November 1, 2001
New director dances the dance of life
Elizabeth (Betsy) Cooper is one of those people the rest of us envy – the ones who somehow knew, while still in childhood, what their future career would be, and have never really wavered from that path. Not for them the doubts and confusions the rest of us endure. They have what you might call inner certainty.
Or, as Cooper puts it, “I knew at a very early age – by the time I was 11 – that this was what I had to do with my life.”
The “this,” in her case, is dance. And except for a brief timeout while she got her undergraduate degree, she has been dancing – in places like New York, San Francisco, Germany and now Seattle. Cooper joined the UW faculty as director of the Dance Program last summer.
It isn’t her first time at the UW, however. Cooper was here as a student in the University’s MFA program in dance, earning her degree in 1997. Since then she’s done a variety of things – from having a child to dancing professionally and, most recently, teaching dance at the University of Texas.
“It’s really great to be back here,” Cooper said.
It’s just the latest of many moves she’s made in pursuit of her passion, but she was lucky to be born near the center of the U.S. dance world, New York. As a child Cooper studied both ballet and modern dance on Long Island and in New York City. By the time she was 16 she had focused on ballet and did all her training in the School of American Ballet, which is the official school of the New York City Ballet.
“I started dancing professionally when I was 16,” Cooper said. “New York City Ballet has a tradition of using the students from their school in a lot of their productions, and I also danced in special festivals they did.”
From there she got into a company founded by Natalia Makarova, but then fate changed her plans. She broke her foot in rehearsal. And like many dancers with serious injuries, she tried to go back too soon, leading to constant pain and an insufficiently healed body part.
It was then that Cooper decided she would go to college, years ahead of schedule. She had always thought she would go after a full career of dancing, she explained, but the injury led to her early “retirement.” She was 21.
So for the next four years Cooper turned in her tutu and toe shoes for a pickax and a trowel while she studied archaeology at Yale. Why archaeology?
“I was trying to find another passion,” she explained. “I’d always been fascinated with art and architecture, and I like studying things in context. I also enjoyed the manual labor, being out in terrible weather, getting dirty. The camaraderie was great.”
It couldn’t hold a candle to dance, however. By the time Cooper graduated in 1987, her foot was feeling better. She got a day job in architectural research and was soon immersed once again in the New York dance scene, this time performing more contemporary work.
If her early years had honed her skill and discipline, the years after college allowed Cooper to find her voice as an artist. She began collaborating with a choreographer and composer named Matthew Nash.
“In the classical ballet world, it’s the norm to do what you’re told. You’re a good ballet girl or boy,” Cooper explained. “Working with Matthew I was able to find my own vision. It was wonderful to learn that somebody wanted to hear what I thought, see how I moved, and work with me to create something.”
Cooper spent the next few years having the career in dance that had been interrupted by her injury. By 1995 she was ready for another transition – into teaching.
“Actually, I’d been teaching off and on since I was 18 – but to make money, not because I enjoyed it,” Cooper said. “I remember when I was in the ballet school, looking at teachers and thinking, ‘Oh I never want to do that. That’s just a pathetic way to make your living.’ I just wanted to dance.”
But after years of dancing, she was feeling the urge to give back, and believed for the first time that she really had something to give. That’s when she researched graduate programs all over the country and wound up at the UW, which she says was the only program to offer what she needed. The MFA program cemented both Cooper’s desire to teach and her belief in her own ability. Now, she says, the classroom is “where I’m really alive, where I’m jazzed.”
She takes over a dance program that she says is in “great shape.” But of course, she has new plans for it. She would like to start an undergraduate dance company, bringing in an outside choreographer each year to set a dance on it and arranging performances in the community – at schools and senior centers and the like.
Cooper would also like to give some attention to students who are more interested in teaching than professional dancing. “We already have a wonderful course here in teaching methodology,” she says. “It would be nice to create an internship program and connections for those students to have some mentors in the community.”
This spring, she’ll be teaching an undergraduate level class called “The Creative Context,” in which she’ll be explaining the historic context for the dances to be performed by the (all graduate student) Chamber Dance Company in their concert. The class will include attending rehearsals and talking with company dancers. It is, Cooper says, an attempt to give non-graduate students – in other fields as well as dance – an opportunity to learn about the historically significant dances the company performs each year.
It’s her way of trying to help others understand her passion, which she struggles to articulate. When asked to talk about the satisfaction she gets from dance, she says, “That’s a hard question. There’s a sheer joy in dance, a sense of accomplishment after a lot of work. I don’t know what it is, really. I just know there were times in my life when I didn’t dance and I always felt there was something missing. When I came back to class I knew – if I don’t dance my soul shrinks.”
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