Masters of the balancing act: they teach, they choreograph, and they make it all work.

How do you juggle being a professor and a choreographer? "Barely," says 53-year-old Billy Siegenfeld, artistic director of Chicago's Jump Rhythm Jazz Project and tenured faculty member at Northwestern University's dance department in nearby Evanston, Illinois. "I'm so grateful for my job--it gives me facilities, benefits, and a weekly check. But I'm on leave now [to set a work on the Jose Limon Dance Company] and for the first time in my life I feel sane. Instead of two full-time jobs, I have one."

Siegenfeld laments that his usual schedule--of teaching classes in jazz, tap, choreography, jazz history, and his signature Jump Rhythm Jazz Technique, combined with directing his company--leaves little time for sitting in cafes or for having a girlfriend.

"If I won the Lotto, I'd change my life," he says, "but I love teaching." He explains, "Teaching is the feeder for my choreography--it's a laboratory. If the material is cockeyed, you see it amplified on twenty bodies." As a professor for more than twenty years (prior to moving to Northwestern he directed the dance program at Hunter College in New York), Siegenfeld tries to help his students discover the "lost city of rhythm." Everyone has rhythm, he believes. Accordingly, he views his technique as a kind of "archaeology."

Among his early teachers, Siegenfeld credits Don Redlich with helping to show that dance is not just steps, but about "the manipulation of motion." He also cites Alfredo Corvino for turning him onto the character side of ballet. But perhaps his most important influence comes from watching Fred Astaire and the Nicholas Brothers in old movie musicals. Siegenfeld says he developed his specific technique as a "response to the joyous, exuberant, pungent dancing I saw as a kid that made everyone want to whoop and hooray." It's this bustling musical energy that feeds into his performance work as well.

Siegenfeld is one of many active choreographers who are working in academia. Increasingly, research institutions are hiring dance faculty whose research area is choreography. This recognition is replacing the notion that an artist entering a college or university setting necessarily compromises a performing career. The expectation, in fact, the requirement, of many academic positions is to stay active professionally.

In the past, says Cynthia Oliver, 40, a newly hired assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, getting a teaching position was often viewed as "selling out or giving up," but now "it's something a lot of us are trying to negotiate."

Oliver, a 1996 Bessie Award-winning choreographer, still thinks of herself as an independent artist, only now she's doing a different kind of "plate-spinning." Her university job guarantees her income year-round, but her challenge, like Siegenfeld's, is time management. She's working to finish her dissertation about beauty pageants in the Virgin Islands while teaching classes, advising students, doing administrative work, and conceiving of her next choreographic project. Fortunately, Oliver likes to gestate her evening-length dances over a long period and says she feels that this process melds well with the demands of university life. The intellectual setting is also stimulating new ideas: "I've always felt like critical thinking fed my creativity and vice versa. In this environment the two things exist simultaneously."

With its cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary emphasis, the Department of World Arts and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles, was designed to ferment exactly this sort of mix. Cheng-Chieh Yu, 36, recently joined choreographers Victoria Marks and David Rousseve on the faculty there. A dancer who's worked with Bebe Miller, Ralph Lemon, and others, as well as a choreographer in her own right, Yu is still learning to balance her new academic responsibilities. Now, however, this native of Taiwan finds she has more time to dig into herself and her own culture than when she was struggling as an independent artist in New York. The university environment strongly encourages her to pursue emerging interests and funded a three-week research trip to China. Gathering material for a new performance project called Love Potions, Yu spent time studying traditional medicine and examining the Chinese cultural practice of using animal parts as aphrodisiacs.

The department is looking for "wider forms of collaboration," Yu says, even if it's not always clear what forms these explorations might take. Yu plans to continue her dance-making on a project-to-project basis and questions the conventional paradigm of the choreographer: "The company model is not going to work for my generation," she states.

Wendy Rogers, 53, disbanded her own San Francisco Bay Area company in 1990 and embarked on a ten-year, open-ended project she called "MAKESHIFT dancing." A professor at the University of California, Riverside, since 1996, Rogers was trying to conceive of a framework for her creative process that allowed time for experimentation and helped her remain connected with collaborators scattered across the country.

"I don't try to maintain a company in the traditional sense," she says, "I'm geographically challenged." Although the ten years are over, she continues working with this alternative approach. Her process has to do with "seeing how, with time, things that appear to be disjointed are actually connected." Recently Rogers found herself far from Riverside, making connections with and setting a dance on students at the University of Montana.

One of the biggest challenges Rogers faces in her busy life is "finding the emptiness from which to make work." Academic responsibilities, especially the administrative ones-- like sitting on committees and doing peer evaluations--she observes, can be "not only time consuming, but also stressful." She doesn't want this pressure to squash her creativity.

She regrets that sometimes "deciding to perform is like signing up to have an emergency--a lot of emergencies." But she also admits, "I don't think I could do academic work if I didn't have this professional work. I need my own realm of art-making"--a realm that also enriches her students' experiences.

"I practically cried," says Allyson Green, 41, "the first time I walked into the big, wide open, sunny space that was there for me to use." Green, who spent the last sixteen years in New York City dancing and choreographing, started a tenure-track position at San Diego State University in September. Booking studio space in New York was a perpetual nightmare of scheduling and phone calls. "Having space and a supportive environment is key at this point in my life to making work," she says. "I still have the same juggling act, but it feels easier. There's a base to work from. I'm not running from place to place, lugging equipment on the subway." Green says that teaching dance in New York felt like "selling water by the seashore." In San Diego her students are not as experienced, but they're hungrier.

Unlike Yu and Rogers, Green does have plans to grow a local company of dancers. For now, Green remains active on both coasts. She brought her East Coast dancers to San Diego last January, and plans a concert at the Danspace Project in New York in January 2003. She is optimistic that the academic calendar will allow her to continue her touring activities, which include trips to Eastern Europe, at least during the summer months and winter break. So far the university has been generous with travel and research grants. Green observes that "the wonderful thing about dance is that you create a community wherever you go."

When she moved to Madison in 1993 to teach at the University of Wisconsin, Li Chiao-Ping initially tried to separate her dance company from the dance department, sensing a certain stigma to being associated with academia. Now, the 38-year-old choreographer feels it makes sense for her company to take advantage of the university's new facilities. But she's proud of having been the first local choreographer presented by the large-scale Madison Civic Center. She and husband Douglas Rosenberg, a video artist, built a studio at their home to facilitate long-distance collaborations. One of Li's current projects, though, is to assist in the formation of a Madison dance alliance, linking disparate groups in order to strengthen the local dance scene. She hopes this effort will produce more Madison-based performers.

How does teaching influence her art? "Teaching sets me in the motion of figuring out how to solve problems in choreography.... Just by looking at how someone interprets my directions, I get information about how I'm communicating." This information translates into Li's performances. The choreographer is just coming off a two-year hiatus--she's been working to rehabilitate her left foot after an auto accident nearly severed it. She's also been raising a baby, now 14 months old. Currently, Li is making her second solo since the accident; it will premiere at New York's Joyce SoHo in May. Li says she believes it's important that her Wisconsin students have contact with professionally active artists, and not only with visiting guests. After all, she says, "choreography isn't just A-B-A--our students need to have a full view of the experience."

If the boom of the 1990s was hard on the performing arts--with cutbacks in government support and rising real estate prices driving many organizations under--the current recession is creating even tougher economic conditions. The challenge choreographers face is figuring out how to make a living while making their work. These days maintaining a company is a feat unto itself, let alone one that can support its artistic director. Academia offers one set of solutions--and problems--to life's exigencies; it's a path that many creative people are navigating.

Jody Sperling is a dancer, choreographer, and writer living in New York City.