My teachers: Anna Sokolow, Meredith Baylis  and Inessa Alexandrovich  (like Stanislavski and Isadora Duncan) were motivated by a deep feeling and an understanding and respect for art and its meaning and depth,  with great understanding of  timing.
They were first of all searching for honesty. Teachers like them are very rare.
George Balanchine said that every dancer needs his own tempo. My tempo was slow and by doing it slowly growing with slow crescendo  I was myself and honest and was able to express my inner world united with the music.
Meredith Baylis' class had a beginning and an end with precise and accurate previous  planning and preparation.
Meredith used to start  the class sitting on her  famous director's chair giving minimalist instructions just with her palms causing us to focus and developing our movement gumption and building a controlled process of crescendo. when she got up from her chair there was a reason  for it and it gave a huge  momentum to the crescendo process, but Meredith always worked on everything together, she prepared dancers for their professional life on stage with ability to control movement ability to give an enthusiastic jump at the right moment and still to be able to stop or doing a slow long movement with absolute self consciousness and previous knowledge of what you are going to show without a  matter of chance, If you have nothing honest to say, don't say it .
This process involved allot of enthusiasm and live feelings , following Meredith's directions gave incredible and focused results.
There was no place for hiding in her class every body had to be in the front raw, the best dancers had more time in front and were good examples to others as individuals not for imitation but for encouraging productive understanding and self intensification process.
Meredith Baylis worked with me and she did it  with a very tough gentleness.
Meredith has a great role of what I am today and my consciousness and in everything that I do including this Web Site.

A good pianist can be a dancer's best friend

A member of Serge Denham's Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo from 1951 until it disbanded in 1962