Susan Blankensop: physical therapist.

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As a dancer, Susan Blankensop was refined and serene. She brought a soft bright energy to her performance. Though classically trained, she wasn't afraid to enter the more eccentric landscape of post-modern choreography. Now, the downtown dance maven has created her own physical therapy practice and works as in-house therapist with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.

Her performance career spanned 22 years, from 1978-2000, and she frequently worked with Douglas Dunn, Lucinda Childs, Susan Marshall, Bill Young, Yoshiko Chuma, Karole Armitage, and Nell Greenberg. "I stopped at a time that I felt like I was still growing as dancer," she says. "I stopped because I wanted to do something else with my life."

Born and raised in a small West Virginian town, Blankensop says she was always physical. It wasn't until college that she began dancing seriously, though. She graduated from Ohio State University with a B.A. in dance and moved to NYC to pursue a performance career. "I wanted to work with Cunningham technique so most of the choreographers I worked with came out of that school of thought," she says.

She began to build a massage therapy practice in the 80s while still dancing. "As I got further along in my dance career I started taking prerequisites for physical therapy. I knew the direction I wanted to go in." In 2002 she received her M.S. from Columbia University.

Even though she had envisioned where her path would lead, the transition was difficult. "It was scary to leave my life as a dancer because it was a whole identity. It meant a lot to me to have a creative life like that," she says. "I always knew my dancing career would be a finite thing. But there are ways of keeping in touch with that world while still moving away from it."

Blankensop currently maintains a private practice and sees clients at an outpatient orthopedic clinic in addition to her position with Cunningham. "We have a small clinic at the studio," she says. "When the company is in rehearsal, every dancer gets a slot a week to work on whatever they need: maintenance, injury, improvement. I travel with them on the road and work with them daily."

"As soon as I get off the plane, Susan works on my big muscle groups because they're tight," says company member Daniel Madoff. "She's extremely strong physically so she can dig into the muscles. She knows where to go and how to not injure me."

Sometimes Blankensop finds herself in the role of another kind of therapist too. "Something happens when you sit on the table," says Madoff. "I trust the person and I start talking." He says he often finds himself opening up to Blankensop about dance concerns he's encountering on tour, like problems with partnering. "She has a deep understanding of what it is we do and what we go through."