I'm able to create so much work. But that's who I am; I lead two very full lives."

As a teacher, Koplowitz has found a novel way to engage his students--and quell the apprehensions that preoccupy many teenagers. He gives each of his ninth-graders a copy of Improvisation Technologies, a CD-ROM that distills the movement principles of William Forsythe, the famously cerebral director of Germany's Ballett Frankfurt. Forsythe may seem like a stretch for freshmen, but experience with the disc proves otherwise. Its deft use of computer animation, superimposed on video clips of Forsythe and four of his dancers, helps illustrate spatial concepts--like lines, planes, and volumes--that are integral to his work.

HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS ARE HIGHLY AWARE OF their bodies," says Koplowitz, 47, who loosely resembles the actor Jason Alexander. "What's great about the Forsythe material is that it helps them let go of their self-consciousness and focus on the techniques. It suspends their ego a little bit and lets them master the material without realizing that they've mastered it on their own bodies. Before long they are making movement and dances that are truly personal," as opposed to learning someone else's steps.

Forsythe originally developed the videos as a training tool for newcomers to his thirty-six-member company. In 2000, he released a commercial version, which can be ordered online at www.artbook.com. The disc features more than sixty' video clips demonstrating the fundamentals of his movement vocabulary, including gestures he refers to as "extrusion," "matching," and "room writing."

Forsythe, who is working on a new version for DVD, noted that Koplowitz is not alone in using the disc as a teaching tool. "It's pretty mappable onto most kinds of dancing, and it's really successful with hip-hop," he said. "Last spring I gave a copy to a social project in Rio de Janeiro, and it gave these teenagers from the favelas [squatter settlements] the ability to get really creative really fast. It accelerates the learning curve."

Its elegant simplicity appeals to Packer's cyber-savvy students, who get their own iBooks in fifth grade and enjoy wireless Internet access throughout the school. Students use their laptops to create digital videos and sound scores, submit homework assignments, and sometimes even to take tests. Founded in 1845, Packer enrolls more than 900 students from preschool through twelfth grade. It requires some course work in the arts, starting as early as kindergarten, but as a college preparatory school it focuses primarily on academic subjects.

At the beginning of ninth grade, each student takes Fresh Arts, a survey course with rotations in dance, music, theater, and visual art. During the second semester they choose two of these art forms for in-depth study. For students in higher grades, Koplowitz and an associate offer intermediate and advanced composition courses as well as a technique class.

"We don't expect our students to pursue carrels in dance," he says. "We're trying to empower them to be independent creators and thinkers. When they leave Packer we want them to have the confidence to express their own voices and share their own visions, no matter what fields they enter."

Koplowitz began using the Forsythe CD four years ago. "As a teacher, you're always looking for new ways of reaching your students," he explains. "At first, I wasn't sure how it would go. But now I use it with trained dancers and with newcomers. The outcomes are different, but it seems to engage them no matter what level they are at."

Last spring, seventeen students signed up for the freshman composition course. Among them was Colin Touhey, an avid hockey player who has never taken a dance class outside of Packer.

"I did a rotation of dance in the first semester, and at the end Mr. Koplowitz showed us the Forsythe CD," Touhey recalls. "That motivated me to sign up for his class. Not the CD in particular, but the theory--and the idea that, as a dancer, you can sec things the audience doesn't necessarily see." (He referred to Forsythe's use of geometric forms as organizing principles for his movement, which the CD makes readily visible.)

Nneka Mitchell, who performs with a neighborhood troupe specializing in African dance, also found the class liberating. "What I get at Packer I don't get anywhere else," she says. "It frees me to explore different kinds of movement. It's amazing to see how Forsythe draws lines in space and plays around with them."

Like many of his students, Koplowitz got turned on to dance in high school. The second of three boys, he grew up mostly in Washington, D.C.

KOPLOWITZ BEGAN PLAYING piano in second grade. When he was a sophomore, the dance instructor asked him to compose some music for a dance recital. Later, while majoring, in music at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, he studied dance will, Cheryl Cutler. That led to an MFA in choreography at the University of Utah, where his mentor was Anne Riordan. Upon moving to New York in 1983, he found it so hard to break into the dance community that he considered applying to law school. Meanwhile, he started teaching dance at Packer, where he found the inspiration--and the cast--for I'm Growing.

Around that time, he had a brainstorm in a photo booth and began using choreography to make pieces of visual art. He took portraits of a man at various angles inside a photo booth and arranged them in a grid, calling it Falling Bob. When he showed some of his murals and photomontages at Dance Theater Workshop, they caught the eye of Elise Bernhardt, a friend who had recently founded Dancing in the Sheets to promote site-specific work in New York.

Bernhardt soon asked him to create a performance at Grand Central Station--specifically, inside a four-story wall of glass with panes resembling the grid in Falling Bob. And so Koplowitz made his breakthrough piece, Fenestrations, which in 1987 drew an estimated 16,000 viewers in the span of two nights. It featured thirty-six dancers on narrow walkways who could be seen through the station's windows. Koplowitz later recreated the piece in Chicago, Philadelphia, and again in New York.

Koplowitz went on to create other site work in big spaces of historical and architectural interest, including Kohler Korper (Coal Bodies), at a former coal- and coke-processing plant in Essen, Germany; Babel Index at the British Library; and Genesis Canyon, performed inside London's Natural History Museum. In 1997 he directed Webbed Feats Presents: Bytes of Bryant Park, a free, seven-hour performance in Bryant Park, behind the New York Public Library. It began on the Internet, where some 200 people submitted poetry, dance phrases, images, sounds, and creative writing for the event. Koplowitz has also made more than twenty dances for the stage, which tend to be more personal and textual than his site work. But he finds it easier to get money to create big, singular events than to maintain a company or mount a season. His last run at Dance Theater Workshop, where he has had seven seasons, was in 1998.

The Guggenheim fellowship will let Koplowitz lighten his teaching load in 2004-05, leaving more time for making his own dances and short films. But his home remains at Packer, where he is now in his twentieth year.

Late last spring, after reminding them to get rid of their gum, he split a class of seventeen students into three small groups. Some had had no other dance training outside of school. Koplowitz asked each group to create a five-minute dance with an introduction, three main sections, and a conclusion. Over the course of several weeks, they worked with matching, avoidance, room writing, and universal writing--concepts they got from Forsythe and filtered through the hip-hop sensibility they brought to the project.

"If I just told them to work with high and low, or fast and slow, it would be so much less interesting to watch," Koplowitz says. "The Forsythe CD is a nice way to get all of them making movement. Once they're done, it's not at all about technology. It's about bodies moving in space."

Christopher Reardon writes for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other major publications.